The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (73 page)

75.
I am indebted to an e-mail from John Stauffer for this ending of the chapter.

1.
Frederick Douglass,
My Bondage and My Freedom,
in
Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies,
ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 268.

2.
Frederick Douglass,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself,
ed. Benjamin Quarles (Cambridge, Mass.; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 95–96.

3.
Dickson J. Preston,
Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 31–40.

4.
Douglass,
My Bondage and My Freedom,
215, and
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,
544, in Gates,
Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies.

5.
Preston,
Young Frederick Douglass,
41–82; William S. McFeely,
Frederick Douglass
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 11–41.

6.
Douglass,
My Bondage and My Freedom,
in Gates,
Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies,
215.

7.
McFeely,
Frederick Douglass,
26–41.

8.
Ibid., 41.

9.
Preston,
Young Frederick Douglass,
140–41. It should be stressed that there is no agreement among historians regarding Douglass’s father. Preston devotes a chapter to Aaron Anthony as “Father Image.”

10.
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger,
Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4.

11.
McFeely,
Frederick Douglass,
69.

12.
Ibid., 70.

13.
Ibid., 71–72.

14.
Ibid., 72–73. For an excellent study of Ruggles, see Graham Russell Hodges,
David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

15.
Ibid., 74–80, 83–85.

16.
Ibid., 87–89.

17.
David W. Blight, “Why the Underground Railroad, and Why Now? A Long View,” in
Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory,
ed. David W. Blight (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 234.

18.
Ibid., 247.

19.
Quoted in ibid., 239.

20.
Ibid., 242.

21.
Benjamin Quarles,
Black Abolitionists
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 143–48, 143.

22.
Franklin and Schweninger,
Runaway Slaves,
367.

23.
Ibid., 367n49. They point out that not all of the one to two thousand slaves traveled along the routes of the Underground Railroad.

24.
Ira Berlin, “Before Cotton: African and African American Slavery in Mainland North America during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Blight,
Passages to Freedom,
24–25; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton,
In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–51. Historian
Gary Nash has notably made the assessment that “In reality, the
American Revolution represents the largest slave uprising in our history.” Yet it was “obvious soon after the new federal government was in place, that
slavery was not going to wither in the United States.” Gary B. Nash,
Race and Revolution
(Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1990), 57–59.

25.
Franklin and Schweninger,
Runaway Slaves,
86–89.

26.
Steven Hahn,
The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 13, 24, 27–38, 55–58. On the political mobilization of slaves, see also Steven Hahn,
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), especially Part 1. When discussing slave resistance, Hahn omits the complicity of many slaves in supporting their masters, as well as the growing economic success of the slave system and the way self-interest motivated planters to extend privileges of various kinds. When treating free blacks in the North, he ignores their frequent pride in an American identity, extending back to their participation in the American Revolution, and their desire for racial integration.

27.
Franklin and Schweninger,
Runaway Slaves,
279–81.

28.
James, W. C. Pennington,
The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington,
3rd ed. (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1971), v.

29.
Eugene D. Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 89–91.

30.
Franklin and Schweninger,
Runaway Slaves,
30.

31.
Harriet Ann Jacobs,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
in
Slave Narratives,
ed. William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Library of America 114 (New York: Library of America, 2000);
Jean Fagan Yellin,
Harriet Jacobs: A Life
(New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004). My understanding of Jacobs has also been broadened by
Gloria T. Randle, “Between the Rock and the Hard Place: Mediating Spaces in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,”
African American Review
33, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 43–56; Ann Taves, “Spiritual Purity and Sexual Shame: Religious Themes in the Writings of Harriet Jacobs,”
Church History
56, no. 1 (March 1987): 59–72; and
Kimberly Drake, “Rewriting the American Self: Race, Gender, and Identity in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs,”
MELUS
22, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 91–108.

32.
Yellin,
Harriet Jacobs,
xv–xxi.

33.
Yellin guesses that Harriet may have first used the surname Jacobs when she met the family of the vigilance committee member who met her at the Philadelphia wharf after her escape. The name came from her grandfather,
Henry Jacobs. Her father Elijah, a carpenter, used the last name
Knox and was the slave of Dr.
Andrew Knox, but was probably the son of a white farmer named Henry Jacobs. Ibid., 66, 67.

34.
Jacobs on the effects of her jealous mistress’s nightly vigils: “At last I began to be fearful for my life. It had often been threatened; and you can imagine, better than I can describe, what an unpleasant sensation it must produce to wake up in the dead of night and find a jealous woman bending over you. Terrible as this experience was, I had fears that it would give place to one more terrible.” Jacobs,
Incidents,
780.

35.
Jacobs,
Incidents,
801.

36.
Ibid., 801–2, 747–48. As Gloria T. Randle puts it: “This mother at once deeply loves and sincerely regrets her children, since their existence constitutes a visible sign of her degradation, an irrefutable marker of her transgression, and the prospect of her children’s eventual judgment against her.” Randle, “Between the Rock and the Hard Place,” 51. But this point is qualified by Kimberly Drake: “Jacobs sets the cult of true womanhood, with its moral expectations, against cultural ideals for motherhood, underlining the limitations of the former as she describes her achievement of the latter. She attempts to change her status from sexual object to sacred mother…[hoping] that her maternity, despite its illegitimacy, will provide an appeal to mothers of the North and enable her to form a bond with them.” Drake, “Rewriting the American Self,” 101.

37.
Jacobs,
Incidents,
826.

38.
Ibid., 840.

39.
Ibid., 830.

40.
Ibid., 830–40. Harriet learned while on the plantation that her children were going to be sent to the plantation as well: “They thought that my children’s being there would fetter me to the spot, and that it was a good place to break us all in to abject submission to our lot as slaves.”

41.
Ibid., 860.

42.
Quoted in Yellin,
Harriet Jacobs,
45.

43.
Ibid., 44.

44.
Ibid., 59.

45.
Jacobs,
Incidents,
911, 914.

46.
Yellin,
Harriet Jacobs,
83, 114–16, and passim.

47.
Yellin,
Harriet Jacobs,
96, 131–32. Issac and
Amy
Post’s activist circle in Rochester has garnered significant scholarly attention, for more on the Post circle of activism and spiritualism, see Nancy A. Hewitt,
Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Ann Braude,
Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America,
2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Harriet Jacobs would be influenced by the Posts’ interest in the spirit world, so far that she consulted spirits to find out about the welfare of her son and brother who were chasing
gold in
Australia.

48.
Ibid., 104.

49.
Ibid., 118–41.

50.
Ibid., 129–31, 140–43, 190–201.

51.
U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 2.

52.
For a concise and detailed explanation of the history of fugitive slaves and American law, see Stanley W. Campbell,
The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 3–25. The threat of kidnapping is often mentioned in studies of free black life and abolitionism in the nineteenth century, but deserves more study as a subject of its own. The issue gains considerable attention in antislavery newspapers prior to the war, free black community organizations, not to mention its frequent inclusion in the numbers of injustices cited by black and white abolitionists on their speaking tours. The only work devoted to the issue is the short book by Carol Wilson,
Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780–1865
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).

53.
Leonard P. Curry,
The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 229.

54.
David Everett Swift,
Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 83. The late historian
David Swift notably argued that the New York–based
Colored American,
the important black antislavery paper of the late 1830s and early 1840s, was formed primarily to serve the ends of the
New York Vigilance Committee. Although the theme of the paper moved well beyond issues of fugitives and kidnapping during its run, the paper nonetheless retained a sense of collective effort and assertive public presence that characterized the
vigilance committees of the North.

55.
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton,
Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North
(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), 99.

56.
Quarles,
Black Abolitionists,
150.

57.
Hodges,
David Ruggles,
94 and passim.

58.
Ibid., 204.

59.
Curry,
The Free Black in Urban America,
230–31.

60.
Henry Highland Garnet, “Address to the Slaves of the United States,” in
A Memorial Discourse; by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865
, with an introduction by James McCune Smith M.D. (Philadelphia: J. M. Wilson, 1865), 44–51.

61.
Steven H. Shiffrin, “The Rhetoric of Black Violence in the Antebellum Period: Henry Highland Garnet,”
Journal of Black Studies,
vol. 2, no. 1 (Sept. 1971): 45–49. As Kenneth Stampp, the great historian of slavery, put it long ago: “The Turner story was not likely to encourage slaves to make new attempts to win their freedom by fighting for it. They now realized that they would face a united white community, well armed and quite willing to annihilate as much of the black population as might seem necessary,” (ibid. 47).

62.
Ibid., 52.

63.
Stanley W. Campbell convincingly argues that while most Northerners were opposed to slavery, “only a few citizens in isolated communities engaged in active opposition to enforcement of the
Fugitive Slave Law.” But his work tends to underplay the strength and importance of Northern opposition to the law as well as the failure of the South to recover between 1850 and 1860 more than three hundred fugitives (
The Slave Catchers,
xvii–xviii, and passim).

64.
In a study of Methodist newspapers,
Ralph A. Keller argues that for churchmen and much of the North’s religious population, it was the Fugitive Slave Law that brought tensions to the highest level at mid-century, and that even conservative editors who ordinarily avoided political issues were outraged by the law. Hence the supposed period of calm following the
Compromise of 1850 “might better be understood as a time of smoldering bitterness which, in turn, can help explain the magnitude of the Kansas-Nebraska explosion of 1854.” Keller, “Methodist Newspapers and the Fugitive Slave Law: A New Perspective for the Slavery Crisis in the North,”
Church History
43, no. 3 (Sept. 1974): 320–27.

Despite the fact that the biblical
Paul was willing, but reluctant, to send the escaped slave Onesimus back to his master, Philemon, in Philemon 1:8–21, the Fugitive Slave Law directly violated
Deuteronomy 23:15: “Thou shalt not deliver unto the master his servant which has escaped unto thee.… Thou shalt not oppress him.” Because of this direct violation, the verse was seized upon in literature opposing the Fugitive Slave Law. Whereas abolitionists had to typically rely on the “spirit of the law” in arguing for the Bible’s opposition to slavery, in this case the letter of the law could more or less serve their ends.