RESISTING THE SLAVOCRACY:

THE BOSTON VIGILANCE COMMITTEE’S ROLE IN THE CREATION OF THE

REPUBLICAN PARTY, 1846-1860

by

Yasmin K. McGee

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

May 2020

Copyright 2020 by Yasmin K. McGee

ii RESISTING THE SLAVOCRACY: THE BOSTON VIGILANCE COMMITTEE'S ROLE IN THE CREATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, 1846-1860

April 16th, 2020 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to put a spin on the familiar proverb “it takes a village,” for me it “took a village” to write this thesis. The village chief, Dr. Stephen Engle, guided me throughout the MA program and as my thesis advisor, with great leadership, insight, understanding, and impressive, yet humble, expertise. I thank Dr. Engle for introducing me to the

Boston Vigilance Committee and for encouraging me to undertake this work. Dr.

Engle’s love for 19th century American history, depicted through his enthusiasm for teaching, has inspired me to continuously improve my writing and understanding of history. His inspiration and confidence in my work has fostered clear convictions about my own capabilities, yet he has set an example of how to remain modest and strive for further knowledge. My gratitude to Dr. Engle goes beyond words and I am grateful for having been able to learn from him.

Dr. Norman has been especially positive and helpful throughout my time in the program. While taking her graduate seminar, she introduced me to the wonders of public and oral history and encouraged me to obtain valuable experience as an intern in a local

South Florida museum. Although I did not have the pleasure of being in one of Dr.

Bennett’s graduate courses, I was fortunate to be a Teaching Assistant under his supervision. Dr. Bennett has taught me a great deal about lesson planning and leading discussion and I will continue to emulate his lecture style and organization when teaching

American History. I thank both Dr. Norman and Dr. Bennett for their positive energy, sharing their knowledge, and direction while serving on my thesis committee.

iv To my parents, Habeeb and Mooniah, my village King and Queen, thank you for your vision and eternal love and support. More than fifty years ago, you decided to make a new life in America and although it was no easy task, you have accomplished what many consider the American Dream. Your remarkable life stories are what sparked my interest in history. I thank you for your foresight and providing me endless opportunities.

You have taught and encouraged me to stay driven through life’s many ups and downs and I’ve completed this work in part because of your resolve. My love and reverence for you both is irrefutable.

I’d like to thank my brothers, my rocks, Sean and Omar, for always taking care of their little sister. I am grateful for you both and will forever cherish our special bond.

Selima, Amani, and Zayn, I count my lucky stars for you all being lights in my life. To my mother and father-in-law, Mom and Papa, you have always treated me like a daughter and have showered me with endless love and support. Thank you for who you are and all that you do. Uncle Joe, I thank you for housing my writing space and for all of your love.

Rab, my girl since I was two, thank you for being my confidante and my sister. To my family and friends, near and far, I am grateful for the endless encouragement, assistance, and much needed laughter you have provided along the way. The support I received from all have made the completion of this thesis a reality.

Last, but surely not least, thank you to my husband, David, and our boys, Zak, and Noah. You have been closest to me while on this journey and have accepted changes in your life so that I may follow my dreams. I love you all very much and feel very blessed and grateful for our family. Thank you for encouraging Mom and Min to spread her wings and accomplish this achievement that means so much. I love you.

v ABSTRACT

Author: Yasmin K. McGee

Title: Resisting the Slavocracy: The Boston Vigilance Committee’s Role in the Creation of the Republican Party, 1846-1860

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Stephen Engle

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2020

Republicanism, a long-standing ideology, which embodied political liberty, virtue, and constitutional law, shaped America’s political culture from the country’s inception. The Republican Party’s formation in the 1850s was no exception to this rule. Paying close attention to the social and political climate in Massachusetts, this thesis will journey through the United States’ turbulent antebellum years and examine how the abolitionist organization known as the Boston Vigilance Committee (BVC) fashioned the contours of this anti-slavery party. Although scholars debate the committee’s origins, by 1846 members increased and expanded their activism in protecting escaped slaves from being returned to slavery and in assisting fugitives to freedom. By standing on moral, economic, and legal ground, Vigilance Committee members transformed Boston’s political culture and helped mobilize Northern support for an anti-slavery agenda that founded the Republican party and ultimately culminated in slavery’s eventual demise.

vi RESISTING THE SLAVOCRACY:

THE BOSTON VIGILANCE COMMITTEE’S ROLE IN THE CREATION OF THE

REPUBLICAN PARTY, 1846-1860

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1. EVERLASTING PRINCIPLES ...... 8

CHAPTER 2. SHADES OF DEEPER MEANING ...... 30

CHAPTER 3. A ROPE OF SAND OR A BAND OF STEEL ...... 49

CHAPTER 4. MOLDING A NEW REALITY ...... 65

EPILOGUE ...... 80

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 85

vii INTRODUCTION

Situated along the North African coast, the territories of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, once known as the Barbary States, bore distinct resemblance to America’s

Southern states. Positioned between vast seas and like parallels, the regions, similar in climate, land mass, and fertile grounds equally shared the institution of slavery. In White

Slavery in the Barbary States, Charles Sumner, noted Boston abolitionist and soon to be a distinguished Massachusetts senator, revealed that Algiers, considered the most loathsome and “chief seat” of slavery in the region occupied the parallel 36° 30’ north latitude, the same line as the Missouri Compromise, or the barrier that designated slavery in the Union west of the Mississippi.1 Sumner deemed slavery in Morocco, Algiers,

Tripoli, and Tunis equivalent to the peculiar institution in Virginia, the Carolinas,

Mississippi, and Texas. “Breeding indolence, lassitude, and selfishness,” Sumner explained, “[accounted] for the insensibility for the claims of justice and humanity which

[seemed] to have characterized both nations.”2 For centuries, western leaders and their

subjects, repulsed by white European enslavement in the Barbary States, triumphantly

and at times, unsuccessfully, attempted rescue missions, paid ransoms, and even

exchanged goods to eradicate their citizens’ bondage. Despite the unease with white

1 Charles Sumner, White Slavery in the Barbary States (Boston: William D. Ticknor and Company, 1847), 6. 2 Sumner, White Slavery, 6-7. 1 enslavement, however, black slavery in the young republic continued and sustained

further in the Union South.3

It was no surprise that Sumner’s lecture compared white slavery in the Barbary

States to southern slavery in the United States. Less than a year prior to his White Slaves

address, Sumner confirmed his stance against Southern slave powers when a fugitive

slave who had arrived in Massachusetts had been wrongfully carried back to bondage in

the slave South. The incident, though a national affair, nonetheless, aroused anger among

enraged Bostonians who called for a meeting at Faneuil Hall on September 24, 1846 to

protest the fugitive’s return. Sumner and like-minded abolitionists supported the

resolutions of the newly created Committee of Vigilance, otherwise known as the Boston

Vigilance Committee (BVC), that vowed to ensure the safety of all persons and safeguard the lawful protection to anyone who set foot on Massachusetts’ soil. Boston Vigilance

Committee members resolved that other states’ laws or institutions, notably those that

endorsed and protected slavery, remained null and void when Massachusetts’ decrees had

been infringed upon. Judged “supreme and inviolable” Massachusetts’ laws, considered

violated if any person was in danger of seizure from the Commonwealth, extended to all

individuals.4 At the initial BVC meeting, Sumner proclaimed slavery’s evils immoral

and that the capture of an ill-fated fugitive slave, which had caused such outrage in a free

state, should “rouse the citizens of Massachusetts and the Northern states to call for the

abolition for [the] institution.”5 This meeting was a turning point, not only for

3 Ibid., 19. 4 Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting, Held at Faneuil Hall, September 24, 1846, for the purpose of considering the recent case of kidnapping from our soil, and of taking measures to prevent the recurrence of similar outrages, (Boston: White and Potter Printers, 1846), 6. 5 Address, 8. 2 Bostonians, but also for Americans who chose to prevent slavery from spreading in

America.

While citizens in Massachusetts had been coping with Southern state laws

encroaching on their own state laws, the Mexican American War, consequently, bolstered

strong divisions within the federal government. Since Texas had been admitted to the

Union as a slave state in 1845, Northern representatives perceived the conflict as an

unjust “war of conquest” and as a ploy to obtain territory that facilitated slavery’s

expansion.6 President James K. Polk and Democratic expansionists, however, insisted

that Mexico was a viable threat and they pre-emptively declared war in the wake of an attack against US soldiers in disputed Texas territory. Despite the debate behind the

Mexican American War’s derivation, however, the question remained, would the territories that were expected acquisitions from Mexico be admitted to the Union as slave

or free states? David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat displeased with the Polk

administration, proposed an amendment that safeguarded the newly acquired territories

from slavery. Although twice rejected in the Senate, the Wilmot Proviso’s intended

prohibition of slavery’s expansion in America foreshadowed the growing rift between the

North and South.7

America’s victory and the war’s outcome, nevertheless, increased the size of the

United States by over 500,000 square miles and allowed the notion of manifest destiny to

take flight as a guiding force pre-ordained by God. Acquired by the Treaty of Guadalupe

Hidalgo, the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico and

Arizona, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado became hotbeds for the American populace

6 David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America before the Civil War 1848-1861 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1976), 3. 7 Potter, Impending Crisis, 20-21. 3 to move West. By 1849, news that squatters had discovered gold in California enticed

the push westward even more. Yet with all the excitement, which Providence gave

Americans the privilege of manifest destiny to inhabit the entire continent, the

uncertainty of slavery’s extension still loomed, pitted North against South, encouraged

turmoil within political parties, and eventually led to the breakdown of the Whigs. In

Massachusetts, Texas’ annexation into the Union as a slave state, the country’s

involvement in the Mexican American War, the Wilmot Proviso’s defeat, and the Whig

presidential nomination of slaveholder Zachary Taylor prompted the departure of key

Boston Vigilance Committee members from the Whig party. This faction, known as the

“conscience” Whigs, held that conservative, or “cotton” Whigs, stooped to southern

powers and essentially paved the way for slavery’s expansion. Together with their

Northern counterparts in the Liberty Party and with “barnburner” Democrats, the anti-

slavery Whigs met at the Buffalo Convention to form the Free Soil Party in August 1848

and nominated Martin Van Buren for president.8

Stressed with the new territories and faced with staunch supporters and opponents of the peculiar institution, Congress passed the Compromise of 1850, authored by

Senators Henry Clay, Kentucky and Stephen A. Douglas, Illinois. The debates that

prompted the Compromise’s enactment were California’s admission into the Union as

either a free or slave state; whether slavery would be allowed in the Utah and New

Mexico territories; the dispute over the Texas boundary with New Mexico, which if

expanded, would permit the spread of slavery; the slavery status in the District of

8 Frank Otto Gatell, “Conscience and Judgement: The Bolt of the Massachusetts Conscience Whigs,” The Historian 21, 1 (November, 1958): 18-19.; In The Impending Crisis, Potter explained the nickname Barnburner stemmed from a likeness between the group of Democrats who would rather ruin the party to purge slavery and an unwise farmer who burned down his barn to do away with rats, 78. 4 Columbia, and the appeal for an effective fugitive slave law. The Compromise of 1850 resolved that California entered the Union as a free state while both the territories of Utah and New Mexico’s slavery issue was left to be determined by popular sovereignty.

Texas, awarded compensation by the federal government, settled the boundary conflict with New Mexico. The slave trade was outlawed in the District of Columbia and a more severe fugitive slave law was enacted. Trusted to appease both free labor and proslavery factions and stave off southern secession, the Compromise ultimately deepened sectional animosities within the country’s political atmosphere and social arenas.

The clause within the Compromise, namely the Fugitive Slave Bill, touched off a firestorm in the North, especially in New England, a bastion of both wealthy conservative and radical abolitionist groups. More importantly, the bill provoked the Boston Vigilance

Committee and sprung its members into action. Under the new bill, fugitive slaves who escaped to Boston, the anti-slavery hub, could be lawfully captured and carted back to enslavement. Between 1850 and 1860, Vigilance Committee members fought desperately to upend the Fugitive Slave Bill and prevent it from intruding on

Massachusetts’ laws. Fugitive slave cases in the Commonwealth, met with significant attention from the federal government and citizens alike, plunged the state’s affairs into the limelight. Massachusetts, although the center of abolition and anti-slavery, remained rather conservative, but a transformation began to occur. The shift in Massachusetts’ political tide became apparent when Massachusetts lawyer and abolitionist, Charles

Sumner, was voted into the Senatorial seat in April 1851. Yet, conservatism in the federal government and the necessity to sustain the Union prevailed throughout the early

1850s. The Compromise of 1850 was a temporary solution to Southern secession and

5 briefly quelled both Northern and Southern interests with regard to slavery in the territories. As much as the Compromise was intended to calm tensions related to the fate of the American expansion west belied the storm ahead.

As the political atmosphere strained in the United States with Southern secession seemingly imminent, Congress delivered another blow to anti-slavery groups in the

House and Senate chambers in May 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act stipulated that slavery in the Kansas and Nebraska territories would be decided by popular sovereignty, an idea Douglas had popularized to place the decision in voters’ hands. The act repealed the Missouri Compromise, dismantled the Whig Party, and revealed the Compromise of

1850’s failure to resolve the slavery issue. The Whig party’s collapse, moreover, united

Northern Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, and Free Soilers into the Republican Party.

It was this storied history of the Republican party that gave rise to the Boston

Vigilance Committee’s importance in the master narrative of American political history.

The group’s deep-rooted anti-slavery nature fueled the party’s moral obligations, an agenda, which their abolitionist supporters firmly drove forward. Yet, the committee understood that most white Americans at the time did not embrace a keen desire for complete equality between themselves and blacks. Given the experience of how the new party came together, members grasped the notion that political and social change needed to progress through the Constitution, which could only be achieved by influencing the thought process of their electorates. The organization, accordingly, used their platform to demonstrate how slavery impeded everyone. Vigilance Committee members and their political allies that formed the Republican Party were well aware that change came from

6 the ballot box.9 The new group launched and maneuvered a political machine that

eventually led to the American Civil War and severed slavery’s grasp on the republic.

9 Michael S. Green, Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 135. 7 EVERLASTING PRINCIPLES

Kidnapped. Joseph, a fugitive slave from Louisiana, was unlawfully seized from

Massachusetts’ righteous shores and transported back to barbaric slave life. The incident

began aboard the brig Ottoman where Joseph attempted his escape from bondage in

Louisiana. He stowed away in cargo and after a two thousand-mile journey miraculously

arrived alive in the Port of Boston, but was discovered by the crew before he could taste

freedom. Despite knowledge of Massachusetts kidnapping laws, the ship’s Captain

James W. Hannum relied on monetary interests and determined the escaped slave would be transported back to Louisiana. By the laws of Louisiana, the master of a vessel was liable for carrying off a slave, whether he knew of his being on board or not, and the only manner to escape the penalty was to carry the slave back. Otherwise, the captain could not return to New Orleans without being imprisoned from between two to ten years and fined the value of the slave. For fear of indictment with unlawful imprisonment if the fugitive slave was discovered on his ship, Captain Hannum had Joseph exit the brig in darkness and hidden on an island in Boston Harbor. Joseph, undaunted, braved another escape attempt; he stole a small craft and, once again, pursued freedom. He arrived on

Massachusetts’ coast, but was soon recaptured by the Ottoman’s crew.10

In the meantime, knowing the abolitionist proclivities of some Bostonians, the

captain feared they might make a fuss, and so before docking at the harbor in the early

10 Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting, Held at Faneuil Hall, September 24, 1846, for the purpose of considering the recent case of kidnapping from our soil, and of taking measures to prevent the recurrence of similar outrages, (Boston: White and Potter Printers, 1846), 3-4; Some accounts list ‘George’ as the fugitive’s name. 8 morning hours, he deposited the slave on Spectacle Island to be guarded by a young and

trusted boatman, and then entered the harbor, went to the city and made arrangements for

his transport back south. Hannum met with John H. Pearson, Boston merchant and the

Ottoman’s owner, explained the situation and the penalty, and Pearson advised him that he had no choice but to return the slave to New Orleans. He instructed Hannum to keep him out of Boston, and to deposit him on board the Niagara, which he also owned and was about to set sail for New Orleans.

Agreeable to arrangements, Hannum was to await for the Niagara to sail the next day, but that morning an easterly gale commenced and the Niagara never appeared. In the meantime, the captain went into Boston had a drink at a hotel, during which Joseph escaped, stole the pilot boat, and headed for the South Boston Point. The captain and boatman pursued in another boat and after landing and running down the slave for about two miles, they overcame Joseph, accused him of stealing his pocket watch, and marched him arm and arm to the Point with the assistance of some citizens. A crowd of men and boys followed unclear of what to make of the incident. The news of the escape and capture spread through the city, officers were dispatched, a reward was offered for assistance in returning the fugitive. In the meantime, due to inclement weather, the captain, slave, and boatmen were forced to wait another day for the Niagara on board a small boat. When it arrived on September 12, the captain placed Joseph on board with

paperwork attesting to what happened to ensure his safe return to his owner. Although

Pearson sanctioned his actions, the New Orleans press stigmatized Hannum as a slave-

stealer, and the Boston press branded him as a kidnapper. Pearson too suffered from the

press criticism, but responded with a rebuttal to the Boston Courier the following month

9 that despite the outcry of abolitionist fanatics who berated him, he had been most universally commended for sending the slave back to New Orleans.11

News of the incident soon spread, and on Wednesday evening, S. E. Sewall obtained a writ of habeas corpus from Judge Hubbard of the Supreme Court, and the police chief dispatched officers down the harbor in search of Captain Hannum and his prisoner, but they returned without success. Edmund L. Benson, merchant applied to the Supreme

Court for a criminal warrant against the captain, under the kidnapping provision. They made the argument that because the Niagara did not go to sea for several days Joseph had been held without law and against law in the waters of Massachusetts. He had been violently and unlawfully restrained of his liberty and abducted by force from the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth. This case placed in a strong view the inconvenience as well as injustice of establishing two conflicting sets of laws in this country—one for the free state and another for the slave states, and furnished a strong argument against the institution of slavery. In reply to these criticisms and the press, Boston merchants joined

Pearson in justifying that however ungodly it might have been, his conduct was lawful.12

The news inspired Vigilance Committee members to meet at Faneuil Hall on

September 24, 1846 and vowed that fugitive slaves, like Joseph, who touched

Massachusetts soil were protected by state laws and would not be subjected to illegal deportation. The committee resolved further that Northern freedmen were lawfully protected from wrongful capture and imprisonment from Southern slave agents. They found Southern slave states forced their slave laws upon Northerners and even degraded

11 Liberator, 23 Oct. 1846; The Independent, 29 May 1873, carried an article from Henry Wilson, Rise and Fall of Slave Power in America. 12 Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal, 23 Sept. 1846; The Liberator, 23 Oct. 1846; Christian Reflector, 17 Sept. 1846.

10 their statesmen who went South to seek legal recourse for their fellow men. These

injustices, deemed the committee, posed as future threats upon the rights of all men.13

In response, the Boston Vigilance Committee determined that Massachusetts’

inhabitants would not succumb to Southern slave laws and would effectively uphold their

states’ laws despite the Southern states’ reactions. The committee implored citizens in all

free Northern states to support their cause against slavery by aiding fugitive slaves and

hindering slave catchers. They urged the public, moreover, to obstruct political aspirants

who upheld Constitutional provisions that tied free states to Southern slave laws. The current Constitution, the members declared, allowed slave catchers rights in their free lands, yet denied their own communities trial by jury and habeas corpus. Vigilance committee members understood the time had come for crucial Constitutional changes.

The committee had fairly humble beginnings, initially formed to assist fugitives in

seeking freedom in Canada, but soon its members became more active in protecting them

from federal marshals. The Boston Vigilance Committee pledged to protect man’s

unalienable rights and through its ascending prominence ultimately transitioned into a

political movement that gave rise first to the Free-Soil party and then to the Republican party, whose principle objective was to rally Northern support to defeat Southern slave

power.14

Ailing, yet eminent, former president and Congressman John Quincy Adams

attended the 1846 Faneuil Hall meeting and advised his countrymen to fearlessly decide

if the committee was able to assume the role as protector for all mankind. He likened the fugitive slave incident to another he had experienced forty years prior when an American

13 Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting, Held at Faneuil Hall, 5-7. 14 Ibid., 7-8. 11 seaman was illegally carried away by a British ship. President Adams’ mere presence

alone exhibited the importance and the gravity of the Boston Vigilance Committee. Like

his patriot father, Adams represented American democracy’s revolutionary foundation

and prepared to pass the torch to the men before him, a new generation determined to

secure and maintain the freedom the Founders had established in the Constitution.

Speakers included Samuel G. Howe, prominent physician and philanthropist, Charles

Sumner, distinguished Boston attorney, Charles Francis Adams, Sr. former Congressman

and editor of the Boston Whig, and Theodore Parker transcendentalist and Unitarian minister who addressed the crowd with impassioned spirits against the injustices provoked by slavery.15

After Adams’ speech, Howe led the Faneuil Hall meeting and described the

unfortunate and cruel kidnapping. He doubted anyone would have been silent if a

clergyman, editor, or lawyer had been abducted by slave powers. Howe pointedly

maintained that slavery controlled the country in all aspects and implored his fellow

citizens to find a solution to the problem. The peculiar institution’s influence, assailed

Howe, was an “incubus . . . that spread her murky wings and [had] covered us with her

benumbing shadow.”16 He ardently suggested the time had come for the laissez-faire system on slavery to end. If public opinion changed, Howe remarked, demands to revise laws on slavery would follow as a consequence. Howe did not advocate for violence, however, but urged that slave catchers were treated as outcasts and denied assistance with their mischievous endeavors.17

15 Ibid., appendix. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 12 Counselor Charles Sumner agreed with Howe’s proposals and further reiterated

that slave powers had undermined Massachusetts law. Government, Sumner argued, was

the most powerful when a great wrong had been done to one, but was felt by the masses,

and he urged Massachusetts’ citizens and all Northern states to join in abolishing slavery.

Charles Francis Adams addressed the gathering and displeased with the evil incident that

befell the community, hoped the meeting’s outcome held remedies to forbid repeat

occurrences. The young lawyer expressed disappointment in Captain Hannum for

permitting slave laws to assume importance over Massachusetts laws, but was confident the Republic had the strength to uphold “justice and humanity.”18 As Whig newspaper editor, however, Adams was more straightforward when he wrote the people in the free states had to except the slave power was a force that remained or the Union was bound to dissolve. The only way to avoid the separation, Adams asserted, was through “the total abolition of slavery” and the “complete eradication of the fatal influence” the slave power exercised over government policy.19

In a more reluctant tone, ardent abolitionist Wendell Phillips took the floor and claimed the anti-slavery sentiment in Massachusetts was no more than just self-flattery.

Slave catchers, Phillips asserted, would not dare enter the Commonwealth if they feared the system. He further maintained that if Captain Hannum had permission from the fugitive slave’s master, the present meeting would not have taken place because Hannum would have been in accordance with Constitutional law, which Phillips added, was a farce and needed to be crushed. Phillips was in tune with fellow abolitionist William

Lloyd Garrison who thought the Constitution was a proslavery document and therefore

18 Ibid. 19 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900), 68-69. 13 rejected Constitutional authority. Garrisonians awoke the public to slavery’s immorality

and gained attention from enflamed Southerners. The Southern reaction fueled the

abolitionists’ cause, but the Garrisonians anti-Union and anti-Constitution views

diminished their credibility with the citizenry.20

Phillips’ tone and irreverence to the Constitution met with much disapproval and

jeers from the crowd. Most attendees at Faneuil Hall respected the Constitution because

of what it represented, but wanted revisions that conformed to anti-slavery sentiments,

which stemmed from their religious beliefs. Spiritual leader Parker connected church and

state well when he declared that man’s laws were supreme, but God’s laws trumped those

of the land. Parker asserted men did not fear anti-slavery laws and pressed the attendees to take action in the name of God; fugitive slaves should find solace and assistance in the

Commonwealth. He went further and declared participants at Faneuil Hall should elect officials who were “not tonguey men,” but “men of deeds” who believed in action under

God’s law.21

The intense nature of the Faneuil Hall meeting was expected since barely a year

prior to the Ottomon incident, Texas had been annexed into the Union as a slave state in

December 1845. The wheels against slavery’s expansion, however, had been already turning in Massachusetts when delegates put their party affiliations aside and established a convention that united attendees against the proposed annexation. In the conventions’

address, Proceedings of a Convention of Delegates, dated January 1845, representatives

charged that Texas’ annexation was an outward scheme by slave interests and,

furthermore, it was clearly unconstitutional. The delegates asserted the intended

20 Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting, Held at Faneuil Hall, appendix; Adams, Charles Francis Adams, 57-58. 21 Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting, Held at Faneuil Hall, appendix. 14 acquisition unlawful because Texas had not been voted into the Union by way of a two-

thirds Senatorial vote. The Senate vote, according to the convention’s attendees,

represented the State vote, “No treaty with a foreign power can be ratified, unless two-

thirds of the Senators [concurred]; in effect, unless two-thirds of the States

[concurred].”22 Considered rejected without the constitutional provision of a Senatorial

vote, the delegates claimed states had been denied equal share in government functions.23

Slavery and primarily its extension, maintained the delegates, was not the

Founding Father’s intention for the future of the young republic. Citing testimony from

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and John Jay, the representatives

indicated that the Constitution’s framers thought slavery a temporary institution.

Washington, quoted the delegates, hoped humanity encouraged slave liberation, which

“might diffuse itself generally in the minds of the people.”24 The revolutionists, certain

that Providence would deliver the shackled from evil, resolved the time would eventually

come for slavery’s end. Consequently, the delegates attested that the Constitution did not

contain the term slavery, which was purposely omitted because it was thought unlikely to

endure or extend beyond its existing borders. Representatives of the Southern states,

declared the delegates, consented to the annexation with the primary intentions to

“control their policy, to make the interests of free labor subservient to the necessities of

an artificial, unthrifty, unnatural and unjust condition of society.”25 “It [was] to force industry out of the paths,” they maintained, “which lead to abundance and prosperity,

22 Proceedings of a Convention of Delegates, Chosen by the People of Massachusetts, without Distinction of Party, and Assembled at Faneuil Hall, in the City of Boston, on Wednesday the 29th day of January, A.D.1845, to take into consideration the Proposed Annexation of Texas to the United States (Boston: Eastburn’s Press, 1845), 8. 23 Proceedings of a Convention of Delegates, 8. 24 Ibid., 11. 25 Ibid., 17. 15 because those paths [were] open only to the feet of freemen.”26 The Massachusetts delegates foresaw the Texas annexation would only lead the country toward “guilt and ruin” and urged the public and the press to inhibit its approval.27

The importance of the delegates’ convention not only revealed Massachusetts representatives’ moral outrage against additional slave states being admitted to the Union,

but also pointed toward territorial acquisition legalities stipulated in the Constitution.

These two key aspects, in motion well before the passage of the Compromise of 1850,

helped determine the changing political atmosphere in the state. As territorial

development increased and thus the debate on slavery’s expansion, Massachusetts

lawmakers were acutely aware that an informed public would be vital to the country’s

success. By way of the press, the delegates encouraged the public to become educated on the origins and motives behind the Texas annexation and call for its termination. Despite the representatives’ appeals, however, Texas came into the Union as a slave state with the

contest on slavery rapidly accelerating.

By the end of 1846, Massachusetts Whigs had split into “cotton” and

“conscience” Whig factions. The “conscience” Whigs, men moved by moral action and opposed to slavery’s extension, disagreed with the direction the Whig party had been advancing. Charles Sumner, Charles Francis Adams, Henry Wilson, and Charles Allen and other “conscience” Whigs sensed their party’s leaders would yield to the national organization and neglect the principled obligations of liberty and justice that

Massachusetts had been founded upon. The conservative “cotton” Whigs, however,

26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 18. 16 considered the “conscience” Whigs divisive and damaging to the party’s coherence.28 “It

was very evident,” claimed Henry Wilson, “that there was little harmony and feeling of

purpose between the two sections.”29 At the Whig State Convention held in September

1847 in Springfield, Massachusetts, Congressman and “conscience” Whig John G.

Palfrey moved for an amendment that stated the Whigs would not support a Presidential

candidate who did not oppose slavery’s extension. With a presidential election

approaching the next year, the “cotton” and “conscience” Whigs clashed on the latter.

Palfrey’s amendment, rejected on the floor, indicated that it was only a matter of time

before the anti-slavery men bolted from the Whig party.30

The onset of the Mexican American War further advanced tensions within the

Whig party in Massachusetts and impelled the “conscience” faction to nominate Howe in

opposition to Boston representative Robert C. Winthrop. Winthrop’s victory, expected

since he represented the prevalent conservative standard at the time, his election to the

House, and his open support for the war infuriated the “conscience” Whigs and prompted

profound criticism from Sumner. The war, professed Sumner in a letter addressed to

Winthrop, was “six times wrong” and was merely an “unjust and cowardly war . . . in the

cause of slavery.” 31 Declared without practically any legislative consent, Sumner

indicated, the war with Mexico was, in essence, against a friendly neighboring republic.

28 In Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Henry Wilson credited E. Rockwood Hoar as the person responsible for initiating the term “cotton” Whig. Hoar commented, in response to a fellow Whig who called for the party to stop passing anti-slavery resolutions, that “it [was] as much the duty to Massachusetts to pass resolutions in favor of the rights of man as in the interests of cotton.” Henry Wilson, Samuel Hunt, Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume II (Boston: JR Osgood and Company, 1874), 117. 29 Henry Wilson, Samuel Hunt, Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America Volume II (Boston: JR Osgood and Company, 1874), 123. 30 Wilson, Rise and Fall, 123. 31 Charles Sumner, George Frisbie Hoar, Charles Sumner: His Complete Works, Volume 1 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1899), 320, 323. 17 The unmerited war, falsely proposed as a conflict instigated by the Republic of Mexico,

originated in actuality as a “series of measures to extend and perpetuate slavery.”32 The

disgraceful attack on a weak republic engrossed in its own civil chaos, Sumner deemed,

was advantageous for the stronger, wealthier, unified America to propagate slavery.33

Sumner and the “conscience” Whigs presented ethical arguments against

slavery’s perpetuation, however, another element against the extension of the peculiar institution was clearly evident. Southern slave powers in the political sphere had already

gained concessions with Texas’ annexation into the Union as a slave state. More

territories, entering the Union as such, indicated that the balance of political power would

tip the scales in favor of the slave South. By the 1840s, territorial uncertainties coupled with abolitionist ideas that began to marinate in Northern minds led the partnership between North and South within the Democratic party to splinter. The party’s members, who once dodged sectional matters to maintain unity, witnessed the slavery issue affecting the group’s harmony. Martin Van Buren, one founder of the Democratic party and former US President, abandoned his designation as the “Northern man with Southern principles” when he openly opposed the Texas annexation.34 Van Buren’s stance on

Texas infuriated Southern Democrats and cost him the Democratic party’s nomination for

president against Polk in 1844. Van Buren’s desertion by the party’s Southern faction

and the selection of Polk alienated Van Burenites and led them onto a path of an

imminent break with the coalition.35

32 Sumner, Charles Sumner: His Complete Works, 321-322. 33 Ibid., 322. 34 Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” Journal of American History 56, No. 2 (1969): 266. 35 Ibid. 18 Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot and other Northern Democrats who favored Van Buren’s politics disapproved of President Polk’s penchant for Southern slave power. Polk’s request for two million dollars to purchase land from Mexico revealed the administration’s intention to spread slavery westward and not, as initially claimed, to protect the country from a hostile nation intruding on US soil. More noteworthy, Northern “Barnburner” Democrats, unhappy with the administration’s clear concession toward Southern slave power were offended with Polk’s blatant exclusion of their own from his cabinet. In an effort to keep their constituents contented, the

Barnburners sensed the need to curb the South’s influence within the party. To combat the irregularity, Wilmot proposed an amendment that stipulated no territories acquired by the Mexican American War would be admitted to the US as slave regions. In 1846 and again in 1848, the Wilmot Proviso passed in the House, but failed in the Southern- dominated Senate. The proviso’s importance, however, marked the perpetuation of sectional rifts within parties, catapulted the slavery dispute into the spotlight, and aided the nation’s regional division between the Northern and Southern US.36

The Wilmot Proviso, however, was not the sole resolution proposed to settle the territorial dispute. Northern and Southern state representatives presented numerous plans to resolve the conflict; one measure advocated for the extension of the Missouri

Compromise’s 36° 30’ line into the new territories. The passage of the Oregon Bill, however, which adhered to the Northwest Ordinance, stipulated the lands of present-day

Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and segments of Montana and Wyoming free and made the stakes too high for any of the parties to come to terms with the proposal. Westward expansion signified a growing electorate, hence political power, and the Oregon Bill’s

36 Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” 266; Potter, Impending Crisis, 23. 19 enactment had rewarded the North with territory and the chance to broaden their

economy and constituency, thus tipping political favor. Despite the Oregon Territory’s

location above the Missouri Compromise line, which would have rendered it free

regardless, Southerners feared the implementation of the Northwest Ordinance in the bill would hamper efforts to prevent future incoming slave territories. Southerners wanted

compromise; free territories emerging into the Union should have required equal value in

slave territories entering the nation as well. Extending the Missouri Compromise,

therefore, would have left the South with less slave territory especially after the passage

of the Oregon Bill.37

Despite Northern concessions in the Oregon Bill, extending the Missouri

Compromise would not have furnished favor on either side of the political spectrum.

Void of vague language, the Compromise’s clarity set a permanent outcome on the

territories and thus, future states’ ability to be slave or free. In this respect, Northern representatives, moreover, did not want the lands South of 36° 30’ to become slave

regions indefinitely. Ambiguity, however, presented itself unmistakably in Democratic

Senator Lewis Cass’ notion of popular sovereignty, or the right for inhabitants of

territories to decide on whether the lands should be free or slave. In a letter to

Tennessee’s former Democratic senator, Alfred O. P. Nicholson, Cass propositioned

popular sovereignty as a resolution to the territorial disputes that were slowly dividing the

nation. The Constitution, Cass affirmed, defined the right of Congress to govern property

and territories (i.e. public lands) belonging to the United States, but local authorities

controlled domestic and public affairs regarding its subjects. Cass believed citizens

inhabiting the territories “with the vast variety of objects connected to them…[could not]

37 Potter, Impending Crisis, 76. 20 be controlled by an authority which [was] merely called into existence for the purpose of

making rules and regulations for the disposition of management and property.”38 They

were, deemed Cass, capable of regulating “their internal concerns in their own way.”39

Cass’ choice of words pointed directly to popular sovereignty’s obscurity; the concept left open the possibility of interpretation by not stipulating at what point in time the citizens of a territory could regulate slavery.40

South Carolina Democratic senator and staunch slavery supporter John C.

Calhoun’s angle on the territories’ status revealed the long-held position of the South and

the conflict between state’s rights and congressional legislation. Calhoun’s resolutions

reasoned that Congress did not have the power to regulate slavery within territories and

consequently, slavery could not be barred from territories before attaining statehood.

Calhoun reasoned that the territories were essentially the property of all the states

belonging to the Union. No citizens, therefore, who wanted to carry their property

(slaves) into the territories could be discriminated against based on the rights afforded

them through the Constitution. The power struggle between state and congressional legislation presented itself noticeably throughout America’s political history, during and even after slavery’s abolition. Southern delegates, apt to object federal strongholds, constantly strived for regulations that ultimately sustained the peculiar institution. After the implementation of the Compromise of 1850, Northern representatives similarly dissented from federal laws which failed to uphold their states’ mandates. Despite the

38 George Hickman. The Life of General Lewis Cass, with his Letters and Speeches on Various Subjects (Baltimore: N. Hickman, 1848), 66. 39 Hickman, The Life of General Lewis Cass, 67. 40 Potter, Impending Crisis, 58; see “Nicholson Letter,” Hickman, Life of General Cass, 65-70. 21 numerous proposals set forth by Northern and Southern representatives, however, no agreement surfaced to quell the territorial debate.41

The Wilmot Proviso’s abandonment and Mexican American War hero Zachary

Taylor’s presidential nomination constituted the final stroke for the “conscience” Whigs to entirely disconnect from the party. At Boston’s Tremont Temple on July 7, 1848, Free

Soil meeting chair and self-professed “old school” Whig, Richard Henry Dana, who later became an essential lawyer for the BVC, stressed his desire to abide by the

Constitution.42 Dana contended how “in good faith, as well as in profession,” he

supported the nation’s laws, but could not come to terms with Taylor’s nomination.43

The Whigs at the convention at Springfield, only a year prior, unanimously voted they

would never consent to acquired territory becoming a part of the Union “unless on the

unalterable condition that there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude

therein.”44 Yet, his Whig friends and colleagues, Dana admitted, did not hold the same

opinion about Free Soil; they were either unconcerned with the movement or felt they

could not oppose the Whig party. To permit Taylor’s nomination, Dana contended,

abandoned Massachusetts’ platform, “leaving the North silent, while the South

rejoiced.”45 Dana trusted the citizens of Massachusetts would not tolerate the

fraudulence, join with all states, and “appeal to reason, instincts, [and] great heart of the

41 Potter, Impending Crisis, 60. 42 Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and Richard Henry Dana, III, ed., Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Speeches in Stirring Times and Letters to a Son (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 146. 43 Dana, Jr., Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Speeches in Stirring Times, 146. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 148. 22 people.”46 Free Soil, Dana asserted, became a duty since politicians and organizations

had clearly failed to represent the objectives and sentiments of the people.47

Taylor’s nomination, consequently, produced a leaflet directed to the people of

Massachusetts, which declared the delegates who voted for him at the Whig National

Convention to have “exceeded their just authority” and had “proposed a candidate whom no Northern Whig [was] bound to support.”48 The announcement fervently refused the

slave holder’s selection and proclaimed Taylor was not a Whig because he did not abide

by party principles. His lack of opinion on public policy, support for slavery’s extension

into newly acquired territories, and the sheer blunder of Taylor’s slave holder status

based nomination, which “command[ed] votes no Whig from the Free States could

receive,” blatantly dismissed the faction’s ideologies.49 The party’s stability had

fractured when the Whigs of Massachusetts determined that impeding slavery’s

expansion was an essential condition of their political orthodoxy and Taylor’s candidacy,

a clear submission to the South, hampered the cause of free labor and freemen. The

leaflet summoned Massachusetts citizens who opposed Taylor’s nomination to meet at

the Convention at Worcester “in support of the principles to which they [were] pledged” and to cooperate with the other free states for the same purposes.50

Charles Francis Adams confirmed the direction of those present at Worcester

when he declared that he intended not to pledge support for any party. Adams, who

“[stood] ready to go forward in the great movement to establish freedom throughout [the]

hemisphere,” confirmed the imminent divide of the “Conscience” Whigs from the

46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 To The People of Massachusetts, 1848. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 23 party.51 All were in agreement when Charles Sumner, who followed Adams, attested that

General Taylor’s nomination for president, “forced upon the late Whig party,” derived from an “unhallowed union” by the politicians of the Southwest and the Northeast.52 It was a conspiracy between the “cotton planters and the cotton spinners…between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”53 The slave powers had dominated the country’s two significant political parties; Taylor’s nomination, accordingly, defended the powers’ interests, upheld its control, and perpetuated slavery’s extension. Those that should have been opposed to the nomination, Sumner proclaimed, carelessly acquiesced and cemented the direction the Whig party was advancing.54

The break from the powerful, established Whig party revealed the determination of the Massachusetts Conscience faction to stimulate renewed sentiments about Southern slave power and the constitutionality of the latter. The group concurred the Texas

Annexation, Mexican American War, and the possible spread of slavery in new territories was largely foreign to the principles in the Constitution and bared the slave power’s tyranny against the document. Sumner deemed the movement his fellow delegates engaged as “a continuance of the American Revolution.”55 It was a pivotal time to reawaken the feeling of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson and return the Constitution

“to the principles and practice of its early founders” when it promoted liberty and not oppression.56 The country should be governed by the Constitution’s intended purpose,

51 Charles Sumner, Orations and Speeches Volume II (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850), 250. 52 Sumner, Orations and Speeches, 256. 53 Ibid., 257. 54 Ibid., 256-257. 55 Ibid., 261. 56 Ibid. 24 that was in “harmony with the spirit of Freedom and not with the spirit of Slavery.”57

Sumner referred back to Washington’s last will and testament; after emancipating his

slaves, the Founding Father “[forbade] the sale or transportation out of said

commonwealth, of any slave I may die possessed of, under any pretense whatever.”58 At

that time, Sumner declared, slavery’s influence in the government was “moderate and

reserved,” but as time passed it became “audacious, aggressive, tyrannical” to the point

where it usurped control of the government.59

Sumner implored his fellow statesmen to learn from the slaveholders’ unity and

their strength in numbers. The slave powers, according to Sumner, could be defeated if

men put aside their differences, fused their own parties together, and promulgated

slavery’s demise. The coalition could attain victory by using political and moral means; they merely needed to confirm slavery’s Christian wrongs and illustrate how the

Constitution, the very document citizens lived by, was being dishonored. By the depth of

Sumner’s rallying cry, it was certain that he knew the profound consequences of employing legal and ethical answers to defeat the slave powers. He was determined the

cause toward freedom by way of constitutional and principled sentiments would “sweep

the heart strings of the people” and “smite all the chords with a might to draw forth

emotions, such as no political struggle [had] ever caused before.”60 It could not be

mistaken, however, that Sumner’s discourse pertained to the peculiar institution’s total departure, but only referred to its expansion within US boundaries. Slaveholders, already

57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 255. 60 Ibid., 263. 25 vexed at the institution’s attempted obstruction, would have raged at the radical thought of eliminating their livelihoods altogether.61

In August 1848, anti-slavery Whigs, the Liberty Party, and revengeful,

“barnburner” Democrats met at the Buffalo Convention to form the Free Soil Party.

Elected president of the convention, Charles Francis Adams instantly appealed to the

large gathering when he voiced the magnitude of the contentious Wilmot Proviso.

Adams referred to the proviso as an “abstraction” or an idea, which manifested similar safeguarding visions like the Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence. The Wilmot

Proviso, Adams contended, was essentially “a struggle between right and wrong…a contest between truth and falsehood, [and] between the principles of liberty and the rules of slavery.”62 He urged the crowd to grasp that slavery was not God’s law nor was its

endurance the intentions of the Constitution’s framers. The country, Adams asserted, had

wandered off course due to the slave powers and required guidance to restore it back to

just principles.63

Setting aside all past political affiliations, the Buffalo Convention’s delegates

contested against Southern slave aggression, resolved to defend free labor, and in the

process, “secure free soil for a free people.”64 It was necessary, read the resolutions, for

the group to depart from the party after Taylor’s nomination and the plain abdication of

Whig principles. The Free Soil objective, then, became an undertaking to save the

federal government from the abhorrent grasp of the slave power. The Free Soil Party

unanimously nominated Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams for

61 Ibid. 62 Oliver Dyer, Oliver Dyer's Phonographic Report of the Proceedings of the National Free Soil Convention at Buffalo, N. Y., August 9th and 10th, 1848 (Buffalo: G.H. Derby and Co.), 7. 63 Dyer, Proceedings, 7-8. 64 Ibid., 19. 26 vice-president for the 1848 Presidential Election. Dana, chosen as a delegate from

Massachusetts, was awestruck with the extraordinary scene at the convention, “where so many thousand men, of different political parties, could have met in one place” and

“adopted a complete set of principles, and their candidates, with entire unanimity, and dispersed without a single unpleasant occurrence.”65

The newly formed party was entirely aware their nominees had no chance to win the election, but also understood their ticket would split votes and secure the ballot for the lesser of two evils. Taylor’s victory, moreover, demonstrated the devoted, conservative nature of Whig party representatives and their inability to sway from the group despite its plain departure from traditional party ideologies. The Free Soil party’s creation, nonetheless, marked a turning point in American politics, especially in Massachusetts where men like Charles Sumner, who later will be seen elected to the senate, commanded the next wave of public feeling. The Free Soil Party’s future success, Dana perceived, lay in the ability to “have an organized demonstration of public sentiment, a means of systematic, continuous, certain, popular action.”66 Dana was confident in the party’s eventual victory because the men that comprised the Free Soil Party came from three distinct political parties and all sections in the United States.

The Free Soil movement gained traction by staunchly opposing slavery’s extension in new US territories, yet did not promote for the institution’s repeal altogether, but openly wished to uphold the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. In a Massachusetts Free

Soil Address, dated March 1850, the members declared they were not “disunionists, agitators, [or] fanatics” who could be compared to pro-slavery Southerners who wished

65 Dana, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Speeches, 161-162. 66 Ibid., 163. 27 for secession and the Union’s dissolution.67 Their ideas on the spread of slavery were not unique; only until the 1848 presidential election, affirmed the Free Soilers, did the Whig party withdraw from their stance on prohibition. Prior to the latter, the party had vehemently opposed slavery in the territories and supported the Northwest Ordinance.

The Free Soilers credited northern fears of Southern secession as the turning point for many in the Whig party. They held, however, that the South had incessantly threatened secession and would continue to do so if their demands on the slavery issue were not met.

The Free Soilers resolved to challenge Southern loyalty to the Union for threatening secession.68

In Massachusetts, the Free Soil party adhered to the anti-slavery viewpoints of the

members associated with the BVC. The group lay somewhat dormant after their initial

assembly and experience with Captain Hannum and the fugitive slave, Joseph. The

committee, however, had not dissipated altogether, but were compelled to fasten

themselves to the politics of the Free Soil party. It was understood by Sumner, Adams,

Howe, and other members that their existence in the national political arena coupled with

the local undertakings of the Vigilance Committee was needed to alter the course of

slavery’s growth. Christian values, constitutional objectives, and the need for political

power to foster a free society inspired both groups forward, but it was not until the

passage of the Compromise of 1850 that the Boston Vigilance Committee’s real presence

and effort to combat Southern slave power was implemented.69

The Compromise of 1850, the Massachusetts Free Soilers considered, was no

compromise at all and left the North yielding heavily to the South. They rejected the

67 Free Soil Address, 1. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 28 compromise because it forsook “the doctrine of prohibition and [left] the freedom of the

territories in peril.”70 Seen as an antithesis “to every principle of republican government,” the compromise inhibited congressional power and consigned the

territories’ government under the exclusive authority of the president.71 In direct contrast to the Boston Vigilance Committee’s objectives, the Compromise of 1850, specifically, the Fugitive Slave Act therein, extended the slave masters’ control over their human chattel in the free states, threatened the security of free colored men, and jeopardized “the peace of the Union.”72 The act revitalized the BVC and positioned the group for the next decade on the frontlines of the slavery dilemma, states’ rights, and on the national political stage.73

70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 29 SHADES OF DEEPER MEANING

William and Ellen Craft, a slave couple from Macon, Georgia, planned a remarkable escape to the North for a chance to live in freedom. During Christmas

holidays in 1848, both procured passes from their masters allowing them to travel for a

few days. Without permission to be away from service, the Crafts’ plan would have been

uncovered at first notice of their absence. Ellen, who took after her white father, was a

product of the relations between master and a female slave. She appeared so undeniably

white that the elaborate plot entailed Ellen disguised as a traveling gentleman and

William as her manservant. So as not to keep company or require her to speak at length

among other passengers on their travels, Ellen, wrapped in poultice, posed as a man

ailing from rheumatism.74 Traveling by train and steam engine, the intricate cover up

made possible the Crafts’ escape from Macon through the intolerant slave states of South

Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia before the couple reached freedom. After a two

week stay with Quakers in Philadelphia, the Crafts eventually settled in Boston and lived undisturbed for two years until the enactment of the Compromise of 1850.75

A clear concession to the South, a harsh fugitive slave law contained within the

Compromise of 1850 infuriated anti-slavery groups and reinvigorated the Boston

74 Ellen, who could not read or write, knew she would be required to sign registration logs on the journey. Donned in gentlemen’s clothing, glasses, and short cut hair, Ellen wrapped her hand and face in poultice (a cloth-like material saturated with medicine to relieve soreness of the body) to make herself appear incapable of writing and disguise her beardless face. Despite a few close calls, Ellen and William passed as a sickly, male traveler and personal slave throughout their daring expedition to attain freedom. See William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles; Or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery for the incredible account in its entirety. 75 William Craft. Running a Thousand Miles; Or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: William Tweedie, 1860). 30 Vigilance Committee. The Fugitive Slave Act was enacted on September 18, 1850 and

contained excessive laws that superseded many local and state laws and legal methods.

The measures were complex compared to the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act and represented a

great expansion of federal power over the states. Federal judges appointed commissioners

to try fugitive slave cases and issue removal documents. The documents could neither be

appealed in any court nor did slaves have the right to habeas corpus or to testify. A slave

owner merely had to obtain a document from their home state that provided a description

of the escaped slave, which was presented to a commissioner to have their property

apprehended. Commissioners were paid five dollars if they rejected the slave owner’s

claim or ten dollars if they issued a certificate of removal. Federal marshals were

authorized to use local officials and citizens to aid in capturing fugitive slaves, whereas if

they refused to assist, faced fines and possible imprisonment.76

The Fugitive Slave Act’s passage provoked Vigilance Committee members who

immediately called a meeting at Faneuil Hall and invited anti-slavery members. Charles

Francis Adams, Jr. chaired the committee and declared it absurd to believe the act settled the slavery question and simply carried out the conditions in the United States

Constitution. Adams asserted that the Constitution only prevented measures in free states that denied slave identification and recovery, but was not an instrument to make all citizens part and parcel to “domestic tyranny.”77 He implored that men who professed the

latter overlooked constitutional benefits and highlighted its shortcomings. He argued that

the Constitution not conflict with the “moral and religious principles, with the love of

76 Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2015), 124-125. 77 The Liberator, October 1850. 31 freedom and the hopes of happiness of millions of conscientious men.”78 Violence,

Adams advised, was not the answer, yet he pleaded with the men and women before him

to persevere and have the “odious law” repealed.79

Witnessed by many townspeople, white and black, the Boston Vigilance

Committee considered the fate of fugitive slaves and freedmen in Massachusetts and

issued new resolutions in response to the Fugitive Slave Act. Written by devout

abolitionist Theodore Parker, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. delivered the resolutions, which began with the committee’s belief that the law conflicted with their Christian values. The law, Dana maintained, infringed upon Christianity’s golden rule, “do unto others as we would have them do to us,” and God’s commandment that no escaped servant should be delivered back to his master.80 The committee rebuked the law as conflicting with the

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, since it denied liberty, due process,

and a writ of habeas corpus. The resolutions further deemed that no citizen should

participate in returning fugitive slaves, but should promise, instead, to aid freedmen and

escaped slaves. Dana concluded the law was offensive to “a vast majority of the people

of the United States” and urged its instant repeal.81 Fifty members initially were appointed to a Committee of Vigilance and Safety to take any action necessary “to protect the lives and liberty of the colored people in the city.”82

The Boston Vigilance Committee soon expanded to nearly 250 members that included a legal and an executive committee in which Theodore Parker was the chairman.

78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, Minister of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, Boston, Volume II (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1864), 94. 81 The Liberator, October 18, 1850. 82 Weiss, Theodore Parker, 94; The Liberator, October 18, 1850. 32 John Andrew, prominent budding Boston lawyer served as the organization’s secretary,

treasurer, and legal counsel. The committee’s main purpose, Parker declared, was to be on the lookout for federal marshals in pursuit of fugitives. If in pursuit, the committee warned the fugitive and made certain that he or she had legal counsel to delay any proceedings. If the fugitive was declared a slave, Parker asserted, agents were notified and organized an escape. Parker attested that anti-slavery men helped the fugitive first;

“we, like Christ, are to seek and to save that which is lost.”83 William and Ellen Craft’s

case became the initial account of the BVC’s refugee affairs. Their exceptional escape to

freedom and the drama that ensued was oftentimes romanticized in fugitive slave

stories.84

After the Fugitive Slave Act’s passage, the Crafts’ master authorized slave

catchers, Knight and Hughes, to travel to Boston for their return. Upon their arrival, the

Boston Vigilance Committee took immediate action and separately hid Ellen and an

armed William from the slave catchers. Parker, who felt a personal attachment to the

Crafts since they were his parishioners, sought out Knight and Hughes and warned them violence could befall them if they tried to take the Crafts back to slavery. Initially, the

slave hunters ardently refused to abort their mission to carry Ellen and William back to

bondage, but they began to experience difficulty wherever they went in Boston. In

addition to being heckled in the streets, the two were arrested on separate occasions for

defamation and planning to kidnap the Crafts. During a second meeting with Parker,

Knight and Hughes griped they feared for their safety after an encounter with one black

83 Weiss, Theodore Parker, 95. 84 Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 436. 33 man who threatened Hughes’ life. The pair eventually succumbed to the pressure and

found their way on a train back home to Georgia with no slaves in hand.85

The Boston Vigilance Committee followed its resolves to fruition when they had

Knight and Hughes arrested on slander and kidnapping charges, delayed their warrants

from being served, and ultimately chased them off. The Crafts’ case and the committee,

moreover, received national attention when the slave hunters failed in their attempt to

catch the fugitives. William Craft wrote, “Our old masters, having heard how their

agents were treated at Boston, wrote to Mr. Fillmore…to know what he could do to have

us sent back to slavery.”86 The slave powers indeed held influence over the country, yet

President Fillmore, who took office after Zachary Taylor’s unexpected death and was responsible for the enactment of the Compromise of 1850, attested that “the Union must and shall be preserved, and this can only be done, by a faithful and impartial administration of the laws.”87 Fillmore further disclosed to his Secretary of State, Daniel

Webster, that he personally loathed slavery, but confirmed the government had the

obligation to tolerate and furnish the institution the rights afforded it by the Constitution

“till we can get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the

world.”88 Fillmore asserted that it was a last resort to use military force to uphold the

Fugitive Slave Act, but if necessary he would not be reluctant to deliver “greater power”

and “bring the whole force of the government to sustain the law.”89

85 Weiss, Theodore Parker, 95. 86 Craft, Running a Thousand Miles, 92. 87 Millard Fillmore and Frank Hayward Severance, ed., Millard Fillmore Papers, Volume I (Buffalo: Buffalo Historical Society, 1907), 334. 88 Fillmore, Fillmore Papers, 335. 89 Ibid., 336. 34 Fillmore’s viewpoint, however, did not deter anti-slavery and abolitionist groups.

William Lloyd Garrison’s, The Liberator published “Reception and Treatment of

Kidnappers,” shortly after the Craft affair, and used the actions the Vigilance Committee had taken as examples to instruct the public on how to handle slave catchers. The article directed citizens to post notices to inform the community the hunters were present, persuade business owners to deny them services, and inevitably harass the derelicts right out of town.90

Abolitionist and Vigilance Committee member, Reverend Samuel May,

responsible for procuring asylum for the Crafts in England, wrote to his British friend

who assisted the couple, and declared that the United States was determined to see the

Fugitive Slave Act through to completion. He lamented that it was a shameful

occurrence to call on the very land “our fathers fought against…in order to be free” for

refuge because man had cursed America “with his devices and crimes against human

souls and human rights.”91 The law, asserted May, had “stirred up the slave spirit of the

country,” which gave reason for the Crafts’ desired departure from the United States.92

William Craft, May communicated, declared himself representative of the two to three

hundred fugitives in Boston at the time and rationalized that leaving the country would

benefit the group. If seized, the Crafts would have been made examples of the slaveholders’ revenge and more instances such as their own would have likely followed.

The Crafts’ affair and May’s letter to his British ally revealed how intricate and widespread the network to aid fugitive slaves had been in the United States and abroad.

BVC members worked together with anti-slavery and abolitionist groups to secure

90 The Liberator, January, 1851. 91 Craft, Running a Thousand Miles, 91. 92 Ibid., 90. 35 slaves’ freedom on the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slave escape attempts continued throughout the decade in places that were abolitionist strongholds, with Underground

Railroad routes spreading through Northern states and as far West as Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. Refugees on their way to Canada passed through Boston which was noted as a main stop on the secret system. Fugitives arrived on foot, as paid passengers on ships and trains, and as stowaways in trade vessels from southern ports. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the number of runaways that travelled through Boston significantly increased. Some fugitives found employment and remained in the city, however, the detestable law terrified most and even led blacks from border states into

Boston en route to Canada.93

Abolitionist and treasurer, Francis Jackson, recorded the Boston Vigilance

Committee Treasurer’s accounts from October 1850 to April 1861. The detailed records provided in the account book revealed the organization’s professional and systematic operation. Donations came from citizens in cities and towns throughout Massachusetts.

The register showed numerous entries for transportation, clothing, money, physician visits, and boarding to aid fugitive slaves. Fund raising collections and disbursements for lectures, printing, posting notices, and postage were also documented. One entry showed payment for a fugitive slave’s child’s funeral expenses, a grim reminder of the danger and risks the runaways bore to obtain freedom. Listed separately, the book’s ending displayed the legal committee’s names and accounts held for law services and court

93 Wilbur H. Siebert, “The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts,” The New England Quarterly 9, 3 (September, 1936): 447, 455-56. 36 proceedings, a clear testament that the Vigilance Committee played both sides against the

middle.94

Years prior to becoming the Vigilance Committee treasurer, Jackson, a staunch

abolitionist, resigned from his post as a Massachusetts Justice of the Peace. The oath to support the Constitution, Jackson attested, pledged allegiance to a document that

“contain[ed] provisions calculated and intended to foster, cherish, uphold, and perpetuate slavery.”95 He deposited his efforts as a true defender of the slave’s cause and hid many

fugitives in his home during his time with the BVC. These well-known instances, evidenced in a testimonial to the late Jackson in the New York Tribune: “…his door [had] never been closed to those who suffered persecution, whether white or black,” and his home functioned as “a haven of refuge to those flying slaves who neither man befriended or the law protected.”96 Upon his death, Jackson designated $2000.00 for fugitive slaves’

assistance and made certain in his will to protest the injustices his beloved state had

inflicted upon an undeserving people. Despite Massachusetts failures, however, Jackson wished safety for future fugitive slaves who escaped to her borders. Jackson’s actions were clear testaments to the Boston Vigilance Committee labors; it was no wonder

William Craft pointedly acknowledged the committee “for the very kind and noble manner in which they assisted us to preserve our liberties and to escape from Boston.”97

Interracial collaboration between whites and blacks in anti-slavery and

abolitionist groups, including the Vigilance Committee, was especially prevalent after the

94 Francis Jackson, The Boston Vigilance Committee, Appointed at the Public meeting in Faneuil Hall, October 21, 1850 to assist Fugitive Slaves: Treasurer’s Accounts (Boston: Boston Vigilance Committee, 1850). 95 William Lloyd Garrison, In Memoriam. Testimonials to the Life and Character of the Late Francis Jackson (Boston: R.F. Wallcut, 1861), 31. 96 Ibid., Testimonials, 30. 97 Craft, Running a Thousand Miles, 93. 37 passage of the Compromise of 1850 and throughout the decade. Prominent whites, like

Jackson and Theodore Parker constantly hid runaways in their homes, however, most escapees were sheltered among black Bostonians and abolitionists. In Beacon Hill, a black neighborhood in the city’s North side, black men and women kept watch and labored daily to provide shelter and support for runaways. Provided secretly and usually undocumented, the cases of individual black involvement in Boston’s underground railroad has been difficult to identify. Records show, however, how the upper and middle class in Boston’s black society who worked closely with the BVC at the leadership level, opened their homes to fugitive slaves. One such home located at 66 Philips Street

(formerly Southac Street) served as the principle hideaway for fugitive slaves. The home belonged to escaped slave Lewis Hayden, who became a prominent figure in Boston’s black community and later in the Massachusetts’ legislature.98

Hayden, born a slave in Lexington, KY around 1811, procured his freedom with the help of abolitionists Reverend Calvin Fairbank and teacher Delia A. Webster.99 Both had been charged and sentenced to jail time for their role in aiding Lewis, his wife,

Harriet, and ten-year-old son Jo’s escape. Ms. Webster, sentenced to two years hard labor, had been pardoned for her part in the escape. Fairbank, however, was imprisoned for nearly five years of a fifteen-year sentence for assisting the Hayden family. Fairbank recounted his first meeting with Lewis Hayden and explained why he had taken an interest in helping him. When asked why he desired freedom, Fairbank noted, Hayden

98 Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 19, 230. 99 Depending on the source, Lewis Hayden’s birth year ranged from 1811-1815. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hayden noted he was unsure of his exact age, but, ironically, knew he had been the property of Reverend Adam Runkin, a Presbyterian minister. 38 replied, “Because I’m a man.”100 Despite the significant penalties associated with

abetting fugitive slaves, Fairbank needed no other reason to facilitate the Haydens’

escape to Canada.101

Lewis Hayden and his family remained in Canada for four years and after a brief

stint in Detroit, laid down roots in Boston. Hayden became a successful business owner

of a clothing store, but quickly became involved in the anti-slavery movement in the

Boston circuit. Undoubtedly driven by his experience as a former man in bondage,

Hayden joined the Boston Vigilance Committee and acted as liaison between the white activists and the black community. His participation and efforts, while occupying a leadership role within the Vigilance Committee and his community, had been logged

repeatedly in Jackson’s account book. Extensive entries indicated Hayden continuously

boarded fugitives, supplied clothing, posted bills, and furnished carriages to aid in

escapes.102 He organized underground activities between white and black anti-slavery advocates and structured missions for working-class blacks who contributed to the cause.

As community leader, Hayden offered his friendship to many and oftentimes helped

unskilled workers with finances. It was typical for Hayden’s circle to consist of lower-

level and working-class blacks rather than the upper or middle class in society. 103

In Reminiscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, Massachusetts native

Austin Bearse documented his experiences working as an agent for the Boston Vigilance

Committee. As a young man, Bearse worked aboard trade vessels along the South

Carolina coast where he witnessed slavery’s brutalities and his own heartache when

100 Calvin Fairbank, During Slavery Times; How “He Fought the Good Fight” to “Prepare the Way” (Chicago: R & R McCabe and Co., 1890), 46. 101 Fairbank, During Slavery Times, 46, 53, 55. 102 Jackson, The Boston Vigilance Committee, Treasurer’s Accounts, 8, 10, 18, 22. 103 James Oliver Horton, Black Bostonians (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1999), 58-59. 39 families were separated “with as little concern as calves and pigs are selected out of a lot

of domestic animals.”104 After reading the Liberator, he devoted his life to the cause and acted together with Boston blacks to combat the peculiar institution. Bearse’s name was listed numerous times throughout Jackson’s account book, which shed light on the services of working-class whites who challenged slavery. As the doorkeeper for the

Vigilance Committee, he notified committee members of meetings and stood guard at the

gatherings to ensure only affiliates attended. Bearse, entrusted as the committee’s

collection agent, obtained donations and funds for legal proceedings. Despite his

responsibilities with various clandestine Vigilance Committee posts, Bearse’s most

exceptional and dangerous tasks were accomplished aboard the Moby Dick, which

literature has suggested the novel Moby Dick, written by Herman Melville in 1851, was

an allegory to the Fugitive Slave Law. The listing in Jackson’s account book: April 28,

1851- Austin Bearse- boat in the harbor, and Bearse’s memoir attested that the ensuing

stories, which could pass as exceptional tales, were actual events.105

Bearse owned and worked the yacht Moby Dick as a pleasure sailing and fishing

schooner, but it was also used as a refugee rescue boat. On word that a fugitive was in

the harbor, Bearse and a few associates sailed the Moby Dick to the brig that held the

runaway and brought him safely on board. He produced a change of clothing for the

fugitive and transported him into the care of another Vigilance member who guided the

escapee to the Underground Railroad’s next route. In one account, a captain blocked

Bearse from retrieving a slave; no associates were in his company, thus with no help he

104 Austin Bearse, Reminiscences of Fugitive-slave Law Days in Boston (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 9. 105 Jackson, The Boston Vigilance Committee, Treasurer’s Accounts, 18; Bearse, Reminiscences, 9. 40 left the brig and planned a return. Bearse returned in darkness with a dozen old hats and

coats attached to the Moby Dick’s rail and demanded the captain hand over the fugitive to

prevent bloodshed. The captain fell for the ploy and gave up the stowaway. He

complained the next day in a newspaper ad that pirates had boarded his ship to save the

slave and offered five hundred dollars reward for the gang leader.106

Unlike Austin Bearse, Lewis Hayden left no memoir, but a personal account of

his earlier years, documented by the legendary Harriet Beecher Stowe in A Key to Uncle

Tom’s Cabin, illuminated the profound and lasting effects slavery had on his life.

Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the precursor to A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sold

millions of copies and placed the book only second to the Bible during the 19th century.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, originally intended as a short series in the abolitionist newspaper The

National Era, ran for forty weeks and became the foremost novel that revealed the

injustices provoked by slavery in literature form. Written after the passage of the

Fugitive Slave Act, the book’s esteem garnered national and worldwide sympathy for the

slave’s plight, but similarly received backlash from the proslavery populace. Legend

states that when Abraham Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe he considered her book as one of the

root causes of the Civil War. Factual or not, Stowe’s story catapulted the concern for

slaves and the nation’s peculiar institution into public interest.107

In his memoirs, black abolitionist, former slave, and statesman, Frederick

Douglass regarded Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a work of marvelous depth and power,” which

“nothing could have better suited the moral and humane requirements of the hour.”108

106 Bearse, Reminiscences, 34-37. 107 Potter, Impending Crisis, 140.; Harriet Beecher Stowe center.org 108 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford: Park Publishing, 1882), 351. 41 The book’s influence, Douglass asserted, was “amazing, instantaneous, and universal”

and “favorably touched the American heart.”109 Stowe’s work, however, endured brutal

criticism by Northern and Southern citizens alike. The Southern Ladies Journal likened

Stowe to Benedict Arnold, “a traitor,” whose “treachery [was] a thousand times more

black and bitter.”110 Stowe’s detractors claimed her account fabricated and lacked

evidence that slavery was an inhumane institution. In response, Stowe wrote A Key to

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which consisted of first-hand accounts from actual people that resembled the characters in her story. Lewis Hayden was one such individual.111

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Cassy’s character, a fair woman who became unhinged

throughout her sexually subjugated slave life, reminded Hayden of his own mother. Ill- treated and sold numerous times, Hayden’s mother suffered the same fate as Cassy. He remembered a “high-spirited” woman, who, sadly, had “crazy turns” after she had been in

prison for rejecting one of her masters. Hayden recalled one memory of his mother when

she had been given permission for a brief reprieve from custody.112 Upon seeing him,

Hayden wrote, she “sprung and caught my arms and seemed going to break them, and

then said, “I’ll fix you so they never get you.”113 He was seven or eight years old and

screamed thinking his mother would kill him. Hayden shared the recollection of his mother’s insanity with Mrs. Stowe and attributed it to the cruel separation from her family.114

109 Ibid., 351. 110 (Quoted) in Joseph P. Roppolo, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and New Orleans: A Study in Hate,” New England Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 3 (Sep. 1957), 354. 111 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Co., 1853), 155. 112 Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 155. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 42 Religious ministers, Hayden contended, did not deem “it any more wrong to

separate the families of slaves by sale than to separate any domestic animals.”115 Upon

notice that his master, a Presbyterian preacher, planned to relocate to Pennsylvania,

Hayden recalled how he hoped he would accompany him and given freedom. Instead, he witnessed his brothers and sisters sold on the auction block and himself exchanged for

two horses. Hayden explained the “strange feelings” he experienced when he saw the

horses and how he “looked at those horses, and walked round them, and thought for them

I was sold!”116 He was certain that he had been given more compassion and caring

guidance on how to obtain freedom from “gamblers and such sort of men than

Christians.”117 Like the character Haley in Stowe’s novel, the slave traders Hayden

encountered knew in their hearts the involvement in the slave system wrong and would

eventually atone for their contributions. The difference for Hayden was the irony that

religious men did not identify with slavery’s transgressions, unlike those cast aside by

society. Given unmistakable purpose in his life to aid the lowly, the memories of his

mother, who partly recovered from her torment, and his own slave days, nonetheless

remained with Hayden as evidenced by his personal account in A Key to Uncle Tom’s

Cabin.118

As Uncle Tom’s Cabin shook the nation, excitement continued and gained

Washington’s attention, once again, when another fugitive slave case erupted in Boston.

Shadrach, alias Frederick Jenkins, was arrested on a claim that he was a fugitive slave who belonged to Virginia slave owner John Debree. Shadrach was held at the Boston

115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., 154-155. 43 court house located near the office of Boston Vigilance Committee lawyer, Richard

Henry Dana, Jr. Dana responded immediately; he obtained a petition for habeas corpus that stated Shadrach was unaware if there had been a warrant for his arrest. Dana’s strategy to test the Fugitive Slave Act and establish if the commissioner had issued a warrant failed when Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw dismissed his petition as insufficient. He surmised that Chief Justice Shaw and men like him were inherently good, but the slave question was so deep seated that their conservatism conquered. Dana, perturbed by Chief

Justice Shaw’s coarse conduct, resolved to appeal the next day to another judge with the petition.119

While the Boston Vigilance Committee worked on a plan to aid the fugitive, a

crowd of black Bostonians assembled at the court house where Shadrach remained, as

Dana described, among pompous and ludicrous authorities. From his office window,

Dana witnessed Shadrach’s fortunes suddenly change when two burly black men quickly

ushered the fugitive from the court house, “with his clothes half torn off and so stupefied

by the sudden rescue and the violence of his dragging off that he sat almost dumb, but the

men seized him and being powerful fellows hurried him through the square.”120 Bands

followed and cheered behind Shadrach and his liberators so swiftly and unexpected there

was no time for the officers to obstruct the rescue or give chase. Shadrach advanced

through the Garrisonian rescue circuit and made his way to Montreal, Canada. Dana

rejoiced and contended Shadrach had been rescued from an unjust and unconstitutional

119 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Richard Henry Dana, A Biography, Volume I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1890), 179-182; The Liberator; *Other texts list Shadrach’s last name as Minkins and Wilkins. 120 Adams, Richard Henry Dana, 182. 44 law. Abolitionist Theodore Parker thanked God for Shadrach’s rescue and considered it

“the most noble deed done in Boston since the destruction of the tea in 1773.”121

Just days after the Shadrach rescue, President Fillmore issued a warning

proclamation directly to Boston citizens. He voiced outrage at the “violent assault”

committed against the marshals involved, although, save for a few bruised egos, many

others recounted no one had been physically injured.122 Fillmore urged the good people

of Boston to uphold the country’s laws and assist the marshals with recapturing the

fugitive. He demanded future incidents prohibited and the offenders involved who,

“aided, abetted, assisted, harbored, or concealed” the fugitive, prosecuted.123 In the

Senate chamber, Henry Clay, author of the Compromise of 1850, scolded abolitionists for

inciting blacks to rise up, arm themselves, and oppose the Constitution. He blamed his

fellow statesmen for making speeches in the Senate and House of Representatives that

provoked noncompliance to the Fugitive Slave Law. Clay confirmed the Fugitive Slave

Bill had been upheld in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, yet the “Union was

denounced” in Massachusetts where the law “could never be executed.”124

Boston authorities arrested a number of men, white and black, in connection with the Shadrach case. The Boston Vigilance Committee helped finance the legal team who defended those involved and all evaded conviction. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. argued for his friend and colleague, Charles Davis, counsel for Shadrach who was accused of aiding in his escape. Dana’s powerful address to the court illustrated Davis’ character as a

121 Adams, Richard Henry Dana, 182-183; Weiss, Theodore Parker, 103. 122 James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, Volume V (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1897), 109. 123 Richardson, Compilation, 110. 124 Calvin Colton, The Speeches of Henry Clay, Volume II (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1857), 609-616. 45 proud, propertied, and honorable man who would never violate the law he swore to

uphold by instigating against it. Davis, moreover, assumed the duty to aid oppressed

people who needed the greatest protection from the courts. Dana maintained the marshal

had overreacted by hastily alerting Washington before obtaining true facts about the

Shadrach rescue. The rescue had not been a premeditated affair, but simply a small

group of men, frightened and threatened by the Fugitive Slave Law, who helped their

friend avoid a horrid future.125

The President and Congressional members, Dana contended, had alarmed themselves to the point of “rashness and delusion.”126 Government officials, newspapers,

and public meetings, moreover, had judged Bostonians treasonous and under black rule.

Dana assured Bostonians were still quiet, peaceful citizens, confident in their laws and

had not undergone civil unrest. He feared, however, that rights and freedoms may be

violated if some Bostonians continued to feel intimidated and ostracized because they

held different opinions about the Fugitive Slave Law. Dana contended the law was a bill

that citizens had every right to overturn if they saw fit. That power did not come from an

honorable man like Davis assigning downtrodden men a rebellious task, instead, it came

from the polls. Dana conducted the case brilliantly and Davis was set free after the commissioner found he committed no injustices.127

The authorities had their revenge in April 1851 when Thomas Sims, a Georgia

slave owned by James Potter, was arrested and returned to bondage under the Fugitive

Slave Law. Sims, a brick layer by trade, lived and worked in Savannah, ten miles from

his master’s home. Potter claimed he allowed Sims to live and work independently with

125 Dana, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Speeches, 179-183. 126 Ibid., 186. 127 Ibid., 187-190. 46 the intention that Sims paid for his freedom with his wages. Potter maintained Sims had

not paid him more than ten dollars and spent the remainder of his earnings on drink and

women. Just a month prior to his arrest, Sims escaped to Boston where he telegraphed an

acquaintance in Savannah with a request to send him money. The telegraph, undoubtedly

helped Potter learn Sims’ whereabouts; he sent an agent, armed with legal documents, for

his retrieval. Potter contended he wished to recover Sims only to test the Fugitive Slave

Law’s effectiveness.128

A warrant was issued for Sims’ who during a struggle injured an arresting officer

but was subdued and held in the Boston courthouse where the government had prepared

to thwart any escape or rescue attempt. The National Era described the scene at the court

house: “Every precaution was taken to guard against surprise; chains were stretched

around the court house; the police appeared in great force and two companies of military

were ordered out.”129 The Liberator denounced the site as “one of the most disgraceful

scenes ever witnessed in the city.”130 In a letter to Charles Sumner, Theodore Parker

wished times were different in Boston and lamented the shamed city for kidnapping men.

Parker admitted to Sumner he never had confidence in the Massachusetts Supreme Court

regarding the Fugitive Slave Law. The latter applied to the conservative judges who still

dominated in Massachusetts.131

The Boston Vigilance Committee legal team included Dana and Sumner who,

among others, exhausted the Fugitive Slave Bill’s technicalities. Sims’ defense counsel

argued the bill’s constitutionality; the Fugitive Slave Act, asserted the defense, delegated

128 Harold Schwartz, “Fugitive Slave Days in Boston,” The New England Quarterly 27, 2 (June, 1954): 197; The Monthly Law Reporter, May, 1851. 129 National Era, April 10, 1851. 130 The Liberator, April 11, 1851. 131 Weiss, Theodore Parker, 107. 47 unjust powers to commissioners who delivered rulings on such cases. A commissioner,

claimed the counsel, was not a judge appointed by the United States Court and should not

hold judicial powers. Sims’, moreover, was entitled to a trial by jury since the case

involved property and personal liberty rights. Denial of trial by jury voided the case on

unconstitutional grounds. Boston Vigilance Committee lawyers also examined states’

rights and declared the testimony against Sims taken in Georgia was insufficient in

Massachusetts. Sims’ defense tried in earnest to dismiss the Power of Attorney as null

and void and cited the statute could not give the authority to any person to claim Sims as

his slave.132

Sumner procured a writ of habeas corpus for Sims, but to no avail. When the defense argued slavery did not exist in Massachusetts, Judge Woodbury who granted the writ, abruptly exclaimed, “Yes, but there is slavery in the Union; and Massachusetts is yet in the Union, thank God!”133 Sims’ defense was up against conservative lawmakers

like Judge Woodbury whose rash outburst, Dana suggested, was nothing more than “a

political speech intended for Southern markets.”134 In vain, Sumner and Dana criticized

the warrant and arrest as “mere tricks” and the case against Sims’ unjust and

unconstitutional. The BVC counsel fought for Sims’ freedom by way of the Constitution,

however, the Fugitive Slave Law deprived slaves any protection under the Constitution.

Judge Woodbury remanded Sims back to slavery in Georgia where upon his arrival he

was publicly whipped and sold on slavery’s auction block.135

132 The Monthly Law Reporter, May, 1851. 133 Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Volume III (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 193-194. 134 Adams, Richard Henry Dana, 191. 135 Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 509. 48 A ROPE OF SAND OR A BAND OF STEEL

The ambition behind the Boston Vigilance Committee’s motives and actions

could be explained by the changing political tide in Massachusetts. A year prior to

Boston’s fugitive slave cases that propelled Massachusetts onto center stage of the

slavery debate and inspired Stowe’s gripping Uncle Tom’s Cabin, prominent Whig,

Daniel Webster altered his prior stance on the slavery issue in his Seventh of March

speech. Webster claimed that the religious fervor in the North, “with greatly augmented

force,” denounced slavery as “a wrong…an oppression” that was not “according to the

meek spirit in the Gospel.”136 Those in the South, Webster contended, who, raised amid

slavery and had been familiar with the relationship between the races, “treat[ed] the

subjects of this bondage with care and kindness.”137 He stated further that slavery was an

established custom in Southern society, which could not be readily dismissed by the existing generation. Webster attacked the press, abolitionist societies, and the North for mischievously purporting slavery’s grievances, which had been part and parcel to the

United States from its inception. His speech alienated anti-slavery enthusiasts to the highest degree when he judged the South’s complaints correct, and the North wrong for refusing the return of fugitive slaves to service. Webster contended, moreover, that

136 Daniel Webster, The Constitution and the Union. Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, US Senate, 1st sess., Appendix, pp. 269-76. March 7, 1850, 270. 137 Ibid. 49 constitutional adherence and the gravity of judicial resolves should be respected and

obeyed in order to meet legislative duties.138

Just days prior to Webster’s speech, John C. Calhoun, a leading Southern

statesman and slavery advocate, addressed the Senate. He regarded Northern agitation

toward slavery as the leading cause which had driven the issue to the point where it could

“no longer be disguised or denied that the Union [was] in danger.”139 Confident in

Calhoun’s outlook, Webster’s speech attempted to alleviate tensions between North and

South by pleading for each side to preserve the Union. Webster proclaimed, moreover,

that a peaceful secession was absurd and proposed for the Union’s coherence under “a

great popular constitutional government, guarded by legislation, by law, and by

judicature, and defended by the whole affections of the people.”140 Condemned by many

constituents “if not by a majority of the whole North,” Webster’s Seventh of March

speech, which included his open support for the Compromise of 1850, cost him any goals

of becoming a presidential candidate.141

Published shortly after Webster’s Seventh of March speech, Boston’s

Emancipator and Republican, lamented the “Fall of Daniel Webster” with “sorrow . . . with shame that the honor of Massachusetts should thus be tarnished by the son she [had]

138 Ibid. 139 Richard K. Cralle, ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun Delivered in the House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883), 542. 140 Webster, The Constitution and the Union. Congressional Globe, 289. 141 George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster Volume II (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1870), 410; Daniel Webster’s close friend and literary executor, George Ticknor Curtis, contended that Mr. Webster was a principled statesman, dutifully acting on “moral independence” who was certain the Union was in grave danger. Mr. Webster, maintained Curtis, expected his speech to attain him the presidency, yet knew his Seventh of March speech may have alienated Northern electors, but accordingly would have gained him Southern support. Mr. Curtis, a “cotton” Whig, who strove to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act, was a Federal Commissioner in both the Shadrach and Sims cases. 50 delighted to honor.”142 The North, wrote the Emancipator, listened to the “time-worn

hackneyed cant of the political trickster” as he vowed support for the Fugitive Slave Bill

with the intention to “[crawl] through the slime of servility to the height of official

power.”143 Massachusetts newspapers blared at Webster’s seeming betrayal and declared

his days over when he “signed his own political death warrant and dug his own political

grave” with his patronage to the slave South.144 Charles Sumner deemed Webster “an

archangel ruined,” and even his fellow Whig, Robert C. Winthrop said Webster’s speech

“would have killed any Northern man except himself.”145 Webster, nonetheless, stood

behind his views and his allegiance to the Constitution and the Union. He claimed he did not contradict his past position on slavery’s increase or expansion, but unreservedly pledged his faith to the United States Government.146

Despite Webster’s apparent alienation, conservative Massachusetts businessmen

applauded his commitment to the Union and supported his decision to back the

Compromise of 1850. Northern mercantile and manufacturing industries relied on

southern purchasing power to fuel their businesses and fear of discontent, due to the

slavery issue, had triggered business owners to heed to the South. Business interests, therefore, threw their support in favor of the Compromise of 1850 as a means to keep southern businesses involved in the market. Conservatives failed to realize, however, (or simply wished to maintain the status quo) that the system operated both ways; if not for northern textile and manufacturing factories, the cotton South would not have a basis for

142 Emancipator and Republican, March 21, 1850, Boston, Massachusetts. 143 Ibid. 144 Semi-Weekly Republican, March 8, 1850, Boston, Massachusetts. 145 David H. Donald, Charles Sumner and the coming of the Civil War (Naperville: Sourcebook, Inc., 2009), 156. 146 Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, 417.

51 industry. Yet, in a public letter to Webster, nearly four hundred merchants, lawyers, physicians, scholars, and clerics from Newburyport, Massachusetts endorsed the statesman and the Compromise of 1850. Signed by “friends and constituents,” the letter commended Webster’s speech for its “manly temper, liberal, and conciliatory sentiments” and “the unanswerable power…with which it [developed] and [maintained] the true principles of the Constitution.”147 The devotees honored his loyalty and courage displayed while reminding the North and South of their constitutional commitments and thanked Webster for his service “towards preserving and strengthening [the] National

Union.”148

It is difficult to state if Webster’s support for the Compromise of 1850 was a tactic to pursue other political aspirations or if he foresaw a coalition being formed between Free Soilers and Democrats to plant an influential candidate in his senatorial seat. In July 1850, after President Taylor’s unforeseen passing, however, Webster resigned from the Senate and became Secretary of State after being offered the position by President Fillmore. Winthrop filled Webster’s seat temporarily and was later named

Whig party candidate for Senator. The Massachusetts Whigs, at that juncture, continued their support for the Compromise of 1850 until its passage and subsequently followed through with the Fugitive Slave Law’s stipulations. While Webster Whigs filled commissioner, district attorney, and legal posts to implement the Fugitive Slave Law,

Free Soilers and Democrats combined to win the Massachusetts Senate.149

147 Letter from Citizens of Newburyport, Massachusetts to Mr. Webster, in relation to his speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th March 1850. Washington: Gideon and Co., 1850), 3. 148 Letter from Citizens of Newburyport, Massachusetts to Mr. Webster, 3; Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner Volume III 1845-1860 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 204-205. 149 Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 209. 52 Charles Sumner’s defeat of Winthrop for Senator can be explained by the Whig

support for the Compromise’s Fugitive Slave Bill at a time when the excitement of the

Craft affair loomed heavily on the Massachusetts public. Winthrop, who had aligned

himself with Webster’s views had not denounced the passage of the Compromise of

1850, yet, Sumner’s speech condemning the Fugitive Slave Bill prior to his election

roused anti-slavery sentiments in the Commonwealth. Sumner’s appeal to the

Democrats, moreover, encouraged a successful coalition between the latter and the Free

Soilers. The Massachusetts Democrats had been largely farmers and artisans, who,

untied to the mercantile interests prevailing within the Whig party and unrestrained by a

national Democratic slaveholding grip, favored the Free Soil party.150

After holding power in Massachusetts for nearly a quarter of a century, it was

certain that the Whigs did not dispel immediately before or after Sumner’s election to the

Senate. Boston’s Daily Atlas published “Whigs of Massachusetts, are you ready!” on

November 6, 1850, less than a week before the election. It reminded constituents of the

benevolent Whig legislature’s successes throughout the state that advanced the people of

the Commonwealth. A first-rate education system, a railroad structure that generated capital for farmers, artisans, and manufacturing industries alike, and philanthropic organizations, which aided the unfortunate, built Massachusetts into “a model

Republic.”151 The article summoned the public to the polls to “vote for the regularly

nominated candidates of the party,” not for the others who boasted scheming reforms

150 Ibid., 224. 151 Daily Atlas, “Whigs of Massachusetts, are you ready!” November 6, 1850. 53 purported through inexperienced measures.152 The piece encouraged the people to “hold fast which [was] good” by electing honorable, respected men of “high moral worth.”153

Paramount to maintaining the Whig establishment, the party held steadfast to past achievements and principles without accepting the social transformation occurring within

Massachusetts. Unlike the Free Soilers, the Whigs did not build upon principles of freedom and honor that had already been established, consequently, acquiescence to the

Compromise of 1850 and the deplorable Fugitive Slave Bill, unsettled voters’ consciences. The Commonwealth, considered a model republic because of tangible achievements, had simultaneously been home to the country’s most determined abolitionists and anti-slavery groups, and yet, also home to some of the most constitutionally ardent minded Americans. The state, established on moral principles from its earliest settlers fleeing religious persecution, had fostered ethical ideologies from its inception. Heeding to the slave powers challenged these virtuous beliefs. The Free

Soilers, together with the Democrats, and particularly Charles Sumner’s graceful eloquence, embraced the principled notions of liberty and influenced the people of

Massachusetts to uphold their Christian standards.154

In his speech, Our Immediate Antislavery Duties, delivered days prior to the

Senate election, Sumner recognized the victories within the Compromise of 1850, but denounced the Fugitive Slave Law, or Bill as he would have referenced it for he refused to accept it as law. Sumner blasted Congress for enacting a bill that dishonored

Massachusetts, the home of the Pilgrims and the Revolution. “The soul sickens,”

152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 154 Charles Sumner, Charles Sumner: His Complete Works, Volume III (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1900), 129.

54 declared Sumner, “in the contemplation of this legalized outrage,” which brought incomparable shame to the American Congress.155 Sumner reviled the officers who were appointed to uphold the offensive bill, awarded fees for each individual case, and were essentially bribed to arbitrate against freedom. His oration spoke to the abolitionists, the anti-slavery men, and more importantly, he conveyed the Fugitive Slave Bill’s wrongs to the general public and aroused their moral senses. Sumner pierced citizens’ revolutionary spirits when he likened the bill to the Stamp Act and hoped the sentiments continued “by a burst of popular feeling against all action under it similar to that which glowed in the breasts” of the forefathers.156 Violence, Sumner persisted, was not the answer to freedom’s call, but the “humane, just, and religious people” of the

Commonwealth would reveal a public opinion that sustained protection “over the liberties of all.”157

Indeed, Sumner’s speech and appeal to the masses furnished a place for him in the

Senate chamber, however, it could not be contested that the coalition between the Free

Soilers and Democratic parties in Massachusetts seized the election from the Whigs. The partnership between the latter had not been in Massachusetts alone; Northern Democrats in Ohio, Connecticut, and Vermont had already begun to fuse anti-slavery sentiments into their platforms and successfully partnered with Free Soilers to triumph in their elections.

Charles Francis Adams, Richard H. Dana, Jr., and other notable Massachusetts Free

Soilers, however, thought the coalition impossible and risked hampering their organization’s goals. Yet, Henry Wilson calculated the advantages of an additional anti- slavery individual in the Senate and pressed forward for the union between the parties.

155 Ibid. 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid., 136. 55 Sumner had been the suitable choice to bridge gap; he was young, intelligent, a compelling orator, and did not have strong ties to the Whig party. Though a novice politician, Sumner’s identification with anti-slavery sentiments was well known and comprised an effective lure for many in the Commonwealth.158

Unlike in Massachusetts, support in Congress did not constitute the same for

Sumner as he resolved to have the Fugitive Slave Act repealed. Sumner met with many opponents, one, who denounced him as a “maniac,” mocked him for being harmless with only the “bark of a puppy.”159 In a more forbidding tone, California Democratic senator

John B. Weller assured him “bloodshed was inevitable” if his constituents followed his direction.160 Weller prophesied, “murder . . . was inevitable,” and the blood of murdered men would be on his hands.161 In his first session, pro-Compromise senators inquired if

Sumner would dutifully return a fugitive slave, to which he responded he would not because the Fugitive Slave Bill was a complete misappropriation and had no place in the

Constitution. Verbally assailed for being on the brink of treason and disobedient to the

Constitution that he swore to uphold, Sumner defended himself and contended that like

Andrew Jackson, who vetoed the United States Bank, supported the Constitution as he understood it, and not how it was understood by others.162

As the 1852 Presidential Election approached, Northern coalitions could not hold strong against the slave South. Congressional support for the Compromise of 1850 and staunch adherence to the Fugitive Slave Law obliterated all opposition and united the

158 Wilson, Rise and Fall, 342; Anna Laurens Dawes, Charles Sumner (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1892), 65-66. 159 Wilson, Rise and Fall, 355. 160 Ibid., 357. 161 Ibid., 355. 162 Ibid., 358. 56 Democratic party. Even the Democrats who combined with the Free Soilers and had

followed Martin Van Buren returned to the party. Consequently, the 1852 Free Soil

presidential candidate, John P. Hale, received over 100,000 votes less than Martin Van

Buren in the 1848 election. Democratic nominee, Franklin Pierce, swept Whig candidate

Winfield Scott to become president for the next four years. Pierce’s vow to the

Compromise of 1850’s finality and to keep the slavery question out of politics garnered

him much support and procured him the victory. Anti-slavery men were despondent, but

not defeated.163

The storm provoked by the passage of the Compromise of 1850 was nothing

compared to the tempest that came with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created an entirely new wave of strong anti-slavery and abolitionist sentiment in the

North. Proposed to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories, Illinois Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas promoted the bill with the intention, as suggested by some scholars, to garner support for a Transcontinental Railroad, which coursed through his state and extended the marketplace into the western United States. It remained to be seen whether or not Douglas advocated for the bill’s passage to secure Southern support for a future presidential bid.164 Senator Charles Sumner and five other senators from

Massachusetts, Ohio, and New York fueled the Kansas-Nebraska Act rift with the publication of the Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the People of the

United States. The Appeal warned citizens their freedom and the Union’s stability were in danger because the bill violated citizens’ rights by barring “immigrants from the Old

163 Potter, Impending Crisis, 142-143. 164 For details and historiography on Stephen A. Douglas’ motivation for the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s passage see Potter’s, The Impending Crisis Chapter 7 and Roy F. Nichols “The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Sep., 1956), pp. 187-212. 57 World and free laborers” from the vast western territories.165 If dismantled by the slave

South, explained the senators, the Missouri Compromise’s annulment would leave the

region open to becoming an undemocratic area occupied by masters and slaves. A “free,

industrious, and enlightened population” in the fertile land, implored the senators, could

“extract abundant treasures of individual and public wealth.”166 The senators’ statement

appealed to the interests of everyday citizens and slavery became an issue that affected

everyone’s well-being.167

In the bill’s defense, and his own for the matter, Senator Douglas contended that

the “legal effect” of the Compromise of 1850 had since “[superseded] the Missouri

Compromise, and all geographical and territorial lines.”168 The bill’s purpose, Douglas

asserted, guided by the principles determined in the Compromise of 1850, “[was] neither

to legislate slavery in territories nor out of them, but to leave the people [to] do as they

[pleased] subject only to the provisions of the Constitution of the United States.”169

Douglas labeled the Appeal’s authors as “Abolitionist confederates,” whose “manifesto”

was a “gross falsification of the laws of the land,” which led to “an erroneous and

injurious impression . . . upon the public mind.”170 The Appeal did just that by

impressing upon Northerners that the Kansas-Nebraska Act interfered with their opportunities for self-advancement.171

Despite Douglas’ motive and the Appeal, however, the act passed in March 1854,

repealed the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery north of 36° 30’, and as a

165 Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the People of the United States (Washington: Towers’ Printers, 1854), 1. 166 Appeal, 6. 167 Ibid. 168 Congressional Globe, Senate, 33rd Congress, 1st Session, January 30, 1854, 278. 169 Congressional Globe, 278. 170 Ibid., 277. 171 Appeal, 6. 58 result, left open the slavery question in the territories to popular sovereignty. Deemed,

“the single most explosive piece of legislation ever passed by Congress,” the act led to

the breakdown of the Whig party, the emergence of the American and Republican parties,

and a firm Democratic South.172 The Kansas-Nebraska Act, moreover, enfeebled the

Union by causing an extreme rise in sectional tensions between anti-slavery and pro- slavery supporters in the United States. The Whig party, unable to unite Northern and

Southern factions, began to dismantle from within due to the slavery issue. As a means to maintain party unity and sustain business interests between Southern planters and

northern textile industrialists, conservative Whigs had long skirted the slavery topic to

remain friendly with their Southern slaveholding counterparts. Anti-slavery men,

concerned with slavery’s moral issues, however, gained a majority in the Northern Whig faction by 1852. The Kansas-Nebraska Act’s passage, consequently, stretched the distance between sections and allowed distrust to develop further among members within the party.173

The Irish famine and the European revolutions that caused the influx of

immigrants into the United States during the mid-1840s and 1850s correspondingly

strained the Whig party’s coherence. Tensions between American Protestants and Irish

Catholics played out in the political arena with Irish voters siding mostly with the

Democrats, attributable to the party’s religious toleration and concern for the everyday man more so than the Whigs. The Democrats, naturally, welcomed the new constituency.

As Northern Democrats bolted, the party yielded more to southern interests and appealed

to section-minded Southern Whigs. The results, a secure Democratic South and yet

172 William L. Barney, The Passage of the Republic, An Interdisciplinary History of Nineteenth- Century America (Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1987), 174. 173 Barney, The Passage of the Republic, 174-176; Potter, Impending Crisis, 237-239. 59 another stroke that constituted a continuing collapse of the exhausted Whig party.

Surrounded by poor intruders with contradicting religious thought, the flood of

immigrants into the United States during the decade triggered an added insecurity to

Americans and produced an upsurge of nativism. As anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic

sentiments emerged, former anti-slavery Whigs and anti-Nebraska Democrats joined in the nativist movement to form the American or Know-Nothing Party.174

Stemming from the anti-immigrant group, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner,

American party members ditched past party loyalties and swore never to support any

non-native or Roman Catholic candidates for office. Pledged to keep all information secret, members, required to declare “I know nothing” when questioned, cemented themselves as the Know-Nothings in the national political contest.175 In Massachusetts,

Know-Nothing victories superseded all other states, which, could be argued, forecasted the rise and influence of the Republican party. As the heart of anti-oppression in the

United States, however, the nativist Know-Nothings proclaimed anti-slavery and anti-

Catholic ideals in the Commonwealth, which perplexed Americans. It seemed contradictory, but the long-held Protestant, Puritan lineage held steadfast in the North, which excluded the foreign-born, mostly Irish Catholics from society. The rapid population growth, along with the manufacturing industries’ demand for labor, which attracted foreign workers, subsequently added to native-born anxiety. The parallels between anti-slavery men who loathed the peculiar institution and the nativists, who detested immigrants became clear. Anti-slavery forces reviled the slavocracy much like the nativists abhorred the Catholic Church’s stronghold. Slave owners and the

174 Potter, Impending Crisis, 241-246. 175 Ibid., 248. 60 priesthood, according to the groups, were sexual deviants who created “one great brothel”

in the entire South and the other, “converted whole nations into one vast brothel.”176

In the pamphlet, Platform of the American Party of Massachusetts adopted at

Springfield, anti-immigrant and anti-slavery sentiments were at its highest. The Know-

Nothings vowed to modify naturalization laws that ensured immigrants could not vote unless they spoke English, had knowledge of American laws and institutions, and maintained residency for twenty-one years in the United States. Strict penalties for false naturalization papers, opposition to the formation of foreign political groups, operative laws that prevented foreign criminal immigration, and the encouragement of foreign assimilation were a few policies set forth by the group. The Know-Nothings further maintained that any “politico-ecclesiastical hierarchy” derived by representatives of the

Papal Power would be fully resisted.177 In the same pamphlet, the party declared the

Union could only be sustained by the principles framed in the Constitution,

“freedom…national, slavery sectional.”178 They required the Missouri Compromise’s

restoration and any new states derived from territories free of slavery. The elements that

constructed the Know-Nothings, therefore, seized upon public sentiment against the

Southern slave powers and the angst associated with the influx of Catholic immigrants

into the Commonwealth.179

Just as the Know-Nothings were rising in popularity in Massachusetts and only

months after the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Anthony Burns, a fugitive from

Virginia living in Boston, was rendered back to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law.

176 George H. Haynes, “The Causes of Know-Nothing success in Massachusetts,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Oct., 1897), pp. 67-82; Potter, Impending Crisis, 252. 177 Platform of the American Party of Massachusetts adopted at Springfield August 7, 1855. 178 Platform of the American Party of Massachusetts. 179 Ibid. 61 Charles F. Suttle, Burns’ master, learned about his whereabouts by intercepting a letter intended for the fugitive’s family. Suttle arrived in Boston with official papers from

Virginia to collect his slave, obtained a warrant from Judge Edward G. Loring, and had

Burns arrested. Burns was held in the same Boston courthouse as Thomas Sims and was also defended by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. As Dana prepared his defense, tensions mounted in the Boston streets and Bostonians by the hundreds protested against Burns’ arrest. Bostonians raised enough money to purchase Burns’ freedom, but when the deal failed, a haphazard rescue attempt went awry and resulted in a courthouse guard’s death.

Consequently, armed cavalry, militia, marines and artillery companies were ordered on the streets around the courthouse to keep the peace.180

Amid the increasing chaos, Dana and the Boston Vigilance Committee legal team attacked the Fugitive Slave Law’s constitutionality and testimony in the claimant’s case.

The committee members argued that the claimant could not prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, Burns’ was Suttle’s slave. Commissioner Loring, however, upheld the Fugitive

Slave Law, ruled in Suttle’s favor, and ordered Burns back to bondage. Thousands jeered the procession that took Burns to the dock; store fronts were draped in black and a black coffin was displayed. It took nearly 1,600 soldiers to march Burns down Boston streets to an awaiting vessel that carried him back to Virginia. After the Burns case, anti-slavery sentiments clearly endured and no fugitive slave was ever rendered back to slavery in

Massachusetts.181

The Know-Nothings’ rapid growth and success, although short-lived, secured government posts, including governor, senate, and almost all of the lower house delegates

180 The Liberator, June 2, 1854; The Monthly Law Reporter, August, 1854. 181 Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 149-150; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 517. 62 during a time of profound social uncertainty and political realignment in Massachusetts.

Former Free Soiler Henry Wilson, elected Senator, supposed the party would propel the

anti-slavery movement into its next phase. Under the Know-Nothing banner, the

Massachusetts legislature passed personal liberty laws that practically nullified the

Fugitive Slave Act. The law prevented state lawyers from representing slave owners and

required judges who became federal commissioners to retire their positions on the bench.

State and local government officials were no longer permitted to aid in renditions, state

facilities could not house fugitives, and accused fugitives were permitted jury trials under

a writ of habeas corpus.182 The legislature’s passage of the personal liberty laws, a

school integration bill, and the attempted impeachment of Judge Loring who rendered

Anthony Burns back to slavery, was excessive in the eyes of many. The coalition who

comprised the Know-Nothings deemed the laws too radical and ultimately caused the

party’s demise. Bay State voters, moreover, unimpressed with the group’s

inconsequential anti-immigrant reform, hastened their support for the party.183

During the Know-Nothings’ sudden rise in popularity and eventual departure

from the political arena, albeit with a platform devoted to anti-immigrant and anti-slavery notions, a segment of Massachusetts Free Soilers remained who retained deeper, unyielding notions toward the slave South and their peculiar institution. Vigilance

Committee members, disgusted by Burns’ rendition, formed the Defensive League of

Freedom “to secure to all persons claimed as fugitives from slavery and to all persons

182 Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 149; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 517-518. 183 Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 149; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 517-518; Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848-1876. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 31. 63 accused of violating the Fugitive Slave Bill, the fullest legal protection.”184 The

association, established by Boston lawyer and ardent abolitionist John A. Andrew,

distinguished physician Samuel G. Howe, among others, declared that “the whole

resources of the general government [were] at the service of the slave power.”185 Left to

fend for themselves, poor, ill-informed fugitives and those who, “from an impulse of

humanity,” provided shelter to the abandoned, possessed the right to proper counsel and

financial assistance.186 Little evidence documents the services provided by the Defensive

League of Freedom, but the pamphlet’s publication and the men involved clearly

depicted one key that unlocked the future Republican Party’s platform in Massachusetts

and the whole United States. Together with the Whig party’s collapse and most Northern

Democrats’ support bestowed upon the slave South, Free Soilers, former Whigs, and anti-

Nebraska Democrats formed the Republican Party in 1854 with notions to eventually disconnect slavery and the federal government. The Kansas-Nebraska Act passage and the events that followed were the catalyst that prompted the new political party’s design to use the Constitution as the means to terminate the peculiar institution.187

184 The Defensive League of Freedom, Massachusetts, 1854, 2. 185 Ibid., 1. 186 Ibid., 2. 187 Ibid., 1-2. 64 MOLDING A NEW REALITY

If the Compromise of 1850, the Anthony Burns Case, and the Kansas Nebraska

Act, brought about a northern coalition across the North that generated a new Republican

party that fashioned themselves as the true heirs of Republicanism, no other episode

galvanized Americans into sectional and partisan acrimony than the canning of Charles

Sumner in May of 1856. More than that, the new party had taken the abolitionist gauntlet

to the political arena and thus, the Boston Vigilance Committee morphed into the

Republican party leadership and took their fight to the Congressional floor in

Washington, D.C. The scene that reporters detailed in the various newspapers across the

North, helped inspire the notion that Boston’s Vigilance Committee could no longer

merely be a social organization but rather a political force that moved beyond state

borders. Even as Sumner, bloodied and dazed, struggled to escape the crushing blows that

mercilessly fell one after another over his head, the Vigilance Committee was being born

anew in a political culture that would forever reckon with ending slavery. Pinned down between his desk and chair, Senator Sumner had suffered more than a dozen strikes by a cane wielded by South Carolina representative, Preston Brooks. The violence that erupted in the Senate chamber on May 22, 1856 against Sumner, a Northern anti-slavery man by the Southern delegate, Brooks, foreshadowed the direction the United States was bound to advance in the ensuing years.188

188 Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 218-221. 65 Just days prior to the assault, Sumner had given his The Crime Against Kansas speech, which characteristic of the senator’s illustrious style and skilled oratory, unapologetically stung the hearts of the Slave Power and Southerners alike. In his speech, Sumner slighted Brooks’ uncle, Andrew Butler, when he described “slavery” as the ailing Southerner’s “harlot,” “a mistress to whom he [had] made his vows; and who, though ugly to others, [was] always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, [was] chaste in his sight.”189 To defend his families’ honor, Brooks assailed

Sumner to the point where he was carried away from the Senate chamber, unable to return for nearly three years. His Senate seat, left empty for his time away, symbolized southern aggression in the eyes of Northerners who undoubtedly accepted the fate of the

Union, validated by the Republican Party’s mounting influence.190

The crime against Kansas, which Sumner referred, was the shoddy, invalid

“governments,” controlled by men polarized by proslavery and anti-slavery factions, who took up arms to defend against one another in the territory. The pretense of popular sovereignty, Sumner explained, enabled the creation of the groups, which permitted

“slavery…forcibly introduced into Kansas, and placed under the safeguards of pretended law.”191 Popular sovereignty’s affect led to an anti-slavery man’s murder by a proslavery individual, which Sumner deemed mockingly, “under the name of law and order.” 192

During the “Sack of Lawrence,” which took place on the day before the assault on

Sumner, proslavery forces ransacked the town of Lawrence, home to the anti-slavery territorial “legislature.” One proslavery man, struck by a piece of falling timber perished

189 Charles Sumner, The Crime Against Kansas (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856), 9. 190 Freeman, The Field of Blood, 218-221. 191 Sumner, The Crime Against Kansas, 22. 192 Ibid., 26. 66 during the unrest, but save for burned homes and material destruction, no other lives were

lost. Sumner’s assault and the turmoil in Kansas set off a feud filled with violence, hate, and angst between anti-slavery and proslavery Americans, which the country had never witnessed before. A precursor of what lay ahead, the mid 1850s propelled the divide between ordinary Americans and strengthened the line that separated the North against the slave South. 193

Just days after the crime against Sumner, John Brown, emigrant to Kansas and

ardent abolitionist, created a place for himself in history. John Brown’s early life was

assailed by trauma; his mother died in childbirth when he was only eight years old and

his father remarried a woman who Brown never favored. Subject to intense discipline by

his father and raised in a strict religious household, Brown’s strong Calvinist faith led

him to believe that he was chosen for a specific purpose in life and was obliged to set a

righteous example for mankind. Calvinists preached that slavery did not align with their

religious philosophy of “do unto others” and would eventually lead to God’s destruction

of America. Into manhood and until his death, Brown’s religious ideology against

slavery’s evils was identifiable in his speech and in his actions.194

Brown was skilled in many trades including surveying, sheepherding, and cattle

breeding, but as a businessman, Brown failed miserably and went bankrupt more than

once in his lifetime. In search of business ventures, Brown moved his large family to and

from New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, but his religious calling to help slaves and

defeat slavery landed him in Kansas. Brown arrived in Kansas one year after the Kansas-

Nebraska Acts passage and ardently joined the battle for a free state. Brown and his sons

193 Potter, Impending Crisis, 208-209. 194 Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011), 18. 67 became known for their militancy when they brandished arms and quelled a disruption incited by proslavery forces. The group further terrorized with the Pottawatomie

Massacre in which revenge killings ended in the brutal slayings of five proslavery settlers. Captain Brown or “Osawatomie Brown,” as he became known, was a feared man after his violent expeditions against proslavery forces in Kansas. In the wake of the massacre and subsequent killings thereafter the territory earned the title “Bleeding

Kansas.”195

“Bleeding Kansas” lasted over six years and resulted in the deaths of over fifty men. The uprisings, moreover, stirred the anti-slavery press, as David Potter concluded, into an exaggerated frenzy, which served the American public with information that was,

“the manufactured product of a remarkable propaganda campaign.”196 News of

“Bleeding Kansas” was not depicted just as a struggle to make the Kansas-Nebraska territory free or slave, but illustrated in anti-slavery newspapers with headlines like bloodshed, slaughter, and war that overemphasized actual events. Potter contended that

Congress aided in the spread of news about Kansas in speeches that were circulated in the

Congressional Globe and Sumner’s speech, The Crime Against Kansas, which had been estimated to have had one million copies distributed. From these sources, Americans, especially Northerners, grasped that the proslavery men in Kansas were nothing but drunkard, unmannerly hooligans who agitated pious, anti-slavery settlers. Together with

Sumner’s speech, which defiled slaveholders as villainous rapists, and the vicious assault

195 Ibid. 196 Potter, Impending Crisis, 218. 68 on the Senator, the South appeared undeniably cruel, unprincipled, and devious. The

stage, set for the Republican Party’s ascendancy in the political arena, awaited its cast.197

At the initial Republican National Convention, held in Pittsburg, February 1856,

the party professed its devotion to the Constitution. The powers afforded to the

government by the Constitution, the party declared, were sufficient to “form a more

perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common

defense,” and endow citizens’ their rights according to the document.198 “If these

powers,” the organization conceived, “[were] exercised in the spirit of the Constitution

itself, they could not lead to any other result.”199 Judged an infallible document, the party

maintained that the powers provided in the Constitution had been “systematically

wielded” to promote and extend the interests of slavery.200 The Constitution, in the hands

of the slave powers, consequently, strayed from the document’s true meaning and

provoked unfavorable outcomes for free institutions. The Slavocracy, moreover,

disregarded American public sentiment and the Christian world. The Republicans confirmed no intent to trouble slavery in the states where it existed, nor to undermine the

Constitutional privileges conferred to such states, but wished to restore the government to

“the principles and the practice of its wise and illustrious founders.”201 Pledged to

“vindicate the Constitution and the Union,” the Republican Party vowed to “secure the

blessings of liberty” for the nation and future generations.202

197 Ibid., 217-220. 198 Republic National Convention, Official Proceedings of the Republican Convention convened in the city of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania on the 22 of February, 1856 (Washington DC: Republican Association of Washington, 1856), 13. 199 Republic National Convention, Official Proceedings of the Republican Convention, 13. 200 Ibid. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 69 The Republican Party resolved to have each law repealed that altered former free soil regions into slave holding lands and swore to resist slavery’s introduction into all US territories by any Constitutional means necessary. Pledged to support their brethren in

Kansas against “the usurped authority [from] lawless invaders,” the Republicans noted that they would position all the strength of their political power behind admitting Kansas into the Union as a free state.203 The current administration controlled by the slave powers, deemed the Republicans, was spineless, disloyal, and fostered civil dissonance.

The perpetuation of power only destined the Slavocracy to “national supremacy,” and it was the Republican organization’s “leading purpose…to oppose and overthrow it.”204

Just weeks prior to the convention, Massachusetts representative Nathaniel P. Banks, former Democrat, Know-Nothing, and ultimately Republican, was elected Speaker of the

House of Representatives. Although through a small margin of victory, the win for the

Republican Party signified that many congressmen had aligned with the organization’s foremost policy, anti-slavery.205

Despite Banks’ victory and the Republican Party’s evident strength, however, the

Slavocracy triumphed over the Republicans in the 1856 Presidential Election. The contest played Democrat James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore on the Know-Nothing and thereafter on the Whig residue ticket, and newcomer John C. Fremont on the Republican ballot for the commander in chief seat. The South’s disunion threat materialized more visibly at the thought of an anti-slavery, Republican candidate and both Buchanan and

Fillmore appealed for votes with the Union’s demise at the forefront. “Should Fremont be elected,” Buchanan charged, “the outlawry pronounced by the Republican Convention

203 Ibid., 23. 204 Ibid., 24. 205 Potter, Impending Crisis, 256. 70 at Philadelphia against fifteen Southern states will be ratified by the people of the North.

The consequences will be immediate and inevitable.”206 On the same note, Fillmore

deemed the North mad to believe Southerners would allow themselves governed by a

candidate entirely elected by the free states. He claimed the country was “treading on the

brink of a volcano,” and if it broke, the Union’s downfall, anarchy, and civil war were

inevitable.207 The candidates’ predictions and Buchanan’s conformity with popular

sovereignty in Kansas, consequently, guided his victory for the presidency and led to a

brief lull in the country’s atmosphere.208

The calm, however, was short-lived as the Panic of 1857 struck the nation. In his first annual address to Congress, Buchanan summed up the circumstances; the country

“in its monetary interests” was “in a deplorable condition.”209 “In the midst of

unsurpassed plenty in all the productions of agriculture and in all the elements of national

wealth,” Buchanan confirmed, “our manufactures [have been] suspended, our public

works retarded, our private enterprises of different kinds abandoned and thousands of

useful laborers thrown out of employment and reduced to want.”210 Buchanan asserted

that the country’s predicament, produced by extravagance and bank credits, promised

Americans alluring, yet shaky, financial prospects, which caused the downfall. The

depression, felt mostly in the East and West, for these regions were home to Big Banking

and funding for westward expansion, allowed the South to gloat that cotton was indeed

king. A South Carolina senator reveled in the fact that the South had not experienced

206 Theodore Clarke Smith, Parties and Slavery, 1850-1859 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906), 171. 207 Smith, Parties and Slavery, 171. 208 Ibid., 173. 209 James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and the Papers of the Presidents, Vol. V (New York: Bureau of National Literature, Inc., 1916), 436. 210 Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and the Papers of the Presidents, 436. 71 much injury from the depression and had “poured in one hundred six million bales of

cotton just at the crisis” to save the North.211 Newspapers blasted Northerners for having

issues with slavery when hundreds of thousands were unemployed and on the brink of

starvation. Insistent on Federal reform to quell the depression, the press urged

Northerners to forget “Bleeding Kansas” and anti-slavery activism and concentrate on

relief.212

The anti-slavery and proslavery debate, perhaps overshadowed by the Panic of

1857, had not waned. The United States Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott, a slave

who had been carried back and forth from free and slave states by his owners, was not a

citizen and could not sue in federal court for his freedom. The decision caused an uproar

among Republicans when the court decided that Congress did not have the right to

prohibit slavery in territories and deemed the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.

The Court’s ruling confirmed the control of the slave powers and for Southerners, validated their rights under the Constitution. For Northerners, the Dred Scott decision reinforced the belief that the Slavocracy insisted on the existence of the peculiar institution throughout the entire nation. The Dred Scott decision’s significance, therefore, increased sectional tensions and underlined the Supreme Court’s adherence to state’s rights, which favored Southern interests, while it left Northerners to question federal authority.213

Despite the Republican Party’s political motivation, emotional and moral

sentiments embraced by the Northern public carried the organization from its inception.

211 Samuel Rezneck, “The Influence of Depression upon American Opinion, 1857-1859,” The Journal of Economic History, vol II, no 1 (May, 1942), 4. 212 Rezneck, “The Influence of Depression upon American Opinion,” 4-5. 213 Potter, Impending Crisis, 291. 72 The Boston Vigilance Committee, although just one anti-slavery group in Massachusetts,

promoted legal solutions and embodied Christian values to uphold their state’s laws and

right slavery’s wrongs. This spirit, seen in the Boston Vigilance Committee’s actions,

albeit through legal recourse or forbidden routes like the Underground Railroad, played a

crucial role in the creation of the Republican Party. The BVCs original members could

be traced from its origin through to the Republican Party’s formation. The devotion to

law and ethics, moreover, followed the group from the mid-1840s, throughout the 1850s,

and right through to the elections of Massachusetts Republican Governor John A.

Andrew and President Abraham Lincoln.214

John A. Andrew, a Vigilance Committee member from the group’s founding,

embodied the radical, yet essential elements needed for the Republican Party’s

ascendance. As nominee for Massachusetts governor, Andrew declared that he believed

in the party’s sound principles and deemed it the only organization “adapted to meet the

exigencies of the time.”215 Andrew, moreover, trusted in his Brother Republicans’

“religious and political education… more than all things else.”216 The religious

education which Andrew referred had been sermonized by the Reverend Theodore Parker for years even before the Republican party’s creation. Contrary to Southerners’ beliefs that Providence had bestowed them blessings to enslave, Parker preached slavery’s sins and instilled in New England churchgoers their responsibilities to triumph over the peculiar institution. The political education of Andrew’s fellow Republicans originated with the Founding Fathers’ ideas of slavery’s eventual demise, which the Whigs had held

214 Ibid., 291. 215 Speeches of John A. Andrew at Hingham and Boston: together with his testimony before the Harper’s Ferry Committee of the Senate, in relation to John Brown. Also, the Republican Platform and other matters. (Boston: Republican State Committee, 1860), 4. 216 Speeches of John A. Andrew, 4. 73 steadfast until the election of Taylor, and continued with the anti-slavery notions of the

Free Soil party. The Free Soilers, furthermore, conceptualized for Northerners how slavery inhibited the promise of a better, secure life if they choose to move westward for economic opportunity and self-advancement. The Republican party, influenced by longtime BVC members, expanded upon these philosophies even further and ultimately advocated for slavery’s downfall to safeguard and elevate American progress.217

Vigilance Committee members guided the construction of anti-slavery politics in

Massachusetts and nationally with the assistance of the political mover and shaker

Francis W. Bird. Bird, a New England paper mill owner and state government

powerhouse, held the Saturday Club, or Bird Club as it was known, where like-minded individuals met weekly over dinner to discuss state affairs and national politics. Since its inception in 1848, the common thread among those in attendance; Charles Sumner, John

A. Andrew, Samuel Gridley Howe, Henry Wilson, and other future radical Republicans, was a strong anti-slavery vision for the country’s future. Determined to establish freedom and justice for blacks, the group maintained that the Declaration of

Independence promised equality to all men, and held firm to these beliefs from the Free

Soil party’s creation, throughout the tumultuous 1850s, during the launch and rise of the

Republican party, and in the Civil War and early Reconstruction periods. Bird Club

members held influential government seats within Massachusetts and in Congress, but it

was not until Governor John A. Andrew’s election that it could be seen where the radical

Republicans dominated state and national politics. Bird’s devotion to the anti-slavery

cause prompted political support for his Saturday Club allies, especially for Andrew, who

had positioned himself like Sumner, through oration and duty, as the next shining light in

217 Speeches of John A. Andrew, 4; Weiss, Parker Life and Correspondence, 95. 74 the Republican party that could eclipse slavery’s growth. Andrew’s gubernatorial

nomination and victory spoke volumes about Massachusetts public sentiment, yet

Northern opinion as a whole can be comprehended with the events and aftermath of John

Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry just prior to the American Civil War.218

For Captain Brown, Kansas was just the beginning. He confided in one of his sons and declared, “God sees it, I will die fighting for this cause. I will carry this war into Africa.”219 “Africa” was clearly Brown’s code for the slaveholding South. With his

newfound fame during “Bleeding Kansas,” Brown became an abolitionist hero and

aligned himself with the Massachusetts Kansas Committee, which raised funds for the

free state fight. As their spokesman for a short time, Brown delivered speeches and tried

to procure money, rifles, revolvers, and ammunition for the cause. Unfortunately for

Brown, when the financial panic struck the nation in 1857, most monies promised were not delivered. Brown, in typical grandiose fashion, used the money he did accumulate to purchase spears, hire a drillmaster for the volunteer army he wished to assemble, and obtain a manual on guerilla tactics.220

Brown’s campaign, funded in part by The Secret Six, as they became known,

were a group of six prominent abolitionists, which included notable BVC members

Theodore Parker and Samuel Gridley Howe. Most denied detailed knowledge of the

Harpers Ferry raid, yet, the secret committee recognized the time had come for slavery’s violent demise. It is evidenced in more than one correspondence that John Brown wrote to Theodore Parker requesting funds for his endeavors. Parker funded Brown through his own earnings and obtained contributions from others, “friends,” Parker attested, “who

218 Baum, The Civil War Party System, 3. 219 Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 59. 220 Ibid., 66. 75 [would] give me money without asking any questions, trusting that I [would] see it

properly applied.”221 Parker managed to secure “limited supplies in this way,” supplies

for what was never known exactly, Brown tended to keep his plans to himself and

operated on his own schedule, unbeknown to the Secret Six. Parker believed Brown a

good man, who fought for a noble cause, yet he was not fully confident that he would

always prove victorious. “But,” Parker concluded, “we shall make a great many failures before we discover the right way of getting at it.”222 It was clear, however, from Brown’s

communications that he intended something grand and illegal; the letters were obscure

and lacked specific details, even written in code when he asked Parker, “to supply a little

straw, so that he may, make bricks.”223

Ready to take his campaign South, Captain Brown was followed by young

revolutionaries who believed in slavery’s destruction. The twenty-one men were from all

walks of life and included three of Brown’s sons, a former slave, well-off and poor

whites, and a free black man. The men concurred with Brown’s redrafted United States

Constitution, the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United

States,” which excluded slavery, developed a militarized state, and forbade sin. Brown’s

plan was to take over the armory at Harpers Ferry, arm freed slaves with guns, and lead

the expedition into the deep South where more slaves would join the insurrection.

Slavery as Brown saw it, would crumble by the hands of the oppressed. Brown and his

soldiers descended into Virginia near the armory disguised as farmers, rented a

farmhouse for their headquarters, installed an undercover spy in town, and established a

“business” where “freight” (guns and ammunition) was shipped to the farmers to set up

221 Weiss, Theodore Parker,161. 222 Ibid. 223 Ibid, 163. 76 shop. Two of Brown’s female family members even moved from New York and joined the conspiracy to make the farmhouse seem more normal.224

The raid on Harpers Ferry was doomed from the start. Harpers Ferry’s geographical position allowed access to the armory, but once the rebels were surrounded, the location made it difficult to get out. Furthermore, the slaves Brown intended to arm lived too far from the armory and were never actually notified of the rebellion. Lasting only thirty-two hours, Brown and his twenty-one men were either shot or taken prisoner by Marines led by future famed Confederate General, Robert E. Lee. Some insurgents managed to escape, only to die fighting in the Civil War a few years later, but others that fled were quickly caught by townsfolk and put to death. Those that survived, including

Brown, were given swift trials and publicly hanged for treason.225

Brown remained composed throughout his venture to end slavery and his notion that it was God’s will for him to lead the rebellion never swayed. When asked about his political affiliation at his trial, Brown answered he belonged to God’s party. Brown maintained a martyr-like demeanor while awaiting his execution and for one month, he wrote letters to loved ones, never once regretted his actions, and even blamed the South for disobeying God’s orders for continuing slavery. On December 2, 1859, thousands of ardent abolitionists and Northern citizens observed Brown’s death with gun salutes, tolling bells, prayer meetings, and fiery orations against slavery. Southerners, however, considered Brown a madman and the raid on Harpers Ferry to be the final Northern aggression against their way of life.226

224 Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 81. 225 Ibid., 177-180. 226 Ibid., 258-259. 77 “…John Brown [was] right,” declared Andrew, “I sympathize with the man. I sympathize with the idea because I sympathize with and believe in the eternal right.”227

Undoubtedly, the eternal right represented a man’s right to freedom so distinctly expressed in God’s words and in the Constitution of the United States of America. When

Andrew openly procured funds for Brown’s legal defense he represented Northern sentiment and the stance of the Republican Party; there was no longer uncertainty that the

South would ever succumb to slavery’s demise nor would the North continue to submit to the Slavocracy. Although defeated, discussions on admitting Kansas as a slave state through the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, the proposal to reopen the African slave trade by Southern secessionists, and John Brown’s undertakings at Harpers Ferry and his subsequent hanging for treason, brought the idea of freedom to reality. The philosophies of the Boston Vigilance Committee and their commitment to freedom and confidence in the Constitution’s legal judgement materialized in the 1860 Republican Party platform.

Rebuked by the convention’s delegates as treasonous acts of betrayal, threats of Southern secession, abuses of power, and slavery’s perpetuation necessitated the party’s “peaceful and constitutional triumph.”228 The stage was set for secession when Abraham Lincoln from the anti-slavery Republican Party won the presidential election of 1860.229

Dated November 24, 1859, Rome, Theodore Parker wrote to BVC Treasurer

Francis Jackson about his feelings on John Brown and the state of the country. He considered Brown a martyr, who would die a saint, and scolded the Democratic newspapers for stating that Brown had many friends, sympathizers, in the North who

227 Speeches of John A. Andrew, 8. 228 Proceedings of the Republican National Convention, held at Chicago, May 16, 17, and 18, 1860 (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1860), 79. 229 Proceedings of the Republican National Convention 1860, 79. 78 supported his raid on Harpers Ferry and provided him with thousands of dollars to

accomplish the task. Parker felt “more than that [was] true of us.”230 If Brown, wrote

Parker, “had succeeded in running off one or two thousand slaves to Canada, even at the

expense of a little violence and bloodshed, the majority of men in New England would

have rejoiced, not only in the end but also in the means.”231 Some violence, Parker

concluded, had become the necessary tool needed to obtain the slaves’ freedom and

demonstrate the profound sympathy Americans held for the enchained. Violent victories,

Parker noted, would operate “as priming for the popular cannon,” that had been “already

loaded.”232 “An anti-slavery party, under one name or another,” Parker prophesized,

“will before long, control the Federal Government, and will exercise its Constitutional rights, and perform its Constitutional duty, and guarantee a Republican form of government to every State in the Union.”233 The latter, however, would have taken time

and required peaceful lawmaking. Yet, “the short work of violence,” Parker foretold,

“will be often tried, and each attempt will gain something for the cause of Humanity,

even by its dreadful process of blood.”234 The decade of compromise had ended, the

American Civil War began just one month after President Lincoln took office.235

230 Weiss, Theodore Parker, 172. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid., 176-177. 234 Ibid., 177. 235 Ibid. 79 EPILOGUE

“In all great movements of mankind, there are three special works to be done…Sentiment…Ideas…and Action.”236 The latter, expressed by Theodore Parker, illustrated the anti-slavery movement’s journey from its inception to the Civil War. The sentiment, produced early on by Garrisonian abolitionists, stimulated feelings among

New Englanders that America’s slavery condition had been sinful and immoral.

Sympathy for the slaves’ plight, consequently, created concepts, or ideas, of what should be done about the peculiar institution. The action, warranted from both the feelings and ideas on human bondage, began with a small band of Boston’s abolitionists and culminated in the powerful Republican Party who succeeded in slavery’s downfall. The

Boston Vigilance Committee was key to establishing the Republican Party, which promulgated slavery’s evils to Northern minds and effected fundamental constitutional and social change through the American political system.237

Under their care, Boston Vigilance Committee members helped over 430 people escape from slavery’s shackles and successfully sent an additional 100 to freedom in

Canada. In ten years of service Sims and Burns were the only two fugitives rendered back to servitude. Committee members realized the time had come for social and political change in the United States and defeating slavery was not just a moral obligation, but became a necessity for the country’s future success. A series of events,

236 Theodore Parker, The Great Battle between Slavery and Freedom (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1856), 6. 237 Parker, The Great Battle between Slavery and Freedom, 6. 80 including the Texas annexation, the Wilmot Proviso’s failure, and the passage of the

Compromise of 1850, attributed to the shifting political tide in Massachusetts. The

Kansas-Nebraska Act, however, and Sumner’s reaction and response to the law, compelled Massachusetts citizens and other Northerners to realize the spread of slavery affected their personal opportunities for advancement. The Republican party’s formation became the necessary tool to spread the message for the slave power termination.238

Scholars have long held that anti-slavery, nativism, anti-southernism, and political power motivated the Republican Party’s emergence and rapid ascendancy to the political forefront. The organization’s members and the party’s rise to predominance, additionally, incorporated economic, moral, social, and legal properties, with the slavery issue at the base, to guide their followers. In the Appeal of Independent Democrats, politicians aligned slavery’s extension with a definite economic impediment to

Northerners. Land in the Northeast had become extremely expensive to obtain, factories emerged, clouding the air with pollution, and left cities overcrowded with immigrants.

Moving Westward, seen as a bright opportunity for Northerners who looked to begin anew, would be obstructed by slavery’s expansion into the West. Indeed, many

Northerners scorned slavery, but by no means were they active abolitionists or believed blacks equal to themselves, in fact they remained quite conservative. Preoccupied with their own predicaments rather than the slaves’ plight, everyday citizens simply attempted to survive in a country altered with economic, social, and political change.239

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, aimed directly at the public’s sensibilities, proved a moral victory and influenced Northern society to oppose the

238 Appeal of the Independent Democrats, 7; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 506. 239 Appeal of the Independent Democrats, 7 81 Southern slaveholding way of life. Though denounced by many Americans as a

malicious fabrication against Southerners, Stowe’s account humanized slaves and created

sympathy for a people who a large number of Northerners never quite comprehended the

atrocities committed against them. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the subsequent Key to Uncle

Tom’s Cabin, moreover, helped uncover the efforts of those representatives in the black

community and other unknown citizens who aided fugitive slaves. Lewis Hayden,

escaped slave and prominent BVC member, became a leader among his people and one

of the first black members of the Massachusetts legislature. His story, along with others,

depicted in Stowe’s books, personified the slave, bared slavery’s injustices, and shaped

Northern opinion.240

The events in the Kansas and Nebraska territories, Sumner’s The Crime Against

Kansas speech, and the Senator’s caning, painted Southerners as “low brow” degenerates

and deviants who were not on equal social standing with upright Northern citizens. The

Republican party’s rise in power developed out of such Northern notions that the South

lagged behind. Industry, infrastructure, and education were but a few factors where the

North secured the lead against the South. Slavery’s perpetuation produced a slave oligarchy, hindered poor whites from obtaining upward mobility, subjugated blacks, and consequently, weakened the nation as a whole. Power and progress, reasoned Boston

Vigilance Committee members and later Republicans, was not ensured with a

government ruled by a select few whose main concern was the weight of their own

pockets.241

240 New York Tribune. "Obituary. Lewis Hayden." New York, NY: 08 April 1889. 241 Charles Sumner, The Barbarism of Slavery (New York: The Young Men’s Republican Union, 1863), 7. 82 The Boston Vigilance Committee played into the legal and moral views of the

public. The BVCs activities, though not always legal, declared the rights of man had

been constructed by the forefathers and should be upheld by the Constitution of the

United States. The Republican Party, moreover, held steadfast to Americans’ rights granted by the Constitution and proclaimed that the Slavocracy denied man “the pursuit of happiness” by seeking to maintain and expand the peculiar institution. The moral initiative, nonetheless, encouraged Northern anti-slavery sentiments, which only

intensified as the Slavocracy’s stronghold on the nation increased. These aspects fed into

Northern minds, hearts, and their patriotic fervor that resulted in the Republican Party’s

formation and growth in power.242

The Boston Vigilance Committee began as a humble group who desired to uphold

Massachusetts laws and resist the Fugitive Slave Act. Together with anti-slavery and

abolitionist men and women, BVC members tirelessly fought for slavery’s demise.

Whether it was through moral or self-preserving obligations, notable and thousands of

lesser-known Americans risked their freedom and lives for the cause. These citizens

transformed into the Republican Party that deemed the Civil War necessary, later

amended the Constitution with the implementation of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments,

and changed history’s course in the United States. Austin Bearse dedicated his work,

Reminiscences, to BVC members for “their faithful service done to humanity in Boston

harbor and streets, in which hunted fugitive slaves were snatched from kidnappers,

sheltered, housed and fed, and forwarded with all speed and secrecy to Canada.”243 The

rescuers, Bearse wrote, defended the fugitives from prosecution and when Sims and

242 Ibid., 7-9. 243 Bearse, Reminiscences, 7. 83 Burns were remanded back to slavery, the call for freedom “found wings on every wind.”244

244 Ibid.

84 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources

Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting, Held at Faneuil Hall, September 24, 1846, for the purpose of considering the recent case of kidnapping from our soil, and of taking measures to prevent the recurrence of similar outrages. Boston: White and Potter Printers, 1846.

Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the People of the United States. Washington: Towers’ Printers, 1854.

Bearse, Austin. Reminiscences of Fugitive-slave Law Days in Boston. Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880.

Christian Reflector

Craft, William. Running a Thousand Miles; Or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. London: William Tweedie, 1860.

Cralle, Richard K. ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun Delivered in the House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883.

Colton, Calvin. The Speeches of Henry Clay, Volume II. New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1857.

Congressional Globe

Daily Atlas

The Defensive League of Freedom, Massachusetts, 1854.

Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Hartford: Park Publishing, 1882.

Dyer, Oliver. Oliver Dyer's Phonographic Report of the Proceedings of the National Free Soil Convention at Buffalo, N. Y., August 9th and 10th, 1848. Buffalo: G.H. Derby and Co., 1848.

Emancipator and Republican

85 Fairbank, Calvin. During Slavery Times; How “He Fought the Good Fight” to “Prepare the Way.” Chicago: R & R McCabe and Co., 1890.

Fillmore, Millard and Frank Hayward Severance, ed., Millard Fillmore Papers, Volume I. Buffalo: Buffalo Historical Society, 1907.

Free Soil Address

Garrison, William Lloyd. In Memoriam. Testimonials to the Life and Character of the Late Francis Jackson. Boston: R.F. Wallcut, 1861.

Hickman, George. The Life of General Lewis Cass, with his Letters and Speeches on Various Subjects. Baltimore: N. Hickman, 1848.

The Independent

Jackson, Francis. The Boston Vigilance Committee, Appointed at the Public meeting in Faneuil Hall, October 21, 1850 to assist Fugitive Slaves: Treasurer’s Accounts. Boston: Boston Vigilance Committee, 1850.

Letter from Citizens of Newburyport, Massachusetts to Mr. Webster, in relation to his speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th March 1850. Washington: Gideon and Co., 1850.

The Liberator

The Monthly Law Reporter

National Era

New York Tribune

Parker, Theodore. The Great Battle between Slavery and Freedom. Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1856.

To the People of Massachusetts

Pierce, Edward L. Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Volume III 1845-1860. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893.

Platform of the American Party of Massachusetts adopted at Springfield August 7, 1855.

86 Proceedings of a Convention of Delegates, Chosen by the People of Massachusetts, without Distinction of Party, and Assembled at Faneuil Hall, in the City of Boston, on Wednesday the 29th day of January, A.D.1845, to take into consideration the Proposed Annexation of Texas to the United States. Boston: Eastburn’s Press, 1845.

Proceedings of the Republican National Convention, held at Chicago, May 16, 17, and 18, 1860. Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1860.

Republican National Convention, Official Proceedings of the Republican Convention convened in the City of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania on the 22 of February, 1856. Washington: Republican Association of Washington, 1856.

Richardson, James D. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, Volume V. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1897.

Semi-Weekly Republican

Speeches of John A. Andrew at Hingham and Boston: together with his testimony before the Harper’s Ferry Committee of the Senate, in relation to John Brown. Also, the Republican Platform and other matters. Boston: Republican State Committee, 1860.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded. Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Co., 1853.

Sumner, Charles. The Barbarism of Slavery. New York: The Young Men’s Republican Union, 1863.

______. The Crime Against Kansas. Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856.

______. Orations and Speeches Volume II. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850.

______. White Slavery in the Barbary States. Boston: William D. Ticknor and Company, 1847.

Sumner, Charles and George Frisbie Hoar. Charles Sumner: His Complete Works, Volume 1. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1899.

______. Charles Sumner: His Complete Works, Volume III. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1900.

Webster, Daniel. The Constitution and the Union. Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, US Senate, 1st sess., Appendix, pp. 269-76. March 7, 1850.

87

Weiss, John. Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, Minister of the Twenty- Eighth Congregational Society, Boston, Volume II. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1864.

Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal

Secondary Sources

Adams, Jr., Charles Francis. Charles Francis Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900.

______. Richard Henry Dana, A Biography, Volume I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1890.

Barney, William L. The Passage of the Republic, An Interdisciplinary History of Nineteenth-Century America. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1987.

Baum, Dale. The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848-1876. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Curtis, George Ticknor. Life of Daniel Webster, Volume II. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1870.

Dana, Jr., Richard Henry and Richard Henry Dana, III, ed., Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Speeches in Stirring Times and Letters to a Son. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910.

Dawes, Anna Laurens. Charles Sumner. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1892.

Donald, David H. Charles Sumner and the coming of the Civil War. Naperville: Sourcebook, Inc., 2009.

Foner, Eric. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2015.

Foner, Eric. “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited.” Journal of American History Vol. 56, No. 2 (1969): 262-279.

Freeman, Joanne B. The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Gatell, Frank Otto. “Conscience and Judgement: The Bolt of the Massachusetts Conscience Whigs.” The Historian Vol. 21, No. 1 (1958): 18-45.

88 Green, Michael, S. Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.

Haynes, George H. “The Causes of Know-Nothing success in Massachusetts.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1897): 67-82.

Horton, James Oliver. Black Bostonians. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1999.

Horwitz, Tony. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis: America before the Civil War 1848-1861. New York: Harper Perennial, 1976.

Rezneck, Samuel. “The Influence of Depression upon American Opinion, 1857-1859.” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 2, No 1 (1942): 1-23.

Roppolo, Joseph P. “Harriet Beecher Stowe and New Orleans: A Study in Hate.” New England Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 3 (1957): 346-362.

Schwartz, Harold. “Fugitive Slave Days in Boston,” The New England Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 2 (1954): 191-212.

Siebert, Wilbur H. “The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts,” The New England Quarterly Vol. 9, No. 3 (1936): 447-467.

Sinha, Manisha. The Slave’s Cause, A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Smith, Theodore Clark. Parties and Slavery, 1850-1859. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly. Bedford: Applewood Books, 1852.

Wilson, Henry and Samuel Hunt. Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume II. Boston: JR Osgood and Company, 1874.

89