Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (20 page)

Another case involving strange twists and turns took place in 1853. Rose Cooper, “a large and showy woman” (according to an abolitionist account) from Mobile, Alabama, owned a slave, Emma, who married a free black man, Charles Trainer. Emma bore several children, among them Jane, born in 1844. Trainer attempted to purchase his daughter’s freedom but was refused. In May 1853, Rose Cooper traveled to Cincinnati with Jane, followed by Trainer. Cooper then headed for New York, planning to embark by sea for San Francisco with the child. A friend in Cincinnati alerted Lewis Tappan, who had Jacob R. Gibbs locate the pair and asked Erastus D. Culver to obtain a writ of habeas corpus for Jane. (Culver, an antislavery lawyer who had served as a Whig member of Congress from upstate New York during the 1840s, moved to Brooklyn in 1851 and quickly became known for defending the rights of blacks in court.) Tappan and Louis Napoleon presented an affidavit to the police that led to Cooper’s arrest for kidnapping. Jane’s father, Charles Trainer, soon arrived from Cincinnati, and all appeared before a New York judge. The case devolved into a fight for custody of the child. Cooper’s lawyers insisted that the marriage of a slave had no legal standing, and therefore Trainer had no parental rights.

Events then took a curious turn. Trainer failed to appear at a court session; he telegraphed Tappan that he had been abducted to Dunkirk, New York, not far from Buffalo. He refused to return unless the judge promised him protection. Tappan himself received threats that if he appeared at the courthouse, he would be assassinated. He came anyway, “putting my trust in God.” The judge suddenly announced that he lacked jurisdiction (“after twenty days he finds this out,” Tappan remarked). Culver located a Brooklyn jurist, Seward Barculo, willing to take over the case. On June 13, Barculo delivered the girl to her father, stating that regardless of the laws of Alabama, Trainer and his slave wife constituted a common-law marriage in New York. Rose Cooper, he continued, had no claim to Jane; once the child was brought into New York, she became free.
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The
Trainer
case underscored the legal area in which the Vigilance Committee experienced the greatest success: persuading New York jurists to enforce the freedom principle. This, it will be recalled, derived from the
Somerset
case in England. It defined slavery as a creature of local law, and held that any slave, with the exception of a fugitive, who entered a jurisdiction where the institution did not exist instantly became free. The freedom principle became part of New York statute law in 1841, when the legislature ended the right of southern owners to bring slaves into the state. (The Fugitive Slave Law did not alter this legal doctrine.)

In its 1853 annual report, the committee claimed to have secured the freedom of thirty-eight such slaves. By far the most prominent of these cases involved two women and six children aged one to ten owned by Jonathan Lemmon of Virginia and his wife Juliette. The Lemmons, their seven children, and the slaves arrived in New York on November 5, 1852, by sea from Norfolk, planning to board a steamboat for New Orleans and relocate from there to Texas. The vessel’s black steward notified Louis Napoleon, Erastus D. Culver, and a black restaurateur of the slaves’ presence. The next day, Napoleon brought to court a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, presumably written by someone else as the illiterate Napoleon signed it with his mark. Superior Court Judge Elijah Paine Jr. ordered the slaves brought before him. Culver and John Jay II, along with a young member of Culver’s firm who had just been admitted to the bar and was trying his first case, future president Chester A. Arthur, represented the slaves. “The lobbies and passages” in the courthouse, the
Times
reported, “were crowded by colored persons.”
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The question before the court, Culver argued, was simple: Did slavery exist in New York State? Within a week, Judge Paine declared the slaves free. The result, the
Times
exulted, constituted a clear vindication of the freedom principle. Any other decision would have made the city the center of “an extensive slave trade by sea,” as it was far easier and cheaper to transport slaves from Maryland and Virginia to the southwest by ship via New York than over land. Accompanied by Louis Napoleon and “amid great cheering” from a crowd of black men and women, the eight liberated slaves rode off in a carriage. The Vigilance Committee held a public reception for them at a black church. They soon made their way to Canada, accompanied by Richard M. Johnson, a fugitive and the brother of one of the adult slaves. Johnson had settled in Cleveland, where he read about the case in a local newspaper, recognized the description of his sister, and immediately left for New York to join her (at considerable danger to himself).
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In the aftermath of the
Lemmon
decision, defenders and opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law launched rival fund-raising campaigns. An appeal by the
New
York
Tribune
collected over $1,000 for the liberated slaves “to begin their new life with.” Fifty dollars went to reward the police officer who had custody of the slaves during the court proceedings and who had turned down an offer of $1,000 to deliver them surreptitiously to their owners. “Downtown merchants” collected $5,280 to reimburse the Lemmons for their lost property; Judge Paine himself contributed $100. The fund represented a shrewd investment, according to the
Tribune
. “Our jobbers . . . will probably get it all back in the increase of their southern business.”
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While not widely remembered today, what one southern newspaper called “the robbery of Mr. Lemmon” caused consternation in the slave states and exacerbated the sectional conflict. Although the slaves had long since departed, the Virginia legislature in 1853 resolved to pursue an appeal of Judge Paine’s decision, in order to establish owners’ legal right to transport slaves through free states. The
Tribune
warned that were Virginia to win the appeal, “gangs of men, women, and children chained together” would be seen on the city’s streets as they were marched from one ship to another. New York’s attorney general took over the defense of the decision and hired Culver and Jay to assist him. After many delays, the appeal came before the New York Supreme Court in October 1857. During the proceedings, Charles O’Conor, a Democratic politician representing Virginia, asked if the Louis Napoleon who had launched the case was the former emperor of France. “A much better man,” Jay replied.
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In December 1857, the state Supreme Court upheld Paine’s ruling, a decision reaffirmed by the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, in April 1860. The
Lemmon
case, wrote a Mississippi newspaper, involved principles “scarcely less important than those settled in the Dred Scott decision.” But for reasons that are not entirely clear, Virginia decided not to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Some Republicans feared, however, that they might in the future, and that the court would use the case to prohibit any state from keeping slaves out of its territory. Abraham Lincoln himself warned that the
Lemmon
case provided the opportunity for a “new Dred Scott decision” that would nationalize slavery by carrying it into the North. The issue became moot when Virginia seceded from the Union.
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Despite the fact that Pennsylvania and New York had long since eliminated the right of slave transit, and despite the
Lemmon
verdict, owners continued to travel to these states with their slaves. Some seized the opportunity to escape from bondage. In October 1855, Sydney Howard Gay provided aid to Rebecca Gill and Emeline Brown after they “left their mistress, Mrs. Hewitt, who brought them from Louisville” to New York City.
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The most celebrated case of these years involving the freedom principle centered on Jane Johnson and her sons Daniel and Isaiah, ages seven and eleven, the slaves of John Hill Wheeler, a prominent North Carolina politician whom President Franklin Pierce had appointed ambassador to Nicaragua. The situation bore a striking resemblance to the case of Jonathan Lemmon. On July 18, 1855, a day after dining with the president, Wheeler, with the slaves, traveled by train from Washington to Philadelphia en route to New York, where he intended to board a ship bound for Central America. While Wheeler was having dinner at a Philadelphia hotel adjacent to the dock, Johnson told a black waiter that she was a slave who did not wish to leave with her owner. He quickly notified William Still of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee that three slaves were in the city and “they want liberty.” With Passmore Williamson, a Quaker abolitionist, Still and five black dockworkers boarded the ferry on which the party was departing. Williamson informed Johnson that she and the children were entitled to their freedom and could leave the ship. Johnson responded, “I am not free, but I want my freedom.” After a brief scuffle, Johnson and her sons disembarked with Still and Williamson. They were soon dispatched to New York, where Gay arranged for their passage to Boston. On behalf of the Boston Vigilance Committee, the black abolitionist William C. Nell met them at the train station.

Meanwhile, Wheeler obtained a writ of habeas corpus directing Williamson to produce the slaves, and filed charges against him, Still, and several other black men for riot and assault. In what the
New
York
Tribune
called “a bold and perilous move,” Jane Johnson returned to Philadelphia from Boston to testify at the ensuing trial. She denied Wheeler’s claim that she had been abducted: “I went away of my own free will; I always wished to be free.” Wheeler found this impossible to believe. “Jane (servant),” he wrote in his diary, had been “induced” to perjure herself. Federal marshals planned to seize Johnson when her testimony concluded, but local officials sent a squad of police to protect her, and a wild carriage chase ensued. Johnson remained in the city until early September, staying at the home of the abolitionists James and Lucretia Mott, and even spoke at an antislavery convention. She then left Philadelphia for Boston; on the way, Gay again paid for her lodging and travel.

The case ended up as a triumph for the Vigilance Committee. The judge declared that Johnson and the children had become free the moment they set foot in Pennsylvania, and the assault cases mostly resulted in verdicts of acquittal. Williamson, however, served more than three months in prison for contempt of court, since he had failed to produce Johnson and the boys. The jailers treated him with uncommon solicitude. A steady stream of supporters, including Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, visited him in his cell, and when Williamson’s wife gave birth, a prison official escorted him to see her.
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Jane Johnson married in Boston and received financial assistance from the Boston Vigilance Committee as well as the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who privately donated money to black newspapers, churches, and fugitive slaves. Without his slaves, Wheeler sailed from New York for Nicaragua, where his bad luck continued. In 1856, the State Department recalled him for extending recognition, without authorization from Washington, to the regime set up in Nicaragua by the filibusterer William Walker, who restored slavery in that country and reopened the African slave trade. (Wheeler had concluded that “the race of Central Americans” was “incapable of self-government.”) The following year, another of Wheeler’s slaves, Hannah Bond, escaped from North Carolina. Sometime in the late 1850s, under the name Hannah Crafts, she produced
The
Bondwoman
’
s
Narrative
, the first novel written by a black American woman. Among the slaves mentioned in the book is one Jane, who had recently escaped from slavery.
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IV

Despite abolitionists’ success in winning the liberty of the Lemmon slaves, Jane Johnson and her children, and other slaves brought to the North by their owners, the freedom principle had no bearing on fugitive slaves. For them, especially after 1850, the only sure avenue to freedom involved seeking refuge in Canada. And at the same time that it inspired heightened efforts to aid fugitives in the courts, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law reinvigorated and radicalized the underground railroad. New local vigilance committees sprang up, and increasing numbers of abolitionists abandoned moral suasion to embrace the use of force.

At public meetings throughout the North, speakers, black and white, invoked the heritage of the American Revolution to justify violent resistance to an unjust law. At the 1852 national convention of the Free Soil party, an organization devoted to stopping the westward expansion of slavery, Frederick Douglass proclaimed, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter [is] to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.” A New Bedford abolitionist urged fugitives to “practice the art of using firearms” so that they could shoot slave catchers. New York City was no exception. Speakers at the public meeting that raised money to free James Hamlet called for resistance. “Liberty is worth fighting for,” declared one member of the audience, and the gathering advised fugitives to “arm themselves with the surest and most deadly weapons, to resist unto the death.” White abolitionists, the
Brooklyn
Eagle
complained, “were foolish enough to endorse the frenzied ravings of the negroes.”
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Rhetoric advocating armed resistance to the new law often amounted to little more than bravado. In parts of the North, however, efforts to assist fugitives took a violent turn. Dramatic attempts to rescue runaway slaves punctuated the 1850s—one study counts over eighty such confrontations. Before 1850, altercations of this kind had mostly been confined to the borderlands between slavery and freedom; now they occurred in many parts of the North. In October 1850, hundreds of armed blacks gathered at a jail in Detroit where a fugitive was being held. The frightened owner quickly agreed to allow his freedom to be purchased. In September 1851, a predominantly black crowd in Christiana, Pennsylvania, routed a group of slave catchers that included a federal marshal and a Maryland owner, who were attempting to apprehend four fugitives. The crowd, which numbered over 100 men and women, many of them armed, was led by William Parker, a runaway slave at whose home two of the fugitives were hiding. The slaveowner died in the affray, Parker and the fugitives fled to Canada, and the Fillmore administration obtained indictments for treason—a capital crime—against forty-one men, the largest such mass indictment in American history. But pursuing the case proved almost impossible in an area with strong sympathy for fugitives. Only one person, a white miller who claimed to have been an innocent bystander, was brought to trial. After deliberating for only fifteen minutes, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
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