73. Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 168–74.
74. Juliet E. K. Walker, “Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War,” Business History Review 60 (Autumn, 1986): 344–58. Leidesdorff was born in the West Indies to a black mother and Danish father, became a sea captain in New Orleans, and then passed as a Californian Mexican as he developed an import-export business, ship chandlery shop, lumberyard, and shipyard before provisioning the U.S. Army in the Mexican-American war.
75. I am indebted to an e-mail from John Stauffer for this ending of the chapter.
9. FUGITIVE SLAVES, FREE SOIL, AND THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE
1. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 268.
2. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Benjamin Quarles (Cambridge, Mass.; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 95–96.
3. Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 31–40.
4. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 215, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 544, in Gates, Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies.
5. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 41–82; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 11–41.
6. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Gates, Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, 215.
7. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 26–41.
8. Ibid., 41.
9. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 140–41. It should be stressed that there is no agreement among historians regarding Douglass’s father. Preston devotes a chapter to Aaron Anthony as “Father Image.”
10. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4.
11. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 69.
12. Ibid., 70.
13. Ibid., 71–72.
14. Ibid., 72–73. For an excellent study of Ruggles, see Graham Russell Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
15. Ibid., 74–80, 83–85.
16. Ibid., 87–89.
17. David W. Blight, “Why the Underground Railroad, and Why Now? A Long View,” in Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, ed. David W. Blight (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 234.
18. Ibid., 247.
19. Quoted in ibid., 239.
20. Ibid., 242.
21. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 143–48, 143.
22. Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 367.
23. Ibid., 367n49. They point out that not all of the one to two thousand slaves traveled along the routes of the Underground Railroad.
24. Ira Berlin, “Before Cotton: African and African American Slavery in Mainland North America during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Blight, Passages to Freedom, 24–25; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–51. Historian Gary Nash has notably made the assessment that “In reality, the American Revolution represents the largest slave uprising in our history.” Yet it was “obvious soon after the new federal government was in place, that slavery was not going to wither in the United States.” Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1990), 57–59.
25. Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 86–89.
26. Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 13, 24, 27–38, 55–58. On the political mobilization of slaves, see also Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), especially Part 1. When discussing slave resistance, Hahn omits the complicity of many slaves in supporting their masters, as well as the growing economic success of the slave system and the way self-interest motivated planters to extend privileges of various kinds. When treating free blacks in the North, he ignores their frequent pride in an American identity, extending back to their participation in the American Revolution, and their desire for racial integration.
27. Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 279–81.
28. James, W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, 3rd ed. (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1971), v.
29. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 89–91.
30. Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 30.
31. Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in Slave Narratives, ed. William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Library of America 114 (New York: Library of America, 2000); Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004). My understanding of Jacobs has also been broadened by Gloria T. Randle, “Between the Rock and the Hard Place: Mediating Spaces in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” African American Review 33, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 43–56; Ann Taves, “Spiritual Purity and Sexual Shame: Religious Themes in the Writings of Harriet Jacobs,” Church History 56, no. 1 (March 1987): 59–72; and Kimberly Drake, “Rewriting the American Self: Race, Gender, and Identity in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs,” MELUS 22, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 91–108.
32. Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, xv–xxi.
33. Yellin guesses that Harriet may have first used the surname Jacobs when she met the family of the vigilance committee member who met her at the Philadelphia wharf after her escape. The name came from her grandfather, Henry Jacobs. Her father Elijah, a carpenter, used the last name Knox and was the slave of Dr. Andrew Knox, but was probably the son of a white farmer named Henry Jacobs. Ibid., 66, 67.
34. Jacobs on the effects of her jealous mistress’s nightly vigils: “At last I began to be fearful for my life. It had often been threatened; and you can imagine, better than I can describe, what an unpleasant sensation it must produce to wake up in the dead of night and find a jealous woman bending over you. Terrible as this experience was, I had fears that it would give place to one more terrible.” Jacobs, Incidents, 780.
35. Jacobs, Incidents, 801.
36. Ibid., 801–2, 747–48. As Gloria T. Randle puts it: “This mother at once deeply loves and sincerely regrets her children, since their existence constitutes a visible sign of her degradation, an irrefutable marker of her transgression, and the prospect of her children’s eventual judgment against her.” Randle, “Between the Rock and the Hard Place,” 51. But this point is qualified by Kimberly Drake: “Jacobs sets the cult of true womanhood, with its moral expectations, against cultural ideals for motherhood, underlining the limitations of the former as she describes her achievement of the latter. She attempts to change her status from sexual object to sacred mother…[hoping] that her maternity, despite its illegitimacy, will provide an appeal to mothers of the North and enable her to form a bond with them.” Drake, “Rewriting the American Self,” 101.
37. Jacobs, Incidents, 826.
38. Ibid., 840.
39. Ibid., 830.
40. Ibid., 830–40. Harriet learned while on the plantation that her children were going to be sent to the plantation as well: “They thought that my children’s being there would fetter me to the spot, and that it was a good place to break us all in to abject submission to our lot as slaves.”
41. Ibid., 860.
42. Quoted in Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 45.
43. Ibid., 44.
44. Ibid., 59.
45. Jacobs, Incidents, 911, 914.
46. Yellin, Harriet Jac
obs, 83, 114–16, and passim.
47. Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 96, 131–32. Issac and Amy Post’s activist circle in Rochester has garnered significant scholarly attention, for more on the Post circle of activism and spiritualism, see Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Harriet Jacobs would be influenced by the Posts’ interest in the spirit world, so far that she consulted spirits to find out about the welfare of her son and brother who were chasing gold in Australia.
48. Ibid., 104.
49. Ibid., 118–41.
50. Ibid., 129–31, 140–43, 190–201.
51. U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 2.
52. For a concise and detailed explanation of the history of fugitive slaves and American law, see Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 3–25. The threat of kidnapping is often mentioned in studies of free black life and abolitionism in the nineteenth century, but deserves more study as a subject of its own. The issue gains considerable attention in antislavery newspapers prior to the war, free black community organizations, not to mention its frequent inclusion in the numbers of injustices cited by black and white abolitionists on their speaking tours. The only work devoted to the issue is the short book by Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).
53. Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 229.
54. David Everett Swift, Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 83. The late historian David Swift notably argued that the New York–based Colored American, the important black antislavery paper of the late 1830s and early 1840s, was formed primarily to serve the ends of the New York Vigilance Committee. Although the theme of the paper moved well beyond issues of fugitives and kidnapping during its run, the paper nonetheless retained a sense of collective effort and assertive public presence that characterized the vigilance committees of the North.
55. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), 99.
56. Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 150.
57. Hodges, David Ruggles, 94 and passim.
58. Ibid., 204.
59. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 230–31.
60. Henry Highland Garnet, “Address to the Slaves of the United States,” in A Memorial Discourse; by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865, with an introduction by James McCune Smith M.D. (Philadelphia: J. M. Wilson, 1865), 44–51.
61. Steven H. Shiffrin, “The Rhetoric of Black Violence in the Antebellum Period: Henry Highland Garnet,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (Sept. 1971): 45–49. As Kenneth Stampp, the great historian of slavery, put it long ago: “The Turner story was not likely to encourage slaves to make new attempts to win their freedom by fighting for it. They now realized that they would face a united white community, well armed and quite willing to annihilate as much of the black population as might seem necessary,” (ibid. 47).
62. Ibid., 52.
63. Stanley W. Campbell convincingly argues that while most Northerners were opposed to slavery, “only a few citizens in isolated communities engaged in active opposition to enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law.” But his work tends to underplay the strength and importance of Northern opposition to the law as well as the failure of the South to recover between 1850 and 1860 more than three hundred fugitives (The Slave Catchers, xvii–xviii, and passim).
64. In a study of Methodist newspapers, Ralph A. Keller argues that for churchmen and much of the North’s religious population, it was the Fugitive Slave Law that brought tensions to the highest level at mid-century, and that even conservative editors who ordinarily avoided political issues were outraged by the law. Hence the supposed period of calm following the Compromise of 1850 “might better be understood as a time of smoldering bitterness which, in turn, can help explain the magnitude of the Kansas-Nebraska explosion of 1854.” Keller, “Methodist Newspapers and the Fugitive Slave Law: A New Perspective for the Slavery Crisis in the North,” Church History 43, no. 3 (Sept. 1974): 320–27.
Despite the fact that the biblical Paul was willing, but reluctant, to send the escaped slave Onesimus back to his master, Philemon, in Philemon 1:8–21, the Fugitive Slave Law directly violated Deuteronomy 23:15: “Thou shalt not deliver unto the master his servant which has escaped unto thee.… Thou shalt not oppress him.” Because of this direct violation, the verse was seized upon in literature opposing the Fugitive Slave Law. Whereas abolitionists had to typically rely on the “spirit of the law” in arguing for the Bible’s opposition to slavery, in this case the letter of the law could more or less serve their ends.
65. Campbell, The Slave Catchers, 23–25.
66. Ibid., 207; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “A Federal Assault: African Americans and the Impact of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,” in Slavery and the Law, ed. Paul Finkelman (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 144–45, 148–51; Leonard W. Levy, “Sims’ Case: The Fugitive Slave Law in Boston in 1851,” The Journal of Negro History 35, no. 1 (Jan. 1950): 72 and passim. Paul Finkelman states that the whole Sims retrieval cost as much as $100,000 if you count salaries and other peripheral expenses. Paul Finkelman, “Fugitive Slave Law of 1850” in Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass, ed. Paul Findelman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 74–78.
67. Calhoun’s famous speech, read on the floor of the Senate by Senator James Mason from Virginia (due to Calhoun’s sickly state) on March 4, 1850, illustrates the testlike atmosphere offered by Calhoun and like-minded Southern congressmen: “But will the North agree to do this [compromise]? It is for her to answer this question. But, I will say, she cannot refuse, if she has half the love of the Union which she professes to have. …At all events, the responsibility of saving the Union rests on the North, and not the South. The South cannot save it by any act of hers, and the North may save it without any sacrifice whatever, unless to do justice, and to perform her duties under the Constitution.… If you, who represent the stronger portion, cannot agree to settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so, and we shall know what to do, when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.” John Caldwell Calhoun, “Speech on the Slavery Question,” in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 1849–1850, vol. 27, ed. Clyde N. Wilson and Shirley B. Cook (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003) 210–11.
68. “From the Nashville American: ABOLITIONISTS AND FREE NEGROES,” The Liberator, October 18, 1850.
69. Luther Lee, Autobiography of the Rev. Luther Lee (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1882), 335–36. Such views were by no means limited to radical clergymen. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the law was one that “everyone of you will break on the earliest opportunity—a law which no man can obey, or abet obeying, without loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the name of a gentleman.” Quoted in Campbell, Slave Catchers, 50.
70. The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, ed. Louis Ruchames, vol. 4: From Disunionism to the Brink of War, 1850–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), 41.
71. John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002), 255.
72. Ibid
., 170–73, 236, 255.
73. Frederick Douglass, “John Brown: An Address at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College” in Meteor of War: The John Brown Story, ed. Zoe Trodd and John Stauffer (Maplecrest, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 2004), 206.
74. Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, p. 37. Stauffer notes that Emerson borrowed the words from his friend Mattie Griffith.
75. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 68–78.
76. Hahn, Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, 57–61.
10. THE GREAT EXPERIMENT: JUSTICE, RESPONSES, AND FAILURE
1. Ralph Wardlaw, The Jubilee: A Sermon Preached in West George-Street Chapel, Glasgow, on Friday, August 1st 1834, the Memorial Day of Negro Emancipation in the British Colonies (Glasgow, 1834), 13, 16–27, 20.
2. Ibid., 26–37.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address Delivered in Concord on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies, August 1, 1844,” in Complete Works of Emerson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–04), 11:99, 115–16, 135.
4. Frederick Douglass, “Freedom in the West Indies: An Address Delivered in Poughkeepsie, New York, on 2 August 1858,” The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed., John W. Blassingame, vol. 3, 1855–63 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 217–21.
5. Ibid., 215–17.
6. Ibid., 216–17.
7. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 202–3. For a detailed analysis of the astounding costs of Britain’s campaign against both the slave trade and slavery, see Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, “Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade,” International Organization 53, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 631–68. Drescher points out that even Kaufmann and Pape overlook the cost of depreciating plantation values from 1808 to the 1850s. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 285n4.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 54