Table
of Contents
Study
Areas:
Slavery
Anti-Slavery
Free
Persons of Color
Underground
Railroad
The
Violent Decade
US
Colored Troops
Civil
War
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Chapter
Eight
Backlash, Violence and Fear: The Violent Decade
The
Law is an Abomination
The
following weeks brought a cool down as the dog
days of August waned into September’s more temperate autumnal
spells. The cool down in the weather mirrored a gradual lowering
of the town’s level of hostility, allowing memories of the
violence of late August to fade into September’s back-to-business
mood. But business this year included a game-changing shift in
how local lawmakers dealt with fugitive slaves, with the signing
by President Millard Fillmore of the Fugitive Slave Law. Suddenly
everything was taken out of the hands of President Judge John J.
Pearson, and all other local judges for that matter.
Instead
of a trial, accused fugitive slaves were hauled before a specially
appointed United States Commissioner for a hearing to determine their
fate. This hearing dispensed with most of the legal trappings of a
trial, and streamlined the process of deciding whether to certify slaves
for return south, or of setting them free. Slave owners were no longer
required to produce written documentation to prove ownership of an
accused slave. All that was required under the new law was a sworn
affidavit from the owner that the person they sought was actually their
runaway slave. If the owner could not be present at the hearing, the
affidavit could come from a third party acting as their agent.
Accused
fugitive slaves completely lost their voice in the hearings: testimony
from them was specifically denied, they had no right to be represented
by an attorney, nor could they summon witnesses to testify on their
behalf. If anyone at all was allowed to say anything in defense of
the accused slaves, it had to be a white man who was offering voluntary
testimony. All African Americans other than the accused were shut out
of the hearing completely. The hearing itself could be conducted at
any hour of the day or night, with no requirement that advance notice
of any kind had to be provided to the public.
In
short, all that was required for a white Southern man to enslave an
African American resident of the North was his sworn word that the
person was a runaway slave. If the Federal Slave Commissioner believed
him, he remanded the accused person south with the slave catcher, and
collected ten dollars for his efforts. The Commissioner could then
appoint as many marshals as he needed to conduct the slave catcher
and the returning slave safely home.
If
the Commissioner decided to free the alleged slave, he could do so,
but collected only five dollars for his decision. This disparity in
fees collected for different outcomes appeared to abolitionists to
be an incentive for Federal Commissioners to favor the claims of slave
owners and their agents. The Commissioners themselves defended the
higher payment for remanding slaves to their owners as being necessary
to cover the extra paperwork that they had to prepare and file when
slaves were returned, but this explanation was far from satisfactory
to those who thought it was a thinly disguised moneymaking scheme.
If
the hearing procedures were not odious enough to Northern anti-slavery
advocates, the mandatory enforcement requirements certainly were. All
citizens were now required by the Fugitive Slave Act to assist federal
officers in enforcing and upholding the new law. Anyone who obstructed
enforcement, or who harbored or aided a suspected fugitive slave in
any way, could be imprisoned or fined, or both. Slaveholders were further
empowered to sue such persons for up to $1,000 per slave. Obstruction
of the law, and aid to fugitives was very liberally defined in the
statutes, making simple acts such as offering a wagon ride or providing
a meal to strange African Americans very dangerous.
The
effect of the law on the security of free African Americans living
in the North was perceived by most Northerners to be highly detrimental.
Many questioned whether the new law was even constitutional, and held
out hope that it would be repealed by Congress. One Pennsylvania politician
who had fought against adoption of the entire Omnibus Bill, and the
Fugitive Slave Law in particular, was U.S. Representative Thaddeus
Stevens, who had been recently elected to Congress as a representative
from Lancaster. Although he immediately introduced legislation to repeal
the hated law, and would continue to work for its repeal as long as
it was on the books, he foresaw only trouble for African Americans
in the free states, and advised them to “put themselves beyond
its reach.” Many did so, uprooting themselves from communities
in which they had dwelt without fear for decades, and abandoned the
United States for Canada.
In
Columbia, a Lancaster County town which had sheltered large numbers
of African American residents since the beginning of the century, and
which was a valuable hub of abolitionist and Underground Railroad activity,
hundreds of residents packed their possessions and headed for the northern
U.S. border. Local African American businessman William Whipper remained,
and performed a valuable service to those who were leaving by acting
as their agent during the sale of their homes and property.13 Many
other towns and cites across Pennsylvania saw the loss of large number
of African American residents.
Harrisburg
may have been an exception to this Canadian migration over the long
run, as its percentage of African American residents remained fairly
constant through the Fugitive Slave Law years, and most of the town’s
prominent African American families remained.
Immediately
after the appointment of a U.S. Slave Commissioner to Harrisburg in
1850, though, there was a noticeable drop in the number of strange
African American faces on the streets of town. Newspaper editor Theophilus
Fenn editorialized that “it is supposed that more than a hundred
have left for Canada and other parts. They had better go—that
is, those who are not well known here.” Despite this desertion
of recent arrivals, most established families stayed.
There
was, however, an effort on the part of many of Harrisburg’s southern-born
African American citizens to hide the fact that they had been born
in a slave state. When reporting their state of birth to census takers
in early August 1850, the month during which the Fugitive Slave Bill
was being debated in Congress, a number of them told census takers
that they had been born in Pennsylvania. By 1870, after all danger
of being claimed as a runaway slave had passed, many of these same
residents reported being born in Virginia, Maryland, or other southern
states.14
A
Chilling Effect on the Underground Railroad
The
effect of the new law on the Underground Railroad operations in Pennsylvania,
at least at first, was also severe. African American residents provided
yeoman’s service in this undertaking, not only in Harrisburg
but also in almost every Pennsylvania town and city in which it operated.
They provided valuable intelligence, intercepted newly arriving freedom
seekers as they entered town, sheltered them in their homes, sewed
new clothes for them, cooked for them, tended to their injuries and
illnesses, guided them between stops, and found work for them when
they stopped running. It was primarily African American crowds that
supported captured runaways with their presence in the streets outside
of courthouses. African American guards stood watch outside of safe
houses, and African American activists diverted lawmen during rescue
attempts. White lawyers were generally working for African American
clients when they represented freedom seekers in courts.
So
when large numbers of African Americans permanently left their homes
in fear for their freedom, or decided to maintain a low profile by
lying about their place of birth, it caused a significant disruption
to established routines and routes. S. R. McAllister, whose father
James McAllister actively aided many fugitive slaves in Gettysburg,
condemned the new law because it “made stars and stripes a libel—and
every man a Negro catcher.” He went on to note, “It got
to be very risky as there was money in it and imprisonment back of
it.”
These
factors, combined with a zealous enforcement of the new law by the
U. S. Commissioner in Harrisburg, led to a significant rise in the
number of slaves captured in Harrisburg and the surrounding area during
the next three years. Local anti-slavery activists, who had many of
their plans thwarted and saw many freedom seekers successfully hunted
down and hauled into a hearing before the new Commissioner, could count
precious few victories after August 1850.
Much
of this frustration was due to the actions of the Harrisburg Commissioner
himself. Three Federal Commissioners were appointed to hear cases in
Pennsylvania, with each one being responsible for his defined district.
The central third of the state fell under the jurisdiction of Harrisburg
lawyer Richard Cox McAllister, a grandson of Colonel Archibald McAllister,
who greatly expanded the Fort Hunter estate north of Harrisburg. McAllister
was appointed to the position by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger
Brooke Taney on September 30, 1850. Once appointed, he took to his
work with an enthusiastic zeal and undisguised pro-southern bias.
As
mentioned earlier, many persons in Harrisburg harbored deeply held
sentiments toward the southern states, but Richard McAllister had stronger
ties than most. He was born at Fort Hunter in 1819, and was educated
locally, studying law at Dickinson College in Carlisle. After graduation
from Dickinson, he traveled to Georgia and entered the law office of
his cousin, prominent Georgia jurist and politician Matthew Hall McAllister.
While in Georgia, Richard McAllister courted and married a young woman
from New York, Cecelia Hoffman.
The
young couple eventually returned to Harrisburg where McAllister resumed
the study of law under Hamilton Alricks, and he was admitted to the
Bar of Dauphin County in November 1841 under the sponsorship of Esquire
Alricks. He was appointed to the post of Deputy Attorney General of
Pennsylvania, under family friend Governor Francis R. Shunk, but lost
the post after Shunk resigned in 1848. When the federal post for slave
commissioner became available in the late summer of 1850, McAllister,
back to being a Harrisburg lawyer, lobbied for and won appointment
to the controversial post.15
He
established the office of the United States Commissioner in a two-story
frame building on the north side of Walnut Street, next to the Exchange
Building, and immediately began to hear cases. His first, on the same
day that he was appointed, was the case of George Brooks and Samuel
Wilson, the two accused fugitive slaves held on assault charges in
the riot of last August. As if on cue, Virginian William Taylor arrived
in his office with Brooks and Wilson in tow, who he brought from their
prison cell across Walnut Street after formally dropping the assault
charges against them.
Also
in the Commissioner’s office was Harrisburg attorney Charles
C. Rawn, appearing in the employ of William Jones in defense of the
two prisoners. Rawn found, however, that defending accused fugitive
slaves under the new law was entirely different and extremely challenging—to
the point of being an exercise in futility—as he was banned from
using his traditional defense strategies during the hearing.
In
fact, he found that he was allowed to play little part in the proceedings
at all. The only testimony and evidence, Rawn noted in his personal
journal, was a sworn oath by Taylor and one other witness, at which
the Commissioner promptly decided the case in Taylor’s favor.
Rawn watched as the two slaves were taken out of the office by their
master, accompanied by a federal posse made up of Harrisburg men, authorized
by Richard McAllister. Later that day he vented his frustration at
being unable to influence the decision, writing in his journal, “the
law is an abomination and the hearing a farce.”16
McAllister’s
decision to return the fugitives to Virginia effectively ended the
episode that had caused Harrisburg’s largest anti-slavery riot,
and it began a period of highly dramatic and emotional incidents that
would change the very nature of Harrisburg’s Underground Railroad
and anti-slavery operations.
The
activists who had been arrested for riot, including Joseph Pople, William
Jones, Franklin Robison, Gabriel Murray, Charles Denny, Thomas Early,
Henry Bradley, and James Williams, were fortunate to have the support
not only of the Harrisburg African American community, but also of
many prominent white residents, a large number of whom signed a petition
to free the persons held as rioters.
The
list of signatories, not surprisingly, included persons who were well-known
advocates of the anti-slavery cause, such as John Andrew Weir, Rudolph
Frederick Kelker, John Parke Rutherford, and Samuel S. Rutherford,
all of whom had been members of the old Harrisburg Anti-Slavery Society
in the 1830s.
The
petition, however, also included among its fifty signatures those of
many men who were not openly associated with anti-slavery causes. The
names of Robert A. Lamberton and John C. Kunkel, two of the three lawyers
who had represented the Virginian William Taylor in the original trial
appeared on the petition, as did the signature of the Reverend William
Radcliff DeWitt, the influential long-time pastor of Harrisburg’s
Presbyterian Church; noted attorney Herman Alricks, who had sponsored
the nomination of Richard McAllister to the Dauphin County Bar in 1841;
Jacob M. Haldeman, a Harrisburg entrepreneur and businessman who was
vested in much of the local infrastructure; and former Pennsylvania
Governor David Rittenhouse Porter, whose 1838 campaign exploited Joseph
Ritner’s supposed abolitionist leanings and his association with
Thaddeus Stevens.
The
weight of these signatures and those of many other prominent Harrisburg
lawyers, businessmen, and military veterans convinced Judge John J.
Pearson that the petition represented more than an abolitionist effort.
He agreed to dismiss charges against the African American rioters upon
a motion of nolle prosequi from the prosecutors in court records,
and the men were all set free.
The
support for the anti-slavery rioters, however, came with a warning.
The town’s newspapers, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, backed
the necessity of enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law as a means of keeping
peace between the North and South.17 The
effort of the rioters to free the slaves was seen as a final outburst
on the eve of the new law, and as a tactic that must not be repeated.
“Te
Suth’ners ish Cummin to Purn Harrispurg”
However,
satisfaction with Judge Pearson’s wisdom in settling the
case was not shared by many Southern observers. His failure to
allow William
Taylor and his party to take charge of the three men immediately,
followed by the charges of inciting riot that were lodged against
Taylor, were
all causes for indignation and even rage from many Southern politicians
and newspaper editors. In their eyes, this was just another effort
on the part of a local judge to frustrate their constitutional
right to pursue fugitive slaves. The editor of the Hagerstown Herald
of Freedom opined:
While there
are many citizens in Pennsylvania who recognize and advocate the
right of the Slave-owner to his property, the masses of them do
not; even the Judge upon the Bench scruples not to disrobe himself
of the ermine of Justice to rescue the fugitive slave from the
hands of his master. In proof of this, we need only refer to the
recent outrageous violation of every principle of justice by a
Harrisburg Judge, in the case of Taylor’s negroes. The truth
is, that the Slave States must have protection in this particular,
or else a fierce border warfare will sooner or later take place.18
The Harrisburg
decision inspired the editor of the Richmond Enquirer to even
greater vehemence, as if the threat of a border war was not frightening
enough. In a truly frightening and irresponsible editorial, the unnamed
editor advocated an immediate and bloody policy of total war against
Northern communities—an ironic stance given that the paper’s
longtime editor, Thomas Ritchie, backed the Compromise of 1850, an
effort that brought great calumny upon him from fellow Southerners,
and went to great pains advocating for civil discourse in the nation’s
public newspapers.
But Ritchie,
by this time, was editing newspapers in the nation’s capital,
and another editorial writer was at his old desk at the Enquirer. This
unnamed editor—more than likely one of Ritchie’s sons,
William F. or Thomas Jr.—wrote that “the people of the
neighboring Southern States should make [Northerners] know and respect
the law of the sword, the rifle, the tar barrel, and the grape vine… a
foray into Pennsylvania or Ohio, with burnings to the ground of a few
such towns as Harrisburg, and the hanging of a few such judges as this
ermined thief named Pierson [sic]…would soon teach the amalgamating
inhabitants of Pennsylvania, that this stealing of [slaves] is not
the delightful amusement they now take it to be.”
The fiery
editorial went on to compare violent border retributive raids with
the Christian destruction of “lawless” Moorish cities,
and “a hundred-fold return of the scalping-knife and tomahawk” by
white settlers against the “Indians of the frontier.” In
one very ominous sentence, the editorial warned, “That time is
returning” and promised that Northern “plunderers” would
be dealt with by “hangings and shootings.”
Few Northern
editors took this panegyric to vigilante justice seriously, and even
the abolitionist press refused to become overly worked up over it.
William Lloyd Garrison, who was himself the object of regular death
threats from pro-slavery writers, reproduced the editorial in its entirety
in the pages of the Liberator with a dismissive aside about
the Southern editor being “dreadfully excited.”
The Daily
Ohio State Journal printed excerpts of the editorial in a piece
that poked fun at Pennsylvania German farmers who took the threats
too seriously, to the point of fleeing the border counties in fear
of a general border war. The article “Mine Dream. A Sleepy
Dutchman and the Fugitive Law,” purported to tell the story
of Diedrich Blinckenstaffer, a simple Pennsylvania German farmer
in one of the southern border counties who suffered nightmares when
he heard that “te Suth’ners ish cummin to purn Harrispurg.”19
Although
the article satirically downplayed the threat of violence as something
only gullible farm boys would worry about, the rage that generated
it was very real, and it would flare up into a series of shockingly
violent incidents involving central Pennsylvania during the next eighteen
months.
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Notes
13. Benjamin
Quarles, Black Abolitionists (1969; repr., Cambridge: Da Capo,
1991), 199-200.
14. The Theophilus
Fenn quote on African American residents leaving for Canada is from
Eggert, “Impact,” 555.
Gerald G. Eggert analyzed computerized census returns for Harrisburg,
for 1850, 1860, and 1870. In comparing the responses of Harrisburg’s
African American residents in regard to their place of birth, he found
that the shift between reported Free State birth and Slave State birth
among tracked respondents was statistically significant enough to indicate
an early intent to deceive. He wrote “By a margin of two-to-one
in 1860 the shifts favored safety; in 1870 they shifted in the direction
of candor by a margin of three-to-one.” Eggert, “Two Steps
Forward,” 13.
15. Caba, Episodes
of Gettysburg, 58-59; Mary Catharine McAllister, Descendants
of Archibald McAllister, of West Pennsboro Township, Cumberland County,
Pa. 1730-1898 (Harrisburg: Scheffer’s Printing and Bookbinding
House, 1898), 14-19, 79.
Edward D. Ingraham served as U.S. Commissioner for the eastern third
of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, until his death in November 1854.
16. Eggert, “Impact,” 545;
Entry for 30 September 1850, “The Rawn Journals.”
17. Eggert, “Impact,” 554-555;
Kelker, History of Dauphin County, 2:644.
18. Gettysburg
Star and Banner, 6 September 1850.
19. Liberator,
11 October 1850; Daily Ohio State Journal, 19 November 1850.
The State Journal credits the Tecumseh (Ohio) Herald for
the article. The highly inflammatory Richmond Enquirer article
was probably the work of Thomas Ritchie, Jr., who took over editorial
responsibility of the newspaper from his father, Thomas Ritchie. Unlike
his father, who took pains to print opposing viewpoints in an effort
to raise the intellectual and nonpartisan reputation of the Enquirer,
the younger Ritchie apparently had a taste for the use of slander against
his political foes. In 1846, under his editorship, the Enquirer charged
rival Whig newspaper editor John Hampden Pleasants with planning to start
an abolitionist newspaper. Pleasants denied the statement, but Ritchie
continued his attacks in the pages of the Enquirer, charging
that Pleasants was attempting to “Out Herod [King] Herod,” and
finally accusing him of cowardice and of hiding behind his family and
children. Pleasants rather unwisely challenged the young Ritchie to a
duel to defend his honor. The two men met at sunrise along the James
River, and in a gruesome affair, Ritchie put five bullets into the rival
editor, who came at him with a sword and a Bowie knife. Pleasants suffered
for five days before dying of his wounds. Ritchie was acquitted of murder
in a highly publicized trial.
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