Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  A similar incident occurred in 1856 when Robert Garner, his wife, their four children, and two other adults fled out of Kentucky to Cincinnati. They were resting at the home of a free black man, Elijah Kite, when their Kentucky masters and a United States Marshal broke through the door. Both Kite and Garner responded with pistol fire, wounding one of the intruders.

  The violence then took a horrific turn. Garner’s wife was the spark. Seeing that the men might lose the fight, Margaret Garner shouted that she would kill her children before returning them to the yoke. By the time the slavers and their government accomplice gained control, Margaret had strangled the life from her two-year-old daughter. For Northerners, Margaret Garner’s infanticide underscored the evils of slavery. Southerners said it was just another example of the baffling Negro and confirmation of his inferior status in law and in nature. After extended legal squabbling, the Garners were given up to their master, who sold them to slave traders in New Orleans.

  Another US Marshal was the target of gunplay when an interracial group in the abolitionist bastion of Oberlin, Ohio, blocked the pursuit of Kentucky fugitive John Price. When the slave catchers and their federal man brought the fight, the resisters brandished guns, to a temporary stalemate. The aftermath reflected the simmering conflict between federal law and technically preempted state statutes that deemed slave catchers kidnappers. State and federal bureaucracies initiated disparate proceedings. The federal process charged the resisters with violating the Fugitive Slave Law. Ohio, on the other hand, indicted the marshal and three Southerners for kidnapping. The conflict eventually was settled with reduced sanctions against combatants on both sides.45

  While Negro life in free states and territories was certainly an improvement over slavery, these places fell far short of the promised land. Opposition to slavery did not necessarily mean full political and social embrace of Negroes. This is evident in various free-state laws restricting Negro rights. Ohio’s early constitution denied free blacks the right to vote, and in 1807 the state passed a loosely enforced law requiring Negro immigrants to post a $500 bond and a guarantee of their good behavior signed by two white men. The Indiana Territory prohibited Negroes from testifying in court against whites. In 1857, Wisconsin voters reversed a previous statute granting black suffrage. An 1857 Oregon statute prohibited blacks from settling in the state. And Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa all prohibited interracial marriage.

  It was the violation of one of those interracial marriage bans in 1845 that sent Rose Anne McGregor of Marion County, Iowa, running for her gun. Rose Anne had the temerity to fall in love with a white man, Tom McGregor, and he with her. They beat the first prosecution for violating the ban by getting the proceedings moved to a Quaker community where a sympathetic grand jury refused to indict them.

  Officials then ordered Rose Anne McGregor either to post manumission papers and a $500 bond or to be sold to the highest bidder. The McGregors were defiant and vowed to do neither. While Tom was away, the sheriff and a deputy came out to arrest Rose Anne. She saw them approaching and warned that she was armed and was a crack shot. It was one of those instances where just the threat of gunfire seemed to be enough, at least until nightfall. Under the cover of darkness, the sheriff sneaked to the door, kicked it down, and seized Rose Anne McGregor before she could get a shot off.

  Rose Anne was captured, but not for long. As they trotted back to town with Rose Anne bound up on horseback, she kicked her mount hard in the ribs and held on as the animal bolted off into the night. She soon met up with Tom, and they abandoned their Iowa home in search of a more welcoming environment.46

  The black tradition of arms ultimately elevates and enshrines the distinction between self-defense against imminent threats and organized political violence seeking group advancement. But in the fight against slavery, there was little concern for that distinction. In a practical sense, slavery was a state of war, and some in the burgeoning black leadership put it basically that way.

  At the 1854 National Emigration Convention of Colored People in Cleveland, Ohio, black abolitionist Martin Delaney cast resistance to slavery as straightforward warfare, declaring, “Should we encounter an enemy with artillery, a prayer will not stay the cannon shot, neither will the kind words or smiles of philanthropy shield his spear from piercing us through the heart. We must meet mankind, then as they meet us—prepared for the worst.”

  With an appreciation of the young nation’s revolutionary struggle, escaped slave Andrew Jackson defended his own and the broader use of violence in the pursuit of liberty, proclaiming, “If it was right for the revolutionary patriots to fight for liberty, it was right for me, and is right for any other slave to do the same. And were I now a slave, I would risk my life for freedom. Give me liberty or give me death would be my deliberate conclusion.” In Ohio around the same time, John Isome Gaines advocated a slave revolution to overthrow the slaveocracy and install a “government of God that would secure universal liberty and equality.”

  Commenting on John Brown’s failed 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, black abolitionist Charles Langston invoked America’s revolutionary principles, and with a plain note of sarcasm, declared that the “renowned fathers of our celebrated revolution taught the world that ‘resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,’ that all men are created equal and have the inalienable right to life and liberty. These men proclaimed death, but not slavery, or rather give me liberty or give me death.” On these principles, Langston argued, Brown’s raid and similar acts of resistance were entirely justified.

  One of the most famous calls for violent resistance was David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.” Walker urged his brothers in bondage to rise up and “kill or be killed.” He declared that “the man who would not fight . . . in the glorious and heavenly cause of freedom . . . ought to be kept with all his children or family in slavery, or in chains to be butchered by his cruel enemies.”

  Similar sentiments were expressed by fugitives who escaped to freedom and became spokesmen for the race. Fugitive activist H. Ford Douglas, publisher of the Provincial Freeman, advocated the violent overthrow of slavery in unequivocal terms. Similarly, David Ruggles, founder of the New York Vigilance Committee, urged that blacks “must look to our own safety and protection from kidnappers, remembering that self-defense is the first law of nature.”47

  In 1843, the Michigan Negro Convention repeated this theme, calling on blacks to wage “unceasing war” against the tyranny of slavery. Soon after that, in 1844, Moses Dickson formed a shadowy organization called the International Order of Twelve of the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, with the agenda of overthrowing slavery by any means. Pressing an agenda beyond abolition, Reverend Henry Johnson gave a militant speech at the 1845 Colored Suffrage Convention in New York, proclaiming that “the colored population were ready to take the musket, if necessary, to defend our churches, our family associations, and the rights of our neighbors.” The details and activities of many of these individuals and organizations are thinly researched, but a few episodes are more richly recorded.48

  In 1848, Henry Highland Garnet advanced David Walker’s earlier appeal and indulged no fine distinctions between self-defense and political violence. Garnet characterized slaves as “prisoners of war in an enemy’s country” and urged, “by all the rules of war, you have the fullest liberty to plunder, burn and kill.” Garnet considered slavery a broad and continuing license for violent resistance. “If hereditary bondsmen would be free, they must strike the first blow. . . . It is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means intellectual and physical that promise success. . . . You had better all die—die immediately, than live as slaves and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity. . . . Let your motto be resistance! Resistance! Resistance!”

  Garnet presented his address for inclusion in the platform of the National Negro Convention. The body rejected it, with the opposition led by Frederick Douglass and Charles Remond, at that stage still under the sway of
the pacifist Garrisonians.49

  But both Douglass and Remond eventually advocated violence as a tool for ending slavery. In June 1849, Douglass gave a speech in Boston that fairly shocked his audience of pacifist abolitionists. In language reflecting his emerging militancy, Douglass said that he would welcome slave rebellion in the South and would celebrate any news that “the Sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the South, were engaged in spreading death and devastation.” Although the precise curve of Charles Remond’s transformation is unclear, his view had changed by 1851 when he celebrated the violence of three fugitive slaves who shot and killed their pursuing master.50

  Militant rhetoric raised objections from pacifist abolitionist and sparked conflicts that illustrated the difference between black and white stakes in ending slavery. Henry Highland Garnet was a particular target of pacifist William Lloyd Garrison’s paper, the Liberator. White abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman denounced Garnet in a lengthy Liberator article, suggesting that he had fallen under the influence of “bad counsel.”51

  The implication was that Garnet had not developed his own views but had been lured and manipulated into militancy by some shadowy white Svengali. Garnet bristled at the suggestion that “his humble productions have been produced by the Council of some Anglo-Saxon.” In a letter to the Liberator that models the objections of modern black contrarians to presumptuous white paternalism, Garnet chided, “I have expected no more from ignorant slaveholders and their apologists, but I really look for better things from Mrs. Maria W. Chapman . . . , editor pro tem of the Boston Liberator. I can think on the subject of human rights without ‘counsel’ either from men of the West or women of the East.”52

  Despite pacifist discomfort, militant abolitionists continued to advance black resistance in heroic terms. The New York Independent observed,

  The framers of this new [fugitive slave] law counted upon the utter degradation of the Negro race—their want of manliness and heroism—to render feasible its execution but it was the cowardly Negro, the worm and not the serpent upon whom they set their foot. They anticipated no resistance from a race cowed down by centuries of oppression and trained to servility. In this however they were mistaken. They’re beginning to discover that men, however abject, who have tasted liberty, soon learn to prize it and are ready to defend it.53

  In some of the most widely reported revolts against the fugitive slave law, blacks, sometimes accompanied by radical white abolitionist allies, defied the authority of the state and attempted to snatch fugitives from the process of the law. In Syracuse, New York, in 1851, black and white abolitionists stormed the courtroom and rescued William McHenry of Missouri, who was offered up to his master under the 1850 law. Federal marshals beat back the crowd and retrieved McHenry, only to lose him again in the tumult.

  McHenry was hustled off to Canada. But two dozen people, half of them Negroes, were indicted for violating federal law by aiding in the escape. Suggesting the sentiments of the community, three of the indicted whites were acquitted. Six blacks who were primary instigators, fled to Canada. One of that group, Reverend Jermaine Loguen, had already articulated his contempt for the 1850 law in print: “I don’t respect this law. I don’t. I won’t obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it and the man who attempts to enforce it on me. I place governmental officials on the ground that they placed me. I will not live a slave, and if force is employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man.”54

  A similar incident occurred in 1851 in Boston, where fugitive Frederick Wilkins was apprehended and taken into custody on the strength of the 1850 law. In a tactic that was repeated in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere, and in overt defiance of any government authority over Wilkins, Negroes burst into the courtroom, stole Wilkins away, and skirted him off to Canada. When two blacks and two whites involved in the rescue were acquitted on state charges, President Millard Fillmore threatened federal prosecution against the “lawless mob.”55

  Commentary from fugitive activists captures the sentiment that under the circumstances, blacks had little to lose from political violence. One commentator, exiled in Canada, rebuked President Fillmore, arguing that because blacks were not protected by the law of the United States, they could not be “censured for opposing its execution.” In Pennsylvania, William Parker, soon to be famous for leading the Resistance at Christiana, expressed it this way: “The laws for personal protection are not made for us and we are not bound to obey them. Whites have a country and may obey the laws. But we have no country.” As for the federal protection and assistance granted to slave catchers, Parker retorted, whether the kidnappers were clothed with legal authority or not, “I do not care to inquire, as I never had faith in nor respect for the Fugitive Slave Law.”

  Religious scruples were no clear bar on such sentiments. In New York City, a mass church gathering resolved that fugitives from slavery should resist “with the surest and most deadly weapons.”56 The militancy of the group was underscored by the thunderous response to William Powell’s question, “Shall the bloodthirsty slaver be permitted by this unrighteous law to come into our domiciles, or workshops, or the places where we labor, and carry off our wives and children, our fathers and mothers, and ourselves, without a struggle—without resisting, even if need be onto death?”

  Surviving accounts distill what probably was a diverse range of views among black congregations. One longs for a transcript of the 1850 meeting at the Colored Congregational Church in Portland, Maine, resolving “that recognizing no authority higher than the law of God, . . . We pledge to resist unto death any and every effort to take from the city for the purpose of enslaving him any person to whom we are united by the ties of brotherhood.” One member of the group invoked the theme of the American Revolution, declaring that “not a man is to be taken from Portland. Our motto is liberty or death.”57

  In 1851, the black state convention of Ohio officially endorsed physical resistance to slave catchers. The sentiment was captured by activist Sam Ward, who concluded that the 1850 law “throws us back upon the natural and inalienable right of self-defense” and warned, “Let the men who would execute this bill beware.”

  The impulse toward resistance trumped the worry of alienating white allies. In Pittsburgh in 1851, black activist Martin Delaney gave a fiery speech in front of the white political establishment. His declaration dripping with irony, Delaney exhorted,

  Honorable Mayor, whatever ideas of liberty I may have, had been received from reading the lives of your revolutionary fathers. I have therein learned that a man has a right to defend his castle with his life, even unto the taking of life. Surely, my house is my castle; in that castle are none but my wife and my children, as free as the angels of heaven, and whose liberty is as sacred as the pillars of God. If any man approaches that house in search of a slave—I care not who he may be, whether constable or sheriff, magistrate or even judge of the Supreme Court—nay, let it be he who sanctioned this Act to become law, surrounded by his cabinet as his bodyguard, with the Declaration of Independence waving above his head as his banner, and the Constitution of his country upon his breast as his shield—if he crosses the threshold of my door, and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet, I hope the grave may refuse my body a resting place and righteous Heaven my spirit a home. No! He cannot enter that house and we both live.58

  There is more than enough hyperbole in Delaney’s speech. But the content and the venue show how he was moved by desperation to an overt policy of political violence. The statements of Robert Williams, little more than a century later, are tame by comparison.

  The harshness of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law pressed dedicated black acolytes of William Lloyd Garrison to a more militant stance. Robert Purvis of Westchester was both a Garrisonian and a Quaker. The 1850 law pushed him to this: “Should any wretch enter my dwelling, any pale-faced specter among them, to execute this law on me or mine, I’ll seek his life and I’ll shed his b
lood.”59

  Although Frederick Douglass would recoil from John Brown’s folly at Harpers Ferry, advising Brown that he was going into “a perfect steel trap,” he condemned the 1850 fugitive slave law with a militancy that reflected his now open estrangement from Garrison.60 Writing in the Frederick Douglass Paper in August 1852, Douglass declared that “the only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”61 He pressed the theme in a widely reprinted speech exhorting black solidarity against slavery.

  When the insurrection of the southern slaves shall take place, as take place it will unless speedily prevented by voluntary emancipation, the great mass of the colored men of the North, however much to the grief of any of us, will be found by your side, with deep-stored and long-accumulated revenge in their hearts and with death-dealing weapons in their hands.

  The colored American, for the sake of relieving his colored brethren, would no more hesitate to shoot an American slaveholder, than would a white American, for the sake of delivering his white brother, hesitate to shoot an Algerine slaveholder. The state motto of Virginia, “Death to Tyrants,” is as well the black man’s, as the white man’s motto. . . . If American revolutionists had excuse for shedding but one drop of blood, then have the American slaves excuse for making blood flow even unto the horse bridles.

  If your oppressors have rights of property, you, at least, are exempt from all obligations to respect them. For you are prisoners of war, in an enemy’s country—of a war, too, that is unrivalled for its injustice, cruelty, and meanness—and therefore by all the rules of war, you have the fullest liberty to plunder, burn, kill as you may have occasion to do to promote your escape.62