1861 (21 page)

On the third morning after Bagby’s arrest, the hearing opened and then quickly adjourned when her attorney, a leading white Republican named
Rufus P. Spalding, asked for time to visit Wheeling and seek evidence that might disprove that she was truly the Goshorns’ legal property. He returned two days later, on January 24, and ruefully informed the court that his mission had failed: “Nothing now remains that may
impede the performance of your painful duty,” he said. Yet, Spalding reflected, the “painful duty” might serve a larger purpose, as news of Ohio’s appeasing gesture reached even the U.S. Capitol: “While we do
this, in the City of Cleveland, in the … Western Reserve, and permit this poor piece of humanity to be taken peaceably, through our streets, and upon our railways, back to the land of bondage, will not
the frantic South stay its parricidal arm? Will not our compromising legislators cry, ‘Hold, enough!’ ”
⁶⁵

Well-meaning whites made a last-ditch effort to purchase Lucy’s freedom from the Goshorns—even the chief marshal who had arrested her pledged $100 to the cause—but the Virginians declined all offers. They were determined to make a point. The elder Mr. Goshorn rose to have the last word in court, thanking the citizens of Cleveland for the “uniform kindness” they had shown during his sojourn with them. His mission, the Virginian said
piously, had been only to pour soothing oil upon the troubled waters of the Union. “How pleasant it would be,” he concluded, “if I could come among you with this same girl as my servant, and enjoy your hospitality as I have now.”
⁶⁶

The “girl” in question was not invited to address the court. Hiding her face in a handkerchief, she was gently but firmly led from the room and out of the building by the marshals. The crowd on the courthouse steps was silent: Cleveland’s colored citizens had decided to accede to the wisdom of their city fathers. At the railway station, Bagby, the marshals, and the Goshorns boarded a waiting train bound for Wheeling, followed by more than a hundred
armed white men who had been deputized to make sure the dictates of justice were fully executed. Two years earlier, as every Ohioan remembered, a captured slave en route back to
Kentucky had been successfully liberated by a determined group of abolitionist radicals from Oberlin—a mishap that must not be allowed to repeat itself.

This time, the journey proceeded peacefully until the train drew near the tiny village of Lima, just a few miles from the state border, where several dozen blacks and whites armed with muskets, clubs, and pistols lay in wait at the depot. But the engineer spotted the ambush just in time. Warning the deputies to draw their revolvers, he signaled as though he were going to stop—and then, at the last possible instant, gave the engine a full head of steam and tore on
past the startled would-be attackers. The train and its young prisoner continued on their way south.
⁶⁷

L
UCY
B
AGBY’S RETURN
to Virginia seemed an allegory: not only of the doomed hopes of those last prewar months but of white Northerners’ ambivalent loyalties. Rarely have the internal contradictions of
American attitudes toward race been starker than during the prelude to the Civil War. And nowhere were those contradictions starker than in Ohio.

As with many Northerners, James Garfield’s feelings about slavery had evolved rapidly over the past ten years. In 1850, an African-American lecturer had visited his school at the invitation of the headmistress, herself an ardent abolitionist. Garfield had little to say afterward beyond noting laconically, “The Darkey had some funny remarks.” Toward the middle of the decade, though, he found himself increasingly surrounded by a culture of antislavery
activism: even his brother, a half-educated farmer, was writing letters proclaiming “Liberty or death” to the “southern deamons.” By the fall of 1857, when Garfield encountered a fugitive slave passing through Hiram, he covertly slipped the man some money to aid him on his escape to Canada. And two years later, when John Brown was hanged for treason in Virginia, Garfield wrote in his diary:

In a pocket notebook, he expressed himself even more firmly—in Latin, as befit the somber majesty of the occasion. “John Brown’s Execution.
Servitium esto damnatum
,” he wrote in thick black letters.
Slavery be damned.

And yet … just months before, as president of the Eclectic Institute, Garfield had flatly forbidden local abolitionists from holding a rally at the college. “The school,” he vowed in a private letter, “shall never be given over to an overheated and brainless faction.” It was one thing to condemn slavery in the private confines of a diary, quite another in the open air, which would be reckless. Slavery might be damned, but
it must be damned discreetly. It was a fine line, and Garfield found
himself, as he put it, “between two fires”: some of his friends criticized him as too moderate on slavery, others as too radical.
⁶⁹

The fire of radicalism was burning ever hotter in the Western Reserve. It was no coincidence that the martyred Brown himself had grown up in the town of Hudson, less than twenty miles from Hiram. Ohio’s early settlers from
New England (Brown’s family included) had brought with them the moral ardor of their Puritan ancestors, combined with the toughness of pioneers, of men and women who kept rifles at their side to ward
off heathen Indians. The
second Great Awakening, together with the miraculous blessings that
God’s providence conferred upon their flourishing new state, made them confident in their own power to transform circumstances. Northeastern Ohio in the first half of the nineteenth century was a heap of dry kindling ready to be set ablaze.

Some said that the tinder was first lit in June of 1845, when the
Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society—then a small and fairly sedate organization—held its annual meeting in a Disciple church in New Lisbon. The spark came in the form of a visitor from New England: Abby Kelley, a young woman on a mission into the West. Her gentle appearance—the blue eyes and rosy cheeks, the demure dress of Quaker gray—was
misleading to many who did not know her, for here was an orator who could fling down brimstone from the pulpit for hours on end; a warrior who had been pelted with stones, rum bottles, eggs, and excrement; a politician who freely declared that she put Liberty before Union. She had been called a Jezebel, a nigger bitch, a “man woman,” and worse, and none of it fazed her in the slightest. Her voice—starting low and quiet and then rising, rising, until it rang from
every corner of the hall—was a fearsome and mighty weapon.

For three hot days in New Lisbon, Kelley preached to the crowd of sweat-soaked men and women who packed the little church and spilled out into the dusty street. Many had come unprepared for what they would hear. When she declared that “Washington and Jefferson were slave holding thieves, living by the unpaid labor of robbed women and children,” a male delegate rose to his feet, leapt onto the platform, and denounced her for this “slander” on
the Founding Fathers, reminding the audience of Jefferson’s famous remark about trembling for his country. “Ah,” Kelley retorted, striding toward the intruder as if to shove him off the stage, “devils fear and tremble when the Almighty is thundering out his wrath upon them, but are they the less devils?” At this blasphemous attack, the hall erupted in gasps, shouts, denunciations. “She is proving it all,” one man cried, “but it
will lead to
war and bloodshed!” Then a voice rose over the tumult—whether of man or woman has been forgotten—and began singing an abolitionist anthem:

By the end of the three days in New Lisbon, nearly all of Kelley’s beguiled listeners had been won over to her brand of warlike radicalism. The delegates adopted four resolutions, the last of which held that the federal Union, based on the Constitution, was nothing short of a “great bulwark of slavery, involving the North equally with the South in the guilt of slaveholding; and that it is the duty of every true friend of humanity, to give it no sanction of
allegiance, but adopting the motto of ‘no union with slaveholders,’ to use every effort to bring about a peaceful
dissolution of the Union.”
⁷⁰
Barely two weeks later—while Kelley was still barnstorming through the towns and villages of Columbiana County, preaching under a makeshift tent when no church would
receive her—the Society launched a new weekly paper, the
Anti-Slavery Bugle,
its masthead bearing a quotation from
Edmund Burke: “I love agitation when there is a cause for it.”
⁷¹

Within a year, the Society had changed its name: it would henceforth be known as the
Western Anti-Slavery Society, in keeping with the geographical broadening of its ambitions. It moved its base northward, to the prosperous town of Salem in the heart of the Western Reserve. Kelley would return again and again in the years that followed, raising funds and—in the words of one unsympathetic newspaper
editor—“ministering to the depraved appetites of her fanatical followers.” In 1854, two Southerners were imprudent enough to pass through Salem on their way home to Tennessee with a recently purchased slave, a girl about twelve years old. Local abolitionists—led by a free black man—stormed the train and carried the little girl off in triumph. That night, at an impromptu rally in the town hall, they brought their liberated captive to the stage and
bestowed on her a new name: Abby Kelley Salem.
⁷²

The girl’s foolish owners should have known: Ohio meant freedom.
Harriet Beecher Stowe had told all America as much—had told all
the world, in fact—in her great novel. There was now scarcely a man, woman, or child who did not know the story of Eliza’s flight from
Kentucky, the most famous scene of the most famous book of the century. In the space of
barely two paragraphs, the young slave woman crossed the frozen river, leaping from floe to floe, her bleeding feet staining the ice, “but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up the bank.”
⁷³

The truth was much more complicated than Stowe’s fiction. The
Ohio River was not a bright line between freedom and slavery but a muddy and disputed no-man’s-land. The farmers and
merchants of southern Ohio made their fortunes shipping corn, wheat, and salt pork downstream to feed the plantations’ black field hands—whose sweat and toil, in the form of stacked cotton bales,
came back up the river to feed the textile mills of the North. Many of these Ohioans would have been more than happy to return Eliza and her baby, or any other
fugitive slaves for that matter, to their master. Few of Stowe’s admirers cared to notice that she had made her villain, the sadistic slave master Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee. Likewise, few heard Kelley when she said that North and South shared equally in the guilt of
slavery.
⁷⁴

In fact, only a tiny portion of the millions of Northerners who read Stowe’s novel even called themselves abolitionists. The term was still an ugly epithet for most people, connoting dubious patriotism and, perhaps worse, a most un-American tendency to trespass upon the affairs of one’s fellow citizens. Abolitionists were attacked by mobs not just in the slave states but also
in Boston and Philadelphia. The eminent Yankee
intellectual
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., condemned them as traitors to the white race—as he sneeringly put it, “ultra melanophiles.” Even the Western Reserve’s congressman,
Joshua Giddings, the most extreme antislavery politician in the national legislature, refused to wear the badge of outright abolitionism until after the war began.
⁷⁵

Among those few Americans who did fully embrace the cause, almost none accepted the idea that blacks and whites were equal intellectually, much less that they ought to be equal politically. At the antislavery meeting in New Lisbon, Kelley nearly lost her audience when she declared that black men and women were no different from whites under the skin. (Even James Garfield, despite eventually becoming an outspoken advocate of full
civil
rights for blacks, was never able to overcome an inward distaste for them as people.)
⁷⁶
Indeed, many antislavery Republicans prided themselves on belonging to the true “white man’s party,” since the
Democrats planned to “flood
Kansas and the other
territories with Negro slaves.” Keeping blacks out of white Northerners’ midst was a good reason for opposing slavery’s expansion.
⁷⁷

What did gain wide currency among Northerners—even many who detested blacks and abolitionists in equal measure—was the self-congratulatory conceit that the North was the land of liberty and the South the land of slavery. On the eve of the war, the journalist and future landscape architect
Frederick Law Olmsted published a widely read series of articles and books recounting his experiences as a native
New Englander traveling through the slave states. He came home ready to admit that many blacks were happier and better provided for as slaves than they would be if free. What disturbed him were the habits that slavery bred among whites, “habits which, at the North, belong only to bullies and ruffians.” In Charleston, he found “police machinery, such as you never find in towns under free government: citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted
cannon, and daily public whippings.” Southern whites, he said, ridiculed the very idea of
democracy. Their brutally hierarchical society, oppressive to poor whites as well as blacks, made the ruling class not just arrogant and backward but indolent, lacking all of the “practical industry and capacity for personal observation and reflection” that many Northerners cultivated. Even more disturbing, Olmsted asked whether
Northerners, out of their fear of undermining national unity, had “so habituated themselves to defend the South that they have become … blind to the essential evils and dangers of despotism.”
⁷⁸