10.
The Fiery Abolitionists
David Walker was a slim, six-foot Black man who made his living running a secondhand clothing store on Brattle Street in Boston. His life’s goal was to unite African Americans and overthrow slavery. His radical views fired people with hope and expectation and made enslavers furious. In a few short years the young African American changed the debate over slavery.
In the 1820s, no one more brilliantly and sharply voiced the anguish and aspirations that more than two million people in bondage shared with their three hundred twenty thousand free brothers and sisters. Walker knew from his own family that enslaved and free were as close as husband and wife. He was born in 1785 in Wilmington, North Carolina, to a free Black woman married to an enslaved man. His father died before he was born. Slaveholder rules assigned the mother’s status to the child, so Walker was born free.
In his late thirties, Walker said farewell to his mother and began to travel. Soon he left the South: “If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long,” he said. “I cannot remain where I must hear the chains.” By the time he arrived in Boston in 1827, he had a purpose: “As true as God reigns, I will be avenged for the sorrows which my people have suffered.”
At forty, he taught himself to read and write and then began to study history. His consuming interest was the European enslavement of his fellow Africans.
In 1827, Freedom’s Journal, America’s first Black newspaper, appeared, and Walker contributed articles and became its Boston distributor. He also attended community meetings and helped enslaved people who had escaped oppression to reach freedom. He married a woman, who probably had escaped bondage, and they hoped to have a child. The next year in a public lecture he asked his people: “Ought we not to . . . protect, aid, and assist each other to the utmost of our power?”
His answer was a lengthy Appeal to the Slaves of the United States, published in 1829. Wide-ranging, fiercely militant, and unequivocal in tone, it drew inspiration from his deeply held Christian beliefs and the recent democratic spirit that had swept through America, France, and Haiti.
Whites enslaved Blacks out of greed, Walker argued, but God had ordained freedom. He “will send you a Hannibal” as leader. He condemned the US government and northern discrimination, and advised his people to prepare “to govern ourselves.” At times Walker said white hearts were “so hardened” that they would not repent or apologize, but other times he voiced some hope that slavery could peacefully be ended. “Treat us like men, and . . . we will live in peace and happiness together.”
Walker’s booklet rang with passionate threats and warnings: “I speak Americans for your own good. We must and shall be free . . . in spite of you.” To his people he wrote: “The entire emancipation of your enslaved brethren all over the world” depended on unity among African peoples.
David Walker’s Appeal.
He wished to avoid bloodshed, but at times he coldly calculated the path forward: “Never make an attempt to gain our freedom, or natural right, from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your way clear—when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid.” “If you commence, make sure work—do not trifle, for they will not trifle with you. . . . kill or be killed.” He agreed with Jefferson that people had the right of revolution.
Walker’s Appeal had an electrifying effect in the South where distribution was probably speeded by sailors Walker had met through his clothing business. In New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah, African Americans were arrested for owning copies. Legislatures in Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, Virginia, and Louisiana imposed a death penalty on anyone circulating materials encouraging rebellion from slavery. The governor of North Carolina condemned it as “totally subversive . . . an open appeal to natural love of liberty.” In Wilmington, Walker’s birthplace, authorities reported “unrest and plotting” among African Americans.
The Virginia legislature met in secret session to deal with the Appeal. Rewards of a thousand dollars or more for Walker’s capture or death were offered in Georgia. The mayor of Savannah asked the mayor of Boston to arrest Walker.
To demonstrate support for his Appeal, Boston’s African American community toasted Walker at a dinner. “I will stand my ground,” he told his friends. “Somebody has to die in this cause. I may be doomed . . . but it is not in me to falter if I can promote the work of emancipation.” On the morning of June 28, 1830, Walker was found dead near his home. His friends believed he had been poisoned. Edward, Walker’s son, was born soon after.
The white foes of slavery learned from Walker. Originally, Benjamin Lundy, the leading white antislavery voice, condemned the Appeal as “bold, daring, inflammatory.” His assistant, William Lloyd Garrison, said it was a disaster for the cause. Before Walker appeared, Lundy, Garrison, and other white leaders had urged caution and moderation. They believed that emancipation must be slow, enslavers should be compensated financially for their loss, and those freed shipped to Africa.
David Walker’s bold language changed the argument. By January 1, 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison began his Liberator, he had rejected his own earlier gradual approach and demanded immediate emancipation without any compensation. His words rang with the indignation of a David Walker: “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.” He then launched the American Anti-Slavery Society, which by 1838 claimed 1,346 clubs and a quarter of a million members. It was interracial, militant, and determined.
The first US political effort to include women, the society counted Black and white women among its speakers and workers. They faced northern mobs of respectable citizens who broke up meetings 115 times in the 1830s and 64 times in the 1840s.
A formerly enslaved man who interviewed Walker’s wife and reprinted the Appeal was Henry Highland Garnet, born in New Market, Maryland, in 1815. At nine, Garnet walked and—when his legs tired—was carried to freedom by his father and uncle. They lived in New York.
In 1843, at twenty-seven and just married, Garnet was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. At a Black convention in Buffalo that year, he issued a call for the solidarity of free and enslaved African Americans and called on the enslaved to “strike the first blow for freedom.” Garnet urged: “. . . rather die freemen, than live to be slaves.” He reminded his listeners of the heroism of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Joseph Cinqué, and Madison Washington and concluded: “Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered.”
When his speech was offered as a resolution, it failed by a single vote in Buffalo. Approving it, some feared, would unleash lynch mobs against Black families in southern states. But Garnet issued his Address to the Slaves of the United States that year in a pamphlet that also included Walker’s Appeal.
Because of Walker’s Appeal and Garnet’s Address, resistance to slavery became highly organized in Black northern communities. Beginning in 1830, annual national conventions were organized by formerly enslaved people to direct campaigns against slavery and discrimination. By then, fifty Black societies were sponsoring protest meetings and issuing publications, including “slave narratives” that exposed the horrors of slavery to the reading public.
The words of Walker and Garnet helped stir militant responses to oppression among African Americans. From New York to California the arrest of enslaved people running from their oppressors increasingly triggered community mobilization. In 1833, when Mr. and Mrs. Thornton Blackburn of Detroit were seized in Kentucky, the community sprang into action. A jailhouse visitor secretly changed clothes with Mrs. Blackburn, who walked out of her cell and was ferried to Canada. The sheriff who returned Mr. Blackburn to slavery was attacked and his skull fractured.
William Lambert and George DeBaptiste formed a secret Detroit escape network called African American Mysteries: The Order of the Men of Oppression. “The general plan was freedom,” explained Lambert, and his determined band “arranged passwords and grips, and a ritual, but we were always suspicious of the white man, and so those we admitted we put to severe tests.” “It was fight and run—danger at every turn, but that we calculated upon, and were prepared for,” he recalled.
In Cass County, Michigan, four enslaved people seeking freedom from Kentucky were arrested and brought to South Bend, Indiana. Black and white citizens demanded the posse’s arrest, and Black residents with clubs and guns massed across from the court. In two days the four were released and carried off in triumph.
On June 3, 1847, a Pennsylvania community swung into action. The Carlisle Herald reported “an attempt on the part of a large portion of our colored population to rescue several slaves who had been arrested as fugitives.” As a man, woman, and young girl were led from the court, people lunged and a battle “ensued in the street . . . paving stones were hurled in showers, and clubs and canes used.” The woman and girl escaped, but the man was taken back to Maryland.
That year in Troy, New York, a Black national convention recommended instructing “sons in the art of war.” Black conventions were meeting annually to plan ways to combat slavery and discrimination.
In 1850, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Law that imposed severe penalties for aiding enslaved people seeking freedom, denied the accused any right to testify, and required citizens to help catch those on the run. Slavery’s violence spilled into northern streets. Whites who had believed that slavery would not touch them now faced jail and fines if they refused to follow the commands of what were called slave-hunters.
Black communities prepared for battle. Formerly enslaved reverend Jarmain Loguen announced, “I don’t respect this law—I don’t fear it—I won’t obey it! It outlaws me and I outlaw it.” Lewis Hayden, a formerly enslaved person who hid freedom seekers in his Boston home, announced he had placed two kegs of explosives in his basement and would blow up the house rather than surrender to anyone.
In Boston, Cleveland, and Detroit, Black vigilance committees expanded to meet the threat, and in Philadelphia, Albany, Syracuse, and New York City, integrated committees also signed up new members. Cleveland’s committee of four women and five men helped 275 escapees in eight months. In Springfield, Massachusetts, an armed League of Gileadites, forty-four men and women, mostly Black, pledged to arm against slavery, and to be “firm, determined and cool” and “be hanged, if you must.”
Slave-hunters rode into the North and civilian forces were deployed and ready. In February, in the first case under the new law, Fred Wilkins, an enslaved man hiding in Boston, found he had neighbors willing to help and Lewis Hayden had organized them. Richard Henry Dana wrote: “We heard a shout from the Court House” as “two huge negroes, bearing the prisoner between them, with his clothes half torn off” rushed him away “like a black squall, the crowd driving along with them and cheering as they went.” In Syracuse, New York, a mixed force of Blacks and whites stormed into a courthouse and liberated freedom seeker Jerry McHenry.
Resistance to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law began to unite Black and white northerners.
William Parker had escaped to Christiana, Pennsylvania, and trained a small Black army to wage war on slave-hunters. Warned that a federal posse was headed his way to seize two enslaved people seeking refuge in his house, Parker and his men loaded their weapons, sang “Die on the Field of Battle, Glory in My Soul,” and waited. On the morning of September 11, Maryland enslaver Edward Gorsuch, his son, and a US marshal and his deputies arrived at Parker’s fortress-like home. When the lawmen called for surrender, Parker and his men laughed.
Parker’s wife sounded a horn from the second-floor window, and dozens of armed Black people—nobody knows to this day how many—appeared. Gunfire broke out, and when the smoke had cleared, Gorsuch lay dead, his son seriously wounded, and Parker’s army and friends were racing to Canada.
William Parker and his armed forces drive off a US marshal and his posse.
The US government dispatched forty-five Marines to Christiana and tried thirty-six Black people and two Quakers for treason. All were acquitted. The battle at Christiana announced that African Americans were ready to fight for liberty.
In Boston, the arrest of Anthony Burns in 1854 had the Reverend Thomas W. Higginson, a noted reformer, abolitionist, and writer, lead a Black and white assault unit on the courthouse. They killed a deputy, but were repulsed by overwhelming force. It took twenty-two US military units to hold back angry, shouting Boston crowds and return Burns to the South.
These efforts to rescue those escaping slavery in the 1850s drew white support and began to change national thinking. Recalled the Reverend Mr. Higginson, “Brought up as we have all been, it takes the whole experience of one such case to educate the mind to the attitude of revolution.” He found it “so strange to find one’s self outside of established institutions,” to lower one’s voice and hide one’s purposes, “to see law and order, police and military on the wrong side, and find good citizenship a sin and bad citizenship a duty.”
Some clashes were more clever than explosive. In 1853, Louis, an enslaved man who escaped bondage and was on trial in a Cincinnati court, pushed his chair back, then stepped backward. A white abolitionist touched his foot to encourage him, and Louis kept inching back. He quietly backed around the room and someone put a hat on his head. When he reached the Black section, people crowded around and rushed him through the door. Abolitionists dressed Louis in women’s clothes and hurried him to freedom.
At times abolitionists used both legal and illegal means to rescue enslaved people seeking freedom. In May 1857, some fired on a US marshal and posse of ten who tried to break into a Mechanicsburg, Ohio, home. The lawmen fled. At nearby Lumbarton another posse was arrested by citizens who charged they were using unnecessary force. A conference between Governor Chase and President Buchanan had to settle the case’s complex legal conflicts.
In 1858, a Black and white strike force from Oberlin, Ohio, rescued Black freedom seeker John Price from a posse that included two US marshals. Of the thirty-seven rescuers arrested, two were tried. One, Charles Langston, spoke so strongly about an African American’s right to challenge the new law—“I will do all I can for any man thus seized and held”—that the judge gave him a minimum sentence.
In 1859, Harriet Tubman helped liberate Charles Nalle from lawmen in Troy, New York. For half an hour, her Black and white civilian band battled Nalle’s captors as she fastened a grip on him and held it while clubs struck her head. When the male rescuers were wounded, Black women, she reported, “rushed over their bodies, brought Nalle out,” and sped him to safety.
Some African American women taken west in bondage sued for freedom in court. In San Jose, California, Mary brought a case in 1846 and won her liberty. In the next decade, in Los Angeles, Biddy Mason gained liberty for herself and three daughters with the help of a local sheriff. During a San Francisco dispute over a fugitive woman, the African American community raised such a furor that state legislators wanted to register them and ban any future Black migration. In 1852, Robbin and Polly Holmes, who had gained their freedom, brought suit in Oregon for the liberty of their three children and won the case.
The Fugitive Slave Law set North against South. It made some northern whites wonder if enslavers might be trying to control all of the United States. By sending southern posses racing through the streets of northern cities and towns, enslavers triggered anger from those who thought they were untouched by or neutral about slavery.
Insisting the Constitution protected them from being forced into slave-hunting posses, all free-state legislatures except New Jersey and California passed Personal Liberty Laws. This legislation represented the first major legal defeat for the enslavers of the United States.
Enslavers found the northern resistance to the law intolerable, in the words of the Augusta, Georgia, Republican, “a successful farce.” It summarized the case of a freedom-seeking man named Sims. Sims was kept in court for a week, a police detachment was necessary, and “the building was surrounded by a barricade of chains, and hundreds of the military had to be kept on guard to prevent his forcible rescue.” Slave-hunters were jailed for kidnapping and released only on bail of up to $10,000. Finally, “one of the agents narrowly escaped being struck on the head by a Negro named Randolph.” This conduct, complained the Republican, will prevent enslavers from “attempting to regain their slaves.”
In the 1850s, enslaved people increasingly heard news about the rising conflicts between North and South. By 1856, enslavers reported those they held in bondage were excited by the birth of a Republican Party dedicated to banning slavery in the West, and its presidential candidate, John Frémont. That year enslaved people also learned that whites in Kansas fought in armed battles over the future of bondage. A journalist in Kansas wrote: “The slaves are in a state of insurrection all over the country.”
Enslaved people in the South escaped in larger numbers than ever before, and more whites, particularly the poor, aided them and took part in their conspiracies. Panicky talk of Black insurrections was heard in several states.
The Washington correspondent for the New York Weekly Tribune wrote in 1856 that “the insurrectionary movement in Tennessee” made “more headway than is known to the public” and insisted “important facts [were] being suppressed in order to check the spread of the contagion.” The next week he told of serious outbreaks in New Orleans, though local papers “carefully refrain from any mention of the facts.”
The New Orleans Picayune admitted it “refrained from publishing a great deal” about the “spirit of turbulence.” Two weeks later the Picayune said Christmas fires pointed to “slave plots” in Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Its evidence added up to a “positive insurrection.”
That year in Colorado County, Texas, two hundred rebellious enslaved men, women, and children were helped, it was reported, by “the lower class of the Mexican population.” By the presidential election in November, enslaved people in southwestern Texas had hatched a plot in three counties to kill tracking hounds and “prepare for a general attack.”
In Mexico, reporter Olmsted found, “Runaways were constantly arriving.” He found that “two had got over the night before . . . forty . . . in the last three months. At other points, further down the [Rio Grande] river, a great many more came than here.” So many had escaped, he found, that their Texas owners agreed to pardon any that returned voluntarily. Mexico, he wrote, had thousands of free African Americans.
People seeking freedom from border states slipped across the Mason-Dixon line in large numbers. When the Ohio River froze, so many running to freedom from Kentucky crossed the ice that congestion became a problem. So many people fleeing slavery crowded into underground railroad stations in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1859, that its director, Colonel J. Bowles, desperately called for large amounts of financial aid.
The 1850s witnessed massive efforts to help escapees, including Harriet Tubman’s nineteen trips. Jane Lewis went to Kentucky to help enslaved people cross the river to freedom. Escapees Elizah Anderson and John Mason rescued more than two thousand. Mason was captured and sold back into slavery, but he escaped and continued his work. Formerly enslaved man Arnold Cragston spent four years rowing hundreds from Kentucky across the Ohio River, saying, “We just knew there was a lot of slaves always a-wantin’ to get free, and I had to help ’em.”
The conflict between enslaved and enslaver had moved to center stage by the 1850s. Fear of a Nat Turner or Toussaint Louverture had planters demanding that all whites commit themselves to control over enslaved people. These owners controlled their state governments.
Enslavers’ contempt for democracy and the rights of all leaped the boundaries of the South. They won the right to ban antislavery literature from the southern mail system. They set bonfires of suspected abolitionist material outside of southern post offices. In 1831, a southern paper threatened the lives of northern abolitionists “upon all occasions which may place them in our power.” In 1836, southerners in Congress won a “gag rule” that banned any petitions about slavery. It took an eight-year battle for congressmen to lift this ban. To tighten their control over enslaved people, masters had to demand new laws and compromises from northerners in Congress and out.
The abolitionist movement, inspired by the resistance of enslaved people and determined to end the system one way or another, became increasingly revolutionary. By the 1850s, thousands of its Black and white men and women members were helping people escape, challenging federal efforts to return those formerly enslaved, and discussing slavery’s violent overthrow in the South.
On abolition’s cutting edge was John Brown, a man of action. A devout Christian who identified fully with African Americans, he planned to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later West Virginia), and help launch Black maroon colonies in the Alleghenies. Brown told Frederick Douglass these mountains were placed by God “to aid the emancipation of your race.” Douglass admired Brown’s courage but warned him he was heading into a “perfect steel trap.”
John Brown before the court in Charleston.
On October 16, 1859, Brown led a band of twenty-two that included five Blacks and seventeen whites, including his own sons. Two Black recruits had been charged in the Oberlin rescue: John Copeland, an Oberlin student, and Copeland’s uncle, Lewis Sheridan Leary (an ancestor of poet Langston Hughes).
US troops commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart trapped Brown and his men. Ten were killed, seven (including Brown) were captured, and five escaped. However, the assault proved some whites were willing to die fighting slavery.
The quiet courage and thoughtful words of Brown during the forty days before his execution stirred the world and placed emancipation on the national agenda. In France, Victor Hugo called him “an apostle and a hero” and a “martyr.” Poet James Russell Lowell said: “But that scaffold sways the future.”
In 1860, President Lincoln and the Republican Party won the presidency. Those who kept men in bondage no longer dictated US policy. Eleven southern states threatened to secede from the Union and form their own confederacy. Bishop Elliot of Savannah announced that self-government and equality were “great falsehoods.” Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens’s inauguration speech called slavery “the great truth” and stated that “freedom is not possible without slavery.”
Once enslavers claimed they were pious, democratic gentlemen. They still felt that way about themselves. But in 1861, many northerners realized enslavers were far more committed to slavery than democracy. To protect slavery they would ignore rights for which Americans had fought and died.