Black History, Literature, Slavery
Briton Hammon Papers
On a December day in 1747 Briton Hammon, a slave to Major John Winslow of Marshfield, Massachusetts, walked out of town with, as he put it, `an Intention to go a voyage to sea.’ Tucked into the sandy bight of Cape Cod Bay, some thirty miles south of Boston, and reeking of tidal flats and Stockholm tar, Marshfield was a minor star in the galaxy of Britain’s commercial empire, and only a short walk from Plymouth, where Hammon shipped himself the next day `on board of a Sloop, Capt. John Howland, Master, bound to Jamaica and the Bay’ of Campeche for logwood.
Experienced at shipboard work, as were approximately 25 percent of the male slaves in coastal Massachusetts during the 1740s, Hammon had not run away. But like all black people in early America who wrought freedom where they could, nurtured it warily, and understood it as partial and ambiguous at best, Hammon seized the moment. (more…)
Slavery
Henry Clay, U.S. senator from Kentucky, was determined to find a solution. In 1820 he had resolved a fiery debate over the spread of slavery with his Missouri Compromise. Now, thirty years later, the matter surfaced again within the walls of the Capitol. But this time the stakes were higher — nothing less than keeping the Union together.
There were several points at issue:
? The United States had recently acquired a vast territory — the result of its war with Mexico. Should the territory allow slavery, or should it be declared free? Or maybe the inhabitants should be allowed to choose for themselves?
? California — a territory that had grown tremendously with the gold rush of 1849, had recently petitioned Congress to enter the Union as a free state. Should this be allowed? Ever since the Missouri Compromise, the balance between slave states and free states had been maintained; any proposal that threatened this balance would almost certainly not win approval.
? There was a dispute over land: Texas claimed that its territory extended all the way to Santa Fe.
? Finally, there was Washington, D.C. Not only did the nation’s capital allow slavery, it was home to the largest slave market in North America.
On January 29, 1850, the 70-year-old Clay presented a compromise. For eight months members of Congress, led by Clay, Daniel Webster, Senator from Massachusetts, and John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina, debated the compromise. With the help of Stephen Douglas, a young Democrat from Illinois, a series of bills that would make up the compromise were ushered through Congress.
According to the compromise, Texas would relinquish the land in dispute but, in compensation, be given 10 million dollars — money it would use to pay off its debt to Mexico. Also, the territories of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah would be organized without mention of slavery. (The decision would be made by the territories’ inhabitants later, when they applied for statehood.) Regarding Washington, the slave trade would be abolished in the District of Columbia, although slavery would still be permitted. Finally, California would be admitted as a free state. To pacify slave-state politicians, who would have objected to the imbalance created by adding another free state, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed.
Of all the bills that made up the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was the most controversial. It required citizens to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves. It denied a fugitive’s right to a jury trial. (Cases would instead be handled by special commisioners — commisioners who would be paid $5 if an alleged fugitive were released and $10 if he or she were sent away with the claimant.) The act called for changes in filing for a claim, making the process easier for slaveowners. Also, according to the act, there would be more federal officials responsible for enforcing the law.
For slaves attempting to build lives in the North, the new law was disaster. Many left their homes and fled to Canada. During the next ten years, an estimated 20,000 blacks moved to the neighboring country. For Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive living in New York, passage of the law was “the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population.” She stayed put, even after learning that slave catchers were hired to track her down. Anthony Burns, a fugitive living in Boston, was one of many who were captured and returned to slavery. Free blacks, too, were captured and sent to the South. With no legal right to plead their cases, they were completely defenseless.
Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act made abolitionists all the more resolved to put an end to slavery. The Underground Railroad became more active, reaching its peak between 1850 and 1860. The act also brought the subject of slavery before the nation. Many who had previously been ambivalent about slavery now took a definitive stance against the institution.
The Compromise of 1850 accomplished what it set out to do — it kept the nation united — but the solution was only temporary. Over the following decade the country’s citizens became further divided over the issue of slavery. The rift would continue to grow until the nation itself divided.
Slavery
Angelina Grimke, along with her sister Sarah, were the first women in the United States to publicly argue for the abolition of slavery. Cultured and well educated, Angelina had gone north from South Carolina with her sister with firsthand knowledge of the condition of the slaves. In 1836 Angelina wrote a lengthy address urging all women to actively work to free blacks. The sisters’ lectures elicited violent criticism because it was considered altogether improper for women to speak out on political issues. This made them acutely aware of their own oppression as women, which they soon began to address along with abolitionism. A severe split developed in the abolition movement, with some antislavery people arguing that it was the “Negro’s hour and women would have to wait.” The Grimkes refused to accept this idea, insisting on the importance of equality for both women and blacks. Angelina’s sister became a major theoretician of the women’s rights movement, challenging all the conventional beliefs about a woman’s place. As to men, she demanded: “All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks.”
Slavery
Pierre Toussaint (June 27, 1766 – June 30, 1853) was a formerly enslaved Haitian-American hairdresser and philanthropist, brought to New York City by his enslavers in 1787. He was declared Venerable by Pope John Paul II in 1996.
Freed in 1807 after the death of his mistress, Pierre took the surname of “Toussaint” in honor of Toussaint Louverture, a leader of the Haitian Revolution.] Toussaint also became a successful barber and used his wealth for various philanthropic causes. He also helped finance the construction of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.
Credited as the de facto founder of Catholic Charities New York, Toussaint is the first and only layman to be buried in the crypt below the main altar of the current St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, generally reserved for bishops of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York
Slavery
(1833-70), promoter, with its state and local auxiliaries, of the cause of immediate abolition of slavery in the United States.
As the main activist arm of the Abolition Movement (see abolitionism), the society was founded in 1833 under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison. By 1840 its auxiliary societies numbered 2,000, with a total membership ranging from 150,000 to 200,000. The societies sponsored meetings, adopted resolutions, signed antislavery petitions to be sent to Congress, published journals and enlisted subscriptions, printed and distributed propaganda in vast quantities, and sent out agents and lecturers (70 in 1836 alone) to carry the impassioned antislavery message to Northern audiences.
Participants in the societies were drawn mainly from religious circles (e.g., Theodore Dwight Weld) and philanthropic backgrounds (e.g., businessmen Arthur and Lewis Tappan and lawyer Wendell Phillips), as well as from the free black community, with six blacks serving on the first Board of Managers. The society’s public meetings were most effective when featuring the eloquent testimony of former slaves like Frederick Douglass or William Wells Brown. The society’s antislavery activities frequently met with violent public opposition, with mobs invading meetings, attacking speakers, and burning presses.
In 1839 the national organization split over basic differences of approach: Garrison and his followers were more radical than other members; they denounced the U.S. Constitution as supportive of slavery and insisted on sharing organizational responsibility with women. The less radical wing, led by the Tappan brothers, formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated moral suasion and political action and led directly to the birth of the Liberty Party (q.v.) in 1840. Because of this cleavage in national leadership, the bulk of the activity in the 1840s and ’50s was carried on by state and local societies. The antislavery issue entered the mainstream of American politics through the Free-Soil Party (1848-54) and subsequently the Republican Party (founded in 1854). The American Anti-Slavery Society was formally dissolved in 1870, after the Civil War and Emancipation.
Slavery
Robert Harper, a Philadelphia builder, gave the community its name. He settled there sometime between 1734 and 1747. In 1761, Harper established a ferry across the Potomac, making this community a major jumping off point for settlers seeking new lands in the Shenandoah Valley and points west.
In the years to come, the Harpers Ferry Arsenal made high quality, rifled muskets and engaged in what we now call research and development. The location of the arsenal eventually attracted other industrial development.
Situated on the Maryland side of the river, the canal connected the ferry with markets in Washington, D.C. A year later, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad arrived and with it the final piece in a political-economic network that made Harpers Ferry and the recently founded community of Bolivar important to the nation’s future. How important became very clear when on October 16, 1859, notorious Kansas Free-State man and abolitionist, John Ossawatomie Brown and his “Provisional Army of the United States,” entered the village of Harper’s Ferry, Va., taken possession of the United States armory, shot two or three whites, placed guards on the railroad bridge, and stopped the passenger trains of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. John Brown saw the ferry as the place to capture arms with which to equip an army and free the slaves of the Deep South.
The President promptly dispatched a detachment of marines to the spot. On the morning of October 18, a storming party of 12 Marines, led by future Confederate States General Robert E. Lee joined with the local army broke down the door of the Armory’s fire engine house, and forced Brown’s terrorist militia into a surrender. They were found to number over twenty white men and negroes. Ten of Brown’s guerrilla’s were killed, two of which were his own sons. Brown, who had received a number of severe wounds, was arrested and charged with treason.
He confessed that his object was to liberate and run all the slaves in the adjoining counties of Virginia and Maryland. At a farm house which Brown had hired a few miles from Harper’s Ferry, were found ammunition and arms, consisting of a large number of Sharpe’s rifles, revolvers, pikes and other implements of war, together with a great amount of correspondence, consisting of letters of Gerrit Smith and Fred Douglas.
While begging for his life, John Brown’s family stated that he was insane. To prove their point they gave the following information on his lineage and the people that surrounded him throughout his life.
Nine relatives on Brown’s mother’s side were insane.
Six of Brown’s cousins were insane.
Two of his own children were insane.
He was also given the chance to testify on his own behalf and proclaimed that his life had been a constant fight to stop the institution of slavery, that from his past deeds his life should be spared.
Brown was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the United States, on the 2d of November, was sentenced to be hung, which sentence was carried into effect on the 2d of December, 1859. Before the sentence was carried out, however, Brown issued a prophetic warning from his jail cell:
“I wish to say furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily; I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled, this Negro question I mean, the end of that is not yet.”
Afterwards, John Brown’s wife died, insane.
It has since been discovered that the following is a portion of the plans of abolitionists, matured in Kansas by Brown and others, and which he attempted in part to carry out:
“1. To make war (openly or secretly, as circumstances may dictate) upon the property of the slave holders and their abettor, not for its destruction, if that can be easily avoided, but to convert it to the use of the slaves. If it cannot be thus converted, then we advise its destruction. Teach the slaves to burn their master’s buildings, to kill their cattle and horses, to conceal or destroy farming utensils, to abandon labor in seed time and harvest, and let crops perish. Make slavery unprofitable in this way, if it can be done in no other.
“2. To make slave holders objects of derision and contempt, by flogging them whenever they shall be guilty of flogging their slaves.
“3. To risk no general insurrection until we of the North go to your assistance, or you are sure of success without our aid.
“4. To cultivate the friendship and confidence of the slaves; to consult with them as to their rights and interests, and the means of promoting them; to show your interests in their welfare, and your readiness to assist them; let them know that they have your sympathy, and it will give them courage, self respect and ambition, and make men of them, infinitely better men to live by, as neighbors and friends, than the indolent, arrogant, selfish, heartless, domineering robbers and tyrants who now keep both yourselves and the slaves in subjection, and look with contempt upon all who live by honest labor.
“5. To change your political institutions as soon as possible, and, in the meantime, give never a vote to a slave holder; pay no taxes to their government, if you can either resist or evade them; as witnesses and jurors, give no testimony and no verdicts in support of any slave holding claims; perform no military, patrol or police service; mob slave holding courts, jails and sheriffs; do nothing, in short, for sustaining slavery, but everything you safely can, publicly and privately, for its overthrow.”
Brown’s raid was a failure, but it set the country in motion toward civil war.
In the years that followed, Harpers Ferry was devastated by warring parties. The armory and arsenal were destroyed, its railroad bridges over the Potomac burned and later rebuilt. Usually occupied by Federal troops, it also became a refugee camp for thousands of runaway slaves making their way North. Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson captured the federal garrison there on September 15, 1862, following a lightning 51-mile march. He bagged thousands of troops and tons of supplies, not to mention hundreds of Black people who were marched South back into slavery.
After the war, the ferry was little more than a ghost town. The federal government sold what was left of the armory and arsenal and other property. Efforts to rebuild its commercial base were frequently devastated by record-breaking floods. But out of the ashes came two occurrences that impacted the country’s future. The first was a small, church-owned school for African-Americans, Storer College. In the 1890s, civil rights leaders convened there in their effort to create a new, national organization that would fight for the rights of blacks. That movement eventually led to the creation of the NAACP.
