Bound for Canaan (48 page)

If Parker's resistance had seriously damaged the Fugitive Slave Law, as Douglass passionately wished, the wound was not readily evident. Unconfirmed rumors later spread through the South that black women had castrated the fallen Edward Gorsuch and cut his body to pieces. The night
after the Christiana “tragedy,” as newspapers quickly dubbed it, a fiftyman posse was mustered at Lancaster. It was joined by gangs of proslavery hoodlums from Maryland, crews of Irish laborers, and eventually by contingents of United States marines and Philadelphia policemen to comb the countryside around Christiana in search of anyone who was implicated in the confrontation. They spread out across the autumn countryside, forcing their way into the homes of blacks and whites alike, threatening anyone who was thought to have anything to do with the Underground Railroad, arresting scores of men on suspicion, with little concern for constitutional niceties. As one eyewitness put it, “blacks were hunted like partridges.”

3

Humiliated in Boston and again at Christiana, the federal government was now determined to break the back of Yankee opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law, this time in the abolitionist heartland. As vigilante gangs continued to storm across Lancaster County, another confrontation was about to begin in the antislavery citadel of Syracuse, New York, where on October 1 radical abolitionists were gathering for the Liberty Party's national convention. No one had forgotten that back in February, Daniel Webster had pointedly warned that the federal government was prepared to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law even “here in Syracuse, in the midst of the next Anti-Slavery Convention.”

Nevertheless, William Henry, who was known to everyone for some reason as “Jerry,” had reason to feel secure as he went about his work at Morrell's barrel-making shop. An athletic, squarely built mulatto with a striking head of red hair, the forty-year-old Henry was a skilled cooper who had come to Syracuse a year or two earlier, after escaping from slavery in Missouri. If a fugitive could expect to feel safe anywhere in the United States, it was in Syracuse, a bustling and progressive city of twenty-two thousand located in the heart of the Burned Over District. The local black population was small but militant. White antislavery forces were well-organized, and the most powerful abolitionist in the country, Gerrit Smith, lived just a few miles away in Peterboro. For years
the city had been a key switching point for the Underground Railroad, receiving hundreds of northbound passengers via Elmira and Albany, and routing them, depending on the season, either directly to ports on Lake Ontario, or westward to Buffalo. The previous autumn, a public meeting chaired by the mayor himself had actually proclaimed Syracuse an “open city” for fugitive slaves. Henry had no way of knowing, as September turned into October, that a Missourian named James Lear had arrived in town, and that the United States commissioner had already sent a posse of federal marshals to arrest him.

Henry was at work on a barrel when the deputies burst in on him. Taking him from behind, they threw him onto the floor, and had shackles around his feet and hands before he realized what was happening. They then sped him in a hired carriage to the office of U.S. Commissioner Joseph F. Sabine. As it did for countless Northerners, the Fugitive Slave Law put Sabine in a complex and morally uncomfortable position. He regarded himself as an abolitionist in principle, but he also believed firmly in obedience to the law. Unlike most other abolitionists, however, the fate of fugitives actually hinged on what he did. His solution may, in its own private way, have been the single most subversive event of the day. He issued the writ for Henry's arrest without demur, but then informed his wife, who immediately reported the news to Charles Wheaton, a member of the city's antislavery Vigilance Committee. Wheaton, in turn, raced to the Congregational church, where the Liberty Party convention was under way. “A slave has been arrested!” Wheaton breathlessly announced.

An “impulsive citizen” raced from the convention to the Presbyterian church and began tolling the bell, a signal that danger was at hand. Soon every church bell in the city, except that of the conservative Episcopalians, was ringing. En masse, furious convention delegates, blacks and whites, local politicians, and the merely curious flooded into the street and streamed toward Sabine's office, in the Townsend Block, a large brick building that opened onto the Erie Canal. The canal was the commercial spine of the city, having more or less brought Syracuse into being when it was cut through to nearby Lake Onondaga, in the 1820s, and it continued to carry a steady traffic of packets and freight boats through the very center of town. Among the first to reach Sabine's second floor office were Jermain Loguen and Gerrit Smith, who immediately declared himself ready to serve as Henry's counsel. From the very start, Loguen and Smith
were thinking of a rescue. But the atmosphere was chaotic. So many people had pushed into the cramped office that Smith and Loguen were physically pressed up against the commissioners' deputies. Every time that Lear, the Missourian—who wore a pair of pistols stuck prominently in his trousers—attempted to speak, Henry's supporters began to jeer. Sabine tried unsuccessfully to keep some kind of order, then after an hour simply gave up and adjourned for lunch, leaving the abolitionists in the courtroom with the prisoner and the virtually immobilized deputies.

Seizing the moment, Henry impulsively hurled himself across the table, scattering papers and pistols in every direction. The crowd instantly opened a path for him. When Marshal Henry Allen tried to follow, someone grabbed him by the throat as the crowd closed again behind the fugitive. Still shackled at the wrists, Henry stumbled down the stairs and into the street, and set off running. Friends and enemies alike took up the chase. A black barber named Prince Jackson kept pace with him, trying to fend off anyone who tried to grab him. For half a mile Henry managed to stay ahead of his pursuers. Two constables finally tackled him on the Lock Street Bridge, where it crossed the canal. When more constables came up a cart was commandeered, and the lawmen heaved the spent man into it. Two of them sat on his bloody and battered body, one across his legs and the other on his back, to hold him down as they jogged triumphantly back the way they had come. The sight sent waves of revulsion through men and women who only minutes before had gazed upon Henry's desperate flight as passively as if they were witnessing a piece of theater rather than a man running for his life. “I have just witnessed a scene (Heaven save me from a repetition) that has frozen my heart's blood,” one eyewitness wrote the next day. “I have seen the perdition of slavery enacted in Syracuse, in the heart of New York…I have heard his frantic wail, his scream of despair. O such a look! O such a wail!”

Instead of returning to Sabine's office, Henry was taken to the more secure police station on Clinton Square, also alongside the canal. Marshal Allen, deciding that a show of force was necessary to deter any attack by the abolitionists, called on the county sheriff, a Democratic Party hack named William Gardner, for help. Gardner, evading the proper channel of command, thereupon went to his fellow Democrat, Lieutenant Prendergast of the National Guard, who took it upon himself to muster the local militia, as well as the guard and a company of artillery. When the
tireless Charles Wheaton of the Vigilance Committee learned what was happening, he appealed in person to Colonel Origen Vandenburgh, the commander of the Fifty-first National Guard Regiment, and a man of presumed abolitionist sympathies. The two men hurried together to the armory, where Prendergast was already in the process of arming the troops. Vandenburgh ordered the guard to disarm and disband immediately. “My soldiers will never be kidnappers with my consent,” he angrily declared. At this, the militia and the artillery also stood down, forestalling what might have turned into a street battle that would have dwarfed the skirmish at Christiana, and which no one wanted, except perhaps the deflated Prendergast.

While these events were taking place, in a doctor's office a few blocks away between twenty and thirty underground men and other abolitionists, including Jermain Loguen and Gerrit Smith, were laying out a plan of rescue. The great majority were white men of business, craftsmen, ministers, by no means the city's elite (who were no friends to abolitionism, for the most part), but solid and respectable, and thoroughly radicalized by what they had already seen. Some counseled restraint. Jerry might possibly be saved by legal argument, some said. Sabine might even free him after the hearing. The pacifist Reverend Samuel J. May, whose home was the main Underground Railway station in Syracuse, abhorred the prospect of violence. Smith, however, argued with his usual vigor for “bold and forcible” action that would serve as an example of resistance for abolitionists everywhere. Loguen too wanted to fight no matter what the consequences. The others listened with deep respect. They all knew that Loguen could have gotten away to Canada, but had stayed at the risk of his own freedom to preach against the Fugitive Slave Law. Good men must stand their ground against federal tyranny, Loguen insisted. They were engaged in a war whether they realized it or not, and they must win it. “If white men won't fight,” he told them, “let fugitives and black men smite down marshals and commissioners—anybody who holds Jerry—and rescue him or perish.” Loguen's eloquence won the day. It was decided that Henry had to be taken away from his captors without delay. The plan was as simple as a sledgehammer: a company of picked men would rush the police station, break in the doors and windows, and overwhelm the deputies inside. With this decided, men were dispatched immediately to obtain a swift horse, a strong buggy, and a bold driver, and to collect the necessary tools from
Wheaton's hardware store. As they left the meeting, Reverend May, who finally embraced the plan wholeheartedly, was heard to pray, “If anyone is to be injured, let it be against us, and not by us.”

The police station was on the ground floor of an ordinary brick office building. The comparatively large courtroom could be entered directly from the street, and was packed with agitated abolitionists when Henry's hearing resumed at about 5:30
P.M.
Behind the courtroom lay an inner office, and beyond that a still smaller chamber with barred windows, where Henry was being held, shackled at the feet this time, under heavy guard. Outside, between twenty-five hundred and three thousand people—more than 10 percent of the city's population—filled Clinton Square and spilled across the nearby bridges over the canal. The mood was fervid and expectant, though for exactly what, not many in the crowd yet knew, except for the few dozen men, perhaps fifty in all, who slipped toward the police station with Wheaton's tools under their coats. A minister named Johnson began orating from a window on the third floor of the police station itself. When the sheriff tried to silence him, Johnson roared so that everyone could hear, “As you command me to stop, I shall begin again, to test the liberty of speech!” As other antislavery orators harangued the crowd, voices by the hundreds chanted, “Let him go! Let him out!”

Shortly before 8
P.M.
, a voice from somewhere in the crowd shouted, “Bring him out!” It was the signal. A moment later, a stone smashed through a window, showering glass over the lawyers, marshals, and constables. More stones began to fly, so many of them rocketing through the courtroom's windows that Sabine abruptly turned Henry over to Marshal Allen and declared the court adjourned. The band of chosen men, blacks mingled together with whites, some of them with cork smeared on their faces, began rushing toward the building, pulling clubs, axes, and iron bars from beneath their coats as they ran. Loguen was probably somewhere among them, and possibly in the lead, although he later denied it. “Don't leave without the Negro!” supporters shouted.

Within minutes, the rescuers forced their way into the courtroom. Doors and windows were smashed, furniture splintered. The marshals and their deputies, perhaps twenty in all, retreated into the inner office and barred the door. Almost immediately, a miller from Oswego named William Salmon appeared with a party of men carrying a thick, fourteen-foot plank. Using it as a battering ram, they charged at the door, with the
burly Salmon shouting, “Go ahead boys! Oswego is here and will stand by you!” The door soon gave way beneath their charge, and the rescuers poured through, sweeping the vastly outnumbered constables in a stumbling tangle before them. Marshal Allen, deciding for himself that the battle was already lost, borrowed an overcoat and fled ignominiously through the crowd to a nearby hotel.

Another door remained between Henry and his rescuers. This was defended by Henry Fitch, a tough U.S. deputy marshal from Rochester, and several very frightened constables. Fitch opened the door slightly and pointed his pistol at one of the rescuers. Someone struck him hard with one of Wheaton's iron bars, breaking the marshal's arm, and knocking the gun out of his hand. In agony, and terrified for his life, Fitch leaped out of the north window of the room, a drop of nine or ten feet, and, landing on the tow path of the canal, disappeared into the night. Inside the office, most of the remaining lawmen had covered themselves with boxes or crowded into the closet, leaving the shackled Henry alone on the floor, shouting to anyone who could hear, “Here I am, don't hurt me!” Suddenly all the gas lights went out, and the entire office was plunged into darkness. Shots rang out. “Come up, gentlemen—they've fired all their powder!” someone yelled.

“Hallo, Jerry!” one of the remaining marshals shouted. “You can quell this riot. Get out! Why the devil don't you go?”

“How can I—you've chained me!” Jerry yelled back.

The lawman took hold of Jerry and shoved him through the door and into the hands of his rescuers. The mob in the outer office roared victoriously. Several of the rescuers put their hands under the stunned and bloodied fugitive and carried him downstairs to the street. They were not shy in their triumph. Before they even got Henry's shackles off, they defiantly brandished him before a crowd of local dignitaries who were gathered at the front door of the Syracuse House hotel. Finally someone thought to shove Henry into a waiting carriage, and he was driven by a roundabout route to the home of a black family, the Watkinses, where a blacksmith cut off his chains.