The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  As for effectiveness, census figures suggest that some ten thousand fugitives were living in the North at the time the law was enacted, and at least that number probably escaped in the remaining years before the Civil War. Yet the major study of the enforcement of the law counted only 332 fugitive cases heard under the new law, and only 298 slaves returned to slavery by the end of 1860. This was far more than all the fugitive slaves returned from 1793 to 1850. But it hardly affected the loss that Southerners felt over the decade. The ideological and political cost of those returns, in terms of the alienation of the North, enormously outweighed any benefit. Moreover, the monetary cost of returning a fugitive, while ordinarily low, could be exorbitant. It cost the federal government and the city of Boston as much as $20,000 to return the fugitive slave Thomas Sims, not to mention the direct retrieval costs incurred by his master, the salaries of those enlisted to keep the peace, and the fortifications put up around the courthouse.66

  It would be misleading to think of the conflicting views over the Fugitive Slave Law as just another example of strong partisan conflicts over contentious political issues. Abolitionists were not alone in viewing the 1850 law as a total violation of basic religious and legal principles—thus justifying open defiance of the law—and as authorization for Southern invasions of the North that could lead to the seizure and kidnapping of free people. This was sometimes seen as a repetition of the original seizure and enslavement of free people in Africa, which now endangered the entire American free black population and the very meaning of emancipation. Southerners like John C. Calhoun, on the other hand, saw the law as a final test of the willingness of the North to deal fairly with the South and support the basic principles of the Constitution and the founding, or face the inevitability of disunion. For this reason, it is enlightening to print some representative quotations.67

  First, consider a somewhat paranoid Southern response to Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, coupled with a sense of impending conflict, taken from The Nashville American:

  The constitutional authorities are all on the side of free negroes and abolitionists against the Southerners. They run Southerners who are overpowered from the watering places, and if a Southerner goes amongst them to catch his fugitive slave, his life is endangered at every step by ungoverned mobs of abolitionists and free negroes. He is treated as a man-stealer, a land pirate, who deserves death at the hands of all persons. This is so in almost every part of the Northern States. The Constitution, so far as the capture of fugitive slaves is concerned, is at the end, no one now goes into a free State to get his slave, who does not go armed to the teeth, prepared to risk his life, and who is not prepared at every step of his progress to encounter gangs of dissolute and desperate abolitionists, and crowds of runaway slaves and free negroes, sent on by prominent and leading citizens. How many under these circumstances will go? An actual state of war on a small scale already exists.68

  Next, an excerpt from a speech given by Luther Lee, a prominent Wesleyan Methodist minister and theologian in Syracuse, New York, who became an abolitionist and supporter of the Underground Railroad. He is recounting an address he made to a meeting called in response to news of the arrest of two persons under the Fugitive Slave Law:

  I affirmed that slavery is wrong—a moral wrong, a violation of every commandment of the decalogue, that no law can make it right to practice it, support it, or to in any way aid and abet it; that the Fugitive Slave Law is a war upon God, upon his law, and upon the rights of humanity; that to obey it, or to aid in its enforcement, is treason against God and humanity, and involves a guilt equal to the guilt of violating every one of the ten commandments. I never had obeyed it—I never would obey it. I had assisted thirty slaves to escape to Canada during the last month. If the United States authorities wanted any thing of me my residence was at 39 Onondaga-street. I would admit that they could take me and lock me up in the Penitentiary on the hill; but if they did such a foolish thing as that I had friends enough in Onondaga County to level it with the ground before the next morning. The immense throng rose upon their feet and shouted, “We will do it! we will do it!” and I have no doubt at that moment they thought they would.69

  Finally, here is the way William Lloyd Garrison describes the state of the country in a letter to a prominent English merchant, reformer, and philanthropist, to whom he is recommending an African American friend who is considering moving to England:

  Never has this nation been so convulsed on the subject of slavery as at the present time. The Fugitive Slave Bill, (so called), which has passed at the late session of Congress, granting unlimited facilities as it does to slave-hunters in quest of their prey,—and striking down, as it does, the writ of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and all the safeguards of liberty, in the non-slaveholding States of this Union,—is producing a tremendous sensation, and rousing up all the human, moral and religious elements in the land against it, and against the foul system it is designed to strengthen and protect.70

  The issue of fugitive slaves leads directly to John Brown’s 1859 abortive raid at Harpers Ferry. According to historian John Stauffer, “In John Brown’s mind the decision to raid Harpers Ferry was a natural extension of his plan to run slaves north through his ‘Subterranean Pass Way’ in the Alleghenies.”71 The mountains surrounding Harpers Ferry had been regularly used by runaways as escape routes, including those aided by Harriet Tubman, who helped Brown plan the raid. It was now Brown’s hope that instead of helping fugitives move northward to freedom, his capture of the federal arsenal and its supply of arms would arouse the slaves and free blacks in the region, who were already prepared to join him and launch an insurrection that would spread through the South and bring freedom to the heartland of bondage.72

  On October 16, 1859, Brown and twenty-one men, including five blacks, invaded and captured the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Though initially successful, no slaves rose in rebellion and the local militia and residents surrounded the armory. Brown took some captives and several townspeople were killed before Colonel Robert E. Lee, of later Civil War fame, arrived with the U.S. Marines. Ten of Brown’s raiders, including two of his sons, were killed in the struggle. After being finally captured, Brown was taken to a local courthouse, convicted of treason against the commonwealth of Virginia, and hanged on December 2. It was his conduct during the trial, however, that elevated him to the status of a martyr.

  Brown had established very close ties with Frederick Douglass and had been a major influence in Douglass’s break with Garrisonian “moral suasion” and endorsement of the need for violence in ending slavery. But when Brown invited Douglass to participate in the raid in the summer of 1859, Douglass refused, believing that the venture was doomed to failure. Nevertheless, in an address in 1881 at Harpers Ferry, Douglass affirmed, “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”73 In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “[John Brown] was that new saint … who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”74 Or, as Henry David Thoreau put it, “Some 1800 years ago Christ was crucified. This morning Captain Brown was hung. He is not Old Brown any longer, he is an angel of light.” Before long Union soldiers marching into the South would be singing, “John Brown’s body lies a mouldering in the grave.”

  The Civil War gave a wholly new meaning to the fugitive issue. Like the American Revolution and other previous wars, it provided slaves with the opportunity to escape behind “enemy” military lines. Soon after hostilities began, Union general Benjamin F. Butler accepted three fugitive slaves at Union-controlled Fort Monroe, in Virginia. Violating the Fugitive Slave Law, he presciently declared that the fugitives were “contrabands” of war, since if they had remained on the Confederate side, they would be economically assisting the enemy’s war effort. If President Lincoln had little desire at this point to make the war “about” slavery, Butl
er had provided the administration with a means of undermining the enemy’s economy and further troubling Southern society by encouraging more runaways. While the flow of contrabands could slow Union army movements, they were used in Union camps to do a variety of tasks, and paid a wage.75 Even more important, some 250,000 of the men took up arms on the Union side. Of the 4 million slaves in the South, approximately half a million had crossed Union lines as contrabands by the end of the war. The issue of contrabands had a profound impact on the Lincoln administration’s evolving stance toward blacks and slavery.76 The Union army became, in effect, an army of liberation, extending freedom—as John Brown had desired—into the South; and hundreds of thousands of slaves responded by fleeing, like the earlier fugitives, into the new “free soil.” Their legal status remained unclear for a time but was eventually determined by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and especially by the Thirteenth Amendment, which later for Cuba and Brazil became an early culmination of the Age of Emancipation.

  10

  The Great Experiment: Jubilee, Responses, and Failure

  AN ESCHATOLOGICAL EVENT AND AMERICA’S BARRIERS

  The British Parliament’s slave emancipation act of 1833, like its earlier abolition of the slave trade in 1807, was hailed as a moral triumph of unprecedented importance. Officially and repeatedly celebrated in Britain, as in 1933 and 2007, these events raised crucial questions about how a nation that had profited immensely from a system of massive dehumanizing exploitation could seemingly renounce greed and self-interest and abolish not only the trade in slaves but slavery itself. For some time the dominant interpretation stressed the importance of prayer and Providence, canonized William Wilberforce, and played down the more radical implications, such as the influence of the great Jamaican slave insurrection, or “Baptist War,” of 1831. Despite the initial misgivings of most abolitionists over the issues of compensation and apprenticeship, on which the actual passage of emancipation depended, the day of “liberation,” August 1, 1834, was celebrated in Britain as a biblical Jubilee, a millennial turning point in human history.

  In one of the most significant of the hundreds of sermons delivered on August 1, 1834, Ralph Wardlaw showed how a seemingly political and secular act helped to fulfill the eschatological promise of Christianity, prefiguring an era of universal freedom and harmony. If slavery exemplified the human conflict and oppression that had permeated modern societies, its abolition would open the way to a new kind of harmony. A prominent reformer in Glasgow, Wardlaw was a devout evangelical who also subscribed to the principles of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. In hailing emancipation as a literal Jubilee, Wardlaw drew on the doctrine that the ancient Hebrew Jubilee prefigured Christ’s mission “to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound,” a passage from Isaiah that, according to Saint Luke, Jesus “stood up to read” in the synagogue at Nazareth. For Wardlaw, Parliament’s political decision was nothing less than the harbinger of Christ’s final salvation of the world:

  The trumpet has sounded through all the colonial dependencies of our country, which proclaims “liberty to the captives.”—O! what heart is there so cold, so seared, so dead, as to feel no thrill of exulting emotion at the thought, that on the morning of this day, eight hundred thousand fellow-men and fellow-subjects, who, during the past night, slept bondmen, awoke freemen!1

  Wardlaw claimed that Britain had averted “a gathering storm of divine retribution” for a national sin, and that the first day of a Jubilee year would inaugurate continuous progress in the cause of freedom, including the Christianization of the former slaves, some of whom would become missionaries in Africa. Above all, he rejoiced that “Britain’s trans-Atlantic daughter” had already caught the spirit of British philanthropy; and that once America joined Britain in setting “the united example of the entire, peaceful, and final extinction of slavery,—the world will be shamed into imitation.”2 Yet it is crucial to note that Wardlaw and his audience could simply take it for granted that West Indian blacks would and should continue to perform the same kinds of labor for the same former masters.

  Despite highly conflicting reports in America concerning the response of West Indian blacks to emancipation, Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed Wardlaw’s optimism in an influential speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Jubilee on August 1, 1844. For Emerson, British emancipation was “an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts; a day, which gave the immense fortification of a fact,—of gross history,—to ethical abstractions.” It especially impressed Emerson that “the negro population was equal in nobleness to the deed.” Meeting in churches and chapels on the night of July 31, they had welcomed their emancipating moment with prayers and tears of joy, “but there was no riot, no feasting” and, according to one report, “not a single dance … nor so much as a fiddle played.” The next morning, Emerson assured his listeners, “with very few exceptions, every negro on every plantation was in the field at work.” Since the much criticized apprenticeship was also abolished on August 1 in 1838, the second emancipation was easily subsumed in the first. Like Wardlaw, Emerson stressed that “other revolutions have been the insurrection of the oppressed; this was the repentance of the tyrant,” the harbinger of a new era, when “the masses” would awaken and apply an absolute moral standard to every public question.3

  For most free African Americans, the First (or Second) of August soon became a national holiday replacing the Fourth of July, a day of promise when both black and white abolitionists could deliver orations and sermons that not only condemned the evils of slavery and racial discrimination but reminded the world that Britain, the tyrant symbolically overthrown every Fourth of July, must still teach white Americans the meaning of freedom.

  Frederick Douglass, who frequently spoke on such holidays, elaborated on this theme in a long address delivered to some three to four thousand blacks and whites in Poughkeepsie, New York, on August 2, 1858:

  How long may we ask, shall it be the standing reproach and shame of the American Government that while England is exerting her mighty power, and her all-pervading influence, to emancipate mankind from Slavery, and to humanize the world, the American Government is taxing its ingenuity, and putting forth its power, to thwart and circumvent this policy of a great and kindred nation? 4

  For Douglass, the profound goal was to make “this ever memorable day” the means of awakening the American people “in the cause of the fettered millions in our own land.” Douglass emphatically argued that the British emancipation act was not an “experiment,” contrary to the views of Britain’s colonial secretary Edward Stanley and the other framers of the law. Instead, according to Douglass, the act “naturally addresses itself to the highest and most ennobling attributes of human nature.” Unequaled in “the annals of the world,” it was “a manifestation of Christian virtue … a confession and a renunciation of profitable sin at great expense, on a grand and commanding scale, by a great nation.” This victory was far from easy or undemanding; Douglass underscored the power of the selfish and “Satanic” interests and the repeated earlier defeats in Parliament and out of Parliament.5

  What finally made success possible was the spread of abolition sentiment “from individuals to multitudes all over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” In response to this united voice of the nation, the British Parliament “calmly” proceeded “to dissolve the relation of master and slave,” and “on the morning of the 1st of August 1834, eight hundred thousand colored members of the human family were instantly declared free, emancipated.” “They had been ranked, as our slaves are, with the beasts of the field, rated with bales of goods and barrels of rum, driven before the taskmaster’s lash.” “But all at once they learn that their bondage is ended, the taskmaster is dismissed, the whips and chains are buried, they are no longer slaves.” Douglass accepted abolitionist reports that th
e freed slaves had then “staggered and fell down, rose up, ran about, shouted, laughed, cried, sung.”6

  But in 1858, as America moved toward the Civil War, Douglass was especially concerned with including a response to the widespread British and American consensus that British West Indian emancipation had been a shocking economic failure. The London Times had editorialized in 1857,

  Confessedly, taking that grand summary view of the question which we cannot help taking after a quarter of a century, the process was a failure: it destroyed an immense property, ruined thousands of good families, degraded the Negroes still lower than they were, and, after all, increased the mass of Slavery in less scrupulous hands.7

  Employing irony, Douglass “admitted” that “in some respects” (from the slaveholders’ perspective) it had failed—that is, the British had failed to impose a repressive substitute for slavery and had failed to prevent former slaves and their descendants from creating their own farms and employments and from achieving civil rights or even becoming jurors and legislators.8

  Douglass was here responding to the undeniable fact that emancipation had led to a sharp decline in the production of West Indian plantations, especially in larger colonies like Jamaica, where many freed blacks were able to obtain their own land and depend on at least subsistence agriculture. He even acknowledged Britain’s dependence on the importation of thousands of so-called East Indian Coolies to replace the ex-slaves who had left the plantations. But for Douglass the preservation of the plantation system was not a priority. The priority was the condition and welfare of the former slaves, which had clearly been vastly improved in the twenty years since the abolition of apprenticeship.