Sixty-three white Virginians were called to testify. The court summarized:
A number of witnesses were introduced by the plaintiff, who testified as to the purchase of Pruey, then a girl of ten or twelve years of age, by Constance Cornwell; and that she and her children were always claimed by her and considered as her own property. Some of them also testified to the admissions of Nelson, up to a short period before his death, that the slaves were the property of John Cornwell; and that he held them for him. The credibility of some of these witnesses was assailed by the defendant; and witnesses were introduced by both parties, whose opinions as to their character for veracity differed.11
Caty Appleby was called as John’s first witness: she came in person to Neale’s office in Alexandria to give her deposition in July 1848. In retaliation, Daniel Jaspar called five men from the neighborhood to try to discredit Caty Appleby and her testimony. She was present to hear her neighbors say, “Her character for veracity, from what I have heard, and what I believe, is not good” and “I would not believe her on her oath in any case.”12 Two respondents for John Cornwell countered under oath that Caty was “a woman of truth.”
These men were also asked to testify on John’s race: “Do you, or not, know John Cornwell, the Plaintiff in this suit, if so, state where or not he is a free negro or mulatto.” On this point, there was general agreement. One witness, John Davis, testified: “[John] is a Mulatto Man, and near my age, we were raised in the same neighborhood—I have always understood that he is the son of Kitty Cornwell, a White woman, and his father was a slave named Jubar, belonging to her father, on his estate—and he has always passed as such in my neighborhood.” Seymour Lynn agreed: “He has always passed as a free negro, and I have never heard it contradicted to this day.”
In May 1849, in her initial deposition, Kitty had neglected to mention that she was John Cornwell’s mother. Four months later, she was called back to Neale’s office to address the accusation. She told the truth, the best form of containment. Judge Neale asked only three questions of her.
[Christopher Neale] Question 1st. Are you acquainted with the Complainant in this cause?
[Kitty King] Answer—Yes.
Question 2nd. Is he or is he not your Son?
Answer—Yes, he is.
Question 3rd. State if you can, or as near as you can, when he was twenty one years old.
Answer—In June 1830.
—Kitty Cornwell, September 14, 184913
For the duration of the trial, Weedon could not legally sell any member of Prue’s family or send them from Virginia; nor could John free them. John Cornwell, fearing that Prue and her family would “be secretly sent from Prince William County, Virginia, to the jail house of said Williams, for the purpose of being transported to the South, and there sold,” filed a complaint. On June 5, 1849, the court said the state of Virginia would take over administration of the “estate of Constance Cornwell.” It ordered Prue and her family to be delivered into the hands of the Prince William County sheriff’s office in Brentsville for safekeeping.
When Prue and her family were delivered to the sheriff’s office, the court ordered that the office notify John’s lawyer in Alexandria. But the Brentsville sheriff, James B. J. Thornton, ignored the order, as did the deputy sheriff, Edwin Nelson—Eliza Jane’s son and J. C. Weedon’s nephew. Four months passed. The court issued a subpoena against the sheriff’s office for not protecting Prue and her family. In September 1849 Cornwell’s suit was amended to include Sheriff Thornton as a party, becoming John Cornwell v. John C. Weedon and James B. J. Thornton.
It was unclear where Prue, Evelina, Ludwell, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s two small children, Oscar and Mary, were living during this time. Did they remain at Weedon’s plantation? According to county records, they could not have been housed at the Brentsville jail, as it had been determined to be too populated to board enslaved families.
“Where are the slaves?” John’s counsel Judge Neale demanded of Sheriff Thornton. “Who has them in possession?” He received no answer.
4
Henry Williams
Boston, 1850
It was Elizabeth’s fifth year as J. C. Weedon’s slave. Though she had survived her pregnancies, she was in poor health, and her husband, Seth, could see from her labored breathing that she might not be with him always. He might torment himself with the thought of Weedon, or one of his overseers, forcing himself on her. Her sister Evelina no longer had use of her hands, so hard had the tyrant worked her in the laundry. For all she knew, her brothers Jesse and Albert had been auctioned off, since neither brother had come back to Brentsville after January 1847. Withholding information was one way slaveholders like Weedon inflicted emotional cruelty and extended their control beyond slaves’ physical reach. The information he gave John Cornwell and his counsel, Christopher Neale, was as incomplete and sporadic as rumor; even less information reached Prue.
Soon after Adelaide Rebecca was born in 1849, Seth had decided that he could no longer wait for the court to decide their destiny. Why would he trust a court of slaveholders to move quickly to secure this baby’s future? The courts did not even know his daughters’ names: Mary and Adelaide were listed in the lawyers’ files as “also two infant slaves, whose names are not known.”
Elizabeth’s husband, Seth, was owned by James Folson, who was “the proprietor of the Bellefair Mills,” in Stafford County, Virginia.1 Bellefair has vanished, lost in the wilderness located on what is now CIA property at Quantico Station. Folson was a wealthy man, free of debt, and hard-working. According to his master, who was also his father, Seth had earned Folson’s trust, his “love and affection.”2
Seth studied the banks of the Potomac for creeks that led deep into the swampy backcountry north of Folson’s place. He saw the mouth of the Occoquan, the river that Elizabeth had grown up along, and the marshes to the south. He located Powell’s Run, Quantico Creek, and Rippon Landing—all were too busy for the business of running away. He had heard of others who had found passage by makeshift skiff in these interconnected waterways. He listened at the tavern for scraps of information—when the steamships and trains ran, which roads were muddy and unused, which creeks were silted in, whose horse was loose—anything he could use to piece into a plan. He was looking for an opportunity to betray Folson’s trust and leave forever.
His half-sister Adelaide Payne could keep Elizabeth and the children close if and when John Cornwell and his lawyer got them to Washington. She could be their surrogate protector if he escaped.
He did not know how many years of labor awaited him in the North, should he make it there. He could not know how many years the courts would take to render a decision. He risked never seeing Elizabeth again. Walking the dirt track back to Bellefair from Brentsville, he trained his mind to look for visions of his journey north in the blank spaces of bondage.
◆
In September 1850, Seth made his move. His journey likely began in his friend Henry Williams’s room in Washington, above the hotel restaurant where Henry worked. This night they met formally, as if it were noon on a Sunday, and honored the solemnity of Seth becoming fugitive. The word sounded like a leaping off; it made the floor grow uneven. Henry Williams carefully copied his own free papers and gave the forgery to Seth, who waited until the night watch ended at ten, then another two hours to be certain.
Seth never told how he got from bondage in Virginia to Samuel Snowden’s May Street Church in Boston, but given the state he arrived in, he appears to have traveled much of the way on foot. Customarily fugitives did not recount how they got to Boston, as making a route public risked its exposure to slave catchers.3 But if he followed the Underground Railroad, he might have run for 37 miles along the railway through Maryland, then stayed low during the daytime at a collecting place, run another 40 miles the following night, slept wherever daylight found him, crossed the Susquehanna River into Pennsylvania, and then walked the remaining miles into a border town where he could fi
nd a Quaker safe house, and transport on to Boston. The water traffic on the Chesapeake and the railway system offered more direct routes out, if he could secure or steal passage. Either way, the first forty hours out of Washington made all the difference.
When he arrived in Boston, he introduced himself as Henry Williams and procured a new shirt to replace his torn one. He lodged with other fugitives at the home of Isabella Holmes, the daughter of a Methodist minister, Reverend Samuel Snowden, who had also escaped slavery. Known to abolitionists and theologians alike, Father Snowden preached antislavery at the May Street Church and welcomed runaways, particularly those who came by sea. Hundreds of fugitives had blessed his front door as the threshold to a new life.
The day Father Snowden died, October 8, 1850, thirteen men arrived at his door, not knowing that they would find grief and succor in equal measures.4 Seth might well have been one of them.
Seth appears to have discarded the name of his ancestor, the eighteenth-century planter Seth Botts, when he got to Boston. The Bottses of Virginia were a powerful family, with business in the North. John Minor Botts, who had served in the U.S. House of Representatives, was often in the press for his Unionist, or anti-secession, pro-compromise views. People in Boston would recognize the name, and that recognition could get Seth taken back to Stafford County. He chose to risk using it only in his correspondence with that place.
In becoming Henry Williams, he took a ubiquitous name, the kind that gives historians headaches. Only two Seth Bottses appear in early American historical records: our man, and his English ancestor who settled in Virginia in the early 1700s. But nineteenth-century Boston knew hundreds of Henry Williamses. In slavery, names are changed without consent. Because Seth became Henry of his own accord, from this point I will use “Henry Williams” to refer to the man, Mary’s father, who bore the name Seth Botts in slavery.
Henry Williams arrived in Boston to find a thriving African-American community on the northern slope of Beacon Hill. According to census data, by the 1850s, black families constituted 2 percent of Boston’s population, or about 2,500 residents, and 70 percent lived in Ward 6. The residences and boardinghouses most often mentioned in this history can be found on Belknap Street (later Joy Street), Smith Court, Southac Street (now Phillips), May Street (now Revere), Robinson Lane, Gibbon Court, Fish Street, and Botolph Street. People moved from one address to another within these few blocks. The Underground Railroad ran directly down Joy Street in the 1850s.5
At 20 Hancock Street, one block over from Joy Street, the newly elected Senator Sumner was packing up his Boston residence for his first term in the Capitol.
In September 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which catalyzed this community, already committed to antislavery activism through fugitive assistance and aid. The federal act prohibited people like Isabella Holmes from aiding fugitives. By offering food and shelter to the thirteen refugees who arrived at Father Snowden’s doorstep on the night of his wake, Isabella Holmes was committing a federal crime punishable by a fine of $1,000 (several years of a man’s wages) and potential jail time. The Fugitive Slave Law deputized the entire North to apprehend people of color as potential fugitives. It mustered a legion of slave catchers, bands of kidnappers who operated under federal commission. These policemen were paid tax dollars to track down fugitives and return them to slaveholders.
In response, some residents of Boston’s black community chose to answer the call offered by colonization and separatist movements and left the country, to begin new lives in Haiti or on the eastern coast of Africa. Others saw the early integration of Cambridge’s school system as a sign that these whites might welcome black children; they moved out of the crosshairs of Black Boston into smaller, scattered communities across the Charles River. A few, including community leaders William Cooper Nell, Dr. John Sweat Rock, Lewis Hayden, and Charles Redmond, stayed in Boston to continue the fight for integrated schools and to protect people of color by demanding their full rights as citizens of Boston. Black militia groups such as the Massasoit Guards and Liberty Guard were organized and armed. Corner lookouts watched key thoroughfares for man-hunters. Outposts were established in the countryside. The community gathered itself together in defiance of this law.
Resolved, That God willed us free; man willed us slaves. We will as God wills; God’s will be done.
Resolved, That our oft repeated determination to resist oppression is the same now as ever, and we pledge ourselves, at all hazards, to resist unto death any attempt upon our liberties.
Resolved, That as South Carolina seizes and imprisons colored seamen from the North, under the plea that it is to prevent insurrection and rebellion among her colored population, the authorities of this State, and city in particular, be requested to lay hold of, and put in prison, immediately, any and all fugitive slave-hunters who may be found among us, upon the same ground, and for similar reasons.
—Congregation of Belknap Street Church, October 25, 18506
Frederick “Shadrach” Minkins, a waiter at Cornhill Coffeehouse, was the first member of the Boston community to be arrested under the Fugitive Slave Law. The coffeehouse, near Boston’s State House, at Court Square, was owned by its former bartender, George Young, who had bought it when its founders retired. By 1850 Young presided over one of the most popular power lunches in Boston, and his private rooms hosted lavish dinners for governmental committees, private men’s clubs, and fundraisers. Young was also known for employing and supporting fugitives from slavery.
On Saturday, February 15, 1851, two federally commissioned slave catchers entered the coffeehouse posing as customers. At the height of breakfast service, they seized Shadrach Minkins, a “stout, copper-colored” man with carefully combed hair. Minkins fought his arrest with the fierceness of a man twice his size. He was taken to the nearby courthouse. Robert Morris, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Ellis Gray Loring, and Samuel E. Sewell, members of the Vigilance Committee and among the leading black and white lawyers in the state, immediately arranged counsel for Minkins and filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus.
The chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Judge Lemuel Shaw (Herman Melville’s father-in-law), refused to honor the defense’s petition. A brief hearing began that very day, on February 15, before Judge George T. Curtis, a Daniel Webster supporter who had led a rally in support of the Fugitive Slave law. Minkins was not to be afforded a trial by jury.
The return of alleged fugitives, according to section four of the Fugitive Slave Law, could be decided by commissioners in concert with the Superior and Circuit courts of Massachusetts.7 These courts had the authority to “take and remove such fugitives . . . to the State or Territory from which such persons may have escaped or fled” upon the evidence of ‘satisfactory proof being made.’ ”8 The court concerned itself only with whether Minkins was the man wanted by his master, not with whether he ought to have a master. “Satisfactory proof” was established by a certificate from the claimant (the master) who stated under oath that this person was his property. This affidavit could be easily obtained, or indeed, falsified.
Minkins could not speak on his own behalf. Section six of the Fugitive Slave Law stated: “In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence.” This was unsurprising, given that black testimony was not permitted in the South.
Section eight added a financial incentive, which propelled the law into infamy, by awarding the commissioner ten dollars should the judge find in the claimant’s favor, but only five dollars should the judge find in the fugitive’s favor.
Minkins’s hearing was scheduled for February 18, giving him and his lawyers three days to strategize. Meanwhile a crowd of two hundred antislavery activists gathered in the hallways and stairwells of the courthouse, easily outnumbering and overwhelming the guards. Officer Calvin Hutchins, who had been assigned to the courtroom door, cautiously unbolted the lock at around two o’clock, to allow the attorney
s to leave. The door was forced, and twenty black men stormed the courtroom. They carried Minkins off upon their shoulders, leaving choice words for Judge Curtis. Black abolitionists Lewis Hayden and John J. Smith hid Minkins in town for a few days, then secreted him out of Boston by way of Concord, where he hid at the home of Mary Brooks, Henry David Thoreau’s neighbor. He later settled safely in Montreal.
President Millard Fillmore responded forcefully, announcing that the nine black and white abolitionists and lawyers identified as planning and aiding in Minkins’s escape would be prosecuted and fined for violating the Fugitive Slave Law. The secretary of state (and former Massachusetts senator) Daniel Webster accused his neighbors of treason for this show of defiance to a federal law. Henry Clay wrote a bill to lend strength to the Fugitive Slave Law in cases such as this one, to settle the question of “whether the government of white men is to be yielded to a government of blacks.”9
The nine rescuers were ultimately acquitted, but Boston’s abolitionist community was put on notice.
One man’s capture was another’s lucky break. In March, after six months without steady work, Henry Williams learned that George Young was short a waiter. He applied for Shadrach Minkins’s place at the coffeehouse and got it.
At the Cornhill Coffeehouse, a standard bill of fare in the 1850s included a first course of oysters, then a soup course, usually mock turtle or tomato, followed by a roast course that offered a choice of “Mongrel Goose, Wild Turkey, or Partridges.” This was followed by a game course and dessert. When Williams served there, the game menu offered a choice of “Black Ducks, Brant, Blue-bill Widgeons, Red Heads, Teal, Woodcocks, Partridges, Quail, Plover, Winter Yellow-legs, Snipes, and English Black Cock.” Meals lasted hours, and diners came to know their waiters.10
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