On the last day of September 1851, when Henry Williams came in for service, his fellow-waiters and Mr. Young informed him that the police—led by the same Frederick Byrnes who had captured Minkins—had called at Cornhill again. This time they did not bother to pose as diners. They presented writs for two men by the name of Williams, claiming both were runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law. Williams prepared to flee. Young sent for Vigilance Committee member Joseph Lovejoy.
Henry Williams had in his possession a letter of introduction that had been given to him by famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison frequently gave out these endorsements to recommend fugitives to friends in securing work and safe housing. When Lovejoy arrived at the coffeehouse, he added his own endorsement to that letter, then sent Williams into hiding in the countryside, at the home of Vigilance Committee member Henry David Thoreau.
The journey to Concord took six anxious hours, and it was dark when Williams arrived at the side entrance of 255 Main Street. In Boston it was said of Thoreau that though he no longer lived in his cabin in the woods, he dressed and groomed as though he might return at any moment. In any case, the house was new and nearly bare. Williams was shown to a room near the back fireplace. Food was brought in, with beer and water. Thoreau and his sister Sophia wanted to know all about Williams: his life in Boston, his wife and children, and the man who had owned him without calling him son. They cheerfully created the atmosphere of a country holiday, not the criminal act of aiding a fugitive.
While Thoreau chatted, he set a pan of hot water before Williams. As if it were the most ordinary of acts, Thoreau began to perform the ablution he provided fugitives who came his way: he took first one shoe and then the other from the fugitive and set the blistered feet in the water.11
The next morning Thoreau collected what funds he could from his neighbors, including fifty cents from Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his journal on October 1, 1851, Thoreau noted that Williams had raised “only” $500 of the $600 that his father Folson had demanded for manumission, “by months of toil and begging and the aid of friends has raised the money for his freedom.”12 A man of New England, Thoreau did not recognize the bargain: a man of Williams’s health and ability would have fetched much more on the auction block.
They spent the late morning talking, while Thoreau looked for the right opportunity to put Williams on a northbound train. The train to Burlington, Vermont, from Concord was a well-known track for fugitives to Canada, so the men decided to try for the train to Fitchburg, in northern Massachusetts, from where a transfer to the cars headed north into Vermont would go unnoticed. He had sent others safely north on this route before.
From the back of Thoreau’s home, the train platform was a two-minute dash across School Street. Thoreau had previously walked Shadrach Minkins to the station and put him on the train moments before it pulled away. But now Thoreau spotted a policeman and decided this underground station seemed rather exposed just now. He and Williams turned and walked back toward Main Street. The policeman did not follow.
They would try again in the late afternoon, which left the day free for conversation. The men were the same age, thirty-four, and could speak as equals. Thoreau asked Williams how he had guided himself from Virginia to Massachusetts without a map or a track.
Oct. 1, 5 P.M. Just put a fugitive slave, who has taken the name of Henry Williams, into the cars for Canada. He escaped from Stafford County, Virginia, to Boston last October; he has been in Shadrach’s place at the Cornhill Coffee-House; had been corresponding through an agent with his master—who is his father, about buying—himself—his master asking $600, but he having been able to raise only $500. Heard that there were writs out for two Williamses, fugitives, and was informed by his fellow-servants and employer that Auger-hole Burns and others of the police had called for him when he was out. Accordingly fled to Concord last night on foot, bringing a letter to our family from Mr. Lovejoy of Cambridge and another which Garrison had formerly given him on another occasion. He lodged with us, and waited in the house till funds were collected with which to forward him. Intended to dispatch him at noon through to Burlington, but when I went to buy his ticket, saw one at the depot who looked and behaved so much like a Boston policeman that I did not venture that time. An intelligent and very well-behaved man, a mulatto.
There is an art to be used, not only in selecting wood for a withe, but in using it. Birch withes are twisted, I suppose in order that the fibers may be less abruptly bent; or is it only by accident that they are twisted?
The slave said he could guide himself by many other stars than the north star, whose rising and setting he knew. They steered from the north star even when it had got round and appeared to them to be in the south. They frequently followed the telegraph when there was no railroad. The slaves bring many superstitions from Africa. The fugitives sometimes superstitiously carry a turf in their hats, thinking that their success depends on it.
—Henry David Thoreau, October 1, 185113
Henry Williams knew it would take more than dirt to guide himself to freedom.
Once Williams was safely on the evening train, Thoreau took his customary walk in the woods and recorded it in his journal. He did not write of what it would be like to be a fugitive tearing through Delaware or New Jersey or Massachusetts, his wife and children left behind in bondage. He wrote instead of the autumnal coolness gathering beneath his bare feet, and how the crickets seemed as far away as the passing season. He wrote that twilight blackened the earth to “an unvaried and indistinguishable black” while the departing sun set the sky alight, “as if you were walking in night up to your chin.”
PART TWO
MANUMISSION
5
John Albion Andrew
Boston, 1852
Henry Williams did not stay in Canada, as Thoreau and the Vigilance Committee had intended. Unlike Shadrach Minkins, who had placed advertisements seeking work as soon as he arrived in Montreal, Williams headed back to Boston, arriving by the end of the year. But before he could show his face again at the Cornhill Coffeehouse, he had to make arrangements with his former master James Folson. He planned to request an advance on his free papers with the $500 he had raised so far. Only that document could protect him against the affidavits of a federally commissioned bounty hunter like Frederick Byrnes.
Among the regular diners at Cornhill Coffeehouse was John Albion Andrew, a young lawyer who kept an office with his partner Theophilus P. Chandler at 4 Court Street, steps from the restaurant. He was a member of the Saturday Club, which met monthly for dinner and discussion of Free Soil politics. He lived on the other side of Beacon Hill at 110 Charles Street, near Pinckney Street. (His home was replaced by a commercial structure by the end of the nineteenth century.)
Andrew was a frequent figure in both the annuals of the North Slope and on the dinner party circuit. Working in alliance with the Reverend Leonard Grimes of the Twelfth Baptist Church, he provided what assistance he could to his neighbors. He founded the Home for Aged Women of Color with the help of the Reverend James F. Clarke and his wife. Every Sunday Andrew visited the prisons. He took on women’s divorce cases at a time when many lawyers chose not to. He opposed the death penalty. When he became the wartime governor of Massachusetts, he opened the ranks of the Commonwealth to regiments of men of color.
No modern biography has yet taken the measure of this man, so it is hard to get a sense of him. A turn-of-the-century biography by Henry Greenleaf Pearson opens with this sinking observation: “It is hard to imagine a man of more transparent nature than John A. Andrew. Yet, for all that his character lies open to the understanding, there was about him a quality which compels one to recognize at the outset the impossibility of presenting him fully to the reader.”1
Photographs show a portly man with curls framing his face. He liked to talk. He suffered debilitating headaches. He chose square spectacles. He loved the work of Byron. He considered himself a dreamer, lazy to a fault. “The truth
is,” Andrew wrote to his dear friend Cyrus Woodman in 1847, “I am a terrible procrastinator; I am, by nature, averse to labor, always thinking of something else; I am forever dreaming about doing.” He was most at ease in the immediacy of the courtroom, where in his perseverance could be found “a dash of old-fashioned but manly temper” that won him his legal and political career.
John Albion Andrew’s carte de visite, 1859–70.
While he was a sophomore at Bowdoin, Andrew had twice heard the British abolitionist George Thompson speak, and he considered lines from those speeches to be forever “adhered to his memory.” One of his classmates remembers that “Andrew would stand in the college grounds or in his room with the window thrown open and give us the recitation of the lecture almost verbatim; and to one listening with averted face, it was generally agreed that the redelivery of the lecture was scarcely a whit inferior to the original presentation in its rhetorical finish.”2 Twenty-five years later, when he was governor of Massachusetts, he would recite from memory this sentence from a Thompson lecture he had heard at nineteen:
“I hesitate not to say that in Christian America, a land of Sabbath schools, of religious privileges, of temperance societies and revivals, there exists the worst institution in the world. There is not an institution which the sun in the heaven shines upon, so fraught with woe to man as American slavery.”3
Andrew’s opportunity to join the ranks of antislavery agitators came in the summer of 1846, when he was three years past the bar but in his first year of practice. The brig Ottoman, which was owned in Boston, had unknowingly picked up a stowaway in New Orleans. When discovered, the fugitive, an unnamed man, was isolated on an uninhabited island in Boston Harbor. The captain intended to pick him up on his return trip to New Orleans. Somehow antislavery activists caught word of it and sent out a steamer to rescue him. The Ottoman’s captain got there first and carried him back to bondage.
Failure instigates meetings. Three days later at Henry Ingersoll Bowditch’s home, a committee was formed, with Dr. Samuel G. Howe as chairman and Andrew as secretary, to collect testimony against the Ottoman’s Boston-based owners. Ten days later they presented the case to the public at Faneuil Hall, with former president John Quincy Adams presiding. Howe recited the facts, Andrew called for a series of resolutions, and Charles Sumner, Stephen C. Phillips, Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and others delivered speeches. Before the night was through, a resolution was passed to form a “Vigilance Committee” comprised of forty members, with the intent to move more quickly to aid fugitives in future.
The Vigilance Committee provided legal aid, shelter, and financial support for fugitives in Boston. Reverend Theodore Parker served as chairman, and its clandestine meetings took place in his study. Similar groups sprang up in New York, in Philadelphia, and along the Underground Railroad, working in tandem with existing networks. Following the Fugitive Slave Law, Boston’s Vigilance Committee swelled to more than one hundred members—including thirty lawyers—with the express purpose of preventing the return of fugitives to their masters, either by force or by law. Senator Charles Sumner was among those who provided legal counsel.
Vigilance Committee member Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in his journal that it took effort for this community to coalesce and “to educate the mind to the attitude of revolution. It is so strange to find one’s self outside of the established institutions; to be obliged to lower one’s voice and conceal one’s purposes; to see law and order, police and military, on the wrong side.”4 Many Vigilance Committee members occupied positions of privilege and power in their communities. They were used to upholding the law and the institutions they inhabited, not circumventing them. So, these members devised every legal means necessary to frustrate slave catchers. Placards were posted with descriptions of known slave catchers, who if found, were followed, harassed, and even arrested. In the last week of October 1850, “two prowling villains” from Macon, Georgia, were arrested three times, charged with slander (against a fugitive) and conspiracy to abduct (a fugitive), and forced to post more than $30,000 in bail.5
A more radical group, the Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League, met every other Wednesday to train themselves in extra-legal tactics to stop fugitive kidnappings by abducting the slave catchers first. It trained its members to physically restrain and deport “man-stealers,” plotting complex maneuvers in hotel lobbies and train stations.
Andrew organized actions for both groups, both in public and in secret. At the time he met Henry Williams, Andrew was chairman of Finance for the Vigilance Committee. His mandate was “to spare no rightful effort to secure every human being upon the soil of Massachusetts, in his right to liberty,” and to secure “the aid and support of firm and watchful friends.”6 His poor health and headaches kept him from participating in the wilder antics of the Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League (such as kidnapping and piracy), so he fundraised: for the league’s boat (the Moby Dick), for billy clubs, and for regional expansion. Moreover he came to know most of the fugitives in Boston personally; his “Budget for Destitute Fugitives” supported four hundred families in the 1850s.
When Henry Williams came back to Boston, he decided to entrust his story to Andrew. He explained how, born as Seth Botts, slave, he had escaped to Boston, how close he had come to restitution last fall, and how much his freedom would mean to his family. He gave a scant summary of Prue’s case, stalled in appeals, and asked Andrew to help him secure his deed of emancipation from James Folson.
Andrew accepted Williams’s case on behalf of the Vigilance Committee. Williams would need a liaison between himself and his master’s lawyer. In legal matters, a fugitive required the intercession of the rare lawyer who could be trusted to keep close any details that might give him or her up. On January 22, 1852, Andrew wrote a fellow member of the Vigilance Committee, Senator Charles Sumner, who, now that he lived in Washington, could be of assistance in this case. Andrew enclosed in his letter a description of Henry Williams that referred to him by his Southern name, Seth Botts.
Seth Botts—owned by James Folson, proprietor of Bellefair Mills, Stafford County, Virginia—Seth is about 31 yrs of age, Stout + well made, 5 feet + 11 inches in height, erect in form, copper complexioned, with thick bushy hair, mild expression of countenance, shows his teeth and smiles often when speaking, has a slight scar on the brow over his left eye, and another slight scar over the left side of his upper lip.
—John A. Andrew to Charles Sumner, January 22, 18527
Andrew’s admiration and friendship for Williams is readable between the lines. Phrases like “mild expression of countenance” and “shows his teeth and smiles often when speaking” are not often found in descriptions of enslaved men in American archives. Henry Williams’s smile resonates across time.
Along with the January 22 letter, Andrew forwarded Sumner a banknote for the $500 that Williams had raised. Sumner was to hand the banknote over to another intermediary, Mr. John Clark of Bellefair Mills, who would call in person on behalf of James Folson by the end of the month. Andrew told Sumner that he would recognize Clark as “a clergyman who writes in the tone and style of a gentleman” and added, “I have had quite an agreeable correspondence with Clark.” Andrew hoped this would interest Sumner, newly in Washington and open to friendships across the divide: “I hope the matter may not be burdensome; that Mr. Clark may be to you an agreeable acquaintance.” Clark was pro-slavery on religious and Unionist grounds, yet somehow Andrew was correct in his matchmaking: Clark and Sumner would correspond for a decade, well after Williams’s liberty had been secured.8
“Will you take the trouble to see that the deed is in proper form and fully secures the object of Seth’s emancipation?” Andrew requested. “I am acting, as a matter of charity, to the poor fellow.”
Sumner and Andrew had been friends since 1846, when Sumner also held an office at No. 4 Court Street and both men became antislavery activists. Andrew and Samuel G. Howe had been the first to urge the uncompromising Sumner into
politics, putting Sumner’s name forward before he accepted the idea of a public life.
Andrew closed, “My letter is already too long; and without stopping to add anything upon matters of more general and political intent, I will only detain you for the assurance of my heartiest sympathy in the labor and trials of your new position and my prayers for your success and prosperity; not only for the sake of the ‘good old cause,’ but, for your own sake and that of your friends.”
Nearly two weeks later, on February 4, Sumner sent Andrew and Williams good news. The exchange had been made: Williams had bought his freedom. The manumission document was enclosed. Furthermore, Sumner confirmed from Clark that James Folson was a “man of considerable means, and free from debt,” so the deed of manumission he signed for Seth Botts was “entirely valid.” Folson’s prosperity made him generous: Folson wrote that for “the consideration of love and affection” he felt for Seth, he agreed to leave two further years for him to raise the remaining sum. Folson’s love did not extend so far as to waive the remaining $100, and during the intervening two years, Williams remained at risk: this agreement “would not suffice against creditors,” should Folson be called to account. As Williams’s lawyer, Andrew noted that the “provision that Seth is to pay $100 more in two years” must not be a “condition” of this agreement, for “if accident should befall” Folson, “it would work a forfeiture.” All involved knew not to trust a master’s promise, which could unravel quickly in death or debt.
Williams made the remaining payment of one hundred dollars “by the hand of the Hon. Charles Sumner” in a document dated July 28, 1854. Sumner enclosed the updated manumission papers in a letter to Andrew and Williams, with a pun on the deed of manumission, enclosed: “I rejoice that this good deed has been done.”
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