The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, by A. Donnelly, New York, circa 1850s. Library of Congress. In this version of Brown’s famed escape to freedom, William Still is replaced on the left with a depiction of Frederick Douglass.
Still also related the riveting account of Jane Johnson (1814?–1872), whose determination to be free shed light on the inner workings of the Underground Railroad. Johnson, born in Washington, D.C., around 1814, had been sold to a civil servant named John H. Wheeler of North Carolina. Wheeler had been assigned as minister to Nicaragua, and on his way to New York in July 1855 with Johnson and two of her children—a third had been sold away—he stopped in Philadelphia. While dining at Bloodgood’s Hotel, Johnson alerted some free blacks that she was a slave. They in turn alerted Still, who hurried to the scene, along with a white abolitionist named Passmore Williamson, hoping to assist her in her quest for freedom.
Wheeler and his property, unfortunately, had already left the hotel and boarded a steamer for New York. The two men ran to the docks and found Johnson and her children up on the second deck. Williamson and Still, confronted Wheeler and advised Johnson that she could be free if she desired it. They scuffled with Wheeler, who claimed that Johnson wanted nothing to do with the two men, but she cried out, “I am not free, but I want my freedom—always wanted to be free!! but he holds me.”35 The family fled with Still while Williamson debated with Wheeler.
William and Ellen Craft, from The Underground Railroad, by William Still (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), 383.
Later that same day Wheeler brought suit against Williamson, claiming that he had kidnapped his property, and the court held him without bail until the end of August, when Williamson’s trial took place. With Wheeler sitting in the courtroom—a pistol tucked in his trousers—Johnson (making a surprise appearance in disguise) courageously testified that she alone had decided that she wanted her freedom and that no one had forced her to run away.
With several white female abolitionists at her side—including the famed Lucretia Mott—Johnson testified that “nobody forced me away; nobody pulled me, and nobody led me; I went away of my own free will; I always wished to be free and meant to be free when I came North.” But under terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, she could be seized and returned to her owner. When she finished her testimony she fled with Mott and the other women, who then spirited her away to Boston, where she came under the protection of William C. Nell and the Boston Vigilance Committee. She married a local black man, and their home on Beacon Hill became a haven for fugitive slaves.36
BY THE 1850S, AS BLACK VOICES SUCH AS THESE FROM THE FUGITIVE SLAVE NARRATIVES POIGNANTLY AND PASSIONATELY ARTICULATED THE HORRORS OF SLAVERY AND THE URGE TO BE FREE, the country was coming apart over the question of slavery, especially its status in the western territories. The white South—unalterably committed to slavery and its expansion—conducted undisguised war with the black community and its white antislavery allies in the North. In places like Christiana, Pennsylvania, this was no metaphor. The war was real, with gunfights, attempted mass escapes, and murder. Much to the outrage of even moderate northerners, the South—which otherwise insisted on a limited government—had recruited the federal government to take responsibility for retrieving runaway slaves. Congress, through the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, even set up special courts to hear only fugitive slave cases, “trials” in which the defendants possessed no rights and in which judges received cash incentives to “return” blacks to slavery—even if they had never been slaves.
The notorious Fugitive Slave Act put every free black person in the North at risk of a legally sanctioned kidnapping by suggesting that no person of African ancestry could really be an American citizen, an implication affirmed by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. The South sent its agents—slave catchers and kidnappers—north to recapture runaways and enslave free people. Among those who responded, one of the most distinctive was Harriet Tubman—or “General Tubman,” as John Brown of Harpers Ferry fame admiringly called her—a Moses figure who took enormous personal risks to help slaves gain their freedom.
Born a slave in the border state of Maryland, Harriet Tubman (1820–1913) grew up in a community of mixed free and enslaved African Americans and married a free black man. Fearing she would be sold into the Deep South, as her sisters had been, she fled to Philadelphia in 1849 and became a servant. But she missed her family and began making trips back to Maryland to rescue them. She soon freed her sister and her sister’s two children, and then returned again to rescue her brother and two other men. On her third trip, Tubman went to fetch her husband, only to find he had taken another wife. Undeterred, she found a group of slaves seeking freedom and escorted them north.
Harriet Tubman, by H. B. Lindsley, circa 1860–1875. Photograph. Library of Congress.
Over the next ten years, she made about 19 trips into the South, becoming the most celebrated hero of the Underground Railroad. She proudly claimed that she “never lost a single passenger” and devised a host of clever techniques to facilitate her operation, including using the master’s horse and buggy for the first leg of the journey; leaving on a Saturday night, since runaway notices couldn’t be placed in newspapers until Monday morning; turning about and heading south if she encountered possible slave hunters; and carrying a sleeping drug to use on a baby if its crying put fugitives in danger. She even carried a gun, which she brandished at the fugitives if they became too tired or decided to turn back, telling them, “You’ll be free or die.”37
Such cases reveal just how extensive, determined, and resourceful the free black community could be in the antebellum years. Despite the heroic sacrifices made by Tubman and others, the Underground Railroad could only help a handful of the enslaved people. The number of blacks who managed to reach freedom was tiny—perhaps 50,000 over the period from 1800 to 1860, although there is no way to ever know the true number.
Whether we speak of Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., or New York, Detroit, Cleveland, or Chicago—indeed wherever African Americans lived—they remained at the forefront of the freedom struggle, exposing the contradictions of American society. In fact, the broader antislavery movement relied upon black speakers like the Crafts, Henry “Box” Brown, Frederick Douglass, and William Wells Brown to authenticate the abolitionist message and combat the white masters’ insistence that their property was content and thrived in slavery. The minister and former slave J. Sella Martin (1832–1876), who was sold eight times, was one of many who put the lie to such claims: “Here a white man says that negroes were contented. Well, I am a negro, and I was not contented…. The white man was not in slavery; I was, and I know where the shoe pinched; and I say I was not contented.”38
But nothing spoke more profoundly, or more tragically, about the contradictions manifest in a country half slave and half free than the case of Margaret Garner (?–1858). On the frigid morning of January 27, 1856, Garner, her husband, their four children, and her husband’s parents escaped from their Kentucky slave owners, along with nine friends from other plantations. They crossed the frozen Ohio River—passing from a slave state to a free state—and split into two groups in Cincinnati. One group made contact with agents of the Underground Railroad and continued on to freedom in Canada. The other group, consisting of eight members of the Garner family, proved not so lucky. They were tracked to the home of a free black man by a force of deputy U.S. marshals, with a warrant for the Garners’ arrest under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act. The Garners barricaded themselves in the home—and decided they would rather die than be captured. This decision led them to do something that is almost impossible to imagine.
The Modern Medea (Margaret Garner). Harper’s Weekly, May 18, 1867. Wood engraving. Library of Congress.
By the time the arresting party battered down the door, the family had slashed the throat of their three-year-old daughter Mary, nearly decapitating her. She lay on the floor in a pool of blood. Hiding in the next room
were two young boys, bruised and bleeding—one with gashes in his neck, the other with a cut on his face. An infant girl had been struck with a heavy shovel, but was still alive. The gruesome scene was likely a family effort—something that the Garners had done as a group—but blame focused on Margaret, who claimed that she would rather kill every one of her children than have them taken back across the river to slavery.
The Garners were brought to the federal courthouse and abolitionists immediately rallied to their cause. According to the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, lawyers were ready to argue that the family was free, not slaves, since their slave owners had brought them to Ohio on earlier occasions. If Margaret were free, she would be tried for murder—and surely convicted—but her surviving children would be free. If the court declared her a slave, the whole family would be sent back to bondage in Kentucky.
The case created a sensation in both North and South. It was the longest and costliest fugitive slave trial in American history. The famous abolitionist Lucy Stone rushed to Cincinnati to support Margaret in court. She drew shocked gasps and tears from many listeners when she referred to the fact that some of Margaret’s children were “very light, almost white”: “The faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation female slaves submit. Rather than give her little daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right to do so?”39
Steven Weisenburger, who has examined the case, considers it highly probable that Margaret’s three younger children were fathered by her owner, Archibald Gaines. At the time of their escape, the Garners faced the imminent threat of being sent to the Deep South, and Margaret’s husband had been hired out for many years, forcing the couple to live apart. Their flight was clearly motivated by the powerful desire to keep their family together, and for Margaret to flee the sexual victimization she had suffered repeatedly.
The Ohio court was unmoved. It ruled that the Garners were slaves, and they were sent back to Kentucky. But the steamboat carrying Margaret’s family down the Ohio River—this time away from freedom—collided with another vessel. In the ensuing panic, Margaret’s nine-month-old baby, Celia, may have drowned, or, in a final, desperate, protective act, her mother may have dropped her baby into the water. We will never know, and her body was never recovered.40
By the 1850s, the United States was already at war with itself. The frontier was aflame, and the federal government enforced the Fugitive Slave Act at bayonet point, threatening those who resisted it with charges of treason. Violence would make sense to John Brown in 1859, as it had a few years before—in a different and intensely personal manner—to Margaret Garner, and as it would to Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and to countless others. But it would take more violence than anyone could have possibly imagined before the Civil War to put an end to the the peculiar institution of human slavery in the United States.
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1 Joseph Conforti, “The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795–1844,” Early American Literature 26:2 (1991): 99–118, 106 quoted; Donald Yacovone, Samuel Joseph May and the Dilemmas of the Liberal Persuasion, 1797–1871 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 17–42; William Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828–1843 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
2 James Brewer Stewart, “Modernizing ‘Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776-1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999): 696 quoted.
3 Thomas C. Holt, Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 114–17.
4 Holt, Children of Fire, 86.
5 For Allen’s life, see Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
6 See Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 64–68.
7 Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 79–102.
8 The 1790 U.S. Census actually uses this number to describe “all other free persons,” listing whites separately.
9 Steven C. Bullock, “The Revolutionary Transformation of American Freemasonry, 1752–1792,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 47 (July 1990): 350.
10 While much has been written about Prince Hall, little of it is reliable. One should begin with his capsule biography by Chernoh Sesay, Jr., in African American National Biography, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): 4:22–24.
11 Chernoh M. Sesay, Jr., “Freemasons of Color: Prince Hall, Revolutionary Black Boston, and the Origins of Black Freemasonry, 1770–1807” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2006), 32.
12 Hall’s A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Menotomy, Mass., can be read at http://memory.loc.gov.
13 Peter P. Hinks and Stephen Kantrowitz, eds., All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
14 George R. Price and James Brewer Stewart, eds., To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 54.
15 Ronald Bailey, “The Other Side of Slavery: Black Labor, Cotton, and Textile Industrialization in Great Britain and the United States,” Agricultural History 68 (Spring 1994): 35–50.
16 See Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) and Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
17 For a brief biography, see Gates and Higginbotham, African American National Biography, 1:627–28.
18 Brown’s memoir, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Now in England (London: British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1855) can be read at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
19 Drumgoold’s memoir A Slave Girl’s Story (Brooklyn: np., 1898) can be read at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/drumgoold/drumgoold.html.
20 See William J. Anderson, Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, Twenty-four Years a Slave; Sold Eight Times! In Jail Sixty Times!! Whipped Three Hundred Times!!! or The Dark Deeds of American Slavery Revealed. (Chicago: Daily Tribune Book and Job Printing Office, 1857), http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/andersonw/andersonw.html.
21 Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 (Auburn, NY: Derby and Miller, London: Sampson Low, Son & Co., 1853), http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html.
22 See Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 139 quoted.
23 Robert L. Harris, Jr., “Charleston’s Free Afro-American Elite: The Brown Fellowship Society and the Humane Brotherhood,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 82 (October 1981): 289–310; Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 57–58, 312–13; Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984).
24 Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
25 Thomas R. Gray, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner (Baltimore: Thomas R. Gray, 1831), which can be read at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/turner/turner.html.
26 French, Rebellious Slave, 280-81; Andrew Putz, “Skullduggery,” Indianapolis Monthly (October 2003): 131, 224–25.
27 Quoted in Julie Winch, A Gentl
eman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 46.
28 Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 247–48, 253, 261–63.
29 Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 49–61.
30 David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles … (Boston: D. Walker, 1830).
31 Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 29.
32 Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 45, 57.
33 William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), 70.
34 William Craft and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery, ed. R. J. M. Blackett (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Still, Underground Railroad, 382–91.
35 Still, Underground Railroad, 76.
36 Still, Underground Railroad, 82.
37 Quoted in Charles M. Christian, Black Saga: The African American Experience, A Chronology (New York: Civitas, 1999), 143.
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