Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (30 page)

Between 1855 and 1860, legislatures in New England, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin enacted new personal liberty laws that authorized the state to provide counsel for accused fugitives, required that their status be determined by a jury trial, and increased the penalties for kidnapping free blacks. Wisconsin and Ohio Republicans went even further. The Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Sherman Booth, an abolitionist who led a crowd that rescued a fugitive slave from jail, and declared the federal statute unconstitutional (a ruling reversed by the Supreme Court in 1859 in
Ableman
v
.
Booth
). In Ohio, after a widely publicized fugitive slave rescue and the subsequent trial and conviction of some of those involved, the state Republican platform in 1859 called for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. Ironically, by making the return of fugitives a national responsibility, Congress, in the words of the
New
York
Times
, had made “the doctrine of state rights, so long slavery’s friend, . . . its foe.” One Republican leader in Ohio even called for the party to “come to Calhoun’s ground”—to affirm the right of states to nullify federal legislation.
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Many Republicans found these developments legally indefensible and a threat to the party’s electoral prospects. Even in radical Wisconsin, Senator Timothy O. Howe observed that since “almost the whole country has declared
nullification
to be an unconstitutional remedy,” it would be suicidal for Republicans to become associated with that doctrine. During the 1850s, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana—the more moderate states of the Lower North—enacted no new laws relating to fugitives. Nor did New York, although its personal liberty laws from 1840 remained on the books. Moderate Republican newspapers, including the
New
York
Times
, criticized the Fugitive Slave Act but insisted on adherence to the rule of law.
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Abraham Lincoln, who on this and other issues sought to find common ground among the party’s factions, urged Republicans in each state to avoid taking positions that alienated voters in others. Lincoln acknowledged that under the Constitution, the South had a right to recover fugitive slaves, but he favored modifying the 1850 law to provide guarantees that free persons would not be “carried into slavery.” “The cause of Republicanism in Illinois,” Lincoln wrote to Salmon P. Chase, the governor of Ohio, “is hopeless, if it can be in any way made responsible” for demands to resist or repeal the federal statute. After Lincoln’s nomination for president in 1860, some abolitionists cited his commitment to enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act as evidence of a lack of antislavery conviction. Wendell Phillips went so far as to call Lincoln “the Slave-Hound of Illinois.” To preserve party unity, the Republican national platform of 1860 made no mention of fugitive slaves or the 1850 statute. Nonetheless, as the decade drew to a close, enforcement of the federal law was becoming more difficult in many parts of the North. In 1859, a U.S. commissioner in Philadelphia discharged an accused fugitive with the resonant name Daniel Webster. Every previous case of this kind, wrote James Miller McKim, had “gone against us. . . . The day of Pennsylvania’s redemption draweth nigh.”
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The fugitive slave issue affected the secession crisis that followed Lincoln’s election in contradictory ways. The eight states of the Upper South, where most fugitives originated, rejected secession until after war broke out, and the four northernmost—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, which bordered the free states and whose owners suffered the most from slaves running away—never left the Union. But in the Lower South, what the
New
York
Herald
called the underground railroad’s “fanatical warfare on the constitutional rights of property” figured prominently in enumerations of secessionists’ grievances. In October 1860, the
Charleston
Mercury
warned that in the event of Lincoln’s election, enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act would cease and the underground railroad would operate “
over
-ground.”
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Even though few fugitive slaves reached the North from South Carolina, the longest paragraph in that state’s “Declaration of the Immediate Causes” of secession, adopted on Christmas Eve in 1860, related not to the territorial issue that had dominated national politics but to northern obstruction of the rendition of fugitives. “An increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery,” the document maintained, had led the free states to render “useless” the fugitive slave clause, without which the Constitution would never have been ratified. With the North having “broken” the constitutional compact, South Carolina, in turn, was “released from her obligation” to it. Alluding to the
Lemmon
case in New York, the declaration also assailed northern states’ abrogation of the right of slave transit. The Confederate Constitution, approved in March 1861, copied virtually word for word its U.S. counterpart’s fugitive slave clause, although unlike its predecessor it explicitly referred to an escaped “slave,” not simply a “person held to service or labor.” Even though there were no free states in the Confederacy, its constitution took no chances about the right to bring slaves from one state to another. It explicitly guaranteed that slaveholders would enjoy “the right of transit and sojourn in any State . . . with their slaves and other property.”
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Rarely was the pro-southern orientation of New York City’s political and commercial leaders more evident than during the secession crisis. Anxious to retain the city’s economic ties with the South, prominent New Yorkers of both political parties pressed for northern concessions that might avert disunion. Mayor Fernando Wood even proposed that the city itself secede. New York, he declared, had no quarrel with the South. It should reconstitute itself as a “free city” so that it could enjoy “uninterrupted intercourse” with the cotton states. The
Journal
of
Commerce
, which had supported John C. Breckenridge, the presidential candidate of proslavery southern Democrats, called for repeal of the personal liberty laws and abandonment of the “new-fangled doctrine, that to rob our neighbor of his slave . . . is a Christian duty.” In January 1861, a special train brought thirty prominent New York capitalists to Washington, including the iron magnate Peter Cooper and William H. Aspinwall of the Union Safety Committee, which a decade earlier had promoted enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. They bore a petition for compromise signed by 40,000 businessmen. Hamilton Fish, a conservative Republican, expressed surprise at the “extent of concessions” New York merchants were willing to make to the South, including acceptance of the
Dred
Scott
decision allowing slavery to spread throughout the West.
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In Washington, compromise proposals abounded during the secession winter, and most included provisions relating to fugitive slaves. Nearly sixty plans to resolve the sectional conflict came before Congress, the most prominent being a series of unamendable constitutional amendments proposed by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. One amendment provided for federal compensation to the owners of fugitive slaves (an idea, it will be recalled, the Lower South had rejected ten years earlier). Crittenden also presented resolutions calling for faithful execution of federal laws relating to fugitives, declaring the personal liberty laws unconstitutional, and, to meet one northern objection to the Fugitive Slave Act, equalizing the fee awarded to U.S. commissioners for discharging or returning an accused runaway.

None of these proposals managed to soothe secessionists’ fears, and none won congressional approval. “It is not your personal liberty bills that we dread,” declared Senator Alfred Iverson of Georgia. “Those personal liberty bills are obnoxious to us not on account of their practical operation . . . but as an evidence of deep-seated, widespread hostility to our institutions.” Without a “change of public sentiment” in the North, his colleague James S. Green of Missouri agreed, the repeal of such laws “would not amount to a straw.” Nonetheless, Republicans demonstrated far more willingness to make concessions on the fugitive question than on their party’s core principle of halting the westward expansion of slavery. Governor Edwin D. Morgan urged the legislature to demonstrate the North’s good faith by repealing New York’s 1840 law requiring a trial by jury for accused fugitives. Senator Lyman Trumbull, who as an Illinois lawyer had represented fugitive slaves and blacks illegally held to long-term indentures, insisted that Republicans must recognize “the right of a slave owner to a reasonable law to recapture his runaway slaves.”
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Lincoln, who vehemently opposed compromise on the territorial issue during the secession crisis, urged congressional Republicans to abandon “all opposition, real and apparent, to the fugitive slave [clause] of the constitution,” while continuing to insist that federal law ought to include the “usual safeguards . . . securing free men against being surrendered as slaves.” In his inaugural address, on March 4, 1861, Lincoln reaffirmed the constitutional obligation to return fugitives but added that “all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and humane jurisprudence” ought to be respected, “so that a free man be not in any case surrendered as a slave.” Lincoln must have known that this discussion was unlikely to conciliate the South. Abolitionists, nonetheless, excoriated his acknowledgment of a duty to return fugitives. Frederick Douglass praised parts of the speech but added that on this question, Lincoln “stands on the same moral level” with slaveholders.
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Whatever Lincoln’s stance, his election seems to have inspired an increase in the number of slaves seeking freedom in the North. “During the last eight weeks,” Stephen Myers reported from Albany on December 17, 1860, more fugitives had escaped from the South than “in any four months before.” Myers was particularly impressed by the growing number who had “come away in vessels this season . . . and have landed in eastern ports.” The outbreak of the Civil War accelerated the process. In April 1861, three days after the firing on Fort Sumter, the
New
York
Tribune
observed that fugitives were passing through Philadelphia on the underground railroad “in far larger numbers than usual.” Throughout 1861, slaves from Maryland and Delaware continued to escape into Pennsylvania, although, as one underground railroad operative remarked, the organization was no longer needed, since “nearly every northern man” was now willing to offer assistance. Runaway slaves, James Miller McKim reported from Philadelphia in December 1861, now traveled “fearlessly by daylight . . . and by a variety of routes heretofore closed to them.” Anyone “who would now undertake to catch and return a fugitive slave,” he added “would be a fool.”
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The Civil War fundamentally transformed the opportunities available to slaves seeking freedom. As soon as federal troops entered a locality, which in Maryland meant from the very beginning of the war, slaves sought refuge with the Union army. Others flocked to Washington, D.C., now the capital of an antislavery government. Eager to conciliate what it imagined to be a host of pro-Union southerners within the Confederacy, and desperate to prevent the secession of the northernmost slave states, the Lincoln administration at first enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, and Union commanders issued strict orders to their troops to respect private property and return runaway slaves. Three months into the conflict, a Maryland newspaper pointed out that more escaped slaves had been remanded to their owners under Lincoln “than during the whole of Mr. Buchanan’s presidential term.” Ward Hill Lamon, a friend from Illinois whom Lincoln had appointed marshal of the District of Columbia, filled the city’s jails with runaway slaves, leading to a power struggle between Lamon, army officers in need of black labor, and antislavery members of Congress. But, especially after the abolition of slavery in the District in the spring of 1862, it became very difficult for owners, even if they hailed from Maryland, which remained in the Union, to retrieve fugitives there. As late as mid-1863, however, a few fugitives whose owners were able to demonstrate loyalty to the Union were remanded to Maryland from the nation’s capital.
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In the fall of 1860, when it became clear that Lincoln would be the next president, Oliver Johnson, who had succeeded Sydney Howard Gay as editor of the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
, heralded “the beginning of a new and better era.” Little could he imagine how quickly the new era would arrive. Many soldiers ignored orders forbidding them to harbor runaways. In May 1861, the president’s cabinet approved the decision of Benjamin F. Butler, who commanded Union forces at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, not to return slaves who arrived at his outpost. That July, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution introduced by Owen Lovejoy, a Radical Republican from Illinois, stating that it was not “part of the duty of the soldiers of the United States to capture and return fugitive slaves.” The resolution did not come before the Senate, but it indicated widespread Republican dissatisfaction with military commanders who returned runaway slaves. By the end of 1861, as slaves by the hundreds, then thousands, sought refuge with the army, Lincoln declared that those who reached Union lines had become free. Early in 1862, the press reported Lincoln’s view that the government had no obligation to return fugitive slaves and that in any event public opinion would not allow it to do so. That March, just as federal forces were entering the Mississippi Valley, leading to a flood of slaves to the army, Congress forbade military officers from returning fugitives.
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