Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (8 page)

The Manumission Society had a special committee that offered legal assistance to fugitives. Nonetheless, the situation of runaways in New York remained fraught with danger. A Virginia lawyer residing in the city, F. H. Pettis, in 1838 advertised his services for those seeking “to arrest and secure fugitive slaves,” promising “he or she will soon be had.” (Three years later, to the delight of the
Colored
American
, Pettis found himself before a judge, charged with having “obtained $125 worth of eatables” at a restaurant run by a black New Yorker and not paying the bill.) “Forgetful that they are in a free state,” slaveowners entered black churches during Sabbath services looking for runaways, and broke into blacks’ homes and carried them off without any legal proceeding.
Freedom
’
s
Journal
advised fugitive slaves to leave the city for “some sequestered country village” or Canada, as “there are many from the South now in daily search of them.” “When I arrived in New York,” Moses Roper, a fugitive from Florida who made his way to the city on a coastal vessel in 1834, later recalled, “I thought I was free; but I learned I was not and could be taken there.” Roper decided to leave for Albany, New England, and eventually London. In New York, the abolitionist Sarah Grimké wrote in 1837, fugitives were “hunted like a partridge on the mountain.”
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But the situation of black New Yorkers legally entitled to freedom also proved precarious. As northern slavery ended, an epidemic followed of kidnapping of free blacks, especially children, for sale to the South. New York was hardly alone. Philadelphia, less than two dozen miles from the border with slavery, witnessed frequent abductions. An investigation in 1826 revealed the existence of an interracial gang based in Delaware that had lured nearly fifty black men, women, and children onto ships in Philadelphia and transported them to be sold in the South. As late as 1844, the abolitionist weekly
Pennsylvania
Freeman
, in an article entitled “Kidnappers,” complained, “Our state is infested with them.” Even Boston, far from the South, was not immune to the kidnapping of black residents.
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Kidnapping was a problem of long standing for black New Yorkers. In 1784, city authorities rescued a group of free blacks whom “man-stealers” had forced onto a ship, “destined either for Charleston or the Bay of Honduras.” The Manumission Society’s first statement of purposes, in 1785, mentioned prominently “the violent attempts lately made to seize and export for sale, several free Negroes” in the city. Due in part to pressure from the society, New York passed a stringent law against kidnapping in 1808. In 1821, the society expressed the hope that in the “not far distant” future the practice would be “unknown among us.” Instead, it seemed to increase, partly because the end of the slave trade from Africa in 1808 and the spread of cotton cultivation led to a rapid rise in the price of slaves. In the 1820s, a gang known as the Blackbirders operated in the Five Points, seizing both fugitives and free blacks living there.
Freedom
’
s
Journal
regularly complained about the “acts of kidnapping, not less cruel than those committed on the Coast of Africa,” that took place in New York City.
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The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 established a procedure by which kidnappers could behave in an ostensibly legal manner, by obtaining certificates of removal from unscrupulous public officials. A group of Philadelphia free blacks in 1799 petitioned Congress to take action on the matter, but the committee to which the House referred the issue never submitted a report. Eventually, several northern states enacted laws to offer procedural protection to individuals claimed as fugitive slaves. Pennsylvania, the only northern state to border on three slave states, led the way in 1820 with An Act to Prevent Kidnapping, which limited the authority to issue certificates of removal to state judges, instead of local officials, and offered those accused of being fugitives the opportunity to prove their free status. The law also authorized a prison term of up to twenty-one years for removing a black person from the state without legal process. Six years later, in response to complaints from Maryland that the law had made the rendition of fugitives too difficult, Pennsylvania expanded the number of officials able to issue a certificate. But it also mandated that only a constable, not the owner, could seize an alleged runaway, and required proof in addition to the word of the claimant before a person was deemed a slave. However, the law denied the alleged fugitive the right to a trial by jury, for which blacks had been agitating.

New York followed in 1828 with a similar law prohibiting the private seizure of a fugitive and outlining a recovery process involving state or local courts. In a backdoor manner, it offered an alleged fugitive the opportunity to have his or her status determined by a jury. The accused fugitive could file a writ de homine replegiando (a writ to release a man from prison or from the custody of a private individual). Under this writ, unlike a writ of habeas corpus, a jury, not a judge, adjucates the claim to freedom. But many officials refused to recognize the legitimacy of such a writ. Some actively conspired to send free blacks into slavery.
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Most outrageous were the activities of Richard Riker, the city recorder, who presided over the Court of Special Sessions, New York City’s main criminal court. An attorney and important figure in the local Democratic party, Riker held the office, with brief interruptions, from 1815 until 1838. With a group of accomplices including city constable Tobias Boudinot and the “pimp for slaveholders” Daniel D. Nash, Riker played a pivotal role in what abolitionists called the Kidnapping Club. In accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act, members of the club would bring a black person before Riker, who would quickly issue a certificate of removal before the accused had a chance to bring witnesses to testify that he was actually free. Boudinot boasted that he could “arrest and send any black to the South.”
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If kidnapping posed a threat to the freedom of individual black New Yorkers, the rise of the colonization movement placed in jeopardy the entire community’s status and future. The gradual abolition laws of the northern states, including New York’s, said nothing about removing free blacks from the country; it was assumed that they would remain in the United States as a laboring class. But the rapid growth of the free black population in the early republic alarmed believers in a white America. Founded in 1816, the American Colonization Society directed its efforts toward removing from the country blacks already free, but the long-term goal of many members was to abolish slavery and expel the entire black population. In the 1820s, most organized antislavery activity among white Americans took place under this rubric. Upper South planters and political leaders dominated the society, but advocates of colonization were also active in New York City.
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The colonization movement made significant progress in the 1820s when it obtained funds from Congress and established Liberia on the west coast of Africa as a refuge for blacks from the United States. Some African Americans shared the society’s perspective. John Russwurm, for a time an editor of
Freedom
’
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Journal
, decided in 1829 to move from New York to Liberia, where he worked as a journalist and public official until his death in 1851. Russwurm and other black supporters of colonization believed that racism was so deeply embedded in American life that blacks could never enjoy genuine freedom except by emigrating.
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Most black Americans, however, rejected both voluntary emigration and government-sponsored efforts to encourage or coerce them to leave the country. They viewed the rise of the colonization movement with alarm. Beginning with a mass meeting in Philadelphia in January 1817, a month after the founding of the American Colonization Society, northern blacks repudiated the idea. In New York, a new antislavery, anti-colonization black leadership emerged in the 1820s, led by three clergymen: Peter Williams Jr., the pastor of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church on Centre Street, not far from the Five Points; Samuel Cornish, minister of the First Colored (later Shiloh) Presbyterian Church; and Theodore S. Wright, who later succeeded Cornish in his pulpit. The fact that many members of the New York Manumission Society were attracted to colonization soured the organization’s relations with leading black New Yorkers.
Freedom
’
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was founded at a meeting of the city’s black leaders seeking a way to oppose the colonization movement. “Too long,” declared its opening editorial, “others have spoken for us”—a thinly veiled reference to the Manumission Society. The group later forced Russwurm to resign as editor when he embraced colonization.
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Asserting their own Americanness, free blacks articulated a vision of the United States as a land of equality before the law, where rights did not depend on color, ancestry, or racial designation. “This Country is Our Only Home,” declared one editorial in the
Colored
American
. “It is our duty and privilege to claim an equal place among the
American
people
.” Through the attack on colonization, the modern idea of equality as something that knows no racial boundaries was born.
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The black mobilization against colonization became a key catalyst for the rise of a new, militant abolitionism in the 1830s. Compared to previous antislavery organizations that promoted gradual emancipation and, frequently, colonization, the new abolitionism was different: it was immediatist, interracial, and committed to making the United States a biracial nation of equals. In New York City, as elsewhere, the new abolitionist movement arose from the joining of two impulses: black anti-colonization and white evangelicism. The spread of revivalist religion promoted the idea that both individuals and society could be purged of sin. In this spirit, many white abolitionists concluded that slavery and racism could be banished from the United States. Many who had previously been sympathetic to the Colonization Society now denounced it for exacerbating racial prejudice in America.
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The first abolitionist organization to reflect the new approach was the New-England Anti-Slavery Society, founded in January 1832. In 1833, the New York City Anti-Slavery Society followed. That December, a convention in Philadelphia founded the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). Its constitution demanded the immediate abolition of slavery without the “extirpation” of the black population, and the removal of prejudice and unequal laws against them. It repudiated the use of “all carnal weapons,” including physical force, and pledged to rely on “moral suasion”—that is, appealing to the conscience of slaveholders and the nation—to bring about the end of slavery. The new abolitionists’ forthright rejection of colonization made the movement far more appealing to free blacks than the genteel reformism of the Manumission Society.
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From the beginning, interracial cooperation was a hallmark of the new abolitionism. Several black New Yorkers, including Cornish, Wright, and Williams, served on the AASS’s initial executive committee. The New York City Anti-Slavery Society openly sought black membership—there was “no way to destroy the prejudice,” it declared, but “to invite our colored brethren to a participation with us.” White abolitionists welcomed black leaders at meetings, published their writings and speeches in antislavery newspapers, served on committees and took part in public events with them, and worked individually to help uplift black New Yorkers.
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Between the formation of the AASS in 1833 and the end of the decade, over 200,000 northerners joined local groups dedicated to the abolition of slavery and equal rights for black Americans. New York City was crucial to the society’s early growth. The organization established its national headquarters at 142 Nassau Street. Virtually the entire initial executive committee consisted of New Yorkers, and much of the organization’s early funding came from the city. But the diffusion of abolitionist ideas faced many obstacles. The first meeting of the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, on October 2, 1833, was dispersed by a mob stirred up by the Colonization Society. The New York State Anti-Slavery Society (founded in 1834) made far greater progress upstate than in the city.
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Two groups dominated among New York City’s white abolitionists: moral reformers strongly influenced by evangelical religion, and radical Quakers. Of the former, none played a more crucial role over the next thirty years than the Tappan brothers, Arthur (the first president of the AASS) and Lewis. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the 1780s, the Tappans had moved to New York in the 1820s and prospered as silk merchants. They financed antislavery activity in New York as well as many other benevolent enterprises, including the American Bible Society, the Magdalen Society (an effort to uplift prostitutes), and the construction of the Broadway Tabernacle to host the sermons of the era’s greatest evangelist, Charles Grandison Finney.

Employing his formidable business skills, Lewis Tappan oversaw the AASS publications board, which in 1836 launched a massive campaign of printing and distributing antislavery materials. He also served as superintendent of a Sabbath school “mostly composed of colored children.” In 1833, two years after William Lloyd Garrison’s
Liberator
made its appearance in Boston as a voice of immediate abolitionism, Arthur Tappan funded the publication of an abolitionist weekly, the
Emancipator
, in New York. He also paid for Garrison’s trip to England to establish relations with British abolitionists. In 1835, the parish of East Feliciana, Louisiana, offered a reward of $50,000 (an unheard-of sum in those days) for “delivery . . . of the notorious abolitionist, Arthur Tappan, of New York.”
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