Fugitive Slave Law Research Articles

To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (review)

Reviewed by: To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker Kabria Baumgartner (bio) Keywords Slavery, Mary Walker, Slave families, Free African Americans, Fugitive slaves To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker. By Sydney Nathans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 330. Cloth, $29.95.) Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Mary Walker: For most readers familiar with American history, the first three names are recognizable. Tubman, Truth, and Jacobs were enslaved African American women who escaped slavery and fought for black emancipation and civil rights in nineteenth-century America. Mary Walker did too, but until now her story went untold. In To Free a Family, distinguished historian Sydney Nathans recovers the lived experiences of Mary Walker, from her upbringing as an enslaved servant on the Cameron plantation in North Carolina to her work as a freedwoman supporting her family in Massachusetts. Nathans suggests that Mary Walker’s experiences were “a more wrenching, more protracted, and probably more representative struggle than that of the trio of ex-slave women whose defiance made them heroines” (3). He raises a valid point. Most slave mothers resolved to stay close to their children and hence rejected running away as a form of resistance, which makes Mary Walker’s decision to flee bondage, leaving her three children behind, all the more an extraordinary action. Thus Mary’s abiding quest to reunite her family, Nathans argues, reveals the “hidden epic of emancipation” (4). Born on August 18, 1818 to Priscilla, an enslaved servant, and an unknown, white father, Mary Walker grew up on the Fairntosh Plantation in central North Carolina. Described as “fair skinned,” Mary served the Cameron family and, while doing so, learned to read, write, and sew (2). At the age of thirteen or fourteen, she bore her first child, Frank, in 1832. She had three more children: Agnes, born in 1837; Edward, born in 1840 and died in 1848; and Bryant, born in 1844. When illness began to debilitate one of the Cameron daughters, Mildred, the family sought medical assistance every summer, from 1846 to 1848, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During that period of time, Mary accompanied the family as caregiver and faithful servant. While she was most certainly a slave in North Carolina, an 1847 Pennsylvania law opened the possibility for her to claim legal freedom. Ten days before her thirtieth birthday, she [End Page 177] escaped. Nathans speculates that she feared being removed to a new Cameron plantation in Alabama for some apparent transgression. For two years, she lived in the relatively safe haven of Philadelphia. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which compelled citizens to assist in the recapture of fugitive slaves, precipitated Mary’s move from Philadelphia to Boston that November. She eventually resided with Peter and Susan Lesley where she worked as a seamstress; later on she became a caregiver to Anne Jean Lyman, Susan Lesley’s mother, in nearby Cambridge. Upon learning of patriarch Duncan Cameron’s death, she embarked upon her journey to free her enslaved children. Unbeknownst to her, Frank, her oldest son, had escaped in 1852. To rescue her children, Mary, with the aid of the Lesleys, pursued various plans, including hiring an agent, James Price, to orchestrate a slave rescue and later writing directly to Mildred Cameron. None of these plans worked. Mary thought often of her children, but as major events related to the expansion of slavery gripped the nation, her plans were thwarted. She committed herself instead to helping freed people, traveling to the South Carolina Sea Islands to provide aid. As the Civil War came to an end in 1865, she returned to Cambridge and finally her two children, now adults with their own families, joined her. Seven years later, she passed away. Prior to Mary’s reunion with her children, the Lesleys had been Mary’s adoptive family, but the Lesley–Walker friendship was an unlikely one. Peter Lesley expressed antislavery sympathies but had not joined the radical abolition movement. When he learned of Mary Walker’s plight from his cousin James Lesley, Peter became an ardent abolitionist, declaring in front of his congregation, “Harbor, and protect the oppressed wherever you behold...

Rhetoric of Doom and Redemption: Reverend Jermain Loguen's Jeremiadic Speech Against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

In his monumental speech protesting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Rev. Jermain W. Loguen urges his fellow townsmen of Syracuse, NY, an “open city” to fugitives, to defy the new federal legislation by protecting the city's fugitives from federal marshals en route to apprehend them. My analysis of Loguen's speech examines his use of American and African American jeremiadic strategies to convince his audience of primarily white Christian abolitionists that their unified resistance against the new law was part of God's providential plan to redeem the nation of the sin of slavery. My study also reveals how Loguen's appeals to manhood, through associating divine punishment with the emasculation of American men, as well as his establishment of “identification” around shared religious and political values, proved effective in rallying Syracuse's citizens to defend their God-given freedom.

Rhetoric of Doom and Redemption: Reverend Jermain Loguen's Jeremiadic Speech Against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

ABSTRACT In his monumental speech protesting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Rev. Jermain W. Loguen urges his fellow townsmen of Syracuse, NY, an “open city” to fugitives, to defy the new federal legislation by protecting the city's fugitives from federal marshals en route to apprehend them. My analysis of Loguen's speech examines his use of American and African American jeremiadic strategies to convince his audience of primarily white Christian abolitionists that their unified resistance against the new law was part of God's providential plan to redeem the nation of the sin of slavery. My study also reveals how Loguen's appeals to manhood, through associating divine punishment with the emasculation of American men, as well as his establishment of “identification” around shared religious and political values, proved effective in rallying Syracuse's citizens to defend their God-given freedom.

Deadweight Loss and the American Civil War: The Political Economy of Slavery, Secession, and Emancipation

Two broad positions have dominated the history of economic thought with respect to chattel slavery. The view of the classical economists, dating back as far as Adam Smith and including a good many abolitionists, was that slavery was inefficient and therefore unprofitable. The contrasting position of the new economic historians, most closely identified with Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, is that slavery was profitable and therefore efficient. Both positions are partly wrong (as well as partly right). Southern slavery was indeed profitable but nevertheless inefficient; it operated like other obvious practices — from piracy through monopoly to government subsidies — where individual gains do not translate into social benefits. In the terminology of economics, it was a system that imposed significant “deadweight loss” on the Southern economy, despite being lucrative for slaveholders. The paper presents both theoretical arguments and empirical evidence for the peculiar institution’s inefficiency. In the process it throws into fresh perspective many historical controversies about the antebellum South. A recognition of slavery’s deadweight loss has major implications for the origins of the Civil War. Slavery’s survival required extensive subsidies from government at all levels. A federal Fugitive Slave Law was among the most crucial ways that the national government socialized the system’s enforcement. That is why runaway slaves were such an important ingredient in sectional strife. A comparative investigation of slavery not just within the United States but elsewhere demonstrates that, wherever slaves could easily run away, the entire system was compromised.

Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts, 1858-1958 (review)

Reviewed by: Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts, 1858-1958 Carla Marano Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts, 1858-1958. Barrington Walker. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Pp. 268, $55.00 In Race on Trial, a recent publication by the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, Barrington Walker examines the ways in which Ontario's Black population engaged with the law over the course of a century. What began as Walker's doctoral thesis is now a welcome addition to the growing literature on race and the law in Canada. While his predecessors have used a case study approach, like James W. St. G. Walker (1997) and Constance Backhouse (1999), or a sociological perspective like Clayton Mosher (1998), Barrington Walker's is a thematic study that centres on nationalism, patriarchy, and sexuality. Walker bases his analysis in post-colonial theory, arguing that 'Black Canadians' experiences in the criminal courts resonated with the unequal power relations that emerged within colonial practices throughout the world' (11). In this way, Walker differentiates himself from his predecessors who he claims focus too closely on the discrimination paradigm. Certainly, he is concerned with how the law discriminated against Blacks but also how racial stereotypes could sometimes work in favour of the Black defendants to lessen their sentences. [End Page 330] Walker's main argument is that when Blacks appeared in Ontario's criminal courts, 'race' was also on trial. He contends that 'the criminal law was an integral part of how race was produced, managed, and expressed in the racial liberal order that framed the Black experience in Canada' (20). Conversely, he sheds light on how the racialized discourses of the period informed the White Canadian experience. Therefore, his most important argument, and indeed the book's largest contribution to the field of legal history, is that White Canadians often used racialized discourse to help shape and affirm their own national identity. For example, Walker explains that Black men accused of raping White women were seen as corruptors of Canadian society and were thus excluded from the definition of the nation. On the other hand, cases involving Black defendants could be used to bolster the nation's British-Canadian identity. While the United States adhered to a system of 'mob justice and lynching' for Black defendants, Canadians viewed this type of legal structure as decidedly unjust, and thus 'unBritish' (21). In reference to his main argument, Walker frequently alludes to the development of a 'racial liberal order' in Canada. However, he does not adequately explain the meaning of the phrase. Is it a response to Ian McKay's 'Liberal Order Framework' (2000), in which the author describes the formation of a British-Canadian nation between 1840 and 1940? If it is, Walker should have made this clear. The book is generally well-written with clear and concise prose. However, its thematic organization - one of its unique characteristics - required the author to describe multiple examples within a single chapter, which sometimes made his argument less clear. Moreover, further explanation should have been given for Walker's choice of periodization. Why did the author choose the century between 1858 and 1958, especially when one considers some important and related dates, such as the Act for the Abolition of Slavery of 1833, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and the enactment of the Canadian Criminal Code in 1892? Upon closer inspection, the periodization is even more problematic because the vast majority of the trials under study took place in the late nineteenth century. In addition, most of the cases (and the primary evidence for the book) are drawn from the counties of Essex and Kent in southwestern Ontario. Perhaps, then, evidence from other parts of Ontario would have strengthened Walker's argument. At times the author draws unconvincing conclusions from the case reports. In chapter 5, for instance, Walker presents the case of Harry Lee, a Black man accused of murdering a White (Jewish) woman named Mary Rosenblatt with whom he was having an affair. In the [End Page 331] post-mortem photographs of Rosenblatt's body, her skin appeared dark, thus throwing her race into question. Walker then...

Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War Kristen T. Oertel Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War. Stanley Harrold. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8078-3431-2, 312 pp., cloth, $30.00. Stanley Harrold contends that violence over slavery was old news to border residents by 1860. In fact, he convincingly argues that Americans who resided on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon Line had been killing each other for decades. Focusing on the sectional tensions that existed between the “Border South” (Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware) and the “Lower North” (Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey), Harrold finds that fugitive slaves, their owners/pursuers, and their protectors engaged in a long, protracted battle over freedom and property rights that foreshadowed and, in fact, contributed to the onset of Civil War. As Border South residents sounded the alarm about “Negro stealers” and runaways, even after the federal government stepped in with a strengthened fugitive slave law in 1850, “Lower South politicians and journalists foresaw one tier of southern states after another falling to the forces of black freedom” (12). To stave off this domino effect, Harrold claims, southerners increasingly considered secession as a viable means of protecting their slave property. Historians have often underestimated the importance of slavery in the border region to the sectional crisis, citing meager slave populations and unionist sentiment as reasons for its relatively benign importance in the acute political battles of the 1850s. Except for the border war in Missouri, which most historians place in the context of the debate over westward expansion, no historian has charted the “extended cross-border conflict” Harrold uncovers with vivid detail (14). Beginning in the 1820s (though Harrold identifies several incidents prior to that decade) and building in strength and frequency with each decade, slaves in the Border South and their black and white allies in the Lower North made it increasingly difficult for slave owners in the border region to recover and protect their slave property. Harrold narrates the numerous slave escapes that punctuated the region’s history, including the remarkable Pearl incident in 1848, when seventy-seven slaves escaped Washington, D.C., on board the Pearl, and more obscure conflicts like the gun battles between abolitionists and “negro-hunters” in Red Oak, Ohio, in 1844. One hopes that with Harrold’s dramatic retelling of the Pearl incident, complete with fleeing slaves stuffed into the hold of the Pearl, the ship’s capture by proslavery men, [End Page 103] and the ensuing riot in D.C., which resulted in President Polk’s intervention, that the iconic Nat Turner will now have some company in the expanding narrative on antebellum slave resistance. In addition to the valuable treasure trove of resistance stories, this work is also notable for its use of newspaper reports, an indication of the central importance of the nineteenth-century press in fomenting sectional discord. After the fighting at Red Oak, when a group of Kentuckians crossed into Ohio to retrieve six fugitive slaves and killed two of the abolitionists who housed them, the Liberator trumpeted that the “‘bloody tragedy, enacted on the free soil of Ohio, by a gang of Kentucky slaveholders’ [was] probably, but ‘the beginning of the end,’” while the Lexington (Kentucky) Observer claimed that “northern ‘slave-stealing miscreants,’ like those at Red Oak, had to be taught ‘a lesson which they will not forget’” (94–95). Similarly, the Chicago Western Citizen raised the rhetoric to a feverish pitch when it printed abolitionist Zebina Eastman’s call for Chicago’s “colored population” to resist the hated fugitive slave law: “While they do not propose to commit any act of violence unless driven to the wall, they will not suffer the new law to be executed upon their persons. In resisting this even to the death, they will be sustained by the omnipotent sentiment of the [white] citizens of Chicago” (150). Using both the abolitionist and mainstream press, Harrold thus highlights numerous examples of black-white alliances in resistance to slavery and illustrates that signal events like John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry were simply “the logical product...

Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial , and: Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage (review)

Reviewed by: Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial, and: Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage Arthur T. Downey (bio) Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial. By Steven Lubet. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 367. Cloth, $29.95.) Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage. By Earl M. Maltz. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010. Pp. 174. Cloth, $34.95; paper, $17.95.) Four days after adopting its Ordinance of Secession, the same South Carolina Convention issued its Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union. The underlying principle was "the law of compact," according to which, if one party to a contract "fails to perform a material part of the agreement," the aggrieved party is released from its obligation. The "proof " that fourteen northern states failed to meet their obligations under Article IV of the Constitution—requiring the rendition of fugitive slaves—was laid out [End Page 90] in the declaration's longest section. Because of this failure regarding fugitive slaves, the compact was "deliberately broken" and South Carolina was released from its obligations. In his first inaugural, lawyer Lincoln destroyed South Carolina's "law of compact" argument—all the parties to the contract, he said, had to agree to its rescission. Then, he jumped headlong into the fugitive slave issue, about which, he acknowledged, there was "much controversy." He urged his northern listeners to abide by the fugitive slave law, rather than hope it might be found unconstitutional. Lincoln reminded the South that, if the sections separated, the North would no longer surrender fugitive slaves as it did, however imperfectly. There was much at stake in how the Fugitive Slave Act was interpreted, not only in southern statehouses and at the White House but in courtrooms throughout the North. The two works under review here bring new attention to the topic. Steven Lubet's Fugitive Justice is essential to exploring the issues surrounding the implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Of the 191 known proceedings under that act, the author selected three fugitive slave trials: the 1851 "Christiana slave riot" trial in Pennsylvania (the largest treason trial in U.S. history); the dramatic 1854 Boston trial of the escaped slave Anthony Burns; and, finally, the 1858-59 trials in Ohio of thirty-seven Oberlin rescuers of a Kentucky fugitive. Lubet, who directs the Bartlit Center for Trial Strategy at Northwestern University Law School, carefully traces the changing nature of defense counsels' strategy, as it evolved from an acceptance of the legitimacy of the Fugitive Slave Act (Christiana), to acceptance of resistance (Burns), to flat-out disobedience based on a "higher law" (Oberlin). The enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 influenced this change, for if the slave-owning South was no longer barred from westward expansion, why should abolitionists feel bound by the fugitive slave law that had been the key part of the Compromise of 1850? Along the way, Lubet explains how antebellum trial practice differs from today's, in that judges enjoyed great latitude in their jury charges, defendants were disqualified from testifying on their own behalf, and defense lawyers had no opportunity to obtain witness statements in advance. He puts the reader in the position of a juror, a prosecutor, a judge, and defense counsel, and succeeds in making the issues human and real. Readers might have found it useful had he included the text of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the author might have spent more time on the March 1859 case Ableman v. Booth, which exposed all the issues with fugitive slave rendition, but these are minor quibbles. [End Page 91] Earl M. Maltz focuses exclusively on the Boston trial of Anthony Burns in Fugitive Slave on Trial. The book is a departure for Maltz, a constitutional scholar at Rutgers Law School, and scholarly readers will miss the footnotes. The author brings his talents to bear in presenting the broad context of the Burns case. While he covers the same ground as Lubet, Maltz digs deeper into the fate of the federal commissioner...

Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (review)

Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial. By Steven Lubet. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 384 Cloth, $29.95.)By Erik J. ChaputWhile the numerous fugitive slave cases conducted under the provisions of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act were very real for the participants involved - often tragically ending in their return to bondage - they also took on symbolic and political significance. Supporters of these proceedings never admitted they constituted a trial because to do so would open a Pandora's Box of constitutional objections. In Fugitive Justice, Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet has written a lively and entertaining account of three of the most celebrated fugitive slave trials in the 1850s. The intention of the Compromise of 1850 was to remove slavery the political arena. However, the act, according to Lubet, transferred the controversy remote, and barely settled, territories to the population centers of the East, potentially entangling the federal government in every escape, warrant, seizure, rescue, and trial until the advent of the Civil War (49).Lubet is particularly skilled at building suspense and reader interest in the legal strategies of both sides in the courtroom. The author leads the reader step by step through the maze of arguments, taking what would seemingly be dry material and raising it to the level of high drama. Lubet maintains in the first part of the decade the antislavery legal bar argued the revamped fugitive slave law (the law was really an amendment to the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law) violated civil liberties and constitutional protections for a jury trial.In the latter half of the decade, arguments solely based on theories of moral justice began to take over. From 1850 to 1859, higher law arguments transformed from an abstract inspiration to an unapologetic legal (8).The first case Lubet covers is the 1851 treason trial of Castner Hanway. On September 11, 1851, a group of blacks violently resisted a Maryland slaveholder's attempt to reclaim four fugitives near Christiana, Pennsylvania. When the dust settled, the slaveowner was dead and his son lay wounded. Because the fugitives had successfully fled the scene, the Fillmore administration was forced to bring charges against anyone they could find. Eventually, thirty-eight men were charged on 1 1 7 separate counts of treason. The trial of the white abolitionist Hanway in the U.S. Circuit Court (ironically located in Independence Hall in Philadelphia) was packed with spectators. Lubet's in-depth discussion of the defense arguments shows the antislavery legal bar was interested primarily in results and not in directly challenging the fugitive slave law or slavery itself. With Hanway's eventual acquittal, Lubet sees cracks in the sectional compromise because of the Fillmore administration's decision to abandon attempts to indict opponents of the new fugitive slave law for treason. Moreover, in subsequent cases, claims of innocence were for less availing as they were in Hanway's trial and that very circumstance would create far greater latitude for invoking higher law in the courtroom (131).The second fugitive slave controversy covered by Lubet is the multiple trials connected with the 1854 Anthony Burns affair in Boston. On May 24, 1854, Burns was arrested on his way home his job at a clothing store. Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson and other Boston abolitionists led an abortive attempt to rescue Burns. Having already endured one embarrassing rescue in 1851, officials were prepared. A guard was killed, but Burns remained in custody. Burns was defended by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Charles Ellis, and Robert Morris. …

Border war: fighting over slavery before the Civil War

During the 1840s and 1850s, a dangerous ferment afflicted the North-South border region, pitting the slave states of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri against the free states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Aspects of this struggle--the underground railroad, enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, mob actions, and sectional politics--are well known as parts of other stories. Here, Stanley Harrold explores the border struggle itself, the dramatic incidents that comprised it, and its role in the complex dynamics leading to the Civil War.

Melville in the Customhouse Attic

In a standard narrative of Herman Melville's career, the author's initial tendency toward cultural nationalism—most famously displayed in his 1850 essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses”—gave way during the early 1850s to political misgivings and increasingly dark novels. The Democratic Party and the “Young America” movement seemed to take a sinister turn with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and Melville grew disillusioned with Young America's literary side following the poor reception of Moby-Dick (1851). Melville's fourth novel, Redburn (1849), though regarded as one of his secondary works, merits greater attention as a counternationalist meditation on the origins of U.S. culture. Because it was written before the political events of the early 1850s and Melville's falling-out with the New York literary establishment, Redburn focuses our attention on a different context for the deepening and darkening of Melville's work: the apparent realization of U.S. “Manifest Destiny” in 1848, with a massive territorial conquest from Mexico. Hager explores the political implications of Redburn's spatial tropes, paying special attention to the architectural history of the New York customhouse and the way Melville expanded the novel itself. As this essay argues, Redburn suggests that excesses of space—architectural, textual, and territorial—obscure the origins and founding principles of the nation.

Lincoln and the Constitution: A Unionist for the Sake of Liberty

Lincoln and the Constitution: A Unionist for the Sake of Liberty LUCAS E. MOREL Ever true to Liberty, the Union, and the Constitution—true to Liberty, not selfishly, but upon principle—not for special classes ofmen, but for all men; true to the Union and the Constitution, as the best means to advance that liberty. Abraham Lincoln to a Committee of German Republicans, June 30, 18581 A perennial question regarding Lincoln’s understanding of the federal Constitution is whether preserving the American Union was more important to him than promoting liberty for all. Lincoln took up the question of lib­ erty when he addressed a sanitary fair (the Women’s Central Association of Relief) in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 18, 1864. He said, The world has never had a good def­ inition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want ofone. We all declare for lib­ erty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his la­ bor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but in­ computable [sic] things, called by the same name—liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the re­ spective parties, called by two differ­ ent and incomputable names—liberty and tyranny.2 So what does it mean to be for liberty? For Southerners who rejected Lincoln as President and attempted to form a government separate from the American Union, liberty meant the right ofa slaveholder to deprive a black man of his freedom simply on the basis of race. Lin­ coln reminded Americans that this policy of whites doing just what they please with black slaves, “being responsible to God alone,” bore 214 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Lincoln’s nemesis, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Dou­ glas (pictured), proposed an alternative doctrine, called “popular sovereignty,” which made consent the prime directive and would simply “let the people decide” on the question of slavery in the territories. a “strong resemblance to the old argument for the ‘Divine right of Kings.’”3 “Freedom for me at the expense ofthee” does not sound like the proper application of the Declaration of Independence, but this was how slaveholders translated the fundamental charter of Ameri­ can liberty. This definition could only be found in what Lincoln called at Baltimore “the wolfs dictionary.” Needless to say, Lincoln rejected this definition of liberty. But he also rejected the definition of lib­ erty offered by many abolitionists. Folks like William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the pre­ mier abolitionist newspaper in America, The Liberator, defined liberty as the equal posses­ sion of all human beings, regardless of race.4 So far, Lincoln would agree. However, Lincoln found their definition untenable as a practical matter because Garrison and his ilk dismissed the federal Constitution because it represented a union with slaveholders and therefore an unconscionable compromise with God’s en­ dowing all men with the same rights. In ad­ dition, so long as the national government could be enlisted in the protection ofslavery— through the notorious Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, for example—it was not a govern­ ment morally binding on any decent American citizen. Garrison’s rhetoric also created difficul­ ties for civic discussion and resolution re­ garding the future of slavery and freedom in America. In 1832, Garrison called the U.S. Constitution “the most bloody and heaven­ daring arrangement ever made by men” and “an unblushing and monstrous coalition to do evil that good might come.” In 1838, he helped establish the New England Non-Resistance Society, which proclaimed, “We cannot ac­ knowledge allegiance to any human govern­ ment.” In 1845, he said the United States “was conceived in sin, and brought forth in iniq­ uity.” In his most infamous formulation, Gar­ rison called the Constitution a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell,” and con­ cluded that it was “a mighty obstacle in the way...

Lincoln and Emancipation: Constitutional Theory, Practical Politics, and the Basic Practice of Law

Lincoln and Emancipation: Constitutional Theory, Practical Politics, and the Basic Practice of Law PAUL FINKELMAN Abraham Lincoln is, by any measure, our greatest President. Whenever we are asked to rank our Presidents, Lincoln comes out on top. This makes sense. His job, leading the nation through four years of Civil War, was the hardest of any President and he accomplished it so stunningly well: winning the War, preserving the Union, and ending slavery. His reputation is mostly a function ofthe challenges he faced and the success he had in leading the nation. That he was a tower­ ing giant surrounded by six decades of Lil­ liputian Presidents is also a factor.1 So too was his incredible use of language. Lincoln’s Sec­ ond Inaugural is one of the greatest speeches ofnineteenth-centuryAmerica; his Gettysburg address helped resurrect the core values ofthe Declaration of Independence while providing a higher meaning than even nationalism for the Civil War. Lincoln’s martyrdom made him mysterious, tragic, and heroic. Finally, of course, Lincoln’s place in his­ tory rests on his role as the Great Eman­ cipator.2 With a stroke of his pen, Lincoln brought liberty to about three million slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation was essen­ tially a political document in the guise of a war measure. But for Lincoln, the Proclama­ tion was also a constitutional document. It re­ flected his constitutional thought and under­ standing, filteredthroughthe reality ofthe War and political conditions. In March 1861, Lin­ coln declared—honestly and correctly—that he had no constitutional power to touch slav­ ery where it existed. A year and a halflater, in September 1862, he declared—honestly and correctly—that he did, in fact, have the con­ stitutional power to attack slavery in the Con­ federacy and order the emancipation of about three million slaves.3 244 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Lincoln’s Proclamation did not, and could not, end all slavery in the United States. To­ tal emancipation required military success and the Thirteenth Amendment. Furthermore, Lin­ coln was hardly the only agent in the process. Tens of thousands of slaves left their own­ ers during the War and ran to the protective shield of the United States Army. From day one of the War, slaves, former slaves, and free blacks participated in the military effort as guides, spies, civilian workers, and ultimately uniformed soldiers. The more than 200,000 blacks who served the Union cause made sig­ nificant contributions to victory and liberty. Moreover, as Ira Berlin has argued, simply by showing up at military bases, slaves left United States soldiers no choice but to of­ fer them shelter and protection. Berlin fur­ ther argues that slaves, by their very pres­ ence, helped shape military policy, and that in turn helped shape civilian policy. Slaves “did what they could to secure” freedom, “throwing their full weight behind the Federal cause, volunteering their services as teamsters, stable hands, and boatmen; butchers, bakers, and cooks; nurses, orderlies, and laundresses; blacksmiths, coopers, and carpenters; and, by the tens of thousands, as common laborers.”4 Slaves cared for the wounded and helped bury the dead, doubtless saying their own prayers to speed the blue-clad liberators on to their final destiny. Similarly, Congress played a role in end­ ing bondage, with two confiscation acts, the immediate end of slavery in the District of Columbia through compensated emancipa­ tion, an act ending slavery in the Territo­ ries without any compensation, the repeal of the federal Fugitive Slave Laws in 1864, and other measures. Most importantly, in early 1865 Congress sent the states the Thirteenth Amendment, which permanently ended slav­ ery everywhere in the United States. The states played their proper role by ratifying the Amendment in less than a year. Finally, of course, the Army and Navy made emancipa­ tion possible. Without military victory, eman­ cipation would have been impossible, or at least incomplete. Butwithout a viable constitutional andpo­ litical theory that allowed Congress, the Army, and the President to free slaves, emancipa­ tion could not have happened. A number of people helped shape these theories, including Lincoln’s abolitionist Secretary of the Trea­ sury, Salmon P. Chase; one of his political generals, Benjamin...

Uncle Tom's Cabin and Apocalyptic Sentimentalism

“I wrote [Uncle Tom's Cabin] because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity—bec...

Re-thinking 'American Studies after US Exceptionalism'

Over the last 15 years, I have devoted a substantial portion of my work to analyzing the discourse of American exceptionalism so as to advocate for a post-exceptionalist American studies.1 After analyzing what I called the Janus face of American Exceptionalism, I concluded that the relations between US citizens' belief in US exceptionalism and the state's production of exceptions to its core tenets might be best described in psychosocial terms as structures of disavowal. By the state's exceptions I referred to measures, like the “Indian Removal Act” and the “Fugitive Slave Law” in the nineteenth century and “Operation Wetback” and the Vietnam War in the twentieth, which violated the anti-imperialist norms that were embedded within the discourse of American exceptionalism. In enabling US citizens to disavow the state's exceptions that threatened their beliefs, the discourse of exceptionalism regulated US citizens' responses to historical events. The standpoint from which I had conducted this analysis correlated the US disavowal of its imperial history with the Cold War state's need to represent the US as uniquely positioned to oppose the imperialist ambitions of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the discourse of American exceptionalism had legitimated America's dominance within a dichotomized world order by supplying the rationale for America's moral superiority to Russian communism. Throughout the Cold War, US dominance was sustained through the US's representation of itself as an exception to the rules through which it regulated the rest of the global order. But with the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the formation of the European Union, the US lost its threatening, socialist, totalitarian Russian Other as well as its destabilized, dependent European Other. After the historical conditions that had formerly undergirded its assumptions faded into the historical past, the exceptionalist paradigm was unable to recoup the absences of these historical processes as signs of US uniqueness. With the loss of the geopolitical rationale for the representation of the US as an exception to the laws of nations, the US also lost the putative right to establish the rules for the global order.

Becoming African in America: race and nation in the early black Atlantic

INTRODUCTION 1. Africa and in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the Letters of Ignatius Sancho 2. Toward a Transformed Africa: The Second Generation of Writers 3. African Identity and the Movements for 'Return': African Institutions and Emigration in the 1780s and 90s 4. Out of America: Sierra Leone's Settler Society and Its Meanings for Africans in America 5. African Identity at the Beginning of the New Century: Politics, Religion, and Emigrationism 6. African Churches and the Struggle for an African Nation: Paul Cuffe, The African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the American Colonization Society EPILOGUE THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW OF 1850 AND RENEWED ASSERTIONS OF AFRICAN IDENTITY

The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave Law, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (review)

The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave Law, Constitution, and Coming of Civil War. By H. Robert Baker. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 260. Illustrations. Cloth, $38.95.)Reviewed by Stephen MiddletonThe fight to liberate African Americans is not a twentieth-century phenomenon, as Robert Baker makes clear in this gripping story about Joshua Glover. The scene is Racine, Wisconsin; year 1854-in a decade when abolitionist lawyer Salmon Portland Chase characterized slavery as the great question of day. Joshua Glover was among more than four million African Americans enslaved in South, and he joined an unknown number of men, women, and children who took flight to a free state or Canada. Glover chose former and, circa 1851, took refuge near Racine, a port city in Wisconsin. He had been legally held against his will by Benammi Garland, a Missouri slave owner who tracked him to Racine and captured him there as a fugitive slave. Garland had prepared for resistance from locals in free Wisconsin by enlisting federal marshals and a few toughs to carry out Fugitive Slave Act, which authorized him to capture and remove anyone who legally owed service under state law. But resistance in Wisconsin was probably greater than anything Garland had expected. Not only did Wisconsinites resist Garland and rescue Joshua Glover, they challenged constitutionality of Fugitive Slave Act. This book chronicles their resistance and constitutional arguments they developed in a futile effort to defeat fugitive slave law.An underlying theme of Baker's book is conflict of laws that surrounded capture of Joshua Glover. Missouri law had sanctioned slavery, and, as long as he was there or in a state with similar laws, Garland was within his legal rights to oppress anyone of African heritage if they had been designated as slaves. Federal law supported slavery, and, with Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, it assisted in capture and removal of fugitives, as well as limited rights of accused to prove their free status. A counterargument developed in antebellum America, as abolitionist lawyers, including Chase, challenged fugitive slave legislation, arguing that Constitution had deprived Congress of any legal authority to pass laws to support slavery. Wisconsin abolitionists shared this point of view, and majority on state Supreme Court agreed. Thus when Garland captured Glover, intending to remove him, he faced abolitionists and state judges who were willing to challenge nefarious law.Baker anchors this story in context of nineteenth-century struggle over slavery. There were competing forces in struggle for hearts and minds of Americans. Minstrelsy, America's first unabashedly popular theatre, is his best evidence to describe cultural violence against African Americans (72). Minstrelsy might have been hilariously entertaining to white who watched white performers in blackface mimic supposedly hapless and contented slaves, but it produced a false impression about black people in white mind. Baker explains that these shows were highly complex, and sometimes depicted how black families were separated and sold away, but they mainly conveyed notion that slavery was an appropriate status for blacks. Baker concludes that audiences increasingly left minstrel shows not only thoroughly entertained but secure in their feelings of racial superiority, and Garland and his supporters skillfully described Glover in unfavorable ways, just as minstrels had characterized black people (73). Of course, abolitionists pushed back, arguing that Glover was industrious and honest, seeming to say that he was entitled to freedom because he was different from masses of African Americans.That Wisconsin was a free state undoubtedly helped Glover's cause, and state was also blessed with able advocates for freedom, including lawyer James H. …

Deportation nation: outsiders in American history

The danger of deportation hangs over the head of virtually every non-citizen in the United States. In the complexities and inconsistencies of immigration law, one can find a reason to deport almost any noncitizen at almost any time. In recent years, the system has been used with unprecedented vigour against millions of deportees. We are a nation of immigrants - but which ones do we want, and what do we do with those that we don't? These questions have troubled American law and politics since colonial times. Deportation Nation is a chilling history of communal self-idealization and self-protection. The post-Revolutionary Alien and Sedition Laws, the Fugitive Slave laws, the Indian removals, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Palmer Raids, the internment of the Japanese Americans - all sought to remove those whose origins suggested they could never become true Americans. And for more than a century, millions of Mexicans have conveniently served as cheap labour, crossing a border that was not official until the early 20th century and being sent back across it when they became a burden. By illuminating the shadowy corners of American history, Daniel Kanstroom shows that deportation has long been a legal tool to control immigrants' lives and is used with increasing crudeness in a globalised but xenophobic world.

To set this world right: the antislavery movement in Thoreau's Concord

To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord. By Sandra Harbert Petrulionis. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 264. Cloth: $29.95.)Reviewed by Carol FaulknerIn this illuminating local study, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis traces Henry Thoreau's evolution as an abolitionist in the context of Concord's antislavery movement. Though scholars have devoted time and energy to understanding the abolitionism of the town's two most famous residents, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, this is the first study of the activism that helped shape their ideas. Joining recent books on the antislavery movement like Julie Roy Jeffrey's The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Beth Salerno's Sister Societies (Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), Petrulionis views female abolitionists, including Thoreau's mother and sisters, and Emerson's wife and daughter, as the central figures in Concord's antislavery movement. She also sees Concord as an example of the transformation of antislavery sentiment in the north. The town's response to and participation in national events such as the Fugitive Slave Law and John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry radicalized relatives and neighbors previously divided on Garrisonian abolitionism, colonization, and racial equality.The book's four chapters are organized chronologically, and Petrulionis begins with the founding of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, following a local appearance by the controversial Grimke sisters. Some of the town's female residents, most notably Mary Merrick Brooks, had already been active in the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society, and the female society continued the women's identification with Garrisonian moral suasion. The sixty-one charter members included Lidian Emerson and Cynthia, Sophia, and Helen Thoreau, and at least one African American, Susan Garrison. But Brooks, whose father was a slaveholder and whose husband opposed abolition, was the most important female activist in Concord. As Petrulionis notes, she pursued Waldo Emerson with a vengeance, convinced that his backing would lend critical weight to the immediatist cause (24). Brooks finally succeeded in 1844 when Emerson addressed an anniversary celebration of West Indian emancipation.Petrulionis weaves the local story into the larger history of the antislavery movement, noting the embrace by Concord abolitionists (though certainly not the entire town) of disunionism in 1844. Personal connections to the national controversy served to radicalize the town's population, as when moderate politician Samuel Hoar went to Charleston, South Carolina, to appeal for the freedom of northern black sailors imprisoned in the state. When South Carolina officials shunned Hoar, Emerson and others were outraged at the insult. …

The Tarring and Feathering of Thomas Paul Smith: Common Schools, Revolutionary Memory, and the Crisis of Black Citizenship in Antebellum Boston

The essay explores an 1851 incident of violence among black Bostonians centering on conflicts about the merits of school desegregation. The episode reveals differing concepts of and approaches to citizenship in the African-American community, tensions that were exacerbated by abolitionist activity, Revolutionary memory, and the Fugitive Slave Law.

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform Kristen Tegtmeier Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 328. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $23.99.) In Beyond Garrison, Bruce Laurie acknowledges the profound influence the Bay State's famous native son had on shaping the abolitionist movement in New England. Laurie urges us, however, to push through Garrison's apolitical "moral dead end" (5) and accept the claim that "politics had meaning and significance extending beyond Garrison" (9). Laurie's detailed study of the roots of antislavery politics in Massachusetts offers historians a fresh interpretation of the demographic and ideological base of the antislavery movement. Perhaps most important, however, he demonstrates how Bay State politicians linked antislavery concerns with other social reforms, such as the ten-hour movement and temperance, and thus strengthened, rather than weakened, the effectiveness of antislavery politics. Ultimately Laurie argues that "political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude and not a naïve plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation" (5). Moving beyond Garrison and his allies, Laurie points to men like Elizur Wright and Lewis Hayden and the "ordinary" citizens who fueled political abolitionism as the most successful leaders of Bay State antislavery activism. Laurie charts the evolution of antislavery politics from its origins in evangelical Protestantism and Garrisonian abolitionism to the rise and fall of the Liberty party, the creation of the Free Soil party and its coalition with Democrats, and the beginnings of the Republican party. Through biographical narratives and a thorough examination of voting behavior and demographics, Laurie demonstrates the importance of men "of the country" from "middling families" who embraced the utility of political action. Elizur Wright, Rev. Joshua Leavitt, and William S. Robinson are just a few of the many politicians, journalists, and activists who Laurie unearths from the ashes of Garrisonian abolitionism; he follows their path toward partisan antislavery vehicles like the Liberty party. He also underscores the importance of free blacks like Lewis Hayden and John Swett Rock in pressing white reformers to enact civil rights legislation. Laurie claims that "black activists were emphatically more combative" than whites [End Page 205] in their resistance to segregation and the fugitive slave law and applauds their rejection of the "non-resistance" abolitionism touted by most Garrisonians and politicos alike (253–54). In addition, Laurie makes the trenchant observation that some of the most effective antislavery politicians opposed "all kinds of slavery, wherever it exist[ed]," referring specifically to labor reform in the textile mills but also referencing the efforts of many Bay Staters to liberate their peers from the liquor bottle (147). Laurie shows that by supporting the ten-hour movement in the 1840s and the Maine Law in 1852, the supposed single-issue antislavery parties actually gained support and widened their political base. He also eschews the predominant view that abolitionism's strength was grounded only in middle-class, educated urbanites who lived in Boston. Instead, he finds some of the movement's most radical champions in industrial centers like Lowell, where working women like Sarah Bagley participated in the "cross-fertilization of abolitionism and labor reform" (145). Laurie reveals one of the weaknesses of his study by highlighting Bagley, however. Laurie features Bagley's courageous leadership of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, but Bagley is only one of the numerous reform-minded women who undoubtedly influenced political abolitionism in the 1840s and 1850s. If Bagley could encourage voters to link wage slavery with plantation slavery, as Laurie says she did, then other women like Abby Kelley and Lydia Maria Child certainly held sway with Liberty and Free Soil men in their home state. But Laurie almost wholly neglects women's antislavery activism, an oversight that could have been forgiven had recent studies by Julie Roy Jeffrey (1998), Melanie Gustafson (2001), and Susan Zaeske (2003) not provided numerous examples of how women participated in sectional politics. While it is true that many political abolitionists eschewed the "woman question," it is not the case that antislavery women were wholly divorced from political action. Although Laurie may have underestimated the significance of female politicos, he did provide...