The South loved Webster’s speech. The opponents of slavery were appalled. William Lloyd Garrison likened Webster to Benedict Arnold, while Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan.”
The debate continued through the summer. When the muggy heat became insupportable, the tobacco-stained red carpet was taken up, and the draperies removed from the chamber, in an ineffectual effort to cool the room. Members stretched their legs in the ninety-six-foot-high rotunda, ornamented by historical pictures painted by Trumbull, or sprawled back with their feet on their desks, cutting fresh plugs of tobacco with their penknives, and shooting the old ones from their mouths at spittoons placed strategically around the chamber. Meanwhile, as Congress discussed putting a stop to the local slave trade, sales in the area soared. “Scarcely a day passed that gangs of chained slaves did not pass through the city,” the underground agent William Chaplin gloomily observed.
Chaplin was busy that summer. Following the capture of the Pearl, he had actually increased his work with fugitives. Then, on August 9, as he was driving a closed carriage with two fugitive slaves north out of Washington, he was ambushed at the Maryland state line by a detachment of militia, who had been alerted in advance by a spy. Chaplin drew a pistol from his coat and fired at a man who tried to seize the reins. The fugitives, who were also armed, then began blazing away from inside the carriage. Twenty-seven shots were fired before the three men realized that they were trapped, and surrendered. The confrontation was no more than a skirmish, if measured by the numbers involved. But like the first shots fired at Concord Green in 1775, they signaled a fundamental sea change in the underground’s willingness to fight back.
Chaplin was taken to the nearest jail, at Rockville, Maryland, not far from the farm where Josiah Henson had toiled for Isaac Riley a quarter of a century earlier. There he was charged with larceny and assault with intent to kill. (The two fugitives were returned to their owners, both Southern members of Congress, and quickly sold.) Gerrit Smith wrote reassuringly to his old friend to remind him that he was still endowed with “a freedom of soul, a freedom in Christ Jesus—which not men, nor Devils, can take from you.” More practically, he immediately dispatched a delegation of New York abolitionists to Washington to try to get Chaplin out of jail.
While Chaplin was awaiting trial, on August 21, abolitionists held an extraordinary two-day convention of fifty fugitive slaves and two thousand white supporters in Cazenovia, New York, near Smith’s Peterboro home. Frederick Douglass presided. In addition to Smith, of course, among those in attendance were the veteran abolitionist Samuel J. May, Charles M. Ray, the most active underground man in New York City, and Reverend Jermain Loguen, who as the slave Jarm Logue had escaped from slavery in an epic ride from Tennessee to Canada in 1834. (Logue had paid for his education at the interracial Oneida Institute by working as a hotel porter, and was now a minister famous throughout the Burned Over District for his fiery antislavery preaching.) A photograph taken at the convention shows a still youthful-looking Gerrit Smith, arm upraised with an oratorical flourish, standing between the teenaged Edmonson sisters, primly dressed in plain frocks and deep bonnets. They had been passengers on the Pearl and were bought out of slavery by Chaplin, on behalf of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, who then “sold” them publicly in a mock auction to raise public consciousness about slavery, a charade that reportedly sent the titillated reverend into “extacies” of excitement. Following denunciations of the debate taking place in Washington, the convention provocatively nominated William Chaplin for president of the United States on the Liberty Party ticket, threatening “revolution” if he was not released. Another resolution, which sent shock waves through the South, openly urged slaves to escape from their masters, to carry arms when they did so, and to kill masters who pursued them. A Tennessee newspaper likened the convention to the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth: “Can any scene be found more disgusting? Can any movement be found more alarming than this? Treason, murder, and robbery are openly proclaimed and advised. If patriots tremble for the safety of our glorious Union…let them look to the madness of these wild fanatics.” Rockville slaveholders, citing the proceedings of the convention, pressured the local magistrate to set Chaplin’s bail at an astronomical nineteen thousand dollars. Gerrit Smith, brandishing his preferred weapon, the cashbox, pledged twelve thousand dollars. Freed on bond, Chaplin fled north with the help of his abolitionist friends, and never stood trial.
On August 26 the new Fugitive Slave Act was voted into law. It was comprehensive and draconian. Anyone who hindered a slave catcher, attempted the rescue of a recaptured fugitive, “directly or indirectly” assisted a fugitive to escape, or harbored a fugitive, was liable to a fine of up to one thousand dollars and six months’ imprisonment, plus damages of one thousand dollars to the owner of each slave that was lost. Commissioners were to be appointed by the federal circuit courts specifically to act on fugitive slave cases, and provided with financial incentives—“bribes,” abolitionists charged—to facilitate the recovery of runaways: the commissioner would receive a fee of ten dollars each time he remanded a fugitive to the claimant, but only five dollars if he found for the alleged slave. Commissioners could be fined one thousand dollars for refusing to issue a writ when requested, and they were personally liable for the value of any slave who escaped from their custody. Contravening new liberty laws in some Northern states, testimony by an accused slave was disallowed, and there was no right to trial by jury. The provision that outraged most Northerners, and not only abolitionists, gave commissioners the authority to compel any bystander, no matter what his beliefs, to help them seize any alleged fugitive. The Columbus, Ohio, Standard announced with disgust, “Now we are all slave catchers.”
Webster, with visions of himself in the White House, pronounced the compromise “a providential escape,” confidently adding, “Whatever party may prevail, hereafter, the Union stands firm.” Clay was also ecstatic. “I believe from the bottom of my soul that this measure is the reunion of this Union,” he bloviated. “I believe it is the dove of peace, which, taking its aerial flight from the dome of the Capitol, carries the glad tidings of…harmony to all the remotest extremities of this distracted land.”
Although conservative Northerners praised the compromise for putting an end to “agitation of the slave question,” the gusts of anger at Webster blew into a cyclone. Meetings of condemnation were reported from Maine to Iowa. In a typical such convention, held in Canandaigua, New York, abolitionists resolved: “Compromise or no Compromise—constitution or no constitution; whether the escaping fugitive from slavery shall have his trial for freedom before a jury, or pro-slavery post-master, or whatsoever tribunal—‘that no testimony short of a Bill of sale from God Almighty,’ can establish the title of the master to his slave, or induce us to lift a finger to aid in his return to the house of bondage.” Frederick Douglass wrote furiously, in the North Star, “Wo to the poor panting fugitive! Wo to all that dare be his friends! Wo to all that refuse to help hunt him down, hold him fast and send him back to his bloody prison-house. Wo to all the just and merciful in the land.”
CHAPTER 15
DO WE CALL THIS THE LAND OF THE FREE?
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then?
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
1
At about 2 P.M. on the afternoon of February 15, 1851, a phalanx of twenty or more black men with their collars turned high and sou’westers camouflaging their faces shoved their way through the doors of Boston’s lofty Doric courthouse. Pushing aside federal deputy marshal Patrick Riley and his constables, they took hold of Shadrach Minkins and carried him out into the rain-slick streets of the city to the cheers of what may have been the largest gathering of African Americans in the city’s history. Over his head, one of Minkins’s rescuers brand
ished the city’s official Sword of Justice, which he had plucked from the courtroom’s wall. Picking up more supporters with every step, the rescuers streamed like a squall in a shouting procession north along Court Street, past the Paul Revere house, whose symbolism could not have been lost on the crowd, whose leaders knew full well that they were part of a second, abolitionist American revolution, into Cambridge Street, and on into the black neighborhood that tumbled down the back of Beacon Hill toward the Charles River. And there Minkins disappeared.
That morning, Marshal Riley and his men had arrested Minkins at Taft’s Cornhill Coffee House, where he worked as a waiter. Minkins had been in Boston only a few months, having escaped by sea from Norfolk, Virginia, in May 1850. His arrest in the heart of Boston, headquarters of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the home of William Lloyd Garrison, whose office at the Liberator stood only a few doors away from Taft’s, was no coincidence. It was meant to demonstrate not just to abolitionists, but also to the slaveholding South that the federal government was serious about enforcing the new Fugitive Slave Law. However, with a rapidity that the lawmen were completely unprepared for, the city’s Vigilance Committee had mobilized its members, both black and white, and in less than two and a half hours after Minkins’s arrest they had organized a rescue plan, and successfully brought it off, under the direction of the indefatigable and courageous Lewis Hayden, the fugitive slave whom the unfortunate Calvin Fairbank and his companion Delia Webster had driven out of Kentucky beneath the seat of a carriage six years before. Police searched frantically for the missing fugitive, while news of his escape raced in every direction along the country’s newly strung telegraph wires. In Washington, outraged Senator Henry Clay demanded to know whether “a government of white men was to be yielded to a government by blacks,” and a distressed President Fillmore called a special cabinet meeting, after which he issued a proclamation describing Minkins’s rescue as “a scandalous outrage,” and ordered civil and military officials of all ranks to cooperate in recapturing the fugitive.
Minkins, meanwhile, was as safe as any man in his position could hope to be, in Hayden’s capable hands. A natural entrepreneur, since his arrival in Boston the forty-year-old Hayden had built up a clothing business to become one of the wealthiest black men in the city, as well as the leading black member of the Vigilance Committee. (He had also raised six hundred and fifty dollars to pay for Fairbank’s release, in August 1849.) Most of the fugitives who found their way to Boston were sheltered initially in his three-story brick home on Southac Street. But Minkins was too hot a property to hide in such an obvious place. After a circuitous trip through Cambridge to throw off pursuers, Hayden personally drove Minkins to Concord, eighteen miles west of Boston, to the home of Francis Bigelow, a white blacksmith and a core member of the local underground. Once Minkins had been fed, Bigelow gave him new clothes and drove him on to Leominster, where he was switched to another carriage, in which he was driven to West Fitchburg, where he was put on a train for Vermont, and ultimately Canada. Four days after leaving Boston, Minkins was safe in Montreal.
“Do we call this the land of the free?” a reflective young Concord man “of taut mind and wound-up muscles” wrote in his diary the day after Minkins passed through. “What is it to be free of King Geo[rge] the IV and continue the slaves of prejudice? What is it [to] be born free & equal & not to live?” The writer, the son of a local pencil maker, was Henry David Thoreau, an operative in the Concord underground, although he would become far more famous for his affinity for a pleasant bit of local landscape known as Walden Pond. Thoreau or Bigelow usually received the late-night arrivals. Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia, was one of the founding members of the town’s Female Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1846 Thoreau himself had elected to go to jail rather than pay his poll tax, as a protest against slavery. In 1848 Thoreau had lectured in the town’s public meeting hall on “the relation of the individual to the state,” the genesis of what was to become one of the most famous essays ever written by an American, “Civil Disobedience,” and the inspiration for countless radical challenges to the tyranny of the majority in generations to come.
The enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law hardened ideas that had begun to gestate during the Mexican War of the late 1840s, which Thoreau and most abolitionists passionately opposed. Before Thoreau, Quakers and some evangelicals had argued that civil disobedience was a principled religious response to slavery and war. Thoreau proposed for the first time that a man’s individual conscience was reason enough to defy a law in which he did not believe. The state, he argued, had no more truth or intelligence than the average man, only greater physical strength: “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.” How could a moral man bring himself to obey immoral laws? he asked himself. “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”
The Fugitive Slave Law instantly transformed philosophical reflections into questions of practical immediacy. “We must trample this infamous law underfoot, be the consequences what they may,” Unitarian Samuel J. May told his Syracuse congregation. “It is not for you to choose whether you will or not obey such a law as this. You are as much under obligation not to obey it, as you are not to lie, steal, or commit murder.” Similar thoughts were coursing even more starkly through the agitated minds of many other Northerners. “This so-called Fugitive Slave Law, what is it, that I am called upon to obey it and assist in its execution?” demanded Rodney French, a Yankee ship’s captain who was denied landing rights in the South because he was rumored to be an abolitionist. “It is the most disgraceful, atrocious, unjust, detestable, heathenish, barbarous, diabolical, tyrannical, man-degrading, woman-murdering, demon-pleasing, Heaven-defying act ever perpetrated in any age of the world, by persons claiming to have consciences and a belief in a just God. In one word, it is the sum of all villainies.”
The arrest of Shadrach Minkins was not the first attack on a fugitive in the North, under the new law. That sad honor went to James Hamlet, who was literally snatched off the street in New York City in October 1850, eight days after the act’s passage. Antislavery newspapers brought almost daily reports of fugitives being handed over to federal authorities somewhere in the free states. There were captures in New York, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. By the time of the “Shadrach Rescue,” as it became universally known, there had been at least sixty (and possibly many more) attempted arrests in the North, involving a total of more than one hundred different fugitives. In February 1851, in a speech to Syracuse businessmen, the administration’s favorite Yankee shill for the Fugitive Slave Law, Daniel Webster, promised that the law “will be executed in all the great cities,” even “in the midst of the next Anti-Slavery Convention.” Those who dared to oppose the law, he warned menacingly, “are traitors! traitors! traitors!”
Fugitive slaves who had lived in comparative safety for years in Northern states, who had painstakingly acquired nest eggs and bought homes for themselves, suddenly fled, as Frederick Douglass memorably put it, “as from an enemy’s land—a doomed city,” to begin over again farther north or in Canada, impoverished and among strangers. To one missionary, it seemed that panicked black refugees were appearing in the queen’s dominions “by fifties every day, like frogs in Egypt.” Desperate calls were put out to antislavery societies in the free states for fresh shipments of food and clothing. As many as three thousand fugitives crossed into Canada within three months after the enactment of the new law. In western New York, where the panic was extreme, about one-third of the 600 blacks living in and around Syracuse fled north. It was reported that of the 114 members of a Baptist church in Rochester, all but 2 left the country, and that in Buffalo, 130 left from another black Baptist church. More than 40 fled Boston with
in three days after the signing of the Fugitive Slave Law, followed by another hundred after the Minkins incident. Their fears were vindicated when, six weeks after Minkins’s rescue, Thomas Sims was arrested in Boston and marched to the port surrounded by an armed guard of three hundred policemen and citizen volunteers. (With cruel though probably unintended irony, he was embarked from the same wharf where radicals dressed as Indians had dumped British tea into the harbor in the prelude to the American Revolution.) An estimated 300 blacks fled from Pittsburgh, including nearly all the waiters in the city’s hotels. Columbia, Pennsylvania, one of the largest African-American communities in the North, was particularly hard hit as slave hunters and outright kidnappers targeted the town: in January 1851 constables snatched a black man named Baker, who had lived in town for years, and who was negotiating to purchase his freedom. Two months later, a woman and her twelve-year-old son were carried off to Philadelphia. And in April a man and his wife and child were dragged from their sleep and taken to the office of the federal commissioner in Harrisburg, leaving the couple’s ten-month-old baby behind. Columbia’s black population of 873 abruptly dropped by 40 percent.
Others stayed. Reverend Jermain Loguen of Syracuse, formerly the slave Jarm Logue, was one who would not be moved. When urged by his wife and friends to flee to Canada, he refused, just as he had always rejected friends’ offers to buy his freedom for him. With the same boldness with which he had fought his way through two separate bands of armed patrollers on his galloping flight north from Tennessee, he now proclaimed his defiance of the law from pulpits all over central New York, daring his former owner, Manasseth Logue, and the United States government to come after him. He was a fugitive slave, he declared to anyone who cared to listen, and he had made up his mind to stand his ground at his home in Syracuse. “What is life to me if I am to be a slave in Tennessee?” he thundered. “I have received my freedom from Heaven, and with it came the command to defend my title to it. The question is with you,” he told Syracusans at a rally that resulted in the formation of a local Vigilance Committee. “If you will give us up, say so, and we will shake the dust from our feet and leave you. But we believe better things. Whatever may be your decision, my ground is taken. I have declared it everywhere. I don’t respect this law—I don’t fear it—I won’t obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it. I will not live a slave, and if force is employed to reenslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man.”
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