Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (18 page)

Mainstream reaction to the Cazenovia meeting was unfriendly. A Buffalo newspaper called Smith a “madman.” But the gathering reverberated in Washington. A large number of fugitive slaves, complained Senator David L. Yulee of Florida, had openly taken part in a “public convention,” yet “no public officer nor citizen” made any attempt to arrest them. “What sort of good faith—what sort of justice,” he asked, “call you this?” Some Garrisonians, committed to the philosophy of moral suasion, found the resolutions and speeches too belligerent.
8
But at the very least, the gathering suggested that the fugitive slave question was leading many abolitionists to abandon their long-standing belief in nonviolence.

On September 18, 1850, two days after its final approval by Congress, President Fillmore affixed his signature to the Fugitive Slave Bill. Compared with the brief measure of 1793, the statute was long, complicated, and draconian. It created a new category of federal official, that of U.S. commissioner, appointed by a federal judge and authorized to hear the case of an accused fugitive and to issue a certificate of removal, a document that could not be challenged in any court. The fugitive could neither claim a writ of habeas corpus nor testify at the hearing, whose sole purpose was to establish his or her identity. For this, a document from the owner’s state with a physical description of the accused would constitute “conclusive” proof. The commissioner would receive a fee of five dollars if he decided against the owner and ten dollars if he issued a certificate of removal, on the grounds that the latter involved more paperwork. (This set the price of a northern conscience at five dollars, abolitionists complained.) Federal marshals could deputize individuals to execute a commissioner’s orders and, if necessary, call on the assistance of local officials and even bystanders. The act included severe civil and criminal penalties for anyone who harbored fugitive slaves or interfered with their capture, as well as for marshals and deputies who failed to carry out a commissioner’s order or from whom a fugitive escaped. No action by a state or local judge and no local law could interfere with the process; northern personal liberty laws were specifically mentioned in the act as examples of illegitimate “molestation” of the slaveowner. To forestall resistance, the federal government at its own expense could deliver the fugitive to his or her owner.
9

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 embodied the most robust expansion of federal authority over the states, and over individual Americans, of the antebellum era. It could hardly have been designed to arouse greater opposition in the North. It overrode numerous state and local laws and legal procedures and “commanded” individual citizens to assist, when called upon, in rendition. It was retroactive, applying to all slaves who had run away in the past, including those who had been law-abiding residents of the free states for many years. It did nothing to protect free blacks from kidnapping.
10

Southern political leaders insisted that compliance with the new law constituted the key test of the Compromise of 1850. On its “faithful execution,” declared the Georgia Platform, a document issued by a convention of supporters of the compromise measures, depended the preservation of the Union. For this very reason, many citizens of the free states, especially in the Lower North, declared their support for the law. So did the national platforms of the Democratic and Whig parties in 1852. Yet Senator Mason, with whom it had originated, told the Senate that he had “little hope” that the measure would prove effective. “The disease,” he remarked, “is seated too deeply to be reached by ordinary legislation,” and the “spirit of the people” would render the law “inoperative.”
11

In May 1850, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society predicted that the congressional bill then under consideration would awaken northerners to the plight of fugitive slaves and change how the underground railroad operated. “Heretofore,” it declared, “the fugitive has been aided in secret.” Now, “men will strive who can most openly do him service.”
12

II

The first arrest under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 took place in New York City. On September 26, 1850, eight days after President Fillmore signed the measure, two deputy U.S. marshals arrested James Hamlet at his job as a porter in a local store. Hamlet had left Baltimore two years earlier on a train to Philadelphia and then made his way to New York. He settled on South Third Street in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn village with a small black population, along with his wife and three children, all born in Maryland. In 1850, Hamlet’s owner, Mary Brown, learned of his presence in New York and hired a “police firm” to retrieve him. The slave catchers advised waiting for the new law to go into effect. As soon as it did, a representative of the firm, together with Brown’s son Gustavus and her son-in-law Thomas J. Clare, brought relevant documents to New York and presented them to Alexander Gardiner, the newly appointed U.S. commissioner. Gardiner ordered marshals to bring Hamlet to his office.
13

The Hamlet case, the
New
York
Tribune
noted sardonically, exhibited “very little of the ‘law’s delay.’ ” Indeed, events proceeded so swiftly that abolitionists had little time to react. The hearing took place the day after Hamlet’s arrest. Although “a large number of colored persons” gathered at the commissioner’s office, he allowed only one to witness the proceedings. Brown’s representatives identified Hamlet as her slave. Hamlet insisted before the hearing that he and his parents had been manumitted but that their free papers had been lost; however, in accordance with the provisions of the new law, Commissioner Gardiner did not allow him to testify. During the proceedings, an attorney hurriedly engaged by a friend of Hamlet’s appeared, asked a few questions, and declared himself satisfied that the law was being complied with. Gardiner ordered Hamlet remanded to Mrs. Brown. When Clare stated that he had “reason to believe” that a rescue “by force” was being planned, the commissioner directed marshals to deliver Hamlet to Baltimore at the federal government’s expense. Hamlet was handcuffed and hurried to a waiting steamboat. The day after his arrest he was back in Maryland, lodged in prison. His wife knew nothing of these events until after his departure.
14

Hamlet’s story, however, did not end there. At some point during his brief stay in New York City, Mary Brown’s son-in-law stated that she would allow Hamlet to purchase his freedom for $800. Two thousand members of the city’s black organizations, “with a slight and visible sprinkling of white abolitionists,” gathered at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Church Street to collect contributions. In an indication of widespread consternation over how the new law had been implemented, the
Journal
of
Commerce
, the voice of the city’s mercantile community and, in the words of the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
, “a paper which has distinguished itself more than any other in the northern states as an apologist of slavery,” launched its own fund-raising campaign. As soon as the money was collected, John H. Woodgate, a “respectable merchant,” carried it to Baltimore and negotiated the transaction. A week after his arrest, Hamlet was back in New York, a free man.
15

The
Hamlet
case galvanized the city’s black community. On October 5, a “great mass meeting of colored citizens” assembled at City Hall Park—the first black gathering ever to take place at that site—to celebrate Hamlet’s arrival. The meeting attracted several thousand persons, including representatives of both of the city’s outposts of the underground railroad. Louis Napoleon, the chief operative assisting fugitives out of the American Anti-Slavery Society office, was among the organizers, and the speakers included Charles B. Ray of the New York State Vigilance Committee and Jacob R. Gibbs, the underground railroad agent who had relocated a few years earlier from Baltimore to New York.

Another speaker was William P. Powell, the veteran black abolitionist who operated a boarding house for black sailors, which had moved several times but in 1850 was located at 330 Pearl Street, near the East River. Powell, who frequently hid escaped slaves in the building, had recently helped to create a new black organization, the Committee of Thirteen, pledged to assist fugitives seized in New York. After Hamlet’s arrest, he led a group of black sailors in a march on City Hall to demand that Mayor Caleb S. Woodhull protect black New Yorkers. Woodhull himself addressed the celebration in the park and promised that the police would no longer participate in the apprehension of fugitive slaves. When Hamlet spoke, “the greatest excitement prevailed.” He told the crowd that after his return to Maryland, slave buyers had been warned not to purchase him as “he had tasted liberty, and therefore could never be held again in chains.” At the event’s conclusion, Hamlet was “borne in triumph” to a ferry terminal, from which hundreds of black New Yorkers escorted him to his home in Williamsburg. “It was quite a day of rejoicing,” the
Tribune
reported, “among the colored people of the village.”
16

The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society seized on the Hamlet affair to reinvigorate itself, although, as time would reveal, only temporarily. It quickly produced a pamphlet by Lewis Tappan on the new law and the
Hamlet
case. Thirteen thousand copies sold in the first three weeks, and the pamphlet quickly went through three editions. The society also distributed through the mail a pledge “not to obey the Fugitive Slave Bill.” By January 1851, it had garnered over 1,600 signatures. Its annual meeting in 1851 was almost entirely devoted to fiery speeches denouncing the new law and pledging to resist it. The longest was delivered by Henry Ward Beecher.
17

Some New York merchants shared the widespread indignation over the treatment of James Hamlet and contributed funds for his freedom. But even though the purchase had been perfectly legal, the business community quickly drew back from any hint of resistance to the new law. “The commercial, trading, manufacturing interests . . . that trade so much with the South,” Lewis Tappan observed, “are favorable to acquiescence in the law.” In the aftermath of the Hamlet affair, a large public meeting called by merchants and bankers from both the Whig and Democratic parties issued a public statement endorsing enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. The gathering established the Union Safety Committee (a kind of Vigilance Committee in reverse) to mobilize public opinion in favor of the Compromise of 1850 and to support the return of fugitives to slavery. Its membership reads like a list of New York’s most prominent businessmen, including sugar trader and banker Moses Taylor; merchant and banker William H. Aspinwall; and William B. Astor, the son of the fur trader and real estate speculator John Jacob Astor and reportedly the richest man in America.

The Union Safety Committee raised $25,000 to finance its operations. The largest contribution came from Brown Brothers, the banking and merchant enterprise with close ties to the South. Only a handful of business leaders refused to join. Among them were the silk merchants Henry C. Bowen and Theodore McNamee, who placed a notice in the newspapers stating, “Our goods, and not our principles, are in the market.” Years later, the black abolitionist Philip A. Bell would cite them as rare examples of prominent New Yorkers who braved the “political and social ostracism . . . which an avowal of abolition principles entailed.”
18

In some parts of the North, the Fugitive Slave Law quickly became unenforceable. Slave catchers tried without success to apprehend fugitives in New Bedford, Massachusetts. One abolitionist in the strongly antislavery Western Reserve of northern Ohio commented, “I doubt if a man could be found to act as a ‘Commissioner’ to hunt fugitive slaves.” In New York City, however, led by the merchant community, public sentiment quickly turned in favor of enforcement. Even the pastor of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, one of the city’s largest black congregations, declared it a “Christian duty” to obey “the law of the land.” Abolitionists found New York even more inhospitable than in the past. In May 1850, while the new law was making its way through Congress, the annual public meeting of the New York State Vigilance Committee was “beset by rioters” who interrupted the speakers and at one point stormed the platform. In 1851 and 1852, because “no public hall could be procured,” the AASS held its annual meetings not in New York, as had become customary, but in Rochester and Syracuse. The following year, Sydney Howard Gay wrote of his newspaper, the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
, “The opposition to it in the city of New York is most bitter and inveterate, while its friends [are] so few as hardly to be appreciable.”
19

Just two months after James Hamlet returned to New York, another alleged fugitive, twenty-five-year-old Henry Long, was arrested at the Pacific Hotel, where he worked as a waiter. Still wearing his white jacket and apron, Long appeared before U.S. Commissioner Charles M. Hall. Dr. William W. Parker, acting as representative of John T. Smith of Virginia, who claimed to be the owner, identified Long as a slave and testified that he had given him medical treatment at Smith’s request. Parker related that Long had escaped by boat to New York in 1848. This time, abolitionists were not caught unawares, and their warring factions united to assist Long. The
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
raised money for Long’s defense, with contributions to be sent to Lewis Tappan, Sydney Howard Gay, or Horace Greeley. The leader of the New York State Vigilance Committee, Charles B. Ray, attended the hearing along with Tappan. When Tappan rose to urge a delay, the federal marshal, Benjamin H. Tallmadge, remarked that he had no standing to say anything. Tappan replied that he found it outrageous that Tallmadge, the son of an aide-de-camp of George Washington, should wish to “hurry a man claiming to be a freeman off to slavery.”
20