Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (17 page)

The ramifications of Belt’s case continued after his departure from New York. Despite the fact that the two police officers who rescued him were performing an official duty, the “friends of Belt” took up a collection to defray the expenses the men had incurred as well as to assist the “poor colored hack driver” who had conveyed the policemen to Brooklyn in the midst of a snowstorm and “whose feet were froze, so as to disable him from work for a month.” In this instance, John Jay II had been engaged by the New York State Vigilance Committee, not Gay’s group. But the committee’s treasurer, William Harned, reported that demands for assistance the previous fall had “exhausted” its resources. A brief public spat ensued over who bore responsibility for providing the money, Gay’s antislavery office or the Vigilance Committee. Eventually, in a display of unity, Elias Smith of Gay’s office drew up an appeal for funds to assist Harned. It raised forty-seven dollars.
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Cases like these, as the American and Foreign reported at its annual meeting in New York City in 1849, helped to “erase from the minds of Northerners the notion that the Constitution forbids efforts” to aid fugitive slaves.
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At the same time, the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, which resulted in the acquisition of vast new territories in the present-day Southwest, moved to center stage of American politics the question of whether slavery’s westward expansion should be allowed to continue. The spread of free-soil sentiment increased the number of northerners sympathetic to runaways. By the same token, consternation among slaveholders, especially in the Upper South, grew stronger as the number of runaways, along with obstacles to their recovery, proliferated.

Particularly alarming to slaveholders was the attempted escape from the nation’s capital, in April 1848, of seventy-six men, women, and children, all slaves, on the schooner
Pearl
. The organizer of this audacious enterprise was William L. Chaplin, formerly the corresponding secretary of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society and an active member of the Albany Vigilance Committee. Chaplin had come to Washington to report for an antislavery newspaper and to take the place of Charles T. Torrey, the underground railroad operative who died in a Maryland prison. Unfortunately, after the
Pearl
slipped away from Washington, the winds picked up and the ship had to anchor on the Potomac River near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay to await a change in the weather. A steamer dispatched by the authorities overtook it, and the two-man crew was arrested and fined. Unable to pay, they languished in prison until pardoned by President Millard Fillmore in 1852.

The
Pearl
slaves were remanded to their owners; most were quickly sold, including fifty to a single slave trader. Two, sixteen-year-old Mary Edmonson and her sister Emily, thirteen, gained their freedom after their formidable purchase price of $2,250 was raised by the New York State Vigilance Committee, people attending a mass meeting at the New York Tabernacle, and the congregations of James W. C. Pennington and Henry Ward Beecher. A recent recruit to the ranks of local abolitionists, Beecher had taken up the ministry of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church in 1847 and was on his way to becoming the nation’s most celebrated prelate. (After the Civil War, the
Brooklyn
Eagle
would call Beecher the “Hercules of American Protestantism,” although he would also achieve notoriety in the era’s most sensational scandal when it was revealed that he had practiced Christian love a bit too literally with his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of the prominent reformer Theodore Tilton.) Beecher helped to raise funds for the New York State Vigilance Committee, and his church provided shelter to fugitives. From his pulpit, he held mock “auctions” of female slaves, to raise money from parishioners to purchase their freedom. Chaplin, who was not on board the
Pearl
, returned to the North and secured a position as “general agent” of the New York State Vigilance Committee.
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The entire attempted escape, although unsuccessful, exemplified some of the worst fears of slaveholders. While many escapes were wrongly attributed to “enticement” by northerners, here was a flesh-and-blood abolitionist who really did travel to the South to help slaves abscond. Moreover, numerous slaves, far beyond those on board the ship, knew of the plan, but not one had betrayed it.

The growing number of slaves attempting to escape to freedom heightened fears about the stability and future of slavery in the states bordering on free soil. As early as 1817, southern members of Congress had proposed measures to strengthen the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. When John C. Calhoun composed his Address of the Southern Delegates in Congress at the beginning of 1849, the first grievance in his long recital of the North’s aggressions was the “flagrant breach” of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause. Without mentioning the underground railroad by name, Calhoun blamed “secret combinations” in the free states for having “enticed” runaways from their owners, “to the great annoyance and heavy pecuniary loss of the bordering southern states.” Not long afterward, a Richmond newspaper called for an armed “foray” into Pennsylvania and Ohio to teach northerners not to assist fugitives. Others demanded a stronger fugitive slave law, which abolitionists vowed to resist. A decade of sectional strife over fugitive slaves, in which New York City would play a crucial part, lay ahead.
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5

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW AND THE CRISIS OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY

I

I
n January 1850, at the direction of Virginia’s legislature, James M. Mason introduced in the U.S. Senate a measure outlining new procedures for the return of fugitive slaves. A version quickly became part of a plan of sectional reconciliation designed by Henry Clay, the senator from Kentucky nearing the end of an illustrious career in national politics. Antagonism between free and slave states had deepened in the previous few years, sparked by the enactment of northern personal liberty laws that impeded the rendition of runaways, demands for the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C., and the growing controversy over whether southerners should be able to carry their human property into western territories. National politics had become so polarized that when Congress assembled in December 1849, threats of southern secession filled the air and it took sixty-three ballots to elect a Speaker of the House. The members finally decided on Howell Cobb, a Georgia Democrat and the owner of over 200 slaves, making him one of the nation’s largest slaveowners.

Clay’s proposal aimed to settle all outstanding points of conflict between North and South to the extent that they intersected with national politics. The Fugitive Slave Bill accompanied Clay’s “omnibus” compromise measure, which among other things provided for the admission of California as a free state; the establishment, without reference to slavery, of territorial governments in the rest of the lands acquired in the Mexican-American War; and the abolition of the domestic slave trade, but not slavery itself, in the nation’s capital.

Of all the South’s grievances, Clay declared when he discussed his plan in the Senate in February, “the most irritating and inflammatory to those who live in the slave States” was the escape of fugitive slaves. Clay had recently given a good deal of thought to this question. Late in 1847, he felt compelled to respond to a public accusation by Lewis Hayden, who had escaped from Kentucky three years earlier and become an important antislavery activist in Boston, that Clay had once sold Hayden’s wife and child to the Lower South. Clay offered a not very convincing denial. In 1849, Clay traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, with a slave, Levi, who promptly escaped, only to return after a short time. Clay then took Levi to Buffalo (in violation of New York’s law prohibiting slave transit), where the slave disappeared again. Clay reacted philosophically. He would not pursue Levi, he wrote, “as it is probable that in a reversal of our positions I would have done the same thing.” On the Senate floor, however, he insisted that responsibility for the return of runaways extended not only to the federal government but also to “the officers of every state” and, indeed, “to every man in the Union.” But since northern states had erected “obstructions and impediments,” it was up to Congress to enforce the Constitution. Clay also complained about the “unneighborly” actions of the northern states in rescinding the right of transit: “a man from a slave state cannot now . . . travel in a free state with his servant, although he has no purpose of stopping there any longer than a short time.”
1

There followed one of the most celebrated congressional debates in American history. On March 4, 1850, Mason read to the Senate the last speech of the dying John C. Calhoun, which rejected compromise. The North must yield on the issues in dispute, he declared, or the Union would dissolve. Three days later, Daniel Webster shocked many of his Massachusetts constituents by embracing Clay’s proposals, including the Fugitive Slave Bill. On this question, he declared, the South’s complaints had a “just foundation,” although he would allow a trial by jury if the accused denied being a runaway. On March 11, William H. Seward, who had signed one of the first personal liberty laws as governor of New York, responded for the antislavery North. Conflict between freedom and slavery was inevitable, he insisted, and freedom must prevail: “you cannot roll back the tide of social progress.” As to constitutional guarantees, Seward offered an arresting and, to the South, alarming, response: “there is a higher law than the Constitution.” The rendition of fugitives, Seward declared, conflicted with “the laws of God.”
2

The debate over Clay’s proposals occupied much of the spring and summer of 1850. At one point, Clay embraced the idea of a jury trial for accused fugitives, not in the North, however, but in the state from which they were alleged to have escaped, where they would be treated with “fairness and impartiality” (an assurance even Clay must have realized was absurd). At the end of July, the omnibus bill, buffeted by criticism from all sides, died in the Senate. Soon afterward, however, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois picked up the individual pieces and piloted each to passage, including the Fugitive Slave Bill. This was the Compromise of 1850.
3

Partly because many Deep South congressmen felt the issue did not directly affect their constituents, and because many northerners wished to steer clear of the subject, the fugitive slave measure occupied less time in the ongoing debate than other aspects of the compromise. The House, in fact, passed the bill with no discussion at all, while many northern members “skulked in the corridors” to avoid casting a vote. In the Senate, a brief but heated exchange took place at the end of August. It revealed deep anxiety in the cotton kingdom about the depth of commitment in Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia to the South’s peculiar institution. The division within the slave states became apparent in discussion of a proposal by Senator Thomas Pratt of Maryland that the federal government compensate the owner when the return of a fugitive slave proved impossible. Deep South senators accused Pratt and his supporters of opening the door to a “mode of emancipation.” Owners in the border region, they claimed, knowing that they would receive compensation, would allow slaves to run away and not pursue them. Senators from the cotton states also feared that allowing the federal government to interpose its “financial power” between master and slave would establish a dangerous precedent. John M. Berrien of Georgia warned that federal compensation for fugitives implied that the government “possesses the power of emancipation,” since once the master has been paid, the slave would presumably be free.
4

But representatives of the slave states of the Upper South rallied behind Pratt’s idea. “Depredations to the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars are committed upon the property of the people of the border slave states of this Union annually,” proclaimed David Atchison of Missouri, and the federal government ought to reimburse them. With southern senators divided and northerners mostly opposed, the proposal failed. Of course, such a debate would never have taken place had it not been for the actions of slaves who ran away seeking freedom, the effectiveness of the underground railroad networks that came to their aid, and the growth of antislavery sentiment in the North. In earlier days, declared Pratt, hundreds of slaves who had escaped from Maryland were returned, but since the rise of the abolitionist movement, “I do not know a single case in which the fugitive has been surrendered to his master.” Mason mentioned the Joseph Belt case in New York City to demonstrate the “tone of feeling among the people in the free states” that had made the rendition of fugitives impossible.
5

Shortly before this debate unfolded, William L. Chaplin, the mastermind of the
Pearl
incident, returned to Washington to put an exclamation point on the fugitive slave issue. Early in August 1850, Chaplin hired a carriage and attempted to transport to Pennsylvania two slaves owned by Alexander H. Stephens and Robert Toombs, members of the House of Representatives from Georgia. The Washington Guard, a local militia unit, was waiting for him. They apprehended Chaplin and moved him to a jail in Maryland, where he was charged with larceny, assault, and other crimes. Bail was set at $25,000, an enormous sum, which abolitionists duly raised, with Gerrit Smith contributing $10,000 himself. Once released from prison, Chaplin headed north and remained there. He did not appear for his trial, and the bail money was forfeited. One of the slaves, Garland White, later escaped and went on to serve as chaplain for a regiment of black soldiers during the Civil War. He was part of the Union force that liberated Richmond, the Confederate capital, in April 1865.
6

While Congress deliberated, slaves continued to escape (thirty-five fled from one county in Maryland on a single day in August 1850, according to the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
), and abolitionists prepared to resist the new law. That month, a black crowd rescued two fugitives who had been apprehended in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. At the same time, Gerrit Smith, in the name of the New York State Vigilance Committee, called for opponents of the Fugitive Slave Bill to gather in Cazenovia, in the heart of upstate New York’s “burned-over district,” home to every kind of religious enthusiasm and social reform movement. Smith issued a special invitation to “fugitives from the prison house of southern despotism” to attend. The two-day convention opened on August 21, 1850, with 2,000 persons in attendance, including some fifty fugitives (among them Frederick Douglass) as well as many prominent abolitionists. The meeting endorsed a “Letter to the American Slave” composed by Smith, which described slaves as “prisoners of war” entitled to “plunder, burn, kill,” if necessary, “to promote your escape.” It assured fugitives they would be safe if they reached New York, while condemning as “grossly inconsistent” individuals—he had in mind northern leaders of the Democratic and Whig parties—who claimed to be critics of slavery but felt obligated to obey “pro-slavery” laws.
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