Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington D.C., 1828-1865 (review)

Washington, D.C., "the land of the free's" center of government, was also the center of controversy as the site of Virginia's and Maryland's sale of surplus slaves. Harrold explores what he calls its "subversive biracial antislavery community" in the antebellum years (67). Focusing on efforts to free slaves by aiding legal cases, escapes, and purchases, Harrold praises the work especially of "radical political abolitionists" tied to Gerrit Smith's person and purse, who allegedly intended to use such actions "to drive slavery from the Chesapeake" (58, 76).

Subversives continues Harrold's glorification of the "martyrs" who were punished for aiding slave escapes in the South. The book's heroes are Charles Torrey, who died in prison for slave theft; William Chaplin, who avoided prison by skipping bail and leaving others to pay the bills; and Myrtilla Miner, who ran a school for black girls in the 1850s, which, according to Harrold, was intended to subvert slavery by training a cadre of black-abolitionist teachers. His central incident is the tragic escape attempt of seventy-seven slaves on the ship Pearl in 1848, financed by Smith and planned by Chaplin.

There's nothing interdisciplinary in the book, even when Harrold generalizes that slave-stealers' "courage" and "bravado" were "characteristics of revolutionary vanguards" (75). Rather, it is a solid historical account, grounded in rich research in abolitionist papers and newspapers. The detail is often telling. Harrold gives name and human face to many blacks who risked their lives to seek freedom for self, family, and others. He offers several examples of masters' coldness that slaves yearned to escape, such as raised prices for slaves that loved ones or philanthropists wished to purchase. But many whites were willing to help individual slaves, too, including Stephen Douglas—who was "particularly generous" in contributing to slave purchases (222)—and Duff Green—who secured the freedom of a slave sold by his mistress just before he was to pay the last installment on his freedom.

Some interpretive loss stems from Harrold's dedication to Kraditor's precedent of anointing "good" abolitionists by handing out "radical" merit badges.¹ Certainly Torrey and Chaplin were courageous abolitionists, but a more sober evaluation of their illegal activities that gained freedom for forty-four known slaves, but that led eighty others to deeper slavery, is surely in order. There is little indication that even Harrold's radicals saw their help as, in Torrey's words, "duty to the whole cause," though Torrey had a fantasy that some court case might establish slave escape and theft as Constitutional rights (76).

These radicals' contributions to slave subversion pale compared to those of Joshua Giddings and his Congressional clique or Gamaliel Bailey and his co-workers on the National Era, even in the limited context of freeing individual slaves. Harrold denigrates the Free Soil and Republican parties as diluting efforts to end slavery. He disparages the fugitive relief efforts of blacks and whites during the Civil War, though biracial cooperation then was greater and more egalitarian than it had been before. He quotes approvingly Smith's claim that it were better had the National Era been destroyed than it should criticize Chaplin's illegalities. So far as Harrold is concerned, Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published therein is important only for the money that Harriet Beecher Stowe received for it and contributed to Miner's school and to slave purchases. Harrold's is a valuable work, but its "radical" fixation makes it a skewed version of the varied antebellum contributions to anti- slavery in the nation's capital.