GO TO LIST OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN HARPERS FERRY

VARIOUS PERSONAGES INVOLVED

IN THE

FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Located just north of the Mason/Dixon line separating Pennsylvania from slaveholding states such as Maryland, the town of Columbia would be an important stop on the . In 1818 its citizens had begun a Columbia Abolition Society. Stephen Smith had in 1831 led free blacks in Columbia in a public meeting in opposition to the agenda of the American Colonization Society. In 1834 he had joined with David Ruggles, John Peck, Abraham Shadd, and John B. Vashon, who were the initial black agents for Freedom’s Journal and later for The Emancipator. In that year and the following one there were riots in Columbia, white riots that made a particular target of the lumberyard of the successful “Black Steve” and his mulatto partner , and in 1835 the Columbia Spy would report that his success had so “excited the envy or hatred of those not so prosperous and of the ruling race” that his office was vandalized and papers, records, and books destroyed. Smith relocated to Philadelphia leaving the business in Columbia under Whipper’s management, and would soon again be prospering. When abolitionists found it difficult to secure a building to hold their meetings, Smith made Pennsylvania Hall available for their use, but on July 17, 1838 a mob of white citizens torched that venue. Taking advantage of a little-known Pennsylvania statute by which a municipality could be held liable for mob damage, Smith sued Philadelphia, obtaining a judgment for damages in excess of what the building had cost: $75,000. Dun and Company, a firm that evaluated local businesses, would in 1857 estimate Smith and Whipper’s annual sales at $100,000, characterizing Smith as “King of the Darkies.” He was on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest black Americans in 19th-Century Pennsylvania. met with Stephen Smith and others while passing through Philadelphia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THOSE INVOLVED, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY

SECRET “SIX”

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. No No No Finance white

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the racist agenda of Eli Thayer’s and Amos Lawrence’s New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the creation of an Aryan Nation in the territory then well known as “,” to the tune of $25,000.

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson Yes Yes Captain or Lt. 26 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The maternal grandfather of Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, Colonel Jacob Westfall of Tygert Valley, Virginia, had been a soldier in the revolution and a slaveholder. Jeremiah had gone to school at Galesburg, Illinois and Kossuth, Iowa and had worked as a peddler, farmer, and sawmill laborer before settling a mile from Fort Bain on the Little Osage in Bourbon County in “Bleeding Kansas” during August 1857. He had twice been arrested by proslavery activists, and had been held for 10 weeks at Fort Scott. He then became a lieutenant of Captain Montgomery and was with him in the attack on Captain Anderson’s troop of the 1st US Cavalry. He witnessed a murder, of a Mr. Denton, on his own doorstep by border ruffians. He went with John Brown on the slave raid into Missouri and remained with him thereafter. He was “J. Anderson” among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. On July 5th, 1859 this 27-year-old had written of his determination to continue to fight for freedom: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.” He was thrust through with a bayonet by one of the Marines, and pinned against the wall “vomiting gore.” A white man, he was tortured because he was perceived by the attackers as a light mulatto: “One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall [to which he was pinned by the bayonet] in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open.” A local commented “Well, it takes you a hell of a long time to die.” When opportunistic medical students would go to transport the remains to their college in Winchester, Virginia for dissection, their treatment of this corpse was so casual as to be recorded by a bystander: “In order to take him away handily they procured a barrel and tried to pack him into it. Head foremost, they rammed him in, but they could not bend his legs so as to get them into the barrel with the rest of the body. In their endeavor to accomplish this feat, they strained so hard that the man’s bones or sinews fairly cracked.” His remains were taken to the college along with the remains of Watson Brown (a corpse found on the banks of the Shenandoah River was more likely that of a local slave).

John Anderson ? ? Private < 30 of color

John Anderson, a free black youth from Boston allegedly killed at Harpers Ferry. Nothing is known as to who he was, other than that he was young, or where he came from, other than from Boston — and it is even possible that actually there had been no such person as this in John Brown’s company. (The John Anderson we do know about had an entirely different life trajectory, in Canada.)

Osborn Perry Anderson Yes No No Private 29 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Osborn Perry Anderson, “O.P. Anderson, or as we used to call him Chatham Anderson,” the only participant of color to survive Harpers Ferry and elude capture, had been born free on July 27, 1830 in West Fallowfield, Pennsylvania. He had learned the printing trade in Canada, where he had met John Brown in 1858. He was a member of Congress of John Brown’s Provisional Government in Chatham, Ontario in May 1858 and was “Osborn Anderson” on the list of signatories of the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States”; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. He would write later of the fight at Harpers Ferry and his escape in A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated….” Anderson, Coppoc, and Meriam had journeyed separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Anderson enlisted in the US Army in 1864, becoming a recruiter and/or noncommissioned officer for a unit as yet undetermined, and mustered out in Washington DC at the close of the war (he would be identified by his father Vincent Anderson in 1872 as having been a recruiter for the “western regiments”). He was a member of the Equal Rights League in 1865, and represented at the National Convention of Colored Men in 1869. He died a pauper of TB and lack of care in Washington on December 13, 1872.

John Albion Andrew No white

Despite the fact that John Albion Andrew was a prominent Massachusetts politician, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would indicate long after the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s “general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Governor Andrew.

Henry Ward Beecher No No No Propaganda white

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of his Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” and to stamp upon that crate the term of art BIBLES. The Reverend’s personal attitude toward American blacks was that although those like whose blood had become partly mingled with the blood of whites were worthy of consideration as human beings, those who yet remained of pure African stock were still in such a “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness that such consideration as human beings would be inappropriate.

Charles Blair No No No Armament white

Charles Blair supplied the pikes.

Ann Brown No No No Supporter white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Ann Brown, a daughter of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath she would move to the West Coast.

Frederick Brown No No No Supporter white

Frederick Brown was fanatically religious to the extent that he attempted to sever his sexual organs when he was attracted to a young lady. He would have been 28 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, but in 1856 had been killed in the fighting in “Bleeding Kansas.”

Jason Brown No No No Supporter 38 white

Jason Brown, one of the elder sons of Captain John Brown, was a gentle sort of person who actually was trying to become an inventor. He took part in the battle at Black Jack in “Bleeding Kansas,” and in the killings on the Osawatomie Creek, but was not at Harpers Ferry. He and his brother Owen Brown would become grape growers in the mountains above Pasadena, California.

John Brown Yes Multiple Yes Commander white wounds

John Brown, “Captain” John “Nelson Hawkins” “Shubel Morgan” “Isaac Smith” Brown.

John Brown, Jr. No No No Supporter 38 white

John Brown, Jr., 38 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid and Captain John Brown’s eldest son, had trained as a phrenologist. After the raid he would go into hiding in Ohio and, when summoned to appear before the investigatory committee of the US Senate, would refuse to appear. During the Civil War he served as Captain of Company K of the 7th Kansas Cavalry. He and his family would then find permanent safe haven on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Martha Brewster Brown No No No Supporter white

Martha Brewster Brown, wife of Oliver Brown and daughter-in-law of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry.

Oliver Brown Yes Yes Captain 20 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, had been born in Franklin, Ohio on March 9, 1839. He was a bookish lad, considered by his mother Mary Ann Day Brown to be the most promising. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1855 with his father and returned to North Elba during October 1856, where he got married with Martha E. Brewster in 1858. She was sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry. “I think there is no good reason why any of us should be discouraged,” he had written his family, “for if we have done but one good act, life is not a failure.... Keep a stiff lip, a sound pluck, and believe that all will come out right in the end.” He had reached the age of 20 when he was shot while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge. His body was dumped into a shallow hole on the bank of the Shenandoah River, with the bodies of other fighters.

Owen Brown Yes No No Captain 35 white

Owen Brown, 3d of John Brown’s sons and his stalwart aid both in “Bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry, was born November 4, 1824 at Hudson, Ohio. With a withered arm, he had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit and his endurance that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader managed to make it out. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names on an oil-well crew in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He was the only one of the 5 escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war. He would never marry. He would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with 2 of his brothers, and then migrate west, and would be the final survivor of the raiders when he would die on January 9, 1891 at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak” near Pasadena, California. A marble monument marked the mountain grave, until during July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the grave was not a registered historical landmark, and not in a cemetery, there would be no investigation.

Salmon Brown No 23 white

Salmon Brown, 23 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, was said to have been exactly like his father, Captain John Brown, in every particular. He would once comment to a newspaper reporter that “The tannery business, farming, wool buying and the raising of blooded stock were my father’s life occupations, though all of them were subordinated to his one consuming passion — freeing the slaves.” Salmon would die in Portland, Oregon in 1919.

Watson Brown Yes Yes Captain 24 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Watson Brown, born at Franklin, Ohio on October 7, 1835, got married with young Isabella M. Thompson during September 1856. “Dear Belle,” he had written to his child-wife, “I would gladly come home and stay with you always but for the cause which brought me here — a desire to do something for others, and not live wholly for my own happiness.... I sometimes feel as if I could not make this sacrifice, but what would I not want others to do were I in their place?” Their son would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive his father, because he was sent out with a white flag by his father John Brown to parley and was gut-shot by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He managed to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and live on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a longish period. When one of his captors asked “What brought you here?” he responded “Duty, sir.” The corpse would be sent for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. Recovering the skeleton from this college during the Civil War, his mother Mary Ann Day Brown eventually would be able to rebury it in the Adirondacks, before heading off to her retirement in California.

John E. Cook Yes No Yes Captain 29 white

John Edwin Cook, a well-connected 5'7" gentleman with blue eyes and long, curly blond hair, born during Summer 1830 to a well-to-do family in Haddam, Connecticut, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College on account of some student indiscretion, and had in 1855 become a member of the guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” by Charles Lenhart and had made himself an excellent shot. The name “John E. Cook” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. He had been dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground and had secured employment as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He had gotten married with a Chambersburg, Pennsylvania woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18th, 1859. After being sent out by Captain Brown to collect weapons, and having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching the events transpire, and after having evaded capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food and was captured on October 25th, 8 miles from Chambersburg. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet. In a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of Samuel C. Young, a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting, Cook would detail for his captors all his movements from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment he would seek to save himself by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas.” Despite his confession, and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end, one of the last, be also hanged for treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, on December 16th.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was an Oberlin, Ohio carpenter and freeborn black American who was the son of a slave. He was active in the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society. It was rumored that he escorted John Price to Canada after the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Copeland later participated in the raid on the with John Brown. He got trapped in “Hall’s Rifle Works” along with his uncle and John Henry Kagi. When the 3 made a run for the Shenandoah River they got caught in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker would assert in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been “the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly.” Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– “Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out.” On the day that he died Copeland declared, “If I am dying for freedom, I could not die for a better cause — I had rather die than be a slave!” (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON: RESPONSES TO JOHN BROWN AND THE HARPERS FERRY RAID that his middle name was “Anthony” rather than “Anderson.”)

Barclay Coppoc Yes No No Private < 21 white

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Iowa, was born in Salem, Ohio on January 4, 1839, and had not attained his majority at the time of the raid on Harpers Ferry. This Quaker escaped, although his adopted brother Edwin Coppoc surrendered and was tried and hanged. “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars.” Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay then went to his family home in Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. There a band of young men armed themselves to defend him, and the Religious Society of Friends disowned him for bearing arms. He was back in “Bleeding Kansas” in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life in a second undertaking of this kind. He became a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he was killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.

Edwin Coppoc Yes Unwounded Yes Lieutenant < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Edwin Coppoc, who had been born on June 30, 1835 and orphaned and adopted at the age of 6 into a nonresistant- abolitionist Quaker farm family first of Salem, Ohio and then of Springdale, Iowa. On March 6, 1857 he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends and in the spring of 1858 went to “Bleeding Kansas” as a settler — but did not take part in the fighting. It was during a visit to Springdale in the fall of 1858 that he met John Brown. He would surrender with Captain Brown in the engine house at Harpers Ferry, and would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown while his still-Quaker brother Barclay Coppoc was eluding capture. He was sentenced on November 2. From prison before his hanging, he wrote his adoptive mother that he was

“sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.” THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

He was hung with John Edwin Cook on December 16th, 1859 and a day later his brother turned up at home in Iowa (he also would soon be disowned). The body of Edwin Coppoc was buried in Winona, Iowa after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio).

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. No No No Enabler white

Treason being punished as what it is, why would the downtown Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. allow himself to become legal counsel to a “” committee that was funding the activities of Captain John Brown, as that loose cannon prepared to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia? He was going to be implicated as having obviously had guilty prior knowledge, and was obviously making himself of necessity a prime candidate for the noose. As the going got hot he would make himself unavailable for prosecution –by venturing on a luxury trip around the globe– but the issue is not how he might extricate himself from this, but why he would have so endangered himself.

Martin Robison Delany No No No Supporter of color

Dr. Martin Robison Delany, Pennsylvania, 1843; attended the Colored National Convention of 1848; attended the Emigration Convention of 1854; a member of the Niger Valley Exploring Party in 1858; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, “M.R. Delany,” the Reverend William Charles Munroe of , and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. That document would be discovered on Brown’s person when he was taken into custody. He would be a Major in the 104th Colored Infantry, and Sub-Assistant Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, in 1865. He was a Freemason.

Frederick Douglass No No No Supporter 41 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Waldo Emerson urged Frederick Douglass early on, to make himself into the General Toussaint Louverture of the North American continent. When Captain John Brown made a speech offering himself as the leader for the forces of freedom in “Bleeding Kansas”, Douglass stood in the audience and endorsed Brown and his mission despite the unpleasant fact that the plan of the abolitionists was to permanently exclude all persons of color, whether free or enslaved, from that new state. When the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was raided, his role was intended to be the raising aloft of the sword of General George Washington and the generaling of the black forces. His involvement in this raid was acceptable to such personages as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher only because his blood had been mixed with white it was removed to a degree from its original “low animal condition” (the Reverend’s category, the Reverend’s words) of blackness. At the very last moment Douglass perceived that the prospects of the raid were for either failure or betrayal, and fled by way of Canada to England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson No No No Supporter white

Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur of race war, recommended to Frederick Douglass in 1844 that he become the liberator of his people on the North American continent, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture. “Let me hold your coat while some white man kills you,” or something to that effect. We only know about this because Henry Thoreau rushed down to Boston right after the lecture, and had the lecture printed up as a pamphlet — after which there was no lying about the provocation that had been made and so all Emerson could do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present.

John Buchanan Floyd No No No Supporter white

Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd was one of those who had been warned, months in advance, that Captain John Brown was planning to attack a federal arsenal to seize weapons with which to arm black slaves, in the creation of a servile insurrection (he didn’t know precisely when, and didn’t know it would be at Harpers Ferry, Virginia). Such a prospect did not alarm him in the slightest. The official story, if the official story is what you want to believe, is that our Secretary of War would pass this warning along to no-one. I myself find it difficult to regard this as anything more than a cover. I think the truth was that these folks were aware that such a servile insurrection could lead to nothing but a race genocide, with white Americans exterminating the black ones, and what I fear is that such a race genocide would have been considered to be just fine, an improvement in our national condition. Let’s not have ourselves a civil war of brother against brother, that would be so nasty — let’s prevent that by having ourselves a nice little race war!

Hugh Forbes No No No Lieutenant white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Captain John Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the “Subterranean Pass Way,” was that the escaped, armed slaves were to “swarm” into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular, the Scottish adventurer Hugh Forbes, Brown’s onetime principal lieutenant, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another nation. Evidently the two planners parted company over issues such as this after Forbes had functioned in Tabor, Iowa as the leader of military training for the recruits (Forbes was a veteran of the Grenadier Guards, and had fought along with Garibaldi in defense of the Roman Republic of 1849), and then Forbes attempted blackmail. When not offered a payoff, he wrote long, detailed letters to congressmen and to others, and it is one of the unresolved issues, how anyone in high office in Washington DC could have avoided knowing in advance that Brown was plotting a strike of some sort against slavery (another of the unresolved issues is what happened to Forbes once his extortion had failed — he simply disappeared from the pages of history).

George B. Gill

George B. Gill had come to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1857 after whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and had there been recruited by John Brown. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. He alarmed other conspirators by conducting himself in such manner as to attract attention and arouse suspicion, for instance displaying weapons, bragging to lady friends that he had been in Kansas and had killed 5 men, informing other boarders at his lodgings that he was in town on a secret expedition with other fighters, who were under his command, etc. During the year before the raid, Captain Brown sent Gill to visit a black con artist named Mr. Reynolds who persuaded Gill that he had gone through the South organizing and had brought into existence in areas of the South a militant organization of black men and women. Pointing out to Gill that Southern newspapers carried numerous references to the death of a favorite slave, he alleged that these were leaders of servile insurrection plots who were being discovered and offed. According to this “mumper” Southern blacks were ready and needed only to be given a cue. There is evidence that several slaves from the vicinity of the arsenal did participate in the raid itself, but returned hastily to their plantations when it became obvious that the raid was a failure. Several fires were set in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid, probably by slaves and free black Americans (Richard Hinton estimates that $10,000,000 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the year 1859; census figures show that between 1850 and 1860 there was almost a 10% decline in blacks in the three counties surrounding Harpers Ferry, a period during which the total number of blacks in Maryland and Virginia was increasing by about 4%).

The Rev. and Mrs. Gloucester No Financial support of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The Reverend James Newton Gloucester and Elizabeth A. Parkhill Gloucester of Brooklyn, New York were wealthy financial supporters of the servile-insurrection plot of Captain John Brown, or “Shubel Morgan,” or “Isaac Smith” (depending on what alias he was using at the time), and had put him up for a week at their home while he was enroute to Harpers Ferry. According to a report in a local newspaper: Brown said, “Goodbye, Sister Gloucester. I’ve only sixteen men, but I’m to conquer.” Mrs. Gloucester said to him, “Perhaps you will lose your life.” “Well, my life,” he replied, “is not worth much. I’m an old man. In Kansas, the balls flew around my head as thick as hail. I’ll never be killed by a ball. If I fall, I’ll open a ball in this country that will never stop until every slave is free.”

Shields Green Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color

Shields Green was an escapee from South Carolina who had served as clothes cleaner in Rochester, New York (his business card there declared “I make no promise that I am unable to perform”) and acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Douglass. He was known as “Emperor,” although how he obtained this nickname is not now known. He decided to go with John Brown when Douglass turned back at the stone quarry prior to the Harpers Ferry raid, saying to his boss “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” He took part in the raid and then refused to speak during his trial. At the time of his hanging he was about 23 years of age. His cadaver would be dug up and used for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. He, like John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their 3 fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

James Henry Harris HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

No one associated with Captain John Brown, and no one associated with politics in North Carolina, has ever been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. “J.H. Harris” signed, as a member of a Vigilance Committee, on May 8th, 1858, the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada, a document which would be found on the person of John Brown when he was captured at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. Although another person of this name, James Henry Harris, had been born a slave in Granville County, North Carolina and had gained his freedom at the age of 18 in about 1848, he was not this “J.H. Harris.” Educated at Oberlin College, he would hold a teaching certificate from the New England Freedman’s Aid Society. He was of Cleveland in 1859, and a member of the 102d US Colored Infantry formed in Michigan by George DeBaptiste that included so many men from Chatham. He would attend the 1st Freedmen’s Convention in the South, held in what would become the St. Paul A.M.E. Church on Edenton Street in Raleigh during September 1865 as a representative of Wake County. He would become the 1st black alderman from Raleigh, and a delegate from Raleigh to the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868; he got married with Bettie Miller, a daughter of Addison J. Smith and Mary Anderson, a cousin of Osborn Perry Anderson; he died in 1891 in Washington DC and the remains are at Mount Hope Cemetery in Raleigh. There is yet a 3d James H. Harris, who was not this “J.H. Harris” signatory, who was belatedly awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and is interred in the remote section of Arlington National Cemetery that was reserved for colored soldiers, and for contrabands.

Lewis Hayden

Lewis Hayden, a black leader in downtown Boston whose escape from had been aided by in 1844. Eight years after escaping from slavery, he raised, as an act of gratitude and duty, a sum of $650, in order to ransom the Reverend Calvin Fairbanks out of the Kentucky State Prison at Frankfort, where the Reverend had been languishing under the accusation that he had assisted 47 slaves in their escape, and had served 14 years, and had been whipped and beaten. Just before the raid on Harpers Ferry, Hayden helped recruit Francis Jackson Meriam to carry a message and cash money to the hideout of John Brown, and take part in that struggle.

Albert Hazlett Yes No Yes Capt. or Lt. < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Albert Hazlett, born in Pennsylvania on September 21st, 1837, did not take part in the fight at Harpers Ferry but, with John Edwin Cook who had escaped from that fight by climbing a tree and who later identified him to the prosecutors, would be belatedly hanged. Before the raid he had worked on his brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and he had joined the others at Kennedy Farm in the early part of September 1859. He was arrested on October 22d in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Chambersburg, where he was using the name “William Harrison,” was extradited to Virginia, was tried and sentenced at the spring term of the Court, and was hanged on March 16th, 1860. George B. Gill wrote “I was acquainted with Hazlett well enough in Kansas, yet after all knew but little of him. He was with Montgomery considerably, and was with [Aaron D. Stevens] on the raid in which Cruise was killed. He was a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and social feelings.... Brown got acquainted with him just before leaving Kansas.” He wrote to Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring on March 15th, 1860, the eve of his hanging, “Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”

Reverend T. W. Higginson No White

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson of the Secret “Six”’s earliest American ancestor was the 1st minister of Salem. He believed that “Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others” (it was therefore up to American black people to demonstrate their courage, and their worthiness to be free — basically by getting themselves exterminated). After Harpers Ferry he would attempt to organize an expedition to raid the Charles Town lockup and rescue the accused — this was an expedition Henry Thoreau would oppose, asserting that to the contrary Captain Brown’s highest and best purpose was to be hung.

Richard J. Hinton

Richard Josiah Hinton, abolitionist journalist whose opposition to slavery led him to transform himself into a gunslinger. Refer to: Richard J. Hinton, JOHN BROWN AND HIS MEN (NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894; Reprint NY: The Arno Press, 1968).

WHAT TO TAKE: Let your trunk, if you have to buy one, be of moderate size and of the strongest make. Test it by throwing it from the top of a three-storied house; if you pick it up uninjured, it will do to go to Kansas. Not otherwise. — and Richard J. Hinton, HAND-BOOK TO KANSAS TERRITORY, 1859, as quoted on page 3 of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map) [Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991].

Dr. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day, to buy enough Sharp’s rifles to arm 200 men to the teeth in “Bleeding Kansas.” He, as well as the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, , and , fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war (black Americans against white), would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators of the Secret “Six” finance committee clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Julia Ward Howe No White

Julia Ward Howe was a racist and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret “Six” finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of that committee’s agendas.

Thaddeus Hyatt No white

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of “Bleeding Kansas” as a “free soil” or “Aryan Nation” enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear and would be imprisoned for a period —but ultimately would get away with this refusal.

John Jones No No No Support of color

John Jones was a businessman of mixed race, an upscale tailor (John Brown visited his home). He and his wife Mary Jane Richardson Jones were active abolitionists whose home was a station on the Underground Railroad while they agitated for repeal of “Black Laws” (not only did these laws obligate black Americans to prove that they were free to enter the state of Illinois but, once there, these laws barred them from visiting the homes of whites, owning any property or merchandise, or entering into any contract).

John Henry Kagi Yes Yes Secretary of War 24 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Although John Henry Kagi, AKA Maurice Maitland, AKA John Henrie, was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era reveal him as the best educated of the raiders. A debater, public speaker, stenographer, wannabee writer, and total abstainer from alcohol, he was cold in manner and rough in appearance. A nonparticipant in organized religion, he was an able man of business. He had been born on March 15, 1835, a son of the blacksmith for Bristolville, Ohio in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). During 1854/1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown, Virginia but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and been compelled to return to Ohio with a pledge never to return. He had gone to Nebraska City in 1856 and been admitted to the bar. He then entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane’s parties and enlisted in Aaron D. Stevens’s (“Colonel Whipple’s”) 2d Kansas Militia. In fighting in the town of Tecumseh in “Bleeding Kansas” he proved himself by killing at least one man, who had been coming after him with a club. After being captured by US troops he had been imprisoned at Lecompton and at Tecumseh, but was finally released. On January 31, 1857 he had been struck on the head with a gold-headed cane by a slaveowning territorial judge, drew his revolver and shot the judge in the groin, but Judge Physic Rush Elmore got off 3 shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long with his family in Ohio recovering from these wounds, but then returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. He bore the title of Secretary of War in the provisional government and was next in command to John Brown; he was also the adjutant. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner. “In a very few days we shall commence,” he wrote on the eve of the raid, “things could not be more cheerful and more certain of success than they are. We have worked hard and suffered much, but the hardest is down now, and a glorious success is in sight.... Be cheerful. Don’t imagine dangers. All will be well.” At Harpers Ferry he was trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got caught in crossfire and Kagi was the first killed, shot in the head, his body being left to float in the river.

Amos Lawrence No White

Amos Lawrence and his son Amos Adams Lawrence provided the large bulk of the investment capital needed by Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company for the purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas,” needed in order to encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there as “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior.

Lewis Sheridan Leary Yes Yes Private 25 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Lewis Sheridan “Shad” Leary was a mulatto citizen of Oberlin, Ohio, a saddler and harness maker whose father had been a freeborn black harness maker as well. He was descended from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who had fought in the Revolution under General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who had married a woman of mixed blood, partly African, partly of that Croatan Indian stock of North Carolina, which is believed by some to be lineally descended from the “lost colonists” left by John White on Roanoke Island in 1587. Leary was born at Fayetteville, North Carolina on March 17th, 1835, and was therefore in his 25th year when killed during the raid upon the federal arsenal. In 1857 he had gone to Oberlin to live, marrying there and making the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry he left his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, his wife being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr. “Tell no man where I have gone,” he commented, “you’ll see me again, but I’ll be marching at the top of the drum.... Men must suffer for a good cause.” He was isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the men made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he was taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He was able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as having said “I am ready to die.” The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips. The corpse was dumped into the common pit beside the Shenandoah River, not to be exhumed until 1899. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their fallen free men of color, Leary, Copeland, and Shields Green (this 8-foot marble monument would be relocated to Vine Street Park in 1971).

William H. Leeman Yes Yes Captain < 21 white

William H. Leeman was of a wild disposition. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell, Maine, by the age of 14 he was working in a shoe factory in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” with the 2d batch of recruits from Massachusetts, and on September 9, 1856 became a member of Captain John Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars.” He fought well at Osawatomie when but 17 years of age. At Springdale, Iowa, Owen Brown found him full of swagger and bluster and difficult to control George B. Gill said of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” He signed “W.H. Leeman” to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when the raiders were subdued at Harpers Ferry. By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he had reached the age of 20, the youngest of the raiders. He wrote his mother, “I shall be in danger, but it is natural to me. I shall not get killed. I am in a good cause, and I am not afraid.” He made a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to attempt to escape by swimming down the Potomac River, where two militiamen caught up with him and shot him down on an islet. For hours his corpse would be used for target practice by drunken citizens, until their hail of bullets pushed the riddled remains into a current that drew it along until only his black hair could be glimpsed in the ripples on the surface. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.”

Francis Jackson Merriam Yes No No Private < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Francis Jackson Meriam, grandson and namesake of the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson, was a young manic-depressive with one good eye. He helped James Redpath collect materials in Haiti and across the American South for use in a book dedicated to John Brown and Redpath arranged for him to join the Harpers Ferry guerrillas. He was not captured or killed because he had been left during the raid in one of his fits of despair at the Kennedy farmhouse. After escaping through Shippensburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Concord, and the area of St. Catharines, Canada he served as a captain in the 3d South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he urged wild schemes upon his superiors and sometimes attempted them. He created, for instance, a list of 5 secret-writing inks for confidential correspondence. In an engagement under General Ulysses S. Grant he received a serious leg wound. He died suddenly on November 28, 1865 in New-York.

Charles W. Moffett Yes white

We believe that the name of Charles W. Moffett of Iowa was among the signatories to Chatham, Ontario’s “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” as “C.W. Moffit,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. Perhaps this “W” stood for “Wesley,” if we can rely upon a tombstone in the Maple Hill cemetery in Montour, Iowa (“Charles Wesley Moffett / Jun. 20, 1827-Aug. 19, 1904”). We wonder if perhaps he did not attend the raid on the federal arsenal because he got cold feet, or perhaps because he was one of a number of people suspected by the others of having written to alert Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd to the plan for a raid on a federal arsenal (the Cabinet member received these warnings while at Red Sweet Springs in Virginia and neglected to alert anyone to be on the lookout for such an attack — he would remind people later that as War Secretary he had been getting a whole lot of spurious warnings).

Edwin Morton No White

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, and from a long line of violinists, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret “Six.” He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with that family, tutoring the son. After the raid, with the heat on while Jefferson Davis was conducting a congressional investigation, he fled overseas as did Frederick Douglass, and for the duration chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley before settling for health reasons in Switzerland.

Dangerfield Newby Yes Yes bridge sentinel 39 light mulatto HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dangerfield Newby, a free light mulatto, son of a Scotsman, very tall and with a splendid physique, was written by his wife begged him to obtain funds to purchase her and their baby who that had just “commenced to crawl ... as soon as possible, for if you do not get me somebody else will.” She pleaded “Oh Dear Dangerfield, come this fall without fail, money or no money I want to see you so much; that is the one bright hope I have before me.” He was serving as a sentinel at the Harpers Ferry bridge and was shot to death as he and the two white men with him retreated before the charge of the Jefferson Guards of Charles Town, Virginia, coming across the Potomac from the Maryland side. He was not brought down by ball or bullet but by a 6-inch spike being used as a musket projectile, which caught him in the throat and ripped him severely. Since neither of the white men were shot, it appears that as a mulatto he was targeted. The body was beaten savagely, and its ears snipped off as trophies, and then a herd of hogs was driven up to root on it. His corpse was dumped into the shallow group pit beside the Shenandoah River, to be exhumed in 1899.

Reverend Theodore Parker No White

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a stone racist, declared from his pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of 4 or 5 men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. Sharps rifles, the very latest in deadliness, cost $25 apiece when had in sufficient quantity:

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE as in “The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed.” He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six”, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their allies among the Northern and Southern black Americans slave and free, in order to foment a rectification of the Southern white Americans.

Luke F. Parsons White

Luke Fisher Parsons was a free-state fighter seasoned in “Bleeding Kansas.” He took part in the battle of Black Jack near Baldwin City on June 2d, 1856, the on August 30th, 1856, and the raid on Iowa during Winter 1857/1858. His name “L.F. Parsons” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in John Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when the raiders were subdued at Harpers Ferry. He had gone off toward a supposed Colorado gold rush and, summoned by letters from Brown and Kagi, did not manage to make it back to take part in the raid on the federal arsenal, or to attempt to rescue the prisoners once they were waiting to be hanged, at the jail in Charlestown, Virginia. He started a family and lived out a long life as a farmer in Salina, Kansas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Friend John Hunt Painter White

John Hunt Painter, a birthright Quaker who owned a farm near Springdale, Iowa, a farm that was used as a waystation on the Underground Railroad, forwarded stored firearms to Captain John Brown at his hideout near Harpers Ferry. After disownment by the Religious Society of Friends he would relocate his farm family to downtown Pasadena, California to there construct and be the proprietor of the toney La Pintoresca hotel.

Richard Realf White

Richard Realf, English poet, was the son of a blacksmith who had become a rural constable. In 1852 he had published GUESSES AT THE BEAUTIFUL and in 1854, after giving up being the lover of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s aging widow Lady Noell Byron, he had been led to the United States of America by “instincts” he characterized as “democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical.” At the end of November or beginning of December 1857 he had been introduced to John Brown in Mount Tabor, Iowa by John Edwin Cook, whom he had met in Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” while working as a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette. He traveled through Chicago and Detroit to Chatham, Ontario West, Canada and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting found when the survivors were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. By reading a book of ethical philosophy written by the President of Brown University, he determined that this violent agenda, and radical in general, were a forbidden path, and so he returned to England to lecture, and visited France. He embarked at Le Havre on March 2d, 1859, arriving at New Orleans on April 17th, 1959 with the intention of becoming a Jesuit priest, then with an aim to join the Shakers, and made no further contact with Captain Brown. After the raid he would voluntarily testify before the US Senate Committee and then fight in the Civil War and then contemplate joining the Oneida Perfectionists and then attempt to become a Colonel of colored troops, before being laid low on account of his messy sexual life.

James Redpath

James Redpath, crusading journalist out to make a buck in the best way. –Panderer in the pornography of armchair violence, at first in regard to the horrors of Southern slavery, –then in regard to the horrors of “Bleeding Kansas” –then in regard to the horrors of starving Ireland. Finally, after the Civil War, without fresh horrors to proffer to his armchair audience, he would resort to publishing defamatory doggerel poetry — lines in which he age-shames and fat-shames various Boston society ladies. –Never a dull moment for this “tell it like it is” dude! The Charleston, Virginia hangman sent him a piece of the scaffold, for which he devised a label: “A Bit of the True Cross, a Chip from the Scaffold of John Brown.”

George J. Reynolds of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

George J. Reynolds was a light mulatto with native American as well as black African heritage, a blacksmith or coppersmith, from Virginia although claiming to be from Vermont, aged about 35 at the time of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and active in the Underground Railroad. He attended the Convention of Colored Men in 1858, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada per a document in John Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued on October 18th, 1859, as “J.G. Reynolds” (3 weeks after signing on to this conspiracy he was disclosing some of Captain Brown’s agenda to a black secret paramilitary group at the Masonic Lodge of his home town, Sandusky, Ohio).

Richard Richardson No of color

Richard Richardson, a fugitive slave from Lexington, Missouri who had joined John Brown in southern Iowa, was going through that unfortunate but now-well-understood initial period of reaction to freedom in which a former slave, accustomed to servitude and unaccustomed to self-origination, attaches himself to some authoritative white man who is able with courtesy to make use of him. He had been in 1858 a member of the African Mysteries, a secret defense group in Michigan, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued on October 18th, 1859, but evidently because of a religious conversion and a dedication to missionary work in Canada did not get from Ontario to Harpers Ferry (of the 34 black signatories to the Chatham document, only Osborn Perry Anderson would be at Harpers Ferry). He became a private in Company E of the 113th US Colored Infantry formed from the 13th US Colored Infantry, that was recruited in Arkansas and provided Civil War post and garrison duty in Little Rock, Arkansas, mustering out on April 9th, 1866.

Judge Thomas Russell No White

Thomas Russell and Mary Ellen “Nellie” Taylor Russell visited John Brown in jail in Charleston, Virginia a few weeks before his execution. She said that although she had never approved of his violent methods, she admired him as a man of vision and idealism. Brown had been friends with the Russells for years and had stayed at their home on several occasions despite the husband being prominent in the Massachusetts judiciary. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would allege long after the raid on Harpers Ferry that “Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Judge Russell.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord descended from the founder and 1st minister of the old New Hampshire plantation of Hampton. Another ancestor, the Reverend Stephen Bachiler, was the 1st minister of Lynn, and probably had among his parishioners there, in 1635-1636, Thomas Parker, the 1st American ancestor of Theodore Parker. He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white Secret “Six” conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies for servile insurrection in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (John Brown, who had himself buried a wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to Sanborn, in regard to the young man’s grief over the prompt death of his young bride Ariana Walker, that he was too young to be married to a gravestone.)

Gerrit Smith No White

The immensely wealthy “H. Ross Perot” political figure of that era was a former Millerite millennialist: Gerrit Smith. In this American’s mansion outside Syracuse, New York, standing in the center of his study, was an ornate mahogany desk. Rumor had it that this had once been the desk of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The millennium of William Miller not having arrived on schedule, Smith had become determined to, as he put it, “make himself a colored man” –he desired to explore his inner blackness– and thus he befriended Frederick Douglass (Smith would be Douglass’s friend, that is, up to the point at which he would discover that black Americans were inherently racially inferior to white Americans and thus unworthy of consideration). He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” fully grasped from the earliest moment that the probable result of their attempt to incite a servile insurrection of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies, in order to disrupt relations between Northern and Southern white Americans, toward the generation of a sectional civil war.

Stephen Smith of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Located just north of the Mason/Dixon line separating Pennsylvania from slaveholding states such as Maryland, the town of Columbia would be an important stop on the Underground Railroad. In 1818 its citizens had begun a Columbia Abolition Society. Stephen Smith had in 1831 led free blacks in Columbia in a public meeting in opposition to the agenda of the American Colonization Society. In 1834 he had joined with David Ruggles, John Peck, Abraham Shadd, and John B. Vashon, who were the initial black agents for Freedom’s Journal and later for The Emancipator. In that year and the following one there were riots in Columbia, white riots that made a particular target of the lumberyard of the successful “Black Steve” and his mulatto partner William Whipper, and in 1835 the Columbia Spy would report that his success had so “excited the envy or hatred of those not so prosperous and of the ruling race” that his office was vandalized and papers, records, and books destroyed. Smith relocated to Philadelphia leaving the business in Columbia under Whipper’s management, and would soon again be prospering. When abolitionists found it difficult to secure a building to hold their meetings, Smith made Pennsylvania Hall available for their use, but on July 17, 1838 a mob of white citizens torched that venue. Taking advantage of a little- known Pennsylvania statute by which a municipality could be held liable for mob damage, Smith sued Philadelphia, obtaining a judgment for damages in excess of what the building had cost: $75,000. Dun and Company, a firm that evaluated local businesses, would in 1857 estimate Smith and Whipper’s annual sales at $100,000, characterizing Smith as “King of the Darkies.” He was on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest black Americans in 19th-Century Pennsylvania. John Brown met with Stephen Smith and others while passing through Philadelphia.

Lysander Spooner

The anarchist (or, to deploy a more recent term, libertarian) Boston attorney , who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith during January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast at threat of execution should Brown be hanged. The motto he chose for himself, that might well be inscribed on his tombstone in Forest Hills Cemetery, was from the INSTITUTES of the Emperor Justinian I of the eastern Roman Empire: “To live honestly is to hurt no one, and give to every one his due.”

George Luther Stearns

George Luther Stearns, a Boston manufacturer of lead pipe and the secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six,” fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in servile insurrection in order to forestall a sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Aaron Dwight Stevens Yes Badly Yes Captain 28 white wounded HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, was of old Puritan stock, his great-grandfather having served as a captain during the Revolution. He had run away from home at the age of 16 to serve with a Massachusetts volunteer regiment during the Mexican War. Well over 6 feet, he made himself proficient with the sword. Enlisted in Company F of the 1st US Dragoons, he became their bugler, but at Taos, New Mexico during 1855 he received a sentence of death for “mutiny, engaging in a drunken riot, and assaulting Major George [Alexander Hamilton] Blake.” This was commuted by President Franklin Pierce to 3 years hard labor but he escaped from Fort Leavenworth in 1856, 1st finding refuge with the Delaware tribe and then joining the Kansas Free State militia of James Lane under the name “Whipple.” He became Colonel of the 2d Kansas Militia and met Brown on August 7th, 1856 at the Nebraska line when Lane’s Army of the North marched into “Bleeding Kansas”. He became a devoted follower. He was a spiritualist. At Harpers Ferry, when Brown sent this middleaged man out along with his son Watson Brown to negotiate under a flag of truce, he received 4 bullets but was taken alive. The never- married Stevens had a relationship of sorts with Rebecca B. Spring of the Eagleswood social experiment near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and after his execution on March 16th would be buried there alongside Albert Hazlett. According to George B. Gill, writing after his death, “Stevens — how gloriously he sang! His was the noblest soul I ever knew. Though owing to his rash, hasty way, I often found occasion to quarrel with him more so than with any of the others, and though I liked [John Henry Kagi] better than any man I ever knew, our temperaments being adapted to each other, yet I can truly say that Stevens was the most noble man that I ever knew.” He was not a 2d time reprieved by the President, and was hanged on March 16th, 1860.

Stewart Taylor Yes Yes Private 23 white

Stewart Taylor was born on October 29th, 1836 at Uxbridge in Canada. He became a wagonmaker and in 1853 went to Iowa, where in 1858 he became acquainted with Captain Brown through George B. Gill. He was a very good phonographer [stenographer], rapid and accurate. A spiritualist, he confidently predicted his own death. He signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario, Canada West per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. A relative, Jacob L. Taylor of Pine Orchard, Canada West, wrote to Richard J. Hinton on April 23d, 1860 that he had been “heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause.” An excellent debater and very fond of studying history, he stayed at home in Canada during Winter 1858/1859 and then went to Chicago, thence to Bloomington, Illinois and thence to Harper’s [sic] Ferry.” While out of touch with the John Brown movement, the 23-year-old had feared being left behind: “I felt as though I was deprived of my chief object in life.... I believe that fate has decreed me for this undertaking.... It is my chief desire to add fuel to the fire.” When mortally wounded in the engine house, begging to be put out of his misery, Brown instructed him “Die like a man.” What remained of his corpse would be recovered in 1899 from a soggy group pit near the Shenandoah River above Harpers Ferry.

Eli Thayer No HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur who believed in “doing well by doing good,” formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas” and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. Thayer would comment in retrospect, about the antebellum abolitionists with whom he had been affiliated, that they had constituted “a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it.” He would instance that there was never “any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises.”

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson Yes Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, brother of William Thompson and a North Elba neighbor of the family of John Brown, was born April 17, 1838. He was “very quiet, with fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes,” a “pippin-cheeked country boy.” His sister Isabella M. Thompson got married with Watson Brown and his elder brother Henry Thompson got married with Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. “I suppose the folk think we are a set of fools,” he wrote from someplace he described as “Parts Unknown,” “but they will find out we know what we are about.” The two brothers died at Harpers Ferry, Dauphin cowering beneath a fire engine until skewered by a Marine bayonet. Their bodies were placed in the common pit beside the Shenandoah River above town, and exhumed in 1899.

William Thompson Yes Yes Captain? < 30 white

William Thompson was born in New Hampshire in August 1833, the son of Roswell Thompson. During Fall 1858 he married a Mary Brown who was not related to the family of John Brown. His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown; his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. He “would have made a successful comic actor ... he was very lively and full of funny stories and jokes.” He had started for “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 but upon meeting the Brown sons returned with them to North Elba. Along with his brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, he took part in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the two of them were shot dead. When Captain Brown sent him out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body onto the rocks of the Potomac River. The corpse “could be seen lying at the bottom of the river, with his ghastly face still showing what a fearful death agony he had experienced.” One of his captors commented that for such “villainous Abolitionists,” he “felt justified in shooting any that I could find. I felt it my duty, and I have no regrets.” The corpse was dumped into a common pit on the bank of the Shenandoah River above town, and buried about a foot deep.

Henry David Thoreau No white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

When, in 1844, Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur, recommended to Frederick Douglass’s face that, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture, he fashion himself into the liberator of his people and initiate on the North American continent a servile insurrection or race war, it was Henry Thoreau who after the lecture rushed this information right down to Boston, and had a pamphlet printed up, after which there was no way to dissimulate about the provocation that had been made — and so all Emerson was able to do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present. (We, of course, have credited Emerson’s cover story, not because there is any corroboration for it but because ... well, he’s Mr. Emerson and wouldn’t lie to us.)

Charles Plummer Tidd Yes No No Captain 25 white

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo, Maine on January 1st, 1834 and had emigrated to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter of Worcester in search of excitement. After joining John Brown’s party at Mount Tabor, Iowa in 1857 he became one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who returned in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857/1858 encampment of the Brown forces in Springdale, Iowa, he “ruined” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team had to sneak him away during the night. Nevertheless, the group obtained some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. He and John E. Cook were particularly warm friends. He signed, as “Charles P. Tidd,” the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Canada per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and took part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. According to Mrs. Annie Brown Adams, “Tidd had not much education, but good common sense. After the raid he began to study, and tried to repair his deficiencies. He was by no means handsome. He had a quick temper, but was kind-hearted. His rages soon passed and then he tried all he could to repair damages. He was a fine singer and of strong family affections.” On July 19th, 1861 he was able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8th, 1862 he died of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island. (This was a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates.) Tidd’s, or Charles Plummer’s, grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne, North Carolina. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Harriet Tubman No of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Harriet Tubman was negotiated with by John Brown for participation in the raid on the federal arsenal. She mistrusted these men and had persistent dreams in which Brown and his sons appeared as serpents. The attack had been scheduled to occur on the 4th of July, symbolic of national birth. At the last moment she alleged she was ill, and for this reason as well as delays in the deliveries of supplies, the attack needed to be postponed for months. On the day of the actual attack at Harpers Ferry she had a premonition that it would fail.

Henry Watson No of color

Henry Watson, barber of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania involved both with John Brown and with Frederick Douglass.

etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1795

Stephen Smith was born to Nancy Smith as a slave at Paxtang near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 15 years after Pennsylvania had legislated gradual abolition.

By this point (possibly already in the previous year), Robert Voorhis, the man who would wind up his life as a hermit in Rhode Island, had escaped from his enslavement in Charleston, South Carolina by hiding away on a ship that had a Quaker master. He made it from Boston to Charlestown, Massachusetts to Lynn to Salem, where he enlisted as a common seaman aboard a ship bound for India. He would be a seaman for approximately the following 9 years. During this time, while in home port, he evidently would get a girl in the family way and would need to marry with her, for he would say in regard to his marriage before Justice Putnam of Danvers that he was being “strongly urged so to do by those who undoubtedly had the authority to use compulsory means had I declined.” –However, upon his return from his next voyage, to and from Canton, China, for whatever reasons his bride would no longer feel affection for him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1801

July 10, Friday: Revolutionary War Brevet Major Thomas Boude, who lived on Front Street in Columbia, Pennsylvania and had a lumberyard in that town, purchased Stephen Smith at the age of 5 from a Cochran family that resided near Harrisburg.1

The 1st reported case of the attempted kidnapping of a slave in Columbia was at the Boude home. Shortly after Boude purchased “Black Steve,” Stephen’s mother Nancy Smith ran away from the Cochrans and came to General Boude’s. Soon a white lady arrived on horseback and, coming through the Boude home into the kitchen, seized Nancy. Dragging her into the street, she attempted to tie her slave to the horse with a piece of rope. Boude, in his lumber yard at some distance, heard the outcries and Mrs. Cochran needed to ride off without her slave in tow. Fearing that the next thing to happen would be, that Mr. Cochran would arrive to retrieve Nancy, Boude went to Harrisburg and purchased her.

1. Stephen was said to be the son of the black slave Nancy Smith by her white slavemaster. Mr. Cochran would then be on our one- person candidate list, to answer the question of who it was specifically who had been Stephen’s father. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1804

The Underground Railroad was “incorporated” in Columbia, Pennsylvania (previously Wright’s Ferry, named after an early Quaker missionary) after Brevet Major Thomas Boude, a slaveholder, declined to surrender an escaped slave to authorities.

The New Jersey legislature enacted “An act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” (P.L. 1804, chap. 103, p. 251). This law required the registration of births of slaves’ children born after July 4, 1804 and declared such children to be “free,” but bound as servants to the owners of their mothers for a period of 25 years for males and 21 years for females. No provision was made for slaves born before July 4, 1804, slaves such as Betsey Stockton who had been born in Princeton as the property of Robert Stockton, a local attorney, in 1798, who thus at this point was about six years of age. (She would be presented to Stockton’s daughter and son-in-law, the Reverend Ashbel Green, then President of Princeton College, as a gift. In that new capacity, she would be permitted to attend evening classes at the Princeton Theological Seminary, manumitted, and accepted into membership by the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missionaries.) PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Subsequent to this legislation, no further legislation would be enacted in New Jersey substantially affecting the manumission of slaves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1816

January 3, Wednesday: The Recorder appeared in Boston, Massachusetts. This was the 2d religious newspaper published. From the different claims which have been made for its establishment, it appears that Nathaniel Willis 1st conceived the idea of such a paper, and printed the Recorder, of which Sidney Edwards Morse was the 1st editor.

As “Black Steve” Smith approached manhood, Brevet Major Thomas Boude allowed him to manage his entire lumber business, and control an area of the riverfront. Upon completion of his indenture at the age of 21, Smith at this point obtained his freedom and borrowed $50 worth of lumber with which to begin his own business.

Meyer Beer (Giacomo Meyerbeer) arrived back in Paris from London.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 3 of 1st M 1816 / In the morning of Yesterday John seem’d more comfortable but drooped toward night & had a very feverish night & this morning Dr Hazard thinks he has a Settled fever — He has been very poorly thro’ the day, his fever exceedingly high & his throat very sore, it is with difficulty that he swallows Drinks - he however ate a mouthful or two of buckwheat Cake & drank Some tea & was quite bright for an hour afterward, but drooped again before he went to bed - his feet were put in warm Water & rye poultices apply’d to them. - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

November 17, Sunday: William White Cooper was born in Holt, Wiltshire.

Stephen Smith got married with the mulatto Harriet Lee, who had been a domestic in the home of Jonathan Mifflin. The ceremony was officiated by Thomas Floyd, Justice of the Peace. There would be no children. Mrs. Smith would operate an oyster and refreshment house while the husband would concentrate on his lumber business.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 11 M 17 1816 / In the forenoon Meeting Hannah Dennis was concerned in a lively Testimony — In the Afternoon father Rodman a few words. - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1818

The last of the original grove of black walnut trees that had been preserved in Philadelphia, a tree in front of the office of J. Ridgeway opposite the State House on Chestnut Street, was in this year chopped down.

Richard Harlan graduated at the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania. He would be employed as a teacher of anatomy in Joseph Parish’s private medical school, and publish a text on the human brain, ANATOMICAL INVESTIGATIONS. He would practice as a physician in Philadelphia.

A group of manumitted persons, from Henrico County, Virginia, arrived in Columbia, Pennsylvania. The citizens of Columbia began a Columbia Abolition Society. Located just north of the Mason/Dixon line separating Pennsylvania from slaveholding states such as Maryland, Columbia would be important as a waystation on the Underground Railroad. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1820

Since Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Johnson and Mary “Polly” Johnson are not listed as having their own New Bedford household in the federal census of this year, clearly at that point they had not yet become householders. In all likelihood they were at that time living in the home of the young Quaker merchant Charles Waln Morgan, who moved from Philadelphia to New Bedford in that year, since in Mrs. Morgan’s journal we find the notation “Polly Johnson (came to us 1st mo 22nd 1820),” and since Rhoda Durfee, a child of Polly’s first marriage, and Nathan Johnson, also worked for the Morgans.

Since 1790, the town of Columbia, Pennsylvania had included a proportionately large free black population, and by this point that community had grown to include 288 persons. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1821

Another group of manumitted persons, from Hanover County, Virginia, arrived in Columbia, Pennsylvania.

After many years of lobbying by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, the Pennsylvania Legislature approved funding to build Eastern State Penitentiary to house 250 inmates. Four architects submitted designs for this massive new structure. The design of John Haviland, a British architect who had settled in Philadelphia, was selected, and he was awarded $100. William Strickland, whose design had been rejected, was hired to oversee the construction.

The citizens of Philadelphia sent a petition in regard to bankruptcy to the federal Congress: The poor African, ...devoid of the intellectual torments which are produced by dependence and subjection, to a mind nurtured in the habits of liberty and intelligence, stands on ground far more enviable that than maintained by the insolvent debtor. (It is clear from the text of this 1821 petition that said “insolvent debtors” who were sending this missile off in the direction of the federal Congress, who although “nurtured in the habits of liberty and intelligence” were presently reduced to “dependence and subjection,” were all and only white people completely lacking in any recognition of or sympathy for the intellectual torments that come with being nonwhite in a racist culture.)

Dr. Thomas Low Nichols, in FORTY YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE, 1821-1861 (NY: Stackpole Sons, originally issued in 1864, reissued in 1937), would characterize the following four decades of his experience as a period of constant unsettled scratching and scraping to keep ahead of the Joneses. It is clear that, where he is speaking of “everyone” and of “all,” actually he is confining his attention to the American white people: Every one is tugging, trying, scheming to advance — to get ahead. It is a great scramble, in which all are troubled and none are satisfied. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1830

Robert Purvis met the abolitionists Friend Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison.

Annual black conventions began in Philadelphia. In the convention of this year, joined in an appeal to establish a manual labor school for blacks.

Stephen Smith and a number of other antebellum black citizens were becoming members of various boards, and Smith’s focus was on the Columbia Bank. Although he may have become that bank’s largest stockholder, of course he could not be its president for reasons of complexion. He was, however, able to designate the white man who would serve him as president.

The original founders of Columbia, Pennsylvania’s “Columbia Abolition Society” reorganized under the name “Columbia Auxiliary Colonization Society. “ HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

The free mulatto Shadd family moved from Delaware to West Chester outside of Philadelphia. would attend a Quaker school there, run by Miss Phoebe Darlington. Her father Abraham Shadd would be active in abolitionist groups and other political organizations that discussed black immigration to Canada, Africa, and the West Indies. He would function as an agent of subscriptions for Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator. He and his family would begin to socialize with the more affluent blacks of the area. The Shadd home in West Chester would function as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In this year the shipbuilders of Chatham in Canada West (where Mary Ann Shadd eventually would teach) were launching their first commercial vessel, the Sans Pareil. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1831

August 5, Friday: Sebastien Erard died near Passy, France at the age of 79.

Frances Trollope set foot on English soil again, almost 4 years after having departed for America.

Stephen Smith, opposing the scheme of the colonization of Liberia by manumitted slaves and free persons of color from the United States, presided at a meeting held in Columbia, Pennsylvania to denounce the scheme being sponsored by the American Colonization Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1832

Nathan Johnson was a delegate –the only one from New Bedford, and one of only two representing Massachusetts– to the 3rd National Negro Convention in Philadelphia.

Stephen Smith purchased a frame church building for the use of the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal congregation of Columbia, Pennsylvania. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1834

In this year John Brown was acting as a postmaster under President Andrew Jackson, at Randolph, Pennsylvania — evidently this job was a political plum issued as a reward for support. He wrote his brother Frederick Brown that he purposed to make active war upon the institution of human slavery, by bringing together some “first-rate abolitionist families” and by undertaking the education of young blacks. If once the Christians of the free states would set to work in earnest teaching the blacks, the people of the slaveholding states would find themselves constitutionally driven to set about the work of emancipation immediately. This letter was officially franked and sent for free by Postmaster Brown, as was then the practice.

Stephen Smith joined with David Ruggles, John Peck, Abraham Shadd, and John B. Vashon, who were the initial black agents for Freedom’s Journal and later for The Emancipator, in soliciting subscriptions and collecting what were termed “arrearages.” ABOLITIONISM

Spring: From this point until early in 1835, Jones Very would be chewing and stewing over George Gordon, Lord Byron’s CHILDE HAROLD.

White rioting began in a number of American municipalities, such as Columbia, Pennsylvania, in which there had come to be a black presence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Summer: White rioting that had begun that spring in a number of Northern cities, inclusive of the town of Columbia, was continuing into the summer. The number of black residents in that locale of Pennsylvania had been increasing. To some white residents they were a necessary evil because they provided a labor force for lumber merchants along the river, especially during the busy season, but for other white residents and in other seasons of the year, some white residents were considering them an unnecessary evil.

Traveling to England, Robert Purvis was equipped with letters of introduction from William Lloyd Garrison to a number of British reformers including Daniel O’Connell and Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton. A passport had been first denied, and had then been granted only through the intervention of the President, Andrew Jackson. Purvis was probably the first black American to receive a US passport. When the passport controversy hit the gazettes, a Virginia slaveholder who was ticketed to travel on same ship to England pressured the shipping line to deny Purvis passage, and he was forced to take passage on another vessel. (On the return trip Purvis would deliberately obtain a ticket on the same vessel as that Virginian in order to eat and drink with this racist and his cronies and, tall and handsome, dance with the Southern white ladies — on the last day of the voyage he would with glee and aplomb disclose his racial identity to his new white “friends.”)2

2. For a comparison situation, during our own timeframe: The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem was “white to all appearances, having blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and light, almost blond, hair.” During his freshman year at Colgate University, his roommate only learned of his racial identity by meeting his father, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., after which he was no longer able to be friends or roommates. During his college years, Powell worked as a bellhop at a summer resort in Manchester, Vermont. During the summer of 1926 Abraham Lincoln’s dying son Robert Todd Lincoln visited this resort. Lincoln was a man of such “Negrophobia” that he could not bear to be waited on by a black person or to have one of them touch his luggage, his automobile, or any of his possessions, and was known to have whacked the knuckles of a helpful black servant with his cane. However, at this resort the dying man did not decline Powell’s services — as he took him to be a white boy! HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

August 16, Saturday: Charles Darwin was clambering up Mount Campana in Chile.

In Canton, Viceroy Lu K’un restricted trade with foreigners.

There was white rioting in Columbia, Pennsylvania that evening, with windows in the homes of some of the colored residents being shattered.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. sailed away on his excellent adventure as a common seaman.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: The next morning was Saturday, and a breeze having sprung up from the southward, we took a pilot on board, hove up our anchor, and began beating down the bay. I took leave of those of my friends who came to see me off, and had barely opportunity to take a last look at the city, and well-known objects, as no time is allowed on board ship for sentiment. As we drew down into the lower harbor, we found the wind ahead in the bay, and were obliged to come to anchor in the roads. We remained there through the day and a part of the night. My watch began at eleven o’clock at night, and I received orders to call the captain if the wind came out from the westward. About midnight the wind became fair, and having called the captain, I was ordered to call all hands. How I accomplished this I do not know, but I am quite sure that I did not give the true hoarse, boatswain call of “A-a-ll ha-a-a-nds! up anchor, a-ho-oy!” In a short time every one was in motion, the sails loosed, the yards braced, and we began to heave up the anchor, which was our last hold upon Yankee land. I could take but little part in all these preparations. My little knowledge of a vessel was all at fault. Unintelligible orders were so rapidly given and so immediately executed; there was such a hurrying about, and such an intermingling of strange cries and stranger actions, that I was completely bewildered. There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life. At length those peculiar, longdrawn sounds, which denote that the crew are heaving at the windlass, began, and in a few moments we were under weigh. The noise of the water thrown from the bows began to be heard, the vessel leaned over from the damp night breeze, and rolled with the heavy ground swell, and we had actually begun our long, long journey. This was literally bidding “good night” to my native land.

August 17, Sunday: Charles Darwin reached the top of Mount Campana in Chile.

Birth of Edward Fisher Nott.

An instrument for force feeding should a slave attempt to escape through self-starvation:

That evening, like the evening before, there was white rioting in Columbia, Pennsylvania, with more windows in the homes of colored residents being shattered. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

August 18, Monday: Marshall Field, who would found a Chicago-based store chain, was born.

That morning:3 Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE

Long before daylight, I was called to go and rub, curry, and feed, the horses. I obeyed, and was glad to obey. But whilst thus engaged, whilst in the act of throwing down some blades from the loft, Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope; and just as I was half out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring, and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor. Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment –from whence came the spirit I don’t know– I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers. Mr. Covey soon called out to Hughes for help. Hughes came, and, while Covey held me, attempted to tie my right hand. While he was in the act of doing so, I watched my chance, and gave him a heavy kick close under the ribs. This kick fairly sickened Hughes, so that he left me in the hands of Mr. Covey. This kick had the effect of not only weakening Hughes, but Covey also. When he saw Hughes bending over with pain, his courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer. With that, he strove to drag me to a stick that was lying just out of the stable door. He meant to knock me down. But just as he was leaning over to get the stick, I seized him with both hands by his collar, and brought him by a sudden snatch to the ground. By this time, Bill came. Covey called upon him for assistance. Bill wanted to know what he could do. Covey said, “Take hold of him, take hold of him!” Bill said his master hired him out to work, and not to help to whip me; so he left Covey and myself to fight our own battle out. We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate, saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. The truth was, that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him. The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger. He would occasionally say, he didn’t want to get hold of me again. “No,” thought I, “you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before.”

Also, that day, the corpse of Elijah Pierson, or what was supposed to be that corpse, was being disinterred and the stomach taken for examination. The examiners would consider that the condition of the stomach indicated that Pierson had been poisoned.

That evening, like Saturday evening and Sunday evening, there was white rioting in Columbia, Pennsylvania, with windows in the homes of colored residents being shattered.

3. Bill Smith was another slave hired from his owner by Edward Covey. Hughes, whom Frederick Douglass says he kicked, was a white man, Edward Covey’s cousin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

August 19, Tuesday: In Bridgewater, New York, Prudence Crandall got married with a Baptist itinerant preacher named Calvin Philleo. The Reverend Philleo was substantially older than her and had previously been married to Elizabeth Wheeler and had a son, Calvin Wheeler Philleo, born in about 1822 in Suffield, Connecticut, who would be adopted by Prudence and who would become a Hartford attorney, author, and politician (Free Soil Democrat).4

The C.F. Durant balloon made an ascension.

That night the municipal rioting became even more serious in Columbia, Pennsylvania. Many of the members of the white mob were juveniles, of course, but there were some older and supposedly wiser heads among them, for they were fired by something that had just happened, in the early part of the evening. According to some, local blacks had attacked a white man who was watching over a lot on the town’s outskirts; according to others, a white property owner subjected to violence had been obliged to mount an appropriate defense. The office of Stephen Smith and his partner William Whipper was trashed. A band of whites, not more than 50 strong, marched on the town’s black neighborhood. They heaved rocks at a number of the houses, did quite a bit of shouting, and fired off their weapons, generally toward the sky. This went on until like one o’clock in the morning. Most of the frightened black residents fled into the dark hills above the town, with a few taking refuge in Bethel’s Woods and remaining there in hiding for several days without food or shelter until they were advised that it was fairly safe to return to their homes. The help of Dave “Dare Devil” Miller, high sheriff of the county, was solicited, and he swore in a considerable number of “deputies” in Lancaster who came to Columbia to calm the rioting. There would be some arrests, particularly of those suspected to be leaders, and some would be brought to trial — of course, no-one would be convicted. RACISM

August 20, Wednesday: In 1777 Friend Moses Brown had gone into his harvest field and called his laborers together, and offered to pay them extra wages if they would be willing to dispense with the usual allowance of distilled spirits that employers of that period provided to their laborers. At this point he confided to his journal that “I have never Since being now 57 years furnished Any Spirits in Harvest or Hay Time, & I have My business done better and the Laborers come in and go out More Quiet and Satisfactory to them & their Family than they used to do when Spirits were freely Given and Used by them.”

Aboard the Pilgrim, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. began to learn the ropes, but some of these “ropes,” such as the rope known as race relations, Dana already knew with sufficient precision. For instance, at numerous points in his nautical narrative there would be references to “the cook” by occupational title, and he would repeatedly be characterized as simple-hearted and as old and as African, but one thing we will never learn is that for our adventurous author a black person has a name.

That evening the inhabitants of Columbia, Pennsylvania assembled in their town hall and: Resolved, That a paper “setting forth the consequences of the present excitement in the town and containing a pledge to assist in the suppression of disorder, which was signed by a large number of citizens, be read”; which having been done, it was

4. We don’t know who the Reverend Philleo’s parents were, and this is extraordinarily unusual as a family name. The Greek term “philieo” occurs in JAMES 4:1-3 and indicates “to love” or “to have an affection for” or “to be the friend of.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Wednesday, Aug. 20th. We had the watch on deck from four till eight, this morning. When we came on deck at four o’clock, we found things much changed for the better. The sea and wind had gone down, and the stars were out bright. I experienced a corresponding change in my feelings; yet continued extremely weak from my sickness. I stood in the waist on the weather side, watching the gradual breaking of the day, and the first streaks of the early light. Much has been said of the sun-rise at sea; but it will not compare with the sun-rise on shore. It wants the accompaniments of the songs of birds, the awakening hum of men, and the glancing of the first beams upon trees, hills, spires, and house-tops, to give it life and spirit. But though the actual rise of the sun at sea is not so beautiful, yet nothing will compare with the early breaking of day upon the wide ocean. There is something in the first grey streaks stretching along the eastern horizon and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the deep, which combines with the boundlessness and unknown depth of the sea around you, and gives one a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can give. This gradually passes away as the light grows brighter, and when the sun comes up, the ordinary monotonous sea day begins. From such reflections as these, I was aroused by the order from the officer, “Forward there! rig the head- pump!” I found that no time was allowed for day-dreaming, but that we must “turn to” at the first light. Having called up the “idlers,” namely, carpenter, cook, steward, etc., and rigged the pump, we commenced washing down the decks. This operation, which is performed every morning at sea, takes nearly two hours; and I had hardly strength enough to get through it. After we had finished, swabbed down, and coiled up the rigging, I sat down on the spars, waiting for seven bells, which was the sign for breakfast. The officer, seeing my lazy posture, ordered me to slush the main-mast from the royal-mast-head, down. The vessel was then rolling a little, and I had taken no sustenance for three days, so that I felt tempted to tell him that I had rather wait till after breakfast; but I knew that I must “take the bull by the horns,” and that if I showed any sign of want of spirit or of backwardness, that I should be ruined at once. So I took my bucket of grease and climbed up to the royal-mast-head. Here the rocking of the vessel, which increases the higher you go from the foot of the mast, which is the fulcrum of the lever, and the smell of the grease, which offended my fastidious senses, upset my stomach again, and I was not a little rejoiced when I got upon the comparative terra firma of the deck. In a few minutes seven bells were struck, the log hove, the watch called, and we went to breakfast. Here I cannot but remember the advice of the cook, a simple-hearted African. “Now,” says he, “my lad, you are well cleaned out; you haven’t got a drop of your ’long-shore swash aboard of you. You must begin on a new tack,– pitch all your sweetmeats overboard, and turn-to upon good hearty salt beef and sea bread, and I’ll promise you, you’ll have your ribs well sheathed, and be as hearty as any of ’em, afore you are up to the Horn.” This would be good advice to give to passengers, when they speak of the little niceties which they have laid in, in case of sea-sickness. I cannot describe the change which half a pound of cold salt beef and a biscuit or two produced in me. I was a new being. We had a watch below until noon, so that I had some time to myself; and getting a huge piece of strong, cold, salt beef from the cook, I kept gnawing upon it until twelve o’clock. When we went on deck I felt somewhat like a man, and could begin to learn my sea duty with considerable spirit. At about two o’clock we heard the loud cry of “Sail ho!” from aloft, and soon saw two sails to windward, going directly athwart our hawse. This was the first time that I had seen a sail at sea. I thought then, and have always since, that it exceeds every other sight in interest and beauty. They passed to leeward of us, and out of hailing distance; but the captain could read the names on their sterns with the glass. They were the ship Helen Mar, of New York, and the brig Mermaid, of Boston. They were both steering westward, and were bound in for our “dear native land.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Resolved, That our civil magistrates do forthwith legally appoint a strong and efficient police for the protection of the persons and property of the peaceable inhabitants of this borough. Resolved, That this special police shall consist of fifty. Resolved, That whereas an undue excitement has lately originated in this borough, endangering the lives and property of the citizens generally; and whereas, it is an imperative duty of every good citizen to use his influence together with every means in his power to prevent and suppress the like occurrence again; it is therefore Resolved, That in case of any attempt to disturb or molest the peace and quiet of any of the inhabitants of the borough in future it shall be the duty of every respectable citizen to give his assistance to the police and unite in going forward to the rioters or other disturbers of the peace, requesting them immediately to desist and disperse; and in case of refusal, to take the name of every person concerned, and prosecute them to the extent of the law. Resolved, That each citizen does pledge himself to volunteer his services as above, in case of disorder, or to go immediately at the request of any respectable person. Resolved, That these proceedings be published; whereupon the meeting adjourned. R.E. Cochran, Chairman A. Green, Jr., Secretary.

The men appointed to patrol the borough would perform their duties as indicated, but excitement levels would remain high.

August 22, Friday: Robert Spear, the Chief Burgess of Columbia, Pennsylvania, issued a proclamation: Proclamation. Whereas there is at present an undue excitement in this town, and whereas there have been unlawful assemblages doing much damage and destroying the peace of the borough, and whereas numerous assemblages of people of color are particularly to be avoided, I do hereby command and enjoin it upon all colored persons from and after the Issuing of this Proclamation and until publicity revoked, to cease from the holding of all public religious meeting whatsoever, of any kind, after the hour of 8 o’clock in the evening, within the borough limits. And I do further request of and enjoin it upon all good citizens to aid in the suppression of all disturbances whatsoever, and particularly to aid in the execution of this Proclamation and in all proper ways to prevent the good order of the town from being destroyed, the laws broken and the lives and property of the citizens endangered, so that all persons concerned, or aiding or abetting in such disturbances may be arrested and HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

dealt with according to the utmost extent of the law. Given under my hand and seal of office as Chief Burgess of the borough of Columbia, August 22, 1834. Robert Spear.

August 23, Saturday: There was a meeting of the white working men and others favorable to their cause in the town of Columbia, Pennsylvania, in the evening in the town hall. After appointing Dr. Thomas L. Smith as chairman and Joseph M. Watts as secretary, there was no dissent to a preamble and resolutions: When a body of citizens assemble to concert measure for the protection of those inestimable rights secured to them by the constitution, they owe to the public a distinct statement of the grievances they meet to redress, so that disinterested and patriotic persons may not labor under any mistake or imbibe prejudices against them. We therefore, willingly detail to the people the causes that urged us to meet this evening, confident that the intelligent will approve and coincide with us in support of our measures. We cannot view the conduct of certain individuals in this borough, who by instilling pernicious ideas into the heads of the blacks, encourage and excite them to pursue a course of conduct that has caused and will continue to cause great disturbance and breaches of the peace, and which we are fearful if not checked will ultimately lead to bloodshed, without feeling abhorrence, disgust and indignation. The practice of others in employing Negroes to do that labor which was formerly done entirely by whites, we consider deserving our severest animadversions: and when it is represented to them that the whites are suffering by this conduct, the answer is, “The world is wide, let them go elsewhere.” And is it come to this? Must the poor honest citizens that so long have maintained their families by their labor, fly from their native place that a band of disorderly Negroes may revel with the money that ought to support the white man and his family, commit the most lascivious and degrading actions with impunity, and wanton in riot and debauchery. Who in this town does not know in what manner many Negroes spend their leisure hours; and who, but one that has lost all sense of right and justice, would encourage and protect them? As the negroes now pursue occupations once the sole province of the whites, may we not in course of time expect to see them engaged in every branch of mechanical business, and their known disposition to work for almost any price may well excite our fears, that mechanics at no distant period will scarcely be able to procure a mere subsistence. The cause of the late disgraceful riots throughout every part of the country may be traced to the efforts of those who would wish the poor whites to amalgamate with the blacks, for in all their efforts to accomplish this diabolical design, we see no intention in them to marry their own daughters to the blacks, it is therefore intended to break down the distinctive barrier between the colors that the poor whites may gradually sink into the degraded condition of the Negroes — that, like them, they may be’ slaves HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

and tools, and that the blacks are to witness their disgusting servility to their employers and their unbearable insolence to the working class. Feeling that this state of things must have a brief existence If we wish to preserve our liberties, therefore be it Resolved. That we will not purchase any article (that can be procured elsewhere) or give our vote for any office whatever, to any one who employs Negroes to do that species of labor white men have been accustomed to perform. Resolved, That we deeply deplore the late riots and will as peaceable men assist to protect the persons and property of the citizens in case of disturbance. Resolved, That the Colonization Society ought to be supported by all the citizens favorable to the removal of the blacks from the country. Resolved, That the preachers of immediate abolition and amalgamation ought to be considered as political incendiaries, and regarded with Indignation and abhorrence. Resolved, That the editor of the Spy be requested to publish the proceedings of this meeting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

“Effusiva-Esplosiva — Lava a SE tra Boscoreale ed Ottaviano [until September 10th]. Distrutto il borgo di Caposecchi e di S. Giovanni (800 persone senzatetto).”

MOUNT VESUVIUS

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 23 of 8 M / Rode into Town this Morning & soon after I got there was informed by Arnold Congdon that our dear friend & faithful labourer in the Gospel Daniel Howland of East Greenwich - he died last night in a fit & is to be buried tomorrow - the particulars I have not learned, but conclude it must be very sudden, he was at Providence on the 8 & 9 of this Month & attended the School committee & Meeting for Sufferings - he then appeared to be as well as usual, tho’ I recollect of noticing a flush in his face, & heft of countenance, which I thought might be indicative of a repeated attack of a fit having had one some Months or a year ago. - He was indeed what may well be denomiated a lovely & very loving friend - but few of my acquaintance possessed more of the milk of human Kindness, or was more devoted HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

in the cause of Truth & deeper in concern for the welfare of our poor society. Altho’ in point of matter there was not that variety of subject & expression in his Ministry yet I can truly testify that his Offerings never seemed to me as old Manna, but if his matter was similar to what we had often heard, it seemed to be renewedly sanctified & seldom failed to produce some baptism in the auditory & were sometimes very reaching — his loss will be deeply felt among a numerous acquaintance by whom he was unusually beloved, & also in Society where his public labours & usefulness in our Meetings for discipline will be greatly missed - He had arrived at an age when according to the course of nature it could not be expected that he could continue much longer, having attained the [blank] Year of his Age, but it is hard to part with such dear friends & valued pillars in the Church. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

August 26, Tuesday evening: There was yet another meeting of the white citizens of the town of Columbia, Pennsylvania in its town hall, in pursuance of a printed call “to take into consideration the situation of the colored population, and to devise some means to prevent the further influx of colored persons to this place.” James Given, Esq. was named as Chairman and Thomas E. Cochran as Secretary. The following resolution offered by Chief Burgess Robert Spear was approved: Resolved, That a committee be appointed whose duty it shall be to ascertain the colored population of this borough, the occupation and employment of the adult males among them, and their visible means of subsistence. Resolved, That a committee be appointed whose duty it shall be to communicate with that portion of those colored persons who hold property in this borough and ascertain, if possible, if they would be willing to dispose of the same at a fair valuation; and it shall be the duty of the said committee to advise the colored persons in said borough to refuse receiving any colored persons from other places as residents among them; and the said committee shall report their proceedings to the chairman and secretary of this meeting, who are hereby empowered and requested to call another meeting at an early period and lay before said meeting the reports of said committees that such order may be taken thereon as may be most advisable. Resolved, That the citizens of this borough be requested, in case of the discovery of any fugitive slaves within our bounds, to cooperate and assist in returning them to their lawful owners.

(That final resolution in regard to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 had been proposed by Henry Brimmer.)

The following committees of white citizens were then appointed by the meeting: On the 1st resolution, Messrs. James Collins, Peter Haldeman, Jacob F. Markley, John McMullen, and William Atkins. On the 2d resolution, Robert Spear, Esq., and Messrs. Henry Brimmer and James H. Mifflin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

September 1, Monday: David Henry Thoreau went back to Harvard College for the 1st term of his Sophomore year, living in 32 Hollis Hall with James Richardson, Jr. Ellery Channing (William Ellery Channing II) was matriculating there, but he would soon depart because otherwise he would have been expelled due to a very low point accumulation. THOREAU RESIDENCES

At some point Henry and his room-mate needed to write to Oliver Sparhawk, the steward of the building: Mr Sparhawk Sir The occupants of Hollis 32 would like to have that room painted and whitewashed, also if possible to have a new hearth put in yours respectfully Thoreau & Richardson

Until November 30th, David Henry would be studying the Italian language under instructor Pietro Bachi.

(Thoreau would be enrolled in the study of Italian for 4 terms, in the study of French for 4 terms, in the study of German for 4 terms, and in the study of Spanish for 2 terms under Francis Sales.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Holden Chapel Hollis Hall Hollis

N Fellows Barn

Harvard Hall ’ Stoughton Hall

Massachusetts Hall

That evening, at the adjourned meeting of the citizens convened at the town hall in Columbia, Pennsylvania, to receive the reports of the committees appointed to inquire into the state of the colored population and to negotiate with them on the subject of a sale of their property, the officers appointed at the previous meeting resumed their seats. The committees having made their reports, a motion was made and approved: Resolved, That these reports be remanded to the committees who offered them for the purpose of having resolutions attached to them, and that this meeting do adjourn until Wednesday evening next. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

September 2, Tuesday: Viceroy Lu K’un stopped all trade with foreigners in Canton.

That midnight in Columbia, Pennsylvania a mob descended upon the home in Front Street of a black citizen. As the occupants fled, its porch and a part of its frame were torn apart. The white men then proceeded to the coal and lumber office of Stephen Smith, on Front street below the present roundhouse, broke through its windows and doors, and rifled the desk, scattering papers about the pavement. After making an unsuccessful attempt to upset the structure, they marched off declaring “glory enough for one night.”

The following advertisement would be placed in the Columbia Spy: NOTICE. I offer my entire stock of lumber, either wholesale or retail, at a reduced price, as I am determined to close my business at Columbia. Any person desirous of entering into the lumber trade extensively can have the entire stock at a great bargain; or persons intending to open yards along the line of the railroad, or builders, will find it to their advantage to call on me or my agent at my yard, as I am desirous of disposing of the above as soon as possible. I will also dispose of my real property in the borough, consisting of a number of houses and lots, some of them desirable situations for business. All persons having claims against me are requested to present them for payment, and all indebted are desired to call and discharge the same at my office in Columbia, or in Lancaster, as I intend being there every Saturday for that purpose. Stephen Smith

September 3, Wednesday evening: The meeting of white citizens at the town hall in Columbia, Pennsylvania reconvened after its adjournment on the previous evening. The white citizens’ committee it had appointed to inquire into the condition of the local population of color offered its report, and a recommendation that the proper local authorities get busy, and actively deal with these named vagrants and nuisances of color: Number of black population found in Columbia, Pennsylvania on August 28, 1834; — 214 men, 171 women, 264 children — total 649. It is supposed that a good number have left the place within a few days, and that a number were scattered through the town that were not seen by the committee. Among the above men, the committee consider the following named persons as vagrants: William Rockaway, Henry Holland, Wash Butler, Charles Butler, Jacob Coursey, Joe Dellam, James Larret, Joseph Hughes, Abraham Waters, William Malston, Jr., and Lloyd Murray. A house occupied by John Scott and William Stockes, is considered by the committee as a house of ill fame; it is rented by Joshua P. B. Eddy to them. James Collins William Atkins John McMullen J.F. Markley Peter Haldeman. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

The committee’s recommendation, that the proper local white authorities get busy, and actively deal with these named vagrants and nuisances of color, was approved.

The white citizens’ committee it had appointed to negotiate with the local population of color on the sale of their property reported as follows: That they have endeavored to give that attention to the subject which its importance justly demands. They have, in the first place, ascertained as nearly as possible the names and number of colored freeholders in this borough, which according to the best information they could obtain they lay before you as follows, viz: Henry Barney, William Brown, Aaron Brown, James Burrell, Michael Dellam, Charles Dellam, Joshua Eddy, Walter Green, John Green, George Hayden, Widow Hayden, James Hollinsworth, ______Henderson, Glascow Mature, Edward Miller, William Pearl, Nicholas Pleasants, Philip Pleasants, Jacob Dickinson, John Johnson, Ephraim Malson, Sawney Alexander, Robert Patterson, Stephen Smith, Peter Swails, John Thomas, James Richards, Betsey Dean (formerly Roatch), George Taylor, George Young, Stephen Wilts, Eliza Park, Thomas Waters, Samuel Wilson, Patrick Vincent, John Vincent and Washington Vincent — making in all thirty-seven. They have called on most of them in person and think the disposition manifested by most of them decidedly favorable to the object of the committee. Some of them are anxious, many willing, to sell at once provided a reasonable price were offered — others would dispose of their property as soon as they could find any other eligible situation. All to whom your committee spoke on the subject of harboring strange persons among them, seemed disposed to give the proper attention to the subject. Your committee deem the result of their observation decidedly satisfactory. In presenting this report your committee would respectfully call your attention to the impropriety of further urging the colored freeholders to sell until some provisions are made to buy such as may be offered, lest they should be led to consider it all the work of a few excited individuals, and not the deliberate decision of peaceful citizens. They therefore recommend the subject to the attention of capitalists; having no doubt that, independent of every other consideration, the lots in question would be a very profitable investment of their funds, and that if a commencement were once made nearly all of the colored freeholders of the borough would sell as fast as funds could be raised to meet the purchasers. Your committee would further remark if everything was in readiness, considerable time would be required to effect the object; they would therefore recommend caution and deliberation in everything in relation to this important object.

In conclusion your committee offer the following resolution: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Resolved, That an association be formed for the purpose of raising funds for the purchase of the property of the blacks in this borough. Robert Spear H. Brimmer Jas. H. Mifflin.

The report and resolution of this committee appointed to negotiate with the local population of color on the sale of their property, as above, were adopted, and a committee of 5 white men was appointed to form an association for the purpose of purchasing the property of the blacks in the borough: Joseph Cottrell, Dominick Eagle, John Cooper, Robert Spear, and Jacob P. Markley.

October 2, Thursday: All clergymen appointed under the former King Miguel were removed from their posts.

While in Leipzig, Felix Mendelssohn visited Friedrich Wieck who presented his daughter Clara. She played some of her own music, some Chopin, and some music by a student of Wieck, Robert Schumann. Mendelssohn was favorably impressed by Clara.

There was a report that a black man and a white woman had married, so that night there was another race riot in Columbia, Pennsylvania. The Columbia Spy would report: Thursday night last was one of bustle and alarm to all classes of our citizens at one hour or another such as we have not lately experienced; the fury of disorderly men and the ravages of the destructive element of fire, conspired to make it a season of confusion and terror. About 12 o’clock a mob which had collected began their operations by stoning, forcing into, and destroying the interior and furniture of several houses inhabited by colored persons. Four dwellings were more or less broken and injured, and the goods were scattered about and destroyed; one of the inhabitants, a black man, was severely bruised, cut in the face and had one of his arms rendered powerless; and other violence was done to the persons and property of the class of people to whom he belonged. These riots continued about an hour, and amidst great noise and shouting, and the sound of missiles coming in contact with the buildings disturbed the rest of the citizens adjacent to the scene of action. The exciting cause of this exhibition of illegal tumult and devastation, was the reported recent marriage of a black man to a white woman, which re-kindled the smouldering ashes of former popular madness and afforded an opportunity to evil-disposed individuals to react past occurrences of disorder and destruction. They, however, did not stop when they had punished the object of their wrath, but spent the residue of it upon others who had committed no fresh acts which called for HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

punishment.

Aboard Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s Pilgrim, the second mate, Mr. Foster, was caught asleep on watch by Captain F. Thompson and removed from his position.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: The second night after crossing the equator, we had the watch from eight till twelve, and it was “my helm” for the last two hours. There had been light squalls through the night, and the captain told Mr. F______, who commanded our watch, to keep a bright lookout. Soon after I came to the helm, I found that he was quite drowsy, and at last he stretched himself on the companion and went fast asleep. Soon afterwards, the captain came very quietly on deck, and stood by me for some time looking at the compass. The officer at length became aware of the captain’s presence, but pretending not to know it, began humming and whistling to himself, to show that he was not asleep, and went forward, without looking behind him, and ordered the main royal to be loosed. On turning round to come aft, he pretended surprise at seeing the master on deck. This would not do. The captain was too “wide awake” for him, and beginning upon him at once, gave him a grand blow-up, in true nautical style– “You’re a lazy, good-for-nothing rascal; you’re neither man, boy, soger, nor sailor! you’re no more than a thing aboard a vessel! you don’t earn your salt; you’re worse than a Mahon soger!” and other still more choice extracts from the sailor’s vocabulary. After the poor fellow had taken this harangue, he was sent into his stateroom, and the captain stood the rest of the watch himself. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1835

One of Massachusetts’s senators, Peleg Sprague, was in this year arguing for slavery by invoking the authority of Jesus Christ. Jesus meek and mild, who “would not interfere with the administration of the laws, or abrogate their authority,” it seemed, could have been no abolitionist — or at least, not according to Senator Peleg Sprague!

The Columbia Spy reported that the business success of Stephen Smith and his partner William Whipper in Columbia, Pennsylvania had “excited the envy or hatred of those not so prosperous and of the ruling race” to the point that their business office had been vandalized and papers, records, and books destroyed. RACISM “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

The Reverend William Henry Brisbane published the first Baptist periodical to be produced outside Philadelphia, The Southern Baptist and General Intelligencer printed by James S. Burges of Charleston, South Carolina, the stated mission of which was to support slavery as a biblically mandated social and economic institution. The periodical would attempt to refute the antislavery writings in THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY of the Reverend Francis Wayland, President of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

The Baptist reverend was struggling against himself: “I am no abolitionist.” Oh, no, he was a regular guy, he could not be one of those detested, deluded people! (Three years later, however, this abolitionism would overcome him — and a local historian would eventually write of him, because he had manumitted his slaves, that “He became, to the white population, the most hated man in the Beaufort District.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1835

This was the year of the 6th National Negro Convention. Robert Purvis would persuade its attenders to “peaceably” resist the fugitive slave law.

This convention, taking note that sugar beets were being grown in France, urged that America’s free blacks should grow sugar beets and offer the sugar through the American Free Produce Association as an alternative to slavery- produced cane sugar. (This idea, of course, would be a nonstarter, as many of the white people who consumed sugar were being made uneasy in their souls not so much by the ingestion of a snow-white substance which had been SWEETS invisibly tainted by slavery but by the ingestion of a snow-white substance which had been invisibly tainted by being WITHOUT touched by black hands. Such whites were uneasy about purchasing cane sugar produced in the tropics by black slaves, SLAVERY but would of course be almost equivalently uneasy about purchasing beet sugar produced locally by free black farmers — and would therefore be unlikely to pay a premium price to consume local beet sugar rather than the imported cheaper cane sugar.)

William Whipper was one of those in attendance at this convention. In addition, during this year he was relocating to Columbia, Pennsylvania with fellow black entrepreneur Stephen Smith. William F. Worner’s account of the Columbia riots includes a record of a missive received in the course of this year: You must know that your presence is not agreeable, and the less you appear in the assembly of the whites the better it will be for your black hide, as there are great many in this place that would think your absence from it a benefit, as you are considered an injury to the real value of property in Columbia. You have [sic] better take the hint.

February 27, Friday: After the mob violence of the previous year the town of Columbia, Pennsylvania seemed to have more or less fallen back into its usual drowsiness. However, Stephen Smith was still advertising in the Columbia Spy that he was disposed to sell his stock and real estate and leave town. We don’t know whether he had been unable to secure a purchaser or whether the move had come to be perceived as no longer so urgent. We know he continued to bid actively on available real estate properties. Then on this day he received the following notice through the post office: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

S. Smith: — You have again assembled yourself amongst the white people to bid up property, as you have been in the habit of doing: for a number of years back. You must know that your presence is not agreeable, and the less you appear in the assembly of the whites the better it will be for your black hide, as there are a great many in this place that would think your absence from it a benefit, as you are considered an injury to the real value of property in Columbia. You had better take the hint and save, February 27, 1835. MANY.

Smith showed this message to his white friends William Wright, John L. Wright, and James Wright and they were so furious that they had it published in the Columbia Spy, along with an offer of $100 reward for the apprehension of its authors. When their action raised in the public mind the question of why white men were supporting a lumber dealer of color, they supplied the following: Enquiry being made why we advocate the cause of S. Smith by offering a reward for the detection of the author of a letter received by him with the vengeance of “Many,” we state that it is not his cause but we consider ourselves injured by threats made to prevent persons from attending and bidding on property advertised by the subscribers, at public auction, to take place on the day following the receipt of said letter. William Wright John L. Wright James Wright.

April 11, Saturday: Stephen Smith decided to remain in Columbia, Pennsylvania and continue his profitable lumber business. He made this clear to the public by inserting the following in the Columbia Spy: NOTICE. The subscriber, desirous to avoid being associated with those heartrending scenes and unrighteous persecutions, that was directed against the colored population of this borough in the month of August last, was induced on the 19th day of the following month, (September) to publish in the “Columbia Spy,” and “Lancaser Journal,” the following advertisement viz: “I offer my entire stock of lumber either wholesale or retail, at a reduced price, as I am determined to close my business in Columbia. Any person desirous of entering into the lumber trade extensively, can have the entire stock at a bargain; or persons intending to open yards along the line of railroad, or builders, will find it to their advantage, to call on me or my agent at my yard, as I am desirous of disposing of the above as soon as possible.” Now upwards of six months have elapsed, and I have not been favored with an opportunity of completing my HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

original design. I do, therefore, under the guidance of a benign Providence, and with renewed confidence in the integrity and virtue of my fellow-citizens, make known to my patrons, and the public generally, not only in the county of Lancaster, but Philadelphia, Baltimore, and elsewhere, that I shall continue to prosecute my business with usual vigor, and will be ready on every occasion, to execute all orders in my line with promptness and dispatch. Stephen Smith.

P.S. — I do most cheerfully return my hearty thanks to my customers for the very liberal patronage I have always received, but more specially for their favors during that eventful period of excitement. For never before has there been a time when I could place such a just estimation on the value of friends. I, therefore, pledge myself in future to accommodate them on the most liberal terms. S.S. Columbia, April 11, 1835. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1836

Deacon William Ingraham Kip became assistant minister of Grace Church in New-York.

Robert Hanham Collyer denounced conditions in the Irish tenements of America.

Stephen Smith joined the General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1837

The American Anti-Slavery Society put out the 4th issue of its abolitionist “omnibus” entitled The Anti- Slavery Examiner, containing an anonymous “The Bible Against Slavery. An Inquiry Into the Patriarchal and Mosaic Systems on the Subject of Human Rights.” (This was by Theodore Dwight Weld and would be TEXT followed by “The Bible ... Human Rights. Third Edition – Revised.” and by “The Bible ... Human Rights. INDEX Fourth Edition – Enlarged.”)

William Whipper got married with the sister of his business partner Stephen Smith, Harriet Smith (1818-1906) of Columbia, Pennsylvania. A daughter, Harriet, born in this year, would appear to have died before adulthood.

Stephen Smith attended the 1st meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.

The Reverend Adin Ballou’s THE TOUCHSTONE. The Reverend came out publicly as, shudder, an abolitionist. Although this announcement produced turmoil at his Mendon church, the pastor’s supporters would there prevail. He would be less successful in introducing such a reform at this year’s meeting of the Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists, his proposal there only producing a rift in fellowship between a group of social reformers and the conservative divines (under the guidance of the Reverend Paul Dean).

Noah Webster, Jr. instructed a daughter who was being unduly influenced by the abolitionist cause that “slavery is a great sin and a general calamity – but it is not our sin, though it may prove to be a terrible calamity to us in the north. But we cannot legally interfere with the South on this subject. ... To come north to preach and thus disturb our peace, when we can legally do nothing to effect this object, is, in my view, highly criminal and the preachers of abolitionism deserve the penitentiary.” Wow, we ought to lock up the Frederick Douglass who followed the North Star to disturb Noah’s daughter’s peace? –With friends like this the American antislavery crusade certainly didn’t need any enemies! HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1838

In about this timeframe half-black successful entrepreneur Stephen Smith was becoming ordained to preach at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (but never as the minister over a congregation).

One of the strange things about human slavery was how it related to Christian family values, and another of the strange things about human slavery was how it related to our capitalist economy. Here are some illustrations of this strangeness, in the Year of Our Lord 1838. In this year Matilda Lawrence, a slave who had escaped from her Missouri owner, was recaptured in , Ohio. She was brought before a court there, was tried, and was remanded back to Missouri and to her lawful owner. This all seems perfectly usual, but we are disregarding the racial fact that poor escaped and recaptured Matilda was only 1/8th black, and was 7/8ths white, and we are disregarding the Christian family-values fact that she was the natural daughter of her owner — which is to say, she was being taken back to serve under enslavement to the man who had covered her mother, engendering her. In this Year of our Lord 1838, also, a year of national economic depression, things were tough all over. For instance, a Southern plantation owner, the Reverend Doctor William Henry Brisbane, a Baptist minister and a physician, was forced into bankruptcy and, against his will and against his better judgment, had to sell off all 22 of his field slaves to a relative, temporarily retaining only his house slaves, 3 in number (this would eat at him and eventually he would buy them all back at a higher price and set them all free –impoverishing himself and his family for life and earning himself the long-term contempt of his community as a business ne’er-do-well and utterly destroying his credit standing– but for the time being human beings were merely an economic commodity — and this Capitalist economy had his hands tied). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

May 17, Thursday: Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, prince de Benevent died at his Paris home.

Franz Liszt performed for the Empress of Austria at court in Vienna.

When the abolitionists had found it difficult to secure a building to hold their meetings, Stephen Smith secured Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia for their use (it is unclear whether he himself constructed it, or merely converted an existing structure). On this evening a racist mob torched that hall. Taking advantage of a little- known Pennsylvania statute by which a municipality could be held liable for mob damage, Smith would file a lawsuit in Philadelphia, obtaining a judgment for damages in excess of what the structure had cost: $75,000.

Refer to S. Webb’s HISTORY OF PENNSYLVANIA HALL WHICH WAS DESTROYED BY A MOB, ON THE 17TH OF MAY, 1838 (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, Printers).

Dr. Daniel Neall was presiding at the antislavery meeting in Pennsylvania Hall –which had been newly provided to the abolitionists at a cost of $40,000.00 because of refusal of other hall owners in Philadelphia to rent existing halls– and Friend John Greenleaf Whittier was standing nearby, when glass from the windows showered down, and rioters forced their way onto the platform to declare that the meeting was over: I am here, the president of this meeting, and I will be torn in pieces before I leave my place at your dictation. Go back to those who sent you. I shall do my duty.

Some years after, while visiting in his native State of Delaware, the Doctor would be dragged from the home of some friends to be abused in the street. After these slaveholders were finished with him, he would tell them that he forgave them — for it was not they but Slavery which had done the wrong.5 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

He would suggest that if they should ever be in Philadelphia and in need of hospitality or aid, they should again call on him. Some years after that, on “6th, 6th month, 1846” to be specific, Friend John would celebrate this hero of gentlemanliness:

DANIEL NEALL. I. FRIEND of the Slave, and yet the friend of all; Lover of peace, yet ever foremost when The need of battling Freedom called for men To plant the banner on the outer wall; Gentle and kindly, ever at distress Melted to more than woman’s tenderness, Yet firm and steadfast, at his duty’s post Fronting the violence of a maddened host, Like some-gray rock from which the waves are tossed! Knowing his deeds of love, men questioned not The faith of one whose walk and word were right; Who tranquilly in Life’s great task-field wrought, And, side by side with evil, scarcely caught A stain upon his pilgrim garb of white: Prompt to redress another’s wrong, his own Leaving to Time and Truth and Penitence alone.

II. Such was our friend. Formed on the good old plan, A true and brave and downright honest man! He blew no trumpet in the market-place, Nor in the church with hypocritic face Supplied with cant the lack of Christian grace; Loathing pretence, he did with cheerful will What others talked of while their hands were still; And, while “Lord, Lord!” the pious tyrants cried, Who, in the poor, their Master crucified, His daily prayer, far better understood. In acts than words, was simply doing good. So calm, so constant was his rectitude, That by his loss alone we know its worth,

5. Legally, there was a distinction between a slaveowner and a slaveholder. The owner of a slave might rent the custody and use of that slave out for a year, in which case the distinction would arise and be a meaningful one in law, since the other party to such a transaction would be the holder but not the owner. However, in this Kouroo database, I will ordinarily be deploying the term “slaveholder” as the normative term, as we are no longer all that concerned with the making of such fine economic distinctions but are, rather, concerned almost exclusively with the human issues involved in the enslavement of other human beings. I use the term “slaveholder” in preference to “slaveowner” not only because no human being can really own another human being but also because it is important that slavery never be defined as the legal ownership of one person by another — in fact not only had human slavery existed before the first such legislation but also it has continued long since we abolished all legal deployment of the term “slave.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

And feel how true a man has walked with us on earth.

As the delegates left Pennsylvania Hall after the mayor of Philadelphia had demanded the keys and canceled all meetings, at the suggestion of Friend Angelina Emily Grimké the white women delegates took the arms of the black women delegates in order better to protect them from being grabbed as they passed through the pro- slavery mob of 17,000 Philadelphians outside the doors. Standing on the steps of the hall, the mayor gave his lightly coded instructions to the mob:

WE NEVER CALL OUT THE MILITARY. YOU ARE MY POLICE.

How hard was it for the Philadelphia citizens’ mob to figure this? They gave their mayor three cheers and broke down the doors. In addition to piling the plush chairs and adding abolitionist books and papers to these piles, they turned on the illuminating gas to full on to help the building burn brightly.6 ABOLITIONISM

Friend John Greenleaf Whittier was running the newspaper office of the Pennsylvania Freeman7 in the front of the building, on an upper story.

I took charge of the “Pennsylvania Freeman,” an organ of the Anti-Slavery Society. My office was sacked and burned by a mob soon after, but I continued my paper until my health failed, when I returned to Massachusetts. The farm in Haverhill had, in the meantime, been sold, and my mother, aunt and youngest sister, had moved to Amesbury, near theFriends Meeting-house, and I took up my residence with them. All this time I had been actively engaged in writing for the anti-slavery cause.

6. About a decade later the Philadelphia County Commissioners would pay almost $48,000.00 in compensation for this torching of Pennsylvania Hall. 7. This is the periodical that, later, would publish UNCLE TOM’S CABIN as a serial. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

As the hall burned, volunteer fire brigades pumped streams of water — upon the walls of the surrounding structures to keep them from igniting.

John Greenleaf8 Whittier

8. According to the American Methodist Monthly, Volume II, page 229, John Greenleaf Whittier was descended from a Fouillevert who had fled from Brittagne to England in the early states of the persecution of Huguenots by the French government. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Whittier slapped on a wig and an overcoat and managed to get into and out of the building during the commotion, while the building was burning, to retrieve some writings he considered of importance. Some citizens then wanted to continue by torching the home of the Motts, but a friend ran in front of them shouting “On to the Motts!” — and of course led them down the wrong street. While Friends James and Lucretia Mott sat unarmed in the parlor of their home, which was on 9th Street between Race and Vine (this was before the Motts moved to 338 Arch Street), waiting the outcome, he led the mob on up Race Street and farther and farther away from their home until it dissipated.

The rioters instead turned to burn down Bethel Church (AME) and a nearby Quaker-founded Colored Orphan Asylum (a structure not yet occupied).

Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks of Concord had taken her step-daughter Caroline Downes Brooks to Philadelphia to attend the women’s antislavery convention in this hall. Caroline wrote from Philadelphia to her friend Elizabeth Prichard to describe the burning. During the late 1830s, presumably during this period, since Caroline was a Sunday school student in Lidian Emerson’s class at the First Parish, presumably Lidian would have had a chance to hear all about this event. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1842

During two nights of anti-black rioting in Philadelphia, the worst in that city’s history, angry mobs surrounded Robert Purvis’s home at 9th and Lombard Streets for 40 hours while he sat inside with a rifle. Although not one member of this racist assembly could summon the courage to invade the house, afterward the wealthy Purvis would relocate his family to a large farm he owned in Byberry, across the road from the Byberry Friends Meetinghouse.

The Reverend Stephen Smith, prosperous in Columbia, Pennsylvania by means of his business acumen but sick and tired of being persecuted there on account of his race, prudently relocated at this point from Columbia, Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. He would enter largely into real estate and stock speculations and continue to prosper. Although he would lose heavily in the collapse of the United States Bank, he would overcome this and recover from the losses. He retained his lumber business in Columbia, with William Whipper as his active partner. They were purchasing many rafts of logs at a time, and much coal.

William Whipper would be an active agent of the Underground Railroad, and assist hundreds of escaping slaves on their way north to safety. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1849

Fanny Kemble Butler gave Shakespeare readings to support herself during and after her divorce from her slaveowning and indolent American husband, in Boston, New-York, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia,

slaveholding and indolent American husband and used her savings after this divorce to purchase a cottage she named “Perch,” in Lenox, Massachusetts near the Hawthorne and Melville families. She would grow increasingly eccentric and would, for instance, be seen fishing locally while attired in a man’s shirt and hat.

(Presumably it would have been during this period that she, Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six”, and Frederick Douglass would attend a dinner party at the home of Friends James and Lucretia Mott in Philadelphia.)

By this point the business of the firm of Smith and Whipper in Columbia, Pennsylvania was being attended to by William Whipper, while the Reverend Stephen Smith’s principal business activity in Philadelphia had become real estate speculation, and the purchase of good negotiable business notes. Notes issued by the firm of Smith and Whipper were accepted at face value wherever they were circulating. The firm had in Columbia, Pennsylvania a stockpile of several thousand bushels of coal, and 2,250,000 board feet of lumber, and owned HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

22 of the finest merchantmen cars on the rails from Columbia to Philadelphia and Baltimore. It owned $9,000 worth of stock in the Columbia Bridge company and $18,000 of the stock of the Columbia bank. Smith was reputed to personally own 52 good brick houses of various dimensions in Philadelphia, and a large number of houses and lots in Columbia and a few in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. An ordained preacher (not a pastor) of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Smith was donating generously to charities such as the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (oldest of that denomination in Philadelphia). He created “Smith’s Beneficial Hall” as a venue for meetings of black citizens (this hall would be torched during the race riots of August 1842, along with a number of African American homes).

Richard Henry Dana, Sr. gave a highly successful lecture series in Philadelphia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1850

873 of the 3,614 blacks in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or 24%, were resident in the town of Columbia.

September 18, Wednesday: When the federal Congress had entered into the famous Compromise of 1850, as part of this agreement (an agreement eventually determined to be unconstitutional) it outlawed trade in slaves within the district boundaries of Washington DC while retaining the institution of human enslavement itself. Another part of this agreement had mandated that the Fugitive Slave Act be strengthened and amplified. Any slaves who escaped to a state where slavery was outlawed must be returned to their owner. As of this date “all good citizens” were required to obey this mandate on pain of heavy penalty,9 while jury trial and the right to testify would in the future be prohibited to any such fugitives:

9. Was there no outcry that this was specifically in violation of DEUTERONOMY 23: 15, 16? What could be more straightforward? “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant who is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place where he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

An Act to amend, and supplementary to, the Act entitled “An Act respecting Fugitives from Justice, and Persons escaping from the Service of their Masters,” approved February twelfth, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three. Sections 1, 2, and 3 were concerned with the formal provisions for appointing commissioners, who were “hereby authorized and required to exercise and discharge all the powers and duties conferred by this act.” Section 4 invested the appointed commissioners with “authority to take and remove such fugitives from service or labor ... to the State or Territory from which such persons may have escaped or fled.” Section 5 specified the penalties for failure to comply with warrants issued under the provisions of the act: Should any marshal or deputy marshal refuse to serve such warrant, or other process, when tendered, or to use all proper means diligently to execute the same, he shall, on conviction thereof, be fined in the sum of one thousand dollars. Furthermore, should an arrested fugitive manage to escape from custody, the marshal or deputy would be liable to prosecution, and could be sued for “the full value of the service or labor of said fugitive in the State, Territory or District whence he escaped.” Commissioners were also empowered “to summon and call to their aid the bystanders,” and any failure to co-operate with such a summons would be a violation of the law: All good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required. Section 6: And be it further enacted, That when a person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the United States, has heretofore or shall hereafter escape into another State or Territory of the United States, the person or persons to whom such labor or service may be due ... may pursue and reclaim such fugitive person, either by procuring a warrant from some one of the courts, judges or commissioners aforesaid, ... or by seizing and arresting such fugitive, where the same can be done without process, and by taking, or causing such person to be taken, forthwith before such court, judge, or commissioner...; and upon satisfactory proof being made, ... to use such reasonable force and restraint as may be necessary, under the circumstances of the case, to take and remove such fugitive person back to the State or Territory whence he or she may have escaped as aforesaid. In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Section 7: And be it further enacted, That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder, or prevent such claimant ... from arresting such a fugitive from service or labor, either with or without process as aforesaid, or shall rescue, or attempt to rescue, such fugitive from service or labor, from the custody of such claimant ...; or shall aid, abet, or assist such person ... to escape from such claimant ...; or shall harbor or conceal such fugitive, so as to prevent the discovery and arrest of such person, after notice or knowledge of the fact that such person was a fugitive from service or labor as aforesaid, shall, for either of said offences, be subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months ...; and shall moreover forfeit and pay, by way of civil damages to the party injured by such illegal conduct, the sum of one thousand dollars for each fugitive so lost as aforesaid, to be recovered by action of debt.... Section 8 dealt with the payments to be made to various officials for their part in the arrest, custody and delivery of a fugitive to his or her claimant. In effect, the financial incentives authorized under this clause turned the pursuit of escaped slaves into a species of bounty-hunting: The marshals, their deputies, and the clerks of the said District and Territorial courts, shall be paid for their services ...; and in all cases where the proceedings are before a commissioner, he shall be entitled to a fee of ten dollars.... The person or persons authorized to execute the process ... shall also be entitled to a fee of five dollars each for each person he or they may arrest and take before any such commissioner. Section 9 stipulated that if the claimant suspected an attempt will be made to rescue the fugitive by force, then the arresting officer would be required “to retain such fugitive in his custody, and to remove him to the State whence he fled, and there to deliver him to said claimant.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

As this new federal Fugitive Slave Law went into effect, hundreds of families across the United States, one or more of whose family members had previously escaped from enslavement, or one or more of whose family members had papers that might not be in the best of order, were forced to abandon their homes and their employments, and seek a safer haven in Canada.

The hounds are baying on my track O Christians will you send me back?

Fugitive Slave Law passed in United States results in flood of slaves and free Blacks to the safety of Canada (in Canada, they would find, the streets were not paved with gold; for instance the Common School Act required blacks to attend separate schools wherever these existed).

The 1st person sent south under the new 1850 fugitive slave law would be James Hamlet in New-York, who was taken back to “his owner” in Maryland. The next 10 black Americans would be seized in Harrisburg and in Bedford, Pennsylvania. By the end of the year the toll would be 19 seized, 17 delivered.

Northern nullifications of the fugitive slave laws would be cited in 1860 by South Carolina as a cause of secession. Congress would repeal both laws during the Civil War, in 1864.

Henry Thoreau would mention Daniel Webster’s bill at the very end of his “Battle of the Ants” materials:

WALDEN: Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have PEOPLE OF long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they WALDEN say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. “Æneas Sylvius,” say they, “after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds that “‘This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.’ A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden.” The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the POLK passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill. WEBSTER

KIRBY AND SPENCE

WILLIAM KIRBY WILLIAM SPENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

On the very day that the Congress was enacting this new and improved Fugitive Slave Law, Waldo Emerson was finally sitting at his desk and replying to a letter that he had received, requesting that he sponsor a woman’s rights convention. The man who has been called “Mr. America” wrote:

I should not wish women to wish political functions.

Emerson responded, to his female petitioner, that he predicted that such a convention would produce mere “heartless noise,” which they might well be ashamed of once it was over. September 18: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was voted into effect by the 1st Session of the 31st US Congress: READ THE FULL TEXT

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT OF 1850 THIRTY-FIRST CONGRESS. Sess. I. Ch. 60. 1850 Chap. LX.--An Act to amend, and supplementary to the Act entitled “An Act respecting Fugitives from Justice, and Persons escaping from the Service of their Masters,” approved February twelfth, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the persons who have been, or may hereafter be, appointed commissioners, in virtue of any act of Congress, by the Circuit Courts of the United States, and Who, in consequence of such appointment, are authorized to exercise the powers that any justice of the peace, or other magistrate of any of the United States, may exercise in respect to offenders for any crime or offense against the United States, by arresting, imprisoning, or bailing the same under and by the virtue of the thirty-third section of the act of the twenty-fourth of September seventeen hundred and eighty-nine, entitled “An Act to establish the judicial courts of the United States” shall be, and are hereby, authorized and required to exercise and discharge all the powers and duties conferred by this act. SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the Superior Court of each organized Territory of the United States shall have the same power to appoint commissioners to take acknowledgments of bail and affidavits, and to take depositions of witnesses in civil causes, which is now possessed by the Circuit Court of the United States; and all commissioners who shall hereafter be appointed for such purposes by the Superior Court of any organized Territory of the United States, shall possess all the powers, and exercise all the duties, conferred by law upon the commissioners appointed by the Circuit Courts of the United States for similar purposes, and shall moreover exercise and discharge all the powers and duties conferred by this act. SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That the Circuit Courts of the United States shall from time to time enlarge the number of the commissioners, with a view to afford reasonable facilities to reclaim fugitives from labor, and to the prompt discharge of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

duties imposed by this act. SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That the commissioners above named shall have concurrent jurisdiction with the judges of the Circuit and District Courts of the United States, in their respective circuits and districts within the several States, and the judges of the Superior Courts of the Territories, severally and collectively, in term-time and vacation; shall grant certificates to such claimants, upon satisfactory proof being made, with authority to take and remove such fugitives from service or labor, under the restrictions herein contained, to the State or Territory from which such persons may have escaped or fled. SEC. 5. And be it further enacted, That it shall be the duty of all marshals and deputy marshals to obey and execute all warrants and precepts issued under the provisions of this act, when to them directed; and should any marshal or deputy marshal refuse to receive such warrant, or other process, when tendered, or to use all proper means diligently to execute the same, he shall, on conviction thereof, be fined in the sum of one thousand dollars, to the use of such claimant, on the motion of such claimant, by the Circuit or District Court for the district of such marshal; and after arrest of such fugitive, by such marshal or his deputy, or whilst at any time in his custody under the provisions of this act, should such fugitive escape, whether with or without the assent of such marshal or his deputy, such marshal shall be liable, on his official bond, to be prosecuted for the benefit of such claimant, for the full value of the service or labor of said fugitive in the State, Territory, or District whence he escaped: and the better to enable the said commissioners, when thus appointed, to execute their duties faithfully and efficiently, in conformity with the requirements of the Constitution of the United States and of this act, they are hereby authorized and empowered, within their counties respectively, to appoint, in writing under their hands, any one or more suitable persons, from time to time, to execute all such warrants and other process as may be issued by them in the lawful performance of their respective duties; with authority to such commissioners, or the persons to be appointed by them, to execute process as aforesaid, to summon and call to their aid the bystanders, or posse comitatus of the proper county, when necessary to ensure a faithful observance of the clause of the Constitution referred to, in conformity with the provisions of this act; and all good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required, as aforesaid, for that purpose; and said warrants shall run, and be executed by said officers, any where in the State within which they are issued. SEC. 6. And be it further enacted, That when a person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the United States, has heretofore or shall hereafter escape into another State or Territory of the United States, the person or persons to whom such service or labor may be due, or his, her, or their agent or attorney, duly HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

authorized, by power of attorney, in writing, acknowledged and certified under the seal of some legal officer or court of the State or Territory in which the same may be executed, may pursue and reclaim such fugitive person, either by procuring a warrant from some one of the courts, judges, or commissioners aforesaid, of the proper circuit, district, or county, for the apprehension of such fugitive from service or labor, or by seizing and arresting such fugitive, where the same can be done without process, and by taking, or causing such person to be taken, forthwith before such court, judge, or commissioner, whose duty it shall be to hear and determine the case of such claimant in a summary manner; and upon satisfactory proof being made, by deposition or affidavit, in writing, to be taken and certified by such court, judge, or commissioner, or by other satisfactory testimony, duly taken and certified by some court, magistrate, justice of the peace, or other legal officer authorized to administer an oath and take depositions under the laws of the State or Territory from which such person owing service or labor may have escaped, with a certificate of such magistracy or other authority, as aforesaid, with the seal of the proper court or officer thereto attached, which seal shall be sufficient to establish the competency of the proof, and with proof, also by affidavit, of the identity of the person whose service or labor is claimed to be due as aforesaid, that the person so arrested does in fact owe service or labor to the person or persons claiming him or her, in the State or Territory from which such fugitive may have escaped as aforesaid, and that said person escaped, to make out and deliver to such claimant, his or her agent or attorney, a certificate setting forth the substantial facts as to the service or labor due from such fugitive to the claimant, and of his or her escape from the State or Territory in which he or she was arrested, with authority to such claimant, or his or her agent or attorney, to use such reasonable force and restraint as may be necessary, under the circumstances of the case, to take and remove such fugitive person back to the State or Territory whence he or she may have escaped as aforesaid. In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence; and the certificates in this and the first [fourth] section mentioned, shall be conclusive of the right of the person or persons in whose favor granted, to remove such fugitive to the State or Territory from which he escaped, and shall prevent all molestation of such person or persons by any process issued by any court, judge, magistrate, or other person whomsoever. SEC. 7. And be it further enacted, That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder, or prevent such claimant, his agent or attorney, or any person or persons lawfully assisting him, her, or them, from arresting such a fugitive from service or labor, either with or without process as aforesaid, or shall rescue, or attempt to rescue, such fugitive from service or labor, from the custody of such claimant, his or her agent or attorney, or other person or persons lawfully assisting as aforesaid, when so arrested, pursuant to the authority herein given and declared; or shall aid, HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

abet, or assist such person so owing service or labor as aforesaid, directly or indirectly, to escape from such claimant, his agent or attorney, or other person or persons legally authorized as aforesaid; or shall harbor or conceal such fugitive, so as to prevent the discovery and arrest of such person, after notice or knowledge of the fact that such person was a fugitive from service or labor as aforesaid, shall, for either of said offences, be subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months, by indictment and conviction before the District Court of the United States for the district in which such offence may have been committed, or before the proper court of criminal jurisdiction, if committed within any one of the organized Territories of the United States; and shall moreover forfeit and pay, by way of civil damages to the party injured by such illegal conduct, the sum of one thousand dollars for each fugitive so lost as aforesaid, to be recovered by action of debt, in any of the District or Territorial Courts aforesaid, within whose jurisdiction the said offence may have been committed. Sec. 8. And be it further enacted, That the marshals, their deputies, and the clerks of the said District and Territorial Courts, shall be paid, for their services, the like fees as may be allowed for similar services in other cases; and where such services are rendered exclusively in the arrest, custody, and delivery of the fugitive to the claimant, his or her agent or attorney, or where such supposed fugitive may be discharged out of custody for the want of sufficient proof as aforesaid, then such fees are to be paid in whole by such claimant, his or her agent or attorney; and in all cases where the proceedings are before a commissioner, he shall be entitled to a fee of ten dollars in full for his services in each case, upon the delivery of the said certificate to the claimant, his agent or attorney; or a fee of five dollars in cases where the proof shall not, in the opinion of such commissioner, warrant such certificate and delivery, inclusive of all services incident to such arrest and examination, to be paid, in either case, by the claimant, his or her agent or attorney. The person or persons authorized to execute the process to be issued by such commissioner for the arrest and detention of fugitives from service or labor as aforesaid, shall also be entitled to a fee of five dollars each for each person he or they may arrest, and take before any commissioner as aforesaid, at the instance and request of such claimant, with such other fees as may be deemed reasonable by such commissioner for such other additional services as may be necessarily performed by him or them; such as attending at the examination, keeping the fugitive in custody, and providing him with food and lodging during his detention, and until the final determination of such commissioners; and, in general, for performing such other duties as may be required by such claimant, his or her attorney or agent, or commissioner in the premises, such fees to be made up in conformity with the fees usually charged by the officers of the courts of justice within the proper district or county, as near as may be practicable, and paid by such claimants, their agents or attorneys, whether such supposed HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

fugitives from service or labor be ordered to be delivered to such claimant by the final determination of such commissioner or not. SEC. 9. And be it further enacted, That, upon affidavit made by the claimant of such fugitive, his agent or attorney, after such certificate has been issued, that he has reason to apprehend that such fugitive will he rescued by force from his or their possession before he can be taken beyond the limits of the State in which the arrest is made, it shall be the duty of the officer making the arrest to retain such fugitive in his custody, and to remove him to the State whence he fled, and there to deliver him to said claimant, his agent, or attorney. And to this end, the officer aforesaid is hereby authorized and required to employ so many persons as he may deem necessary to overcome such force, and to retain them in his service so long as circumstances may require. The said officer and his assistants, while so employed, to receive the same compensation, and to be allowed the same expenses, as are now allowed by law for transportation of criminals, to be certified by the judge of the district within which the arrest is made, and paid out of the treasury of the United States. SEC. 10. And be it further enacted, That when any person held to service or labor in any State or Territory, or in the District of Columbia, shall escape therefrom, the party to whom such service or labor shall be due, his, her, or their agent or attorney, may apply to any court of record therein, or judge thereof in vacation, and make satisfactory proof to such court, or judge in vacation, of the escape aforesaid, and that the person escaping owed service or labor to such party. Whereupon the court shall cause a record to be made of the matters so proved, and also a general description of the person so escaping, with such convenient certainty as may be; and a transcript of such record, authenticated by the attestation of the clerk and of the seal of the said court, being produced in any other State, Territory, or district in which the person so escaping may be found, and being exhibited to any judge, commissioner, or other office, authorized by the law of the United States to cause persons escaping from service or labor to be delivered up, shall be held and taken to be full and conclusive evidence of the fact of escape, and that the service or labor of the person escaping is due to the party in such record mentioned. And upon the production by the said party of other and further evidence if necessary, either oral or by affidavit, in addition to what is contained in the said record of the identity of the person escaping, he or she shall be delivered up to the claimant, And the said court, commissioner, judge, or other person authorized by this act to grant certificates to claimants or fugitives, shall, upon the production of the record and other evidences aforesaid, grant to such claimant a certificate of his right to take any such person identified and proved to be owing service or labor as aforesaid, which certificate shall authorize such claimant to seize or arrest and transport such person to the State or Territory from which he escaped: Provided, That nothing herein contained shall be construed as requiring the production of a transcript of such record as evidence as aforesaid. But in its HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

absence the claim shall be heard and determined upon other satisfactory proofs, competent in law. Approved, September 18, 1850. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1853

William Whipper helped organize the American Moral Reform Society.

To assist in moral reform, unofficially, in this year some Boston policemen were beginning to carry pistols.

Stephen Smith attended the national meeting of the Pennsylvania Convention of Colored Citizens.

Although the tombstone in the Olive Cemetery adjoining the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored Persons in West Philadelphia has so eroded over the years that it cannot now be read, so far as we can determine the name of Stephen Smith’s mother was Nancy Smith and she died in this year at the age of 94.

The Fugitive Slave Act caused Stephen Smith and William Whipper (along with about 15,000 other black Americans), to consider fleeing to Canada. They purchased property in the black community of Dawn near Dresden, Ontario.

The challenge to those Unitarian ministers who supported the Fugitive Slave Law because they supported obedience to law and/or supported the Federal Union, that they were the same as “traffickers IN HUMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

FLESH,” a challenge which had been initiated during Spring 1851 by the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, came to a conclusion of sorts, with instructions going out to ministers that the debate over slavery was driving away potential converts to Unitarianism, and that therefore they should avoid discussion of the peculiar institution of slavery, avoid discussion of Daniel Webster, and avoid discussion of the merits of the Fugitive Slave Law — and that those Unitarian ministers who found themselves unable to avoid such discussion would be finding themselves fresh out of a job.

In sum: at this juncture in the South one might lose one’s life, for opposing the Fugitive Slave Law, or in the North one might lose one’s livelihood, for opposing the Fugitive Slave Law. What would be the solution? The New-York Herald Tribune declared in favor of the deportation of American blacks to Africa on grounds of inherent racial inferiority. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1857

Elizabeth A. Parkhill Gloucester and the Reverend James Newton Gloucester opened a furniture store at 881 W. Broadway in New-York. Alfred P. Gloucester was born (this toddler would die during 1859).

The Reverend Stephen Smith built the Zion Mission Church at 7th and Lombard Streets in Philadelphia, and because his family was spending its summers in Cape May, New Jersey, it was largely through his efforts that a black church was created there as well. When Olive Cemetery in Philadelphia was repossessed and put up for bids in a sheriff’s auction, it was he who preserved it as a place of burial for blacks. He helped to create a Home for Aged and Infirm Colored Persons (which would eventually be located at 44th Street and Girard avenue, Philadelphia.

Dun and Company, a firm that evaluated local businesses, estimated Stephen Smith and William Whipper’s annual sales at $100,000, characterizing Smith as “King of the Darkies.” He was on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest black Americans in 19th-Century Pennsylvania.

The mulatto Lewis Sheridan Leary went to Oberlin, Ohio to live.

(He would marry there and make the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry, he would leave behind his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, she being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr., a student at Oberlin College. He would get isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men would make a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they would get themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he would be taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He would be able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.)

Charles Plummer Tidd joined John Brown’s party at Tabor, Kansas. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

(He would become one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who would return to Kansas in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857-1858 encampment of the Brown forces in the Iowa Territory, he would “ruin” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team would need to sneak him away from Springdale, Iowa during the night. Nevertheless, the group would obtain some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Tidd and John E. Cook would be particularly warm friends. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He would visit Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and take part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he would be able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he would die of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island, a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates. Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne, North Carolina.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1858

March 10, Wednesday: Frederick Douglass, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, Stephen Smith, William Lloyd Still, John Brown, Jr., and possibly some others, assembled in the dwelling either of Smith or Still in Philadelphia to confer with Captain John Brown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1864

A house at 340 South Front Street in Philadelphia was purchased for use as the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored Persons, and would soon be recognized to be entirely inadequate. At the 6th annual celebration of this institution the Reverend Stephen Smith would present it with a $10,000 plot next to the Olive cemetery in West Philadelphia, on which it might erect a more commodious structure. He would contribute $28,000 in ground rents to be used in the erection of this “Smith Building.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1867

The Antipeonage Act of 1867 (14 Statutes at Large 546) made “holding of any person to service or labor under the system known as peonage” unlawful. It nullified all state or territorial laws which attempt “to establish, maintain, or enforce, directly or indirectly, the voluntary or involuntary service or labor of any persons as peons, in liquidation of any debt or obligation, or otherwise.” This peonage law would of course be unenforced as Southern whites took control again of the South, but in 1921 federal authorities concerned over Southern practices would notice this Reconstruction-Era enactment still in existence on the books and begin to attempt to employ it to harass Southern plantation managers — who had of course fallen into the habit of holding Southern black laborers to involuntary servitude because of “debt.”

In the post-Civil War era the headquarters of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company was relocated from New-York to Washington DC. Cashiers were to be present whenever soldiers were being paid, and were to work closely with the distribution officers of The Freedmen’s Bureau –who by act of Congress of March 1867 had sole responsibility for distributing the back pay and bounties of black soldiers– to secure whatever portion they could of a soldier’s cash. In a number of bank branches –Vicksburg, Mobile, Charleston, Jacksonville, Norfolk, and Louisville– Freedman’s cashiers doubled as Freedmen’s distributing officers. Cashiers were not the only bank officials who held dual positions at both Freedman’s Bank and The Freedmen’s Bureau. The Reverend John W. Alvord served as the company’s president while being also the general superintendent of education of The Freedmen’s Bureau. This close relationship with The Freedmen’s Bureau added to the depositors’ belief that Freedman’s was a federal rather than a private bank. After the dissolution of the partnership of Stephen Smith and William Whipper, lumber merchants of Columbia, Whipper moved to Philadelphia and became head cashier of the Philadelphia branch of Freedman’s Savings and Trust. Branches not only solicited the deposits of black adult civilians and soldiers, but encouraged schoolchildren to make deposits of 5 to 25 cents and routinely “preached” to them about the importance of work and saving. Black churches, private businesses, and beneficial societies also maintained accounts. These institutions often were the driving force behind getting many new individual depositors. In less than a decade, an estimated 70,000 depositors had had accounts, and bank deposits would come to total more the $57,000,000.00. When Freedman’s would collapse in 1874, many of these institutions, particularly the churches and beneficial societies, would be obliged to suspend or curtail services. Whipper himself would lose most of his life’s savings.10 The Spanish government in Madrid dismissed the “Junta de Información,” a 22-member Cuban delegation asking for reforms, and imposed a new tax on the island of Cuba ranging from 6% to 12% on real estate, incomes, and all types of business. (This was on top of the enormous customs duties about which islanders had continuously been complaining.)

10. Flemming, Walter L. THE FREEDMAN’S SAV IN GS BANK: A CHAPTER IN THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE NEGRO RACE (1927), pages 33-34. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1868

December 12, day: Hector Berlioz attended a meeting of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris for the final time.

A white Philadelphian wrote The Columbia Spy supporting suffrage for black Americans, and offer as an example the life of Stephen Smith “whose wealth [was] almost equal to the combined wealth of the entire Democracy of Columbia.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1873

November 14, Friday: A student at Moscow Conservatory, Eduard Sack, who has been having a torrid affair with Professor Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, killed himself.

The final years of Stephen Smith had been years of suffering. For some 6 months he had been of deranged mind. His marriage had produced no children. On this day he died at the age of 77 at his residence in Philadelphia, on Lombard Street above Ninth Street. The estate would be valued at more than $200,000. In his will he left $5,000 to Philadelphia’s Home for Aged and Infirm Colored Persons, an institution of which he had been a vice-president.

The remains would be placed in Olive Cemetery, adjoining that Home. The tombstone is inscribed: Rev. Stephen Smith. Died Nov. 14, 1873, aged 76 years 9 months.

By the side of this grave is the grave of the wife: Harriet Smith. Dec. 25, 1797. Aug. 17, 1880. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1976

Summer: Ira V. Brown’s “Racism and Sexism: The Case of Pennsylvania Hall,” Phylon 37:2, pages 126-36.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: November 19, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.