Bound for Canaan (46 page)

1

At about 2
P.M.
on the afternoon of February 15, 1851, a phalanx of twenty or more black men with their collars turned high and sou'westers camouflaging their faces shoved their way through the doors of Boston's lofty Doric courthouse. Pushing aside federal deputy marshal Patrick Riley and his constables, they took hold of Shadrach Minkins and carried him out into the rain-slick streets of the city to the cheers of what may have been the largest gathering of African Americans in the city's history. Over his head, one of Minkins's rescuers brandished the city's official Sword of Justice, which he had plucked from the courtroom's wall. Picking up more supporters with every step, the rescuers streamed like a squall
in a shouting procession north along Court Street, past the Paul Revere house, whose symbolism could not have been lost on the crowd, whose leaders knew full well that they were part of a second, abolitionist American revolution, into Cambridge Street, and on into the black neighborhood that tumbled down the back of Beacon Hill toward the Charles River. And there Minkins disappeared.

That morning, Marshal Riley and his men had arrested Minkins at Taft's Cornhill Coffee House, where he worked as a waiter. Minkins had been in Boston only a few months, having escaped by sea from Norfolk, Virginia, in May 1850. His arrest in the heart of Boston, headquarters of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the home of William Lloyd Garrison, whose office at the
Liberator
stood only a few doors away from Taft's, was no coincidence. It was meant to demonstrate not just to abolitionists, but also to the slaveholding South that the federal government was serious about enforcing the new Fugitive Slave Law. However, with a rapidity that the lawmen were completely unprepared for, the city's Vigilance Committee had mobilized its members, both black and white, and in less than two and a half hours after Minkins's arrest they had organized a rescue plan, and successfully brought it off, under the direction of the indefatigable and courageous Lewis Hayden, the fugitive slave whom the unfortunate Calvin Fairbank and his companion Delia Webster had driven out of Kentucky beneath the seat of a carriage six years before. Police searched frantically for the missing fugitive, while news of his escape raced in every direction along the country's newly strung telegraph wires. In Washington, outraged Senator Henry Clay demanded to know whether “a government of white men was to be yielded to a government by blacks,” and a distressed President Fillmore called a special cabinet meeting, after which he issued a proclamation describing Minkins's rescue as “a scandalous outrage,” and ordered civil and military officials of all ranks to cooperate in recapturing the fugitive.

Minkins, meanwhile, was as safe as any man in his position could hope to be, in Hayden's capable hands. A natural entrepreneur, since his arrival in Boston the forty-year-old Hayden had built up a clothing business to become one of the wealthiest black men in the city, as well as the leading black member of the Vigilance Committee. (He had also raised six hundred and fifty dollars to pay for Fairbank's release, in August 1849.) Most of the fugitives who found their way to Boston were sheltered initially in
his three-story brick home on Southac Street. But Minkins was too hot a property to hide in such an obvious place. After a circuitous trip through Cambridge to throw off pursuers, Hayden personally drove Minkins to Concord, eighteen miles west of Boston, to the home of Francis Bigelow, a white blacksmith and a core member of the local underground. Once Minkins had been fed, Bigelow gave him new clothes and drove him on to Leominster, where he was switched to another carriage, in which he was driven to West Fitchburg, where he was put on a train for Vermont, and ultimately Canada. Four days after leaving Boston, Minkins was safe in Montreal.

“Do we call this the land of the free?” a reflective young Concord man “of taut mind and wound-up muscles” wrote in his diary the day after Minkins passed through. “What is it to be free of King Geo[rge] the IV and continue the slaves of prejudice? What is it [to] be born free & equal & not to live?” The writer, the son of a local pencil maker, was Henry David Thoreau, an operative in the Concord underground, although he would become far more famous for his affinity for a pleasant bit of local landscape known as Walden Pond. Thoreau or Bigelow usually received the late-night arrivals. Thoreau's mother, Cynthia, was one of the founding members of the town's Female Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1846 Thoreau himself had elected to go to jail rather than pay his poll tax, as a protest against slavery. In 1848 Thoreau had lectured in the town's public meeting hall on “the relation of the individual to the state,” the genesis of what was to become one of the most famous essays ever written by an American, “Civil Disobedience,” and the inspiration for countless radical challenges to the tyranny of the majority in generations to come.

The enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law hardened ideas that had begun to gestate during the Mexican War of the late 1840s, which Thoreau and most abolitionists passionately opposed. Before Thoreau, Quakers and some evangelicals had argued that civil disobedience was a principled religious response to slavery and war. Thoreau proposed for the first time that a man's individual conscience was reason enough to defy a law in which he did not believe. The state, he argued, had no more truth or intelligence than the average man, only greater physical strength: “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.” How could a moral man bring himself to obey immoral laws? he asked
himself. “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”

The Fugitive Slave Law instantly transformed philosophical reflections into questions of practical immediacy. “We must trample this infamous law underfoot, be the consequences what they may,” Unitarian Samuel J. May told his Syracuse congregation. “It is not for you to choose whether you will or not obey such a law as this. You are as much under obligation not to obey it, as you are not to lie, steal, or commit murder.” Similar thoughts were coursing even more starkly through the agitated minds of many other Northerners. “This so-called Fugitive Slave Law, what is it, that I am called upon to obey it and assist in its execution?” demanded Rodney French, a Yankee ship's captain who was denied landing rights in the South because he was rumored to be an abolitionist. “It is the most disgraceful, atrocious, unjust, detestable, heathenish, barbarous, diabolical, tyrannical, man-degrading, woman-murdering, demon-pleasing, Heaven-defying act ever perpetrated in any age of the world, by persons claiming to have consciences and a belief in a just God. In one word, it is the sum of all villainies.”

The arrest of Shadrach Minkins was not the first attack on a fugitive in the North, under the new law. That sad honor went to James Hamlet, who was literally snatched off the street in New York City in October 1850, eight days after the act's passage. Antislavery newspapers brought almost daily reports of fugitives being handed over to federal authorities somewhere in the free states. There were captures in New York, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. By the time of the “Shadrach Rescue,” as it became universally known, there had been at least sixty (and possibly many more) attempted arrests in the North, involving a total of more than one hundred different fugitives. In February 1851, in a speech to Syracuse businessmen, the administration's favorite Yankee shill for the Fugitive Slave Law, Daniel Webster, promised that the law “will be executed in all the great cities,” even “in the midst of the next Anti-Slavery Convention.” Those who dared to oppose the law, he warned menacingly, “are traitors! traitors! traitors!”

Fugitive slaves who had lived in comparative safety for years in Northern states, who had painstakingly acquired nest eggs and bought
homes for themselves, suddenly fled, as Frederick Douglass memorably put it, “as from an enemy's land—a doomed city,” to begin over again farther north or in Canada, impoverished and among strangers. To one missionary, it seemed that panicked black refugees were appearing in the queen's dominions “by fifties every day, like frogs in Egypt.” Desperate calls were put out to antislavery societies in the free states for fresh shipments of food and clothing. As many as three thousand fugitives crossed into Canada within three months after the enactment of the new law. In western New York, where the panic was extreme, about one-third of the 600 blacks living in and around Syracuse fled north. It was reported that of the 114 members of a Baptist church in Rochester, all but 2 left the country, and that in Buffalo, 130 left from another black Baptist church. More than 40 fled Boston within three days after the signing of the Fugitive Slave Law, followed by another hundred after the Minkins incident. Their fears were vindicated when, six weeks after Minkins's rescue, Thomas Sims was arrested in Boston and marched to the port surrounded by an armed guard of three hundred policemen and citizen volunteers. (With cruel though probably unintended irony, he was embarked from the same wharf where radicals dressed as Indians had dumped British tea into the harbor in the prelude to the American Revolution.) An estimated 300 blacks fled from Pittsburgh, including nearly all the waiters in the city's hotels. Columbia, Pennsylvania, one of the largest African-American communities in the North, was particularly hard hit as slave hunters and outright kidnappers targeted the town: in January 1851 constables snatched a black man named Baker, who had lived in town for years, and who was negotiating to purchase his freedom. Two months later, a woman and her twelve-year-old son were carried off to Philadelphia. And in April a man and his wife and child were dragged from their sleep and taken to the office of the federal commissioner in Harrisburg, leaving the couple's ten-month-old baby behind. Columbia's black population of 873 abruptly dropped by 40 percent.

Others stayed. Reverend Jermain Loguen of Syracuse, formerly the slave Jarm Logue, was one who would not be moved. When urged by his wife and friends to flee to Canada, he refused, just as he had always rejected friends' offers to buy his freedom for him. With the same boldness with which he had fought his way through two separate bands of armed patrollers on his galloping flight north from Tennessee, he now pro
claimed his defiance of the law from pulpits all over central New York, daring his former owner, Manasseth Logue, and the United States government to come after him. He was a fugitive slave, he declared to anyone who cared to listen, and he had made up his mind to stand his ground at his home in Syracuse. “What is life to me if I am to be a slave in Tennessee?” he thundered. “I have received my freedom from Heaven, and with it came the command to defend my title to it. The question is with you,” he told Syracusans at a rally that resulted in the formation of a local Vigilance Committee. “If you will give us up, say so, and we will shake the dust from our feet and leave you. But we believe better things. Whatever may be your decision, my ground is taken. I have declared it everywhere. I don't respect this law—I don't fear it—I won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it. I will not live a slave, and if force is employed to reenslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man.”

2

Edward Gorsuch was also an angry man. He had, by his lights, been kind to the four prime field hands who had run away from him on the night of November 6, 1849. He had even promised them freedom when they reached the age of twenty-eight. That was an economically sensible decision in the border country of Maryland, where slavery had been in decline for decades, and the steady hemorrhaging of slaves north into Pennsylvania made human livestock a poor long-term investment. But it was also magnanimous, the sixty-three-year-old Gorsuch thought. After all, he had every right to sell unwanted slaves southward, if he preferred. But he was a Methodist, and a Sunday school teacher, and a man of principle. He was also a deeply proud man, and by the spring of 1851 his failure to find the men—Noah Buley, Nelson Ford, and George and Joshua Hammond—embarrassed him in front of his fellow slave owners, and set a worrisome precedent for his seven remaining slaves. Then, in September 1851, he received an encouraging message from an itinerant clock mender in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who earned extra income by serving as a spy for local slave catchers. Nelson Ford and Joshua Hammond had been
spotted living near the town of Christiana, a nexus of Underground Railroad routes, which lay just fifteen miles north of the Maryland state line.

Gorsuch did not imagine that recovering the men would be easy. But at least the law was now firmly and unequivocally on his side. He started for Pennsylvania with a well-armed party that included his son Dickinson, nephews Joshua Gorsuch and Thomas Pearce, and two other Marylanders. They traveled first to Philadelphia, where Gorsuch, appealing for assistance under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Law, acquired the services of the bewhiskered U.S. deputy marshal Henry H. Kline, who was well-known as an ardent slave hunter, and two city constables. Unknown to Gorsuch, however, he was being tracked by Philadelphia abolitionists, who closely monitored the arrivals of slave-catching parties from the South. En route to Christiana, an underground spy named Samuel Williams managed to gain Gorsuch's confidence by ostensibly offering him advice about fellow blacks in Lancaster County. Having learned the slave owner's plans, Williams hurried ahead to Christiana, where he spread news of the expedition's imminent arrival among the many fugitives living in the area.

Gorsuch was traveling into one of the richest farming counties in the United States, an expanse of gently rolling fields, red-brick villages, and prosperous farms, centering on the small, handsome city of Lancaster, with its stately ensemble of harmonious Federal Era homes. The northern part of the county was occupied largely by conservative Germans, including many Amish and Mennonites, and its southern tier, the heart of the county's underground, by a substantial minority of Quakers. Interspersed among them were hundreds of blacks, many of them fugitives who on their way north had acquired work and made homes for themselves in tiny rural hamlets that existed just beyond the perimeter of white attention and control. Not surprisingly, they were also magnets for slave hunters. In 1851 Lancaster's blacks lived in a state of permanent high alert against gangs of night-riding kidnappers who broke into cabins without warning, seized men and women in their sleep, and carried away entire families.