The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  “After supper, John Brown first revealed to me the purpose of the expedition. He said it was to sweep the Pottawatomie of all pro-slavery men living on it. To this end he desired me to guide the company some five or six miles up to the forks of the creek, into the neighborhood where I lived, and point out to him on the way up the residences of all the pro-slavery men, so that on the way down he might carry out his designs. Horrified at his purpose, I positively refused to comply with his request, saying that I could not take men out of their beds and kill them in that way. Brown said, ‘Why don’t you fight your enemies?’ To which I replied, ‘I have no enemies I can kill in that way.’ Failing to prevail upon me, he decided to postpone the expedition until the following night when they would go, as the old man himself said, where they knew pro-slavery men to be. I then proposed to him that he take his things out of my wagon and allow me to go home; to which he replied that ‘I could not go, that I must stay with them; there was no other way of getting along.’ We remained in camp that night and all the next day. During the morning of this day, the 24th, I tried to dissuade him and his boys from carrying out the expedition, and to this end talked a great deal. Brown said it was necessary to ‘strike terror into the hearts of the pro-slavery party,’ and taking out his revolver, said to me, ‘Shut up! You are trying to discourage my boys. Dead men tell no tales.’ From the last remark, I inferred that I must henceforth keep still or suffer the consequences.

  “Some time after dark we were ordered to march, and went northward, crossing Mosquito Creek above the residence of the Doyles. Soon after crossing the creek, one of the party knocked at the door of a cabin, but received no reply. I do not know whose cabin it was. We next came to the residence of the Doyles. John Brown, three of his sons and son-in-law went to the door, leaving Frederick Brown, Winer, and myself a short distance away.

  “The old man Doyle and his sons were ordered to come out. This order they did not immediately obey, the old man being heard instead to call for his gun. At this moment, Henry Thompson threw into the house some rolls or balls of hay in which during the day wet gunpowder had been mixed, setting fire to them as he threw them in. This stratagem had the desired effect. The old man and his sons came out, and were marched one quarter of a mile in the road toward Dutch Henry’s crossing, where a halt was made. Here old John Brown drew his revolver and shot old man Doyle in the forehead, killing him instantly; and Brown’s two youngest sons immediately fell upon the younger Doyles with their short two-edged swords. One of the young Doyles was quickly dispatched; the other, attempting to escape, was pursued a short distance and cut down also. We then went down Mosquito Creek, to the house of Allen Wilkinson. Here, as at the Doyle residence, old John Brown, three sons and son-in-law went to the door and ordered Wilkinson out, leaving Frederick Brown, Winer and myself in the road a little distance east of the house. Wilkinson was marched a short distance south and killed by one of the young Browns with his short sword, after which his body was dragged to one side and left lying by the side of the road.

  “We then crossed the Pottawatomie and went to Dutch Henry’s house. Here, as at the other two houses, Frederick Brown, Winer and myself were left outside a short distance from the door, while old man Brown, three sons and son-in-law went into the house and brought out one or two persons with them. After talking with them some time they took them back into the house, and brought out William Sherman, Dutch Henry’s brother, and marched him down into Pottawatomie Creek, where John Brown’s two youngest sons slew him with their short swords, as in the former instances, and left his body lying in the creek.

  Unlike Garrison, John Brown believed in deeds rather than words, as when killing “border ruffians” during the Pottawatomie Massacre of 1856 or raiding Harper’s Ferry three years later. In his own opinion, and that of many others, his death by hanging made him a martyr— as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, his execution made “the gallows glorious like the Cross.”

  “The killing was done with swords in order to avoid alarming the neighborhood by the discharge of fire-arms. Soon after midnight we went back to where my team and the other things had been left, and remained there in camp until the next afternoon. Just before daylight, Owen Brown came to me and said, ‘There shall be no more such work as that.’

  “I did not then approve of the killing of those men, but Brown said it must be done for the protection of the Free-state settlers … I told him I was willing to go to Lecompton and attack the leaders, or to fight the enemy anywhere in open field, but that I could not kill men in that way. The deeds of that night are indelibly stamped upon my memory.

  “In after years my opinion changed as to the wisdom of the massacre. I became, and am, satisfied that it resulted in the good to the Free-state cause, and was especially beneficial to the Free-state settlers on Pottawatomie Creek. The pro-slavery men were dreadfully terrified, and large numbers of them soon left the Territory.”

  As for John Brown, his belief that his actions were justified never wavered. “Time and the honest verdict of posterity will approve of every act of mine,” he said, while waiting to be hanged after Harper’s Ferry.

  Meanwhile, back in the East, lawlessness was also becoming more common. In Boston there had been a great—but not complete—change in public opinion since the well-dressed mob had tried to lynch William Lloyd Garrison; now the violence was often exercised on behalf of the fugitive slave. This happened on three notable occasions.

  First, there was the case of Shadrach Minkins. Although for a brief period he was one of the best-known men in America, very little is known about him. He was born a slave in Norfolk, Virginia, but whether his last name was Minkins or Jenkins or Wilkins remains uncertain. Thanks to an advertisement in the Norfolk American Beacon, we know that he was sold at public auction on July 23, 1849, to pay the debts of his owner; we also know that he escaped the following year, perhaps by bribing the captain of a ship, or perhaps by stowing away.

  Having arrived in Boston, he was hired as a waiter at Taft’s Cornhill Coffee House, an elegant establishment in the center of town, and it was there that in February, 1851, he was arrested on a warrant issued under the recently-passed Fugitive Slave Law. This was the first time that the law was about to be enforced in Boston, whose bustling black community included several hundred fugitive slaves. Hitherto, thanks to the state’s personal freedom laws, they had felt fairly secure; but now, if Shadrach could be seized under the new law, so could other fugitives. And those blacks who had always been free were not inclined to sit back and do nothing while one their neighbors was hauled off. So, in a very short time, a large and almost entirely black crowd gathered at the Court House to which Shadrach had been taken.

  Many years later, the radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in his memoirs of the “skill and daring” of “a colored man of great energy and character”—probably Lewis Hayden, a leader in the black community—who worked nearby and “strolled into the Court House. Many colored men were at the door and had been excluded; but he, being known and trusted, was admitted, and the others, making a rush, followed in behind him with a hubbub of joking and laughter. There were but a few constables on duty, and it suddenly struck this leader, as he and his followers passed near the man under arrest, that they might as well keep on and pass out the other door, taking among them the man under arrest, who was not handcuffed. After a moment’s beckoning the prisoner saw his opportunity, fell in with the jubilant procession, and amid continued uproar was got outside the Court House, when the crowd scattered in all directions.”

  Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast and now a lawyer preparing to work on Shadrach’s behalf, was in his office nearby when “we heard a shout from the Court House, continued into a yell of triumph, & in an instant after, down the steps came two huge Negroes, bearing the prisoner between them, with his clothes half torn off, & so stupefied by the sudden rescue and the violence of his dragging off, that he sat almost down, & I thought had fainted; but t
he men seized him, & being powerful fellows, hurried him through the Square into Court St., where he found the use of his feet, & and they went off toward Cambridge, like a black squall, the crowd driving along with them & cheering as they went. It was all done in an instant, too quick to be believed, & so successful was it that not only was no Negro arrested, but no attempt was made at pursuit.”

  From other sources we know that Shadrach was put into a cab, hurried out of town, passed on from one sympathizer to another until—like several thousand others fugitives—he reached safety in Canada. There he settled for the rest of his life, working first in a restaurant in Montreal and then as a barber, marrying an Irish girl with whom he had four children, and returning, probably with relief, to the obscurity from which he had so dramatically emerged.

  In the meantime, back in the United States, there was a great deal of outrage. Henry Clay, one of the architects of the Compromise of 1850, was particularly angry that the rescue had been carried out “by Negroes; by African descendants; by people who possess no part, as I contend, in our political system.” Daniel Webster, another architect of the Compromise, which he hoped would carry him into the White House at the next election, declared that Shadrach’s rescue was nothing less than “an act of treason … levying war against the Union.” President Fillmore issued a proclamation in which, among other things, he said, “I do especially direct that prosecutions be commenced against all persons who have made themselves aides or abettors in this flagitious offense.” The conservative, pro-Compromise Boston papers—the so-called “Cotton Press”—chimed in. “One of the most lawless and atrocious acts that ever blackened the character of any community,” wrote the Boston Daily Times, which also deplored “the predominancy of Negrodom in the Athens of America.” As for the Southern press, a fairly typical example was the opinion of the Savannah Republican that “The city of Boston is a black speck on the map, disgraced by the lowest, the meanest, the BLACKEST kind of NULLIFICATION!!” Several of those who had taken part in the rescue were arrested and put on trial, but the evidence against them was so weak and the prosecution so incompetent that all the cases were dismissed.

  The Shadrach case made southern owners all the more determined to assert their rights in the heartland of abolitionism. Their chance came a few months later when a youth named Thomas Sims, who had escaped from Savannah, was positively identified, arrested, and taken to the same Court House where Shadrach had been held. His lawyers did their best to slow down the peremptory legal proceedings. For example, was Sims really Sims? But of this there could be no doubt, one of the witnesses who had come up from Georgia testifying that he had “known the prisoner for the last ten months in Savannah, under the name of Thomas Sims; that he worked as a bricklayer on the same scaffolding with him in August and September last; that he once asked the prisoner if he was a slave, and he replied that he was, and that he belonged to James Potter, a rice planter, who lives ten or twelve miles from Savannah, and that he had to pay his wages to Mr. Potter monthly, to the amount of about $10 a month.

  “The other witness, Bacon, is the agent of Mr. Potter, who came here to make the arrest. He testifies that he has known the prisoner as the property of Mr. Potter for fifteen years, that he last saw him in Savannah on the 22nd of February; that during the last ten years the prisoner has generally lived with his mother, in Savannah, accounting to Mr. Potter for his wages; that he knew the prisoner did so account for his wages from being present both when they were paid to Mr. Potter by the mother and by the prisoner, and from repeatedly seeing his mother go after him for his wages, and that there is not a shadow of doubt with reference to his identity. He [Bacon] also testifies that the last thing the mother said to him on the eve of his departure, was to beg him, whether her son was in a free state or a slave state, for God’s sake to bring him back again.”

  Meanwhile, the Boston Vigilance Committee, formed in the wake of the Shadrach affair and composed largely of well-intentioned whites, met to consult. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who prided himself on being a man of action, it was “impossible to conceive a set of men, personally admirable, yet less fitted on the whole than this committee to undertake any positive action in the direction of forcible resistance to authorities. In the first place, half of them were non-resistants, as was their great leader, Garrison, who stood composedly at his desk preparing his next week’s editorial …” Black members were demoralized and weakened by the new Fugitive Slave Law—in the first month after its passage an estimated two thousand blacks had left the North for Canada. One of their leaders, Lewis Hayden, told Higginson that “we do not wish anyone to know how really weak we are. Practically, there are no colored men in Boston; the Shadrach prosecutions have scattered them all. What is to be done must be done without them.”

  “The next day showed that absolutely nothing could be accomplished in the court-room. There were one or two hundred armed policemen in and around the Court-house. Six men were at the door of the court-room. The prisoner, a slender boy of seventeen, sat with two strong men on either side and five men in the seat behind him, while none but his counsel could approach in front.” When not in court, Sims was held a prisoner on the third floor of the Court-house building. “It was evident that if anything was done, it must be done by a very few.”

  A plan was soon made. “The room where Sims was confined, being safe by reason of its height from the ground, had no gratings at the windows. The colored clergyman of Boston, Mr. Grimes, who alone had the opportunity to visit Sims, agreed to arrange with him that at a specified hour that evening he should go to a certain window, as if for air, and should spring out on mattresses which we were to bring from a lawyer’s office across the way; we also providing a carriage in which to place him. All was arranged—the message sent, the mattresses ready, the carriage engaged as if for an ordinary purpose; and behold! in the dusk of that evening, two of us, strolling through Court Square, saw men busily at work fitting iron bars across this safe third-story window. Whether we had been betrayed, or whether it was a bit of extraordinary precaution, we never knew.” (Or perhaps Sims himself, having worked on a scaffold in Savannah and thus well aware how dangerous a drop from a third floor could be, had asked for the bars to be installed, choosing rather to go back to mother and Mr. Potter than risk breaking his neck by jumping on to a pile of mattresses which, coming from a lawyer’s office, cannot have been that many and would also, like most mattresses in those days, have been thin, without springs, and stuffed with horsehair.)

  At any rate, to the shame of the city and the delight of the South, Sims was taken under military escort to the Long Wharf where a ship provided by the government was waiting to take him back to Savannah. Twelve years later, during the Civil War, he escaped once again and returned to Boston, just in time to watch the famous black 54th Massachusetts Regiment parade through the streets he had once traveled under heavy escort as they embarked for the campaign in the South.

  The third case was that of Anthony Burns, who was arrested by federal marshals on May 24, 1854, on the charge of being a fugitive from the “service and labor” of Charles F. Suttle, a merchant of Alexandria, Virginia. After the arrest, which was made very discreetly, “he was escorted to an upper room in the Court House where, under a strong guard of officers, he was kept for the night, and the intelligence of his arrest did not transpire until the following morning.” (This account comes from Boston Slave Riot and Trial of Anthony Burns, a quickie book composed mostly of edited newspaper accounts.)

  “Burns, who is about thirty years old, has for some time been in the employ of Coffin Pitts, clothing dealer, No. 36 Brattle Street. He is a shrewd fellow and his story of the manner of his leaving Alexandria is curious. After acquitting his master of all suspicion of cruelty, he stated that leaving him was the result of an accident—that one day, while tired, he laid down on board a vessel to rest, got asleep, and during his slumbers the vessel sailed! Burns, at one time after his arrest, expressed a willingness to
return with his master, but he was induced by his advisers to make his claimants show their authority for his return.” (Other accounts, such as that by Richard Henry Dana, his lawyer, say nothing about falling asleep or being willing to return.)

  When he was brought before Commissioner Loring, Burns was identified by a friend of the owner and was then held prisoner—like Sims—in an upstairs room at the Court House, under heavy guard. Soon after, this notice “appeared in all the papers and was placarded throughout the city: ‘A Man Kidnapped!—A Public Meeting will be held at Faneuil Hall this (Friday) evening, May 26, at 7 o’clock, to secure justice for a man claimed as a slave by a Virginia kidnapper, and imprisoned in Boston Court House, in defiance of the laws of Massachusetts. Shall he be plunged into the hell of Virginia slavery by a Massachusetts Judge of Probate?”

  As expected, the meeting at Faneuil Hall was crowded, noisy and disputatious. “On taking the chair, Judge Russell said he had once thought that a fugitive could never be taken from Boston. But he had been mistaken! One [Sims] had been taken from among us, and another lies in peril of his liberty. The boast of the slave holder is that he will catch his slaves under the shadow of Bunker Hill. We have made compromises until we find that compromise is concession, and concession is degradation. (Applause.)