Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery

Preface

ix Many years ago, while working on a study of the role African Americans played in the transatlantic abolitionist movement, I ran across William and Ellen Craft, former slaves who were enormously popular with British audiences. Following up their story, I discovered that they had escaped from slavery in Macon, Georgia, over the 1848 Christmas holidays. Ellen, who looked white, dressed as an invalid slave master, and William accompanied her as her slave. Within four days they were being hidden by sympathizers in Pennsylvania, where they spent a few days before moving on to the relative safety of Boston. There they established a life for themselves , a life that was shattered when, in October 1850, two slave catchers from Macon appeared, seeking to return them to slavery. All the evidence suggests that their former owner had long known where they were yet chose to wait until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law two weeks earlier provided additional license to retake them. Much more draconian that the earlier version, the 1850 law unleashed political passions that few anticipated. At public meetings throughout the North, people pledged to defy the law; others saw it as nothing more than a means to reaffirm a pledge made Preface x :: PREFACE by the founding generation. The South looked on wearily, deeply skeptical of the North’s willingness to enforce what many saw as the last best chance to keep the Union together. The law, for all intents and purposes, nationalized the political debate over slavery. As if to thumb their noses at the law, the enslaved continued to escape in increasing numbers. In so doing, they actively joined the debate over the future of slavery. In this volatile political climate, the Crafts, and many other fugitives, became symbols of defiance and a yearning to be free. The pledge by the Boston black community and white supporters to protect the Crafts at all costs, in defiance of the law, only added to the sense of political crisis. The slave catchers were threatened physically and followed wherever they went by crowds of African Americans. In a coordinated effort , they were simultaneously sued by white members of the local Vigilance Committee for violating a number of ordinances. It is not clear that these suits had any legal merit; they were simply another way to intimidate the two Georgians. In the end, fearful for their safety, they returned to Georgia empty-handed. Although the attempt to recapture the fugitives had been repelled, supporters of the Crafts thought it best for the couple to leave the country once the president had publicly pledged his commitment to enforce the law at all costs and to punish those who resisted. By the end of the year, the Crafts were on their way to England, where they remained until 1869 when they returned to a United States free from slavery. About ten years ago I decided to try to make sense of the political turmoil that followed in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law by looking at how communities on both sides of the slavery divide organized to either resist or support enforcement of the law, and how slaves either entered or influenced the debate over the future of slavery by the act of escaping. Wanting to be as comprehensive as I possibly could, I made the rather foolish decision to cover the area from Virginia and Maryland in the east to Missouri in the west and north through the Free States to Canada. Having collected a mountain of data, I struggled over how the materials should be PREFACE :: xi presented. The kind invitation from William Blair, director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Center at Penn State University , to give the annual Brose Lectures in March 2012 forced my hand. My marching orders from Blair were simple enough: reevaluate the Underground Railroad. To do so, I chose to follow the trail laid out by the case of the Crafts. It is the Crafts who fashioned and executed their escape. Once they arrived in Pennsylvania, they were protected by members of the UGRR network who sent them to Boston. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and their former master’s attempt to retake them threatened to destroy their newly won freedom. They and their supporters chose to defy both their former owner and the law. Those who came to their aid considered the law morally indefensible...