In 1853, a year after a recapture scare and after Cornelia Grinell Willis solicited funds to purchase her freedom, Jacobs decided to begin to write her story. (She had earlier rejected an offer to have it included in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.) At one crucial moment, she heard that her beloved but judgmental grandmother had died in North Carolina. This removed the last psychological obstacle to revealing her troubled sexual history. A few months earlier she had published three letters in the New York Tribune, signed “A Fugitive Slave,” describing the kind of sexual crimes masters committed against their female slaves.49
Working mostly at night, after caring for the children and family with whom she lived, Jacobs completed the manuscript in 1858. Despite Lydia Maria Child’s offer to edit the work and write an introduction, there were fortuitous problems in getting it published. Two Boston publishers accepted the manuscript but then went bankrupt. In 1861, it was published by a Boston printer “for the author,” but the book sold widely in bookstores and by antislavery agents and was even pirated by a publisher in England. When Jacobs went off to Washington early in the Civil War to do relief work among the so-called contrabands who had fled from slavery—and she would continue to work for Quakers in distributing clothing, teaching, and providing health care—she was well recognized by abolitionists as the author of the most vivid and compelling account of the anguish, suffering, and dilemmas slave women faced as they lost real control over their “owned” bodies.50
FUGITIVE SLAVES AND THE LAW
Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs achieved remarkably free and successful lives after escaping to free soil, but the hazards they faced are indicated by the fact that both achieved true liberty only after friends purchased their legal freedom. The boundaries fugitives faced involved both physical space and the law, and free soil was defined by law. We turn now to the conflict between North and South over the meaning of free soil—a nonissue before 1777, when racial slavery was legal and relatively unchallenged in all the North American colonies.
The American Revolution led to the emancipation of the small number of slaves in Vermont in 1777 and in Massachusetts in the 1780s and to laws providing for the gradual freeing of slaves in Pennsylvania in 1780 and in four other northeastern states by 1804. In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance seemed to ensure that the institution was doomed in the vast Northwest Territory north of the Ohio River. These measures were very slow to take effect. Slavery remained legal if in diminishing importance in New York until 1827, in Connecticut and Illinois until 1848, and in New Jersey until the Civil War. But as early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a meeting in a state then committed to future freedom, it became clear to Southerners that the new nation would be divided between “free” and “slave” states and that this division would affect various crucial issues in the Constitution, ranging from national representation to the African slave trade. Although the Constitution significantly avoided use of the terms “slave” and “slavery,” South Carolinians in particular were successful in gaining a provision regarding fugitive slaves:
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.51
Even by 1793 there were enough fugitives to motivate Congress to pass a Fugitive Slave Law implementing this constitutional provision. The law saddled local legal authorities in the North, such as circuit or district judges, with the responsibility of delivering runaways to their masters or slave-catcher representatives. In states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, bordering slaveholding Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky, this put free blacks in constant danger of being kidnapped, since many officials equated blackness with slavery and readily believed the claims of slaveholders. Yet with the passage of time, the flagrant injustice of such invasive captures led most Northern states to pass personal liberty laws, often mandating jury trials, to prevent kidnappings, and Northern magistrates showed less and less interest in helping to recover fugitives—a development that finally evoked the South’s counterproductive Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.52
Even in the South, runaway slaves often headed for cities and towns, where they could more easily avoid detection, solicit help from free blacks, and find work. The smaller number who headed north ended up in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, or even Boston. Many slaves manumitted during or after the Revolution assembled in Baltimore, which also became an obvious place for rural slaveholders to look for fugitives. The resulting vulnerability of free blacks led, as early as 1819, to the creation of a vigilance committee, which soon became the Baltimore Society for the Protection of Free People of Color. Full-fledged vigilance committees, dedicated to the assistance of fugitives and populated by the best-known African American leaders of the time, emerged in Philadelphia and New York in the 1830s and in Boston in 1846.53 The New York Vigilance Committee boasted that after a single year it had enlisted one hundred members and had “protected from slavery” a total of 335 persons. No less important was that by publishing the stories of fugitives, the committee made it increasingly necessary for slave catchers to procure warrants and begin hearings, instead of just seizing a supposed fugitive.54
Vigilance committees would continue to face the somewhat controversial issue of paying money to free a fugitive. In some cases, collections were raised for such a purpose, but there was seldom any organized effort to free more than a single individual, after the failure of other efforts, since abolitionists hated giving any sanction to the principle of human ownership. Often a payment was seen as “paying ransom” to recover a family member or a recently returned fugitive.
One sees a blend of solutions in the formal and informal efforts to free George Latimer in Boston. A fugitive from Norfolk, Virginia, Latimer was arrested in Boston in October 1842; his owner’s lawyer had avoided getting a warrant and had enlisted the local police. After a crowd of angry blacks tried without success to rescue Latimer, abolitionists failed to free him legally through a writ of habeas corpus. Frederick Douglass and other dignitaries then addressed mass meetings, and local black churches helped raise money to pay for his freedom. His owner, after receiving threats of violence, finally agreed to sell Latimer to the abolitionists.55
The fugitive slave issue provided opportunities for increasing cooperation between black and white abolitionists, who were divided on other matters, such as true social equality for blacks. Yet blacks dominated the vigilance committees and led the way not only in the Underground Railroad efforts to help fugitives escape and avoid recapture, but in “Upperground” assistance in helping them find homes, employment, and a social place within the United States.56 The unification of these goals can be seen in David Ruggles, the fearless and scrappy founder of the New York Vigilance Committee.
Born in Connecticut to free parents, Ruggles moved to New York City in 1827, opened and ran a grocery store, and then delighted Samuel Cornish and other black reformers when he became a temperance man and stopped selling alcohol. As the full-time agent for The Emancipator, Ruggles traveled in the Mid-Atlantic states, lecturing, getting subscriptions, and making connections with Underground Railroad stations. He then rapidly rose within the ranks of New York’s black abolitionist community and exemplified the movement for black uplift and improvement we examined in chapter 8 (he played a crucial part in the Phoenix High School for Colored Youth; wrote articles and pamphlets calling for black education and enhancement; and opened the first African American–owned bookstore and library). As the founding officer of the New York Vigilance Committee, Ruggles did his best to assist fugitives, prevent kidnappings, and help runaways move farther north or to Canada. Working with black veterans such as Samuel Cornish and Peter Williams, he helped solicit funds from wealthy white abolitionists, such as Gerrit Smith and the Tappan brothers. Ruggles published a kind of black list of merchants
and others who were complicit in supporting slavery or the internal slave trade, and helped educate the city’s black community on the legal issues surrounding the seizure of blacks—on how the burden of proof for their freedom was upon them and that the courts were not to be relied on, “where every advantage is given to the slaveholders and to the kidnappers.”57
Ruggles’s service in aiding fugitives was relatively brief, because he had a conflict with Cornish and other abolitionists, and he was forced to resign as an officer from the Vigilance Committee. He went on to establish a successful Water-Cure Hospital in Massachusetts, where he treated Garrison and Sojourner Truth, before dying at age thirty-nine. But Ruggles succeeded in combating New York’s slave catchers—he was dragged out of his house at night and beaten by enemies, and suffered long-term injuries—and, according to his modern biographer, “Unlike any activist before, Ruggles brought ordinary blacks into the struggle by empathizing with the plight of families damaged by kidnappers or by tapping into the anger of young blacks in the street.”58
Given the physical confrontation between blacks and slave catchers, it is surprising that there were not more violent attempts in major cities to seize and free fugitives who were held by authorities. Such efforts did occur, especially in smaller towns, and in Boston a group of blacks liberated two fugitives in 1836, and in 1851 an interracial mob stormed the courthouse and freed Shadrach Minkins, a fugitive from Virginia. But, while hundreds of abolitionists poured into the Boston streets to protest the capture and reenslavement of Thomas Sims in 1851 and Anthony Burns in 1854, no serious effort was made to physically free them. In part, this was because they were protected by armed guards and the U.S. Marines as they were tried and taken for deportation. Moreover, many of Boston’s blacks were themselves fugitives who were fearful of recapture and increasingly intent on escaping the Fugitive Slave Law by fleeing to Canada.59 But especially in view of the Garrisonian abolitionists’ commitment to pacifism, there was a very slow and gradual acceptance of violence, in the 1850s, on the part of black and even white abolitionists. It was only as the Civil War approached, exemplified by John Brown’s raid, that increasing numbers of abolitionists concluded that a slave system undergirded by violence required violence to topple it.
This point is illustrated by the black response to Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves,” or “Call for Rebellion,” given at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens at Buffalo. Born a slave in the South, Garnet escaped as a child to Pennsylvania with his fugitive family, attended black schools in New York, and became a Presbyterian minister and radical abolitionist. He was much taken with David Walker’s Appeal, which he reprinted with a brief account of Walker’s life. His Buffalo speech was the first important call on American slaves to rebel since Walker’s Appeal. Slaveholders, Garnet proclaimed, “endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible.” And “TO SUCH DEGRADATIOIN IT IS SINFUL IN THE EXTREME FOR YOU TO MAKE VOLUNTARY SUBMISSION.” Like Walker, Garnet coupled his endorsement of violence with a startling condemnation of slave docility and complicity, a recognition of at least some success on the part of Southern paternalists. Thus his praise for Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Cinque, and Madison Washington was coupled with the image of brain-washed (“Elkins-like”) Sambo slaves:
It is in your power so to torment the God cursed slaveholders that they will be glad to let you go free. If the scale was turned, and black men were the masters and white men the slaves, every destructive agent and element would be employed to lay the oppressor low. Danger and death would hang over their heads day and night. Yes, the tyrants would meet with plagues more terrible than those of Pharaoh. But you are a patient people. You act as though you were made for the special use of these devils. You act as though your daughters were born to pamper the lusts of your masters and overseers. And worse than all, you tamely submit while your lords tear your wives from your embraces and defile them before your eyes. In the name of God, we ask, are you men? Where is the blood of your fathers? Has it all run out of your veins? Awake, awake; millions of voices are calling you! Your dead fathers speak to you from their graves. Heaven, as with a voice of thunder, calls on you to arise from the dust.60
By 1843, there was much skepticism even among white abolitionists over the Garrisonian commitment to pacifistic “moral suasion,” but in view of influencing public opinion, there was still much sensitivity to the dangerous Southern “narrative” that the French Amis des noirs had instigated the Haitian Revolution, that American abolitionists were responsible for Nat Turner’s uprising, and that abolitionists in general always threatened to incite a major slave insurrection with its predicted bloodshed and raping of white women. The fear of the persuasiveness and possible truth of such accusations surely prompted a negative white reaction to Garnet’s call for slave revolt—there was virtually no white interest or support—and may well have influenced the black assembly’s voting down an adoption of his address (by a vote of 19 to 18). James Gillespie Birney, who ran as the Liberty Party’s candidate for president in 1840, remarked in 1838 that he did not know a single abolitionist who would incite slaves to insurrection. Garnet himself had disavowed slave violence in a speech a year and a half before his 1843 address. Aside from issues of Christian nonviolence, much of the discussion at the Buffalo convention centered on questions of practicality—in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s bloody uprising of 1831, even slaves themselves came to recognize the almost inevitable self-destructive outcome of armed resistance.61 Yet the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, coupled with a number of judicial decisions, helped to persuade many abolitionists, blacks especially, that slavery could not be ended without some kind of violence. Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond, who both spoke out against Garnet’s address in Buffalo, also moved in that direction.62
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 greatly magnified the issue of fugitives and free soil. The law was counterproductive and self-defeating for the South, since the number of fugitives who escaped to the North was never large enough to endanger the Southern economy, and the provisions of the law increasingly outraged Northern public opinion, as a kind of gift to the abolitionists. There was of course much initial support for the law in parts of the North, given the concern for the union and strong ties with the South. The North received some gains from the Compromise of 1850, and it was argued that the fugitive slave measure was simply a way of carrying out a provision in the Constitution.63 Nevertheless, it was Daniel Webster’s defense of the law that ruined his political career, and Northern opposition to the law increased over time, thanks in part to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the growing fear of “the Slave Power” and its expansion of slavery in the West. It can well be argued that resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, declared unconstitutional in 1854 by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, later reinforced by resistance to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott Decision, prepared the way for Northern acceptance of Civil War.64
The Fugitive Slave Law was part of Henry Clay’s large Compromise of 1850, an omnibus of measures intended to pacify the country by meeting and balancing the demands of North and South in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Although the effort was initially voted down by Congress, Stephen A. Douglas guided the measures through Congress as separate bills. Thus the North achieved the ending of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and the admission of California as a free state. The South won the Fugitive Slave Law and the organization of the rest of the land ceded by Mexico into two territories, New Mexico and Utah, without any federal restriction on slavery.
The Fugitive Slave Law, which required federal agents to recover fugitive slaves from sanctuaries in the North, directly challenged the North’s integrity and its new self-image as an asylum of liberty. Increasing numbers of former moderates, especially religious believers in God’s punishment of national sins, now echoed Garrison’s rhetoric of disunion, and an increasing number of former nonresistants called for a slave uprising or predicted that the s
treets of Boston might “yet run with blood.” As abolitionists in effect declared war on the so-called Slave Power, the Western territories would become the crucial testing ground that would determine whether America would stand for something more than selfish interest, exploitation, and rule by brutal power.
The new Fugitive Slave Law radically strengthened the law of 1793, which had not provided for any government support for the removal of a slave. Federal commissioners could now be appointed by Circuit Courts throughout the United States, where they could issue warrants, certificates of removal, and hold hearings. Suspected fugitives were not allowed to testify, there were no juries, and if no attorney volunteered or was hired by the defendant, only the commissioner and the claimant (the master or master’s agent) could speak. Even more alarming, the law required any citizen to become a “deputy of the law” and help in the task of apprehending fugitives. Anyone who interfered in such apprehensions, or who assisted a fugitive, could be fined as much as $1,000 or sentenced to six months in jail. Finally, commissioners were to be paid ten dollars if they returned the supposed fugitive to his or her owner, and only five dollars if they acquitted the accused black—the difference being justified on the basis that convicted fugitives required more paperwork and thus more labor.65
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