“Preachers of Sedition”
Syracuse
and
Freedom,
1851-1861.
By
John M. Rudy
A Thesis
Submitted to the Department of
History and Philosophy and the Graduate Council
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
SHIPPENSBURG UNIVERSITY
Shippensburg, Pennsylvania
December, 2010
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SHIPPENSBURG UNIVERSITY
Shippensburg. Pennsylvania
This thesis submitted by John M. Rudy has been approved as meeting the
research requirements for the Master of Arts degree.
______________________
Date
_____________________________
John Bloom
Chairperson of Thesis Committee and
Professor of History
______________________
Date
_____________________________
Susan Rimby
Department Chair, Professor of History
______________________
Date
_____________________________
Steven Burg
Professor of History
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Contents
Introduction
“Up Salt River”
……………………
9
“…Their voices will be loud against you till you die.”…
Daniel Webster and Syracuse, New York in 1851
17
ASIDE
Webster’s Second Jerry Address
……………………
51
“He Calls Me by the Thunder…”
Jermain Loguen’s Jerry Rescue
……………………
53
ASIDE
……………………
The Death of William “Jerry” Henry
99
“The Jerry Level”
……………………
Gerrit Smith and Troubled Commemoration
101
……………………
127
ASIDE
Breaking His Chains
6
“… And Rejoice with Trembling” ……………………
Samuel May and the Death of the Jerry Rescue
129
EPILOGUE
……………………
“This old-time religion…” - Legacies and Memory
161
……………………
169
Works Consulted
7
To
Mimi Rudy, for giving me strength
&
Darothy DeAngelo, for giving me inspiration.
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INTRODUCTION
“Up Salt River”
Catherine Harris had run for her life. The thirty-six year old woman, with her husband of
seven years and three year old daughter, had pulled up stakes and fled northward, picking their
way up the eastern seaboard of the United States to Albany, and then further inland towards
refuge in Canada. Their journey had taken them by canal boat from Albany through Syracuse,
New York. In the hold of that boat, amid oysters and clams, the family sojourned on toward
safety farther down the placid waterway which trekked across New York. The Harris Family was
fleeing neither master nor chains, neither whip nor overseer; the Harris Family was fleeing the
law.1
Catherine Harris declared to a court convened inside of the Police Office in Syracuse that
she was no slave. She had been born and raised in Philadelphia. Her small family had struck
northward not as panting fugitives from slavery, but well outfitted travelers heading for a new
“Testimony in the case of Harris, against Webster, Cowell and Cluney, charged with assault and threatening
Harris, while on board a canal boat. – Before Police Justice House,” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 October
1850.
1
10
life. “We had our two trunks, and basket,” she told the court, “our quilts were in the trunk which
we took out at night.” The family had left behind a decent life in Philadelphia. “My husband
was a mason,” she reported to the court, adding that, “besides he mends shoes.” Still, Catherine
could read little, and was, “never so far from home before.” The land she found was unfriendly
and foreign. Catherine felt, traveling through New York, “from what she had seen [she] didn't
think there were any on the canal who were their [the Harris’], or colored people's friends'.”
“She found,” she recalled, “no friends among any of them.” America had been altered in the
course of two months. The Fugitive Slave Law, part of the landmark Compromise of 1850
championed by Daniel Webster, had instantly made tenuous the lives of blacks throughout the
North, free and fugitive alike. The law provided for the recapture of slaves running from
plantations throughout the South. The provisions of the legislation required no trial or real proof
of an accused fugitive's status. Any black man or woman became a prospective target for
enslavement in the American South, and the simple fact of living near the Mason-Dixon line
became a direct threat to an African-American's life and liberty. 2
The Harris family was riding along one of the most famous thoroughfares in American
history. The Erie Canal was known the world over as a wonder of the modern world. Just as
noteworthy was its chief freight: Salina salt. Springs in Central New York near Onondaga Lake,
named for the Indian tribe who lived along its shores when white settlers first arrived in the
wilderness of New York, ran rich with salt.3 By the 1820s, salt had become big business for the
Empire State. Hydraulic pumps siphoned water to giant solar vats to be boiled away. What
“Testimony in the case of Harris…,” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 October 1850.
Père LeMoyne, of the French mission “Sainte Marie” on Onondaga Lake, first wrote of the availability of salt
in 1653. The formal manufacture of salt in the Onondaga region originated in 1789, chiefly for local use in
preserving meats and vegetables. For more background on Salt manufacture in Central New York, see Charles
Carroll Smith, ed. Pioneer Times in the Onondaga Country. (Syracuse: C.W. Bardeen, 1904).
2
3
11
remained was the sustaining mineral used across the world for storage and preservation. Salt, a
natural desiccant, was crucial to the expansion of any peoples into the frontiers of exploration.4
The salt works at the heart of New York would be revolutionized by the construction of the Erie
Canal. With an abundant supply of salt produced alongside a thriving waterway, trade in the
preservative skyrocketed. In the year 1839 alone, only 19 years after the canal first opened to the
solar salt fields of Salina and Syracuse, a total of 2,864,740 bushels of salt were produced in
Central New York and shipped out via the Erie Canal to markets around the nation. The town of
Salina alone had 86 salt manufactories within its borders. “Passing as the canal does,” one
observer noted, “within the toss of a biscuit of some salt springs,” the low country surrounding
the saline fountains of Salina had, “immense advantages… for a town.” What would later
become Syracuse started as, “a few scattered and indifferent wooden houses… amid the stumps
of the recently felled trees.” In spite of the lackluster appearance of Syracuse in 1820, one of the
small village’s founders quipped that he would, “see it a city yet.” In time, Syracuse would grow
as the canal pushed people and salt through the town.5
Friends in Albany helped book passage for the Harris family on a canal boat belonging to
Hartwell C. Webster in mid-October of 1850. The famous canal had been quickly outmoded by
railroads in the 1830s, and by 1850 was a much cheaper means of transportation for goods which
were not time sensitive. Passengers and stable freight traversed the canal between Albany and
Buffalo, shuttling goods and people between small canal depots and giant metropolises along the
way. Along with the Harris family, the boat had a number of passengers, including three Irish
families, an English family and two Dutch families. Three, “colored boys or young men,” were
4
John Warner Barber and Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the State of New York, (New York: S. Tuttle
for the authors, 1842), 394.
5
John Warner Barber and Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the State of New York, (New York: S. Tuttle
for the authors, 1842), 394-395.
12
aboard as well, “one named George, John, and don't know the other,” Harris recounted before the
police inquiry. Among the white passengers aboard were Jeremiah Cluney, a traveler on the
canal, and Silas H. Cowells, a twenty year old oyster peddler from Albany. Cluney, Cowells and
Webster thought the black family who traveled along the river were obviously fugitives from
slavery. The men, “immediately devised a plan to trouble and terrify them.” The small
impromptu gang simply wished to find amusement in their sport of chiding the fugitive family.6
On the second day of the family's journey, “Cowell and Cluney commenced talking, and
said they had not much money now,” but as soon as they arrived at their destination they, “would
have some money off the niggers.” The pair, “winked their eyes and looked at us,” the freewoman from Philadelphia recalled. The next morning, “Cluney came down and said no niggers
could pass this canal without being taken, and that more would be taken.” The next day the pair
repeated their threats against the family. For, “two or three day,” the Harris family endured the
derision from their fellow passenger. Finally, Harris reported, “in presence of herself and
husband in the hold of the boat,” the gang of troublemakers said that, “ that was the night we
were to be taken... they said the kidnappers were to take us.”7
As the couple sat in the hold, a ruse was materializing above their heads. The Harris
family heard cries of, “murder,” and, “Oh Lord.” A scuffle broke out above them. Catherine
Harris, “ was much frightened.” The woman turned to William, and, “said to her husband, the
slave-catchers are coming, and I am going overboard.” William replied that, “ he would follow
her, or take his life in some other way.” Catherine, resolute in her desire not to feel slavery's
chains on her wrists, took her three year old daughter in her arms and leapt through the window
“Outrageous Conduct of a Boat's Crew,” Daily Sentinel and Gazette (Milwaukee, WI), 1 November 1850;
“An Outrage,” The Daily Sanduskian (Sandusky, OH), 1 November 1850; “Testimony in the case of Harris…,”
Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 October 1850.
7
“Testimony in the case of Harris…,” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 October 1850.
6
13
of the boat, into the chill October waters of the Erie Canal. “When I jumped over board I was
expecting the kidnappers were doing their work,” Harris told the court, she would, “die rather
than to be taken by the kidnappers.” Flailing in the canal, the mother and her three year old
daughter were drowning. The mother was fished from the canal, out of her senses but alive; the
child's body was never found, and no effort was made by the crew to recover the Harris'
daughter.8
William Harris, after placing his wife below the deck and making sure she was safe, went
back to the deck the following morning where Cluney, “threatened to cut his throat.” Catherine
approached Captain Webster and protested at the threat against her husband, demanding of the
Captain, “you ain't going to let the men kill my husband, are you?” The man replied that he
would, “show you what shall be done, the sheriff will be here at 10 o'clock, and take his head
off.” All the wife could reply was, “Lord have mercy on me,” and returned to her berth to tell
her husband of the Captain's plans. William replied that he, “would sit and wait patiently his
doom.” At 10 o'clock, Cluney came into the couple's berth, laughed and, “ hallowed,” and, “said
the crew would be there presently and take [William's] head off.” William's resolve was strong.
“Sooner than have that pleasure,” the slave resolved, “he would cut his own throat.” The boat
was silent and Catherine looked away. As her eye went back to her husband, she, “saw the blood
running down,” the black man's neck. Her husband had sliced across his own throat with a
straight razor. She cried for help, but none came. Cowell and Cluney, the fellow travellers
turned tormenters, said, “d—n the nigger, let him die; if they had had the cutting of it they would
have done it right.” Captain Webster came into the cabin and scoffed at William's wound,
declaring the man, “hadn't cut it to hurt... d—n him, he ain't going to die yet.” As William lay on
8
“Testimony in the case of Harris…,” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 October 1850.
14
the floor bleeding, “Cluney and others went to playing cards; and laughing.” “It was too bad,”
the players chuckled over their games, “to be playing cards over a dead nigger.”9
Again and again, Harris begged through his blood and wounds to be let off the boat to see
a doctor. His wife, likewise, pleaded for the white passengers to help him. The only reply she
got, her husband dying on the floor of a oyster hold of a canal boat, was from one of the other
female passengers: “she would be better off without than with such a nigger.” All the while
Cluney and Cowells laughed and mocked the bleeding man. They passed through Utica, a city
of nearly 18,000 people without letting the prostrate man off the boat to see a doctor. Harris
asked the pair why they treated him so. The reply was terse; “Cowell said he was afraid of
him.”10
Finally, they dumped William Harris unceremoniously on the canal’s towpath. Unsure
what to do, the boat with his wife continuing down the canal, Harris staggered behind the boat
for twenty miles begging to be let back aboard. The former slave, so close to freedom, walked
nearly the entire way from Utica to Syracuse before collapsing just outside the city at Lodi, about
a mile from the edge of town. A, “good Samaritan,” Captain Valentin R. Ogden of Syracuse,
then picked him up and brought the wounded freeman to a doctor.11
The city which William Harris entered was wildly different than that founded in the
1820s. Charles Dickens would later describe the city as, “a most wonderful out-of-the-world
place,” looking, “as if it had begun to be built yesterday, and were going to be imperfectly
knocked together with a nail or two the day after to-morrow.” The small collection of shacks had
undergone a vast transformation into a city, “in extent, and the magnitude and durability of its
“Testimony in the case of Harris…,” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 October 1850.
“Testimony in the case of Harris…,” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 October 1850; “The Census.
Population of Utica,” New York Times (New York, NY), 11 July 1855.
11
“An Outrage,” The Daily Sanduskian (Sandusky, OH), 1 November 1850.
9
10
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buildings.” The city rising above the wounded black man's head was immense and sprawling,
growing into a metropolis much as his native Philadelphia had a century before. Standing in the
streets, visitors glanced, “upward, and around, upon splendid hotels, and rows of massive
buildings in all directions, and the lofty spires of churches glittering in the sun.” The streets
teemed and, “thronged with people full of life and activity, the canal basins crowded with boats
lading and unlading at the large and lofty stone warehouses upon the wharves.” Syracuse had
been transformed, a change which, “seemed like one of enchantment.”12
Syracuse had been transformed by the enchantment of a salt river. The Erie Canal, an
artificial river cutting clear across the state, brought Syracuse’s saline gold to the world and
caused a boom of growth in what later became known as the Salt City. The Harris family’s
journey on that salt river was not one of progress, however, but of utter defeat. “Salt River,” is
also political slang for oblivion. To “Row up salt river,” is to sail into obscurity and destruction
through defeat at the ballot box. But the Harris family had taken their own journey of
destruction up Salt River. Their destruction was not wrought at the hands of voters dropping
slips of paper with candidates names blithely into a hat at a polling station. Instead, the
destruction of the Harris family came at the hands of other Americans. Fear and prejudice towed
William Harris and his wife along the Erie Canal; the Fugitive Slave Act was the whip driving
the mules.13
And the only escape from slavery which the Harris Family saw on that cold October day
in 1850, standing on the deck of a canal boat heading up Salt River, was suicide and death. So
foul was the thought of being locked into chains and driven south that dragging a razor across the
12
Charles Dickens to M. Charles Fechter, 8 March 1868 in Georgina Hogarth and Mary Dickens, ed., The
Letters of Charles Dickens: 1857-1870, (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1879), Vol. II, 425; John Warner Barber and
Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the State of New York, (New York: S. Tuttle for the authors, 1842), 394-395.
13
John Russell Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1889), 547.
16
neck and lying bleeding on a grimy boat deck was the best option. So abhorrent was the idea of
unjustly being stolen away to a life of servitude that drowning an infant child in a murky fetid
canal was the superior choice. So repugnant was the thought of giving up American freedom
that death was the only option. The Harris Family, wounded and battered, floated into Syracuse
at a moment of upheaval in America. This upheaval would destroy a nation and ultimately see
thousands spill blood across the American landscape. But it would also ensure that men like
William Harris would not be faced with the awful choice of Liberty or Death.
17
CHAPTER 1
“…their voices will be loud against you till you die.”
Daniel Webster and Syracuse, New York in 1851
“Syracuse,” the New York Evening Post touted, was, “in Danger.” The city was quickly
slipping into a fetid cesspool of destruction and drastic measures needed to be undertaken to
salvage any hope of reviving the city. The Evening Post was simply passing on the words, “put
forth by a citizen of Syracuse,” in a book published in mid-1850. The title alone, convoluted and
serpentine, called Syracuse the, “Doomed City of the Valley,” and implied that it would,
“eventually sink, as did Sodom and Gommorrah,” into a mired grave. The Greenville, South
Carolina Mountaineer reprinted the story on August 9th, undoubtedly to the chagrin of the local
populace. Syracuse was known throughout the nation, as was the majority of Upstate New York,
for its complicity at best, and its active participation at worst, in the escape of slaves from
southern plantations into Canada. The agitation over slavery was, by 1850, coming to a head. In
the Mountaineer, the Post's article ran adjacent to another swiped from the Montgomery Atlas,
touting that soon would form a, “deep and solid phalanx of a Southern Union.” Secession and
18
dissolution of the government was hot on the minds of many throughout the south.14
But Syracuse's fate was not to sink, as many southerners might have hoped, into a pit of
destruction on account of their abolition politics and willful ignorance of the fugitive slave
provisions of the Constitution. Instead, the Evening Post expounded, the cause of Syracuse's
demise was simply, “the quantity of Saline water taken from its base for the use of the salt
manufactories [sic].” “The writer,” who, the Evening Post explained, had, “paid considerable
attention to the philosophy of salt licks,” was simply announcing that, “the city of Syracuse is
placed immediately above a vast salt deposit which is constantly dissolving by the action of
water, so that at some time or other, it must sink below the earth.” The Evening Post was quick
to rib both the author and the city, pointing out that, “the inhabitants, unless they make their
escape in time, will get well pickled.”15
The gag article ran in papers across the country. In Bangor, Maine, the Evening Post's
article ran just above another more serious notice. The nation had just seen the death of a sitting
president and the elevation of his milquetoast vice-president, Millard Fillmore, to the highest
office in the land. Fillmore did make the radical decision to oust the entirety of the late Zachary
Tyler's cabinet. Fillmore was quick to place Daniel Webster, by this time one of the most famous
statesmen living, into the post of Secretary of State. Webster, the Bangor Daily Whig & Courier
conceded, was, “so eminent as a statesman and an orator, that his name and his fame are as
familiar as household words.” Yet they continued on to reprint a relatively complete biography
of the newly minted Secretary of State, copied from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Webster, as the
people of Bangor read, “was born in Salisbury, N.H.,” in 1782 to a family of modest means. His
father was a veteran of the French and Indian War, as well as the Revolution. The young man
14
15
“Syracuse in Danger,” Greenville Mountaineer (Greenville, SC), 9 August 1850.
“Syracuse in Danger,” Greenville Mountaineer (Greenville, SC), 9 August 1850.
19
grew into a polished lawyer with an education undertaken at Dartmouth and in Boston. His first
seat in national office came in 1812, when Webster, “was elected a representative in Congress
from New Hampshire.” From then on Webster found himself firmly planted on the national
stage as Senator and Congressman for both New Hampshire and Massachusetts for most of his
life.16
By 1850, Webster was reaching his late sixties. This afforded his great power in his role
on the floor of the United States Senate. When he spoke, the words had deep weight. “I wish to
speak to-day,” he said in March of that year, “not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern
man, but as an American.” Webster spoke in favor of a compromise over the issues of the day,
chiefly the future of slavery in the United States. “The imprisoned winds are let loose,” he said,
“the East, the North, and the stormy South combine to throw the whole sea into commotion, to
toss its billows to the skies, and disclose its profoundest depths.” But Webster spoke for what he
saw as righteous ends. “I speak to-day,” he continued, “out of a solicitous and anxious heart, for
the restoration to the country of that quiet and the harmony which makes the blessings of this
Union so rich, and so dear to us all.” The heart of the argument at hand, the, “imprisoned
winds,” which so threatened the nation were the old saw of slavery, rearing its ugly head again.
In this instance, the question revolved around the extension of Slavery into the territories gained
during the Mexican Cession following the Mexican-American War.17
But Webster's speech on the floor of Congress that day — the aged senator's voice
echoing with the weight of a man who had witnessed compromise after unceasing compromise
on the subject of human bondage — was more than a simple legal argument. Webster struck at
“Syracuse in Danger,” Daily Whig & Courier (Bangor, ME), 3 August 1850; “Daniel Webster,” Daily Whig
& Courier (Bangor, ME), 3 August 1850.
17
Daniel Webster, “Speech of the 7th of March, 1850,” in George W. Gordon and James W. Paige, eds., The
Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1851) Vol. V, 325-326.
16
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the moral core of the debate over slavery. Northern clergy and abolitionists, he contended, had
simply, “taken hold of the religious sentiment of [their] part of the country, as they have, more or
less, taken hold of the religious feelings of a considerable portion of mankind.” But the South, in
spite of the biblical and moral arguments leveled against slavery for decades, “having been
accustomed to this relation between the two races all their lives,” in consequence of tradition,
had not found just cause for the destruction of the institution. “There are thousands of religious
men,” Webster continued, “with consciences as tender as any of their brethren at the North, who
do not see the unlawfulness of slavery.” Webster's opinion of the moral character of the Southern
slaveholder was clear. “Candor obliges me to say,” he spoke, “that I believe they are just as
conscientious, many of them, and the religious people, all of them, as they are at the North who
hold different opinions.”18
But woe to the abolitionists of the North. “There are men,” Webster proclaimed with
vitriol, “who, with clear perceptions, as they think, of their own duty, do not see how too eager a
pursuit of one duty may involve them in the violation of others.” The Abolitionists of the north
were simply, in Webster's estimation, “disposed to mount upon some particular duty, as upon a
war-horse, and to drive furiously on and upon and over all other duties that may stand in the
way.” Webster touted the obvious fallacy, held dear by Abolitionists, that, “what is right may be
distinguished from what is wrong with the precision of an algebraic equation.”19
Webster would not, however, stand for secession. The idea was as disgusting as any to
the aging statesman. “Instead of dwelling in those caverns of darkness,” Webster concluded,
“instead of groping with those ideas so full of all that is horrid and horrible, let us come out into
Daniel Webster, “Speech of the 7th of March, 1850,” in George W. Gordon and James W. Paige, eds., The
Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1851) Vol. V, 330-331.
19
Daniel Webster, “Speech of the 7th of March, 1850,” in George W. Gordon and James W. Paige, eds., The
Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1851) Vol. V, 332.
18
21
the light of day.” “Let us enjoy,” he spoke, with no sense of irony, “the fresh air of Liberty and
Union; let us cherish those hopes which belong to us.”20
The reactions to the fruits of Webster's labors, the Compromise of 1850, echoed
throughout the nation. Most odious to the abolitionist leaders across the north was the passage
on the 18th of September, 1850, of the Fugitive Slave Act. The bill greatly altered the original
Fugitive Slave provisions of the Constitution, in essence giving what had been a hollow
requirement previously, a system by which it could be vigorously enforced. Federal Marshals
were transformed into bounty hunters duty-bound to capture slaves at the flimsiest affidavit
presented by a claimant. More outrageous to the abolitionist community was the requirement, in
the bill's fifth section, that “all good citizens,” were, “commanded to aid and assist in the prompt
and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required.” In spite of the
moral attitude of a citizen, they were now required by the law to assist in the capture and return
of fugitives from labor.
Reaction to the bill was swift. In Syracuse, the city's leading abolitionists gathered for
what was purported to be, “one of the largest meetings ever held in central New York.” “The
largest Hall in our city was crowded to its utmost capacity,” one newspaper account reported,
“hundreds pressed for entrance and retired because they could not enter.” The sentiment of the
convention was quite clear. Syracusans desired only that, “New York would ever remain free
soil.” In a series of resolutions, passed with only a single dissenting vote in the packed hall,
Syracuse laid plain its displeasure. “'The Fugitive Slave Law' recently enacted by the Congress
of these United States,” the people cried with a single voice, “is a most flagrant outrage upon the
inalienable rights of man, and a daring assault upon the Palladium of American liberties, our
Daniel Webster, “Speech of the 7th of March, 1850,” in George W. Gordon and James W. Paige, eds., The
Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1851) Vol. V, 365.
20
22
CONSTITUTION.” The bill had none less than a, “diabolical spirit and cruel ingenuity,” with
which the intelligent men and women of the nation were called only to, “prepare themselves to
oppose all attempts to enforce it.”21
Samuel Joseph May lived up to the resolutions almost immediately. The Syracuse
Unitarian minister wrote to Frederick Douglass' North Star that he was unable to leave his home
on account of his, “daily expectation of the arrival of three if not four fugitives from our
Southern task-masters.” In writing these words, any of Syracuse's citizens would find
themselves threatened with six months imprisonment and a hefty $1,000 fine. Syracuse's answer
to congress and their course of action were all too clear. “We must trample this infamous law
under foot, be the consequences what they may. Fines, imprisonment shall not deter me from
doing what I can for the fugitive....” May and his fellow Syracusans were keen in their
understanding of the source of the odious bill. “To none,” the collection of citizens proclaimed,
“in all our country, should be attributed the passage of this most infamous law, so much as to
Daniel Webster.” The blame fell squarely upon the statesman's shoulders, who, the resolutions
contended, thereafter, “cannot be called the Defender of the Constitution, except in bitter
irony.”22
Webster, like Syracuse's abolition community, was fuming at the Fugitive Slave Act as
well. But Webster's seething anger sprang more from the general rejection of the bill by citizens
across the north, not only in Upstate New York but in the heart of abolitionism itself. Daniel
Webster's Boston, the city of patriot blood and American compromise, was equally William
Lloyd Garrison's Boston, the very heart of the American anti-slavery machine. Webster,
suffering from illness in these the waning years of his life, had returned to his home in
21
22
“Great Meeting in Syracuse!” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 25 October 1850.
“Great Meeting in Syracuse!” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 25 October 1850.
23
Marshfield, Massachusetts to rest from an annual illness he called his, “catarrh.” Doctors
prescribed, “nothing but rest, patience, & herbal teas,” to help alleviate the thick mucous
draining from his head. Still, Webster expected to be over the illness and back to Washington to
help with the continued promotion of the agenda of the Fillmore administration.23
As the Secretary of State lay in bed, awaiting a visit from Amin Bey, an official emissary
from Turkey, the reactions of Boston's citizens to the newly minted Fugitive Slave Law did not
escape the statesman's ken. “The Abolitionists, & the quasi Abolitionists are furious,” Webster
wrote to Millard Fillmore in October of 1850. Webster reported to the chief executive that, as far
as Garrison and his crew were concerned, the, “only topic at present, is the Fugitive Slave law.”
Furthermore, “their conduct in this respect,” in Webster's estimation, was, “wicked &
abominable in the extreme.” What appalled Webster most, and the strongest image he wished
Fillmore garner from his report, was the abject treason being sewn in the streets of the Athens of
America. “Their presses only recommend resistance,” Webster decried, “by force, & to the
death, in case of any arrest.”24
But Boston's local abolitionist press was doing far more than simply deriding the Fugitive
Slave Act as amoral. They were chastising President Fillmore and Webster himself as wicked
and foul creatures. Just days before Webster penned his letter to the President, Garrison's The
Liberator compared the Secretary of State to Shakespeare's Richard the Third, placing the simple
words in the politician's mouth that he was, very simply, “determined to prove a villain.”
Continuing their quotation of Richard, Webster is aped to say, “Plots I have laid – inductions
23 Daniel Webster to Millard Fillmore, 14 October 1850 in Charles M. Wiltse and Michael J. Birkner, eds.,
The Papers of Daniel Webster: Correspondence, Volume 7 (1850-1852), (Hanover, New Hampshire: University
Press of New England, 1986), 159-161.
24 Daniel Webster to Millard Fillmore, 14 October 1850 in Charles M. Wiltse and Michael J. Birkner, eds.,
The Papers of Daniel Webster: Correspondence, Volume 7 (1850-1852), (Hanover, New Hampshire: University
Press of New England, 1986), 159-161.
24
dangerous.” A week previous, the same paper had run a story sniping at Webster further, riffing
on his quotation of Richard III in celebration at the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. “In one
short six months,” the paper stated coolly, Daniel Webster had done so much, “ to smother the
progress of free principles, put chains upon the limbs of men, and strangle all those generous
ideas of which he had once been the advocate and defender, merely to gratify a miserable
ambition,” that no better character than Richard fit. Webster and Richard alike had a, “perverted
and treacherous heart.”25
Webster's enraged tone writing to Fillmore rings with vitriol, responding equally to the
personal attacks as to the political ones. The Abolitionist clergy and politicians were simply
deluding themselves to think that trite questions such as, “Does the color of the skin affect the
rights of the individual enveloped in it?” matter at all in the eyes of the law. These questions,
incessantly ringing in the abolition press and voice, to Webster, are tawdry matters. “For
practical, useful, conservative measures of Government,” these fanatics, “care [not].”26
By November, Webster was once again on his way back to Washington. So far, the
Fugitive Slave Law had not been tested. Threats of violence in resistance to the law had not
manifested themselves as action. “The excitement caused by the Fugitive Slave Bill,” Webster
wrote to Fillmore, “is fast subsiding.” In Webster's estimation, there was simply, “now no
probability of any resistance, if a fugitive should be arrested.” “There is an evident, & a vast
change of public opinion in this quarter,” the Secretary of State noted. Still, Webster supported
the positioning of troops nearby Boston, in case something might happen which overturned law
and order. He even recognized the seeds of dissent within the city's populace, in spite of the fact
25
“Mr. Webster,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 11 October 1850; “Mr. Webster’s Quotations,” The Liberator
(Boston, MA), 4 October 1850.
26 Daniel Webster to Millard Fillmore, 14 October 1850 in Charles M. Wiltse and Michael J. Birkner, eds.,
The Papers of Daniel Webster: Correspondence, Volume 7 (1850-1852), (Hanover, New Hampshire: University
Press of New England, 1986), 159-161.
25
that, “the agitators themselves appear[ed] to understand that,” it was the administration's
intention, “to see the laws duly executed.” William and Ellen Craft, whose daring daylight
escape from the South to Massachusetts had awed the abolition community of the North, had a
bounty on their head. Even with warrants out for their arrest, Webster wrote, “the Fugitives keep
concealed.” Webster mused to the President on the legality of bashing in doors to recover the
fugitives, weighing in with the opinion that there was, “ a precedent, in favor of the affirmative
of the proposition.”27
As December turned to January, the question of the Fugitive Slave Act and its moral
implications simply would not die. Southern newspapers lit up with indignant rage at the actions
of their northern countrymen. “A Convention in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law, will be
held in Syracuse, New York, on the 7th inst, trumpeted the Jackson Mississippian and State
Gazette. In response to the Convention's assertion that, if left unchanged, the Fugitive Slave Act
would, “see the American Union deluged in blood,” the Mississippian wrote that the vitriol
simply, “exhibits the hyena-spirit which prevails among a large class at the North.” The
Mississippian's characterization of the announcement was not far off. “It may not be that we can
save our country from the ruin that impends,” the committee of organizers wrote, “but we are
bound to make on effort.” The Fugitive Slave Law was simply odious and, at its a core, “made it
plain, that liberty and slavery cannot subsist together.”28
The response to the call of Syracuse's abolition community to hold a state convention in
the salt city was well received. On Tuesday, January 7th, Wednesday, January 8th and Thursday,
January 9th, the leading lights of the abolition community gathered in Syracuse to make their
27 Daniel Webster to Millard Fillmore, 5 November 1850 in Charles M. Wiltse and Michael J. Birkner, eds.,
The Papers of Daniel Webster: Correspondence, Volume 7 (1850-1852), (Hanover, New Hampshire: University
Press of New England, 1986), 177-179.
28
“A Convention in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law...” Mississippian and State Gazette (Jackson, MS), 3
January 1851; “Call to the State Convention,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 20 December 1850.
26
voices heard. “On the first day of the convention,” one southern paper recounted, “the
infamous blabber-lipped negro, Fred. Douglass, amidst immense cheering and applause,” rose to
the podium. Douglass, escaped slave and renowned newspaper editor of Rochester, was elected
by the crowd as the President of the convention. He spoke in tones which infuriated the South.
“This Convention ought to say to slaveholders that they are in danger of bodily harm if they
come here, and attempt to carry men off into bondage,” Douglass urged his fellow abolitionists.
“I say to any fugitive,” he continued, “that nothing short of the blood of the slaveholder who
shall attempt to carry him off, ought to satisfy him.” For Douglass, speaking to the crowd
assembled in Syracuse, the course of action was clear. To defeat the Fugitive Slave Law was as
simple as, “to make it unsafe for a slaveholder or his agent, or a United States officer to
undertake to kidnap any man or woman among us.” To do anything less, according to Douglass,
was tempting fate. “If in Syracuse you allow one to be taken off,” the former slave warned,
“another will soon follow.” The answer, however, was simple. “I do believe that two or three
dead slaveholders will make this law a dead letter.”29
Southern newspapers derided the convention. The Daily National Intelligencer in
Washington, D.C., was quick to note that, “the City Hall was not more than half filled.” Quoting
from the Albany State Register, the Intelligencer continued that, “the signal failure of this grand
demonstration of the Abolitionists against the Fugitive slave law, we regard as the most cheering
indication that has yet occurred.” The Savannah Morning News, after recounting the thousands
in money pledged at the Convention in Syracuse to the abolition cause, concluded that the sheer
mass of money was a sign that, “the war is now waging in the North between friends and foes of
the Constitution.” Furthermore, the Morning News quipped, “the South has a deep stake in the
issue.” But the Cincinnati Gazette, perched on the banks of the Ohio opposite slaveholding
29
“Spirit of the North,” Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette (Natchez, MS), 1 February 1851.
27
Kentucky, relished the outcomes of the January Fugitive Slave Law convention the most. “This
gathering,” the paper reported, “had a ‘bust up termination.’” “It seems,” the report continued,
“that Garret Smith [sic], Fred. Douglass… and other congenial spirits could not harmonize.” The
image in the Southern press was of distinct and destructive discord within the meeting. They
crowed of the, “final bustification,” of the abolition movement.30
The Southern press was not entirely incorrect. Discord had reigned at the Syracuse AntiFugitive Slave Law convention in January of 1851. The convention was organized to address the
state of New York, and the nation, with a set of resolutions as well as a unifying prose message.
Frederick Douglass’ speech was only the first of a litany of addresses and pontifications on the
subject of liberty and slavery. Many echoed Douglass’ sentiment that, “there was something in
the heart of the community here at the North, which said, when a slave-catcher fell by the hand
of a fugitive, ‘served him right!’” On the evening of the convention’s first day, the hall grew
silent as Gerrit Smith rose to address the convention on behalf of the Business Committee.
Smith, “read a very long, though interesting address, from the Convention to the people of the
State. It was one of his best efforts, and bears the unmistakable marks of his great mind.”31
Smith proclaimed to the assemblage that, “the doctrine, that wrong may be done, if
commanded by Civil Government, is utterly fallacious.” This concept, in Smith’s estimation,
“found no favor with the young Hebrews [Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego], who preferred
the fiery furnace to obeying a sinful command of the Government.” “Nor,” Smith continued,
“did it find any favor with [Daniel], who had rather be cast into the lion's den than comply with a
wicked requirement of the Government.” Smith’s stance was firm. “We are summoned, in the
30
“The Albany State Register says that the Abolition Convention...” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington,
DC), 15 January 1851; “Abolition Movements in Massachusetts, New-York and Pennsylvania,” Savannah Morning
News (Savannah, GA), 15 January 1851; “The Anti-Fugitive' Law State Convention at Syracuse, New York,” The
Cleveland Herald (Cleveland, OH) 29 January 1851.
31
“Anti-Fugitive Slave Law State Convention,” Syracuse Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 9 Jan 1851.
28
name of patriotism, to obey this law,” he announced, “but this law, being treason to God and
man, we cannot serve our country by obeying it.”32
Smith concluded by addressing, “the colored people of the State of New-York: and, in
speaking to them… the colored people of all the Northern States also.” He urged his, “brethren,”
to help in the overthrow of, “the bloody and satanic system of American slavery.” Whites alone
could not, “dispense with it.” “Much less,” Smith intoned, “can we afford to have you an
obstacle in our way.” Smith chastised the freedmen of New York, crying out, “Would to God,
brethren, that you were inspired with self-respect! Then would others be inspired with respect for
you.” The reason, in Smith’s estimation, that, “selfish and prostituted persons, as Daniel
Webster,” held no sympathy for the black men of the north was simply because they failed to
undertake, “brave, self-denying, and heroic endeavors… to throw off their oppressions.” Smith
knew in his heart that if, “the colored people of the North display bravery, and self-sacrifice, and
heroism, in their own behalf, and in behalf of their brethren in bonds,” then, “even Daniel
Webster and [Democrat] Lewis Cass, now negro-murderers, will then be negro-admirers.”33
The Syracuse Daily Journal the following day assured its readers that the address would,
“doubtless,” be adopted as the sentiment of the whole convention. But as Gerrit Smith closed his
remarks, the tension in the hall leapt precipitously. William L. Chaplin, himself recently bailed
out of prison for helping fugitives escape Maryland, tried to ease the situation by remarking that,
“he thought that twenty or thirty meetings in different parts of the State like this one, would do
more to kill off slavery than any other means that could be adopted.” His humor failed.
Frederick Douglas turned the topic of conversation immediately back to Smith’s words.
32
Gerrit Smith, Anti-fugitive slave law meeting, (1851) in the Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection,
Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.
33
Gerrit Smith, Anti-fugitive slave law meeting, (1851) in the Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection,
Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.
29
Douglass, “objected to it because of the introduction of topics foreign to the object of the calling
of the Convention,” the protest of the Fugitive Slave Law. For the next three days the
convention would wind round and round Smith’s words. Douglass the next day would remind
Smith that, “This was not a Liberty Party Convention, nor did Liberty Party sentiment generally
prevail in it.” The convention was, instead, a gathering of all parties, sectional and national
alike. As resolution after resolution was raised, each based upon Smith’s address, the tension in
the room escalated.34
Finally, on the third evening of the convention, with so many of the attendees fed up with
Gerrit Smith’s sweeping statements, Charles B. Sedgwick, a native of Onondaga County who
would go on to join the United States Congress during the Civil War, rose to present a counteraddress. Sedgwick, “made a lengthy speech in opposition to the Fugitive law and counseling
such opposition from each individual as that individual thought the most effectual.”
Immediately, Samuel May leapt up to move that the, “speech of Mr. S. be written out, and
published as embodying the sentiment of the Convention.” “Here began trouble, the Syracuse
Daily Journal later reported, “and from that time to the adjournment… every body was excited
and everything was in confusion.” It appeared even that there was, “a chance for the Convention
to break up in a row.” The Chair of the meeting declared a formerly tabled motion neutering all
religious language from Smith’s remarks to be passed. “This,” as the Daily Journal wrote,
“disposed of the address, as it destroyed its argument.” Without vote, the Chair declared that
Sedgwick’s speech now embodied, “the sentiments of the Convention.” Chaos reigned for three
hours as egos clashed. The meeting adjourned just before midnight.35
34
35
1851.
“Anti-Fugitive Slave Law State Convention,” Syracuse Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 9 Jan 1851.
“Anti-Fugitive Slave Law State Convention (Third Day),” Syracuse Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 11 Jan
30
Smith was incensed at the wholesale slaughter of his ideas. As crowds began filing from
the hall, he seized the podium. He quickly brought to order a new Convention, a counterconvention comprising, “three or four hundred persons,” who, “remained in the Hall.” Frederick
Douglass was declared president. Smith addressed the remaining crowd, holding that, “the New
Convention was not responsible for the proceedings of the one which had just adjourned. God
would not smile on the closing proceedings of that Convention.” It was an, “abandonment of
God's cause not to adopt the address which had been objected to.” Quickly, “the address of the
Business Committee of the old Convention was unanimously adopted, and after a prayer, at 1
o'clock, the Convention adjourned sine die.” Smith would publish his address and resolutions
for circulation as a pamphlet to the state and nation as the sentiment of abolitionism, a sentiment
that was distinctly radical.36
The radical stance of Abolitionists across the north did not go unnoticed. Daniel
Webster, from his post at the head of the State Department in Washington, was keenly aware of
the sentiment brewing across the northeast. In a letter declining an invitation to speak in
Westchester, NY, just outside of New York City, in late January of 1851, Webster spilt his rage
at the abolitionists out onto paper. “The purpose of overturning the government,” Webster wrote,
“shows itself more clearly in resolutions agreed to in voluntary assemblies of individuals,
denouncing the laws of the land, and declaring a fixed intent to disobey them.” Just weeks
before the Syracuse Anti-Fugitive Slave Law convention had resolved to not simply, “pour out
upon the Fugitive Slave Law the fullest measure of our contempt and hate and execration,” but
to,” resist it actively, as well as passively, and by all such means, as shall, in our esteem, promise
the most effectual resistance.” But Webster likened these meetings to calls for disunion, and
36
1851.
“Anti-Fugitive Slave Law State Convention (Third Day),” Syracuse Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 11 Jan
31
characterized them as, “distinctly treasonable.”37 “If any law of the land be resisted, by force of
arms or force of numbers,” Webster wrote, “in all cases, this is levying war against the
government.” But small meetings were only being, “defended, encouraged, and commended,” in
Webster’s estimation, by, “a considerable portion of the public press,” and, “what is still worse,
the pulpit.” Webster saw the dialogue on the Fugitive Slave Law as simply pitting, “the laws of
society,” against, “the institution of religion and the authority of the Divine Revelation,”
smearing both with dishonor and contempt. 38
The resistance to law, for Webster, was the most dangerous type of crime. “It is evident,”
he continued, “that, if this spirit be not checked, it will endanger the government; if it spread far
and wide, it will overthrow the government.” Webster issued a rallying cry through his pen.
“Citizens of the State of New York!” he wrote, “the voices of your own illustrious dead cry to
you from the ground.” Webster raised the dead of the Revolution, “they who are in their graves,”
to speak for him. And Webster’s words, spoken through their mute mouths, must be heeded as
firmly as, “you respect their names and memories, as you love liberty, as you value your own
happiness, as you regard the hopes of your children.” Webster’s message was simple: “hold on
with unflinching firmness to the Constitution and to the union of the States.” The patriots of the
Revolution cried out to New York, “as if with lips still living… in tones of indignation, to reject
Webster’s letter to the “Friends of the Union” of Westchester, NY directly references a meeting held, “lately
in the very heart of New England, and said to have been very numerously attended.” Webster quotes one of the
meeting’s resolutions: “that, as God is our helper, we will not suffer any person charged with being a fugitive from
labor to be taken from among us, and to this resolve we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” This
meeting was held in Worcester, Massachusetts in October of 1850, shortly after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed.
For a very brief accounting of the Worcester Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting see “The Fugitive Slave
Excitement,” The North Star (Rochester, NY), 31 October 1851.
38
“Letter from Daniel Webster,” Pittsburg Daily Gazette and Advertiser (Pittsburg, PA), 6 February 1851;
Daniel Webster to J.A. Hamilton Esq., and others, Westchester, New York, 27 January 1851 in George W. Gordon
and James W. Paige, eds., The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1860) Vol. VI, 582.
37
32
all such ideas as that disobedience to the laws is the path of patriotism, or treason to your country
duty to God.”
39
In Syracuse, Webster’s necromancy went unheeded. Throughout the spring Anti-Fugitive
Slave Law and Abolition Conventions became more and more fervent. Open resistance to the
laws of the United States became the watchword of many in the community. Syracuse became
more infamous for her citizen’s actions. In Louisville, Kentucky, the populace read about Rev.
Samuel May’s declaration that, “It was better to break up the Union than that slavery should
continue.” The indignity that, “in the name of humanity,” a citizen of Syracuse would pray that,
“his country would not stand, if it could not stand but upon the necks of three millions of
people.” The Louisville Journal proclaimed that, “such language as this, if uttered upon
American Soil, should by legal enactment be made treason.” The paper went on to declare such
sentiments as, “war upon the constitutional rights of fifteen of the thirty members of this
confederacy.” If such voices were not put out like that of, “Arnold, who as a penalty, suffered a
traitor’s doom,” then surely, “our requiem as a nation will soon be chanted by all the despotic
governments in the world.”40
Such images of Syracuse’s treason were offset in the abolitionist presses by scenes of her
citizens’ compassion. At one Anti-Slavery Convention in the city, the Pennsylvania Freeman
reported in March, the compassion expressed for the slave shone out as a, “warning to those
demented politicians who think to smother the voice of humanity by Proclamations, or silence it
by the cannon and the sword.” As the guest speaker from Great Britain, George Donisthorpe
Thompson, finished his address, “five fugitives, just arrived from the slave land, were put upon
the stand.” The freedom seekers had just arrived in Syracuse. “There they stood, fresh from the
39
40
“Letter from Daniel Webster,” Pittsburg Daily Gazette and Advertiser (Pittsburg, PA), 6 February 1851
“The Rev. S.F. May, of Syracuse...” Missouri Courier (Hannibal, MO), 24 April 1851.
33
manacles, just out from the hell of Slavery, in the first meeting of freemen they ever witnessed.”
Syracuse poured out its kindness. Many in the assemblage were moved to tears, but, “the
compressed lip, the eye of fire, and the death-like silence, told that here the spirit of Liberty was
fully roused.” Samuel May, denounced in the press for wishing fire and brimstone on the nation,
cried out, “Men, matrons, and maidens of Syracuse! You see these victims of tyranny before
you…. Shall these fugitives be taken from Syracuse? I call on you to answer.” The room filled
with a resounding cry of, “NAY!” The, “voice of the multitude, like a peal of thunder… made
the very walls quiver.” The Syracuse Standard lamented that Webster and Fillmore could not
have, “looked in then, and seen in full play the latent energies of that love of freedom which lies
so deep in every human breast. Within fifteen minutes, a call to, “furnish these fugitives with
employment,” had been fulfilled and the five refugees were, “comfortably provided for.” “If Mr.
Fillmore comes, or sends his Marshal,” the paper chided, acknowledging that to harbor a fugitive
was a crime, “they will probably find the kettle on; and everything hot and comfortable for
them.41
By the late spring of 1851, the smoldering fire lit under the abolitionists of the north had
erupted into a wildfire. In February in Boston, Massachusetts, black abolitionist leaders wrested
Shadrack Minkins from the hands of Federal Marshals. Minkins had been captured in the coffee
house in which he worked, a double insult as coffee houses were among the birthplaces of
American liberty as the American Revolution fomented. As he was taken to the courthouse, the
streets erupted with men and women, black and white, who burst into the Boston court house and
spirited Minkins away to Montreal, Canada. President Fillmore was, to the extent he was wont
to be, incensed. He handed down an edict that those who had assisted Minkins be brought to
justice. Syracuse’s Democratic Daily Star reported that, “the Conservative press without an
41
“A Voice from the Heart of New York,” Pennsylvania Freeman (Philadelphia, PA), 27 March 1851.
34
exception condemn it as it deserves to be.” The Shadrack case was none but, “one of the foulest
stains upon the character of the city of Boston, ever inflicted by the fanatics who make their
head-quarters within her limits.” The Star chastised the abolition community, bemoaning the
fact that, “outrages like that recently committed in Boston, can be perpetrated with impunity in
the heart of a civilized community.” “If the Fugitive Slave Law may be resisted with impunity,”
the Star proclaimed, “Anarchy will then reign with undisputed sway throughout the length and
breadth of the Republic.” Syracuse’s citizens were urged not to, “convert this glorious country
into a pandemonium, unparalleled for misery and crime, by any country on the face of the
earth.”42
In a letter to the Citizens of Lowell, Massachusetts in May of 1852, President Fillmore
expressed his hopes for the matters facing the nation. “I feel that my first duty is due to the
country,” the President wrote, “I trust the storm which threatened to overwhelm the Government,
and array section against section, and brother against brother, in treasonable and fratricidal strife,
has passed away.” But, he admitted to the men and women of the New England manufacturing
town, “the waters are still agitated, and it will take some time for the elements to subside.”
Fillmore hoped that his next endeavour would help to calm the troubled waters of the nation. “I
have… just accepted an invitation to attend the celebration of the opening of the New York &
Erie Railroad,” Fillmore wrote, extending his apologies to Lowell for not being able to visit their
town that summer. Fillmore’s trip to Buffalo to inaugurate the New York and Erie Railroad
would take him straight through some of the most turbulent political territory in the nation. The
President, a native of Moravia, New York, in the heart of the “burned-over district” of the state
flooded by religious revival throughout the nineteenth century, structured his visit as a simple
“The Boston Riot," Syracuse Star (Syracuse, NY), 22 February 1851; For a deeper discussion of the Shadrach
Minkins case and the fate of Minkins, see Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen,
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
42
35
goodwill tour, wherein he and his cabinet could back the nation away from the precipice of
national suicide.43
In early May, Syracuse hosted the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
The meeting was originally to be held in New York City, but the group was denied. “Not a
meeting-house, not a hall, can be obtained in that city for this purpose,” William Lloyd Garrison
proclaimed later. Syracuse swiftly offered up its podium for the affair, which commenced on
May 7th. The leading lights of the abolition movement flocked to Syracuse to denounce slavery,
the Fugitive Slave Law and Daniel Webster. The City of New York, likewise, could not avoid
assault. “We here at the North,” William Lloyd Garrison spoke sarcastically to the assembly,
“are no longer to have any thought, any opinion, any freedom of speech, or the right peaceably to
assemble together to discuss the great cause of liberty; at least, it seems not in the great city of
New York.” But, the society was determined to make the best of the situation. Now that we are
driven out from New York,” Garrison continued, “we are compelled to make our appeal to the
interior.” “Thank God,” Garrison proclaimed, “large as is the city of New York, it is not the State
of New York! Thank God, wealthy and mighty as is the city of New York, it is powerless as
against the Empire State.” Garrison issued a call to the citizens assembled in the Syracuse City
Hall, asking loudly over the din of the crowd, “Now, people of Western New York and Syracuse,
what do you say?... Shall we say just what we think on the subject of liberty and slavery? Will
you defend the right of speech?” Garrison was met with hearty applause. Garrison shared his
utmost conviction that, “the people of the North never will surrender the right of free speech.”44
43
Millard Fillmore to Citizens of Lowell, Mass. in Frank H. Severance, ed., Millard Fillmore Papers, (Buffalo,
NY: Buffalo Historical Society, 1907), Vol. II, 312.
44
“Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 23
May 1851.
36
The following three days of the convention were typical, punctuated by the indistinctive
pronouncements on Slavery’s evil, resolutions on the destructive nature of the Fillmore
administration for its course on the Fugitive Slave Law and promises of resistance when
necessary. Garrison’s band found a relatively receptive audience, even in those citizens who did
not typically ally with the abolitionists. “There is,” one observer noted, “among the masses in
southern, central, and western New York, the farmers and mechanics, the operatives, and indeed
all the non political interests of the country, a feeling of opposition to those measures of the last
Congress with which Mr. Fillmore and Mr. Webster are so much identified.” This hostility could
only prove, “fatal to any aspirations of these gentlemen for future honors from New York.” For
New York there existed a, “deep and settled moral and religious sentiment of the interior in
opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law, and to any and every concession to slavery. Proponents of
slavery were warned not to simply believe that, “the small fraction of the community represented
in abolition conventions,” did not embody, “the whole of the spirit,” of Central New York.45
As Syracuse’s guests began filing from the city and heading home, New York State was
preparing to play host to the President’s party. The President’s tour was the talk of the nation,
and sat at center stage in the American consciousness as Fillmore, Webster and their entourage
traveled across the Empire State. The Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette reported that their, “New
York, Albany and Buffalo exchanges are filled with accounts of the ‘progress; of the President
and Cabinet from Washington, on their way to celebrate the opening of the great Erie Railroad.”
The caravan first was welcomed briefly at Baltimore and Philadelphia, before wending along the
Lehigh Valley Railroad to Amboy, New Jersey, just opposite the Arthur Kill from Staten Island.
Here, the President and his cadre boarded the steamer Erie to be whisked to New York City. As
the President’s ship made its way across New York harbor, cannon fire echoed from the
45
“The Sober Thought of the People,” Pennsylvania Freeman (Philadelphia, PA), 26 June 1851.
37
surrounding hills. “The guns from Fort Hamilton, Bedloe’s Island46, and Castle William, saluted
in succession, and a vast crowd of citizens and Military received the guests at Castle Garden,”
papers around the nation reported. Ships in the harbor, likewise, let loose their cannons in salute
of the president’s arrival. After brief speeches by the President, Attorney General John J.
Crittenden and Secretary of State Webster, “a procession was then formed by a vast concourse of
societies and citizens generally.” The parade wended through the streets of New York City,
sporting fraternal organizations and, “12 regiments of troops, presenting one of the most splendid
pageants ever witnessed in New York.”47
Accounts of the festivities welcoming Fillmore and Webster to New York, however, were
at the whim of the political leanings of their authors. While conservative Whigs and Democrats
heralded the President as patriotic symbol of the republic, Henry C. Wright, prominent
contributor to Garrison’s Liberator, wrote of Fillmore as “THE KIDNAPPER.” Wright, just four
days after leaving the convention at Syracuse, found himself standing on the Battery at the south
end of Manhattan waiting for the President’s ship to land. Wright’s curiosity had gotten the
better of him, and he was compelled, “to stay and see how the piety and patriotism of that city
would receive one of the greatest criminals of the age.” Wright wrote that he cared not for
seeing, “the miserable wretch himself, but how the politicians and church-members of New York
would receive the man whose soul is steeped in the blood of innocent men, women and
children.” The crowd which met Fillmore, according to Wright, numbered in the thousands,
pouring out, “from the lanes and alleys, the cellars and garrets and drunkeries of the city.” This
46
Bedloe’s Island in this period was better known as Fort Wood. In later years, this fortification would become
Liberty Island, site of Frédéric Bartholdi’s immortal “Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.” For more on the
fortifications of New York Harbor and their evolution, see Benjamin Levine and Isabelle F. Story, National Park
Service Historical Handbook No. 11: Statue of Liberty National Monument, Bedloe’s Island, New York
(Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1954)
47
“Erie Railroad Celebration & A Compliment,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 21 May 1851.
38
raucous crowd, intermingled with the high society of New York, crowded the Battery to
welcome, “the Commander-in-Chief of American slave-hunters.” But as the boat docked, the
crowd stood dumbstruck. “Not one shout from the multitude greeted his landing,” Wright
recounted, “the people looked on with indifference, so far as the great marauder upon humanity
was concerned.” Anger seethed in Wright. “I felt, as Fillmore and Webster approached, as I do
at the approach of some loathsome, disgusting reptiles…. Fillmore and Webster are among the
world’s most ruthless kidnappers; they are of the most polluted and disgusting criminals of this
or of any age.” Wright echoed the sentiments of the convention he had just departed in Syracuse
as he continued to berate Fillmore and Webster. “They spring like skulking beasts,” Wright
wrote, “upon the weak, the defenceless, the helpless and the innocent.” The scene was too much
for the abolitionist. Disgusted with Webster and Fillmore, Wright, “turned in disgust from the
scene where such wretches are held in honor.”48
For his part, Secretary of State Webster had misgivings about the trip across New York.
He wrote to his friend and confidante Richard M. Blatchford before the excursion began that he
had, “not wished to join this jaunt on the Erie Railroad, because I have much work on hand,
which I wish to get through before the hot weather.” However, Webster had to acquiesce to the
demands of the President, the highest power in the land. “There was a wish,” he continued, “ I
believe warm and sincere, that I should be of the party.” Webster continued this thought to
Blatchford a few days later, concluding of the trip that he saw, “four elements of distress in it:
1.Heat. 2. Crowds. 3. Limestone-water. 4. The necessity of speech-making.” “This last is not the
least,” Webster extolled, “for I have exhausted my opinions and my thoughts, my illustrations,
and my imaginations; all that remains in my mind is as ‘dry as a remainder biscuit, after a
voyage.’” In spite of his confidante’s well wishes, Webster still felt, “a caving in at the prospect
48
“Reception of Fillmore, The Kidnapper, In New York,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 23 May 1851.
39
before me.” Still, all the orator needed to do was refrain from making a blunder. “If I should not
be remarkably foolish, nor remarkably unlucky,” the Secretary of State quipped, “I shall not spoil
all the past.”49
The day following their arrival in New York, Fillmore and his party went by train to the
western terminus of the Erie Railroad at Dunkirk, New York, along Lake Erie. In spite of it
being early May, the weather was still relatively cold across the Northeast. Webster had reported
to a friend before leaving the capitol that four of six consecutive nights in the week leading up to
the departure from Washington had produced frost. On the night of May 15th, Webster’s son
Fletcher, who worked as a personal aide and at one point earlier in his career as Chief Clerk of
the State Department, took violently ill. Webster recounted that at, “half-past one ,” Fletcher had
been attacked, “by a violent inflammation of the throat.” “He woke me in much distress,”
Webster continued, “and said he could not breathe. In fifteen or twenty minutes we had a
physician, who let blood freely, gave a powerful emetic, applied mustard-plasters, etc., etc.”
Fletcher taking ill forced Webster to abandon the Presidential party. As Fillmore left for Buffalo,
Webster remained behind to nurse his 32-year-old son back to health. For the remainder of the
tour back across New York State, Webster would constantly be playing catch-up to Fillmore’s
entourage.50
President Fillmore’s tour of New York was relatively benign. At Buffalo, the President
spoke to a crowd made up of his neighbors. Fillmore had made a name for himself as a lawyer
in nearby East Aurora, and did not let the fact pass lightly. “I came among you,” Fillmore
addressed the city, “not many years ago, a friendless boy.” Fillmore milked the crowd’s
49
Daniel Webster to Richard M. Blatchford, 7 May 1851 and Daniel Webster to Richard M. Blatchford, 11 May
1851 in George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, (New York: Appleton and Co., 1870) Vol II, 502.
50
“By Telegraph,” Quebec Morning Chronicle (Quebec, Canada), 17 May 1851; Daniel Webster to Richard M.
Blatchford, 17 May 1851 in George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, (New York: Appleton and Co., 1870)
Vol II, 503.
40
emotions and fondness for their President. “And I hope to be permitted to return to you, and
spend my days with you, and at last to sleep in yonder grave yard and mingle my dust with
yours.” Fillmore did attempt to speak to the issues of the day. At Buffalo, Fillmore referred to
the Compromise of 1850 in sidelong glances, in spite of the fact he was joined on the dais by
Stephen Douglas of Illinois, one of the bill’s younger architects and a rising star in the U.S.
Senate. “As partizans we may differ,” Fillmore extolled, “questions as to the manner in which
the government shall be administered may divide us.” But it was Fillmore’s belief that, “when
treason stalks abroad at the South and rears its snaky head at the North, all rally to its support.”
“There is no liberty- no security without law,” the President pointedly declared. Fillmore,
however, saw the greatest irreverence to law in the desire of a, “portion of our people… to rush
headlong to the conquest of Cuba.” Cuban ambition, and not abolitionists, was the note Fillmore
hit hard and repeatedly throughout his tour. 51 Still, at Rochester, upon his conclusion, the
President was showing signs of wear. “I am hoarse; I can say no more; but one word before I
conclude.” “One of the distinguished men of my cabinet is detained at Buffalo,” the beleaguered
Fillmore explained, “you will, however, see him soon.” Fillmore urged on the crowd: “You may
hear him, too, and I congratulate you on the prospect.”52
As Fillmore left his adopted home of Buffalo, Daniel Webster entered the city, greeted
with accolades from the local Whig and Democratic establishment. “The Mayor,” of Buffalo, the
citizens of Raleigh, North Carolina eagerly read, “and leading citizens of all parties tendered him
a dinner, to testify their sense of his public services to the country.” Webster graciously
accepted, but with the simple caveat that he hoped Buffalo would, “as far as may be, dispense
51
The southern ambition to seize Cuba as a new territory into which to extend slavery was a perennial theme
throughout the mid-19th century. The issue did come to a head in the spring of 1851, as Fillmore faced the public
trials of John Henderson, former U.S. Senator from Mississippi, for attempting to support a private invasion of the
island colony to free it from Spanish rule.
52
“The President's Tour,” The Boston Daily Atlas (Boston, MA), 26 May 1851.
41
with ceremonious forms.” Webster toured the city and nearby Niagara Falls. On the evening of
Wednesday, the 21st of May, the Secretary of State found himself on the stump again. Where he
had asked Buffalo’s leading political lights to quell any ceremony, Webster himself would fill the
hall with pomp and circumstance through his belabored speech. Webster painted with florid
language a description of the State of New York. He belabored the founding of the United
States. He argued with himself over the disposition of the public lands in the territories and their
division. The lands of the west, Webster held, were the means by which America could remain
debt free. But his long and luscious speech makes no mention of slavery. Standing just a few
days before at the crest of the cataract of the American Falls, which Webster explained as simply
but profoundly, “the wonder of the world,” the Secretary of State could undoubtedly see into
Canada. Just a few miles across that gaping maw carved by thousands of years of rushing water
was the safe haven of the American slave: Canada West.53 In St. Catharines, Canada West, little
more than ten miles from where Webster stood in awe at a sight, “attractive to all the world,” the
escaped property of the south were making new homes and lives for themselves.54
Webster would not disappoint the citizens of Buffalo the following day. If Fillmore’s
speech to Buffalo was naught but dishwater, Webster would deliver a stinging ointment in his
public address of May the 22nd. “Gentlemen,” Webster spoke to a throng of onlookers in a
driving rain, “There is but one question- one question in the country now.” Webster, driving
toward the point that Fillmore refused to touch, proclaimed that, “it is obvious to every body- we
all know it, that the great question in the country is slavery. We must meet it- we must consider
53
Benjamin Drew, in his 1856 book The Refugee: Narratives Of Fugitive Slaves In Canada, wrote of Canada
West: "Refuge and Rest! These are the first ideas which arise in my mind in connection with the town of St.
Catharines.... Of the population of about six thousand, it is estimated that eight hundred are of African descent.
Nearly all the adult colored people have at some time been slaves."
54
“Movements of the Presidential Party,” Weekly Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette (Raleigh, NC),
24 May 1851; Daniel Webster, “Daniel Webster, Speech at Public Dinner at Buffalo,” in George W. Gordon and
James W. Paige, eds., The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1860) Vol. II, 533-543.
42
it- we must deal with it fairly, honestly, justly….” Over the course of the last months, Webster
was well aware that he had, “been libelled a thousand times, and because these libels have been
perpetrated a thousand times,” he could only, “expect to be libelled again.” In Webster’s eyes, as
he explained it to his soaked supporters in Buffalo, the Constitution’s mandate to return all
fugitives from labor was an absolute, immobile writ. Yet still, he cried out, “we are told by forty
conventions, that if a slave comes here he is a free man.” But this was simply, to Webster, “a non
sequitur. The Constitution says he is not a free man, and shall be returned to his master.” “Now,
gentlemen,” the Secretary of State continued, challenging the crowd, “this is the Constitution of
the United States. Do we propose to execute it?”55
If the Compromise of 1850 was a haven of order and constitutional mandate, then
Webster saw the Abolitionists of New York as the polar opposite: a rabble hell-bent on the utter
destruction of the union of states. “Tell me,” Webster challenged his audience, “tell me if any
resolution was adopted by the convention at Syracuse favorable to the carrying out of the
Constitution.” He answered his own question with a resounding cry of, “Not one!” The
Abolitionists, Webster charged, were simple anarchists, who, “deny, altogether, that the
provisions of the Constitution ought to be carried into effect.” These men and women, meeting
at, “antislavery conventions in Ohio, Massachusetts, and at Syracuse, in the State of New York,”
were to Webster the greatest threat to the nation for, put simply by Webster, “they pledge their
sacred honor to violate the Constitution ; they pledge their sacred honor to commit treason
against the laws of their country!” “There is not a man of them,” Webster strained to be heard
over the roar of the downpour, “that would not trample the rights of their political brethren in the
“Webster's Speech at Buffalo,” Cleveland Herald (Cleveland, OH), 26 June 1851; “Speech of Daniel Webster
at Buffalo,” Mississippian and State Gazette (Jackson, MS), 20 June 1851; Daniel Webster, “Speech at Buffalo,” in
George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, (New York: Appleton and Co., 1870) Vol II, 505-508.
55
43
dust.” In closing, Webster exhorted Buffalo’s citizens to, “Live and be happy. Live like patriots,
live like Americans.”56
Webster continued in the footsteps of the President, espousing similar sentiments at
Rochester. At Canandaigua, Webster was already drained. “I get along slowly,” he confided in a
letter to his friend Richard Blatchford, “as well as poorly.” Webster was quick to qualify his
statement. “I do not mean poorly in health,” the aging statesman continued, “for my health is
much improved, but I get poorly through the meeting of such crowds of people.” Weariness of
the speaking circuit had hit Webster hard. Still, he explained to his confidante, “I seem to have
no option.” Fillmore had made it a point to stop, “everywhere,” making speech after speech
across Upstate New York. “It would be thought churlish if I were to do less,” Webster
complained. His next destination was Auburn, and, “thence to Syracuse, that laboratory of
abolitionism, libel, and treason.”57
Young William Stoddard was a deep fan of the conventions and political events of
Syracuse. As Daniel Webster crept toward the Syracuse, or as Stoddard called it,
“Conventionville,” the sixteen year old shop clerk waited with bated breath. The young man had
already shown a deep interest in the political question of the day. “I had,” Stoddard later
recalled, “a number of acquaintances among the colored people and the more prominent
Abolitionists.” Stoddard had witnessed many of the most important speeches in Syracuse, “and
such colored orators as Fred Douglas, an escaped slave from Maryland, were [his] especial
favorites.” Stoddard took quickly to the world of oratory and philosophy. He worked by day at
56
“Webster's Speech at Buffalo,” Cleveland Herald (Cleveland, OH), 26 June 1851; “Speech of Daniel Webster
at Buffalo,” Mississippian and State Gazette (Jackson, MS), 20 June 1851; Daniel Webster, “Speech at Buffalo,” in
George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster, (New York: Appleton and Co., 1870) Vol II, 505-508.
57
Daniel Webster to Richard M. Blatchford, 25 May 1851 in Charles M. Wiltse and Michael J. Birkner, eds.,
The Papers of Daniel Webster: Correspondence, Volume 7 (1850-1852), (Hanover, New Hampshire: University
Press of New England, 1986), 250-251.
44
Stoddard and Babcock, the bookshop and publishing house owned by his family, as, “general
clerk, salesman, messenger, and all-the-books reader.” Witnessing the political climate morph
and change around him, and in spite of the fact that, “it was almost like incipient treason to utter
what one felt or thought upon the slavery question,” Stoddard personally labeled himself a,
“Whig Abolitionist.” Still, Stoddard snidely wrote years later in his memoir, there would be no
trouble if nothing was, “done or said to irritate the slaveholders or to interfere with their sacred
right to own black men and women, half black, quarter black and sixteenth black, or white which
might be called black.” Now, Daniel Webster, architect of the Compromise measures of 1850,
“offensively foremost among these… the obnoxious Fugitive Slave Law,” was coming to
Syracuse, “to imprudently set and light a slow match and to prepare for a destructive explosion.”
“I read all that the newspapers had to say,” Stoddard recalled, “and they said enough to set me on
fire.” Boiling with anger though he was over the compromise measures, the young man still had
an insatiable, “determination to have a close look at the Great Expounder.”58
Webster, as with every other stop on his New York tour, had been preceded by President
Fillmore’s party of travelers five days before. The President’s impression on Syracuse was
lackluster. Samuel Holmes, a citizen of Syracuse, recalled later that the intentions of the party
were quite clear. Fillmore’s visit to New York was far from a simple celebration of a canal
opening. “By an arranged plan to further checkmate the growing anti-slavery sentiment of the
North,” Holmes recalled, “and in support of the Fugitive Slave Law, President Fillmore, John J.
Crittenden, United States Attorney General, and [William] A. Graham, Secretary of the Navy,
came to Syracuse.” The Presidential party was, “given a public dinner at the Syracuse House,”
on the southeast corner of Clinton Square, its balconies overlooking the still waters of the Erie
58
William O. Stoddard, Recollections of a Checkered Lifetime, (Unpublished Manuscript, 1907), Lincoln
Financial Collection, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, IN, 101-118, [accessible online:
http://www.archive.org/details/recollectionsofc01stod]
45
Canal. “After dinner,” Holmes continued, “speeches were made and, with special reference to
the Fugitive Slave Law, and one remark made by Mr. Graham we distinctly remember.” Holmes
years later recalled the strictest of challenges from the North Carolinian Secretary of the Navy:
“If you people of the North do not like the laws of the United States, you can go to Canada or
some other country that suits you better.” Graham did not say these words exactly, but they sum
up succinctly his sentiments. The Secretary of the Navy urged his, “fellow citizens,” to, “cast
aside all local fanatical feelings.” “Destroy this government, let there be civil war, the shedding
of brother’s blood by brother’s hands,” Graham warned, “there is no telling to whaty depths we
may be reduced by the failure of this experiment.” Still, the secretary rejoiced at the reception of
Syracuse, noting that, “the deep seated affection for the Union of the States is bounded by no
limits North or South.”59
There were Democratic and Whig friends of the administration within the Salt City, in
spite of the large mass of abolition sentiment that roiled in the city’s streets. These allies of
Fillmore, Webster and the Fugitive Slave Law began readying the city for the arrival of the
distinguished Secretary of State. With just a day’s notice, the city’s conservative kitchens busily
spat forth a prodigious meal. Webster would be treated to both oyster and mock turtle soups.
Webster would dine on boiled ham, chicken, pork, corned beef and “Leg lamb [with] caper
sauce.” Then would follow a course of roast beef, pig, pork, veal, chicken, lamb and turkey.
This illustrious spread, however, only served as appetizer for the meal’s entrees. Webster would
have his choice of twenty separate dishes, including, “Snipe, a la Financier,” “Lamb’s fries, with
pork,” “Rice and ham, Creole style,” and the appetizing, “Calves’ head, en tortue.” The baker’s
59
Earl E. Sperry, The Jerry Rescue: October 1, 1851, (Syracuse, NY: Onondaga Historical Association, 1924),
35-37; William A. Graham, “Graham’s Speech in Syracuse, May 20 1851” in J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton, ed., The
Papers of William Alexander Graham, Volume Four, 1851-1856, (Raleigh, NC: State Department of Archives and
History, 1961), 98-102.
46
ovens and sweet confectioners of Syracuse were not to be outdone. The city’s confectioners
turned out seven different pastries and twelve other sweet treats for dessert, including, “Boiled
peach pudding,” and “Wine jelly.” The dinner, one local newspaper account concluded, was sure
to be, “sumptuous and elegant.” Webster, the consummate proponent of democracy and
republicanism, a man of the people, would eat that night like royalty.60
But before he could partake of Syracuse’s bounty, the Secretary of State would address a
crowd assembled. “Due preparations were made for his reception,” the young William Stoddard
would later record, “and the open space in front of the City Hall was made ready for the speech
which was to come.” Webster would speak from a balcony on Frazee Hall, hanging above the
citizens of Syracuse gathered in Market Square. “An ample platform was provided,” Stoddared
continued, for “the local great men who were to sit behind him and start the rounds of applause.”
But Webster’s speech was orchestrated as a pageant. “Just in front of the platform was a wooden
arrangement for the necessary brass band, for he was to have music as well as applause.”61
At 3pm on May 26th, 1851, Daniel Webster stepped forth on the balcony overlooking a
crowd of Syracuse’s citizens, friends and foes, and began reciting an ultimatum. An armed guard
stood at Webster’s feet, “the Syracuse Citizens Corps,” standing, “at parade rest in front of the
speaker's stand.” There Webster stood, “amid all the cheering any man need have asked for.”
Stoddard recalled that he, “was indeed a noble presence, all that his pictures had taught me to
expect, and when he slowly turned and looked around upon the crowd he appeared to be a very
impersonation of political dignity.” Parish Johnson, another young onlooker in the crowd, wrote
60
Theodore W. Clark, “When, Where and What Daniel Webster Spoke in His Syracuse Speech,” Syracuse
Journal, 23 March 1917 in Onondaga County Primary Sources to 1855, Abolition & Anti-Slavery Activity Vertical
Files (hereafter AAS Vert. Files), Onondaga Historical Association (hereafter OHA), Syracuse, NY.
61
William O. Stoddard, Recollections of a Checkered Lifetime, (Unpublished Manuscript, 1907), Lincoln
Financial Collection, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, IN, 128-130 [accessed online:
http://www.archive.org/details/recollectionsofc01stod]
47
that Webster’s, “large body was clad in a blue swallow-tailed coat with brass buttons.” Staring
down from the balcony was, “a vast head with a dark, impressive face, deep cavernous eyes,
which occasionally flashed like the embers of smouldering [sic] fire, was presented to the
people.” Immediately after the speech, the Syracuse Liberty Party Paper reported that, “we saw
an ordinary looking, poor, decrepid old man, whose limbs could scarce support him.” Webster
appeared to the abolitionist press as a shell of their expectations. His eyes, “had more of the
meaningless glare of a dead man’s, and the wide cavities in which they set more marked with the
shade of the corpse than of life, and beauty, and intelligence.” Another witness wrote to William
Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator that Webster’s, “worst enemy could have wished him to make no
more depressing exhibition of himself, nor desired for him a more mortifying reception.” As
Webster mounted the platform, three anemic cheers rose from the crowd, which, “would have
left a painful sense of his isolation from the sympathies of his audience,” led into interminable,
“cold silence,” from the gathered crowd.62
Stoddard remembered that Webster, “wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and then
his deep, mellow, sonorous voice rolled out, as it may have done when in the United States
Senate.” “‘Fel-low Cit-i-zens of Syr-a-cuse and On-on-daga County,’ he began, with impressive
deliberation, and the stillness became breathless.” Stoddard, Johnson and the rest stood
dumbstruck. Syracuse, “gazed with awe and listened with bated breath.”63
Webster’s remarks were measured, if somewhat spontaneous. The aged statesman
grasped the iron railing of the balcony tightly. “On the great questions of the day,” Webster
62
William O. Stoddard, Recollections of a Checkered Lifetime, (Unpublished Manuscript, 1907), Lincoln
Financial Collection, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, IN, 128-130 [accessed online:
http://www.archive.org/details/recollectionsofc01stod]; Earl Sperry, The Jerry Rescue: October 1, 1851, (Syracuse,
NY: Onondaga Historical Association, 1924), 37-38; “Daniel Webster at Syracuse,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 6
June 1851; “Daniel Webster in Syracuse,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 20 June 1851.
63
William O. Stoddard, Recollections of a Checkered Lifetime, (Unpublished Manuscript, 1907), Lincoln
Financial Collection, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, IN, 128-130 [accessed online:
http://www.archive.org/details/recollectionsofc01stod].
48
exclaimed, “I have no secrets. I have nothing to conceal and nothing to boast of.” The Secretary
of State knew the nature of his audience, he knew the vitriol in the minds of his hearers. “Ladies
and Gentlemen,” he continued, “ I know very well, that on the agitating questions of the present
day, I have not the happiness to concur with all the people of Syracuse, or the county of
Onondaga, or other parts of the State of New York.” Webster proclaimed: “I lay no claim to your
approval of my views, and I ask no favorable reception of them.” Abolitionism was a dangerous
affair, in Webster’s estimation, causing its believers to, “disregard the line of their own duties,
and adventure upon fields which are utterly forbidden.” Abolitionists, “have done nothing but
mischief; they have riveted the chains of every slave in the Southern States— they have made
their masters jealous and fearful —and postponed far and far the period of their redemption.”
Webster stood in the den of lions and chided their slavering maws. “They loudly denounce Mr.
Webster,” the statesman cried, “I believe he has been denounced here. Is this not Syracuse?”
Laughter rose from the audience. “They denounce Webster as the fit associate of Benedict
Arnold….”64
Webster did not contend that the Fugitive Slave Law was “perfect.” “I proposed some
amendments to it,” the former Senator assured the crowd, “but was called from the Senate before
it was adjusted.” But even without his proposals, the law must stand. “The law is a
Constitutional one, passed in perfect conformity to the requirements of the Constitution. What
then?” Webster queried, “Is it not to be obeyed?”65
“But what do we hear?” Webster cried, reaching the stride of his remarks. “We hear of
persons assembling in Massachusetts and New York, who set themselves above the
Constitution.” Syracuse, Webster quickly added, and Onondaga County surrounding it, had
64
65
“Speech of Daniel Webster,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 13 June 1851.
“Speech of Daniel Webster,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 13 June 1851.
49
raised its voice in opposition to the law. “And have they not pledged their lives, their fortunes,
and their sacred honor, to defeat its execution?” But to Webster, the pledge was in vain.
Syracuse’s abolitionists were simply pledging themselves to, “the violation of the law- for the
committal of treason to the country.” Webster seethed with rage. “No! No! It is time to put an
end to this imposition upon good citizens, good men, and good women,” proclaimed Webster, “It
is treason, treason, TREASON, and nothing else.”66
Then came Webster’s promise to Syracuse. “They say the law will not be executed,”
Webster mused, “let them take care for those are pretty bold assertions.” Webster’s voice frothed
from his mouth, proclaiming that the Fugitive Slave Law, “will be executed in its spirit and to its
letter.” The abolitionists would meet heavy resistance wherever they trod, “depend upon it.”
The law, Webster was sure, would, “be executed in all the great cities – here in Syracuse, - in the
midst of the next Anti-Slavery Convention, if the occasion shall arise.” “Then we shall see,”
Webster chided, “ what becomes of their lives and their sacred honor.”67
The crowd was stunned. Stoddard recalled that Webster, “said it slowly, solemnly, with
tremendous emphasis, but his words were greeted by silence only, for something like an electric
shock went through the crowd.” The Liberty Party Paper reported that Webster’s, “whole frame
seemed quaking and trembling with that idea, standing obviously on the brink of the grave.”
Webster’s speech continued, but Syracuse halted with those words. “It will be executed in all the
great cities – here in Syracuse, - in the midst of the next Anti-Slavery Convention, if the occasion
shall arise.” Webster, “had no idea that he had been making a pronunciation of war,” Stoddard
recalled, “which hundreds of his hearers were mentally accepting.” With a few more words,
Webster closed, and left the balcony. The brass band at his feet struck up with patriotic music.
66
67
“Speech of Daniel Webster,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 13 June 1851.
“Speech of Daniel Webster,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 13 June 1851.
50
“The average American,” Stoddard later mused, “ is an unhandy man to threaten and we all felt
that the great orator had left a threat behind him which it might be well for us to remember.”
Webster left Syracuse and the city girded itself for an oncoming storm.68
68
William O. Stoddard, Recollections of a Checkered Lifetime, (Unpublished Manuscript, 1907), Lincoln
Financial Collection, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, IN, 128-130 [accessed online:
http://www.archive.org/details/recollectionsofc01stod]; “Daniel Webster at Syracuse,” The Liberator (Boston, MA),
6 June 1851.
51
ASIDE
Webster’s Second Jerry Address
Daniel Webster's death in 1852 did not preclude him from making another speech in
Syracuse. The Massachusetts orator failed to live long enough to see the fruits of his support of
the Fugitive Slave Act, with fracturing and division of the nation he had protected for so long.
Still, in February of 1855, Webster made one final speech in the Salt City. Webster was reported
as, “regretting his ambitious disregard of the rights and claims of humanity.” “He intimated,”
The Syracuse Standard reported, “that, as a penalty for his neglect of duty,” in Syracuse and his
flagrant disregard for human rights, “he is now required to communicate with mortals.” The
voice of Daniel Webster purportedly spewed forth from the mouth of, “Randolph, the spiritual
medium,” who was giving, “a lecture at Myer's Hall... on the nativity of the devil.” The medium
channeled Daniel Webster, who chided his audience to, “do sufficient good to counterbalance the
evil which his teachings and influence produced.”69
“Daniel Webster Made Speech In City 3 Years After Death,” Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), 13 September
1953 in AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
69
52
Webster's influences and notoriety lived long beyond his death. In Syracuse, the
statesman became vilified to the point of being sideshow wonder and the medium's choice for the
voice of repentant evil.
53
CHAPTER 2
“He calls me by the thunder…”
Jermain Loguen’s Jerry Rescue
A knot of abolitionists gathered in Dr. Hiram Hoyt’s office along South Warren Street on
an October night in 1851. The streets outside the window were beginning to darken. The men
included doctors, lawyers, clergymen and leading citizens of the city of Syracuse. Rev. Samuel
J. May, the city’s Unitarian minister, was counted among those present. So too was Gerrit
Smith, the prominent reformer and politician from nearby Peterboro. But aside from Syracuse’s
white fathers, there were scattered black faces around the room. Fugitive slaves and their white
friends, intermingled together, were plotting and scheming the overthrow of government agents
and the direct violation of Federal law.
Among the black faces in the room that twilight was Jermain Loguen. Loguen had
spoken out harshly just a year previous, before many of the men with whom he now conspired.
He had shouted down the Fillmore administration and the United States Constitution. Jermain
Loguen was an American, born in the United States and considered himself a free and rightful
citizen of Syracuse, his adopted home. “Some kind and good friends advise me to quit my
country,” the former slave spoke to an assemblage of Syracuse’s citizens a year earlier in
October of 1850. “Quit my country, and stay in Canada,” the Loguen continued, “until this
54
tempest is passed.” “I hesitated to adopt this advice,” the man continued, “I believe that their
own bosoms are charged to the brim with qualities that will smite to the earth the villains who
may interfere to enslave any man in Syracuse.” For whites in Syracuse and the nation, the
prospect of the Fugitive Slave Law was a new terror. For Jermain Loguen, however, the threat
of capture was an everyday truth long before the enactment was strengthened in 1850. “I have
looked at it,” the black man remarked, “steadily, calmly, resolutely, and at length defiantly, for a
long time.” Loguen had even been offered the title to his own freedom by benefactors, “over
prudent and good men and women,” who wished to, “purchase my freedom,” to deliver him from
harm. “Generous and kind as those friends were, my heart recoiled from the proposal,” Loguen
explained to the crowd gathered in Syracuse’s City Hall in 1850. “I owe my freedom,” the
former slave quipped, “to the God who made me, and who stirred me to claim it against all other
beings in God's universe.”
Loguen exhibited a keen faith in his fellow citizens, as the threat of capture loomed everpresent over his shoulder. “And do you think I can be taken away from you and from my wife
and children, and be a slave in Tennessee?” the skilled orator piped to the crowd. “Has the
President and his Secretary [of State Webster] sent this enactment up here, to you, Mr.
Chairman, to enforce on me in Syracuse? —and will you obey him?” he challenged his
neighbors and friends gathered in the hall. His simple response was no. Loguen knew
instinctively of the strength Syracuse boasted to protect the Fugitive Slave, both, “in numbers
and love of liberty.” Syracuse’s love for that basic right of man was so great, Loguen was
convinced, as to, “take fire, and arms, too, to resist the least attempt to execute this diabolical law
among them.” The white establishment, the white government at Washington, D.C. had failed
Jermain Loguen. Now, he turned to his white brethren of Syracuse. “The strength of this city is
55
here to express their sense of this fugitive act,” Loguen roared to the crowd gathered on that
October evening, “and to proclaim to the despots at Washington whether it shall be enforced here
— whether you will permit the government to return me and other fugitives who have sought an
asylum among you, to the Hell of slavery.” Loguen’s adopted city, in his mind, now faced its
ultimate test. “If you will give us up, say so,” he urged his fellow Syracusans, “and we will
shake the dust from our feet and leave you. But we believe better things.”70
Loguen’s path had been one of infinite struggle. 71 As a young man, Loguen had never
been able to read or write, or express himself well. Jarm Logue, the man who would eventually
become the pastor challenging his fellow Syracusans, had made a hard fought journey wrought
with danger from slavery in Tennessee to freedom in the north. The fugitive, while on his trek
toward freedom through Indiana with another escaped slave, found refuge in varied inns and
taverns, the two travelers posing as freedmen. After a particularly harrowing experience fording
a river with their horses, and nearly drowning midway, the pair lighted at a log tavern. The
innkeeper had witnessed their near death experience and welcomed the pair of runaways before
his fire to warm and dry themselves. The pair knew enough of their surroundings to blend in.
“On their first appearance at the tavern,” Jermain Loguen later wrote in his autobiography, the
pair of runaway slaves, “quaffed a deep drink of whiskey — not because they loved it, but to act
like freemen.” Temerity and timidity would reveal the slave for who he was. Loguen knew to
70
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 391-394.
71
It must be noted of Loguen’s early life, and the sources available, there is but one: Loguen’s own biography.
The book appears to have been an autobiography, but may have been edited by abolitionist John Thomas. The
chronicle is written in the first person as well, further muddying the water as to the true authorship of the account.
The biography’s preface does acknowledge that some portions of the story have been grafted onto the narrative from
other fugitives’ accounts, to help further the cause of anti-slavery. On the whole, Loguen’s early life must be taken
with a healthy grain of salt. For more on the authorship question of Loguen’s biography, see Jenn Williamson’s
introductory note and summary of the work on the UNC Chapel Hill “Documenting the American South” project
(http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/loguen/summary.html) as well as Carol M. Hunter, To Set the Captives Free: Reverend
Jermain Wesley Loguen and the Struggle for Freedom in Central New York, 1835-1872, (New York: Garland
Publishing Co., 1993), 20-22.
56
act free was to appear free. The pair bravely, “called for dinner… dried their clothes and killed
time as best they could.” Idle hands, for Loguen, nearly became a threat to their escape plan
entirely. “Seeing a newspaper on the table, and to cover the pretence that he was a freeman,
Jarm took it.” His illiterate eyes passed over the words and pages, to make, “as if he was reading
it.” But the man knew but one letter, the capital “A”, aside from which he, “was entirely
ignorant of every letter of the alphabet.” Jarm hunted for the letter diligently in the newsprint,
“but when he found it, to his deep mortification, it was wrong end upwards!” The slave, posing
as an educated freedman, instantly, “knew he had the paper bottom upwards.” He quickly thrust
the paper from his hands, sheepishly surveying the tavern to see if his ruse had been found out.
His fatal mistake had not been noticed, so Jarm, “he took another taste of the whiskey, and
turned to the fire — firmly resolved to let newspapers alone, until he reached a land where it was
safe to handle them.”72
When he reached Canada, however, Jarm Logue would learn to devour the written word.
At Hamilton, Canada West, on the shores of Lake Ontario, the future minister found hope and
his first tastes of freedom. He later wrote to Frederick Douglass that, “Hamilton is a sacred and
memorable spot to me; and I cannot slightly pass it.” For Loguen, the memory of Hamilton was
a sweet balm to a fugitive’s soul. “It seems to me,” Loguen wrote to his fellow fugitive, “and
ever will seem to me, a paternal home. I shall never visit it without the feelings which a child
feels on returning after weary years to his father's house.” Arriving in Canada West, Logue
stood full of doubt. He was, “penniless, ragged, lonely, homeless, helpless, hungry and forlorn
— a pitiable wanderer, without a friend, or shelter, or place to lay my head.” The refuge he had
sought looked as a frozen wasteland to his weary eyes. “I had broken from the sunny South,” he
72
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 323.
57
recalled, “and fought a passage through storms and tempests, which made the forests crash and
the mountains moan— difficulties, new, awful, and unexpected, but not so dreaded as my white
enemies who were comfortably sheltered among them.” But, in spite of the harrowing journey,
doubt nagged at the young fugitive’s mind. “There I stood, a boy twenty-one years of age, (as
near as I know my age,)” Loguen continued, “the tempest howling over my head, and my toes
touching the snow beneath my worn-out shoes— with the assurance that I was at the end of my
journey.” A question throbbed in his mind: “Was it for this that I left sweet skies and a mother's
love?”73
Standing alone in Canada in 1834, the weight of the moment drove the friendless and
penniless man, “the personification of helpless courage and finited [sic] hope,” to his knees. “I
can never forget the moment,” Loguen wrote to Douglass, “I was in the last extremity. I had
freedom, but nature and man were against me.” Logue, the young, beaten man, began to pray:
“Pity, O my Father — help, or I perish!” The prayer brought renewed hope, and Logue soon
found, “an earthly father,” who took the slave, “to his home and angel wife, who became to me a
mother.” The man offered Logue $10 a month wages and lodging; “he thought a body lusty and
stout as mine, could brave cold, and cut cord wood, and split rails — and he was right.” His new
employer, indeed his first employer, gave Logue more than simple wages. The couple, he wrote
later, “taught me many lessons of religion and life.” “I had a home and place for my heart to
repose, and had been happy,” Loguen told Douglass, “but for the thought that ever torments the
fugitive, that my mother, sisters and brothers were in cruel bondage, and I could never embrace
them again.” Still, education beckoned. Logue’s new family, he wrote, “took me to the Sabbath
School at Hamilton, and taught me letters the winter of my arrival; and I graduated a Bible reader
73
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 339-340.
58
at Ancaster, close by, the succeeding summer.” Less than a year after escaping slavery, the
young, benighted Logue had begun to read and earned his first wages as a freedman.74
But the transition from slave to freedman was not quite complete for the fugitive. On the
shores of Lake Ontario, the young man decided to rededicate himself. “After two years hard
labor for good wages,” he had become an upstanding member of Hamilton society. He had
earned the respect of the white community and acquired, “the character of an able, faithful, and
judicious farmer, in good repute as a man and citizen.” Now, he chose to begin life anew with a
new name. “His paternal sir name was Logue,” a name the young fugitive shared with his nowformer master, “but he disliked that name, and added to it the letter n, to suit his taste.” His
name of Jarm, a name given him likewise by his master in Tennessee, he lengthened to the
proper form, “Jarmain” or Jermain. But he lacked a middle name. This was quickly remedied
by, “his Methodist friends,” who, “insisted he should adopt the name of Wesley for his middle
name, which he did.” Thus was born the new man, the free, educated and industrious man,
“Jarmain Wesley Loguen.”75
By 1850, as the first inklings of the impacts of that year’s newly-strengthened Fugitive
Slave Act were being felt throughout the north, Jermain Loguen found himself in a relatively
comfortable position. His wife, Caroline Storum Loguen, a native New Yorker and free woman
of color, and children were living in Syracuse, while Loguen was preaching to an African
Methodist Episcopal congregation in Troy, New York. But the Fugitive Slave Act sent
reverberations through the minister’s life almost immediately. Loguen was almost immediately,
“advised by his friends, and urged by his wife, to leave his charge and return to
74
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 339-340.
75
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 339-341.
59
Syracuse.” Loguen was simply, “more exposed than any fugitive in America to be seized
under,” the Fugitive Slave Law. The minister, now in his mid-thirties, had spoken bravely and
brashly against the institution of slavery. “He had published himself on the stump and in the
pulpit and the papers, all over the North, as a defiant fugitive from slavery.” Jermain Loguen
had crafted himself, through outspoken criticism of slavery, as a prime target for the Fugitive
Slave Act and now, “not to attempt to re-enslave him, was an admission that the Government
dare not test the strength of the law in such a case; or that the claimant and officers dare not trust
their persons in the attempt.” But Loguen would not be silenced on the subject. Instead, he
joined the fervor, arriving in Syracuse just hours before the city’s damning convention against
the Fugitive Slave Act.76
“If you will stand by me,” Loguen spoke to his predominately white audience, “I say if
you will stand with us in resistance to this measure, you will be the saviours of your country.”
“Your freedom and honor are involved as well as mine,” Loguen urged, “it requires no
microscope to see that.” What Loguen called Syracuse to do was simply to strike a clear blow
for freedom. He sought not simply words, but a resolution for action. His audience was
receptive; “The people knew Mr. Loguen and loved him.” More so, the gathered assembly,
“knew he was a slave, and trembled for him…. They knew it was no occasion for Buncomb77 for
any body, and least of all for him.” Loguen that night helped to set into motion a cascade. “His
manliness and courage in a most trying crisis electrified them.” The crowd was forged together
in action, “drawn together by the enthusiasm of a great idea, and that idea was stirring, defiant,
revolutionary and sublime.” Loguen’s words had, “uncapped the volcano.” “Your decision tonight in favor of resistance,” he shouted, “will give vent to the spirit of liberty, and it will break
76
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 387-388.
77
Claptrap or nonsense
60
the bands of party, and shout for joy all over the North….” Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act,
for Loguen, was a foregone conclusion. “Heaven knows,” the preacher cried to the crowd, “that
this act of noble daring will break out somewhere — and may God- grant that Syracuse be the
honored spot, whence it shall send an earthquake voice through the land!”78
Now, a full year after Loguen had called for Syracuse to be the earthquake’s epicenter,
the abolitionists gathered in Dr. Hiram Hoyt’s office had their opportunity for action. A fellow
fugitive, finding refuge in Syracuse, William Henry, had been captured earlier that day. William
Henry was a cabinet maker working for Charles Ferre Williston, a local Unitarian businessman,
in his warerooms. Henry, as Williston recalled, was, “as finely moulded specimen of humanity
as one liked to see.” William Henry was around thirty years old when he first arrived in
Syracuse in the winter of 1849-1850. Henry stumbled into Williston’s offices one evening,
“bright, strong and healthy, and wanted employment at wood turning, sawing or any job by
which he could earn a livelihood.” The man made a deep impression on Williston, with
“intelligent answers,” to the businessman’s questions and quickly found a job in the shop.
William Henry recounted his personal history to Williston. William Henry was, “the
confidential servant (slave) of,” Marion County, Missouri slaveholder John M. Reynolds, “born
on his master’s plantation, and, for a slave, had been carefully educated and for years had sole
charge of his master’s interests, so far as plantation matters were concerned.” Williston recalled
that the fugitive told him he, “bought and sold produce, etc., kept the accounts, and was the righthand man of the estate.” Henry was employed at turning a lathe, and joined Williston’s
workforce of around forty-five laborers. Most of his fellow workers were German immigrants.
By the end of the first week of the fugitive slave’s employment with Williston, a committee of
78
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 394-395.
61
employees informed the foreman that, “the ‘nigger’ must quit, or that the rest of the workmen
would leave.” Williston recalled inquiring, “into the reasons,” for their anger, and, “found that
the ‘color’ was the trouble.” Williston took the threat in stride, telling the men that if they
wished to quit they may do so, and he, “would try to run my business, with the help of the
‘nigger.’” No man quit, “and in short time [Henry] was a favorite of all.” After a year or so
working at the lathe, William Henry struck into the business of coopering. Still, the former slave
made a distinct impression on Williston, who remarked that, “no ordinary politician kept himself
better posted on current legislation, news and affairs generally.” Henry was, “at home in history,
geography, and, sadly enough, in the Slave Code and legislation.”79
The rosy picture of William Henry’s carriage during his tenure in Syracuse is muddied
somewhat by a few curious artifacts. Primary among these are three separate notices, originally
appearing in the Syracuse Standard, remarking that a Sarah H. Cowell has brought charges
against one William Henry for “assault and battery.” The first instance, in December of 1850,
“the parties settled, paid costs and the prisoner was discharged.” The second time, in February
of 1851, William Henry was, “convicted and sent to the penitentiary for 30 days.” The third
instance, after conviction, William Henry spent 4 months in the penitentiary. The Syracuse
Journal, after Democratic papers began impugning the fugitive’s character, wrote that, “the
papers represent that [William Henry] was a very bad fellow, that he was a theif, etc., and had
been in the penitentiary four times in this city.” The liberal paper argued that, “it could not be
expected that a man brought up 35 years in the midst of slaves, where all the commandments of
the Decalogue are set at naught, would have a very nice sense of morals.” The Journal continued
that Henry’s, “commitments to the penitentiary all grew out of difficulties in regard to the
79
29-30.
Earl E. Sperry, The Jerry Rescue: October 1, 1851, (Syracuse, NY: Onondaga Historical Association, 1924),
62
woman he was living with,” presumably Sarah Cowell. Curiously enough, Henry’s employer
Williston does mention that Henry spent at least one month in the employ of the county, which
could be a polite means of saying working a labor detail in the county penitentiary. 80
On October 1st, 1851, near the noon hour, William Henry was working in Fred Morell’s
Cooper shop in the city’s first ward. The fugitive slave, busy at his craft, was, “on his seat at
work when he was seized.” The shop was empty; Henry, “was alone, the other workmen having
gone to their meals.” A number of Federal Marshals seized him from behind, catching the man
off guard, his back to the door. After a brief struggle, the men, “threw him to the floor, and
ironed him, before he had time to resist.” They calmed him, by telling him that he was simply
under arrest for theft, and took him to United States Commissioner Joseph F. Sabine. His
accuser, James Lear of Missouri, approached the fugitive slave. “How do you do, Jerry?” the
man asked. It was only then that, “the truth flashed on Jerry's mind with all its intensity and
horror .” William Henry, the fugitive slave, had just been called by the name he had not shared
with the city’s white community, that of Jerry. William “Jerry” Henry, “suffered not a muscle to
change the expression of his face or body.” Instead, the man simply, “sat down like a chained
tiger, amid armed ruffians more hateful than tigers, and to his eye more wicked than devils.” A
fugitive lay shackled at hands and feet in Syracuse, and war would soon break loose.81
October 1st, 1851 was a lively time in Syracuse. The County Agricultural Fair was in full
swing; the city was hosting huge crowds throughout the last week in September and the first
week of October. Syracuse also was playing host to the state’s Liberty Party State Convention, a
80
Research Notes in William Jerry Henry Biographical, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; Gurney S.
Strong, Early Landmarks of Syracuse (Syracuse, NY: Times Publishing Co., 1894), 288-289; Earl E. Sperry, The
Jerry Rescue: October 1, 1851, (Syracuse, NY: Onondaga Historical Association, 1924), 29-30.
81
“The Jerry Rescue, An Account by Another Syracusan who was Present,” The Journal (Syracuse, NY),
Undated in Jerry Rescue Primary Accounts taken after 1865 (A-H), AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; Earl E.
Sperry, The Jerry Rescue: October 1, 1851, (Syracuse, NY: Onondaga Historical Association, 1924), 22; Jermain
W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily Journal,
1859), 401.
63
gathering of the alternative political party organized and championed by nearby Peterboro, New
York lawyer Gerrit Smith. This was the first major abolition convention to be held in Syracuse
since Daniel Webster had laid down his edict. As Jerry was finding out his charges were more
severe than simple theft, the gathered abolitionists were roused when a man burst through the
doors of the hall and announced that a fugitive slave had been captured. “The members of the
Liberty Party Convention,” Loguen later recounted, “probably to a man, walked quickly to the
office of Commissioner Sabine.” Sabine’s office sat near the Wieting Block on the south side of
Clinton Square, a wide central hub of activity in Syracuse. Dotting the square were the County’s
Courthouse, the Syracuse House and bisecting it from east to west ran the Erie Canal. The
abolitionist crowd processed through the central hub of Syracuse toward Sabine’s office, Jermain
Loguen at the mob’s head.82
“Who is this Jerry?” Loguen asked of one of the fellow black faces in the crowd, on the
march toward the Commissioner’s office. The reply came quickly. “I know him. He is a short
time from slavery, and has few acquaintances.” The fellow antislavery man continued, “He is
stout and brave, and could not be taken without stratagem.”83
“I see,” Loguen replied, “there is concert in this villainy. They had their mind on taking
somebody, and have picked him. Why didn't they take me? There are spies in the city
speculating on our blood.”84
Indeed, there was deep concert in the choice of that day and that time for the taking of
Jerry. Commissioner Sabine’s wife, Margaret, reminiscing much later, recalled that her husband
82
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 398-399.
83
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 401-402.
84
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 401-402.
64
felt much consternation over the case. Sabine, “found the captured runaway negro slave, Jerry,
was to be tried before him,” far before chains were ever clapped on Jerry’s wrists. Sabine and
his wife, “were both staunch Abolitionists, rather of what was called the rabid order.” Margaret
remembered, “the distressed look on his face as he told me (confidentially85, for it was a secret)
about the matter, ending by saying, “It is cowardly to resign before my first case comes to trial;
but what else can I do?” His wife replied, simply, that, “Shylock never got his pound of flesh,
though the law plainly gave it to him.” Sabine simply needed to, “hold on to [his] commission,
let no other man have [his] place.” “The trial,” she assured him, “is a week off, let things
stand.”86
But the week had come and gone. Loguen and the crowd trailing him plunged on
through the October afternoon. Loguen and his compatriot began formulating a plan. “But,”
queried one of the men to the other, “what are you going to do, surrounded, as we are, by snares
and scoundrels?” The reply swiftly followed: “I shall stay and defy them.”87
While the crowd pressed wildly across Clinton Square, the air began to shake with the
ring of Syracuse’s church bells. William L. Crandall, “an intelligent, impulsive and chivalric
citizen,” had broken from the crowd and hurried to the Presbyterian church, “and vigorously
tolled the bell.” The sound echoed throughout the Salt City. “Instantly every bell in the city (the
Episcopalian excepted) sounded the tocsin of liberty.” Peal after peal enveloped the city and
surrounding countryside. William Stoddard recalled that, “Bell after bell took it up, as if they
85
Margaret later notes that her confidentiality was not worth that much, as she let slip that a slave was to be
captured in Syracuse to at least two other people. “You know,” she later wrote, “women never could keep secrets,
and somehow this one leaked out, and the Rev. Mr. May found out the secret, and another Abolitionist whose name
I do not remember.” The capture of Jerry, in part, could be argued an event allowed to happen by Syracuse’s
abolition community, to usher in a greater good.
86
Earl E. Sperry, The Jerry Rescue: October 1, 1851, (Syracuse, NY: Onondaga Historical Association, 1924),
40-42.
87
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 401-402.
65
were answering one another, until every steeple in Syracuse was sending out a tocsin of
warning.” The sound was low and mournful, “it was not a ring but a toll.” “The bell,” Stoddard
recounted, “would toll slowly, as for a funeral, a minute or so, and then pause as long to think the
matter over before he began again.” Democrat and Whig, Abolitionist and Hunker, the church
bells were tolling across Syracuse. “Perhaps one of the maddest men to be found,” William
postulated, “was the Hunker Democratic sexton of the Baptist church, for his bell was tolling like
the rest and he could not get in to stop it.” The key to the Baptist church hung safely at
Stoddard’s home and he could not, he coyly remembered, “swear positively that Rev. Robert R.
Raymond went and obtained it of my mother.” The bells would continue long into the evening,
with the ringing extending far beyond Syracuse. “I had an idea that all the bells in the
surrounding villages must be tolling also,” Stoddard recalled, “for the country people were
pouring in, in streams, afoot and on horseback and in wagons.” The sound, low sonorous and
vast, was, “long known in Syracuse as ‘the Jerry bell.’”88
The crowd of abolitionists swelled to the foot of the stairs of Sabine’s office. Loguen and
his compatriot paused momentarily. “Here we are, at the office — the first ones. Shall we go in?
How do we know they will not grab us?” Again the reply came swiftly: “Let them grab.” 89
“Now is the time to try the spunk of white men,” the voice continued, “I want to see
whether they have courage only to make speeches and resolutions when there is no danger.” The
Rescue of Jerry, the resolve to see him not bound in chains southward, was already fomenting in
the minds of the crowd. “Let us be here at nightfall, and if white men won't fight,” the voice
88
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 400; William O. Stoddard, Recollections of a Checkered Lifetime, (Unpublished Manuscript, 1907),
Lincoln Financial Collection, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, IN, 134, [accessed online:
http://www.archive.org/details/recollectionsofc01stod].
89
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 401-402.
66
concluded, “let fugitives and black men smite down Marshals and Commissioner — any body
who holds Jerry — and rescue him or perish.” The pair, quickly followed by the crowd of
Liberty Party members, charged up the stairs and into Sabine’s Courtroom, crowding the small
space and pressed Loguen and his fellow black Syracusans to the front, “shoved them in their
very faces.”90
Two men from the crowd sat down beside Jerry. One of the figures said quietly, “I am
Gerrit Smith — your friend.” Smith assured the slave that he would, “defend you at any
expense, and leave no stone unturned to secure your freedom.”
Jerry was shocked. “You ain't Gerrit Smith, are you?”
“Yes,” Smith replied, “and I mean you shall have the best counsel, and to stand by you
with my fortune.” Loguen later reflected on the moment, noting that, “the countenance of Jerry
brightened.” “What fugitive slave,” Loguen asked rhetorically, “if he has been in the country a
short time, has not heard of Gerrit Smith? or sitting by his side, is not inspired by the aura that
surrounds him ?” 91
The courtroom, packed with onlookers and abolitionists, sat as a powder keg waiting to
explode. Jerry leaned in to his counsel and remarked that he believed, “if I should throw myself
upon this crowd, they would help me to escape, — they look like friends.” Gerrit Smith’s
answer was telling of the mind of the crowd: “They are friends,” the lawyer replied, “but not yet.
I mean you shall escape — but not yet.” The case continued, but was not trending in Jerry’s
favor. The crowd was beginning to become rowdy. Charles Merrick recalled a tanner from
Oswego crying loudly to the room, “Gentlemen, you see how it is going; there is no use of longer
90
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 401-402.
91
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 401.
67
waiting!” The room erupted into noise. Voices began rising shouting, “Let’s take him out.” A,
“tall, country looking chap,” as the young Stoddard recalled, “slipped past,” the guard keeping
the crowd at bay. “I saw a long arm flash out,” Stoddard recalled, “and a set of hard knuckles
smote the unwise officer on the side of his head.” Jerry, as Merrick remembered, turned to him
and asked if he should, “try it?” Merrick winked, and the fugitive acted.92
Jermain Loguen recalled that the wink had been, “hasty,” and poor advice. Still, Jerry,
“with eyes flashing fire, and the strength and agility of a tiger, threw himself across the table,
scattering papers and pistols.” The slave leapt for the crowd and, “lay upon the bosom of the
multitude, who made room for him, but closed upon the kidnappers, and effectually separated
them from him.” The mob poured into the streets, the fugitive dashing at its head eastward
through Clinton Square along the canal. “A great multitude, friends and enemies alike, took up
the chase in the utmost confusion,” following close on Jerry’s heels. The abolitionists followed
to harass and, “embarrass his pursuers.” The slave ran, “as fast as he could with fetters on his
hands,” stumbling through the streets of the Salt City. But the fetters were his undoing. Without
them, the man could have slipped into the crowd and disappeared. With them, he was branded,
unable to be, “lost in the great surge of humanity around him, whose voice at a distance was as
the roar of the ocean.” Somewhere near the Weighlock Building along the canal, two carriages
vied for Jerry’s patronage, one bound for freedom and the other for the Commissioner’s office
and continued trial. Two city officers tackled Jerry, leaving, “his body bare and bleeding, with
nothing to cover it but pantaloons and a part of his shirt,” and forced the fugitive into the wagon
92
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 403-404; Earl E. Sperry, The Jerry Rescue: October 1, 1851, (Syracuse, NY: Onondaga Historical
Association, 1924), 31-35.
68
bound for Sabine’s office. One of the officers sat on Jerry in the bed of the wagon in order to
keep him pinned down. Jerry’s rescue had been foiled.93
The man was carried now to the police offices, just a block up from Sabine’s office in a
building adjacent to the canal. He was to be bound at the feet and locked in a wooden cell at the
office’s rear. It was now time for the abolitionists to regroup and rework their plans. At, “early
candlelight,” a group of abolitionists met in Dr. Hiram Hoyt’s doctor’s office. Jermain Loguen
gather along with the rest of his fellow Syracuse radicals, determined to strike a blow for
freedom. “When each had proved his title to a place in this Congress of freedom,” Loguen
recalled in his autobiography, “they gave an emphatic opinion that Jerry must be taken from his
captors and set free.” Syracuse, it was determined, “should not be disgraced by his taking off, be
the consequences what they might.” The crowd gathered there understood that Sabine was a
friend of the fugitive, but even, “if such were known to be the result,” the rest of the assembly
concluded, “they could not be deterred from releasing him by force.” The room burst forth with
applause at Gerrit Smith’s opining that, “it is not unlikely that the Commissioner will release
Jerry if the examination is suffered to proceed — but the moral effect of such acquittal will be as
nothing, to a bold and forceible [sic] rescue.” It was only through a, “forceible rescue,” that the
men there gathered could, “demonstrate the strength of public opinion against the possible
legality of slavery, and this fugitive law in particular.” A violent rescue attempt of the slave
Jerry, in the opinion of those gathered in Hoyt’s office that night, could only, “honor Syracuse,
and be a powerful example everywhere.” Loguen’s feeling was likewise. He later added that a
violent blow against the fugitive slave law, “would be a lesson to the dough faces of the North
and the blind men at the South.” The consequences of infamy and blind hatred from their
93
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 404-405.
69
detractors, North and South, “instead of deterring, precipitated determination, and nerved these
men to strike quickly, and in a manner to give the blow the greatest possible effect in all
directions.” “It was,” Loguen concluded, “the only treatment the law deserved.”94
While the abolitionists plotted and schemed, the streets of Syracuse continued to be
thronged with onlookers and rabble rousers. Some stood in a great crowd, flooding across the
western extent of Clinton Square. “The foundations of the city now seemed to be shaken,”
Loguen remembered, “and all the men and women assembled.” Clinton Square, “on both sides of
the canal, was dotted with hats and bonnets.” The crowd had assembled to witness what Loguen
characterized as, “the most daring and stirring event that had occurred on the continent.”
Women and children stood on balconies and sidewalks ringing the square, “out of the reach of
danger, to see the battle which they prayed would set the bondman free, though it periled the
blood of their sons, brothers and husbands.” “The excitement among them was intense.” But the
ring of spectators were not simply observers, but catalysts, surrounding, “the two or three
thousand actors at the Police office as a celestial guard, and stimulant of their manly and heroic
qualities.” Orators stood on the porch of the police office, inciting the crowd to action.95
The rescuers, filing out of Doctor Hoyt’s office, began arming themselves for combat,
“some with clubs, and others with axes under their overcoats, while others were arming
themselves with rods of iron from a pile before Mr. Wheaton's Hard Ware store.” About ten
minutes after eight, “one of the rescuers, anxious for an overt act, and pained intensely by the
delay, cried out at the top of his voice from the crowd, ‘Bring him out! Bring him out!’” A stone
let fly from another of the organizer’s hands and shattered a light of glass in the police office’s
94
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 407-409.
95
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 414.
70
window. Soon, more projectiles were hurling into the office. The investigators, still
interrogating Jerry, evacuated. Then, brazenly, the rescuers began demolishing the police office
piece by piece. “The assailants walked boldly to the windows and broke them in with clubs and
axes,” Loguen wrote, “sash and glass together were dashed upon the floor within and the
platform without.” But, in spite of the abrupt deeds of destruction, “no shouts of the actors
attended them.” Instead, the square, “gently murmured the approbation of the assembled city, as
distant thunder responds to lightning.” The mob was not a drunken assemblage hell-bent on
wanton destruction, “moved by rum or party madness to destroy property and rights and laws.”
The quiet riot was, “pregnant more of bliss than pain, while ultimating in the outer world the
sentiment which makes Heaven within — ‘thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’— a sentiment
on which all happiness and all order depends.”96
The rescuers had planned out carefully their strategies. “It was thought best not to enter,”
the police office, Loguen recalled, “until every window and door and particle of woodwork were
demolished — not until even the casings under the windows which came down to the platform
on which the orators stood were destroyed, and the whole room was open to the assailants.” The
work was slow going. Finally, “several strong men went to a pile of hemlock plank near by, and
took therefrom a board about ten feet long and four inches thick for a battering ram.” The group
charged forward. The crowd, “opened at the command of one of their number, William L.
Salmon, of Granby, Oswego county, a brave and true man, who called aloud: — ‘Open the way !
— Old Oswego is coming!’” The windows had been demolished to the floor, “and nothing
remained to the rescuers but to enter and conquer the police, constables and rowdies, who were
96
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859),411-412.
71
retained to guard the outer door of Jerry's prison.” The crowd surged forward and, battering
apart the cell inside, soon spirited Jerry from the smashed police office.97
“The huge hemlock was now dropped, the sound of axes and iron bars ceased, and raising
the thrilling bondman, the rescuers,” Loguen recalled, “for the first time, uttered a shout of joy
and triumph.” The newly freed man was, “received at the door by Peter Hollinbeck and William
Gray — both colored men, and the latter a fugitive slave.” Now, with Jerry in their possession,
the crowd, “forgot their hatred of tyrants and detestation of wrong doers, in the sweet gushings of
Heaven that trickled in their bosoms.” Loguen characterized the sound of the crowd as simply,
“the music of Heaven in the soul, celebrating the birth of a new era in politics and Religion.”
Syracuse’s rescue of Jerry had begun to usher in, “the jubilee of the incarnation of a celestial
sentiment, which, like the mountain stone seen by the prophet, has grown and is to grow, until it
fills the republic and gives liberty to the continent.”98
The crowd dispersed, with the helpful ruse of shouts of, “Fire!” from the Jerry Rescuers.
Jerry was smuggled to the black community of Syracuse. His chains were broken and he was
spirited away to Kingston, Canada East. The slave had been freed and the struggle was over.
But for Jermain Loguen, the struggle was only beginning.99
Some ten days after the Jerry Rescue, the Syracuse Standard ran a simple notice that,
“some sixty fugitives from the South, have passed through our city.” These souls had made,
“their way to Canada.” Those sixty escaped slaves were Syracuse’s contribution of freedom
97
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 413-414.
98
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 417-418.
99
Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as A Slave and as A Freeman, (Syracuse, NY: Office of the Daily
Journal, 1859), 420-421.
72
over the course of one month of abolition activity. Syracuse’s abolition community was spitting
in the face of their enemies. Jerry might have been one soul run to freedom, but Syracuse had
spirited away dozens more without trial and violence.100
In a letter addressed to Washington Hunt, the Governor of New York, sent on the 2nd of
December 1851 from St. Catherine’s, Canada West, Jermain Loguen pled his personal case. “As
a citizen of the State of New York,” Loguen wrote, “now in exile for the sake of liberty, which is
dearer to me than life, I take it upon me to address to you a few lines on the subject.” “I am not
disposed, sir,” Loguen continued, “to deny my presence in Syracuse at the time of that notable
event, or that in common with thousands of my fellow citizens I felt sincerely desirous that the
conflict should result as it did, in favor of freedom.” Loguen first, needed to clarify the reason
for his exile. He had run, he writes, not because of his complicity in the Rescue. Instead,
Loguen felt he needed to flee because, “according to a fundamental law of American
despotism… I was born unconstitutionally.” Syracuse had been a kind home to the minister, and
Loguen, “felt in some degree secure among the sons of noble sires who gallantly fought and bled
for liberty,” within the United States. Then Loguen’s confidence in his nation, “was shaken by
the passage of the horrible Fugitive Slave enactment.” Still, he felt he needed to stand his
ground. Finally, Loguen wrote to the governor, “my personal liberty had been some time
threatened, and from the earnest entireties of my wife and four children, from whose presence I
am driven, as well as my esteemed and faithful friends,” the fugitive minister was forced to
escape to Canada, “this glorious land of refuge.” But Loguen was not fleeing trial. “I am not
here sheltered under the protecting aegis of her Majesty’s powerful Government as a fugitive
“Some sixty fugitives...” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 11 October 1851 in Onondaga County Primary
Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
100
73
from justice,” Loguen wrote to Hunt, “but from the fiendish machinations of merciless slavehunters….” Loguen asked of the governor two simple questions. First, could the Fugitive Slave
Act truly, “endanger the liberty of an American citizen, who, for 20 years before it was enacted,
has stood upon free soil, inhaling and exhaling the air of freedom?” Second, and most
importantly, Loguen implored the Governor to defy that law. “Will your Excellency, in the
name and on the behalf of the sovereign State of New York,” Loguen asked, “guarantee to me
that protection which belongs of right to an American citizen, if I will voluntarily return to
Syracuse, and stand trial as indicted for the crime of loving liberty?”101
The indictment of Loguen in the Rescue of Jerry, among the more than a dozen such
indictments handed down by the United States District Court, was perhaps the most threatening.
Loguen’s outspoken criticism, and his friends’ previous attempts to purchase his family’s
freedom from his former master in Tennessee, placed a heftier penalty on Loguen than fines or
imprisonment. If he was convicted, Loguen would more than likely be deported, back to slavery
in Tennessee and away from his free wife and children. His decision to run to Canada, a choice
made, “to suit the feelings of my wife and friends, not my own,” was one of preservation of
liberty and not simple flight from prosecution. “If the irrepressible heavings of a bosom fraught
almost to bursting with love of freedom,” Loguen argued to the governor, “was treasonable, then
I was a great transgressor.”102
A few days after his entreaty to the Governor, Loguen wrote to J.R. Johnson that he was,
“determined not to give up so.” “If,” Loguen lamented, “the government will put me on trial for
rescuing Jerry, and that alone, I will hasten back and meet the charge like a man.” Likewise, if,
“they will come upon me single handed with their claim on me as a fugitive from slavery,”
“The Fugitive Slave Law,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 8 April 1852.
“The Fugitive Slave Law,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 8 April 1852; “Letter from J. W.
Loguen,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 8 January 1852.
101
102
74
Loguen continued, “then I will come back to my family.” Conflating one charge with another’s
punishment was the true danger facing Loguen. He knew full well that, had he been in the same
circumstances as Jerry, the community would have risen up likewise. But in trial there would be
no rising and no rescue, only a return to slavery. “Ah my brother,” Loguen wrote, “I know it is
not all of life to live, nor of death to die.” The minister only wished to, “die like a man of God…
to live a traitor and a coward, to me is to die all the day long.” “What I want,” Loguen
concluded, “is to be in the Jerry battle at Albany.”103
The fears of Loguen’s immediate family and friends of possible capture were not entirely
unfounded, but Syracuse as a whole pledged to protect the man with equal fervor as they had
Jerry. “The friends of Loguen,” a correspondent for Frederick Douglass’ Paper commented that
there were, “two reasons probably for advising him to leave the United States for Canada.”
“One,” the paper continued, “was to escape arrest on judicment [sic] for aiding in the arrest of
Jerry.” The second was, the paper wrote dropping an obvious pun, “to save himself from being
kidnapped under color of such indictment.” Loguen’s caution, “might have been prudent
immediately after the rescue.” Canada could readily serve as a refuge from capture, “until the
smoke rolled off the battle field, and we could see how things stood after the rescue.” But, the
paper argued to its readers, “it should be done only as a temporary expedient.” Syracuse cared
not, the correspondent continued, if Loguen was implicated in the Jerry Rescue; instead, they,
“glory in it.”104
“Shall he stay in Canada,” the correspondent continued, “because he may be kidnapped
under color of an indictment?” The answer was swift and solid: “We have no fears about the
safety of Loguen in Syracuse.” Loguen, the writer claims, “could not be held at all.” “Woe to
103
104
“Letter from J. W. Loguen,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 8 January 1852.
“Letter from J. W. Loguen,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 8 January 1852.
75
the wretch,” the proclamation of allegiance read, “who puts a hand on him to claim him as a
slave!” Loguen’s fears of, “falling in his own defence and the defence of others,” were
completely unfounded and unwarranted. “If there is occasion of falling in the cause of freedom
in Syracuse,” Frederick Douglass’ paper assured Loguen, “we will assure him he will not fall
alone.” The people of Syracuse had, “long ceased to fear about these subjects.” Instead, “it is
the assailing party who fear now.” Syracuse, however, was not the battleground to which
Loguen must return. Instead, it would be a courtroom in Buffalo or Albany. Here the fugitive’s
safety could not be totally guaranteed. “We have reason to believe,” the letter to Douglas’ paper
continued, “the perjured wretches who procured his indictment, did it, not to convict him of
crime.” Instead, their motive was simply, “to enable a diabolical kidnapper from Tennessee to
steal him out of the State.” Still, Syracusans had more faith in their fellow Upstate New Yorkers
than not, declaring that, “a fugitive Slave is perfectly safe at every point between Albany and
Buffalo.”105
Loguen’s exile in Canada was far from wasted. The minister contributed to St
Catharines’ society by working with the city’s poor and uneducated fugitive slaves. Loguen
found himself, “preaching the gospel to them, and talking about slavery and temperance, and
teaching them in night schools.” The people of St. Catharines were, “very poor,” and could pay
Loguen nothing. “My reward,” the minister wrote, “is their good attention to the word.” Of St.
Catharines’ around six thousand citizens, nearly eight hundred were black. Many of those men
and women were fugitives, “wearied with his thousand miles of travelling by night, without
suitable shelter,” Benjamin Drew, a Boston abolitionist who visited the city in the mid-1850s
noted. Drew interviewed a number of St. Catharines’ poor, including a Mrs. Ellis, a mother of
four who escaped her rapacious master with only two of her children. The woman remarked that,
105
“Letter from J. W. Loguen,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 8 January 1852.
76
“rents and provisions are dear here, and it takes all I can earn to support myself and children.”
“This is a hardship,” the freedwoman continued, “but had I to struggle much harder than at
present, I would prefer it to being a slave.” William Johnson, another St. Catharines fugitive,
reported that he had, “found good friends in Canada…. I have been trying to learn to read since I
came here, and I know a great many fugitives who are trying to learn.” Loguen’s work among
St. Catharines’ poor did not go entirely unnoticed. Samuel Brown and John Anderson, ministers
at the Methodist Colored Church and Zion Baptist Church in St. Catherines, respectively,
forwarded an open letter to Frederick Douglass’ paper, praising the Syracuse minister’s work.
The pair addressed Loguen, acknowledging, “the important services which have been rendered
by you, to your colored brethren in this town and vicinity.” “As a teacher,” the ministers
continued, “you have devoted your nights to the instruction of adults and juveniles, in the
elements of literature.” “By your candid and talented advocacy,” the Canadian ministers
believed, Loguen had, “reduced the amount of prejudice heretofore existing, even in this free
land, against the colored race.”106
Loguen returned to Syracuse in the spring of 1852, determined to test the Fugitive Slave
Law. Though arrested and bailed surreptitiously by friends, Loguen, like many of those arrested
for freeing Jerry on October 1st, 1851, never stood trial for the Rescue. But the event and
Loguen’s subsequent exile sent shockwaves through the man’s life. The minister no longer was
associated with particular churches and congregations, choosing instead, as Frederick Douglass’
newspaper characterized him, to become, “the only fugitive slave in the United States, who is
regularly and constantly in the lecturing field.” Loguen, in Douglass’ estimation, deserved, “on
“Letter from J. W. Loguen,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 8 January 1852; Benjamin Drew,
A North-Side View of Slavery - The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, (Boston: John P.
Jewett & Co., 1856), 29-30, 44-45; “Letter from John Anderson to the Rev. J. W. Loguen,” Frederick Douglass'
Paper (Rochester, NY), 6 May 1852.
106
77
that account, as well as on the score of his talents, and untiring zeal, in laying before the public
the accumulated wrongs of his race, to have his hands upheld and his spirit cheered.” By late
1852, Loguen was taking, “no regular salary from any society or organization,” but instead was
funding his own mission, going, “forth on his own motion, with the heart of a genuine
philanthropist in his breast.” No man in the, “extended ranks,” of the abolition movement, was,
“doing more in the lecturing field, in school houses and chapels, to disseminate right views and
to promote right feelings on the subject of slavery than he.”107
But Loguen’s work was not simply to speak out on the issue of slavery and fugitives’
welfare from the pulpit. The independent minister began wars of words, wielding a pen in his
crusade against slavery. In 1853, as the concept of colonization began to take root within some
of Syracuse’s more conservative abolitionists, Loguen acted out swiftly. In a friendly letter to
Frederick Douglass, on March 14, Loguen assured the Rochester abolitionist that he, “would
have laughed if you could have been in our city last Monday evening, and attended, with some of
us, at the First Presbyterian Church, where a few of the so-called friends of ‘the poor Africans’
were assembled.” The men had gathered in Syracuse to, “form a County Colonization Society,
auxiliary to the American Society.” The chief speaker, “Ex-Governor Pinney, as they call
him…. affected great benevolence of feeling for the poor colored people, (the free ones, not the
slaves.) and pictured in glowing colors, how happy they would be in Africa.” The fugitive slave
Loguen’s tone of derision is palpable as he recounts the white speaker’s descriptions of, “the
colored man’s paradise.” “As long as they remain in this country,” Pinney continued, the
African-American was to be, “nothing but ‘the filth, the scum and offscourings of the earth.’”
With sarcasm ringing in his words, Loguen remarks on, “what a wonderful, transforming, and
107
1852.
“J. W. LOGUEN is laboring in Madison Co...” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 3 December
78
regenerating effect this journey to Africa produces, forsooth!” To Loguen, the Colonization
Society was the essence of evil and a pretender to the throne of abolitionism. Pinney claimed
that colonization was, “neither anti-slavery nor pro-slavery; but I suppose,” Loguen continued,
“he would have us understand, much better than both.” Loguen took keen notice that, the men
moving for colonization were, “the very men that use every exertion in their power to carry into
execution the hellish Fugitive Slave Act.” Loguen characterized them as, “ministers of our
negro-hating American gospel… members of our negro-hating, wine-drinking churches.” In a
letter appearing in the Syracuse Standard, Loguen noted that, “the colored people, Sir, regard
both the Fugitive Slave Bill, and the Colonization scheme as coming (to a great extent) from the
same class of men, and would just as soon help in one direction as the other.” The black
population of places like Syracuse, chief in organizing efforts to resist the Fugitive Slave Act,
was the obvious target to Loguen. “It is but natural,” Loguen concludes, “that they should wish
to rid themselves of these obstacles in the way of their benevolent operations.”108
“But,” Loguen queried, “is it true that these men owe their defeat mainly to the free
colored population?” For Loguen, the answer was simple: “so I believe.” Without the black
population as a catalyst, the white abolition movement would not have nearly the strength it did.
Indeed, in Loguen’s estimation, “even Jerry would have been taken back to slavery, but for the
colored people of this city and vicinity.” In the end, it was the black community’s courage
which, “gave life and vigor to some of our white friends, and induced them to lay hold and help
in that glorious struggle.” Loguen is quick to note that these white allies, “induced to work
manfully, being stimulated, as many of them confess, by the noble deeds and courage of colored
men,” deserved his love to the extent, “the American people their Revolutionary Fathers.” It
“Letter from J. W. Loguen,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 25 March 1853; “Colonization,”
Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 14 March 1853 in Onondaga County Primary Sources 1853 to 1855, AAS Vert.
Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
108
79
was, in Loguen’s estimation, to rid the north of such inspiring examples, “to get such colored
men out of the country, that this Colonization movement is pressed at this time.” The opponents
of the Fugitive Slave Law, “dread one true-hearted colored man more than they do fifty white
men that are in fellowship with their religion and politics in this country.” Loguen assured
Douglass, however, that Pinney and his allies would hear from him soon. He would, he
concluded his letter to Douglass, let all, “see that I am willing and ready to enter into a life-long
fight for my rights, and the rights of my enslaved brethren, come rough or smooth, or come what
may.” Likewise, Loguen closes his letter to the Syracuse Standard with a succinct declaration:
“we require no Colonization schemes for our benefit.” “I, for one,” Loguen declares, “am
willing to enter into a lifelong fight to obtain it, and will not quit the field so long as my people
are held as slaves — preferring to suffer on here if need be until we all be slaves, or all be
freemen together .” Loguen would hold himself up as a, “true-hearted colored man,” as a
symbol for others to follow, white and black. 109
By late 1853, Loguen had begun lifting himself up in deed as that example which others
might follow. “We understand that some of the friends of fugitives in Canada,” the Syracuse
Standard reported, “are making an effort to get up a box or two of clothing to send forward to
them.” This delivery of supplies to Canada’s escaped slaves would come, “by their agent, Rev.
Mr. Loguen.” The paper continued, expressing a hope that, “all that feel friendly to this outraged
class of our fellow men, will lend a helping hand, for they have a long and cold winter coming
“Letter from J. W. Loguen,” Frederick Douglass' Paper (Rochester, NY), 25 March 1853; “Colonization,”
Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 14 March 1853 in Onondaga County Primary Sources 1853 to 1855, AAS Vert.
Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
109
80
on in Canada.” Donations, “Clothing or money,” were to be, “left at C. Bate's store, W. E.
Abbott's store, or at Mr. Loguen's house, in the 9th ward.”110
But donations from the community were not simply directed at the fugitives abroad.
Loguen himself was the benefactor of numerous benefits and fundraising endeavours. “The
Donation for Rev. Mr. Loguen,” the Standard announced in January of 1854, “comes off this
afternoon and evening at Market Hall.” The newspaper admitted handily that, “Mr. L. is
engaged in a difficult enterprise,” that of spiriting slaves to freedom, “and needs and deserves all
the encouragement his friends can bestow.” The paper admonished its readers to give
generously, quoting Proverbs and reminding its readers that, “They that giveth to the poor
lendeth to the Lord.” A few days later, Loguen wrote to the Standard on behalf of himself, and
his, “wife and six children.” The family returned, “thanks to our friends in Syracuse and
vicinity, for their timely and liberal Donation on the 18th inst.” Loguen continued, noting that he
could, “feel my heart cheered and my hands strengthened to preach the Gospel to the poor and
assist in working the underground railroad.” Speaking in the metaphor of the ‘railroad,’ Loguen
assured his friends that he would, “be ready in season and out of season to watch the track for the
forlorn, and help the fleeing fugitives over to British dominions.” If they could not be moved on
to freedom in Canada, Loguen pledged publically to, “defend them on our own soil.” Loguen
defiantly proclaimed, “I am myself called a slave, but will wear no fetters.” The fugitive cried
out in print: “I will be free.” 111
The Agents of the Underground Railroad in Syracuse were not beyond boasting of their
achievements. The Syracuse Standard, over the course of April and May, noted that slaves were
“Help for Fugitives,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 15 November 1853 in Onondaga County Primary
Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
111
“The Donation for Rev. Mr. Loguen,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 18 January 1854 in Onondaga County
Primary Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
110
81
passing through the city (and its surrounding neighbors) nearly daily. “Three fugitive slaves,”
the Standard reported on the 18th of April, “passed through this city yesterday, on their way to
the dominions of Queen Vic.” Again on the 22nd, the paper noted that, “the underground railroad
has been doing a very successful business lately.” “Almost every train,” the announcement
continues, “brings along one or more fugitives on their way to Canada.” Writing of a, “female,
about 24 years of age, nearly white, and beautiful,” the paper noted that, “the bird had flown having taken the express train to Canada several hours,” before her pursuers arrived in the city.
Just a few days later, the Standard noted that, “three Fugitive slaves, from Virginia, passed
through this city yesterday, on their way to Canada.” Again on May 18th, the paper mentioned,
“Seven fugitive slaves,” who had, “passed through this city on Tuesday afternoon last, on their
way to Canada.” But all of these notices raised the ire of the local opposition to abolition. “The
Republican editor's nerves,” the Standard gleefully reported, “appear to be shocked by our notice
of the passage of fugitive slaves through this city.” The notes of slaves, the paper commented,
“on their way from the haunts of such man-hunters as himself, to the dominions of Queen
Victoria,” had offended the rival editor’s, “exceedingly tender,” sensibilities. “But,” the
Standard proclaimed, “the truth should not be withheld even though the Republican editor and
his handful of partizans wince at the ‘items.’” The editor, the paper retorts, might be better
served to emulate the abolitionists who, “studying the history of a certain individual who lived
about the commencement of the Christian era,” a wry reference to Christ himself.112
“Three fugitive slaves passed…” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 18 April 1854 in Onondaga County
Primary Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “The underground railroad has been doing…”
Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 22 April 1854 in Onondaga County Primary Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files,
OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Three Fugitive slaves, from Virginia…” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 27 April 1854 in
Onondaga County Primary Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Emigration,” Daily Standard
(Syracuse, NY), 18 May 1854 in Onondaga County Primary Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY;
“The Republican editor's nerves appear to be shocked…” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 29 April 1854 in
Onondaga County Primary Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
112
82
In the fall of 1854, James Fuller, one of the Jerry rescuers, wrote to the Syracuse Daily
Standard on behalf of the, “Directors of the Underground Railroad.” Using the language of an
actual board of directors for a true overland railway, Fuller informs the community that,
“conformity with a resolution passed at a meeting of the stockholders have resolved not to
declare any dividend for the present.” “The fall trade,” the report continues, “has opened with
indications of an unusually large amount of travel.” Fuller admits that Syracuse’s Underground
Railroad hubs had, “been visited by many, who, preferring freedom to slavery, have disregarded
the ‘provisions of the constitutional compromises,’ and have sought to endanger the safety of our
Republican institution of chattelism, by flight.” The business of helping the, “panting and fleeing
fugitive from the cotton fields and rice swamps of the south,” however, was an expensive one.
As a result, the “directors” were forced, “to appeal again to the open pockets, warm hearts and
generous feelings of those who meet with us,” not simply to help the fugitive along his way, but
to, “commemorate the triumphant rescue of Jerry from his kidnappers.”113
By November of that same year, a similar boast ran in the Standard penned by Loguen
himself. Loguen trumpeted that he was, “constantly receiving, by the Underground Railroad,
travelers direct from the south.” Weather was getting increasingly cold as winter came on in
Central New York. Many of the fugitives, Loguen wrote, “would like to stop on this sine [sic] of
the lake, while others prefer to go to the land of Queen Victoria to spend the winter.” But each
man, woman and child fleeing the institution, “would like to get homes for the winter,” to shelter
them from the elements. Loguen pleaded for anyone to help, either by providing a roof, or, “in
“Railroad Dividends,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 27 September 1854 in Onondaga County Primary
Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
113
83
the way of food or clothing,” and offering himself to collect it at his home on Genesee Street, as,
“the agent of the Underground Railroad.”114
Loguen seemingly understood the importance of propaganda in the fight against the
institution of slavery. In an article, originally running in the Syracuse Chronicle, but eventually
appearing in the New York Tribune, the public learned from, “The Underground Railroad Agent
in this city,” of the plight of the fugitive, “and through his kindness we are permitted to give as
many particulars of some of these as it would seem proper and judicious to publish.” Loguen
had related the story of two wayfarers at his station, “Isaac and Henry,” who were being, “taken
to a public house to be sold.” Their new owner interrogated the chattel, concluding by saying, “I
suppose, boys, you will not make me any trouble?” The pair responded coyly that they had,
“come here without any trouble, and we mean to go away without any.” The trader left, and, “no
sooner was he gone than the two slaves carried out their threat to go away without trouble.”
These men, described derisively as, “uncertain riches,” simply, “walked off in the woods.”
Through a convoluted story of survival and recapture, Loguen relates the hardship of their
journey, ultimately leading them to his door in Syracuse. “The usual method of night-traveling
and day-resting was pursued,” the paper reported Loguen’s tale, “and, after three weeks'
energetic exertion, they reached the dépôt in this city.” The pair, bloodied and weary, recounted
their tale to Loguen; the fugitive Henry showing him, “more than a hundred shot in his body,”
and Isaac bearing, “honored wounds, or wounds that would be honored if borne by a Hungarian
in the same cause.” The Syracuse paper rejoiced in the fact the two were, “now beyond the reach
of American republicanism.” “Hurrah,” they cried, “for the U. R. R!” The notation of two
individuals’ success is underscored by a note appearing in the Standard just a few days before.
“Railroad Notice,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 25 November 1854 in Onondaga County Primary
Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
114
84
“The Chronicle, the paper reported, “learns from the conductor of the Underground Railroad that
two hundred fugitives have passed through this city to Canada since the first of January last
[January 1854].”115
In May of 1855, Loguen made his involvement and agency for the Underground Railroad
clear with an appeal to Syracuse for more assistance. In a letter to the people of Syracuse,
Loguen wrote that he wished, “to return thanks to the friends therein, from whom,” he continued,
“the many Fugitive Slaves who have passed through our city to the British soil during the past
cold winter and spring… have received substantial aid and comfort.” “They escaped from the
land of mangled bodies and bleeding hearts,” Loguen explained, “and found many among you to
relieve their wants and strengthen their hearts.” Loguen’s heart was buoyed by the, “many good
citizens who have never before been known to stir in such a case, in Syracuse and vicinity,” who
had helped the fugitive. These newly minted antislavery voices, in leaving, “their warm beds in
the coldest nights of a winter like the past, to lead these shivering and stricken ones to the
Underground Railroad Depot, where I and my family are found,” produced a deep conviction in
Loguen that, “the prowling man-hunter better not dwell in or pass incog through our blessed
city.” But Loguen’s letter was more than simple thanks. Instead, the station master was calling
for continued and enlarged support. “The genuine friend of the colored man, Loguen continued,
“is not satisfied with simply delivering him from whips and chains.” Instead, he would,
“joyfully open to him, whether bond or free, the passages to employment and self elevation.”
“Who, then,” Loguen cried, “in and about Syracuse will take into their shops and on their farms
our colored youth, and discipline and educate them to the industry and arts of life, as white
“How Two Men Escaped From Slavery,” New York Tribune (New York, NY), 1 January 1855 in Onondaga
County Primary Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Underground RR,” Daily Standard
(Syracuse, NY), 19 December 1854 in Onondaga County Primary Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA,
Syracuse, NY.
115
85
children are educated?” Loguen was noticing an insidious system at play within his own city.
Even, “on the plantation we are the only artizans [sic] and laborers,” Loguen noted. But, “while
as freemen at the North, our color, hitherto, excluded us from mechanical and a fair participation
in agricultural employments.” Although the schools and churches were, “thrown open,” to the
black population of Syracuse, “labor, honest labor, must be connected with the education of our
heads, and hearts,” Loguen noted, “or we can never come to the natural level of our race.”116
As he became increasingly active within the anti-slavery community, Loguen became
more and more radical. By 1855, Loguen had firmly embraced the Garrisonian wing of the
abolitionists, even while keeping active relationships open with the more liberal Douglass camp
of the movement. The arguments which had occurred in the spring of 1851 in Syracuse between
the two segments of abolitionism had flared into a war of words and deep seated resentment
between those who felt that slavery could be eliminated within the Constitutional system, and
those who declared with Garrison, that the, “U.S. CONSTITUTION IS ‘A COVENANT WITH
DEATH AND AN AGREEMENT WITH HELL.’” Jermain Loguen wrote to Garrison that he
wanted the editor, “to set me down as a Liberator man.” “Whether you will call me so or not,”
Loguen continued, “I am with you in heart.” The one main difference, in Loguen’s eyes, with
the Garrisonians, was that Logan knew his “hands will fight a slaveholder – which I suppose The
Liberator or some of its good friends would not do.” Still, Loguen professed he would, “love
The Liberator and its noble editor, Wm. Lloyd Garrison.” “So let the name of Wm. Lloyd
Garrison be borne on every breeze, until the chain shall be knocked off the last slave!” Garrison,
for his part, was seemingly flattered by Loguen’s ascent to his ideas, noting that the letter was,
“of course very gratifying to us.” Garrison could readily understand why, “Mr. Loguen,
“Letter from Rev. J. W. Loguen,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 31 May 1855 in Onondaga County
Primary Sources to 1855, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
116
86
educated as he has been, is unable to accept the doctrine of non-resistance, while hourly in
danger of being seized by prowling slave-hunters, and carried back to the South.” Still, Garrison
hoped that Loguen would, “yet realize the truth… that it is solely because of war and violence
that slavery exists,” and that through non-violence slavery could be abated.117
The most potent weapons Loguen wielded, however, were not his fists but his doorknob
and voice. After the Jerry Rescue, Loguen became a force to be reckoned with, trading in the
iron bars and axe handles of 1851 for the warm beds and pen of an Underground Railroad station
master. In January of 1856, the Syracuse Chronicle reported that Loguen had offered its editor,
“the pleasure of seeing seven very intelligent, fine-appearing fugitives…fresh from the land of
the ‘Peculiar Institution.’” The group had come from slavery in Virginia, via what is perhaps the
Underground Railroad’s most famous depot, that of William Still in Philadelphia. “Two of
them, a young, married couple,” were most likely Barnaby Grigby and Mary Elizabeth. Among
the others were Frank Wanzer and Emily Foster. Two more travelers escaping to freedom,
however, had not made it to Syracuse. “They came on in good order, for a time, in carriages,
without opposition;” the Syracuse newspaper reported to its readers, “but before reaching the
borders of the Free States, they were attacked by a party of six whites.” The slaves acted
quickly, taking, “their horses from the carriages, and mounted them; two of the men taking each
a female behind him, and the other two going singly.” The lone riders were recaptured. The
group of fugitives, less two of their brethren, soldiered on to William Still, who forwarded them
to Loguen in Syracuse. “In Syracuse,” Still later wrote, “Frank (the leader), who was engaged to
Emily, concluded that the knot might as well be tied on the U. G. R. R., although penniless, as to
delay the matter a single day longer.” Frank, “twenty-five years of age, mulatto, and very
smart,” and Ann, “twenty-two, good-looking, and smart,” Still recounts, “the twain were
117
“Letter from Rev. J. W. Loguen,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 5 May 1854.
87
accordingly made one at the U. G. R. R. Station, in Syracuse, by Superintendent—Rev. J. W.
Loguen.” Wanzer and his new bride, along with their fellow fugitives, continued on to Canada,
the Syracuse Chronicle recounted, “on their way for the Land of the Free.”118
By 1856, the route to Syracuse often came from Philadelphia and Still’s Vigilance
Committee in that city. In April of 1856, the Syracuse Standard notes that, “two brave fellows
arrived at the Underground Depot last night, direct from ‘Old Virginy.’” Loguen, “the agent for
this line, in this city, took them in charge and saw them well provided for.” One of these men
was most likely James Johnson. Johnson had escaped from, “Deer Creek, Harford Co., Md.”
His master, according to Still’s records, was William Rautty119, who planned to sell James to the
Deep South. The fugitive, the Syracuse Standard recounted, “started from his ‘master’s’
premises with a pair of handcuffs on, which had been put upon him with the intention of
shipping him next day as chattel to the Slave market at Baltimore.” The human property was
supposedly secure with the chains on his wrists. “Trembling at his impending doom,” Still
recounted, James Johnson, “resolved to escape if possible.” Still, the slave, “could not rid
himself of the handcuffs.” Johnson, the Standard reported, “proceeded with these cumbersome
articles on his hands, to Philadelphia, where he was relieved of them by some good friends, and
“Fresh Arrival of Fugitives,” New York Tribune (New York, NY), 22 January 1856 in Onondaga County
Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; William Still, Still's Underground Rail Road
Records: with a life of the author, (Philadelphia: William Still, 1886), 124-127. It is interesting to note that Frank
Wanzer, having left family in bondage, would return again to the south and free three more slaves, spiriting them
northward on much the same route in mid-summer of 1856.
119
The 1850 slave schedules do not list a slave owner named “Rautty” in Harford County, Maryland. Given
relative illiteracy of many slaves, this might simply be a homophonic representation of a number of slave owners
within the area. William Rierly did own six slaves in 1850, including two teenaged males and two young male
children. Other possibilities might include C. H. Raitt (who in 1850 owned three males under the age of 30) and
William Rampley (who owned four males under 30).
118
88
was declared a free man.” “What Master Rautty said when he found his property gone with the
handcuffs,” Still gleefully mused, “we know not.” 120
Another fugitive to make the journey from Still’s Philadelphia to Loguen’s Syracuse
stations was James Harris. Harris had escaped Middletown, Delaware and his mistress,
Catharine Naudain. 121 The slave had, “resolved to take the first train on the Underground Rail
Road that might pass that way,” and quickly found himself in Philadelphia. The young man had
resolved to escape with his new bride, a house servant of a nearby wealthy master. The plan,
however, was revealed, and “her master suspected that she intended to escape with her husband,
and arrested her and put her in jail.” Harris has, “instantly fled to avoid a similar fate.” Still
recorded that Harris was, “a man of yellow complexion, good-looking, and intelligent,” and sent
the man on to Loguen and direct passage to Canada. A few weeks later, another passenger
arrived in Syracuse. The Standard described her as, “a beautiful mulatto woman from the
Maryland shore, near Baltimore,” who stopped and, “called upon Mr. Loguen.” The young
woman, “naturally enquired [sic] into the quality and amount of business at the Syracuse Depot.”
Loguen began reading from a register of names he had kept of some of his recent passengers.
When the station master read the name of James Harris, the young woman suddenly cried out,
“That is the name of my husband.” The young woman had, “procured her release,” from jail,
“More Arrivals Per The U.G.R.R.,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 11 April 1856 in Onondaga County
Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; William Still, Still's Underground Rail Road
Records: with a life of the author, (Philadelphia: William Still, 1886), 383.
121
Sill lists Harris’ owner as “Catherine Odine”, however no such slave holder existed in New Castle County,
Delaware in the 1850 U.S. Census Slave Schedules. There is, however, a Catharine Naudain owning seven slaves,
with three men over 18, and a woman aged 16 in 1850. This is most likely the owner of Harris, and again a relative
homophone.
120
89
“and in three days thereafter she fled on foot to Philadelphia, with the aid of the man who helped
her husband off.”122
Loguen had not sent James Harris to Canada, but instead to Rev. L. Delos Mansfield’s
care in Auburn, to seek employment. The young man, “was an excellent machinist.” Now, with
the man’s wife standing in his home, “Mr. Loguen at once thought it his duty to go to Auburn
with her and help find her husband.” With the young woman, Loguen travelled to Auburn,
finding her a suitable place to wait, “in the parlor of one of the best hotels,” while he tried to find
her husband. Mansfield had not heard of Harris, but the two travelled to a third minister, who,
“was at meeting.” In the hall, “Loguen saw a colored man in a distant part of the meeting who
resembled the fugitive, and sent a person to bring him to the lobby to see Mr. Loguen.” This
stressed the fugitive Harris, who was, “seized with a tremor.” Loguen played with the fugitive’s
nerves even more by urgently telling him, “They are after you… but hold up your head - I'll take
you where you won't be hurt.”123
“Who is after me?” the young slave asked.
“Who but your master could be here after you,” Loguen toyed with the slave’s sanity,
“but don't be scared- follow me and you will be safe.” Loguen continued the ruse: “Can you
fight?”
The fugitive responded quickly: “It depends on whom I am to fight.”
Loguen queried, “Will you fight slaveholders if they have come to take you?”
“Yes,” the young fugitive assured the elder, “I would fight a regiment of them.” The pair
arrived at the hotel along with Mansfield, and went, “directly to the parlor, which was richly
122
William Still, Still's Underground Rail Road Records: with a life of the author, (Philadelphia: William Still,
1886), 516-517; “Underground Rail Road,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 13 December 1856 in Onondaga
County Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
123
“Underground Rail Road,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 13 December 1856 in Onondaga County Primary
Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
90
furnished and gas lighted.” The Standard noted that the fugitive’s feelings must have been,
“worked up to the highest point by being led to such a place, where he could expect to see no one
but a slaveholder.” Mansfield recalled that the man, “was so frightened that he did not know his
wife at first, until she called him James, when they had a very joyful meeting.” Harris remained
in Auburn with his wife, he having, “work, and doing well,” she working as a servant in the
Mansfield family. “We shall do all we can for them, and teach them to read and write,” the
Auburn minister wrote, “and endeavor to place them in a condition to take care of
themselves.”124
By 1857, the Underground Railroad activity in Syracuse was reaching its peak. In June,
Loguen’s station was seeing dozens of slaves each week. On the 11th of June, the Standard
reported that the, “Conductors of this mysterious Road report it in good order, and doing a grand
business in supplying the Canadas with stout, active laborers, from the South.” A group of
fugitives had passed through Syracuse just a few nights before, “all in good health and spirits
except one whose fatigue and exposure had affected his physical system, but his courage was
still good.” Just a week later, the paper reported that, “ten fugitives were at the depot of the
Underground RR. in this city one day this week.” “Brother Loguen, the Agent,” the Standard
concluded, “is doing a rushing business this season. Hurrah for freedom!” A handful of days
later, the Standard reported that, “seven passengers, by the Underground Railroad, passed
through this city yesterday, guided by the North Star, on their way to the land of promise.”
Loguen himself even categorized the number of fugitives in a letter to the paper, noting that, “the
Road is doing a flourishing business.”125
“Underground Rail Road,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 13 December 1856 in Onondaga County Primary
Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
125
“Underground R.R.,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 11 June 1857 in Onondaga County Primary Sources
1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Underground R.R.,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 18 June
124
91
By September, Loguen had become the sole agent in the city of Syracuse, in charge of all
fugitives coming through the Salt City. “The members of the Syracuse Fugitive Aid Society find
it no longer convenient, nor necessary, to keep up their organization,” a notice read in the
Syracuse newspapers. “The labor of sheltering those who flee American Tyranny, providing for
their immediate wants, and helping them to find safe homes in this country or in Canada,” the
note continued, “must needs devolve upon a very few individuals.” The notice acknowledged
that, “since 1850,” this work had, been done for the most part, by Rev. J. W. Loguen.” Loguen
was keenly suited for the work, “he having been a slave and a fugitive himself, knows best how
to provide for that class of sufferers, and to guard against imposition.” The note, signed by
Samuel J. May, James Fuller and a number of other Jerry Rescuers, simply requested that, “all
fugitives from Slavery, coming this way, may be directed to the care of Rev. J. W. Loguen.”
Loguen, for his part, readily accepted the new position, although the transfer of power was
largely ceremonial. “I hereby give notice,” Loguen responded, “that I shall devote myself
assiduously to the duties I have undertaken to discharge.” Loguen was quick to add that he,
much as he had been doing for nearly a decade, “must depend for the support of my family, and
of the operations I am to conduct, upon the liberality of the friends of freedom.” Loguen was
now the publically acknowledged Underground Railroad station master in Syracuse and, for all
intents and purposes, a professional freedom fighter.126
1857 in Onondaga County Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Seven
passengers, by the Underground Railroad...” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 27 June 1857 in Onondaga County
Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Underground Railroad Stock,” Daily
Standard (Syracuse, NY), 8 August 1857 in Onondaga County Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files,
OHA, Syracuse, NY.
126
“To the Friends of the Fugitives from Slavery,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 September 1857 in
Onondaga County Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Mr. Loguen's Card,”
Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 September 1857 in Onondaga County Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert.
Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
92
The slaves would come, now, thick and fast. In one ten-day period of November, 1857,
the Standard posted notices of twenty-five slaves travelling through Syracuse. “Remember,” the
paper admonished, “it costs something to take charge of the U.G.R.R., at Syracuse, and that Mr.
& Mrs. Loguen now have the whole of that cost on them.” By the 19th of November, the paper
announced that thirty-one passengers had come to Syracuse since the first of the month, “and
have been provided for by Mr. Loguen.” “Two arrived last evening,” the article continued, one
“was from Columbia, South Carolina.” The man had fled slavery, “from a master who owned
800 slaves, because his sister was whipped to death by him.” The second slave was, “a native of
Alabama, who had been sold to Virginia, where he escaped.” The paper, keen on the weight on
the Loguen family’s shoulders, again admonished the reader, asking, “have you contributed
anything to the Underground Railroad?” Incessantly, the paper queried, “has the fleeing slave
never found a home in your house or bosom?” “Then,” the editors concluded, “I pity you!”127
In late November, one of those black faces crossing Jermain Loguen’s threshold was
Frederick Douglass. Douglass wrote in his Rochester paper that, on his way, “from the east,
when the train stopped at Syracuse near 11 o'clock at night, we fell in with another company of
nine [fugitives].” Douglass, passing through Syracuse on his way home from a speaking
engagement, joined the party of, “two men, one woman, and six children.” Syracuse, Douglass
wrote, “was exceedingly dark, and the rain was very heavy.” The small group of fugitives was
set in what they wished for: “They wanted to find one Mr. Loguen, they said; that was enough.”
Douglass looked upon the knot of runaway slaves and, “felt a desire to see the company safely
“Underground R.R.,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 4 November 1857 in Onondaga County Primary
Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Underground R. R.,” Daily Standard (Syracuse,
NY), 11 November 1857 in Onondaga County Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse,
NY; “Four more fugitives passed...” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 12 November 1857 in Onondaga County
Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Underground Rail-Road,” Daily Standard
(Syracuse, NY), 19 November 1857 in Onondaga County Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA,
Syracuse, NY.
127
93
directed, and halted in our homeward march to pilot the strangers to the house of J. W. Loguen.”
“We were,” Douglass recounted, “unable to reach the home of Brother Loguen till midnight.”
But how, Douglass wondered, would the fugitives be, “received by the family aroused from
sweet sleep, at this late hour of a stormy night.” The group knocked on Loguen’s door. The
minister inside, “knew the meaning of the rap, and sung out ‘hold on.’” “A light was struck in a
moment, the door opened and the whole company, the writer included,” Douglass noted, “were
invited in.” The family at once sprung to work to make the fugitives comfortable. “Candles
were lighted in different parts of the house, fires kindled, and the whole company made perfectly
at home.” Loguen that night, Douglass concluded, “showed that he remembers his brethren in
bonds as bound with them.”128
Douglass’ account closes with a simple thought. “Housekeepers,” the paper reminded its
readers, “must know that to provide food and shelter for the hundreds who pass through in the
course of the year, must require much labor and much expense.” The account implored its
readers to, “bear this fact in mind during the present season, and promptly send in supplies both
of money and food.” But by early 1859, these stores, along with public trust, were in
increasingly short supply. In a letter to Gerrit Smith, written in March of that year, Loguen
refutes the claim of a man, “William Smith,” to have a letter of introduction and reference from
Loguen. “I know nothing about it,” wrote Loguen to Smith. Loguen had seen William Smith,
who had come to Syracuse, “as a fugitive Some year or two ago.” But Loguen did, “not regard
him as true.” Warnings of false fugitives and imposter slave catchers appeared sporadically in
Syracuse’s press. One article warned of, “an Irishman named Martin Kinney,” who had been,
“about town for some time past pretending to be in search of runaway slaves.” The man “got on
“Nine Fugitives,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 November 1857 in Onondaga County Primary Sources
1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
128
94
a bender,” and ended up in the penitentiary, “for 10 days, like other drunken vagabonds.”
Another warned, “against colored men who are said to be about the city, calling on our citizens
for aid.” These men were using, “the pretence that they are fugitive slaves.” The Standard
warned that only, “Rev. Mr. Loguen, is ready to relieve the necessities of all real fugitives,” and
that the station master was adept at keeping, “guard against all impositions.” Still, even though
he could easily weed out imposters individually, the criminals were a drain on the good will of
the community at large. “I am very sorry that we have such men around through the Country,”
Loguen wrote, “yet I know of many – and how to get at them I know not.” “Some of them are
white men,” the befuddled abolitionist continued, and, “some are black men – But all of them are
bad men.” 129
Unlike the lack of understanding on how to tackle the problem of imposters, Loguen had
a distinct plan for remedying the expense of the Underground Railroad. Like many escaped
slaves, Loguen turned to the presses. “I am Trying to get out a book,” he wrote to Gerrit Smith,
“what think you of it?” The minister explained that his family needed, “something to helpe us to
take care of the many poor, that are calling on us for helpe.” Loguen’s memoir would be
published in the very last months of 1859, helping to fuel both his public persona and the
Underground Railroad’s coffers for its last year of operation before the war.130
Following the Jerry Rescue in 1851, Jermain Loguen found himself hunted. His family
feared that he would be captured and deported to slavery in Tennessee once again. But action
“Nine Fugitives,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 November 1857 in Onondaga County Primary Sources
1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; Jermain W. Loguen to Gerrit Smith, 23 March 1859 in
“Loguen, Jermain W.” folder, Box 25, Gerrit Smith Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse
University Library, Syracuse, NY; “Police,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 6 February 1857 in Onondaga County
Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “A correspondent of the Journal warns…”
Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 11 March 1857 in Onondaga County Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert.
Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
130
Jermain W. Loguen to Gerrit Smith, 23 March 1859, 824c in “Loguen, Jermain W.” folder, Box 25, Gerrit
Smith Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.
129
95
had replaced fear. Threat to his life, however, returned in 1860. With the increased notoriety of
open resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, through violence and subversion, and his newly
minted memoirs, Loguen’s fate had traveled throughout north and south. In late February of
1860, a letter arrived in Syracuse addressed to “Jarm Logue.” Its author started cordially. “I
now take my pen to write you a few lines,” the woman began, “to let you know how we all are.”
She let the radical activist know that she was, “a cripple, but,” she added, she was, “still able to
get about.” The woman assured Loguen that, “Cherry is as well as common.” But her purpose
of writing was not simply a polite note to update the minister on the state of affairs. This note
was sent from Maury County, Tennessee, by Sarah Logue, his former master Manasseth Logue’s
wife. She was writing, instead, so Loguen could, “know the situation we are in – partly in
consequence of your running away and stealing Old Rock, our fine mare.” The family was now
experiencing the hard times of economic recession, much as most of the nation was in the late
1850s. “I now stand in need of some funds,” Sarah wrote to her slave, “I have determined to sell
you.” An offer had come, but she was letting her former property have a chance at his own
purchase. “If you will send me one thousand dollars,” the woman offered to the minister, “I will
give up all claim I have on you.” Loguen’s flight had caused hardship for the Logue family and,
according to Sarah, force them to, “sell Abe and Ann and twelve acres of land.” All that the
woman wanted was, “the money, that I may be able to redeem the land that you was the cause of
our selling.” The threat was far from hollow, however. “If you do not comply with my request,”
the old mistress continued, “I will sell you to some one else, and you may rest assured that the
time is not far distant when things will be changed with you.” Jermain Loguen’s liberty hung in
the balance. “I understand you are a preacher,” the woman added, “I would like to know if you
96
read your Bible.” To Sarah Logue, Loguen’s fate would be simple: “can you tell what will
become of the thief if he does not repent?”131
Loguen’s reply was twofold. First, in the Syracuse Journal, the entirety of Sarah Logue’s
letter ran for Syracuse to see. Above it read a notice from the former slave. “Mr. Loguen
authorizes us to say to Mrs. Logue, that he will purchase, no, purchase is not the word;” the
paper rambled, “he will sell Mrs. Logue 3,000 books entitled ‘Rev. J.W. Loguen as a Slave – and
a Freeman,’ for $2000.” The books, jokingly the paper assured the reader that the book, “sells
like ‘hot cakes’ for $1 each.” The paper urged the woman that this was, “the best [proposition]
Mrs. Logue will ever get from ‘Jarm.’”132
A few days after the jesting article ran in local newspapers, Loguen penned a reply to his
former mistress, which he subsequently publicized throughout Syracuse. “It is a longtime since I
heard from my poor old mother,” the slave Cherry, “and I am glad to know she is yet alive,”
Loguen wrote to the woman in Tennessee. “I wish,” he continued, “you had said more about
her.” With that, any pretence of cordiality washes from Loguen’s response. He is incensed.
“You sold my brother and sister, Abe and Ann, and 12 acres of land, you say, because I run
away,” the former slave continued. “Now,” he protested, “you have the unutterable meanness to
ask me to return and be your miserable chattel, or in lieu thereof send you $1,000 to enable you
to redeem the land, but not to redeem my poor brother and sister!” Loguen vowed to never send
the woman money for his freedom, crying that, if he, “were to send you money it would be to get
my brother and sister, and not that you should get land.” To Logue’s imploring that the family
131
“Rev., J.W. Loguen to be Sold,” Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 26 March 1860 in “Loguen, Jermain W.”
folder, Box 25, Gerrit Smith Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse,
NY.
132
“Rev., J.W. Loguen to be Sold,” Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 26 March 1860 in “Loguen, Jermain W.”
folder, Box 25, Gerrit Smith Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse,
NY.
97
had raised the slave, “as we did our own children,” Loguen cried back, “Woman, did you raise
your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping-post? Did you raise them
to be drove off in a coffle in chains?” Emotion bleeds through the words as Loguen continued
writing to his former mistress, “Where are my poor bleeding brothers and sisters? Can you tell?”
Instead of an intact family, Logue and the institution of slavery had damned Loguen to a life
knowing his sister and brother had been sent, “off into sugar and cotton fields, to be kicked, and
cuffed, and whipped, and to groan and die; and where no kin can hear their groans, or attend and
sympathize at their dying bed, or follow in their funeral?” Loguen notes that Manasseth Logue
is not mentioned in the letter. Assuming him dead, the fugitive pitied his former master, for in
death he had, “gone to meet the spirits of my poor, outraged and murdered people, in a world
where Liberty and Justice are MASTERS.”133
In regards to threats of capture and things being, “changed,” Loguen did not mince
words. “If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my
rights,” the incensed fugitive wrote, “they need but come here and lay their hands on me to
enslave me.” “I will not,” Loguen swore, “budge one hair's breadth.” Instead, the man had faith
in his community. “I stand among a free people,” the Minister declared, “who, I thank God,
sympathize with my rights, and the rights of mankind.” The Jerry Rescue was Loguen’s
template. In 1851, the drama had played out on the streets of Syracuse with a lowly cooper,
captured and jailed as a fugitive. Now, if a leader of the community was threatened, it was
obvious to Loguen the outcome. “If your emissaries and venders come here to re-enslave me,”
the escaped slave closed, and they manage to, “escape the unshrinking vigor of my own right
arm,” Loguen knew the outcome. “I trust,” he hurled at his mistress in Tennessee and the
“Letter from Mr. Loguen to his former Mistress,” Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 31 March 1860 in “Loguen,
Jermain W.” folder, Box 25, Gerrit Smith Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY.
133
98
oppressive slave power as a whole, “my strong and brave friends, in this city and State, will be
my rescuers and avengers.”134
“Letter from Mr. Loguen to his former Mistress,” Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 31 March 1860 in “Loguen,
Jermain W.” folder, Box 25, Gerrit Smith Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY.
134
99
ASIDE
The Death of William “Jerry” Henry
In the Syracuse Standard, on the 17th of October, 1853, a notice appeared under the
heading, “Death of Jerry.” Edward Wheeler, a Syracusan who had emigrated to Kingston,
Canada West, wrote to Syracuse to, “inform us that Jerry died in Kingston on Saturday the 10th
inst.” The article went on to recount William Henry's life after his rescue from Syracuse's police
office in 1851. The slave eventually, after passing across the border into Canada, “took up his
abode in Kingston.” Henry worked, “most of the time at his trade of Coopering.” Jerry had
attended a religious revival sometime in 1852, and, “became 'converted'... (by the Baptists we
believe).” “During his residence in Kingston,” the Standard reported, “we understand his
conduct has been quite as good as that of the generality of men of his rank in life.” The fugitive,
in a strange land, did have, “occasional fits of despondency and loneliness.” But Jerry, “was
generally cheerful and contented with his lot.”135
135
“Death of Jerry,” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 17 October 1853 in Jerry Rescue – William Henry in
Canada (Kingston) 1851-1853, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY. For an account of William Henry’s ultimate
burial place in Cataraqui Cemetry in Kingston, Ontario, see Dick Case, Good Guys, Bad Guys, Big Guys, Little
Guys: Upstate New York Stories from the Syracuse Herald-Journal, Herald American, (Utica, NY: Pine Tree Press
Publication / North Country Books, 1994).
100
The Standard closed noting that William Henry had, “gone to meet his original master,
and perhaps father, where all are on an equality.”
101
CHAPTER 3
“The Jerry Level”
Gerrit Smith and Troubled Commemoration
Any alliance with a national party, because of their membership lying on both sides of the
Mason-Dixon line, was in Smith’s estimation a covenant with slavery and its defenders.136
“Time was,” Smith confessed to his readers, “when I confidently expected a peaceful termination
of American slavery.” But the forces standing in the way of peace were too great. “In view of
the tenacious clinging to our national, and, because national, proslavery, political and
ecclesiastical parties,” Smith explained, “there is far more reason to fear, that it will have a
violent… termination.” The Democrats and Whigs alike were simply, “the great props of
slavery,” and if they were abolished, the institution would, “fall by its own weight, and die a
natural death.” But if these parties remained, Smith warned, though slavery would, “still die, its
death will, nevertheless, be violent, and violent too, in proportion to the succor and support,
which these parties give it.” “It is, indeed, lamentable,” Smith succinctly summarized, “when
This chapter incorporates some research which originally was undertaken for John Rudy, “The Jerry Level”:
Anti-slavery, Mutable Memory, and The Rescue of the Slave Jerry, Unpublished Manuscript, American University,
2007. This research had to be greatly expanded in both scope and content.
136
102
all, that is necessary to bring slavery to a speedy and bloodless end is to vote against it, that so
few can be found, who are willing to vote against it.”137
Just nine days after the Rescue of Jerry in Syracuse, Gerrit Smith wrote an open letter to
the, “members of the Liberty Party in the County of Madison.” Smith wrote from Peterboro, his
hometown, in the town of Smithfield. Both bore the name of his father, Peter Smith, a local land
speculator. But where his father operated in land alone, Gerrit Smith went a step beyond,
becoming one of the chief philanthropists in Upstate New York. Now, in 1851, his eyes had
been strongly set upon abolition and the future of blacks in America for over a decade. The
Smith sixty year old Smith, a founder of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, addressed his
constituents. “The recent demonstration of Liberty in the ever-to-be-loved and honored city of
Syracuse will, undoubtedly, have a mighty effect in quickening, and strengthening, and
spreading the antislavery sentiment,” Smith assured his readers. But Smith feared that the Jerry
Rescue alone could not serve to garner support for the Liberty Party. “If, by relying on this
glorious demonstration to increase our vote,” Smith wrote, “we shall relax our efforts to increase
it, it will not be increased.” The Jerry Rescue must act as catalyst and inspiration, and was not
simply a signal of a mission accomplished.138
The political playing field, Smith continued, remained fractured. “Our countrymen are
divided into two great political parties,” Smith reminded his followers, “we are at work to detach
them from these parties, and to bring them to vote, not according to party, but according to
truth.” These political parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, were simply defined in Smith’s
137
Gerrit Smith to the members of the Liberty Party in the County of Madison, 10 October 1851 in the Gerrit
Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY.
138
Gerrit Smith to the members of the Liberty Party in the County of Madison, 10 October 1851 in the Gerrit
Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY.
103
mind: “the madness of the many for the gain of the few.” The national political parites were rife
with, “bewitching and corrupting influences,” wielded by, “wire-workers and sorcerers of all
grades from the Town and County to the State and National politician.” “But,” Smith moaned,
“few Whigs and Democrats are prepared to leave their parties.” The thousands of partisans,
“who were gathered at Syracuse, and who either participated in, or rejoiced in, the rescue of the
fugitive slave,” Smith admitted, “show themselves therein to be men of heart.” But he
questioned their willingness to hold to these principles, and when they, “come to the polls of the
approaching Election, they will, with, alas, too few exceptions, show themselves to be sadly
deficient in consistency and principle.”139
Gerrit Smith’s voice, even on paper, was imposing. But his figure was equally as
well suited for making an impression. Smith’s frame was, “stately;” his features, “noble.” With
brown mottled hair and long beard which, “fell in strong masses over the collar,” Smith,
“possessed the great advantages of stature and weight.” The philanthropist was six foot tall and
over two hundred pounds in weight. But the most distinctive feature of Gerrit Smith was his
face, deep and, “expressive.” His, “eye was large and brilliant; the voice was sonorous and rich,
remarkable for compass, musicalness and power.” Smith’s imposing figure had undertaken
numerous endeavours throughout his career. The deeply religious man had been a leader in
temperance and religious revival activities throughout Upstate New York. Susceptible to
millennialism, Smith showed himself a self doubting believer in strict adherence to Christian
principles. On reading that, “the world will end at three tomorrow morning,” Smith wrote to his
wife in 1844 that he knew, “not my dear Nancy, that we shall meet in the air.” The
philanthropist was sure that, upon Judgment, he must, “cast myself on [Christ’s] mercy, like the
139
Gerrit Smith to the members of the Liberty Party in the County of Madison, 10 October 1851 in the Gerrit
Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY.
104
thief on the Cross.” But Smith’s piety was not to be scoffed at. He had once petitioned, in 1829,
the United States Congress, “praying that,” as a biographer later observed it, “the laws regulating
the post-office department might be so amended, as not to require the transmission of the mail
and the opening of the post-offices on the Lord's Day.” Living the concept of Christ’s
philanthropy was chief in Smith’s life. One dinner guest recalled a night when Smith welcomed
into his home weary travelers from the road, all regardless of their political or moral stances. “I
have seen eating in peace, at one time, at dinner, in his house,” the friend recalled, “a Hicksite
Quakeress minister, a Calvinistic Presbyterian deacon of the Jonathan Edwards school, two
abolition lecturers,” all paired with, “a Whig pro-slavery member of Congress, a Democratic
official…, a southern ex-slave holder and a runaway slave.” Smith, “managed them all. Not one
was neglected.” And not only were they provided for, with Christian charity, but Smith
conversed, “with each in such a sweet way as to disarm all criticism, and making everyone feel
that, if he could be other than himself, he would rather be Gerrit Smith than any other living
man.”140
But the same Christian impulse to serve and protect his fellow men, led Gerrit Smith
toward social activism. Abolition was simply an outgrowth of helping another of God’s
creatures to Smith. The threat of death against abolitionists who fought the Fugitive Slave Law,
in Smith’s estimation, is simply a threat of murdering men, “for being Christians.” Helping a
slave, Smith continued in his 1851 address to the Liberty Party of Madison County, was none
less than, “doing that, which we cannot refuse to do, and yet be men and Christians.” “If I refuse
to unite with my neighbors in concealing a poor innocent brother from the monsters, who would
plunge him into the pit of slavery,” Smith continued, “then, most certainly do I trample on my
140
Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1878), 38-39,
48, 142.
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manhood, and deny my God.” Smith knew the consequences for antislavery actions well, in
spite of the fact they contradicted the word of Christ. “Nevertheless,” Smith concluded, “unless I
do refuse these services, Millard Fillmore and his associates would have me hung.”
Furthermore, Smith contended, the President of the United States, “would have me hung,
notwithstanding they know, that the Common Father of men commands these services at my
hands.”141
Where there were white men willing to eschew their Christian duty, however, Smith
noted that blacks were quickly rising to the challenge. “The half million of free blacks in this
Nation and in Canada, hitherto patient, beyond all parallel, under the insults and outrages heaped
upon them,” Smith reminded his Madison County constituents and friends, “are, at last, giving
signs, that they will ‘stand for their life.’” No sign, to Smith, was as potent a bellwether of this
fact than the, “brave and beautiful bearing of the black men of Syracuse, who, on the ever
memorable first day of October, perilled their lives for the rescue of their abused brother.”
“Heaven grant,” Smith prayed, “that all of the half million may have the manliness and courage
to ‘stand for their life.’” “If they do,” Smith assured his readers, “the whites will stand by them,”
as they had in the streets of Syracuse. “Brave self-defence in a righteous cause… has ever won
the sympathy and admiration of the world,” Smith remarked, “and whose cause is so righteous,
as that of the American blacks?”142
Smith called, in his 1851 letter, for the rendition of those who enforced this death
sentence. “Even a Federal Judge,” Smith cried, “and of however high a grade, who has a part in
141
Gerrit Smith to the members of the Liberty Party in the County of Madison, 10 October 1851 in the Gerrit
Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY.
142
Gerrit Smith to the members of the Liberty Party in the County of Madison, 10 October 1851 in the Gerrit
Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY.
106
sending a man into slavery under this law, can, and should be punished under State laws as a
kidnapper.” But not simply judges. “Nay,” Smith continued, “the President himself, if he will
turn kidnapper, should be taught, that he cannot do so with impunity.” It now stood in the hands
of, “the friends of freedom in Syracuse,” to, “give opportunity for Onondaga County juries to
pass upon the late attempt of Marshals and others to reduce a citizen of Syracuse to slavery.” If
they refused to do so, Smith intoned, they quite simply would, “disgrace themselves and their
cause.”143
Threat to Smith’s life itself, however, and his own freedom were great. As he wrote to
the Liberty Party in October of 1851 of the events which had transpired in Syracuse just a few
days earlier, the judicial system was fast attempting to hold those who had rescued Jerry
accountable for their actions. Samuel May later recorded that, “foiled in their attempt to lay a
tribute at the feet of the Southern oligarchy, the officers of the United States Government set
about to punish us ‘traitors.’” Gerrit Smith, on the 20th of October, received a letter from Charles
Augustus Wheaton, of Pompey Hill just south of Syracuse. Wheaton operated a hardware store
in Syracuse where the Jerry Rescuers had collected their iron bars and axe handles before the
raid began. Wheaton’s wife Ellen recorded in her diary that, “Charles confidently expected to be
arrested, but has not been as yet.” “What they can prove against him,” she admitted, “will be of
no account, unless they get purjured witnesses.” In Syracuse, with an abolition community as
vocal and hated by Democrats and hunkers, Wheaton concluded, “it will not be difficult to do
that.” Charles reported to Smith on the 20th that, “Freedom’s battle is waging hotter and hotter.”
Wheaton told the Peterboro lawyer and businessman that he, “in company with a large number of
our best citizens have just returned (50 or 60 of them ladies) from Judge [Alfred] Conkling’s
143
Gerrit Smith to the members of the Liberty Party in the County of Madison, 10 October 1851 in the Gerrit
Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY.
107
Court at Auburn.” Eight of Syracuse’s citizens had been arrested and arraigned on charges of
interdicting the Federal Fugitive Slave Law. “The defence,” Wheaton reported to Smith,
“offered no testimony, thinking it the better course to reserve it until the trial.” Wheaton
recounted to Smith the scene as the prisoners from Syracuse faced their bail, “$2000 each for the
White men [5] + $500 each for the black men [3].” Wheaton wrote that, among the crowd of
onlookers from the Salt City, and those friendly faces who had come out from Auburn’s
abolition community, “we had plenty of volunteers to sign the bonds for all Black + White.”
Among those on hand as the mens’ bail bonds were being signed was former New York
Governor and current United States Senator William H. Seward. The politician, “rather begged
the priviledge of signing all the bonds, which he did.” The situation, one the crowd of
abolitionists had presumed would be somber, was anything but. A carnival atmosphere prevailed
as bonds were signed, and the crowd, “had a joyful time rather.” Conkling’s decision, Wheaton
admitted, “gave us fanatics some hot shots,” but the judge had also, “repudiated the idea of
making ‘Treason’ of it, because, the features of concert, combined, or organized resistance did
not appear.” Wheaton and Smith, both present in Dr. Hoyt’s office, planning a “forcible rescue,”
knew that the evidence could swing either way.144
Charles Wheaton’s letter to Gerrit Smith, however, does not simply recount the bail of
Syracuse’s rescuers. Wheaton and Smith were working in concert on plans to strike back at the
Fugitive Slave Law in earnest. “I have just rec’d your letter,” Wheaton noted to Smith. “We
shall,” he continued, “in due time do something in the direction which you suggest in respect to
prosecuting those engaged in the Gov’t side.” In response to arrests, Wheaton and Smith had
Charles A. Wheaton to Gerrit Smith, 20 October 1851, 590 in “Wha-Whea” folder, Box 38, Gerrit Smith
Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY; Donald Gordon, ed., The
Diary of Ellen Birdseye Wheaton, (Boston, MA: Privately published, 1923), 89-92; Samuel Joseph May, Some
Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (Boston, Mass.: Fields, Osgood, & co., 1869), 379.
144
108
concluded together, there needed to be arrests in kind of those who had sought to jail William
Henry and return him to the south. “On the side of the oppressor we see there is power,”
Wheaton wrote, “and they mean to use it, to the obliteration of the conscience + the humanity,
and the Christianity of the Nation.” Wheaton admitted to Smith that he had often asked himself,
“in the language of the Psalmist, figuratively, ‘How Long? Oh Lord! How long shall the wicked
triumph.’” “In the midst of the gloominess and darkness morally speaking,” Wheaton continued,
the abolitionists required, “more than an arm of flesh to lean upon,” referencing the Old
Testament oppression of the Hebrews by the Assyrian Empire. Still, Wheaton expected to be
persecuted by what he saw as an oppressive regime. “I expect to be indicted for something,” he
assured Smith, “but don’t exactly know what.” Wheaton closed his missive to Gerrit Smith with
the gravest of warnings. “I am told,” Wheaton confided in Smith, “the officials delayed their
proceedings.” The United States prosecutors had one aim in Wheaton’s estimation: that, “they
might reach, You, Mr. May + Me, as the ring leaders.” Wheaton warned his fellow abolitionist
to not, “be alarmed or disappointed if you should find the ‘hounds baying on your track.’”145
Smith had preempted Wheaton’s fears, however. Just a few days before Wheaton wrote
his letter, Gerrit Smith, while visiting his wife in a water cure asylum in South Orange, New
York, began thinking, “upon our emputatively guilty country.” He captured his thoughts on
paper and forwarded them on to Judge Alfred Conkling himself. “I have long believed that the
day is not distant,” the Peterboro businessman wrote to the U.S. District Court Judge, “when
both the Federal + State Judges at the north will take the ground, that the Constitution does not
make the Federal Government the tool of slavery.” Smith wrote in forceful tones to the man who
would eventually hear the case of the Jerry Rescuers, hoping that Conkling had, “the discernment
Charles A. Wheaton to Gerrit Smith, 20 October 1851, 590 in “Wha-Whea” folder, Box 38, Gerrit Smith
Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.
145
109
+ the bravery to lead the way in this resolution.” Smith took hope from Conkling’s acquittal of
the Buffalo, New York fugitive slave Daniel Davis.146 If Conkling were to strike down the
charges against the rescuers, Smith believed, “many would hate you for it.” “But, I believe,”
Smith assured Conkling, “far more would love you for it.” To strike down the Fugitive Slave
Law with his ruling could be the, “brightest + best part of,” Conkling’s legacy. Smith argues
adeptly with the judge the legal merits and lack thereof for the Fugitive Slave Act, point out
deficiencies in Article 4, Section 2 of the Constitution. Smith admits that Conkling would need
to throw precedent to the wind in order to rule in favor of the rescuers. Still, Smith appeals to the
Judge’s emotion. “Would you follow precedent + authority,” the Peterboro businessman asked,
“if to do so were to uphold murder?” “But,” Smith continued, “slavery is more wrongful than
murder. You would rather your child were murdered than enslaved.” Smith firmly believed that,
“American Slavery is on its last legs.” “It can withstand the progress of civilization but a little
while longer,” Smith argued, and Conkling could be an aid to the end by simply refusing to
equate resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law with treason.147
Smith also became deeply involved with those on the opposite side of Judge Conkling’s
bench. Ira Cobb, one of those arraigned in mid-October, wrote to Smith on the 25th of the month
that the days of simple action for social good, “have past and new duties devolve upon us.”
“Events for the coming of which I have prayed,” Cobb continued, “and yet never expected to
see… have dawned upon us;” events which had bestowed new tactics on, “the old & tired
soldiers in the war.” Cobb was sure he knew, “of no event which has accomplished more than
the recent rescue in our city.” But Cobb, a defendant in pending litigation, had been, “advised to
146
For more on the August 1851 arrest of Daniel Davis and his subsequent release by Judge Alfred Conkling,
see. Jean Richardson, “Buffalo's antebellum African American community and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,”
Afro-Americans in New York Life and History (July 2003).
147
Gerrit Smith to Alfred Conkling, 17 October 1851 in “June 17 1851 – June 11 1852” folder, Box 41, Gerrit
Smith Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.
110
say little in any communications that I commit to the Post Office,” and could not go into further
detail with Smith. By January, the courts had begun pressing forward on the charges of resisting
the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. Smith was anxious about the case. He wrote to Samuel
J. May in Syracuse that he was, “studying the ‘Jerry’ matters.” He was acquainting himself with
the details of the case so that, “should our lawyers get faint hearted in any of the trials where the
testimony may go hard against us,” Smith could, “be able to take their place.” Smith was not a
practicing lawyer in 1852, however, and would not have been an effective member of the
defensive team.148 The philanthropist continued to May, however, stating that he thought the
Syracuse minister should, “be there during all the trials.” “You must be a witness in all the
Trials,” Smith emphasized. “I will explain to you when I see you,” Smith continued, “how
effective use we can make in the argument,” that, “the Fugitive Law is infernal.” Gerrit Smith
simply deemed this one, “piece of testimony indispensible.” The cases of the rescuers should be
fought from a moral high ground, and Smith was not above flaunting the moral superiority of the
rescuers over the Marshals and police. The, “lies which the scoundrels told Jerry when they
arrested him,” coached Smith, and their, “brutal treatment of him after recapturing him,” were to
be repeated over and over. “They are things to make mighty use of with a Jury.”149
Smith’s active role in the Jerry Rescue trials came with his participation in the case of
Henry W. Allen, one of the United States Marshals who helped apprehend the slave Jerry. By
mid 1852, Smith was among the counsel and ringleaders of the arrest of one of, “those engaged
in the Gov’t side,” as Charles Wheaton had intimated almost immediately after the Jerry Rescue.
For more information on Gerrit Smith’s specific legal contributions to the Jerry Rescue defense and his
obtaining the bar in the State of New York, see Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer,
(New York: H. Holt and Company, 1939), 300.
149
Ira Cobb to Gerrit Smith, 24 October 1851, 594 in “Coates-Codding” folder, Box 7, Gerrit Smith Papers,
Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY ; Gerrit Smith to Samuel J. May,
17 January 1852 in “June 17 1851 – June 11 1852” folder, Box 41, Gerrit Smith Papers, Special Collections
Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.
148
111
Marshal Allen was brought up on the charge of violating the 1840 New York State personal
liberty law, guaranteeing even fugitive slaves a jury trial before deportation. The case was
largely a de jure exercise, more for publicity than for actual punishment of Allen. The question
of the case, as W. L. Crandall succinctly summarized in his coverage of the trial, was, “whether
in the State of New York, any man has the rght [sic], on any authority whatever, to place another
person who has not committed crime, and is not charged with crime, or breach of contract, in
durance vile, with impunity.” The case, in short, was designed to test the supremacy of state
personal liberty law over federal law, and to directly question whether the Fugitive Slave Law
was, “inconsistent with the constitutional rights of the people of the State of New York.”
Crandall was keen to point out in his notes on the trial, “that not a word was addressed to the jury
by counsel.” The part played by the Jury in the trial, “was one of form, only.”
Instead,
Crandall reported, “the only question raised was, whether or not the Fugitive Slave Law is
constitutional--and that trial was before the judge.”150
The prosecution was represented by Rowland H. Gardner, the District Attorney of
Onondaga County, Charles B. Sedgwick, and Gerrit Smith. Henry Allen was defended by James
R. Lawrence, the U. S. Dist. Attorney, George F. Comstock, and Stephen D. Dillaye. Much of
the course of the trial was a formality. As Crandall succinctly put it, “not a fact was placed
before [the jury], save those in the stipulation--that Allen was a Marshal, Sabine Commissioner,
&c.” Instead, the bulk of the argument was made in the conclusory statements of the prosecution
and defense. In this, Gerrit Smith was the ‘ringer’ for the prosecution. Smith’s closing
statement began at half past eight on June 22nd, 1852. For hours, Smith railed against the
institution of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law in a seventeen point argument, blurring the
W. L. Crandal, “Proceedings,” inTrial of Henry W. Allen, U.S. deputy marshall for Kidnapping (Syracuse,
NY: Daily Journal, 1852), 5-8.
150
112
lines between the moral and the Constitutional. “What is the prisoner's excuse for this high
crime against his brother man?” Smith queried the court. “It is,” he quickly answered, “that he
acted under law, and according to law.” But Smith was keen to point out that officers of the law
are, “required to swear to support not an Act of Congress, but the Constitution.” “If an Act of
Congress direct the judge to direct the marshal to insult the people he meets,” Smith
hypothetically mused, “neither judge nor marshal can obey it with impunity,” because it was a
blatantly unconstitutional pronouncement. Likewise, these same officers would be,
“emphatically unsheltered,” if they were to attempt to enforce, “an Act of Congress, which
commands them to enslave people -- unless, indeed, such Act should prove to be Constitutional.”
If a law were, according to Smith, “immoral and wicked, its immorality and wickedness
constitute presumptive evidence of its Unconstitutionality.” “Especially prompt and full should
be,” this conclusion, Smith opined, “if its immorality and wickedness are flagrant, as in the case
of a law for slavery.”151
Smith’s strongest arguments against the Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law in
front of the bench in the 1852 Henry Allen trial centered around the pronouncement’s ability to
overturn the entire system of judicial traditions. The threat to the right of trial by jury was prime
among Smith’s points. The Fugitive Slave Law explicitly withheld this right, Smith said, not
simply from all; “but it may be said, that the enactors of this law intended to deny the jury trial to
the black race only.” “Alas, what an outraged race it is!” Smith cried. Quoting Isaiah, Smith
characterized the African-American population of the country as, “a people robbed and spoiled.”
If such a law was passed aimed at the liberties of the white race, Smith argued, “scarcely would
the lives of the enactors have been safe from the fury of that haughty race.” This instance of
Gerrit Smith, “Abstract of Gerrit Smith’s Argument,” in Trial of Henry W. Allen, U.S. deputy marshall for
Kidnapping (Syracuse, NY: Daily Journal, 1852), 9-40.
151
113
discrimination, “this distinction between one portion of the American people and the other,” was
to Smith a, “stupendous crime.” But the denial of a right to one is a denial to all. “Will not the
denial of the right of trial by jury to one race of our citizens prepare the way for denying it to
every other race of our citizens?” Smith asked, “and will it not hasten the day, when this right
shall be cloven down in every part of our land, and denied to every class of our people?”152
Smith also took umbrage with the Fugitive Slave Law’s offer of, “a bribe,” to
Commissioners executing its elements. To infer that bribing Federal officials was Constitutional,
“is to cast great reproach and insult upon the Constitution,” according to Smith. “Now, that this
law is guilty of bribery is too plain to need argument,” Smith continued, “this law offers to the
commissioner twice as much money, if he will go wrong, as if he will go right.” The
Commissioners were paid, “twice as much, if he will favor the proud and oppressive, as if he will
show mercy to the sad and crushed,” Smith colorfully illustrated, “twice as much, if he will
decide for the rich plaintiff, as for the poor defendant.” Just as sinister was the Fugitive Slave
Law’s reliance on, “exparte testimony,” denying the right of the accused to mount a defense.
“The law,” Smith pointed out to the judge and assembled courtroom, “provides for admitting
testimony on the plaintiff's side only.” “It makes no provision whatever,” Smith continued
indignantly, “for the reception of testimony, even rebutting testimony, from the defendant's
side.” The Fugitive Slave Act, Smith argued, held no reverence for the doctrine of facing your
accusers openly and fairly.153
Smith’s argument wandered at times into deeply complex legal territory and at others into
deeply spiritual and philosophical arguments. The Constitution, to Smith, was inherently a
Gerrit Smith, “Abstract of Gerrit Smith’s Argument,” in Trial of Henry W. Allen, U.S. deputy marshall for
Kidnapping (Syracuse, NY: Daily Journal, 1852), 9-40.
153
Gerrit Smith, “Abstract of Gerrit Smith’s Argument,” in Trial of Henry W. Allen, U.S. deputy marshall for
Kidnapping (Syracuse, NY: Daily Journal, 1852), 9-40.
152
114
document unable to legislate slavery, simply because it, “does not refer to slaves,” and does not
provide for further legislation over their disposition. But Smith closes with damning
pronouncements about how the Fugitive Slave Law was the product of a corrupt national
political system. “How came this grossly Unconstitutional law to be enacted?” Smith asked,
“How came such able lawyers as Clay and Webster to favor its enactment?” The solution was,
according to Smith, “that they acted in the case, not as lawyers, but as politicians.” The crime
perpetrated by Clay and Webster over the compromise in 1850 was absolute. “They had a
compromise to make,” Smith pointedly remarked, “and make it they must, and make it they did,
at whatever expense to an oppressed and outraged race, and at whatever expense to their
reputation as lawyers.” But Webster had betrayed the American Government at its fundamental
core. The founders had not created the nation, “to be a gigantic slave-catcher, and to expend in
slave-catching the contributions which honest toil is compelled to make to the national treasury.”
“Their willingness to have their Government and treasury put to such cruel and shameless and
infamous uses, proves,” Smith declared, “that the American people have fallen down into very
low depths of degeneracy and depravity.” America was simply an, “insane and guilty nation,”
which was driving on, “heedless of warning and entreaty, until engulfed in destruction.” The
world’s hope in American democracy was lost. Americans, “not only assent to this hideous and
Heaven-defying law,” which provided for the enslavement of, “Heaven's unoffending and
guiltless poor, but they bestow most favor and honor upon those, who are most the champions
and upholders of this law.” America was caught, Smith argued, as, “pro-slavery decisions and
pro-slavery laws are weaving a strong net-work around the American people, which will leave
them bound and helpless at the feet of the slave power.” Smith pleaded with Judge Marvin to
find the act unconstitutional on the simple truth that is denied, “natural rights.” “Slavery,” Smith
115
concluded, “ is a war upon nature, and is the devourer of the rights of nature; and wherever, as in
this country, it is in the ascendant, all rights and all interests, conventional as well as natural,
accommodate themselves to its demands.”154
“These are grave questions,” remarked Justice R. P. Marvin in his jury instructions. But
the justice readily admitted that they were, “purely questions of law.” “Counsel so regard them,”
Marvin continued, “They have addressed their arguments to the Court, and have brought to the
consideration of these questions much learning and great ability.” Thus, it was the Judge’s chief
responsibility to rule in the case through the jury. Justice Marvin, like Smith, readily admitted
that, “laws and Constitutions should be construed humanely, and in favor of liberty, when they
will bear that construction.” But his view of the Constitution is one which inherently provided
for the protection of slavery. “Slavery is a State matter,” Marvin professed tritely to the court, “a
State institution solely, established, regulated, and sustained, by the particular State in which it
exists, and upon that particular State rests the responsibility of its existence and continuance.”
As far as moral obligations to fight slavery, and Smith’s the concept that an amoral law is
inherently unconstitutional, Marvin felt that, “as a citizen of New York,” he could not see how,
“this State or its people are responsible for slavery in Maryland or Virginia.” But, “as neither
has a right to interfere with the internal regulations of the other,” Marvin professed, “so neither
can be responsible for the manner of ordering and managing those internal State concerns.” The
institution of slavery was simply no concern to New Yorkers. “The presumption is generally in
favor of the Constitutionality of a law, and the onus of showing that it is not Constitutional, is
upon him who attacks it.” Smith and his fellow counsel had failed to prove the law’s
unconstitutionality in Marvin’s eyes. “The grave questions discussed have excited some
Gerrit Smith, “Abstract of Gerrit Smith’s Argument,” in Trial of Henry W. Allen, U.S. deputy marshall for
Kidnapping (Syracuse, NY: Daily Journal, 1852), 9-40.
154
116
feeling,” confessed Marvin, adding that, “all our sympathies are in favor of the great principles
of liberty.” New York carried, “out those principles to their legitimate results.” “But,” Marvin
admitted, “as we have seen in some of the other States, those principles have not been extended
to all persons.” But this choice to eschew human liberty in favor of slavery, in the end, was, “a
regulation of the State, and such State is responsible for it.” Marvin declared that, “Our own
State is not. Our people are not. We have no right to interfere.” Marvin directed the jury to find
in favor of the defendant, which they did immediately. The Jerry Rescue as Constitutional test
case was a dead letter.155
By October of 1852, the abolition community had moved beyond revenge and making
Constitutional stands over Jerry, toward commemoration and remembrance of the event which
had scarcely passed. A notice appeared in a Syracuse newspaper, announcing the planned
commemoration of the Jerry Rescue on its first anniversary. Another article ran adjacent, noting
that the call for a mass meeting had, “occasioned a commotion in certain quarters.” The
celebration was, “denounced as treasonable and wicked; and foolish and suicidal besides.” The
paper chided that, “what else can out conservative friends expect from traitors and ‘sinners above
all other men,’ as they have so often declared us to be?” “Gentlemen,” the paper cajoled the
naysayers, “don’t be in a flurry.” We shall paddle our own boat, and make the best of it,” the
writer continued, “we are, aud [sic] always have been, entirely in earnest about this Jerry affair.”
The haughty voice tested the mettle of the Syracuse conservatives, declaring that, “what we said
in ’51, we are ready to stand by in ’52.” The abolitionists had, “taken a year to think of it, and
R. P. Marvin, “Judge Marvin’s Charge,” in Trial of Henry W. Allen, U.S. deputy marshall for Kidnapping
(Syracuse, NY: Daily Journal, 1852), 87-98.
155
117
are more sure than ever that we are right.” “So,” the article proclaims, “hurra [sic] for the
Celebration!”156
Gerrit Smith took the podium at this first commemoration of the Jerry Rescue to address
the abolition community. The Syracuse Carson League reported that the crowd he addressed
numbered nearly five thousand. Smith's rolling voice washed over the immense crowd. “Poor
Jerry, the image of God,” the skilled orator intoned, “a bruised and tattered image, indeed, for he
had passed through the fearful mill of slavery, yet the image of God, and capable, by Divine
grace, of shining forever.” But Jerry had been captured to be taken back to that mill. “O how
can men be found to execute, or even to conceive, such a purpose?” Smith wondered to the
gathering. He quickly followed with a sharp quip: “Men, did I say? They cannot have been
men,” he assured the crowd, “They must have sunk their manhood and become monsters, before
they could have undertaken,” such an act. And Jerry's manhood? Smith noted that while the
slave was being taken, Jerry was, “almost as naked as when he came from his mother's womb.”
But Smith caught his feigned mistake again: “Mother! what do I say? Had poor Jerry, then, a
mother?” “Yes, sir, like you and me, he had once a mother,” Smith assured the crowd, “He once
sat on her lap, and they exchanged with each other looks of love as tender as though their skin
had been white.” Looking on the oppressed Jerry, Smith confessed to the crowd, “the scene
MADDENED me!” It drove his hands to action.157
Was the Rescue of Jerry, “right, or wrong?” Smith reminded the crowd that they were
there that day to decide such a question of meaning. “Time,” he assured them, “will develope the
truth, that in behalf of God and man, that was one of the most useful and honorable transactions
“Celebration of the Jerry Rescue,” Unattributed Newspaper Clipping in Looking Back at the Jerry Rescue:
Newspaper Clippings 1852-1951 (Scrapbook), LN48Sy8j2, Local History and Genealogy Department, Syracuse
Public Library, Onondaga County Public Library System.
157
“The Jerry Rescue Celebration,” The Carson League (Syracuse, NY), 7 October 1852
156
118
ever known.” The authorities sitting in judgement of some of Syracuse's citizens had declared,
Smith reminded the crowd, that the Jerry Rescue was, “against law.” To them, Smith had a
simple response. “Sir,” he proclaimed, “it was done in accordance with the dictates of justice,
benevolence, and compassion, and 'against these' the New Testament tells us, 'there is no law.'”
Jerry had been delivered not simply from unjust imprisonment, but truly and righteously, “by
FORCE.” “The application of that force,” Smith noted, “was deliberate and concerted, pouring
contempt on the mob that held him, on an infamous government and its infamous laws.”
Through action, the, “rescuers of Jerry,” showed they simply would, “not believe there could be
a law for slavery, and they walked over the sham laws that pretend to legalize it, as over so much
paper.” The Rescue of Jerry was a beacon of righteous action to be mimicked. But others were
not necessarily following suit. “A few months ago, Sims was taken from Boston, and returned to
slavery,” Smith reminded the crowd, alluding to the case of Thomas Sims, who was tried as a
fugitive and returned to slavery under the guard of United States Marines. “Now which was
right, Boston or Syracuse?” Smith asked the crowd. Boston had responded to the capture of
Sims that they would, “show ourselves law-abiding, and therefore Sims shall go back into
bondage.” But at the capture of Jerry, “Syracuse said, We will show ourselves law-abiding, and
therefore Jerry shall not go back into bondage; we will stand between the Government and
Jerry.” Sims' return to slavery had been the, “heaviest blow ever struck against American
liberty.” Jerry's deliverance to freedom was the, “heaviest blow ever struck at American
slavery.”158
For Gerrit Smith, the Jerry Rescue was a legacy to live up to. It would take the unity of
the vast divisions and sects of abolition, Smith assured the crowd at that first commemoration of
the Jerry Rescue. But once that unity of, “the mighty anti-slavery host,” was achieved, Smith
158
“The Jerry Rescue Celebration,” The Carson League (Syracuse, NY), 7 October 1852
119
told them, “then every shot on slavery will tell159.” The people's guns were still able to strike
their targets, Smith said, in spite of the fact that, “the guns in Congress have all been fired from
too [low] a level.” “They must come up to the high Jerry level,” Smith assured the crowd,
asking quickly thereafter, “Are you on that level?” The Carson League reported the crowd's, “
tremendous response, 'Yes! Yes!'” With the movement on the Jerry Level, the slaves would be
freed. “Don't come down then,” Smith charged the crowd, “if you would be honest, and
effective anti-slavery workers.” “We rescued a man from slavery;” Smith reminded his audience,
“what say you, would we do it again?” To leave a man in slavery and bondage was to commit a
sin against God. Smith assured his crowd that, “all the riches of this world could not remunerate
us for our loss, if we should leave one poor Jerry, whom we could deliver, in the hands of his
oppressors.” 160
Syracuse, in the intervening decade, would not witness another spectacle like the Jerry
Rescue of 1851. No grand escapes would be mounted. The Fugitive Slave Law was, for all
purposes, a dead letter on Syracuse's streets. But the memory of the event lived on. Smith
would speak at the successive Jerry Rescue Celebrations, reminding his audience again and again
that righteous action was the proper response to evil action. In 1853, Smith admitted that the
celebration spoke, “not to our neighbors only, but to all our countrymen also.” “We justify our
rescue of Jerry,” Smith told the nation, “solely on the ground of doing unto others, as we would
have others do unto us.” “Jerry wished to be rescued,” Smith reminded the nation, just as, “were
we kidnapped, we should wish to be rescued... Were Marshal Allen kidnapped, his heart would
go out forever toward the Jerry - the white Jerry, or the black Jerry - who should deliver him.”
159 Hit its mark.
160
“The Jerry Rescue Celebration,” The Carson League (Syracuse, NY), 7 October 1852
120
Smith admitted to the nation that Syracuse and the abolitionists there had, “rescued one fugitive
slave.” “We,” he demanded of the citizens of the nation, “must rescue every other, that we can.”
“We have exhorted our fellow men to trample on the Fugitive Slave Act,” he admitted, “We
must continue to exhort them to do so.” The abolitionists, Smith declared, “cannot recede.... we
owe it to ourselves, our children, our country, our God, to go forward.” Again in 1855, Smith
called unequivocally for action. Of Jerry, Smith said, “what was our duty to him, in regard to the
slave code, is our duty to all the American slaves.” “In rescuing Jerry,” Smith proclaimed to the
crowd at this the fourth anniversary of the Rescue, “we ignored the whole slave code, and denied
all possibility of law for slavery.” Speaking again of the, “Jerry level,” Smith proclaimed it as,
“that level [to which] all must come, who would be honest... who would be effective in the antislavery cause... who would be sound and trustworthy in any of their moral and political
relations.” Smith asked of the people if they be voters who, “vote for the human brotherhood
and for God,” then they must make their, “vote represent and honor the principles of “the Jerry
level,” and be a vote for no man, who knows slavery to be law, or to be anything short of the
most infamous and diabolical outlaw.” “We rejoice to know,” Smith concluded, “that there are
thousands in our land, who stand upon 'the Jerry level'... they will be ready and fully aroused by
any outrage upon those principles.”161
But on the face of the situation, the nation and Syracuse's stock in radical abolition
seemed to be waning. By the late 1850s, outward appearances were trending against the popular
acceptance of the movement. Kansas had erupted into bloody violence as free-soilers and proslavery settlers killed one another to ensure victory for their ideology. Smith had been soundly
161
Gerrit Smith, Address Of the Convention held in Syracuse, Oct. 1, 1853, for the purpose of Celebrating the
Rescue of the Man Jerry, 485 (broadside) in the Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection, Special
Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY; “Address Read by Gerrit Smith, and
adopted at the Jerry Rescue Celebration, held at Wieting Hall, Syracuse, October 1st, 1855,” Syracuse Evening
Chronicle (Syracuse, NY), 13 October 1855.
121
defeated in a futile bid for the Presidency as the Liberty Party candidate, running against James
Buchanan, Millard Fillmore and John C. Frémont. Syracuse's antislavery community appeared
to be shrinking. The Underground Railroad network in the city, organized by the Syracuse
Fugitive Aid Society, had publicly consolidated in September of 1857 to just the agency of
Jermain Loguen. The furor which surrounded the Jerry Rescue seemed to be seeping away from
Upstate New York, into the west where brash anti-slavery forces were raising arms against proslavers in open conflict. One of these fighters from Kansas, a charismatic failed businessman
named John Brown, appeared at Syracuse’s Kansas Support convention in the summer of 1855.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's wide-reaching decision in a case pitting Dred Scott versus his
owner seemed to cement the institution of slavery in perpetuity. Even the new avowedly antislavery Republican Party gave Smith no hope of progress. “If the Republican Party enjoys the
confidence of the abolitionists,” Smith quipped in his 1857 Jerry Rescue address, “it is
nevertheless not too much to say that it has not yet earned it.” Smith blamed the, “recent
Constitutional proscription of the black man in Iowa... to Republican as well as to Democratic,”
influences. Smith concluded his address in 1857 with a question: “Why is it that so little has
been accomplished during these six years for the overthrow of slavery?” He answered to the
crowd that at the root of the problem was the fact that, “so few have dared to identify themselves
with that rescue, and to espouse the great principle which underlies it - the principle that there is
no law, and can be no law, for slavery.” Action had been replaced across the North with empty
rhetoric and Gerrit Smith was tiring of the development.162
162
“To the Friends of the Fugitives from Slavery,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 28 September 1857 in
Onondaga County Primary Sources 1856 to 1857, AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; Gerrit Smith, Address
reported by Gerrit Smith to the Jerry Rescue Convention : held in Syracuse October 1, 1857, 508 (broadside) in the
Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
Syracuse, NY; For more on the development of Gerrit Smith's relationship with John Brown, see Ralph Volney
Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer, (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1939), 339-341, 391-422.
122
By 1858, Smith's ire with the established political parties and the intransigence of the
anti-slavery community led him to take up the banner himself yet again. This time, Smith allied
himself with friends establishing their own party explicitly so the Peterboro reformer could run
for Governor of New York. Among those present on an August afternoon in 1858 at the
organizing meeting in Syracuse was Frederick Douglass. The New York Times noted that, “a
heavy storm of rain, accompanied by occasional peals of thunder and frequent flashes of lighting,
occurred before the Convention had fully met,” setting an ominous tone for the heated debate
that ensued over the party platform. The group of men declared that their intent was simply, “to
protect us from the maddening curse of rum selling and from the encroachments of slavery and
inhumanity and barbarous cruelty of the Fugitive Slave Act.” Heeding Smith's calls throughout
the decade to act on their words, the men declared their intent to, take our cause in our own
hands.” In another column, the Times summed up the party's platform with two simple planks:
“'Prohibition' and 'Jerry Rescue'”163
Shortly after speaking at the 1858 commemoration of the Jerry Rescue in Syracuse whose
numbers had dwindled to just six hundred participants, Smith fielded questions from an Albany
audience eager to hear his opinions on the issues of the day. To the question, “What are your
views with regard to the Fugitive Slave law?” came a pointed response “I supposed that every
body knew the part that I played in the rescue of our friend Jerry,” the candidate for Governor
replied. Smith quickly added that, “to protect the least black baby from the hands of the
kidnapper I would be willing to see rivers of human blood flow.” With fiery rhetoric and radical
“The Friends of Gerrit Smith at Syracuse,” New York Times (New York, NY), 6 August 1858; “The Gerrit
Smith State Convention,” New York Times (New York, NY), 06 August 1858.
163
123
views, Smith would lose his bid for Governor, further reinforcing his belief that New York could
no longer live up to the “Jerry level.”164
In August of 1859, Smith received a letter from the Jerry Rescue committee, requesting
his presence at that year's October commemoration. “I have presided at all the Anniversaries of
this important event,” Smith wrote in response to the committee, “and written the Address
adopted at each of them.” “But,” the beleaguered abolitionist admitted, “my interest in them has
declined greatly for the last two or three years.” Smith had firmly decided upon the, “opinion
that it is unwise to continue to repeat the farce any longer.” Writing from his mansion in
Peterboro, Smith called the Jerry Rescue a, “great and glorious event.” “But those who achieved
it,” Smith chided the committee, “have, with few exceptions, proved themselves unworthy of the
work of their own hands.” Smith had seen that night how the crowd's, “humanity owned Jerry for
its brother,” but questioned, had the thousands, “but maintained the sublime elevation to which
the spirit of that night exalted them, what a force for the overthrow of slavery would they not
have accumulated by this time?” But the people of Syracuse, “soon fell from it.” Party politics
and moral compromise had killed the Jerry Rescue spirit. “'Jerry Rescuers' voting for men who
acknowledge a law for slavery!” Smith exclaimed, “I do not know a greater or more shameless
or more pernicious hypocrisy than an Anniversary of the Rescue of Jerry.” Smith instructed the
committee that abolitionists simply, “had better give up the celebration of the Rescue of Jerry.”
“The thing,” he derisively admitted, “is quite too great and good for us.” The Jerry Rescuers
were only, “mean men and sham men.”165
“Celebration of the Jerry Rescue,” Daily Standard (Syracuse, NY), 2 October 1858; “Gerrit Smith's Political
Opinion,” Madison Observer (Morrisville, NY), 14 October 1858.
165
Gerrit Smith to John Thomas, Esq., Peterboro, 27 August 1859, Smith 521, Gerrit Smith Broadside and
Pamphlet Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.
164
124
“No wonder then is it,” Smith announced to the committee, with the voters of the North
electing candidates who did not live up to Smith's “Jerry level” that the, “intelligent black men in
the States and Canada should see no hope for their race in the practice and policy of white men.”
These men, Smith informed the committee in Syracuse, “are brought to the conclusion that no
resource is left to them but in God and insurrections.” Violence was coming, Smith noted, and,
“for insurrections then we may look any year, any month, any day.” Violence was, “a terrible
remedy for a terrible wrong!” But, Smith noted, “come it must unless anticipated by repentance
and the putting away of the terrible wrong,” of slavery. “What portions are there of the South
that will cling to slavery,” Smith queried, “after two or three considerable insurrections shall
have filled the whole South with horror?” Smith foretold of the South and, “the day of her
calamity,” when, “ fire and rape and slaughter shall be filling up the measure of her affliction.”
The cause, the, “evil influence,” which in part would cause this calamity and murder, Smith
noted, “was the apostacy of those 'Jerry Rescuers,' who were guilty of falling from the 'Jerry
Level,' and casting proslavery votes.”166
“But why,” Smith admitted, “should I have spoken of the sorrows that await the South?”
The end of slavery had been prophesied by Americans throughout the preceding decades. In the
end, the South would not ever heed, “her own Jefferson's prediction of servile insurrection.”
“Whoever he may be that foretells the horrible end of American Slavery,” Smith astutely noted,
“is held at both the North and the South to be a lying prophet - another Cassandra.” But in
coming months, Smith's letter to the Jerry Rescue Committee would gain deep prominence
among the general public. John Brown, the abolitionist who had put actions to words in Kansas,
did so again in October of 1859, a scant few days after the eighth anniversary of the Jerry
166
Gerrit Smith to John Thomas, Esq., Peterboro, 27 August 1859, Smith 521, Gerrit Smith Broadside and
Pamphlet Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY.
125
Rescue. Among his raiders on the Federal Arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia were, “intelligent
black men,” just as Smith had predicted, almost prescient. As the investigation into Brown's
failed raid began, found in Brown's cabin, “letters from various individuals at the North.”
Among Brown’s belongings, Harpers Weekly reported, was one, “letter from Gerrit Smith about
money matters, and a check or draft by him for $100.” The failed uprising plotted by John
Brown, an endeavour which Smith had described to the Jerry Rescue Committee as designed to,
“have filled the whole South with horror,” had been partially bankrolled by the philanthropist
himself. Action had met words when Brown struck a blow against slavery at Harpers Ferry.
Smith, in funding John Brown, was simply living up to the, “Jerry Level.”167
Instead of continuing on with the mass of Jerry Rescuers, only paying lip service to their
cause instead of actively pressing it forward, Smith struck out to support a new voice. This voice
was no longer characterized by the shout of a mob pressing into a police station to free a man
bound, but instead the voice of John Brown’s ‘Beecher Bibles,’ their throats of worked metal
echoing out gunshots for freedom. The increasingly sedentary nature of the Jerry Rescue
Celebrations had given way to outright war on slavery where once there had been measured
resistance. A shift in paradigm had occurred, thanks in part to the events surrounding the
commemoration of the freedom of a black cooper in Syracuse. Violence of oppression was now
to be met with violence of aggression. And for Smith, where slavery and murder were set forth
for his choice, to enslave was, “worse than to murder.”168
167
168
1856.
“Domestic Intelligence,” Harpers Weekly (New York, NY), 29 October 1859.
“Address, Adopted at the Jerry Rescue Convention at Syracuse, Oct. 1 1856,” The Liberator, 24 October
126
127
ASIDE
Breaking His Chains
Lucy Watkins, a 16 year old African-American girl living with her parents east of the
center of Syracuse was ironing clothes when bells began to peel in the city's center. The young
girl, a native of Syracuse and grand-daughter of a slave, started walking downtown when a man
on the street called, “Tell your people there's a fugitive arrested.” The young woman forged on
toward the center of town, stopping when she reached the far side of Clinton Square, standing on
the bridge over the canal closest to the Police Office. The bridge, “was so crowded that the
officers made us move on for fear it would break down.” “I went home,” she later recalled, “and
had no more than reached there when there was a rap on the door.” When she opened the door,
William Thompson, one of the black men later charged with aiding the fugitive that night, stood
in the darkness. Thompson told the girl, “I've got Jerry.” Lucy, along with her sister Frances,
“hurried outside and, “made a queen's chair like the children make with their hands.” The pair
carried Jerry, broken and battered, into their parents' home in the basement of their building.169
“Mrs. Lucy Watson - A Colored Woman Who Assisted in the Jerry Rescue,” Unattributed Newspaper
Clipping circa 1892 in Jerry Rescue Primary Accounts taken after 1865 (A-H), AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse,
NY.
169
128
Shackled, Jerry was helpless. He had been battered in the fight for his freedom, and was
bleeding from the forehead. Lucy, “got some whisky and washed out the sores.” Jerry's leg
irons were laid across Lucy's iron, just hours before used to smooth clothes, and struck against
the makeshift anvil with a hammer. The kitchen implements shattered the chain. Jerry's
handcuffs were filed open by Peter Lilly, a nearby white blacksmith, “so excited when he found
that we had Jerry that he could scarcely file them.” Jerry was given a disguise of women's
clothing, then the two young women, “boosted him over the back fence and told him how to get
out by the underground railway.” “That,” Lucy recalled, “is the last that I saw of him.”170
170 “Girl Broke Bonds of Runaway Slave,” Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), 13 February 1908 in Jerry Rescue
Primary Accounts taken after 1865 (A-H), AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY; “Mrs. Lucy Watson - A Colored
Woman Who Assisted in the Jerry Rescue,” Unattributed Newspaper Clipping circa 1892 in Jerry Rescue Primary
Accounts taken after 1865 (A-H), AAS Vert. Files, OHA, Syracuse, NY.
129
CHAPTER 4
“…And Rejoice with Trembling”
Samuel May and the Death of the Jerry Rescue
The night was ablaze in the city’s streets on that Wednesday evening as the sky grew
dim. “Ruffians” were out for a political rally to beat the band. Marching through the streets,
they presented a ghastly sight to the few citizens of Syracuse who just wished to speak their
minds. In a town torn asunder, as much as the nation itself, the right to even peaceably assemble
had been called into question to disastrous ends. And now it was the right of the mob to show
just what lay at the end of the line for those who would continue pressing the slave question.
Throughout the afternoon, “drummers” had pressed local citizens into their numbers, so that by
nightfall hundreds gathered in the city’s streets. Headed by a brass band, toting signs that read
“Freedom of Speech, but not Treason,” and “Abolitionism no Longer in Syracuse,” they
processed through the streets of the city bearing upon their shoulders two straw dummies. One a
woman, the other a man, each pinned to their chest a sign: “Rev. Samuel J. May and Susan B.
Anthony squelch’d.” And, indeed, this is just what had happened in the previous few hours.
Free speech had been trounced, and the abolitionist hordes seemed to be losing their foothold in
130
Central New York.171
The abolitionist speaking circuit in Upstate New York did not die because of the onset of
war. The Southern reactions to the election of Abraham Lincoln and the coming of the conflict
of 1861 did anything but squelch the fires burning in the hearts of upstate abolitionists. More
evidently, it made the proponents of freedom more adamant in their cause for black rights and
the death of slavery. This was the environment in which Samuel Joseph May found himself
squarely seated in January of 1861. Syracuse, the economic center of Upstate New York, had
polarized so easily it seemed that the entire nation would be riven, not only across the MasonDixon, but within the very free states themselves. “The commencement of the new year is sad,”
May noted in his diary on the first day of 1861, “Our country is in an alarming condition on the
brink perhaps of civil war.” 172 Wherever one turned, it appeared that the nation was on the
verge of tearing itself asunder. Still, men attempted to stay their emotions. In New York City,
the Times queried if it was “even within the range of possibility that the Alleghanies [sic], the
Mississippi, the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains shall be cleft in twain by the sword of
Africa, wielded by South Carolina?” Certainly, Abolitionists did not wish war upon the nation,
or disunion upon its people. But they too, like South Carolina, were wielding the sword of
Africa, striking fatal blows at the nation’s innards.
Upheaval was rampant in the United States in those scant months between Lincoln’s
election, November 1860, and the outbreak of the rebellion in April 1861. These secession times
were uncertain, unstable and combustible. With incidents such as the Star of the West and the
precarious Forts at Charleston, S.C. and Santa Rosa Island, Florida, America was a crisscross
network of fault lines, waiting to split, fracture and consume the American Experiment whole.
“Disgraceful Orgies..," The Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 31 January 1861.
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan. 1, 1861, Samuel J. May Anti-slavery Collection, Division of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
171
172
131
These times would prove short, but volatile. Within this period, the United States would reveal
to itself the worst of man’s emotions, from greed and selfishness to outright hatred. No
community, North or South, would emerge unscathed. Syracuse, New York certainly stood
along one of these faults of aggression, pitting neighbors against each other over a fundamental
principle: that all men are created equal.
By 1860, Syracuse had become akin to the bustling urban centers of the coast to which its
rich salt trade sent its wares, sporting both a bustling canal and its descendent, the railroads. In
an 1864 account of the city, James William Massie, a minister and British ministerial emissary
sent to present a resolution of support for the abolition of Slavery in America, commented that
Syracuse opened, “its ports to the puffing traveler with prompt hospitality.” The city’s
population had grown from a single hotel to nearly twenty-six thousand people, who benefited
chiefly from, “the manufacture of salt for the United States.”173 Indeed, Syracuse and nearby
Salina were world renowned areas. By 1829, newspaper accounts lauded the area’s salt
production facility as “what may be called one of the wonders of this part of the world.”174
Massie was quick to note on the area that, “while they have salt in themselves, they are not left
without Attic salt. This town is oft frequented by political and state conventions when the tactics
of party are matured.”175
Samuel J. May certainly had the Attic salt to warrant such a statement. May was a leader
not only in Syracuse’s intellectual community, but that of the nation. As a Unitarian Minister,
May was a member of the caste of intellectuals of America, preaching not only on moral topics,
but epistemological ones as well. Unitarianism is a more radical version of Luther’s rejection of
173
James William Massie, America: Her Prospect for the Slave, and Her Claim for Anti-slavery Sympathy
(London: John Snow, 1864), 231-232.
174
“NOTES OF A TOUR THROUGH THE WESTERN PART OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK :No. 5..”
The Ariel. A Semimonthly Literary and Miscellaneous Gazette (1827-1832), December 12, 1829, 133.
175
Massie, America: Her…, 231-232.
132
the Catholic Church’s dogmatic belief system. “We have no formula of faith – no system of
doctrines – no list of articles prescribed by Pope, Bishops, General Assembly, or other human
authority, which everyone must profess to believe, before he can be admitted to membership in
our church,” May wrote in his 1860 treatise on the nature of Unitarian belief. The nature of
Unitarian belief, in May’s eyes, was quite simple. As a Rational Unitarian, May believed that,
“Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary…. We believe that Jesus of Nazareth was led by the
Spirit of God, more constantly and entirely than any other son of man….”176
Unitarian belief is characterized by not only disbelief in the trinity, but in the good nature
of man as well. Each man, May said, could work his own way toward faith in God and man, “by
study of the Bible, and the works and the providence of God.” Each person should “strive to
learn all he may of the mind, the purposes, the will of the Heavenly Father,” to become more like
the non-divine, enlightened, human Christ. Of the idea that God saddled Christ with the sins of
all, May shuns the prospect, saying that, “most Unitarians, if not all, consider this dogma as most
odious – an impious stigma upon the character of our Heavenly Father.” Each man, instead, was
charged with his own misgivings and his own wrongs, to atone through the same principles
Christ taught on earth: “that faith, that hope, that love… alone could raise them above the trials
and temptations of earth…. We believe that men are saved, and can be saved, only so far as they
become themselves righteous in the sense and spirit of Christ’s righteousness.”177
May’s Unitarianism certainly influenced his belief on the virtue, or lack thereof, of
slavery in America. As a whole, Unitarians protested the enslavement of blacks in the South.
May found himself among the most vocal ministers raising the cry of abolition. But his
inspiration came from beyond his religious beliefs. In October of 1830, May visited Boston,
176
Samuel Joseph May, What Do Unitarians Believe? (Syracuse, NY: Masters & Lee, book and
job printers, 1865 [2nd ed.]), 3.
177
S.J. May, What Do…, 4-7.
133
Massachusetts from his then parish in Brooklyn, Connecticut. It was by chance, or as May put it
in his Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict, “in the good Providence ‘which shapes
our ends,’”178 that he caught the lecture of Mr. William Lloyd Garrison in Boston. Garrison had
recently made Boston his new home and Anti-slavery soapbox. Recently released in June from a
Baltimore prison where he was held for Libel against a local trader and slave owner, Garrison
had since moved to the relative intellectual safety of New England, opting for Boston. This city
was home of the benevolent Arthur Tappan, the Boston abolitionist who paid Garrison’s fees and
had him released.179 May’s fortunate attendance at the lecture by Garrison, on October 15, 1830,
most likely is partially due to its location. The lecture was held in Julian Hall, the Unitarian
lecture hall of Boston.180 May wrote of the event that, Garrison, “had his eyes so anointed that
he could see that outrages perpetrated upon Africans were wrongs done to our common
humanity.” May wondered at the prospect of Garrison’s unique point of view among Americans,
that “he only… had had his ears so completely unstopped of ‘prejudice against color’ that the
cries of enslaved black men and black women sounded to him as if they came from brothers and
sisters.”181
“Never before was I so affected by the speech of man,” May noted in his 1869
Recollections…, commenting that Garrison was “a providential man…. A prophet; he will shake
our nation to its centre, but he will shake slavery out of it.” May then pledged to Garrison, much
as the founding fathers did to their cause, his sacred honor. “I am not sure that I indorse [sic] all
you have said this evening,” the 33-year old Unitarian minister said to the future editor of The
178
Samuel Joseph May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (Boston, Mass.: Fields, Osgood, & co.,
1869), 17-18.
179
Baltimore Patriot. June 10, 1830, 2.; Boston Recorder, Wednesday, June 23, 1830.
180
Archibald Henry Grimké, William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist (New York: Funk & Wagnall’s, 1891),
90.
181
Thomas J. Mumford et al., ed., Memoir of Samuel Joseph May (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), 141.
134
Liberator, “But I am prepared to embrace you. I am sure you are called to a great work, and I
mean to help you.” The two, with A. Bronson Alcott and Samuel Sewell, retired to Sewell’s
home and spoke until midnight: a night upon which May wrote that his “soul was baptized in his
spirit.”182
One of the tenants of May’s Unitarianism was the belief that “it is not what a man may
profess or pretend to be that should establish his claim to the Christian name, but what he is seen
and known to be [that] prove ‘what spirit he is of.’”183 By 1846, May and his fellow Unitarians
had allowed baptism in Garrison’s spirit to engage this Unitarian ideal. “We are the more
obliged to bear this testimony,” a congress of 170 ministers wrote in a proclamation, “because
the gospel of Christ cannot be fully preached in the slave-holding states.” The proclamation goes
on to declaim the, “violent and lawless men,” who had, “made it impossible for the Southern
minister to declare the whole counsel of God of that particular sin with which the community he
addresses is specially concerned.” Slavery, to the Unitarians, was in direct violation to the ideal
that man needs be “righteous in the sense and spirit of Christ’s righteousness,” and furthermore
impeded another man’s ability to strive toward righteousness. The ministers solemnly protested
“against the system of slavery, as unchristian and inhuman,” because it violated “the law of
right,” outraged “the law of love,” degraded and defiled both the soul of the slave and the master,
and seared “the popular conscience, and destroy[ed] public virtue.” Masters were tossing their
salvation to the wayside, which was their right under Unitarian beliefs, but they were also
corrupting the salvation of another human being, the slave, which Unitarians found abhorrent.
To add to the list of the sinful, Slavery was acknowledged as a Northern transgression as well as
Southern when the protest recognizes that by their, “political, commercial and social relations
182
183
Thomas J. Mumford et al., ed., Memoir…, 141-142.
S.J. May, What Do…, 11.
135
with the South,” Northerners were leaving little, “which prevents us from engaging in this
system as fully as [the Southerners].” “Silence, therefore,” the protest warns, “is upholding
slavery, and we must speak against it in order not to speak in its support.”184
May was not content with this proclamation, not for its content, but for its acceptance in
the Unitarian community. The postscript to the report in the Christian Reformer, a British
Unitarian magazine, is quick to add May’s admonition of October 11, 1845, that “not fewer than
80 ministers of the Unitarian denomination, more than fifty of whom have charge of
congregations, have withheld their names from the Protest against Slavery.” Among this number
were, “many of the oldest and most influential ministers of the denomination.”185
May’s newfound abolitionism was not cut from whole-cloth by Garrison’s scissors.
Instead, Garrison’s words only built upon the values under which May had operated for his entire
life. Both May’s spirituality and ideals of equality among races can be traced to his early
childhood. Spiritual inspiration came due to tragedy in his early development when, near the age
of four, one of his elder brothers died of a terrible accident. Samuel, who had been named for
two of his previously deceased brothers, and his brother Edward were miracles to their parents.
After having experienced such grief over losing two sons, the Mays were protective of their
remaining children and covetous of their safety. Edward, however, was a mischievous six year
old, and was, according to May’s own account, “full of glee.” One day, upon returning from
school, Edward summoned Sam “to the yard to partake of his sport.” The boy mounted the fence
against the barn, and proceeded to play at chimney sweep, little Sam watching from the ground.
But, as Edward swung his legs over the edge to descend, and rested “his weight upon the slender
post of a chair, the top of which was broken off,” the boy lost his balance, and impaled himself
“Intelligence.- American.,” Christian Reformer or Unitarian Magazine and Review, new series, Vol II.
(1846): 58.
185
Ibid., Christian Reformer, 59.
184
136
on the splintered wooden rods of the chair back. “Its splintered point penetrated his body,
several inches, under the arm,” May recalled vividly in his Memoirs.186
The boys’ father, Joseph May, a leader in the nascent Unitarian community movement at
Boston’s King’s Chapel, quickly rushed to the scene, but to no avail: “the dear, beautiful boy
was dead.” The young Samuel Joseph had a profound problem comprehending the death of his
brother. He could not understand why the boy remained cold and still, “giving no replies to the
tender things that were said to him, taking no notice of all that was being done to him or about
him.” May began to mimic his parents’ and siblings’ grief, without truly understanding the death
of his brother, but only a change in Edward’s demeanor.187
May’s faith experience came with the realization of Edward’s true state. During his
brother’s funeral at the cemetery, one of Sam’s uncles brought him into the family crypt, and
explained that Edward was not dead, but had “gone to heaven, to dwell with the good and the
happy in the presence of God and Christ.” The uncle opened one of the other coffins in the
crypt, showing the four year old the body of one of his decaying relatives, assuring him that
Edward’s body would wither, but his soul would live in heaven. That night, young the ceiling of
young May’s room opened and, “a bright, glorious light burst in, and from the midst of it came
down my lost brother.” The young boy was dreaming of his brother’s inherited glory. “He lay
by me as he used to…. The next night, and for several nights afterwards, I enjoyed the presence
of my brother.” May concluded with the simple belief that this small event, “had the greatest
influence in awakening and fixing in [his] soul the full faith,” which guided his principles for the
rest of his life.188
Like his religious inspiration, May’s abolition inspiration came at a relatively young age,
Thomas J. Mumford et al., ed., Memoir…, 5.
Ibid., Memoir…,5.
188
Ibid., Memoir…,6-7.
186
187
137
through two separate events. The first was his schooling in the Boston area. May had been sent,
for two years, to a “Ma’am school, kept by a good old lady.” This school, run by a Mrs. Wallcut,
was particular in that the students were integrated. Young children, black and white, “some from
the richest and others from the poorer families in the neighborhood,” studied together in the same
classes and sat upon the same school benches to learn the basic knowledge of the age. May
shared a bench with one boy who he grew to respect greatly, noticing that he was “more witty, if
not more wise,” than any of the other children in the class. His skill was comparable in all
subjects, from mathematics to recitation of the Catechism. The boy was also a prodigious actor,
and in their class plays, “few were his equal.” The boy’s sole peculiarity? May’s bench mate
was “a boy whose skin was as dark as a starless night.” But, as May had grown to know him as
an equal, it only mattered to him that his, “spirit was as bright and joyous as a cloudless noonday.” Young May trusted the boy, and felt him to be just as human as any other boy in the class,
in spite of his color.189
May’s friends were not only of color, but his savior was as well. Much like his brother
Edward at the same age, Samuel was a rambunctious, energetic and mischievous lad. At about
six or seven, May too would fall to the brink of his own life, when a dog leapt upon the boy in
the street. Young May fled the canine, “often looking backward as,” he rushed forward. The
boy lost his footing, and tumbled to the ground, striking his “temple upon a stone, and lay
senseless.” May found himself, upon waking, “in the arms of a large black woman.” May’s
eyes opened and the woman calmed him with gentle words: “Don’t be afraid, little boy. I know
who you are. I’ll carry you to your mamma.” Cradled to his door, May’s bloodied form
frightened his Mother, giving twinges of a repeat of Edward’s death. She quickly tended to the
boy, finding “the injury to be not so serious as she feared.” Samuel’s mother turned to thank the
189
Ibid., Memoir…,10-11.
138
savior of her son, she “looked around gratefully to thank and to offer her some reward.” But the
woman had disappeared. The only thanks she needed was to see the boy had not sustained
serious harm, then she left, not holding her hand out for some reward or payment, “as many poor
white women would have done.” The family never found out “where she lived, or who she
was,” and May’s mother never was able to show some sign of gratitude for the woman. Instead
it would be left to May, as he grew to manhood, to express thanks to the woman by fighting for
her right to a share of the title ‘humanity.’190
Before his arrival at the Unitarian Pastorate in Syracuse in 1845, the city had not shown
such magnanimous feelings for the African race as May had. Syracuse was far from the
unanimous Anti-slavery town oft popularly depicted as the norm for the great majority of
northern cities. The city was indeed a hovel for the anti-abolition forces throughout the 1830s.
Syracuse’s “citizens prided themselves in her exemption from the ‘Abolition infection’ in 1824.”
The city’s response to an Anti-slavery Convention in 1836 was one of “scarce tolerance.”
Syracuse was well shy of virtue in the eyes of the abolition movement, and indeed “there were
few darker spots on the map than Syracuse,” in the late 1830s. 191 As Samuel Joseph May and
another fomenting abolitionist, Rev. Jermain W. Loguen, were arriving in Syracuse, “the
Abolitionists were few in number, but mighty through the great truths.” As Loguen took his
appointment in the Zion church, he found himself in a city in flux. “He found the colored people
comparatively uncared for,” a destitute class among the city’s growing commercial and industrial
wealth. But Syracuse’s black population was on the cusp of a change. An upheaval of thought
and an influx of thinkers such as Loguen and May would spark a “controversy between the
Abolitionists and anti-Abolitionists,” which stood to bring the blacks into focus for “good and
Ibid., Memoir…,11-12.
The Thirteenth Annual Report of the American & Foreign Anti-slavery Society (New York: American and
Foreign Anti-slavery Society, 1853), 37.
190
191
139
humane men and women.”192
Syracuse’s black population was not the best educated, or indeed the most immediately
deserving of true intellectualism. Loguen himself noted that, “the colored people…. Their minds
were on the lowest natural plane, and unprepared for the simple truths of religion.” The black
population had been “deprived of social and mental culture,” and had formed a distinct
“suburban girdle of moral and intellectual darkness about the city.” Syracuse was a divided city,
with distinct Black, German, Italian, Irish and nativist neighborhoods. By 1845, Syracuse, and
all of Upstate New York, had begun changing and polarizing. “At this time the slavery agitation
had stirred the minds and passions of the people into a tempest,” as the question became more
nationally significant. The question had begun “mingling fiercely with the politics of the day,”
soon to be one and inseparable and lead the nation toward a great conflict.193
May’s career as an abolitionist in Syracuse would run along an auspicious path. One
historian claimed him as the “New York Garrison, though less caustic and aggressive.”194 May’s
actions, and those of Syracuse at large following the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, were certainly
not lacking in aggression. The history of New York’s Democratic Party writes the incident off in
one sentence: “A fugitive-slave riot of considerable proportions occurred at Syracuse, September
30th [1851], with the rescue of the slave, and a hot assault upon the owner claiming his return.”195
What would be known as the “Jerry Rescue” was anything but that simple. Samuel Ringgold
Ward, a former slave himself, let up the cry in Clinton Square on October the 1st. “Fellow
citizens,” he beseeched the crowds, “We are witnessing such a sight as, I pray, we may never
192
Jermain Wesley Loguen and Elymas Payson Rogers, The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A
Narrative of Real Life (Syracuse, NY: J.G.K. Truair & Co., 1859), 371-373.
193
Ibid., The Rev. J. W…, 372-374.
194
Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition, 1831-1841 (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1906),
189.
195
Martin Wilie Littleton and James K. McGuire, The Democratic Party of the State of New York: A History of
the Origin, Growth and Achievements (United States History Company, 1905), Vol. I, 282.
140
look upon again. A man in chains, in Syracuse!” The man was William "Jerry" Henry, and he
was a supposed runaway slave. Ward and Reverend May were both allowed into the cell to see
the man, and were moved to compassion. The crowd was stirred far beyond civilized reaction.
By ten o’clock that evening, “through certain stalwart fellows whom the Government have never
had the pleasure of catching,” Ward later boasted, a mob “broke open the door and the side of the
building where Jerry was, put out the lights, took him out in triumph, and bore him away where
the slave-catchers never after saw him.”196
The Rescue of Jerry is, in and of itself, a great event in the slave history of Syracuse, but
more important are the reverberations its memory sent through the Syracuse community. The
“Jerry Rescue committee” would proceed to hold a convention, each year, on the anniversary of
the mob’s capture of the fugitive. Helping to head the committee through the 1850s was Samuel
Joseph May. By 1860, the committee was a veritable who’s-who of the Syracuse Anti-slavery
community. May’s diary lists the special committee to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the
event in neat letters near its end. On the list for the “Committee on the Arrangements for the
Celebration of Oct. 1. 1861,” are prominent ministers and businessmen of Syracuse; included
high on the list are May and Loguen.197
But a few pages before this hopeful listing of plans lay a more prophetic warning.
“Christmas [1860].- The least happy one I have ever known… the spirits of many people
depressed by the condition of our country.”198 America was changing politically. What at first
was seen as a minor victory for the northern abolition movement, the election of Abraham
196
Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-slavery Labours in the United States,
Canada, & England (London: John Snow, 1855), 117-125.
197
S.J. May (1860 diary entry), “Committee on the Arrangements for the Celebration of Oct. 1. 1861”, Samuel
J. May Anti-slavery Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, Cornell University
Library System, Ithaca, NY.
198
S.J. May (1860 diary entry), Dec 25, 1860, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
141
Lincoln, was quickly degenerating to ashes in the mouths of the victors. The New Year would
be filled with heartache never before known by Americans. May was about to experience some
of the first inklings of the great extent to which the public held the Abolition movement to blame
for the secession crisis.
In late 1860, May delivered a sermon to his congregation at the Church of the Messiah in
Syracuse, just north of the Erie Canal’s basin, and the junction of the Erie and Oswego canals.
The scriptural basis of the sermon was one verse of one psalm: number 2, verse 11. “Rejoice
with trembling.” May wished with a good part of his heart to be optimistic. But conflict was
swiftly becoming the main goal of red-blooded Americans, and little could be done to stem the
tide of war. Yet May expressed hope that all would be abated. “Rejoice and give thanks, that so
much has been done,” the minister announced from the pulpit, “A new political party has come
to power, which is pledged, at least, to withstand the further extension of slavery.” May was not
naïve, acknowledging that “the slaveholders understand all this, and they are alarmed.” May still
expressed cautious hope of some reconciliation. War was not the chief option for the
abolitionists in his eyes, but was the chief prospect if man did not think his way through the
crisis at hand. Quoting the framer of the equality of men in the United States, May painted the
eventuality with Jefferson’s own words, “come it will, said Mr. Jefferson, if not by the generous
energy [of] our own minds, it will come by the awful processes of St. Domingo.” But May
laments Jefferson’s compatriots, that the warnings had remained unheeded, and looks forward to
the possible prospect of “servile and civil war,” if they remain so ignored. May’s solution,
however, is weak. His greatest hope is not for the eventual purchase or gradual abolition of the
slaves, but instead for a great awakening of the southerner to his ills. The process, according to
May, must be a voluntary repentance, in which they, “come to see the unparalleled iniquity of
142
their system, and in the spirit of true repentance shall set about to rid themselves of the wrong.”
His final phrase of the sermon, “let us fix our eyes, and press on to is with increased and
increasing diligence,” truly would be tested in the coming months. As 1861 broke, the
Abolitionists’ vocation would become increasingly harder to undertake.199
One of the first major events in May’s experiences of 1861 was a short visit by an
unassuming black man. His name: Osborne Anderson. January 10th, the man came to May’s
home to meet him and deliver a complimentary copy of his own book, an autobiography entitled
A Voice from Harper's Ferry: A Narrative of Events at Harper's Ferry: with Incidents Prior and
Subsequent to its Capture by Captain Brown and his Men. The raider, or as he termed himself,
“one of the number,” traveled and hocked his book to the nation, a manifesto on John Brown and
the inevitability of the war to come. “John Brown,” Anderson claimed audaciously, “dug the
mine and laid the train which will eventually dissolve the union between Freedom and Slavery.
The rebound reveals the truth. So let it be!”200 May never says as much, but the words of
Osborne would certainly have put some fear into his heart. Since before Lincoln’s election, May
had been an ardent member of peace societies, so prominent that, when Edward Everett declined
to accept an invitation to speak at Boston for the American Peace Society, their next choice was
the Syracuse Unitarian. May felt war, like slavery, would keep men from reaching their full
Christ-like potential, and flew in the face of modern religion.201
And so, with Osborne’s volume in his possession, May began a trip to Rochester that
January 10th at 6:30 in the evening. His train ride was pleasant, encountering Aaron Macy
Powell, a youthful firebrand in the Abolition movement, and a leader among young abolitionists.
“A Discourse, Delivered in the Unitarian Church…,” The Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 3 December 1860.
Osborne Perry Anderson, A Voice from Harper's Ferry: A Narrative of Events at Harper's Ferry… (Boston,
Mass: Printed for the author, 1861), 62.
201
“Peace Address…,” The Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 17 May 1860.
199
200
143
Upon arrival at Rochester, the two retired to their hotel near the depot, and rested for the next
day. May, upon rising the next day, “spent the forenoon writing letters and resolutions for the
Convention,” to be presented that evening at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. The party left the
hotel at noon for tea at the home of Isaac Post, a local druggist, former Quaker and abolitionist
organizer. Then, the party was off to the hall for the convention. By May’s account, the
afternoon’s session was unassailed, but come evening, the tale took a turn for the worse. The
Rochester Evening Express summed up the reception perfectly: “In every city…there is a large
element of the population who are restive under restraint, and will exultingly seize every
opportunity of displaying their bad manners.”202 May’s assessment of the situation is short,
cursory. He titles his diary entry, “mob at Rochester,” and writes of the encounter that “a gang
of roudy [sic] young men made such uproarious noises that we were obliged to yield to the
entreaty of the Chief of the Police and adjourn our meeting.” But the tale is far more
complicated.203
“A large majority of the disorderly congregation were… stimulated by bad advice and
worse spirits—and countenanced by those whose position in society and whose education should
have taught them better.” The crowd’s hecklers were not so much the dregs of society, as a cross
section of Rochester’s populace. The crowd was, “not generally of a class who rally to the
standard of moral reform, or who often sit down to intellectual repasts.” The Express is quick to
note, to balance the ruffians, there is the occasional knot of “solid men” of Rochester. Add to the
mix “hackneyed and bankrupt politicians of Democratic and pro-slavery-American antecedents,”
and the hall was bound to explode from the tension. The most dangerous jeers, however, came
from Rochester’s finest. As Susan B. Anthony introduced her compatriot Abolitionist Elizabeth
202
“The Abolition Convention,” The Rochester Daily Express, 12 January 1861, in The Liberator, 25 January
1861.
203
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan 11, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
144
Cady Stanton, the jeers began, loud enough that Stanton ceased trying to pierce the din. As she
stood aghast at the near riot, the loudest voice spouted from Constable Richard R. Swift. “Go
on! That answers my time exactly (flourishing his cane). I’m a gentleman (Applause, ‘Ha,
ha!’).” As Stanton attempted to continue, the Express reports, the crowd became more irascible.
“I would say (hisses) to the (hisses) audience,” at this the audience erupted into loud, long hisses
and stomping of feet.204
Samuel J. May took the podium next, but was “defeated by a storm of hisses, stamping of
feet, and demonic yells.” The crowd of Abolitionists seemed to be on the verge of surrender to
the mob when Reverend May tried to soldier on after a long silence. Again he was shouted
down, deriding them as he stepped down. “Well, then, we’ll have a Quaker meeting; only let us
think— let us all think a little.” Constable Swift took this as his cue to turn the crowd into a
unified mob. “I understand this is a meeting for free discussion,” Swift said, appearing to
acquiesce and yield to the Abolitionists. Next, he addressed Ms. Anthony: “I don’t know,
Chairman, whether I should call you Mister or Miss, but I propose we all keep still and hear what
is said.” The crowd was firmly in the Constable’s camp as May once again mounted the podium.
He started into his resolutions written that morning; among them the crowd caught the words,
“denounce [New York] Gov. Morgan,” distinctly and reacted. Despite repeated attempts at
shouting down the wind, the Abolitionists bowed out. The hall was left to the rowdies, who
proceeded to elect new chairmen, repudiate May’s proclamations, and generally cause havoc
until finally the Chief of Police ordered the gas lights doused.205
Taking along the daily papers, May boarded a train for Syracuse the following day.
Everywhere he looked, May was finding portents “giving only too many proofs that we are in the
204
“The Abolition Convention,” The Rochester Daily Express, 12 January 1861, in The Liberator, 25 January
1861.
205
Ibid, The Roches…, 12 Jan 1861.
145
midst of Civil War.” Disheartened that free speech had been quashed, he returned to Syracuse to
find a city well acquainted with the news from Rochester. “The tidings had come of our
mobbery at Rochester,” he noted in his diary. May’s tone was terse. He realized the gravity of
the reception. Cries of “Three Cheers for Major Anderson!” had rung out through the hall the
previous day. America was hungry for war, ready for the fray, and ready for revenge against
those who had brought on the conflict. This meant fighting the rebels and the abolitionists
indiscriminately, as both had brought on Civil War.206
On the afternoon of January 12th 1861, May undertook his regular Saturday routine. He
wrote his sermon and read those of others. Among the works he read was a piece by Harvard
Divinity graduate and fellow Unitarian William Rounseville Alger entitled A Critical History of
the Doctrine of a Future Life. The work discusses the history of the notion of soul. May was
finding repose from the terror of the present in the thought of eternal life. His attempts to
provide respite to the situation in the current life were less than successful. On January 14th,
May “wrote a letter to S.B. Anthony advising that the series of Conventions should be deferred.”
Too much mobbery had been shown already, and the stakes were too high for any community to
allow another Rochester to happen in their streets. Very little had kept the Rochester crowd from
becoming violent, and May rightly guessed that this fear would seep throughout Central New
York.207
May’s fears were not that far from the mark. As he penned his letter to Susan B.
Anthony, the female abolitionist was having her own troubles in Utica. “The mountain labored,
and brought forth a mouse. Utica labored and brought forth nothing,” the Utica Herald chastised
the next day. Another convention, smaller than that at Rochester, involving only Beriah Green
206
207
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan 12, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan 12 & 14, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
146
and S. B. Anthony, had been planned for Utica’s Mechanic’s Hall. Green was a well known
character in Utica, having once headed the Oneida Institute in Whitestown, one of the city’s
suburbs. To meet these two was a crowd, “about fifty persons, possibly seventy-five,” which
had gathered in the street in front of the hall. “There was not one in all that heroic band,” which
had gathered at the doors to the hall, “who was not ready to sacrifice life, liberty and happiness
in the glorious cause of preventing several individuals from giving vent to their ‘dangerous’
abolition principles.” What Green and Anthony met in Utica was far more menacing than a
crowd ready to tear them from the pulpit.208
As the crowd outside the hall grew restless, with no speakers or audience in sight with
whom to row, a small group “inquired where the meeting was, and why it did not go off; but they
were told, in an ominous tone, that the hall had been refused.”209 The operators of the hall had
simply cancelled the abolition meeting, and would not allow Green and Anthony, when they did
arrive, to enter the building. On one hand, the abolitionists agreed with the ruling. The
“Directors of the Mechanics’ Association acted prudently,” a Liberator article commented after
the event, “the mob would take possession of [the hall] if the Convention were admitted.” But
this benign decision was part of a darker conspiracy, a “secret gathering by which it was resolved
that this Convention should be prevented.” This was “the most dangerous thing as a precedent
that could well be devised.” The Abolitionists could very well no longer air their opinions
because there pulpits would be pulled from under their feet.210
Samuel Joseph May’s January 15th diary entry is simply titled “a cloud.” The weather in
the winter of 1861 was bleak, with snowstorm after snowstorm pummeling the Salt City.
“The Abolition Convention Which Was Not Held,” The Utica Herald, 15 January 1861, in The Liberator, 1
February 1861.
209
Ibid., The Utica…, 15 January 1861.
210
“A Bad Precedent,” The Liberator, 1 February 1861.
208
147
Syracusans, both then and now, become quite used to ominous clouds growing on the horizon.
May’s commitment to the abolition cause had placed his physical well-being on the line in
Rochester, and now it threatened his career and vocation as well. “Spent the evening at our
vestry with a member of our Society,” May noted in his diary, “conversing about the affairs of
our Church.” The congregation was airing their grievances, not with Slavery, but with AntiSlavery. “I was told that many are dissatisfied because I preach so much on the subject of
Slavery,” May wrote. In no uncertain terms, he was being threatened. His vocal stance on
slavery not only affected his reputation, but that of his congregation. May’s vision must swiftly
have seen the moral decay surrounding him, and the decent into Civil War, seemingly “as if a
cloud was settling down upon,” the movement and the nation. But May would not yield, instead
opting to gird himself more strongly to his work, pleading with God to help him, “to maintain the
right.”211
For the next few nights, May was unable to rest well. On the 16th, May noted that he had,
“had an almost sleepless night.” The next day, he reported having slept, “about 4 hours.” The
next day, a Friday, May met with the abolitionist crew of speakers for “a long interview.” The
speakers, including “Beriah Green, S.B. Anthony, A. M. Powell and S.S. Foster” were slow to
listen to any word of striking down their own convention. But May was beginning to see the
writing on Syracuse’s proverbial wall. He urged the group to reconsider their position that the
“convention must be held.” But the speakers would not budge, and May had no choice but to
throw his lot in with the abolition convention at Syracuse, determining that he must, “brace
[him]self to the trial.” The next day, the language grows direr. “A day of trial is at hand I pray
continually for wisdom and strength.”212
211
212
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan 15, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan 16 & 17, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
148
Further proof that the aggressions against abolition conventions was growing came that
Sunday, January 20th. May “Rec’d a letter from Fulton informing,” the group that they could
not, “have the Hall for an Anti Slavery Meeting.” Fulton was preempting the chances that Utica
took, opting to bar the meeting from the hall before any type of crowd could grow to inflict
violence. Upstate New York was now becoming truly toxic toward the Anti-slavery
movement.213
By January 23rd, the issue had come to a head. As May walked the streets of Syracuse, he
could scarcely avoid the calls for a postponement. Newspapers were whipping the people of
Syracuse into a frenzy with May only able to watch and, “to remonstrate with them in reference
to… articles in their paper respecting,” the Anti-slavery Convention. The streets of the city
buzzed with tensions much as they had ten years earlier. But this time, instead of clambering for
the release of a captured fugitive, Syracusans were calling to disrupt the very people who fought
for fugitives’ rights. “Every where I hear the rumors that we are to be broken up,” May wrote in
his diary, quickly following up with the fact that, “All are anxious about the Union.” The fight
against secession was quickly becoming a fight against any kind of raised voices, a fight for
shushed unity, peace and against the radicalism that characterized both the Southern and
Abolition causes.214
The day prior to the convention became one of May’s most hectic. It began, as had the
Rochester Convention, with preparations and resolutions. Rising early, May worked diligently
until being interrupted by Colonel Richardson, Syracuse’s Chief of Police. He brought to May a
letter, from the Mayor, “enclosing a petition from about twenty of the principal citizens,” of the
City. The petition was dated January 26th, and indeed May had expected it. As the men were
213
214
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan 19, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan 23, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
149
preparing it, May had caught wind that, a letter was “circulating thro’ the City for signatures requesting me to postpone the Convention.”215 In no uncertain terms, the letter did just this,
stating that, “…in the present excited condition of the public mind, on the great question of
Union or Disunion, we beg leave to suggest to you, and to your associates, the propriety of
avoiding any new cause of agitation or complaint.” Syracusans were not asserting that they were
pro-slavery or “Disunionists.” In fact, they felt the opposite, viewing “the existence of Slavery
among us as a great moral, political and social evil.” But the secession crisis was too great, too
monumental a problem to face for the American people as a whole. The citizens acknowledged
the Constitution, and the rights of speech, but expressed a belief that, “public peace and the
general good of the whole country, demand of us at this time forbearance and moderation.” The
group still saw no reason for the Convention, no greater good and certainly no solution to the
secession crisis springing from the coming words of May, Green and Anthony. “If your object
be to convince the public that our Southern friends are entitled to no constitutional protection,”
the letter haughtily proclaims, “we cannot but regard it as giving just cause of offence.” In the
end, they ask May to “prevent the assembling of a Convention, which can now be productive
only of evil,” believing that the Abolition words only stand to “excite a disturbance of the public
peace, and to forward the efforts of the Southern States to dismember the Confederacy.”216
May penned a response to the request with speed but heed, spending an hour carefully
choosing his words. “I have no authority to postpone the Convention,” on the behalf of the
Committee for the Arrangements of the Convention, May noted first and foremost, placing the
responsibility instead on the group and girding himself to the greater movement. May’s aims for
the Convention are quite clear. “We have much to say to the people,” May continues, “much
215
216
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan 26, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
“Highly Interesting Correspondence.," The Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 31 January 1861.
150
that we deem it most important that they should hear and ponder, lest they bow themselves to
another compromise with the slaveholding oligarchy which…has ruled our republic.” To May
and his ilk, these men wanted naught but “the entire subjugation of…liberties to their ‘peculiar
institution.’” He then smartly turns the petitioners’ words against them. “But, gentlemen, as you
generously ‘affirm’ in the letter before me,” May quotes, “‘that your duties as citizens would
require you to aid in extending protection to our Convention, in case it shall be convened, in the
exercise of all the rights which all deliberative bodies may claim.’” With this affirmation, the
petitioners have guaranteed May what he knows will not be. They have offered him protection
from mobocracy. And with this, he strikes at their decency, describing the scene he knows will
come, as it did in Rochester. “If, gentlemen, you had assured me that our proposed meeting will
be violently assaulted; that those who may assemble peacefully to listen to us, will not be
allowed to hear us; that they will be dispersed with insult,” May would have cancelled the
meeting. But the assurances of the city’s leaders had given him so-called confidence that, “the
rioters will be overawed, the liberty of speech will be vindicated, and the city rescued from a
deep disgrace.” No such redemption came.217
May’s entry for the next day is terse, attempting to place as much information as possible
into the short pages of his folio diary. “At 2 went to Convention Hall - found it full of
mobocrats- After vainly attempting to get a hearing- I left.” May’s account of the situation
seems more for his own memory than anything else, a listing of where he went that day. 218
Aaron Powell, in his Personal Reminiscences of the Anti-slavery and Other Reforms and
Reformers, remembered the event much more vividly. “On going to the hall at the appointed
time we found it filled with an unruly mob,” Powell recounts, “convened for the purpose of
217
218
Ibid., Daily Journal…, 31 January 1861.
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Jan 29, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
151
preventing the holding of our convention.” Powell recalled that, “when Mr. May attempted to
remonstrate, he was immediately threatened with personal violence by ruffians who surrounded
him.” Certainly, threats on the abolitionists’ lives were nothing new as evidenced by Rochester,
but the ruffians surrounding May would have presented an ominous sight.219 May’s Memoir
fleshes out the details further, holding that, “fists were thrust into his face, and rough men swore
they would knock him down and put him out of the hall if he said another word.” More
importantly, May’s sarcastic entreaty to the leading citizens of the city had gone unheeded, and
“the Convention was not protected either by the officers of the law or by good citizens.” The
Abolitionists were to fend for themselves.220
Certainly the most colorful accounts of the Anti-slavery Convention in Syracuse in 1861
come from the newspaper accounts which followed, both domestic and national. On January
30th, the Syracuse Daily Journal published a detailed account of the proceedings, trumpeting
that, “the Mob has achieved another triumph in Syracuse,” but this triumph was for silence, and,
“free speech lies prostrate before the proscriptive interposition of the infatuated, bigoted and
intolerant votaries of mock conservatism.” In spite of the feelings of some of the people of
Syracuse in alliance with the Abolitionists, “a half hour before the time [when the meeting would
start], some half dozen persons, who sympathized with the objects of the meeting, had gathered
in the hall.” But these few Anti-slavery supporters were to be surrounded in short order by “a
procession of men and boys, forty or fifty in number, and embracing many of those who are
noted for their activity at Democratic caucuses.” Among the men were, “‘Salt Pointers,’
‘Vinegar Hill boys,’ and ‘roughs’ of that stamp.” By two o’clock, the ruffian crew had
appropriated the dais, and elected as their chairman Mr. Darius A. Orcutt, a man in his fifties, but
219
Aaron Macy Powell , Personal Reminiscences of the Anti-slavery and Other Reforms and Reformers (New
York: Caulon Press, 1899), 69-70.
220
Thomas J. Mumford et al., ed., Memoir…, 225.
152
whom the paper characterized as “long since entered upon the fossil state.”221
“Rev. Saml. J. May, Rev. M.E. Strieby, and others… endeavored to make themselves
heard, but the instant,” the mob saw their intentions of taking back the meeting from the
democrats, “they were hissed, stamped and hooted, so that their voices were drowned.” Still, the
two soldiered on, attempting to speak, and the crowd in the hall once again erupted with
dripping, hateful sentiment. “We want no more abolitionists.” “Put ‘em out.” “Throw them
down stairs.” “Dry up, old boy.” “Put the nigger out.” The Abolitionists were as hated as those
they wished to save, and met with “great applause and cheering,” as they slowly gave up their
ground. The Democratic convention continued, multiple resolutions were made, and the whole
body stayed listening, hooting and hallooing until five o’clock. Among the speakers was Mr.
W.W. Green, “an attaché of the Syracuse Post Office, whose Pro-Slavery sentiments were highly
palatable to the great body of his hearers.” Two others, John Burns and Luke McKenna followed
him, to great “uproar, laughter and applause,” which made it near impossible to understand
anything they were saying upon the stage. Of utmost insult were the “occasional shouts and
cheers for ‘The Union, the Constitution and the Laws,’ which were sublimely ridiculous, under
the attending circumstances, and were evidently so looked upon by many in the audience, who
could not restrain their hilarity and mirth.”222
But the disruption did not end with the adjournment at five o’clock, as the Abolitionists
retook the hall the next morning, January 30th, at half past ten o’clock. May’s diary for the day
makes reference to an attempt, “by some of our citizens to reestablish Freedom of Speech,” but
laments that, “the meeting was broken up by greater violence than yesterday.” The meeting for
the morning seemed to be going well at the first, with multiple resolutions being proffered in
221
“The Abolition Convention Suppressed By Mob Violence.," The Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 30 January
1861.
222
Ibid., Daily Journal…, 30 January 1861.
153
support of free speech. “Resolved, that our liberty of speech is as dear as our life, and that we
will contend for the one with equal determination that we defend the other.” Following this
assertion, “the Chairman introduced Mr. A.M. Powell, a member of the American Anti-Slavery
Society and one of the speakers announced for the annual meeting.” 223 Powell recalled in his
memoir the quiet attentive crowd changing in an instant to a great group of “mobocrats,”
commencing to howl and shout so that he could not be heard. Each time an entreaty was made
by the chairman for freedom of speech, the crowd settled, only to erupt once again when Powell
continued. Finally, when Powell’s remarks came to a condemnation of the current Constitution,
and a restructuring of the Government by writing a new one, the dam holding back the crowd
broke. “At this point fifty men at least,” the newspaper reported, “instantly sprang to their feet in
the back part of the hall, and amid cries of ‘put him out,’ ‘we want no such talk as that,’ made a
rush for the platform.” As the men rushed the platform, the Abolitionists’ allies in the crowd, “a
group of excited ‘Jerry Rescuers,’” as Powell called them, “gathered in front [of the hall] and a
collision seemed imminent.” The violence of speech was bubbling over into action, “as one
[man] threw himself partly on the platform at [Powell’s] feet, and at the same moment, putting
his hand in his side pocket, grasped his revolver.”224 The police rushed the crowd and broke up
the impending brawl, but the mobocrats had free reign of the hall now. Luke McKenna, a
mobocrat who had spoken the day before, took hold of the meeting and, “said he favored the
freedom of speech, if kept within proper bounds, and that he held that love of country and the
observance of the Constitution and the laws were above even freedom of speech.” This was met
with “Tumultuous applause,” and left Powell to feebly attempt to win back the abolitionist’s
failing control of the crowd. But, upon speaking that “the Constitution conferred the right to
223
224
“Meeting This Morning..," The Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 30 January 1861.
Aaron Macy Powell , Persona Reminiscences…, 69-70.
154
amend and alter it,” and that this is all he had suggested, the crowd indignantly shouted him
down. “We won’t hear him.” “He is a traitor.” “Down with treason.” “Hang him up.” “He is
nothing but a John Brown man.” The meeting had completely fallen to bedlam, as “several
rotten eggs were thrown from the rear of the Hall…in several parts of the Hall, violent
altercations [were] in progress.” The abolitionists beat a hasty retreat from the hall. 225
That evening, the streets of Syracuse were lit by torches and filled with the ruffians from
the rally of that day. Miller’s Brass Band led the procession through the street. In essence, it
was the funeral procession for the city’s abolitionists. In the midst of the crowd hung two straw
dummies, bearing the names of Samuel Joseph May and Susan B. Anthony. But a solemn
procession it was not, instead proceeding “through the streets, the rabble ‘making night hideous’
with their shouts, hootings and screechings, mingled with disgusting profanity and ribaldry.”
The parade made its way to Hanover Square, the home of Syracuse’s genteel businesses,
intellectual services and the city’s center. There, the crowd “performed the most revolting,
blasphemous and beastial [sic] orgies, preparatory to burning the effigies.” The “defunct
Abolitionists” were eulogized, and a “mock prayer” concluded the ceremony. “Among the
infamous performances indulged in was the representation of improper familiarities between the
effigies,” a puppet show, of sorts, to the great enjoyment of the crowd: “going so far as to
represent the act of sexual intercourse!” The crowd dispersed shortly after they lit the straw
dummies afire, amid cheers of “Constitution and the Union!” The Syracuse Courier & Union
would later boast that, “the Jerry Rescue has been signally avenged.” The mobocrats had had
their way, smoldering ashes representing Samuel May lay in the street, and the resolve of Antislavery in Syracuse had been broken.226
225
226
“Meeting This Morning..," The Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 30 January 1861.
“Disgraceful Orgies..," The Daily Journal (Syracuse, NY), 31 January 1861.
155
Or had it? The previous day, after the first, terrible trouncing of the Convention, the
members of the Committee and their fellows met at the home of Dr. R.W. Pease to at least
formulate a response to the show of force earlier that day. With Reverend May as a chairman,
the group ratified the resolutions May had labored over just the day before. “Resolved, That the
holding of human beings as pieces of property, and, treating them like domesticated brutes, is the
grossest outrage upon humanity, and the highest offense to the impartial Father of all, that men
or nations can commit.” The Resolutions sound like most made in this period, denouncing
slavery. “Resolved, That our General Government ought to abolish all Fugitive Slave Laws; for,
unless they can dethrone God, the people will ever be under higher obligation to obey Him than
to obey any law.” The Resolutions show the definite hand of May, calling upon God the creator
for retribution over all, and spurning arguments toward Christ for those higher based in Hebrew
laws. “Resolved, That the friends of Liberty and Humanity throughout the State, and all free
States, should flood legislatures with petitions to enact more stringent laws for the protection of
the people.” The Abolitionists showed the proper resolve, mirroring their fellow across the
North, with righteous indignation, but little action. That is, until their final resolution.
“Resolved, That the abolition of slavery is the great concern of the American people, ‘the one
thing needful’ for them,— without which there can be no union, no peace, no political virtue, no
real, lasting prosperity in all these United States.”227
Just as the laws of Man mean nothing if they contradict the laws of God, the Union, too,
means nothing if Slavery is included. There will no longer be concessions made for the South.
There will no longer be time for talk and reintegration of the Union as it existed before
November of 1860. The Abolitionists would make their stand just as the South Carolinians had
before. And the author of these resolutions, a leader in the peace movement just a year earlier,
227
“The Anti-slavery Convention.,” The Liberator, 15 February 1861.
156
spurned peace and welcomed war and unrest if it meant eventual union and the abolition of
slavery in accordance with God’s law.
War was still two months away. In the intervening time, May secluded himself from
Conventions and outward action in the Abolition cause. Instead, he focused publicly on
temperance. But, as war and unrest quickly approached, May and his fellows were taking active
roles to subvert the South still. They worked not to foment war per say, but to foment the
freedom of the blacks for whom they spoke. During a trip to Brooklyn, New York in late
February, Samuel J. May would arrange a meeting with Lewis Tappan, the chief force behind the
Amistad case and an elder statesman among the Anti-slavery movement, to discuss, “the
expediency of sending the fugitives directly thro to the Suspension Bridge,” into Canada.228 The
next month, May would receive a telegraph from William H. Leonard, a minister in
Pennsylvania, informing him that a fugitive woman would be in Syracuse the next day at roughly
4 A.M. The diary entry that outlines the incident relates this in terse tones, almost as if a regular
occurrence. May’s son George was tasked by his father to awaken at the appointed time, meet
the woman at the depot and provide her safe passage.229 However, May’s son missed the
fugitive at the station. She sought the help of the baggage handler, who, as May recorded,
“brought her to our house. Our servant would not let them in, nor bring her letter to me.” The
quick thinking baggage handler took the woman to Reverend Loguen’s home, May’s fellow
abolitionist minister who, during the failed Anti-slavery convention of January 29th, had been
denounced as “nigger Loguen.”230 At Loguen’s home, May reports, “she was provided with the
228
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Feb 13, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), March 25, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
230
“Free Speech in Syracuse.," The Syracuse Standard, 30 January 1861. The article goes on to argue that
Loguen should not be characterized as such, for two distinct reasons. First, “he is a colored man, but his parents
were half white,” and second, that the charge only speaks negatively to the character of the “rowdies” for having
debased a man of fine upstanding moral sentiment.
229
157
means to get on to Rochester.”231
The Underground Railroad in Upstate New York was one of the most viable routes for
escape to Canada. Furthermore, the activities of so-called conductors were not nearly as secret
as may be assumed. The Rochester Express published accounts of fugitive slaves passing
through the area regularly, under headings so conspicuous as “Business of the U.G.R.R.”
Syracuse’s papers even reprinted these notices, which tended only to give vague information on
the ‘passengers.’ “They were a man and a wife, and left separate masters at Baltimore to find
what they were denied, freedom.” The custom was for the stations to provide, as had Loguen,
“tickets through, and comforts… [and] a small amount of money, to pay,” any expenses they
might incur before reaching free soil in Canada. May’s active role in the Underground Railroad
community helped to fulfill his aims of a vocal battle for black freedom, while still remaining in
the relative safety of the shadows.
May’s morally ailing congregation, having before complained about his Anti-slavery
sermons, rallied behind their minister in the days following the failed Convention. At the
February 3rd Service in the Church of the Messiah, “a meeting was organized to take suitable
notice of the offences committed the last week upon free speech and the insults offered to
[May].”232 Commentary came from the gallery that never had the people “known of such an
outrage, or series of outrage, being committed, in Syracuse, or indeed, “in any Christian land.”
Then the congregation, holding a meeting after the next service, ratified a series of resolutions
denouncing the “mob which lately interrupted and finally broke up two meetings of peaceable
and orderly people.” Asserting their religious convictions, the group went on to state that they
too would be guilty if they failed to denounce, “the brutal insults and indignities to [their]
231
232
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), March 26, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), Feb 3, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
158
minister, whose life-long Christian labors in upholding the rights of every human being should
have been his protection.” May’s faith had led him into the ideology of Anti-slavery and finally
that faith was not only causing him grief over the rights of man, but vindication in the eyes of his
fellows.233
Perhaps the greatest ripple emanating from the trials of the secession times is the
devastating effect that events such as the failed Convention and, indeed, the coming of war had
on the remembrance of victories in the struggle against slavery. 1861 was the tenth anniversary
of the Jerry Rescue, the seminal moment in Syracuse’s abolition history when a mob worked for
the good, and civil disobedience begat freedom. The Jerry Rescue was the antithesis of January
29th, and had proved that Syracuse had once shown itself to be honorable. But following the
events of the spring and summer, with the outbreak of war, the debacle at Manassas and men
from the Salt City heading off to war, Syracuse’s spirit for remembrance died. During a war that
many saw as caused by Anti-slavery, the abolition movement’s leaders quickly caught on that
flaunting success would only lead to more mobocracy, and greater violence. In late September,
May agitated with his committee to go forward with the even, but they were hesitant. Finally, on
the 23rd of the month, just eight scant days from the anniversary, May visited Gerrit Smith.
Smith took great care with May, welcoming him to “his hospitable home.” The two, “had a great
deal of conversation… about the state of the country,” walking together over Smith’s “domains.”
The judgment came from the man who had written so many blank checks for so many causes:
“He is decided in his opinion that we had better not celebrate the Rescue of Jerry this year.”234
The Jerry Rescue anniversary was, therefore, not celebrated publicly. While certainly he must
have been thinking on ten years of violence in Syracuse’s Anti-slavery community, May rejoiced
233
234
“Action of the Unitarian Society,” The National Anti-slavery Standard, 23 February 1861.
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), September 23, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
159
over the freedom of Jerry in a much more sublime manner than in previous years. His diary
simply notes, “A man and boy picking apples….Beautiful Weather.”235
235
NY.
S.J. May (1861 diary entry), September 30 and October 1, 1861, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca,
160
161
EPILOGUE
“This old-time religion…”
Legacies and Memory
Anna Anderson spoke to a large audience gathered in Syracuse's 1876 New York
State Armory on October 1st, 1884. Reciting a poem by George Boker entitled, “The Black
Regiment,” Anderson read in a, “spirited manner.” The hall listened patiently as the woman read
through the poem's lines. She spoke of how the, “fierce rolling drum / Told them their time had
come, / Told them what work was sent / For the Black Regiment.” “'Freedom!' their battle-cry—
,” the poem continues, “'Freedom! or leave to die!' / Ah! and they meant the word, / Not as with
us 'tis heard, / Not a mere party shout: / They gave their spirits out.” The poem's final stanza
spoke to the crowd, many veterans of the struggles against the Confederacy of 1864 and 1865,
but a few of whom were veterans of an earlier conflict in the streets of Syracuse itself. “Oh, to
the living few, / Soldiers, be just and true!” the poem commanded, “Hail them as comrades tried;
/ Fight with them side by side.”236
The crowd gathered that day for the Thirty-Third anniversary was primarily black, with a
smattering of white faces representing city officials and distinguished guests. The Syracuse
George H. Boker, “The Black Regiment” in Francis F. Browne, ed., Bugle-Echoes: A Collection of Poems of
the Civil War, (New York: White, Stokes & Allen, 1886), 170-172; “Jerry Rescue,” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse,
NY), 29 August 1884; “Jerry Rescue. Arrangements Complete for To-morrow's Celebration of the Event,” Syracuse
Standard (Syracuse, NY), 30 September 1884.
236
162
Standard announced that the “Dark-Skinned Citizens,” had commemorated, “the Event in an
Appropriate Manner.” The centerpiece of the event was a procession of, “Colored Veterans',”
through the streets of Syracuse and an address by Frederick Douglass to commemorate the
anniversary. Likewise, the Auburn News and Bulletin reported that the Celebration had called,
“all the Colored Elite to Syracuse.” Among the other events slated was a, “base ball game
between the stars and rescues, which,” the Standard announced, would be, “played on the
O.D.A. Grounds,” the afternoon of the anniversary, “as a part of the Jerry Rescue celebration.”
The Stars, Syracuse's all-white professional ball team (part of the International Association),
would face a team specially organized for the event, “The Rescue club... composed entirely of
colored players.” A conflict of sport between white and black, much like the conflicts beginning
to erupt across America as Reconstruction faded into memory and the dream of full black
citizenship was deferred for more than a generation.237
The Civil War had ushered in a brief period of seeming success for the goals of
Abolitionists of Syracuse and around the North. With the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments, the roots of the first working biracial democracy in world history began to take
shape in the American South. Former slaves and their free brethren served in political positions
on the local and national level. America had seemingly risen to Gerrit Smith's, “Jerry Level.”
But much of this forward momentum was arrested and reversed with the compromise election of
Republican President Rutherford Hayes in 1876, and the end of Reconstruction. America
seemingly was backsliding. By 1884, the roots of a new insidious system, Jim Crowe racism,
were securing a tight grip on the South. The Republican party, which had bestowed freedom on
“Colored Men Celebrate,” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 2 October 1884; “The Jerry Rescue - Its
Celebration Calls All the Colored Elite to Syracuse,” Auburn News and Bulletin (Auburn, NY), 2 October 1884;
“Everything Ready. The Colored Veterans and Citizens to Celebrate the 'Jerry' Rescue,” Syracuse Standard
(Syracuse, NY), 1 October 1884.
237
163
the slave and engineered Reconstruction, was grasping for control of an increasingly bleak
political system.238
The Jerry Rescue Celebration had become political rally, much as it had in the years
before the war. Frederick Douglass was its political centerpiece. The aged abolitionist, the
Standard reported, “came to this city yesterday to talk to the colored people about the famous
Jerry rescue, about the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments to the constitution of the United
States, about the freed slave as a citizen and about the political duty of colored men.” The
Standard astutely noted that even, “the merest reference to any one of these topics implied a
mention of the pending national canvass,” the campaign between James G. Blaine and Grover
Cleveland. “Mr. Douglass did not hesitate to give his views to the friends who heard his address,
yesterday in the armory.” Douglass addressed the crowd, telling them that, “It is enough for you
to know... that Mr. Cleveland is a Democrat.” Grover Cleveland, “nor his party is fit to hold the
reins of government.” Douglass admitted to the crowd assembled to celebrate the freeing of a
slave over a quarter century earlier that, even if, “Mr. Cleveland [were] as pure as snow and
possessed of an intellect equal to that of Clay, Seward or Webster, I could not vote for him,
because he is the candidate of the Democratic party.” “Mr. Douglass knows a thing or two,” The
Republican Standard editorialized, “which some white people may have forgotten, regarding a
bit of a war that occupied the thought of the country some twenty-five years ago.”239
In spite of the backsliding on black rights, Douglass was, “deeply and gratefully
impressed,” with the, “vast and wonderful changes wrought in the thoughts and feelings of the
American people on the subject of human rights, since the memorable rescue of JERRY in this
city, three and thirty years ago.” “Though an eyewitness,” Douglass mused, “and, in some
238
For a deeper investigation of the Rise and Fall of the Reconstruction Era, see Eric Foner, A Short History of
Reconstruction: 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).
239
“Fred Douglass came to this city yesterday…” Syracuse Standard (Syracuse, NY), 2 October 1884.
164
humble measure, an actor and coworker with those [by] whom they were brought about,” the
abolitionist still found it, “hard to believe [his] own senses.” The fact, Douglass recalled, “that
hungry and blood-thirsty slave hunters, eager to clutch their trembling prey,” were allowed to,
“prowl in safety about the streets of this beautiful city in broad daylight,” was hard to even
fathom. Looking at the change in the political status of the former slave in America, Douglass
assured the crowd that they all, “may almost realize the feeling of JOHN, when we saw in the
apocalyptic vision a new heaven and a new earth.” “It is hard to think that here, in broad
daylight,” that Jerry, “a human being, guilty of no crime but the crime of loving and seeking
liberty, could be arrested, chaine[d] and fettered, and given up to slavery.”240
“No doubt some will regret a revival of the JERRY RESCUE celebration,” Douglass
admitted to the crowd of veterans and citizens, “it will be thought to call up unpleasant memories
and to keep alive sectional animosities.” Douglass would not, “assent to these gloomy thoughts
and apprehensions.” The abolitionist was thoroughly convinced that we, as Americans, “are far
more likely to forget too soon, than to remember too long, the history of the great American
conflict with slavery, one of the mightiest that ever shook a country.” Forgetting, “the great
errors and evils of the past, we must also forget,” Douglass explained, “the high intelligence, the
noble courage, and the true moral heroism with which these evils were met, combatted [sic] and
overthrown.” “Thus,” the crowd was told, America would, “lose to after coming generations a
vast motive power and inspiration to high and virtuous endeavor.” The inspiration to be drawn
from Syracusan's act in 1850 was great; the Jerry Rescue, “was no trifling matter.” They stood
against President Fillmore and Daniel Webster, who, “did not think it beneath their dignity to
240
Frederick Douglass, “Speech on the 33d Anniversary of the Jerry Rescue,” in Speech, Article, and Book
File, The Frederick Douglass Papers, United States Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [accessible online:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/ampage?collId=mfd&fileName=24/24009/24009page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=/ammem/doughtml/dougFolde
r5.html&linkText=7 ]
165
constitute themselves missionaries, and to go around the country preaching the new gospel of
slave catching.” As for the prospect of capturing of slaves, “the rescue of JERRY settled that
question at once and forever... the rescue of JERRY did most to bring the FUGITIVE SLAVE
BILL into contempt, and to defeat its execution every where.”241
Was celebration of the Jerry Rescue simply awakening tensions long forgotten? “We
should not only remember that event and the men who participated in it,” Douglass argued, “but
the men whose burning words and consistent devotion to the cause of freedom made that event
possible.” These were, “men of unusual mind and merit, such as come to the world only upon
some great demand.” The great abolition voices haunted Douglass as he stood on the podium on
that Thirty-third Anniversary, “their eloquent pleas for justice and humanity,” still echoing within
the city of Syracuse. “I see the noble form of Gerrit Smith,” Douglass told the crowd, “erect,
grand, and majestic, and hear his deep, never to be forgotten voice, denouncing slavery as an
unmitigated piracy.” The words rang in Douglass' ears: “there can be no law for slavery.” The
orator saw, too, “the sweet, Melancthon242 face of Samuel J. May, overflowing with kindness,
and hear him in silvery accents, pleading the golden rule against the FUGITIVE SLAVE BILL.”
Douglass recalled Jermain Loguen and the host of others who barreled into a police office and
saved a man from bondage. “It is something,” Douglass mused, “to have lived in the same world
with them, and to have been deemed worthy to be a coworker with them; to have seen their noble
faces, and to have felt the manly grip of their honest hands.”243
Frederick Douglass, “Speech on the 33d Anniversary of the Jerry Rescue,” in Speech, Article, and Book
File, The Frederick Douglass Papers, United States Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [accessible online:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/ampage?collId=mfd&fileName=24/24009/24009page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=/ammem/doughtml/dougFolde
r5.html&linkText=7 ]
242
One of the church reformers who allied with Martin Luther to lead the protestant reformation.
243
Frederick Douglass, “Speech on the 33d Anniversary of the Jerry Rescue,” in Speech, Article, and Book
File, The Frederick Douglass Papers, United States Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [accessible online:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi241
166
Remembrance of days past was not enough. “It would be delightful,” Douglass admitted,
“to dwell upon the words and works of these noble men, this occasion,” however, “calls for
something more.” The, “old watch man on the walls of the black man's liberty,” Douglass
reported that he was often, “asked today in all seriousness, and with much anxiety, “WHAT IS
THE BLACK MAN'S FUTURE?” “The great and all commanding question of the hour,”
Douglass answered, “is the question respecting relation subsisting between white and colored
people of this country NOW,” and not to dwell in the crime of slavery. “Reaction against the
negro since the war,” Douglass reminded his African-American crowd, “has been marked, rapid,
violent and general.” The newly enfranchised had been quickly swept, “away from nearly all the
high places of the nation; from the legislative halls of the South, as well as from the halls of the
National Congress. It has driven him from the ballot box. It has denied him civil rights.” “The
tide of popular prejudice against him,” Douglass lamented, “is swollen by a thousand
streams.”244
But, Douglass queried, “is there any hope of success for the negro in the face of such
odds?” “His sky is dark indeed, but not,” Douglass admitted, “cheerless.” “Above all the clouds
and storms that lower and beat upon,” the houses of America's black population, “there shines
the steady light of stars.” “Dark as our days are now,” the former fugitive slave turned statesman
reminded the crowd, “we have seen days that were darker.” America's black population did have
the ability to lift himself up and find a place in society. “He sometimes makes eloquent
speeches,” the orator quipped, “and at other times thrills the hearts of refined people with his
bin/ampage?collId=mfd&fileName=24/24009/24009page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=/ammem/doughtml/dougFolde
r5.html&linkText=7 ]
244
Frederick Douglass, “Speech on the 33d Anniversary of the Jerry Rescue,” in Speech, Article, and Book
File, The Frederick Douglass Papers, United States Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [accessible online:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/ampage?collId=mfd&fileName=24/24009/24009page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=/ammem/doughtml/dougFolde
r5.html&linkText=7 ]
167
wild warbling JUBILEE music.” But the negro could not go it alone in America in the 1880s.
“The hope of all oppressed and down-trodden,” is the assistance of, “the moral government of
the universe.”245
“The assumption that the cause of the negro is a dead issue,” Douglass assured his
audience, “is an utter delusion.” At the moment, the cause of black freedom might be, “buried
under the dust and rubbish of endless discussion concerning,” the various political issues of the
day, “but our LAZARUS IS NOT DEAD.” The Lazarus of black equality, “ONLY SLEEPS.”
Quoting Daniel Webster, the figure who at once was laudable and damnable, Douglass reminded
his crowd that, “the earthquake has power, the tempest, whirlwind and lightning have power.”
Webster, Douglass pointed out to the crowd, “might have added that JUSTICE, LIBERTY, and
HUMANITY, have a mightier power.” Echoing another paragon of American culture, Ulysses
Grant, Douglass spoke of how his heart echoed, “the sentiment of the greatest American Captain,
'LET US HAVE PEACE!'” “But,” Douglass added, “it is weak and foolish to cry PEACE, when
there is no peace. You Know, I know, and every thoughtful man in the country must know, that it
is,” that peace could come, “where there is injustice, wrong, and oppression.” “IN AMERICA,”
Douglass proclaimed boldly and firmly, “INJUSTICE MUST CEASE BEFORE PEACE CAN
PREVAIL.” The struggle continued and would continue for decades, the fight for freedom
would march on ceaseless, the Jerry Rescue would live on in the resolve of a people to be free.246
Frederick Douglass, “Speech on the 33d Anniversary of the Jerry Rescue,” in Speech, Article, and Book
File, The Frederick Douglass Papers, United States Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [accessible online:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/ampage?collId=mfd&fileName=24/24009/24009page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=/ammem/doughtml/dougFolde
r5.html&linkText=7 ]
246
Frederick Douglass, “Speech on the 33d Anniversary of the Jerry Rescue,” in Speech, Article, and Book
File, The Frederick Douglass Papers, United States Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [accessible online:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/ampage?collId=mfd&fileName=24/24009/24009page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=/ammem/doughtml/dougFolde
r5.html&linkText=7 ]
245
168
169
WORKS CONSULTED
NEWSPAPERS
The Ariel. A Semimonthly Literary and Misc. Gazette, Philadelphia, PA.
The Baltimore Patriot, Baltimore, MD.
Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, Bangor, ME.
The Boston Atlas, Boston, MA
The Boston Recorder, Boston, MA.
The Carson League, Syracuse, NY.
Cleveland Herald, Cleveland, OH.
Christian Reformer or Unitarian Magazine and Review. London.
Daily National Intelligencer, Washington, DC.
The Daily Sanduskian, Sandusky, OH.
Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Rochester, NY.
Greenville Mountaineer, Greenville, SC.
Harpers Weekly, New York, NY.
The Liberator, Boston, MA.
The Madison Observer, Morrisville, NY
Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and Gazette, Millwaukee, WI.
Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette, Natchez, MS.
The Mississippian and State Gazette, Jackson, MS.
Missouri Courier, Hannibal, MI.
The National Anti-slavery Standard, New York, NY.
New York Times, New York, NY.
New York Tribune, New York, NY.
The North Star, Rochester, NY.
Pennsylvania Freeman, Philadelphia, PA.
Pittsburg Daily Gazette and Advertiser, Pittsburg, PA.
The Quebec Morning Chronicle, Quebec, Canada.
The Rochester Daily Express, Rochester, NY.
Savannah Morning News, Savannah, GA
Syracuse Daily Journal, Syracuse, NY.
Syracuse Daily Star, Syracuse, NY.
Syracuse Evening Chronicle, Syracuse, NY.
Syracuse Post-Standard, Syracuse, NY.
Syracuse Standard, Syracuse, NY.
The Utica Herald, Utica, NY.
Weekly Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette, Raleigh, NC.
170
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Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection. Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse
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Gerrit Smith Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library,
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Looking Back at the Jerry Rescue: Newspaper Clippings 1852-1951 (Scrapbook), LN48Sy8j2.
Local History and Genealogy Department. Syracuse Public Library. Onondaga County
Public Library System.
May, Samuel Joseph. 1860 Diary. Samuel J. May Anti-slavery Collection. Division of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, Cornell University Library System, Ithaca, NY.
May, Samuel Joseph. 1861 Diary. Samuel J. May Anti-slavery Collection. Division of Rare and
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Stoddard, William Osborn. Recollections of a checkered lifetime: Told for his children in his old
age. 1907. Manuscript. Lincoln Financial Collection. Allen County Public Library. Fort Wayne,
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Maryland.
Sill lists Harris’ owner as “Catherine Odine”, however no such slave holder existed in New
Castle County, Delaware in the 1850 U.S. Census Slave Schedules.
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