The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (43 page)

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.
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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.”
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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:

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 streets 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.