Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (9 page)

Black New Yorkers, as we have seen, had long acted individually to assist fugitive slaves, taking them into their homes and keeping a lookout for stowaways who arrived on the docks. The white abolitionists in the Manumission Society had long doubted the “propriety” of acting in ways that violated the law. But the militant abolitionism that emerged in the 1830s included individuals who would play important roles in what came to be called the underground railroad. Lewis Tappan owned a horse that regularly carried fugitives from his “agent” at Havre de Grace, Maryland, to Pennsylvania. In January 1838, a runaway slave from Alabama arrived at Tappan’s home on New Year’s Day and was sent to England, at Tappan’s expense. Arthur Tappan also aided fugitives with “his purse, advice and sympathy.”
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William Jay, the son of John Jay, who “early imbibed my father’s hostility to slavery,” divided his time between residences in New York City and Bedford, Westchester County, where he long served as a judge. More conservative than the Tappans, he warned against needlessly alienating white public opinion by admitting black members to local antislavery societies and having them speak at antislavery meetings. Nonetheless, Jay contributed money and offered refuge to fugitives. Early in the 1830s, Judge Jay wrote to another abolitionist that he would “withhold his obedience” to state laws outlining procedures for the return of fugitives, and “refuse all applications that may be made to me” to execute them. “I shall ever deem it both a duty and a pleasure,” he added, “to facilitate the escape of any fugitive slave.” These were remarkable affirmations by a sitting judge. The British abolitionist Joseph Sturge, who visited the United States in 1841, reported that Jay spoke openly of “the runaway slaves who called at his house.” Jay died in 1858. His will included a bequest of $1,000 “to be applied . . . in promoting the safety and comfort of fugitive slaves.”
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Isaac T. Hopper, his daughter Abigail Hopper Gibbons, and her husband James S. Gibbons, all of whom moved to the city from Pennsylvania in the late 1820s and 1830s, exemplified the Quaker presence in New York abolitionism. A generation older than the new breed of militant abolitionists, Hopper served as a mentor to New Yorkers who became involved in the underground railroad. Born in Woodbury, New Jersey, in 1771, he had established himself as a tailor in Philadelphia at the age of sixteen. He soon joined the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Hopper’s history of assisting runaways and kidnap victims began in the 1790s, and fugitive slaves frequently stayed at his home in Philadelphia. In 1804, Hopper persuaded a local court to free a slave brought to that city by Pierce Butler of South Carolina, author of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause. Junius C. Morel, a black journalist and abolitionist who had been born a slave in North Carolina and moved to the North with the permission of his white father, described Hopper, whom he had encountered in Philadelphia, as “the first white man that I ever saw, who pitied the colored man.”

Hopper left Pennsylvania for New York in 1829 after being “disowned” by his Quaker congregation, which disapproved of public antislavery agitation, especially in cooperation with non-Quakers. He joined the New York Manumission Society, took fugitives into his home at 110 Second Avenue, established a bookstore to sell Quaker and antislavery publications, and became a founding member of both the AASS and the New York City Anti-Slavery Society. In 1840, Hopper began publishing “Tales of Oppression” in the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
, a series of dramatic accounts of the fugitive slaves he had assisted in Philadelphia. Hopper’s daughter and son-in-law moved frequently in lower Manhattan, before purchasing a house at 339 West Twenty-Ninth Street in the 1850s. Wherever they were living, their home served as a refuge for fugitives, as well as the place William Lloyd Garrison stayed when he visited New York. Another radical Quaker, Barney Corse, a wealthy leather merchant and member of the Manumission Society, worked with Hopper to combat kidnappers and provided funds to defend blacks accused of being fugitives. Hopper and Corse exemplified the link between the antislavery activism that descended from the revolutionary era and the radical abolitionism of the 1830s, and between earlier efforts to assist runaway slaves and the underground railroad.
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Black New Yorkers responded enthusiastically to these white abolitionists’ demand for greater rights for blacks in the North, and their principled rejection of colonization. They appreciated the risks white abolitionists incurred because of their commitment to the cause and their financial contributions, which few if any blacks could match. When the
Colored
American
issued an appeal for funds in 1837, it called upon others to emulate “our Tappans, our Jays, and our Smiths, who have been blessed with the disposition as well as the means to give.” (A wealthy upstate reformer, Gerrit Smith for three decades dispensed much of his fortune aiding the abolitionist cause.) To be sure, black New York leaders sometimes accused white allies of sharing the prejudices of their society, and insisted on the necessity of holding all-black conventions and maintaining separate uplift societies. Never before, however, had black and white Americans worked so closely for common goals.
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As abolitionists stepped up their activities, the prospects of retaliation also escalated. Throughout the 1830s, northern mobs (well over 100 by one count) broke up abolitionists’ meetings and destroyed their printing presses. As in other parts of the North, colonizationists instigated and participated in anti-abolitionist violence in New York City. The
Courier
and
Enquirer
, at the time the most influential newspaper in the United States, was edited by James Watson Webb, a leading colonizationist. It excoriated abolitionists for promoting “amalgamation” (interracial marriage) and endangering the Union, on which the city’s prosperity rested. In May 1834, Lewis Tappan organized a week of public meetings to promote abolition and denounce colonization. The following month, Tappan, who opposed the common practice of relegating black worshipers to “Negro pews,” invited the Reverend Samuel Cornish to sit alongside him during services at a Presbyterian church. A number of parishioners vocally objected, whereupon the minister made tolerance the subject of his sermon.
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Tolerance, however, was in short supply in New York City in 1834. That July, a full-fledged riot broke out, with mobs attacking black homes, churches, and businesses, as well as the residences of leading white abolitionists. The crowd demolished St. Stephen’s Church and burned Lewis Tappan’s home on Rose Street (just east of City Hall) to the ground. With some 7,000 persons taking part, this was the largest and most destructive riot in the city until the uprising against the Civil War draft three decades later. The violence lasted for several days, ending only when the militia arrived. Many New Yorkers blamed the abolitionists for the riot. The Episcopal bishop of New York ordered Peter Williams Jr. to resign from the executive committee of the AASS, which he proceeded to do, although he remained a member until his death in 1840.
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The violence temporarily shook the abolitionist movement. Arthur Tappan issued a “Disclaimer,” which insisted that the organization had “no desire to encourage intermarriages between white and colored persons” or “resistance to the laws.” An “Address to the People of Color” by the AASS executive committee quickly followed. It condemned the outrages committed against the black community and praised African Americans for their “peaceful endurance,” but it also chastised them for intemperance, “profaning” the Sabbath, and frittering away their money on lottery tickets. After a bit of a hiatus, however, the AASS renewed its activities in the city and gathered new recruits. Alarmed by the assaults on his home and business, Lewis Tappan moved to Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights, but redoubled his commitment to the antislavery cause. William Jay now accepted appointment to the AASS executive committee. In 1835, he was elected president of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society.
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Not long after the riots, Elizur Wright Jr., the editor of the
Emancipator
, began publishing “Chronicles of Kidnapping,” a series of essays exposing how the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 operated in New York City. The articles told the stories of black persons who had been shipped south by city officials without a hearing and of accused fugitives who had spent months in prison before their cases were adjudicated. In one instance, a North Carolina slaveowner, Dr. Rufus Haywood of Raleigh, staged a midnight raid on the home of one Lockley. Despite protests that he was a free man, Lockley, his wife, and their twelve-year-old daughter were imprisoned as fugitives, and after a series of hearings before Recorder Richard Riker, they were taken south by Haywood. Peter Martin, who had lived in the city for four years with his wife and child, was arrested at his employer’s store, held in a “coffin-like cell” for months, and returned to slavery in Virginia. Martin’s case ended more happily than most, as his employer raised the money to purchase his freedom. A month after his return to slavery, Martin was back at his old job in New York.
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In what Wright called a “vile and despicable outrage,” a Virginia slaveowner, Richard Haxall, a member of the family that owned one of Virginia’s largest flour mills, accompanied by a city policeman, dragged out of an African Free School seven-year-old Henry Scott, whose father had brought him from Virginia to New York. Haxall claimed that Henry had been the property of his late father and that ownership had passed to his mother. He failed, however, to produce a will. Nonetheless, Recorder Riker lodged the boy in jail. Through the efforts of African Americans, including his classmates, and white abolitionists, Scott’s plight was widely publicized and aroused considerable sympathy. He was released from prison and taken to live with Elizur Wright and his family.
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Such efforts on behalf of kidnap victims and fugitives were ad hoc and sporadic. As early as 1828,
Freedom
’
s
Journal
had called for the creation of an organization “for the preventing of kidnapping and man-stealing.” Precedents existed; the editors mentioned the Protecting Society of Philadelphia, a short-lived adjunct of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Not until 1835, however, did such a group come into existence in New York. The leading spirit in its creation and in its activities for the first five years was David Ruggles. Born in Connecticut in 1810, one of eight children of a free black family, Ruggles did not belong to New York’s black elite. He had been educated at a Sabbath School for the poor, and came to the city at the age of fifteen. Ruggles worked for a time as a mariner, then opened a grocery store at 1 Cortlandt Street, on the corner of Broadway. He quickly became involved in the black community’s institutional life, joining the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Society and the Phoenix Literary Society. But his main activity was abolitionism. Soon after its founding in 1831, he became an agent of Garrison’s
Liberator
. When the
Emancipator
was established, Ruggles became that paper’s general agent; he was the only individual to work for both publications simultaneously. Ruggles solicited subscribers in the city, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and upstate New York, making contacts that would prove invaluable when he turned his attention to aiding fugitive slaves.
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It was Ruggles who in November 1835 called a mass meeting to respond to the epidemic of kidnapping. The meeting created the Committee of Vigilance for the Protection of the People of Color. It appointed an interracial executive committee “to aid the people of color, legally, to obtain their rights.” With the advent of the Vigilance Committee, a new chapter opened in the battle over fugitive slaves in New York City.
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3

ORIGINS OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD: THE NEW YORK VIGILANCE COMMITTEE

I

T
he New York Vigilance Committee began its life in 1835 with large ambitions and a very small membership. Initially, it consisted of only five persons: David Ruggles; William Johnston, an English-born abolitionist and grain merchant who served for several years as treasurer; George R. Barker, a white businessman and another lifelong abolitionist; James W. Higgins, a black grocer; and Robert Brown, a white attorney. Soon, the black ministers Theodore S. Wright, Samuel Cornish, and Charles B. Ray joined the executive committee, along with Thomas Van Rensselaer, who had escaped from slavery in New York’s Mohawk Valley in 1819. (Van Rensselaer’s owner “sent messengers in all directions, and traveled himself as far as Canada” in an unsuccessful effort to retrieve him.) Sometime in the 1820s, Van Rensselaer made his way to New York City, where he opened a restaurant, became superintendent of a Sabbath School, and in 1834 presided over a gathering of over 2,000 people to celebrate emancipation in the British West Indies.
1

In a number of incarnations, the Vigilance Committee survived until the eve of the Civil War. Over the course of its life, it propelled the plight of fugitives to the forefront of abolitionist consciousness in New York and won support from many outside the movement’s ranks. It forced the interconnected issues of kidnapping and fugitive slaves into the larger public sphere. The committee’s active leaders generally consisted of only a dozen or so individuals, most of whom lived near each other in lower Manhattan. Yet the group and its supporters took part in a remarkable range of activities. In effect, the committee combined the moral suasion of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the legal strategy of the Manumission Society, and the direct-action tradition of the city’s black population.

In the years following its founding, the Vigilance Committee held monthly meetings to raise money, report on its activities, and spread its antislavery message. It petitioned the legislature to expand the rights of free blacks and accused fugitives. It employed lawyers who went to court attempting to block kidnappers, prevent the return of fugitive slaves, suppress the illegal slave trade, and secure the freedom of slaves brought to the city by southern or foreign owners.