Contents Border War Forum

Home , Addison White, Calvin Fairbank, Christiana Riot, Coolie, Delia Webster, Gamaliel Bailey

Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2014

A Journal of the History and Culture of the Ohio Valley and the Upper South, published in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, by Cincinnati Museum Center and The Filson Historical Society. Contents Border War Forum

3 The Antislavery Wars of Southern Blacks and Enslaved Rebels Shifting the Historiography into the South Douglas R. Egerton

12 Men Are from Missouri, Women Are from Massachusetts Perspectives on Narratives of Violence on the Border between Slavery and Freedom Carol Lasser

20 Transatlantic Dimensions of the Border Wars in the Antebellum United States Edward B. Rugemer

32 Stanley Harrold’s Border War An Appreciation Manisha Sinha

43 Reflections on the Antebellum Border Struggle Stanley Harrold

51 Fugitive Slave Rescues in the North Toward a Geography of Antislavery Violence Robert H. Churchill

76 American Historians and the Challenge of the “New” Global Slavery James Brewer Stewart

87 Collection Essay Civil War Guerrilla Collections at The Filson Historical Society James M. Prichard

94 Collection Essay Remembering Those Who Served The World War I Servicemen Portrait Collection at Cincinnati Museum Center Scott L. Gampfer on the cover: “A Bold Stroke for Freedom”: African Americans fight 100 Announcements off slave catchers, from William Still, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Let- ters, &c…(Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872). COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Contributors

Douglas R. Egerton is professor of history at Le Moyne College. He is the author of seven books, including most recently Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2010), and The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s First Progressive Era (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Carol Lasser is professor of history and director of the Institute on Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Oberlin College. She has written on women, abolition, and feminisms, and is co-author, with Stacey Robertson, of Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). She is com- pleting, with Gary Kornblith, Elusive Utopia: A History of Race in Oberlin, Ohio.

Edward B. Rugemer is associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University, and author of The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2008).

Manisha Sinha is professor of Afro-American studies and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), and The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins of American Democracy (forthcoming Yale University Press, 2015).

Stanley Harrold is professor of history at South Carolina State University. He is the author of numerous monographs on the antislavery movement and the Civil War, including Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (University of North Carolina, 2010), which won the Southern Historical Association’s 2011 James A. Rawley award. He is working on a comprehensive history of the relationship between American abolitionism, politics, and government between 1700 and 1870.

Robert H. Churchill is associate professor of history at the University of Hartford. He is the author of To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement (University of Michigan Press, 2009).

James Brewer Stewart is the founder of Historians Against Slavery and James Wallace Professor of History Emeritus, Macalester College. He has published a dozen books on the history of the American antislavery movement, has appeared in several of the American Experience’s historical documentaries, and is co-editor for Louisiana State University Press of the book series “Abolition, Antislavery, and the Atlantic World.”

2 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY The Antislavery Wars of Southern Blacks and Enslaved Rebels Shifting the Historiography into the South

Douglas R. Egerton

s late as the early 1980s, scholars of the abolitionist movement tended to focus on two areas of the early republic, and to squabble about which was the more important of the two: the broad Burned Over District thatA stretched from Boston to Buffalo, and the Ohio world of the Lane rebels. At least when it comes to popular culture, regrettably, not a great deal has changed. As 2013’s multi-part PBS series The Abolitionists indicates, militant antislavery evidently sprang to life in 1831 when William Lloyd Garrison began to pub- lish The Liberator. As marvelous and insightful as were on-camera commenta- tors David Blight, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Manisha Sinha, and James Brewer Stewart, they ultimately could not counteract the producers’ vision of the movement as largely white, largely northeastern, and one that effectively existed only for the last three decades of the antebellum era. As Richard S. Newman perceptively observed in a critical review of the series, the documentary “could have been told several decades ago and in an historiographical universe far away,” as its intense focus on a small band of New England reformers was “not very different from 1960s depictions of abolitionists.”1 Like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, in which abolitionists were largely absent and black Americans existed to observe passively congressional debates from the balcony, the PBS series hinted that African Americans generally served the antislavery movement by sing- ing at white weddings. Richard Allen, David Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Ruggles, and David Walker failed to earn Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: even brief cameos. University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

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The scholarly world, as specialists in the field well know, has largely moved on, and it had begun to do so well before I waded into this historiography in graduate school. As early as 1961 and 1966, Merton L. Dillon’s biographies of Elijah P. Lovejoy and Benjamin Lundy examined the saga of antislavery reform in the Lower North and Upper South, as did Stewart’s 1973 article, “Evangelicalism and the Radical Strain in Southern Antislavery Thought.” More recently, historians like Newman, Graham Russell Hodges, and Gary Nash—writers more interested in black activism than in white evangelical reform movements—have turned their attention to New York and Philadelphia, just as they have shoved the story back into the years following the American Revolution. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Carol Lasser, and Stacey Robertson have wonderfully chronicled the great grassroots army of women who fought and organized to end slavery.2 Stanley Harrold’s prodigious, influential, and revisionist body of work draws the story farther south yet, into Washington City and the contested borderlands stretching from Maryland in the East to Kansas in the West. From 1986’s Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union through The Abolitionists and the South, the co-edited anthology Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, 2001’s American Abolitionists, followed by Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, and then The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves, and most especially, the award-winning Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, perhaps no single historian has done as much to upset the old narrative, confound the old debate, and re-conceptualize the antislavery movement. Such paradigm shifts, of course, do not come without detractors, so allow me to illuminate Harrold’s greatest achievements and suggest what remains to be done.3 To an extent, Border War is not the first study to portray the Lower North and Upper South as a region long caught up in cross-border conflict, and of course even the most innovative scholarship rests on the shoulders of historians who came before. William W. Freehling, as Harrold observes, not only has thoroughly studied the Border South in the years leading up to secession and war, he essentially pioneered the concept of a multi-sectional South. Yet Freehling emphasizes moderates in the region and underlines peaceful resolution of sectional issues, whereas Harrold highlights “violent and often exter- nal threat[s] to a viable slave system.” Over the course of Harrold’s interlock- ing books, endless battles over abolitionist plots, such as the 1848 attempt to smuggle slaves out of the nation’s capital aboard the Pearl, legal and extra- legal efforts to assist runaway slaves, and openly violent assaults on the system forced petty masters along the border into the arms of Lower South ideologues. In this telling, clashes over runaways replaces territorial expansion as the fundamental North versus South conflict along the borderlands. (Because Harrold focuses on the Upper South, however, he carefully argues

4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

that territorial acquisition remained the key motive among Lower South fire-eaters and expansionists.) Seen in this way, bleeding Kansas becomes not so much a new and sudden explosion of violence over the movement of slavery into America’s heartland, but rather “an escalation of an existing border conflict.”4 This returns us to that historiographical perennial: just how important were the abolitionists? Interestingly, a panel at the first meeting I attended of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR), 1985’s Gunston Hall conference, explored just this question. Some panelists, having painted all abolitionists in broad Garrisonian strokes, wondered about the relevance of non- voting pacifists. Slavery, they argued, ultimately died through bloodshed and politics. Harrold’s body of work answers that

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879). question, to an extent, as he clearly demonstrates that mili- COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS tant activists posed a real threat to slavery in the counties around the nation’s capital. But Harrold has not persuaded all reviewers. One critic thinks that Border War does not completely “unseat” the widely held view that the origins of secession lay in the debate over territorial slavery, although he concedes that “it does nibble at the edges.” Writing in the Journal of the Early Republic, another historian questions “how plausible” Harrold’s theory is. The reviewer notes that Harrold repeats a contemporary 1850 estimate that Maryland masters lost eighty thousand dollars in runaways annually. The reviewer breaks that down into one thousand dollars per runaway, which amounts to eighty people or .01 percent of the state’s black population. The Maryland senator quoted in Border War, however, did not mention the number of runaways, only the loss of property to his state’s slaveholders. Michael Tadman’s numbers in Speculators and Slaves suggest that Upper South sales would typically have earned only half that amount, but even so, this represents a total of less than two hundred runaways. “Do the [small number of] escapes to the North represent a real threat to the integrity of the slave system,” the reviewer wonders?5 In history, context and geography matter. Would the loss of two or three slaves bankrupt the vast Davis Bend plantation in Mississippi? Of course not, and years ago, Eugene D. Genovese argued that the draconian Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 amounted to political folly because it enraged northern moderates yet did little to stem the flow of a statistically negligible number of successful runaways. But the borderlands of Maryland and Kentucky were not Mississippi and Alabama. As John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger observe in Runaway Slaves, when two young, skilled bondmen absconded from a small estate along the border, that

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An enslaved person seeking freedom. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

loss often financially crippled a petty slaveholder. The fact that Senator Thomas Pratt of Maryland brought up this dollar figure in 1850 when advocating for a tougher fugitive law indicates that his constituents thought it of enormous consequence. Although Border War largely ends before secession, one sees the same concerns in Virginia’s response to John J. Crittenden’s proposals. While the state endorsed his plan to extend the 1820 Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, the two proposed amendments that won Virginia’s strongest endorsements protected the intrastate slave trade and provided federal compensation for escaped slaves. Freehling noted as early as 1970 that southern concerns over losing the borderlands played a role in their decision to leave following Abraham Lincoln’s election, and of course when the shooting started at Fort Sumter the slave export- ing state of Virginia followed its customers out of the Union.6

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This raises the second significant contribution of Border War and Harrold’s earlier works: black agency. Here too, of course, Harrold builds upon the scholarship of those who came earlier. Long before Hodges or Newman or Nash, Benjamin Quarles wrote about black abolitionists, and Shirley J. Yee followed his pioneering 1969 study with her monograph on black women activists. Yet Quarles’s book was a product of his time in that he focused on a handful of highly visible black abolitionists in the North. Those less famous activists who spent their living battling away in the trenches against segregated schools and streetcars earned few pages in his study. David Ruggles won only a handful of cameos, and two of those came in the context of assisting runaway Frederick Douglass upon his arrival in the North. Young Octavius Catto, murdered on a Philadelphia street for his activism, appears not at all. By comparison, Harrold’s borderlands activists—many of them relatively unknown prior to the author’s diligent research—prove important actors in this drama. In his pages, the border clashes that so provoked southern whites involved three key groups: slaves willing to fight for their liberty, and the white and black northerners ready to help them. Similarly, in his The Abolitionists and the South, Harrold devotes several chapters to men such as Boston attorney John Rock and Syracuse minister Jermain Loguen, people who put their lives on the line to aid runaways, calling them “John Brown’s Forerunners.” And in contrast to Quarles’s account, the slave rebel Gabriel earns a mention.7 Gabriel returns in Border War, a study filled with episodes in which enslaved Americans battle for their liberty. In 1829, four bondmen from Kentucky murdered their master as he attempted to transport them downriver. Sentenced to die, they went to their executions unrepentant. “Death,” one shouted from the gallows, “death at anytime, in preference to slavery.” African Americans, Harrold argues, understood the boundary between slavery and freedom. They not merely risked their lives to reach free soil, they battled from one end of this contested terrain to the other, and as the nation moved west, so did these border wars.8 Here, perhaps, the historiography of antislavery can advance a bit farther, since southern rebels rarely make it into the abolitionist pantheon. Not surprisingly, the older, classic studies by Gilbert Barnes, Louis Filler, and Clifford S. Griffin began their narratives with the 1831 publication of The Liberator, but the tendency to situate abolitionism far above the Potomac remains. As late as 1992, a Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1895). justly lauded collection of black abolitionist papers CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

SUMMER 2014 7 THE ANTISLAVERY WARS OF SOUTHERN BLACKS AND ENSLAVED REBELS

adhered to a white, antebellum chronology that omitted documents describing black freedom struggles in the wake of the Revolution, such as those waged by former slave Richard Allen.9 Since 2005, Peterboro, New York, once home to Gerrit Smith, now houses the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum. Every two years, the society inducts prominent antislavery activists, and to date they have inducted eighteen individuals. Only three of them hail from the South—Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Jermain Loguen—but even those three rose to fame only after escaping into and becoming active in the North. Southern activists of either race have yet to move past the nomination stage. Yet Peter Hinks once built a compelling if circumstantial case that David Walker lived in Charleston at the time of Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy and probably knew the old carpenter, or at least attended the same AME congregation. If Walker carried Vesey’s angry message north and reframed it seven years later in his 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, why should historians regard Walker as an abolitionist but not Vesey? Decades before, in Richmond, enslaved artisan Gabriel began to plot his revolt at about the same time that his young master began to court the daughter of Daniel Hylton, who had recently relocated from New York, most likely to escape the coming gradual emancipation act of 1799. Hylton brought several slaves with him, both of whom promptly tried to escape back to Manhattan. Assuming that the literate blacksmith knew of abolitionist activity in New York and hoped that limited violence might prod his state into passing a similar law for black freedom, why should scholars regard those New York and Pennsylvania activists as abolitionists, but not Gabriel and his men?10 The late Merton L. Dillon, of course, wrote about northern abolitionists as “allies” of enslaved rebels, and even before that, Robert Abzug argued that Garrisonian pacifists retailored their message in the wake of Turner’s violent revolt. But scholars of antislavery need to gaze farther south than even Harrold has and stop drawing false distinctions between northern abolitionists—white or black—and southern rebels. To do so, admittedly raises complications. Historians tend to distinguish between abolitionists and antislavery Americans largely by the question of immediatism. Abolitionist Douglass wanted slavery to end instanta- neously, while antislavery freesoilers such as Lincoln and William Henry Seward hoped to eradicate it slowly, over time. Gabriel evidently shared Douglass’s hope of ending slavery immediately in his Virginia, but Vesey clearly intended little more than a mass escape, in which perhaps several thousand black Carolinians would crowd aboard available ships and sail to Haiti. As his white critics observed at the time, that would hardly end slavery in South Carolina and would surely doom those left behind to white retribution. Yet could one not say the same for the abolitionists Harrold has described as packing Washington, D.C., slaves aboard the Pearl in 1848? Like Vesey, they failed, and surely they did not believe that the escape of a handful of blacks would bring slavery in the borderlands to a

8 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

Frontispiece and title page of Henry Highland Garnet’s reprint of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens (1830; New York: J. H. Tobitt, 1848). COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS sudden end. But quite possibly they hoped that their actions would result in the liberation of a few Americans, demonstrate the dangers of trying to hold people as chattel in the nation’s capital, and prod proslavery voices into new outrages.11 Terminology also remains important, and yet another complication. So far as the extant documentary record indicates, neither Gabriel nor Vesey ever applied the term “abolitionist” to themselves, and as Carol Lasser correctly suggests, such self-designations or lack thereof can be critical. Despite offering his legal services to abolitionist Lewis Tappan on behalf of the Amistad captives, for example, John Quincy Adams stubbornly refused to apply that word to himself. Yet historians seek to impose order and discover meaning on an unsystematic and unexam- ined past. And in many cases, actions can prove as important as terminology. In the end, the aged Adams stood before the Supreme Court in the name of freedom, and when the young boy Kale wrote to the former president, he called him a “Dear friend,” adding, “All we want is to make us free.” When abolitionist

SUMMER 2014 9 THE ANTISLAVERY WARS OF SOUTHERN BLACKS AND ENSLAVED REBELS

Douglass called upon young black northerners to enlist in the army, he urged them to “Remember Denmark Vesey of Charleston [and] Nathaniel Turner of Southampton.” For Douglass, what Vesey had tried to accomplish meant more than what term he might have used to define himself.12 To suggest, however, that more remains to be done hardly diminishes Harrold’s enormous contribution to this historiography. Those historians who have the greatest impact on their field are those who advance a significant and coherent argument and shove the historiography in one direction or another by crafting a number of truly interrelated studies that present a coherent vision of the past. For the past quarter century, Stanley Harrold has convincingly argued that antislavery subversives along the North-South border successfully placed Upper South slaveholders on the defensive and forced the contradiction of American slavery and freedom on to the national agenda. Had those historians who packed the room at SHEAR’s Gunston Hall conference in 1985 the opportunity to read Gamaliel Bailey or Border War or every important study Harrold has produced in between, they would have had no doubts about the role abolitionists played in the coming of the Civil War.

1 Although the crusade led by Gilbert Hobbes Barnes Stewart, “Evangelicalism and the Radical Strain in Southern in his The Antislavery Impulse, 1830-1844(1933; New Antislavery Thought During the 1820s,” Journal of Southern York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964) to denounce History 39 (Aug. 1973), 379-96; Richard S. Newman, The Garrison and his New England followers as self-righteous Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery fanatics appears dated now, Brown University’s William in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North G. McLoughlin renewed the debate when he published Carolina Press, 2001); Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop a new version of Antislavery Impulse (Gloucester, Ma.: Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Peter Smith) in 1973, only seven years before I began Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008); graduate school in the fall of 1980. Even those histo- Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural rians who disagreed with Barnes’s hostility to Garrison North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New found merit in his argument that earlier scholars had Jersey, 1665-1865 (Madison, Wi: Madison House, 1997); ignored abolitionists in the western sections of the Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York Burned Over District. Merton L. Dillon, for example, and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of dubbed Antislavery Impulse “a classic work”; see his The North Carolina Press, 1999); Hodges, David Ruggles: A Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (De Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 277. New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina More recently, Stanley Harrold, American Abolitionists Press, 2010); Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation (New York: Longman, 2001), 6, praised Barnes’s depic- of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, tion of the role played by evangelicalism in the movement Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Julie Roy Jeffrey, as of “especial significance.” Richard S. Newman, review The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women of The Abolitionists, in Journal of American History 100 in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of (June 2013), 305-308. North Carolina Press, 1998); Carol Lasser and Stacey M. Robertson, Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan 2 Merton L. Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, Abolitionist Editor (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); and (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961); Dillon, Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom in the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North (Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 1966); James Brewer Carolina Press, 2010).

10 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

3 Stanley Harrold, Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union 7 Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford (Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 1986); Harrold, University Press, 1969), 15, 33, 100, 109, 151-52, 155, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861(Lexington: 163; Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study In University Press of Kentucky, 1995); John R. McKivigan Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee and Harrold, Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Press, 1992); Harrold, Abolitionists and the South, 53, Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America(Knoxville: 56-57, 60, 78. University of Tennessee Press, 1999); Harrold, American Abolitionists (New York: Longman, 2001); Harrold, 8 Harrold, Border War, 18. Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., Anti-Slavery Impulse The Crusade 1828-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University 9 Barnes, ; Louis Filler, Against Slavery, 1830-1860 Press, 2003); Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: (New York: Harper, 1960); The Ferment of Reform, 1830-1860 Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: University Press of Clifford S. Griffin, Kentucky, 2004); Harrold, Border War: Fighting over (Arlington Heights, Il: H. Davidson, 1967); Peter C. Black Abolitionist Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of Ripley and Michael F. Hembree, eds., Papers The United States, 1830-1865 North Carolina Press, 2010). , vol. 3: (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 4 William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil 10 Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Harrold, Border War, 13. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997), 30, 37-39; Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The 5 Jeremy Neely, review of Border War, in Journal of Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel American History 98 (Sept. 2011), 520; Michael Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 23. Fitzgerald, review of Border War, in Journal of the Early Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Republic 32 (Spring 2012), 162-65; Michael Tadman, 11 Merton L. Dillon, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in Their Allies, 1619-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, University Press, 1990), 114-19; Robert H. Abzug, “The 1989), 53. Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists’ Fear of Slave Violence on the Antislavery Argument, 1829-1840,” 6 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Journal of Negro History 26 (Jan. 1970), 15-26; Douglas Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1972), 648-57, did con- R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark cede, however, that in some parts of the South “the eco- Vesey (1999; Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, nomic drain and political irritation remained dangerous.” 2004), 136-37; Harrold, Subversives, 129-34. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford 12 Carol Lasser, “Men Are from Missouri, Women Are from University Press, 1999), 260-64; Douglas R. Egerton, Massachusetts: Perspectives on Narratives of Violence Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and on the Border between Slavery and Freedom,” Ohio Valley History the Election That Brought on the Civil War (New York: 14 (Summer 2014), 12-19; Lynn Hudson John Quincy Adams Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 301, 308-12; William H. Parsons, (Lanham, Md.: Rowman The Freehling, “The Editorial Revolution, Virginia, and the and Littlefield, 1998), 236-41; Marcus Rediker, Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Coming of the Civil War: A Review Essay,” Civil War Freedom History 16 (Mar. 1970), 64-72. (New York: Viking, 2012), 181-82; Frederick Douglass in Hartford Daily Courant, Mar. 7, 1863.

SUMMER 2014 11 Men Are from Missouri, Women Are from Massachusetts Perspectives on Narratives of Violence on the Border between Slavery and Freedom

Carol Lasser

order War is a remarkable book. In it, Stanley Harrold highlights the role of people of color and their allies in the struggle to liberate themselves, and the American nation, from slavery, making clear that the resulting Bviolent conflict along the border was, to paraphrase Mao Tse-Tung, not a dinner party. Harrold replaces the recycled myths of the Underground Railroad with accounts of brutal confrontations in the Lower North between freedom seekers and free people who, sometimes aided by mixed-race allies, boldly resisted their would-be captors; in addition, he provides narratives of courageous northern raiders whose forays south liberated enslaved people. At last, scholars and students can turn to a book that takes seriously mobilized and coordinated resistance without fantasizing about signs, quilts, and station numbers. And what a wealth of evidence! Harrold has patiently scoured newspapers and personal papers, bringing to bear the fruits of over four decades of ongoing archival work across the borderlands and beyond. With compact, clear, and forceful writing, Harrold packs into just over two hundred pages his well-honed, sharp, and convincing argument. He asserts that the election of a Republican president who “might allow” the persistent and intrac- table struggle over slavery on the border to expand—not to the western boundaries as most historians of the politics of the 1850s have asserted, but rather into the South itself—pushed Lower South leaders finally to carry out their secession threat. In Harrold’s account, much of the Border South did not in the end join their Lower South counterparts, preferring instead to seek more security for the borders of slavery through federal legislation and enforcement. Thus, ironically, in Harrold’s account, when armed struggle over slavery that had long characterized the country burst into a certifiable civil war, the Lower South alienated key allies along the border, and in doing so set the stage for the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy. Critical, creative, thorough, provocative—this is an important book.1 The brief rumination that follows places this exceptional book in dialogue with another set of border stories, those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Having just completed co-teaching a course devoted entirely to this classic novel (in its own time

12 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY CAROL LASSER

First page of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY and in our time), I stand haunted by the legendary, albeit apocryphal, quip with which President Abraham Lincoln greeted his White House guest Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Even if Lincoln never said it, Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains the ur-text of the border war.2

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Stowe gleaned her first-hand knowledge of slavery during her residence in Cincinnati, in the years 1832-1850, supplemented by a few brief trips across the river to Kentucky to visit acquaintances and former students. Stowe knew the violent confrontations along the border, having seen the 1836 anti-abolitionist riots that destroyed James Birney’s press. Stowe’s household staff included a Kentucky- born woman of African descent who was claimed by a man vigorously asserting his legal ownership of the domestic, involving Stowe’s family in defensive feint and flight. In addition, a freedwoman, “Aunt Frankie,” assisted in Stowe’s home. And Stowe resided in Cincinnati in 1841, when a riot characterized by historian Nikki Taylor as a “race war” rocked the city again; she was no stranger to the border war.3

“Riot and mobs, confusion and bloodshed”: Account of the 1841 Cincinnati race riots from the Cincinnati Gazette, September 6, 1841. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

14 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY CAROL LASSER

Yet Stowe’s book and the actions it inspired do not enter into Harrold’s accounts. Why this omission? Granted Harrold focuses on forceful hostile encounters but his account raises questions: How did reports of those encounters shape perceptions of the events? What might historians learn if they studied his evidence in the context of the war of words that also characterized border politics? These questions do more than justify spending a semester immersing undergraduates in the scholarship about a sentimental and at times repellant novel; rather, at the risk of sounding like Harrold should have written a different book, this rumination uses Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin to think about how scholars might bring Harrold’s findings to bear on two sets of questions. First, how did Harriet Beecher Stowe craft her book as a gender- appropriate intervention in the struggle over the border? Second, how does a study of words about the conflict illuminate the ways border southerners, lower southerners, and lower northerners read the accounts of bleeding on the boundaries, and how did such readings influence their engagement in physical conflicts and actions of the border war, as well as scholars’ understandings of that engagement?

Stowe came somewhat late to the border war, mobilizing in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, an event that Harrold argues triggered a percep- tion of the escalation of attempted slave escapes and, conversely, efforts to recapture and sometimes to kidnap people of color on the northern side of the border. Bursting on the scene first in its serial publication in Gamaliel Bailey’s National Era between 1851 and 1852, and then as a two-volume, religious- sentimental pot-boiler, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a sensation, a “social fact” in the border war, and thus had significant political effects. Its public and partisan import should come as no surprise; Stowe intended Uncle Tom’s Cabin to have a political impact. Literary scholars may argue over whether the book uses sentiment to urge readers beyond momentary identification with the characters into a deeper sense of empathy that could cause readers to act; or instead, whether the book allows its readers to wallow in sensations of sympathy as ends in themselves. But whatever literary scholars may deduce, in the volume itself Stowe made clear she intended to mobilize sentiment for political purposes. In the didactic “Concluding Remarks” that appear as the last chapter of her novel, Stowe instructed her readers first, to “see to it that they feel right,” then to pray, and finally to undertake “some effort at reparation for the wrongs that the American nation has brought” upon those who have escaped enslavement. She specifically and explicitly worked to harness sentiment to support the black combatants of the border war. She sought to move her readers to action—perhaps not violent confrontation but forceful exertion on behalf of humanitarian and political ends nonetheless.4

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When challenged by skeptics North and South to provide evidence for the veracity of the wrongs chronicled in her novel, Stowe produced A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In its final chapter she addressed the clergy, urging them not only to preach against the sin of slavery from their pulpit but also to engage in a struggle that both encompassed and transcended matters of government, contending:

It seems proper that the minister should instruct [his congregation] somewhat as to their political responsibilities. [On Judgment Day] Christ will ask no man whether he was of this or that party; but he certainly will ask him whether he gave his vote in the fear of God, and for the advancement of the king- Title Page, Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original dom of righteousness. Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded, Together with Corrobora- tive Statements Verifying the Truth of the Explicitly endorsing notions of higher law, she Work (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853). finished by observing: “It is no child’s play to THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY attack an institution which has absorbed into itself so much of the political power and wealth of the nation.”5 Here Stowe, daughter of the tepid and reluctant antislavery preacher Lyman Beecher, endorsed a full-out ideological border war, rallying readers of her fiction to join in combat in particular ways—indeed in gendered ways. As a woman, Stowe wrote of the need to move the struggle from the earthly partisan sphere from which her sex was generally excluded to the realm of salvation. Moreover, Stowe’s 1854 “Appeal to the Women of the Free States,” authored the year after her Key, articulated an explicitly gendered plea to her fellow females, assigning them specific tasks in the contest over Kansas in order that “the war of principle may not become a mere sectional conflict, degenerating into the encounter of physical force.” Stowe concluded that “our true office, as women, [is] to moderate the acrimony of political context.” According to Stowe, it fell to women to navigate boundaries not only between North and South, but further, to

foster proper conversation and instruction across partisan Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896). 6 divides in order to pre-empt a violent border war. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

16 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY CAROL LASSER

Female abolitionists like Stowe argued that they battled for hearts and minds while avoiding the nasty machinations of worldly politics. Most antislavery men agreed, upholding a longstanding notion that women should calm the political passions when they boiled too high in their male family members and acquaintances. Ardent partisanship could threaten domestic peace within the family household as well as within the nation. As a writer for the Poughkeepsie, New York, literary publication the Casket explained, in the frenzy of electioneering some women transgressed these boundaries when they:

presented political banners, and…political speeches have been made on the presentation of these banners. This is all wrong and entitled to censure. Politics already rage too high in this country.…If we sanction the interference of women in such bitter political strife, we shall tend still further to disturb the relations of courtesy between friend and friend.…The sphere of woman is away from such scenes. She should soften rather than excite the asperities of the “rougher sex,” and endeavor to render the household roof a retreat and ref- uge from the unpleasant bickerings and exciting controversies of political life.

In this tradition, Stowe wanted to inspire women to obey a higher law while eschewing violence. She joined the fray at the boundary with her chosen, gender appropriate weapon: words.7 Public response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin proved immediate and considerable. Even as reviewers in publications like George Graham’s Magazine called it “over- rated,” the presses struggled to keep up with demand for this best seller. The Christian Examiner called it “a publication…in service of a holy but perilous work.” As Barbara Hochman writes, Uncle Tom’s Cabin made reading fiction respectable for the evangelical heretofore mildly antislavery community; this pious public imbibed Stowe’s more demanding abolitionist stance along with her text. As with Stowe’s Mrs. Bird, activities in opposition to slavery moved beyond the black and white abolitionists on the border into the parlors of a broader northern constituency. Moreover, Stowe was not the only writer to construct explicitly antislavery plots peopled with characters who, when they felt and acted “right,” intervened in the border war. Among Lydia Maria Child’s antislavery works, her 1857 short story, “The Kansas Emigrants,” stands out. In it, readers meet longsuffering New England-born Kate Bradford, who finds herself on aptly named Massachusetts Street in tumultuous Lawrence, Kansas, sure that her home state, “Massachusetts will not look on with indifference, while her emi- grant children” fight slavery in the borderlands.8 While Stowe reached out to women in Massachusetts and beyond to engage in antislavery activities, she angered men in Missouri and other border states. In 1853, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois took to the floor of the Senate

SUMMER 2014 17 MEN ARE FROM MISSOURI, WOMEN ARE FROM MASSACHUSETTS

to protest: “Millions are being expended to distribute Uncle Tom’s Cabin throughout the world, with the view of combining the fanaticism, ignorance, and hatred of all the nations of the earth in a common crusade [against the American South].” And two years before his kinsman resorted to blows against Senator Charles Sumner, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina attacked Sumner verbally for calling slavery a practice that embodied ignorance and want of civilization. Butler charged that such remarks “may furnish materials for what I understand is a very popular novel—Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”9 Historians need to take seriously the way in which words shaped the border controversy, engaging both men and women. Words like Stowe’s contributed to and shaped perceptions about the shedding of blood. Stowe and her readers, allies as well as opponents, became crucial participants in a changing political context influenced by the reports of escapes, of northern vigilan- tes rescuing families and individuals from enslavement, and black revolts in which enslaved people claimed their freedom. The copious reports of border violence from which Harrold draws his weighty evidence offer testimony to the significance of words. These texts fueled further imaginings that in turn fanned the flames of violence along the boundaries that ultimately dissolved into the Civil War.10 Were these lurid accounts as important as the acts themselves? It would perhaps prove unwise to become embroiled in a long debate over discourse, linguistic turns, and the new historicism. Can scholars instead simply agree that both events and their representations played an important role in shap- ing the border war for the Lower North, the Upper South, and of course the Lower South as well? Can historians acknowledge that women as well as men engaged in struggle at the boundary between slavery and freedom? And can they recognize that events as well as their representations had a significant impact on the ways in which the Border South turned to the federal government for protection during the secession crisis, while the Deep South, per- ceiving itself under sustained attack, determined to leave the Union? In the end, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a construction made of words, a work of fiction; but northerners nonetheless touted its veracity. Joshua Giddings praised the novel for “carrying the truth to the minds of millions,” and Massachusetts Representative Orin Fowler called the book “a work which for descriptive power and truthful delineation of character is unrivaled.” Can historians put the “truths” of antislavery literature in general, and this particular piece specifically, in dialogue with Harrold’s wealth of evidence to deepen our understanding of the war along the border? I urge scholars to make the effort.11

18 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY CAROL LASSER

I am deeply grateful to Stanley Harrold for his generous 5 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s response to my original comment at the annual meet- Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon ing of the Society for Historians of the Early American Which the Story Is Founded, Together with Corroborative Republic (SHEAR) in July 2013; I have learned much Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work (Boston: John P. from Harrold and from his work. I also thank my fellow Jewett, 1853), 501. panelists, especially Douglas Egerton, for sharpening my thinking. I have special gratitude to Sandra Zagarell, my 6 Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Appeal to the Women of the colleague in team-teaching our fall 2013 Oberlin College Free States,” UTC-AT, 461 (originally published in The course entitled “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Icon and Archive,” Independent, vol. 6, Feb. 23, 1854). and I give special thanks to Jake Streich-Kast who Poughkeepsie Casket: A Semi- located a myriad of references to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 7 “Women and Politics,” Monthly Literary Journal Congressional Record. , vol. 4, no. 13, Oct. 3, 1840, p. 100 (reprinted from the New York Mercury). On the 1 Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before belief that antebellum women should cool the partisan the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina passions of men, see Carol Lasser, “Antebellum Women Press, 2010), 212. and ‘Separate Spheres’: Private, Public, and Political,” paper presented at British American Nineteenth-Century 2 For a good account of the evolution of stories about Studies Conference, University of Leicester, Eng., Sept. Lincoln’s meeting with Stowe, see Daniel R. Vollaro, 20, 2008. This argument also appears in Lasser and “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Stacey Robertson, Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Partisan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Anecdote,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 30 (Winter 2009), 18-34. 8 Barbara Hochman, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851- 3 Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New 1911 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 104-109; Charles 78-103; Lydia Maria Child, “The Kansas Emigrants,” Edward Stow, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Autumnal Leaves: Tales and Sketches in Prose and Rhyme Her Letters and Journals (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and (New York: C. S. Francis and Company, 1857), 356. Company, 1889), 93; David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin And the Battle for America 9 Appendix to the Congressional Globe, Mar. 16, 1853, pp. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 92ff; Nikki M. Taylor, 275-76, Feb. 24, 1854, p. 236. Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802- 1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 125. 10 The phrase “political imaginings” comes from Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along 4 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Authoritative the Ohio River (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Text, Background and Contexts, Criticism, 2nd ed. (New York: Press, 2013), 138. W. W. Norton, 2010), 404 (hereafter cited as UTC-AT). Appendix to the Congressional Globe On the debate among literary critics, see Jane Tompkins, 11 , Dec. 14, 1852, p. 39, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Mar. 31, 1852, p. 394. Literary History,” originally published in Glyph 8 (1981), 79-99 (in UTC-AT, 539-61); and Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature 70 (Sept. 1998), 635-68.

SUMMER 2014 19 Transatlantic Dimensions of the Border Wars in the Antebellum United States Edward B. Rugemer

ames Brewer Stewart posed an important question at the July 2013 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) session on Stanley JHarrold’s Border War that went largely unanswered during an otherwise vibrant discussion. “How do we reconcile the history told in Border War with the international antislavery movement?” Harrold’s work does not consider transatlantic dimensions; indeed, the geography of Harrold’s book lies on either side of the political border between the slaveholding states and the non-slaveholding states—the Lower North and the Border South—created by the gradual abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania (1780), the Northwest Ordinance (1787), and the Missouri Compromise (1820-1821). This band of territory about two hundred miles wide saw decades of armed conflict over slavery. This long-running “fight” over slavery stemmed from the bold efforts of enslaved black Americans to escape slavery by running across state lines, the largely illegal actions of abolitionist northerners to assist them, and the efforts of slaveholders to retrieve them, often by force of arms. Harrold persuasively argues that the “border war” that developed in this region, along with the failed attempts to resolve it through inter-state diplomacy and political bargaining, played a crucial role in the coming of the American Civil War.1 One of the most valuable contributions of Border War lies in the book’s capacity to transcend “the sequence” of national political events—the Missouri crisis, Texas annexation, the political crises of 1850, bloody Kansas, John Brown’s raid, and the election of 1860—that preoccupy most accounts of the coming of the Civil War. While these events were no doubt important, narratives organized around them have become a bit stale. By illuminating a long-term conflict that under- lay the entire antebellum era, Harrold averts our attention from national politics and allows a deeper understanding of the conflict over slavery as it unfolded in the communities and neighborhoods along slavery’s border in the United States.2 Attention to the transatlantic dimensions of the antebellum period can provide similar nuance to how we understand the coming of the war. Violent conflicts over slavery took place well before the advent of the United States, and with the emergence of radical abolitionism in the 1780s, these conflicts intensified and did

20 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY EDWARD B. RUGEMER

Map of slaveholding and free labor states, c. 1855 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1893). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

not end until the abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil in the late 1880s. Major developments such as the Haitian Revolution, the abolition of slavery in many parts of Spanish America during the wars for independence, British abolition in 1834, and French abolition in 1848 posed a constant counterpoint to Americans on either side of the slavery struggle in the United States—for those who hated slavery as well as those who hated abolitionists. This essay cannot consider all of these developments, but it seeks to build upon Border War by considering some of the transatlantic dimensions suggested by James Stewart’s question. It begins with a brief investigation of how the concept of a slavery border emerged in the British Empire on the eve of the American Revolution. It then considers the impact of Britain’s abolition of slavery on the abolitionist communities of the Lower North, and it briefly surveys some of the violent conflicts along the southernmost slavery border of the Old South, the border created by Britain’s abolition of slavery in the Caribbean. In short, this essay argues that the “border war” described by Harrold had important transatlantic dimensions that deeply influenced its participants. Attention to this broader history enriches our understanding of slavery’s borders and further explains the coming of America’s Civil War.3

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In the Anglo-Atlantic world, the history of a political border defined by slavery goes back at least to 1772 when the Lord Chief Justice William Murray, Earl of Mansfield decided in Somerset v. Stewart that James Somerset, formerly a slave and the legal property of Charles Stewart of Virginia, could not be enslaved and transported to Jamaica for sale. Like many eighteenth century slaveholders, Stewart had brought Somerset to London to serve him during a business trip, quite similar to the travels of southern slaveholders to Lower North states in the antebellum decades. Somerset escaped from Stewart, with probable assistance from the free black community, and when Stewart recaptured Somerset and had him shackled on a ship headed for Jamaica, Granville Sharp, the famous abolitionist Lord Chief Justice William Murray, well known to blacks in London, filed a writ ofhabeus corpus to Earl of Mansfield (1705-1793). COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS get Somerset out of danger, and then assisted him with the legal suit for his freedom. The case, which attracted much attention on either side of the Atlantic, tested the rights of slaveholders in the metropole as well as the English tradition, expressed by William Blackstone in 1765, that “the spirit of liberty is so deeply implanted in our constitution, and rooted even in our very soil, that a slave or negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws…and becomes eo instanti a freeman.” Judge Mansfield ruled that slavery was “so odious” that only positive law upheld it. As no English law guaranteed the rights of slaveholders, Mansfield ordered that “the black must be discharged.” Mansfield’s ruling created a border within the British Empire between the colonies, where slaveholders could enforce their rights, and Great Britain itself, where they could not.4 Outraged by this decision, the Jamaican planter Edward Long penned a long pamphlet that denounced the apparent insecurity of slave property that Mansfield’s ruling suggested. Long rightly pointed out that Parliament had a long history of acknowledging the legitimacy of slave property, and that Great Britain itself, through the Royal African Company, had long owned slaves. But with the Somerset case, it now appeared that “the law of England [was] inconsistent with itself.” According to the legal tradition Long invoked, Charles Stewart had every right to capture his runaway slave and sell him for profit. These rights for slaveholders had been affirmed and reaffirmed since the mid-seventeenth century, yet Mansfield had ruled property in slaves “offensive to the constitution of the kingdom.” Title page, William Blackstone, Com- mentaries on the Laws of England It meant that planters who traveled with their slaves lost their (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1768). rights as “natural born subjects” when they passed from their THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

22 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY EDWARD B. RUGEMER colonies into the metropole, the same legal contest that began to shape a slavery border in the United States eight years later when Pennsylvania abolished slavery. Ohio Supreme Court Justice Ebenezer Lane’s 1841 ruling in State v. Farr starkly enunciated the legal issue: “If the owner of a slave voluntarily bring him into this State or permit him to come, although it should only be for the purpose of visit- ing, or traveling through from one State to another, the slave in such cases becomes a free man the moment he touches the soil of Ohio.” The political context had certainly changed between 1772 and 1841, but Lane clearly worked in the tradition marked by the Somerset case.5 Among the most transformative events between the Somerset case and Judge Lane’s adoption of its principles was Great Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1834. British abolition inspired the small band of antislavery radicals in the United States while it puzzled American slaveholders and ultimately caused them much anxiety. As late as September 1832, less than two years before Parliament passed its landmark abolition legislation, Thomas R. Dew, professor of history and political science at William and Mary, argued that even “the Parliament of Great Britain, with all its philanthropic zeal…has never yet seriously agitated this question in regard to the West India possessions.” British abolition helped inspire the institutionalization of an American abolitionist movement in 1833, and it fostered the emergence of the distinctive “positive good” proslavery argument that American slaveholders alone advocated. The slave rebellions that precipitated British abolition played an important role in the southern push for a gag rule in Congress, and until the eve of secession and even during the war, Americans debated the outcome and meaning of emancipation in the West Indies because it shaped public perceptions of the future of slavery and the policy of abolition.6 British abolition powerfully impacted Americans who lived along slavery’s border. Theodore Weld, who played such an important role in the genesis of Ohio abolitionism, was deeply influenced by the British abolitionist Charles Stuart who sent him reams of abolitionist propaganda generated by the struggle over slavery in Great Britain. Another Ohio abolitionist, James Thome, became indelibly associated with emancipation in the West Indies through his travels and writing. Thome came from a wealthy, slaveholding family in Kentucky, but after a religious conversion he renounced slaveholding and joined Weld in the establishment of Oberlin College after the Lane debates in the spring of 1834. In 1837, Thome traveled to the West Indies to study the effects of emancipation in Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica. His work, Emancipation in the West Indies, co-authored with the Vermont abolitionist Horace Kimball, argued that immediate emancipation, adopted only by Antigua, had proven a far better policy than the gradualist apprenticeship system adopted in Jamaica and Barbados. Apprenticeship, intended by the law to last six years, compelled the former slaves to work forty hours a week without pay for their former masters. The freedpeople

SUMMER 2014 23 TRANSATLANTIC DIMENSIONS OF THE BORDER WARS IN THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES

hated the system, which they did not consider “freedom,” and the sugar planters abused it by trying to squeeze as much labor from the apprentices as they could within the time allowed. The system caused such tension that Parliament abolished it after four years. Thome and Kimball provided readers with a decid- edly abolitionist account of Caribbean emancipation that American abolitionists would cite throughout the antebellum decades.7 But emancipation in the British West Indies proved an economic disaster, at least for the former slaveholding sugar planters. Proslavery Americans felt bolstered by this recent history in their defense of a future for slavery in the United States. James Shannon, president of the University of Missouri, Columbia, argued in 1855 that British abolition revealed the folly of “free soil fanaticism.” He cited Blackwood’s Magazine of London, which had lambasted the loss of “two hundred millions sterling” because of the misguided policy of abolition. Shannon believed that financial ruin would devastate the United States to an even greater degree, as slaves represented a “vast amount of produc- tive capital” that would vanish if the abolitionists gained power. “Look to St. Domingo and the British West Indies,” he argued. Because of Title page, James A. Thome and J. Horace abolition, both societies had “retrograded with Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, rapid strides towards a savage, and even a bru- and Jamaica, in the Year 1837 (New York: tal state” of civilization. Proslavery arguments American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838). rooted in British abolition also appealed to THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY the secessionist commissioner Stephen Hale of Alabama, who in his letter to Governor Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky invoked the “scenes of West Indian Emancipation, with its attendant horrors and crimes (that monument of British fanaticism).” Hale argued that the American South would follow in the wake of the British West Indies if Abraham Lincoln pursued his work. Recent Caribbean history resonated with antebellum Americans, and in their readings of it historians can find some of the roots of America’s Civil War.8 Harrold emphasizes actions, not ideas, and in addition to serving as a “mighty experiment” in emancipation policy, British abolition created an international border between the United States and Britain’s Caribbean empire that became the site of a diplomatic and then a violent contest over the rights of American slaveholders. Beginning in 1831, a series of ships—the Comet, Encomium, Enterprise,

24 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY EDWARD B. RUGEMER

and Hermosa—involved in the coastal slave trade between the Border South and the port cities of the expanding cotton belt ran aground on the sharp, protrud- ing rocks at various points along the Bahamian archipelago, a British possession. In each case, British authorities freed the slaves on board, a total of three hundred twenty five people, slaves worth about a quarter million dollars in the cur- rency of the day. But in November 1841, when the brig Creole disembarked from Richmond with one hundred thirty slaves bound for New Orleans, a group of nineteen led by Madison Washington organized a rebellion that killed one crew member and seized control of the ship. The rebels knew about the Hermosa. They understood the liberating potential of this international border and much like runaways in the Border South they used its proximity to fight for their own liberation. Once they controlled the ship, they commanded the crew to take them to the Bahamas.9 The previous cases of shipwrecked slaves had aroused southern anger and the Creole affair made it boil over. Southern representatives demanded redress from the British and in March 1842, Joshua Giddings of Ohio introduced a set of resolutions that protested federal action on behalf of slaveholders. Giddings argued that because of the United States abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, the federal government had no responsibility for the actions of slavers on the high seas; American slavers took the risks of that trade on themselves. And because the Creole had “left the territorial jurisdiction of Virginia, the slave laws of that State ceased to have jurisdiction over the persons” on board, regardless of their status at the moment of disembarkation. In effect, Giddings argued that once slaves passed beyond the power of “positive municipal law,” they became free, and therefore had every right to repossess the “natural rights of personal liberty” that belong to every man and woman. Giddings used legal precedent to justify slave rebellion, and when every Democrat in Congress, along with most of the southern Whigs, censured Giddings, he immediately resigned, only to be returned to Congress in the next election with the support of 95 percent of the voters in Ohio’s sixteenth congressional district. For Ohio residents during the spring and summer of 1842 the international dimensions of the fight over slavery were palpable and inspiring.10 Britain’s abolition of slavery extended slavery’s border into the Caribbean, but it also fostered a tradition of commemoration that enabled abolitionist communities throughout the Lower North to bring their movement into the

Joshua Giddings (1795-1864). public square. Parliament’s Act of Emancipation became law THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY on August 1, 1834, and the First of August commemorative

SUMMER 2014 25 TRANSATLANTIC DIMENSIONS OF THE BORDER WARS IN THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES

tradition began during that year in black abolitionist communities in the Northeast. The tradition built upon older practices of African American celebration that stretched into the colonial period. The Pinkster celebrations of New York and New Jersey and Negro Election day in New England provided festive occasions for black communities to come together and publicly assert their distinctive cultural presence. These celebrations died out in the early nineteenth century, replaced by more overtly political celebrations of the 1808 abolition of the slave trade, celebrated in Boston on July 14 and in New York and Philadelphia on January 1. In 1827, many black communities staged celebrations to commemorate the abolition of slavery in New York State (enacted on July 4), though many black leaders argued that they should celebrate it on the fifth because too many Fourth of July events excluded black people, and some had even led to mob violence against black communities.11 Beginning in 1834, however, remembrances of the First of August became the most important Emancipation Day celebration in the antebellum United States. The first celebrations took place in New York and New England, and in 1836, Philadelphia became the first Lower North city to celebrate the First of August. But in 1838, when Parliament abolished the hated apprenticeship system, First of August celebrations spread into more Lower North communities, including Pittsburgh, Valley Hill, Lumberville, and Upper Providence in Pennsylania; and Cincinnati and Putnam in Ohio. In 1839, more towns staged celebrations, including Newark, New Jersey; Wilmington, Delaware; and New Petersburg, Ohio. By 1860, First of August celebrations had been staged throughout the Lower North, and one documented celebration even included a contingent from the Border South city of Baltimore, which traveled north to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to celebrate the First in 1859.12 In addition to the communities already named, which continued their celebrations, the following Lower North cities and towns staged celebrations of the First of August: Beaver, Berlin, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Flushing, Frankfort, Glendale, Harrisville, Harveysburgh, Mt. Pleasant, Randolph, Salem, Springborough, St. Clairsville, Urbana, Warren, Wilmington, and Xenia in Ohio; Allegheny, Christiana, Cochranville, Kennett, Germantown, Laceyville, Longwood, Norristown, Penningtonville, and Towanda in Pennsylvania; and Bergin Village, New Jersey. In many cases, the same group of abolitionists staged their celebrations in different towns from year to year, which spread the impact of these events. Andrew Gordon of Cleveland, for example, gave formal addresses on British West Indian emancipation at the 1838 and 1839 celebrations in Cincinnati. A native Virginian, Gordon was a barber, a member of the “committee of nine” that operated Cleveland’s Underground Railroad, and a prominent black Ohio Valley orator. In 1853, John Mercer Langston of Oberlin attended the First of August celebration in Frankfort, Ohio, about one hundred fifty miles south of Oberlin and only sixty miles from the Kentucky border. Langston spoke

26 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY EDWARD B. RUGEMER

First of August celebration in Cincinnati reported in the (Cincinnati) Philanthropist, August 13, 1839. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER before twenty-five hundred people, “for the most part white,” who he believed had never heard an antislavery lecture before, and was heartened by the response. At least 274 of these celebrations occurred, but more certainly took place, as the newspapers never recorded everything. Clearly, the abolitionist communities of the Lower North enthusiastically commemorated emancipation in the British Caribbean as an important day in the movement.13 The First of August celebrations commemorated a transatlantic event that promised hope for a people still enslaved, but they also provided the spiri- tual, psychological, or political sustenance—however understood—to people who were already at war against slavery. In staging these celebrations African Americans took public action, and newspaper accounts magnified their impact. They challenged white society to countenance those invested in the movement to abolish American slavery, and as the struggle over American slavery intensified, they celebrated the radical violence of the border war. The 1838 celebration in

SUMMER 2014 27 TRANSATLANTIC DIMENSIONS OF THE BORDER WARS IN THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES

Cincinnati, for example, featured a parade through city streets that had seen violent white mobs in recent years. That city’s 1839 celebration ended with toasts to the Republic of Haiti; Toussaint Louverture; Ohio Senator Thomas Morris; the British abolitionist William Wilberforce; “our West Indian friends”; the pioneer abolitionist editor Benjamin Lundy; the New York Vigilance Committee leader David Ruggles; John Quincy Adams, former president and leader in the fight against the gag rule; and Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Everyone also observed a moment of silence for the murdered Ohio abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy. The men and women who came together at these celebrations were soldiers in the border war and the toasts they made illuminate a radical abolitionist ideology that drew inspiration from transatlantic abolitionism and the national struggle over slavery in the United States. These days of celebration gave them strength to continue the fight against slavery.14 As the American border war intensified, Lower North First of August celebrations became even more explicit about the radical abolitionism they supported. In 1844, the Bucks County Antislavery Society staged its First of August celebration in “the woods near Concord Schoolhouse…[because] it was in the site of this spot, that the Death-Struggle for liberty was made a few months since in the person of “Big Ben.” At the celebration in Randolph, Ohio, in 1849, which drew participants from New Lisbon, Salem, Rootstown, and Mecca, a committee consisting of Oliver Johnson, Ann Eliza Lee, and J. F. Smalley presented a set of resolutions that a “large and attentive audience” passed. After declaring slavery a “violation of the natural laws,” the meeting:

Resolved, That slaves owe no obedience nor service to their masters; that they have a right to run away from their oppressors; and to aid them in their escape, to use the horses, carriages, boots, clothes, and money which slaveholders have obtained by the unpaid toil of their victims, and to come to Ohio or any Northern State; and that it is the duty of the people of Ohio and all the States, to give food, shelter, employment and protection to fugitive slaves—the constitutions and laws of the Federal and State governments to the contrary notwithstanding.

Here, abolitionists declared the ethos of the border war, celebrated on the First of August.15 And in 1858 black abolitionists in Pennsylvania celebrated the First of August on one of the bloodiest grounds of the border war: Christiana. Writing without the benefit of Harrold’s research, the correspondent to theNational Anti-Slavery Standard described the battle at Christiana as the “first combat between the master and his property.” On this spot Edward Gorsuch caught “red-hot shot” instead of fugitives. There was, noted the correspondent, no more “suitable locality for

28 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY EDWARD B. RUGEMER a celebration than this very spot.” Participants gathered at ten o’clock, formed a procession, and marched to a grove established for the occasion accompanied by the sweet music of Anderson’s Band of Philadelphia. William Wells Brown gave the by now traditional oration contrasting emancipation in the British Empire with slavery in republican America, followed by a “bountiful dinner” for the largest celebration the correspondent had ever seen.16 In the 1850s, as the Fugitive Slave Law intensified the sectional passions on either side of slavery’s border, First of August celebrations grew larger, the proces- sions grew bolder, and they now included African American military companies. In 1856, the “Sons of Protection,” a colored society, organized the First of August celebration for Salem, Ohio, and the surrounding towns with a large procession to the state fairgrounds led by a band of music and speeches by Benjamin Bown, Henry C. Wright, and “Mr. Davis,” a fugitive slave. That same year, during the Pittsburgh celebration, “a newly organized colored military company” led the procession. In 1859, the procession at the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, celebration included the Philadelphia Brass Band and L’Toussaint Club No. 1; in Pittsburgh, the Hannibal Guards processed; and in 1860 in Cincinnati, the Attuck Blues led a “very large” procession through the city streets. Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie has documented many more of these organizations and argues that historians should see the formation of these military societies and their processional marches on the First of August as part of a larger historical process that stretches from the border war to black enlistment in the Union Army beginning in 1863.17 But one more story: In May 1853, the Pittsburgh Vigilance Association sent a letter of warning to the editors of the Kingston Morning Journal, a newspaper published by the free-colored Jamaican editor Edward Jordan since 1829. They wrote of their successful recapture of the Jamaican youth Alexander Hendrickure, fourteen years old and nearly tricked into enslavement by one Thomas Adams. Adams had met Hendrickure in Kingston when he stopped there on a return journey from California on the steamer Uncle Sam. He gave the young man a set of new clothes, promised him a job in America, and enticed him away with the possibility of making great wealth in California, if only Hendrickure would come with him to Philadelphia. Operators of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee saw the pair on the wharf and suspected foul play, so they wrote to their counterparts in Pittsburgh, where Adams and his victim headed on the train. Members of the Pittsburgh Vigilance Association met them at the station, confronted Adams, and had Hendrickure seized by sympathetic local authorities for his own protection. Adams fled the scene, but Hendrickure was safe.18 His own experience proved warning in itself, but the boy told the Pittsburgh abolitionists stories that needed to be shared with black Jamaicans. Hendrickure had been tricked once before, when he was twelve, and had gone on a ship to Norfolk, Virginia. The man who brought him there, whose name we do not have,

SUMMER 2014 29 TRANSATLANTIC DIMENSIONS OF THE BORDER WARS IN THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES

left Hendrickure on the ship while he did some business on shore; in all likeli- hood he engaged to sell the boy. Fortunately, the ship left for New York before the man returned and Hendrickure ended up with British authorities who sent him back to Jamaica. But others faced the same threat. Hendrickure said that three other boys had traveled with him on the Uncle Sam with another American but they had disembarked in New York. They were probably now enslaved. And the Pittsburgh merchant Samuel Cuthbert had witnessed a similar scene unfold on his own return trip from California the previous year.19 The Pittsburgh abolitionists, hardened by experience in the border war, warned their Jamaican compatriots: there is “a regular system of decoying, kidnapping, and selling into hopeless bondage, in the United States, the free subjects of Great Britain.”20 The vigilance committees in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, actors in the border war, recognized the dangers that American slavery posed to all black people. That they sought to include black Jamaicans like the editor Jordan in their network of communication and defense against American enslavement illustrates the transatlantic dimensions of their struggle. And through their annual commemorations of the First of August, abolitionists of the Lower North revealed the continuities and connections between the struggles over slavery that bloodied the long fight along slavery’s border in the United States and stretched southward into the Caribbean Sea.

I would like to thank James Brewer Stewart for his com- 1555-1860 (London: Orbach & Chambers, 1971), mentary on this essay. 95-114 (quote 114).

1 “Stanley Harrold’s Border War: A Discussion of the State 5 [Edward Long], Candid Reflections Upon the Judgment of Abolitionist Historiography,” SHEAR, July 19, 2013. Lately Awarded by the Court of King’s Bench, in Westminster I paraphrase Stewart’s question based on my own notes Hall, on What is Commonly Called The Negro Cause, by a on the session. Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Planter (London: T. Lowndes, 1772), 23-29, 37, 42-43; Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of Ebenezer Lane, quoted in Harrold, Border War, 67. On North Carolina Press, 2010), 2-3. the Somerset case as a legal precedent in United States law, see Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, 2 James L. Huston, “Interpreting the Causation Sequence: Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill: University of North The Meaning of the Events Leading to the Civil War,” Carolina Press, 1981). Reviews in American History 34 (Sept. 2006), 324-31. 6 Edward B. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The 3 For a valuable overview of this vast scholarship, see Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Thomas R. Dew, Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). quoted in Rugemer, “The Southern Response to British Abolitionism: The Maturation of Proslavery Apologetics,” Bury the Chains: Prophets and 4 Adam Hochschild, Journal of Southern History 70 (May 2004), 232. Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 47-50; William Blackstone, 7 Gilbert Hobbes Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830- Commentaries on the Laws of England, 2 vols. (1765), 1844 (New York: D. Appleton Century, Co., 1933), 1:123, quoted in David Brion Davis, The Problem of 14-15, 33; Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 165-70. Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975; James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball, Emancipation in New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 473; “The the West Indies: A Six Months’ Tour of Antigua, Barbadoes, Case of James Somerset, 1772,” from Howell’s State and Jamaica in Year 1837 (New York: American Anti- Trials, vol. 20, reprinted in James Walvin, The Black Slavery Society, 1838). Thome and Kimball’s original man- Presence: A Documentary History of the Negro in England, uscript is held in the Oberlin College Special Collections

30 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY EDWARD B. RUGEMER

Library, Oberlin, Oh. On the apprenticeship system, see Slavery, Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard, eds. (London: Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Routledge, 2011), 316-19. Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), chaps. 2-3. 12 Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 234. Further Experience along the slavery border also inspired some to accounts of the First of August celebrations include pursue the fight against slavery overseas; see, for example, Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning Joseph Yannielli, “George Thompson among the Africans: in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808- Empathy, Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition,” 1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Journal of American History 96 (Mar. 2010), 979-1000. Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana 8 Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 267 (Shannon), State University Press, 2007). The Emancipator(New 289 (Hale). York), Aug. 16, 1838; The Philanthropist (Cincinnati), Aug. 21, 1838, Aug. 13, Sept. 3, 1839; The Colored 9 Ibid., 197-204; Seymour Drescher, The Mighty American (New York), Aug. 25, 1838, Aug. 17, 24, Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British 1839; Pennsylvania Freeman, Aug. 9, 16, 1838; The Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, Anglo-African (New York), Aug. 20, 1859; The Liberator 2002). Estimated slave value based on price of prime (Boston), Sept. 2, 1853. male field hands in the New Orleans market in 1840 (eight hundred dollars); see Laurence J. Kotlikoff, 13 For biographical information on Andrew Gordon, see “Quantitative Description of the New Orleans Slave William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Market, 1804-1862,” in Without Consent or Contract: The Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom (Urbana: Rise and Fall of American Slavery: Technical Papers, Robert University of Illinois Press, 1989), 72, 83n89. See the W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., 2 vols. (New geographic spread of the First of August celebrations in the York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 1:35. We should also note maps in Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 235, 252-53. the old slavery border in the ever-shifting southwest that To compile this list of communities, I consulted the fol- made Spanish (and later Mexican) jurisdiction a potential lowing newspapers from July-September: The Liberator haven of freedom for enslaved Africans in the Anglo (Boston) (1834-1860); The Philanthropist(Cincinnati) southwest. On colonial South Carolina, see Ira Berlin, (1838-1846); The Emancipator(New York) (1834- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery 1839); The Colored American(New York) (1837-1840); in North America (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York) (1840-1860); Press, 1999), 71-72. For the 1792 resolution to this The Anglo-African(New York) (1859-1860); The North long-lingering source of tension, see Message of Governor Star (Rochester) (1848-1849); Frederick Douglass Paper Charles Pinckney, Dec. 2, 1792, Governor’s Messages (Rochester) (1853-1855); Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, Oh.) #554, South Carolina Department of Archives and (1849-1850); Voice of the Fugitive (Sandwich, Canada History, Columbia. With the beginning of the Mexican West) (1851-1852); Provincial Freeman (Toronto) (1855- Revolution in 1810, the southwest border again offered a 1857); National Era (Washington, D.C.) (1849-1857). line of liberation to African Americans held in slavery by the growing number of Anglo settlers in Tejas, and with 14 New York Colored American, Aug. 25, 1838; The Texan independence in 1835, the Rio Grande became Philanthropist (Cincinnati), Aug. 13, 1839; Rugemer, a slave border that attracted considerable numbers of Problem of Emancipation, 233-39. enslaved fugitives and featured sporadic violent conflict. National Anti-Slavery Standard On this history, see Sarah Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere: 15 (New York), July 25, 1844. Border Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, See Harrold’s account of the “Big Ben” rescue in War Anti-Slavery Bugle , 1833-1857,” Journal of American History 100 (Sept. , 62. (Salem Oh.), Aug. 11, 1849. 2013), 351-400; Sean Kelley, “‘Mexico in His Head’: 16 National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York), July 31, Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860,” Aug. 21, 1858. Journal of Social History 37 (Spring 2004), 709-23. Thanks to Alice Baumgartner for these citations. 17 Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, “Rehearsal for War: Black Militias in the Atlantic World,” Slavery and Abolition 26 (Apr. 10 Joshua Giddings, An Expose of the Circumstances which 2005), 1-34. Led to the Resignation by the Hon. Joshua R. Giddings (Painesville, Oh.: J. Leonard, 1842), 7, 21; James Brewer 18 Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 284-86. Edward Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of Radical Jordan’s first newspaper was entitled the Watchman and Politics (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve Kingston Free Press (1829-1832). University, 1970), 70-74. 19 Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 284-86. 11 Edward B. Rugemer, “Emancipation Day Traditions in the Anglo-Atlantic World” in The Routledge History of 20 Ibid.

SUMMER 2014 31 Stanley Harrold’s Border War An Appreciation Manisha Sinha

tanley Harrold has produced a large corpus of works on the abolition movement. His latest, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (2010), makes an important contribution not only to the history Sof abolitionism but also to the coming of the Civil War. It stands as a fitting culmination of his scholarship, which has consistently shed light on the grassroots nature of antislavery activism, leading historians to reevaluate both the abolition movement and its centrality to antebellum American history. Few scholars have the ability to go beyond the caricatures and received wisdom on the abolition movement and truly undertake the hard work of original research that reveal scholarly nuggets as well as help redirect interpretive trends. Much of Harrold’s work has done that. My personal encounter with Harrold’s scholarship began ten years ago when I set out to write a history of black abolitionism from the American Revolution to the Civil War. The contributionist tone of much of the work on the subject proved analytically simplistic and did not do justice to its importance. But historians such as Leon Litwack, Richard J. M. Blackett, David Blight, Gary Nash, Julie Winch, James and Lois Horton, Graham Hodges, Douglas Egerton, John Stauffer, Patrick Rael, Richard Newman, and most recently, Steven Kantrowitz, to name a few, have restored the significance of African Americans to the antislavery and abolition movements. Kantrowitz rejects the term abolitionist to describe the black Bostonians he studies, but most of them would likely be outraged on being read out of the abolition movement.1 Much of Benjamin Quarles’s work anticipated this historiographical trend. Scholars tend to forget that Quarles first made the important and now commonly repeated argument on the pioneering role of African Americans in the rise of the antebellum abolition movement, and their rejection for the most part of colonization that William Lloyd Garrison and other immediatists adopted.2 To appreciate fully the significance of the black presence in abolition, African Americans need to be situated in the much larger and complicated milieu of the movement. Here Harrold’s books, where African Americans do not appear ghettoized in their own niche but are always represented in the broader context of the abolition movement, have proved so important. As a result, Harrold’s perspective avoids the naive contributionist trap: they were there, or more commonly now, where are they.

32 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MANISHA SINHA

“The Fugitive’s Song,” sheet music cover featuring African American runaway and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

No one book or documentary can do justice to the complex history of abolition that stretches from the first wave of Anglo-American abolition in the eighteenth century to the antebellum second wave movement before the Civil War. But at a time when most of the public knows little about even leading abolitionist

SUMMER 2014 33 STANLEY HARROLD’S BORDER WAR: AN APPRECIATION

figures and views Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, apart from the wider context of the abolition and antislavery political movements, even a docudrama focusing on just five individual abolitionists from the pre-Civil War period represents a step in the right direction.3 Ideally, the abolition movement in all its iterations merits a multipart series with all figures or wings of the movement well represented, including black abolitionists. However, the recent attempt to reassert the importance of African Americans in the abolition movement must take into account their influence as activists as well as strategists and theoreticians. For this reason, my study of black abolitionists expanded to become a comprehensive history of abolition from the Revolution to the Civil War. Few historians since James Stewart have attempted that task. I planned to write a synthetic history of the topic but went back to the archives, rein- venting the wheel in part, in order to write the book. But much existing historical scholarship made my task easier and Harrold’s books definitely fit that category. His research, when trendy arguments have at times replaced the hard work of scholarship, managed to uncover an amazing picture of on-the-ground abolitionism. This activism revealed instances of cooperation between blacks and whites and thus the interracial nature of the abolition movement, along with a history of radicalism long obscured by bitter historiographical debates over the relative importance of Garrisonians versus evangelicals versus political abolitionists. In these debates, far less important than the attention bestowed on them, historians revisited and rehashed old divisions, at times even uncritically adopting the positions of their subjects. Indeed, it became de rigueur for historians of different factions of abolition to take a necessary swipe at Garrison and followers. In this sterile historiographical terrain, Harrold’s work reads like a breath of fresh air. Even his helpful collection of abolitionist documents, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism(2004), challenged much of the received conventional wisdom on the abolition movement.4 Harrold’s first book, a biography of Gamaliel Bailey, an extremely important and somewhat neglected figure in the history of abolition, illustrated through the life of one extraordinary abolitionist journalist the connections and transition from political abolitionism to a broader political antislavery. After edit- ing the abolitionist Philanthropist in Cincinnati, Ohio, Bailey went on to edit a national antislavery newspaper, the National Era, in Washington, D.C., which became the voice of free soil politics long before the rise of the Republican Party. Bailey also first published serially in his newspaper Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose romantic racialism popularized the abolitionist indictments of slave narratives for a much larger reading public. Stowe herself traveled from colonizationist to abolitionist, relying on abolitionist literature and slave narratives in her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to respond to hysterical southern criticisms of her book. She proved receptive to black abolitionist Martin Delany’s reservations about her portrayal of a passive Uncle Tom with her lesser known novel,

34 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MANISHA SINHA

Title page, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, featuring a slave rebel who resembled Nat Turner and the American maroons, a group finally getting their due in the history of slave resistance in the United States.5 Through Bailey, Harrold also uncovered a relatively hidden aspect of abolitionism, not just the dramatic and well-known Pearl escape but the network of abolitionist activism in the District of Columbia. Harrold’s biography of Bailey pre- figured his spate of books on the contest over slavery and freedom that preceded

SUMMER 2014 35 STANLEY HARROLD’S BORDER WAR: AN APPRECIATION

the Civil War, especially two of his most important works, The Abolitionists and the South(1995) and Subversives (2003). In the first, Harrold brought to light the daring abolitionist undertaking of running off slaves, an unknown aspect of the Underground Railroad too long dismissed by historians as myth, and the black-dominated abolition vigilant committees of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other northern cities such as Pittsburgh, Albany, Syracuse, and Detroit. Men and women, including Calvin Fairbank, Delia Webster, and George Thompson, who ventured south to run off slaves and faced repeated imprisonment for their daring activities were, Calvin Fairbank (1816-1898). in Harrold’s apt words, “John Brown’s forerunners.” In that THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY seemingly simple appellation, he uncovered a world of meaning for the history of abolition. Brown stood not as some aberrant, lone wolf phenomenon, but as part of a longer tradition within the abolition movement. In Subversives, Harrold highlighted the network of black and white abolitionist activists who defied local and federal authorities at tremendous personal risk to funnel a steady stream of “freedom seekers” from the District of Columbia area to upstate New York, New England, and on to Canada. The subversive careers of Charles Torrey, Thomas Smallwood, Leonard Grimes, and William Chaplin shed light on relatively little-known figures while demonstrating the wide-ranging and fairly organized nature of abolitionist subversion. These men were not armchair reformers and Harrold did not engage in hyperbole when he called them “subversives.”6 In these books, Harrold simultaneously widened and deepened the pur- view of abolitionist history. Further, Harrold revealed that the slaves themselves played a central role in the growth of abolition, an argument that until recently historians of the abolition movement have seldom appreciated, but one that African American historians such as Vincent Harding and Sterling Stuckey pioneered. Harrold’s work points not just to the few prominent instances of slave rebellions—Gabriel’s 1800 conspiracy in Virginia, the 1811 German Coast revolt in Louisiana, Denmark Vesey’s 1822 conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina, Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, and the shipboard slave rebellions of the Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841) that arguably had a greater impact on antebellum abolitionism—but to the steady stream of fugitive slaves and their allies. Merton Dillon first developed this insight, but Harrold’s corpus of work on abolition expands on this important aspect of abolition activism. His careful historical studies eschew both the romanticism of the popular understanding of the Underground Railroad and the scholarly caricature that dismisses all such talk as legend and myth making, the mere stuff of a self-serving memory rather than history. Harrold’s work blows apart both these stereotypical constructs.

36 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MANISHA SINHA

Title page, Delia A. Webster, Kentucky Jurisprudence: A History of the Trial of Miss Delia A. Webster. At Lexington, Kentucky, Dec’r 17-21, 1844…(Vergennes, Vt.: E. W. Blaisdell, 1845). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

It also recovers a long and continuous history of self-emancipated slaves and forgotten abolitionist activists who joined their struggle. Following in Harrold’s steps, writers such as Fergus Bordewich have adeptly revived the story of the Underground Railroad. In addition, a spate of new work by such distinguished historians as Richard Blackett and Eric Foner will finally give runaway slaves and the abolitionist underground their due.7

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To add to Harrold’s argument: precisely this movement of fugitive slaves set the stage for the abolition of slavery in the Civil War. Fleeing slaves took the initiative and set in motion the process of emancipation during the war. In this telling, African Americans did not passively receive the gift of freedom, but acted as architects of their own liberation.8 Only through a complete recovery of the history of abolition rather than mere bean counting can historians illustrate the true significance of black actions and words. In short, by voting with their feet fugitive slaves convinced the rest of the nation of what they long knew: slavery itself represented a state of war against black people. Border War builds on Harrold’s previous books about grassroots abolitionist activism spurred by the actions of runaway slaves. Here he argues that confrontations over the fate of slavery involved not just the most committed abolitionist men and women, but became the stuff of day-to-day conflict between ordinary northerners and southerners in the borderlands—that is, the Border States. The fight over fugitive slave renditions, Harrold convincingly demonstrates, consisted of more than such well known instances of opposition to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act as the 1851 Christiana riot, the Shadrach Minkins, Thomas Sims, Jerry (William Henry), Anthony Burns, Joshua Glover, and the Oberlin-Wellington rescues, but proved far more widespread and ubiquitous. Harrold’s research reveals the sustained conflict sparked by renditions and the attempted kidnappings of free blacks. (The recent film, Twelve Years a Slave, based on Solomon Northup’s narrative highlights the frequency of such kidnappings for a broader audience.) Black and white abolitionists always saw the two issues as interconnected. These mini riots and uprisings stand alongside the Kansas wars that commonly figure in the histories of the crisis decade of the 1850s and the coming of the Civil War. But Harrold does not confine himself to a simple story of activism; he fleshes out its larger political consequences in the state houses of the Border North and South, adding to the work of Paul Finkelman and others, on the antebellum breakdown of comity between the slave South and free North in landmark court cases. When northern state governments recognized the freedom and rights of African Americans and protected citizens who became involved in black freedom struggles, they clashed with southern state governments committed to protect- ing slaveholders’ property rights and brought the nation that much closer to full- fledged civil war. Border War goes a long way to explaining why a majority of northern white citizens not committed to abolition or black rights opposed slavery—indeed, many of its insights apply beyond the borderlands—and why many southerners felt threatened and compelled to overreach and challenge the boundaries of freedom in counterproductive ways. Within the North itself, citizens contested the boundaries between slavery and freedom, especially in new states in the West where forms of unfree labor co-existed with black slavery. Scholars should also not underestimate the political significance of fugitive slaves by relying on the

38 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MANISHA SINHA numbers of the U.S. Census, already suspect because proslavery ideologue J. D. B. Debow compiled them in the 1850s, and because they offered an official account of an essentially illegal activity. In fact, Robert Churchill’s recent digitization of conflict over runaway slave cases reported in newspapers, also an important source for Harrold, challenges much of the received historical wisdom on this subject.9 Harrold’s story points to the ongoing ideological conflict, pioneered by abolitionist activists, between the two sections. This conflict found a wider resonance in the North and South with each successive sectional crisis over the expansion of slavery, fugitive slave rendition, political debates over the constitution and federalism (a story that James Oakes’s recent book privileges), and the norms and principles of representative government. Historians of abolition should also start taking abolitionist thought as seriously as abolitionist grassroots activism, retrieving some of the insights Aileen Kraditor first developed. But scholars also need to remain particularly wary of an insidious historiographical trend that has African Americans playing the role of grassroots activists or of voting with their feet, practical and action oriented, and white abolitionists doing all the intellectual work of construct- ing ideologies and debating strategy. No such arbitrary racial division of political labor existed within the abolition movement, as John Stauffer’s important work on abolitionist inter-racialism illustrates.10 For too long, historians of abolition have emphasized one story or one aspect of the movement over another, resulting in a zero sum game. The ability to tell the entire story of abolition in all its complex- ity will eventually reinstate its centrality in antebellum U.S. and Civil War history. Some historians, including those in this forum, have criticized Harrold for neglecting current trends in abolitionist historiography, especially gender and transnationalism. As work by Nell Painter, Beth Salerno, Susan Zaeske, Stacey Robertson, and Julie Roy Jeffrey, among others, has shown, female abolitionists wrote, lectured, organized, fund raised, petitioned, led the charge for women’s rights, and harbored fugitive slaves. Unfortunately, the history of women abolitionists remains far more bifurcated by race than the rest of abolitionist historiography. As Harrold illustrates, many of the encounters between fugitive slaves and their allies and sympathizers with slaveholders, police officials, slave catchers, and bounty hunters included black women.11 Edward Rugemer raises the issue of transnationalism and argues that Harrold’s work does not address the international dimensions of the abolition movement. Rugemer’s book, which emphasizes the Caribbean roots of the Civil War, along with recent work on abolitionist missionaries in the West Indies and Africa, and Caleb McDaniel’s book on Garrisonian abolitionists in England reveals that historians have hardly neglected the international context of abolition. These recent studies build on the works of Seymour Drescher, Richard J. M. Blackett, and Betty Fladeland who first drew attention to Anglo-American abolitionism. With the prominent exception of Blackett, black abolitionists often disappear in these

SUMMER 2014 39 STANLEY HARROLD’S BORDER WAR: AN APPRECIATION

transnational studies. Abolitionist transnationalism also involved the impact of the Haitian Revolution, as Laurent DuBois, Mathew Clavin, Robin Blackburn, and David Brion Davis have argued, and the black Atlantic included Africa. To raise this issue in the context of Harrold’s work, historians must rather pay attention to the international borders where the actions of fugitive slaves created another sort of border war. The panelists at the roundtable did not ignore the issue of transnationalism. The border war included slavery’s international borders in North America, Canada, Mexico, the West Indies, and for a time, Spanish Florida. New work by Nathaniel Millett, Sarah Cornell, and Harvey Amani, among others, flesh out the transnational dimensions of Harrold’s argument.12 The war over slavery was long in the making, and the logic of Border War extended into the Civil War. Americans recently marked the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the invasion of Gettysburg by Robert E. Lee and his army— or what some historians have labeled “the great Confederate slave hunt.” The honorable and moderate Lee and his forces wreaked vengeance on the free black population of the area, enslaving and carrying many of them south during their retreat. Southern slaveholders also dreamed of a global tropical slave empire during the wars over slavery, one that would involve not just the perpetuity and expansion of racial slavery in the American republic but also proslavery imperial- ism.13 Border War thus reveals something of the momentous nature and the stakes involved in the sectional conflagration over slavery, something that little of the recent historical literature on the Civil War does.

1 Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Carolina Press, 1999); Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Press, 1961); Jane and William H. Pease, They Who Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New Would be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830-1861 York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina (New York: Atheneum, 1974); Richard J. M. Blackett, Press, 2010); Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: Beating Against the Barriers: The Lives of Six Nineteenth- African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Century Afro-Americans (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Oxford University Press, 2009); John Stauffer, The Black Press, 1986); Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1847 of Race (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1988); 2001); Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of of Revolution (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University North Carolina Press, 2002); Richard S. Newman, The Press, 2006); David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North State University Press, 1989); Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Carolina Press, 2002); Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding for Autonomy, 1787-1848 (Philadelphia: University of Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Winch, A Gentleman of Color: Manisha Sinha, “Coming of Age: The Historiography of The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Black Abolitionism,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering Press, 2002); James Oliver and Lois E. Horton, In the History of American Abolitionism, Timothy Patrick Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds. (New York: The Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford New Press, 2006), 23-38; Stephen Kantrowitz, More University Press, 1997); Graham Russell Hodges, Root Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White and Branch: African Americans in New York and New Republic, 1829-1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 4.

40 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY MANISHA SINHA

2 Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford 7 Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Freedom University Press, 1969). See also see Jacqueline Bacon, Struggle in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, Jovanovich, 1981); Sterling S. Stuckey, Slave Culture: and Abolition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America Press, 2002); Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Merton and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, California Press, 1998); Donald M. Jacobs, ed., Courage 1619-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston Press, 1990). See also James Oakes, “The Political (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Significance of Slave Resistance,” History Workshop 22 (Autumn 1986), 89-107; Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved 3 Rob Rapley, The Abolitionists(PBS, 2013); Manisha Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of Sinha, “The Forgotten Emancipationists,” The New York the French Atlantic,” Social History 31 (Feb. 2006), 1-14. Times, Opinionator Disunion, Feb. 24, 2013, http:// For a differing view on the significance of slave resistance, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/manisha-sinha/ see Francois Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: (accessed June 23, 2014). Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 89 Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists 4 James Brewer Stewart, (Mar. 2003), 1295-1330; Steven Hahn, The Political and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins Manisha Sinha, University Press, 2009). David W. Blight, ed., Passages of American Democracy (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and The Press, forthcoming 2015). Gilbert Hobbes Barnes, Memory (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004); Antislavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (1933; New York: Harcourt, Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story Brace & World, 1964); Betty Fladeland, “Revisionists vs. of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Abolitionists: The Historiographical Cold War of the 1930s Movement (New York: Amistad, 2005); Richard J. M. Journal of the Early Republic and 1940s,” (Spring 1986), Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social 1-21; Bruce Laurie, the Politics of Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Carolina Press, 2013); Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses Stanley Harrold, The Underground Railroad in New York City(New York: to the Slaves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004). W. W. Norton, forthcoming 2015). Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union 5 Stanley Harrold, 8 Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, et al., Slaves No More: Three (Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 1986). See Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Antislavery Origins of the also Dwight Lowell Dumond, Cambridge University, 1992); Martha S. Jones, Kate Civil War in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Masur, Louis Masur, James Oakes, Manisha Sinha, Free Soil, Free Labor, Michigan Press, 1939); Eric Foner, “Historians Forum: The Emancipation Proclamation Free Men: The Origins of the Republican Party (New York: Forum,” Civil War History 59 (Mar. 2013), 7-31; Oxford University Press, 1965); Richard H. Sewell, Manisha Sinha, “Architects of Their Own Liberation: Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, African Americans, Emancipation, and the Civil War,” 1837-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Organization of American Historians Magazine of History No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Frederick J. Blue, 27 (Apr. 2013), 5-16. Antislavery Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics 9 Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst: University of before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Massachusetts Press, 2005). David S. Reynolds, Mightier Carolina Press, 2010); Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, Robert S. Levine, University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Robert ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Churchill, “Fugitive Slave Rescues in the North: Toward Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American a Geography of Antislavery Violence,” Ohio Valley History Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 14 (Summer 2014), 51-75. See also David G. Smith, On the Edge of Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Issue in South The Abolitionists and The South, 6 Stanley Harrold, Central Pennsylvania, 1820-1870 (New York: Fordham 1831-1861 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, University Press, 2013); and Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s 1995); Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River Washington, D.C., 1828-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), State University Press, 2003). Also see E. Fuller Torrey, which emphasizes economic convergence. The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

SUMMER 2014 41 STANLEY HARROLD’S BORDER WAR: AN APPRECIATION

10 Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and in the Atlantic Abolition Movement, 1830-1860 (Baton Tactics, 1834-1850 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967); Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Betty Stauffer,Black Hearts of Men. See also Lewis Perry, Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God Cooperation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University On the Haitian Revolution, see Laurent DuBois, Avengers Press, 1973); Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth Century American (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Abolition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, Manisha Sinha, “An Alternative Tradition of Radicalism: 1978); Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American African American Abolitionists and the Metaphor of Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford Revolution,” in Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and University Press, 1994); Steven Mintz, Moralists and Power in American History, Manisha Sinha and Penny Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: Von Eschen, eds., (New York: Columbia University Press, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Eddie S. 2007), 7-30; Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture Glaude Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of Nineteenth Century Black America (Chicago: University of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University Chicago Press, 2000); Rita Roberts, Evangelicalism and the of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Robin Blackburn, The Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776-1863 American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). Rights (New York: Verso, 2011); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: 11 Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Knopf, 2014). On the black Atlantic, see Paul Gilroy, Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Deborah (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bingham Van Broekhoven, The Devotion of These Women: Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network (Amherst: and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, Ma.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Susan Zaeske, Harvard University Press, 1999); James Sidbury, Becoming Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); North Carolina Press, 2003); Beth A. Salerno, Sister Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum Consciousness and Transnational Identity in Nineteenth- America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 2005); Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African Press, 2005). On slavery’s North American borderlands, American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830- see Nathaniel Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Martha their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World (Gainesville: S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question University Press of Florida, 2013); Mathew Clavin, “‘It is in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (Chapel a Negro, not an Indian War’: Southampton, St. Domingo, Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Erica and the Second Seminole War,” in America’s Hundred Years’ Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American War: U.S. Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Seminole, 1763-1858, William S. Belko, ed. (Gainesville: Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2008); Stacey M. University Press of Florida, 2011); Sarah E. Cornell, Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African in the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Americans in Mexico, 1833-1857,” Journal of American Carolina Press, 2010). History 100 (Sept. 2013), 351-400; Sean Kelley, “‘Mexico in His Head’: Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810- The Problem of Emancipation: 12 Edward B. Rugemer, 1860,” Journal of Social History 37 (Spring 2004), 709-23; The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: Black Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Gale Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860 (Burlington: Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists L. Kenny, University of Vermont Press, 2006). in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Joseph Yannielli, 13 Harrold, Border War, 209-11; David G. Smith, “Race “George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, and Retaliation: The Capture of African Americans Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition,” Journal During the Gettysburg Campaign,” in Virginia’s Civil of American History 96 (Mar. 2010), 979-1000; W. Caleb War, Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, eds. McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2005), 137- Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton 46; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Seymour Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery University Press, 2013). (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Richard J.

42 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Reflections on the Antebellum Border Struggle Stanley Harrold

hat an honor to have four distinguished historians discuss Border War. Douglas R. Egerton’s books in American history span the period from the Revolution through Reconstruction. Manisha Sinha has writ- tenW about southern defenses of slavery and is preparing a comprehensive history of American abolitionism. Carol Lasser studies antebellum women and is especially interested in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great novel. Edward B. Rugemer writes about emancipation in the British West Indies within the context of the Atlantic World. At the center of Border War stands physical conflict over slavery pitting its defenders, including masters, overseers, slave patrollers, militiamen, and slave catchers, against escaping slaves, free African Americans, a few white border southerners, and considerably more white lower northerners. The contested region stretched north and south from the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River. The struggle involved kidnapping of African Americans into slavery and resistance to it, as well as violent escapes and captures. Several books and many journal articles examine aspects of this struggle, but Border War portrays the struggle in its entirety and gauges its impact.1 The book places in context such well known movements and events as the Underground Railroad, war in Kansas, and John Brown’s raid. Border War does not discuss political debate over slavery or religious differences regarding slavery except when they led to or resulted from physical violence. Border War, in other words, makes a distinction between metaphorical and literal use of such words as fought. Historians often write such things as “senators fought over the Kansas-Nebraska bill.” They mean senators had a heated debate. In John Brown (1800-1859), from R. M. De Witt, The Life, Trial, and Execution of Captain John Border War, “fought” means the real thing. Brown: Being a Full Account of the Attempted Within borderlands contrasting economies, cul- Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, VA. (New York: R. M. De Witt, 1859). tures, and jurisdictions overlap, with contrasts between THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY regions often becoming weaker. In many respects,

SUMMER 2014 43 REFLECTIONS ON THE ANTEBELLUM BORDER STRUGGLE

free-labor society and slave-labor society differed less in the North-South borderlands than they did farther north or south. In portions of the Border South slave labor had never been extensive, had not expanded, or had declined. Commerce linked the Border South to the Lower North. Conversely, proslavery economic, cultural, and political influences permeated the Lower North. These conditions usually lead historians to stress the moderation of the two regions.2 Journalists and politicians in the borderlands often advocated sectional compromise. But by cen- tering on physical conflict a different picture emerges. In terms of violence, the borderlands were the front line of the sectional struggle. People in the region exhibited little moderation when they fought and sometimes killed each other over slavery. The violence arose because (despite interconnectedness) four differences divided Border South from Lower North. First, in contrast to the Lower North, the Border South states maintained a structured society and conservative culture. Second, commercial development and population growth lagged in the Border South. Third, northern Virginia’s tobacco planters, Kentucky’s Bluegrass aristoc- racy, and Missouri’s powerful master class maintained strong ties to the Cotton South. Fourth and most important, race-based slavery helped forge different societies. Contemporaries and historians exaggerate slavery’s decline in the Border South during the decades prior to the Civil War. The slave populations of Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri increased throughout the antebellum period. Between 1830 and 1860, the total number of slaves in Virginia rose from four hundred seventy to over four hundred ninety thousand. Kentucky’s slave population went from one hundred sixty five thousand to two hundred twenty five thousand, and Missouri’s from twenty five thousand to one hundred fifteen thousand. These states retained a major economic stake in slavery, and white residents feared near- term emancipation would create a large and uncontrollable free black class.3 In contrast to the Border South, few African Americans lived in the Lower North. In 1850, for example, black people constituted 1.3 percent of Ohio’s population. Throughout the Lower North, the great majority of residents had a low stake in slavery, and the great majority regarded it as an economic, political, and moral evil. None of this prevented white racial prejudice. Laws in Lower North states restricted black rights. Anti-black violence broke out frequently. But most white inhabitants regarded African Americans as human beings rather than aberrant forms of property. Many white people sympathized with fugitive slaves. And fugitive slaves (the illegal immigrants of their time) catalyzed the Lower North’s differences with the Border South into border war.4 The conflict began during the 1780s with Pennsylvanians on the one side and Marylanders and Virginians on the other. In 1793, Congress passed the first Fugitive Slave Law in an attempt to stop the violence from spreading. But so long as slaves escaped, so long as black and white residents of the Lower North helped them, and so long as masters and their agents attempted to reclaim their

44 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY STANLEY HARROLD human property, cross-border fighting continued. It intensified during the 1830s and 1840s. In 1847, at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a black crowd used “paving stones,” bricks, and other heavy objects to rescue three fugitive slaves from the country courthouse. White students from nearby Dickinson College helped the black crowd. The master of two of the slaves died as a result of wounds he suffered in the melee. During the same years, violent southern efforts to capture African Americans led white border northerners to fear for their own rights. In 1848 a white woman in Downington, Pennsylvania, complained that “three white… Thomas Ritchie (1778-1854), from Charles ruffians” had invaded her home to abduct a Ambler, Thomas Ritchie: A Study in Virginia Politics (Richmond, Va.: Bell Book and young black woman. The white woman regarded Stationary, 1913). the violent invasion as a threat to her “own race.”5 THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY For decades, the more dramatic violence took place in the Lower North. But white Border South leaders regarded slave escapes—and especially assisted escapes—as attacks on their region. By the 1840s they had more reason to worry as northern abolitionists, active in Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and Washington, D.C., helped slaves escape. Also, between 1845 and 1848 a series of northward mass escape attempts further frightened and antagonized white border southerners. In two of the attempts, field hands in Maryland and Kentucky undertook armed efforts ending in violent confrontations with white militia. In the third attempt, house servants in the District of Columbia sought peacefully to leave their masters. Although the two armed efforts were indigenous and black, slavery’s defenders blamed them on northern white abolitionists. As for the peaceful escape attempt, no one doubted white abolitionists had a role. Violent border incidents encouraged anticipation of wider sectional conflict. In 1835, Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Enquirer pre- dicted Virginia would stand on the front line in a civil war against “fanatics” who interfered with slavery. Following the peaceful District of Columbia escape attempt, John C. Calhoun called slave escapes “the gravest and most vital of all questions to us and the whole Union.” Such views led to demands for a stronger federal fugitive slave law as part of the Compromise of 1850. Noting that escapes had “greatly increased,” Henry Clay of Kentucky and other Border South politicians insisted on the new law because they believed nothing else could prevent slavery from being pushed out of their region.6 Some historians, relying on questionable census data, discount the role of slave escapes in sectionalism during the 1850s. But people who lived in the borderlands believed increasing escapes placed slavery under siege. By 1853 white

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Missourians feared that if the region to their west became a free territory slaves would escape in that direction, prompting Missouri’s proslavery leaders to fight to make a slave state of what in May 1854 became Kansas Territory. The war in Kansas, in turn, escalated the long struggle along the North- South line. A similar fear shaped Virginia governor Henry Wise’s reaction to John Brown’s October 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry. Brown’s band killed four men, took nine prisoners, and confiscated two slaves. Local volunteer companies and a detach- ment of U.S. Marines killed or captured most of the band. But based on years of border struggle, Wise perceived a wider threat. He claimed “an entire social and sectional sympathy” inspired the raid. He believed Virginia, the oldest and largest slave state, faced an “unparalleled border war.”7 Henry Clay (1777-1852). The issue for Wise and other Border South lead- THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY ers intensified after Abraham Lincoln’s election to the U.S. presidency in November 1860. How, Wise and the other leaders wondered, would they respond to an escalating border struggle. Would they leave the Union to protect slavery, as Lower South secessionists urged them? Or would they place their faith in Lincoln’s promise to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law? They knew if they seceded the Fugitive Slave Law would no longer protect slavery in their states. In the end, most Border South leaders decided remaining in the Union provided the best protection against slave escape and northern interference with slavery. They knew they were losing the border war, and believed secession would only make matters worse. Their decision to stay in the Union deprived the Confederacy of crucial resources. In this respect, the long conflict across the North-South line determined the outcome of the Civil War.8 As this summary suggests, Border War is not a typical history of the American antislavery movement. Egerton and Sinha point out that for many years, historians of the movement concentrated on studying white reformers in the Northeast and Old Northwest. Historians portrayed these reformers as men and women who affected popular opinion in an atmosphere shaped by evangelical religion. As interest in black abolitionists has grown since the 1960s, the parameters of antislavery studies have expanded. Emphasis on action has increased. But historians still center on rhetoric and political debate rather than on physical conflict. Sinha notes that an often compartmentalized scholarship can make the movement difficult to grasp as a whole. Like Sinha, I credit Gamaliel Bailey with broadening my perspective. Bailey, the abolitionist editor of the Cincinnati

46 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY STANLEY HARROLD

Philanthropist, appears in my master’s thesis about opposition in Ohio to the Mexican War. Subsequently, I chose Bailey as my dissertation topic and soon realized that his life did not fit traditional presumptions about abolitionists. He lived in the North-South borderlands, including southern New Jersey, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Washington, D.C. As I learned about Bailey, I learned about other abolitionists, black and white, men and women similarly situated. And I learned about physical conflict over slavery in the border region. As the historians writing in this forum indicate, no one can make sense of nineteenth-century American social and political history without including the actions and perspectives of women and African Americans, as well as white men. Border War places escaping slaves and those who helped them at the center of North-South conflict over slavery. Most of the escapees were men, as were most of those who helped them. But as Sinha emphasizes, plenty of women escaped, took risks, helped escapees, and (on occasion) fought. Actions count more than words. But unlike Border War, a comprehensive history of the role of abolitionism in the coming of the Civil War will have to emphasize ideology, rhetoric, and elective and legislative politics, as well as physical conflict. Both Egerton and Sinha suggest moving abolition studies even farther south. Egerton’s biographies of Gabriel and Denmark Vesey portray these southern black men, who led slave conspiracies in 1800 and 1822 respectively, as abolitionists. As Egerton points out, whether in the North-South borderlands or farther south, mass escape attempts consciously aimed at weakening slavery. And as Sinha notes, slave escapes influenced the abolitionist movement and the coming of the Civil War. My supposition in this regard is that two abolitionist movements existed, one in the South dominated by African Americans and one in the North dominated by white people, but including African Americans. The two movements influenced each other. In some cases, black abolitionists from the South went north. In other cases, black and white abolitionists from the North went south. This interpretation does not appear in Border War, but in The African-American Odyssey, the leading black history textbook, now in its sixth edition, that Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and I wrote.9 Sinha analyzes how my books (especially Border War) contribute to an understanding of the relationship among John Brown, the Underground Railroad, and organized abolitionism. Some historians portray Brown as an aberration among white abolitionists because of his identification with African Americans and his emphasis on action rather than rhetoric. Others, beginning with Larry Gara, contend that slave escape networks amount to little more than legends produced by aging white abolitionists. Instead, such networks and the border conflict they helped create place Brown within the abolitionist movement. Brown particularly admired Charles Torrey and Jonathan Walker who during the 1840s rescued slaves in the Chesapeake region and in Florida, respectively. Some historians

SUMMER 2014 47 REFLECTIONS ON THE ANTEBELLUM BORDER STRUGGLE

also contend the Civil War began in 1861 simply as a war to save the Union—a Union war. This approach leads to severe disjunctures, including a tendency to regard slave escape before the war as fundamentally different from slave escape during the war. Such historians also miss the continuity between southern slave catching expeditions during the decades before the war and the significant role slave catching played in Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863. As Sinha (and James Oakes in much more detail) show, historians need to place events in context.10 In contrast to Egerton’s and Sinha’s comprehensive approaches, Lasser and Rugemer each center on single, though very important issues. As Lasser suggests, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin influenced the sympathies of white northerners on behalf of fugitive slaves and influenced southern white proslavery defensiveness, provoking several anti-Stowe novels. The well-known borderlands story of Eliza Harris crossing the Ohio River in winter, with her baby in her arms and blood- hounds at her heels, epitomizes the influence ofUncle Tom’s Cabin on the northern public. Stowe probably read the original reported version of the Harris’s story in the Youth’s Monthly Visitor, edited by Margaret Bailey, wife of Gamaliel Bailey. But if Stowe sought to use her didactic novel “as a gender-appropriate intervention in the struggle over the border,” to remove “the struggle from the earthly partisan sphere,” she failed as clashes along the border grew in number and intensity during the years after 1851. Lasser correctly notes that words illuminate a conflict. Historians have no way, beyond a few woodcuts, to understand the events in Border War except through printed words. In January 1851, when Bailey asked Stowe to write for his National Era the short piece that grew into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe responded, “I feel now that the time has come when even a woman…can speak a word for freedom and humanity.” Yet despite its enormous impact, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is fiction, and living women participated in the border conflict over slavery. By 1851 other women, black and white, had for some time acted in the North-South borderlands on behalf of freedom and humanity. A few years later, Stowe aided two of them, Myrtilla Miner, a white woman from New York, and Emily Edmonson, a former slave. Both women faced violence as they maintained a school for black girls in Washington, D.C., and Miner at least carried a pistol.11 Rugemer’s essay deals with several developments in the history of slavery and antislavery in the Atlantic World. Among the latter are the British court case Somerset v. Stewart (1772), the impact of Britain’s August 1, 1834 emancipation in the West Indies, and the resulting annual celebrations of the First of August. Rugemer suggests that these events “can provide…nuance to how we understand the coming of the [Civil] War” and background for the long North-South border struggle described in Border War. Rugemer, however, does not mention the most important international transaction affecting the border struggle: African

48 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY STANLEY HARROLD

Americans in search of secure freedom crossing into the British Dominion of Canada. But even this international border did not have the importance of the internal border between the slave states and the free labor states. Somerset v. Stewart has an important place in the development of American antislavery constitutionalism. But as Rugemer notes, the internal North-South border formed as a result of state and congressional legislation rather than as a result of a judicial decision. And the border struggle began well before British abolition of slavery in the West Indies in 1834. Moreover, while the British movement for immediate abolition helped shape American abolitionist thought in New England during the late 1820s and early 1830s, it proved less relevant to the proximity-driven struggle over slavery along the North-South border. James A. Thome helped a slave escape from Kentucky and Weld attended black church services, but neither had a major role in the border struggle.12 Rugemer correctly notes that more than one contested border or border region existed in the Americas where black people could seek freedom. Such borders and maroon communities existed early in the seventeenth century. Slaves during the nineteenth century escaped from the Old Southwest into Mexico. They attempted to escape from Florida and via American ships to the Bahamas. Rugemer suggests too how celebrating August First had special relevancy among African Americans in the Lower North. Madison Washington certainly exempli- fied the spirit of these celebrations, but his physical experiences remain more relevant. He had escaped from Virginia to Canada before returning, with abolitionist help, to Virginia in a failed attempt to rescue his wife from slavery. His recapture and re-enslavement led to the successful revolt on board the Creole and freedom for himself and others in the Bahamas.13 Once again, I thank the contributors to this forum for their comments, thoughts, and criticism. I thank A. Glenn Crothers and Robert Gioielli for publishing the essays in Ohio Valley History. Much of the long border war took place in the Ohio Valley.

1 See, for example, Keith P. Griffler, Front Line of Freedom: 3 University of Virginia Historical Census Browser, http:// African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, (accessed, May 29, 2104); Ira Berlin, Slaves without 2005); Richard J. M. Blackett, “‘Freedom, or the Martyr’s Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South(New Grave’: Black Pittsburgh and the Fugitive Slave,” Western York: Pantheon Books, 1974). Pennsylvania History Magazine 61 (Apr. 1978), 117-34. 4 Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil 2 Brian DeLay, ed., North American Borderlands (New York: War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Routledge, 2013); Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of 2010), 6-7; Harrold, “The Hidden Link between Illegal Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 Immigrants and Fugitive Slaves,” Jan. 28, 2013, HNN: (New York: Norton, 2003), xiii-xix; Barbara Jeanne History News Network, http://hnn.us/article/150271 Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: (accessed June 23, 2014). Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1985), esp. 4-5.

SUMMER 2014 49 REFLECTIONS ON THE ANTEBELLUM BORDER STRUGGLE

5 Pennsylvania Freeman (Philadelphia), June 10, 1847 (first National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, quote); Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, Oh.), May 5, 1848 1861-1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); David (second quote). G. Smith, “Race and Retaliation: The Capture of African Americans during the Gettysburg Campaign,” 6 Harrold, Border War, 129-33; Richmond Enquirer in in Virginia’s Civil War, Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Emancipator (New York), Oct. 1835 (first quote); Wyatt-Brown, eds. (Charlottesville: University of th nd Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 25 Cong., 2 sess., Virginia Press, 2005), 137-43. Apr. 20, 1838, pp. 501-504 (second quote); Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, Oh.), Mar. 2, 1850 (Clay quote). 11 E. Bruce Kirkland, The Building of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), 105- 7 Stanley W. Campbell, Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the 106. Reports of the escape across the Ohio River circu- Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860 (Chapel Hill: University lated widely; see, for example, The Liberator(Boston), of North Carolina Press, 1971), 110-47, 195-96; Larry Oct. 18, 1850; Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin Gara, Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground (1876; New York: Arno, 1968), 147-51; Harriet Beecher Railroad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961), Stowe to Gamaliel Bailey, Mar. 9, [1851], typed copy, 36-40, 152-59; C. F. Jackson to David R. Atchison, Jan. William Lloyd Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library 18, 1854, Atchison Papers, State Historical Society of (quote); Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Missouri, Columbia; New York Daily Tribune, Jan. 30, Washington, D.C., 1828-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana 1854; Richmond Enquirer, Dec. 6, 1859 (Wise quote). State University Press, 2003), 184, 188, 195-98.

8 Harrold, Border War, 200-202. 12 William W. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Ithaca, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia 9 Douglas R. Egerton, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 20-45; Carleton Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1801 (Chapel Hill: Mabee, Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from He University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Egerton, 1830 through the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (1999; 1970), 33, 272. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Harrold, The African- 13 Ronnie C. Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico,” Journal of th American Odyssey, 6 ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Negro History 57 (Jan. 1972), 1-12; Sean Kelley, “Mexico Pearson Education, 2014), 189-91. in His Head: Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border 1810- 1860,” Journal of Social History 37 (Spring 2004), 709- John Brown: Abolitionist 10 David S. Reynolds, (New 23; Harrold, Abolitionists and the South, 68-69; Harrold, Liberty Line The York: Knopf, 2005); Gara, ; Harrold, “Romanticizing Slave Revolt: Madison Washington, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves the Creole Mutiny, and Abolitionist Celebration of (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 142- Violent Means,” in Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861 43; Harrold, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, John R. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 64-83. McKivigan and Harrold, eds. (Knoxville: University of The Union War Gary W. Gallagher, (Cambridge, Ma.: Tennessee Press, 1999), 90-92. Harvard University Press, 2011); James Oakes, Freedom

50 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Fugitive Slave Rescues in the North Toward a Geography of Antislavery Violence

Robert H. Churchill

n the morning of April 11, 1851, a force of three hundred armed troops escorted Thomas Sims from Boston’s courthouse square to the ship waiting to take him back to Georgia and slavery. A small group of Oabolitionists, including members of Boston’s vigilance committee walked alongside, bearing witness to Sims’s rendition. A few days later the Washington, D.C., National Intelligencer celebrated the rendition of Sims as a triumph for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: “The law has been vindicated; its supremacy has been established; and the hands that would have opposed its execution were paralyzed by the spontaneous rally of the whole city of Boston.” In 1968, Stanley Campbell’s history of the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, The Slave Catchers, advanced a similar conclusion. Based on a survey of fugitive slave cases adjudicated under the law, Campbell concluded that broadly speaking northern public opinion supported enforcement of the act and accepted the return of fugitives to the South. According to Campbell, “only a few citizens in isolated communities engaged in active opposition to enforcement of the law.” Of 176 rendition cases brought before federal tribunals, Campbell found that only in eighteen were fugitives rescued from custody.1 In his discussion of the enforcement of the law, Campbell told the story of judges and officials charged with upholding a controversial law who stood firm in the face of opposition from a minority of extremists and largely succeeded in vindicating the law. He noted the consistently strong opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act in several distinct geographic regions of the country, most nota- bly Massachusetts, the Burned-Over District of New York, the Ohio Western Reserve, Chicago, and Wisconsin. Outside of these areas, however, he maintained that “the great majority of the northern population” either supported the law or acquiesced in its enforcement. The Sims case, Campbell observed, demonstrated that even in Boston, “the abolitionists did not dominate public opinion.” Campbell noted that after the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1854, the law became a dead letter in New England, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but he maintained that in the Lower North states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the law retained broad support.2

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Over the course of a generation, historians have complicated this narrative. David Grimsted has pointed out that resistance to the reclamation of fugitive slaves on northern soil had a long history dating back to the 1820s. Book-length treatments of rescues that had a significant impact on national politics in the 1850s have contextualized these cases within the history of African American communities in the North, the legal history of slavery, and the history of the Underground Railroad. Stanley Harrold has flipped Campbell’s geography on its head, noting that the states of the Lower North served as the primary theater of a border war over slavery that raged throughout the antebellum period.3 Despite this body of work, the salient features of Campbell’s narrative have retained their hold on the scholarly literature of the political crisis over slavery. Grimsted’s work emphasized urban riots, most of which occurred in the Upper North and involved largely African American crowds. Legal histories of rescue cases have focused on the same cases discussed in Campbell’s chapter on rescues, most of them located in cities of the Upper North or isolated regions of the Lower North renowned for their abolitionist leanings. Even Harrold, whose work has done so much to broaden our understanding of the full dimensions of the struggle over fugitive slaves, frames the theater of combat over the issue in a manner that accepts the Upper North/Lower North dichotomy offered by Campbell. Campbell’s narrative has significantly influenced historical syntheses of the 1850s, and has thus become the standard narrative of the reception of the Fugitive Slave Act.4 But that narrative remains problematic. It understates the breadth of the moral determination to resist the rendition of fugitive slaves. It slights the determination of rural residents and of communities in the Lower North to resist the recapture of their African American neighbors. It fails to capture the most important geographic dynamics of the opposition to the recovery of fugitive slaves in the North. Finally, it obscures the reality that in the vast majority of communities in both the Upper and Lower North, it was the champions of the law who had become isolated by the late 1850s. This article begins building a new narrative by offering a more comprehensive examination of forcible rescues of fugitive slaves in the North. This survey and analysis of fugitive slave rescues covers the period from 1794 to 1861, a span of time that highlights important chronological trends in the data. Furthermore, this larger data set permits a more complex analysis of the geography of the exercise of and resistance to proslavery violence in the North. The analysis distin- guishes among three regions: a narrow borderland encompassing northern counties adjacent to slave states; free soil communities of the Upper North; and a broad swath of contested territory in between where the fate of the Fugitive Slave Act was ultimately decided. This more complete view of northern resistance to the exercise of proslavery violence highlights the disparate political impact of

52 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL fugitive slave cases in these different regions. It lays bare the shifting geography of violence within which Underground Railroad activists and federal officials tasked with the rendition of fugitive slaves operated. Finally, the analysis highlights the importance of a group of fugitive slave rescues in the late 1850s that have hith- erto received little attention and that illustrate the collapse of the Fugitive Slave Act outside of the borderland in the late 1850s. The analysis that follows is based on a database that will eventually, the author hopes, incorporate every known fugitive slave rescue prior to the beginning of the Civil War. It defines a fugitive slave rescue as an incident in which activists used force or intimidation either to prevent the recapture of individuals claimed as fugitive slaves who had reached the North or to rescue such individuals from the custody of slave catchers, masters, or officers intent on returning them to slavery. This definition of resistance is by design broader than Campbell’s. It includes, for example, attempted rescues that failed, cases where crowds faced slave catchers down before they could conduct house searches, and cases where crowds coerced masters into agreeing to the sale of their slaves by threatening a rescue. The database also includes the rescue of slaves traveling with their masters through the North, so long as the rescue involved force, and cases in which crowds released free individuals from custody under the false impression that they were held as fugitive slaves. Finally, the database includes a handful of cases of individuals rescued in Iowa and the Kansas and Dakota Territories or off ships in northern harbors. The database does not include resistance to the kidnapping of free African Americans, except where those resisting had reason to believe that the individual kidnapped was a fugitive from slavery (see appendix for database). Perhaps most controversially, the database includes cases in which crowds rescued individuals seized as fugitives by forcing slave catchers to bring their prisoners before a local magistrate to ensure that local norms of due process were observed. Some scholars might view such cases merely as attempts to enforce the laws governing recovery of fugitive slaves rather than attempts to resist them. Nevertheless, after the 1842 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, officials could deem any forcible interference with the recovery of a fugitive slave, even for the purpose of serving a state writ of habeas corpus, as illegal interference with the constitutional right of recaption guaranteed to slaveholders under the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. Furthermore, a closer inspection of these cases most often reveals conscious attempts by those involved to bring the case before a jurist of known antislavery sympathy, who would seize any legal technicality or delay the departure of the slave catchers from the community until a full rescue could be organized. A few months after the decision in Prigg, in a particularly blatant case involving a mix of force and legal maneuver- ing, abolitionists secured an arrest warrant requiring slave catchers to go before a judge in Lake County, Ohio, to answer the charge that they had assaulted Milton

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Clarke in the course of arresting him as a fugitive slave. The road to the judge’s residence ran through the town of Unionville, which lay on the border between Lake and Ashtabula Counties. As the slave catchers brought Clarke through town, a crowd pushed their carriage across the county line, where the sheriff of Ashtabula County waited with a writ of habeas corpus to bring Clarke before an Ashtabula County justice, thus legally separating the slave catchers from their quarry. Clarke subsequently “disappeared” from the sheriff’s custody.5 The database presently records 209 incidents between 1794 and 1861. Of these, I have either confirmation or high enough confidence for 154 cases and include them in the analysis that follows. These cases include those in which an attempted rescue failed. The research that went into the collection of this database has included a comprehensive survey of the secondary literature, comb- ing through the nineteenth century primary accounts published by antislavery activists and Underground Railroad operatives, extensive searching of electronic newspaper databases, and an examination of the twenty-five thousand pages of the microfilm edition of the papers of Wilbur Siebert, the first historian of the Underground Railroad. While still preliminary, the research has thus gleaned data from the vast majority of available sources. Of the forty-four cases not included in the analysis below, further research may confirm the historicity of some, some are almost certainly apocryphal, and some will always lack enough information to make a determination. Undoubtedly, the research has yet to uncover some rescues and historians will probably never know the “true” number of rescues. Nevertheless, the number mostly likely does not exceed two hundred, and most of the “missing” cases probably occurred prior to 1840, and thus have compara- tively little bearing on the analysis that follows.6

Table 1: Fugitive Slave Rescues and Success Rate, by Year, 1794-1861 Rescues incl. Years Successful % Successful Attempts 1794-1819 5 5 100.0

1820-1824 9 7 77.7

1825-1829 4 3 75.0

1830-1834 2 2 100.0

1835-1839 13 10 76.9

1840-1844 18 16 88.9

1845-1849 29 26 89.7

1850-1854 32 23 71.8

1855-1861 42 27 64.2

Total 154 119 77.3

54 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL

Table 1 presents the chronological trends in the data. Fugitive slave rescues remained a relatively rare phenomenon prior to the 1840s, with the exception of a brief period, 1821-1822, when the national controversy over slavery inflamed passions over the issue. Rescues became a more regular occurrence after 1832, the last year prior to the Civil War to pass without a rescue. Thereafter, the data show the incidence of forceful resistance to the recovery of fugitive slaves rising rapidly in the 1840s and peaking in the early 1850s. An important caveat when considering this data is that prior to 1850, historians do not and probably cannot know the total number of fugitive renditions John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). that took place over the same period. Thus they can- CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER not determine an overall resistance rate, or whether the rising number of rescues reflects an increase in renditions or a stiffening of resistance. Table 1 also illustrates the success rate of resistance. Overall, almost 80 percent of rescue attempts succeeded in maintaining the freedom of the fugitive. In the most successful period in which rescues were common, almost 90 percent of rescues in the late 1840s ended in freedom, while in the least successful period, two out of every three rescues between 1855 and 1861 succeeded.7 In 1849, South Carolina Senator John Calhoun gave a speech to a convention of the southern members of Congress in which he complained bitterly about the refusal of northern states to honor the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. He charged that:

The citizens of the South, in their attempt to recover their slaves, now meet, instead of aid and cooperation, resistance in every form; resistance from hostile acts of legislation…resistance from judges and magistrates—and finally, when all of these fail, from mobs, composed of whites and blacks, which, by threats or force, rescue the fugitive slave from the possession of its rightful owner. The attempt to recover a slave, in most of the northern states, cannot now be made without the hazard of insult, heavy pecuniary loss, imprisonment, and even of life itself.8

Though southern officials had made similar complaints since the 1790s, the figures in Table 1 demonstrate that in the late 1840s, Calhoun’s complaints had become increasingly based in reality. Calhoun’s address initiated the legislative process that produced the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which represented a response to a significant rise in both the incidence and the success of forceful resistance to the recovery of fugitive slaves in the late 1840s.

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The act did not, however, succeed in creating a deterrent against rescue attempts, its ostensible purpose. In the 1850s the pace of rescue attempts remained at roughly the same level as in the late 1840s. The enforcement measures embedded in the Fugitive Slave Act and the political determination of the Democratic presidential administrations of the 1850s did, however, succeed in driving the success rate of rescue attempts down from 90 percent to 64 percent albeit at an enormous political cost. Table 1 also reveals that Stanley Campbell’s work on the 1850s uncovered only a small portion of the forcible resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Campbell recorded eighteen successful rescues in 176 fugitive slave cases between October 1850 and the end of 1860. The present research shows sixty-eight rescue attempts in the same period, of which forty-nine (72 percent) proved successful. Besides attempted rescues, which Campbell recorded simply as renditions, the present findings include twenty-five rescues that fit Campbell’s criteria that he either missed or mischaracterized. These include some well-publicized episodes such as the Coatesville, Pennsylvania, rescue of December 1850, the rescue of William Thomas in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (which Campbell characterizes as an escape), the rescue of James Worthington in Akron, Ohio, and the rescue of Jane Johnson in Philadelphia. The present findings also include ten rescues that took place off ships in northern harbors or in western territories, incidents that Campbell consciously excluded from his findings. Finally, for four of the eighteen rescues in Campbell’s appendix, I have found either no record or evidence that no rescue took place.9 The following map divides the North into three regions with markedly different responses to the proslavery violence represented by the capture and rendition of fugitive slaves. The analysis begins by recognizing the distinctiveness of a borderland region extending north of the Mason-Dixon line and the Ohio River and west of the Mississippi River. Generally, this borderland extended from twenty-five to forty miles into the territory of the North. However, in the region of southern Illinois known as Egypt, the borderland extended as much as seventy-five miles north of the Ohio River. By the late 1850s this borderland had extended across the southern border of Iowa and into the territory of Kansas. The borderland also encompassed the city of New York. Though not geographically contiguous with the rest of the region, New York most closely resembled other borderland cities such as Cincinnati and New Albany, Indiana, in its acceptance of the norms of proslavery violence and in the routine involvement of city officials in slave catching.10 In this region, slave catchers freely acted according to southern norms of proslavery violence, and most white residents and local officials accepted these norms. While abolitionists and African American communities stoutly resisted proslavery violence, all recognized the hostile climate in which they lived and worked.

56 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL Upper South South Lower 4 5 North Contested Contested Free Soil North Free Borderlands 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 Regions of Fugitive Slave Rescue Violence

Regions of Fugitive Slave Rescue Violence. COURTESY THE AUTHOR

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Fugitive turned abolitionist J. W. Loguen described the borderland as “a country of man thieves, and wretches formed into banditti.” Cincinnati Underground Railroad activist Levi Coffin explained that in the counties on the north side of the Ohio River “fugitive slaves were in as much danger of being captured as on the other side of the river” because many white residents acted as ad hoc slave catchers in hopes of monetary reward. Given the proximity that allowed easy access to southern slave catching posses and the willingness of northern residents of the borderland to join in the chase, the majority of African Americans returned to slavery were captured in this region. Levi Coffin (1798-1877). According to Campbell’s list of fugitive slave renditions, CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER of 169 cases in which he records the location precisely enough to determine the region, 104 (62 percent) took place in the borderland.11 The depredations of a slave catching posse composed of Kentuckians and local part-time slave catchers led by Edwin Towers that chased several escaped slaves into Highland County, Ohio, in 1844 reveal the extent of proslavery violence in this region. The posse murdered Red Oak Underground Railroad activist Robert Miller when he tried to help several of the men escape from his home. When Red Oak Underground Railroad activist Absalom King resisted Towers’s demand to search his house without a warrant, a gun battle broke out in which King was wounded and one of the posse killed. Later in the day a second posse returned and lynched one of the fugitives who had defended King’s house. Local authorities reestablished order, but neglected to bring criminal charges against those who murdered Miller and the unnamed fugitive. Resist as they might, African Americans and white antislavery activists in the borderland knew that neither their neighbors nor the law would afford them much protection.12 In contrast, the Upper North and discrete regions of the Lower North com- prised a distinctive free soil region marked by consistent and collective resistance to the recovery of fugitive slaves. This region encompassed all of New England, all of New York State except for the Hudson River Valley south of Albany, the Ohio Western Reserve, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the counties immediately surrounding Chicago. Though the best known examples of antislavery resistance in this region were the large urban riots of the 1850s, rural residents were just as consistent in their resistance to slave catching. The rescue of Milton Clarke amply demonstrated the lengths to which rural residents of the Ohio Western Reserve would go to resist the rendition of fugitive slaves. As one local abolitionist related to a Boston newspaper editor after the rescue: “We have had a great excitement

58 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL here in consequence of an arrest of a supposed fugitive. It resulted as I have often said it would. A fugitive cannot be taken from this county into slavery.”13 The collective determination to prevent the rendition of fugitives marked the free soil region. Even masters who scrupulously followed the legal process and behaved in a peaceful and lawful manner faced broad communal opposition. Slave catchers seeking legal counsel or official assistance often received little cooperation. When Captain J. G. Harness arrived in Buffalo, New York, in 1855 to claim prison inmate Henry King as a fugitive slave, he could not find a lawyer willing to prepare the necessary papers. The U.S. Commissioner proved similarly uncooperative. All of those he asked for assistance advised him to desist, “stating that such were the feelings of the masses, that a fugitive could not be taken from the city; that a riot would inevitably ensue on the attempt.” Even when claimants in the free soil region managed to take custody of fugitives and bring them to court, they often found their efforts frustrated. In almost a dozen cases free soil crowds rescued fugitives from the courtroom itself or from jail.14 Proslavery violence of any kind proved anathema to most free soil residents. Indeed, slave catchers often found themselves confronted by menacing crowds and targeted for violent and legal retaliation for any violence or legal infraction committed in the process of recapturing fugitives. For example, in the summer of 1847 a posse of slave catchers set out from Kentucky, headed for Young’s Prairie, a growing community of fugitive slaves in Cass County, Michigan. Michigan had proved itself hostile territory for slave catchers in the late 1840s, so the masters of several families who had escaped to Michigan pooled their resources and hired an exceptionally large posse. The posse raided three farms in the middle of the night, breaking into cabins and seizing several African Americans, including a father and his infant son born on free soil. The community quickly rallied and a crowd of two hundred took the posse into custody and brought them to Cassopolis for trial on charges of kidnapping. The crowd was particularly angered that the posse had beaten the father into submission while he resisted recapture. They forced his former master to dismount his horse and walk to Cassopolis, while the man he claimed as his property rode. They also forced the master to carry the infant, and at every house on the road the crowd introduced the master to residents as a “child stealer.” When they arrived at Cassopolis, this ritual continued as the crowd paraded the master up and down the streets until tears of humiliation streamed down his face.15 The free soil region was also distinguished by the pains that residents took to perform their resistance within the public sphere. After the arrest of Jerry McHenry as a fugitive in Syracuse, New York, in 1851 during the Liberty Party’s state convention, some of the assembled abolitionists suggested that residents should wait to see if legal maneuvers would suffice to free him. According to J. W. Loguen, however, Gerritt Smith insisted that activists must rescue McHenry in open, public

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defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, arguing that “a forcible rescue will demonstrate the strength of public opinion against the possible legality of slavery and this Fugitive Slave Law in particular. It will honor Syracuse and be a powerful example everywhere.” In 1854, a long public meeting, speeches, and the passing of resolutions preceded the rescue of Joshua Glover in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Residents of Syracuse responded to the news of Glover’s rescue by offering to join Milwaukee as “Sister Cities” in a “Holy Confederacy” bound by the promise that “no broken hearted fugitive shall ever again be consigned to slavery” from their territory. Many free soil residents publicly dedicated themselves to building that holy confederacy.16 Between these two regions lay a broad middle ground, a belt of territory running across the middle and upper latitudes of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Resistance to slave catching in this region lacked the consistency, publicity, and political resonance that characterized resistance in the free soil region. Nevertheless, slave catchers could not operate with the relatively free rein that they enjoyed in the borderland. Instead, within this contested region local responses to slave catching proved fluid and conditional. Slave catchers might operate, but only if they observed community norms of due process and refrained from acting out southern patterns of racial violence. When slave catchers violated local norms, either in cities or in more rural communities, they elicited a quick and overwhelmingly hostile public reaction. The fluidity of public opinion in this region is best illustrated by moments in which residents responded with horror and outrage to acts considered norma- tive in the South. In 1839, when slave catchers arrested Bill, an African American resident of Marion, Ohio, his neighbors turned out to watch justice take its course. But when a local judge found fault with the owner’s process and prepared to release Bill, the master and his posse drew pistols in the courtroom and announced that they would hold him by force regardless of the court’s ruling. This act so outraged the community that residents broke into the local militia arsenal, distributed weapons, assaulted the law office to which the posse had taken Bill, and forced the posse to free him. Acts of proslavery brutality might also arouse communities in the contested region. In September 1853, slave catchers attempted to arrest William Thomas at the hotel where he worked in Wilkes- Barre, Pennsylvania. Thomas escaped their grasp and ran for the river, plung- ing in up to the neck. The slave catchers began to fire their pistols at him in an effort to persuade him to come out of the river. They inflicted several wounds on Thomas, including a scalp wound that bled profusely. A fugitive slave rendition had taken place in Wilkes-Barre in 1851 and residents had made no demonstra- tion against the slave catchers. But the sight of a man being used for target practice proved too much for residents to stomach. As the crowd of onlookers grew in size and hostility, the slave catchers decided it was time to leave Thomas to his fate and depart from the city.17

60 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL

These distinct regional responses to the exercise of proslavery violence took on particular political importance with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The passage of the act encouraged masters to pursue fugitives beyond the borderland, and thus shifted the geographic location of antislavery resistance to slave catching out of the borderland for the first time. Table 2 illustrates this shift by breaking down fugitive slave rescues by region. This regional analysis reveals several shifts over time in the theater of battle over fugitive slaves.

Table 2: Fugitive Slave Rescues (incl. Attempts) by Region, 1794-1861 Border- Contested Free Total Years % % % land Region Soil Cases

1794-1819 1 20.0 2 40.0 2 40.0 5

1820-1824 6 66.7 2 22.2 1 11. 1 9

1825-1829 2 50.0 2 50.0 0 0.0 4

1830-1834 0 0.0 1 50.0 1 50.0 2

1835-1839 4 30.7 6 46.2 3 23.1 13

1840-1844 7 38.9 6 33.3 5 27.8 18

1845-1849 12 41.4 10 34.5 7 24.1 29

1850-1854 10 31.2 7 21.9 15 46.9 32

1855-1861 14 33.3 17 40.5 11 26.2 42

Total 56 36.4 53 34.4 45 29.2 154

Prior to 1840, the number of rescues is too small and their distribution too haphazard to permit a meaningful regional analysis. As rescues accelerated in the 1840s, however, the borderland emerged as the region generating the most incidents of violent resistance to the recovery of fugitives. This should come as no surprise, given that the borderland almost certainly witnessed the majority of renditions in the 1840s, just as it would in the 1850s. Such rescues generally conformed to two types. In urban settings, local African American communities though representing a small minority of the urban population could sometimes mobilize crowds and rescue fugitives before local authorities intervened or while officials transported fugitives to or from court. In 1849, for example, Cincinnati police officers arrested a young runaway at a home in Bucktown, an African American neighborhood, but the local woman who had harbored him summoned the neighbors and a crowd quickly overwhelmed the officers and hustled the boy to safety. In rural areas of pronounced antislavery sympathy, interracial crowds sometimes faced off against slave catchers attempting to search a home and tried to force the posse to retire. In April 1844, an interracial crowd forced a posse that had seized Thomas Hall of Coatesville, Pennsylvania,

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as a fugitive to release him. Given the hostile climate of the borderland, such incidents represent the heroism of these isolated antislavery communities.18 The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act emboldened masters and slave catchers to attempt to recapture fugitives living, sometimes openly, in the Upper North. As a consequence, the locus of violent resistance shifted to the free soil region, as Table 2 illustrates. The law’s political backers encouraged southern hopes that authorities would routinely enforce the law in free soil cities with large fugitive populations. In Syracuse, Senator Daniel Webster, one of the leading proponents of the law, famously boasted, “Depend upon it, the law will be executed in all the great cities, here in Syracuse, in the midst of the anti-slavery convention, if the occasion shall arise.” In the winter of 1850- 1851, Boston, Chicago, and Detroit were paralyzed for days as slave catchers attempting to remand fugitives clashed with large antislavery crowds. In Syracuse, the rescue of Jerry McHenry during the Liberty Party convention in October represented central New York’s response to Webster’s taunt. These cases all commanded the attention of the national press, but of the five men arrested as fugitives in these cities, only one, Thomas Sims, returned to slavery. Even as most fugitive slave cases in the early 1850s took place in the borderland, and ended in peaceful, successful renditions, national attention fixated on cases of resistance in the free soil region where slave catchers faced the most intense resistance. This shift in the theater of battle has led to the historiographical preoccupation with large-scale urban rescues in the free soil region and with southern misperceptions that free soil attitudes represented the North as a whole.19

Title and first page of Samuel May, The Fugitive Slave Law and its Victims (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

62 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL

As Table 2 demonstrates, however, the locus of resistance shifted once again after 1854, this time into the contested ground between the borderland and free soil regions. This final shift, to which historians have paid little attention, determined the fate of the Fugitive Slave Act. The borderland had largely made its peace with the rendition of fugitive slaves. The free soil region had settled on resistance. As the number of fugitive renditions in the contested region accelerated, residents were exposed to the violence of slavery in new and threatening ways. The shift of renditions into the contested region forced the remaining population still open to persuasion to take a stand. Table 3 captures the contested region’s response. The table represents a consolidation of the fugitive slave cases listed in the appendix of Stanley Campbell’s Slave Catchers, those described in Samuel May’s 1861 pamphlet The Fugitive Slave Law and its Victims, and those in my own database of rescues for the period October 1850 through the end of 1860. It eliminates redundancies and excludes a number of kidnappings mischaracterized as renditions by Campbell, cases from California that do not fit this regional analysis, and cases that took place in slave states. It also omits four rescues from the Kansas and Dakota territories, as the available information on successful rendition cases in these areas remains incomplete. The table measures rescues and attempted rescues as a percentage of all fugitive slave cases from October 1850 to the end of 1860, broken out by region at five-year intervals.20

Table 3: Rescues (incl. attempts) as a Percentage of all Fugitive Slave Cases, 1850-1860, by Region Rescues incl. Region Dates Cases % Attempts

1850-1854 57 7 12.3

Borderland 1855-1860 49 10 20.4

Total 106 17 16.0

1850-1854 15 7 46.7 Contested 1855-1860 22 14 63.6 Region Total 37 21 56.8

1850-1854 18 15 83.3

Free Soil 1855-1860 15 10 66.7

Total 33 25 75.8

Total 176 63 35.8

The first reality laid bare by Table 3 is that over 60 percent of fugitive slave cases brought after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 took place in the borderland. As heroic as the resistance in the borderland was, overall resistance

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rates in this region generally stood lower than 20 percent. In the borderland, the standard narrative of isolated resistance in the midst of general support for the Fugitive Slave Act rings true. The table also demonstrates the ubiquity of resistance in the free soil region. Residents resisted more than 70 percent of fugitive slave renditions in this region, and in only three of these cases was the fugitive eventually remanded. Of the eight free soil fugitive slave cases that passed without resistance, two of those arrested, Moses Johnson in Chicago and Giles Rose in Detroit, were released by federal commissioners, and thus required no rescue. In both cities, officials had to call out the militia to keep order, and any ruling to remand the men back to slavery would have likely resulted in a rescue. Two other cases involved children brought to the North by their masters and returned south without public notice. In two further cases, slave catchers lured or forced men residing in Chicago and Cleveland on to overnight trains bound for the borderland before their free soil communities could react. These cases were actually heard by “reliable” commissioners in Cincinnati and St. Louis. This context highlights the exceptional nature of the peaceful rendition of Thomas Sims from Boston in 1851. The data seriously undermines historians’ assertion that the free soil region did not unite against the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act until after the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act. The entire region knowingly gave up a total of three fugitives during the 1850s without a fight.21 Most important, Table 3 reveals the response of the contested region to the acceleration of slave catching in their midst after 1854. The data show that a sharp rise in resistance accompanied the rise in the number of rendition cases. Between 1855 and 1860, residents in this region resisted almost two thirds of fugitive slave renditions, a figure comparable to resistance rates in the free soil region. This suggests a consolidation of antislavery sentiment in the contested region, and an increasing willingness by residents to confront slave catchers regardless of their behavior. It also suggests that historians’ focus on particular fugitive slave cases in the late 1850s—the Margaret Garner case in Cincinnati, 1856; the Oberlin- Wellington, Ohio, rescue in 1858; and the rescue of Charles Nalle in Troy, New York, in 1860—may be misplaced. Ultimately, the series of cases coming out of the contested region better illustrates the collapse of the Fugitive Slave Act.22 The aftermath of a May 1851 attempt to capture Addison White in Mechanicsburg, Ohio, resulted in residents of three Ohio counties rising en masse to confront a deputy U.S. marshal and his posse. In April 1858, three slave catchers led by a deputy marshal seized a fugitive in Blairsville, Pennsylvania. An interracial crowd quickly gathered, freed the man, and chased the marshal and his posse all the way to a train station several miles outside of town. In October 1859, a crowd in Ottawa, Illinois, freed an African American named Jim as he left the courthouse in the custody of a U.S. marshal. In September 1860, two slave catchers were publicly whipped for attempting to

64 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL

The Margaret Garner case, reported in the The Addison White case, reported in the Cincinnati Gazette, February 11, 1856. Cincinnati Gazette, May 29, 1857. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

recapture several residents of Iberia, Ohio, as prominent members of the community looked on. Finally, in December of that year, Perry Simmons of Moorestown, New Jersey, held off a posse at gunpoint, promising to surrender at dawn. His resistance gave his neighbors time to rally, and at dawn an armed crowd faced the posse down and forced them to leave the neighborhood. In each of these cases, U.S. marshals accompanied the slave catching posses and had completed all necessary documenta- tion to satisfy the demands of due process under the law. In the Moorestown case, the U.S. commissioner himself accompanied the posse. Yet in each case their presence in the community incited the formation of a hostile crowd and these crowds acted more violently than in earlier incidents in the contested ground. The marshal and his party faced repeated assaulted in the Blairsville case, and two posse members received two dozen lashes well laid on in Iberia. In Moorestown, “the expedition, therefore, for the safety of their lives, were obliged to return to Camden.” 23 Most telling, crowds in the contested region invoked the public sphere in a manner that had become customary in the free soil region. After the judge in the Ottawa case announced his decision to remand Jim into the marshal’s custody, abolitionist James Stout announced to the crowd that the

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time for action had come, declaring, “I move, gentlemen, that this meeting resolve itself into a committee to carry out the law.” In the Mechanicsburg case, Judge Ichabod Corwin gave a speech that rallied the residents of South Charleston to go in pursuit of the marshal and his posse. In Iberia, the Reverend George Gordon, president of Iberia College, looked on while his students whipped two slave catchers, and explained to them the meaning of the punishment: “I told one of them that the chastisement that he had received had been inflicted by some of the best men in the community, men who would…protect him to the fullest extent, in any decent business. But that slave catching we could not tolerate.” In essence, residents of the contested region began in the late 1850s to behave as though they believed their communities constituted free soil. Their moral determination to defy the law rendered it a dead letter in all but the narrow strip of territory that com- prised the borderland.24 Thus, historians need to revise the standard narrative of the Fugitive Slave Act. Urban resistance to the recovery of fugitive slaves proved important, but it was accompanied by resistance in a large number of rural communities, by both African American and white residents. The resistance to the rendition of fugitives was consistent across the entire free soil region from the beginning of the 1850s, much as it had been in earlier decades. Finally, when the broad belt of contested territory north of the borderland turned against renditions in the late 1850s, enforcement of the law collapsed. This more comprehensive examination of fugitive slave rescues and the shifting geography of violence that it reveals helps make sense of the far- flung operations of the Underground Railroad. The clandestine network operated in all three regions, as antislavery activists gave assistance to fugitives and helped speed their passage north. In the free soil region, activists operated openly, even boastfully. But they devoted their activities as much to making their communities into safe refuges for fugitives as to providing passage to Canada. In the contested region, activists proceeded more cau- tiously, quietly offering fugitives respite from their travels, the opportunity to earn wages, and assisting their passage by directing them around communities and neighborhoods of pronounced proslavery feeling. When slave catchers pursued fugitives into the contested region, activists personally conducted them north. By the 1850s, communities in the contested region also offered safer access to railroad transportation networks than found in the borderland.25 But as the evidence makes clear, in the borderland the work of the Underground Railroad proved most difficult and most crucial. Here, activists worked to transport fugitives as quickly as possible out of the reach of the slave catching posses that continually scoured the region. They formed

66 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL tightly organized networks and operated by stealth, working under the con- tinual threat of violent and legal retaliation. In other words, in the borderland, the Underground Railroad was everything that Larry Gara told us fifty years ago that it was not. In his 1961 revisionist history of the Underground Railroad, Gara dismissed post-Civil War accounts of secret, well-organized networks operating under threat as romantic folklore. In reality, those who assisted fugitives in the borderland operated quickly, covertly, and collectively out of necessity.26 Finally, the details of fugitive slave renditions in the contested and free soil regions in the late 1850s reveal a surprising modus operandi. In many of these cases, federal marshals with legal warrants, wishing to avoid almost certain communal resistance, broke into the homes of African Americans claimed as fugitives in the middle of the night, hustled them into wagons, rode to the nearest train depot, and took passage for the borderland before any neighbors could take notice. For example, Cincinnati-based U.S. Marshal W. L. Manson led a posse of seven to a farm three miles outside Sandusky, Ohio, in October 1860. The posse made its assault on the farm at nine in the evening, seizing the Marshall and Hutchins families, including two young children born in Ohio. The posse quickly overpowered the families, took them to a nearby rail siding, and put them in a darkened car on the overnight train to Cincinnati. The neighbors rallied and rushed to the Castalia depot to inter- cept the train, but did not realize the darkened car was attached to the train until too late. After summary proceedings the next morning before the U.S. commissioner in Cincinnati, both families, together with their freeborn children, were remanded to Kentucky. The methodology employed by Manson followed precisely the modus operandi that had been adopted over decades by borderland criminals who kidnapped African Americans in order to sell them in the South as slaves. In the late 1850s, in other words, outside the borderland the law quite literally came as a thief in the night. Operating at night, by speed and stealth, rather than basking in public approbation in the light of day, federal officials had in effect created their own underground railroad, this one headed south.27

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APPENDIX: Fugitive Slave Rescues in the North, 1794-1861 Name of Type of Year Month Day Place County State Region Outcome Confidence Fugitive Resistance 1794 Boston Suffolk MA Free soil Rescue Freedom High Contested 1804 Montgomery OH Rescue Freedom High Region Contested Ned and 1806 January 30 Dayton Montgomery OH Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Lucy Page 1806 Cleveland Cuyahoga OH Free soil Ben Rescue Freedom High Hamilton 1819 Bendersville Adams PA Borderland Rescue Freedom High Moore Contested Toby 1820 Lewistown Mifflin PA Rescue Freedom High Region Moore Ensure Due 1821 February 8 New Albany Floyd IN Borderland Moses Freedom Confirmed process 1821 March 16 Philadelphia Philadelphia PA Borderland Ezekiel Rescue Freedom Confirmed Contested 1821 June Worthington Franklin OH Isham Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region 1821 Bird in Hand Lancaster PA Borderland Robert Rescue Freedom High 1822 Summer Darby Delaware PA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Ensure Due 1822 October 20 Hatboro Montgomery PA Borderland John Remanded Confirmed process Lucy and Slave 1822 November Nantucket Nantucket MA Free soil George Catcher Freedom Confirmed Cooper faced down 1824 September 7 Philadelphia Philadelphia PA Borderland Attempt Remanded Confirmed 1825 April 14 Harrisburgh Dauphin PA Borderland Attempt Remanded Confirmed 1825 October Brookville Franklin IN Borderland Saby Rescue Freedom High Contested 1828 June Danville Columbiana PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Contested 1828-29 Fall Lawrenceville Tioga PA Rescue Freedom High Region Rutha and 1833 June 17 Detroit Wayne MI Free Soil Thornton Rescue Freedom Confirmed Blackburn Contested 1834 September 14 Brookville Jefferson PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Stanford 1835 July 12 Buffalo Erie NY Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed family Contested 1835 December 30 Salem Salem NJ Bett Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Slave Contested 1835 Alum Creek Morrow OH Catcher Freedom High Region Faced down Eliza Small 1836 August 4 Boston Suffolk MA Free Soil and Polly Rescue Freedom Confirmed Ann Bates Contested Severn 1836 August 13 Burlington Burlington NJ Attempt Remanded Confirmed Region Martin Swedesbor- Contested 1836 December 4 Gloucester NJ Attempt Remanded Confirmed ough Region Henry 1836 December 29 Utica Oneida NY Free Soil Bird, Rescue Freedom Confirmed Georgee 1837 April 12 New York New York NY Borderland Dixon Rescue Retaken Confirmed

68 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL

Nicholas 1838 February 7 Philadelphia Philadelphia PA Borderland Attempt Remanded Confirmed Reynolds Contested 1839 January 1 Cabin Creek Randolph IN Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Moses Gist Settle- 1839 April Brown OH Borderland Cumber- Rescue Freedom Confirmed ment land Contested 1839 August 27 Marion Marion OH Bill Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region 1839 November 6 Franklin TWP Warren OH Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Ensure Due 1840 May Ashtabula OH Free Soil Freedom High process 24- 1841 February Oberlin Lorain OH Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed 25 1841 June 9 Salisbury Twp Chester PA Borderland Elizabeth Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1841 June 26 Free soil George Attempt Remanded Confirmed Contested 1841 July Newport Perry PA Rescue Unknown Confirmed Region Contested 1841 October 15 Portersville Butler PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Contested 1841 October Mercer PA Attempt Remanded Confirmed Region Milton 1842 September 5 Unionville Lake OH Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Clarke George Coerced 1842 October 20 Boston Suffolk MA Free Soil Freedom Confirmed Lattimer Purchase Contested James Coerced 1843 August 1 Princeton Mercer NJ Freedom Confirmed Region Johnson Purchase 1843 August 1 Cincinnati Hamilton OH Borderland Lavinia Standoff Freedom Confirmed Lucinda 1843 September 26 Carlinville Macoupin IL Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Lea Thomas 1844 April 1 Coatesville Lancaster PA Borderland Hall and Rescue Freedom Confirmed wife Ensure Due 1844 April Marrietta Lancaster PA Borderland Thomas Freedom Confirmed process Contested John 1844 Spring Westfield Hamilton IN Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Rhodes Contested 1843 August 1 La Moille Bureau IL Rescue Freedom High Region 1844 November 3 Greensburg Decatur IN Borderland Rescue Freedom High 1844 December 12 Red Oak Brown OH Borderland Stand Off Unknown Confirmed 1845 February 18 Cincinnati Hamilton OH Borderland Watson Attempt Remanded Confirmed Jane Gar- 1845 February 28 Sandusky Erie OH Free soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed rison Anthony Contested 1845 June 26 Indiana Indiana PA Holling- Rescue Freedom High Region sworth Contested 1845 June Pittsburgh Allegheny PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Wife of Contested 1845 July 23 Pittsburgh Allegheny PA Ezekiel Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Stichland Asa 1845 August 16 Lancaster Lancaster PA Borderland Stanton/ Attempt Purchase Confirmed Dorsey

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1845 Vinton Gallia OH Borderland Stand Off Freedom High George 1846 October 24 New York New York NY Borderland Attempt Freedom Confirmed Kirk 1846 October 28 Chicago Cook IL Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Adam 1847 January 26 Marshall Calhoun MI Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Crosswhite Contested 1847 February 7 Toledo Lucas OH Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region 1847 February 7 Marietta Washington OH Borderland Stand Off Freedom Confirmed Contested Daniel 1847 April 16 Pittsburgh Allegheny PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Lockhart Robert 1847 April 20 Detroit Wayne MI Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Cromwell Slave Catch- 1847 May 1 Randolph Portage OH Free Soil ers Faced Freedom Confirmed down 1847 June 2 Carlisle Cumberland PA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1847 August 27 Young’s Prarie Cass MI Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Contested Thomas Ensure Due 1847 August Bristol Elkhart IN Freedom Confirmed Region Harris process Cranberry Contested 1847 September 10 Butler PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed TWP Region Christo- 1847 September 30 Buffalo Erie NY Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed pher Webb Mount Pleas- 1847 October 18 Lancaster PA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed ant 1847 November Eden Randolph IL Borderland Rescue Freedom High Ensure Due 1848 June 4 Salem Henry IA Borderland Sam, et al Freedom Confirmed process 1848 June Eden Randolph IL Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Contested John 1849 July 4 Princeton Bureau IL Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Bruckner Contested David 1849 September 27 South Bend St. Joseph IN Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Powell 1849 September 29 Harrisburg Dauphin PA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1849 December 1 Cincinnati Hamilton OH Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Contested Jacob 1849 Huntington PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Tenley 1850 August 8 Strasburg York PA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1850 August 21 Harrisburg Dauphin PA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1850 August 29 New York New York NY Borderland Julia Blunt Rescue Unknown Confirmed 1850 December 27 Coatesville Lancaster PA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed William 1851 January 23 Columbia Lancaster PA Borderland Attempt Remanded Confirmed Baker 1851 February 15 Boston Suffolk MA Free soil Shadrach Rescue Freedom Confirmed Contested Wife of 1851 February 26 Port Carbon Schuylkill PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Brown Ellen and 1851 March 12 Philadelphia Philadelphia PA Borderland Attempt Remanded Confirmed son 1851 June 3 Cincinnati Hamilton OH Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Daniel 1851 August 15 Buffalo Erie NY Free soil Attempt Remanded Confirmed Davis 1851 September 17 Christiana Lancaster PA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed

70 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL

Harrison 1851 September 30 Buffalo Erie NY Free soil Attempt Remanded Confirmed Williams 1851 October 1 Syracuse Onondaga NY Free soil Jerry Rescue Freedom Confirmed Contested 1851 October 26 Ottawa Lasalle IL Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Slave Catch- Contested Cal 1851 Newport Wayne IN ers Faced Freedom High Region Thomas down 1852 October 20 Sandusky Erie OH Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Contested 1853 February 25 Cabin Creek Randolph IN Attempt Remanded Confirmed Region 1853 July 18 Boston Suffolk MA Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Patrick 1853 August 23 Niagara Niagara NY Free Soil Smead aka Rescue Freedom Confirmed Watson Contested William 1853 September 3 Wilkes-Barre Luzerne PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Thomas 1853 September 9 Cincinnati Hamilton OH Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1853 October 20 Cincinnati Hamilton OH Borderland Lewis Rescue Freedom Confirmed Joshua 1854 March 5 Milwaukee, Milwaukee WI Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Glover James 1854 May 17 Akron Summit OH Free Soil Worthing- Rescue Freedom Confirmed ton Anthony 1854 June 3 Boston Suffolk MA Free Soil Attempt Remanded Confirmed Burns 1854 June Otsego NY Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Contested 1854 July 13 Peru Lasalle IL Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Abby Kel- 1854 August 28 Salem Columbiana OH Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed ley Salem 1854 September 10 Chicago Cook IL Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Slave had 1854 September 20 Portland Cumberland ME Free Soil Attempt Confirmed escaped 1854 September Boston Suffolk MA Free Soil Rescue Freedom High Contested 1854 December 8 Cambridge Guernsey OH Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Contested 1855 March 10 Pittsburgh Allegheny PA Attempt Remanded Confirmed Region 1855 June 13 Dayville, CT Windham CT Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Jane 1855 July 18 Philadelphia Philadelphia PA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Johnson 1855 September 3 New Albany Floyd IN Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1855 September Lawrence KS Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1855 October 9 Boston Suffolk MA Free Soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Contested Jacob 1855 October 20 Holidaysburg Blair PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Green Slave Catch- 1855 November Eckmansville Adams OH Borderland ers Faced Freedom Confirmed down 1856 July 16 Boston Suffolk MA Free Soil Attempt Freedom Confirmed 1856 July Dupont Jefferson IN Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1856 September 18 Carlisle Cumberland PA Borderland Attempt Remanded High 1856 October Portland Cumberland ME Free Soil Rescue Freedom High

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Mechanics- Contested Addison 1857 May 21 Champaign OH Rescue Freedom Confirmed burg Region White 1857 June Kane’s Branch OH Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Samuel Gantz was 1857 August 30 Chicago Cook IL Free soil Attempt Confirmed Gantz free Contested 1857 December 5 Indianapolis Marion IN West Rescue Remanded Confirmed Region Contested 1858 April 1 Blairsville Indiana PA Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Contested 1858 April 17 San Francisco San Francisco CA Archy Attempt Remanded Confirmed Region Contested Ensure Due 1858 July 21 Terre Haute Vigo IN Remanded Confirmed Region process 1858 September 11 Wellington Lorain OH Free soil John Price Rescue Freedom Confirmed 1858 October 1 New London New London CT Free soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Slave Catch- Contested 1858 November 2 Zanesville Muskingum OH ers Faced Freedom High Region down Contested 1858 November Sandoval Marion IL Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Charley 1859 January Leavenworth KS Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Fisher Lewis Ensure Due 1859 March 26 Buckskin TWP Ross OH Borderland Remanded Confirmed Early process Contested 1859 May 3 Zanesville Muskingum OH Jackson Attempt Remanded confirmed Region Contested 1859 October 20 Ottawa Lasalle IL Jim Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Contested 1859 October 28 Columbus Franklin OH John Tyler Attempt Remanded Confirmed Region Ne- Contested William 1859 December 14 Dacota Rescue Freedom Confirmed braska Region Phillips Contested 1860 February Centralia Marion IL Attempt Remanded Confirmed Region 1860 March 9 Tabor Freemont IA Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Moses 1860 March 28 Philadelphia Philadelphia PA Borderland Attempt Remanded Confirmed Horner Charles 1860 April 27 Troy Renssalaer NY Free soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed Nalle Arnold and 1860 May 7 Aurora Dearborn IN Borderland Attempt Remanded Confirmed coutier James 1860 May 28 Cincinnati Hamilton OH Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Upson Contested 1860 September 20 Iberia Morrow OH Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region Marshall, 1860 October 12 Sandusky Erie OH Free soil Attempt Remanded Confirmed Hutchins Eliza Gar- 1860 November 13 Chicago Cook IL Free soil Rescue Freedom Confirmed rison Contested Perry Sim- 1860 November 30 Moorestown NJ Rescue Freedom Confirmed Region mons Lucy 1861 January 21 Cleveland Cuyahoga OH Free soil Attempt Remanded Confirmed Bagby Contested Lucy 1861 January 24 Lima OH Attempt Remanded High Region Bagby John 1861 March 2 New York New York NY Borderland Rescue Freedom Confirmed Pohelmus

72 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL

1 Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), 5 The Telegraph (Painesville, Oh.), Sept. 7, 1842; Lewis Apr. 14, 1851; Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Garrard Clarke and Milton Clarke, Narratives of the Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860 (New Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke (Boston: B. Marsh, York: W. W. Norton, 1968), vii-viii, 199-206. See also 1846), 88-98. On Prigg, see H. Robert Baker, Prigg v. Daily Evening Transcript (Boston), Apr. 12, 1851. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012). 2 Campbell, Slave Catchers, 51-61, 87-94, 121. A. J. Beitzinger earlier offered a similar narrative in his discus- 6 The database sorts cases into Confirmed, High Confidence, sion of the struggle to uphold the act in Wisconsin in Medium Confidence, and Low Confidence. Confirmed the aftermath of the rescue of Joshua Glover. H. Robert cases are those mentioned in contemporary newspapers Baker notes that the specter of the South’s campaign of or court records. Examples of High Confidence include “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education hovers cases from a generally reliable postwar reminiscence such over Beitzinger’s narrative. One can see a similar echo of as those of Levi Coffin and William Parker for which I the “silent majority’s” repudiation of the civil unrest of cannot find contemporary newspaper mention. Cases of the late 1960s in Campbell’s description of support for Medium Confidence include detailed first-hand accounts the act. See Beitzinger, “Federal Law Enforcement and of rescues found in postwar reminiscences such as those the Booth Cases,” Marquette Law Review 41 (Summer collected by Wilbur Siebert or Robert Smedley, for which I 1957), 7-32; and H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua can find no contemporaneous confirmation. Cases denoted Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming as Low Confidence are probably apocryphal, but I cannot of the Civil War (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). rule out their occurrence. For this analysis, I have included 133 confirmed cases and twenty-one high confidence cases. 3 David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Readers are invited to bring additional cases to my atten- Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); tion: [email protected]. Gary L. Collinson, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 7 With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, rendi- 1998); Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana tions became sufficiently politicized that they reliably Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New generated news coverage. This does not seem to have been York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Milton C. Sernett, the case in previous decades, so even a comprehensive North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade newspaper search would probably yield an incomplete data for African American Freedom (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse set with which to estimate a resistance rate. Recent work University Press, 2002); Baker, Rescue of Joshua Glover; on runaway slave advertisements offers an estimate of what Albert von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom proportion of runaways chose the North as their destina- and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard tion, but this work does not track the chronological flow University Press, 1998); Nat Brandt, The Town that Started of runaways with sufficient sensitivity to help estimate long the Civil War (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, term trends in renditions. See John Hope Franklin and 1990); Steven Lubet, Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, Loren Schweniger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Freddie Press, 2010); and Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting L. Parker, Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in North over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University Carolina, 1775-1840 (New York: Garland Publishing, of North Carolina Press, 2010). 1993). That said, historians might extrapolate from the data on fugitive renditions in the 1850s to estimate an 4 For a sense of the breadth of Campbell’s influence on upper and lower bound for the number of renditions in the recent histories of the 1850s, see David M. Potter, The 1840s. In 1851, empowered by the determination of the Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, national government to enforce the new Fugitive Slave Act, 1976), 132-39; Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the and expecting the assistance of federal commissioners and American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset marshals newly assigned to the task, slaveholders initiated of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, approximately forty rendition cases. Between 1852 and 1999), 603-605; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding 1860, as opposition to the recovery of fugitives stiffened, Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s renditions dropped to approximately fifteen per year. The Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, average annual number of renditions in the 1840s prob- 2001), 233-39; James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The ably lies between those two numbers. The 1840s also likely Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: McGraw Hill, followed the pattern of the 1850s: the rising number of res- 2001), 83-89; Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: Economic cues probably caused a decline in the number of renditions Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, over the decade as news coverage of resistance discouraged 2009), 206; and Lubet, Fugitive Justice, 4-10. masters from making an attempt. The last row of Table 1 artificially enhances the incidence rate by including 1860 and 1861, which witnessed thirteen rescues.

SUMMER 2014 73 FUGITIVE SLAVE RESCUES IN THE NORTH

8 “Address of Southern Delegates in Congress to their the depredations of slave catchers in Nashville and Cairo, Constituents,” The Sun (Baltimore), Jan. 29, 1849. Illinois, in July 1857); and Parker, “Freedman’s Story” (on the decade-long battle between slave catchers and 9 Campbell, Slave Catchers, 199-203. My figure of sixty- the African American community of Lancaster County, eight differs from the seventy-four cases cited in Table 1 Pennsylvania). because it omits three rescues in 1850 prior to October, when the Fugitive Slave Act took effect, and three in 1861. 13 Emancipator and Republican (Boston), Sept. 22, 1842. Campbell’s omission of eight of the rescues seems especially odd in that Samuel Joseph May discussed them in The 14 Jamestown Journal (Jamestown, N.Y.), Sept. 14, 1855. See Fugitive Slave Law and its Victims (New York: American also Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), Dec. Anti-Slavery Society, 1861), a source on which Campbell 6, 1850, on the similarly frustrated attempt to capture relied heavily. The four rescues that Campbell erroneously William and Ellen Craft. For examples of rescues from incorporated include the rescues of John Anderson and northern courthouses, see Portland Daily Advertiser, Oct. George Clark in 1855 (Anderson eluded capture and Clark 16, 1850 (on a 1794 rescue in Boston); Karolyn Smardz was rescued from a kidnapping attempt), and rescues of Frost, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the unnamed fugitives in Syracuse in 1857 and Sandusky in Underground Railroad (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and 1858, both of which appear to be apocryphal. Giroux, 2007), esp. 176-90 (on the 1833 Blackburn riots in Detroit); Friend of Man (Utica, N.Y.), Jan. 5, 1837 10 My conception of the borderland as described here (on a rescue in Utica, New York); and Western Citizen adheres more closely to that offered by Matthew Salafia (Chicago), Nov. 3, 10, 1846 (on a rescue in Chicago). than it does to that presented by Stanley Harrold in Border War. Salafia describes the manner in which the 15 Coffin,Reminiscences , 366-73; and History of Cass County, white populations of the counties on either side of Michigan (Chicago: Waterman, Watkins, and Co., 1882), the Ohio River Valley co-existed in a shared political 111-15. For similar cases, see Signal of Liberty (Ann Arbor, economy in which slavery and the tight control of free Mi.), Apr. 24, 1847 (on the rescue of Robert Cromwell African American labor constituted a central feature. See in Detroit); Morning Express (Buffalo), Oct. 1, 1847 (on Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the rescue of Christopher Webb in Buffalo); Chicago the Ohio River (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Tribune, Sept. 11, 12, 1854 and Indiana Free Democrat Press, 2013). Local historians will no doubt have their (Indianapolis), Dec. 14, 1854 (on two frustrated attempts own ideas about precisely where the line between the to seize fugitives in Chicago); and The Sun (Baltimore), borderland and the contested region should be drawn. Nov. 16, 1860 (on the rescue of Eliza Grayson in Chicago).

11 Jermain Welsey Loguen, The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave 16 Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen, 409; Baker, Rescue of Joshua and as a Freeman; a Narrative of Real Life (1859; New Glover, 17-23; and the resolutions of a public meeting in York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 297; and Levi Syracuse, N.Y., Mar. 22, 1854, quoted in Vroman Mason, Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin (1876; New York: “The Fugitive Slave Law in Wisconsin, with References Arno Press, 1968), 208. For other contemporary descrip- to Nullification Sentiment,” in Fugitive Slaves, Paul tions of the borderland, see Stuart Seely Sprague, ed., Finkelman, ed. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker 283. For other examples of rescues accompanied by public (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 71-72; and William resolutions or celebrations, see John H. Yzenbaard, “The Parker, “The Freedman’s Story,” Atlantic Monthly, Feb.- Crosswhite Case,” Michigan History 53 (Summer 1969), Mar. 1866, p. 162. For Campbell’s appendix of fugitive 134-35; Charles Emery Stevens, Anthony Burns: A History slave cases, see Slave Catchers, 199-206. The figure of (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856), 33-41; 169 omits several cases for which Campbell provides no Western Citizen (Chicago), Nov. 3, 10, 1846; and James precise location, and for which I can find no other refer- H. Fairchild, The Underground Railroad (Cleveland Oh.: ence. As noted below, Campbell’s list contains numerous Western Reserve Historical Society, 1895), 120. errors. The proportion based on a corrected list remains, The Philanthropist however, quite similar, as discussed below. 17 On the Marion, Ohio, rescue, see (New Richmond, Oh.), Sept. 17, 1839; Albany Evening Journal, 12 Georgetown Democratic Standard, Dec. 31, 1844. For Sept. 17, 1839; The Ohio Statesman (Columbus), Nov. similar cases of proslavery aggression in the borderland, 13, 1839; and Aaron Benedict’s reminiscences in The see Cincinnati Gazette, Mar. 10, 1821 (for an account of Sentinel (Mt. Gilead, Oh.), July 27, 1893. On the rescue a clash in New Albany, Indiana, on February 8, 1821); of William Thomas, see The Liberator (Boston), Sept. Ann Hagedorn, Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the 16, 1853; and Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, Heroes of the Underground Railroad (New York: Simon D.C.), May 19, 1854. For similar cases, see Emancipator and Schuster, 2002), 187-88 (on the murder of Sally and Republican (Boston), May 10, 1838 (on a rescue in Hudson at the Gist Settlement, Brown County, Ohio, on Salem, New Jersey, on December 30, 1835); and New April 30, 1839); May, Fugitive Slave Law, 74-75, 77 (on York Anti-Slavery Office, The South Bend Fugitive Slave

74 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ROBERT H. CHURCHILL

Case (New York: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1851), 5 (on a rates of the contested region. If the six remands in New rescue in South Bend, Indiana, September 27, 1849). In York between 1850 and 1854 and the three between 1855 both cases, local residents rescued slaves after slave catchers and 1860 are counted as contested ground cases, the brandished pistols in court in response to adverse legal resistance rates fall to 33 and 56 percent respectively. rulings. See also Virginia E. McCormick and Robert W. McCormick, New Englanders on the Ohio Frontier: The 23 The Addison White case generated almost daily coverage Migration and Settlement of Worthington, Ohio (Kent, Oh.: in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette and Cincinnati Enquirer Kent State University Press, 1998), 214-16 (for the June for the following month, and the news was carried nation- 1821 rescue of a fugitive slave being transported through ally. On the Blairsville case, see the Chicago Tribune, Apr. Worthington, Ohio, tied behind a horse); and Wabash 7, 1858. On the Ottawa case, see Report of the Trial of Express (Terre Haute, In.), July 22-24, 1858 (on a Terre John Hossack (Chicago: Press and Tribune Steam Book and Haute crowd that took custody of a fugitive slave away Job Printing Office, 1860). On the rescue in Iberia, see from a slave catcher who had beaten him severely). Cleveland Morning Leader, Sept. 25, 1860; Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, Oh.) Oct. 6, 1860; and Ohio State Journal 18 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Dec. 2, 1849; The (Columbus), Oct. 2, 1860. On the Moorestown case, see Pennsylvania Freeman (Philadelphia), Apr. 11, 1844. The Constitution (Washington, D.C.), Dec. 4, 1860.

19 Sernett, North Star Country, 134. On the other four urban 24 Ottawa Free Trader (Ottawa, Il.), Oct. 22, 1859; The free soil cases of 1850-1851, see Daily Evening Transcript History of Clark County, Ohio (Chicago: W. H. Beers and (Boston), Feb. 17, 1851, and Collinson, Shadrach Minkins Co., 1881), 757; and “Remarks of Rev. George Gordon (on the case of Shadrach Minkins); Daily Atlas (Boston), to the U.S. Court,” Washington Reporter (Washington, Apr. 7, 1851, and the account of the Boston Courier Pa.), Dec. 19, 1861. reprinted in the Vermont Journal (Windsor), Apr. 11, 1851 (on the case of Thomas Sims); the accounts of several 25 On the Underground Railroad in the free soil region, Chicago papers reprinted in The Liberator (Boston), June see Sernett, North Star Country; Judith Wellman, “Larry 13, 1851 (on the case of Moses Johnson); and Detroit Daily Gara’s ‘Liberty Line’ in Oswego County, New York, 1838- Advertiser, Oct. 8, 9, 1851 (on the case of Giles Rose). 1854: A New Look at the Legend,” African Americans in New York Life and History 25 (Jan. 2001), 33-55; and 20 Campbell describes a number of ambiguous cases as Gary L. Collinson, “The Boston Vigilance Committee: renditions and May describes them as kidnappings. A Reconsideration,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 12 Without definitive evidence, I have accepted Campbell’s (June 1984), 104-16. On the contested region, see Coffin, characterization pending further research. I have also Reminiscences; and Aaron Benedict’s reminiscences in The omitted several apocryphal cases. Sentinel (Mt. Gilead, Oh.), July 27, 1893.

21 On Johnson and Rose, see The Liberator (Boston), June 13, 26 Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the 1851, and Detroit Daily Advertiser, Oct. 8, 9, 1851. On the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University of Kentucky rendition of two children, see Massachusetts Spy (Worcester), Press, 1961). For the best book length treatments of the Oct. 31, 1885 (on Jack, aged nine, returned from Boston); Underground Railroad in the borderland, see Hagedorn, and May, Fugitive Slave Law, 49 (on Fanny, aged five, Beyond the Line; Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Anti-Slavery returned from Chicago). On fugitives spirited out of the Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865 (Baton borderland by train, see May, Fugitive Slave Law, 121-23 Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Keith P. (on the case of Washington and James Anderson and Griffler,Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Henry Scott); and The Liberator (Boston), Dec. 2, 1859 (on Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley the case of Henry Seaton). Two fugitives were remanded (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); Owen from Cleveland in November 1857, apparently without W. Muelder, The Underground Railroad in Western Illinois resistance. One of the two escaped from the train on the (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008); and R. C. Smedley, journey to Cincinnati; see Massachusetts Spy, Dec. 2, 1857. History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: 22 All of these cases excited national attention at the time and Stackpole Books, 2005). all have also received book-length treatment more recently. See especially Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A 27 The best illustrations of this modus operandi are the 1858 Family Story of Slavery and Child Murder from the Old Iberia case, the 1859 rendition of Henry Seaton from South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); Brandt, The Cleveland, and also the rendition of the Marshall and Town that Started the Civil War; and Scott Christianson, Hutchins Families from the outskirts of Sandusky, Ohio, Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of described in the Daily Commercial Register (Sandusky), the Civil War (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, Oct. 15, 1860. On kidnappings, see Carol Wilson, Freedom 2010). Note that the categorization of New York as a at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780- borderland community has an impact on the resistance 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).

SUMMER 2014 75 American Historians and the Challenge of the “New” Global Slavery James Brewer Stewart

n September 19, 2013, approximately one hundred twenty registrants gathered in Cincinnati’s National Underground Freedom Center for a conference sponsored by Historians Against Slavery (HAS). The event Omarked a departure from the usual academic gatherings to which historians have long been accustomed. Although organized by scholars of antebellum slavery and antislavery, the conference’s agenda spoke explicitly to the problem of slavery in the present as well as the past. In addition to historians, its participants included leading antislavery activists, college and high school teachers and their students, survivors of enslavement, a law enforcement official, two former prison inmates, a prominent antislavery prosecutor for the European Union, a Florida farm worker, a well-known Latino labor organizer, and a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist.1 The conference combined the knowledge of historians with the practical wisdom of on-the-ground activists to develop opposition to the “new” global slavery. In the spirit of esteemed scholars of the Civil Rights era such as Kenneth Stampp, John Hope Franklin, Winthrop Jordan, Benjamin Quarles, and Gerda Lerner, scholars at the gathering sought to offer activists informed historical perspectives on contemporary slavery. Activists, in contrast, introduced historians to the harsh realities of enslavement in our time and the work of those opposing it. The need for such an initiative could not be greater. The 2013 Global Slavery Index compiled by Kevin Bales and Monti Datta estimates that over the globe as many as thirty million people are currently enslaved, more than twice the number transported

Historians Against Slavery Logo. COURTESY STACEY M. ROBERTSON

76 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JAMES BREWER STEWART

National Underground Railroad Freedom Center CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

from West Africa to the Western Hemisphere during the entirety of the Atlantic slave trade. Much as before the Civil War, the enslaved today are uprooted, transported, trafficked, exploited, and abused. Like “back then,” enslaved labor creates an enormous number of products the rest of us purchase and rely on every day. Today, however, these products deluge us from many international sources, not solely from the U.S. economy. Coffee, tea, clothing, electronics, food products of all sorts, cosmetics, automobiles, and household furnishings only begin a much longer list. And as always, slavery today wrenches children from parents, wives from husbands, and husbands from wives. Now, as then, wherever it exists, slavery results in the sexual exploitation of women and children.2 To ensure that the conference addressed these challenges directly, the organizers made the papers available on line so that attendees could read them before the event opened. The proceedings prompted conversation and collaboration rather than the usual academic regimen of reading and listening to papers. As its title Crossing Boundaries, Making Connections: American Slavery and Antislavery “Now” and “Then” suggests, sessions did not feature scholarship “for its own sake.” Instead, the proceedings reaffirmed a well-known provocation issued by the emi- nent abolitionist Wendell Phillips in his famous 1881 Harvard University Phi Beta Kappa address, The Scholar in a Republic: “Timid scholarship either shrinks from sharing in these agitations, or denounces them as vulgar and dangerous,” he warned. “I urge on college bred men” to set aside “cold moonlight reflection on older civilizations” and instead “lead in the agitation of the great social questions which stir and educate the age.”3

SUMMER 2014 77 AMERICAN HISTORIANS AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE “NEW” GLOBAL SLAVERY

Wendell Phillips (1811-1884). COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Historians Against Slavery takes up Phillips’s challenge. Founded in 2011, it counts chapters on a dozen campuses and offers grants that support their activities. It has established an ongoing partnership with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center through which it collaborates in holding conferences, website development, supporting campus activities, documentary film consulta- tion, the design of short antislavery web videos, and building partnerships with other activist organizations. It is directly involved in developing an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported Center on Modern Slavery and Antislavery at Tougaloo College, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi. Its website features The FREE Project, a user-friendly tool for establishing campus-based antislavery societies that offers practical answers to the most important abolitionist question of all: “What can I do to make a real difference?” Historians Against Slavery responds to this question by insisting above all on the central importance of historical knowledge. For this reason, its Speakers Bureau offers colleges and universities outstanding exponents of antislavery scholarship and teaching. Sessions organized by Historians Against Slavery have filled rooms at recent meetings of professional historians. Its new book series with Cambridge University Press, “Slavery since Emancipation,” provides a long-term scholarly vehicle for making good on its motto: “Using History to Make Slavery History.”4 But why insist on the necessity of historical perspectives? Are not activists across the United States and the world finally gaining traction against today’s slavery? On first blush, it seems so. Highly developed non-governmental organizations are working to end slavery all over the globe. Since 2000 no fewer than thirty new

78 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JAMES BREWER STEWART

Adrian College students, members of their Michigan school’s “Not For Sale” antislavery organization, attend the Historians Against Slavery conference in September 2013. COURTESY STACEY M. ROBERTSON antislavery books have been published, two dozen antislavery documentary films produced, and an exceptional array of informative digital resources made available on line to publicize the challenges of slavery around the world. Federal and state governments have committed increasing resources to address human trafficking. Talented journalists such as Nicholas Kristof and media celebrities such as Emma Thompson and Brad Pitt have repeatedly highlighted the global problem.5 Thanks to sensational headlines, the public has become aware that police and prosecu- tors target sex-trafficking rings and enslavers of immigrant laborers. These developments surely indicate growing public awareness. But the organizers of Historians Against Slavery worry whether “awareness” uninformed by historical understanding can amount to more than hand-wringing, sending money, and mistaking “clicking and joining” for sustained personal engagement. Answers emerge once we consider, as historians, the deep deficiencies in how activists present contemporary slavery to the American public and what historians can do to enhance the power of that presentation. Access any webpage for the leading antislavery non-governmental organizations (Free the Slaves, the Polaris Project, Not For Sale, the International Justice Mission) and television networks (Al Jeezera and CNN) and look hard for historical perspectives.6 Search the books and films just mentioned and one can find little historical perspective. These organizations, publications, and films focus almost exclusively on contemporary slavery because NOW counts most for antislavery activists working at close quarters and in short time frames to liberate the enslaved, prosecute their oppressors, and assist in rebuilding their lives. No matter where the area of concern—India, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Eastern Europe, West

SUMMER 2014 79 AMERICAN HISTORIANS AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE “NEW” GLOBAL SLAVERY

“Enslaved Children, Historic and Contemporary” panel at the September 2013 Historians Against Slavery conference. From left to right: Presenter Anne Mae Duane (University of Connecticut), moderator Carol Lasser (Oberlin College), and presenters Tasha Perdue and Jared Rose (University of Toledo). COURTESY STACEY M. ROBERTSON

Africa, northern Florida, Chicago, and Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation, to name just a few places slavery exists—activist groups offer information about today’s slavery bereft of historical context. Ordinary Americans, as a result, find it difficult to connect descriptions of today’s slavery with their reflexive understanding of African American bondage in the national history. Whenever today’s antislavery activists complain—as they often do—about the widespread and pre- sumably ignorant American belief that the world permanently abolished slavery in 1865, they actually demonstrate their profound historical blindness. But why not believe this? After all, we historians have assured Americans that emancipation constitutes a transformational event in United States history thanks to an enormous civil war, costing the lives of over seven hundred fifty thousand dead and leaving an additional four hundred thousand wounded while emancipating roughly four million people in what stands as the largest governmental appropriation of private property until the Russian Revolution. Scholars also insist that Americans can better understand the nation’s ongoing racial dif- ficulties—the “achievement gap” or the “prison-industrial complex,” for example—once connected to the historical legacies of enslavement, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Little wonder then that the vast majority of Americans find it difficult to empathize with today’s enslaved, believing instead that all slaves were black, their owners all white, and that human bondage vanished in 1865. Mention of slavery today leads Americans to fasten instinctively on Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Gettysburg, Martin Luther King, post-Katrina New Orleans, the “prison industrial complex,” the “achievement gap,” reparations, Trevon Martin, and Barack Obama. For this reason, today’s

80 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JAMES BREWER STEWART manacled wood cutters in Manaos, Brazil, children sequestered behind barb- wire fences on West African cacao plantations, enslaved vegetable pickers in the Florida “panhandle,” or prostituted women trafficked in Bangkok and St. Louis remain to most Americans wholly remote and unrecognizable as enslaved people. The balance of this essay contends that fresh perspectives that American historians can readily supply offer effective remedies for this “blindness.” To evaluate the substance of this claim, consider the following hypotheti- cal situation. Imagine yourself speaking on behalf of Historians Against Slavery on “the challenges of the new global slavery and the need for a new abolitionist movement” at Tougaloo College, Jackson, Mississippi, the birthplace of the Freedom Riders Movement in the late 1950s. The audience consists entirely of African Americans who trace their genealogies to enslaved ancestors. If you fail to connect the “new” slavery with the “old,” the audience will likely conclude that the history of enslavement they consider central to their lives and the “global” slavery you plan to describe exist in separate and incompatible universes. They might also suspect that you harbor certain racial insensitivities. Fortunately, the best response available is also one at which you excel: developing revealing comparisons and contrasts between slavery in the antebellum South and slavery in the world today. These include:

• The old slavery was legal and widely considered a respectable practice. Abolitionists attacked it from close range and caused enormous controversy. Today’s slavery is illegal and universally condemned. Today’s abolitionists have no proslavery advocates to argue against. How can an abolitionist movement thrive in the absence of controversy?

• In the nineteenth century, slavery constituted the nation’s second largest capital asset. Controversy over slavery involved incredibly high stakes. Though enormously profitable, the enslaved today are treated as “disposable people.” Their labor has no visible impact on our formal economy. In today’s economic terms, who cares?

• Because of their skin color the enslaved in the South were easy to identify. Though racism and ethnic hatred often motivates slaveholders today, slavery involves so many races and ethnicities that the enslaved themselves become much harder for Americans to identify.

• Yesteryears’ enslaved troubled the white nation by rebelling, fleeing, and becoming formidable abolitionists. The enslaved today remain isolated, sequestered, seemingly quiescent, and therefore all but invisible.

SUMMER 2014 81 AMERICAN HISTORIANS AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE “NEW” GLOBAL SLAVERY

“Testimonies” panel at the September 2013 Historians Against Slavery conference. From left to right: author Douglas Blackmon; Mike Brickner of the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union; former inmate and University of Cincinnati graduate student Wendi Bare; former inmate, author, and founder of the Cincinnati I Dream Academy De’Ron Smith; and HAS board member Robert E. Wright. COURTESY STACEY ROBERTSON

• Back then, abolitionists fought against geographically defined opponents and the enslaved escaped from their masters across those same geographical boundaries. Today’s slavery respects no boundaries. Traffickers remain out of sight. How can we fight for enslaved people if we cannot see them?

As you develop these obvious comparisons it quickly becomes clear why Americans have such difficulty identifying, understanding, and responding empathetically to the enslaved today. Insight into contemporary slavery supplied by the African American past becomes a remedy for the “blindness” inflicted by ahistorical frames of reference. Moreover, and at least as important, comparisons drawn from the African American experience make manifest the deepest truth about slavery that Americans need to know no matter its location, dynamics, or history. Inescapable in every instance, past and present, is slavery’s detestable brutality and the categorical imperative to assist those ensnared in it. Having demonstrated how the nature of antebellum slavery brings to life the problem of slavery today, you continue your lecture by reflecting on enslavement in the United States after the end of the Civil War. You will develop still more illuminating connections between a past that deeply engages your listeners and the moral challenges of slavery facing us today. You refer primarily to Pete Daniel, David Oshinski, and Douglas Blackmon, scholars who have exhaustively documented how former masters redesigned African American slavery after 1865 by instituting debt peonage and by trafficking fraudulently indicted black citizens as enslaved convict-lease laborers. As historians know, these practices ensnared tens of thousands and persisted well into the twentieth century. But you need to stress one essential and largely

82 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JAMES BREWER STEWART

Norma Ramos, director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, speaks on the “State of Contemporary Sex Trafficking” at the September 2013 Historians Against Slavery conference. COURTESY STACEY ROBERTSON unappreciated aspect of these familiar facts: If transported back to the 1880s today’s slave masters and human traffickers would instantly recognize the activities of their southern counterparts and eagerly join in. Enslavement today and the enslavement of African Americans that menaced your audience’s immediate ancestors for generations appear as close fraternal twins. Slavery “then” should strike today’s antislavery activists as disturbingly like slavery “now.”7 Enslaving traffickers the world over demand the repayment of impossible sums for supposed “services rendered” from undocumented people after smuggling them across national borders. These workers find repayment impossible and face the pen- alty of enslavement for sexual exploitation and/or brutalizing labor in factories, on farms, and in fishing ships. The southern convict lease system replicates itself wherever unscrupulous governments and private recruiters enslave “guest workers” after luring them with promises of employment. What awaits them is enslavement in public works projects and private industries. Similarities multiply once one recalls that debt peonage has paved the way for newer forms of enslavement throughout the world. The Central American nations, the British Caribbean Islands, Haiti, and the Philippines, each a major exporter of “enslaveable” people today, have a significant history based in “old” slavery followed by decades of debt peonage. In China and India, debt peonage enslaves millions, many of whom flee only to face re- enslavement elsewhere. Undocumented labor as a springboard to enslavement has hardly ended within the United States either. Exploitative fruit and vegetable grow- ers, for example, have made southwest Florida infamous as “‘ground zero’ for modern-day slavery,” as former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Douglas Molloy notes.8 The African American experience illuminates the plight of enslaved people today. The enormity of the problem of contemporary slavery, conversely, lends powerful support to historical claims for justice on behalf of African Americans.

SUMMER 2014 83 AMERICAN HISTORIANS AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE “NEW” GLOBAL SLAVERY

Wrapping up your presentation, you recognize that much remains unad- dressed regarding history’s relationship to slavery within the United States today. How, for example, might the enslavement of violently displaced Native Americans before the twentieth century help to explain why today’s Indian reservations stand as epicenters of sex trafficking? How might the history of slavery in the Far West, embedded in early twentieth century “guest worker” and “coolie labor” programs, help account for the enslavement of undocumented immigrants today? How might late nineteenth century “white slavery” involving immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe illuminate our current plague of sexual enslavement of undocumented Asian, Mexican, and Central American women and children? Though an essay this brief cannot address these varieties of post-emancipation slavery, it does suggest that assessments of emancipation’s historical impact need substantial reexamination to understand the challenges of human bondage today. True, historians must acknowledge the supreme importance of dramatic turning points such as the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, the British Compensated Emancipation Act, the Cuban War for Independence, and the collapse of Brazilian slavery. But at the same time, the public must keep in mind Wendell Phillips’s prescient admonition in response to the ratification of the 13th Amendment: “We have abolished the slave, but the master remains.” The epochal moments of emancipation noted above surely transformed the lives of millions of the liberated and those who once owned them. In this vital respect the narrative of “from slavery to freedom” retains enormous explanatory power. Nevertheless, as Phillips’s comment suggests, this narrative can also double back on itself, especially when historians remind us that post-emancipation southern planters created “slavery by another name” even as other groups entering the United States fell prey to similar exploitation. The narrative becomes painfully twisted when historian Sven Beckert documents how the post-emancipation plunge in southern cotton production caused the massive expansion of state-sponsored slavery in India and Egypt as its governors rushed to capture unmet world demand. Could the Civil War have enslaved at least as many as it emancipated? It tan- gles and snarls completely in Joel Quirk’s The Antislavery Project: From Slavery to Human Trafficking (2012), which confutes the ahistorical assumptions that inform so much of contemporary antislavery activism—that a “new” slavery has only recently exploded across the planet, powered by unprecedented globaliza- tion, political disruption, population explosion, and so forth. We know better.9 Quirk forcefully reminds us that in the face of epochal emancipatory moments slavery endures and evolves across the centuries, having adapted in response to ongoing social and economic changes. While old systems of enslavement across the Americas ended, replaced by newer forms in the nineteenth century, millions remained in longstanding systems of bondage across Africa, the Middle East, India, and Asia through much of the twentieth century. Following the traumas

84 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JAMES BREWER STEWART of two world wars and in response to antislavery, activists demanded that first the League of Nations and then the United Nations issue protocols requiring global abolition. Certain governments took these injunctions seriously and significantly advanced the abolitionists’ agenda. Many others, however, responded with flimsy legal decrees while persisting with time-honored forms of coer- cion or replacing them with new ones that continue today—again, “slavery by another name.” As Quirk notes, little about either the “new slavery” or about global initiatives to eradicate it is unprecedented. The deepest and most comprehensive historical account we have of slavery and antislavery all over the globe, Seymour Drescher’s magisterial Abolition (2009), confirms this crucial point with unmatched erudition.10 Historical insight of such importance has much to offer today’s activists and historians engaged with the problem of slavery. Instead of regarding their work as perpetually focused on the moment, activists can look to the past and recognize themselves as the inheritors of rich, varied, and endlessly challenging abolitionist traditions. They can develop empowering understandings that illuminate their predecessors’ incontestable accomplishments, enduring insights, and sustained commitment. They can develop self-critical perspectives by considering how and why earlier abolitionist initiatives fell short, generated unintended negative consequences, or outright failed. They can and above all should demand that historians answer questions that repeat the ones that once so deeply engaged Wendell Phillips and his fellow abolitionists: Where did this oppressive system come from? Who was responsible for creating it and who is currently responsible for maintaining it? What instructive examples and cautionary lessons does history offer us when we oppose it? Historians responding to queries such as these have served as vital intellectual first responders to our most agonizing social crises. They have also developed powerful historiographical precedents for doing so. When, in the 1960s, the United States experienced deep conflicts over white racism and civil rights, historians contributed African American history. In the 1970s when women reignited their struggle for equality, historians answered with women’s history. When the 1980s brought the realization that humans are destroying the planet, historians created environmental history. Scholars engaged today with the history of slavery and antislavery clearly face challenges from contemporary enslavement every bit equal to those of previous decades. Recognizing this, the motto of Historians Against Slavery—“Using History to Make Slavery History”—succinctly summarizes the nature of the task immediately at hand. Our next conference, timed to acknowledge the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment, convenes in September 2015. Please consider joining us in Cincinnati at the National Underground Freedom Center.

SUMMER 2014 85 AMERICAN HISTORIANS AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE “NEW” GLOBAL SLAVERY

1 To read the program, see www.historiansagainstslavery. 6 Free the Slaves, www.freetheslaves.net/; The Polaris org/conference.htm (accessed June 25, 2014) Project, www.polarisproject.org/; Not For Sale, www. notforsalecampaign.org/; International Justice Mission, 2 Kevin Bales and Monti Datta, comp., Global Slavery www.ijm.org/ (all accessed June 25, 2014). Index 2013, Walk Free Foundation,www.globalslaveryin- dex.org/ (accessed June 25, 2014). 7 Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972); 3 Wendell Phillips, The Scholar in a Republic: Address at the David M. Oshinski, “Worse the Slavery”: Parchman Farm Centennial Anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, University (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1881), 17, 18, 22. 1996); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War 4 For information on The FREE Project, see http://thefree- to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008). project.org/ (accessed June 25, 2014). 8 President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and 5 The most widely read of the recent studies on modern Neighborhood Partnerships, Building Partnerships to slavery include Kevin Bales, Disposable People: The New Eradicate Modern-Day Slavery: Report of Recommendations Slavery and the Global Economy (Berkeley: University to the President (Apr. 2013), p. 23, www.whitehouse.gov/ Ending Slavery: How of California Press, 2001); Bales, sites/default/files/docs/advisory_council_humantraffick- We Free Today’s Slaves (Berkeley: University of California ing_report.pdf (accessed June 25, 2014). Press, 2007); E. Benjamin Skinner, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery (New York: The 9 National Anti-Slavery Standard, Feb. 23, 1866, quoted Free Press, 2008); Louise Shelley, Human Trafficking: in James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips, Liberty’s A Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, Press, 2008); Siddarth Kara, Sex Trafficking: Inside 1986), 98; Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: the Business of Modern Slavery (New York: Columbia Reconstruction and the Worldwide Web of Cotton University Press, 2010); Kara, Bonded Labor: Tackling Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” the System of Slavery in South Asia (New York: Columbia American Historical Review 109 (Dec. 2004), 1405- University Press, 2012). Many excellent documentaries 38; Joel Quirk, The Antislavery Project: From Slavery exist, but these three are representative: “Fatal Promises,” to Human Trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Katherina Rohr, dir., www.fatalpromises.com/Fatal_ Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Promises/Home.html; “The Dark Side of Chocolate,” Miki Mistrati and U. Robert Romero, dirs., www.thedar- 10 Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and ksideofchocolate.org/; and “Not My Life,” The Human Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Trafficking Action Awareness Center, producer, http:// notmylifedvd.com/ (all accessed July 10, 2014). For one of the most accessible and comprehensive data-based sites addressing modern slavery and antislavery, see www. polarisproject.org/ (accessed July 10, 2014).

86 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Collection Essay Civil War Guerrilla Collections at The Filson Historical Society

s a border state, Kentucky, like Missouri, was scourged by guerrilla warfare during the Civil War. Although Federal forces twice drove Confederate armies from Kentucky soil in 1862, the state remained vulnerableA to cavalry raids and guerrilla depredations throughout the conflict. In fact, roving bands of guerrillas remained at large in the Bluegrass long after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. The Special Collections Department of The Filson Historical Society contains numerous diaries, man- uscripts and images that reflect this dark chapter in Civil War history throughout the war-torn nation. Specific collections include the Winn-Cook Family Papers, the Charles Crawley Letters and the Cora Owens Hume Diary to name a few. The following selected sources reflect the brutal nature of guerrilla warfare in Kentucky. Although a commissioned Confeder- ate cavalry officer, John Hunt Morgan of Lexington adopted hit-and-run tactics that branded him as a “guerrilla” in the eyes of Federal military authorities and Kentucky Unionists. In his first Kentucky raid (July 4-22, 1862), Morgan sparked widespread panic throughout the heart of the state. His nine hundred man force captured over seventeen John Hunt Morgan Proclamation issued at the beginning of the Perryville campaign, Kentucky towns and damaged both the in early September 1862. Louisville & Nashville Railroad and rail THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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connections between Cincinnati and Lexington. The raiders also seized or destroyed large amounts of Union weapons and supplies, captured twelve hundred prisoners and took over six hundred government horses and mules. In a letter from his Tennessee camp dated July 28, 1862, Jonathan B. Holmes of the 6th Ohio Infantry referred to Morgan’s raid and lamented the fact that “a few mounted outlaws can frighten the loyal people of a whole state and fill Cincinnati with fears of invasion.”1 Morgan’s forays into Kentucky continued through the summer of 1864. At the same time, Kentucky experienced raids by other Confederate cavalry leaders, including Joseph Wheeler who commanded General Braxton Bragg’s mounted forces during the 1862 Brigadier General John Hunt Perryville campaign. The formidable General Nathan Bedford Morgan (1825-1864). Forrest raided western Kentucky in the spring of 1864 and attacked THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY the Union fortifications at Paducah. In December of the same year, Brigadier General Hylan B. Lyon of Forrest’s command swept through western Kentucky and burned over eight courthouses. Staunch Bowling Green Republican Joseph Whitfield Calvert penned a lengthy account of life in a border state to fellow Republican Edward Morris Davis, prominent in abolitionist circles. On February 20, 1863, Calvert wrote, “With great raids by…Bragg and lesser ones by Morgan, Wheeler, Forrest & co. through our part of the state we have been, at least, half the time without mail communication with the North.” Calvert lamented that he had burned many of his pro-Republican and antislavery papers for self protection. He added, “I keep nothing in my trunk that would be a warrant for hanging me by the ‘Guerrillas’ except Old John Brown’s picture. I could not burn that. I could it hide—so kept it.”2 From the beginning of the conflict Kentucky, particularly in the counties bor- dering Tennessee and Virginia, was plagued by small bands of both Union and Confederate partisans. The Confederate government authorized some of these units, like the Partisan Rangers, to operate behind the lines. Others consisted of men who had deserted from both armies to wage their own petite guerre against home front foes. Captain Champ Ferguson of Clinton County was typical

J. W. Calvert to E. M. Davis, February 20, 1863. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

88 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JAMES M. PRICHARD of these guerrilla chieftains. Ferguson and his men hunted down and killed numerous Union soldiers and sympathizers, many of them former neighbors, along the upper reaches of the Cumberland River. Captured by Union forces during the summer after Lee’s surrender, he was tried by a military commission and hanged in Nashville on October 20, 1865. Captain L. P. Deatherage of Hart County was typical of those Confederate officers who operated behind the lines in Union-controlled Kentucky. An officer in Morgan’s command, the former Methodist minister issued a proclamation on August 13, 1862 that warned Champ Ferguson (1821-1865). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY Union military authorities not to punish the families of his men for the deeds they committed while “fighting for their freedom.” He declared that he would hold accountable any Unionists who failed to heed this warning. Union Brigadier General Edward H. Hobson condemned the decree, stating that Deatherage’s guerrillas were guilty of “many robberies and murders.” He boasted: “They were finally wiped out of existence, many of them had been killed by troops under my command.”3 Like Ferguson, Union authorities captured Deatherage in 1864 and charged him as a common “Highwayman.” He barely escaped trial by

L. P. Deatherage’s Proclamation, August 13, 1862, in Edward H. Hobson Papers. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

SUMMER 2014 89 CIVIL WAR GUERRILLA COLLECTIONS AT THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

a Louisville military commission and secured his release from confinement on May 11, 1865. The mountains of eastern Kentucky swarmed with Confederate partisans and guerrillas throughout the conflict. While stationed at Mount Sterling in the spring of 1864, Colonel John M. Brown of the 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry led many scouts through the guerrilla-infested hills between Owingsville and West Liberty. Among the prisoners who fell into his hands was Jacob L. Edwards of Bath County who reportedly participated in the capture and ruthless execution of four Union scouts near Mount Sterling in the fall of 1863. In a letter dated February 17, 1864, the acting Judge Advocate of the Marcellus Jerome Clark or Sue Monday Military District of Kentucky informed Brown that (1845-1865). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY he would be pleased to “acknowledge the receipt of the charges against Jacob Edwards, the guerrilla… or such testimony bearing on his particular acts or his general character as will justify me in bringing charges.”4 Brown duly sent Edwards to the Louisville Military Prison to await trial but he escaped from his captors on October 20, 1864. The closing days of the war witnessed an upsurge in guerrilla depredations in the state. As the North prepared to crush the Confederacy with military offenses on all fronts, Kentucky was drained of needed Union troops. At the same time, many Confederate soldiers, especially the hundreds of men scattered and cut off during John Hunt Morgan’s last Kentucky raid in June 1864, preferred to des- ert the ragged, hungry ranks of their own armies and return home to fight on Kentucky soil. Roaming the state at will, many of these heavily armed guerrillas eluded capture and lived off the land. Perhaps the most notorious was Marcellus Jerome Clarke better known as “Sue Mundy.” Clarke’s band was joined in the winter of 1865 by the notorious Missouri guerrilla William C. Quantrill and a handful of followers who included the future outlaw legend Frank James. Driven out of Missouri, Quantrill made central Kentucky his next theater of operations. Federal troops captured young Clarke and hanged him in Louisville on March 15, 1865. However Quantrill remained at large for weeks to come. He was finally tracked down by Captain Ed Terrill’s Kentucky scouts and mortally wounded in a clash in Spencer County on May 10, 1865. The Filson holds an 1888 letter written by John Langford, one of Terrill’s men, who claimed that he fired the shot that toppled Quantrill from his horse. The former Union scout recalled, “I shot him in the left shoulder—just back of the shoulder blade—the ball ranging downward and lodging in the right groin.” He added, “we took him to Louisville—in a farm wagon— next morning.”5

90 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JAMES M. PRICHARD

While few remember his name today, Lieutenant Colonel George M. Jessee posed a far more formidable threat to Union-held Kentucky than Jerome Clarke, Quantrill, and other guerrilla leaders who generally operated in small bands. A regular Confederate officer and resident of Henry County, Jessee oper- William C. Quantrill’s 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kansas, from Harpers Weekly. ated in north-central Kentucky in THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY the late summer of 1864, following orders to gather the scores of men cut off from their units in the aftermath of Morgan’s last raid and lead them back through the Confederate lines. Adopting Morgan’s “hit and run” tactics, Jessee, at times leading between two and three hundred men, gained virtual control of the vast region between Louisville, Frankfort, and Covington. Jessee’s operations proved so successful that Confederate leaders permitted him to operate behind the lines in Kentucky until the end of the war. A dispatch in the papers of Colonel John Mason Brown was typical of numerous reports that bedev- iled the Union high command. Sent on August 14, 1864 by the deputy provost marshal of Carroll County, Kentucky, the dispatch warned that Jessee led at least two hundred men John Langford to W. W. Scott, September 8, 1888. 6 in neighboring Trimble County. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY Brigadier General Stephen G. Burbridge, the Union commander of the Military District of Kentucky, adopted ruthless measures to halt guerrilla depredations. His General Orders No. 59 decreed that four guerrilla prisoners be executed for every Union civilian killed by marauders in the Bluegrass. However, he thwarted Governor Thomas Bramlette’s efforts to raise state troops for home defense, fearing they might also be used to halt the organization of U.S. Colored Troops on Kentucky soil. In a letter from Shelbyville dated January 23, 1865, Thomas B. Cochran advised Attorney

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General James Speed: “the Guerrillas are devastating our state, robbing and mur- dering everywhere. [They] robbed the mail coach and passengers in 3 miles of this place a few days ago. They go about in squads of 2 to 20.” A former Union cavalry officer, Cochran continued, “the guerrillas kill every returned volunteer that falls into their hands. (They) killed four of the 15th Ky. (Infantry) last week. The 15th and 6th (Kentucky Infantry) were mustered out a few days ago. The men are afraid to go home.” He urged Speed, a fellow Kentuckian, to support Bramlette’s efforts Lieutenant Colonel George M. Jessee to raise local defense forces. Cochran con- (1830-1896). tended that “Experience proves that the THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY regular Federal troops are utterly worthless to hunt down these fellows.” He argued that one hundred state volunteers, composed of recently discharged Kentucky veterans, could “catch more guerrillas in three months then all of Burbridge’s men combined.”7 During the last months of the war Union troops operating in Kentucky were ordered not to take any guerrillas prisoner but to execute them on the spot. Yet despite this “No Quarter” policy, Burbridge’s firing squads, and public hangings, many guerrillas remained defiant for months after the fall of the Confederacy. While Jessee’s partisans laid down their arms in Henry County on May 5, 1865, Quantrill’s Missourians remained at large in Nelson County until July 26. Still

T. B. Cochran to James Speed, January 23, 1865, Speed Family Papers. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

92 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JAMES M. PRICHARD others refused to surrender and continued to elude capture. Captain Samuel O. “One Armed” Berry, who rode with Jerome Clarke and Quantrill, and King White of Louisville, led a dozen men on one final foray through Nelson, Meade, and Breckinridge Counties in the fall of 1865. On November 2, Union citizens routed them when the band attempted to plunder the hamlet of Stephensport. With most of their followers either killed or captured, Berry and White returned to Nelson County where they were finally captured on December 8, 1865. Although federal authorities subsequently released White, a military commission tried Berry for more than fourteen killings and sentenced him to ten years at hard labor in a New York penitentiary. The last of the guerrilla chiefs died in his cell on July 4, 1873. While much of the rest of the nation enjoyed peace in 1865, Kentucky continued to suffer from waves of violence and lawlessness for decades after the Civil War. The seeds sown by years of guerrilla warfare bore bitter fruit and darkened the reputation of the state in the eyes of the nation. Long after the pioneer era, Kentucky remained a “Dark and Bloody Ground.” James M. Prichard Manuscript Cataloger

1 Johnathan B. Holmes to Anna Phillips, July 28, 1862, The Filson Historical Society (hereafter FHS).

2 J. W. Calvert to E. M. Davis, Feb. 20, 1863, FHS.

3 L. P. Deatherage Proclamation, Aug. 13, 1862, Edward H. Hobson Papers, FHS.

4 W. R. Hardy to John M. Brown, Feb. 17, 1864, John Mason Brown Papers, FHS.

5 John Langford to W. W. Scott, Sept. 8, 1888, FHS.

6 Captain Americus V. Carlisle to [John Mason Brown?], Aug. 14, 1864, John Mason Brown Papers, FHS.

7 T. B. Cochran to James Speed, Jan. 23, 1865, Speed Family Papers, FHS.

SUMMER 2014 93 Collection Essay Remembering Those Who Served The World War I Servicemen Portrait Collection at Cincinnati Museum Center

or those who attended the U.S. and Allied Governments War Exposition, held in Cincinnati at Music Hall in December 1918, one of the most poi- gnant features of the event was the display of approximately six thousand Fphotographs of area servicemen and women loaned to the local organizers for inclusion in the exposition. Although a traveling exposition, the local committee solicited the loan of photographs from the families of Cincinnati area servicemen for use in a special added display. The committee assured families that they would handle the images with care and return them after the exposition ended. Opening on December 14, 1918 at Music Hall, the Allied War Exposition (sometimes referred to as the Victory War Exposition) ran for nine days and attracted over 164,600 visitors. Cincinnati was one of numerous cities to host the Allied War Exposition in 1918 and 1919. George Creel and the Committee on Public Information conceived of the exhibition. Since 1917, Creel, a journalist and newspaper editor known for his muck- raking investigative reporting, had headed President Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, created to help shape public opinion about U.S. involvement in World War I and bolster support for the war effort. As Creel himself put it, “Public opin- First Lieutenant Hall A. Taylor, Co. D, 148th ion stands recognized as a vital part of the Infantry, killed in action September 28, 1918. national defense, a mighty force in national CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER attack. The strength of the firing line is not in trench or barricade alone, but has its source in the morale of the civilian population from which the fighting force is drawn.” The Committee on Public Information used a variety of devices, including some influenced by modern advertising techniques, to reach and influence the widest public audience.1

94 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY SCOTT L. GAMPFER

State fair organizers approached the committee with requests for a war exhibit as early as the spring of 1917. Although the committee discussed the idea with the army and navy, not until the summer of 1918 did they act on the requests. Ultimately, the committee set up exhibits at thirty-five state fairs around the country. These exhibits, produced with the cooperation of the War Department and accompanied by active duty service personnel, consisted of “guns of all kinds, hand-grenades, gas-masks, depth-bombs, mines, and hundreds of other things calculated to show the people how their money was being spent.”2 In June 1918, Creel appeared before the Committee on Public Information, Souvenir Committee on Appropriations of the House of Catalogue: United States and Allied Govern- Representatives to explain how the Committee ments War Exposition, Cincinnati, December 14th to December 22nd, 1918, Music Hall on Public Information spent its money. Creel (Cincinnati: Wade-Biddle Company, 1918). had something of an uphill battle convinc- The exhibition was divided into sections, ing Congress and others of the importance of each containing materials contributed by an allied government. The catalogue includes exhibits as a way of “carrying the facts of war to descriptions of each item on display. the People of the United States.” Some members CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER of the appropriations committee, including its chairman, responded to Creel’s arguments with “not only a very notable lack of enthusiasm, but even a distinct disposition to regard the idea as somewhat stupid and quite unnecessary.” Nevertheless, the House did appropriate a small amount of funding specifically for “war expositions.”3 The Associated Advertising Clubs of the World approached Creel and his committee with a request to stage a patriotic war exposition in San Francisco in July 1918 in conjunction with their annual convention. The committee con- tacted the U.S. War Department and the commissions of Italy, England, France, and Canada to request war trophies for inclusion in the exposition. The San Francisco exposition, although modest, proved larger and more comprehensive than the earlier state fair exhibits. The success of the event in San Francisco attracted the attention of city officials in Los Angeles who requested the exposition for their city. The war exposition drew an even larger audience in Los Angeles and made money in both cities. The public reaction to the exposition in its first two locations encouraged the committee to expand and improve it. Eventually, it grew in size until it required its own train to transport it from one city to another. It included captured weapons and equipment from Germany and the other Central Powers, as well as Allied weapons, equipment, and uniforms.

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The exposition also featured photographs, artwork, musi- cal events, speakers, and motion picture films. Some of the early venues simulated trench warfare in daily mock battles using real service personnel. Some of the items on display were quite large, including armor, artillery, and aircraft. A great naval gun from the German raider Emden stood alongside an enormous enemy howitzer referred to as “Big Bertha,” a tank battered by enemy fire at Chateau Thierry, and even an airplane flown by the French air ace Georges Guynemer. Cincinnati hosted the traveling exposition in December 1918. Although the war had ended by the time it came to Cincinnati, interest remained high. A month before it arrived in the city, local newspapers described what was coming: A portion of the French exhibit showing machine guns and a Spad fighter plane on The Victory War Exposition, conducted under the the floor of the Music Hall exhibition wing. auspices of the United States Government, will be CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER staged in Music Hall, December 14 to 22. Forty of the staunchest and largest railroad cars are required to carry it. At least forty thousand square feet of space are needed for its proper display. Every item in it is authenticated by the governments of the nations which conquered the Central Powers. It requires a company of soldiers to guard it. The United States, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, France and Canada each have a detail of veterans to explain its various features. For nine successive days it will be seen in Cincinnati.

The newspapers also reported on the planned display of photographs of local servicemen: “It is expected that the pictures of Cincinnatians in service will make one of the most inspiring exhibitions of its kind ever shown in the United States. The collection will be almost 100 per cent in exhibiting the entire of Cincinnatians in uniform.”4 The exposition’s actual arrival in the city in December attracted great attention. TheCincinnati Times-Star ran an article under the headline, “Warlike Scene in Cincinnati as Exposition Trophies Arrive,” reporting that “for the next few days Cincinnati Streets between Eggleston Avenue and Music Hall will have a resemblance to sections of France during the German retreat. Hundreds of war trophies captured from the Germans will be seen going through the streets on trucks bound for the exhibition, to open at Music Hall Saturday.” Tickets could be purchased at the Music Hall box office for a price of fifty cents for adults and twenty-five cents for children.5

96 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY SCOTT L. GAMPFER

View looking down on a portion of the French exhibit showing wrecked fighter planes, machine guns, and assorted weapons and equipment. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

The exposition was well received in Cincinnati, with an average daily attendance of 18,291 and over 35,500 attending on the exhibition’s final day at Music Hall. The photographs of local servicemen were displayed in special rooms, including a “Gold Star” room containing the photos of those who had given their lives in service. Women volunteers, many of them mothers of servicemen, oversaw the photos of the Cincinnati soldiers while on display. As

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might be expected, the photographs of the local men in uniform, particularly those who had died, produced a profound and solemn effect on the spectators who viewed them:

But there is one exhibit which it seems, each woman visitor must see first of all. They stood in rows, three deep on Tuesday afternoon, each woman eagerly pointing out the photograph which to her was most imposing of the entire collection. Only in the gold star room there was no chatter. Men stood silent and considerately avoided each other’s eyes.

The reporter was moved by the reaction of one woman in particular, Ida McMinn of Newport, Kentucky, whose son had fallen in action near Chateau Thierry the previous July. After noting her reaction to seeing her son’s portrait he wrote, “But the little gold star mother from Newport quickly recovered herself, her red-rimmed eyes flashing almost defiantly. ‘I am proud to see him there,’ she said, ‘proud for him and proud for myself that I could let him go.’”6 The Victory War Exposition ended its run in Cincinnati on December 22, 1918 and like all the other cities where it was displayed, proved a financial success. As promised, the local orga- nizing committee returned the photographs to the lenders with a cover letter from Executive Secretary Edwin E. Meyers that Sergeant David McMinn, killed in action July 15, 1918 stated, “The collection of portraits of men in the service was near Château Thierry in the one of the most successful features of the War Trophy Exhibit. Second Battle of the Marne. The enclosed photograph is herewith returned in accordance CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER with the terms under which it was loaned.” Meyers further encouraged the lenders to send a copy of their photographs to the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio (HPSO) for preservation. He emphasized that “The collection, which included over 6000 photographs, if kept together would be of great historical value.”7 Many of the families who had loaned their loved one’s photos for the exposition followed Meyers’s suggestion and donated copies to the society, some along with notes or letters. Ella Kirker, one of the Cincinnatians who donated a photograph to the society, sent a portrait photograph of her son, Captain George H. Kirker, to the society in May 1919 with a handwritten letter conveying her thoughts. Captain Captain George Howard Kirker, who died of complications from Kirker had died of complications from influenza while serving influenza at St. Paul, Minnesota. in Minnesota. His mother wrote: CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

98 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY SCOTT L. GAMPFER

He was my only son, and we miss him so much. He was so good and kind to us. In perfect health, young and strong had taken his father’s place in the home since his father’s death several years ago. God gave him to us to love but Oh he has taken him from us and hope we shall meet him soon.8

In the end, Cincinnatians donated over three thousand photographs to the society’s collection. The librarian for the society noted in the HPSO annual report for 1919:

A collection of photographs, several thousand in number, of soldiers in service during the late war, has been given to us for preservation by the fathers, mothers, and other relatives. It is a precious gift, and in years to come will form a valuable historical record of this locality’s participation in the great conflict, as well as a memorial to those brave boys and men who fought and suffered for humanity.9

These photographs of loved ones entrusted to the care of the society ninety-five years ago are preserved and remain accessible to researchers today in the collections of the Cincinnati History Library and Archives at Cincinnati Museum Center. Scott L. Gampfer Director, History Collections and Library

1 Committee on Public Information, Souvenir Catalogue: United States and Allied Governments War Exposition, Cincinnati, December 14th to December 22nd, 1918, Music Hall (Cincinnati: Wade-Biddle Company, 1918), 3.

2 George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1920), 142-43.

3 Creel, How We Advertised America, 143.

4 Cincinnati Times-Star, Nov. 18, 1918; Cincinnati Enquirer, Dec. 10, 1918.

5 Cincinnati Times-Star, Dec. 10, 1918.

6 Ibid., Dec. 18, 23, 1918.

7 Edwin E. Meyers, [form letter, 1919], The Victory War Exposition Papers, Cincinnati Museum Center (hereafter CMC).

8 Ella F. Kirker to Edwin E. Meyers, May 31, 1919, The Victory War Exposition Papers, CMC.

9 Annual Report of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio for 1919, Librarian’s Report, p. 37, CMC.

SUMMER 2014 99 ANNOUNCEMENTS Exhibit documents a century in the life of the Queen City

Treasures in Black and White: Historic Photographs of Cincinnati A century’s worth of black and white photos from Cincinnati Museum Center’s collections provides a window into the Queen City between 1860 and 1960. Through still images of Cincinnati’s people, commerce, transportation, infrastructure, and religious, cultural, and educational institutions, Treasures in Black and White documents the remarkable story of Cincinnati over a century of change and progress.

Treasures in Black and White is an opportunity to revisit the neighborhoods, architecture, and people of Cincinnati from the outbreak of the Civil War to the 1960s. This visual history of a city provides a snapshot of the nation as it grew through five wars, economic depression, and great prosperity. The images will inspire, provide perspective, and evoke insight into former generations of Cincinnatians.

This fascinating and nostalgic exhibit utilizing historical artifacts and video in addition to more than sixty photographs runs through October 12, 2014 at Cincinnati Museum Center. For more information visit cincymuseum.org or call (513) 287-7000.

Online exhibit features history and use of World War I propaganda posters World War I Propaganda Posters: Art That Shaped History In an age before commercial radio and television, posters served as an important method of communicating with and influencing a mass audience. Entering World War I in 1917 after nations in Europe had already been fighting for three years, the United States needed to mobilize men and resources in a short period of time. Just as countries in Europe on both sides of the conflict utilized posters to manipulate public opinion, the United States took similar steps.

World War I Propaganda Posters: Art That Shaped Historyis an online exhibition featuring fifteen posters pulled from Cincinnati Museum Center collections that demonstrate the variety of posters used during World War I. Some were used to galvanize public opinion by depicting the enemy as brutal, sadistic, and inhumane while also emphasizing the strength and morality of one’s own side. Other posters depict American soldiers in heroic poses and scenes to encourage men to enlist or others to buy liberty bonds. Visit the exhibit online at www.cincymuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-I-propaganda-posters.

100 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS

1310 South Third Street, Louisville, KY 40208

FELLOWSHIPS AND INTERNSHIPS Filson Fellowships and Internships encourage the scholarly use of our nationally significant collections by providing support for travel and lodging. Fellowships are designed to encourage research in all aspects of the history of Kentucky, the Ohio Valley region, and the Upper South. Internships provide practical experience in collections management and research for graduate students.

FELLOWSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT

Due to construction and renovations that are part of The Filson’s Campus Expansion Project, fellowship applications will not be accepted in October 2014 or February 2015. Fellowship applications will be accepted again in October 2015 and thereafter.

If you have received a Fellowship but have not yet conducted your research, you should do so before March 1, 2015.

For more information about our Fellowships and Internships, please visit www.filsonhistorical.org

SUMMER 2014 101 ANNOUNCEMENTS Richard C. Wade Award Announcement

The editors of Ohio Valley History are pleased to announce that Dr. Stephanie Cole is the recipient of the third Richard C. Wade Award for the best article published in the journal in the past two years (volumes 11 and 12). Dr. Cole, associate professor of history at the University of Texas Arlington, is honored for her article, “Servants and Slaves in Louisville: Race, Ethnicity, and Household Labor in an Antebellum Border City,” which appeared in the Spring 2011 issue.

Our panel of reviewers, drawn from our board of editors, praised “the uniformly high quality” of all the articles, but honored Dr. Cole’s essay for its “solid research in newspapers and correspondence. [She] argues that market considerations governed Louisvillians’ householding decisions and their employment of slaves versus free laborers. [Ultimately, she finds that employers] were wedded to bot- tom line, not slavery.” Additionally, “Cole’s article documents in wonderful and revealing detail the slow transition from African American slaves to immigrant servants in Louisville’s domestic economy, highlighting the ways in which free and enslaved labor co-existed for many years along the border between the free and slave states. The article also shines a much needed spotlight on nineteenth century working class and enslaved women, revealing the complex ways in which a changing labor market shaped their lives.”

Dr. Cole received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida. As recipient of the Wade award, she receives a five hundred dollar cash prize and a copy of Richard Wade’s The Urban Frontier, a landmark study of the Ohio Valley. The award ceremony will take place at The Filson Historical Society on September 15 at 6:00 p.m., where she will discuss the article in addition to receiving the award. Dr. Cole will also lecture at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center on September 16.

102 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY