Twelve

TRIALS OF CONSCIENCE

1.

In November 1849, almost a year before the fugitive slave law went into effect, four young black men fled Baltimore County, Maryland, where they were kept as slaves by a wheat farmer named Edward Gorsuch. Gorsuch, who prided himself on being a lenient master, had been coming around slowly to an antislavery view and had even promised to emancipate his slaves. He was not prepared, however, to free them until they reached the age of twenty-eight, and when they chose not to wait, he was offended. The offense was compounded in his mind when he discovered that before they left, they had been pilfering his wheat.

Time did nothing to temper Gorsuch’s anger. In August 1851, he learned that two of his former slaves were living with a black farmer, William Parker, in a free black community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, near the town of Christiana. That region of central Pennsylvania had a history of conflict between its substantial black population (more than three thousand persons by 1850) and white kidnappers who ran a thriving business of abduction and sale to buyers in the South. Some of these human traffickers grabbed any black man, woman, or child off the road or from the fields who seemed likely to fetch a good price. Others, pretending to observe the legal niceties, surveilled their prey before sending a physical description to southern collaborators, who would then obtain a certificate (often fraudulent) authorizing capture. Under these conditions, the black community was on high alert, which rose higher with the passage of the fugitive slave law. William Parker, who had escaped from slavery in Kentucky twelve years earlier, was among the leaders of what has been called a “secret black militia” tasked with the job of community protection.

Into this patrolled zone, on September 11, 1851, Edward Gorsuch arrived with several men including his own son and a deputy U.S. marshal, Henry Kline, who carried a warrant for the arrest of Gorsuch’s former slaves. They were greeted by a crowd of black men wielding shovels, clubs, and a number of guns. Also in the greeting party was an unarmed white neighbor of Parker’s, Castner Hanway, a man of Quaker sympathies who warned the slave catchers to leave before things got ugly.

Three months later, at Hanway’s trial, Kline recalled their encounter. Mr. Hanway, he said, was “sitting on a sorrel horse, and [I] went up to him and said, ‘Good morning, sir,’ and he made no reply. I then asked him his name, and he allowed it was none of my business.” Kline then handed him the warrant, which Hanway read “not only once, but twice” while “some fifteen or twenty . . . colored people” watched.

U.S. district attorney John W. Ashmead asked Kline to tell the court exactly what Mr. Hanway “said at the time”:

After I got through telling him . . . who I was, and he had refused to assist me, I told him what the Act of Congress was, and urged him to assist me. After I had told him my warrants, he read them and handed them back, and he said the colored people had a right to defend themselves, and he was not going to help me, and I asked if he would keep them away, and he said No,—he would not have anything to do with them.

Ashmead then asked Kline to tell the court and jury what happened next. “After he refused,” said Kline,

I told him what the act of Congress was as near as I could tell him. That any person aiding or abetting a fugitive slave, and resisting an officer, the punishment was $1000 damages for the slave, and I think to the best of my knowledge imprisonment for five years. I told him that. He said he did not care for any act of Congress or any other law. That is what he said.

The standoff continued. Gorsuch refused to leave, his former slaves refused to surrender, gunfire broke out, and he was mortally wounded. The younger Gorsuch, too, was shot, though not fatally. The hunters retreated in panic, and Parker, along with several others—presumably including the targeted fugitives—fled north through New York. At Rochester, they were aided by Frederick Douglass, who helped them get passage to Canada.

2.

Three weeks after the events at Christiana and three hundred miles almost due north, another uprising took place against another attempt to execute the fugitive slave law. On October 1, 1851, while the Liberty Party was holding its convention in Syracuse, New York, a red-haired, light-skinned black man (he had probably been fathered by his mother’s master) who had fled from slavery in 1844 was seized as a fugitive in the barrel-making shop where he worked. Known as Jerry, he was arrested for what seems to have been a trumped-up misdemeanor charge designed to convince him that he should submit quietly, which he did. Upon arriving at the office of U.S. commissioner Joseph F. Sabine, he was confronted by an agent of his most recent owner in Missouri and told that he was under detention as a runaway.

For reasons of conscience or prudence or some combination of both, Sabine was queasy about the fugitive slave law and nervous about trying to enforce it. Leading white and black abolitionists, including Gerrit Smith, Samuel J. May, and Samuel Ringgold Ward, were either residents or regular visitors in Syracuse, each with a popular following. “It is cowardly to resign before my first case comes to trial,” the commissioner confided to his wife, “but what else can I do?” Trying to encourage him, she advised, “Hold on to your commission,” and “let no other man have your place.”

Sabine held on long enough to see an angry crowd invade his office while he tried to conduct Jerry’s hearing. A few minutes into the proceedings, Jerry broke free and dashed out an open doorway while the crowd got between him and his pursuers. His arms still in shackles, he ran through the streets until two officers caught, beat, and threw him into a cart to take him back. One witness recalled that the scene “made me ashamed of the land of my native country; a country of which I had been taught to be proud. I saw this fugitive from, not justice, but injustice, dragged through the streets like a dog, every rag of clothes stripped from his back; hauled upon a cart like a dead carcass and driven away to the police office for a mock trial.”

Barricaded now in a more secure room at the police station, Jerry kept up a wild screaming until, at the request of the police chief, May and Ward came to pacify him. The clerical visitors succeeded in calming him down—not by persuading him to accept his fate, but by assuring him that he would be rescued soon.

By the time the hearing resumed late that afternoon, it seemed likely that the prisoner would be acquitted. But Smith, who was thinking beyond Jerry and Syracuse, had concluded that “the moral effect of such an acquittal will be as nothing to a bold and forcible rescue.” Estimated by another resistance leader, the former slave Jermain Loguen, at more than twenty-five hundred people, the crowd started throwing rocks and bricks through the police station windows. When one stone barely missed the commissioner’s head, he stopped the hearing without any plan to resume it.

Shortly after nightfall, the full-fledged attack began. Armed with clubs, axes, and a battering ram, a group of black and white men smashed into the building, broke into the room where Jerry was being held, and overwhelmed the guards. Jerry was spirited away and hidden by sympathizers for several days at several locations throughout the city while arrangements were made to get him to Canada.

While these events were taking place in Syracuse, back in Pennsylvania the Christiana conflict had moved from William Parker’s farmhouse to a Philadelphia courtroom. On October 6, a grand jury issued a first slate of indictments of twenty-eight black men and four whites on multiple counts of treason (more indictments would follow), including the Quaker Castner Hanway, who was accused of leading the mob and was the first to stand trial. The Hanway trial, which ran from the last week of November until mid-December 1851, captured the nation’s attention like no other until the prosecution of John Brown in 1859.

Conservative newspapers demanded that the Christiana rioters suffer “the penalty of Treason—hanging by the neck,” while, like Shadrach’s rescuers in Boston, the defenders at Christiana were celebrated in the antislavery press as heirs to the heroes of the American Revolution. In the Voice of the Fugitive, Henry Bibb’s paper published at his refuge in Windsor, Ontario, Bibb wrote a tribute to William Parker:

This man deserves the admiration of a Hannibal, a Toussaint L’Ouverture, or a George Washington. A nobler defense was never made in behalf of liberty on the plains of Lexington, Concord, or Bunker Hill than was put forth by William Parker at Christiana.

Hanway’s legal team included Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who had once represented a slave owner seeking return of his runaway but was now a fierce antislavery man. Presiding was Justice Robert Grier of the U.S. Supreme Court (it was still customary for Supreme Court justices to travel the circuit hearing cases in the federal courts), who is mainly remembered today for voting with the majority in the notorious Dred Scott case of 1857. Grier was assisted by district judge John Kane, a unionist Democrat who had presided over several fugitive slave cases in his Philadelphia courtroom located in, of all places, Liberty Hall—some of which resulted in rendition, some in acquittal.

Perhaps because of the glare of publicity, the complexity of the questions at issue, or simply the dread of a long trial, a stream of prospective jurors during voir dire asked to be excused—a request to which Judge Grier reacted with a mixture of exasperation and sympathy:

MR. MASSEY (a prospective juror). “My disease is angina pectoris, I have to walk very slowly, and then frequently have to stop. . . . Any violent exertion will bring on the disease.”

JUDGE GRIER. “But sitting still would not bring it on.”

MR. MASSEY. “Any agitation will bring it on.”

JUDGE GRIER. “I am in nearly the same situation myself.”

Another prospective juror feared he would be unable to follow the testimony:

MR. TAYLOR. “I am hard of hearing at the best of times, and at present I labor under a very severe cold in the head, and it affects my hearing; and I should be unwilling to sit upon a case of so great importance, unless I could hear all the evidence presented.”

JUDGE GRIER. “Your disease has become epidemic to-day. Mark him excused.”

With a jury finally impaneled, the trial got under way on November 24. It soon became evident that the real issue at stake would be not the behavior of the defendant—against whom the charge of inciting violence grew more implausible with each witness—but whether breaking the fugitive slave law constituted treason. In this sense, Webster, who had insisted ever since the Shadrach rescue that defying the fugitive slave law was a treasonable act because it threatened the Republic, was present in the courtroom in principle if not in person.

After the concluding arguments, Judge Grier made clear in his charge to the jury that he had no patience with challenges to the fugitive slave law itself:

It may not be said of this law, or perhaps of any other, that it is perfect, or the best that could possibly be enacted; or that it is incapable of amendment. But this may truly be said, that while there are so many discordant opinions on the subject, it is not possible that a better compromise will be made; and, most probably, none of us will live to see an Act on this subject made to please everyone.

But when it came to Webster’s assertion that breaking the law amounted to treason, the judge was having none of it. “The resistance of the execution of a law of the United States accompanied with any degree of force, if for a private purpose, is not treason,” he said. “To constitute that offence the object of the resistance must be of a public and general nature.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given his failure six years later to dissent in the Dred Scott case from Chief Justice Taney’s opinion that the black man had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” Grier expressed sympathy for the resisters, especially those who were black:

Individuals without any authority, but incited by cupidity, and the hope of obtaining the reward offered for the return of a fugitive, had heretofore undertaken to seize them by force and violence, to invade the sanctity of private dwellings at night, and insult the feelings and prejudices of the people. It is not to be wondered at that a people subject to such inroads, should consider odious the perpetrators of such deeds and denominate them kidnappers—and that the subjects of this treatment should have been encouraged in resisting such aggressions.

When the jury took barely ten minutes to return a verdict of not guilty, the prosecutor dropped all remaining indictments against all others charged in the Christiana incident.

3.

The foregoing events—the Hamlet case; the escapes by the Crafts and by Shadrach; the Sims rendition; the rescue of Jerry; the armed defense (or attack, depending on one’s point of view) at Christiana, whose name, like “Stonewall” in the next century, became a byword for a nascent resistance movement—all did their part to inflame the nation. Yet if one could draw a map of mid-century America showing the variable intensity of public opinion, the places where most people remained cool would have outnumbered those where many had caught the fever.

In the North, a quiet if not silent majority still wanted to believe that fugitive slaves were somebody else’s problem. In the South, the publicized rescues sparked outrage, even though, as one scholar remarks, “compared with the number of slaves returned, the number of rescues was small”—not to mention that the total number of fugitives, recaptured or not, was incomparably smaller in relation to the enslaved millions. It is also true that some features of the fugitive slave law that seem outrageous now in retrospect—the prohibition of testimony by the accused, for example—were less controversial at the time, even among opponents of the law. Most defendants in civil and criminal cases in antebellum America, on the premise that they were interested parties whose testimony could not be trusted, were not permitted to testify on their own behalf. Cross-examination was not yet an accepted courtroom practice, and the first state to permit defendants to testify in civil disputes was Connecticut, in 1848. Massachusetts did not allow testimony by criminal defendants until 1866. In this context, the exclusion of testimony from accused fugitives was neither extreme nor unusual.

At the same time, in the disapproving words of one federal judge, more and more Americans seemed to be embracing a “new discovery in ethics; that there are obligations and duties depending upon the dictates of conscience of a higher nature than the laws of our country.” This discovery had once belonged to intellectuals like Thoreau, who used the phrase “higher law” in his 1849 essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (better known as “Civil Disobedience”), in which he wrote that “the only obligation I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.” It was Emerson’s principle of self-reliance put into practice.

First delivered as a speech in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican War, Thoreau’s essay was written before the idea of individual immunity to the rule of law was given new impetus by the fugitive slave bill. Early in 1850, while the bill was still under debate in Congress, Henry Ward Beecher declared that “if the compromises of the Constitution include requisites that violate Humanity, I shall not be bound by them.” Once the bill was passed and enacted, Charles Beecher summed up his brother’s point in the title of one of his own sermons: The Duty of Disobedience to Wicked Laws (1851).

Given the gulf of time, the voices that carry through now tend to be those of the famous (Douglass or Emerson) exalting those who defied the law as heroes, or the infamous (Webster or Shaw) condemning the same people as traitors. Meanwhile, lesser-known men of troubled conscience—people in conflict with themselves who struggled to know what to think and how to act when law came into conflict with conscience—are barely audible through private journals or reminiscences by relatives or friends. Yet in some respects these people bring us closer to the heart of America’s moral crisis in the pre–Civil War years than those who committed themselves without compunction to one side or the other.

They included Charles Devens, who, as U.S. marshal in Boston during the Sims case, had stood by a law in which he did not believe because he considered it his civic duty to do so. In a prefatory memoir to a posthumous selection of Devens’s writings, the Civil War historian John Codman Ropes described his friend’s torment at “participating, even in an official capacity, in the wretched task of surrendering a fugitive slave.” That Devens continued to feel the burden of the task after Sims’s rendition was made manifest by his efforts to purchase freedom for Sims and, in later years, to find him employment.

There are hints of similar self-division in Judge John Kane, who assisted Justice Grier in the Christiana case and believed firmly in enforcing the fugitive slave law. In an empathetic memoir, Kane’s daughter-in-law Elizabeth, wife of his son Thomas, wrote that the judge “thought the Law the noblest profession a man could follow [while] Tom thought it a school for perverting a man’s conscience”—so much so that the younger Kane resigned his position as a commissioner rather than send fugitives back to the South. He believed in “the right of a member of society to break any law of which his conscience disapproved, if he did so openly and without attempting to escape outlawry.” When he renounced his appointment as a commissioner rather than carry out the law, his father, who had employed him as a law clerk, “calmly and sadly” found him in contempt of court and even sentenced him to a year in prison, though it is not clear that any part of the sentence was served.

Tom continued to live, with Elizabeth, in his father’s house, which the young couple converted into a station of the Underground Railroad, while the judge, whose “naturally tender heart longed for the freedom of Tom’s,” turned a blind eye to their activities. “The family,” Elizabeth recalled, “had their secret jests over the ‘black beggars’” (here she seems to be quoting the judge) “over whom he sometimes stumbled without seeing them” when he came downstairs before dawn. In his robes, Judge Kane was a law-and-order man. In his nightclothes, he was the lawbreakers’ accomplice.

The same conflict divided the family—and evidently the mind—of Joseph Sabine, commissioner in the Syracuse case, who was saved from having to choose between conscience and duty by the disruption of Jerry’s rendition hearing and whose brother William was active in the Syracuse branch of the Underground Railroad. Even in the case of Judge Shaw, one suspects that his angry impatience at Dana manifested a certain anger at himself. It was Lincoln who best articulated the inner conflict such men felt when he wrote in 1855 to his friend Joshua Speed that “the great body of the Northern people,” among whom he included himself, “do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.”

Looking back from the late nineteenth century, the writer John Jay Chapman, who would later publish a laudatory biography of Garrison, came to the defense of those who submitted to the law not out of sympathy for slavery but because of what he called a “committed conscience”:

I do not know what more awful subject for a poem could have been found than that of the New England judge enforcing the fugitive slave law. For lack of such a poem the heroism of these men has been forgotten, the losing heroism of conservatism. It was this spiritual power of a committed conscience which met the new forces as they arose, and it deserves a better name than these new forces afterward gave it.

For most readers and writers today, the type whom Chapman had in mind—men like Kane, Grier, Sabine, Devens, even the stiff-necked Webster and Shaw—are well forgotten. They have been consigned, like the “neutrals” in Dante’s Inferno, to spend eternity in the anteroom of hell.

The sentence is harsh. These were people caught up in what has been called an “inner civil war”—of which it is hasty to think that all the courage was on one side and all the cowardice on the other. While Devens was acting “in face of the unpopularity and misconstruction of motives and personal abuse in which his action was sure to involve him,” Dana was crowing in his journal that he had received “a handsome congratulatory letter from the [Massachusetts] Attorney General upon my defense of Davis, & a gratifying testimonial in the shape of a box of beautiful fresh flowers” from a lady in Plymouth, along with an admiring note from her husband. Whether Dana was acknowledging the irony that doing right meant doing well, or was reveling in sheer self-satisfaction, his pleasure fairly leaps off the page as he writes about his work for the Shadrach defendants: “I believe I have never done anything professionally that has gained me so much credit.” During the fugitive slave crisis, acquiescence could bring shame, and resistance could buy social cachet.

Richard Henry Dana Jr. in 1849

A particularly compelling case of committed conscience was to be found far from Boston, in a slave state, in the person of William Greenleaf Eliot, mainly remembered today as the founder of Washington University in St. Louis and for the genealogical fact that he was the grandfather of T. S. Eliot. In his own time, Eliot’s reputation for probity and generosity was such that Dickens paid him his respects on his American tour and Emerson called him the “Saint of the West.”

A self-exiled New Englander, Eliot had been groomed to join Boston’s ministerial elite before he decided, in 1834, to answer a call to fill the pulpit of the First Unitarian Church in Missouri. He hated slavery. He hated it at least as much as did his Boston peers—Fuller, Thoreau, Emerson, or Eliot’s close friend James Freeman Clarke, who also went west, to Louisville, Kentucky, but lasted only three years before retreating back to Boston. Eliot stayed in St. Louis, but with no illusions. “Over the best and most pampered slave,” he wrote after the Civil War, “the sword of uncertainty always hung, suspended by an invisible hair, from which it came to pass, that, under the best of circumstances, the best condition of slavery was worse than the worst condition of freedom.” The journal he kept from the 1840s through the Civil War reveals the mind of a morally resolute New Englander coming to grips with the sins of a slave society from within rather than decrying them from without.

Eliot’s journal is filled with self-interrogation. “Upon no other” subject, he wrote in one entry in 1848, “have I been more anxious to do what is right.

I never pass by the slave jails on Olive Street without saying almost, sometimes quite loud: “May the curse of God abide on this vile traffic.” Yet I have spoken of it in public comparatively seldom, only once or twice each year. . . . In conversation I have always spoken freely. Has it been through want of moral courage?

Haunted by this question, and thinking of his friend Clarke’s self-liberating return to Boston, he reflects that

ten or five years ago, I had only to come out as an “Abolitionist” & altho’ I wd have been required to leave my place here, I could have returned to friends & kindred, with the honors of a martyr, without his losses: “covered with glory” & with the certainty of good settlement. But my gain would have been the only gain.

William Greenleaf Eliot in 1850

St. Louis, where Eliot remained until his death in 1887, was a city where most black people—those nominally free as well as those legally enslaved—lived under ghastly circumstances, psychological as well as material. In a state where manumitted slaves could remain only by obtaining a license at a price few could afford, Eliot put up his own money to aid them and asked his parishioners to do the same. After Eliot’s death, one of his eulogists, Joseph Shippen, recalled that “he himself once bought a slave woman to save her from ruin, and owned her until he could set her free; and to my involuntary expression of astonishment at the example, he said he cared little for the opinion of the world, he only thought to save the poor woman.”

Eliot organized a school (known around town as Nigritia) for black children. He worked to persuade the legislature to initiate a gradual emancipation. After the outbreak of the Civil War, when President Lincoln countermanded an emancipation order issued by the commander of Union forces in the West, John C. Frémont, for fear of pushing Missouri into the Confederacy, Eliot sided with the general against the president. During the war, when pro-slavery mobs operated freely in the city, he sheltered in his own home, at risk to his and his family’s safety, a hunted fugitive slave named Archer Alexander, who had been accused of giving information about Confederate positions to Union troops.*

And yet, before the war, Eliot never took a public stand against the fugitive slave law. Convinced that the higher law doctrine “is the more dangerous because it can always bring to its aid the conscientious feelings of those . . . whose wishes & interests & prejudices & enmities & sectional jealousies are all made to assume the sacredness of duty,” he believed that “the Country which makes this appeal must do so with sword in hand, in open revolt & struggle.” Like the Websterites, he hoped until the last moment to forestall disunion and war, which to some of his counterparts in Boston might have been a titillating prospect but to him seemed likely to tighten the grip of slavery, brutalize even more the lives of black people, and set back what hopes there were of gradual emancipation. This was the context in which he regarded the higher law doctrine as “the most dangerous of popular delusions.”

It is easy to scorn him, in the words of the prophet (Revelation 3:15–16), as “neither cold nor hot,” an overcautious man unwilling to take risks, looking for some middle way that did not exist. Some did so scorn him in his own time. Another of his eulogists, the English-born Robert Collyer, who filled a Unitarian pulpit in Chicago, remarked that Eliot’s opposition to abolitionism before the war “had set me rather against him because I was a strong abolitionist, but only,” he confessed in light of Eliot’s example, “as the man’s ox was ‘strong at light work.’” Collyer acknowledged that Eliot, living in a slave state, carried the heavier burden. Paraphrasing Isaiah 53:3, he eulogized him as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” who “knew how the land lay and the light.” Joseph Shippen, also a resident of Illinois, tried to grasp the moral complexities of living in Missouri before the war and came to see that being in a slave state “in the days of slavery,” Eliot “was a friend and sympathizer with the oppressed and down-trodden, doing much to alleviate their condition and to inspire a fellow-feeling in their behalf. But he withheld from, and even disapproved of the abolition agitation which for twenty-five years preceded the war of the Rebellion . . . a non-interference with the subject that was nevertheless hard to reconcile and comprehend.”

In order to come to terms with such a man, one must try to grasp what it meant to live with a hatred of slavery but without knowledge of the imponderable future. No one in Eliot’s circumstance could have known that despite all the compromise efforts—of which the fugitive slave law was the most painful and exigent—disunion and war would come all the same and that the fugitive slave problem would disappear with the disappearance of slavery itself. If the dreaded war came, no one could know whether it would end with slavery weakened or strengthened, perpetuated or destroyed. No one before the Civil War knew any of these things—a fact to which Eliot, after the war, gave eloquent expression:

A true history of that fierce struggle will probably never be written. There were no impartial judges, no unprejudiced witnesses, to observe or record the facts. Right-minded men could hardly tell where the lines of right and wrong crossed each other. Living in St. Louis the whole time and long before, and knowing many of those engaged in the strife on either side, I thought I saw both sides as they really were, but, in truth I saw neither. The complications of actions and motive, both right and wrong, were past finding out. One thing, however, is sure: that the right prevailed at last. Thank God for that.

4.

Whether in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Missouri, or anywhere else where the grip of slavery was less than complete, the public and private struggles triggered by the fugitive slave law had the effect, in the words of one of Castner Hanway’s defense attorneys, of putting “the law . . . on trial itself in this country.” He might have added that the trial was conducted not only in the minds of lawyers, judges, and ministers, or in the streets and courts, but also in newspapers, periodicals, and books.

Time has obscured this fact because most of the writers whom we now count as literary classics touched on the issue only glancingly. In all his correspondence from the year 1851, Emerson expended more words asking newspaper editors to refrain from printing summaries of his paid lectures on philosophical subjects (he worried that such reports would suppress turnout for his next talk) than on the fugitive slave law. In Moby-Dick—written from the spring of 1850 to the fall of 1851—Melville seems to wink at his father-in-law, Judge Shaw, with a sentence that must have startled the judge when (or if) he read it: “Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges.” Later in the book, Melville gestures again in Shaw’s direction with the story of the black cabin boy Pip abandoned at sea after he becomes an impediment to the mission of the ship.

In his next book, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville returned to the theme, this time more directly. Late one night, the young protagonist comes knocking at the door of a clergyman whom he accuses of complicity in expelling a young woman (she is suspected of being the illegitimate child of Pierre’s father and his mistress) from the neighborhood. The confrontation between the hot young man and the cold minister, to whom Melville gave the mocking name “Falsgrave,” reads like a synopsis of the confrontation between Dana, who was a friend of Melville’s, and Judge Shaw. “In heaven’s name, what is the matter, young gentleman?” the minister wants to know, to which the young man replies, “Everything is the matter; the whole world is the matter. . . . Heaven and earth is the matter, sir! . . . How is she to depart? Who is to take her? Art thou to take her? Where is she to go?” Mr. Falsgrave also bore a likeness to a real-life minister, Moses Stuart, whose opinion of the fugitive slave law ran like this: “We pity the restored fugitive . . . when he is sent back to be delivered into the hands of enraged cruelty. But when he is sent back to a lenient and Christian master, the matter is less grievous. The responsibility, however, of bad treatment for the slave, rests not in the least degree on us of the North.”

Melville’s portrait of the gutless minister was, to say the least, unflattering. More than thirty years later, he made amends. In his valedictory masterpiece, Billy Budd, about a young sailor who strikes a fatal blow against an officer who has falsely accused him of fomenting mutiny (a capital crime), he constructed the whole narrative around the problem of duty versus conscience. The choice is personified in Captain Vere, another figure bearing resemblance to Shaw, who agonizes over whether to follow the naval code in sentencing Billy to death or to acquit him in accordance with justice. As the literary scholar Brook Thomas has written, “Shaw faced the same conflict between higher law and positive law as Vere does in Billy Budd.” We will never know if Shaw himself was closer in reality, or in Melville’s mind, to Falsgrave or to Vere, but the trajectory of the writer’s emotion suggests that the later portrait is the better likeness.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose relationship to Melville mirrored that of the phlegmatic minister to the badgering young man in Pierre, wrote to Longfellow in the summer of 1851 that “this Fugitive Law is the only thing that could have blown me into any respectable degree of warmth on this great subject of the day.” In fact, Hawthorne’s “warmth” was barely tepid. According to the Virginia-born abolitionist Moncure Conway, who greatly admired his writing, he was afflicted when it came to slavery “by a blindness which seems the very counterpart of his clear vision.”

Having lived in Concord, where his neighbors the Alcotts sheltered fugitives with help from Thoreau in getting them aboard northbound trains, Hawthorne took a certain pride in being contrarian. “I have not, as you suggest,” he wrote to a friend after the Shadrach and Sims events, “the slightest sympathy for the slaves; or, at least, not half so much as for the laboring whites, who, I believe, as a general thing, are ten times worse off than the Southern negroes. Still, whenever I am absolutely cornered, I shall go for New England rather than the South; and this Fugitive Law cornered me.” He did not stay in his corner for long. A leading theme of Hawthorne’s published works from The Scarlet Letter (1850) to The Marble Faun (1860) is the folly of wishing too soon for too much freedom.

By far the most consequential literary intervention came not from any of the established figures but from an unheralded writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe, sixth child of the thundering preacher Lyman Beecher. When Stowe’s father was elected to the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati in 1832, he moved the family—including the future ministers Edward, Charles, and Henry and his twenty-year-old-daughter, Harriet—from Connecticut to Ohio. There, in 1836, she married a widowed faculty member, Calvin Stowe. As Henry Clay complained in his long compromise speech to the Senate in February 1850, Cincinnati was a busy entry point for runaways from and through Kentucky. For Harriet Beecher Stowe, it became the incubator of her antislavery passion.

Just as the fugitive bill was coming under debate in Congress that spring, Calvin Stowe accepted a teaching offer from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Upon returning east with her husband and children, Harriet approached Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the antislavery paper National Era, with a proposal for a series of sketches about slavery. On March 9, 1851, she wrote to him that “the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.”

Bailey, who had already published several of Stowe’s sketches about rural life, gave her a contract. The result, published in installments from June 1851 to April 1852, was a series of fictional sketches of slaves under physical and psychological assault—among them, the beautiful Eliza, who escapes from bounty hunters by leaping across the frozen Ohio River with her baby in her arms; the mysterious and brooding Cassy, who belongs to the brutal Simon Legree; and Tom, whose gentleness and generosity grow apace as he is sold farther and farther south, eventually to Legree, who has him tortured before ordering his overseers to beat him to death.

The magazine pieces were gathered and published on March 20, 1852, as a book titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, with a first print run of 5,000. Within a year, it had sold 300,000 copies in America and over a million in Britain, making it the second-bestselling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible. Because it appeared at a time when reading aloud was common and books were shared by family and friends, the number of people who heard or read it might have been ten times the number who bought it. Stowe’s novel made the name of Simon Legree synonymous with cruelty, Uncle Tom the symbol of stoic faith (his reputation for obsequiousness came later), and Eliza the quintessential image of the fugitive slave. Putnam’s Monthly magazine declared that “the history of literature contains nothing parallel to it, nor approaching it.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, the year Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published

In the North, Frederick Douglass rejoiced that Stowe had “baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.”* In the South, her portrait of Legree was likened to a “malignant” attack on the institution of marriage, as if she had chosen an abusive husband to represent “the normal condition of the relation” between loving spouses. In the presence of Mark Twain, who became a friend of Stowe’s in later life, she recounted how, soon after Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, she received in the mail a severed human ear as a token of contempt—cut, presumably, from a would-be runaway. It does not seem to have occurred to the sender that the contents of the package confirmed the truth of what she said.

In the figure of Captain Ahab, Melville had portrayed Calhoun in a book that almost no one read. Stowe now gave a portrait of Webster in a book that everyone read. He appears in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the fictional “Senator Bird” of Ohio, “whose idea of a fugitive was . . . the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle.” When his wife laments the plight of runaway slaves, he tut-tuts at her for failing to recognize the priority of “great public interests” over mere feelings. “Your feelings are all quite right, dear, and interesting, and I love you for them; but, then, dear, we mustn’t suffer our feelings to run away with our judgment.” And yet Stowe endowed Senator Bird with a good heart. When confronted in his own kitchen with a “cut and bleeding” runaway in the person of Eliza, he loses his scruples in a flash and swings into action to save her and her child from the slave hunters.

Wife, daughter, and sister of Protestant clergymen, Stowe had composed a brilliantly visual presentation of love and martyrdom that was closer in spirit to the Catholic liturgy than to what Emerson called the “corpse-cold” Protestantism of New England. In her initial proposal to Bailey, she had said that “my vocation is simply that of painter” because “there is no arguing with pictures, and everybody is impressed by them, whether they mean to be or not.” Henry James was later to describe Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “less a book than a state of vision.” In the figure of Eliza and her baby, she placed before her readers a vividly rendered image of Madonna and Child. Further on in the book, she organizes the story around the image of the suffering Christ in the person of Tom. She knew exactly what she was doing. When she describes Eliza in the kitchen melting the heart of Senator Bird, she uses the phrase “the real presence of distress”—a theological reference to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which teaches that the wine and wafer are miraculously transformed into the blood and body of Christ. The elemental Catholic images—pietà and crucifix—are deployed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a means to overcome the obstruction of sympathy by reason.

Part of Douglass’s appreciation of Stowe’s novel may be attributed to the fact that he, too, understood the power of the “picture passion” to touch the heart. Among “all our religious denominations,” he wrote about the new medium of photography (which, like Lincoln, he used to present himself to the public in different moods and roles), “the Roman Catholic understands this picture passion best. It wisely addresses the religious consciousness in its own language—the child language of the soul. Pictures, images, and other symbolical representations speak to the imagination. The mighty fortress of the human heart silently withstands the assaults by the rifled cannons of reason, but readily falls before the magic power of mystery.” There could be no better account of the power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in evoking through word-pictures the pathos of a hunted mother and the pity of a god-man crucified.

After her book was denounced by southern critics as lies and slander, Stowe published a defense titled A Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in which she assembled documentary evidence to substantiate her claims while accusing unrepentant slave owners of failing to live by Christ’s teaching in Matthew 25:40:

In the last judgment will He not say to you, “I have been in the slave-prison,—in the slave-coffle. I have been sold in your markets; I have toiled for naught in your fields; I have been smitten on the mouth in your courts of justice; I have been denied a hearing in my own church,—and ye cared not for it. Ye went, one to his farm, and another to his merchandise.” And if ye shall answer, “When, Lord?” He shall say unto you, “Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Like her brothers and her father, Stowe wanted to believe that slave owners could be shamed by sin and moved by love. Yet Uncle Tom’s Cabin was ultimately an argument against itself. From the opening chapters, in which Tom’s owner, a decent man who feels real affection for his faithful slave but nevertheless sells him under financial duress, she shows again and again that conscience is no match for the coercive force of the market. If she was a crypto-Catholic, she was also a proto-Marxist in the sense that she recognized that in the war between conscience and material interest the latter is most likely to prevail. The whole structure of racial ideology (the natural dependency of blacks, the superiority of whites, the dignity of slavery, and all the rest) was nothing but a veneer of rationalization pasted onto an economic foundation. If the foundation were to be shaken—by, say, a collapse in cotton prices—the edifice would come tumbling down. Stowe attributes this view to a clear-sighted slave owner, but she clearly believed it herself:

Now, when any one speaks up, like a man, and says slavery is necessary to us, we can’t get along without it, we should be beggared if we give it up, and, of course, we mean to hold on to it,—this is strong, clear, well-defined language; it has the respectability of truth to it. . . . But when he begins to put on a long face, and snuffle, and quote Scripture . . . well, suppose that something should bring down the price of cotton once and forever, and make the whole slave property a drug in the market, don’t you think we should soon have another version of the Scripture doctrine? What a flood of light would pour into the church, all at once, and how immediately it would be discovered that everything in the Bible and reason went the other way!

In spite of herself, Harriet Beecher Stowe saw no way out of the slavery impasse short of the violent destruction of the slave economy and forcing southern society to reorganize itself. She was not ready to concede this truth explicitly, but it was implicit in every word of her devastating book.

5.

While the initial furor over Uncle Tom’s Cabin was dying down, Boston had become a battlefield again. Even though the Sims case had ended in rendition, many Bostonians had lulled themselves into thinking that slave hunters were not likely henceforth to use their city as a testing ground. That illusion evaporated on May 24, 1854, when a young slave named Anthony Burns, who had escaped to Massachusetts from eastern Virginia, was arrested on Court Street. Two days after the arrest, a multiracial crowd including Higginson and other veterans of the Sims case stormed the courthouse in a failed attempt to free him. In the chaos, a deputy U.S. marshal, James Batchelder, was stabbed to death.

As the crowd faced off with police and militia, federal troops and antislavery activists converged on the scene. The new president, Franklin Pierce (a college classmate of Hawthorne, who had written a campaign biography for him in 1852), was no less determined than Fillmore to put down disorder. Burns’s rendition hearing before Commissioner Edward G. Loring (not to be confused with the Lorings who had argued in the Aves and Sims cases) moved swiftly, with Dana and Morris leading the defense. On June 2, Loring remanded Burns to his owner in a decision that included a flailing attempt to explain himself as a reluctant executioner rather than a “merciless judge.” Many good people, he acknowledged, regarded as “wicked and cruel” the statute that his constitutional duty compelled him to enforce.

Unlike Sims, who was a tough character given to drinking and brawling, Burns at his sentencing was tentative and meek. For fear of worsening the retribution he would suffer when sent back to Virginia, he did not wish at first to contest the case, and he had to be coaxed into accepting legal counsel. Throughout the hearing, he was surrounded by “a numerous body-guard” of over a hundred men, deputized by the U.S. marshal Watson Freeman and “taken chiefly,” in the estimate of Samuel May Jr. (who shared the anti-Irish sentiment common among abolitionists), “from the vilest sinks of scoundrelism, corruption and crime in the city.” Burns, who looked to Dana like “a piteous object, rather weak in mind and body . . . completely cowed and dispirited,” remained quiet throughout the proceedings, having told Parker that “if I must go back, I want to go back as easy as I can.”

When, after delivery of the negative verdict, Wendell Phillips came to say farewell, Burns asked him, “Mr. Phillips, . . . Must I go back?” Phillips later recalled, “I went over in my own mind the history of Massachusetts. I thought of her schools, her colleges of learning, her churches, her courts, her benevolent and philanthropic institutions, her great names, her Puritans, her Pilgrims, and I was obliged to say, ‘Burns, there isn’t humanity, there isn’t Christianity, there isn’t justice enough here to save you; you must go back.’” In an eerie repetition of the Sims spectacle, crowds massed along the route as the prisoner, under armed escort numbering some fifteen hundred troops, was marched to the ship that would return him to Alexandria, Virginia. In a letter to Horace Mann, the physician, reformer, and abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe recalled seeing in the crowd “a comely coloured girl of eighteen, who stood with clenched teeth and fists, and with tears streaming down her cheeks.” Howe tried to console her: “Do not cry, poor girl—he won’t be hurt.” “‘Hurt!’ said she, ‘I cry for shame that he will not kill himself!—oh! Why is he not man enough to kill himself!’” Upon arrival in Richmond, Burns was imprisoned for four months until his master sold him to a North Carolina slave owner for nine hundred dollars.

The Burns case echoed the Sims affair, but its consequences were larger. In conjunction with events in Washington—where, on May 30, led again by Stephen Douglas, Congress approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act extending the principle of popular sovereignty to territories from which slavery had been previously excluded under the Missouri Compromise—the case galvanized the antislavery movement and attracted new converts. Men who had once stood with Webster—who had died in the fall of 1852—now switched sides. Amos Lawrence, among the leading “Cotton Whigs” who had been in Webster’s orbit and who had volunteered to help arrest Shadrach’s rescuers in 1851, visited Dana before Burns’s trial to say that the “solid men of Boston” had been shaken out of their moral lethargy by the Kansas-Nebraska bill and wanted now to pay for the fugitive’s defense. John H. Pearson, the shipowner who had furnished the vessel that carried Sims back to Georgia three years earlier and who still controlled landing rights at Boston’s Long Wharf, refused to allow a government steamer to drop anchor there to receive Burns. The Boston police captain Joseph Hayes sent a resignation letter to the mayor, declaring his refusal to participate “in the execution of that infamous ‘Fugitive Slave Law.’” Amos Lawrence summed up how much had changed: “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

The marshal’s posse moving Anthony Burns down State Street to the pier

Others, unable to wake themselves, thrashed in the nightmare. Ezra Stiles Gannett, minister of the Federal Street Church, where the eminent William Ellery Channing had preached against slavery in the 1830s and 1840s, had urged compliance with the fugitive slave law but now burst into tears when John Parkman, a member of his congregation as well as of the Boston Vigilance Committee, informed him that Burns had been sent back to Virginia. Parkman later said of Gannett that “no one during that week,” including those like himself who had participated in the rescue attempt, “seemed to take so much to heart the event which made it so sad and memorable.”

A week after Burns’s rendition, Gannett preached a sermon on Matthew 6:23 (“if therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness”) in which he put on public display his private conflict between conscience and “Loyalty to the Law.” The “struggle between opposing tendencies in [his] intellect and temperament” had reached the point of what one historian calls “psychic violence.” Years later, in a memorial account, Gannett’s son could not decide between blaming his father for lacking the abolitionists’ resolve or crediting him with seeing what “the Abolitionists could not, and others would not, see; that disunion almost certainly meant war”—an outcome that his father believed would not bring “relief to the slaves” but was “certain to bring worse enslavement.”

History has been hard on Gannett and others like him because we know that the events of the ensuing decade proved them wrong. They have become examples of the proverbial bystander—constrained by fear or, worse, indifference, “contemptible moderates,” in the words of the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin (who was thinking of his own reputation during the Cold War), “miserable centrists” whose caution made them useless in a soul-trying time. This is a distorted judgment. It rests on the retrospective knowledge that the war they feared did indeed come, that what began as a war for the Union became a war against slavery, and that, as Eliot wrote after all the killing and dying were done, “the right prevailed at last.” To dismiss these men “as mediocre, timid, and weak” and to credit their more radical opponents with “flair and foresight” is to subject them all to what has been aptly called “outcome bias.” It is to wrench them out of the context of their times.

The historian David Potter offers a better way to see them:

The problem for Americans . . . who wanted slaves to be free was not simply that southerners wanted the opposite, but that they themselves cherished a conflicting value: they wanted the Constitution, which protected slavery, to be honored, and the Union, which was a fellowship with slaveholders, to be preserved. Thus they were committed to values that could not be logically reconciled.

What the Burns rendition did in combination with the Kansas-Nebraska Act—not only for Boston, but for the whole nation—was to show that the values of emancipation and union could never be reconciled short of war.

As with any historical event, it is of course impossible to draw a direct line of cause and effect from the Burns case to events that followed. But one thing is sure: it expanded the membership of the antislavery movement and raised the temperature of those who were already part of it. Whittier felt his blood boil:

And, as I thought of Liberty

Marched handcuffed down that sworded street,

The solid earth beneath my feet

Reeled fluid as the sea.

Thoreau, disgusted by the sniveling lassitude of his fellow citizens, declared that there were now “perhaps a million slaves in Massachusetts”—by which he meant everyone who had held themselves aloof during the Burns affair. Two days after the rendition, Theodore Parker preached a scorching sermon, “The New Crime Against Humanity,” in which he reviled Judge Shaw, who played no role in the Burns case, though Loring had quoted a passage from Shaw’s decision in the Sims case. Parker quoted it now too, but with a caustic substitution: where Shaw had said that because slavery “was not created, established, or perpetuated by the Constitution . . . the framers of the Constitution could not abrogate Slavery, or the rights claimed under it,” Parker reworked the words as if they had been spoken by a Roman consul defending the killing of heretics: “The framers of the constitution could not abrogate the custom of persecuting, torturing, and murdering Christians, or the rights claimed under it.”

Southern voices replied in kind. The Norfolk Herald quoted Burns flaying the abolitionists for the selectivity of their sympathy. Even if there was a touch of truth in some of what he was said to have said, the article in which he was quoted was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a hostage video:

None of his abolition friends cared for him until they found out that he was a “runaway nigger,” and then they were ready enough to help him. A common nigger there (he said) was of no account with them—he might starve and rot; but if he was only a “runaway,” they were almost ready to fall down and worship him. “Look at these clothes,” said he, pointing to the elegant dress suit he had on—“do you think they would have given them to any common nigger? Shugh!”

Unknown to his captors, Burns found a way to make his real feelings known. Despite the chains on his wrists, he managed to cut through the floorboards of his cell with a spoon, obtained ink from a slave in the room below, and scratched out a letter to Dana that he threw down to a black man walking past his barred window. Beseeching Dana and his friends to liberate him by buying him—“I am for sale”—he wrote with a poignancy deepened by his struggle to express himself:

Richmond August 23th 1854

I am yet Bound in Jail and are waring my chings Night and day But is Waitinge for Som kinededliver to Come that I May Bee DeLivered & the Man or Men that Brought me here sad that they was going to By Me But I dont heir No More a Boute it and I think that it is the Last that I shall heir thay tole My oner to Not Let you all have Me But I am for Sale And if you all my friends will please to healp your friend this Much I will Bee to you all A friend all My days And if you will get Sum of your friends to come to Alexandra and not to say that he come from Boston and inquier where Mr Suttle keep Store And Ask him if hath Sole his man and what he will take for him that he wood Like to By Me and you can get Low he wood take $800 dollars for me Now & I pray in the name of the Lord that you will Bee to healp me out suffereinge one time please Anthony Burns dont rite to me until I tel you

6.

In his speech to the citizens of Concord following the Shadrach rescue and the Sims rendition, Emerson had called the fugitive slave law a “university to the people.” With every new incident, its enrollment grew. But what exactly did it teach?

It taught that compromise with the South was no longer conceivable. On March 2, 1850, after Clay’s oration in the Senate, but before Webster’s reply, Whitman published a poem in the New York Evening Post called “Song for Certain Congressmen”:

Beyond all such we know a term,

Charming to ears and eyes,

With it we’ll stab young Freedom,

And do it in disguise;

. . .

That term is “compromise.”

Higginson, dripping with contempt for those who clung to the so-called peace measures while fugitives were dragged through the streets, lamented that “there are always compromisers. There are always men . . . who if anyone claims that two and two make six, will find it absolutely necessary to go half way, and that two and two make five.” Charles Sumner, now representing Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, was even more direct about the poisonous effect of compromise on American morals. “From the beginning of our history,” he wrote, “the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned.” No northern senator was more reviled by his southern counterparts than Sumner, but in this case they cordially agreed with him—except that the abandoned rights they had in mind were those not of slaves but of slave owners.

There were more lessons. The fugitive slave law taught that anyone who believed it still possible to live outside the web of slavery was deluded. For decades, antislavery activists had tried to make this clear. “I am just as much a murderer,” one writer (probably Whittier) wrote in an antislavery paper in 1845, “if I turn a crank which through five hundred connecting links cuts off a man’s head, as though I had done it directly by taking the sword into my own hand.” Soon after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe made the same point in a letter to a British admirer. America, she wrote, was finally learning “by what an infinite complexity of ties, nerves, and ligaments this terrible evil is bound in one body politic; how the slightest touch upon it causes even the free States to thrill and shiver. . . . Nobody can tell the thousand ways in which by trade, by family affinity, or by political expediency, the free part of our country is constantly tempted to complicity with the slaveholding part.”

For some, this lesson had been a long time coming. In the late 1830s, just when he burst into public notice, Emerson, in the privacy of his journal, had expressed icy irritation at his wife for bemoaning the plight of “obtuse and barbarous” Africans shipped to America:

Lidian grieves aloud about the wretched negro in the horrors of the middle-passage; and they are bad enough. But to such as she, these crucifixions do not come. They come to the obtuse & barbarous to whom they are not horrid but only a little worse than the old sufferings. They exchange a cannibal war for a stinking hold. They have gratifications that would be none to Lidian.

But by the 1850s, after Shadrach, Sims, Christiana, Syracuse, and Burns, Emerson was chastising himself for having waited so long to grieve with her:

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity . . . race living at the expense of race.

The fugitive slave law was indeed an education. For those who had thought that slavery was not their problem, it forced them to think again. The words of Commissioner Curtis after the Sims affair—“we have no responsibility, not even of a moral kind, in the act that is done”—were no longer credible. The better argument now belonged to those who retorted, “So long as slavery exists, and the Union continues, we are in fact abettors of that crime.”