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By the 1847 national black convention, debates were more pessimistic, more militant, and even more bellicose. Educate your sons in the "art of war," urged one resolution. Calls for patience and faith in rational debate were replaced by arguments favoring the use of violence to discourage slaveholding and the kidnapping of free blacks. The next year in Cleveland, the convention passed resolutions advocating women's rights and the right of violent self-defense. The delegates supported speakers who urged that additional committees of vigilance be formed "to measure arms with assailants without and invaders within."1 Ohio blacks reinforced that message in 1849 when their meeting urged "the slave [to] leave [the plantation] immediately with his hoe on his shoulder" and made plans to publish five hundred copies of a volume pairing Walker's Appeal with Garnet's 1843 address.2 Even Frederick Douglass, previously opposed to violence in the antislavery cause, could see justice in slaves' killing slaveholders. In the winter of 1849 Douglass asked, "Who dare say that the criminals deserve less than death at the hands of their long-abused chattels?"3
Events during the 1850s confirmed blacks' growing conviction that the federal government was unlikely to support the cause of freedom. The U.S. victory over Mexico brought large tracts of land under federal authority, again raising the inflammatory question of whether the new lands would be open to slavery. This issue had broad political consequences, since the common wisdom among northern white working men was that their labor was cheapened and their opportunities severely limited in regions that tolerated slavery. Although most white workers would not disturb slavery in the South, they were strongly opposed to allowing slavery in the western territories, fearing it would deprive white working people of access to the new lands that were the core of the American future. White southerners agreed that the nation's future lay in the western territories but asserted their right to bring slavery, an institution basic to their way of life, into that future. To forestall a clash between regions, Kentucky representative Henry Clay engineered a political compromise in Congress. California would be admitted as a free state, but the other southwestern territories taken from Mexico would be organized without a decision on slavery. For the antislavery forces the compromise promised the abolition of the slave trade in the nation's capital. For proslavery interests, the compromise offered the strictest fugitive slave law ever enacted, far stronger than the 1793 provision. This measure was so harsh that even President Millard Fillmore, who signed it into law in the fall of 1850, questioned its constitutionality.4
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 infuriated African Americans, who considered it definitive evidence that proslavery forces had taken over the federal government. This new law made it easier for slaveholders to retrieve runaways who sought asylum in the North. They were not even required to bring accused fugitives before a court but could take possession of their human property simply by presenting an affidavit drawn up by a southern court, with a physical description of the runaway, to any federal commissioner. Further, any bystander who refused to help recover a fugitive could be fined one thousand dollars and sentenced to up to six months in jail. This law not only struck down northern states' personal liberty laws, which prohibited the use of local and state officials or facilities in the capture of fugitives, but it even threatened the freedom of blacks who were legally free. Since alleged fugitives could not speak in their own defense, free blacks could more easily be kidnapped into slavery. Thus, even where abolitionists were strongest, no African American was beyond the reach of the slave power.5
Free blacks immediately swore to defy the new federal law. Meeting in Chicago only a few days after its passage, African Americans strongly denounced it. The city council in Chicago called it unconstitutional, deemed its supporters traitors, and refused to order city police to enforce it.6 At Boston's Faneuil Hall abolitionists vowed that no fugitive would be taken from that city, and Frederick Douglass asserted that the streets "would be running red with blood" before the law could be enforced in Boston.7 Pittsburgh blacks, stating their intention to make the recovery of fugitives in that city a costly proposition, bought one store's entire inventory of handguns and knives.8 In Cazenovia, a town in the middle of New York State, abolitionists and fugitive slaves met defiantly in a "Fugitive Slave Convention" and called for slave rebellion. Anticipating a confrontation, leaders in Ohio and Massachusetts called for the formation of black military companies to be ready to take up arms against slavery.9 Despite such strong reactions, the federal government, prodded by southern political pressure, was determined to enforce the law. James Hamlet, who was arrested in New York City and taken to Baltimore, had the dubious distinction of being the first to be returned to slavery under its provisions.
The New York abolitionists, who had been unable to prevent his capture, collected the eight hundred dollars demanded by Hamlet's master, bought his freedom, and returned him to the city. Others were not so fortunate and were returned to slavery from northern cities during the early 1850s. Many, even those who had lived in the North for several years, fled to Canada. Commu- nities closest to the South felt this emigration most acutely. According to contemporary accounts, small towns in southern Pennsylvania were "almost deserted of black fellows, since they have heard of the new law. It is supposed that more than a hundred have left for Canada and other parts." The black population of Columbia, Pennsylvania, decreased by more than half in a matter of months.10 One observer in Pittsburgh reported that "nearly all the waiters in the hotels have fled to Canada." According to his tally, "Sunday 30 fled; on Monday 40; on Tuesday 50; on Wednesday 30 and up to this time the number that has left will not fall short of 300."11 Fugitive or free, blacks not well known in their local communities were especially vulnerable to capture or kidnapping. 12 Things were not much better farther north-in Buffalo one black church lost 130 members of its congregation, Rochester's black Baptist church lost 114 members, and Boston's Twelfth Baptist Church and Albany, New York's, Hamilton Street Church each lost one-third of its members to Canadian migration.13 Shortly after the fugitive slave provision was signed into law, the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada estimated that between four and five thousand African Americans had crossed the Canadian border, and many of them were free blacks.14
Most blacks, however, did not go to Canada. Free blacks were critical in the fight against the Fugitive Slave Law, and the historical record is filled with their defiance of authority, as they endangered themselves and their property in attempts to prevent the recapture of fugitives. Before the passage of the new law, William Craft and his wife, Ellen, had escaped slavery in Georgia. They had made their way to Philadelphia and then to Boston, using an ingenious disguise, with the light-complexioned Ellen posing as an ill young white man and the darker William as her slave attendant. After their escape they traveled widely as antislavery speakers, mesmerizing audiences with their story. While in Boston, the couple stayed with Lewis Hayden, the escaped slave and active abolitionist. Though one of the best-known centers of antislavery activity in the country, Boston was not beyond slavery's reach. In early November 1850 the Liberator warned of "the appearance of two prowling villains . . . from Macon, Georgia, for the purpose of seizing William and Ellen Craft, under the infernal Fugitive Slave Bill, and carrying them back to the hell of Slavery."15
Abolitionist pressure led to the temporary arrest of the slave hunters, but eventually they descended on Hayden's home intending to recover the fugitives. Hayden confronted the slave hunters on the front porch of his house where he had placed barrels of explosives. He made clear his intention to blow up the house and anyone who might enter rather than allow the fugitives to be taken back to slavery. Meanwhile a number of Boston's blacks met to consider their course of action, and it was the overwhelming sense of the meeting that the fugitives would not be taken without a fight. Yet, realizing it was only a matter of time before the federal government would prevail even in Boston, abolitionists raised funds to send the Crafts to England, where they were taken in by British abolitionists and remained safe from capture.16
In Springfield, Massachusetts, John Brown, a deeply religious-some said fanatical-white activist, organized the U.S. League of the Gileadites. This group of black men and women armed themselves and intended to act as a guerrilla force to defend fugitives and attack slavery. Defiant abolitionist action spread across the North, but federal officials grew more determined as resistance increased. When an integrated group of abolitionists successfully rescued a fugitive named Shadrach Minkins from a Boston courtroom, President Filmore ordered the prosecution of the rescuers. Eight Bostonians, four blacks and four whites, were arrested, but none was convicted. In Syracuse, New York, in a case that became known as the Jerry Rescue, William ("Jerry") McHenry, a fugitive from Missouri, was arrested, but abolitionists rescued him from authorities and delivered him to Canada.