Transcript
The Chain
April 1851
Boston · April 1851
In April 1851, the city of Boston put a chain around its own courthouse.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow the Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court forced to stoop under chains to enter the temple of Justice!
Another judge refused to stoop. The police made a gap for him.
Upstairs, federal officers held Thomas Sims, a bricklayer who had escaped slavery in Georgia. The chain was there to stop Boston from rescuing him.
Congress passed this law to save the Union. When the law and your conscience disagree, which one do you obey?
To see why Boston chained its own courthouse, start with a map.
Whose West?
1846–1849
The war with Mexico added more than half a million square miles. The Missouri line of 1820 stopped at the old border. Nobody had decided about the rest.
In 1846, David Wilmot proposed banning slavery from all of it. The House passed his proviso. The Senate killed it. Four answers, and Congress couldn't agree on any. So in 1848, the voters got to choose.
In 1848, the answers ran for president. Democrats chose Lewis Cass: let the settlers decide. Whigs chose Zachary Taylor, a war hero with no platform, who had never cast a vote.
Antislavery Democrats and Whigs formed the Free-Soil Party and nominated Martin Van Buren. Van Buren carried no state, but his votes in New York helped Taylor win.
Then came gold. By the end of 1849, about a hundred thousand newcomers had poured into California.
California skipped the territory stage, banned slavery unanimously, and asked to join as a state.
That's contextualization in one picture: the Gold Rush changed the argument before Congress could have it.
Since 1820, states had come in pairs. California had no partner.
When Congress met that December, the House needed nearly three weeks and sixty-three ballots just to choose a Speaker.
Texas claimed half of New Mexico, Santa Fe included. Southern leaders had called a convention to meet at Nashville.
Men in Congress said 'disunion' out loud. Into this walked a seventy-two-year-old from Kentucky.
The Last of the Giants
January–March 1850
Henry Clay had helped settle Missouri in 1820 and the tariff crisis in 1833. Sick with tuberculosis, he had come back for one more.
Clay's plan: California joins free. The rest of the Mexican land gets no rule on slavery. Texas is paid to give up land. Washington's slave trade ends. The fugitive slave law gets tougher.
Everyone had to swallow something.
Henry Clay I have never before arisen to address any assembly so oppressed, so appalled, so anxious.
John C. Calhoun of South Carolina was dying, too weak to read his own speech. Senator James Mason of Virginia read it for him.
James M. Mason I have, Senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion.
He said the cords holding the Union together were snapping, one by one. The Methodists split into Northern and Southern churches in 1844. The Baptists followed in 1845.
The North ran the House. The Senate stood at 15 to 15.
James M. Mason The South asks for justice, simple justice, and less she ought not to take.
Three days later, all Washington wanted a seat.
Daniel Webster I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American.
Daniel Webster An honorable member whose health does not allow him to be here to-day…
An unnamed senator He is here.
Daniel Webster I am very happy to hear that he is.
Nature, he said, would keep slavery out of New Mexico.
Daniel Webster I mean the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth.
On returning people who had escaped slavery, he sided with the South.
Daniel Webster In that respect, the South, in my judgment, is right, and the North is wrong.
Read alone, this speech sounds like courage or like betrayal. Set it beside what else happened that March, and you can see what he feared: a South ready to leave.
John Greenleaf Whittier So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
John Greenleaf Whittier Which once he wore!
Antislavery New England called him a traitor. Hundreds of Boston men signed a letter thanking him.
Four days later, Seward of New York went further.
William H. Seward But there is a higher law than the Constitution.
He meant the western lands. Soon it was aimed at the fugitive law.
All Aboard
April–September 1850
On April 17, Jane Grey Swisshelm became the first woman to sit in the Senate press gallery. Vice President Fillmore, she recalled, had warned her it would be “very unpleasant for a lady.”
That afternoon, Senator Foote pulled a loaded pistol on Senator Benton.
Thomas Hart Benton Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!
Senator Dickinson of New York took the pistol and locked it in his desk.
Jane Grey Swisshelm You are nothing the poorer when the deed is done. It is the mother and her children who are called upon to foot the bill.
Clay's committee packed the biggest pieces into one bill. Washington called it the omnibus, after the city's horse-drawn buses. Everybody rides together.
President Taylor opposed it. He enslaved more than a hundred people, yet wanted California and New Mexico admitted now, as states, with no deal.
In June, delegates from nine slave states met in Nashville to plan for a South shut out of the West. The moderates held. For now.
On July 4, Taylor sat through two hours of speeches in the sun. The story goes he ate cherries and iced milk. Five days later, he was dead.
Millard Fillmore wanted a deal. Webster left the Senate to be his secretary of state.
Henry Clay I owe a paramount allegiance to the whole Union—a subordinate one to my own State.
On July 31, the omnibus came apart. New Mexico fell off. Then Texas. Then California.
Thomas Hart Benton The omnibus is overturned, and all the passengers spilled out but one. We have but Utah left.
Clay went off to Newport, Rhode Island, to rest.
Stephen Douglas of Illinois was thirty-seven and about five foot four. They called him the Little Giant. His idea: stop asking anyone to vote for all of it.
Five laws, signed in September. Washington fired a hundred guns. One man wrote that it was “a night on which it was the duty of every patriot to get drunk.”
Almost nobody had voted for the whole Compromise. The historian David Potter called it “a truce perhaps, an armistice.”
Millard Fillmore A final settlement.
Then people read the fine print.
The Fine Print
September 1850–February 1851
Reading clerk of the Senate In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence.
A person seized under this law could not testify. There was no jury.
The commissioner got ten dollars if he sent the person south, and five if he set them free.
Reading clerk of the Senate All good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law.
Every citizen could be ordered to help.
The Constitution said a person held to service who escaped must be delivered up. Some Northern states forbade their officials to help. Senator Mason of Virginia filed a bill to enforce it.
A Georgia convention accepted the Compromise on one condition.
Reading clerk of the Senate Upon the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill by the proper authorities depends the preservation of our much-loved Union.
Millard Fillmore God knows that I detest Slavery, but it is an existing evil … and we must endure it.
Millard Fillmore I know no higher law that conflicts with it.
The law put every Black person in the North at risk. In Rochester, a Black Baptist church had 114 members. All but two left. The pastor went first.
Families left for Canada.
In Boston, Black and white citizens packed Faneuil Hall.
Frederick Douglass spoke for the people the law was hunting.
Frederick Douglass We one and all … are resolved rather to die than to go back.
Two Georgia slave catchers came for William and Ellen Craft. The committee had them arrested until they left town. The Crafts sailed for England.
In February 1851, federal officers seized Shadrach Minkins, a Boston waiter. That afternoon, Black Bostonians, Lewis Hayden among them, carried him out. He was in Canada within a week.
Three days later, Fillmore issued a proclamation against the rescue.
Daniel Webster It is, strictly speaking, a case of treason.
No one was convicted.
The next case would go differently. It came in April.
Under the Chain
April 1851
On the night of April 3, Boston police seized Thomas Sims on a false charge of theft. He fought back.
This time, the authorities were ready. Up went the chain.
In 1836, Chief Justice Shaw freed an enslaved girl who had been brought to Boston. In 1851, he denied Sims habeas corpus and upheld the federal law.
A federal commissioner heard the case, with no jury. On April 11, he ordered Sims returned to Georgia.
Before dawn, about three hundred police marched him down State Street, some with swords the federal government supplied. Past the Old State House. Vigilance Committee members stopped where soldiers had shot Crispus Attucks in 1770. Down Long Wharf, to the brig Acorn.
Sims landed in Savannah on April 19, the anniversary of Lexington and Concord. Theodore Parker made sure Boston noticed. Sims was whipped in public. Thirty-nine lashes.
Parker drafted a poster. It warned Black Bostonians that the city's police were now KIDNAPPERS AND Slave Catchers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write.
Ralph Waldo Emerson I will not obey it, by God.
The chain came down. The law stayed.
A Higher Law
1851 → 1877
The Compromise drew new lines on the map. The Fugitive Slave Act drew one through every Northern town.
Both sides believed they were saving something. The Union, or their souls.
The armistice lasted four years. A novel came first. Then Kansas.
In April 1863, as Grant's army closed on Vicksburg, Sims escaped again, with his wife and child. Grant gave him a pass. He made it back to Boston.
In 1877, Sims got a job as a messenger at the Justice Department. The attorney general was Charles Devens, the marshal who had marched him to Long Wharf.