Between Slavery and Freedom (20 page)

Francis Johnson. Francis Johnson (1792–1844) toured extensively in North America and Europe with his band, which was made up entirely of African-American musicians, and composed music for many white upper-class social events. This portrait is by Robert Douglass Jr., a black painter from Philadelphia who struggled to make his own career in the arts. (Ferdinand J. Dreer Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

Caution!! Colored People. The passage of a harsh new Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 made free blacks feel vulnerable. They could be arrested as runaways, denied the chance to prove that they were in fact free, and shipped off to the South. (Photographs and Print Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

CHAPTER FIVE

“No Rights which the White Man was Bound to Respect”

Black Freedom and Black Citizenship, 1850–1861

The message the new generation of African-American leaders wanted to convey to the entire free black community was that if they hoped to see every slave in the nation liberated and every free person treated as a citizen they must unite. It was one thing to call upon people to rally around the core issue of ending racial oppression. It was quite another, however, to reach a consensus about how best to proceed, or indeed who should speak
for the nation's free black population. By 1850, that population stood at almost 435,000. Free people of color lived in every state of the Union and in every territory. They dwelled on small farms and in great cities. Some were wealthy, while many were desperately poor. Several hundred were slaveholders, while a great many more were ex-slaves. Although most were legally free, a considerable number—we will never know the precise figure—were passing as free. Geography and socioeconomic status divided the free community, and so too did gender. Black women struggled with the “double bond” of race and gender; when they spoke out, some black men were supportive but others dismissed their concerns. Although unity was difficult to achieve across lines of region and class, education and gender, the overwhelming majority of free people were agreed on one central point: things could not remain as they were.

The new decade began ominously for the nation's free people of color. Negotiators in Congress patched together the Compromise of 1850 to try to damp down the fires of sectional discord. California entered the Union as a free state, a move that seemed promising to African Americans who wanted to settle there. The Compromise organized New Mexico and Utah into territories. It resolved a boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico, and it banned the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Foreign visitors to the nation's capital had been openly critical of the fact that auctioneers were selling off slaves to the highest bidder just blocks away from where congressmen were holding forth on the subject of American liberty. The slave trade ended in the District, although slavery did not, but by far the most controversial provision of the Compromise was the passage of a new Fugitive Slave Law.

Slaveholders had been complaining for decades that the 1793 law was not tough enough. They wanted a law that had “teeth.” In 1850 they got it. The new Fugitive Slave Law was broad in its scope and truly terrible in its impact. It made every African American vulnerable to arrest and enslavement. Slave owners or their agents had the power of the federal government behind them. Armed with vague descriptions of the individuals they were hunting, they roamed black neighborhoods in the North and Midwest. The people they seized as fugitives were judged to be so unless they could prove otherwise—but they could not prove otherwise because the law did not allow them to bring forward witnesses to attest to their free status. The fact that the federally-appointed commissioners responsible for determining whether the black man or woman standing before them was a slave or a free person received ten dollars if they ruled in favor of the slave catcher and only five if they found that it was a case of mistaken identity obviously weighed in the decision-making process.

In Boston and elsewhere, black and white antislavery radicals stormed courthouses, harassed slave catchers, and did whatever they could to wrest alleged runaways from the clutches of their captors. If they had to use violence, some were prepared to do so. In at least one instance—in Christiana, Pennsylvania, in 1851—a slave owner paid with his life for attempting to take back his human property. As Frederick Douglass proclaimed, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”
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Black people began to arm themselves and some of them fortified their homes.

The federal government repeatedly intervened to uphold the law. The “rendition” of Anthony Burns in Boston in 1854 took so much manpower and generated so much expense that, humanitarian considerations apart, critics of the slave law insisted that it would have been cheaper if the authorities had simply paid Burns' master for his freedom. Nine “free” states either revamped their personal liberty laws or wrote new ones. Those states might not give black people many rights in their everyday lives, but they were concerned about the implications of the federal law. Tensions escalated as the defenders of slavery demanded that the Supreme Court strike down the state laws.

The 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
stiffened the resolve of the antislavery forces and brought them new recruits. Some African-American readers were dismayed that Stowe's novel ended with George and Eliza Harris leaving for Liberia. They argued that Stowe should have had this brave young couple stay and fight the slave system, but they appreciated the response
Uncle Tom's Cabin
generated. It brought home to many of Stowe's white readers the evils of slavery and the pernicious nature of the Fugitive Slave Law. However, sympathy for the poor, oppressed slaves in the South did not necessarily change the way whites in the “free” states viewed people of color in general. The body of laws in place in all sections of the nation reinforced to free black people their marginal status, and where the law was silent, majority sentiment often ruled the day. If race riots were less prevalent in the 1850s, racial violence was as commonplace as it had ever been. The mob actions of earlier decades had given way to smaller-scale but no less virulent assaults on black people and black-owned property. An unstable economy only made things worse as whites took out their fears and frustrations on their black neighbors.

Facing an uncertain future, some light-skinned free people tried to redefine themselves in racial terms. Charleston's James Hanscome was one individual who succeeded. Hanscome was the wealthy slave-owning son of a white planter and a free woman of color. Under South Carolina law, the child of a Native-American woman and a white man was considered white, so Hanscome declared that his late mother had been an Indian. He also
insisted that he had never paid the discriminatory tax that South Carolina imposed on all free people of color, and hence he never had been “colored.” He even produced as a witness the official responsible for collecting the tax. Both men lied. Hanscome
had
paid the tax. Whether his white ally perjured himself out of friendship or because Hanscome had bribed him is open to question, but no one checked, and Hanscome slipped quietly across the racial boundary. What he achieved was hardly unusual. A newspaper in Charleston around the same time that James Hanscome “passed” lamented that “[e]very day” free people stretched the truth and “gained the privileges of white men.”
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Suspicion of free people increased in many quarters. Even if only a small number of them were able to do what Hanscome had done, many whites saw free blacks as constituting a dangerous and restless element in society. Southern states made vigorous efforts to cut off the flow of recruits into the free community. Manumission became virtually impossible in most slave states after 1850. Courts that had once been fairly liberal in their interpretation of what counted as a “meritorious act” on the part of a slave now adopted a much harsher attitude. And when the laws of a particular state required that newly-emancipated slaves leave immediately or face reenslavement, judges were less likely than they had been to grant waivers. Masters and mistresses who did want to liberate a slave often found that they could not do so. If an owner defied the law rather than trying to maneuver around it, that did not help the slave, who would find him- or herself back in slavery by order of the state. Local authorities in the South began conducting sweeps of particular neighborhoods, taking into custody black people who had been living as free, with or without the connivance of their owners.

Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that some free people chose to leave the United States. A new Haitian emigration scheme induced hundreds of men and women to try their luck in the island nation. People of color reevaluated emigration to Liberia. In the 1820s and 1830s, the free community had been intensely critical of the American Colonization Society and had condemned as foolish and misguided anyone who even considered going to Liberia. However, in 1847 Liberia had become an independent republic and it had a black man, Virginia-born merchant John Jenkins Roberts, as its president. That made it much more appealing.

Black men and women left America to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Some, like abolitionist lecturer Sarah Parker Remond and gifted young scholar Jesse Ewing Glasgow, sought in Britain the college education they could not get in the United States. France attracted a number of mixed-raced émigrés from Louisiana. Some people ventured much further afield.
African-American mariners and whalers jumped ship in faraway locations like Hawai'i, while black prospectors joined whites in seeking their fortunes in the gold diggings in Australia.