Streetcar to Justice

by Amy Hill Hearth

  William Lloyd Garrison, founder of The Liberator.

  “I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard.” Those words were written by William Lloyd Garrison in the first issue of The Liberator, an antislavery newspaper he founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1831.

  A white man raised in poverty in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Garrison became one of the most outspoken and passionate antislavery advocates in the United States. He didn’t write only about slavery, however. He was vigilant in condemning the inequality that free blacks in the North were facing. One of the issues he was concerned about was segregation in northern modes of transportation.

  A newspaper editor by training, Garrison had grown impatient with the antislavery movement while working for two years as an assistant to Benjamin Lundy, a New Jersey Quaker and an antislavery advocate. Garrison despised the idea of gradual emancipation, believing instead that slavery should end everywhere immediately, and he also found that Lundy’s writings on the topic were too mild.

  By launching The Liberator, Garrison altered the tone of the antislavery movement. In 1832 he started the New England Antislavery Society and, the following year, helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society.

  Garrison received countless death threats but remained undeterred. He died in 1879 at the age of seventy-four.

  Horace Greeley and the New-York Daily Tribune

  Horace Greeley, founder of the New-York Daily Tribune.

  Among large American newspapers, the New-York Daily Tribune was far from typical. The newspaper reflected the progressive outlook of its publisher and editor, a white man named Horace Greeley. He was born into a poor family in New Hampshire in 1811.

  Greeley was a man with an opinion about almost everything, from vegetarianism (he was in favor of it) to alcohol (he was against it). He was well known for his strong antislavery views. He is said to have helped Abraham Lincoln get elected and afterward leaned on the president to declare the emancipation of enslaved people.

  Disturbed by the influence of what was called the gutter press, which was a type of newspaper that focused only on sensational and outrageous stories, Greeley started the New-York Daily Tribune as an alternative. His newspaper was a success, becoming the largest in New York and perhaps all of America. Weekly editions were mailed to subscribers around the country. When Elizabeth Jennings was injured and ejected from the streetcar, the New-York Daily Tribune published her firsthand account on July 19, 1854, bringing the story to a wide audience that reached far beyond New York.

  Another focal point for Greeley was the American West. He became famous for the iconic phrase Go west, young man, although he may not have been the first to use it. The town (now city) of Greeley, Colorado, was named after him.

  Greeley tried his hand at politics, serving a short vacancy for a congressman who had resigned. He ran an unsuccessful campaign for president in 1872 and, in failing mental and physical health, unsuccessfully attempted to return to journalism. He died on November 29, 1872.

  Chester A. Arthur in a picture taken around 1858.

  EIGHT

  A Future U.S. President

  A VOLUNTEER at the First Colored American Congregational Church passed the hat that night from row to row, and people gave what they could afford to help the Jennings family pay for an attorney.

  The black community was behind Elizabeth. But could a lawyer be found who would take the case?

  It was a long shot. With very few exceptions lawyers were white men. It would be difficult to find one interested in taking on an equal rights case involving a black woman.

  With few places to turn, members of the committee that was formed at the church to advocate for Elizabeth visited the office of a lawyer named Erastus D. Culver, a well-known abolitionist. Culver was sympathetic. He was deeply disturbed by the story and agreed that it deserved to be heard in a court of law.

  But Culver had to turn the committee down. A year before, in the spring of 1853, he had been elected as a city judge in Brooklyn. He had turned over all his cases to a young lawyer in his practice. In an interesting twist of history, the newly minted attorney was Chester A. Arthur, who would one day be the twenty-first president of the United States.

  But that was far in the future. The committee members who met Chester Arthur that day in 1854 were surely disappointed that they wouldn’t be able to hire Erastus Culver and were being asked to accept an attorney who was just twenty-four years old and who had been a lawyer officially for exactly six weeks.

  The Fugitive Slave Act

  New York City was growing rapidly. The population surged in 1855 to a new high of 629,810 because of immigration. Most of the newcomers were white and came from Ireland and Germany.

  Meanwhile, the number of black residents of the city was on the decline, decreasing from 16,358 in 1840 to 13,815 in 1850. From 1850 to 1855 the black population dropped again, to 11,740.

  The decline was caused in large part by the fact that blacks in New York City, as well as other northern cities, were increasingly in danger, and even more so following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.

  Signed into law in 1850 by President Millard Fillmore, the Fugitive Slave Act meant that runaway slaves who fled to the North could be captured and returned to the South. This included even those who had lived as free men and women in the North for decades.

  Slave catchers were already doing a brisk business in New York, where runaway slaves could be found quickly because there were more leads in populated areas. Many blacks left the city and headed to farms or small towns in the countryside, where they hoped they would be undetected. A large number of blacks left the United States altogether and settled in Canada.

  The new law instantly transformed free states such as New York from places where a runaway slave could count on a certain level of opportunity and safety to places where southern laws about slavery were enforced. Some historians believe that the passage and signing of the Fugitive Slave Act led America into the Civil War.

  The new law also harshly punished those who helped to protect runaway slaves. New Yorkers played a major role in the Underground Railroad, a network of hidden routes and secret hideaways where escaped slaves received help on their journeys to freedom. Now sheltering fugitive slaves or simply interfering with their recapture put these antislavery volunteers in danger.

  While there had long been the possibility that any black person, whether a fugitive or not, could be kidnapped, taken south, and sold to a slave owner, the new law made that scenario much more likely. Even someone like Elizabeth Jennings, born free in a northern state, faced this risk. Sometimes it was a case of mistaken identity. In other cases bounty hunters, motivated by greed, kidnapped the first black persons they encountered. Once they were in the South, there was little that could be done, although there were some cases in which money was raised and a kidnapped person’s freedom was purchased.

  The capture of a black female fugitive in New York.

  Yet Chester Arthur was impressive in his own right. He had earned the respect of Erastus Culver in a very short time. Chester had been an apprentice to Culver for the previous year, and Culver certified to the Supreme Court of New York that the young man was “of good moral character,” an endorsement that is still required (though described differently from state to state) before someone is allowed to practice law. Culver was so enthusiastic, in fact, that even before Chester Arthur was granted official permission to practice law, he’d been made a partner in the renamed law firm of Culver, Parker and Arthur.

  Erastus Culver must have been very persuasive to convince the committee members that Chester Arthur could handle Elizabeth Jennings’s case. Arthur was very young, it was true, but he was extremely bright and hardworking. Culver won them over.

  Chester A. Arthur: His Early Years

  Chester A. Arthur was the fifth child in a poor white family that had strong antislavery views. His father, a Baptist minister n
amed William Arthur, preached about the evils of slavery from the church pulpit.

  William Arthur, who was born in the township of Dreen, County Antrim, Ireland, was so fiercely opposed to slavery that it led to problems in his career. Parishioners of a church he served in Greenwich, New York, from 1839 to 1844, for example, reported that he gave so many sermons on the topic that they grew tired of him.

  He and his wife, a Vermont native named Malvina Stone, and their children relocated eleven times as he served churches in Vermont, western New York State, and the area surrounding Albany, New York, the state capital.

  Chester A. Arthur was born while the family lived in Franklin County, Vermont. He was born on October 5, 1830, though some historians believe that it was a year earlier. (Some historians have also argued that Chester Arthur was actually born across the border in Canada. This would become an issue for him when he ran for national office because being born outside the United States would have disqualified him.)

  In 1844 the family was relocated to the Albany, New York, area so that Elder Arthur, as Chester Arthur’s father was called, could serve as pastor of the First Particular Baptist Church and Society of Gibbonsville and West Troy. At last Elder Arthur had found a place where he was welcome. He became friendly with the faculty of Union College, including its nationally known president, Eliphalet Nott. The college in 1845 awarded Elder Arthur an honorary master of arts degree, coinciding with his work as editor of The Antiquarian and General Review, a magazine of “popular knowledge, covering history, philology, religion, and science.”

  Young Chester was enrolled at Union College in September 1845. Often described as “amiable,” or friendly, Chester was well liked but not a great student. One teacher recalled that he was “frank and open in his manners, and genial in his disposition.”

  For most of his college career Chester Arthur seemed more interested in having a good time than following in the footsteps of his serious-minded father. He was known to get into trouble for silly pranks, such as carving his name into wooden objects around campus or throwing the college bell into the Erie Canal. Having studied the French language and Greek and Latin philosophers, among other subjects, he was graduated from Union College in July 1848.

  Chester Arthur did have one moment before he left Union College that revealed a serious side to him that would become more apparent when he went on to study law. He wrote an essay in which he argued that slavery infected the very soul of the nation itself.

  What the committee members didn’t know, but would soon learn, was that Chester Arthur was as passionate about the rights of blacks as was Erastus Culver.

  Still, the young attorney admitted privately that he was overwhelmed. He had little time for anything but work and rarely left the office, at 289 Broadway, or his room at a nearby boardinghouse.

  Although he told friends he missed having a social life, he recognized that Culver’s faith in him presented a great opportunity that should not be wasted.

  “It comes rather hard at first,” he wrote to his mother, “but it will do me a great deal of good.”

  He had been given a chance to prove himself. But was he up to the challenge?

  Brooklyn City Hall (now Borough Hall), where the case of Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Railroad Company was heard.

  NINE

  Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Railroad Company

  CHESTER ARTHUR WASTED NO TIME. Working closely with Elizabeth Jennings and her supporters, he filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. The lawsuit sought damages(payment) from the streetcar company, the conductor, and the driver of the team of horses (but not the police officer, who was not named in the lawsuit). They would have to pay a certain amount of money, to be decided in court, to Elizabeth Jennings if they lost.

  Although the assault had taken place in Manhattan, the lawsuit was filed in Brooklyn because the company that owned the streetcar line, the Third Avenue Railroad Company, had its headquarters there.

  One might wonder why Chester Arthur didn’t pursue a criminal case, in which those guilty of assaulting Elizabeth Jennings could have gone to jail if convicted. The answer comes from Elizabeth’s father.

  What they really wanted, Thomas Jennings wrote, was to change the system.

  Winning a criminal case would punish a small number of people, the men who assaulted Elizabeth. Winning a civil case, however, could improve the lives of all black New Yorkers, in the present and in the future. The owners of the streetcar company, if forced to pay Elizabeth Jennings damages in a civil suit, might end segregation on their streetcars rather than risk further costly lawsuits from others.

  What Elizabeth Jennings and her father were trying to do was force the issue so that all blacks, regardless of who they were, would be able to ride with respect and dignity on New York City streetcars.

  It was a wise and calculated move, which Thomas Jennings explained in a letter to Elizabeth’s supporters.

  “Now, I am not aware of any difference in the law of this state in relation to persons of color . . .” he wrote. “What we want to know is what our legal rights are in this matter, not by hearsay, but by the decision of the Supreme Court of the State of New York.” Referring to the attack on his daughter, he added, “The assault, though a very aggravated case, is only secondary in our view to the rights of our people.”

  Chester Arthur listened to this reasoning and agreed that it was the best path to victory.

  Now, with the filing of the lawsuit done, they would have to be patient. There was no guarantee that the suit would move forward. A judge could review the lawsuit, find that it held no merit under the law, and decide that it would not be heard, or have its day in court.

  After a few months, though, there was good news: the lawsuit could go forward.

  The conductor, identified only by his last name, Moss, and the driver, whose name we don’t know, chose not to fight the lawsuit, meaning they would accept the court’s decision.

  The streetcar company, however, began preparing for battle. The case of Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Railroad Company was headed to court.

  FEBRUARY 22, 1855, the day of the trial, was a brutally cold day in an unusually frigid month. Seven months had passed since the hot July afternoon when Elizabeth Jennings was assaulted.

  The morning started early for Elizabeth, her parents, and Chester Arthur. They had to travel to Brooklyn; that meant crossing the icy East River from Manhattan.

  The New York State Supreme Court, Second Judicial District, was located within Brooklyn’s City Hall, now Borough Hall, which had been built in 1848. Four judges traveled throughout the district, which included Kings County, Brooklyn. Among them was a man named William Rockwell who would preside over Elizabeth’s case.

  Despite severely cold weather, the courtroom was “crowded almost to suffocation,” according to one account. Those in attendance likely included members of the First Colored American Congregational Church in Manhattan as well as other black churches and civic organizations in Manhattan and perhaps also Brooklyn. At least one reporter, from The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was present.

  Details of the testimony have been lost to time, probably in a 1911 fire at the state library in Albany. However, among the important witnesses was almost certainly Sarah E. Adams, Elizabeth’s friend and companion. Others probably included the German man who had written down his name and address and given it to Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Jennings, who could have testified about his daughter’s injuries that he had observed after she limped home.

  And while it’s not known for sure, it’s very likely that Elizabeth Jennings herself was the star witness. Because her father had wisely asked her to write down a firsthand account immediately, Elizabeth would have been able to provide excellent testimony. She would not have had to rely on her memory seven months after the event.

  While Elizabeth Jennings was permitted to be a plaintiff—a person who takes another to court—the judicial system w
as unfair to people of color. Elizabeth Jennings faced a jury made up of white men. The judge and all the attorneys involved in the case were white men, too. Was fairness even possible?

  The lawyers defending the Third Avenue Railroad Company had several options. They might have argued that the company owners couldn’t be held responsible for the actions of the company employees. They might have tried to persuade the jury that the company’s employees had the right to keep Elizabeth Jennings off the streetcar by claiming that as the owners of a private company they could operate as they chose. They probably tried to undermine Elizabeth Jennings and her witnesses or to insist that she hadn’t been hurt as badly as she claimed.

  Illustration from a Boston newspaper shows people crossing the frozen East River from Brooklyn to New York (Manhattan).

  Getting to Brooklyn

  How did Elizabeth Jennings, her parents, and her attorney, Chester Arthur, get from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the morning her case was heard in court on February 22, 1855?

  It’s possible they had to walk across a nearly frozen East River. While small boats and ferries routinely transported passengers between Manhattan and Brooklyn, occasionally the river was clogged with blocks of ice. On Elizabeth Jennings’s court date the weather was unusually bitter, as it had been all month. They either trekked across the river or they had a very cold ride on a small boat whose captain had to dodge large chunks of ice.

  Why didn’t they just cross over the famous Brooklyn Bridge? It wasn’t completed until 1883, almost thirty years in the future.

  After closing arguments Judge Rockwell spoke to the jury (this is known as charging, or instructing the jury). He told the jurors that under the law in his jurisdiction, a company was indeed liable (held responsible) for the actions of its employees. It made no difference, he said, whether an employee did something on purpose and with intent or was simply careless.