The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  The modest victory over Covey caused Douglass to consider something larger. He met a free black woman named Anna Murray who helped him plot his escape from bondage. She provided clothing, cash and advice. Douglass, posing as a sailor, with false identification, boarded a train bound north from Baltimore. The ruse worked, and without major incident he reached New York. “I have often been asked how I felt when I first found myself on free soil,” he wrote later. The answer was simple yet profound. “A new world had opened upon me,” he said. “I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life.”

  Anna Murray joined him in New York, and the two were married. They were advised that he would be safer farther north, and they moved to Massachusetts, where he soon became a celebrated figure in the abolitionist movement. Escaped slaves were not unusual, but ones as handsome as Douglass and as eloquent as he proved to be were rare. He was persuaded to tell his story in lectures and in print; before long he was the face and voice of American abolitionism. He traveled to Britain, where he was lionized still more. British abolitionists weren’t restrained by politics in the way American abolitionists sometimes were; they had no constitution protecting slavery, and they didn’t worry about provoking a civil war in their country. They could indulge their moral preferences to their hearts’ content. They couldn’t get enough of Douglass. Some pooled resources to purchase his freedom from the Maryland master who still claimed ownership, after which Douglass was able to travel more freely around America.

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  IN 1847 DOUGLASS MET John Brown, in Springfield, Massachusetts. The meeting, and the impression Brown made, remained with Douglass ever after. “In person he was lean, strong, and sinewy, of the best New England mold, built for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships,” Douglass wrote. “Clad in plain American woolen, shod in boots of cowhide leather, and wearing a cravat of the same substantial material, under six feet high, less than 150 pounds in weight, aged about fifty, he presented a figure straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine. His bearing was singularly impressive. His head was not large, but compact and high. His hair was coarse, strong, slightly gray and closely trimmed, and grew low on his forehead. His face was smoothly shaved, and revealed a strong, square mouth, supported by a broad and prominent chin. His eyes were bluish-gray, and in conversation they were full of light and fire. When on the street, he moved with a long, springing, race-horse step, absorbed by his own reflections, neither seeking nor shunning observation.”

  They shared a meal before Brown turned to business. “Captain Brown cautiously approached the subject which he wished to bring to my attention; for he seemed to apprehend opposition to his views.” Brown had gathered that Douglass eschewed violence in confronting slavery. Brown did not. “He denounced slavery in look and language fierce and bitter, thought that slaveholders had forfeited their right to live, that the slaves had the right to gain their liberty in any way they could, did not believe that moral suasion would ever liberate the slave, or that political action would abolish the system.”

  Brown got more specific. “He said that he had long had a plan which could accomplish this end,” Douglass recalled. “He said he had been for some time looking for colored men to whom he could safely reveal his secret, and at times he had almost despaired of finding such men, but that now he was encouraged, for he saw heads of such rising up in all directions. He had observed my course at home and abroad, and he wanted my cooperation.”

  Brown sketched his plan. Douglass, in his later description, added disclaimers that might have been his own rather than Brown’s. “It did not, as some suppose, contemplate a general rising among the slaves, and a general slaughter of the slave masters. An insurrection he thought would only defeat the object, but his plan did contemplate the creating of an armed force which should act in the very heart of the South. He was not averse to the shedding of blood, and thought the practice of carrying arms would be a good one for the colored people to adopt, as it would give them a sense of their manhood. No people he said could have self-respect, or be respected, who would not fight for their freedom.”

  Brown showed Douglass a map and pointed to the Allegheny Mountains. “These mountains are the basis of my plan,” he said. “God has given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for the emancipation of the negro race; they are full of natural forts, where one man for defense will be equal to a hundred for attack; they are full also of good hiding places, where large numbers of brave men could be concealed, and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time. I know these mountains well, and could take a body of men into them and keep them there despite of all the efforts of Virginia to dislodge them.”

  Brown laid out his strategy. “The true object to be sought is first of all to destroy the money value of slave property; and that can only be done by rendering such property insecure. My plan then is to take at first about twenty-five picked men, and begin on a small scale; supply them arms and ammunition, post them in squads of fives on a line of twenty-five miles, the most persuasive and judicious of whom shall go down to the fields from time to time, as opportunity offers, and induce the slaves to join them, seeking and selecting the most restless and daring.”

  Brown understood the need for secrecy. “He saw that in this part of the work the utmost care must be used to avoid treachery and disclosure,” Douglass recounted. “Only the most conscientious and skillful should be sent on this perilous duty. With care and enterprise he thought he could soon gather a force of one hundred hardy men, men who would be content to lead the free and adventurous life to which he proposed to train them; when these were properly drilled, and each man had found the place for which he was best suited, they would begin work in earnest; they would run off the slaves in large numbers, retain the brave and strong ones in the mountains, and send the weak and timid to the North by the underground railroad; his operations would be enlarged with increasing numbers, and would not be confined to one locality.”

  Douglass asked how Brown’s army would be supported. “He said emphatically he would subsist them upon the enemy. Slavery was a state of war, and the slave had a right to anything necessary to his freedom.”

  Douglass objected that Brown’s project, far from loosing the grip of slavery upon the slaves, would tighten it. The very people Brown hoped to help would be harmed. “Suppose you succeed in running off a few slaves, and thus impress the Virginia slaveholder with a sense of insecurity in their slaves,” Douglass said. “The effect will only be to make them sell their slaves further south.”

  Brown didn’t deny it. “That will be first what I want to do,” he said. “Then I would follow them up. If we could drive slavery out of one county, it would be a great gain; it would weaken the system throughout the state.”

  “But they would employ bloodhounds to hunt you out of the mountains,” Douglass countered.

  “That they might attempt,” Brown granted. “But the chances are we should whip them, and when we should have whipt one squad, they would be careful how they pursued.”

  “But you might be surrounded and cut off from your provisions or means of subsistence,” Douglass said.

  Brown wasn’t worried. “He thought that could not be done so they could not cut their way out,” Douglass recorded. “But even if the worst came, he could but be killed, and he had no better use for his life than to lay it down in the cause of the slave.”

  Douglass offered a nonviolent approach, to no avail. “When I suggested that we might convert the slaveholders, he became much excited, and said that could never be. He knew their proud hearts and that they would never be induced to give up their slaves until they felt a big stick about their heads.”

  Writing years later, Douglass recalled the end of the conversation and the effect Brown had on him. “He observed that I might have noticed the simple manner in which he lived, adding that he had adopted this method
in order to save money to carry out his purposes. This was said in no boastful tone, for he felt that he had delayed already too long and had no room to boast either his zeal or his self-denial. Had some men made such display of rigid virtue, I should have rejected it, as affected, false, or hypocritical, but in John Brown, I felt it to be as real as iron or granite. From this night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass., 1847, while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful of its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.”

  4

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN COULDN’T have afforded to be as categorical about slavery as John Brown was, even if Lincoln’s temperament had pointed him in that uncompromising direction. Not long after being admitted to the practice of law, Lincoln moved to Springfield to partner with John Stuart. Lawyers were thick in the Illinois capital, and competition was fierce. Lincoln had to struggle to keep the office in coal and ink. A full five years into the practice his financial straits compelled him to decline an invitation to visit a friend in Kentucky. “I do not think I can come to Kentucky this season,” he wrote. “I am so poor, and make so little headway in the world, that I drop back in a month of idleness as much as I gain in a year’s rowing.”

  Lincoln took the clients who walked in his door. Illinois courts heard many cases involving slavery. The state lay across the Mississippi River from Missouri, and across the Ohio River from Kentucky, and slave owners from both states frequently brought slaves with them when they visited Illinois. Robert Matson did more than visit. His roots were in Kentucky, but he owned a farm in Illinois. He made a habit of bringing some of his Kentucky slaves to work on the farm for limited periods, then shipping them back to Kentucky. Illinois law winked at this practice, because it was exceptional enough to avoid direct affront to the clause of the Illinois constitution forbidding slavery. In any event, most white citizens of Illinois shed few tears for black slaves.

  But Matson got careless. He valued the work of his black foreman and decided to keep him in Illinois, effectively emancipating him. Yet the foreman’s wife and children remained slaves, at least in Matson’s view—and in the view of Matson’s white housekeeper and mistress, who conceived a jealous antipathy to the foreman’s wife. On behalf of her paramour she threatened to send the wife and children back to Kentucky to be sold. The foreman acted first, spiriting his family into hiding with two local abolitionists. Matson thereupon sued the abolitionists for return of his property.

  The abolitionists sought legal counsel. One of them, Hiram Rutherford, approached Lincoln. “I had known Abraham Lincoln several years, and his views and mine on the wrong of slavery being in perfect accord, I determined to hire him,” Rutherford recalled. “I found him at the tavern sitting on the veranda, his chair tilted back against one of the wooden pillars, entertaining the bystanders and loungers gathered about the place with one of his irresistible and highly-flavored stories. My head was full of the impending lawsuit, and I found it a great test of my patience to await the end of the chapter then in process of narration. Before he could begin on another I interrupted and called him aside. I told in detail the story of my troubles, reminded him that we had always agreed on the questions of the day, and asked him to represent me at the trial of my case in court. He listened attentively as I recited the facts leading up to the controversy with Matson, but I noticed a peculiarly troubled look came over his face now and then, his eyes appeared to be fixed in the distance beyond me, and he shook his head several times as if debating with himself some question of grave import. At length, and with apparent reluctance, he answered that he could not defend me, because he had already been counseled with in Matson’s interest, and was therefore under professional obligations to represent the latter unless released.”

  Rutherford reacted badly. “This was a grievous disappointment, and irritated me into expressions more or less bitter in tone,” he said. “I remember retorting that ‘my money was as good as anyone else’s,’ and although thoroughly in earnest I presume I was a little too hasty.”

  Rutherford soon rued his haste. Lincoln contrived to extricate himself from his obligation to Matson and thereupon told Rutherford he could represent him.

  “But it was too late,” Rutherford recounted. “My pride was up, and I plainly indicated a disinclination to avail myself of his offer.”

  So Lincoln, requiring some fee out of the suit, returned to Matson and took up his case, which was a weak one. “I remember well how he presented his side of the case,” a professional colleague recounted. Lincoln told the court, “This, then, is the point on which this whole case turns: Were these negroes passing over and crossing the state, and thus, as the law contemplates, in transitu, or were they actually located by the consent of their master? If only crossing the state that act did not free them, but if located, even indefinitely, by the consent of their owner and master, their emancipation logically followed.”

  In fact, what Lincoln correctly identified as the crux of the case was the plaintiff’s weakest argument, for it was apparent to nearly all—including the court—that Matson had intended to locate—that is, to domicile—the contested slaves in Illinois, and that only the wrath of his mistress had prompted him to send them back to Kentucky. The court ruled in favor of the slaves, who were thereby freed.

  Hiram Rutherford recalled the denouement. “After the trial, which ended Saturday night, Matson left the country”—the region—“crossed the Wabash River on his way to Kentucky, evaded his creditors, and never paid Lincoln his fee.”

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  MARY TODD HAD a particular view of slavery. She had grown up in Kentucky surrounded by slaves and tended by servants in the Todd household. The face of the institution she observed was genteel and paternalistic, and she found in it little to object to.

  Mary Todd met Lincoln after moving to Springfield from her parents’ home in Lexington to that of her sister, who had married the son of a former governor of Illinois. Attractive, vivacious and educated in the manner of daughters of Southern gentry, she readily drew suitors. Stephen A. Douglas, a lawyer and a rising star of the Illinois Democratic party, was one. Abraham Lincoln, lawyer and Whig, was another. Mary Todd’s family were Whigs. Perhaps this tipped her heart’s balance toward Lincoln. Or maybe she saw promise not obvious to most in Springfield, who deemed Douglas the likelier to succeed.

  Yet the path of love was convoluted. Some who knew Lincoln thought he still pined for Ann Rutledge. Others observed that he was simply inept around women. Lincoln proposed marriage to Mary Todd, then got cold feet. He asked to be released from his offer. Mary assented. Lincoln re-changed his mind; he once more wanted to tie the knot. His indecision affected everything he did, eventually causing acquaintances to wonder if he was losing his mind. “The doctors say he came within an inch of being a perfect lunatic for life,” one remarked. “He was perfectly crazy for some time, not able to attend to his business at all. They say he does not look like the same person.”

  He never quite was. The couple were wed, but neighbors and friends failed to notice much affection between the two.

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  LINCOLN SEEMED SURER of himself in politics. He again won election to the state legislature, this time from Springfield, and added to his circle of Whig friends. His tenure in the Illinois assembly produced no landmark accomplishments for the state, but it did signal the position Lincoln would take in the politics of slavery. In 1837 he and a colleague, protesting what they considered an amoral position on slavery adopted by the assembly, offered a statement of their own views, which were firm but moderate. “They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils,” the two lawmakers said of themselves. They believed Congress had no power to interfere w
ith slavery in the states, but did have power over slavery in the federal District of Columbia.

  Lincoln’s middle-of-the-road stance pleased Springfield’s Whigs enough to win him nomination for Congress, and Springfield’s voters sufficiently to elect him. He arrived in Washington in late 1847, amid the war between the United States and Mexico begun the previous year.

  In the 1840s the American capital was a required stop on the tour of the many Europeans who came to the United States trying to make sense of the emerging phenomenon of democracy. Charles Dickens was disappointed. “It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances,” he wrote of Washington. “But it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions.” Dickens observed the marks of the city’s unfinished character: “spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament.” The city’s incompleteness reflected a broader ambivalence about its reason for being. It had but one purpose, government, and that purpose was intermittent. “It has no trade or commerce of its own, having little or no population beyond the President and his establishment, the members of the legislature who reside there during the session, the government clerks and officers employed in the various departments, the keepers of the hotels and boarding-houses, and the tradesmen who supply their tables.”