Negroes and the Gun Read online

  The fugitive Horace at Mechanicsburg, Ohio, the other day, who taught the slave catchers from Kentucky that it was safer to arrest white men than to arrest him, did a most excellent service to our cause. Parker and his noble band of fifteen at Christiana, who defended themselves from kidnappers with prayers and pistols, are entitled to the honor of making the first successful resistance to the Fugitive Slave Bill. But for that resistance, and the rescue of Jerry and Shadrack, the man-hunters would have hunted our hills and valleys, here—with the same freedom with which they now hunt their own dismal swamps.31

  It was not just Douglass who championed violent resistance against the fugitive slave law. In 1846, white abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, advocating distribution of arms to fugitive slaves. Giddings saw resistance to slavery as fully within the boundaries of self-defense, declaring, “If a slave killed his master in a struggle to prevent his arrest in Ohio, he would be justified in the eyes of the law and I would call him a good fellow.” Untroubled by the implications, Ohio senator Thomas Morris cast resistance to slave catchers as the ultimate political violence, declaring that the kidnapping of blacks by slave catchers was “an act of war.”

  The technical legal claims here are intriguing. The Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution plainly recognized slave catchers’ rights through the euphemism that “person[s] held to service or labor” had to be “delivered up” to their masters. This constitutional provision and its 1793 statutory embellishment had no enforcement mechanism, and many free-state laws defied slave catchers. Pennsylvania, for example, made slave catching a crime and indicted man-hunters who chased quarry into the Keystone State. Under this sort of state law, which underscored the violence inherent in the slave catcher’s craft, resistance using deadly force seems fairly within the boundaries of self-defense.

  Even with passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which put federal authority explicitly behind the claims of slave catchers who ventured into free states, black fugitives and some radical white abolitionists remained untroubled by any theoretical weakness in their stance of righteous violence. This sentiment is evident in an editorial from the Pittsburgh Gazette, which responded to the 1850 law advising blacks “to arm themselves and fight for freedom if need be, but not to run away.”32

  Although most slaves did not escape, it is a testament to the spirit and grit of those who did that the storied Henry Clay of Kentucky stomped to the floor of the United States Senate in 1849 to rant that “it posed insecurity to life itself for slave-owners to cross the Ohio River to recover fugitives.” That same year, decrying abolitionist agitation and fugitive resistance, John C. Calhoun agonized that “citizens of the South in their attempt to recover their slaves now meet resistance in every form.” A constituent complained to Calhoun that Pennsylvania’s antikidnapping law made slave property insecure and that rumor of the law had drawn slaves to escape from the upper south in gangs.33

  During this same period, there was a great deal of abolitionist agitation directly on the question of arms for self-defense. As early as 1838, the abolitionist paper the Liberator, decried state laws that deprived free Negroes of the basic rights of citizens like suffrage, assembly, and the “right to bear arms.”34

  After the Compromise of 1850, the pacifist voices that had dominated commentary in the Liberator were challenged by more aggressive types who advanced the constitutional right to keep and bear arms not merely as an incident of citizenship, but also in practical terms, as a response to slave catchers. In 1851, abolitionist firebrand Lysander Spooner connected higher constitutional principle to the practical security interests of fugitive slaves, declaring:

  The Constitution contemplates no such submission, on the part of the people, to the usurpations of the government, or to the lawless violence of its officers. On the contrary, it provides that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” This constitutional security for the right to keep and bear arms implies the right to use them—as much as a constitutional security for the right to buy and keep food would have implied the right to eat it. The Constitution, therefore, takes it for granted that, as the people have the right, they will also have the sense to use arms, whenever the necessity of the case justifies it.35

  In 1853, the New England Antislavery Convention pressed the finer technical point of precisely how the Constitution guaranteed fugitive slaves a right to arms. Arguing that the word persons in the Representation Clause of the Constitution (where slaves were counted as 3/5 a person for determining seats in Congress) was intended to mean slaves and therefore “all the guarantees of personal liberty given to persons belong to slaves also.” From there, the convention reasoned, fugitive slaves were among the “people” who “were guaranteed the right to bear arms and of course by implication to use them.”36

  The rhetorical skirmishes over the idea of armed self-defense carried none of the risks of actually fighting with a gun, and there are many reminders that using a gun in self-defense was no guarantee of a good or just result. Certainly the gods were distracted in 1836 when a fugitive in southern Ohio grabbed a rifle to protect his family against a gang of kidnappers. He used his single shot to no avail, was quickly subdued, and then stomped to death. That same year, two black fugitives managed to acquire rifles and escape from Missouri into Illinois. They poached some livestock and were cooking dinner when pursuers surrounded them and demanded their surrender. The fugitives decided to fight. The decision left one of them dead and the other apprehended on charges of escape and attempted murder for wounding one of the slave catchers.

  Successful and not, continuing episodes of resistance show a budding culture of gun ownership and a commitment to self-defense. Civil-rights activist James Forman would comment in the 1960s that blacks in the movement were widely armed and that there was hardly a black home in the South without its shotgun or rifle.37 Anyone surprised by this should reflect on the early episodes of entire well-armed communities turned out against slave catchers in defense of fugitives.

  This is evident in 1836, in Swedesboro, New Jersey, where a black family was captured by a professional bounty hunter and held in the basement of a local tavern. A little before midnight, forty black men—neighbors and friends of the captives—armed with rifles, muskets, and pistols, riddled the building with bullets and grape shot. The tavern owner, now ad hoc warden, got the worst of the deal. His building was ventilated and his return fire hit no one except a white bystander.

  The armed community was in evidence again when fugitive Thomas Fox of Red Oak, Ohio, was apprehended by bounty hunters from Kentucky. The commotion brought out his neighbors, who confronted the Southerners and freed Fox. Several weeks later, on a Sunday morning, slave agents returned to the neighborhood with reinforcements and dragged a black man out of church. An armed, interracial group of rescuers assembled on horseback and interdicted the kidnappers, who released their black quarry without a fight.38

  But this respite was only temporary. The Kentuckians were soon back across the border, this time eighteen strong and well-armed. They quickly encountered an armed group dead set against any neighbors being carted back to slavery. This time, the slave catchers identified a young woman, Sally Hudson, as a runaway and moved to seize her. When Sally tried to flee, one of them shot her in the back. This was deemed so cowardly by both sides that it actually diffused the conflict. To the disgust of local abolitionists, an Ohio grand jury refused to indict the man who killed Sally Hudson.

  Fig. 2.5. Farmer with a gun. (Illustration by E. W. Kemble, from Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories [1900].)

  When racial violence broke out in Cincinnati in 1841, blacks took up arms and fought the surging mob. Initial press reports claimed multiple white casualties, but final assessment showed that only one man, an instigator from across the river in Kentucky, was killed.39

  The scene repeats in 1844 in Chester County, Penns
ylvania, where slave catchers again encountered an assembly of resisters. The slavers’ target was a black man named Tom who lived with his family on the Myers’ farmstead. As the man-hunters broke through the door of his cabin, Tom grabbed an ax and gave battle. One of the slave catchers fired his pistol in an attempt to cow Tom and his wife, now wielding an ax of her own. The warning shot went astray and actually hit one of the slave catchers.

  The gunshot also alerted Tom’s neighbors, who ran to help, carrying guns, axes, and garden tools. Three of the slave catchers ran to seek help for their wounded man. Two of them stayed behind, guarding Tom and nervously threatening death to anyone who interfered. Sensing his advantage, one bold black man, pistol in hand, stepped forward, seized Tom, and freed him. Their bluff called, the slavers now implored some whites in the crowd to protect them from the circling Negroes. The threat was staunched when a constable arrived and arrested the Southerners for kidnapping.40

  The willingness of neighbors and loosely knit groups to come to the rescue sometimes exceeded their effectiveness. But the fashion in which they appeared shows a more than incidental rate of gun ownership. In 1847, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, ten fugitive slaves were captured by slave agents from Maryland. They had been hiding out on the farm of a Pennsylvania abolitionist. After an initial confrontation of bluff, bluster, and retreat, both sides sent for reinforcements. Responding to the call, close to forty armed black men arrived on horseback from nearby Harrisburg. This time the putative rescuers were ineffective. The slavers’ reinforcements had arrived first, taken their human property, and were already away.

  Sometimes loose confederations of ordinary folk with guns propped up a failed official response. Beginning in 1847, Kentucky slaver John Norris started a years-long quest in pursuit of a family of slaves who had escaped from his Boone County farm. Eventually, Norris captured several of his runaways, who were living free in Michigan. Traveling with his prize through Indiana, Norris encountered difficulties in South Bend, where more than one hundred residents, armed with guns and clubs, slowed him long enough for local abolitionists to get a sheriff’s order for release of the blacks. Norris and his cohorts brandished pistols and denied the sheriff’s authority.

  Defying the sheriff turned out to be easier than confronting the second wave of black men who arrived in response to some unrecorded call for assistance. Variously reported as seventy-five to four hundred strong, the group, organized in military fashion, entered the village “in companies.” Against this show of force, Norris gave up the chase, retreated south, and filed a lawsuit that dragged on for seven years before granting him a small measure of relief.41

  In the border states of the lower North, slaves often depended on the help of sympathetic whites who typically had better resources and easier access to firearms. A century later, strategists in the modern civil-rights movement would worry about political violence alienating sympathetic whites. There was some risk of that under slavery as well. Abolitionists were a slim minority of the population. Many were avowed pacifists. But some abolitionists actually were friendly to violent slave resistance.

  In 1838, for instance, Illinois abolitionist Gamaliel Bailey applauded fugitive slaves who defended themselves with guns. Moving beyond rhetoric, a Pennsylvania abolitionist in Indiana County warned slave catchers to be careful of local Negroes, “as they were armed, had guns and knives and most likely would fight.” What he didn’t tell the man-hunters was that two of these fugitives worked on his farm and he was certain they were armed because he gave them the guns.42

  Negroes with guns were a fleeting comfort for abolitionist missionary Jarvis Bacon, who in 1851 attempted to guide a group of fugitives out of Kentucky to a free labor settlement in Ohio. The escape plan was detected by patrollers before it really got started. Obviously thwarted, the “well-armed” fugitives still decided to fight, killing one of the pursuing posse and wounding four others.43

  In a high-profile incident in 1852, two slaves owned by a Georgia congressman were aided in flight from Washington, DC, by white abolitionist William Chaplin. Hidden in Chaplin’s carriage, the fugitives were jolted to a halt when district police jammed a fence rail into the carriage spokes and stormed in.

  The episode is notable because of the technology. Many early reports of fugitive resistance describe the discharge of firearms followed by hand-to-hand combat. The implication is that the resisters were armed with common, single-shot firearms. Developing repeating technology was relatively expensive and probably harder for free blacks and fugitives with meager resources to acquire.

  Reflecting the status of their patron, Chaplin’s charges had state-of-the-art revolvers. As the lawmen pounced, Chaplin and the fugitives fired in anger and got an equal measure in return. They exchanged nearly thirty shots before the slaves and Chaplin were finally subdued. That same week, two captured slaves in transit back to Maryland pulled out hidden pistols and opened fire in a renewed attempt to escape. These men, it seems, were equipped with single-shot technology and with guns empty, were easily subdued.44

  The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law gave Negroes new things to worry about. It pressed government agents and even civilians into the aid of slave catchers. This amplified threat was both practical and symbolic, and blacks responded with renewed vigilance. When a black man was apprehended in New York and remitted to his owner, the community reacted by “arming to the teeth” and forming mutual-aid committees against further incidents.

  The new fugitive law also escalated the war of rhetoric. Hyperbolic abolitionists warned that even white people were at risk. One radical pamphleteer argued, “there are in the South, already, slaves as white as any of us, who have in our veins the purest Saxon blood. . . . The whiter the slave—especially if it is a female—the more extravagant the price. The more desirable the victim.”

  There was actually a flash of this in New Albany, Indiana, where an apparently white woman, her daughter, and her grandson were handed over to an Arkansas slaver whose claim satisfied the legal formalities. This type of incident seems rare. More common was the objection of Northern whites that the new law dragooned them as “slaves” into the man-hunting business.

  The Fugitive Slave Law also chased some blacks farther north into Canada. In 1850, a body of 150 fugitives fled Pennsylvania, determined to fight anyone who stood in their way. According to one sympathetic report, “many are armed and resolve to be free at all hazard, an attempt to arrest them would be no child’s play.”

  The pressure of the 1850 law also pushed more blacks to advocate political violence. In Chicago, a group of three hundred assembled to endorse a pact of mutual self-protection against stalking slavers. Their preamble expressed a preference to avoid violence, but the operative provisions promised that no matter what the law said, “if driven to the extreme,” these Negroes would “defend themselves at all hazards.”

  In Ohio, a similar meeting produced the resolution that “all colored people go continually prepared that they may be ready at any moment to offer defense in behalf of their liberty.” This reference to going prepared does not explicitly mention firearms. But in Philadelphia, the articulated resolve of a similar group following an abduction of a well-known member of the community was plain. They advised the “colored race to arm themselves and shoot down officers of the law” complicit in the capture of fugitives.

  Some of the most explicit advocacy of political violence came from interracial gatherings of antislavery groups. In December 1850, short months after the new statute was passed, Robert Purvis, a black conductor on the Underground Railroad, spoke candidly to the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Black men, said Purvis, had a responsibility to arm themselves. Purvis argued that by standing up with arms and defending themselves, blacks would show the world that they were men and “not worthy of slavery.”

  Some in the audience were avowed pacifists and urged Purvis to follow the example of Christ. Purvis’s answer was earnestly practical. “What can I do when my family are assault
ed by kidnappers? I would fly and by every means endeavor to avoid it, but when the extremity comes, I welcome death rather than slavery and by what means God and nature have given me, I will defend myself and my family.”

  In strongholds of aggressive abolitionism, the press openly urged fugitive slaves: “Arm yourselves at once. If the catcher comes, receive him with powder and ball with dirk or bowie knife or whatever weapon may be most convenient. Do not hesitate to slay the miscreant if he comes to re-enslave you or your wife or child.” Radical abolitionist Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings went further, claiming that blacks would not fight alone, that the white people of northern Ohio would engage in warfare to resist slave catchers and their federal-government enforcers.

  As the rhetorical war escalated, armed resistance continued apace. In 1850 in Lawrence County, Ohio, six “well-armed” fugitives fired on a group of Kentucky slave catchers. Like many of these incidents, once the single shot firearms were spent, the Negroes descended on their pursuers with clubs, leaving them for dead and then escaping into the forest.

  There was continued confirmation during this period that the results of violent resistance could vary dramatically. Pursued by slavers over the border into Indiana in 1853, a group of ten fugitives resisted with gunfire but were overcome by better-armed whites. With two slaves and one slaver wounded, the blacks were apprehended and carted back to an unrecorded fate.

  Under the new Fugitive Slave Law, hunters of human property could now demand the assistance of United States Marshals. But this federal “authority” made little difference to blacks fighting for their lives. A willingness to defy the federal government and fight the marshals too was evident in 1850, in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where a free black couple opened fire on a marshal and posse who were pursuing a fugitive in their care. Their firearms spent, the free man and his wife commenced fighting with axes, giving the fugitive cover to escape. Later, they displayed wounds from the fight as badges of honor.