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NY Review of Books, DECEMBER 6, 2018 ISSUE
The Power of Running Away
James Oakes
The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive
Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery
by R.J.M. Blackett
Cambridge University Press, 511 pp., $120.00; $32.99 (paper)
Philadelphia Museum of Art/Charles White Archives
Charles White: Exodus I: Black Moses (Harriet Tubman), 1951; from the
exhibition ‘Charles White: A Retrospective,’ on view at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York City, until January 13, 2019. The catalog is
published by the Art Institute of Chicago and MoMA and distributed by
Yale University Press.
In January 1850 Senators Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina and James
Mason of Virginia proposed a new Fugitive Slave Law to replace the
statute that had been on the books since 1793. A new law was needed,
they said, because the old one was not being enforced. Free black
communities in northern states routinely sheltered runaway slaves. For
decades an alliance of free blacks and white abolitionists had been
operating an Underground Railroad that assisted thousands of slaves
escaping from the southern states. In cities and towns across the North
countless white citizens and local police officials refused to assist in
fugitive slave renditions.
Northern legislatures had passed a series of “personal liberty laws”
designed to thwart the federal statute. Some of those laws banned state
and local officials from participating in renditions. Others closed
state and local prisons to slave catchers. Most often, however, the
personal liberty laws mandated jury trials and habeas corpus for blacks
accused of being runaway slaves, mandates the slaveholders considered an
assault on their constitutional right to reclaim their slave property.
Although many Northern whites sympathized with the slaveholders or
viewed it as their legal and constitutional duty to enforce the law,
even those who cared little about slavery were often repulsed by the
specter of slave catchers swarming into their communities and enforcing
Southern law in Northern states.
The new Fugitive Slave Law created a body of federal commissioners
empowered to impose federal authority on the North, bypassing
obstreperous state and local officials. Slave owners were required to
provide only minimal proof of their claims. Those accused were stripped
of due process and denied any right to appeal a commissioner’s ruling.
Commissioners were paid five dollars if they ruled against the
slaveholder and ten dollars if they ruled against the fugitive. There
was no statute of limitations. African-Americans who had built families
and worked as free people in the North for decades were vulnerable to
reenslavement at any time. If there were signs of local opposition,
federal marshals could conscript Northern citizens into a posse, forcing
them to participate against their will in the capture and return of
alleged fugitives. Heavy fines were prescribed for anyone convicted of
helping slaves escape.
Senator William Seward of New York and other opponents of the proposed
law warned Southerners that it could not be enforced in Northern states.
Salmon P. Chase of Ohio predicted that the law would “produce more
agitation than any other which has ever been adopted by Congress.” Even
Butler, the bill’s cosponsor, doubted that it would ever be enforced.
Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolinia questioned the efficacy of a
law that clearly contradicted the “opinions and feelings of the
[Northern] community.” Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had no faith that
a mere statute could overcome the widespread hostility to slavery in the
North.
But in the end nearly every Southerner in both houses of Congress
supported the bill, while most Northern congressmen voted against it or
else absented themselves rather than vote for it. In late September,
after months of rancorous debate, a slim majority in the House approved
it and President Millard Fillmore signed the new Fugitive Slave Act into
law. It was one of several bills passed as part of the so-called
Compromise of 1850. Party leaders hailed the measures as the “final
settlement” of all the controversial issues related to slavery, but that
was a fantasy. The hostile Northern reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law
was as swift as it was severe.
In most historical accounts, the 1850 law provoked a wave of panic in
free black communities across the North. Hundreds of African-Americans
fled their homes for the safety of Canada. But Richard Blackett’s
extraordinary new book, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom, tells a more
complicated story. The flights to Canada were terrifyingly real.
“Fugitives and their families fled in droves in the days and weeks after
the law’s adoption,” Blackett writes. “Forty left Boston in three days.”
But along with waves of panic came waves of defiance. “I don’t respect
the law,” declared Jermain Loguen, a black leader in Syracuse who had
escaped from slavery years earlier. “I don’t fear it—I won’t obey it!”
Samuel Ringgold Ward, a black abolitionist pastor, urged Bostonians to
make any attempt to enforce the law “the last act in the drama of a
slave-catcher’s life.” Henry C. Wright, a white abolitionist, told
listeners in Cleveland that if he were a fugitive he would readily
“plunge a knife into the heart of his pursuer.” Scores of protest
meetings—168 by Blackett’s count—erupted all across the North in late
1850 and early 1851. Critics denounced these “mongrel gatherings” of
whites and blacks that sprang up in “every city, and nearly every
village of the North.”
Blackett has identified over 140 fugitive slaves whose cases came before
commissioners in the fifteen months after the law was passed. Of those
only seven were freed. Ninety-eight were returned to slavery, and
thirty-three escaped or were rescued. But those statistics are
misleading, Blackett shows, because the law never reached most fugitive
slaves. Thousands managed to escape into a free state and make their way
to one of the hundreds of free black communities that dotted the
Northern landscape. Those communities were not only a safe haven for
fugitives from the South, they were also places that slave catchers
approached at the risk of their lives. The arrest of an escaped slave
invariably aroused local blacks who quickly formed crowds outside
courtrooms and jailhouses, intimidating judges and sheriffs. At
Christiana, Pennsylvania, a group of armed black men fought off a group
of slave catchers, killing a slave owner and wounding his son. In
Pittsburgh it was reported that “escaped slaves have all armed
themselves and declare that they were resolved to die rather than be
again carried into bondage.” In Syracuse an organized mob stormed the
police station and rescued a fugitive named Jerry from his captors.
In many Northern communities it was impossible to find men willing to
serve as commissioners, and those who did serve were often ostracized or
so harassed that they soon resigned. Organized protest meetings passed
resolutions denouncing commissioners as “moral nuisances, contaminating
the air of freedom” and a “putrid, moral pestilence.” Charles Stetson,
the federal commissioner in Cleveland, publicly swore never to enforce
the 1850 law, and there is no recorded case of any slave being returned
from Cleveland for the entire decade. The law was supposed to make
fugitive slave rendition easier, but antislavery lawyers repeatedly
clogged the system with delaying tactics that made the process slow and
expensive. Northern juries acquitted those accused of assisting runaway
slaves. Threatened by crowds of protesters, local officials who called
out a posse sometimes faced wholesale refusal to participate. The law
was most strongly supported and enforced in cities like New York, with
strong commercial ties to the South. But as Blackett points out, “the
new law was a dead letter, unenforceable where, as in Buffalo, it did
not meet with public approval.”
Supporters of the law claimed to be scandalized by the opposition it
aroused, despite the numerous warnings that it could not be enforced.
Clay was especially disgusted by the organized activity of
African-Americans. The Compromise of 1850, he said, was under assault
from people “who possess no part…in our political system.” He dismissed
black activists as the mere “catspaws” of abolitionists. Daniel Webster
denounced whites as well as blacks who resisted the law. “They are
traitors,” he complained, “and are guilty of treason.”
The federal government marched thousands of troops into Northern cities
and spent vast sums of money in its overbearing effort to enforce the
law. When slave catchers caught up with Thomas Sims after he escaped
from a rice plantation in Georgia, antislavery advocates used every
conceivable legal tactic to thwart his rendition. Determined to make an
example, President Fillmore authorized the expenditure of between
$10,000 and $20,000 to pay for the troops required to send Sims back
into slavery. In Syracuse, the trials of those accused of rescuing Jerry
took two years and cost the federal government $50,000.
A very different reaction to the controversy was a revival of interest
in proposals to colonize Liberia with former slaves. Clay, a longtime
supporter of colonization, endorsed the establishment of a federally
funded steamship line to transport free blacks to Africa “with their own
consent.” The proposal went nowhere. Deep South slaveholders objected to
anything that even hinted at federal support for emancipation, and many
Northern Democrats agreed that it was none of the federal government’s
business. As a consequence Washington had for decades barely funded
colonization. Most of the government money came from the states,
especially from Maryland and Virginia, which in 1853 appropriated
$18,000 per year for five years—the largest state authorization ever.
Indiana’s total of $5,000 was more typical, but most states never
appropriated any funds for colonization. And most of the politicians who
voiced support for the idea insisted that colonization be strictly
voluntary.
This last specification doomed the entire project because
African-Americans had almost no interest in voluntary emigration from
the land of their birth. As Blackett shows, in the immediate aftermath
of the state’s appropriation only a handful of Indiana blacks took
advantage of the subsidies, and after 1855 none did. In the forty years
leading up to 1860, by which date there were 57,000 free blacks living
in Pennsylvania, fewer than 300 emigrated to Liberia. For all practical
purposes, voluntary colonization meant no colonization.
Most of The Captive’s Quest for Freedom—seven of twelve
chapters—consists of a series of state and regional studies of the
fugitive slave crisis as it unfolded during the 1850s. Not surprisingly,
most of the conflict took place in the border regions between slave and
free states. Fugitive slaves crossed from Missouri into Illinois, from
western Kentucky into Indiana, and from eastern Kentucky into Ohio. The
long southern border of Pennsylvania—the famous Mason-Dixon Line—was a
particularly attractive refuge for fugitive slaves, and Blackett devotes
an entire chapter to it. Another chapter traces the course of fugitives
from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Philadelphia. But two more
chapters move the story deeper into the Northern states of New York and
Massachusetts.
In these chapters political history gives way to social history as
Blackett skillfully reconstructs dozens of stories of slaves escaping to
the North. Some of these escapes and rescues are well known, but they
take on renewed salience in Blackett’s account because of the wider
setting he establishes. More impressive is the deep and meticulous
research that has enabled him to piece together the remarkable stories
of previously unknown cases. As the chapters proceed and the stories
pile up, they are sometimes repetitive, but their cumulative effect is
overwhelming. They lend credence to Blackett’s argument that fugitive
slaves themselves played a central part in the politics of slavery in
the critical decade before the North and South went to war.
Antislavery politicians denounced the 1850 law for its failure to secure
the due process rights of accused runaways. Clay responded to this
criticism by proposing that jury trials be allowed in the South, in the
places from which the slave had escaped, but the slaveholders killed the
idea. Seward countered that jury trials had to be convened in the
Northern communities where the accused was seized. Anything else would
not guarantee a fair and impartial hearing. William Dayton of New Jersey
proposed that “in all hearings before commissioners, depositions had to
be authenticated and proof provided that the person claimed was a fugitive.”
Insisting on extensive documentary proof quickly became another means of
thwarting the law. Antislavery lawyers appeared at hearings where they
grilled slave catchers and demanded verification of the alleged
fugitive’s identity.1 In mid-November, only weeks after the 1850 law was
passed, the Vermont legislature enacted a statute of its own,
guaranteeing accused fugitives a jury trial and habeas corpus.
Virginia’s governor, John B. Floyd, denounced such “gratuitous
intermeddling with our slaves”; Vermont’s and similar laws were “nothing
short of open rebellion and utter defiance.” Blackett’s conclusion seems
indisputable:
When measured by how effective it was in returning runaways, the law
left a great deal to be desired. And more alarming, renditions generally
produced a firestorm of protest in the cities and towns where they
occurred….By the end of the first year of the law’s operation it was
clear to all dispassionate observers that, rather than quieting
agitation over slavery as so many of its proponents had hoped, it had
stirred passionate opposition and defiance.
Blackett’s larger point, equally persuasive, is that although the
Fugitive Slave Act was ineffective it was hardly insignificant. One of
the many strengths of The Captive’s Quest is its appreciation of the
political as opposed to the statistical significance of fugitive slaves.
Though he resisted the suggestion to call his book Fugitive Slaves and
the Coming of the Civil War, he makes the point himself in the preface:
“The crisis caused by escaping slaves was not enough to bring on the
Civil War, but there is no doubt that it was a major contributing
factor.” Blackett returns to this issue, and to politics, at the very
end of his book. He notes that the first major congressional speech
Charles Sumner gave as a senator from Massachusetts was a ringing
condemnation of the Fugitive Slave Act. And although Blackett does not
emphasize the point, his evidence suggests that fugitive slaves exposed
a partisan divide in Northern politics. By the time the Civil War broke
out, it was widely understood that Democrats would return fugitive
slaves but Republicans would not.
Library of Congress/© 2018 The Estate of Bernarda Bryson Shahn/Licensed
by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Bernarda Bryson Shahn: In Hiding, circa 1935
Yet as far as Blackett goes in linking fugitive slaves to the political
crisis of the 1850s, there is still more that can be said. When he turns
his attention to individual states, Blackett largely abandons the
political history of the fugitive slave controversy, even though most of
it took place in the states. It was the personal liberty laws passed by
Northern states in the 1840s that had prompted Southerners to demand a
more aggressive Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, and once the new federal law
took effect those same Northern states responded with another round of
personal liberty laws. Over the course of the decade street protests
gave way to assaults by state legislatures on the Fugitive Slave Act.
Fixated on the struggle over slavery in the territories and overly
impressed by Southerners who wrapped themselves in the misleading mantle
of states’ rights, historians have greatly underestimated the
significance of Northern defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act.
Political opposition focused on what seems at first glance a narrowly
legalistic demand for jury trials for accused fugitives. But like the
dispute over slavery in the territories or abolition in Washington,
D.C., the debate over due process rights for accused fugitives was a
kind of proxy fight. Because nearly everyone on all sides agreed that
the Constitution did not allow the federal government to abolish slavery
in a state, antislavery politicians tried to undermine slavery wherever
they could. Blocking fugitive slave rendition was one such way, and the
call for due process was particularly threatening. Due process was
widely regarded as one of the “privileges and immunities” of
citizenship, so the demand that accused fugitives be guaranteed a jury
trial was an implicit recognition of black citizenship.
Southerners were fully aware of the subversive implications of due
process. When Seward proposed an amendment to guarantee jury trials in
the North for accused fugitives, Maryland Senator Thomas Pratt denounced
it as “a practical denial of the whole right of the slaveholder over his
slave, if he gets beyond the jurisdiction of his own State; because
everybody knows,” Pratt continued, and “the honorable Senator from New
York himself knows” that fugitive slaves were being “discharged” by New
York courts on the flimsiest of pretexts. “Of all the subjects doing
harm at the South,” Pratt added, “the escape of fugitive slaves is doing
the most harm,” and was “the most calculated to excite the public mind.”
In 1854 Abraham Lincoln began to signal his endorsement of Seward’s
approach. Lincoln believed that the presence of a fugitive slave clause
in the Constitution implied a federal obligation to enforce it. The
question was how. Lincoln preferred a statute that “did not expose a
free negro to any more danger of being carried into slavery, than our
present criminal laws do an innocent person to the danger of being
hung.” Over the next several years Lincoln would repeat his call for
revisions to the 1850 statute, to remove what he called its
“objectionable” provisions—not only the absence of due process
protections for accused fugitives, but the obnoxious requirement that
northern civilians participate in fugitive slave renditions.2
In 1859 Lincoln went even further and warned that secession would bring
a halt to all fugitive slave renditions in the Northern states. In a
speech in Cincinnati, he declared that if any states seceded from the
Union in response to a Republican victory in the 1860 elections,
Northerners would be relieved of any constitutional obligation to return
fugitive slaves. The Southern states complained, he said, that
Northerners made it difficult for owners to recapture their fugitive
slaves. But, he asked, “do you think you can better yourselves on that
subject by leaving us here under no obligation whatever to return those
specimens of your movable property that come hither?” The South was
threatening to break up the Union because “we would not do right with
you” in the rendition of fugitive slaves, but “when we cease to be under
obligations to do anything for you, how much better off do you think you
will be?”
After he was elected president in November 1860, Lincoln renewed his
call for substantial revisions of the 1850 law to guarantee due process
rights to suspected fugitives and restrict enforcement to federal
officials, absolving Northern states and civilians of any obligation to
participate in the capture and return of fugitive slaves. There was
nothing at all unusual about his proposal. Antislavery politicians had
been demanding due process rights for accused fugitives for at least a
decade.
You don’t have to spend much time reading secessionist speeches and
editorials to appreciate why Lincoln’s proposal for a federal personal
liberty law was more likely to inflame than to calm the South. The very
first item in South Carolina’s declaration justifying its withdrawal
from the Union listed by name fourteen Northern states that had passed
personal liberty laws. Those laws, the Carolinians declared, “either
nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute
them.” Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown asked why the South should
remain in the Union: “Will the Northern States repeal their personal
liberty laws? No.” More to the point, the personal liberty laws were but
a symptom of a much larger problem, as Stephen Hale explained to
Governor Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky. Hale was the commissioner sent by
Alabama to persuade Kentucky to secede. Among the reasons he gave was
the fact that the Fugitive Slave Act
remains almost a dead letter upon the statute book. A majority of the
Northern States, through their legislative enactments, have openly
nullified it, and impose heavy fines and penalties upon all persons who
aid in enforcing this law…. The Federal officers who attempt to
discharge their duties under the law, as well as the owner of the slave,
are set upon by mobs, and are fortunate if they escape without serious
injury to life or limb; and the State authorities, instead of aiding in
the enforcement of this law, refuse the use of their jails, and by every
means which unprincipled fanaticism can devise give countenance to the
mob and aid the fugitive to escape.
Lincoln responded to these complaints by reiterating his proposal for a
federal personal liberty law in his inaugural address. “There is much
controversy about delivering up fugitives from service or labor,” he
began. Everyone who swore an oath to the Constitution was of course
swearing to uphold the fugitive slave clause. The problem was the
draconian fugitive slave law, which he wanted to replace. “In any law
upon the subject,” he suggested,
ought not all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and humane
jurisprudence be introduced, so that a free man be not, in any case, be
surrendered as a slave? And might it not be well, at the same time, to
provide by law for the enforcement of that clause of the Constitution
which guaranties that “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to
all the privileges and immunities of the citizens of the several states?”
As long as the 1850 law remained on the books it should be obeyed,
Lincoln said, but there were some laws that communities found so morally
offensive that they would never be fully obeyed. The Fugitive Slave Act,
he conceded, was “as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a
community where the moral Sense of the people imperfectly supports the
law itself.” And secession would only make the already lax enforcement
of the fugitive slave law even “worse,” Lincoln warned, because “after
the separation of the sections…fugitive slaves, now only partially
surrendered, would not be surrendered at all.”
Ten weeks later Lincoln called his cabinet to a special session where he
approved Union General Benjamin Butler’s decision not to return fugitive
slaves to their owners. Butler had claimed that, because Virginia had
seceded from the Union, the federal government was no longer under any
obligation to return escaped slaves. Behind that decision lay decades of
controversy caused by slaves who continually expressed their opposition
to bondage by the deceptively simple act of running away. Thanks to
Richard Blackett’s impressive research, we now have a much better
understanding of how that happened.
1
The Union Army adopted the same tactic in the first year of the Civil
War. When slaveholders or their representatives arrived at military
camps demanding the return of their slaves, Union officers often
demanded substantial documentation as a means of thwarting the rendition. ↩
2
Lincoln’s concerns about the political wisdom of calling for repeal of
the Fugitive Slave Law were expressed in an 1859 exchange of letters
with Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. See The Collected Works of Abraham
Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Pasler (Abraham Lincoln Association, nine
volumes, 1953–1955), Vol. 3, pp. 41, 384, 386, 514. ↩
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