Girl in Black and White

by Jessie Morgan-Owens

  Senator Seward was in high spirits when he took the podium at eleven o’clock that night to rail against the absurdist nativism of the secret coalition known as the Know Nothings, who were at their zenith of influence in 1855. In Massachusetts, the American Party, as the outward-facing party of the secret coalition was known, had captured the governor’s office, the state senate, and most of the state’s house of representatives. They held most elected offices in Boston. Every one of these elected officials was a sworn member of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, a network of secretive, ethnocentric, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant nativist lodges. They were against the Fugitive Slave Law and the extension of slavery into the western territories, not out of love for the slave or for justice, but because it would mean reduced wages for the non-immigrant white working class.16

  Seward condemned Know Nothing nativism: “I do most earnestly and most affectionately advise all persons hereafter to be born, that they be born in the United States; and if they can without inconvenience, to be born in the State of New York, and thus avoid a great deal of trouble for themselves and for others.” The Senate chamber erupted in laughter, and he continued. “Moreover, I do most affectionately enjoin upon all such persons as are hereafter to be born, that they be born of fathers and of mothers, of grandfathers and of grandmothers of pure American blood.”

  The nativists fumed but did not protest, as their secret party bound them to silence in the face of Seward’s mockery.

  Meanwhile, Seward had bait in reserve. “Speaking from a full knowledge and conviction of the serious inconveniences which absolute and eternal slavery entails upon man and upon races of men, I do earnestly, strenuously, and affectionately conjure all people everywhere, who are hereafter to be born, to be born white.” There was laughter again, though this time the hall laughed divided. Seward brought his point home. “Thus, being born in this free and happy country, and being born white, they will be born free.”17

  Senator Charles Sumner, the last of this group to speak, rose to make his own impassioned appeal. But Senator Andrew Butler would not let Sumner present his speech without debate. Butler, asking for the support of the floor, said Sumner “talks as if he was disposed to maintain the Constitution of the United States; but if I were to put him a question now, I would ask him one which he, perhaps, would not answer me honestly.”

  Sumner responded from the podium, “I will answer any question.”

  “Then I ask you honestly now, whether, all laws of Congress being put out of the question, you would recommend Massachusetts to pass a law to deliver up fugitives from Slavery.”

  “The Senator asks me that question, and I answer, frankly, that no temptation, no inducement, would draw me in any way to sanction the return of any man into Slavery. But then, I leave others to speak for themselves. In this respect, I speak for myself” was Sumner’s reply.

  The Fugitive Slave Law was the law of the land, but in his remarks, Sumner had promised to follow the higher law of his conscience. That was treason. To promote higher law ideology on this scale held up the possibility of righteous anarchy over the rule of law. “If I understand him,” Butler said, “he means that, whether this law, or that law, or any other law prevails, he disregards the obligations of the Constitution of the United States.”

  “Not at all,” Sumner responded. “That I never said. I recognize the obligations of the Constitution.”

  Butler addressed the chamber, “He says he recognizes the obligations of the Constitution of the United States. I see, I know he is not a tactician, and I shall not take advantage of a man who does not know half his time exactly what he is about.” This comment was met with laughter. Butler turned back to Sumner: “But, sir, I will ask that gentleman one question: if it devolved upon him as a representative of Massachusetts, all Federal laws being put out of the way, would he recommend any law for the delivery of a fugitive slave under the Constitution of the United States?”

  To which Sumner replied, “Never.”

  “I knew that. Now, sir, I have got exactly what is the truth, and what I intend shall go forth to all the Southern States.” Butler took his seat.18

  Sumner passed a note to his friend Samuel P. Chase of Ohio that whenever he tried “to utter some truth,” he “was interrupted by Senators positively drunk!”19

  At the close of his remarks, Sumner proposed an amendment to this judiciary bill to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law. This was not the first time Sumner had called for a repeal, but in this case, a repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law would make any arguments about its application moot. He called for an immediate vote, and the result was nays 29, yeas 9. Nine senators voted for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, representing Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. As reported in the Massachusetts Spy, “The population of these States, with one half of Connecticut, as her representation was divided, is 9,472,318, only half a million less than one half of the free population of the country! Here is a power which the slave power may well fear. How will the South get on with New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio against her?”20

  A vote was called on the judiciary bill, and the result was the same. The bill passed.

  Sumner’s position on the Fugitive Slave Law was “higher law” ideology, and Butler told the South to take notice. Higher law thinking maintains that citizens have an imperative to follow their consciences if placed in situations where to act morally would be to act illegally. The Puritan legacy of higher law provides cover for a wide range of American acts of conscience, from Thoreau’s night in jail for not paying taxes to a war government, to the one hundred incidents of clinic bombings at the hands of antiabortion extremists that took place in the first twenty years of Roe v. Wade. When a group of constituents place themselves above the laws made by representatives, democracy is compromised. Adherence to a higher law, or personal morality, trumps their allegiance to the laws of the society and state in which they live.

  A higher law stance toward the Fugitive Slave Law was particularly appealing for Americans who came to antislavery activism through religious belief. At a rally in 1854, William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution and the American flag. His position on human laws was that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document written by slaveholders, and that men and women of moral conscience therefore need not see themselves as bound to the laws its government produced. At a time when the privacy of home and church were sacred spaces set apart from politics, the Fugitive Slave Law legislated against providing hospitality to desperate strangers.

  Many mainstream Northerners felt that the Fugitive Slave Law demanded an everyday complicity with the slave power that was not theirs to shoulder. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it this way in his journal: “Dine with the Club. Felt vexed at seeing plover on the table this season, and proclaimed aloud my disgust at seeing the game-laws thus violated. If anybody wants to break a law, let him break the Fugitive-slave Law. That is all it is fit for.”21

  Back home in Auburn, New York, the Seward family was operating a station on the Underground Railroad, and clandestine visitors continued to arrive despite significant political risks to the senator. Senator Seward’s wife, Frances, maintained the station. Once when he was home without her, Seward reported to her, “the underground railroad works wonderfully. Two passengers came here last night.” In 1857 Seward would provide a home in Auburn for Harriet Tubman’s aged parents. Frederick Douglass often thanked the Sewards publicly in his newspaper for their financial support of fugitives, knowing full well that their support did not end there.22 If Seward ever feared the legal ramifications of his outright refusal to heed the Fugitive Slave Law, his actions did not show it.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, who said she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in response to the Fugitive Slave Law, repeatedly called on ordinary Americans to break it the first chance that they got. Her fictional politician Senator Bird explains to his wife, “It’s a tiresome business, this legislating!” before adding, off-handedly, that
the Fugitive Slave Law has his support.

  On the present occasion, Mrs. Bird rose quickly, with very red cheeks, which quite improved her general appearance, and walked up to her husband, with quite a resolute air, and said, in a determined tone,

  “Now, John, I want to know if you think such a law as that is right and Christian?”

  “You won’t shoot me, now, Mary, if I say I do!”

  “I never could have thought it of you, John; you didn’t vote for it?”

  “Even so, my fair politician.”

  “You ought to be ashamed, John! Poor, homeless, houseless creatures! It’s a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do! Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can’t give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things!”

  “But, Mary, just listen to me. Your feelings are all quite right, dear, and interesting, and I love you for them; but, then, dear, we mustn’t suffer our feelings to run away with our judgment; you must consider it’s not a matter of private feeling,—there are great public interests involved,—there is such a state of public agitation rising, that we must put aside our private feelings.”

  “Now, John, I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.”

  “But in cases where your doing so would involve a great public evil—”

  “Obeying God never brings on public evils. I know it can’t. It’s always safest, all round, to do as He bids us.”

  “Now, listen to me, Mary, and I can state to you a very clear argument, to show—”

  “O, nonsense, John!—you can talk all night, but you wouldn’t do it. I put it to you, John,—would you now turn away a poor, shivering, hungry creature from your door, because he was a runaway? Would you, now?”

  —Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)23

  That evening, by the plot machinations of sentimental fiction, the fugitive star of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eliza Harris, arrives with her son Harry half frozen at the Bird home. Senator Bird has never tried his political theories against “the magic of the real presence of distress—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony.” But “the letters that spell the word” fugitive had ceased to have any meaning for Senator Bird beyond “the image of little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle.”24 Visual culture historian Marcus Wood has argued that by the 1850s, some Americans had become desensitized to the idea of the “fugitive slave,” in part because of the ubiquity of wanted posters and ads for their recapture.25

  “The Fugitives Are Safe in a Free Land,” illustration by Hammat Billings for Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852. The image shows George, Eliza, and Harry, and Mrs. Smyth.

  Stowe did not remind us of it in this scene, but Eliza and Harry could both pass for white. Illustrations for the first American edition by Hammatt Billings, who also designed the masthead for the Liberator, and for the British edition by celebrated illustrator George Cruikshank, would render the optics of this scene more clearly, by showing a white family of fugitives. Stowe’s narrator attributes Senator Bird’s total reversal of personal and political opinion—and his subsequent decision to aid the fugitives, at risk to his office and reputation—to the surprising resemblance he sees between Eliza’s child Harry and the Birds’ late son Henry. His astonishment that a fugitive could so closely resemble his lost son causes him “intense excitement.” Radicalized by relatability, he weeps, then acts on their behalf. In defiance of the law that he helped write and protect, he caves to his wife’s moral authority.

  When Sumner introduced Mary to the Massachusetts legislature and others in Boston, he intended for her presence to produce an instant and entire “softening” effect on hard-liners who supported the Fugitive Slave Law, not unlike the sudden reversal of Senator Bird when he recognizes his son in the fugitive child Harry. In his February 19 letter to Dr. Stone, he had joked that “her presence among us” would be more effective than his speeches, because by her appearance, Mary would work the same “magic of real presence” that readers had seen end the argument between the fictional senator and Mrs. Bird.

  The Senate session ended, and it was time to leave Washington.

  PART FOUR

  SENSATION

  12

  “A White Slave from Virginia”

  New York, March 1855

  On March 7, 1855, Elizabeth and her three children, Oscar, Mary, and Adelaide Rebecca, along with Prue and Evelina, headed north. According to the New-York Daily Times, the newly manumitted family “created quite a sensation in Washington, and were provided with a passage in the first-class cars in their journey to this City.” Train cars were segregated—blacks were permitted to ride only in a small section of the smoking car. To be provided with “a passage in the first-class cars” is a meaningful detail in this context. The women traveled as white, while Oscar accompanied them in the role of servant or rode segregated in the smoking car. They traveled in the company of Charles Henry Brainard, the thirty-eight-year-old lithographic publisher and publicist from Boston. His book Brainard’s Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans—primarily drawn from portraits of men who worked in Washington—was in production, and he had to deliver the daguerreotypes to his engraver, Leo Grozlier. It may have been for this reason that Brainard was en route from Washington to Boston in early March 1855. Or perhaps he traveled with Elizabeth as a personal favor to his senator.

  In reading the local press, during the weeks leading up to Mary’s arrival in New York, we find much commentary on babies. That month, in New York City, P. T. Barnum launched one of his most controversial and successful ventures—the “Baby Show.” Parents lined up outside his museum with their babies, hoping their little ones would be determined to be charming enough to enter the show. Barnum had put up $1,100 in prize money for the most likely baby, the most healthy baby, and babies with other merits. Would black babies be allowed to compete?

  When public opinion sanctions without exception the promiscuous assemblage and close companionship of black and white, in churches, schools, theaters, courts of justice, railroad cars, Italian Opera houses, editorial sanctums, and printing offices as well as among bank directors, merchants on exchange, and in the social circle, I shall not be found backward. . . .

  As society is as present constituted, however, and as it seems likely to remain during our day and generation, I regard his question as impertinent, and merely state that I shall manage the Baby Show, as I manage all other enterprises in which I engage, with a respectful deference for the social usages of the community I seek to please.

  —P. T. Barnum, May 4, 18551

  The “one-hundred cradles” exhibition drew sixty thousand white people when it opened in June 1855. (People of color were not allowed to enter Barnum’s museum until after the Civil War.) After exhibiting “one hundred of the finest white babies on this continent,” Barnum stated that he would offer the same prize money for a similar exhibition of “the finest colored ones,” provided an equal number were brought around for the competition. Unsurprisingly, this did not come to pass.2

  The circus man’s distinction between white and black babies reflects the era’s total segregation, a gauntlet through which Mary would have to pass for the rest of her free life in the North. Arriving in New York, she would begin to be submitted to a long series of examinations and observations intended to determine what her race would be, if legible at all. If she were found to be black, her family’s mobility would be curtailed. If white, they could continue to travel first class.

  When meeting Mary, New Yorkers responded in ways not unlike their gawking at the curious exhibits at Barnum’s museum, at such celebrities as Tom Thumb or the “Feejee
mermaid.” Strangers examined her for traces of the African race: in her skin, in the arrangement and size of her facial features, in the shape of her head, in the curl of her hair, and in the whites of her eyes. Her examination began at the offices of the New-York Daily Times, located at 138 Nassau Street.

  A WHITE SLAVE FROM VIRGINIA. We received a visit yesterday from an interesting little girl,—who, less than a month since, was a slave belonging to Judge NEAL, of Alexandria, Va. Our readers will remember that we lately published a letter, addressed by Hon. CHARLES SUMNER, to some friends in Boston, accompanying a daguerreotype which that gentleman had forwarded to his friends in this city, and which he described as the portrait of a real “Ida May,”—a young female slave, so white as to defy the acutest judge to detect in her features, complexion, hair, or general appearance, the slightest trace of Negro blood. It was this child that visited our office, accompanied by CHARLES H. BRAINARD, in whose care she was placed by Mr. SUMNER, for transmission to Boston. Her history is briefly as follows: Her name is MARY MILDRED BOTTS; her father escaped from the estate of Judge NEAL, Alexandria, six years ago and took refuge in Boston. Two years since he purchased his freedom for $600, his wife and three children being still in bondage. The good feeling of his Boston friends induced them to subscribe for the purchase of his family, and three weeks since, through the agency of Hon. CHARLES SUMNER, the purchase was effected, $800 being paid for the family. . . . The child was exhibited yesterday to many prominent individuals in the City, and the general sentiment, in which we fully concur, was one of astonishment that she should ever have been held a slave. She was one of the fairest and most indisputable white children that we have ever seen.

  —The New-York Daily Times, March 9, 18553