Читать книгу The Underground Railroad in Connecticut - Horatio T. Strother - Страница 11

CHAPTER 2

THORNY IS THE PATHWAY

IN BOSTON, on the first day of the year 1831, that same abolitionist issued a forthright call to action in the anti-slavery cause. His name was William Lloyd Garrison; and in the initial number of his newspaper The Liberator he stated his position in words that no man could fail to understand:¹

I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I WILL BE HEARD !

Garrison was as good as his word. For three decades, in the face of opposition at first nearly overwhelming and always formidable, he led the fight for emancipation—not partial, not gradual, not linked to such disguised forms of discrimination as colonization, but immediate, unconditional, and complete. The band of reformers who gathered about his standard were idealists all, stirred by the same zeal for human betterment that inspired the contemporary movements for temperance and for universal popular education. Among themselves, abolitionists might—and sometimes did—differ over strategy and tactics, but never over the ultimate goal. To these standard-bearers, with their crusading spirit and selfless deeds, the Underground Railroad owed more of its organization and effectiveness than to any other group.

An early result of Garrison’s challenge was the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, established at Boston in 1832. Within a year it had become the American Anti-Slavery Society and had spread over the North, carrying Garrison’s principles wherever it went. Its purpose was dual: “To endeavor, by all means sanctioned by law, to effect the abolition of slavery; and to improve the character and condition of the free people of color.” Its program included the following points:

1. To organize in every city, town, and village.

2. To send forth agents to preach the gospel.

3. To circularize antislavery tracts and periodicals.

4. To encourage the employment of free laborers, rather than of slaves, by giving market preference to their products.²

A fifth purpose, not explicitly stated but evident in the acts of many Society members, was to encourage and assist the escape of fugitives from slavery—the passengers of the Underground Railroad.

Among the earliest antislavery societies in New England was that of New Haven, established in 1833. Two of its leading spirits were clergymen, the Reverend Samuel J. May of Brooklyn, Connecticut, and the Reverend Simeon S. Jocelyn. Their reasons for enlisting in the cause of immediate, complete emancipation were well phrased by May:

Often it was roughly demanded of us Abolitionists “Why we espoused so zealously the cause of the enslaved? Why we meddled so with the civil and domestic institutions of the Southern States?” Our first answer always was, in the memorable words of old Terence, “Because we are men, and therefore, cannot be indifferent to anything that concerns humanity!” Liberty cannot be enjoyed nor long preserved at the North, if slavery be tolerated at the South.³

In the South, indeed, slavery was not merely tolerated; it was encouraged and was growing apace. The cotton gin, invented as far back as 1793, was by now in widespread use; and with it, cotton production became increasingly profitable, so that more and more land was brought under cultivation and more and more slaves were demanded to work it. Moreover, the trans-Appalachian region of Alabama and the Mississippi Delta had become safe for full-scale settlement and exploitation only comparatively recently, with Andrew Jackson’s victory over the Creeks in 1814. After that came a rush of settlers to the newly opened areas—hard-driving men, intent on carving a cotton empire out of the forests and canebrakes, and more than willing to burn up any amount of slave labor in the process. Where once the buckskin-clad hunter had roamed, it was now the overseer and the slave coffle, the endless rows of cotton growing through the long hot season, the back-breaking tasks of chopping and picking, and the human beasts, ill fed, ill clothed, and ill treated, on whose driven labors the master might wax fat. Even the planters of the upper South, whose eighteenth-century forebears may in fact have treated their slaves with a certain patriarchal concern, could not fail to realize that the auction block now offered them high profits in human flesh sold down the river—especially since the importation of slaves from overseas had been banned in 1807. Everywhere, the lot of the slaves grew steadily worse, while the Southern slaveowners—never more than a small percentage of the white population in the slave states themselves—grew steadily more powerful and more arrogant.⁴

As reports of these conditions filtered back to the North, more and more persons of conscience came to see that slavery could no longer be regarded as a local matter but was becoming a national concern. This conviction fed the rolls of the antislavery societies, which by 1837 numbered twenty-nine in Connecticut, with memberships ranging from twelve to three hundred.⁵ They set about their work with resolute purpose, often against determined opposition.

Part of that work had to do with providing better conditions for free Negroes. Two cases in Connecticut, both arising in 1831, showed how difficult was the fight that lay ahead.

In June of that year, at a United States convention of colored people in Philadelphia, the Reverend Simeon S. Jocelyn proposed the establishment, at New Haven, of “a Collegiate school on the manual labor system” where Negro students would “cultivate habits of industry” and “obtain a useful Mechanical or agricultural profession.” The school would be “established on the self supporting system,” but preliminary backing was essential to its founding. The proposal was ratified by the convention, and a committee with the Reverend S. E. Cornish as “agent” was appointed to solicit funds. Forthwith there was issued an “appeal to the benevolent,” setting forth the difficulties met by colored youths in gaining admission to ordinary institutions, their need f6r adequate preparation, and the purpose of the proposed school to supply it.

Opposition to the plan among citizens of New Haven was immediate. The mayor, as soon as he heard of the idea, summoned first his Council, then a town meeting. Here, it is reported, the “air ran hot and foul” as the plan was heatedly discussed. Despite all the proponents could do, the town meeting adopted resolutions fatal to the reformers’ hopes:

1. That it is expedient that the sentiments of our Citizens should be expressed on these subjects, and that the calling of this Meeting by the Mayor and Aldermen is warmly approved by the citizens of this place.

2. That inasmuch as slavery does not exist in Connecticut, and whenever permitted in other States depends on the Municipal Laws of the State which allows it, and over which, neither any other State, nor the Congress of the United States has any control, that the propagation of sentiments favorable to the immediate emancipation of slaves, in disregard of the civil institutions of the States in which they belong, and as auxiliary thereto, the contemporaneous founding of Colleges for educating Colored People, is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States and ought to be discouraged.

3. And Whereas in the opinion of this Meeting, Yale College, the institutions for the education of females, and the other schools, already existing in this City, are important to the community and the general interests of science, and as such have been deservedly patronized by the public, and the establishment of a College in the same place to educate the Colored population is incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence of the present institutions of learning, and will be destructive of the best interests of the City: and believing as we do, that if the establishment of such a College in any part of the Country were deemed expedient, it should never be imposed on any community without their consent,—Therefore; Resolved—by the Mayor, Aldermen, Common Council, and Freemen of the City of New Haven in City meeting assembled, that we will resist the establishment of the proposed College in this place, by every lawful means.

In face of this attitude, Jocelyn’s plan was dropped. The citizens of New Haven had plainly recorded their indifference to the slavery issue; their awareness that Negro education must lead, however slowly and indirectly, to emancipation and racial equality; and their wish to avoid any offense to Southern slaveholders whose sons attended Yale or with whom, as merchants, they had had business dealings.⁶

Starting in that same year, the people of the little village of Canterbury became involved in a somewhat similar case that grew to command nation-wide attention. It began in an atmosphere of general approval when Prudence Crandall, a Quaker from nearby Plainfield, opened a “young ladies boarding school” whose pupils included an impressive number of daughters of “the best families in town.”⁷ Everyone admired Miss Crandall; she was a lady of all the classical virtues, her pupils became devoted to her, parents recognized her as a teacher of great ability, and ministers and public officials in surrounding towns recommended her school to public patronage. All was going smoothly when Sarah Harris applied for admission to the school.

Sarah was a pious girl of seventeen, daughter of “a respectable man who owned a small farm” in the vicinity, and she was sincerely anxious to “get a little more learning.” Everything was in Sarah’s favor—except the fact that she was a Negress.

Miss Crandall was perfectly aware of the problem she thus had to face, and for a time she hesitated. But she had all the sense of justice and the moral courage of her Quaker persuasion. Her sympathies, she said later, “were greatly aroused”; she admitted Sarah as a day scholar. As soon as her action was known, protests arose on every side—mutterings, threats of withdrawal from her pupils’ parents, the direct warning from a prominent minister’s wife that, if she did not dismiss Sarah, her school would fail. Let it fail then, returned Miss Crandall, “for I should not turn her out.” She went further than that; she resolved to remake her school into one exclusively for colored girls.

Local reaction was immediate. The citizens of Canterbury swung into action, under the leadership of Andrew T. Judson, state senator, proslavery spokesman, and advocate of colonization. First a town meeting was called to “avert the impending calamity”—for, as Judson and his followers saw it, “should the school go into operation, their sons and daughters would be forever ruined, and property no longer safe.” Most of those present accepted this specious view, and when Arnold Buffum and Samuel J. May attempted to speak in Miss Crandall’s behalf, they were shouted down before they could deliver their message—which was, essentially, that Miss Crandall was prepared to move her school elsewhere if given time to do so and a fair price for her property. But the citizens never heard that proposal; they were too busy resolving that “the obvious tendency of this school would be to collect within the town of Canterbury, large numbers of persons from other States, whose characters and habits might be various and unknown to us, there-by rendering insecure the persons, property, and reputation of our citizens,” and that they would oppose the school “at all hazards.”

These resolutions were conveyed to Miss Crandall. They produced no effect whatsoever. She remained peaceful and kind at all times, but her purpose never wavered. She dismissed her white pupils and reopened the school to colored girls only, with a small group of students from relatively prosperous families in Boston, New York, Providence, and Philadelphia.

Thereupon she and her pupils became the targets for the strongest sort of opposition. First, the selectmen submitted an appeal for help to the American Colonization Society, in which they castigated the members of the Anti-Slavery Society who, they said, “wished to admit the Negroes into the bosom of our society” and to justify “intermarriages with the white people.” Then the citizens, at another town meeting, resolved that “the establishment of the rendezvous falsely denominated a school was designed by its projectors as the theatre, as the place to promulgate their disgusting doctrines of amalgamation, and their pernicious sentiments of subverting the Union.”

Meanwhile the school was subjected to all kinds of meannesses and harassments. The well was filled with stable refuse. Stones and rotten eggs were thrown through the windows. The village store refused to sell groceries for the school’s use. Miss Crandall’s father was threatened with mob violence and legal action when he brought her food. She and her pupils were stoned on the streets. Doctors refused to treat her when she was ill. The local authorities dusted off an old vagrancy law and invoked it against one of the girls, Ann Eliza Hammond. Under the terms of this enactment, Miss Hammond had “forfeited to the town $1.62 for each day she had remained in it, since she was ordered to depart; and that in default of payment, she WAS TO BE WHIPPED ON THE NAKED BODY NOT EXCEEDING TEN STRIPES, unless she departed within ten days after conviction.” This brutality was avoided only when abolitionists of the vicinity managed to raise $10,000 to meet the financial demands of the obsolete law.

Meanwhile, Andrew Judson introduced a so-called “Black Law” into the General Assembly, which enacted it in the spring of 1833. Its preamble read as follows: “Attempts have been made to establish literacy institutions in this State for the instruction of colored persons belonging to other States and countries, which would tend to the great increase of the colored population of this State, and thereby to the injury of the people.” The act went on to provide that “every person, who shall set up or establish any school, academy, or literary institution, for the instruction or education of colored persons who are not inhabitants of Connecticut; or who shall teach in such school, or who shall board any colored pupil of such school, not an inhabitant of the State, shall forfeit one hundred dollars for the first offence, two hundred dollars for the second, and so on, doubling for each succeeding offence, unless the consent of the civil authority, and selectmen of the town, be previously obtained.”

With the passage of this measure, Canterbury was triumphant. Miss Crandall was arrested at once, imprisoned overnight while May and others collected the necessary bail, and eventually brought to trial before Judge Joseph Eaton and a jury at Brooklyn on August 23, 1833. Judson, appearing as prosecutor for the state, attacked Miss Crandall’s school as “a scheme, cunningly devised, to destroy the rich inheritance left by your fathers. The professed object is to educate the blacks, but the real object is to make the people yield their assent by degrees, to this universal amalgamation of the two races, and have the African race placed on a footing of perfect equality with the Americans.” He further contended that Negroes were not citizens of the United States within the meaning of the Constitution, and that therefore they could not enjoy the “privileges and immunities of white citizens.” W. W. Ellsworth, for the defense, maintained the precise opposite: that citizenship was a matter of birth or naturalization, not of color; that Negroes born in this country were therefore citizens; and that as such they were entitled to all the privileges of citizenship, including education, “the first and fundamental pillar on which our free institutions rest.” The jury, divided between these two points of view, could not agree. The case then went before Judge David Daggett of the State Supreme Court for retrial.

Daggett, a sometime professor of law at New Haven, had been among the more active opponents of Jocelyn’s proposed Negro school there. Now, in his charge to the jury, he categorically denied the citizenship of colored persons: “God forbid that I should add to the degradation of this race of men; but I am bound to say, by my duty, that they are not citizens.” Miss Crandall was convicted. On appeal to the Court of Errors, the verdict was set aside on technical grounds and she went free. The constitutionality of Connecticut’s Black Law was not called into question.

Having thus failed to stop Miss Crandall by legal means, the opponents of her school now had recourse to violence. First an attempt was made to set the building on fire. Then a mob came by night and broke out every window and window frame in the place. Miss Crandall had just been married, to the Reverend Calvin Philleo; at his insistence, she now closed the Canterbury school permanently, yielding the battle to her enemies. The battle, but not the war; for with her husband she removed to northern Illinois, where she was engaged in the education of Negroes for the rest of her active life.

The pattern of anti-Negro, anti-abolitionist violence set in the Crandall affair was repeated on a lesser scale in many parts of the state during the next years. In 1834 a mob raided an abolitionist meeting at the First Presbyterian Church in Norwich, drummed the parson out of town, and threatened him with tar and feathers if he returned. The following year saw a serious riot in Hartford, when a group of white roughs attacked Negroes on their way home from church.⁸ In Middletown, Cross Street was reported to be “crowded with those worse than southern bloodhounds.”⁹ In Meriden, when Reverend Henry Ludlow came to the Congregational church to deliver an abolitionist lecture, an infuriated crowd stoned the building, battered down the locked door, and pelted the congregation with rotten eggs and trash. Even in the birthplace of John Brown, Torrington, in 1837 the organization meeting of a new county abolition society was attacked by a proslavery mob, whose members had “elevated their courage with New England rum”; blowing horns, yelling, and beating on tin pans and kettles, they surrounded the un-heated barn where the meeting was held and broke up the gathering “by brute force.”¹⁰ Outbreaks of similar nature were reported during the 1830’s in other towns as well— New Haven, New Canaan, and Norwalk among them.¹¹

Most of these outrages appear to have been of more or less spontaneous nature—a matter of a few ringleaders surrounding themselves with a hastily gathered group of roughs who perhaps cared little about slavery one way or the other but who, warmed by liquor and hot words, were easy prey to the mob spirit and not at all averse to throwing eggs, destroying property, and pushing people around. The Danbury riots, however, bespoke greater purpose and more careful organization. Danbury was already a center for hat manufacturing, and the Southern trade had been important to it at least since 1800; indeed it was said to have “gained its growth largely by developing the Southern market.” Many of its citizens, therefore, sympathized with Southern views and had no patience with abolitionists. To this town, in 1837, came an itinerant anti-slavery lecturer, the Reverend Nathaniel Colver, who was scheduled to speak at the Baptist church. When the hour arrived for him to do so, a blast of trumpets was heard from near the courthouse; then immediately men charged into the streets from every direction, arranged themselves in military formation, and marched like an infantry regiment to the church. The congregation scattered at once; some of its members, along with two constables, hurried Colver to a private house. The rabble churned around outside for a while but finally dispersed. Colver was not easily scared off, however. He returned to the church, determined to deliver his message. Now the mob’s action was decisive; masked men blew up the building with gunpowder.¹²

Behind all these rowdy demonstrations, perhaps not condoning their violence and lawlessness but certainly sharing the same attitude toward abolitionists, there was a large segment of Connecticut’s most respectable citizens. One abolitionist paper went so far as to say that the troubles around Norwalk were sparked by “ministers, magistrates, lawyers, doctors, merchants and hatters.”¹³ Undoubtedly there were many ordinary persons who agreed with Mrs. Frances Breckenridge of Meriden: “Some of the sympathy for the slave might as well be given to the owner. Let any Northern housekeeper select the most idle, insolent, thievish and exasperating servant she ever knew or heard of and multiply by a dozen or two and she will have a faint idea of one of the trials of the Southern housekeeper.”¹⁴ Or with the two men who, having worked on a Southern plantation where there were slaves, came back to report that they “didn’t think niggers wuz fit fer ennythin but ter be made ter wuk fer white folks.”¹⁵

All during the decade, indeed, the Connecticut Colonization Society continued to preach its gospel of salvation-through-separation. One of its leading spokesmen was Willbur Fisk, president of the newly established Wesleyan University in Middletown, who declared in 1835:

African Colonization is predicated on the principle that there is an utter aversion in the public mind, to an amalgamation and equalization of the two races; and that any attempt to press such equalization is not only fruitless, but injurious… . Hence this society lifts up the man of color, at once from his connections and disabilities; and places him beyond the influence of the shackles of prejudice.¹⁶

Other colonizationists set forth the view that no good would befall the escaped slave in Canada, that Africa was his only hope. As one of them phrased it:

A few months since I was traveling near to Canada, and desiring to see the result of freedom, as they found it in their northern flight, with their eyes fixed on the pole star … I inquired about them, and I found that when they first came there they were docile and full of hope, but soon their appearances changed, they lost their buoyancy of spirits,—became indolent, unwilling to submit to the restraints of society which the whites submit to, and as a necessary consequence, a large number of them were in the penitentiary, and others are in the greatest state of want and wretchedness… . There is no advantage gained by going to Canada. Go and sit with the colored man, and ask him where do you find your best friends? And he will tell you among the colonizationists.¹⁷

But the free Negroes of Connecticut were saying no such thing. Hartford’s colored inhabitants adopted a resolution that the Colonization Society was “actuated by the same motives which influenced the Pharaoh when he demanded that the male children of Israel be destroyed.” Those of New Haven declared that they would “resist all attempts made for their removal to the torrid shores of Africa, and would sooner suffer every drop of blood to be taken from their veins than submit to such unrighteous treatment by colonizationists.”¹⁸ From the free Negroes of Lyme came “the sincere opinion that the Colonization Society was one of the wildest projects ever patronized by enlightened men.” From Middletown, where Joseph Gilbert and Jehiel Beman were among Negro leaders, came the question: “Why should we leave this land, so dearly bought by the blood, groans and tears of our fathers? Truly this is our home, here let us live and here let us die.”¹⁹

That most Connecticut Negroes shared such views is evident. In twenty years, from 1830 to 1850, only ten Negroes altogether sailed from Connecticut ports to Liberia—approximately one per eight hundred of population. It is possible that others sailed from ports in other states, but the total cannot have been great, for the number of emigrants sent to Africa by the Colonization Society from the entire country amounted to less than ten thousand in all the years from 1820 to 1857.²⁰ In Negro eyes, the answer to the slavery problem remained what it had been: in the long run, abolition and equality; in the immediate moment, escape to free soil, preferably to Canada.

Despite all the violence and the legal penalties, there were citizens willing to help runaway slaves in any way they could. The Underground Railroad was now taking definite shape, and not even Connecticut’s own fugitive slave law of 1835 could stop it. This measure, supplementing the federal law of 1793, provided that “no person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up, on the claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” The fugitives who succeeded in reaching the Nutmeg State could look for no official help in their quest for freedom.²¹

But they could look for direct and immediate aid from dedicated abolitionists like Samuel J. May, who later stated that he had begun receiving fugitives “addressed to my care” at Brooklyn as early as 1834; and that he “helped them on to that excellent man, Effingham L. Capron, in Uxbridge, afterwards in Worcester, and he forwarded them to secure retreats.”²² They could look, too, to a climate of opinion that was slowly shifting in their favor. Under the impetus of William Lloyd Garrison and his Liberator, antislavery speakers were increasingly active, and abolitionist publications were growing in numbers, circulation, and influence. Books like Theodore Weld’s anthology American Slavery As It Is had nationwide impact.²³ Connecticut had its own antislavery periodicals, too—the Christian Freeman, published in Hartford from 1836 onward, and the Charter Oak, founded in 1838. There was also one issued at New London, the Slave’s Cry. Their circulations were limited, yet the Charter Oak’s 3000 subscribers in 1839 compared favorably with the approximately 5500 readers enjoyed by the Connecticut Courant, a leading general newspaper, in the same era.²⁴ It was estimated that by this time “the number of anti-slavery publications reached a total of over a million.”²⁵ Much of the abolitionist writing was in the form of tracts, issued by the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which played up the barbarous treatment of slaves by quoting advertisements from Southern newspapers:

Ranaway, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off, I burnt her face, I tried to make the letter M.

Ranaway a negro man named Henry, his left eye out, some scars from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.

Ranaway a negro named Arthur, has a considerable scar across his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the goodness of God.

Ranaway a negro girl called Mary, has a small scar over her eye, a good many teeth missing, the letter A. is branded on her cheek and forehead.

Fifty dollars reward, for my fellow Edward, he has a scar in the corner of his mouth, two cuts on and under his arm, and the letter E. on his arm.²⁶

Just how much influence such publications had in arousing public sympathy for the slave it would be impossible to determine, but it was sufficient to stir the ire of the Southern slavocracy. A meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, adopted resolutions against the “incendiary literature” of Northern abolitionists and mailed copies to “each incorporated city and town in the United States.”²⁷ In Hartford and in New Haven, these Charleston resolutions were supported by mass meetings of proslavery citizens, who further resolved that abolitionists in Connecticut and elsewhere had “no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them in different states.”²⁸

None the less, the abolitionist propaganda made itself felt in many groups, not least the General Assembly. In 1838, that body repealed the notorious Black Law that had struck down Prudence Crandall’s school; and it did so at the insistence of one of the measure’s original backers, Phillip Pearl, who had been converted to the antislavery cause by Theodore Weld. “I could weep tears of blood for the part I took in that matter,” Pearl said. “I now regard the law as utterly abominable.”²⁹

In that same year the Assembly took an even more important step in the direction of freedom by enacting one of the most detailed personal liberty laws in the union. This measure, while not extending automatic emancipation to runaways who reached Connecticut, severely limited the activities of slave-hunters by providing that “no officer, or other person can remove out of the State any fugitive slave under the laws of any other state in the Union” except in accordance with the following:

1. The claimant must fill out an affidavit, setting forth minutely the grounds for claiming the fugitive, “the time of his or her escape, and where he or she then is, or is believed to be.”

2. The claimant must obtain a writ of habeas corpus or a writ to bring the alleged fugitive to court, where the fugitive would be tried by a jury of twelve men, none of whom would be an abolitionist.

3. The claimant must pay in advance all fees and expenses of the proceeding; and if the alleged fugitive were acquitted, the claimant must pay to him “all damages and costs” determined by court or jury.

4. If the alleged fugitive were found to be in fact the claimant’s legal property, then the claimant must remove him from the state with all due haste by “direct route to the place of residence of such claimant.”³⁰

Not everyone in the state was pleased by this enactment. The influential Columbian Register of New Haven, for instance, inveighed against it:

If we put severe penalties upon those who attempt to enforce the laws of the Union, which secured to them their labor, they can put as severe or severer penalties on those who attempt to enforce within their limits the tariff laws, which secure to us our labor. Are the northern manufacturers ready for this? … Why then has the negro Act been selected in preference to the others, for this special legislation? But one answer can be given. The New England Anti-Slavery Society recently voted that southern slave holders are thieves and robbers.³¹

The law nevertheless reflected a growing concern for justice to the Negro who might or might not be a runaway slave; it demanded legal proof of his status, and it called for a fair trial of the accused fugitive before a jury. It thus helped to focus public attention on the victims of slavery.

By this time, the victims themselves had been escaping to and through Connecticut for four decades in a constantly increasing stream.