Negroes and the Gun (8 page)

The fugitives verily believing that the time had arrived for the practical use of their pistols and dirks, pulled them out of their concealment—the young women as well as the young men—and declared they would not be taken! One of the white men raised his gun, pointing the muzzle directly towards one of the young women, with the threat that he would “shoot” etc. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” she exclaimed, with a double barreled pistol in one hand and a long dirk knife in the others, utterly unterrified and fully ready for a death struggle. The male leader of the fugitives by this time had “pulled back the hammers” of his “pistols,” and was about to fire! Their adversaries seeing the weapons, and the unflinching determination on their part of the runaways to stand their ground, “spill blood, kill, or die,” rather than be “taken” very prudently “sidled over to the other side of the road” leaving at least four of the victims to travel on their way.
27

The worry about the veracity of such oral accounts is diminished by a corresponding newspaper report that “Six slaves . . . from Virginia came to Hoods Mill . . . and some eight or ten persons gathered round to arrest them; but the Negroes drawing revolvers and bowie knives, kept their assailants at bay, until five
of the party succeeded in escaping. . . . The last one . . . was fired at, the load taking effect in the small of the back [and was captured]. He ran away with the others the [next] evening.”
28

Fig. 2.3. Fugitives defy slave catchers, from William Still's account of the 1855 Barnaby Grigby escape. (From William Still's
The Underground Railroad
[Philadelphia: Porter & Coats, 1872], p. 125. Courtesy of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.)

Equally prominent in William Still's account of slave escapes is the
Conflict in the Barn
, an image depicting Robert Jackson and his little band of fugitives with guns fighting for their freedom and their lives against a band of border-country slave catchers. Jackson was a fugitive from Virginia, traveling under the alias of Wesley Harris. He had run off after fighting with his overseer, who attempted to whip him for some trifle. Jackson resisted, grabbed the whip, and gave the white man a taste of his own lash. When Jackson's master heard about it, he decided to sell off Jackson at the next offense.

The mistress of the house had embraced Jackson as a favorite and warned him of her husband's plans. When Jackson learned that another slave—a fellow named Matterson—and his two brothers, were planning to run off, he conspired to go with them. On the next dark moon, they struck out. It took them two days to reach Maryland. A friendly Negro there warned them of slave catchers scouring the border and advised them to hide. They headed to the countryside and took shelter in the barn of an ostensibly friendly white farmer who “talked like a Quaker,” and promised to help them travel northward to Gettysburg.

Something about the Good Samaritan did not sit right with Jackson, and that sixth sense was a sound barometer. In the morning, eight armed men including a constable descended on the barn, asking questions, demanding to see travel passes, and determined to take the Negroes to the magistrate. Jackson warned, “if they took me they would have to take me dead or crippled.” Then one of Jackson's companions spied the farmer who had betrayed them and “shot him, badly wounding him.” The constable seized Jackson by the collar, and Jackson responded with pistol fire. He recounted later:

I at once shot him with my pistol, but in consequence of his throwing up his arm, which hit mine I fired, the effect of the load of my pistol was much turned aside; his face, however, was badly burned besides his shoulder being wounded. I again fired on the pursuers, but do not know whether I hit anybody or not. I then drew a sword I had brought with me, and was about cutting my way to the door, when I was shot by one of the men, receiving the entire contents of one load of a double barreled gun in my left arm.

With the help of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, Jackson survived his wounds. William Still reports that the committee “procured good medical attention and offered the fugitive time for recuperation. . . . And sent him on his way [to Canada] greatly improved in health and strong in the faith that
he who would be free, himself must strike the blow
.”
29

Fig. 2.4. An artist's rendering from William Still's account of fugitive slave Robert Jackson's 1853 fight for freedom. (From William Still's
The Underground Railroad
[Philadelphia: Porter & Coats, 1872], p. 50. Courtesy of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.)

Certainly many acts of resistance did not involve firearms. Sometimes the fugitive himself was the main weapon. In Fairfax, Virginia, for example, two slaves were sentenced to death for a barehanded assault on slave patrollers. The record
is richer surrounding the 1844 abduction of “Big Ben” Jones from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Jones was literally a giant, nearly seven feet tall and correspondingly strong. Jones had escaped from Maryland almost fifteen years earlier. Undeterred by time, his master and four accomplices found Jones in a forest clearing, splitting logs. They approached with pistols and bludgeons and demanded his surrender. Jones feigned submission but then with fists, feet, and his ax, laid into his abductors, taking down two of them before he was overcome. Finally beaten into submission, Jones was hauled into the back of the carriage that could be tracked, said witnesses, by the stream of blood dripping from the floorboards.
30
We are left just to wonder whether a gun would have made a difference.

Many Negroes were better prepared than Big Ben Jones, and their reported acts of armed resistance meant that the exhortations of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass were no empty rhetoric. Douglass was less a policy advocate than a reporter of the facts on the ground. In a published speech in 1857, Douglass celebrated recent acts of armed self-defense:

The fugitive Horace at Mechanicsburg, Ohio, the other day, who taught the slave catchers from Kentucky that it was safer to arrest white men than to arrest him, did a most excellent service to our cause. Parker and his noble band of fifteen at Christiana, who defended themselves from kidnappers with prayers and pistols, are entitled to the honor of making the first successful resistance to the Fugitive Slave Bill. But for that resistance, and the rescue of Jerry and Shadrack, the man-hunters would have hunted our hills and valleys, here—with the same freedom with which they now hunt their own dismal swamps.
31

It was not just Douglass who championed violent resistance against the fugitive slave law. In 1846, white abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, advocating distribution of arms to fugitive slaves. Giddings saw resistance to slavery as fully within the boundaries of self-defense, declaring, “If a slave killed his master in a struggle to prevent his arrest in Ohio, he would be justified in the eyes of the law and I would call him a good fellow.” Untroubled by the implications, Ohio senator Thomas Morris cast resistance to slave catchers as the ultimate political violence, declaring that the kidnapping of blacks by slave catchers was “an act of war.”

The technical legal claims here are intriguing. The Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution plainly recognized slave catchers' rights through the euphemism that “person[s] held to service or labor” had to be “delivered up” to their masters. This
constitutional provision and its 1793 statutory embellishment had no enforcement mechanism, and many free-state laws defied slave catchers. Pennsylvania, for example, made slave catching a crime and indicted man-hunters who chased quarry into the Keystone State. Under this sort of state law, which underscored the violence inherent in the slave catcher's craft, resistance using deadly force seems fairly within the boundaries of self-defense.

Even with passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which put federal authority explicitly behind the claims of slave catchers who ventured into free states, black fugitives and some radical white abolitionists remained untroubled by any theoretical weakness in their stance of righteous violence. This sentiment is evident in an editorial from the
Pittsburgh Gazette
, which responded to the 1850 law advising blacks “to arm themselves and fight for freedom if need be, but not to run away.”
32

Although most slaves did not escape, it is a testament to the spirit and grit of those who did that the storied Henry Clay of Kentucky stomped to the floor of the United States Senate in 1849 to rant that “it posed insecurity to life itself for slave-owners to cross the Ohio River to recover fugitives.” That same year, decrying abolitionist agitation and fugitive resistance, John C. Calhoun agonized that “citizens of the South in their attempt to recover their slaves now meet resistance in every form.” A constituent complained to Calhoun that Pennsylvania's antikidnapping law made slave property insecure and that rumor of the law had drawn slaves to escape from the upper south in gangs.
33

During this same period, there was a great deal of abolitionist agitation directly on the question of arms for self-defense. As early as 1838, the abolitionist paper the
Liberator
, decried state laws that deprived free Negroes of the basic rights of citizens like suffrage, assembly, and the “right to bear arms.”
34

After the Compromise of 1850, the pacifist voices that had dominated commentary in the
Liberator
were challenged by more aggressive types who advanced the constitutional right to keep and bear arms not merely as an incident of citizenship, but also in practical terms, as a response to slave catchers. In 1851, abolitionist firebrand Lysander Spooner connected higher constitutional principle to the practical security interests of fugitive slaves, declaring:

The Constitution contemplates no such submission, on the part of the people, to the usurpations of the government, or to the lawless violence of its officers. On the contrary, it provides that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” This constitutional security for the right to keep and bear arms implies the right to use them—as much as a constitutional security for the right to buy and keep food would have implied the right to eat it. The Constitution, therefore, takes it for granted that, as the people have the right, they will also have the sense to use arms, whenever the necessity of the case justifies it.
35

In 1853, the New England Antislavery Convention pressed the finer technical point of precisely how the Constitution guaranteed fugitive slaves a right to arms. Arguing that the word
persons
in the Representation Clause of the Constitution (where slaves were counted as 3/5 a person for determining seats in Congress) was intended to mean slaves and therefore “all the guarantees of personal liberty given to persons belong to slaves also.” From there, the convention reasoned, fugitive slaves were among the “people” who “were guaranteed the right to bear arms and of course by implication to use them.”
36