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86 d D Breaking Chains his own children and further denies that he is harsh, or that his wife Polly is cruel to their children, but on the contrary avers that his and his wife’s reputation for kindness and parental care for their children is such that he can safely ask the court to enquire thereof, and that his character for honesty sobriety and industry is good as petitioner believes, and this he prays may be inquired of by the court. As on previous documents, Holmes signs the affidavit with an X. d D Holmes and Ford by this time have laid out in great detail their respective cases. There appears nothing more for either man to say. But a ruling will await the arrival of a new judge. Ford’s Secret Strategy Nathaniel Ford told the court he delayed responding to Robin Holmes’ suit because he misplaced the court papers and also couldn’t afford the expense of transporting the children to court. The delay lasted more than a year, frustrating Holmes. But these were fraudulent excuses. In truth, Ford was using the time to try to circumvent Holmes’ suit by devising a plan to return the entire Holmes family to Missouri to sell them back into slavery. Holmes told the court in his affidavit that he didn’t know whether Ford was serious about sending them back, or whether the threat was merely a ruse to discourage him from trying to regain his children. For his part, Ford told the court someone else suggested he return them, but he decided against it. However, a letter that turned up later in Missouri revealed that Ford had a very specific plan in mind to send the Holmeses to Missouri. He hoped to claim them as runaway slaves under the new, more rigid, Fugitive Slave Act, which Congress enacted in 1850. While no one in the Holmes family, by any stretch of the imagination, could be considered a runaway, the Fugitive Slave Act required no more evidence than a claimant’s sworn testimony that the person was a runaway and belonged to him. Law enforcement officers, even in non-slave states and territories, were required to enforce the law, or face a fine of $1,000. Anyone helping the Ford’s Secret Strategy d D 87 suspect was also subject to a fine and six months in jail. Nor could the suspect testify on his or her own behalf. With such flimsy evidence free blacks might be fraudulently conscripted into slavery, although there is no recorded instance of this happening in Oregon. Ford, however, may also have been exploring whether a new fugitive slave law in California could be replicated in Oregon. Although California had a constitutional prohibition against slavery, hundreds of slaves were brought from slave states to help mine gold. Not wanting to give up their slaves, slaveholders won approval from the legislature for the highly controversial California Fugitive Slave Act of 1852, which provided that owners had a legal right to return slaves to their slave states, if they brought them to California prior to statehood.1 The California Supreme Court upheld the law in “one of the most deeply proslavery decisions ever rendered in a free state,’’ said Stacey L. Smith, an assistant professor of history at Oregon State University. The court ruled that the constitution’s anti-slavery clause did not free anyone because it lacked an enforcement provision.2 Thus, the new fugitive slave law potentially authorized the enslavement or re-enslavement of nearly all of California’s two thousand enslaved and free black residents. As it happened, some African Americans who thought they were free were returned to their former owners, although there is no way of knowing how many. Ford evidently felt no remorse about devising a strategy to reclaim Robin and Polly Holmes as slaves two years after he gave them their freedom. The letter outlining his plan was addressed to James A. Shirley in Howard County, Missouri, on June 22, 1852, two months after Holmes initiated his suit and ten months before Ford responded to Holmes. Ford revealed to Shirley he had sold a slave in Oregon—he didn’t identify him or her. It was also in this letter that Ford complained about having no Missouri friends. The following excerpts, with misspellings and grammatical mistakes included, detail Ford’s strategy: Dear Sir: I have for the first time since I left Howard County come to the conclusion to write...

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