The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861 080717730X, 9780807177303

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THE MOST ABSOLUTE ABOLITION

AN TISL AVERY, ABOLITION, AND THE ATL AN TIC WORLD R. J. M. Blackett and Edward Rugemer Series Editors James Brewer Stewart Editor Emeritus

THE MOST ABSOLUTE ABOLITION RUNAWAYS, VIGILANCE COMMITTEES, AND THE RISE OF REVOLUTIONARY ABOLITIONISM 1835–1861

JESSE OLSAVSKY Louisiana State University Press Baton Rouge

Published by Louisiana State University Press lsupress.org Copyright © 2022 by Louisiana State University Press All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations used in articles or reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any format or by any means without written permission of Louisiana State University Press. Designer:  Andrew Shurtz Typefaces:  Thorowgood Grotesque, Adobe Caslon Cover illustrations by Henry Louis Stephens, circa 1863. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names:  Olsavsky, Jesse, author. Title:  The most absolute abolition : runaways, vigilance committees, and the rise of revolutionary abolitionism, 1835–1861 / Jesse Olsavsky. Other titles:  Runaways, vigilance committees, and the rise of revolutionary abolitionism, 1835–1861 Description:  Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2022] | Series: Antislavery, abolition, and the Atlantic World | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:  LCCN 2022005034 (print) | LCCN 2022005035 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7730-3 (cloth) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7836-2 (pdf ) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7835-5 (epub) Subjects:  LCSH: Antislavery movements—United States—History— 19th century. | Vigilance committees—United States—History— 19th century. | Abolitionists—United States—History—19th century. | Fugitive slaves—United States—History—19th century. | Underground Railroad. Classification:  LCC E449 .O48 2022 (print) | LCC E449 (ebook) | DDC 973.7/114—dc23/eng/20220323 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005034 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005035

To Grammy

CONTENTS ACKN OWLEDGMEN TS  ix IN TRODUCTION

The “Noble System”  1 ONE

The Politics and Political Economy of Running Away  15 T WO

Radical and Practical Abolition, 1835–1849  50 THREE

The Pedagogy of Radical Abolitionism, 1850–1861  87 FOUR

All Shall Be Thrown Down  124 FIVE

Toward Revolutionary Abolitionism  162 CON CLUSION

Marching Onward  200 N OTES  213 INDEX  275

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The debts one accrues while writing a book are too great to fully enumerate. There are, however, a few individuals and institutions I must duly acknowledge for the tremendous help they have given. Special thanks to Titas Chakraborty for reading multiple drafts of this work, critiquing it, arguing with it, and ultimately improving it. Comradeship matters. I also appreciate Edward Baptist, Michel Gobat, Niklas Frykman, and Dick Oestreicher, all of whom have pushed this project on its way. Many thanks to Marcus Rediker for allowing me a unique amount of intellectual freedom as a PhD student. Funding for this research has been generously provided by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Particular acknowledgment must be made to the Lapidus Center at the Schomburg Center, and former director Sylviane Diouf; it was there in 2017 that the argument for this project finally came together. Michael O. West offered numerous comments, criticisms, and suggestions over the past few years, not to mention much support and solidarity. For over a decade, Peter Linebaugh has been my teacher; apart from his insights, the many, many years I have toiled and troubled trying to poeticize and preserve peoples’ histories the way he does has itself made me a better writer. Suchetana Chattopadhyay—role model of a politically engaged, academically rigorous intellectual—gave much encouragement under quite strenuous writing conditions. I am extremely grateful to you all. Thanks to Manisha Sinha, Douglas Edgerton, and Graham Hodges, from whom I have received useful advice and learned much from their powerful books of what there is to know about abolitionism and the Underground Railroad. Thanks also to Michael Roy for generously inviting me to contribute a chapter for his volume, Frederick Douglass in Context. The comments I received on that piece helped me further think through the role of Douglass in my book. ix

ACKN OWLEDGMEN TS

Richard Blackett and Edward Rugemer, editors of the Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World Series, carefully read through the book manuscript, giving many nitty-gritty editorial suggestions while pushing me to sharpen my arguments. Thanks to Kevin Brock for superb copyediting. Many thanks, too, to Paul Rand Dotson, editor in chief at LSU Press, for advice and assistance. Much gratitude to friends and colleagues for all kinds of support, whether reading my work, listening to me speak about it, or helping me learn. Particular thanks go to Aura Jirau Arroyo, Anne Bouie, and Manuel Yang for many dialogues and exchanges of ideas. The writing and revision of this book largely took place outside of the United States, part in Shanghai, where I live, and part in Kolkata, where I was unexpectedly stranded for most of the 2020 pandemic year. Thanks to colleagues at Duke Kunshan University, particularly to my department chair, Kolleen Guy, for intellectual and logistical support in a period of global crisis. Thanks to Selina Lai Henderson for collaboration with the “Freedom Lab,” which provided an intellectual space to develop our research agendas. Thanks also to Yue Qiu and Henry Stevens for help collecting, transcribing, and editing all the histories of the Haitian Revolution composed by American abolitionists. Our conversations on that project have also influenced this book. I am ever grateful and indebted to Utpal and Gouri Chakraborty. They assisted me in infinite ways at a time of immense stress, when I was stranded from home and trying to write without my research notes. There are many more adventures to come, I assure you. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Joe and Jackie, as well as siblings Matt, Kim, and Steve. They all provided a warm place to stay between exhausting research trips and have been supportive of my long moves across the world, among much else. Joe taught me the tenacious work ethic that I have used to get this far; Jackie imparted the creativity. Together, they made everything possible.

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THE MOST ABSOLUTE ABOLITION

INTRODUCTION

THE “NOBLE SYSTEM” The Underground Railroad stands as the most militant, egalitarian movement this country has ever seen. . . . There were vigilance committees, UR conductors, and stockholders. These brave and committed individuals were the technicians of the movement, while its heart and soul were always the runaways themselves. —Russel Maroon Shoatz, “The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America”

In 1854, runaway slave Isaac Williams and his two companions, Henry Banks and Kit Nickless, reached the Philadelphia office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Black abolitionist William Still greeted them. Still was the son of enslaved people who had gotten out of the South. Inspired by radical abolitionism at a young age, in 1847 he took up a job with the society. Officially, Still worked as clerk for its office; unofficially, from that same office, he headed the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, the organization that managed the Underground Railroad in the region. Still welcomed Williams and his two fugitive companions, asking the trio to tell their stories, which he diligently wrote down in a notebook.1 Williams, the leader of the trio, narrated to Still of having been enslaved in Virginia. He hated his master for his cruelty, and his master hated him for his intelligence. Upon learning of his master’s desire to sell him into the Deep South, Williams ran away, taking his friend Banks with him. They hid in the woods for two weeks before armed slavecatchers found, fought, caught, and imprisoned them; Williams received a severe bullet wound in the arm during the fray. Determined never to return to bondage, the pair broke out of prison and retreated “far into the forest” to live off the land as maroons. As Williams told 1

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Isaac Williams. From Isaac D. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow of Slave Life (East Saginaw, MI: Evening News Printing and Binding House, 1883).

Still, he had “heard, as most slaves had,” of maroons “and pretty well understood all the measures which had to be resorted to for security when entering upon so hazardous an undertaking.” After three months of hard liberation “among reptiles and wild animals,” he and Banks decided to trek north. Along the way, they met fellow enslaved worker Nickless and took him along. After “wandering around as the Jews did in the wilderness,” the trio arrived in Pennsylvania. They received assistance from Black abolitionist William Whipper as well as a “colored woman” who ran “one of the stations of the underground railway.” She directed them to the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, and thus to Still. In return for telling him their accounts of oppression and escape, Still entertained his guests with tales of other daring fugitives whom he had defended from the slavecatchers’ clutches.2 The story of escape did not end there. Slave hunters rarely remained in the South, so Still sent the fugitives on to Canada. First they went to the vigilance committee in New York City, which then sent them on to Jermain Loguen, a fugitive-abolitionist and head of the Syracuse Vigilance Committee. Loguen 2

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helped them get to Canada. Williams’s contacts with abolitionists hardly ceased once in Canada. There he met Hiram Wilson, a Canadian abolitionist who worked closely with various vigilance committees in the United States. One of Wilson’s acquaintances, abolitionist Benjamin Drew, interviewed Williams, to whom Williams happily denounced both slavery and the racism he faced in Canada. Drew later republished the interview in a widely circulated volume of testimonies by Canadian fugitives that exposed slavery for what it was.3 Impoverished and unable to work due to the disabling bullet wound in his arm, Williams returned to Syracuse at the invitation of Loguen, who arranged a free surgery from an abolitionist doctor. While Williams’s arm healed, Loguen secured him temporary employment as an antislavery lecturer. Williams also visited Rochester and had a long “interview” with Frederick Douglass, another fugitive who had been helped by vigilance committees and now worked with them.4 Williams subsequently worked with his hands, as a janitor, but had found his true calling with his voice, as an antislavery speaker. Much later, he became a writer. In 1883, Williams wrote his own slave narrative, contributing to a revival of that inherently abolitionist genre after Reconstruction. THE VIGIL AN CE COMMIT TEES Many freedom seekers, like Isaac Williams, educated others and learned to be freedom fighters by participating in vigilance committees (VCs). These were antislavery organizations, based largely in northeastern cities, devoted to protecting Black neighborhoods from police and slavecatchers and to helping runaways along the Underground Railroad. In public, they agitated with and on behalf of the fugitive, while covertly they assisted thousands to escape the “prison house” of slavery. The committees were the most inclusive organizations in an abolitionist movement itself notorious for being “motley” and “promiscuous.” Men and women, Black and white agitators, enslaved and free people, workers and men of property, children and disaffected intellectuals, all did the underground work of fugitive aid. The best-known abolitionists either had close ties to the committees or led them. Williams noted “such men as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips and many others,” including “Mr. William Sill [sic],” were “enrolled amongst its most active members.”5 Leading fugitive-abolitionists also had close ties to the committees. Through VC networks, Williams met fugitive thinkers like Loguen and Douglass. The committees thus provided a unique space for unusual activists to converge and learn from the experience 3

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of thousands of runaways who had firsthand knowledge of the institution they all fought to overthrow. Williams described VC networks as the “noble system whose aim it was to help those who would help themselves.”6 It was an organized “noble system,” a movement within the movement, whose impetus lay not in sentimental white reformers but in thousands of enslaved people who enacted “immediate” emancipation by running. Vigilance committees were distinctive organizations in their time, though scholars usually see them as unexceptional groups in an antebellum era fraught with vigilante violence. During this era, vigilante groups of all sorts mobilized ordinary citizens to uphold law, the Constitution, and civic morality in the absence of a highly centralized bureaucratic state.7 Temporary vigilante groups mobilized to punish criminals who had evaded the law or to suppress drunkenness and homelessness, but more often they organized to hunt fugitives, repress abolitionists, and antagonize immigrants as well as free African Americans. In assuming duties usually arrogated to a state, citizen-vigilantes were indeed enacting a “democratic” civil society, even as de Tocqueville conceived it at the time. But abolitionists aptly called much of that “democratic” vigilantism “repression by popular violence” and organized their VCs on an entirely novel basis.8 The express goal was not to publicly uphold law and Constitution, in addition to the forms of white supremacy that underwrote them, but to undermine these things from below. They defied the fugitive slave laws, sanctioned by the Constitution, and trampled the etiquette and institutions of white supremacy. Abolitionists did use the law when it was on their side, pushing legal definitions of freedom to their limits, but they obeyed only the “higher law” of conscience. They did not mobilize to affirm a really existing white democracy but to anticipate a possible liberation beyond slavery and white supremacy. This book investigates the VCs as a movement. In particular, it focuses on the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, the Boston Vigilance Committee, the New England Freedom Association, the New York Vigilance Committee, the New York State Vigilance Committee, the Syracuse Vigilance Committee, the Albany Vigilance Committee, the Elmira Vigilance Committee, Detroit’s Colored Vigilant Committee, and the Chatham Vigilance Committee as well as affiliated groups such as the Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League. VCs had sprung up on a temporary basis elsewhere, but the committees studied here were the longest lasting, the most efficient, and part of a single, well-coordinated network. Scholars have long ignored abolitionist VCs, depicting them as small, 4

IN TRODUCTION: THE “N OBLE SYSTEM ”

disorganized, or marginal to the movement to abolish slavery.9 Only recently, with revived interest in Black abolitionists, have they turned to the VCs that so many Black activists had been a part of.10 Recent studies of the New York VC by Eric Foner and by Graham Hodges have underlined the importance of that committee.11 Yet as Foner avers, “far more remains to be done in analyzing how vigilance networks functioned on the local level, and how they built connections with groups across the antebellum North.”12 This book tells the story of the entire eastern VC network, the “noble system” described by Isaac Williams, laying bare the many-faceted work of the committees in local urban settings as well as the transregional and international networks their members forged. Each of the VCs had a unique and revolutionary history, yet one can only recover that unique story by studying the committees as a single movement. They collaborated constantly and sent to each other information, personnel, and unconventional ideas, not to mention thousands of runaways. Relying upon common networks of support among middle-class reformers, intellectuals, enslaved people, women, and free workers, the committees extended the scope of abolitionist sentiment and activism. Moreover, located in the urban hotbeds of abolitionism and on the strategic roadways and waterways that the enslaved used to flee, the committees were well positioned to have an effect far beyond any single community and far beyond their numbers. Their influence upon abolitionism has long been underestimated. More than just a history of VCs, this book is a study of the abolitionist movement from the vantage point of the committees. Though the VCs were technically small organizations, they made their mark on all aspects of the radical phase of antislavery from the 1830s to the outbreak of civil war. At worst, scholars have seen the Underground Railroad as a semi-mythological romance. More often, they see it as a genuine counterforce to slavery but unorganized and occupying a distinct sphere from the “aboveground” antislavery movement.13 Historian Manisha Sinha has recently called the Underground Railroad the “abolitionist underground,” suggesting that long-accepted distinctions must be further scrutinized, if not demolished.14 Hence, this book puts the organized urban nexus of the Underground Railroad—the VCs—at the heart of abolitionism. As the only organizations that facilitated a continual dialogue with enslaved people, the committees became the educators of abolitionism. They organized substantial sectors of the Underground Railroad and made fugitive aid an issue of urgent concern among abolitionists long before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. They pushed antislavery activism beyond the realms of middle-class reform 5

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while working across feuding factions. Within the committees, activists from all walks of life debated all sorts of ideas, from feminism to prison abolition. They pioneered aggressive tactics and achieved notoriety in the nationwide conflicts of the 1850s. Members crafted ideas of abolition revolution and even tried to enact them. In short, by learning from and organizing fugitive resistance while uniting it to the antislavery cause, VC members radicalized their movement and helped heighten North-South contradictions to the point of no return. F UGITIVES AND ABOLITIONIST PEDAGOGY Immediately upon encountering activists working for the VCs, Isaac Williams entered a unique world of fugitive-abolitionist exchanges. Abolitionists taught fugitives. Still had encouraged Williams to articulate fully his suffering under slavery and his means of escape. But Still also told him tales of the escape of others. Williams had exchanges with Douglass, the movement’s most powerful orator and mind. Loguen pushed him to speak in public for the first time. Though Williams was nervous, “Logan [sic] told me what was expected and . . . I gave them a plain recital of the incidents of my life.” More significantly, fugitives taught abolitionists. Williams told his story to abolitionists, like Still and Drew, who wrote that story down. Fugitive knowledge thus became abolitionist knowledge, which helped activists assist other fugitives and made possible their incisive, accurate critiques of the slave economy. As a lecturer, Williams disseminated his knowledge and experience much more widely. Loguen sent him not only to churches to lecture but also “to the schools of the city,” where, as Williams noted, “I could narrate to some of the teachers parts of my history.”15 Williams educated the educators. Such dialogue and knowledge making happened daily through the VCs, as thousands of fugitives came to the committees, told their tales, and even entered the movement. Without such fugitive-abolitionist learning, northern activists would have been nearly blind to the realities of slavery and virtually isolated from the subjects who mattered most in any process of radical emancipation—the enslaved themselves. VCs brought fugitives and abolitionists into conversation in the context of a radicalized phase of antislavery struggle from the 1830s. Well before 1830, Black and white abolitionists protested, mostly separately, while enslaved people fled north, yet after 1831 fugitive resistance and abolitionism took on new significance.16 During those years, slavery expanded violently, underpinning America’s monstrous capitalist takeoff. After Nat Turner’s slave insurrection 6

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(1831), slaveholders turned toward increasingly violent repression and policing. With a harsh work regime, an oppressive police state, and limited prospects for insurrection, Black workers ran north in unprecedented numbers. Also around this time, activists such as David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison, dissatisfied with piecemeal forms of antislavery action, began agitating for immediate emancipation without compensation to the master. The new abolitionists who followed them—known as “immediatists” or “radical abolitionists”—were often interracial, defiant flaunters of convention, open to new ideas and tactics. Nevertheless, in the early 1830s, fugitives and abolitionists still fought slavery independently and in differing ways. Following their formation, after 1835, VCs brought together these two forms of antislavery action—underground resistance and aboveground protest—while organizing the escape of increasing numbers of people. The Underground Railroad was born through this convergence. It should come as no surprise then that VCs began using the term “Underground Railroad” in the 1840s to describe their activities.17 Alternatively, they used the term “practical abolitionism” to describe their work, stressing commitment to freeing people in practice, not simply in theory. The dialogue between fugitives and abolitionists went far beyond creating new tactics and terms; it was a pedagogical process that made the most radical dreams of abolition thinkable. All too often, the scholarly history of the Underground Railroad merely narrates daring stories of escape or uncovers how fugitives were secretly moved from one “station” to another. The fugitive underground is hardly ever treated as a radical space of learning, ideas, and imagination. Recent research has proven runaways to be creative aboveground antislavery thinkers, yet typically that work focuses on a few “exceptional” writers, even though thousands of fugitives fled slavery and exchanged ideas with abolitionists.18 By focusing instead on VCs, where fugitive-abolitionist dialogue was the most concentrated, this book tells a different story about abolitionism, one in which thousands of fugitives, not simply a few, were both the drivers of the movement and its teachers. The story begins with the ways runaways described slavery, escape, and ideas of liberation to VC members. Those discussions shaped antislavery organization and tactics, sharpened analyses of the “slave power,” and led to the creation of dozens of published slave narratives. More than that, fugitives drew all sorts of radicals into continuous dialogue. Women and men of all classes and races, “alienated from the established order,” came together and debated ideas. Though led by a committed core of fulltime activists, the VCs relied on hundreds of part-time activists who moved in and out of the 7

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committees, imbuing the groups with their own ideas and experiences while taking what they learned to other realms of activism and intellectual creation. Obeying only the “higher law,” such activists developed feminist and antiracist ideas, critiqued American Christianity and empire, wrote histories, sang songs, and engaged in utopian fantasies; some even advocated the abolition of prisons and police. Ralph Waldo Emerson described VC members as “abolitionists of the most absolute abolition,” and rightly so.19 VC members used terms such as “stations,” “agents,” and “conductors” to describe their practical work—terms still used to describe the Underground Railroad.20 But “absolute” abolitionists also likened VCs to “schools” where activists studied and revolutionary ideas burst forth. To write only of the daily business of concealing and conveying runaways with little mention of the revealing and relaying of iconoclastic ideals surely marginalizes a significant part of Underground Railroad history. REVOLU TIONARY ABOLITIONISM VC members were international revolutionaries in an age of global revolution. As slavery and colonialism expanded under the dictates of globalizing Western capital, so did resistance. The era began with the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) but continued through revolts in Algeria (1830s), Ireland (1840s), the 1848 revolutions, and the Indian Revolt (1857) before culminating in the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the largest insurrection in human history.21 Slavery in the Americas faced radical challenges as well. Continual slave revolts, in addition to metropolitan revolutions and anticolonial wars, incited abolition throughout much of the Caribbean and South America. Lecturing on the history of emancipation in these regions south of the US slave empire, VC activist Wendell Phillips exclaimed, “you will find that it [abolition] was in every instance, I think, the child of convulsion,” the child of war and revolution.22 American abolitionists, particularly VC members and fugitives, were aware of these international currents of convulsion and supported them. They traveled across international borders to evade slave hunters or to build solidarity with other movements. They antagonized an aggressive slave power that—feeling beleaguered by convulsive revolts, emancipations, slave escapes, and a new Republican Party hoping to halt its expansion—initiated a counterrevolution to preserve and expand slavery. That counterrevolution and the ensuing Civil War, which also provoked the flight of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people, culminated in the final overthrow of America’s chattel economy.23 8

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In the United States, as had been the case in Haiti, the runaway took the lead in pushing the nation from sectional crisis, to secession, to war, and then to emancipation.24 Recent scholarship, particularly the work of Kellie Carter Jackson, Richard Blackett, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, and Manisha Sinha, has proved this beyond a doubt.25 If enslaved people did not run, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 might not have been needed. After that law had been passed, every slave rendition, every incursion of slavecatchers into the North, further awoke northerners to the slave power’s control of America. Fugitives engaged in armed resistance to slavecatchers, which gave abolitionism a militant temper, sharpening its antagonism with the South. Historian Stanley Harrold has described such violence as a “war” that anticipated the Civil War.26 Freedom seekers remained ever a step ahead of the Republican Party, which historians sometimes see as the driver of emancipation. Republicans adhered to a program of “nonextension,” not abolition, of slavery, largely to secure western indigenous land for nonslaveholding white men. They clung to that vision even into the Civil War, only to be pushed to more extreme measures by wartime exigencies, abolitionists, Radical Republican congressmen, and the hundreds of thousands of people who ran to Union lines. As W. E. B. Du Bois claimed, politics followed in the footsteps of fugitives. VCs followed most closely behind.27 The committees played a significant role in this revolutionary process. They had been orchestrating slave escapes well before 1850, even leading ventures into the heart of the slave South to assist runaways. Slaveholders had pushed for a stronger fugitive slave statute, claiming that abolitionist organizations “enticed” their laborers to run. They were wrong only in assuming that the enslaved needed “enticing.” Throughout the 1850s and even before, VCs, having learned from fugitives, encouraged organized, armed self-defense. On occasions, they provided weapons to fugitives, though in a few cases fugitives armed VC members. The major violent confrontations of the period, such as the Christiana Insurrection (1851), the Jerry Rescue (1851), and the Burns Rendition (1854)—which awakened northerners to slaveholder aggression and enraged southerners over antislavery violence—had been orchestrated, in large part, by VCs.28 But more importantly, the VCs also engaged in numerous other rescues and confrontations that have been far less studied. John Brown’s attempted slave revolt in 1859, the greatest affront to a slave power that feared slave revolt above all, bore the imprint of committee practices. Brown had been a part of a VC and gathered personnel, knowledge, and funds for his revolt through VC networks. In fact, Douglass, Loguen, and Still, the Black abolitionists who had helped Williams, 9

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had all advised Brown in the pivotal months before his venture to Virginia. No event, apart from the election of Abraham Lincoln, did more to provoke the Civil War than John Brown’s Raid.29 VC activists did not halt at revolutionary practices; they developed theories of revolution as well. Usually, when scholars speak of “revolutionary” abolitionism, if they speak of it at all, they mean those, mainly Black abolitionists, willing to use violence.30 Historian Herbert Aptheker named such physical-force abolitionism “militant abolitionism.”31 What made abolitionism “revolutionary,” according to him, was not just its use of force but something more—its commitment to overthrowing an entire system of production and property, which itself reproduced and expanded a capitalist world economy. Moreover, Aptheker adds, abolitionists’ commitment to radical equality between races, genders, and sometimes even classes also gave it a revolutionary hue. Sinha also rigorously stresses this egalitarianism in addition to a strong internationalist sensibility.32 VC members certainly denied all rights to property in humans and were the most egalitarian among antebellum reformers in their ideas and practices. But they took a further conscious step. In various ways, they theorized abolition as a revolutionary process: that is, they theorized how political power, if not property, could be transferred from planters to freedpeople and how visions of equality might become real. They sympathetically observed the revolutions in the world around them. They studied the history of revolutions, looking particularly to the experience of Haiti and to maroons across the Americas for models. Examining their own practices with a critical eye, such abolitionists wondered if desertion from the plantations could spark America’s revolutionary transformation. Convinced that the enslaved can “do the work of emancipation better than others,” as runaway and VC activist Henry Highland Garnet put it, some foresaw a revolution led by the enslaved. Even VC members who followed the pacifist doctrines of Garrison, including Garrison himself, contributed to such revolutionary thought, a fact underemphasized by historians. In all cases, committee members did not foresee a revolution from above. As One Boston VC activist affirmed, with no little self-congratulation, abolitionists were pure international “revolutionists” who fought for an ideal of liberation, “which they placed so high above any mere question of nationality, that, for the sake of that idea, they arrayed themselves against their country’s unity.”33 Not all such activists desired the dissolution or overthrow of the Union, but if the Union had to fall for slavery to fall, they embraced that eventuality; some even tried to enact it. 10

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A Haitian-style revolution never came to the United States, as some VC activists predicted. Yet during the Civil War, even though some committees ceased operations, VC activists made significant contributions to unfolding events. They continued to help fugitives, contributing to the “general strike” of enslaved workers that helped end slavery. They criticized Republican racism and cautiousness and mobilized Black troops in the North. They recruited and sometimes led regiments of freedmen and fugitives. Because of his debilitating bullet wound from fighting slavecatchers, Williams could not join the Union armies during the war. But his close friend Kit Nickless, with whom he had escaped, did go to fight a liberation war against the old masters. Nickless saw active combat as part of a South Carolina regiment composed mainly of runaways. The slaveholders “had given it to him once,” Williams said of his friend, “and now he was returning the compliment.”34 The world had been turned upside down, if only for a moment. IN TO THE ABOLITIONIST ARCHIVE Movements produce knowledge. Seeking to make the world anew, they necessarily see the world in new ways. Essential to the praxis of the VCs was the creation of their own archives, whose innovations and limitations will be scrutinized throughout this book. Scholars of slavery rightly view the archival record as a site of distorted representations by the powerful for the powerful, which obscure the experiences of enslaved people, women especially.35 VC members and fugitives, however, by waging a cooperative liberation struggle, produced their own documents, papers, and printed works that countered the silencing by the powerful. They created an emancipatory archive of knowledge that brought new voices and vantage points to the fore. Those new voices had a commitment to what went unspoken—the truth. As one abolitionist told Williams before his first public lecture, the job of the antislavery speaker was to be “realistic.” Though Williams, while speaking, had been “affected to tears” and used, as he claimed, “language I was ordinarily never capable of,” he never strayed from the unexaggerated truth of “the wrongs done to my race.”36 As the archives produced by VC members and fugitives show, to be passionate and partisan hardly disqualifies the truth teller. The committees helped perhaps as many as 10,000 fugitives, many of whom immediately made their ideas known to the movement. Straight upon Williams’s arrival at the Philadelphia VC, Still “listened with great interest” while the fugitive told his story.37 This experience was far from unusual. VC members 11

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regularly listened to these new arrivals, recording detailed information on over 1,700 fugitives in unpublished records—remarkable sources that have been underutilized by historians. VC members noted all facets of fugitives’ experiences, from their work and modes of escape to their notions of liberation. Though these records were used for purely practical purposes at the time, they document the intellectual exchanges between runaways and VC activists. Fugitive truth telling did not cease there. Dozens of fugitives helped by VC members entered the movement. They lectured and wrote for abolitionist newspapers. Thirty-Four runaway-abolitionists associated with the committees—including such figures as Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry “Box” Brown—published slave narratives. Besides helping these formerly enslaved intellectuals free themselves, VC activists offered editorial advice and printed their narratives, playing an unacknowledged, behind-the-scenes role in shaping the genre. Certainly, northern abolitionists had a hand in shaping the fugitive archive, deciphering it in their own ways, as will be discussed in the following chapters. Nevertheless, thousands of runaways, not simply a few “exceptional” fugitive thinkers, exchanged and produced knowledge as well as informed both VC members and other abolitionists how to correctly understand slavery, freedom, and much else. Besides written interviews with fugitives, VC members produced other records. Extant meeting minutes, personal papers, and account books offer insights into committee activities and their internal debates. Similar records for antislavery and other reform societies reveal the ways that VC activists, fugitive and freeborn, intervened decisively in the ideas and practices of numerous radical organizations. VCs maintained a public presence in addition to their underground one. Occasionally, they held public meetings or fundraisers, which were recorded in local newspapers. Such published and unpublished documents reveal a great deal not only about the organization and networks of the committees but also about how lesser-known fugitives, women, and working-class activists contributed to the VCs and educated other abolitionists. Abolitionists wrote and wrote and wrote. In fact, few movements so small wrote so much. As seminal nineteenth-century Black historian George W. Williams admiringly wrote, these activists produced “uncounted millions of antislavery tracts, pamphlets, journals, and addresses” during “the entire period of [antislavery] agitation.”38 As a small movement, antislavery societies expected their rank and file to do double labor as practical organizers as well as public speakers and writers. In some ways, VC activists did triple and quadruple labor. For instance, Still ran the Philadelphia VC, worked as a clerk for 12

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the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, and also went on lecture tours, often recounting the stories that fugitives, like Isaac Williams, had told him. During Reconstruction, Still wrote a memoir about the Underground Railroad. Of course, fugitives had the added toil of escaping before becoming VC workers and antislavery intellectuals. Unlike Still, most members did not have salaried positions with antislavery societies. While they agitated, wrote, and ran, they also worked, as sailors and dockworkers, as housewives and ministers. Nevertheless, VC activists produced hundreds of lectures, books, pamphlets, articles, and memoirs, articulating their radical ideas, their precise understandings of slavery, and their preferential option for slave resistance. The subversive records produced by emancipatory movements can and do produce subversive interpretations of history. For instance, while imprisoned in Norfolk Prison in the 1950s, Malcolm X read numerous abolitionist pamphlets, which, by chance, had been left rotting in the Massachusetts prison’s library. What he found in those documents, he later recalled in his 1965 autobiography, were incisive portrayals of slavery’s extreme violence. He also recalled discovering in abolitionist documents an insurgent history, hitherto unknown to him, of fugitives, enslaved insurrectionists like Nat Turner, and militants like John Brown. In the same year as the publication of Malcolm X’s autobiography, civil rights activist and historian Howard Zinn, in an essay on the relevance of abolitionist praxis, asked “Does the Agitator Distort the Facts?” He defiantly suggested not.39 Scholars have sometimes viewed documents made by antislavery agitators as more self-righteous than rational, driven more by morals than method. But this book, by critically examining the archives and knowledge crafted by VC networks, affirms what thinkers like Malcolm X and Zinn knew long ago—namely, what abolitionists said about themselves and the oppressive America they confronted contained a great deal of truth. Abolitionists and fugitives were frequently right from a factual and historical standpoint, not merely a moral one. It is precisely this combination of rightness and righteousness that has enabled the abolitionist tradition to live on and do battle with the many afterlives of slavery. Chapter 1 focuses on the fugitives helped by the VCs from 1835 to 1861. Based on committee records as well as a quantitative database I have constructed from these sources, it offers a collective portrait of the fugitives who arrived at the VCs and told their stories. This chapter details who these runaways were, where they came from, what work they had done, and how they fled, analyzing their attitudes toward slavery and their politics of resistance. Abolitionists listened to 13

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thousands of fugitives describe their lives under slavery. This was the first and most powerful instance of fugitive-abolitionist knowledge creation. Chapter 2 narrates the first years of the VCs, from 1835 to 1850. It locates the origins of the committees in Black traditions of resistance, Quaker radicalism, and Garrison-inspired immediatism. It then delves into the early VC movement itself—its motley personnel, its networks of communication, and how it helped fugitives. The committees then survived the sectarian divides of the 1840s and transformed the public antislavery movement—originally conceived to convince whites of slavery’s immorality—into one self-consciously devoted to assisting runaways, bringing them, too, into the movement. Chapter 3 follows the VCs into the tumultuous 1850s. In the wake of the crisis over the Fugitive Slave Law, the committees revamped themselves. They extended their networks, became more efficient, and grew more militant in their use of force to defend fugitives. This chapter also delves deeper into the specific kinds of abolitionist-fugitive pedagogy made possible by the committees. The VCs invigorated “higher law” theory by learning from those fugitives who had resisted law and Constitution, in the name of conscience, to obtain freedom. Members learned how slavery functioned from fugitives, and both they and fugitives began writing incisive critiques of the slave power’s economy, particularly in the form of slave narratives. Most importantly, VC members, and the fugitives they helped, radicalized the slave narrative and created an antislavery sociology. Chapter 4 explores the numerous radical ideas produced by VC members. As the most diverse and most radical of antislavery organizations, fighting against the principal contradictions of American society, these people produced revolutionary ideas. In particular, this chapter investigates how committee members contributed to religious radicalism, feminism, antiracism, prison abolition, transcendentalism, novel writing, and music. It proves that VCs, and the Underground Railroad more generally, nurtured the creative imagination and produced egalitarian forms of thought having lasting value. Finally, chapter 5 illustrates how the VCs helped make abolitionism revolutionary in both thought and deed. The committees led the way in advocating armed self-defense and even insurrection as antislavery tactics. Members wrote widely on the history and theory of revolutions, looking for models for their own abolitionist upheaval. Eventually, they helped plan a revolution of their own by providing logistical and intellectual support for Brown and his men in their famous raid of 1859. This event, along with the fugitive slave crisis of the 1850s and the election of Lincoln in 1860, provoked the American Civil War. 14

ONE

THE POLITICS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY OF RUNNING AWAY There’s warrant in that theft which steals itself, when there is no mercy left. —William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, Scene I

W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote that fugitives “by thousands spelled the doom of slavery,” not simply by withdrawing their labor power, but by then “furnishing a text for the abolition idealists.”1 Famed narratives and other fugitive writings, which exposed the cruelties of slavery before abolitionists and before the public, constituted one such “text.” Yet there was another “text,” another archive of fugitive-abolitionist knowledge, secretive but no less significant to mobilization against the chattel empire. That “text” was not penned by the few exceptional fugitive authors, but was created by the many who canceled their captivity every day. Thousands of fugitives came into contact with vigilance committee members. These fugitives did not silently plead for food, shelter, and passage to the next “station” of the Underground Railroad. They engaged in sustained dialogue with VC members, which they often recorded in unpublished records. These activists allowed runaways to tell their life’s history and to recount and denounce all the oppressions they had endured in bondage. During these dialogues, fugitives spoke eloquently and authoritatively, not only about their own personal experiences but also about the political economy of slavery and the many strategies runaways used to resist the system that confined and exploited them. These became an informal, unpublished “text” for radical abolitionists that 15

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aided them in organizing the Underground Railroad and radicalizing the public antislavery movement. The VC records thus have a dual character: They reveal the experiences runaways chose to share with abolitionists; but they mark, too, the knowledge abolitionists crafted. By the 1830s, slavery had grown to be the most significant factor in the US economy, greater than all other American economic assets combined. Slave labor fueled the nation’s economic takeoff and the West’s industrial revolution. From the 1830s up to the Civil War, slavery in the United States continued to grow despite its abolition in parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. The enslaved population also grew. The internal slave trade expanded to monstrous proportions, as did levels of productivity, violence, and exploitation. After the vicious suppression of Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia (1831), slaveholders suffered no major slave revolts for the next thirty years, though the constant fear of such conspiracies remained, stoking slaveholders’ desires for security through power, independence, and indigenous territory. With riches beyond belief and a near monopoly on national politics, slaveholders were among the most confident ruling classes in the entire world. For good reason, abolitionists named this system of perpetual chattelization, alongside the economic, cultural, and political institutions propping it up, the “slave power.” Still, the enslaved resisted this overwhelming authority and lived to tell their tales.2 Runaways, who fled in increasing numbers after the 1830s, bore witness to this great transformation, this “second slavery,” which they explained to abolitionists in published texts and unpublished dialogues. VCs recorded information, often based upon interviews, from nearly two thousand runaways. Almost three dozen who became associated with the committees wrote autobiographies of their experiences. These documents have not received comprehensive scholarly treatment. Historian William Kashatus has done statistical work on the Philadelphia VC (PVC) records of the 1850s, offering new insights on fugitives’ age and gender as well as the routes and methods they used to escape.3 Yet the extant records of multiple committees from the 1830s to the 1860s reveal much more about fugitive-abolitionist knowledge of work, culture, resistance, countergeographies, politics, and ideas of liberation. Moreover, fugitive styles of narration and abolitionist methods of interviewing have yet to be subjected to scholarly scrutiny. Long overdue is a critical prosopography of slavery and resistance, based upon the knowledge created by fugitives who told their tales and the VC activists who wrote those stories down. Runaways did speak of routes and methods of escape, 16

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as has been stressed in the historiography of the Underground Railroad, but they went far beyond this. Fugitives described with precision the political economy of slavery. They were especially attuned to the dynamics of the internal slave trade; various kinds of industrial, domestic, maritime, and rural labor; and the many forms of punishment and immobilization, particularly of enslaved women. These fugitives did not speak of a moribund, inefficient mode of production, as some abolitionists did, but of a profitable system, expanding its geographic scope and techniques of exploitation. What is more, they revealed to abolitionists the politics of slave resistance in the South, speaking of failed but inspiring militancy in the form of rebellion as well as various forms of “marronage.” The selfliberated illuminated the geographical knowledge they used to free themselves and identified allies they found along the way. In articulate words, they not only communicated their hatred of slavery and of the alienations and lies it fostered but also spoke of the meaning of freedom in its practical and ideal dimensions. This was fugitive knowledge—illicit, on the move, hunted down and repressed, but rooted in the thoughts and pains of enslaved millions. Yet by speaking to abolitionists—and often becoming abolitionist agitators themselves—fugitives helped create the common knowledge of an organized social movement. IN TERVIEWIN G RUNAWA YS VCs left behind a rich but fragmentary documentary record. They bequeathed to posterity meeting and account books and, most importantly, extensive notes on their interviews with runaways. Not all of these interviews have survived. William Lambert of the Colored Vigilant Committee in Detroit wrote down “reports that give the dates and names, and from whence they [fugitives] came.”4 Similarly, fugitive Jermain Loguen, head of the Syracuse VC, kept “a record book of those who pass that way.” A comrade of Loguen’s noted in 1858 that this record book “would one day be a greater contribution to American history than the seventh volume of Bancroft.”5 Sadly, both Loguen’s and Lambert’s records have been lost. Others destroyed their records, fearing that such documents could implicate them in illegal or treasonous activities. Daniel Gibbons and Robert Purvis (PVC) trashed their notes after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.6 In southeastern Pennsylvania, William Parker, a fugitive himself, destroyed his records after leading an armed insurrection against a gang of slavecatchers.7 William Still (PVC) hid his extensive records after John Brown’s Raid, in which he was implicated, but thankfully recovered them later.8 Yet, against the 17

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odds, hundreds of interviews do survive. Among the fragmentary records of the early PVC (1839–40) and of the Boston VC (BVC), for the years 1846 and 1847, are notes from 91 interviews.9 The much more extensive records of the New York VC (NYVC), for 1855–56, contain the shorthand notes of 197 interviews.10 BVC records for 1850–63 contain less detailed information on 505 fugitives. Still published the records of the PVC (1853–61) in 1872, along with his own commentaries on nearly 1,000 fugitives he helped.11 The extant records contain information on over 1,700 fugitives, detailing where they worked, how they lived, how they thought, and how they resisted. This is a substantial sample of the total runaways assisted by the committees, which may have neared 10,000 people. Though most of the surviving interviews are from the 1850s, the evidence is nevertheless extensive, illuminating fugitive resistance and abolitionist knowledge of it. Recording interviews with fugitives had practical purposes. It was a way to gather information about where freedom seekers came from, how they escaped, and who helped them in the process. This proved vital for understanding slavery and organizing the Underground Railroad. Imposters came to the committees, pretending to be fugitives, in order to obtain money or to spy on activists. Conducting rigorous interviews and keeping records limited such duplicity. In rare cases, the threat of imposters and spies led VC activists to disbelieve the testimony of the enslaved. When a fugitive named William arrived at the BVC in 1847 and requested extra cash to bring his wife and child to Boston, the group’s leader, John W. Browne, was wary. “I am particularly led to distrust his statements,” he wrote, “because today he has been drinking and has been in a place of evil. Yet I do not doubt he is a fugitive slave.”12 Undoubtedly, Browne’s praxis as stern temperance man informed his moralizing assessment of William’s story. Recording interviews also allowed the committees to keep track of who was helped and where they went after the interview. For instance, one fugitive woman came to Loguen in Syracuse searching for her husband, who had fled before her. Loguen found the man’s name in his records and told her where he had sent him.13 The nature of interviews with fugitives varied widely. Some were quick, others were long. Still occasionally stayed up whole nights talking with fugitives; when he was pressed by other duties, his interviews only lasted a few minutes. In one instance, Still briskly and haphazardly interviewed a man named Peter while sorting the society’s mail. Distracted by multiple tasks, it took him a bit of time to realize that the man before him was Peter Still, his long-lost brother, who had recently purchased his freedom.14 When larger groups of runaways 18

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arrived together, the VCs sometimes took only the testimony of the group’s leader; other times, they recorded short, few-sentence biographies of each group member. The interrogation was often a friendly conversation, though other times it became “a rigorous cross-questioning.”15 A fugitive storyteller might prove to be a “forcible narrator” who spoke at great length. Other times the storyteller “had no remarkable tales of personal suffering to relate.”16 One runaway who arrived at the Albany Vigilance Committee (AVC) told his tale without words; according to his interviewer, the man simply “raised his shirt to show me his back—it was scarred from his waistbands to his neck.”17 Usually, a single or a few VC members conducted interviews discreetly at an antislavery office or in a private household. But when Henry Brown arrived at the PVC office in 1849 in a box, a large group of abolitionists gathered to hear “Box” Brown dramatically narrate his story of escape.18 Some fugitive stories went unrecorded, while other runaways bore witness multiple times, imparting knowledge to activists across regions. In urgent situations, they were rushed out immediately upon arrival, permitting little time to write their stories down. In September 1855, ten fugitives arrived at the PVC, but “the names of said arrivals were not taken” as “one of the acting committee was on a visit to Canada,” interviewing refugees there.19 In contrast, ninety-nine fugitives sent by the PVC to the NYVC in the 1850s told their story to both committees.20 In 1857, a correspondent for the Afro-Canadian newspaper Provincial Freeman published interviews with recently arrived refugees Anthony Loney, Thomas Elliot, Cornelius Scott, Samuel Williams, and Nancy Brister.21 All five had been previously interviewed by the PVC. Of the self-emancipated refugees in Canada interviewed by abolitionist Benjamin Drew for his volume A North-Side View of Slavery (1855), many, like John Atkinson, Henry Banks, Christopher Nichols (Kit Nickless in the PVC records), and Isaac Williams had been previously interviewed by VCs.22 Isaac Williams had told his story to the PVC and likely also to the Syracuse VC, but he retold his story often as an antislavery lecturer and then in his autobiography.23 From the beginning, VC members pondered the proper methods for conducting interviews. As Elizur Wright, who worked for both the NYVC and the BVC, wrote in 1837: “In getting such testimony it will be well to impress upon the witnesses the importance of stating nothing which they do not of their own knowledge know to be true. Show every one of them, before they have committed themselves to you at all, by telling their story, the great evil which they could do by stating anything which should turn out to be incorrect. . . . It is important 19

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that narrators should give out minute particulars, names, places, and especially as nearly as possible, dates.” This method, which Wright called the “collection of facts from the self-emancipated,” had a dual purpose: to amass knowledge for liberating others and to amass facts for antislavery propaganda.24 VC activists rarely practiced their methods perfectly, but they improved over time. Due to inexperience, lack of resources, and commitments to other antislavery activities, the committees in the 1830s and 1840s usually wrote just the bare facts about where fugitives came from and when they escaped. The NYVC in the same period wrote down only the most dramatic escape stories, which they published in their annual reports.25 After 1850, as increasing numbers of fugitives arrived and as the committees became more experienced and better organized, interviews grew more rigorous, though never systematic. The questions the VCs asked and the topics fugitives discussed became more comprehensive. Fugitives explained where they lived, who their masters were, and how they escaped. They also answered more sensitive questions about their treatment by masters, their work conditions, their family lives, their attitudes toward religion, and their views of slavery.26 In principle, VC members favored the rigorous interview methods prescribed by Wright. In practice, however, they found it more useful, as Still admitted, to allow runaways to give “his or her experience of slavery, escape, etc., in his or her own way.”27 VC members had to build trust with fugitives to permit frank conversations— not always an easy task. Fugitives were rightly suspicious of any who questioned them about where they came from. John Seward was “scared” of white abolitionists, for “they used me so well I was afraid of a trick.” But he eventually discovered that their generosity was genuine.28 One fugitive directed to the NYVC from “one of the French West India islands” was “fearful of trusting himself in the power of anyone.” He “inquired, in broken English, about the road to Canada” but was “at first both unable and unwilling to give” information on where he came from or why he desired to reach Canada. Eventually, the committee made clear their good intentions, and the fugitive gave a comfortable “account of himself in French.”29 In many other cases, as will be elaborated below, runaways had extensive awareness of the abolitionist movement and of Underground Railroad networks well before escaping; they arrived at a VC knowing they were in trustworthy hands. VC members also built trust by risking imprisonment to help runaways. Perhaps most significantly, they built trust by showing respect to fugitives. They opened a space for recently self-emancipated runaways to bear witness against slavery, often for the first time, though rarely for the last time. 20

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There were limits to mutual trust and mutual interchange. Still’s interview with his own brother, Peter, began in deep mutual distrust. The PVC agents who guided Peter to William’s office found his “story” to be “improbable,” and they “suspected him of being a spy sent out to hunt fugitives.” Peter, on the other hand, grew suspicious of William’s questioning, fearing he might be accomplice to a ring of slavecatchers. During the interview, Peter “seated himself as near as possible to the door, and watched intently every motion of the young man whose treachery he so much feared.” Of course, once their brotherly bond became obvious, trust between the two Stills became natural.30 In the case of Harriet Jacobs, her interviews with Black PVC members caused conflicting feelings of trust and insecurity. Jacobs’s experience of slavery in North Carolina had been traumatic. Sensitive to this, the PVC provided a comfortable setting, as she explained: “Many questions were asked concerning my experiences, and my escape from slavery; but I observed how careful they all were not to say anything that might wound my feelings. How gratifying this was can be fully understood only by those who have been accustomed to be treated as if they were not included within the pale of human beings.” Nevertheless, when Jacobs narrated to Black minister Jeremiah Durham (PVC) her repeated experiences of sexual violence, Durham replied, “your straight-forward answers do you credit; but don’t answer every body so openly. It might give some heartless people a pretext for treating you with contempt.” As Jacobs recalled, “That word contempt burned me like coals of fire.” Deeply affected by this, for many years, she refused to talk or write about her life in slavery and avoided involvement in the public antislavery movement.31 The extensive knowledge of slavery reproduced in VC records came direct from runaways, though not always in their own voices. Fugitives chose what to tell, but abolitionists chose what to write down and how. Often, VC members wrote shorthand notes on runaway narratives in the third person, mixed with details about the costs incurred assisting them. Aware of the limits of such notes, when Still published the PVC records in 1872, he made sure to include supplementary documentation. He included correspondence written by fugitives or by the VC agents who had helped them. Still reprinted the runaway-slave advertisements—he had collected them all through the 1850s—of many fugitives he had helped. He also added his own commentaries and recollections on each case.32 In other instances, though, VC activists did write down, in first person, everything a fugitive told of their life. Still transcribed fugitive accounts as long as nine pages.33 The interview of Jonathan Thomas, in the hand of BVC treasurer Francis Jackson, spanned ten pages. In it, Thomas told his full life’s history, from 21

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birth to escape, which Jackson transcribed word for word. After Thomas gave his account, Jackson followed up with two questions of his choosing. He wanted the runaway to elaborate more on “whether he often attended to hear clergymen preach and if he could recollect any portion of their preaching.” Much to Jackson’s pleasure, Thomas gave a long elaboration on the hypocritical preaching of the master class. Jackson also requested him to say more on “whether he had seen many instances of cruel punishment.” Thomas refused this, declaring that his experiences were “too brutal and revolting to be stated.”34 Despite Jackson’s meticulousness and care, some things had gone unsaid. Likely, Thomas did not feel comfortable relating his most traumatic experiences to the white abolitionist he had only just met. Despite undoubted limitations, the VC interviews offer a unique portrait of slavery based on the experiences of hundreds of runaways. They differ greatly from the only other body of mass interviews with the enslaved—the thoroughly studied Federal Writers Project (FWP) interviews, conducted in the 1930s. The FWP interviews were conducted seventy years after emancipation with then-elderly people who only experienced slavery in their youth. The VC interviews took place during the epoch of enslavement, with people who had fresh experiences from many years of oppression. FWP interviewers were often, though not always, white southerners. As a consequence, interviewees often did not open up about the full violence of slavery, knowing it could directly implicate their interviewers’ ancestors or even endanger themselves by being too critical of the southern order of things. VC interviewers, on the other hand, were northern abolitionists, usually African American. There was thus a higher level of trust. Even when Thomas refused to describe to Jackson the traumatic violence he had encountered, he made absolutely clear that such violence was simply “too brutal” to describe. The objectives differed as well. The FWP interviews had been conceived as a cultural project—documenting, sometimes nostalgically, African American “folk culture.”35 The VC interviews belonged to a political-critical project. Abolitionists used them to understand the varying nodes of slave resistance in order to help the enslaved further resist. They also used them as a means to critique the chattel empire’s politics, political economy, culture, and religious life while furthering fugitive participation in that critique. As Still wrote, “a full interchange of thought resulted” between fugitives and abolitionists during the interviews.36 And even now they should be regarded as such, an interchange of thought, a sharing of ideas, a collaborative creation of new kinds of critical knowledge. 22

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SL AVERY AS IT IS Fugitives unveiled the slave economy, and VC members took note of all they could. Runaways of all ages, genders, and regions described labor conditions, discipline, family life, slave trading, social reproduction, surveillance, and much else. In particular, the less-studied experiences of runaway women feature prominently in VC documents.37 Runaways fled in increasing numbers to get away from this very economic system, which, they knew, was ever increasing in its geographic scope and intensity of exploitation. In their dialogues with VC members, runaways unveiled with precision the slave economy so mysterious to northern abolitionists, many of whom had never even set foot in the South. Proslavery ideologues often claimed that “most abolitionists know little or nothing of slavery” apart from the narratives of a few “tempted fugitives.”38 In fact, in addition to those narratives, VCs secretly had for their own use the oral and written testimony of thousands, who freely offered them a subversive portrait of “slavery as it is.”39 The VC records reveal the diversity of runaways. According to their data, 364 runaways (21 percent) who came to them were female, while 1,059 (62 percent) were male. These numbers, which exclude those whose names were not given, may underestimate the percentage of women helped by the committees. For instance, the AVC, for which no complete records exist, boasted in 1843 that they had helped 150 women, 150 men, and 50 children.40 The committees were not systematic in noting the ages of fugitives. Sometimes their records note the specific age of fugitives, but more often they simply note whether a fugitive was an adult or a child. Some 1,008 fugitives were recorded as adults, ranging from eighteen to sixty-five years old, while 245 (14 percent) had not reached adulthood. Of these latter, 14 were infants and 176 were young children who accompanied parents or other adults northward. Of the 55 teenage runaways, some had run off with parents, some with friends, and some alone.41 The VCs thus listened to the testimonies of fugitives of all genders and ages. There was less variation in where runaways originated. Overwhelmingly, they came “from all along the Atlantic seaboard and from every part of the border states.”42 VC members recorded the state of origin for 1,056 fugitives: 507 came from Maryland, 361 from Virginia, 80 from Delaware, and 38 from North Carolina. Only 14 enslaved people came from the Deep South. “It is almost an impossibility,” remarked fugitive Henry Watson, “for a slave to escape [Mississippi] on account of its situation.”43 “Escape from Alabama is almost 23

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impossible,” concurred another fugitive.44 The distances and dangers were simply too great for those farther south. Runaways came from outside the United States as well. Five from Central and West Africa, Brazil, and the French West Indies also came to the VCs for aid.45 Members recorded the town or county of origin for 884 fugitives. The majority, 592, escaped from towns, small cities, and rural areas, but many also came from the swiftly growing cities of the Upper South. Of them, 75 runaways came from Baltimore, Maryland; 58 from Richmond, Virginia; 118 from Norfolk, Virginia; and 41 from Washington, D.C.46 These are just the places fugitives mentioned escaping from and do not always denote where they had lived and worked their whole lives. As the VC records attest, most of the enslaved moved about quite a bit. They were sold across regions and had work experience in both rural and urban settings. Of the 361 runaways who indicated their occupations, 164 had worked as rural agricultural laborers. A handful had worked on cotton plantations in the Deep South or on sugar plantations in Louisiana or as far away as Brazil, but the vast majority worked on tobacco plantations of the Upper South.47 To be sure, the old “tobacco kingdom” that had secured the wealth and power of the Founding Fathers had been superseded by the “cotton kingdom.” Yet tobacco remained a junior partner in American empire. Tobacco prices soared from the 1830s to the Civil War, as transportation and fertilizer improved and domestic and international consumption expanded.48 Rural fugitives offered VC members “much information, especially with regard to the workings of the system on the farms.”49 They spoke of the intensive labor process—cultivating, curing, stripping, and prizing tobacco. Rural runaways also emphasized intensified exploitation and overwork. Women labored on farms alongside men to increase productive capacity. Elizabeth Ann told the PVC that she “had been more accustomed to field labor than housework; ploughing, fencing, driving team, grubbing, cutting wood, etc.”50 Another female runaway, from New Orleans, described long days in the cotton fields and at the cotton press. “Enfeebled and worn down with suffering as she was, her strength was unequal to the labor she was required to perform.”51 Mary Curtis, only nineteen years old, said that her “health failed from doing farm work.”52 With minimal mechanization in the labor process, rural slaves noted how exploitation intensified through work speedup and the lengthening of the working day from dusk to beyond dawn, with only one meal break.53 Plantation owners drove down the costs of social reproduction to the barest minimum. Still noted, sometimes condescendingly, that the rural fugitives who came to him were always the worst clothed, least healthy, 24

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least skilled, least articulate, and least intelligent enslaved people he met.54 Rural fugitives knew they had it tough. “The slaves in the cities (Petersburg, Richmond, and Norfolk, in Virginia) do not fare so hard as in the plantation where they have farming work to do,” quipped one fugitive.55 “Most of the town and city slaves are hired out, to bring money to their owner,” rightly observed former Virginia slave Peter Randolph.56 Scholars have only recently become attuned to the significance of wage labor—“hiring out”— to the American slave economy.57 In a sense, this rich scholarly work has replicated the kinds of discussions that took place within the VCs over a century before. With the service sector, industries, and coastal trade expanding in the Upper South, slaveowners increasingly hired out people as a way to accumulate wealth, to pay off debts, or to create divisive hierarchies of privilege among Black workers. Seen as a “genteel kind of slave trading,” many masters owned people only to hire them out.58 The profits were immense. Employers could now hire for rates below those demanded by free white laborers. Masters pocketed most of the wages while forcing their hired-out workers to pay for their own upkeep. Fugitives told committee members that they usually paid their masters between $100 and $150 per year. One angrily noted that “he paid his master $175 per annum. . . . Besides paying this amount, he had to find himself board, clothing, and pay doctor’s expenses.” Another fugitive, Elijah Hilton, from Richmond, told the PVC that in the “last year he was hired out for one hundred and eighty dollars out of which he received but five dollars.”59 Sam Nixon, of Norfolk, worked as an assistant in his master’s lucrative dentistry office. Of the $3,000 his master took in per annum, “full $1000 of this amount in the opinion of Sam was the result of his own fettered hands.”60 Other fugitives said they had agreed to pay as much as $1,000 in return for freedom, bargains that their masters immediately reneged upon once the money had been paid.61 Of the 118 fugitives who told committee members they had been hired out, 46 noted the amount of cash their masters had stolen from them. The VC records note that the enslaved were also hired out variously as draymen, porters, blacksmiths, boatmen, fishermen, and factory workers. Women worked as “dress makers, chamber maids, etc.,” as well as cooks and domestic servants.62 One runaway described having spent nineteen years “hired out sometimes as a waiter, sometimes in a tobacco factory, and for five years in the coal mines.”63 Anthony Burns worked in a mill until he mangled his hand there, then labored on the Richmond docks, “discharging cargoes of coal, guano, and other lading.”64 For sure, the hired slave had it “easy,” as Randolph claimed. 25

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They pocketed some wages, had greater mobility, and could “escape the evil eye and cruel lash of the overseer.”65 But it was not always easy. Urban slaves still worked in tough conditions for long hours. Sometimes they worked days for an employer, then nights for their master, or vice versa.66 Industrial settings—coal mines, iron foundries, bagging factories, and others—demanded a fast work pace, long hours year-round, and harsh labor discipline by foremen. Runaways testified that they hated their working conditions and employers. Above all they hated handing wages over to a thieving master. “I could never reason with myself into the belief,” wrote Milton Clarke, that slaveholders “had any right to the annual rent which I paid for my own body.”67 Fugitives described in exceptional detail tobacco manufacturing in Virginia, which, as its most capital-intensive enterprise, spearheaded the industrialization of that state. The manufacture of tobacco products expanded swiftly after the 1820s, with “the greatest qualitative advance in the 1850s.”68 Despite overproduction crises in the late 1830s and the late 1850s, domestic and international demand steadily increased, and the industry remained “very prolific in inventions of new sizes of manufactured tobacco, with variations in style of package.”69 “Manufacturers of the weed,” noted one Richmond slaveholder in 1860, “have sprung up in every direction. The largest buildings in the city are, with few exceptions, tobacco factories, and I may venture to say that more tobacco is manufactured in Richmond than in any other place in the world.”70 In 1840, 3,824 enslaved people worked in tobacco factories. By 1860, that number had shot up to 12,843.71 Box Brown described the Richmond tobacco factory he worked in as “about three hundred feet in length, and three stories high.” Of its 150 workers, “one hundred and twenty of the persons employed were slaves.”72 Fugitives spoke of the tobacco factories with particular hatred. Even one fugitive who had been promoted to the privileged position of factory foreman spoke without nostalgia for his former workplace.73 Enslaved factory workers toiled “fourteen hours a day in the summer, sixteen in the winter.”74 Women separated stems and flavored the tobacco, while men pressed, twisted, and packaged it. Employers were loath to discipline severely the property of another person, but factory foremen, who had full control of the tobacco factory, had no such qualms. They closely watched workers, packed together in confined, industrial settings, punishing those who labored too slowly. Box Brown noted that his foreman also instructed the factory hands in religion every Sunday.75 Forced faith and forced works indeed formed the spirit of capitalism. Foremen beat enslaved employees as well. Peter Still recalled being viciously thrashed after 26

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giving tobacco sweepings to a poor old woman.76 The factories became hotbeds of violence and resistance. Slaves scuffled with foremen, sabotaged equipment, burned down facilities, played truant, and drank heavily.77 They also ran away to the VCs, where abolitionists faithfully recorded their observations of one of the worst workplaces in the South. Female fugitives told committees about the onerous domestic and care work of slavery. Women maintained the enslaved workforce, doing most of the cooking, cleaning, and care of children. They did much of the same work within the master’s household as well, often under the strict supervision of harsh mistresses and predatory masters. Only thirty-nine women interviewed by the committees named housework as their primary occupation; this number was small because they did many other tasks in addition to domestic work.78 Women produced and reproduced much of the wealth of the slave economy, understanding well this crushing double burden thrust upon them. Mary Ennis told William Still that she worked “sometimes in the fields and sometimes in the barn as well as in the kitchen, by which it is needless to say that her life was rendered servile to the last degree.”79 In addition to the fieldwork, which took up most of her time, Elizabeth Ann did housework and hired out “by the day to wash” clothes.80 Anne Maria’s master hired her out to various employers. She gave most of her wages to him but then had to pay living expenses for herself and her children. Thus, Still commented, “she worked with double energy, and the master was largely the gainer as the children were of no expense to him.”81 Enslaved women also made it clear that as workers, they “had harder times than the men.”82 Harriet Jacobs famously wrote: “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.”83 Male runaways acknowledged this truth.84 Still noted, based on his interviews with over two hundred women, that “abuse and hard usage were the common lot of poor slave girls.”85 Female fugitives insisted that physical reproduction—giving birth—was a form of productive labor essential to the slave economy. As philosopher Angela Davis has explained, “since slave women were classified as ‘breeders’ as opposed to ‘mothers’ their infant children could be sold away from them like calves and cows.”86 Women spoke to the committees of giving birth to as many as fifteen children for their masters, who would work the children on the plantation or sell them off for extra cash.87 In the case of hired-out women, who paid for their children’s upkeep out of pocket, masters received free slaves, to work or to sell, without having to pay the initial costs of social reproduction. Though women 27

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were often “encumbered,” as fugitive Lear Green put it, “with the chains of slavery and the duties of family at the same time,” they nevertheless resisted.88 Many women, like Jenny Buchanon, withdrew productivity by refusing to have children. (Some men told the committees they did the same thing by refusing to marry).89 Lewis Clarke claimed he knew multiple women who committed abortions and infanticides to keep further profits from their masters and to keep new souls from waking to the hell of slavery.90 Many other women simply fled with their children, taking away from their masters hundreds of dollars of potential profit. Extreme exploitation and the transformation of their reproductive powers into forms of commodity production were the main reasons women chose to flee. As runaway Elizabeth Castle narrated to a woman working for the AVC: “She found she was raising children for her master and that they were mere articles of merchandise. She resolved, therefore, to flee.”91 The most important thing “manufactured” in the South by enslaved laborers was enslaved laborers. VC members learned more than they desired about the internal slave trade. Two hundred and two fugitives recounted to the committees experiences of being sold, of facing imminent sale, or of seeing friends and family sold off.92 One fugitive, Robert McCoy, had been owned by a slave trader for sixteen years. He shared with the PVC his “varied observation and experience related to the trader’s conduct in his nefarious business.”93 James Connor gave a similarly detailed account of the slave trade. He had been sold from Kentucky to a wealthy Louisiana planter, whom he would accompany on trips to Virginia to buy new laborers for his plantation work force of more than three hundred people.94 Some fugitives narrated being sold as many as four times, moving in chains through nearly all the states in the South.95 They named names, telling of prominent southern men—senators, governors, even Henry Clay—who sold away people for cash.96 They told of having purchased their freedom only to be sold south by their masters before the manumission papers could be issued. They recalled fighting with slave traders, breaking out from slave pens, or hiding in the woods when the slave trader came to the plantation—all to avoid removal to the Deep South.97 Mothers and fathers told grief-filled stories of having as many as six of their children sold away from them. After Mary Epp’s fourth child had been sold away, “she was so affected with grief that she was thrown into violent convulsions, which caused the loss of speech for one entire month.”98 She fled soon thereafter and spoke again. Fugitives thus offered abolitionists crucial information on a horrific trade, which slaveholders tried to hide from public scrutiny. 28

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Fugitive testimony on the slave trade was not simply sentimental or personal. Fugitives gave empirical evidence too. “A traffic in the bodies and souls of native-born Americans is carried on in the slaveholding states to an extent little dreamed by the mass of people in the non-slaveholding states,” noted runaway William Wells Brown.99 Another ex-slave, who worked with the VCs, later estimated, based upon his own study of abolitionist documents and other relevant material, that over 400,000 slaves had been sold south, for a profit of nearly $200 million, from 1830 to 1840.100 Abolitionist James Redpath estimated that slaveholders in the Upper South sold off 25,000 slaves per year, based upon his own research and “having spoken with hundreds” of enslaved people.101 Masters treated “selling and buying slaves as a business,” noted another runaway to the PVC.102 One enslaved woman diagnosed the cause of this new middle passage: “the south had all gone mad after money.”103 The self-emancipated were right on the mark. Modern scholarship has shown that enterprising, or indebted, masters sold nearly 900,000 people to the cotton plantations between 1820 and 1860, supplying the labor power needed for the expansion of America’s slave-based, money-mad empire. Financial speculation, insurance companies, and private jails proliferated to bolster the trade.104 The most concentrated period of slave trading took place during the 1830s, just as radical abolition and the Underground Railroad began to get organized. Enslaved workers in the Upper South had a 10-percent chance of being sold off in their lifetimes, a figure closely reflected in VC records; for instance, 11 percent of those aided by the PVC had been sold at least once.105 But, wrote one formerly enslaved VC activist, “who can calculate the amount of suffering occasioned by the sudden snapping of conjugal and parental ties . . . for the gratification of about 248,911 slaveholders?”106 Indeed, it was easy to calculate how many people suffered, more difficult to understand how they suffered. Masters used the threat of sale and family separation as one of many cruel means for managing Black workers. As Kentucky fugitive Lewis Hayden remarked, “there were the rice swamps and the sugar and cotton plantations; we had them held before us as terrors by our masters and mistresses all our lives.”107 All enslaved people knew that if they misbehaved, they would be sold away from family to a place where work was harder and early death certain. Many fugitives witnessed examples being made of recalcitrant slaves. Those who scuffled with overseers were sold south. Those who had “advanced notions,” who openly criticized slavery, were shipped away.108 Women who resisted the sexual advances of their masters were sold and sent away. Hayden said his mother had been sold for 29

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this reason.109 Milton Clarke watched as his sixteen-year-old sister was whipped and sold off after resisting their masters’ predatory advances.110 Using threats and making examples sometimes worked on enslaved people, especially those who had families to protect. Yet as Mark Twain jested, “If the threat to sell an incorrigible slave ‘down the river’ would not reform him, nothing would—his case was past cure.”111 The VC records reveal many cases “past cure”: eighty-six individuals said they ran off because their master threatened to sell them.112 But the slaveholders’ primary instrument of rule was the whip. All the enslaved faced some sort of physical discipline, and 227 runaways described to VCs “hard usage” and cruel punishments as the primary reason for fleeing.113 A few claimed that they were “well treated,” at least comparatively so. Charles Henry Green recalled, with bitter sarcasm, “I was well used—have been hit over the head with chunks of wood—hit over the back with a pitchfork handle, but was never whipped with a cowskin.”114 Most, though, got the cowskin, a weapon used to speed up work on the plantations.115 Runaway William Green knew of one whip-happy slaveowner who called himself “the great labor saving man.” With whip in hand, this master would “make one man do the work of two, as good as any piece of industrial machinery.”116 Masters, overseers, mistresses, and occasionally employers of hired labor whipped slaves. In fact, many fugitives described their mistresses as being far more brutal than their masters.117 Two runaways narrated slaves being forced, with threat of sale, torture, or death, to whip other slaves, their fellow workers, brothers, and even wives.118 America was indeed the land of the “stars and stripes,” as fugitive John Jacobs characterized it.119 Cruel and unusual punishment was far from unusual. The fugitive “H.B.” said that his master punished his chattelized people by putting them in tobacco hogsheads “filled with wrought nails driven in from the outside, so that they projected inside the hogshead. . . . In this place of torment, they were rolled round the slave quarters to strike terror in the slaves; on every turn, the nails were driven into the flesh till they were literally bleeding at every pore.”120 James Morris told the NYVC that, apart from receiving only one meal a day for eight years, his master beat him with sticks and hatchets and would throw him out into the cold during the winter.121 Another runaway told the AVC that after his family had fled, “in order to compel him to confess where his family was, he was placed in the stocks and burnt with red hot irons on his right side and arm.”122 Captured after running off the first time, one enslaved woman was thrown in prison for three months, during which she delivered a stillborn child.123 Mary Jane Johnson recalled that “a brother of her owner for a trifling offence kicked 30

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her so brutally that she was immediately thrown into a fit of sickness, which lasted all one summer.”124 Such testimony showed the slaveholders’ ideal of “the patriarchal institution” to be hollow in every sense but its extreme male domination. It was more a form of “social murder”—in some instances explicit murder. William Curtis, for example, told the BVC he saw a fourteen-yearold girl whipped to death for refusing “to have intercourse with her master.” She “was buried like a dog.”125 Four fugitives told the committees that their masters had shot them with firearms. Seven others witnessed masters murder their workers.126 James Connor saw firsthand two of his fellow Black workers whipped to death; “running away was the crime.”127 The VCs provided the only abolitionist spaces where enslaved women spoke of the sexual violence they had escaped. Jacobs spoke in great detail about the sexual violence she suffered to the PVC in 1842 but otherwise kept quiet about the subject until she published her autobiography almost twenty years later. In most cases, women merely alluded to this trauma. They sometimes described their masters as “frolickers” and left it at that.128 Martha Bennet alluded to her master’s sadism. “He made a common practice,” she said, “of flogging females when stripped naked.”129 Nancy Grantham told the PVC that her master once insisted “that he was coming to my pallet that night, and with an oath he declared if I made a noise, he would cut my throat.” She immediately fled. “I had to resist,” Grantham explained.130 Enslaved women (and men) did not view these sexual transgressions as pathological aberrations but as a fundamental form of disciplinary violence.131 Runaways recounted masters beating enslaved women who thwarted their desires and mistresses beating them out of jealousy—revealing the ways passions like lust and envy intermingled necessarily with the heinous instrumental rationality that required beatings to keep the enslaved ever producing and reproducing. Sexual violence, in fugitives’ view, had links to the slave trade. Jenny Buchanon recounted being sold south after resisting the advances of her master’s son.132 Grantham said that her sister had been sold south for similar reasons, a fate that she herself narrowly evaded.133 Even when speaking to VC activists, women fugitives practiced what scholar Darlene Clark Hine has described as “dissemblance,” a partial revelation and partial concealment of their full traumatic experiences in order to maintain the autonomy of their inner lives while fashioning their own narratives about sexual violence.134 In most cases, during the VC interviews, women highlighted the sadism and depravity of their masters and their own resistance to rape by refusal and flight. 31

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Fugitives described to the committees the strict surveillance placed upon them, particularly the system of passes and slave patrols. They hated the pass system. Only with a pass could men visit relatives or leave the plantation. Men rarely had access to such documents; women, almost never.135 Fugitives told the VCs that they loathed “being obliged to have a pass.”136 Harrison Cary said that his master locked in a “cage” any enslaved person caught out without one.137 Some slaveowners had their own private prisons for absconders; if not, the local jails—”always tenanted by captured fugitives”—did the job.138 Another fugitive told the AVC that he loathed being “often examined” and harassed when out and about without a pass, so much so that he “had written his own pass” to travel freely.139 Even more loathsome than the pass system were the police and slave patrols enforcing it. Patrols of poor whites “would watch us and report to our master everything they saw us do that was in violation of the rules.”140 These men checked passes and beat, imprisoned, and harassed the enslaved, especially those out without documents. They broke up religious meetings. Patrols hunted down fugitives and maroons with bloodhounds as though it were a sport.141 Lewis Clarke angrily denounced the slave patrollers as “the offscouring of all things; the refuse, the fag end, the ears and tails of slavery. . . . They are emphatically, the servant of servants, and slaves of the devil, they are the meanest and lowest, and worst of all creation.”142 In short, runaways recounted facing “armed surveillance” by all white people at every moment.143 White folks of all classes “always go armed with knives and pistols,” observed a pair of fugitives to the BVC.144 In southern cities like Richmond, from where many fugitives escaped, policing became systematic. Around the Virginia capital lay numerous walls and gates where personnel checked passes and free papers. A police guard spent most of its time searching for those who stole themselves. Additionally, wealthy citizens of Richmond organized a committee “for the Prevention of Absconding and Abducting of Slaves.” They searched vessels, had their own lawyers, and offered fifty-dollar rewards for captured fugitives.145 Thus, “around the American slave,” noted Samuel Ringgold Ward, who had escaped as a child, “are placed all manner of obstacles to his escape, and over him the most vigilant surveillance is constantly exercised.”146 Scholars have described such “vigilant surveillance” and confinement as the “carceral landscape” of slavery and have shown it to be the antecedent, even basis, for more contemporary forms of mass incarceration.147 Runaways long ago had already gotten straight to the point. They called slavery the “prison house.”148 32

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The VC archive contains a portrait of slavery, consciously articulated by freedom seekers and learned by abolition activists, that was astonishingly detailed. Fugitives imparted precise knowledge of the vast internal slave trade. Runaways also illuminated the practices of hiring out, field work, care work, and reproductive labor, showing that enslaved laborers, especially women, endured double or triple the exploitation faced by all other American workers. Lewis Clarke estimated “seventy-five millions as the sum robbed from slaves every year.”149 Runaways understood the implications of acute exploitation. They knew that they had built up America’s wealth and had fueled white-settler expansion.150 They were conscious that the mechanization of production would not abolish or ameliorate their condition. In fact, slaveholders felt limited incentive to mechanize, for they could work Black laborers as machines. Runaways also grasped that increasing repression, policing, and surveillance, all needed to hold the system together, compelled the enslaved to intensify their own politics of resistance. “The laws are becoming worse and worse for us every day,” concluded one exslave from Richmond. “We can’t enjoy anything now; we can’t have the social meetings as we used to have; the colored people think about it a good deal. They run away every chance they get.”151 They fled because they rightly perceived a decline in their living conditions and the stability of their family lives and at the same time an intensification of repression and exploitation. THE POLITICS OF FLIGHT In city and country, concluded William Still, the enslaved were fully “awake to their condition,” not simply to their own nightmarish experiences but to how their unpaid labor produced and reproduced the wealth of an affluent nation in which they had no share.152 Runaways hated slavery with “perfect hatred,” as Still decisively phrased it.153 With this “perfect hatred” they formed their oppositional politics. As scholars Merton Dillon and Manisha Sinha have critiqued, all too often, historians treat the practices of slave resistance as separate from organized abolitionism instead of as being allied or mutually reinforcing. Though indeed mutually reinforcing, it is not always clear how deep northern abolitionists’ knowledge of enslaved people’s politics of resistance had actually been. After all, in the published slave narratives, runaways often kept quiet about resistance strategies, not wanting to give over vital knowledge to the enemy. Through VCs, hundreds of runaways revealed a great deal of their insurgent antislavery knowledge. They offered abolitionists new insights into their own 33

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countergeographies, countercultures, traditions, and methods of resistance as well as the ideals that made it morally and politically necessary to resist by any means. W. E. B. Du Bois insisted that “abolitionists hated slavery with perfect hatred.” Only under influence of the fugitives’ “perfect hatred,” mentioned by Still, could abolitionists, too, hate slavery perfectly.154 Fugitives described to abolitionists the alternative mobilities used by the enslaved to communicate knowledge and expand their autonomy. Enslaved people frequently left the plantations to steal hogs, it being the “first principle” in their alternative “code of morals that they that worked had a right to eat.”155 Fugitives told the committees that many would fly to the forests temporarily to escape whipping, the harvest, or the slave dealer. Black workers secretively left their workplaces to visit family scattered in other regions or neighborhoods. Others snuck off to have their own religious meetings, unbeknown to masters. Usually, these were of the revivalist sort, but not always. Anthony Burns spoke of sneaking off to an enslaved “fortune teller” who read his palm and envisioned that he would be freed. The prophesy became self-fulfilling, for it caused Burns’s once-abandoned “hopes of freedom to bud and blossom afresh.” Similarly, just before escaping, James L. Smith consulted a fortune teller who rightly prophesied, “you will reach the free country in safety.”156 Of course, the greatest conjuring trick was the forged pass. Twelve fugitives told various committees they had been in the illicit business of forging passes, which they themselves used to escape the South.157 John Thompson said he had fled north after being suspected of forging passes for others to roam about or escape slavery.158 Knowledge of such practices proved vital for organized abolition. It proved the existence of widespread, illicit forms of communication and movement among the enslaved. It showed that knowledge of abolition could spread south secretly and easily without abolitionists needing to bring their methods of public agitation into the region. It also suggested that VC members could engage in secret communications when needed. They knew well, as one BVC member elucidated, that “all fugitive slaves have communication with their friends at the south” and could adopt those same methods when needed.159 VC members collected the forged passes used by runaways and studied how they were written, quickly learning to create their own fake passes and freedom papers to assist runaways.160 They also greatly admired enslaved people’s methods of movement and communication, calling them the “underground telegraph.” Abolitionist James Redpath, basing his conclusions on his interviews with “hundreds” of enslaved people, said of the underground telegraph: “This system of secret travel 34

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originally grew out of the social desires of the slaves—their love of gossip and wish to meet their friends and relatives; but as the tyranny of the system grew more insupportable, in the natural course of events, and the yearnings after freedom became stronger in the minds of the negroes themselves, it was used for other and far more dangerous purposes.”161 It also made possible the Underground Railroad. Thanks to the underground telegraph, runaways had keen awareness of the many fronts in the battle against slavery long before they decided to flee. Enslaved people knew of the movement for Liberian colonization. Naturally, as Isaac Williams remarked, Liberia “was painted up as a perfect paradise by those interested in having free negroes shipped there.” “But,” he added, “some colored men who had been [there] once and returned told very different stories about fevers, hostile tribes that fought to drive the colony away, and other discouragements.”162 Williams likely knew of the racist motives of white colonizationists, but in addition, he did not want to be an unwelcome settler on someone else’s land. More significantly, runaways suggested that many, perhaps most, enslaved people knew of the organized abolitionist movement.163 They overheard their masters, who constantly fumed against such activists in their daily conversation. Fugitives like Frederick Douglass inferred that since masters denounced abolitionists as enslavers’ enemies, they must in reality be enslaved people’s true friends.164 One former slave told abolitionists that it was northern free Blacks kidnapped into slavery as well as recaptured runaways who disseminated “information at the south of all our efforts for the abolition of slavery.”165 Other fugitives elicited information from northern sojourners. Walter Hawkins, of Maryland, heard about abolitionism from Walter Proctor, an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister from Philadelphia who occasionally preached in Maryland. Hawkins later fled to the city in search of Proctor, who happened to work for the PVC.166 Henry Watson and Williams both encountered men from Boston, travelling on business, who told them of abolitionists in the North.167 Sometimes the enslaved relied upon the literate among them to scour newspapers for information about the activists. Harriet Jacobs said that fellow Black workers sometimes “asked if I had seen anything in the newspapers about white folks over in the big north, who were trying to get their freedom for them.”168 Knowledge of abolitionism was harder to come by in the Deep South, yet some still managed to gather information. One VC member, who had spoken to many of the enslaved in those states, claimed they had learned of abolitionist activities “from the negroes brought from Virginia and the border states.” In this way, 35

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enslaved people “kept in close touch with the progress of the movement.”169 They sometimes knew its principal leaders. They also knew of “emancipation in the West Indies,” which was celebrated with “great joy,” as runaway Clarke attested.170 As another abolitionist noted in 1841, the few runaways he encountered “had heard of emancipation in the British West Indies, and the efforts of abolitionists in the states, but they were unacquainted with the existence of vigilance committees.”171 Some runaways knew little or nothing about the secretive organizations before fleeing, only learning of them while on the run as they came into contact with “agents” working for the VCs in southern and northern cities. The NYVC, however, suggested that “information” about VCs “rapidly spreads even through the slave states.”172 Fugitives had considerable knowledge of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, an event that shocked and inspired runaways and abolitionists alike. As one fugitive said in an interview: “It may be that you have heard of Nat Turner and his insurrection. . . . [W]ell some of the slaves know all about it all over Virginia, Kentucky, and Carolina.”173 James L. Smith wrote admiringly that “Turner was one of the slaves who had quite a large army; he was the captain to free his race.”174 Some fugitives had personally experienced the reign of terror that ensued in the wake of the revolt. Smith and Harriet Jacobs described intensified surveillance and repression of religious meetings afterward.175 Fugitive Charity Bowery told abolitionist Lydia Maria Child of vicious patrols and indiscriminate murder of innocents. “The best and brightest was killed in Nat’s time,” she mourned.176 Henry “Box” Brown recalled a similar reign of terror in Richmond: “slaves were whipped, hung, and cut down with swords in the streets; and some that were found away from their quarters after dark, were shot.”177 Mrs. Coleman Freeman told abolitionists that she had fled “in consequence of persecution” after “the rebellion among the slaves, under Nat Turner.”178 Fugitives pondered the significance of Turner’s actions and learned the right lessons. As the runaway Jim explained: “We think Nat Turner was a good man, but he couldn’t do much to make us all free though he scared the white folks awfully. Then they hung Nat Turner, and them that know, say it is best not to try that way again.”179 Mass slave revolution had become impossible in a white-majority nation. Mass desertion became the preferred way to fight against oppression. Runaways told VCs that they had been well aware of permanent forms of desertion long before they themselves fled. Enslaved people knew of maroons hiding in forests and swamps, particularly the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia.180 Some worked near that swamp, communicating and trading with 36

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maroons. Peter Randolph said that after his brother became a maroon in the “swamps of Virginia, . . . my mother and myself used to carry him such food as we could provide.”181 Other fugitives told the committees that they knew of the maroon communities of the Seminoles in Florida. Jim Bow-Legs, of Georgia, even told the PVC that he was the nephew of Billy Bow-Legs, the leader of Seminole resistance to US aggression in the 1850s.182 Many more knew of the permanent deserters who went north. John Thompson learned, both from discussion with bondspeople and from overhearing his master’s complaints, that many in his area of Maryland had escaped to freedom.183 Many knew about running away because immediate relatives or fellow workers had already fled. Harriet Jacobs, for instance, slowly built up the courage to flee after her brother and uncle had run away.184 Zechariah of Maryland fled only after fifteen others on his mistress’s farm had done so before him.185 The fugitive Logan fled after seeing a harsh local master “obliged to give up working his farm as his hands have all gone.”186 Others had intimate knowledge of desertion because they had helped others escape. Sam Nixon was a “quite active and successful Underground Railroad agent” in Norfolk. He fled to the PVC only upon discovery that “slaveholders were watching him.”187 In rare instances, fugitives in the North came back south to communicate with or rescue enslaved friends and relatives. Harriet Tubman, Frank Wanzer, and Madison Washington did just that.188 Occasionally, fugitives in the North communicated via mail, a risky act that VC members discouraged.189 Enslaved people took joy in successful escapes, observed fugitive Andrew Jackson: “It is the theme of almost every meeting among them, and one of the most happy events whenever one escapes.”190 In addition to their deep knowledge of the traditions and tactics of resistance, runaways had great awareness of the geographies of slavery and freedom. They knew much of the North and desired to get there. In rare instances, fugitives possessed, even before fleeing, great knowledge of the distances to be traveled and precisely how to do it. William and Ellen Craft, for instance, knew very well they had to travel “1000 miles” from Georgia to freedom and would have to cover the distance by foot, boat, carriage, and train, through city and country, from South Carolina, up the coast, to Pennsylvania.191 Before escaping, John Hall charted an elaborate route “by land and water, in the woods and swamps of North Carolina and Virginia.”192 Such fugitive “counter-geographies,” as historian Stephanie Camp has called them, usually meant spatial awareness of the places to hide or to avoid, where one could pass as free or find allies as guides. Such knowledge was hard to obtain. “Slavery is as ill adapted for obtaining 37

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this kind of knowledge as all other kinds,” wrote fugitive Leonard Black of geography.193 Fugitives normally learned of “spaces of freedom” through their diverse work experiences in town and country or through their contact with the mass of runaways, the vast majority of whom remained in the South.194 They informed VC members of these spaces of freedom, enabling the committees to better utilize those spaces in their work of fugitive aid. Still asserted that most self-emancipators had fine “geographic abilities,” without which escape would be nearly impossible.195 But even fugitives without “geographic abilities” managed to escape to the North. One, William Brown, wandered from Maryland to the PVC, though only after having been lost for over five weeks, during which time he nearly starved to death.196 The countryside, particularly of Virginia and North Carolina, offered vast tracts of swamp and woodland where runaways hid and sought self-determination. Isaac Williams reflected the attitudes of many when he wrote, “I knew my way all over the country round about and all sorts of secret hiding places I carefully remembered in case they might ever be needed by me.”197 Thousands fled to the wilderness, sometimes for a short period, only to return to work. Some tried to live permanently in southern forests and swamps. Hundreds of runaways, for instance, fled to the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia, establishing a permanent maroon community. But for some, retreat to the wilderness was merely the first step before fleeing north. Twenty-six runaways interviewed by the committees had hidden in swamps, forests, hollowed trees, or caves before heading north.198 Some had originally fled with no intention of leaving the South, but did so after finding survival amid “bears, wild-cats, rattle-snakes, and the like” to be impossible.199 Most hid temporarily, waiting for the right opportunity to head northward. Some secreted themselves for as little as a week; others for much longer. William Brown remained in a North Carolina swamp for ten months before stowing away on a northbound vessel.200 Similarly, Harry Grimes hid more than a year in forests, caves, and swamps before finding the right chance to stow on a vessel.201 These maroons did what they could to survive, stealing hogs and “subsisting upon raw potatoes and wheat” or “on such wild fruit as they can gather.”202 Mostly, they relied on others for their survival. Winny Patsy, of Virginia, told the NYVC that while hiding, “she was fed . . . at the expense of a society among the slaves organized to aid persons in her circumstances.”203 Eliza Manoga, of Maryland, said she received similar aid from “free colored families” in the area.204 Henry Car hid in the Dismal Swamp for three months, presumably surviving on help from local maroons. At the same 38

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time, he maintained communication with a Black ship carpenter, who eventually got him a job working on board a vessel headed north. The carpenter and the captain of that ship happened to be agents for the PVC.205 Other runaways fled first to southern cities, searching for greater autonomy or opportunities to get north. As recent scholarship has shown, many thousands, perhaps the majority, of enslaved deserters stayed in cities, as urban “maroons,” amid large numbers of free Blacks as well as enslaved people trying to “pass” as free.206 Places like Richmond, Norfolk, and Baltimore were centers of trade and transport where one could find ships, roads, and trains out.207 Many came to cities as fugitives, hiding in basements, underneath buildings, in kitchens, and in other spaces, until the first chance of northward passage presented itself.208 Others, finding it relatively easy to “pass” as free but far riskier to trek northward, remained in cities for a few years before heading north.209 John Andrew Jackson, for instance, fled to Charleston and obtained employment with “a gang of negroes working at the wharf.” He only fled north after suspicious coworkers asked if he had a pass.210 Others had arrived in cities not as fugitives, but as hired laborers, and quickly discovered unanticipated chances to get to the free states. Fugitives sometimes moved from city to city, staying for some time in each place and making allies. Enslaved and free Black men and women hid them as well as guided them to and from major metropoles. Sailors and ship captains helped them board vessels.211 Such accomplices sometimes knew of, or worked for, the VCs. The experience of John Henry Hill is typical of such urban fugitives. Hill was taken to the Richmond slave market in 1853 to be sold south. En route, he escaped the slave trader and hid in the kitchen of an unsuspecting Richmond merchant under “care of a lady friend of my mother.” When he “got tired of staying in that place,” he forged a pass to Petersburg and stayed “with a very prominent colored person, who was a friend of Freedom.” Finding it unsafe there, too, he returned by rail to Richmond. Hearing from a friend of an opportunity to escape by ship from Norfolk, he traveled there using another forged pass and sailed north to Philadelphia.212 Runaways like Hill used their knowledge of urban settings to find hiding places and allies, to move about freely, to pass as free, and to utilize multiple modes of transportation to escape. Within southern cities, the waterfronts became the most significant space of autonomous mobility. The wharves of Richmond and Norfolk; Wilmington, North Carolina; and elsewhere bustled with economic activity and social life. Slaves and “passing” fugitives could find plenty of work hiring out as 39

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dockworkers, porters, ship caulkers, or boatmen.213 A few freedom seekers used their “knowledge of small boats” to commandeer skiffs and navigate north along “the inlets of the coast.”214 For Anthony Burns, originally from rural Virginia, the waterfront opened his aspirations to freedom. Hired out at the Richmond wharf, “he was thus brought into familiar intercourse with sailors . . . whose language to the slave had no smack of the whip.” Moreover, he now found himself “in daily sight of those northern keels” on their way to free lands.215 Frederick Douglass had expressed similar feelings. While working as a ship caulker in Baltimore, Irish fellow workers encouraged him to flee. He, too, saw the “northern keels,” which he imagined as symbols of absolute freedom from confinement.216 Many, like Burns, did everything they could to get on such vessels. They begged or bribed captains and sailors, loaded ships for sailors or did other work, snuck on board when no one was looking, or got the sailors on guard drunk.217 Thomas Sims boarded a vessel when applying for the post of ship’s cook. He did not get the job but did find a hiding spot.218 Female fugitives disguised themselves as washerwomen delivering clean laundry to ships’ crews.219 Despite the efforts of police to inspect ship hulls and to jail free Black sailors (who might help runaways), slaves climbed onto northern vessels, begging, hiding, and bribing, “in hopes of obtaining passage in her to a land of freedom.”220 Of those interviewed by the committees, 222 had arrived by ship—“saltwater fugitives,” as William Still called them—though the actual number was certainly higher.221 Some runaways stowed onto ships unbeknown to crews, but eleven saltwater fugitives told the committees they received help from dockside workers.222 Black workers on the waterfront steered those who desired freedom toward the right vessels.223 Sailors, cooks, and other crewmembers, often Black, stood on the front lines of this saltwater underground. They let fugitives onto ships and found them hiding places in holds and berths. Henry Johnson told the NYVC that a Black cook asked if he wanted freedom. Upon Johnson’s reply “yes,” the cook snuck him on board.224 Burns told abolitionists that while conversing with a sailor, “the subject of his bondage was broached, and his aspiration for freedom were disclosed.” The “sailor entered heartily into his views” and let him on board.225 John Andrew Jackson entered into a similar conversation in Charleston with a Black cook, who rigorously interviewed him before letting him come on board. The cook was rightly concerned that “some white man” had sent Jackson as a spy.226 Individual sailors sometimes stowed fugitives “without the knowledge . . . of the captain and crew.”227 Edinbur Randall told the BVC that after sneaking onto a vessel, “I soon found out that the sailors were all 40

Wandering the Dens and Caves of the Earth. From William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872), 424, 425.

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friendly to me; the captain and the mate . . . were the only enemies I had on board the ship.”228 But some captains helped runaways. New England captain and VC worker Daniel Drayton believed that hundreds came to ship captains, like himself, begging for passage: “There is not a waterman who ever sailed the Chesapeake Bay who will not tell you that, so far from the slaves needing any prompting to run away, the difficulty is, when they ask you to assist them, to make them take no for an answer.”229 Enterprising skippers did not always say “no” to runaways but instead charged them as much as fifty-seven dollars for northward passage. Self-liberation by sea was hardly idyllic and not always for free, yet the ship came to have a symbolic relation to dreams of freedom.230 It is no small coincidence that Marcus Garvey later named the maiden vessel of the Black Star Line the SS Frederick Douglass, a steam-and-steel floating prophecy of the political and economic self-determination of all African peoples. Flight was inherently a form of collective action, as recent scholarship has emphasized. Of the fugitives helped by the VCs, 885 (or 52 percent of all fugitives recorded by the committees) are known to have fled in groups.231 Collective flight was far more conspicuous, and hence far more dangerous, than individual flight. The fact that so many runaways fled with someone else shows they privileged ties of trust and solidarity over personal safety. Fugitives made sure to choose trustworthy “comrades” to escape with.232 George of Maryland ran off with two friends only after “finding them sound on the question of freedom.”233 Hetty Scott convinced a young couple to flee with her after delivering an “eloquent speech . . . on freedom.”234 The elderly slave Lloyd Hacket also chose carefully a trustworthy, freedom-loving friend to escape with. But he made sure that his comrade was healthy and twenty years junior to him, able to guide him and care for him along the way.235 Douglass claimed that many enslaved people met at night, conspiring to escape. These “meetings,” he wrote, “must have resembled, on a small scale, the meetings of revolutionary conspirators in their primary condition. We were plotting against our (so-called) lawful rulers, with this difference . . . we did not seek to overthrow them but to escape from them.”236 In other cases, individuals escaped alone but ran into fellow fugitives along the way.237 “Saltwater fugitives” often fled alone but occasionally boarded northbound ships with others who coincidentally had made the same plans.238 The size of the fugitive groups that reached the committees varied widely. On average, runaways fled in groups of four to five people. The more daring ship captains stowed as many as twenty fugitives on a single trip.239 In one instance, twenty-eight runaways from different plantations coordinated their escape by 42

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land from Maryland in 1857. They left in two waves, roughly a week apart, split into smaller groups along the way, and then reconvened in Philadelphia.240 Three hundred and ninety fugitives fled with their immediate family, despite the immense risks.241 Affective ties and responsibilities, as well as simple desires for human solidarity, weighed more heavily than the dangers involved. Loved ones made the hell of slavery endurable for many, and life itself, even in the imagined splendors of freedom, seemed unthinkable without them. Knowing that slavery crippled conventional family life, some fugitives told the VCs that they fled mainly to fulfill their moral obligations as fathers and mothers.242 Some fugitives found it irresponsible to abandon spouses and children for personal freedom, for when a slave fled, the master sold spouses or children to deter other Black mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, from fleeing. Some fugitive parents believed themselves morally obligated to bring those they had birthed into slavery out of it. Rebecca Jones told the PVC that she would rather “take the lives of her children” than to leave without them or see them sold away.243 Harriet Shephard led her five children (and five other fugitives as well) out of bondage because she “could not bear the thought of having her offspring compelled to wear the miserable yoke of slavery.”244 Daniel Stanley justified fleeing with his wife and six children, simply saying “all work and no play” was the unhealthiest life for children to live.245 Some childless couples, like William and Ellen Craft, who refused on moral grounds to get married or produce children as commodities, fled together, in part to be able to start a family. (BVC members married the couple immediately upon their arrival in Boston!)246 Husbands and wives planned their escapes together, usually as equal coconspirators, but sometimes women took the lead in family escapes. In rare instances, mothers fled with children but let their husbands behind. Enslaved women sometimes had to goad their husbands, who had slightly more privileged lives—and thus “had less spirit”—to flee. Anna Scott, for example, “took the lead” in plotting her family’s escape. Her husband, quite willing to defer to her authority, merely “agreed to stand by her in her struggles while fleeing.”247 Only rarely did men assert their authority in family escapes. In one instance, a fugitive told the NYVC that he “had to whip his wife to make her consent to go,” a singular and obscene case, no doubt.248 Many more fugitives—814—fled unaccompanied. Of those, 32 went alone in search of previously escaped relatives (whom they often had helped run away).249 Frances Hilliard, of Richmond, for instance, “assisted her husband to escape,” then followed him soon after.250 In other cases, slaves only made the decision to 43

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run after family members had been sold off. Robert Brown chose to leave only after his wife, who “had resisted the lustful designs of her master,” and four children had been sold away.251 Others had no qualms about leaving alone, for they left behind few relatives or were too young to be “encumbered with a family.”252 Robert Fisher justified never marrying or having children under slavery “as a matter of principle,” for he did not “wish to be encumbered, if the opportunity offered to escape.”253 Nevertheless, nearly all fugitives left family and friends behind, with a few privileging freedom over family enough to leave their own partners or children behind. One enslaved woman left her children with a free Black man and fled.254 When Elizabeth Tompkins confided to her husband her plot to escape, he threatened to betray her; she left without him.255 Family ties stood foremost in the mind of those pondering whether to flee alone. Often, they received consent and sometimes encouragement and aid from the family members in whom they confided.256 In some cases, fugitives brooded secretly, not telling a soul and leaving before anyone knew of their plans. Elias, for instance, left slavery secretly without even telling his wife. He was afraid, he said, that she might “let the ‘cat out of the bag.’”257 Hilliard, similarly, left without telling her mother, “fearful that her excitement might arouse suspicion.”258 In a few cases, freedom seekers left alone without reservation, being hearty individualists. Isaac Newton said that he stole himself from his Richmond master solely because he believed it to be his “bounden duty to look after number one.”259 Fugitives displayed much creativity in their escape efforts. Runaways forged passes, an act of creative writing if ever there was one. They stole horses, carriages, and money from their masters, sometimes even fleeing in small caravanlike processions. They commandeered boats and sailed dangerous waters. In one instance, a boat commandeered by a band of fugitives capsized, and one among them died.260 Runaways hopped on top of or into the boxcars of trains, as a later generation of itinerant workers and radicals would do. One fugitive who did this fell off the train, breaking his leg, which was later amputated, yet lived long enough to tell his tale to VC members.261 Six fugitives got north by mailing themselves in boxes, including the famous Henry “Box” Brown.262 One woman even hid in a sailor’s chest.263 Fugitives came up with elaborate disguises, too. Notoriously, Ellen and William Craft fled Georgia disguised—Ellen as a veiled white woman in mourning, William as her trusty servant.264 Two other fugitive women used the exact same disguise to escape.265 Two fugitives escaped with Irish lovers who pretended to be their masters.266 Harriet Jacobs, of North Carolina, and Cassey, from Baltimore, imitated the dress and gait of sailors in 44

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order to sneak onto ships.267 Six women, in fact, fled disguised as Black men, knowing that enslaved men had greater privileges to travel about, visit family, or go to cities to hire out, which meant much less risk of being harassed by patrols.268 Others used their complexion and knowledge of the ways of white folk to escape. Two lighter-complexioned fugitives escaped pretending to be white men.269 Escape required not only wits but sometimes wittiness, too. One runaway, the brother of Harriet Jacobs, left a note for his master: Sir—I have left you, not to return; when I have got settled, I will give you further satisfaction. No longer yours JOHN S. JACOBS 270 For sure, escaping slavery required practical sense, yet it was also an act of creative imagination, requiring a dream, a hope of liberation, and audacious plans for seizing it. According to the VC records, eighty-one runaways fled armed with weapons stolen from their masters. They took rifles, revolvers, pistols, and bowie knives, as well as butcher knives, razorblades, and broadaxes, for self-defense.271 Fortunately, in the majority of cases, fugitives did not have to use the weapons, though they certainly expressed a willingness to do so, if necessary. For instance, Elizabeth Amby, a fugitive woman who fled Maryland with a pistol and a knife, argued that “she would wade through blood and tears for her freedom.”272 Frank Wanzer and his band of fugitives from Virginia brandished their arms openly, not to provoke a fight, but to frighten white folks from confronting them.273 Twenty-two runaways had to use their weapons against pursuing masters and slavecatchers. Some fugitives shot at, hit, stabbed, and even killed their pursuers.274 In one extraordinary case, five runaway men and women from Maryland, after commandeering a small skiff, battled slavecatchers who pursued them on their own skiff on the Chesapeake Bay. The groups shot at each other with pistols and dueled with oars, with the fugitives emerging victorious.275 As William Still noted, fugitives’ use of violence revealed that enslaved people had fervent faith in freedom, a “faith” they were willing to prove by their “works.”276 Some fugitives told—and later convinced—abolitionists that violence was an acceptable, though not sole means, for fighting the slave power. Importantly, though, they rarely fetishized the gun, as a principle. In a few cases, runaways, 45

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upon arriving at the committees, quickly “laid aside their arms.” Fugitive Pete Matthews, for example, gladly handed over his gun to the PVC, for as a newly self-emancipated man, he “had more confidence in his ‘understandings’ than he had in his old pistol.”277 Weapons were tools, not principles, in the struggle for liberation. Only the masters and their allies fetishized the right to bear arms. Fugitives did not simply speak of politics as action; they spoke of it as knowledge of alienation. Runaways perfectly described to VC members the condition of slavery as the purest and deepest alienation ever known. All that one should be permitted to possess or self-determine was alien. They emphasized the alienation of labor—the wealth they created belonged to another. Fugitives told VC members they left slavery because they were “tired of working for the white people for nothing.”278 Hetty Scott similarly justified running off with her children, exclaiming that her master “should not have the satisfaction of enjoying the fruit of the toil of herself and offspring.”279 They referred to alienation from land, hearth, and home. The land they tilled was not their own, and where they lived was not their home but a place of confinement. Still noted that runaways rarely knew the South as “home” but as a “prison house.”280 Runaways noted the precariousness of family and of the alienation of children from parents. Mothers produced children as commodities; fathers could not fulfill the duties of patriarchs. The alienation ran much deeper, down straight to the self. Runaways like Box Brown recounted that their bodies were not their own but merely “moneyed value” for the master.281 Enslaved people spoke of alienation of the will as well. “I was never to consult my own will, but was, while I lived, to be entirely under the control of another,” recounted Lunsford Lane, who eventually purchased his freedom—buying back his own willpower—went north, and joined the BVC.282 Runaways had little access to the powers of knowledge and literacy. Masters regulated their religious instruction, too. Feelings of compassion and tenderness were beaten out of or stolen from the enslaved, noted Brown.283 Harriet Jacobs famously said that it was nearly impossible to love under slavery. Quoting Byron in her later autobiography, Jacobs powerfully described the American “prison house” as the land: Where laughter is not mirth; nor thought the mind; Nor words a language; nor even men mankind. Where cries reply to curses; shrieks to moans, And each is tortured in his separate hell.284 46

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Thus, fugitives thought deeply upon the alienation they suffered, the condition that was meant to prevent them from thinking at all. Runaways further acknowledged that slavery dehumanized the master class and stripped them of their morality. They acknowledged this not out of empathy, nor because they lived by the dictum “love thy enemy,” but rather because they enjoined themselves to “know thy enemy.” Slaveholding, they repeated again and again, made masters violent, short tempered, and irritable, lacking all virtues of patience or sympathy. The reason was simple, as one runaway explained: “The masters are ever feverously anxious about the slaves running away and this being always continued necessarily produces an irritability characteristic of the slaveholder.”285 Such “drapetophobia” was common among the enslavers. Mistresses were equally “irritable.” Confined to the home amid irascible sons, abusive husbands, and many potential concubines and illegitimate children, mistresses could sometimes be violently jealous, “mad, passionate, raving.”286 In fact, sixty-seven runaways fled because their mistress, not their master, was violently abusive.287 Fugitives also described masters as quarrelsome, “incestuous,” murderous, and lazy, men who rarely worked, indulged in “a great deal of extravagance,” and often fell deep into debt.288 Masters spent most of their time horseracing, gambling, “frolicking,” and drinking. Thirty fugitives told the committees that they fled primarily because their masters were violent drunkards, a fact of great importance to those northern abolitionists (including fugitives, like Douglass) who linked slavery and intemperance.289 Runaways also spoke at length on the religious hypocrisy of slaveholders. Seventeen fugitives, in fact, listed their masters’ religious hypocrisy as a reason they fled. Such men pretended piety while preaching to slaves, “servants obey thy masters.” A handful of fugitives who spoke to the committees even said that the drunken, gambling, adulterous masters they worked for were themselves deacons, ministers, and even bishops of the religion of Christ. Jo Norton provocatively summed up their feelings when he called the masters “niggers.” Such men, he said, were crude, cruel, uneducated, intemperate, and had “nigged me out of all I ever earned in my life.”290 Abolitionists always searched for proof that slavery degraded the morals of whites; fugitives provided the ammunition for such moralizing politics. With varied experiences of servitude and resistance, runaways expressed to abolitionists rich but pragmatic notions of freedom. For some, freedom meant recompense for unrequited, servile toil—wages, if not reparations.291 For Richard Bayne, it meant to “lay down the shovel and the hoe,” to cease to be a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water.292 Fugitive John Quincy Adams 47

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defined freedom more broadly as access to “education,” “protection,” and “plenty of work” with “good pay for it.”293 Charles Lucas said any real “emancipation” also ought to include accessible education and health care.294 It meant freedom from want, from ignorance, and from fear. Fugitives sought liberation from the fearful whip, from the separation of families, and from sexual violence and humiliation. “The great day of emancipation,” wrote Henry Watson, would dawn “when the husband may return to his wife; the child to the mother; when the clanking chains, the crack of the whip, the cries of the bleeding bondmen shall no more ascend to heaven.”295 Fugitives, conscious of the forced migrations and subsequent immobility that sustained slavery, articulated freedom simply as the liberty to move. One fugitive told the PVC that it meant a condition “where passes were not needed to be out o’ nights.”296 Though a few fugitives likened freedom to religious conversion—a life of light, self-knowledge, and spiritual liberation—most considered it in eminently practical terms.297 That understanding of freedom would give grounding and depth to the abolitionist vision of full human liberation. Runaways valued knowledge as much as they did freedom, and indeed, the two were connected. Resistance required much thought—brooding upon one’s own condition and imagining alternatives—and many a fugitive, as William Still noted, set to “thinking seriously on the subject of immediate emancipation” while plotting their escapes.298 Knowledge of geography and society—of words even—inspired or empowered individuals in their resistance. “Knowledge is power” was a dictum that fugitive-abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Jermain Loguen repeated in their writings and speeches. In particular, fugitives often told the VCs of their painstaking efforts to teach themselves to read. Some did so by stealing Bibles, spelling books, or encyclopedias. Others bribed children or had some literate friend initiate them into that “key to all the mysteries of wisdom and knowledge.”299 Most often, self-educated fugitives used the power of literacy to forge passes, while others used it to secretly read Uncle Tom’s Cabin or the Bible.300 Runaways understood the value of knowledge philosophically, as something intimately bound to freedom. Knowledge—of the world, of oneself, of god—was a thing most vehemently denied to the enslaved and thus became the most desired, most necessary, thing in freedom. Fugitive John Henry Hill told Still exactly why it had been denied him in slavery: “If my master had allowed me to have an education, I would make him feel me, yeas [sic], I would make them tremble when I spoke.”301 Fugitive Alexander Hemsley told abolitionists that he believed freedom to be a “state of liberty for the mind . . . 48

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which I could not enjoy unless I were free.”302 Another further affirmed that, in freedom, “I don’t have to study all day about running into woods, nor dream of it at nights, as I used.”303 True liberty thus gave room to the mind, a room of one’s own, to study, to think, and to dream as one wills. It was precisely this desire to think and dream, at all costs, that would make fugitives the leading teachers and intellectuals of abolitionism. As Hill said to Still about his future plans as an educated freeman, “I will try to use my midnight lamp, until I can have some influence upon American slavery.”304 Many other runaways had similar intentions. William Still often described fugitives as those who “wandered in the dens and caves of the earth.” The description was apt, as fugitives did wander the wilderness and barren places of the world, sometimes for years, to escape the prison house of bondage.305 They knew the landscapes of freedom and unfreedom—the places to hide or avoid—and they knew the workings of the oppressive system they wandered from. But there was deeper meaning to Still’s words. In Hebrews 11:38, the faithful, who “wandered in the dens and caves of the earth,” were the “destitute, afflicted, mistreated—of whom the world was not worthy.” Fugitives wandered to escape personal affliction and mistreatment and, more importantly, to liberate themselves from a world they deemed unworthy for themselves and others. They experienced injustice as “sectional,” or southern, but also knew it to be national and global. As fugitive Lewis Clarke later wrote, even “the natives of India fled to the jungles . . . to escape the barbarous cruelty of Warren Hastings,” the vicious former governor-general of colonial India.306 Running away was thus a universal form of resistance, an immediate leaping beyond the confines of capital, colonies, and settler empires.307 Thousands of fugitives awoke to such actions and realizations. By finding ways to cancel their captivity, without compensation to their masters, they developed their own practices of “immediate abolition” to complement the abolitionist theory of the same name. Fugitives built up the Underground Railroad. They taught what they knew in vivid “narratives, letters, and facts,” which VC members preserved and used to help others.308 It was this process of wandering and pondering, then teaching and leading, that slowly made abolitionism into a movement with revolutionary aims—the immediate, uncompensated overthrow of an entire system of labor exploitation, by any means necessary, led by the self-liberated.

49

TWO

RADICAL AND PRACTICAL ABOLITION, 1835-1849 I don’t recognize uniqueness, not as its applied to individualism, because it is too tightly tied into decadent capitalist culture. . . . But then how can I explain the runaway slave in terms that do not imply uniqueness? —George Jackson, Soledad Brother

In 1887, the biographer and son of Black New York Vigilance Committee activist Charles B. Ray, distinguished abolitionists into “three classes.” There were “[1] those who made eloquent appeals in his [the enslaved’s] behalf with voice and pen, either to stir up an indifferent community or to refute antagonistic arguments—[2] those who gave freely of their means to insure [sic] his purchase—and [3] those who not only went about quietly awakening an interest in the bondman, but actually came into contact with him, aiding him with counsel, sympathy, and often with shelter.” The first class were the radical public agitators who emerged under the guidance of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s. The second class were those who independently purchased the freedom of individuals. The final class did all of the above but devoted most of their time to secretly helping runaways. This “last class,” noted Ray’s son, “who came nearest in everyday experience to the objects of their compassion,” were “often the least signalized,” or the least heralded.1 This unheralded class of agitators, to which the elder Ray belonged, were the vigilance committee members of the early years of the radical abolitionist movement. Ray was typical of the early VC activists. Of humble, mixed Afro-Indigenous origins, he had worked variously as a shoemaker and farm laborer before 50

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becoming a minister and moving to New York. In the 1830s, Ray had worked as an agent, later editor, of the Colored American, one of the first Black-run newspapers. He participated in Black-run mutual-relief societies and helped lead the all-Black “colored conventions.” But Ray also participated in interracial movements for land reform and women’s rights. He joined the radical abolitionist movement, initially led by Garrison, in the 1830s but broke with Garrison in the 1840s to support the Liberty Party. But more significant than Ray’s public activism was his work “underground” with the NYVC.2 He assisted hundreds of fugitives, collaborated across sectarian divisions, and helped make the least heralded aspect of abolitionism into the most essential. Frequently working away from the public eye, early VC members were indeed the “least signalized” within the radical, public-oriented abolitionism that emerged in that period. Scholars have long assumed that the early VCs had started strong in the late 1830s but by the 1840s became rent by factionalism, disorganized, dormant, or altogether marginal to the radical abolitionist movement.3 Some have suggested that the early VCs were not new innovations of radical abolitionism but outgrowths of the legalistic forms of antislavery activism prominent prior to the 1830s.4 On the other hand, Historians Eric Foner and Graham Hodges have shown how the early NYVC creatively innovated tactics for assisting enslaved people.5 Yet much less has been said on the ways the wider VC movement transformed radical abolitionism. Illegally assisting fugitives had, initially, been seen by most abolitionists as secondary to the cause of awakening the northern public to the evils of slavery. Yet by the 1840s, VCs became vital to the public movement in those tough early years, when abolitionists faced external abuse and internal fracture. Members brought some level of unity and organization to the different “classes” of abolitionists, who often worked independently of each other. They supported the public movement— those who used “voice and pen” to “stir up an indifferent community”—and were often public agitators themselves. They had no qualms about using what little funds they possessed to purchase slaves’ freedom. More than that, they organized disparate activists for the cause of practical assistance to the enslaved, or “practical abolitionism,” as they called it. They transformed the tactics of abolitionism, making the whole movement—not just one “class” of it—into abettors of fugitive resistance. Most important of all, committee members “came nearest in everyday experience” to runaways. They helped thousands in their self-liberation and listened to their stories. They also beckoned them into the movement. Very soon, runaways ceased to be “objects of their compassion” but 51

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the subjects and leaders of their movement. The establishment of VCs, thus, may very well have been one of the most momentous acts in the organized struggle against slavery. BEGINNIN G RADIC AL ABOLITIONISM In the 1820s and early 1830s, Black refugees from the South fled north in unprecedented numbers. By that time, the North’s (very) gradual abolition of slavery, begun in the period after Independence, was largely completed. The region became associated with “free soil.” By the 1820s, the Deep South, as well as Missouri, had been incorporated into the Union as slave states. The “cotton kingdom” had matured, and with that came intensified exploitation, punishment, and slave trading from the Upper South. The violent suppression of Denmark Vesey’s Revolt in South Carolina (1822) and Nat Turner’s Rebellion further convinced Black southerners, both free and unfree, to flee to the “free” states. Many refugees from this period later became active in the VCs. Daniel Payne, born free in South Carolina, fled to Philadelphia after the repression of Vesey’s Revolt.6 In his youth, he had been inspired by the Haitian Revolution; as an adult, he worked as an AME minister and Philadelphia Vigilance Committee member. Led by his mother, Henry Highland Garnet, then a child, fled slavery in Maryland to New York. He would later become a leader in New York’s underground as well as a vocal advocate of revolutionary abolitionism. Similarly, other enslaved people who liberated themselves in the 1820s—Austin Steward, James W. C. Pennington, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Thomas James, and others— became active in VCs.7 All these refugees later recalled the difficulties of escape and the precariousness of freedom. Kidnappers and slavecatchers hunted them in the North, sometimes in organized gangs, with the complicity of local police, courts, and mercantile elites.8 “At that time, there was no Vigilance Committee to aid the flying slave—at that time, the two powerful Anti-Slavery Societies of America had no being,” recalled Pennington.9 Black refugees were not without help. Northern cities, especially Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, had sizable free Black communities. Their members were only a generation removed from slavery and still suffered from prejudice, lack of rights, and illegal kidnapping. Yet these communities had their own schools and churches, protested against kidnapping and colonization, and showed some solidarity with refugees.10 Robert Purvis, the mixed-race son of a wealthy merchant and a leading figure in Philadelphia’s Black middle class, 52

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protested racism and slavery. He illegally hid fugitives at his home well before forming the PVC in 1837. In New York, the young refugee Garnet went to the Free African School, run by local reformers, where he learned antislavery ideas. Among his schoolmates were the fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward and the Haitian émigré Charles Lewis Reason both of whom later worked with VCs.11 From 1830, Black reformers, many of whom later became VC activists, held “National Conventions” to promote self-help and protest racism.12 Sometimes northern Blacks resorted to direct action. Austin Steward, who moved from Kentucky to Rochester, New York, after his master freed him, witnessed free Black workers forcefully rescue a suspected fugitive from jail in the late 1820s. The event had a radicalizing influence on him, and he later collaborated with the NYVC.13 Though not all free Black northerners openly advocated abolitionist ideals, they did create a milieu that nurtured revolutionary abolitionist thinkers like David Walker. Born free in North Carolina, Walker fled to Boston in the wake of Vesey’s Revolt. In 1829, he published the incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a revolutionary break from previous forms of abolitionism, which had been white led, patriotic, legalistic, and focused on either expelling ex-slaves to Africa (colonization) or gradual emancipation. Walker denounced white supremacy, gradualism, colonization, and the horrid state that had strengthened slavery in the name of “freedom.” He urged the violent overthrow of America’s slave empire. And Walker meant what he said. With the help of sailors, he distributed the pamphlet in the slave states, causing a wave of fear and repression in the South. White Boston Vigilance Committee member Thomas Wentworth Higginson later recalled that the Appeal was “the very first antislavery book which attained wide attention.”14 Walker died in 1830 in mysterious circumstances, some suspecting assassination.15 With new refugees from the South, as well as rising anger over the expansion of slavery and the inability of conservative white abolitionists to stop it, “ultra” ideas began to emerge in northern cities. Though Walker died too early, his uncompromising style of critique and search for slave-initiated strategies of swift abolition later inspired VC activists to craft their own strategies of revolutionary abolitionism. White abolitionists were also active in this period. Gradual abolition societies, such as the New York Manumission Society and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, both of which had been established in the late eighteenth century, offered legal representation to hundreds of free Black northerners illegally kidnapped or wrongly accused of being fugitives. Though deeply committed to defending Black rights where such rights had been gained, these organizations 53

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were restricted to white males only, gradualist in approach, and opposed to illegal direct action. They could do little to stop slaveholders when their claim to a fugitive was lawful.16 Nevertheless, these “old” abolition societies had decades of experience behind them and, on occasions, proved trusty allies to the VCs. Hicksite Quakers, however, intimated more radical forms of activism. Hicksites, radical Quaker followers of Elias Hicks (1748–1830), broke from “orthodox” Quaker meetings in the 1820s. They advocated open antislavery action, opposing orthodox Quakers’ privileging of private antislavery conviction.17 Believing that the “Higher Law” of conscience “conformed to no outside doctrine of creeds, Bibles, [or] legislative enactments,” Hicksites trampled the original Fugitive Slave Law (1793) by illegally helping runaways.18 In the 1820s, a Delaware Hicksite, Thomas Garrett, had helped young Garnet and his family escape. In 1829, Hicks himself helped Garnet evade slavecatchers prowling in New York City.19 Garrett, Lucretia Mott, Isaac Hopper, and other Hicksites who illegally aided fugitives throughout the 1820s later became stalwarts of the radical antislavery societies and the VCs in the 1830s.20 The activism of Isaac Hopper most clearly anticipated the “practical abolitionism” of the VCs. Known as the “sans-cullote” of Quakerism, Hopper worked as a prison reformer, land reformer, and worked with the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.21 On the intellectual front, he edited and published Hicks’s spiritual journals.22 From 1800 to 1835, Hopper assisted over one thousand fugitives. He knew the law well and helped in the legal defense of suspected fugitives. But Hopper also used illegal methods independently. Black working-class allies informed him of arriving fugitives needing shelter or transportation.23 Due to his antiracism, runaways “were not afraid to tell him their experiences in their own way.”24 Hopper wrote down these fugitive experiences, “tales of oppression” as he called them. For over thirty years, he had been a “perpetual ‘committee of vigilance,’” influencing a younger generation of more radical activists.25 Some younger Black activists had parents whom Hopper had assisted.26 Moreover, throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Hopper published his “tales of oppression” in the National Antislavery Standard. These included gripping stories of fugitive resistance but also included extensive descriptions of how he had assisted them.27 VC workers later used these “tales of oppression” as a “manual, which might be consulted, and aid in the assistance of other fugitives.”28 In 1835 in New York City, Hopper, alongside Black ex-sailor David Ruggles, spearheaded the first VC. Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison gave impetus and organization to these nascent forms of radicalism. The son of a sailor, Garrison had been 54

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deeply influenced by the ideas of Hicksites. In the late 1820s, learning from Black activists, fugitive and free, in Boston and Baltimore, he began to realize that the colonizationist, gradualist, whites-only, legalistic approaches to emancipation were ineffective. The catalyst for his complete conversion, though, was his brief stint in a Baltimore prison, in 1830, for libeling a slave trader. There, Garrison held discussions with incarcerated fugitives, listening intently to their stories of never-ending woe. From then on, he affirmed that slavery could never end in any other way but all at once.29 In 1831 (the same year as Turner’s Rebellion), Garrison launched a radical newspaper, the Liberator. In its pages, he enunciated his vision for “immediate” not gradual, “radical” not moderate, emancipation. He opposed racism and sexism. Garrison espoused a liberation theology contemptuous of the American clergy and the Constitution that upheld slavery. Though he sympathetically publicized David Walker’s ideas, Garrison believed that slavery would only fall through “nonresistance” (pacifism) and “moral suasion,” that is, the transformation of proslavery public opinion through peaceful protest. The Liberator publicized incidents of slavecatching and resistance by runaways.30 Black reformers and even fugitives were the newspaper’s main readers.31 In 1833 in Philadelphia, Garrison and his followers, including Mott and Purvis, formed a national organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). They composed the society’s manifesto, the Declaration of Sentiments, in the home of Black abolitionist James McCrummel, later to be a leader in the PVC. State branches of the AASS, such as the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (PASS), formed soon thereafter. Activists who later founded VCs flocked to these new organizations, also becoming agents for the Liberator as well as traveling lecturers.32 These organizations brought together for the first time once-marginalized and once-isolated radicals across regions. Garrison’s strict emphasis on antiracism and antisexism brought together abolitionists white and Black, male and female, who espoused radical ideas and had long helped fugitives on their own. ORGANIZIN G VIGIL AN CE COMMIT TEES In the early 1830s, Garrisonian radicals made few efforts to organize informal methods of fugitive aid. The new antislavery societies, devoted to immediate emancipation, had only begun their work. They had limited resources and personnel but were overconfident in their newfound philosophy of “moral suasion.” They believed they could convince the American public of the sins of 55

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slaveholding and provoke a mass conversion of conscience, a moral revolution. Thus, the majority of antislavery resources went into the mediums of “moral suasion”—newspapers, pamphlets, petitions, lectures, and so forth. Many new converts like Hopper, Mott, and Purvis assisted fugitives as a matter of individual conscience. Helping these individuals liberate themselves one at a time was, they believed, an ethical, necessary act, but it contributed only minimally toward the liberation of three million slaves instantaneously and forever.33 For every fugitive who escaped, two children would be born into slavery. Thus, fugitive aid was mildly encouraged, but did not receive funding or organization from the young, idealistic, but cash-poor antislavery societies. After the shock of Turner’s Rebellion as well as the increase of fugitive resistance and the advent of Garrison’s incendiary radicalism, the South shut its ears to all talk of emancipation and became increasingly aggressive. In fact, southerners organized the first “vigilance committees” of the era. These organizations were bands of citizen-vigilantes formed, on a temporary basis, to protect slavery, law, and the Constitution from various internal threats.34 In practice, they became the citizens’ paramilitary wing of the slave power—an extension of existing slave patrols—ready to “perpetuate their system at all events.”35 These armed committees “exercised a kind of inquisitorial surveillance” to prevent desertion, night meetings, abolitionist agitation, and the influx of incendiary literature.36 These “vigilance committees” terrorized free Blacks, lynched or drove out of town abolitionists, and offered cash sums of up to $1,500 for anyone caught distributing Walker’s Appeal.37 Such citizen-vigilantes also continued coming into the North to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and to illegally snatch free Black northerners.38 Throughout the early 1830s, the Liberator vigorously tracked and publicized the activities of the southern “vigilance committees.” As Garrison sourly observed, “the whole South resolved itself into a vigilance committee, whip in hand, dirks and pistols in pockets, to watch with Argus eyes the appearance of the least spark of the doctrine that ‘all men are created equal.’”39 With intensified vigilante organization by the slave power alongside floods of fugitives fleeing its increasingly repressive economy, antislavery activists swiftly discovered “moral suasion” to be insufficient, even if essential. By the mid-1830s, in Philadelphia and New York—cities flooded with fugitives and slave hunters—Black Garrisonians established the first abolitionist vigilance committees. In 1835, abolitionists led by ex-sailor David Ruggles, a founding member of the New York Anti-Slavery Society with strong connections to Black workers, established the NYVC.40 Ruggles formed the VC 56

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believing that the previous forms of fugitive aid and self-defense had been disorganized, underacknowledged, and “too insecure.”41 Abolitionists in Philadelphia, led by the Black Garrisonian Purvis, came to similar conclusions in 1837 in the wake of a nearly unsuccessful fugitive case. That year, slavecatchers seized Basil Dorsey at the home of Purvis, who had been hiding him. Fearing that the ensuing court case would favor the slavecatchers, Purvis and a group of Black workers hastily devised plans “to assemble in squads about the three leading roads and use adequate means for the purpose of liberating” Dorsey.42 Fortunately, the case, handled by abolitionist lawyer David Paul Brown, went in Dorsey’s favor, and Purvis sent him off to Massachusetts. Realizing that the assistance to Dorsey had been too hastily and inefficiently organized, Purvis and other Black abolitionists formed the PVC. The purpose of these new committees was to provide “an organized body of men . . . a rallying point, a center of action,” for all fugitive-defense activities.43 Ruggles’s biographer, Graham Hodges, has written that the NYVC “was by far the most radical response any abolitionist group had made to the problems of kidnapping and easily the most overt demonstration of support for self-emancipated slaves.”44 This can be said as well about all the other VCs that sprung up afterward. In Boston, a city with fewer fugitives, tactical education went slower. Informal methods seemed to work. In 1836, Black dockworkers notified Garrisonian lawyer Samuel Sewall of a brig in Boston harbor detaining two female fugitives.45 At the workers’ behest, Sewall served as defense attorney for the two women. When a court ruled that the women were fugitives, Black workers sprang into action. An “old colored woman, of great size, who did the scrubbing in Mr. Sewall’s office,” throttled the guard. Meanwhile, a group of Black women rushed into the courthouse to rescue the runaways. Abolitionists “sacredly cherished and transmitted to posterity” the memories of this heroic rescue.46 But no formal organization came out of the incident. Five years later, in 1841, authorities seized runaway John Torrence, found stowed away on a Boston-bound vessel. Local abolitionists and sympathetic sailors separately staged rescue attempts.47 These poorly prepared, poorly coordinated efforts could not prevent Torrence’s rendition. After this organizational failure, a group of abolitionists, led by the hot-headed but conscientious Congregationalist minister Charles T. Torrey, formed the Boston Vigilance Committee. At one of the BVC’s first meetings, Ruggles and Henry Highland Garnet offered advice and “related instances which had come within their knowledge of the escape of many a fugitive from the southern prison-house.”48 In 1842, the BVC reorganized as the Black-led 57

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New England Freedom Association, which lasted until 1846.49 But following another kidnapping afterward, white and Black abolitionists reconstituted the BVC more firmly that same year.50 VCs formed elsewhere throughout the 1840s. In Buffalo, New York, fugitive William Wells Brown “organized a vigilance committee to protect and aid slaves while passing through that city.” Brown had worked on steamboats along the Mississippi River before escaping slavery in 1834. As a self-emancipated man, he now worked as a steward on steamers plying Lake Erie and used his position to sneak fugitives, by water, to Canada. But the VC in Buffalo seems to have been short lived, as the articulate, ever-mobile Brown took up a post as touring lecturer for the AASS in 1843.51 White minister Abel Brown, with the assistance of BVC founder Torrey, established the Albany Vigilance Committee (AVC). “The Albany Committee of Vigilance,” claimed Ruggles, “has the reputation of being the most efficient organization in the state of New York, in the business of aiding the way-worn and weary-beaten refugee from slavery’s shambles.”52 The AVC remained “efficient” through the 1850s. In the late 1830s, Black activists in Pittsburgh formed the Philanthropic Society. Though devoted to mutual aid in many forms, the society also organized the city’s abolitionist underground. It shrouded this work in utmost secrecy and had few connections to other VCs.53 Nevertheless, when Peter Still arrived in Pittsburgh en route to Philadelphia, Black Pittsburghers advised him to search for PVC member James G. Bias.54 Among the leaders of the Philanthropic Society was Martin Delany, a learned physician and reformer of noble African lineage who later became a leading advocate of exodus from the racist US empire. In Detroit in 1842, after the rendition of fugitive Nelson Hackett, Black activists led by William Lambert formed the Colored Vigilant Committee (CVC). Lambert was a tailor by profession and had been influenced by Walker’s Appeal, a copy of which he had kept in his desk. Highly secretive and geographically separate, the CVC had few links with the more tightly connected eastern VCs, though Lambert maintained friendships and correspondence with such eastern activists as Garrison, Mott, and Garnet. The CVC would also remain active through the 1850s.55 The new VCs had the same objectives and similar organizational structures. As one abolitionist described it, “the object of a vigilance committee is to assist fugitive slaves with food and clothing; to shelter them and forward them to Canada; to protect them from their pursuers; and, if overtaken and apprehended, to procure them legal advice and assistance.”56 All the committees followed this formula. Organizationally, they imitated each other. Each had an 58

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elected leadership of officers, such as president, secretary, and treasurer, as well as “agents,” whose job it was to collect funds and promote the organizations. The committees had dues-paying members, auxiliary committees, and regular meetings.57 For example, the NYVC had a dues-paying membership of over one hundred men and women, elected officers, and supported a women’s auxiliary. It also had a “traveling agent” who toured the North, using his missionary skills honed in Africa to missionize for the VC.58 Thus, abolitionist VCs differed considerably from southern “vigilance committees.” They were permanent and highly organized, whereas southern committees were spontaneous posses organized on a temporary basis. The southern committees protected state, law, and property; abolitionist committees undermined them. Abolitionist VCs, in short, became the organized embodiment of a “higher law.” In a few instances, abolitionists described their organizations as committees of “vigilance and public safety,” invoking the memory of the Committee of Public Safety from the French Revolution’s most extreme phase.59 THE WORKERS AND THEIR WORK The committees were the most motley organizations of the era, though Black, middle-class abolitionists dominated leadership positions. 60 Robert Purvis, president of the PVC, a devout Garrisonian, had received a hefty inheritance from his merchant father.61 He hardly worked a day in his life but put all his time, passion, and resources into radical abolition and women’s rights. Charles Reason (PVC), a Haitian emigrant, was a “meditative” poet, teacher, and then professor at New York Central College.62 Black ministers like Daniel Payne, Charles Gardiner (PVC), Theodore S. Wright (NYVC), and Charles B. Ray (NYVC) served as officers in those committees.63 Ray, in addition to preaching and his VC work, labored as a newspaper editor and land reformer. William Augustus Hanson, the NYVC’s “traveling agent,” had been born in Accra to an elite Ashanti family. Educated in Britain, he later transferred to the United States in the late 1830s. Shocked by the unparalleled racism and unfreedom in the nation renowned for “such flaming professions of liberty,” Hanson sought community among the NYVC before returning, as a missionary, to the Gold Coast in the 1840s. Besides missionizing for the committee, he lectured “on the history, manners, and customs, religion and character of those African tribes with which he is personally conversant.”64 William Powell (NYVC) ran a sailor’s boarding house, where many fugitives and radical sailors congregated and 59

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circulated news. A temperance man, he tried to keep his establishment alcohol free.65 Despite being stern temperance activists like Powell, PVC members nevertheless welcomed Samuel Williams into their ranks. Williams ran Bolivar’s Tavern, named after the South American “Liberator” who had pushed Spanish America down the path of decolonization and abolition.66 Other Black leaders came from poorer backgrounds. William Cooper Nell (BVC) grew up poor but studied hard, finding work as Garrison’s assistant in the Liberator office. He later studied law under abolitionist William Bowditch but quit upon discovering that, to practice, he had to swear an oath to the proslavery Constitution. Instead, he devoted his life to scholarship, antislavery activism, and women’s rights. Even in his early twenties, Nell was known to assist fugitives, well before the founding of the BVC.67 David Ruggles headed the NYVC. A seaman from Massachusetts, he soon turned to reform and selfeducation, moving to New York. Ruggles used his ties to dockworkers, sailors, and reform societies to assist fugitives coming north by water and by land.68 Two Black porters and an ex-slave worked for the PVC. Women led the committees alongside workingmen. The New England Freedom Association accepted Black working-class women into leadership positions. And among the officers in the PVC were Hester Reckless, an elderly Black woman, and Lucy Freeman, also a Black woman.69 Formerly enslaved people also played vanguard roles from the very beginning. Thomas Van Rensellaer was an AASS and NYVC officer who had fled slavery in 1819.70 Runaway Henry Watson and ex-slave Lunsford Lane worked for the BVC.71 William Wells Brown collaborated on and off with various committees. Working as a minister in Troy, New York, Henry Highland Garnet coordinated with multiple committees in New York and was known to help as many as 150 runaways per year.72 Runaway James W. C. Pennington, also a minister, worked closely with Ruggles to assist fugitives.73 The behind-the-scenes work of John S. Jacobs, brother of Harriet Jacobs, for the early VC movement has largely been unheralded. Enslaved in North Carolina, he escaped while accompanying his master on a trip to New York. Making his way to the whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Jacobs decided the best plan for himself was to “get such books as I should want, and go a voyage to sea.” After three years a-whaling and a-reading, he returned more of an intellectual than Herman Melville’s Ishmael.74 Through the 1840s, Jacobs worked as an antislavery lecturer and also patrolled Boston’s wharves, looking for runaways stowed away on ships. In 1846, he was active in the protests and meetings that led to the reconstitution of the BVC.75 60

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White VC leaders, the minority in these organizations, came largely from respectable backgrounds. Merchants Lewis Tappan (NYVC) and Francis Jackson (BVC), as well as landed gentleman Gerrit Smith, donated tens of thousands of dollars to VCs and other reform endeavors.76 Charles D. Cleveland (PVC) was a professor of classics and literature. Other leaders, like Oliver Johnson, Daniel Neal, Isaac Hopper, Samuel Levick, and J. Miller McKim, sympathized with Hicksite Quakerism.77 McKim, the PVC’s second in command, started his career as an uptight Presbyterian minister. Black working-class militants introduced him to the Liberator; Lucretia Mott introduced him to Quaker theology. McKim then scandalously deserted his ministry and found no other employment than that of fulltime antislavery agitator.78 Lawyer John W. Browne led the BVC and singlehandedly coordinated most of its activities during the late 1840s. Loathing his professional work, Browne distracted himself by reading widely, especially Lord Byron, and engaging in every reform movement under the sun. Although spending most of his time venting his frustrations against the American slave system, Browne was also an ardent prison reformer, feminist, labor reformer, and critic of American Christianity.79 Initially, the VCs maintained a strict autonomy from radical antislavery societies.80 The constitution of the BVC explicitly states that “the Association shall have no connection with any antislavery society.”81 The PASS acknowledged that the PVC’s work “does not fall within the constitutional purview of our society.”82 Antislavery societies focused on propaganda and ideas; VCs helped fugitives. Committee members worked in the antislavery societies, sometimes as leadership, and believed fully in the Garrisonian mission to “revolutionize public sentiment.”83 But they needed funds and resources of their own and refused to siphon off funds from already cash-strapped antislavery societies. VC members thus asserted their autonomy not out of principled difference, but from practical necessity.84 Similarly, the committees kept apart from the “old,” gradual-abolition societies. Sometimes lawyers affiliated with the “old” societies, like David Paul Brown, helped the committees by defending fugitives in court, and VC workers maintained friendly relations with such individuals due to their resources and long-time experience. Purvis even joined the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, in 1842, becoming its only Black member.85 Nevertheless, the “old” societies kept aloof from Garrisonian radicalism and interracialism and opposed illegal action, all of which VC activists adhered to. One member of the New York Manumission Society made the separation quite clear: “Ruggles is a colored man, and is 61

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secretary of a vigilance committee of colored persons, who have no connection whatever with the manumission society.”86 VC work went well beyond radical propaganda and moderate legal work, thus requiring flexibility. As Ruggles concluded, the VC had to become “in itself a perfect antislavery society.”87 In the first annual report of the NYVC, Ruggles first theorized that the committees had to be antislavery societies unto themselves in order to advance the cause of immediate emancipation. Though seeking the same ends, the tasks of VCs and antislavery societies differed. The societies sought to make a public moral revolution against the entire slave system. The committees sought to secretly assist individual fugitives. Antislavery societies, at first, sought to attract middle-class intellectuals and agitators, makers of public opinion. The committees attracted the Black worker, “who knows the evils to which his brethren are exposed” and can combat those evils with actions, not just ideas. Moreover, Ruggles and later VC organizers did not see the committees as splinter groups or rivals of the antislavery societies, but as acting in “mutual cooperation” with them. Pushing forward what Ruggles called the “mighty revolution” of immediate emancipation required aboveground organizations with a presence in civil society. But there also needed to be underground workers who “in every case of oppression and wrong inflicted on our brethren prove our sincerity, by alleviating their suffering, affording them protection, giving them counsel.” The enslaved, he argued, were themselves a constituency of abolitionism, subjects in the movement, not objects of it. Of course, some activists had to prove the wrongfulness of slavery to the white skeptics. But others had to prove their “sincerity” to slaves, not simply with words, but with actions, “and thus in our individual spheres of action prove ourselves practical abolitionists.”88 The NYVC masterfully combined legal methods with direct action, serving as a blueprint for other committees.89 Relying on dockworkers, sailors, cooks, and servants as informants, Ruggles received word of fugitive stowaways or of slaves traveling north with their masters.90 He would find them out, inform them of their rights, secure a writ of habeas corpus, and make sure they were not taken without due process.91 Even if skeptical of the law’s pretenses, Ruggles and his allies firmly believed that common law presumed all people free until proven unfree. In court cases, the NYVC relied on abolitionists William Jay, John Jay (both descended from the Supreme Court justice), and Horace Dresser, among the best barristers available.92 Sometimes, fearing that masters and slavecatchers would skip out of court proceedings and leave with their prize, Ruggles would “kidnap” runaways from their “rightful” possessors.93 In prosecuting kidnappers, 62

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he acted most creatively. In some cases, he received word from abducted people as to the identity of their kidnappers. Other times, if the perpetrator was a ship captain, sailors would inform Ruggles of their employer’s misdeeds and testify against them in court.94 In another instance, Ruggles uncovered that a man he had arrested for kidnapping was wanted for murder in Florida; he had the accused extradited for a heavier sentence.95 Ruggles became so hated for causing the arrest of respectable slaveowners, captains, and slavecatchers that the New York elite disparaged him as a Black “kidnapper” of white men.96 During the 1842 George Latimer case, abolitionists in Boston tried to combine legal tactics with direct action, though far less successfully. Latimer stowed away on a ship to Boston, where Black workers illegally sheltered him without the knowledge or aid of the BVC. He was soon arrested.97 Abolitionist lawyers Ellis Gray Loring, Samuel Sewall, and John Albion Andrew organized as a solid defense team for him.98 Black abolitionists called for an illegal rescue of Latimer from jail, which white abolitionists dismissed, in this case, with apprehension.99 The court case failed, the rescue plans aborted, and the abolitionists resorted to paying Latimer’s owner $400 to keep him free.100 The purchase had been worthwhile; Latimer and his wife, Rebecca, later became agents for the BVC. VC activists took varied stances on the controversial practice of freedom purchasing. Garrisonian stalwarts vehemently opposed the purchase of enslaved people’s freedom, for it implicitly recognized the legitimacy of buying humans plus it put cash in the hands of slaveholders to buy even more humans. Enslaved people had fewer moral qualms about the practice, though some fugitives, like William Craft, vehemently opposed abolitionists “being willing to pay our oppressors for enslaving us.”101 The VCs engaged in few freedom purchases largely because the price of an enslaved worker was well beyond their fundraising power. The BVC and the New England Freedom Association explicitly enjoined their rank and file “not to pay one farthing to any slaveholder for the property they may claim in a human being.”102 Yet one of their own activists, Lunsford Lane, had purchased his own freedom and had worked to purchase his family’s freedom as well.103 In New York, a Black working-class woman known in NYVC circles was famed for saving enough cash to purchase eleven people out of slavery.104 Gerrit Smith donated hundreds of dollars for freedom purchases. Abel Brown (AVC) helped a freedman raise $1,800 to purchase his wife and children.105 Debate on the ethics of this practice would continue unabated into the 1850s.106 63

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Illegal fugitive aid, not its legal forms, quickly became the primary function of the committees. Philadelphia, being in close proximity to the South, had a constant inflow of fugitives, so the PVC was primarily an illegal-aid organization from the beginning.107 The NYVC began as a group focused on fighting kidnappers “but did not scruple to help fugitive slaves to places of safety.”108 But as more runaways came to it for help, the latter function received priority.109 The constitution of the BVC stated that the committee would focus solely on legal action. But after much debate—led by Black abolitionists and the more militant among white activists—the BVC judged legal action alone to be impractical.110 The New York State Vigilance Committee (NYSVC) and the AVC, both formed by political abolitionists in the 1840s, focused from the beginning mainly upon illegal aid and liberty purchasing.111 Some historians have described the pre-1850s committees as inefficient, disorganized, and either not focused on illegal aid or unable to help a large number of runaways.112 Though the records of the early committees are incomplete, the extant sources do prove that the early committees aided many thousands of runaways. The incomplete BVC records for 1846–47 show that they helped 31 fugitives.113 BVC head John W. Browne, though, estimated that the committee aided “about two fugitives per week” during those two years.114 The PVC records for parts of 1839 and 1840 mention 62 fugitives aided.115 In monthly reports given by the PVC to the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in the years 1841– 43, the committee reported assisting a total of 480 fugitives.116 Purvis estimated that an average of one fugitive per day sought aid from the PVC between 1837 and 1852.117 The NYVC noted that it had aided 1,373 runaways from 1835 to 1842 and further believed that, with the help of other committees, “it is highly probable, (though we have no certain information,) that the whole number would be between two and three thousand.”118 The next year, the NYVC aided another 302 runaways.119 The AVC reported helping 350 fugitives in 1843 as well, “about 150 were men, 150 women, and 50 children.”120 Most likely, from 1835 to 1850, the VCs collectively helped 5,000 runaways, though one Boston member, in 1848, estimated that number to be 20,000.121 Recently, historian Robert Churchill has suggested that, nationwide, the Underground Railroad was quite effective in the 1840s.122 If so, the VCs were at the vanguard. Illegal work meant, first and foremost, coordinating care work for destitute fugitives. This referred to housing, clothing, feeding, and first-aid services. Men tried engaging in such work. Purvis, for example, frequently cared for fugitives and built a secret room in his home for them.123 But since care work was 64

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housework, most of it conformed to conventional gendered divisions of labor. Women abolitionists cooked for fugitives and made up their beds. Female antislavery societies knit clothes and blankets for runaways.124 The wives of VC leaders did most of this care work.125 Eliza Bias, the wife of ex-slave J. G. Bias (PVC), did intrepid service “hiding and forwarding in her home and from her home troops of flying slaves.”126 Catherine Brown, the wife of Abel Brown (AVC), did such household toil for runaways, finding in it a way to recruit new singers and orators for her antislavery speaking tours, which had brought so much meaning to her once-common, unpublic life.127 Hester Reckless was “full of life and enthusiasm” when it came to housing fugitives. Despite being over seventy years old, she cared for as many as eleven runaways at a time.128 Hicksite Quakers associated with the PVC also helped in this conscientious care work. Lucretia Mott cared for runaways in her home in addition to her numerous other antislavery activities.129 Esther Moore found herself so exhausted with constant care work that she had to resign her position as president of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) in order to commit full time to fugitive aid.130 Such care work was hard drudgery, even if it was a “labor of love.” But this domestic drudgery was also a form of emancipationist labor. The Black working people in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston served as informants for the committees. Fugitives, upon reaching northern cities, usually went straight to Black neighborhoods, hoping to find people they could trust (slaveowners hired Black slavecatchers for this very reason). Black workers, upon discovering a fugitive, would send them to a VC. When Henry Watson landed in Boston in the 1840s, he quickly made himself “known among the people of color.” They sent him off to Garrison and William Cooper Nell, to whom “I told my history.”131 When a Black New York landlady discovered two runaways in her boarding house, she sent them straight to Ruggles.132 Two Black women rode the trains coming in and out of Philadelphia, searching for people who matched the descriptions of runaway-slave advertisements.133 Other Black workers apprised committees of fugitives on a casual basis. Runaway Walter Hawkins, when he arrived in Philadelphia, asked a Black day laborer for help and was promptly taken to Walter Proctor of the PVC.134 When Peter Still asked a poor elderly Black man where he could find PVC member J. G. Bias, the man replied, “I know where he lives, and I will carry your trunk there.”135 Additionally, when the VCs had too many runaways to care for—they sometimes helped over one hundred a month—they sent them to the Black neighborhoods.136 As Purvis remarked, “colored people did much and were always 65

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ready to make room for a fugitive slave.”137 When they could, the committees paid people for their efforts.138 This sort of activism built strong solidarities between enslaved and free people, between fulltime, often middle class, Black agitators and working-class fellow travelers. The early Black feminist Hallie Q. Brown wrote in the 1920s that through such Underground Railway care work, “a spirit of race consciousness was developed.”139 The VCs also served as a sort of employment office for fugitives. Members worked hard to find positions for runaways as sailors, farm laborers, house servants, cooks, or artisans.140 In Pennsylvania, Quaker associates of the PVC hired runaways to work on their farms. This was usually temporary employment, for slavecatchers constantly prowled the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.141 Gerrit Smith, with support from NYVC members, doled out hundreds of acres of land for African Americans to farm. Fugitive Jermain Loguen, for instance, recommended to Smith individuals who should get land deeds, some of whom may have been fugitives.142 When Henry Watson reached the BVC, Nell immediately found him work on board a vessel. Watson thus saved up enough money to live in Britain, though he eventually returned to Boston to continue in the antislavery struggle.143 John Thompson, as fugitives sent to the port of New Bedford often did, took a long “whaling voyage, as being the place where I stood least chance of being arrested by slave hunters.” Ellis Gray Loring (BVC) insisted that a fugitive sent to him in 1846 “must go a whaling” to escape terrestrial bloodhounds.144 BVC head John W. Browne put much of his energy into finding work for fugitives. In one case, he sent George Langdon to work on a rural farm away from Boston. Langdon soon deserted this job, “feeling lonely without colored persons,” and Browne had to find him work in town.145 In another case, Levin Evans complained that his new employer, to whom Browne had sent him, had not paid his full wages. An advocate of the rights of labor, Browne arbitrated on his behalf and got him his due wages.146 Strapped with such work, in 1847, Browne named Black abolitionist J. B. Smith “relief agent” to deal with all matters of employment.147 When Ruggles discovered a Black woman from South Carolina who had been working in Brooklyn as a slave for her mistress, he entered the house, snatched her, and found her a paying job. He even tried to sue her owner for four years’ unpaid wages.148 Sometimes, VC members helped other working-class people find work. Sidney Howard Gay, who became active in New York’s underground in the late 1840s, helped immigrant Irish laborers, fleeing famine, find jobs.149 In another instance, Lewis Tappan sent Gay a freedwoman, recently arrived from Jamaica, and demanded 66

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that he find her good work as a teacher.150 The committees also found employment for fugitives in the antislavery societies themselves. Giving self-liberated people such antislavery work met a practical need but would transform the character of the movement. VC workers gave runaways the option of staying put or moving on to safer places. Many opted to go to New England, hearing that many abolitionists lived there.151 Runaways, especially if escaping by land, generally arrived at the PVC first. Its members then sent them on to the NYVC, which sent them on either to the BVC or to New Bedford, a bustling port town with plenty of work to be had.152 New Bedford had a large Quaker middle class, who disliked slavery. The Black laboring class there was militant, willing to use direct action against slavecatchers.153 The committees sent fugitives off either by train, by carriage, or by boat. They paid transportation fares, when they had the funds, and supplied letters of recommendation to VC leaders or prominent abolitionists like Ruggles or Garrison.154 Forwarding fugitives caused a great amount of anxiety, for they often traveled alone through towns and cities with lurking slavecatchers. Gay urged Browne to inform him “of the safe arrival of the persons whom I send you. I had some little anxiety when a fugitive goes from here to know whether he is drowned, caught by his master, or got safe to Boston.”155 Thankfully, the antislavery societies had plenty of itinerant lecturers on the move. When possible, the committee paired runaways with these speakers on their northern circuits. For instance, when the PVC sent William and Ellen Craft to the BVC, the experienced runaway-lecturer William Wells Brown happened to be on his way there and happily served as their escort.156 Other runaways desired to desert the land of “stars and stripes” altogether, either to Canada, England, or the Caribbean. The vast majority went to Canada. VC workers forwarded fugitives there along a northwesterly circuit of allies. The PVC sent runaways to the NYVC, which then sent them to the AVC. From there, runaways moved to allies in Buffalo or Rochester and thence into Canada West. Sometimes the committees sent runaways to Gerrit Smith’s rural estate in Peterboro, New York. Smith forwarded them to Oswego, where he owned dock property. His agent and other dockworkers there “would secrete the fugitives on board vessels bound for Canada.”157 By the 1840s, the committees began to strengthen their political ties to fugitives and abolitionists in Canada. VC members worked closely with abolitionist Hiram Wilson of the American Missionary Association and commended his efforts helping Canadian refugees from American despotism.158 Members began taking tours of Canada in the 67

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1840s to talk with the self-emancipated and assess its suitability as a fugitive refuge.159 Jonathan Walker, an associate of the BVC, took a trip to Mexico for the same purpose.160 The committees did not just send runaways to Canada. Henry “Box” Brown went to England to lecture.161 William Wells Brown requested aid from Gay to get to England.162 The PVC also sent two runaways to Trinidad.163 The case of Mahommah Baquaqua shows the sophistication of the VC networks of communication and transportation. Baquaqua had been enslaved in Dahomey, and sold to Brazil. He luckily found work under a ship captain and away from the sugar and coffee plantations. In 1846 he sailed to New York, transporting a shipment of coffee. Almost immediately upon arrival, Black workers boarded the vessel, enquired whether any of the Black sailors were slaves, and communicated that, on New York soil, any slave was entitled to their freedom. The enslaved among the sailors conferred secretly and decided “that we would take the first opportunity and the chance, how we would fare in a free society.” They fled the ship but were recaptured and incarcerated.164 While imprisoned, a fellow inmate, perhaps in collusion with the NYVC, helped the runaways break jail. The freedmen swiftly fled to Boston, where the BVC housed them for four weeks, trying to find each man suitable work or passage to either Canada or England.165 As Baquaqua relates it, he was asked where he preferred to go and told them Haiti “would agree better with my health and with my feelings.”166 The BVC contacted a merchant, who offered him free passage there.167 A Black worker who had spent a winter in Haiti wrote letters of recommendation to a friend in Haiti who would find Baquaqua and other freedmen work.168 “When I arrived at Hayti, I felt myself free, as indeed I was,” Baquaqua reminisced. “No slavery exists there, yet all are people of color who dwell there.”169 The committees relied heavily upon sailors to help runaways secretly escape the South. The majority of fugitives who came to the NYVC and BVC came by boat.170 Sailors, like VC leaders, were rigorous practical abolitionists and also conducted interviews of runaways.171 They disguised runaways to get them on board, hid them, and fed them. If the captain discovered the stowaway, sailors cooperated to prevent the captain from turning the ship around and sending the runaway back. In one case, a crew threatened mutiny to prevent a captain from turning back.172 If the runaway was discovered upon reaching a northern port, sailors worked to get him off the vessel. They sometimes sent fugitives to sailors’ boarding houses, including the one run by William Powell (NYVC), or sent them straight to a VC.173 Sailors helped Harriet Jacobs get from North Carolina to Philadelphia and escorted her to the Rev. Jeremiah Durham of the PVC. 68

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Before leaving her with Durham, the sailors “came to bid us goodbye.” “They had been kind to us and rendered us a greater service than they could possibly conceive of,” Jacobs said of the men. A sailor escorted Frederick Douglass to David Ruggles upon arrival in New York.174 After hiding fugitive John Andrew Jackson on a Boston-bound ship, the crew hid him at a local boarding house. When slavecatchers came to the house demanding Jackson, “this incensed the sailors, who said ‘here are slave hunters, hunting for niggers,’ and drove them from the house.”175 VC leaders worked closely with these sailors, had much experience of maritime labor, and acknowledged their contributions as abolitionists. Ruggles, of course, had plied the seas himself and actively cultivated connections with sailors. He worked particularly hard to defend Black seamen from being kidnapped into slavery when at southern ports.176 The BVC tried to recruit allies among sailors and other “friends of liberty in all those seaport towns, especially which have commercial intercourse with slaveholding states and countries.”177 Fugitive John S. Jacobs, the brother of Harriet and a VC collaborator, worked as a sailor when he was not off giving antislavery lectures.178 Jonathan Walker sailed the Indian Ocean, an oppressive occupation that he felt brought him into sympathy with oppressed peoples worldwide.179 He called “himself Cosmopolite—citizen of the world; and his countrymen are all man and womankind.” Walker rejected orthodox Protestantism for Hicksite antinomianism and rejected orthodox living for the vagrant life of a maritime Underground Railroad conductor.180 Coming from a family of sailors, Garrison always showed solidarity with them and vowed to agitate on their behalf once slavery had been abolished. Other VC leaders took seriously the antislavery commitments of seamen.181 The wives of Black sailors came to Catherine Brown (AVC) if they feared their husbands were sold into slavery or when the men had been imprisoned for aiding runaways. Brown would write pamphlets on a sailor’s behalf or urge the AVC to make further inquiries.182 When Quaker abolitionists Elizabeth Neal and Sarah Pugh (both with close PVC ties) took a dreary ship voyage from Philadelphia to New York, a Black cook broke the boredom and silences by exclaiming, “I too am an abolitionist.” The three spent the rest of the journey excitedly debating antislavery strategies.183 In 1846, the BVC asserted that seamen were “generous” natural allies who would never send a fellow person back to slavery.184 Even in the 1830s and 1840s, the committees had numerous “agents” who did dangerous work in the South. In Baltimore, the PVC worked with an interracial group of market women, as well as an African American man, who forwarded 69

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fugitives to the committee, doling out forged passes and stolen freedom certificates. Robert Purvis described the market women as “the most efficient helpers or agents we had.”185 In one instance, a runaway reached the PVC in the 1830s and asked that the committee retrieve his wife and family, still in Virginia. The PVC “dispatched an agent to Baltimore” to contact the market women. They then sent out “an efficient female agent by the name of Butler, who worked her plans and ours so well that in a short time the little party landed in Philadelphia.”186 The PVC also worked with a “free colored man” in Baltimore who would hide runaways in his home. By 1842, he had “already colonized over 500 slaves within a few years.”187 Hicksites from rural Pennsylvania, also working with the PVC, sometimes hired Black teamsters to travel to Baltimore to sell farm produce and bring back runaways.188 Hicksite Thomas Garrett worked in the slave state of Delaware and directed thousands of fugitives to Philadelphia. He had his own informal network of Black working-class informants who led runaways to his home. In 1848, Garrett was arrested for such activities. During the ensuing trial, he vowed to redouble his illegal efforts, for which he was fined $5,400.189 The PVC even converted two sons of slaveholders to the cause. A Virginian would help fugitives get to Philadelphia by rail from Washington. The other, from New Bern, North Carolina, secured berths for fugitives “on vessels engaged in the lumber trade, which plied between Newberne [sic] and Philadelphia.”190 In Washington, the committees had the help of Thomas Smallwood and his wife, Elizabeth.191 Thomas had worked as a slave until the age of thirty, when he purchased his freedom; Elizabeth was a free Black washerwoman. Both took inspiration from the moral revolt led by Garrison. But, as Thomas realized being in the South, “I knew I could not go about the country and lecture against slavery.” He and his wife turned to aiding fugitives instead, “independently of abolitionists.” By 1842, Elizabeth contacted abolitionist Charles T. Torrey, who came to Washington as a newspaper correspondent.192 Together, the trio, along with the Black woman who boarded them, organized the Underground Railroad in the nation’s capital (in fact, some contemporaries believed that the term “Underground Railroad” was coined by them).193 With the help of Torrey, the Smallwoods built up a secret network in Washington, Baltimore, and Wilmington, Delaware, where they worked with Garrett. They also made connections to the VCs. Occasionally, Torrey and the Smallwoods would take as many as a dozen fugitives at a time to the AVC and PVC. Thomas had strong ties with both committees, even debating tactics and exchanging information with Daniel Payne and other PVC members. Alongside Torrey, he attended some of the 70

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PVC’s secret “special meetings,” perhaps to discuss plans for further organization of the Underground Railroad in the South.194 Thus, the Smallwoods and Torrey helped open up the South as a legitimate field for antislavery activity.195 Aiding fugitives was an expensive task, and VC members continually faced funding shortages. Feeding, housing, and transporting a runaway could cost from two dollars to six dollars. Occasionally, the committees paid court fees amounting to as much as two hundred dollars.196 The BVC offered rewards of up to one hundred dollars for information regarding runaways who may have been recaptured or hidden on southbound ships.197 The committees relied entirely upon donations, often supplied by the wealthier membership. William Jay left one thousand dollars in his will for the purpose of fugitive aid. Francis Jackson spent many hundreds of dollars to keep the BVC going.198 Gerrit Smith donated as much as five hundred dollars at a time to the NYSVC. In 1849, that committee thanked him for making “his purse strings the common property of the anti-slavery cause.”199 All of the VCs made desperate pleas in the abolitionist press for donations and held public meetings to raise funds. The NYVC held numerous such events, gathering up to five hundred dollars a meeting.200 It received further financial help from women’s antislavery societies, Black working people, and the occasional runaway in Canada.201 The PVC had a large list of donors. Black abolitionists, including Abraham Shadd and Robert Purvis; numerous Black churches, such as Bethel Church; and a number of organizations like PFASS and the Porters’ Beneficial Society all contributed funds.202 Sometimes the VCs lent each other cash.203 Despite vigorous fundraising, all the committees contracted debts. The debts of the NYVC often hovered around one thousand dollars.204 With such financial issues, committees had to beg for money. For instance, when the BVC had no cash, members “were instructed to attend the several colored churches . . . and urge a contribution” to help fugitives.205 The NYVC asked Isaac Wright to write of his experiences of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. The committee planned to publish the narrative and have the book “sold for the benefit of their treasury.”206 Lack of cash compounded frustrations and suspicions as well. The PVC and the NYVC investigated members accused of embezzling funds. In fact, when NYVC members made such an accusation against their comrade and leader David Ruggles in 1840, he retired from the committee.207 To raise funds and promote activities, the committees depended upon women’s organizations. In Boston, the New England Freedom Association worked with the “Lynn Sewing Circle,” whose members knit “clothing for the use of 71

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fugitives.”208 In 1838, the PVC established the Female Vigilant Association (FVA). The FVA organized fairs, soirees, recruitment meetings, and concerts to raise funds for the PVC.209 The women knit clothes for fugitives as well. They held public gatherings “consisting of those who are poor in the world’s goods.”210 The FVA also forged ties between the PVC and PFASS.211 Hester Reckless, a leader in all three organizations, gave monthly reports of PVC activities to PFASS.212 Society officers, like Reckless, Esther Moore, Lucretia Mott, and Rebecca White (wife of Black PVC member Joseph White), all FVA members, encouraged PFASS to make donations of clothes or of money to the PVC. These women also gave according to monthly needs, sometimes as much as fifty dollars. When in a bind, the PVC wrote directly to PFASS “to solicit donations.” In January 1843, for instance, the PVC desperately pleaded that “they have sent on to the committee in New York four persons and have now five on hand and have not the means to send them on.”213 In 1841, inspired by the FVA, the NYVC established its own women’s auxiliary committee. The NYVC also received funds from other women’s organizations, like the New York Ladies Antislavery Society. Black abolitionist William Johnson remarked in 1841: “It is truly pleasing to observe the interest which our colored friends, and especially the females, take in these benevolent associations. They have ever been the most efficient coadjutors of the N.Y. vigilance committee.”214 To teach youth the ropes of practical abolitionism, the PVC established a unique but short-lived youth vigilance committee. It issued to these young people fancy membership cards and allowed them to march on behalf of the VC in parades and to organize its meetings. During the August 1842 parade to celebrate West Indian emancipation, the youth committee, which critics declared had been “taught impudence by the abolitionists,” unfurled militant banners portraying slaves taking over a slave ship (in tribute to the Amistad and Creole rebellions). Some blamed the provocative banners for igniting the 1842 race riots in Philadelphia.215 This sort of radical education had an effect. William Still, son of former slaves, may have belonged to the youth VC. He possessed a membership card, dated 1839, which stated: “this is to certify that William Still is a member of the Vigilant Committee.”216 As Still himself related, during his teenage years, he “commenced taking antislavery newspapers.” He also participated in the movement, “adhering closely to the ‘Higher Law’ and commands of Christ to undo every burden and let the oppressed go free.”217 By the late 1840s, Still worked on the Underground Railroad; by the 1850s, he led the PVC. 72

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The committees remained organized and kept the practical branch of abolitionism running. They “did not scruple to help fugitive slaves” illegally and by the thousands. Originally, only a disparate handful of Black workers and radical Quakers helped runaways. Now that work had become organized.218 VC leaders enlisted women and men of all races, classes, and conditions. They helped hundreds of fugitives receive the trials due them by law. They had jailed and defamed kidnappers, arousing public hostility to kidnapping. By the late 1840s, kidnapping had become rare in the North. In New York, activists had mobilized to successfully guarantee jury trials for fugitives. After the rendition of George Latimer, besides arranging to purchase his freedom, activists lectured rampantly and petitioned the Massachusetts legislature. Their efforts made possible passage of the 1843 Personal Liberty Act, dubbed the “Latimer Law,” which barred Massachusetts officials and facilities from assisting in the rendition of runaways.219 Summing up the achievements of the vigilance committees in the 1830s–40s, fugitive Samuel Ward wrote: “There was, indeed, a regularly organized society, distinct as an organization from the Antislavery Society, to aid fugitives; and that society, called the Vigilance Committee . . . annually published its report, held platform meetings, etc. So effective was this action, that it became almost needless for the slave to go further North than the border states.”220 This is what the VCs achieved separately from the public antislavery movement. And they reshaped the public movement as well, in nearly every facet. TRANSFORMIN G RADIC AL ABOLITIONISM Despite innovation and creativity, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, abolitionists moved from crisis to crisis. Elite-led mobs antagonized abolitionists and African Americans or destroyed their property.221 Southern vigilantes made organizing in those states impossible. Congress passed a “gag rule,” preventing antislavery petitions from being read or debated. The mail was watched. The moral revolution of public opinion was failing, and the movement appeared to produce more martyrs than converts. Garrison and his followers, with ample justification, became increasingly critical of the inherently proslavery character of the whole US political and cultural fabric. By the 1840s, the movement split. Garrisonians remained committed to moral suasion and nonresistance but now insisted fervently on nonvoting, “coming out” of reactionary churches, disunion, and women’s rights. The breakaway factions insisted on the formation of abolitionist churches and political parties and viewed women’s rights as a distraction. In the 73

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1840s, the new factions, with their own organizations, critiqued each other as venomously as they critiqued slavery. After facing extreme vigilante violence in the South, abolitionists of all sorts limited the geographical scope of their movement to the North. Garrisonians vented their anti-institutional radicalism on a North that did not want to hear it, while political abolitionists tried to organize an antislavery third party with a northern base, a hopeless endeavor at the time. Helping fugitives seemed the lowest priority. Nevertheless, enslaved people kept escaping, and VCs kept assisting them. Far from buckling under the crises of the early 1840s, the committees offered some limited unity amid antislavery factionalism.222 They brought in new activists of all races, genders, regions, and classes into an increasingly isolated antislavery fold. They evolved from an autonomous “sphere of action” to a leading actor within radical abolitionism. VCs were themselves far from immune to crisis. Committee members faced the brunt of mob violence. Racist and antiabolitionist rioters burned Lewis Tappan’s home, the church of Stephen Gloucester (PVC), and Pennsylvania Hall, an abolitionist meeting place in Philadelphia. Quaker Daniel Neal (PVC) received a tarring and feathering. Garrison was nearly lynched.223 Unbeknown to him, Black working-class abolitionists, armed with cudgels, would guard the notorious nonresistant editor as he walked the streets of Boston.224 After being forced to defend his Philadelphia home with a firearm during the 1842 race riots, pacifist Robert Purvis left for the countryside outside the city.225 He continued to serve as president of the PVC, but the committee was weakened by his distance. Other VCs lost vital leaders during this time. Abel Brown, a leader of the Albany VC, died of natural causes. Charles Torrey, who worked between multiple committees, died of tuberculosis in a Baltimore prison. Ruggles left the NYVC in poor health after being accused of embezzling VC funds. Amid the nationwide economic crisis setting in after 1837, all the committees lacked funds. They still received minimal or no support from antislavery societies. Even the question of fugitive aid became contentious. In the early 1830s, a certain Garrisonian “orthodoxy” developed that relegated illegal fugitive aid to a secondary, even counterproductive activity. Garrison himself helped fugitives, a fact underappreciated by historians.226 Yet many of his white followers were more “Garrisonian” than he. They took his strictures on moral suasion to be the supreme doctrine of the movement. Convincing reprobate whites of the sins of slavery was the primary work of the movement, argued these “orthodox” Garrisonians.227 For such activists, “practical” abolition meant secretive assistance to individuals, not open advocacy of emancipation for all.228 It wasted the time 74

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and funds of the movement. When allocating funds raised at an antislavery fair, Boston Garrisonians forbade money “being used in the . . . less effectual channel of a vigilance committee. It will be spent in propagandism.”229 The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society even argued that helping runaways did not necessarily make one an abolitionist.230 Similarly, non-Garrisonian abolitionists, though more supportive of fugitive aid than “orthodox” Garrisonians, put their resources into antislavery churches and political parties.231 The vicious quarrels between Garrisonian and political abolitionists affected the committees but did not fully fracture the VC movement as it did the antislavery societies. VC members Lewis Tappan, Gerrit Smith, and Charles T. Torrey led the split with Garrison in 1840. They organized their own antislavery societies, their own churches, and the Liberty Party. After Ruggles’s retirement, political abolitionists in New York City took control of the NYVC and established the NYSVC for the entire state.232 A small Garrisonian operation, conducted by Sidney Howard Gay, editor of the National Antislavery Standard, also operated in New York by the mid-1840s.233 The PVC and the BVC remained Garrisonian, supporting Ruggles in his feud with the NYVC.234 Nevertheless, both factions of VC activists remained committed to “practical abolitionism” and cooperated. Political members believed the Fugitive Slave Law to be unconstitutional and ought to be disobeyed until the laws of the land conformed more perfectly with the higher ideals of the Constitution. Garrisonians among them believed the Fugitive Slave Law to be fully constitutional but ought to be disobeyed in the name of a moral law higher than any human constitution. Thus, in this case, the divide between them was philosophical, not practical. Both the PVC and BVC included political abolitionists in their membership. At VC meetings, they usefully debated whether the Fugitive Slave Law was constitutional.235 The NYSVC appointed Isaac Hopper, a pragmatist close to both Garrisonian and political abolitionists, as its first president.236 Abel Brown, typical of vigilance activists, preached Garrisonian positions on women’s rights and vowed never to swear an oath to the vile Constitution; yet he also endorsed antislavery electoral strategies. Similarly, Garrisonian VC activists, like Nell, McKim, and Gay, worked with and promoted Douglass’s newspaper, the North Star, after the bitter Douglass-Garrison split, and even tried to organize antislavery meetings that crossed factional divides.237 Black BVC members remained firm “old organizationists”—Garrisonians—well into the 1850s but scolded comrades for taking hostile, sectarian attitudes toward Douglass or the Free-Soilers (supporters of the Free Soil Party).238 Moreover, 75

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Garrisonian-led and political-led committees sent fugitives to each other. Working together and mixing ideas, VC activists preserved some limited unity in a fractured movement. Similarly, the question of women’s participation did not rend the committees as deeply as it did the rest of the movement. Women did most of the work in the VCs. Garrisonian workers, naturally, sided wholeheartedly with women’s participation. VC members like Mott, Purvis, Nell, and Hester Reckless were the most vocal abolitionist-feminists of the day.239 Political abolitionists looked coldly upon women’s activism and women’s rights, seeing them as distractions. Yet political abolitionists in the VCs, like Ray, Smith, and Abel Brown, advocated women’s involvement in the struggle. In some cases, this acknowledgment of the necessity of women’s participation led political VC members to advocate women’s rights as well.240 They learned from the example of their female comrades. For instance, Torrey had led the political break from Garrison over the woman question. But, after working with female Underground Railway conductors, he recanted his antiwomanism.241 While abolitionists heatedly debated whether Black activists should participate in integrated organizations at all times or establish independent organizations, the committees engaged in creative experiments to see which strategy worked for their purposes. In the early 1840s, militant Black abolitionists took control of all the PVC leadership positions. In Boston, at the same time, activists formed the almost exclusively Black New England Freedom Association. In both cases, finding combined resources and collaboration with white allies to be more efficient, the PVC and the Boston vigilance groups reintegrated by the mid-1840s.242 VC members brought these organizing experiences into the public movement. They criticized antislavery societies for insufficiently encouraging Black participation. To address the problem, members of the PVC organized and led a subcommittee of the PASS that sought to “promote interest among the colored people in respect to associating with us in our meetings.”243 Nell and Purvis argued that organizing must be interracial in most instances.244 Other Black VC workers like Garnet, Douglass, Ruggles, Ward, and Whipper organized Black National Conventions, independent, all-Black institutions devoted to moral reform. Even while participating in interracial VCs, they asserted that integration in every instance would lead to white domination.245 Some organizations had to be integrated, while others had to be all Black. Committee members even tolerated the notoriously aloof, individualistic transcendentalist philosophers to enter their ranks. At first, the two groups had 76

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more misunderstandings than compatibilities. In the 1830s, abolitionists believed that transcendentalist hyper-individualism threatened to undermine the first need of all social movements: collective organization.246 Similarly, intellectuals like Emerson believed that collective organization stifled individual spontaneity. When organizing did go on among transcendentalists, it seemed to be in the wrong directions, veering away from the great contradictions of American society. In the 1840s, transcendentalists spent much of their time criticizing stale theologies, writing for literary journals, or engaging in utopian experiments in communal living, vegetarianism, and celibacy. When socialist-abolitionist William Channing decided to live at the utopian community Brook Farm, Gay wrote frantically to abolitionist comrades: “Channing is to leave here and go to Brook Farm. I fear it will ruin him. Do get him out [antislavery] lecturing. If anything will save him that will.”247 Channing soon left Brook Farm and, by the late 1840s, began helping fugitives in Rochester.248 Through VC work, Boston intellectuals began to develop a more political transcendentalism. For instance, in the early 1840s, Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote only on abstract theology. When he got involved in the BVC in the late 1840s, he constantly urged his comrades to action, exclaiming, “we are to be a committee of vigilance, not of dormitance.”249 By the 1850s, he became a leader of the BVC. Historian Peter Wirzbicki has shown that transcendentalist ideas profoundly influenced Black BVC activist William Cooper Nell.250 For the most part, though, transcendentalist intellectuals still observed the work of the committees from a contemplative distance. In 1846, Emerson wrote an open letter to the BVC, praising its activities. He noted, though, that in those dark times, instead of acting and organizing, he preferred to “turn to the mountains to chop wood and seek . . . labors compatible with freedom and honor.”251 By the 1850s, VC members and transcendentalists forged a closer coalition of ideals as well as actions. VCs attracted a more reliable group of intellectuals into the movement— fugitives. While antislavery societies fought one another, the committees pushed fugitives to the forefront of the movement. When Peter Randolph arrived at the BVC in 1847—freed by the last will and testament of his deceased master—the committee gave him part-time work at Boston’s antislavery fairs. He soon became an agitator and writer.252 After Lewis Hayden fled to Boston from Kentucky in 1844, Francis Jackson (BVC) got him a job as an agent for the AASS.253 Finding him “an apt scholar,” Garrison and Jackson acceded to his desire to become an antislavery speaker. Garrison knew Hayden had much to teach, but he also privately, and patronizingly, suggested that he also 77

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had much to learn about the proper (that is, Garrisonian) positions regarding church and state.254 When Gay sent “uncommonly smart” runaways to the BVC, he would send an accompanying letter stating that the new arrival “will make a capital lecturer.”255 VC members did not always act as paternalistic talent searchers. Black abolitionists Theodore Wright and Charles Ray, as well as white abolitionist Catherine Brown, let any fugitive who desired to bear witness accompany them on their speaking and singing tours.256 Mississippi fugitive Henry Watson, who was helped by the BVC and later to work for the group and wrote a slave narrative, seems to have been recruited into the movement by his wife, a fugitive from Baltimore and “earnest antislavery worker.” A depressive Watson believed fighting for the emancipation of the enslaved to be a hopeless task. Yet his wife would “cheer me with hopes of the approaching time of their liberation.”257 Encouraging runaway intellectuals—or “fugitive slave abolitionists,” as Manisha Sinha has called them—occurred in many ways. When Henry “Box” Brown arrived at the PVC office in 1849, a large group of committee members gathered at Lucretia Mott’s home to listen to his dramatic narration of escape. After this performance, William Wells Brown escorted Henry northward to Boston. During the trip, he took him to antislavery meetings and introduced him to abolitionist leaders. “Being anxious to identify myself with that public movement,” Henry immediately became an antislavery activist.258 Not only did VC members rescue, escort, and encourage him, but they also made him the center of attention, something Brown later reveled in as a public lecturer. In general, Wells Brown made it his business to encourage fellow fugitive minds. In 1846, he did speaking gigs alongside the still-inexperienced Hayden. “To think that 18 months since I wore manacles and chains—but thank god I have a host of friends coming up to do battle against the cursed thing,” wrote Hayden about co-lecturing with a fellow fugitive activist.259 Wells Brown additionally arranged the first public lectures for William and Ellen Craft, in 1849.260 Even so, VC members did not always succeed in encouraging fugitive agitators. After her interview with the PVC, Harriet Jacobs felt discouraged from publicly discussing the traumatic violence she had suffered under enslavement. In another case, a fugitive being recruited by the NYVC replied that he could “not do much for your noble committee right now.” Instead, he donated three dollars.261 VCs played a little-known role in encouraging Frederick Douglass’s early antislavery activism. Often, young Douglass is portrayed as the pupil of Garrison, but he also learned from the committees.262 He reached the NYVC in 1838 78

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with the help of his wife, Anna Murray, as well as sailors. Ruggles sent Douglass and Murray to the port of New Bedford, a hotbed of abolitionism, where “the colored people . . . are educated up to the point of fighting for their freedom, as well as speaking for it.”263 Black minister Thomas James, later to work for the BVC, encouraged the young, shy man to speak publicly. Soon, Douglass had become a salaried antislavery lecturer, delivering one of his earliest lectures at a meeting of the New England Freedom Association.264 In 1843, according to PVC records, he escorted a fugitive named “Mrs. Bayley” out of Philadelphia.265 Likely, this was the fugitive Harriet Bailey, whom Douglass welcomed into his own family as an “adopted” sister. She lived with the Douglasses for a brief period in the 1840s, likely helping assist many runaways, often sent to them from the VCs. In 1850, she joined an armed VC formed in Springfield, Massachusetts, under the leadership of another close friend of Douglass’s, John Brown.266 Thanks to the committees, fugitive-abolitionists, unabashed advocates of their own acts of self-liberation, infiltrated every field of antislavery labor. Runaways worked at fairs, preached Sunday sermons, and wrote for antislavery papers or even edited them, as Douglass did. Fugitive-abolitionists worked with VCs and helped other fugitives too. They also became lecturing agents. And some did all of the above. John S. Jacobs, Harriet’s brother, lectured, wrote newspaper articles, and worked with the BVC.267 Lunsford Lane, besides having toiled to purchase his and his family’s liberty, helped organized BVC meetings, wrote an autobiography, and worked as an antislavery lecturer before becoming a Bible salesman.268 Lewis Washington, “a fugitive slave,” worked briefly as lecturing agent for the AVC, collecting money and clothing from antislavery societies.269 Other fugitives became full-time lecturers with the antislavery societies, sometimes doing “more than five hundred meetings” in a year.270 Ward, Garnet, Douglass, Jacobs, James L. Smith, Wells Brown, Box Brown, Peter Randolph, and Lewis Clarke, just to name a few, did this sort of lecturing in addition to other VC work. Lecturers received little pay. They faced exhaustion, hailstorms of stones and rotten vegetables, racist heckling, lynch mobs, and kidnappers.271 Thus, Wells Brown justly wrote that “lecturing agents” performed “the most difficult of all the work in the movement.”272 Speaking, however, was not all tribulation. Hayden, for example, despite being recently liberated and virtually penniless, found work as a lecturing agent exhilarating. He now could teach others and become, he exclaimed, of “use to my Brethren in Bonds.”273 He could cry out from the top of the podium, “Slavery must fall . . . down down with the evil!”274 79

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With a diverse array of activists and intellectuals, especially fugitives, the committees began to exert influence over the public movement. They did so first and foremost in their unique meetings.275 These, often held in Black churches, were open to the public. They had audiences “composed mostly of colored people” in addition to white abolitionists and a few curious onlookers.276 The NYVC encouraged “especially strangers” to attend their meetings.277 Now and then, Boston’s Black citizens independently organized their own demonstrations to show solidarity with the BVC.278 Abolitionists like Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and Garrison practiced their famed oratorical eloquence at these meetings.279 Fugitive-abolitionists, including Garnet, Ward, Douglass, and Wells Brown, spoke as well.280 The New England Freedom Association raised funds by holding a “Juvenile Colored Concert.”281 At PVC meetings, Daniel Payne and Charles Reason read aloud their heavily stylized poetic compositions.282 Eloquence did not always prevail, however. At an NYVC meeting, one speaker “took the liberty to use profane language in his speech.”283 Open discussions on numerous topics broke out at these gatherings. At one NYVC event, a female fugitive interrupted the meeting and criticized antislavery organizations for not paying enough attention to women or to slaves.284 At an 1840 NYVC meeting, Ruggles brought with him three Africans rescued from illegal slave traders. He “supposed that the audience had never seen native Africans.” He also wanted to prove that the US slave empire illegally “imported a larger number of persons than the Colonization society has succeeded in exporting” to Africa.285 At another NYVC meeting that year, some activists apparently proclaimed themselves “ready to aid in the liberation of the slaves BY FORCE AND ARMS!!” 286 At yet another event, the wife of a kidnapped sailor pleaded for help to a moved audience. As a consequence, runaway Wells Brown wrote of VC meetings, they were “always interesting to the most uninterested person who may attend them.”287 VC activists did not promote their work merely at their own meetings; they did so within other abolitionist organizations as well. At a meeting of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society, James Fuller (NYVC) urged the group to give more “liberal aid” to his committee.288 At an AASS meeting in 1848, runaway Washington Christian complained that antislavery societies did not put enough resources into fugitive aid.289 The PFASS had heated debates on the Underground Railroad. Some VC women, like Reckless and Esther Moore, argued that more of the society’s resources be used to help the PVC. Others, like Lucretia Mott, believed that VC work should have an equal, not lesser, role to other spheres of antislavery activity.290 PFASS members tried to convert the 80

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Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to pro-fugitive attitudes, though with little success.291 Charles Torrey ensured that runaways had a say in these debates. At an antislavery gathering that included delegations from many northern states, he and a band of fugitives moved “that the South should be represented in the delegation of certain fugitives.”292 Torrey also advocated illegal fugitive aid in his private correspondence with other antislavery leaders.293 Fugitive lecturers convinced some abolitionists that buying slaves’ freedom, besides freeing individuals, could advance antislavery propaganda.294 Runaway Peter Still (with the support of the PVC and BVC) went on a lecture tour solely for the purpose of raising money to buy his family’s freedom. In the process, though, he gathered much sympathy from students and female factory workers, the type of people abolitionists sought to convert.295 Even Garrison warmed to the practice. In 1849, he worked with PVC and BVC members to help a man purchase his enslaved wife.296 VC members believed fugitive aid to be more than a gradualist tactic. Through mass slave desertion, “property in slaves would be rendered so insecure that it would hasten emancipation.”297 As this “self-emancipation department” expanded, fugitives and VC workers argued that the Underground Railroad became a form of immediate emancipation, immediate for individual runaways and immediately disruptive to the whole slave system.298 Lucretia Mott asserted at meetings that those who “harbor and assist fugitives” should also be “considered ultra” abolitionists.299 Committee workers thus advocated a “preferential option” for the enslaved, relegating white conversion to the secondary role. Public agitation was foundational, Charles B. Ray admitted. Yet, he added, it had done far more to encourage slave escapes than to inspire white conversion. “In proportion as the principles of freedom are agitated in this land, in one form or another, the slaves will be prompted to flee from their prison house,” concurred the entire NYSVC in an 1849 circular.300 Turning to the fugitive had thus become the antidote to the many crises of the 1840s. As William Powell believed, in a society where the vast majority of whites supported slavery, the only way for abolitionists to avoid sectarian isolation, find new strategies, and build a mass base was to follow the fugitive: “When abolition doctors disagree about prescribing medicine to cure the infectious disease of slavery, who shall we look to for a decision? My answer is—to the patient.”301 Abolitionists eventually began to listen to these arguments and rethink priorities. “At first,” wrote Lewis Tappan, “some abolitionists doubted the propriety 81

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of such measures [of the vigilance committees], . . . but reflection convinced them that it was not only right to assist men in efforts to obtain their liberty, when unjustly held in bondage, but a DUTY.”302 Antislavery societies that once remained aloof from VCs began to take interest. Members of the Massachusetts Female Anti-Slavery Society carefully “read the reports of the Vigilance Committee in New York, Pennsylvania, and our own state.” They found the “increasing” number of escapees “most cheering.”303 The PASS, by the 1840s, began to publicly support VC work and urged “upon abolitionists the duty of freely supporting them as efficient means of rebuking the slaveholder and giving freedom to the helpless victim.”304 Aware that the PVC collaborated with slaves, sailors, and other working-class militants, the PASS praised the committee for having fostered “the growth of antislavery feeling beyond the bounds of antislavery organizations.”305 More funds from Philadelphia antislavery bazaars now went toward “the relief of fugitive slaves.”306 As early as 1839, the New York Anti-Slavery Society endorsed the activities of the NYVC.307 In Boston, “orthodox” Garrisonians stubbornly kept aloof from VCs. For instance, Edmund Quincy, Harvard-educated editor and MASS secretary, vehemently opposed their formation.308 But other leaders of the Garrisonian MASS worked for the BVC and wrote sympathetically of fugitive aid in the society’s annual reports.309 Influenced, no doubt, by peer pressure, Quincy eventually joined the BVC. This evolution in priorities led to changes in organizational structure. In Philadelphia, by 1846, the PVC became close to the PASS, using its office as its own headquarters. The committee relied on society funds. Robert Purvis served as president of both the PASS and PVC. In New York, in 1845, the New York Anti-Slavery Society decided to revamp the NYVC, and “extend aid to self-emancipated slaves.”310 Sidney Howard Gay independently used the society’s offices for fugitive aid. The NYSVC became so tied to the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society that the two were indistinguishable.311 In 1842, the Eastern New York Anti-Slavery Society appended itself to the AVC. This move occurred, admitted Abel Brown, because the leadership of the society “were already among the official members of the Committee of Vigilance in Albany.”312 Brown argued that these reversals in antislavery practice had been due to “the addresses of fugitive slaves,” who were “a living demonstration of the need of such efforts.”313 In the 1830s, antislavery societies complained that their tactics had to be limited due to the fact that they had “no access to the slave population.”314 By the 1840s, no abolitionist could make that excuse. By then, fugitives had decisively remade antislavery strategy. 82

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Renegades associated with the VCs reopened the South for antislavery action, an unthinkable endeavor. After failed propaganda campaigns and violent repression by southern “vigilance committees,” abolitionists stayed North. Antislavery sailors made the first ventures South in the 1830s. By the late 1830s, the VCs worked with a few southern agents, such as the market women of Baltimore and Torrey and Smallwood in Washington. By 1844, Torrey had been caught “stealing” enslaved property and sentenced to six years hard labor. Under suspicion, Smallwood fled to Canada. But others carried on their work. Joshua Coffin (PVC) and William Chaplin (AVC) went respectively to Baltimore and Washington to organize desertion.315 In the 1840s, Jonathan Walker, now captain of his own ship, also began to help fugitives from Florida. Daniel Drayton worked variously as a factory laborer, as a sailor, and then as a petty coastal trader. In 1847, he became a maritime Underground Railway conductor, being unable to say “no” to the dozens of people who snuck aboard his vessel or pleaded desperately for passage north.316 By 1848, Drayton got more ambitious in his underground work and turned to Charles D. Cleveland for money and a new vessel.317 In the spring of 1848, while Washington slaveowners celebrated the overthrow of European monarchies in the streets of the capital, Drayton took the opportunity to try and sneak off seventy-seven enslaved people.318 His effort proved unsuccessful, landing him in jail, but it did spark heated debates in Congress over the abolition of slavery and slave trading in the nation’s capital.319 VC members did not always encourage such southward excursions. The PVC was particularly unhappy that Cleveland had encouraged Drayton’s adventurism in Washington. Such reckless schemes always had the potential to subject underground work to greater surveillance and repression.320 When Madison Washington (helped by the PVC) decided to return to Virginia to free his wife, Robert Purvis urged him not to. But after gazing upon Purvis’s stirring portrait of the Amistad rebel Cinqué, Washington was moved to push on. Within months, he had led the famous (and successful) slave-ship rebellion on board the Creole (1841), an event that shocked and inspired many abolitionists.321 Nearly all of these southbound radicals were imprisoned for their actions. But far from being disheartened, VC members helped their imprisoned comrades and used their example to further promote aggressive abolitionist tactics. After Chaplin’s arrest, Gerrit Smith, Charles Ray, and Frederick Douglass organized a convention of fugitive slaves. Delegates resolved to raise money to pay Chaplin’s release bond (Smith did most of the paying). The meeting also published an address to slaves, encouraging them to resist. During Torrey’s 83

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imprisonment, Cleveland formed a rescue plan, but it was never carried out.322 After Torrey died of tuberculosis while in prison, the BVC and their Black working-class allies praised his deeds and raised money to erect a monument to his memory.323 When Walker got out of prison, abolitionists paired him up with fellow sailor John S. Jacobs, and they went on lecture tour. Jacobs spoke of his life in slavery as well as his work on the Boston wharves as slave rescuer and informant for the BVC.324 Walker recounted his life as a maritime Underground Railway worker. Runaway Lewis Hayden began his antislavery lecturing to raise funds for Calvin Fairbank and Delia Webster, the two abolitionists imprisoned for helping him flee Kentucky.325 After completing his sentence, Fairbank came to Boston and stayed with Hayden. Francis Jackson gave Fairbank part-time work as an antislavery lecturer.326 During the efforts in the late 1840s to help Fairbank, Hayden and Jackson first began to collaborate. Their partnership became the foundation for the revamped BVC of the 1850s.327 Encouraged by abolitionist incursions into the South, VC members tried to make the movement committed to what historian Stanley Harrold has called “aggressive abolitionism,” a movement that addressed itself to slaves and encouraged their resistance. In 1842, Smith delivered and printed his address “to the Slaves in the United States of America.” He denounced the facile tactic of preaching to masters and racists and instead incited slaves to lead the movement by deserting their masters. The role of abolitionists then would merely be as “advisors, comforters, and helpers” of the runaway vanguard. Though Smith hoped the address would be circulated in the South, he wrote it mainly to persuade other abolitionists. Enslaved people, he believed, needed much less convincing.328 Abel Brown believed that some sailors who later encouraged slaves to escape had been influenced by Smith’s address.329 “Orthodox” Garrisonians criticized the address.330 Garrison, though, republished Smith’s address in the Liberator and wrote his own address to slaves in 1843. He encouraged slaves “to transform yourselves from things to men by flight,” a striking statement, anticipatory of Frantz Fanon, who wrote that “the ‘thing’ colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation.”331 Garrison desired abolitionists to learn “from the testimony of thousands of slaves who have escaped” and to help thousands more in escaping.332 Both Smith’s and Garrison’s addresses drew directly from the politics of the VCs, with far-reaching implications. William Channing (BVC) described them as “disturbing, exciting, even revolutionary.”333 Indeed, other VC members would later rework the form of “address to slaves” into declarations of a revolutionary abolitionism based upon the armed resistance of the enslaved. 84

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In the early 1840s, Abel Brown wrote, “the suggestion which is made, respecting the efforts of Vigilance Committees, being only one branch of the subject of emancipation is equally applicable to any other branch.”334 He was critiquing a widespread assumption that opening too many fronts, or branches, of struggle would fracture and dilute the abolitionist movement. The most orthodox Garrisonians believed anything unrelated to public agitation distracted and detracted from the noble aims of “moral suasion.” Political abolitionists, on the other hand, accused Garrisonians of diverting the movement through public advocacy of irrelevant reforms, like women’s rights. Implicit in such attitudes was a belief that “moral suasion” or organizing political parties was the struggle itself, all other approaches merely lesser “branches.” VC activists, like Brown, were well situated to break down such narrow approaches to the struggle, having learned from a motley crew of activists and from an equally motley array of antislavery fronts. VC members appropriated the Hicksite heresy, which suggested that unjust laws ought to be disobeyed. They copied the actions of Black militants, who actually broke laws to help runaways and prevent slavecatching. They even adopted some of the far less radical, though no less useful, legal strategies of the moderate abolition societies. The VCs built upon these ideas and actions, but, more significantly, they organized them and connected them to a radical abolitionism that called for immediate, uncompensated liberation. Beyond that, VC members weathered the storm of sectarian divide, which nearly imploded abolitionism in the 1840s. They maintained the committees as creative, often nonsectarian organizations through which abolitionists of all creeds and backgrounds could assist the resisting slave. Committee leaders rose to leadership positions within antislavery societies, both Garrisonian and non-Garrisonian, aligning abolitionist vision more closely with the objectives of the committees. In doing this work, members extended abolitionists’ networks of working-class support, learned from runaways, and recruited fugitives into the movement. They made illegal fugitive aid one of the accepted plans of attack and even intimated less-accepted forms of “aggressive abolitionism” in the South. They also made the Underground Railroad more efficient. “Where one slave made a successful escape of twenty years ago, probably fifty make their flight now,” noted the MASS with much delight.335 They thus made abolitionism more practical, more radical, perhaps more revolutionary, and certainly more comprehensive. As Wendell Phillips aptly noted in the 1840s, the comprehensive abolitionists, who secretly aided fugitives and integrated that work with other antislavery “branches” and other reforms, stood “at the vanguard of benevolent effort.”336 85

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The VCs led the movement and prepared it well to confront the crisis of the 1850s. At a NYVC meeting in 1850, just four months before passage of the new Fugitive Slave Law, runaway Samuel Ringgold Ward—among those at the vanguard of benevolent effort—declared that the VC was “cheered by the success of the past year . . . and will continue, in spite of any laws they may encounter, to help the fugitive from bondage.”337 They were ready.

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THE PEDAGOGY OF RADICAL ABOLITIONISM, 1850-1861 How many slave hunters and Abolitionists have clashed here with fire in their eyes and deep convictions in their hearts! —Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices

In the early 1850s, Arianna Sparrow fled with her mother to Norfolk, Virginia, “where a captain was to meet about 20 people and bring them” to Boston. The captain was not able to make it, but the Sparrows did find another antislavery captain to get them out. Notified of their arrival long beforehand, fugitive Lewis Hayden met the mother and child at the Boston wharf. “He took me right up into his arms,” Arianna recalled, and marched her and her mother direct to “the antislavery office.” At the Boston Vigilance Committee’s office, Hayden, Garrison, and other members gathered as the mother “told her story.” “It was a rule,” observed Arianna, “for every escaped slave to report at the antislavery office.” At the end of the meeting, Garrison encouraged Arianna to attend school. She did so but all too often, interested in other kinds of education, skipped class to attend antislavery meetings. Her mother refused to attend such meetings, for they brought back traumatic memories of enslavement. But she encouraged her to daughter to go and to report back to her what she had learned. Very quickly, Arianna became “a member of the antislavery society.”1 Sparrow’s story is illustrative of the workings of the VCs in the 1850s. The committees were well organized, with a wide communication network spanning straight into the South. Ship captains and sailors; fugitives, like Hayden; and 87

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prominent abolitionists, like Garrison, all worked together. Members took down the stories of fugitives systematically. VC relations with antislavery societies became more closely integrated. For sure, the committees did all the same work they had done earlier. Yet now they had a decade, and often more, of experience. They were better prepared, better organized, and better connected, with sharpened tactics and ideas. They were well prepared for the tumultuous decade of the 1850s, when their work suddenly took on novel significance. During those years of cataclysm, made so largely by the new Fugitive Slave Law, VCs took on a leading role within abolitionism. They orchestrated the notorious rescues and violent confrontations with slavecatchers, such as the Christiana Insurrection, the Shadrach and Jerry Rescues, and the attempted rescue of Anthony Burns, events well documented by historians. Yet much of the work VCs did to spur on the crisis occurred less spectacularly, through revamping their everyday activities and methods while bringing in a new generation of militants. In short, VCs helped undermine attempts at sectional compromise between northern Whigs and southern Democrats with an alliance between northern abolitionists and southern fugitives. Behind all this stood the unique methods of fugitive-abolitionist pedagogy, pioneered by the committees and deepened in the 1850s. Even a child such as Arianna could be a learner and a teacher, a recipient of aid and an intellectual, and that was key to everything. THE NEW F UGITIVE SL AVE L AW The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was part of a compromise to maintain the unity of the American nation. It divided the country instead. The compromise included admission of Texas (slave state) and California (free state) to the Union while preserving slavery, though not the slave trade, in Washington. D.C. The slave power also got a revamped Fugitive Slave Law, which they had long desired, to curtail the activities of abolitionist “slave stealers.” The new measure required law-enforcement officials and citizens, under penalty of fines, to aid in recapturing fugitives. Special commissioners were given jurisdiction to enforce the act. Suspected runaways brought before the courts were neither allowed to testify nor to have juries. To the surprise of many architects of the compromise, the new Fugitive Slave Law was not well received in the North. Some jurists saw it and the new courts as unconstitutional. White citizens of the North disliked the new intrusion of federal power into their lives. They loathed the idea of being made into “blood-hounds” for a slaveholding aristocracy seemingly bent on 88

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controlling national politics and undermining democratic privileges guaranteed to all free white men. Few white northerners joined the abolitionist vanguard or participated in the Underground Railroad as a result. Yet many passively refused to comply with the new law. They no longer opposed the actions of VCs and sometimes applauded them for the slave rescues they conducted in the 1850s. Still, the powerful stood on the side of law and order.2 Amid renewed abolitionist resistance and aroused popular hostility against southern aggressiveness, many “large capitalists and monopolists of the North,” who profited from southern trade, organized to protect law, property, and the Union. In Philadelphia and Boston, the “gentleman of property and standing” tried deepening their control of the press and the public sphere. They organized pro-Union meetings, published runaway advertisements in their papers, and mobilized clergy to suffocate the breath of discontent. When possible, they helped slavecatchers in the rendition of fugitives. In New York, they aided in the rendition of James Hamlet (1850); in Boston, “the proslavery press and pulpit, [and] all the mercantile class,” supported the rendition of Thomas Sims (1851).3 In 1850, respectable members of the New York upper class formed the Union Safety Committee. The organization detained fugitives and returned them to masters, paid citizens to obey their constitutional duty of aiding in the rendition of runaways, and bankrolled lawyers to defend slaveholders’ claims in court.4 It organized meetings and published pamphlets and booklets with quotations from the Founding Fathers.5 Members and supporters slandered runaways as “foreigners to us with no right to be here, and to be repelled on the same ground that foreign paupers and criminals were to be excluded.”6 Elite pro-compromise, pro-law-and-order factions mobilized religion, patriotism, prejudice, and xenophobia to try and whip up support for the Fugitive Slave Law. VCs and their Black allies redoubled their efforts and self-organization after 1850. To them, the passage of the new Fugitive Slave Law was not so much a galvanizing turning point in history, but an intensified continuation of the same, which required an intensified response.7 Unable to “trust Uncle Sam,” as Harriet Tubman put it, Black northerners, many of them former runaways, fled to Canada.8 VCs aided them—the BVC helping as many as three hundred—in their exodus from the American empire to the British Empire.9 In 1850, when Harriet Jacobs found out that her master had tracked her to Boston, a woman, likely associated with the BVC, helped sneak her out of the city to Rochester, near the Canada border.10 Black militants organized themselves. In Boston, fugitives met together and wrote a public appeal. They affirmed in prophetic tones 89

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that in resisting the Fugitive Slave Law lay the only path to “human redemption” and the only means to “break the rod of the oppressor.” The BVC printed and circulated their appeal.11 In another 1850 meeting of Black Bostonians, organized by Black BVC members and two fugitives whom they aided, Joshua B. Smith encouraged all present to arm themselves. He had ample justification for his call to arms; many years earlier, his enslaved father had been shot to death by slavecatchers during an escape attempt. Smith further urged a reinvigoration of the BVC with new members who were “actors and not speakers merely . . . men of overalls—men of the wharf—who could do heavy work in the hour of difficulty.”12 As Mifflin Gibbs of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee related, Black Philadelphians organized their own consciousness-raising meetings, which “were nightly held for counsel, protest, and assistance to the fugitive, who would sometimes be present to narrate the woes of slavery.” PVC members attended and occasionally led such meetings.13 Autonomous Black self-defense groups organized sporadically as well. In rural southeastern Pennsylvania, fugitive William Parker, a “black prophet,” alongside his wife, Eliza, also a fugitive, “formed an organization for mutual protection against slaveholders and kidnappers.” Hearing of its existence, the PVC established ties with it.14 In New Bedford, as Theodore Parker (BVC) excitedly noted, “between six and seven hundred colored citizens many of whom are fugitives, . . . are determined to stand by one another and live or die together.”15 Most infamously, the New York State Vigilance Committee organized a convention of fugitives at Cazenovia, New York, in 1850.16 Runaways defiantly turned up to the public meeting, as did a cross-sectarian array of Garrisonians and political abolitionists, both men and women. The convention debated and circulated a communique of resistance entitled “A Letter to the American Slave from Those Who Have Fled Slavery.”17 The final draft of the communique affirmed that, whether “of the [Garrisonian] American Antislavery Society, or of the Liberty Party,” abolitionists would “act the part of friends and brothers” to all runaways. It also affirmed that all runaways “have the fullest liberty to plunder, burn, and kill, as you may have occasion to do to promote your escape.”18 More than words, forceful acts of disobedience to the law inspired VC members to rethink and reorganize. When slavecatchers came to Boston in 1850 to seize William and Ellen Craft, the BVC concocted plans to drive them out. The plan “was debated before the vigilance committee, but never thoroughly matured, nor thoroughly put into practice.”19 Instead, the Black community forcefully drove the slavecatchers out of town, one human hunter 90

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“near[ly] losing his life at the hands of an infuriated colored man.” Fugitive James Williams, himself on the run from slavecatchers, happened to be in Boston at this very moment. “I armed myself on that occasion and went out to fight for” the Crafts, he recalled.20 Among the many slave rescues and violent confrontations with kidnappers in 1850–51, the insurrection at Christiana, Pennsylvania, was perhaps the most portentous.21 William and Eliza Parker’s fugitive self-defense organization in rural southeastern Pennsylvania had become famous for daring rescues and violent attacks against slavecatchers. In one case, the organization beat to death two such men who had kidnapped a young girl. In another instance, William attempted to assassinate a local Black man who colluded with slavecatchers.22 In 1851, a gang of slavecatchers, led by slaveholder Edward Gorsuch, traveled to the Parkers’ home in Christiana to recapture a group of runaways traced there. The PVC, having received word of the plan, sent an agent to warn them. When the slavecatchers reached the Parkers’ home, five Black men and two Black women mounted an armed defense.23 Meanwhile, another armed band of “fifteen or twenty infuriated and raging negroes,” two Quakers, and a group of PVC members surrounded the gang. The women in the group killed one of the slavecatchers.24 US Marines later arrived on the scene, and “a reign of terror ensued.” They arrested various suspects, who were then put on trial for treason. One Black activist escaped prison “to avoid being called upon to testify at the trial.” He “dug a cave in the woods, in which he lived for a long while”; marronage had come north.25 The Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society mobilized a legal team to defend those arrested for treason. The PVC secretly sent some of the runaways in the Parkers’ group, including Parker himself, to Frederick Douglass, then in Rochester, who sent them on to abolitionists in Canada.26 The PVC also sent its own members, who had been involved in the “servile insurrection” to the New York Vigilance Committee.27 The Christiana Insurrection forced VC leaders to ponder the necessity of armed self-defense. It also gave the movement the first hero of the 1850s, William Parker. Theodore Parker (BVC) likened him to “a Hannibal, a Toussaint L’Ouverture.”28 REVAMPIN G THE VIGIL AN CE COMMIT TEES In the wake of such events, the VCs tightened their organizations. The BVC reconstituted itself almost immediately after passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.29 The NYVC reorganized after the rendition of James Hamlet (1850). 91

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Hamlet was a porter residing in New York, taken to court on accusations of being a fugitive. Unable to testify in his trial, the judge accepted the account of the slaveowner and sent Hamlet into slavery. It was the first execution of the new Fugitive Slave Law.30 PVC members reorganized in 1852, feeling themselves to be “disorganized and scattered” in the wake of the Christiana Insurrection and a number of kidnappings and renditions in southeastern Pennsylvania.31 The NYSVC remained active in the early 1850s, but later much of its work went through the NYVC or to newly formed local committees in Syracuse, Rochester, Elmira, and Troy.32 The reorganized committees kept better records of their expenses and interviews with runaways. Because of rising popular hostility to the Fugitive Slave Law, the VCs now had little problem collecting funds from antislavery societies, churches, and private individuals.33 The Colored Vigilant Committee, which also reorganized after 1850, made organizational changes that none of the other committees imitated, becoming a secret society. Influenced by Freemasonry and fearful of repression, the Detroit militants developed an elaborate array of oaths, passwords, rituals, and ranks for initiates. The highest ranks one could obtain were “chevaliers of Ethiopia” and “Knight of St. Domingo,” indicative of the revolutionary, Pan-African imagination driving both their rituals and their praxis.34 To streamline their work, most of the pivotal administrative tasks of the VCs devolved to a few individuals. Twenty-nine-year-old William Still, the son of slaves and former member of the Philadelphia Youth VC, now did most of these same tasks for the PVC. J. Miller McKim assisted him.35 Francis Jackson, Theodore Parker, and Lewis Hayden managed the BVC. Jackson, a wealthy merchant and “come-outer” loyally devoted to Garrisonian radicalism and women’s emancipation, served as BVC treasurer. He managed all the recordkeeping, fundraising, and correspondence of the committee in addition to housing dozens of fugitives.36 A Unitarian minister and transcendentalist philosopher, Parker worked as its secretary. He printed placards, helped organize meetings, housed runaways, gave them guns, and even performed marriages for fugitive couples who fled together. Hayden, a fugitive and “the head and front . . . in effecting rescues and transportations,” did much of the work housing, defending, and transporting runaways. In addition, he ran a used-clothing store.37 Work in New York devolved to newspaper editor Sidney Howard Gay, a former seaman with experience in China, and his Black working-class assistant, Louis Napoleon. Gay did most of the bookkeeping; Napoleon went to the docks to pick up fugitives.38 In Elmira, New York, a group of white abolitionists provided 92

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the funds for the local VC, but runaway John W. Jones did all of the work.39 In Syracuse, VC members voted to delegate all work to Tennessee fugitive Jermain Loguen. An AME minister, Loguen worked hard to raise funds and care for fugitives, having no qualms about using force to “outlaw” the law that outlawed him.40 Ex-slave Stephen Myers, who had been freed in 1827, ran the VC in Albany.41 In Detroit, William Lambert, who had led the CVC since 1842, now worked in tandem with George De Baptist, a free Black Virginian and veteran Underground Railroader, who had moved to that city around 1846.42 These VC leaders still relied upon a broad membership to assist them. The PVC had over twenty members. The two-man group in New York got help from a short-lived, autonomous “committee of thirteen,” an all-Black group led by veterans James McCune Smith and William Johnson.43 The BVC expanded to over two hundred members, which made meetings somewhat messy affairs.44 It kept its members busy, organizing numerous subcommittees assigned to find jobs for fugitives, raise funds, or print circulars. Veterans from the 1830s and 1840s held most of the leadership positions. Among those still working in the 1850s included Robert Purvis, McKim, Lucretia Mott, Gerrit Smith, Charles Ray, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, Wendell Phillips, Francis Jackson, and William Cooper Nell. Though veterans dominated the leadership, a new cohort of militant intellectuals began to make their presence known. Among these included the transcendentalist philosopher Bronson Alcott, the poet James Russel Lowell, and the eccentric sociologist Richard Hildreth, the last two being less active in the committees. Among the most significant young intellectuals were the Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the Black poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Fuming with “halfway socialist” and transcendentalist ideas, Higginson had “preached himself out of his pulpit” in the late 1840s. Having “an intrinsic love of adventure,” which he got from his “sailor grandfathers,” he joined the BVC.45 Higginson did all the tough work of the committee, from hiding runaways to fighting slavecatchers. Yet he also wrote works on ethics, revolutionary theory, and slave resistance.46 Harper grew up free in Baltimore, raised by her uncle William Watkins Sr., a vocal Garrisonian known for vehemently opposing Black American removal to Africa and Cherokee removal to Oklahoma. She moved to Philadelphia in 1854 and worked with Still to aid fugitives. “If there is common rough work to be done, call on me,” she would write him. Harper published poems dramatizing the life and resistance of slaves and reformers while lecturing across the country for the PASS.47 “Her little books,” 93

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exclaimed Still, “have been published and sold by the tens of thousands, and she is today the best-known colored poetess and lady speaker on the continent.”48 Intellectuals like Harper helped make the VCs into a creative, not just a “practical,” branch of abolition. The committees maintained a strong team of lawyers. They not only defended runaways in court but also wrote manuals for Black northerners that detailed the legal machinery of the Fugitive Slave Law.49 Many of them believed that law to be unconstitutional, a position Garrisonian VC activists rightly disputed.50 Veteran barristers, including Samuel Sewall, Ellis Gray Loring, William Jay, and John Albion Andrew, handled VC-related casework in New York and Boston, as they had done since the 1830s.51 In Philadelphia, David Paul Brown remained a steady accomplice of the PVC. When runaway Isaac Mason saw his master prowling around the city, he “at once notified some of the leading colored men,” who then consulted Brown. Knowing that any legal case, should Mason be captured, would be unwinnable, they sent him and his family to New York and from thence to the BVC, which then sent him to “Worcester with letters of introduction to Mr. William [Wells] Brown, now living and widely known.”52 David Brown and the PVC worked in tandem in other cases as well, Brown defending accused fugitives in court, PVC members waiting armed outside in case the ruling favored the human-hunters.53 Younger lawyers became active too. Richard Henry Dana, an aristocratic writer-turned-lawyer, did legal work for the BVC. In the 1830s, the adventurous Dana had gone to sea, becoming famous in the 1840s for writing a thrilling memoir of his life as a sailor.54 Literary critics long assumed that his turn from writing and seafaring to the boorishly bourgeois profession of law destroyed his sense of daring and creativity.55 Not entirely. Now at the heart of the sectional conflict, he defended BVC members accused of attempting to rescue fugitives from jails and courthouses. He also defended runaway Anthony Burns. Robert Morris (BVC), who trained as a lawyer under Ellis Gray Loring (BVC), was the first Black person accepted to the Massachusetts bar. He made a name for himself as a defender of Black civil rights and of the working, mainly Irish, poor. Morris rarely defended runaways in court, instead assisting them illegally, either by sheltering them or rescuing them from courthouses. Having “the innate nature of a Hannibal to lead, the ability of a L’Ouverture to conceive,” he proved one of the more militant and reliable leaders of the BVC.56 The example of Morris shows that, even for abolitionist lawyers, illegal direct action took precedence over legal action. 94

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Frances E. W. Harper. From William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872), 748.

A new generation of Black workingmen, of various shades of experience, joined the committees. Many liberated people, like Douglass, Peter Randolph, Henry Garnet, Wells Brown, Loguen, George Latimer, and John W. Jones worked for or led the committees. Jones fled Virginia slavery to Elmira, New York, and set up the VC there. He was thought to have aided over eight hundred runaways during the 1850s.57 Latimer, of the famous 1842 slave case, housed runaways and worked as a spy for the BVC.58 Free Black men from the South came north and worked for the committees. Leonard Grimes, of Virginia, an orphaned son of free Black parents, spent two years in a Virginia prison for aiding runaways. Upon release, he went to Boston, became a Baptist minister, led a congregation of mainly fugitives, and joined the BVC.59 William H. Johnson, who grew up free but very “poor” in Virginia, came north as a young man and worked with the PVC and AVC. He later vented his hatred of race prejudice as a prominent civil rights and women’s rights activist as well as labor organizer.60 The committees strengthened their relationships with Black workingmen to house fugitives and provide information. The records of the BVC indicate that the committee housed fugitives with numerous Black Bostonians, mainly of 95

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the laboring classes, including John R. Taylor, Samuel Flint, Ben Giger, Phillip Russel, Samuel Snowden, William Mannix, James Watkins, James Scott, Henry Tyler, John Oliver, and Lewis Howard.61 Louis Napoleon (NYVC), a porter by profession, was credited posthumously with having aided three thousand runaways.62 Service workers in hotels informed VCs of arriving slave hunters or of slaveholders who brought servants with them. William Still worked with a number of Black porters and carriage drivers who informed him of runaways arriving by boat or who transported them to the next Underground Railway “station.”63 In one instance, five Black porters associated with the PVC boarded a docked ship, rescued fugitive Jane Johnson and her two children, and assaulted her master, the US minister to Nicaragua.64 Other working people of color helped out, too. Indigenous Wampanoag boatmen from Martha’s Vineyard helped fugitive Edinbur Randall evade his pursuers, by land and water, to reach the BVC.65 Women of all classes and races continued to do most of the care work and fundraising, in addition to public agitation and rescue operations. Notorious female intellectuals like Lucretia Mott, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Lydia Maria Child not only did practical work for the committees but also promoted them in the public sphere. In Philadelphia, women involved with the Female Vigilant Association, which disbanded in the 1850s, remained active. Esther Moore later worked full time with the PVC. She “begged the committee . . . that she might be duly notified of every fugitive reaching Philadelphia, so that she could personally offer hand-knit clothes or encouragement.”66 Hester Reckless, by 1850 approaching eighty years old, still helped fugitives.67 Letitia Still, William Still’s wife, did more labor for the PVC than anybody. In addition to raising four children, she cared for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of runaways in her own home.68 More informally, female cooks, washerwomen, and domestic workers warned the PVC of arriving fugitives or lurking slavecatchers.69 Women, though less active in NYVC affairs, still did most of the fundraising.70 Though BVC meetings were quite masculine spaces, women, most of them Black and working class, did much care work behind the scenes. They sometimes escorted fugitives out of Boston to hide in nearby villages or go directly to Canada.71 One “colored woman” snuck on board harbored ships and “found out if there was any fugitive on board.”72 Rebecca Latimer, wife of George Latimer, often cared for fugitives in her home.73 Harriet Hayden did the same, while her husband, Lewis Hayden, guarded their residence fully armed. White abolitionist Ellis Gray Loring took many fugitives into his home, 96

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but, most likely, any care work devolved to the Black servant working in his household.74 The BVC records further show that the committee relied on a large group of mainly Black women—Clara Vaught, Catherine Greenland, Susan Burroughs, Adeline Skeen, Isabella Holmes, Maria Bell, and others—to do essential labor.75 Contemporaries took note of the extreme diversity of the VCs during the 1850s. They were the most notoriously “promiscuous” organizations of the decade, subversive to all hierarchies of race, gender, class, and decency. As one antiabolitionist writer condescendingly, but accurately, put it, the PVC “was composed of backsliding ministers, worn out tract colporteurs, elderly females, and a few cunning-looking negroes.”76 Others saw the diversity in a different light. One fugitive observed with admiration the ability of Underground Railroad activists to recruit from “every class of society.”77 An abolitionist writer noted that, in the BVC, “the white and the colored race, freeborn sons of Massachusetts and fugitive slaves, cooperated together.” That motley crew, the writer continued, “displayed the most diversified assemblage of characters, but this diversity secured its greater efficiency.”78 The committees believed in equality. They also believed in subverting accepted conventions and in mobilizing a united front against slavery. But, more importantly, they needed to diversify to do their work and gather supporters. With slightly increased resources and personnel, the VCs greatly expanded their efforts to care for fugitives’ basic well-being. Naturally, they clothed and fed them, mended shoes, and did laundry. The BVC spent a great deal of its funds on “the relief of Fugitive Slaves in Canada during the severe winters of that region.”79 When runaways desired to stay in the United States, the committees found them housing and employment.80 In one case, BVC members tried to secure a suitable home for an orphaned fugitive child.81 Committee members also made sure that most fugitives had their transport costs paid. For instance, the PVC often paid carriage drivers to take runaways across Philadelphia. It then paid for boat fares to New York.82 In that city, Louis Napoleon waited at the docks in the wee hours of the morning to greet them. The NYVC then sent runaways by canal, by carriage, by train, or by foot across the state. The committees paid great attention to hygiene as well. The PVC provided runaways with a thorough bath. They sent male arrivals off to local Black barbers for haircuts and a clean shave. Runaways received such treatment for health reasons, after they had spent weeks in woods, in swamps, or in the unsanitary holds of vessels. The committees also did this as a means of disguise—a clean, well-shaven, 97

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well-dressed individual was less likely to be suspected as a fugitive.83 They met the immediate spiritual needs of the new arrivals as well. If runaways desired lessons in reading and writing, women taught them. As part of her antislavery care work, Graceanna Lewis (PVC) read stories to fugitive children, usually from the works of Frederick Douglass and feminist-abolitionist Lydia Maria Child.84 VC members agreed that care work had to be comprehensive. As one BVC circular publicized, “there is no difference in opinion as to our duty in furnishing clothes and food, physicians and medicine, and professional counsel to the poor, sick, frightened and bereft men, women, and children from the South.”85 Providing fugitives “physicians and medicine” became essential to the committees’ politics of care by the 1850s. William Still often noted how runaways he interviewed either received minimal medical care from masters or paid out of pocket for their own treatment.86 This would not do. Women with nursing skills bandaged runaways and attended to wounds incurred escaping. The PVC procured medicine from David Johnson, a chemistry teacher at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.87 In 1856, Martin Delany, fed up with the United States, moved to Canada, where he joined the Chatham VC. A physician by profession, “his practice embraced a great portion of those who were refugees from American slavery.”88 The BVC had Black physician John Rock among its membership to take care of runaways’ medical needs. But the BVC also hired other physicians for “doctoring fugitive slaves.”89 Jermain Loguen had arranged for a surgery for Isaac Williams to treat his bullet wound from fighting slavecatchers. Despite medical care, two fugitives died of injuries sustained from their journeys to freedom. One, who made a winter escape in 1857, perished of frostbite and lockjaw, despite “nursing and competent medical aid,” under the care of the PVC. “His sufferings were intense, but he bore them with the utmost fortitude, supported by the consciousness that he was out of the clutch of the slaveholder and at last a free man.”90 In 1858, Johnson Walker gravely injured his foot while escaping, having leapt from a moving train. He hobbled to the PVC office. “He could not be sent to a hospital . . . since it was known the slave-hunters were in waiting,” so activists privately nursed him for months before sending him to Boston. There, gangrene and consumption set in. The BVC paid one hundred dollars to “Palmer and co for artificial leg for Johnson H. Walker who in his flight from slavery had his foot crushed by the car wheels at the railroad station at Wilmington Delaware.” His situation hardly improved. Walker “was sent, with a number of other immigrants, to the milder climate of Jamaica, where he finally died.”91 98

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By the 1850s, the PVC had organized a systematic network of Black and Quaker helpers in rural southeastern Pennsylvania. William Parker’s organization had been broken up by 1851, but that did not deter other Black militants. For instance, free Blacks and fugitives in Columbia, “filled with the old spirit which animated . . . the blacks of Hayti,” defended their community and “passed hundreds” of runaways to Still.92 In West Chester, Abraham Shadd, John Brown, and Benjamin Freeman worked with local Quakers to send off fugitives to the PVC.93 Hicksites and a few other Quakers who once harbored fugitives individually now collaborated with the PVC. Philadelphia Garrisonians had worked hard to transform isolated Quakers into organized cadres. Abolitionists sent Wells Brown and Douglass on lecture tours in southeastern Pennsylvania.94 Quaker abolitionists, like Graceanna Lewis and Lucretia Mott, denounced quietism from within.95 Purvis and McKim established ties with Quaker radicals through family and friends.96 Hester Reckless befriended Quaker Lewis Dannaker, “an intelligent radical thinker” from Chester County. Dannaker advised dozens of runaways to go straight to Reckless.97 Thanks to such organizing, by the 1850s, most of the major towns in southeastern Pennsylvania, all the way down to the Maryland and Delaware borders, had Black and white individuals working with the PVC.98 The PVC and these Underground Railroad “conductors” communicated with each other and passed fugitives between themselves.99 Most of these runaways arrived at the office of Still, who then sent them either to New York or to Boston.100 In the 1850s, the VCs more firmly organized what they sometimes called the “submarine railway” or the “‘Peoples Line’ of steamboats.” In the early 1830s and 1840s, mainly Black sailors had worked informally to help fugitives stow away, then directing them to antislavery offices or sailors’ homes upon arrival in the North. Such work involved great risk, greater yet after 1850. Being caught helping runaways in southern ports meant jail time or worse. Being caught in transit by an unsympathetic captain meant severe physical disciplining or dismissal from the job. For the fugitive, it meant reshipment south. Still, sailors helped runaways “constantly.”101 The committees devised various strategies to assist sailors in their dangerous work. The BVC had agents on board ships, as well as “friends in the seaports of the south,” to inform them which Boston-bound ships contained fugitive stowaways.102 In one case, the BVC received a telegram about a vessel hiding a fugitive on its way to Bath, Massachusetts, rushing members there to meet him. Sailors welcomed them aboard the designated ship only to inform them that the fugitive had jumped ship a few days earlier, 99

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after the captain tried making arrangements to hand over the runaway to the police.103 The BVC even devised plans to deploy a “pirate” boat “off the capes of Virginia” to resist “pilot boats” that “boarded and searched every coasting vessel for fugitive slaves.”104 It additionally employed maritime workers directly to rescue fugitives from arriving ships. Austin Bearse, a sailor, and Henry Kemp, an Irish laborer, led the BVC’s maritime wing. They relied upon Black dockworkers and sailors as informants, while the committee gave them money to build a yacht. Upon receiving word of an arriving fugitive, Bearse, Kemp, and occasionally other members, including Wendell Phillips, William Bowditch, or John Browne, as well as any wharf workers interested in helping would get on the yacht, sneak onto the suspected ship, and rescue the runaway. Bearse and Kemp succeeded in doing this dozens of times. The BVC paid the two men up to fifty dollars for some of their more dangerous rescues.105 The PVC developed its own “submarine” strategy by working directly with antislavery ship captains. Coordinating with these conscientious captains, who hired sympathetic crewmembers, ensured cooperation on board and made the maritime underground less dangerous for both common sailors and runaways. Antislavery ship captains passed on information of their activities to trusted allies “in Richmond, Norfolk, [and] Petersburg.”106 Runaways now knew which ships to go to and had much less difficulty sneaking onto them. They had less uncomfortable passages as well, being allowed to roam on deck. In one case, an antislavery captain generously hired a fugitive as a sailor, at least until he dropped him off in New England.107 Such efforts made the maritime Underground Railroad far more effective than in previous years. The vast majority of runaways who reached New York and Boston “came by water, as stowaways on vessels.”108 At least two hundred runaways came to the PVC by water. The committee received help from over a dozen captains. For instance, a Captain Fountain navigated thirty runaways to the PVC; a Captain Bayliss helped twenty-six runaways. The captain of the steamer City of Richmond also aided twenty-six fugitives. Of these three, only Bayliss was ever jailed in the South.109 A Captain Lambdin was also arrested for helping runaways. He boldly but unsuccessfully tried to defend himself in court, relying on antislavery literature sent to him by the PVC.110 The committees welcomed the help of agents working in the South, who did so at their own risk. When Seth Concklin went south at the behest of the PVC to retrieve the family of Peter Still, a proslavery mob murdered him. Lewis Hayden paid Mark R. De Mortie, a free Black man, to help enslaved people flee Norfolk by water. Nearly arrested, De Mortie himself fled to Boston permanently. Afraid 100

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slaveholders might seize him and put him on trial in Virginia, he consulted BVC lawyer John Albion Andrew. According to De Mortie, Andrew advised him to “arm” himself; “better to be tried in Massachusetts for murder than to be tried in Virginia for running away slaves.”111 Other conductors lived in the South and worked in VC networks unbeknown even to committee members. Sam Nixon, an enslaved man working in Norfolk, “knew the captains” who helped fugitives. He would secretly bring runaways to these men, who then sent them to the PVC. After a number of years doing such work, Nixon came under suspicion for his illegal activities. He then secured a berth with one of the captains he knew and got to the PVC. Because committee members did not know of him, they at first thought Nixon an imposter, “a great brag,” when he narrated his work helping fugitives. But they soon found his stories to be truthful.112 Other conductors were better known. The committees still worked with Thomas Garrett in Delaware. He, in turn, worked with a group of informants, most prominent among them “two Roman Catholics, of Irish birth,” who sent him runaways. Garret claimed to have helped over two thousand fugitives.113 Moncure Conway came from a genteel slaveholding family in Virginia. While studying at Harvard, he became radicalized by reading the transcendentalists and joined the BVC. Moncure traveled between Virginia and Boston, communicating to fugitive Bostonians knowledge of their relatives and friends back south. While on one such trip to Virginia, a group of slaves confronted Conway and “hinted expectations that I was contemplating some movement.” Initially reticent, he eventually began helping enslaved people, many of whom belonged to his father, escape north.114 The more famous Harriet Tubman also went south on her own to lead people northward. She would send runaways directly to Garret, the PVC, or the NYVC.115 Because they did abolitionist work within the heart of the slave empire, such “conductors,” as one runaway described them, were “the advanced guard of the Underground Railroad.”116 Because the VCs now directed so many runaways to Canada, they established stronger contacts with activists there. Members went on tours “to look into the condition of fugitives domiciled there, and to see how they could be further aided.” VC associates, like William C. Nell, Abraham Shadd, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Samuel J. May, Lucretia Mott, William Still, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, went on such tours.117 They met with fugitives they had helped, swapping Underground Railway tales. The fugitives discussed their successes in Canada as well as the discrimination and poverty they faced in the British Empire.118 VC members also built useful ties with abolitionists there, including 101

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Hiram Wilson, Thomas Henning, Mary Bibb, and her fugitive husband, Henry Bibb. These activists donated funds, informed VC members of safe routes to Canada, and took down the stories of runaways, sometimes notifying the committees of the arrivals of fugitives they had sent.119 They also formed their own “vigilance committees” that found work for refugees and prevented them falling into “begging” and destitution.120 When Loguen fled the United States after forcefully rescuing the runaway Jerry from a jailhouse, he stayed with Wilson. Loguen made good use of his exile, gathering knowledge from fellow fugitives. Upon returning to the States, he lectured on the condition of Canadian refugees and assumed leadership of the Syracuse VC.121 One Black couple who worked with the PVC divided their labor internationally. The wife stayed in Pennsylvania and did “what good she could for the cause,” sending runaways to Still. Her husband, a fugitive, fled to Canada, where he helped arriving fugitives and lectured to raise funds for the Underground Railroad.122 Additionally, the PVC had their own Canadian agent, Mary Ann Shadd Cary. The Black activist received a practical abolitionist education from her father, Abraham, who helped fugitives get from rural Pennsylvania to the PVC. In the 1850s, she moved to Canada to work with runaways there. She set up an abolitionist paper, the Provincial Freeman, which awakened abolitionists to the condition of Canadian refugees and encouraged African Americans to flee the United States.123 Cary also allowed PVC members to promote their activities in the Provincial Freeman.124 She even formed the Chatham VC to help runaways.125 Her committee proved the most militant of the Canadian vigilance societies. Among its associates were fugitive refugees as well as militant Black abolitionists such as Cary, Mary Ellen Pleasant, William Howard Day, and Martin Delany. It also maintained close ties with the secretive but nearby CVC in Detroit. The Chatham VC had a record of direct action. In 1858, it orchestrated the armed rescue of a young Black man being abducted into slavery.126 The committees worked hard to build international networks of solidarity. While Chartism and revolutionary movements shook Europe, VC members crossed the Atlantic, offering up their own radical experiences to activists abroad, especially in England. J. Miller McKim received a commission from the PVC to go to England to “represent this committee” and “to promote its interests and advance its objects.”127 McKim did just that. He also ventured into Ireland and continental Europe, seeking out revolutionaries from whom he could learn.128 The BVC used its own funds to send William and Ellen Craft to England, where they became celebrity lecturers against slavery and the 102

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Fugitive Slave Law.129 J. W. C. Pennington promoted the NYVC in lecture tours through Scotland, raising as much as three thousand dollars for the committee.130 Though more interested in talking about his own courageous escape from slavery, Henry “Box” Brown also promoted VC work during his lecture tours in England.131 William Powell transferred from the NYVC to Britain, where he welcomed fugitives like Alexander Duvall and Francis Anderson, both sent to him by the BVC. He made sure to get such fugitives involved in the British antislavery scene.132 Fugitive-abolitionists, finding celebrity, safety, and less racism in Europe, often opted to stay there. Samuel J. May, during his tour of England, learned bluntly from the Crafts that “they have no wish to go back to our country.”133 Thus, when fugitive-abolitionists came back to fight in the belly of the beast in the States, VC members hailed such returns as reinvigorations of the revolution. When William Wells Brown returned to Boston in 1854 after a long European sojourn, BVC members likened the event to John Milton’s own return from his tour of continental Europe to participate in the English Civil War.134 The PVC arranged a public meeting, “crowded to its utmost capacity,” to welcome Wells Brown.135 The international work of the committees paid off, contributing to what Richard Blackett has called an international “moral cordon” against slavery. More immediately, the VCs received much-welcomed pecuniary contributions from English, Scottish, and Irish antislavery societies.136 By forcefully asserting their freedom to transgress borders, fugitives abroad crafted a new tradition of internationalism. Famed singer and anticolonial activist Paul Robeson (1898–1976), whose own father had fled slavery to Philadelphia, asserted: “From the days of chattel slavery until today, the concept of travel has been inseparably linked in the minds of our people with the concept of freedom. Hence, the symbol of a railroad train recurs frequently in our folklore—in spirituals and gospel songs, in blues and ballads—and the train is usually ‘bound for glory’ and ‘heading for the promised land.’ And there are boats, too, like the ‘Old Ship of Zion’ and the ‘Old Ark’ that will take us over waters to freedom and salvation.” Robeson continued: “Some runaway slaves went to foreign countries not to secure their own freedom but to gain liberation for their kinsmen in chains. The good work they did abroad lives on in our own time, for that pressure which comes today from Europe in our behalf is in part a precious heritage from those early Negro sojourners for freedom who crossed the sea to champion the rights of black men in America.”137 It is indeed a precious internationalist and Pan-Africanist heritage that would later play a part in African Independence and Black Power. 103

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VC activists often used the term “Underground Railroad”—as well as associated terms like “lines,” “stations,” and “conductors,” among others—to denote a highly organized, “modern” movement. For sure, white writers after the Civil War mythologized the speak of the Underground Railroad to palliate the white liberal conscience and to show how white folks quietly, privately resisted the evils of slavery without needing to be flaming abolitionists, extremists, or “ultraists.”138 Yet the language and praxis of the Underground Railroad had its origins with the extremists of the 1840s. As the system of fugitive aid became more organized in the 1850s, such rhetoric became commonplace among abolitionists. The VC movement was indeed quite organized. Antislavery ship captains manned the maritime underground from southern ports to the northern VCs. By foot, once runaways reached Delaware or Pennsylvania—often with the help of VC agents or informal allies—they usually found help from a long line of committee associates, stretching from Pennsylvania to Canada. Black and Quaker “conductors” sent runaways to the PVC.139 The PVC then sent them either by water to New York City or Boston or by land to upstate New York. In New York City, runaways were directed to VC stations in Elmira, Troy, Albany, Peterboro, Syracuse, and finally to Rochester and Canada. In Boston, runaways went to Canada via “stations” in Concord, Worcester, the utopian community at Northampton, Springfield—where John Brown organized a small fugitive-aid society—and from thence to Albany and onward.140 Hundreds of other fugitives got to Canada via Detroit’s CVC, which had its own network of associates, including Calvin Fairbank in Kentucky, Laura Haviland in Ohio and Michigan, Levi Coffin in Indiana, and also John Brown.141 Many freedom seekers got north without any aid. But many more, presumably, had help. Abolitionists did not use the terminologies associated with the Underground Railroad to mythologize or romanticize reality. On the contrary, just as sociologists of social movements in the digital age use the terminologies of “networks” and “networking” to explain how movements organize, so abolitionists in the age of rail used the language of “lines,” “railways,” and “conductors” to describe what they themselves were doing. The committees began to rely more heavily upon their interviews with fugitives. These helped them reunite families who had fled separately.142 Sometimes fugitives vividly described their pursuers. The VCs used that information to print placards with descriptions of slavecatchers, warning Black citizens to be on guard.143 Rigorous interviews also served to prevent infiltration by spies and imposters, a significant threat in the 1850s.144 Jacob Bigelow, who worked for the PVC and the NYVC, said that slaveholders sent him numerous such pretenders 104

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to try and extract information.145 One Black informer, posing as a fugitive, lived with Still despite having received a rigorous interrogation. Thankfully, local Black workers uncovered the con and drove the man from the abolitionist’s home.146 In many cases, imposters were desperate people—jobless, homeless, or even escapees from nasty northern penitentiaries—who desired money or a place to stay the night.147 These the VCs charitably gave. Sidney Howard Gay sometimes found employment for such individuals.148 In a divisive case, Dimmock Charlton went to the NYVC and the PVC for money to purchase his family’s freedom. Gay and Still both doubted the veracity of his story and warned other abolitionists. Charlton, in turn, publicly defended himself, and Douglass came to his side. As a result of the controversy, Douglass and Still stopped speaking to each other (though they still cooperated when it came to aiding runaways).149 The committees innovated novel forms of surveillance. For instance, the PVC subscribed to southern newspapers, using the runaway adverts to stay informed on possible fugitives coming their way.150 VC members first formulated the Black Panther strategy of “policing police” and watching slavecatchers. Charles K. Whipple, one of the more anarchistic BVC members, published a short manual on how to conduct surveillance upon kidnappers.151 The committees put up placards warning of slavecatchers in their cities. These provided physical descriptions of the men and urged Black neighborhoods to be on guard. One placard warned the “colored people of Boston” that “watchmen and police officers of Boston” will “act as kidnappers and slave catchers.” Written by Theodore Parker, it further called upon “the helpers of the fugitives among you” to “shun them [watchmen and policemen] in every possible manner as so many hounds on the track of the most unfortunate of your race.”152 In one case, when Lewis Hayden reported to the BVC that “his house was closely watched by a constable and policeman,” members mobilized to sneak out the fugitive hiding there.153 The committees kept watch on slavecatchers, either with their own membership or through informants. One BVC agent would “get news of warrants” for the arrest of fugitives by conversing with a boastful police officer who did not know he was a VC member. Other times, anonymous informants notified the committees of police warrants or arriving slavecatchers.154 So warned, the committees then located the runaways and hurried them off. The BVC made the habit of patrolling the streets and searching hotels for arriving slavecatchers from the South. All of the committees relied heavily on the cooks, waiters, and domestic servants in hotels to notify them of suspicious individuals arriving.155 Sometimes 105

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members did their intelligence work by posing as the enemy. In one instance, the PVC employed someone to impersonate the notorious slavecatcher George Alberti in order to extract information from a slaveowner who had to come to Philadelphia to recover his property.156 Similarly, the BVC had members pose as slaveholders, who would then enter docked ships pretending to search for their absconded property.157 The VCs engaged in organized forms of self-defense with unprecedented vigor.158 No committee member denied the fugitives’ natural right to defend their freedom and their lives. They proclaimed that they would stand by runaways in maintaining that right. Theodore Parker affirmed: “One thing . . . I think is very plain, that the fugitive has the same natural right to defend himself against the slave catcher or his constitutional tool. . . . The man who attacks me to reduce me to slavery in that moment of attack alienates his right to life.”159 Even committed pacifists like Timothy Gilbert (BVC) and Samuel J. May (SVC) vowed to stand as physical obstacles to the slavecatcher in the name of fugitive self-defense.160 “I am opposed,” Gilbert wrote, “to war and all the spirit of war—even to all preparations for what is called self-defense in times of peace, yet I should resist the pursuer and not allow him to enter my dwelling until he was able to tread under my feet.”161 The committees put this philosophy into practice. The wealthy Gilbert, in addition to giving runaways work for above-market wages and allowing “them the privileges of his private residence,” also hired armed “private watchers for the better security of fugitives.”162 When Hayden had runaways hiding in his house, an armed guard sometimes kept watch there, too.163 The transcendentalist philosopher Bronson Alcott guarded the residence of Wendell Phillips “armed with a revolver.”164 Black minister Leonard Grimes did guard duty, too, and once “hunted a fugitive slave catcher with a club.”165 In 1860, when Samuel Snowden (BVC) and “3 or 4 other colored men” were “out on the watch,” police arrested them for “making a noise in the street and disturbing the peace.”166 Frequently, the BVC sent white members on late-night guard duty, well aware that racist police were far more suspicious of gangs of Black men out during those hours. Because self-defense constituted only one small branch of VC work, some of the more aggressive committee members organized associations solely devoted to this. Many Black associates of the VCs organized militias. These usually had a dual purpose. As organizations with a public presence, the militias served as a way for Black men to assert their rights as citizens. The formation of such Black citizens’ militias was, in fact, widespread in the nineteenth-century Atlantic 106

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world.167 Yet in the case of northern cities like Boston and Philadelphia, they may have had the secretive purpose of defending Black communities from slavecatchers. When Robert Morris and William Watkins decided to organize a militia of Black Bostonians, they petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to strike the word “white” from the law allowing militias, appealing to what they believed to be their rights as state citizens. Both men, BVC members who endorsed violent strategies, certainly intended their militia to engage in acts of illegal self-defense.168 Perhaps suspecting this, the legislature rejected their petition. John Henry Hill, a Canadian refugee helped by the PVC, organized a similar militia, composed entirely of runaways in Canada. The pretext was a simple assertion of the rights and duties of freedmen, but there were, perhaps, ulterior purposes. Hill collaborated with the PVC to get fugitives to his place in Canada West. He even tried corresponding, less successfully, with southern friends to help slaves escape.169 Hill spoke openly to abolitionists about the need for armed struggle. Other Black militias armed themselves without the pretexts of republicanism. William Parker’s short-lived self-defense group in Pennsylvania armed solely for the purpose of fighting off slavecatchers. A group of young Black men in New Bedford armed themselves for similar reasons.170 In 1859, young PVC member William Henry Johnson organized a militia in his city. Johnson never made explicit the aims of his little “colored military company,” but he did later admit that he formed it with “a number of young men connected with the Underground Railroad.”171 The wildest experiment in armed self-defense was organized in 1855 and known as the Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League. The group consisted of mainly white “lawyers, doctors, clergymen, tradesmen, laborers, young, and old,” most of them also in the BVC. The league’s members described their objectives thus: “whereas previous attempts had been made to free the slave and let the man-hunter either depart or come before some court . . . we were determined to seize the hunter and let others care for the slave.” The league organized secretly, with clandestine meetings, code names, and strict rules for membership. It offered drills to train members on how to properly assault and capture slavecatchers. Most league members appear on BVC membership rolls and collaborated with the committee.172 Many, though not all, opposed Garrisonian principles of nonresistance, whereas the BVC had a Garrisonian leadership. The league viewed itself as more radical than other groups, “the most advanced Jacobin-wing of practical antislavery . . . elaborately organized, drilled, disciplined, and trained to the use of arms.” Despite its militancy, the league seems to have done little 107

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other than train and talk, becoming relatively inactive after its first year of existence.173 Some of its members turned their aggressive aspirations toward the bloody battleground of Kansas Territory. But most found more usefulness in their BVC work, seeing the league as just a minor auxiliary. After all, far more fugitives arrived in Boston than did slavecatchers to seize them. Following their Black comrades, the VCs made numerous attempts to free fugitives from courtrooms and prisons.174 The PVC usually worked with Black auxiliaries to rescue runaways if a court case went against them. Thomas Oliver brought a gang of “colored people” to watch over a hearing in the 1850s. When the court ruled against the fugitive, Oliver’s men set up an ambush along the road leading away from the courthouse. When the slaveholders reached the appointed spot, “all of a sudden knives were drawn and pistols—it looked like Nat Turner’s insurrection in a minute.”175 After the end of that minute-long “insurrection,” the rescuers took off with the fugitive, leaving behind a bruised and bewildered band of human hunters. In other cases, the PVC organized armed bands for courthouse rescues. But if the lawyers working with the committee defended the runaway well and won the case, the rescuers would peacefully escort the runaway out of the city.176 In Syracuse in 1851, slavecatchers seized runaway Jerry McHenry and imprisoned him to await trial. Local VC members and Liberty Party men held indignation meetings. After Jerry told members of the Syracuse VC he would “never go back to slavery” without a fight, the committee, led by Loguen, Gerrit Smith, and local fugitives, decided on a rescue. They stormed the prison, breaking the bones of one of the guards, and took Jerry off to Canada. Enoch Reed, a “sturdy seaman,” assaulted a police officer during the action.177 Abolitionists romanticized what they called the “Jerry Rescue” as one of the great victories of abolition.178 They prayed for more such daring rescues to come. But Loguen understood the Jerry Rescue for what it was, considering it “an act of violence against the government.” To avoid arrest, he went into hiding in Canada for nearly a year.179 In Boston, Black militants took the lead in riotous rescues. When fugitive Shadrach Minkins stood trial in 1851, Black workers rushed into the courthouse and seized him. The rescuers rushed out of the city, with a “crowd driving along with them and cheering as they went.”180 Though Robert Morris helped coordinate the rescue, the act seems to have been done without the direct knowledge of the BVC.181 In another court case, this one involving a young female runaway, Morris also coordinated the rescue. At the appropriate time, he gave a signal, and a group of Black workers seized the girl and spirited her off in a carriage, 108

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with three other carriages driving off simultaneously as decoys. Meanwhile, a group of Black women threw cayenne pepper into the eyes of the police officers who left the courthouse in pursuit. The BVC seems to have helped plan the latter rescue (it employed Morris and likely hired the carriages), but Black workers did most of the serious labor.182 Not all such attempts ended in success. During the 1851 court case of Thomas Sims, the BVC heatedly debated whether to rescue him from prison. “A plan of rescue was afterwards formed, but was defeated by putting up a grating at the windows of Sims’ cell.”183 Regretfully, the committee made no further rescue plans, and federal troops carried Sims back to Virginia. When the BVC voted against a violent rescue of Anthony Burns in May 1854, a militant faction of the committee attempted an unauthorized armed rescue. The would-be liberators, despite killing one police officer, failed miserably.184 In contrast, Black militants, led by Morris, regularly chose the right opportunities for rescues: low-profile cases with few police or soldiers present. In trying to rescue Burns, BVC militants had selected the wrong moment. Hundreds of federal troops had come to Boston in 1854 to ensure the rendition of Burns and make an “example” of the city for its seeming noncompliance with federal law. More than that, the government attempted to prosecute BVC members involved in the failed rescue attempt. Fortunately for the committee, the government’s plans backfired. The presence of an occupying army of federal troops angered Bostonians. They came out and protested by the thousands. Amid widespread anger at the rendition, the BVC smartly negotiated to purchase Burns from his master.185 A more tragic rendition occurred at the same time as the Burns case, this involving the trio Stephen, Robert, and Jacob Pembroke, the brother and nephews respectively of fugitive and NYVC worker James W. C. Pennington. After having passed from the PVC to the NYVC, culminating in a joyous reunion with their relative, slavecatchers seized the three runaways. Wary of a rescue attempt being mobilized, the court changed the time of their hearing, and the slavecatchers made sure that a large, well-armed posse escorted the runaways from the prison in New York to the prison house of slavery. Pennington was able to purchase the freedom of brother Stephen, but his nephews were sold farther south. 186 The work of the VCs in the 1850s to revamp themselves, organize the Underground Railroad, and cooperate in rescues and self-defense had immense consequences for political thinking, for out of these efforts arose the concept of “direct action.” At the end of the nineteenth century, the anarchist philosopher Voltairine De Cleyre, the daughter of Underground Railroad conductors, first 109

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elaborated upon this concept. According to her, direct action meant “cooperative experiments,” organized attempts to effect immediate social change without “indirect” resort to law and politics. “Among the various expressions of direct rebellion,” she wrote, the most clear and distinct “was the organization of the ‘underground railroad.’” Underground Railway agents organized a system of illegal aid to fugitives, redoubling their efforts as the political agents of the slave power redoubled theirs: “When the fugitive slave law passed, with the help of political actionists of the North who wanted to offer a new sop to slave-holders, the direct actionists took to rescuing recaptured fugitives. There was the rescue of Shadrach and the rescue of Jerry, the latter rescuers being led by the famous Gerrit Smith; and a good many more successful and unsuccessful attempts.”187 De Cleyre had seen the origins of direct action in abolitionist praxis. VC members went further, locating its origins in the actions of enslaved people. William Still called the deeds of fugitives “direct protest.” Running away was an illegal protest to immediate forms of oppression, which sometimes necessitated secondary forms of protest and illegal action on the part of abolitionist helpers. Though Still certainly viewed VC work as a part of it, he believed that direct protest happened first and foremost on the plantations, at the point of production.188 As in much else, abolitionists learned their concept of direct action, or “direct protest” from runaways. A SCHOOL FOR LEARNIN G William Cooper Nell described the VC as a “school indeed for learning,” one in which runaways did most of the teaching.189 William Wells Brown said at a PVC meeting, “education and elevation is to be one of the levers to overthrow the institution of slavery.”190 VC workers took pedagogy seriously, ensuring time and space for fierce debate, discussion, and movement education. Abolitionists conversed with thousands of runaways. They learned from the fugitives, who in turn learned from them. Antislavery societies received education from both. In the process, the movement refined its outlook and tactics, allowed runaways to lead, and denounced slavery with sociological precision. The committees practiced a “pedagogy of the oppressed” in its purest form. As one activist ruminated, many of the less militant abolitionists “might have learned a lesson from the poor negro woman . . . who sheltered under her roof, at the risk of ruin to herself, the fugitive slave.”191 Thomas Wentworth Higginson reminisced after the Civil War: “It has been my privilege to live in the best society all my life— 110

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namely that of abolitionists and fugitive slaves. . . . Nothing short of knowing them could be called a liberal education.”192 By that high standard, most American education—so often geared toward producing good ministers, good citizens, and good wives—was far less than liberal.193 Committee members, who had taken leadership roles in the antislavery societies by the 1840s, continued to educate them from within. Robert Purvis served as president of the PVC and the PASS. Francis Jackson served as Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society president and BVC treasurer. VC members were regularly elected to offices in such societies. Others did important work behind the scenes. Jackson and Sidney Howard Gay hired Lewis Hayden and Louis Napoleon to help run the respective antislavery offices in Boston and New York.194 William Still and J. Miller McKim received salaries to run the society’s office in Philadelphia. They used it as PVC headquarters as well. Such integration had practical consequences. Funds from the societies went to the committees. Moreover, VC activists obtained salaries, enabling them to devote all their time to activism. In fact, when Still asked for a pay raise as recompense for his incessant labors with the PVC, the PASS acceded to his request.195 More importantly, antislavery societies became spaces for discussing the dramatic and banal affairs of the VCs. For instance, at an 1854 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, McKim pleaded with abolitionists to contribute money to defray the court costs of a man convicted for assisting runaways. At the same AASS meeting, Unitarian minister William Henry Furness (PVC) railed against “the atrocities of the fugitive slave law.”196 With VC members as the advanced guard, the societies held discussions on recent court cases and slave rescues and passed resolutions clarifying the role of fugitives in accelerating abolition.197 At these meetings, VC workers regularly presented “gratifying accounts of fugitive slaves” helped by them.198 Sometimes “fugitives just arrived from the house of bondage” attended meetings and told their tales.199 Such accounts, noted the PASS, were “full of interest, and left the impression that the most intelligent abolitionist is yet ignorant of the manifold horrors enacted under the diabolicism, called American slavery.”200 These societies organized auxiliary committees to raise funds for VC work and donated clothing.201 As the MASS resolved in 1850: “This [Fugitive Slave] Law is to be denounced, resisted, disobeyed at all hazards. . . . [L]et a vigilance committee be appointed in every place whose duty it shall be to succor and help in every way, the fugitive slave.”202 As in the 1840s, the societies endorsed VC work, only now they did so more fully, more openly, and more aggressively. 111

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Committee members loved to educate and agitate by organizing their own public meetings. When he could spare time, Still traveled to “lecture on the history and operations connected with the Underground Railroad.” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper retold tales that fugitives told her and made sure to make “every lecture a poem.”203 Jermain Loguen lectured on his escape from Tennessee slavery as well as on his “efforts in helping others secure the boon of freedom.”204 The presentations of Still, Harper, and Loguen relied wholly upon the alternative archive of knowledge generated by VC interviews with fugitives. Committee members organized creative public events as well. The PVC invited Wendell Phillips to deliver his notorious speech on Toussaint Louverture, a speech anticolonial activist Paul Robeson would later read aloud to educate his audiences.205 The PVC also invited William Wells Brown to read aloud his play based upon his own life as a runaway.206 Similarly, BVC member Leonard Grimes invited Oneda De Bois, a former slave from Alabama and an advocate of Haitian emigration, to lecture on “her early experience in the house of bondage, and the customs and manners of her adopted country, the Island of Hayti.”207 In Syracuse, the VC there held yearly commemorations of the great Jerry Rescue.208 The BVC hosted public indignation meetings.209 It also helped organize the famous Framingham meeting following the rendition of Anthony Burns. Henry David Thoreau proclaimed at that meeting, “my thoughts are murder to the state.” There Garrison burned the Constitution. Moncure Conway, speaking on behalf of the BVC, called for “revolution.”210 And Sojourner Truth delivered a fiery oration, screaming that slaveholders deserved no compassion, no forgiveness, only punishment by God, or by man, or by woman.211 VC members also began to use the “underground telegraph” with greater effectiveness.212 This system began with the enslaved, who developed secretive means to move, to communicate, to visit family, and to organize meetings. Abolitionists adopted these methods, using the “secret routes,” trustworthy people, code words, and hidden places the enslaved relied upon to escape. Harriet Tubman, for instance, imparted her underground knowledge to VC members whom she trusted would use it to help others.213 John W. Jones (Elmira VC) sent fake free papers to southern contacts who then distributed them to prospective runaways. Jones had learned how to forge free papers from a young runaway, who “was most successful in drawing up these papers.” After the rendition of Thomas Sims in 1851, Francis Jackson established illicit communications with the fugitive. Sims had a sister in Boston who corresponded with him and showed Jackson the reenslaved man’s replies. Jackson even sent a friend of his brother’s to 112

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Charleston to secretly meet Sims. From these communications, Jackson learned that, after his rendition, Sims had been thrown in prison and tortured, only to be released and sold down to Charleston after a physician reported that “Sims would die if he was kept much longer in prison.” Jackson tried to orchestrate a rescue of Sims from Charleston, but this plot failed, too, as Sims was sold off to New Orleans before the escape attempt could be carried out.214 Knowledge passed from south to north and vice versa. Abolitionists gathered information on doings in the South from southern newspapers and from runaways. They received information from ship captains and sailors. Southern “agents” also tried to correspond with northern abolitionists.215 Enslaved people got information about trustworthy sea captains from sailors, dockworkers, and the occasional Black minister touring in the Upper South. In one instance, a free Black man from Maryland, Sam Green, traveled to Canada to visit his fugitive son (who had been helped by the PVC). He returned to Maryland with maps of Canada and a letter from his son “with a request to his father that he shall tell certain other slaves, naming them, to come on.”216 He also possessed a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a volume he likely did not get from southern book dealers. Other runaways in the North and in Canada wrote letters to friends and family who lived in the South, hoping to coordinate their escapes.217 VC members discouraged this, for slaveholders watched the post. Yet when runaways did get information from enslaved compatriots via mail, they often passed it on to VC members, hoping the committees would help secure the freedom of friends and relatives.218 Such communication was intermittent at best, but Higginson believed slaves’ “constant communication with Canada has been teaching them self-confidence and resistance.”219 The common wind kept blowing. The telegraphs and railroads, discussions and deeds, of the VCs created an organized milieu of underground knowledge that constantly enlightened and initiated new activists. Once an individual immersed themselves deeply in this subterranean and in many cases submarine political world, their perspectives and praxis evolved dramatically. Canadian naturalist and vegetarian Alexander Milton Ross began talking to runaway refugees in the 1850s, spurring his own ascent to abolitionist enlightenment. Speaking with Canadian fugitives, Ross garnered “practical information as to the workings of the institution of slavery.” Further, he “had learned from the refugees in Canada that there existed in the Northern states relief organizations formed for the purpose of extending aid to fugitives.” Curious to know more, Ross received from his fugitive friends 113

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“names and addresses of many good friends of freedom.” He traveled to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, serving as an apprentice of sorts to the VCs there. He was eventually “initiated into a knowledge of the relief societies, and the methods adopted to circulate information among slaves of the south.” Freshly educated and self-confident, Ross, despite some disapproval from VC comrades, ventured to work alone in the South. He moved about in Richmond and Nashville, finding “reliable slaves” and Quakers who helped him organize secret meetings for enslaved people and facilitated their escape. Ross, in turn, helped educate his educators. He spread abolitionist propaganda to enslaved people. Though he worked independently of the committees, he sent them runaways and reported on movements among the enslaved. Like other VC workers, Ross did his work armed with a revolver. A converted militant, he soon became an informant for John Brown. Later, in the 1860s, he joined Mexican reformer Benito Juarez—an “Indian of Oajaca [sic] merits”—in his struggle to overthrow the French dictatorship of Emperor Maximilian. In short, the committees “initiated” renegades like Ross into the mysteries of militancy.220 VC members aided fugitives, first in their self-emancipation and then in their self-education. They incessantly encouraged fugitives to “seek an education.”221 William Still sent off medical books to one runaway who wanted to train as a dentist.222 William Cooper Nell allowed self-liberated people access to “his vast library.”223 When they could, VC members sent runaways off to reform-minded places of learning, like the Oneida Institute or Oberlin College.224 James L. Smith recalled the NYVC sending him to Massachusetts, where he went to school. “I became quite proficient in my studies, especially mathematics, it being my favorite study,” he wrote.225 When fugitives requested it, VC abolitionists sent them antislavery literature.226 John S. Jacobs, the fugitive-sailor-intellectual, ran an antislavery library. He made his shyer sister, Harriet, manage the library, her first foray into public antislavery activism.227 VC members served as personal mentors to runaways. When younger fugitives, especially children, arrived at the homes of such activists as Graceanna Lewis and William Whipper, they would entertain them with stirring history lectures on great Black freedom fighters, like Frederick Douglass, and on “coloured persons . . . who had distinguished themselves for learning,” like Phillis Wheatley.228 Thankfully, such pedagogy did not always take the form of a paternalistic relation between “teacher” and “student.” During an 1851 meeting, abolitionists discussed how best to disseminate “the principles of the antislavery cause.” J. Miller McKim vociferously 114

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interjected, “we were not permitted to give any advice to fugitive slaves on the subject.”229 Runaways formulated antislavery principles themselves. VC members merely provided them the platforms to articulate what they had learned. In the process of liberating their minds, fugitives became participants and pedagogues of the movement. As in the 1840s, committee members recruited fugitives as antislavery lecturers and agents. They searched for genius and encouraged gifted individuals to learn the work of abolition. Most fugitives, though, became agitators on their own accord, with only soft encouragement from VC workers. Those helped by Still often wrote back to him, reporting of their efforts to train themselves as antislavery lecturers.230 Israel Campbell learned to raise funds, get up meetings, write articles, and speak before crowds as “agent” for Henry Bibb, the Canadian fugitive and editor of the newspaper Voice of the Fugitive. “My duties as an agent learned me a great lesson,” Campbell wrote; “I had a good opportunity of studying human nature and learning the motives which influenced the great mass of men.”231 The BVC gave the formerly enslaved Peter Randolph a job working at the city’s annual antislavery fairs. At these events, Randolph took the opportunity to discuss antislavery strategy with “a number of noble-hearted men and women.” He also “listened attentively to the lectures and discussions given under the auspices of this society,” absorbing much from “the language and words used by some, in describing and denouncing the slave power.” Yet he realized that he had much to teach as well: “As I listened and conversed with these earnest men, I was impressed also with the idea that they were not familiar with all the relations that existed between master and slave.” Randolph soon became active in the BVC, writing and speaking widely to educate his comrades.232 The role of VC networks in the remaking of the slave narrative has long been unacknowledged. Members aided or worked with thirty-four autobiographers who had escaped from slavery. Harriet Jacobs (helped by the PVC) had great anxiety about publicizing her experiences of sexual violence under slavery. Daniel Payne (PVC), she later wrote, had originally “advised me to publish a sketch of my life.”233 Her brother, John, “would mingle his tears with mine while he would advise me to do what was right.”234 When she began writing her frightful masterpiece, Underground activists in Boston and upstate New York advised her on how to evade slave hunters and gave her editorial suggestions.235 In addition to giving Henry Bibb cash donations and forty acres of land, Gerrit Smith offered him advice on writing an autobiography. When Jermain Loguen contemplated writing his own life’s history, he, too, went first to Smith for advice.236 115

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VC members helped in other ways. Wendell Phillips (BVC) read through the drafts of Frederick Douglass’s first narrative. Edmund Quincy (BVC) did the same for William Wells Brown’s memoir. Quincy (an experienced editor) was struck by Brown’s unusual self-confidence as a first-time author: “He never seems to (and says he never does) think uncomfortably about his being a black man.”237 Members wrote endorsements and introductions to slave narratives, attesting to their truthfulness and literary quality. Printers Robert F. Walcutt and Bela Marsh, who worked for the BVC, published many of the narratives of the 1850s. Self-taught runaways usually had deep anxieties about writing.238 It took great courage for an unschooled once-illiterate person to write something for publication and distribution. VC members helped fugitive intellectuals gather that confidence needed to write. Sometimes members extensively edited or wrote whole narratives for runaways. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a narrative for James Williams; Charles Stearns for Henry “Box” Brown.239 Committed editorial work was standard abolitionist practice, whether the writer was white or Black, freeborn or fugitive, novice or veteran author. Harriet Jacobs allowed Lydia Maria Child to edit her narrative. Racial paternalism crept into relations between white writers and fugitive storytellers. For instance, Charles Stearns’s placid prose certainly contrasts with Box Brown’s lively performances and lectures, revealing the power Stearns had in shaping the style of the latter’s narrative. But in many cases, fugitives and writers willingly worked with each other. When runaways did leave writing wholly to a professional author, they did so for pragmatic reasons. Peter Still and Box Brown had exhausting schedules of lecturing, working, organizing, or raising funds to purchase their relatives’ freedom. They enjoyed no sabbatical leave for writing a whole book. Peter Still gladly left to others the irksome task of approaching multiple publishers until a good and willing one was found for his book.240 The Harvard-educated Phillips, who himself never wrote a whole book, found oratory a more effective means of communication. Similarly, runaways believed public speaking reached the masses more powerfully than did published writing. Indeed, abolitionists lived in an age when oratory was considered the higher art. The praxis of fugitives and committee members revolutionized and secularized the form of the slave narrative. New forms of narration began when freedom seekers stated their circumstances to VC workers. This had the practical purpose of conveying plain facts of where the writer worked and how he or she resisted. Candid descriptions shocked, and stories circulated. Some fugitives 116

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helped by the committees repeated what they had already told audiences thousands of times as antislavery lecturers. By the 1840s and 1850s, dozens of such fugitives had brooded on their experiences, honed their styles of preaching and speaking, and finally written down their testimonies of slavery and the movement. The stories they told, first orally, then in writing, were no longer the old tales of spiritual redemption and protestant ethics. They were secular analyses of slavery with an ethics of protest.241 Describing “slavery as it is” became more important than denouncing sin as it is. Portraying resistance to masters became more important than portraying humility to God. Straightforward writing took precedence over abstruse religious cant. Often, as in the case of Douglass, one does discover plain fact transmuted into lofty language. This was not a reversion to evangelical enthusiasm but a progression to romantic rebellion. One Black minister even complained in the 1850s that the new slave narratives focused too much on “the operations of the system of slavery” and too little on “transmitting the history of our colored churches.”242 The function of these narratives changed, for they had the power of a movement to back them. Runaways wrote to raise funds to buy the freedom of relatives. Anthony Burns sold the story of his life to pay for his education at Oberlin College. Jermain Loguen published his narrative to raise funds “to take care of the many poor that are calling on us for help.”243 Writing was VC work. Runaways wrote to overthrow a society. Like all revolutionary texts, the new slave narrative contained a subjective element, a consciousness of the value of liberation. More importantly, such writing was not simply about “authenticity” but also about “objectivity”—an analysis of the roots of oppression and of concrete resistance to that oppression.244 Often, fugitives could not fully write of resistance, for it would reveal too much of their methods to the enemy. Instead, they used personal narrative form to develop a secular sociology of slavery. Fugitives opted for hard-hitting sociological precision in their prose. This intellectual choice revolutionized antislavery literature, which often appealed to sentiment. Fugitive writers composed under conditions that required rigor, accuracy, commitment to facts, and direct language. When runaways narrated their experiences to William Still, accuracy mattered, for their information could help him free others. Fugitive-abolitionists constantly faced accusations of fanciful and false claims. If runaways wrote narratives with extravagant language, they faced allegations that an abolitionist had written high-flown falsities for them. Fugitive Israel Campbell preemptively described his writing process thus: “I have not painted scenes with fancy; for I consider the naked truth more 117

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powerful than fiction.”245 Not only was Campbell attesting to the accuracy of his narrative, but he may have also been implicitly critiquing white abolitionists who used “fancy” to write sentimentalized fiction books about slavery. Fugitive writers aspired to write a mass-revolutionary literature, easy to read and cheaply printed. Lunsford Lane modestly stated that he wrote his book “with little regard to style, only to express the ideas accurately and in a manner to be understood.”246 Self-liberated people carefully and consciously chose plain precision in their writing as the best way to, as Samuel Ringgold Ward explained, “point out the intrinsic nature and character of slavery—not in the abstract, but in the concrete—not as one might imagine it to be, but as it is.”247 To stay close to immediate facts while methodically arranging those facts around a new moral-political outlook, most runaways, in lectures and in narratives, used their own specific experiences to make middle-level generalizations about slavery in a specific region. Some were more ambitious. Henry Gowens believed he had a right to generalize about slavery as a whole, for “I have wide experience of the evils of slavery in my own person and have an extensive knowledge of the horrors of slavery, in all her length and breadth, having witnessed them in old Virginia, North Carolina, new Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.”248 Henry Watson, on the other hand, wrote his narrative to “throw some light upon the condition of slaves in Mississippi; the narration of other fugitives having their scenes in other states.”249 Before writing his autobiography, John Thompson read the existing slave narratives to corroborate his own experience. He decided to go ahead and write once he realized that, apart from Douglass, “scarcely any from Maryland” had written about slavery there.250 Thus, fugitives, like social scientists, worked to fill gaps in existing knowledge. Some used their experience and knowledge to generalize about the slave trade, conditions in rural or urban settings, the nature of the slave family, or all the above. Harriet Jacobs wrote of her experiences to give readers “a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage.”251 Experience was certainly enough to speak the truth, yet fugitive-abolitionists did their research. They spoke with other runaways and abolitionists, and they read. VC members supplied fugitive lecturers and writers with pamphlet literature and advice.252 Fugitive writers refused in their accounts to divide research from experience, morals from facts, or localized observations from wider generalizations. By resisting the temptation to pure sentimentality, on one hand, or to amoral, impersonal positivism, on the other, they were capable practitioners of the “sociological imagination.”253 118

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The significance of this sociology of slavery cannot be overstated. The narratives written by fugitives are still valued by historians trying to grasp “slavery as it is” at that time. Fugitives described individual life and thought with great precision but focused more on the social system. For example, they often based their narratives around thematic chapters on such topics as “Punishment and Marriage,” “Social and Religious Restraint,” or “Cultivation of Tobacco, Rice, and Cotton.”254 Sometimes runaways wrote astutely on enslaved people’s folk customs, songs, and rituals, anticipating anthropologist-turned-Pan-Africanist Jomo Kenyatta’s radical claim that anthropology should be written by insiders.255 Others refused to downplay the personal element. Wells Brown, always the writer in spirit, composed his narrative about himself but included a useful appendix on the workings of the internal slave trade.256 Elizur Wright had suggested back in the 1830s that fugitive authors should include “an appendix of some sort, containing documentary evidence.”257 Lewis and Milton Clarke added a bundle of explanatory appendices to their personal narratives. One detailed work conditions of slaves in southern factories, while another consisted of common questions about slavery put to them during their lecture tours, with detailed answers. The latter appendix shows the close relation between oral and written forms of agitation in the new slave narratives.258 Peter Randolph structured his personal narrative as a systematic study of slavery, titled Sketches of Slave Life. And Randolph sketched everything. He included chapters on “The System” as a whole, “House Slaves,” “Slaves on the Plantation,” “City and Town Slaves,” and “Slaves on the Auction Block,” among many others on southern culture and class structure.259 Some have suggested recently that antebellum slave narratives began as “factual compendiums” merely to affirm arguments white abolitionists had already made about slavery.260 There were, no doubt, varied origins and influences upon the slave narratives. But among the most important were the practices of the VCs, where firsthand narration was vital and where fugitives, like Randolph, corrected white abolitionists “not familiar with all the relations that existed between master and slave.” Other VC members also learned to be rigorous sociologists of slavery. Such “sociology”—that is, a critical analysis of society based upon empirical observation—usually emerged through dialogues with the enslaved. William Still diligently took note of any information that runaways revealed about “the inner workings of the peculiar institution.”261 He then transmitted that knowledge in public lectures.262 The NYVC, over a decade earlier, had promoted its work by publishing in pamphlet form stories of the fugitives it assisted.263 Other 119

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abolitionists, relying on methodological advice from VC members, interviewed hundreds of Canadian refugees. James Redpath, a fellow traveler in VC networks, went south to interview enslaved people, a dangerous sort of anthropology.264 Alexander Milton Ross not only conducted similar interviews but also helped people escape to the committees. When not doing that, he spent time in libraries “collecting statistics” on slave populations, on southern geography, and on political economy. Ross passed this research on to VC members.265 Other VC workers kept large collections of southern newspapers, magazines, and books as well as numerous slave narratives, circulating these materials widely to abolitionists, fugitive lecturers, or other scholars wanting to write about slavery.266 With such rich resources, both printed and personal, abolitionists wrote widely. They wrote on family relations under slavery and the internal slave trade in the South, among many other topics.267 Samuel J. May compiled an exhaustive compendium of every slave case tried under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.268 Exsailor Jonathan Walker elegantly simplified such dense writing into short, accessible, though nonetheless incendiary, pamphlets intended for both children and working people. He, like other social scientists of abolition, stressed that finding the truth about slavery was impossible without the testimony of runaways.269 Scholars have often seen in abolitionist propaganda an appeal to “sentiment,” to indignation, to pity, to compassion, and to white guilt.270 Sentiment indeed pervaded abolitionist rhetoric, yet the lasting legacy of abolitionist writing was its effort to create a sociology of “slavery as it is.” Developing such an emancipationist sociology was absolutely necessary. Slaveholders mobilized natural science to defend themselves, and abolitionists had to counter with a natural science of their own. 271 But slaveholders also rallied Western social science to their cause, which also needed abolitionist rebuttal. The very discipline of “scientific” knowledge termed “sociology” had been invented in Europe to prove the rationality of dominant social orders and the irrationality of emergent social movements. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville used sociological method to justify the American social order as the fullest existing expression of a “democratic” civil society. Lorenz von Stein used similar methods to denounce the French Revolution of 1848, an event that inspired many abolitionists.272 Leading slaveholder ideologue George Fitzhugh imported “the word sociology” from French thought to critique the sentimental irrationalism of abolitionism. Following Fitzhugh, fellow sociologists for the South mobilized facts and experience to prove the justness of slave societies. They treated abolitionist enthusiasm as an emotional disorder caused by “the 120

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failure of free society.” In the 1930s, W. E. B. Du Bois asserted that antiabolitionist sociology would become the pillar of a “modern and exact social science” that falsified the history of the West and justified planetary white supremacy.273 Slave narratives and abolitionist propaganda created an alternative to this emergent sociological knowledge. Du Bois, America’s finest sociologist, firmly believed that “the slave biographies” and the “careful observations” of abolitionists provided the foundations for a different, liberatory social science counter to the “propaganda of history.” A blunt example of such abolitionist countersociology is BVC member Richard Hildreth’s Despotism in America (1854). Hildreth’s book is a scathing critique of Tocqueville’s work of sociology, Democracy in America. He argues that slavery, not democracy, lay at the foundation of US institutions. Slavery lay behind America’s imperialistic expansion; it controlled the US economy; it dominated the state; and it shaped class relations, race relations, and relations between the sexes. By systematically unveiling violent, undemocratic forms of repression and the “methods of resistance on the part of the slaves,” Hildreth shows slavery to be neither orderly nor reasonable, neither humane nor democratic. In short, works like Despotism in America summed up what fugitives and their allies had been teaching.274 As the example of Hildreth further shows, the methods VC activists used to unveil “slavery as it is” constituted a self-consciously radical sociology. It rebuffed both the reactionary and the liberal efforts to write a “science of society.” The best rebuttal slaveholding ideologue James Henry Hammond could concoct was to admit that, though abolitionists mustered much “research and ingenuity,” they had been misled “by the invention of runaway slaves.”275 What VC activists thought or did conformed not to earthly laws—and if then, only incidentally—but to the “higher law” of conscience, that is, the faculty, or instinct, that intuits injustice. Throughout the antebellum period, many abolitionists believed that any law going against the conscience ought to be disobeyed.276 The conscientious human being, as Charles Stearns proclaimed, had complete “freedom from man’s authority . . . [and] freedom from obedience to any power,” save that of conscience.277 That idea had antecedents in Hicksite Quakerism and antinomianism before it. It had further antecedents, Isaac Hopper believed, in the deeds of many runaways, driven by “conscientious scruples” against the practice of enslavement.278 Not merely abstract moralizing, VC higher-law theory had a practical dimension. Describing his escape from a slave pen, Isaac Williams recounted, “then conscience said to me ‘go and try that window . . . and see if you can’t get 121

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out.”’279 Here, conscience was not merely the faculty that intuited injustice; it was the practical reasoning that enabled resistance. VC higher-law theory always addressed the question of means and organization, not just right or wrong in the abstract. Some members, like Garrison and Robert Purvis, argued that conscience dictated nonviolent means. Others, like Theodore Parker, Douglass, and Jermain Loguen, argued that conscience dictated resistance by any means necessary.280 VC members were pragmatically deferential to such divergent demands of conscience. When Black Bostonians called for armed self-defense in 1850, Garrison had private moral qualms about such strategies but publicly bade them to “be consistent with their own principles,” even if that meant the use of carnal weapons.281 In other cases, higher law implied a vision of an emancipated society. One Black NYVC member argued that slavery abrogated the “moral economy of God,” implying that truly conscientious action must aim toward a restructuring of the economy along moral lines.282 In a similar vein, Lydia Maria Child thought that obedience to unjust laws “accustom people to the idea that it is right for capital to own labor.” Following a higher law compels one to disobey in the name of a revolutionary restructuring of economic relations.283 Despite some difference of opinion, most agreed with Austin Bearse that abolitionists must organize “themselves into a Vigilance Committee under a Higher Law than that of the American Congress.”284 The VCs achieved a great deal in the 1850s. They led the popular agitation against the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. They organized the Underground Railroad. Gerrit Smith described these achievements: “The period between 1850 and 1860 was crowded with excitement. . . . Anti-slavery men of every complexion were put to the mettle. The ‘agitators’ went up and down; the preachers thundered; the politicians worked their wires in frenzy; vigilance committees were unsleeping; the ‘underground railroad’ laid tracks on the surface and opened new connections.”285 VCs made fugitives the vanguard of the movement. As Loguen said of his fellow fugitives: “Disgusting as is the story of their wrongs, they are a necessary and important part of history. They are generating a new element of life, which is rapidly infusing and regenerating the masses, and lifting them to a higher and holier sphere of thought and action.”286 Fugitives contributed to thought through their creative literary technique and rigorous analysis of the slave power. They contributed to action by pioneering the methods of what we now call “direct action.” Fugitives uplifted other activists “to higher and holier spheres” by teaching them ways to disobey the laws of the land in the name of 122

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the higher law. For sure, fugitives and abolitionists cooperated to make their movement “higher and holier,” but that required doing the lowly, dangerous, and dirty work that made noble thoughts possible. When one antiabolitionist critic, by the name of Robinson, described abolitionists as elitist, uncourageous, impractical “silk-glove radicals,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson retorted furiously: “If our friend Robinson had been a member of the vigilance committee during the fugitive slave cases in Boston, he might have learned to take a more comprehensive view of the dangers to be incurred, under some circumstances, by abolitionists—and of the readiness of different classes to meet them.”287 In public, some abolitionist intellectuals may have appeared to wear “silk gloves” with their refined rhetoric. But underneath the gloves, underneath the public displays, many radicals had dirty, calloused hands from having done the practical work of the Underground Railroad.

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FOUR

ALL SHALL BE THROWN DOWN See ye not all these things? There is not one stone builded upon another that shall not be thrown down. —Matthew 24:2

In 1841, John Murray Spear served a prison sentence for helping an enslaved woman find refuge in Massachusetts. Throughout his early life, Spear worked in factories and endured an oppressive father before landing in jail. After his 1841 incarceration, Spear leapt into a world of radical ideas. He became a firm Garrisonian, experimented with spiritualism and utopian socialism, and advocated women’s liberation. He devoted much energy to helping the incarcerated and to prison reform, even advocating the abolition of prisons. In the 1850s, he became an active member of the Boston Vigilance Committee.1 Through vigilance committees, the eccentric, somewhat misanthropic Spear socialized with some of the most brilliant minds of his generation. He was exposed to the fervent antiracism of Black BVC members as well as fugitives’ systematic descriptions of slavery. Spear patrolled the streets of Boston with philosopher Bronson Alcott.2 He met reformers and writers of all sorts, critics of religion, of prisons, and of patriarchy. Such exposure enhanced Spear’s practical radicalism as well as his literary output. Throughout the 1850s, he wrote large systematic tracts imagining what a fully emancipated society, with neither property nor hierarchy, ought to look like. His VC work had influenced these new prophecies. With explicit reference to the fugitive, Spear wrote that full human liberation could only arise when “the more especially oppressed, enslaved, and hunted will, of necessity, be emancipated.”3 124

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“Practical” abolitionism nurtured the imagination, and the Underground Railroad, contrary to historical depictions, was a movement of ideas as much as people. Runaways and committee members, desiring an exodus from some or all of America’s unjust institutions, brought wild, unorthodox ideas into the VCs. They debated those ideas, crafted new ones, and reinforced them through practical activism. VC work thus melded seamlessly into other forms of activism, making it rather difficult, and rather unhelpful, to rigidly segregate fugitive aid from other reforms. As Wendell Phillips put it, “all oppressions under the sun are linked together.”4 Gerrit Smith similarly derided those who sought to delink one oppression from another, in order to focus on one, as “halfway reformers, men of one idea.”5 To throw down one thing meant to throw down all. Fugitives and VC members fiercely critiqued the religion of their times, as they did racism, sexism, and sometimes class oppression. Some critiqued and resisted forms of mass incarceration. They made remarkable contributions to literature, from novels and histories to songs. As fugitive-abolitionist Jermain Loguen somewhat dreamily elaborated, abolitionists and fugitives together gave expression to “invisible mental powers” that had been “turning society on its hinges to let in a new dispensation of learning, religion, and life.” This they achieved by fusing the spirit of reform with “the African element”— Afro-American experience, philosophy, and politics—“amalgamating with that element to form a new basis for society.”6 To be sure, VC members affirmed a wide variety of ideas, some of them contradictory and not all of them radical. Nor were VCs the root cause of all radical ideas. Nevertheless, due to their daring deeds, sensitivity to ideas, and knack for bringing the most diverse and absolute abolitionists into dialogue, fugitives and vigilance activists stood at the vanguard of antebellum political speculation. A DISORDERLY CONVEN TION The sheer diversity of VC membership made possible their radical creativity. Black workers, daring because they had to be, struggled alongside middle-class intellectuals of all kinds seeking both justice and adventure. Pacifists, dreaming of a nonviolent millennium and the return of Christ, worked with advocates of armed revolution. Fugitives, who despised slavery with perfect hatred, instructed lofty idealists who raged against an institution they had neither seen nor experienced. Male activists were forced to rely on female comrades. The majority of committee members were Garrisonians, which meant they brought to the VCs readymade critiques of church, state, Constitution, racism, and sexism. 125

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Most VC activists participated in multiple reform movements—from women’s rights to come-outerism to prison reform—bringing unconventional ideas into the committees while also bringing their experiences of VC work into those other movements. There were certainly great differences in individual levels of commitment to VC work. For some, like William Still, it was their primary form of activism; for others, like Lucretia Mott, fugitive aid was essential work but by no means more consequential than other kinds of activism. Philosophers like Henry David Thoreau helped the VCs only when it suited their intellectual passions—Moncure Conway (BVC), who knew the Walden wanderer well, even speculated that Thoreau’s occasional assistance to the fugitive might have been rooted in his devotion to the moral precepts of the Bhagavad Gita. Whatever the motive or intensity of commitment, all VC members disobeyed the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, a law sanctioned by the Constitution. For that, they faced mobs, prison sentences, and worse. Such experiences made it easy, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson said, for VC members to find themselves “outside established institutions” and “alienated from the established order.” Situated thus, they inevitably harbored numerous ideas against that “established order.”7 VC activists met to raise funds and discuss practical business, yet members rarely divided that work from other matters. Their meetings, as has been discussed, were spaces for musical contests, poetry readings, and eloquent speeches as well as profane language. As Higginson described it, “the Vigilance Committee meetings were a disorderly convention, each man having his own plan or theory.”8 Any idea could be spoken. The New York Vigilance Committee organized a meeting to protest the war against Mexico. At a Philadelphia Vigilance Committee meeting in 1854, William Wells Brown gave a lecture on US designs against Haiti.9 At the 1850 Cazenovia Fugitive Convention, organized by the New York State Vigilance Committee, freeborn and self-liberated activists spent much time critiquing American Christianity.10 At another 1850 NYSVC meeting, fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward spoke approvingly of many white Americans’ solidarity with revolutionary movements in “France, Ireland and Hungary.” But, he added, too many of them refused solidarity with the enslaved, who had the selfsame right to revolution.11 An exception among the VCs, the secretive Committee of Thirteen, based in New York City, kept things within more disciplined bounds. Their meetings were “not a secret session of a political party, or a club for literary debates, or a meeting for old friends to renew broken friendships.” They solely met “to discuss measures and concert plans for the present relief and future benefits of the colored people.”12 The homes of VC activists— 126

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the very same spaces where runaways hid—were also meeting places to exchange ideas. Lewis Hayden’s used-clothing store was not only a place where sailors and fugitives congregated but also “the place where [Wendell] Phillips, [William Lloyd] Garrison, [Theodore] Parker, and his friends congregated for conference.”13 Similarly, Charles Ray’s home was a place where runaways and abolitionists met for assistance as well as for an “interchange of views” on “the inner workings of that grand moral conflict.”14 One scholar has recently written that “the Underground Railroad had no gathering spaces of its own, no meeting schedule for its members, and no delegates.”15 Actually, the abolitionist underground met rather frequently—at VC meetings, at private homes, at antislavery gatherings, or at Black National Conventions—to discuss ideals and business. VC members had abundant opportunities to put their ideas in print, for their leadership practically monopolized the antislavery press. Garrison, William Cooper Nell, and Charles K. Whipple ran the Liberator. For a period, Ray ran the Colored American, “the national voice of black abolitionism.”16 John Greenleaf Whittier and J. Miller McKim edited the Pennsylvania Freeman. AVC head Stephen Myers ran his own paper, the Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate. Other AVC members ran the Tocsin of Liberty. Frederick Douglass and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, of course, respectively ran the North Star and the Provincial Freeman. All of these papers contained regular columns on “all the items of intelligence in regard to fugitives, kidnappings, etc.,” while publishing editorials by VC members, and others, on virtually every reform imaginable.17 The most unusual such paper was the Mirror of Liberty, run by David Ruggles in the late 1830s. The Mirror was the public organ of the early NYVC. Most of its pages contained reports on the doings of the committee free from sectarianism and “theoretical disquisitions on abstract questions.” Yet Ruggles also used the Mirror to express his sympathies for all movements for “Equal Liberty” as well as his critiques of corrupted electoral politics, slaveholders’ religion, and the degenerate US state.18 VC influence extended to the circulation of books. Nell and Robert Purvis possessed large personal libraries with heterodox texts alongside “choicest literature.” Theodore Parker was reputed to have the largest private library in America.19 In short, the homes where runaways sought refuge were among the nation’s finest spaces of learning. The NYVC installed a “reading room” at its office, open to all “whose complexion furnish an apology for our fairer citizens to exclude them from reading rooms, popular lectures, and all places of literary attractions.”20 The wealthy Francis Jackson devoted much of his wealth to “shelter 127

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the fugitive slave” and to support “the printing and distribution of anti-slavery tracts and periodicals.”21 Samuel Painter “kept a bookstore and circulated many anti-slavery tracts” outside of Philadelphia. He sent runaways to McKim, who sent in return antislavery books for Painter’s store.22 Though William Still was a poor man, he generously patronized Black writers. In one instance, he bought and distributed one hundred copies of books by William Wells Brown, paying up front in cash.23 In another instance, Still noted in his PVC records having spent $1.34 to advertise lectures by Wells Brown. He clearly saw no distinction between patronizing fugitive intellectuals and his PVC work.24 Other members were radical printers. William Chaplin (Albany Vigilance Committee), imprisoned for a stint in the 1840s for helping fugitives, published “tracts, books, and other revolutionary documents.”25 R. F. Walcutt (BVC) and Bela Marsh (BVC) printed antislavery hymn books and slave narratives as well as volumes on anarchism, spiritualism, utopian socialism, and virtually every other “ism” known at the time.26 In 1855, the BVC persuaded Walcutt to print one thousand copies of Parker’s sermon on the Burns Rendition.27 VC members thus had plenty of means to collect or convey unconventional ideas. The committees provided a kind of “school” where members debated ideas, tested the limits of these ideas, and engaged in the uncomfortable yet earnest task of calling out each other’s shortcomings. This pedagogy from below did not entail silent consensus, but uncontrived expression often met with fierce rebuttals. Sidney Howard Gay’s interactions with fellow VC members exemplify this reality. Before becoming an abolitionist, Gay had worked at sea, spending much of his time in China. There, he saw firsthand how Western missionary imperialism inculcated the Christian “precept ‘peace on earth and good will to men’ by the sacking of their [China’s] cities, the devastation of their villages, the starvation of their poor.”28 Gay later brought a deep anticlerical bent into his abolition work, reinforcing it by learning from fugitive accounts of slaveholders’ equally hypocritical Christian preaching. Yet, on other issues, Gay remained far less advanced. He behaved very assertively toward female activists and virtually banished his wife, Elizabeth, once an active abolitionist, to full-time household drudgery upon their marriage. In private correspondence, he occasionally referred to African Americans as “niggers.” He even questioned the veracity of notable fugitive testimonies. Gay believed Henry Highland Garnet had no proof of being a fugitive and “may have been manumitted.” He wrote that “[ James W. C.] Pennington’s case is exceedingly suspicious.”29 Gay questioned Hayden’s accusation that Henry Clay engaged in slave trading. But fellow activists got 128

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back at him. Women activists, like Mott, called out Gay for his sexism. Hayden, in a rather lengthy letter, angrily rebuked his insinuations with all the facts.30 No doubt, Gay’s shortcomings were tremendous, but his case does show how fellow activists went to great lengths to criticize comrades. For activists like Hayden and Mott, the fact that Gay heroically and illegally assisted hundreds of fugitives to freedom was simply not enough. LIBERATIONS FROM THEOLOGY AND THEOLOGIES OF LIBERATION A slaveholder’s religion seemed to rule America. The master class ruled the pulpits of the South. Northern ministers kept quiet on the slavery question, though occasionally they were vocally proslavery, pro–law and order, antiabolitionist, and antifugitive. Even the more egalitarian vectors of evangelical revivalism, which swept the country like wildfire during the antebellum era, had contradictory outcomes. In some cases, the fervor of righteousness, spiritual rebirth, and individual nearness to God moved northerners down the path to reform or kindled in enslaved people a sense of divine mission and desire for freedom. Yet, in the hands of clever demagogues, evangelicalism also became a tool for the powerful to sway the popular imagination through fear of damnation.31 As Peter Still lamented, because “injustice constitutes the base of the system,” false faith would ever “adorn the superstructure.”32 Historians have typically seen in antebellum religion a revivalist, democratic-egalitarian impulse, of which abolitionism was one of many typical outgrowths.33 Fugitives and abolitionists associated with the VCs did not always see themselves in this light. Rather, they saw themselves as outcasts from, and deep critics of, a white-supremacist “American church” and spearheaded efforts to craft alternatives to reactionary religion. In their interviews with VC members, fugitives tenaciously denounced the “Christian” morals of their masters. With abolitionist encouragement, they named the religious denomination of their masters, in most cases Baptist, Methodist, or Episcopalian.34 Many masters, they claimed, served at least part-time as exhorters, deacons, ministers, or simply as pious churchgoers who “in outward show passed for a good Christian.”35 Underneath the “outward shows,” masters drank heavily, gambled, fought each other, beat their slaves and their wives, and committed adultery frequently. Lewis Hayden observed from experience that southern ministers loved to sell people south as a way to earn extra cash.36 Sometimes fugitives saw in slaveholders a sort of antichrist. A runaway known 129

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only as Robert told the PVC that “he looked upon the slaveholder as a kind of living, walking, talking Satan, going about as a roaming lion seeking whom he may destroy.”37 In other cases, fugitives viewed “slaveholders” not simply as vice ridden but as “very superstitious, . . . continually haunted by fears of ghosts and goblins.”38 In short, looking to the examples of their pious masters, slaves saw little more than wrongs and untruths. As fugitive William Thomas related, “It would require a great deal of hard preaching to convince him that such a Christianity was other than spurious.”39 Similarly, fugitive Charles Thompson told the PVC that white Southern Baptists “will go to the deepest hell, if there is any, for they are so wicked.”40 The sinfulness of slaveholders was not the unavoidable result of a “fallen” world. Slaveholders made their own sins, just as they made a false Christianity to justify them. Fugitives did not simply denounce the “unchristian” behavior of their masters; they critiqued the content of their preaching. Frederick Douglass railed against slaveholders’ Christianity at NYSVC meetings.41 The message of slaveowners’ religion, runaways explained again and again, could be boiled down to the dictum, “servants, obey thy masters.”42 Others told abolitionists that the only Bible passage they learned was, “He that knoweth his master’s will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”43 Such Christianity proffered a message of meekness, passivity, and obedience. William Bowditch angrily wrote that “the Christian teacher of today aims to make the slaves more faithful and obedient.”44 Even Jermain Loguen, himself a minister, agreed that “religion in a slave is a marketable quality and therefore their masters are always desirous their slaves be converts for the supposed increased value which religion gives them.”45 Above all, slaveholders drove the fear of God into the hearts of the oppressed as a means to curtail desertion. Peter Randolph simply said that southern preachers taught, “if you run away, you will be turned out of God’s Church.”46 Douglass affirmed: “I well remember how, for a long time, I feared to run away, lest I would offend the Lord, and had I listened to the carping priest, I should have remained in slavery to this hour.”47 For these reasons, when fugitive Sheridan Ford first began to have doubts about the justness of his servitude, “he went not . . . to able ministers of the Gospel in his distress and trouble, but wended his way ‘directly to the woods.’”48 Better maroon than Methodist. Would-be fugitives sought out alternatives to slaveholding Christianity. Enslaved people secretly organized their own religious meetings, where attendees searched for a personal spirituality and a God of the oppressed.49 Randolph described how during such meetings, instead of listening to white reactionary 130

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preaching, the enslaved worshipped as equals. They sang, danced, felt God’s presence, forgot worldly sorrows, and would always “ask each other how they feel, the state of their minds, &c.” “Enlightened people call it excitement,” Randolph added, “but I wish the same was felt by everybody.”50 At such meetings, some crafted organizing techniques they would later use as Underground Railroad conductors. Enslaved people held secret meetings much like religious gatherings, and here VC members such as Alexander Milton Ross could discuss his plans for getting runaways northward.51 In other cases, fugitives, who had once worked as “underground” exhorters in the South, used their oratorical techniques to lecture against slavery “aboveground” in the North.52 Douglass wrote of sneaking off to religious meetings, where he listened, felt, and preached. Soon he organized his own secret meetings in which he spoke of escape. “I here began my public speaking,” Douglass exclaimed.53 A few fugitives, though, displayed outright hostility to religion, which placed them in affinity with other abolitionist heretics.54 Fugitive Bill Cole told William Still that, due to his experiences with slaveholders’ Christianity, “he had been led to disbelieve in the Protestant faith altogether.”55 He vowed that, as a freeman, he would never again attend church. AME minister Daniel Payne (PVC) lamented that many enslaved people he talked with “scoff at religion itself—mock their masters and distrust both the goodness and justness of God. Yes, I have known them even to question his existence.”56 The number of fugitives who rejected God was likely small. But radical questioning looms larger when seen as part of a widespread rejection of slaveholding Christianity, common to fugitives and abolitionists.57 Runaways taught abolitionists about the hypocrisies of slaveholding religion; northern abolitionists taught that northern churches were no better.58 Together, abolitionists and fugitives used the antislavery platform to criticize American churches as a whole. They criticized the economic interests that stood behind reactionary preaching. Runaways, of course, showed how slaveholders controlled the southern pulpit and repressed independent forms of religiosity. VC members, some of whom had been expelled from their churches, showed how the vested interests of merchants, bankers, and industrialists worked with the clergy to keep antislavery off the spiritual agenda. Fiery activists, like fugitive John S. Jacobs, argued that church and state worked together in unity to lie and oppress—“One will tell a lie, the other will swear to it,” he declared. Ex-sailor Jonathan Walker likewise denounced American church and state as “blood thirsty,” “dehumanising organizations” that “leagued together.”59 Fugitive-abolitionist 131

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Samuel Ringgold Ward argued more simply that racism was white America’s national religion.60 In his first autobiography, Douglass fumed with such prophetic rage against churches that he had to defend himself from accusations of atheism in later editions of the book.61 Churches, VC members understood, held hegemony over public opinion, through the press, pulpit, and widespread religious revivals. Hence, they had to battle those institutions in their efforts to change popular consciousness.62 VC activists vented a surprising amount of hatred at the revivals that swept the nation. Fugitive Henry Watson recounted in his slave narrative the way in which many southern evangelical revivalists, under the pretense of spiritual equality, preached submission to worldly masters. Slaves could attend and “get religion,” but only under white supervision. Watson derided America as “the land of Bibles and whips.”63 Douglass similarly fumed that “revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other.”64 Richard Hildreth (BVC) described revivalism as a form of “mystical reaction” that channeled popular desires for worldly salvation into otherworldly hopes. For these same reasons, Elizur Wright “was disposed to dispute the prevailing theology, and stayed clear of the revival meetings.”65 Even in the “burnt over” districts in New York, where revivalism occasionally inspired individuals to become reformers, VC activists formed critiques. At an 1849 NYSVC meeting, committee members discussed the usefulness of disseminating Bibles and revivals among the enslaved. Douglass intervened, exclaiming, “I would rather give $10 to take a slave away than one cent for a bible.”66 NYVC workers denounced the revivals as mainly having converted sinful souls “to a slaveholding and colonization religion.” The intention of revivalism, they explained, was to purify sinful white souls, giving them the haughtiness to proclaim to others, “Stand off ! I am whiter than thou!”67 Black abolitionists associated with the VCs sometimes criticized Black churches. These institutions contributed funds to the VCs and hosted VC meetings. Black ministers, as well as their parishioners, served as committee members.68 Nevertheless, these preachers occasionally took soft public stances on the issue of slavery, usually out of rightful fear that race rioters would burn down their churches. When AME ministers preached in the Upper South, they were instructed by the church hierarchy not to make themselves “familiar with the slaves or go to people’s houses and quarters.”69 Even when sympathetic to antislavery, they occasionally privileged their ministry over the movement. For instance, Daniel Payne, active in the PVC during the 1840s, distanced himself 132

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from the movement upon his promotion to an AME bishopric in the 1850s, by which time he considered antislavery a hopeless endeavor.70 Black VC members called out the churches for such quietism. William Watkins (BVC) once denounced Black churches for not using religious sentiment to combat earthly wrongs. “Cannot we pray and preach against oppression?” he asked.71 Theodore S. Wright (NYVC), himself a minister, admitted that Black churches did not do enough on the antislavery front.72 At an 1856 convention of the AME church, James Bias (PVC) declaimed that it “was once a truly apostolic church, but she suffered slavery to get into her bosom.” The AME hierarchy, with Payne at the head, responded by denouncing “the ultra ideas of Dr. Bias.”73 Runaway Thomas James fled slavery and became a Baptist minister in New York. After seeing Frederick Douglass leave the churches, James himself, at a Baptist convention, called the clergy “a brotherhood of thieves.” Soon thereafter, he left his ministry to become an antislavery lecturer and BVC activist.74 A few had deeper frustrations. Thomas Rensallaer (NYVC), a runaway slave and leader in the American Anti-Slavery Society, lamented that Black Americans were a “priest-ridden people.” Such harsh critiques were not meant to undermine independent Black religious institutions. As Black Power theologian James Cone has argued, it was precisely this commitment to self-criticism and the most uncompromising abolition that made mid-nineteenth-century Black theology a “religion of revolution.”75 Despite the complicity of white churches with slavery, some VC members, skeptical of Garrison’s outright abandonment of the churches, opted to stick with them, hoping to reform them from within. White abolitionist Timothy Gilbert (BVC), though he affirmed that “most of the churches, both North and South, are on the side of the oppressor,” remained a churchgoing Baptist.76 After fully committing himself to antislavery and fugitive aid in the 1850s, Unitarian minister William Henry Furness decided to remain in his Philadelphia pulpit. Many of his parishioners, sick of “his plain preaching on the subject of slavery,” left his church, searching for more conservative options in the American shopping market of religion.77 Methodist ministers Luther Lee and Orange Scott, involved in the Syracuse VC and NYSVC respectively, created their own Methodist sect, the True Wesleyans, in the early 1840s after encountering internal opposition to their antislavery preaching.78 Lucius Matlack (Syracuse VC), a white minister who preached in Black churches after being denounced by white Methodists for “obnoxious” antislavery antics, also joined the True Wesleyans.79 Their newspaper, the True Wesleyan, reported on the doings of the 133

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Enslaved People Forced to Listen to Reactionary Preaching. From Henry Watson, Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1850), 29.

NYSVC. The NYVC had as one of its supporters Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous congregational preacher of the day and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Though Beecher did not advocate resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, only noncompliance, he spoke at NYVC meetings and allowed Douglass to speak in his Brooklyn pulpit.80 VC ties to churches paid off. In Philadelphia, the AME church contributed funds and members to the PVC and hosted some of its meetings.81 In the 1850s, at the high tide of popular fury against the Fugitive Slave Law, the BVC made calls to churches for donations, and over seventy-five answered to the sum of $817.82 Overwhelmingly, Theodore Parker noted, “clergymen from the churches of commerce did not condescend to give a reply; but little Methodist Churches, little Baptist Churches, humble, obscure, Unitarian Orthodox, Universalist ministers” all helped out.83 Far from preaching the traditional creeds and orthodoxies, ministers working with the VCs used their pulpits for experiments in radical preaching and pedagogy. At his Unitarian church in Boston, Parker preached transcendentalist theology and read aloud from reform newspapers to a congregation of fugitives, reformers, and intellectuals.84 William H. Channing (BVC) let Black and working-class members of his Unitarian church do some of the preaching. When he did give sermons, he referenced Charles Fourier more than the Bible.85 Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Gerrit Smith led autonomous, nondenominational “churches” with working-class congregations, which Higginson called “wildcat” 134

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churches. “Not calling themselves specifically Christian,” wildcat churches focused on matters of ethics and politics instead of theology. Higginson’s abolitionist experiments in anti-racist non-Christocentric universal spirituality continued throughout his life. He would later write and speak on non-western religions with great sympathy, and even strike a friendship with the famed Indian philosopher Swami Vivekananda.86 Black minister Leonard Grimes (BVC) ran 12th Baptist Church, one of the most creative experiments in abolitionist faith. The majority of its congregation were fugitives. Day and night, 12th Baptist, with aid from the BVC, offered “shelter and protection” for runaways. Grimes preached antislavery every Sabbath and invited all proponents of “the religion of humanity” to share the pulpit with him. Garrison, Parker, Phillips, and Douglass all preached there. William Still and Loguen gave lectures on the Underground Railroad.87 Two of his deacons were runaways whose freedom he had purchased.88 Grimes licensed formerly enslaved person Peter Randolph as co-minister of 12th Baptist. Grimes gave him the task of “telling the story of my bond-brethren in the South” to 12th Baptist and other congregations. Randolph later wrote that he learned from radical VC ministers, especially Parker and Grimes, that the true preacher should side with “the outraged and the oppressed.”89 Preaching to, learning from, suffering with, and siding with the oppressed—nothing more faithfully characterizes the Theology of Liberation, which demands practitioners to exercise a “preferential option” for the poor and to humbly “accompany” their struggles for liberation.90 Quakers associated with the VCs were also moved to devise alternative religious organizations. Isolated from “orthodox” meetings and sometimes expelled from the Society of Friends, Hicksites organized the Progressive Friends Meeting in 1853. The founders of the Progressive Meeting, including Lucretia Mott and Thomas Garrett, along with many of the membership, were VC activists. Though the Progressive Meeting consisted mostly of Hicksites, they admitted non-Quakers like Sojourner Truth, Higginson, Parker, Garrison, Francis Jackson, and members of the Hopedale socialist community.91 In fact, the Progressive Friends resolved that their meetings would gladly “admit Brahmins, Buddhists, Jews, and Mahommedans as brethren.” During meetings, members read “appropriate and impressive passages from the Hindoo Vedas, from the works of Confucius, the Zend Avesta of the Persians, the Koran, and the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.”92 Progressive Friends reported on the state of reform movements, particularly abolition and women’s rights. The meeting also organized committees to formulate positions and lead discussions on indigenous 135

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rights, the rights of labor, civil rights, education, land reform, and capital punishment. They believed that radicalism had to be comprehensive: “Slavery, intemperance, war, capital punishment, the denial of equal rights of women, oppression in all its forms, ignorance, superstition, priestcraft and ecclesiastical domination—these, and such as these, are the evils and sins which they feel constrained to assail by every rightful and legitimate weapon.” Supporters of the Progressive Friends thus rightly described them as “practical Christian socialists.” 93 VC activists, particularly Garrisonians, helped lead drives to “come out” of churches for good. Though some became atheists, like Elizur Wright and Lucy Coleman, most “come-outers” remained spiritual people, devoted only to the higher law and secular reform. They were a mix of (mostly white) proletarian dissidents, speculative artisans, and wayward intellectuals.94 Among the most vocal were John Browne, Isaac Hopper, Francis Jackson, Edmund Quincy, J. Miller McKim, Lucretia Mott, Austin Bearse and Bronson Alcott—all of them VC leaders as well. In fact, come-outers described themselves as “fugitive slaves escaped . . . from spiritual and ecclesiastical plantations.”95 The fugitive had become the symbol of anti-institutional resistance. Heretical VC members took the act of “coming out” to its extremes. For them, it meant leaving church, plantation, prison, patriarchal family, factory, and state. It meant doing away with all unholy institutions that caused humans and animals “to grind in the prison house of toil, namely idolatry, priestcraft, sectarianism, slavery, war, intemperance, licentiousness, monopoly, and the like.”96 It meant creative, ultimately anarchist, ways to live in the present. Come-outing VC members lived in utopian socialist communities. They experimented eclectically with vegetarianism, abstinence, and free love. Some rejected the Sabbath entirely and worked seven days a week to make a different world. Others argued that the Sabbath occurred every day, or that every day must be a day of rest.97 Far from being a closed-off sect, come-outers encouraged candid debate. They peddled their principles in other reform organizations and held open, inclusive meetings, which attracted sympathetic, curious crowds.98 Theodore Parker went excitedly to come-outer meetings and graciously endured criticism from Lucretia Mott for his observance of the Sabbath. Minister Luther Lee (Syracuse VC) also went to come-outer meetings to jovially criticize them for their vegetarianism and impractical radicalism.99 A handful of VC activists, especially in the 1850s, turned to spiritualism— that is, communications with spirits—for both religious and political purposes.100 Many VC members criticized spiritualism as the spurious fruits of hysteria and superstition. Fugitive James Williams devoted an entire chapter in 136

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his autobiography to refuting spiritualism. “What! Tell me that a man has power to come back into this world in the form of a spirit? Don’t believe it,” Williams demanded.101 Others believed. William Cooper Nell was among the most vocal supporters of spiritualism and conversed frequently about his own “spiritual experience” with fellow spiritualists Amy Post, John Murray Spear, Bela Marsh, and Garrison.102 Spiritualism was attractive because it could be used to challenge earthly authority by appeal to otherworldly powers. Divine influx did not require the mediation of church, clergy, or worn biblical prophecy. Women, in particular, used it to assert their authority over patriarchal priests and preachers.103 Harriet Tubman became famous in reform circles for her profound, sometimes bewildering spiritual visions.104 VC members appealed to spirits for political guidance. For instance, an association of spirits dictated to Spear his systematic blueprint for remaking society without slavery, racism, patriarchy, property, factories, or prisons.105 Garrison claimed, in the early 1850s, that he received visitations from the recently deceased Isaac Hopper; perhaps they discussed how best to organize the Underground Railroad.106 Spiritualism, like other abolitionist experiments in heterodox religion, was not merely a turn toward the incorruptible “Kingdom within.” It posed imaginative alternatives to the oppressive world without. THE TRIPLE CURSE OF RACE, SEX, AND CL ASS Slavery, and its imperialistic expansion, as abolitionists saw it, was the principal contradiction in American society. Yet it structured other contradictions, enhanced other oppressions. It placed curses on women, on people of color, and on the working classes, even if some within these groups accrued a few privileges from slave-propelled prosperity. All sectors of the antislavery front confronted these issues, but few more so than the VCs, which always had more Black, female, fugitive, and working-class associates than other organizations. Through the committees, abolitionists and fugitives exchanged perspectives on these issues and sharpened methods for fighting the threefold oppressions of the slave empire. In unique ways, fugitives and abolitionists considered issues of class in their critique of American society. They denounced merchants, factory owners, and financiers for supporting the Fugitive Slave Law. They raged against the “gentleman of property and standing” behind antiabolitionist mobs. Likewise, fugitives wrote of how slavery degraded Black and white labor in the South, making poor whites into deluded, dehumanized, vicious vassals of the master class that oppressed them. Lewis Clarke perceptively noted that overseers and patrolmen 137

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“are the sons of run-down families,” whose only sense of self-affirmation came through their “almost unlimited power over the slaves.”107 Together, fugitives and abolitionists unveiled how slaveholders and their northern capitalist allies controlled the press and pulpit, manipulating public opinion through racism and reactionary forms of religion. In fighting these forces, radical abolitionists consciously saw themselves as opposing the interests of a national ruling class guided by the “slave power.” Nevertheless, abolitionist positions put them at odds with the nascent, white-led working-class movement.108 Abolitionists saw the oppression of white workers as a subsidiary issue to the oppression of Black workers. They argued that “chattelized” labor on the plantation was more dehumanizing than “free” labor in the factory.109 Ever a small movement at the margins of a white-supremacist polity, VCs attracted whomever they could for a united front against slavery. Merchants, ministers, lawyers, and artisans worked for the committees. Yet unlike the public abolitionist movement—though deeply interracial, it remained middle-class dominated—VCs attracted many working-class cadres. Black sailors and dockworkers worked for the committees, as did other working people of all colors. The VCs offered such laborers avenues through which their specialized skills and knowledge could be used meaningfully to advance the struggle. Thus, Frederick Douglass proclaimed that those who “get a living by rolling casks on the wharves and sweeping chimneys . . . are the men who are to come to the rescue of the slave.”110 Occasionally, VC activists consciously cultivated working-class participation in abolitionism. During the Latimer Case (1842), activists who later joined the BVC held public meetings “on Saturday evening, so as to accommodate the operatives in the factories, who were not required to work that evening.”111 Of course, public VC meetings were open to all who wanted to attend. The few white VC members of working-class backgrounds were often social outcasts who had been radicalized through abolitionism. They were viewed by their communities as race traitors, sometimes isolated from the white, working-class culture they had been born into. For instance, Seth Concklin, a “laboring man,” had been driven out of various cities in upstate New York “for taking the part of black men against white rowdies.” He spent time variously in Illinois and Florida, helping fugitives escape. He then moved to Philadelphia, found friends in the city’s antislavery circles, and spoke for the rights of slaves, women, and Indigenous peoples. In 1851, a proslavery mob murdered Concklin while he tried to lead the family of Peter Still, William Still’s brother, out of slavery.112 Only after reading William Wells Brown’s inspiring slave narrative 138

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did workingman Martin Stowell (BVC) become an antislavery activist and advocate of labor rights.113 John Murray Spear, similarly, became an advocate of general working-class emancipation only after being radicalized through the Underground Railroad and abolitionism. Irish laborer Henry Kemp had fled Ireland for Boston during the famine. A supporter of the insurrectionary Young Ireland Movement, Kemp was appalled that fellow Irish freedom fighters and workers exiled in America had become racists.114 He isolated himself from expatriate Young Irelanders and denounced them as traitors and British agents.115 Though remaining Roman Catholic in faith, Kemp refused to associate with the American Catholic churches, which he considered as proslavery, deserving of excommunication by the pope.116 Instead, he found community among radical Garrisonians within the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the BVC. Kemp coordinated with sailors and dockworkers to rescue many fugitives who arrived at the Boston wharf.117 For some VC members, abolitionism and the Underground Railroad were, in fact, a labor movement. Fugitives made clear that they were the most oppressed sector of a workforce who produced most of the wealth of imperial America. In her 1860 compendium of documents and direct testimony, including numerous runaway advertisements, Lydia Maria Child concluded that slavery was a modern system ruled by “unchecked, unregulated, and irresponsible capital.”118 Richard Hildreth, an eccentric, quasi-socialist thinker, believed the next stage of history would be the “Age of the People—of the working classes.” Helping bring that golden age about, he believed, would be the “movements on behalf of the laboring class, the abolition of chattel slavery.”119 At a come-outer meeting, two BVC activists argued that abolitionism was the most important labor movement in the United States, for it organized most rigorously around the principle “that capital may not work up human bodies into profits and dividends.” “We come to speak for labor,” they proclaimed, “as represented in the downtrodden slave whose rights are the rights of labor everywhere.”120 VC activists thus articulated abolition as working toward the emancipation of labor. Many white and Black VC members advocated the uplift of all laborers and did much practical work on their behalf. Running away was, of course, itself a form of labor uplift. VC members agitated against the incarceration of Black sailors held in southern ports. Charles Ray tried to organize an all-Black labor organization, at a time when such organizations were all white.121 Black working-class PVC member William Henry Johnson made similar appeals on behalf of labor, both slave and free. He later became a leader in the Knights of 139

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Labor, the first mass labor organization in the United States to have interracial membership.122 Moreover, in their writings and speeches, other VC members, among them Jonathan Walker, John Murray Spear, John Browne, and Wendell Phillips, advocated for the ten-hour day, livable wages, and the right to organize. But always, the uplift of Black labor came first. Jonathan Walker, a selfconscious “working man,” as the sailor called himself, appealed “to the laboring classes” that emancipating themselves from their racist, proslavery sentiment was the only way for them to break free from their oppressors: “The chain which you have been helping to secure upon the limbs of the southern chattled slaves, has at its other end fastened upon your own.” He called upon white workers like himself to “renounce the present government of the United States, and the present American church.”123 Thus, Walker, while hoping like other VC activists for the emancipation of all laborers, made a compelling but unheeded case for prioritizing the abolition of slavery and the abolition of whiteness. VC members stood at the forefront of antiracist thought. They pondered the origins of racism and questioned whether it predated slavery or was a classbased form of oppression.124 Activists like Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Joshua B. Smith, William Watkins, and Henry Highland Garnet were pioneer “emigrationists,” who believed that African Americans could only emancipate themselves if they left the racist American nation-state. “Emigrationists,” as opposed to “colonizationists,” believed that such an exodus should be Black-led and voluntary, not instigated by white organizations who desired to expel Africans from America.125 Their ideas had been informed by the many runaways who insisted upon leaving the United States. The majority of VC members opposed both “emigration” and “colonization,” yet they ironically acknowledged that they had facilitated the largest Black exodus out of the United States via the underground to Canada. In some cases, these activists advocated the abolition of the idea of race. William Cooper Nell went so far. Robert Purvis advocated for the “forgetfulness of all race ideas.” Spear similarly thought of himself as “a friend to man, irrespective of color, clime, sect, or condition.”126 VC members communicated their ideals with each other in newspapers, in pamphlets, and in public debates, sometimes angrily, sometimes congenially.127 When need be, they backed words with actions. VC members fought racism everywhere they could find it, even in the antislavery ranks. They criticized antislavery societies for insufficiently encouraging Black participation and organized their own committees to deal with this problem.128 They criticized white abolitionists and VC comrades if they displayed any 140

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hint of conscious or unconscious racism. Black activist John Rock, for instance, publicly condemned his BVC comrade Theodore Parker for declaring that the “Anglo Saxon race” was an assertive, liberty-loving race.129 Similarly, Black BVC members criticized spineless white comrades for refusing to put their lives on the line to rescue Thomas Sims and William and Ellen Craft from slavecatchers. Activists combatted racism in the rest of US society as well. VC members, Black and white, sat together in whites-only passenger cars of trains until they were thrown out, among the first sit-ins of the American protest tradition. William Still led a campaign to desegregate Philadelphia’s passenger cars. Nell organized abolitionists and the Black community in Boston to desegregate the city’s schools.130 VC members like Robert Purvis and Stephen Myers led the protests in Pennsylvania and New York against the restriction of Black voting rights.131 Black VC members worked with other Black abolitionists to create their own autonomous institutions and attempted to organize armed, all-Black militia groups in Boston and Philadelphia. Charles L. Reason, Theodore Wright, Charles B. Ray, James W. C. Pennington, and Garnet were among the vocal leaders of the Negro National Conventions, which provided an independent, all-Black space for activists to discuss moral reform, civil rights, and antislavery strategy.132 As one scholar has perceptively suggested, because most leaders in the convention movement were Underground Railroaders, it would be absurd to “study Colored Conventions without understanding the Underground Railroad.”133 The same goes for other sectors of the antislavery struggle. Some VC members engaged in radical land-reform projects, even combining them with the antiracist demand for reparations. Spear, Bronson Alcott, and William Henry Channing had lived on utopian socialist communities, which abolished individual property in land. After leaving the NYVC, David Ruggles retired to one such community in Northampton, Massachusetts.134 In rare instances, VC members sent fugitives to hide at utopian socialist communities.135 In Channing’s case, experience of land reform may have informed his ideas about reparations in an imagined postslavery world. He called for land distribution, monetary repayment, and planned economic development to counteract “the power that capitalists and politicians can bring to bear” against former slaves.136 Others experimented in the redivision of land among landless African Americans well before emancipation. Ray, Isaac Hopper, and Gerrit Smith, with some input from fugitives like Henry Bibb and Jermain Loguen, cooperated to divide Smith’s landed inheritance of 140,000 acres in New York among three thousand fugitive and free African Americans.137 Smith and his collaborators 141

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saw their plans of land redistribution as an alternative to the violent seizure of Indigenous land by whites out west. “Do not understand that I sympathize with lawless, violent, bloody agrarianism,” Smith wrote. Land reform did not mean easy acreage for whites, stolen from Native Americans, but property to those “robbed and crushed” by the slave power. Land meant reparations.138 For Robert Purvis, the land problem in the United States could be easily explained: “this is the red man’s land by natural right and the black man’s by virtue of suffering and toil.”139 Thus, abolitionist calls for land reform occasionally took on antiracist, antisettler, and reparationist dimensions. The solidarities crafted by VC members within their own activist communities extended into visionary Pan-African unities that crossed borders of race, region, and nation. Ray argued that the abolitionist underground enabled northern free Blacks and southern enslaved people—groups vigorously divided by the slave power—to show real solidarity with each other for the first time. Du Bois called this historic, though hardly inevitable, alliance the “great black phalanx that worked and schemed and paid and finally fought for the freedom of black men in America.”140 Mary Ann Shadd Cary placed Black activists at the center of her dreams for international phalanx building. Black American radicals, she believed, were ideally positioned “both to enlighten whites and assist fugitives.”141 As the next step, according to Cary, Black American activists had to unite with others in Africa and Latin America to hold back “the dominating tendency of the Saxons.” Ghanian William Augustus Hanson’s stint as NYVC “traveling agent” also taught him the significance of Pan-African sympathies. In an 1838 speech to Black abolitionists, Hanson told his audience that he felt “bound to you by the common brotherhood of humanity, and claiming affinity to you in owning one common country with the noble sires which gave you birth.” If he, “an African,” kept “mute” on American injustices, Hanson continued, “I were indeed a recreant to my nature, recreant to my country, whose scorching sands and palmy groves I call my own.” He returned to Accra’s “palmy groves” in the early 1840s, perhaps with a new sense of what it meant to be “African.” An 1851 Toronto convention of fugitives and northern Black activists ambitiously called for “the formation of a great league of colored people of the North and South American continents and of the West Indies, for the general abolition of slavery, for the protection of the common rights of their brethren throughout the world.” They hoped such a “great league” would foster emigration from the United States while opening “the door to future escapes on a gigantic scale.” Such were the early Pan-Africanist dreams.142 142

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In practice, though, VC workers built such ties of solidarity mainly with Haiti, sending fugitives who desired to go there. Former slaves like Isaac Mason and Joshua B. Smith, both of the BVC, worked in an organization that encouraged Black opponents of American racist despotism to emigrate to that Black republic in the Caribbean.143 Elizur Wright, a white BVC member, corresponded with Haitian activists, who insisted that “the means by which it [Haiti] has obtained its glorious triumph and proclaims itself a free and independent nation, without aid or interference of white men . . . , have not been sufficiently spread in your country.”144 Wright heeded their suggestions to the word in his writings on the Haitian Revolution. At an 1854 PVC meeting, William Wells Brown proclaimed that if the United States ever tried to forcefully intervene in Haitian affairs, “let our arms speak for the Haytians.”145 Black liberation was not merely an American struggle, but an international one. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that the reformers who founded the women’s movement received their initial education in activism by illegally caring for fugitives in their homes. She rightly cited VCs as a space where such feminist education took place.146 Thanks to the committees, the toilsome domestic care work provided by women for runaways received recognition as emancipatory labor. Dozens of fugitives wrote to Letitia Still, thanking her for caring for them alongside her four children.147 When they could, VCs paid women for their abolitionist care work, perhaps implicitly recognizing that domestic labor, like other forms of labor, deserved remuneration.148 In some cases, the domestic work of abolition subverted male authority in the household. Two female VC members, one in Boston, another in Syracuse, hid fugitives in their homes unbeknown to their antiabolitionist husbands.149 Emboldened by such work, women became leaders in VCs and organized independent, female antislavery societies. By the 1840s, activists like Lucretia Mott helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention, which initiated the woman’s rights movement. Other VC activists soon made demands that went beyond the mainstream women’s rights movement. VCs opened up unique spaces for women to debate their male comrades. They criticized their patriarchal bearing toward women. Mott called out Sidney Howard Gay, head of the NYVC, and Richard Henry Dana, lead lawyer of the BVC, for opposing women’s rights and keeping their wives locked up in the home.150 Enslaved women told harrowing tales of oppression, omitting few details. Black women, like Hester Reckless, often preferred working within VC networks, finding more in common with them than with white, middle-class women’s rights groups. In a speech at an 1841 NYVC meeting, runaway Harriet 143

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Lloyd praised that committee, exclaiming: “This was the cause of God’s poor. . . . She had no confidence in other societies. They were societies where a woman was not allowed to speak her heart for the slave. They were afraid of hearing women. She had no confidence in men who rated women like that. They were no friends of the slave. They did not hold women any higher than slaves.”151 Thus, women, especially Black women, found unique opportunities to criticize other organizations and other abolitionists or to speak on behalf of fellow slaves and fellow women. In Lloyd’s case, this opening allowed her to point out frankly the similarities between slavery and patriarchy and to condemn those who prevented women from bearing witness as friends of reaction. VCs created an activist community that nurtured Black female intellectuals, whose voices had been marginalized, even within abolitionism. PVC activists donated to Shadd Cary’s newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, the first one edited by a Black woman, while offering her further funds to go on lecture tours to promote her emigrationist and Black nationalist ideas.152 When young, unknown Black poetess Frances Ellen Watkins Harper arrived in Philadelphia, William Still “strove to secure for her a literary recognition, in a private way, among his anti-slavery friends.”153 Moreover, the PVC notified Harper of arriving fugitives, whom she interviewed. She used the knowledge derived from her discussions to write popular antislavery poems, many of which documented the oppressions of enslaved females.154 Women VC members taught fugitives the ins and outs of public activism. They encouraged Harriet Jacobs in her development as a writer. Catherine Brown (AVC) and Charlotte Ray (NYVC) would take female fugitives along with them on their lecture tours.155 Frederick Douglass sent to Lucy Coleman “a young woman, the daughter of a fugitive slave, who showed considerable talent for public speaking.” He instructed Coleman to “initiate her into the ways of advertising and getting up meetings.”156 Education went the other way as well. Thomas Wentworth Higginson said, “my own teachers were the slave women who came shyly before their audience, . . . women who had been stripped and whipped and handled with insolent hands and sold to the highest bidder . . . or, women who, having once escaped, had, like Harriet Tubman, gone back again and again into the land of bondage to bring away their kindred and friends.”157 VC members assisted women activists as they learned from them. What fugitive women said about sexual violence under slavery added to abolitionist-feminist knowledge. As discussed earlier, though VC interviews were the only spaces where they spoke openly to abolitionists about sexual 144

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violence, fugitive women nevertheless “dissembled” their full experiences. They concealed aspects of what they knew and felt in order to fashion narratives of themselves as moral subjects. In most cases, women emphasized the immorality of their masters, the use of rape as disciplinary terror, and their own resistance to sexual violence through refusal or running. VC activists adopted such self-fashioned narratives in their own discussions of this disturbing topic. Still wrote admiringly of the great “number [of women] who resisted influences apparently overpowering,” namely, “the base lusts of their masters.”158 Higginson wrote that “there were again and again, women known to us who had fled to save their honor,” stressing that flight was itself a form of resistance to rape. VC activists placed blame on the depravity and mammon worship of the masters. David Ruggles, in an early pamphlet on sexual licentiousness under slavery, wrote, “the temptation from pecuniary advantage with all rapidity to multiply slaves is equivalent to a bribe to impurity.”159 Fugitive Jermain Loguen acknowledged the same in 1859, though he also realized that much went unsaid. Only could the “clairvoyant translate and publish” the complete “sexual history” of the slave empire.160 Significantly, two years after Loguen published these words, Jacobs gave the fullest and most personal account of such harrowing history. It was, she asserted, a story that represented “the condition of two millions of women at the South.”161 Other women activists integrated knowledge of sexual violence with analyses of structural violence. They argued that slaveowners’ despotic authority over breeding, feeding, clothing, and trading enslaved bodies formed the reproductive base for the entire slave system. As Lydia Maria Child suggested, the source of the South’s economic dynamism lay in driving down the cash cost of life while making enslaved women “brood mares.” This system of cheapened social reproduction and coerced physical reproduction, she wrote, offered many “advantages to capitalists.”162 Later political economists would demonstrate that the use of violence, rape, and expropriation to control and cheapen reproduction was the essence of “primitive accumulation.”163 VCs strongly affected the early women’s movement. They enabled dialogue between Black women, enslaved and free; white women; and other openminded radicals. Some activists, like Douglass and Mott, helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention (1848). Others pushed things further. Abolitionists heard from runaways that enslaved women committed infanticides and abortions as political acts to take control of reproduction and to prevent new souls from facing the pains of slavery. Fugitive Lewis Clarke described such acts as a form of antislavery resistance in his public lectures.164 John Murray Spear argued 145

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that because “the masculine sex” had for millennia “monopolized the power,” the new socialist era, “for the purpose of regaining a lost equilibrium, will, for a suitable season, place the feminine element in preponderance.”165 William Channing as well as some Progressive Friends argued for “just remuneration for women’s work” in the household and in the factory.166 Not all VC members were feminist-abolitionists. Yet most, particularly the Garrisonians, refused to see women’s emancipation as a sideshow to the slave’s cause, having depended so often on female collaborators. VC members variously described women’s emancipation as “the greater revolution” or “the new abolition.”167 After surveying the history of women’s activism in Philadelphia, including their engagements with the PVC, Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked, “Where are the underground railroads and watchful friends at every point to help fugitive wives from brutal husbands?”168 Feminism was viewed as a continuation of abolitionism. But it was also seen as a continuation of the Underground Railroad. Black VC women refused to separate antiracism from feminism and abolitionism. They spoke and wrote upon the experiences of Black women as slaves, as mothers, and as freedom fighters. They nurtured a nascent Black feminism that would assert its autonomy after the Civil War, when the mainstream women’s movement retreated from its former critiques of racism, class oppression, and empire.169 That more radical feminism, best articulated in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 1866 Women’s Rights Convention address, spoke of wrongs as well as rights. Harper spoke to the experiences of Black mothers and working women. She advocated activism over voting and lauded Harriet Tubman as a model. Most importantly, Harper noted, this sort of feminism treated human beings and forms of oppression as “all bound up together.” Women’s emancipation would come to fruition only as part of a larger struggle to bring about a society with no dominant race and “no privileged class, trampling upon and outraging the unprivileged classes.” For good reason, contemporary philosopher and activist Angela Davis has named feminism that is class conscious, race conscious, and critical of the afterlives of slavery in the prison “abolition feminism.” 170 ABOLITIONISTS AGAINST IN C ARCERATION VC members and fugitives strongly condemned America’s carceral systems.171 They denounced slavery as a prisonlike institution. Indeed, in writings and speeches, their primary euphemism for slavery was “the prison house,” the term the Israelites had used for Egyptian bondage. VC members critiqued southern 146

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and northern penitentiaries while resisting racialized policing of various kinds. Some involved themselves in projects of prison reform, and a few advocated the full abolition of prisons and police. Though abolitionists universally condemned slavery as “the prison house,” full-blown prison-abolitionist attitudes, infrequent though they were, occurred solely among activists involved in VCs. That such prophetic attitudes, anticipatory of contemporary prison abolitionism, had manifestations within the movement culture of the committees should not be surprising. Fugitives faced the brunt of the “prison house” of slavery. Alongside VC activists, they endured jail time and constantly confronted police and slavecatchers. Deeper still, slavery and prisons were linked together within abolitionist liberation theology. As abolitionists frequently repeated, the mission of Christ had been “preaching deliverance to the captive, and opening of the prison doors to them that are bound” (Luke 4:18). Some VC members took those words literally. In countless instances, fugitives described their bondage as imprisonment but worse. They described vigorous policing and curtailment of mobility, denial of education, and physical punishment. Harriet Jacobs and Henry Watson even spoke of private prisons on plantations, where slaveholders implemented cutting-edge penitentiary methods, such as solitary confinement.172 One fugitive, describing his bondage to William Still, said, “I might as well be in the penitentiary.” Another told Still he had suffered “under circumstances compared with which, the diet, labor, and comforts of an ordinary penitentiary would have been luxurious.”173 Fugitive Williamson Pease told a Canadian abolitionist that his enslavement “was worse imprisonment than the penitentiary. In the penitentiary, a man expects to get out in a few months, but on plantations, they do not expect to get out until they are dead.”174 Similar descriptions made their way into fugitive autobiographies. Frederick Douglass said of his birthplace, “it was not a home, but a prison to me.”175 Austin Steward wrote, “far rather would I spend my life in a state’s prison than be the slave of the best slaveholder on earth.” Harriet Jacobs concurred that the “penitentiary is preferable [to slavery].” Harriet Tubman, recalling her life in slavery, said she “felt like a man who was put in State Prison for twenty-five years.”176 Contemporary prison abolitionists critique the penitentiary by comparing it to slavery; fugitive-abolitionists critiqued slavery by comparing it to the prison. Other VC activists learned this carceral rhetoric. James Freeman Clarke wrote, “every plantation is a penitentiary for its own slaves.”177 Richard Hildreth, in Despotism in America, his polemic against Alexis de Tocqueville, understood slavery as a carceral regime similar to but harsher than the prison: 147

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“[The] discipline which we have fixed upon as the most terrible and exemplary punishment of crime—or rather a discipline much more severe than that—is the regular, constant, perpetual condition of a large proportion of our fellow countrymen in the South.”178 Samuel Gridley Howe went further, arguing that the “prison house” of slavery extended far beyond the South. The plantation complex, Howe wrote, was “a prison which every citizen of the United States helps to support, . . . a place of confinement and punishment.”179 With northern finance and tax money bolstering the national power of slaveholders, with northern citizens complicit in the policing of fugitives, America itself was truly a prison for Black laborers, with white men as the jail keepers. VC members and runaways alike spent time in horrid southern prisons and had a common hatred for them. Fugitives, like Douglass, frequently had experiences of incarceration for attempting to escape, for helping others escape, or while in transit for sale. Fugitives described to abolitionists the beatings and chain-gang labor they endured, while one woman even described enduring a stillbirth in prison.180 Leonard Grimes, himself a freeman, told of his two years of slave-like labor in a Richmond penitentiary for helping fugitives. White northern abolitionists—William Chaplin, Jonathan Walker, and Delia Webster, to name a few—served time in southern prisons for helping fugitives.181 They likewise faced hard conditions. Calvin Fairbank spent seventeen years in prison for helping fugitives in Kentucky.182 Samuel Smith got eight years for helping Henry Brown escape Virginia in a box. Daniel Drayton and Charles Torrey, who had helped many fugitives escape from Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, lost their health and their lives due to harsh prison conditions. Torrey died of tuberculosis in a Baltimore penitentiary, while Drayton lost his mind and committed suicide shortly after a four-year sentence.183 Abolitionists enjoined their rank and file to “remember those in bonds as bound with them” (Hebrews 13:3). Imprisonment in the South proved one of the few instances when slaves and abolitionists suffered a near-common confinement. Understanding, sometimes experiencing, the deep ties between incarceration and enslavement, VC members immersed themselves in prison reform as part of their abolitionist praxis. Howe, William Channing, Isaac Hopper, and John Browne belonged to prison-reform societies that sought to improve penitientiaries.184 Howe, who had long studied prison conditions in both the North and the South, felt deeply disturbed at the growth of the prison into a self-reproducing regime of mass incarceration. “The number of human beings,” he wrote, “committed to prisons in civilized countries is so vast that its statement would 148

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appear incredible. . . . The prison is the first and only school provided by government, which thousands of its hapless subjects ever enter.”185 J. Miller McKim visited southern prisons and wrote scathing exposés based upon conversations with jail keepers and Black inmates.186 Hopper visited prisons and spoke with inmates, writing down and later publishing their “tales of oppression” just as he had done for runaways. Above all, Hopper loathed the growing tendency to criminalize the poor.187 Douglass and other Black activists denounced the racist tendency to “impute crime to color.”188 Abolitionists particularly loathed capital punishment, a “formal elaboration of lynch law,” as Charles K. Whipple (BVC) called it, which united plantation with prison discipline. The abolition of judicial murder was at the core of Garrison’s nonviolent abolitionism. Douglass raged against capital punishment, too, and Wendell Phillips organized his own anti–capital punishment society.189 In one case, experience of incarceration led an antislavery prisoner to craft a full-blown critique of the penitentiary. During his second incarceration in a Baltimore penitentiary, in 1846, for assisting runaways, Charles Torrey formed some thoughts on prisons. In an open letter published in the National Antislavery Standard, he raged against the whole basis of the penitentiary complex. He denounced the “years of bodily labor,” always unpaid, which could not but “break down the physical nature of a man.” He denounced the “solitary cells,” silence, and “mental inaction,” which only led to “mental imbecility.” “The system itself,” Torrey continued, “contains, after all, the seeds of destruction of everything good and noble in man’s nature—Man is there subjected to, virtually, despotic power, . . . his intellect fettered far more than his body; and both mind and body made the mere laboring machines to grind out profit to the State.” During his incarceration, Torrey had “been gathering up facts and ideas,” based upon conversations with prisoners, for an extended “Essay on Crime and Punishment.”190 Tragically, he died in prison from tuberculosis before this project could be completed. In a few cases, mere hatred of prisons evolved into deep desires to abolish them. William Lloyd Garrison himself had intimated that prison abolition was part of the very essence of abolitionist liberation theology: “It constitutes no part of the mission of Christ to incarcerate men in cells and dungeons for their crimes. He came to open prison doors, not to bolt and bar them.”191 VC members frequently protested the jailing of abolitionists for helping runaways and sometimes plotted to forcefully break them out.192 In an 1851 protest meeting against the incarceration of William Chaplin (AVC), Douglass angrily resolved to “demolish the prison of these philanthropists” by any means.193 Lydia Maria 149

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Child, long interested in prison reform, found American prisons hopelessly appalling. The problem of mass incarceration, she believed, lay not in the sinful natures of individuals, but in “the merciless machine of a falsely constructed society,” which cultivated poverty, madness, and desperation. “If society is the criminal, were it not well to reform society?” she asked.194 Radically changing society took precedence over minor prison reforms. Only with such radical change, Child prophesied, “the time will come when war and prisons will both cease from the face of the earth.”195 John Murray Spear was perhaps the most dedicated prison abolitionist, following his own 1841 prison sentence for helping runaways. He conversed with prisoners and donated 7,500 books to prisons. He “assisted eight hundred persons, by writing letters, providing them with food, fuel, counsel, returning them to their friends.”196 He wrote essays and delivered many lectures. Spear even came out with the first anthology of American prisoners’ poetry, Voices from Prison: A Selection of Poetry from Various Prisoners, Written within the Cell (1847), containing pieces by prisoners he had known. The anthology also contained prison poems by abolitionist political prisoners, such as Garrison and Placido, the Afro-Cuban poet executed for inciting slave revolt.197 In Spear’s writings, the word “incarceration” was a stand in for all unfreedoms. His dream of liberation was a world where humans were no longer “shut up in their institutions, incarcerated within their walls.”198 Above all, Spear worked “to abolish those wretched buildings we now call prisons.”199 Fugitives and militant abolitionists linked their critique of prisons with a critique of the police. They resisted slaveholders’ methods of policing. Activists watched northern police, putting them “on the wrong scent” to prevent them from enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.200 They warned Black northerners to always be on guard against “watchmen and police officers” and engaged in armed self-defense against them and slavecatchers.201 During the attempted rescue of Anthony Burns, the fugitive Lewis Hayden killed a police officer.202 Based upon such experiences, Whipple, who had drafted a short manual for how to keep watch on slavecatchers, also drew up a visionary plan for police abolition. In his pamphlet, Non-Resistance Applied to the Internal Defense of a Community (1860), Whipple argued that communities ought to regulate themselves democratically. Every neighborhood should be patrolled by elected pacifists who carried no weapons, arrested no one, and dissuaded people from immoral actions merely with words. He explicitly acknowledged taking inspiration from the “aid rendered to fugitive slaves” and urged that “the whole police force . . . 150

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should be composed of men like Isaac Hopper.” Concurrently, Whipple imagined communities where, “instead of prisons, we have Houses of Reformation,” which could be attended on a voluntary basis.203 LITERARY RADIC ALISM VC members made numerous contributions to literature and the life of the imagination. There were a number of reasons for this. The movement demanded all activists to be thinkers, speakers, and writers, thus producing its own organic intellectuals. Being well outside the pale of what Lydia Maria Child described as “the falsely constructed machine” of America’s conformist, racist civil society, the committees attracted many intellectuals alienated from middle-class life. VC activists made the slave narrative into an art form. Their activism inspired novels, historical writing, music, and even transcendentalist philosophy. VC members participated in the young, perhaps naïve, oracular culture of American romanticism, though they always gave to it a revolutionary, subaltern dimension. They valued realist analysis alongside utopian speculation and prophetic utterance. Yet, as idealists, they nevertheless believed, as Walt Whitman did, that great literature had the power to “balance ranks, colours, races, creeds, and the sexes.”204 Committee members appreciated slave narratives as works of world literature, not just blunt countersociology. William Wells Brown always viewed them as serious literature. Brown’s many plays, novels, histories, sketches, and travel writings—all autobiographical to some extent—can be seen as sequels to his first narrative. Wendell Phillips saw in slaves’ daring resistance narratives a style of romance bolder than that of Sir Walter Scott.205 Black abolitionist James McCune Smith, an astute critic and among the first to hail Melville as a great artist, saw in Frederick Douglass a writer equal to Alexandre Dumas.206 J. Miller McKim noted that slave narratives exhibited acts more “revolutionary” than any done from the barricades of Paris. He further prophesied that slave narratives, “now deemed unworthy of notice of any, save fanatical abolitionists,” would someday be recognized as part “of the popular literature of this nation.”207 Charles D. Cleveland (PVC), who through his popular anthologies of US writers helped create the idea of a distinct “American literature” believed that “American literature will be indebted for some of its best productions to those who have been slaves.”208 In the mid-1840s, when Thoreau still lived alone at Walden and Melville had only just returned from sea, fugitives had already begun to compose their works of art. The “silent factor” of American literature had found its voice, 151

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as feminist and former slave Anna Julia Cooper claimed. The enslaved, Cooper argued, had always been the foundation for American literary thought. As “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” they did the material labor that made leisurely white intellection possible. They had been the voiceless objects upon which US statesmen, preachers, and writers sharpened their wits. Fugitive-abolitionist autobiographers broke the silences and gave to the world a poetic, politically conscious literature authored by those who had built American civilization.209 “The abolitionists have never overlooked the wonderful power which the wand of the novelist was yet to yield in their behalf over the hearts of the world,” remarked Phillips.210 VC activism inspired numerous fictional accounts. Douglass wrote a militant novella about Madison Washington, the fugitive revolutionary who received help from the PVC.211 Other authors dramatized what they thought the VCs secretly did. A brief but accurate fictional depiction of the committees appears in white abolitionist Emily Pierson’s Jamie Parker, the Fugitive (1851). In this novel, the fugitive protagonist receives advice and transport help from the Philadelphia and New York committees. Pierson had no connection to VC networks but culled her information from the annual reports of the NYVC.212 The most interesting depiction of a VC came in George Lippard’s New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853), a popular novel about extremes of wealth and poverty in the US metropolis. In the novel, the NYVC, called the “black senate,” is portrayed as a Black, working-class self-defense group. A “motley crowd” of Black radicals, this “senate” helped fugitives, gave them arms, and fought slavecatchers on the streets of New York.213 Lippard, the most popular novelist of the period, was a working-class dissident and trade unionist who churned out books written for white workers about the desperations of their lives and their hopes for change.214 With New York, Lippard attempted to speak to the white working masses in a new way: “I have said much on white slavery of the North. Now I must say something on black slavery in the South.”215 He had long paid homage to the myth that white factory workers faced a “slavery” harsher than Black plantation laborers; now he at least conceded that African Americans faced a hard slavery that also had to be resisted. Harriet Beecher Stowe gathered many of the facts and ideas for her antislavery fiction from VC members. She had direct connections to them, her brother being a participant in NYVC events.216 She once collaborated with Jacob Bigelow (PVC) to purchase the freedom of a group of enslaved people in Washington.217 Stowe “was in constant communication with friends in Boston,” who reported on their fugitive aid work.218 She worked with William Cooper 152

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Nell on writing projects and read all of Theodore Parker’s publications.219 Stowe was friends with fugitives Lewis Clarke and Milton Clarke, who had been helped by the BVC, and was also in touch with a female BVC worker who often went to Black-run boarding houses to check on fugitives. At the insistence of BVC members, the author visited Lewis Hayden while he was sheltering twelve runaways in his home.220 Some fugitives helped by the BVC also went to Stowe’s house for aid. These interactions shaped some of the characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The slimy slavecatcher who went after Shadrach Minkins influenced depiction of the slave dealer in the novel. Some of the Quaker characters were based upon Thomas Garrett and John Hunn (PVC). Facts found in Lewis Clarke’s and Josiah Henson’s narratives influenced the characters of George Harris and the notorious Uncle Tom. Arianna Sparrow (helped by the BVC) influenced the character of Eliza.221 Timothy Gilbert (BVC) believed that Stowe’s ideas were both indirectly and directly influenced by the efforts of the VCs: “The spirit of receiving slaves became infectious. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was born of this spirit.”222 Members also provided Stowe with essential facts about slavery for her compendium of documents, testimonies, correspondence, and commentaries, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). Richard Henry Dana gave her information about court cases and the Shadrach Rescue, which he had witnessed.223 Lewis and Milton Clarke offered personal insight into the internal slave trade and other aspects of slavery. James W. C. Pennington (NYVC) shared information about his own escape from slavery. Samuel Gridley Howe (BVC) wrote to her about his recent visit to New Orleans. Stowe also included in the Key her interview with Hayden about his life under slavery. Sailor Austin Bearse (BVC), who rescued runaways from Boston’s wharves, also wrote to Stowe about his firsthand experiences. He told her that, during his travels as a seaman, he had seen slavery in Algeria, South America, and elsewhere, but he knew of none more despicable and despotic than in the United States.224 Much more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Key represents the rigorous commitment to direct testimony and “careful observation” pioneered by the committees. Unsurprisingly, committee workers and fugitive agitators lauded the book as “a key to unlock the prison house.” Douglass wrote that one can “learn from it to hate slavery with unappeasable intensity.” On the other hand, they denounced Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its sentimental paternalism, apology for colonization, and its main character, who was unlike any enslaved person they had ever met or interviewed.225 Stowe still had much to learn from the VCs. 153

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Committee members made fundamental contributions to historiography, particularly by placing Africa and its diaspora at the heart of the historical process.226 Though enlightenment and romantic historiography, as Martin Bernal has shown, erased the African contribution to the great classical and modern civilizations, abolitionist romantics sought to rediscover that heritage.227 Fugitives Wells Brown and Pennington wrote on ancient history from an Afrocentric perspective.228 Perhaps influenced by them, white committee members, even the classically educated ones, argued that the “Egyptians were a colony from Ethiopia,” or that Africa was “the mother of religion and learning.”229 VC workers wrote modern history. Nell wrote on abolitionism and Black participation in the American Revolution.230 Higginson wrote on maroon resistance across the Americas. Many activists wrote and lectured on the Haitian Revolution and made contributions to biography too. Wells Brown wrote, during the Civil War, a volume of short biographical sketches of Black freedom fighters. He included sketches of Haitian revolutionary leaders alongside biographies of VC activists like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Robert Morris, Leonard Grimes, John S. Rock, Still, Garnet, Purvis, and many others.231 These militant historians thought rigorously about method. Wells Brown did extensive “research amid the archives of England and France.” Higginson and Nell researched in US archives.232 They wrote serious history for the masses. Wells Brown printed his histories cheaply in order to disseminate his ideas on Black liberation widely among “the working classes.”233 One bookish fugitive praised Nell’s writings as having, “with solid historical facts, . . . brought forward much to our credit that might have been entirely lost.”234 The politics of Black liberation proven through “solid historical facts” and written in accessible language describes the essence of this new historical writing. VC workers shaped antislavery music. Abolitionists of all persuasions sang songs of freedom. They composed songs and published them in antislavery newspapers. They reworked old church hymns into songs with an antislavery message. The Hutchinson family of singers, whom George Latimer befriended upon his liberation, brought their own brand of folk music into the reform movements of the day. VC members helped make such music integral to the movement.235 Charlotte Ray, Abel Brown, and Catherine Brown sang antislavery songs and brought fugitives to sing with them.236 Harper composed antislavery songs, detailing the woes of slavery, based upon “numerous facts . . . from her interviews with fugitives.”237 VC members patronized the Hutchinson family and “exhorted the singers to devote their talent to the cause of humanity.” (One 154

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member of the Hutchinson family tried to organize an auxiliary of the BVC in Haverhill, Massachusetts.)238 VC members helped develop antislavery songs into an independent genre. Radical printer Bela Marsh (BVC) put together a book of antislavery songs for activists’ use. Wells Brown also collected such songs and published them as “a cheap anti-slavery song-book.” Both publications included hymns of hope for activists, but more often the songs depict the sorrows of the slave and the heroism of flight. For instance, among the popular hymns included in Wells Brown’s collection were “Flight of the Bondman,” “The Bereaved Mother,” “Rescue the Slave,” “Fugitives Triumph,” and “Fugitive Slave to a Christian.”239 The most intense and infamous of the antislavery singers was George W. Clark, the “Liberty Minstrel,” who worked with the VCs in upstate New York and had attended the militant Fugitives’ Convention in Cazenovia.240 Feeling “a deep consciousness of the injustice of slavery,” Clark devoted his self-taught musical abilities completely to antislavery. He sang at antislavery meetings and on nationwide singing tours. He composed, anthologized, and published antislavery songs. His single volume of hymns, The Liberty Minstrel (1845, with subsequent editions), contained songs composed by himself, by fugitives, and by VC activists like Oliver Johnson, Elizur Wright, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Clark served as the movement’s unofficial philosopher of music. Believing that “nature speaks the language of music,” he argued that true music ought to fill the human soul with a sense of natural justice: in short, it must “subserve every righteous cause, . . . aid every humane effort,” and be accessible to all. To make possible such hopes, Clark suggested that radical but disciplined “associations of singers” be formed. This musical vanguard would sing songs of freedom that masterfully mixed music and poetry, melody and words, appealing to sentiment and to reason. “And then singing will answer its true end, and not only please the ear, but affect and improve the heart.”241 Clark’s singing and philosophizing certainly had an effect. Abolitionists recited his lyrics and sometimes formed their own singing groups. His songs moved activists and even found approval with runaways. For instance, when narrating his own life’s history at abolitionist meetings, runaway Jo Norton frequently broke out into one of Clark’s songs: They worked me all day Widout once cent of pay So I took my flight 155

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In de middle ob de night When de moon am gone away.242 Those few lines laid bare the nature of exploitation and the justness of resistance as good as any. Fugitives contributed to this new music. Wells Brown composed, collected, and sang antislavery songs. Henry “Box” Brown composed and sang songs, mainly about his own escape from slavery.243 On his lecture tours, Israel Campbell often sang a hymn he composed, “A Song of Martyrs,” which narrated the deeds and deaths of his two heroes, Nat Turner and Charles Torrey.244 Campbell saw the enslaved insurrectionary and white VC activist as part of the same revolutionary tradition. Fugitives brought their own styles and aesthetic attitudes into the movement. Some rejected music, as they did liquor, seeing in it a mere palliative for oppression permitted by the master class.245 Others brought their talent wholeheartedly into the movement. One fugitive managed to escape to the AVC with his violin. He immediately began composing antislavery songs and went on singing tours with committee members.246 Another fugitive, whose compositions Clark included in his songbook, creatively reworked slave spirituals into antislavery songs. In one, he revised the spiritual “Judgment Is a-Rolling Around.” The original spiritual speaks of the longing for death, judgment, and admittance into heaven to meet long-deceased relatives: Judgment day is a-rolling around Judgment, Judgment Oh, I love to go I’ve a good old mother in the heaven, my Lord Oh, how I long to go there too The radically revised antislavery song speaks of resistance and retribution against the master: If e’er I reach a northern shore I’ll never go back, no, never more . . . We’ll sing for freedom night and day Sinner! Man! Why don’t you repent For the judgment is rolling around!247 156

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Little mention of God, heaven, or death is made in the revised song. The judgment spoken of in this brilliantly political spiritual is not of oneself by God, but of the oppressor by the oppressed, who, no doubt, had God on their side. Fugitives and VC members wrote down the songs of the enslaved. As poet James Weldon Johnson later noted, it was through such bold activists that “these songs have been collected, preserved, and given to the world.”248 Fugitives began the scholarly process of preservation and interpretation. Francis Frederic wrote down songs he had heard while enslaved, as did Harriet Jacobs and Peter Randolph.249 Harriet Tubman sang spirituals to curious abolitionists. Both she and Frederick Douglass explained that spirituals had a “double meaning,” as Douglass called it, a simultaneous and compatible desire for spiritual redemption and secular liberation.250 John Andrew Jackson devoted a whole chapter in his slave narrative to recording and deciphering slave songs. He wrote with deep sympathy for the songs that provided “a sweet solace after a hard day’s work under the horrible tyranny of slavery.” Jackson analyzed the influence of white church hymns on the lyrics but carefully pointed out the original innovations in rhythm, word order, and meaning. The church hymns sang obedience to God’s just order, but enslaved people sang about “the wicked in high places and the servants of God suffering injustice.”251 Jackson was among the first to counter the popular views of the time that the spirituals were imitations of white religious songs or were songs of fatalistic resignation.252 They were instead original creations built upon hope and experience.253 White VC members also took down songs and interpreted them. Higginson had been struck by those that fugitives sang to him in the 1850s. While leading a regiment of South Carolina runaways during the Civil War, he wrote down the songs they sang, surveying the religious and experiential themes they contained. Writing and thinking amid the cataclysm of Civil War, Higginson was particularly fascinated about how the songs “were more than a source of relaxation; they were a stimulus to courage and a tie to heaven.” Limited by romantic conceptions of creativity, he believed that each song was the creation of some individual “genius” among the enslaved. He naïvely searched far and wide for the individual bards, with little success.254 J. Miller McKim and his daughter, Lucy, had a similar interest in the spiritual. They first heard such songs “sung by the black stevedores, or perhaps the crews themselves, . . . loading and unloading at the wharves of Philadelphia.” (McKim worked closely with such men as a leader of the PVC.) In 1862, Lucy traveled with her father to South Carolina to work with the Port Royal Commission. During her stay, she wrote down the most comprehensive 157

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collection of spirituals, all taken “from the lips of the colored people themselves.” Lucy attempted to decipher the songs analytically by rigidly distinguishing the “barbaric” (African) rhythms from the “civilized” (European) lyrics—an analytical racism, one could say.255 Her father, who had decades of experience interviewing fugitives, got to the core of the songs more easily. He simply asked an ex-slave “where they got these songs,” to which the freedman answered: “I’ll tell you, its dis way. My master call me up, and order me a short peck of corn and a hundred lash. My friends see it, and is sorry for me. When dey come to do the praise meeting dat night dey sing about it. Some’s very good singers and know how; and dey work it in—work it in you know, till they get it right; and dat’s de way.”256 The rhythms, words, and meanings of these songs evolved from a collective learning process at clandestine night meetings. These were part of the wider slaves’ underground that had made the Underground Railroad possible. VC activist-intellectuals added practical dimensions to transcendentalist thought. For instance, Theodore Parker and Bronson Alcott, who had been part of Emerson’s intellectual circle in the 1840s, leapt into the BVC in the 1850s. In the 1840s, Parker fought the New England clerical establishment from his Unitarian pulpit and edited the transcendentalist literary magazine The Dial.257 After joining the BVC, Parker learned from fugitive Lewis Hayden and other militants the necessity of armed defense. He gave away his firearms to William Craft and took part in the failed effort to rescue Burns.258 By the 1850s, Parker was writing less about faith and the divinity of Christ and more about the right to disobey unjust laws and the right to violent revolution. In many cases, his publications in the 1850s had been encouraged or funded by VC members.259 Similarly, in the 1840s, Alcott had been a come-outer and utopian socialist who wrote abstruse discourses in a Neoplatonist idiom.260 In the 1850s, the aloof man of ideas became a man of action. Alcott patrolled Boston streets armed, though comrades doubted “if he knew the breech of the weapon from the barrel.”261 During the Burns rescue, he acted with much bravery, pondering “serenely amid the clubs axes pistols and other implements of war.”262 Alcott published little during the 1850s, but as one friend observed, his newfound blend of the “ideal tendency” with “moral and physical courage” showed the mark of a “true sage.”263 In some respects, Alcott and Parker had pioneered a direct-action transcendentalism. Higginson did most to radicalize transcendentalism’s idealist idiom. He too had been part of Emerson’s philosophical circle and had wandered the woods with his friend Thoreau.264 Higginson described himself as having been early “brought up under their [the transcendentalists’] influence, yet naturally 158

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independent.”265 Instead, he credited the fugitives and other wild agitators he had met via the BVC as his teachers. Such praxis and priorities shaped his intellectual output. Like Emerson and Thoreau, Higginson did occasionally discourse on metaphysics, religion, aesthetics, and nature.266 But he wrote more on slave spirituals as well as the trans-American history of marronage and slave revolt, topics far removed from transcendentalist musings. Significantly, in 1854, not long after his participation in the Burns rescue plot, Higginson wrote an extraordinary essay on Yoruba proverbial philosophy. In it, he republished numerous Yoruba proverbs, analyzing them philologically. The proverbs’ transcendentalist-like symbolism struck Higginson—“Every object affords its metaphor, every thought becomes an aphorism”—and he claimed that a few elaborate proverbs featured the structure of “parallelism” prominent in Hebrew verse. Moreover, oral transmission in Yoruba philosophy, as with the slave spirituals, was an entirely legitimate form of knowledge production, a medium for true philosophical contemplation. Never straying from antislavery strains of thought, Higginson made sure to declare that the Yoruba had a culture rich in poetics, “mechanical ingenuity and commercial enterprise”—all stifled and barbarized by “Christian civilization” and “Christian commerce.” “If the character of the place [the Bight of Benin] disgusts us,” Higginson wrote, “let us remember that it is Europe and America that have made it what it is.”267 Many transcendentalists, like orientalists before and after, revered the written non-Western philosophies of India and Persia. Yet unlike Higginson, they had never acknowledged Africa as a site of philosophical speculation nor critiqued the effects of Western empires on Indigenous societies. VCs even influenced transcendentalist luminaries Emerson and Thoreau. Both men counted committee members, such as William Channing, William Henry Furness, Higginson, Parker, and Alcott as part of their close circle. In the early 1850s, Emerson held discussions with them on the subjects of “Union, Disunion, the Vigilance Committee, and the slave hunter’s work here in Boston.”268 After learning of Henry “Box” Brown’s exploits, he vowed that he “would not obey” any law that forced him to send back such righteous individuals to slavery.269 Emerson even may have sheltered fugitives in his home; Higginson claimed that he sent runaways to him from Kansas. Thoreau helped at least one fugitive sent to him by the BVC.270 Yet, valuing individual freedom over collective organization, contemplation over practice, Thoreau and Emerson learned little in terms of praxis from the intellectual world of the BVC. Instead, they idealized the VCs from a contemplative distance. In 1859, Emerson, dismayed 159

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by the corrupted state of American politics, mused that there should be more “abolitionists of the most absolute abolition,” “honest, sincere men,” the “soul of Vigilance Committees.”271 Speaking of the US state, Thoreau said, “that is but a shadow of a government whose existence necessitates a vigilant committee.” By this, he meant that VCs maintained the rights of man and thus had a right to do the work of a state: to legislate, to monopolize the means of legitimate violence, and even to build roads. “The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the vigilant committee.”272 Thus, VCs truly represented a law of conscience, higher than the state and civil society that upheld injustice, unfreedom, and conformity. The dialogue between the VCs and transcendentalism had been creative, though never perfect.273 As Peter Wirzbicki has proven, transcendentalist ideas invigorated abolitionist resistance on multiple fronts, particularly resistance to orthodox religion and the Fugitive Slave Law, while also influencing Black abolitionists thought.274 Yet there were limits too. Furness tempted Emerson to take action with them, a temptation Emerson too easily resisted. Abolitionistfeminist Ann Damon lamented that intellectuals like “Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson were always afraid of committal—we women never.”275 Higginson and James Russel Lowell (BVC) fiercely criticized Emerson’s “colorphobia” and refusal to admit Frederick Douglass into his discussion circle.276 Even into the 1850s, Parker reveled in the virtues of the “Anglo-Saxon race” and praised Saxon settler-colonialism, much to the dismay of fellow VC activists. As Higginson famously observed: “Two rather different elements combined to make up the so-called Transcendentalist body. There were the more refined votaries, who were indeed the most cultivated people of that time and place; but there was also a less educated contingent. . . . These were largely developed by the antislavery movement.”277 There was a sustained conversation between the two “elements” but tensions too. After all, one “element,” the “refined votaries,” eventually, perhaps unintentionally, birthed a “genteel tradition” that, in seeking to become the American philosophy, later shared in the oracular mythmaking of American individualism, exceptionalism, and finally empire. The other “element,” that of militant abolitionism, sought to undermine a good few of those selfsame myths.278 Recent scholarship on abolitionism particularly stresses political abolitionists’ march through the institutions—through churches, through courts, through political parties—to make possible the end of slavery. The movement is seen as a reasonable, long-term plan of republican nation building to complete the 160

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unfinished revolution of 1776.279 This institutional strand of abolitionism, which coalesced in the Republican Party by the late 1850s, became strong through advocacy of the nonextension, not abolition, of the slave empire. Some VC members maintained strong ties with these moderated forms of institutional abolitionism. Yet VCs also nurtured another strand of struggle against the slave power. That strand did not always march through the institutions of empire but sought an exodus from them. Indeed, exodus from the “prison house” of Egypt was the metaphor of the Underground Railroad. The enslaved sang about Moses and the biblical exodus in their songs. They reenacted exodus by running away. Mary Ann Shadd Cary described Moses as the head of a “vigilance committee” that led the Israelites out of slavery.280 Abolitionists named Harriet Tubman the “Moses” of her epoch. But the metaphor extended further. It meant exodus from church and state, from prisons, and from all the chains of authority and conformity that stifled what Moncure Conway (BVC) called “humanisation,” the full development of the human being.281 This tradition of antislavery exodus bore fruits, which must be remembered. The more institutional paths of abolitionism helped create the Republican Party. This is well known and oft repeated. But the tradition of exodus anticipated, sometimes even initiated, forms of radicalism still with us in the postemancipation world. Radical abolitionists gave us tactics of “direct action.” Abolitionist anticlericalism inspired groups like the African Blood Brotherhood and other forms of freethinking radicalism that have been so oft marginalized in America’s hyper-Protestant culture. Abolitionist religious radicalism, on the other hand, influenced the civil rights movement, the Black social gospel, and Black liberation theology.282 The VCs also nurtured early Black nationalists, Black feminists, “race traitors,” and prison abolitionists.283 Such iconoclasm and hard use of the imagination necessarily had inflections in the life of the mind. The radicals of the VCs accentuated the nonconformist strands within transcendentalism, helped in the creation of African American literatures, and preserved the slave spirituals for others to sing and innovate upon. In trying to bring forth a new American revolution, they spurred on the “American Renaissance.” The Underground Railroad was thus as much a movement of ideas as it was about simply moving fugitives from one place to another. Underground activists sought to throw all down in order to imagine some other millennial kingdom, a kingdom that some believed could only be bodied forth through revolution.

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TOWARD REVOLUTIONARY ABOLITIONISM Henceforth there is to be no peace on earth—no cessation of revolutionary movements—no exhausted imbecility— until unjust rule be at an end. —William Lloyd Garrison, Liberator, 7 January 1832

Abolitionists lived through an age of upheavals greater far than the Atlantic “Age of Revolution” of the late eighteenth century. It began with the independence of Haiti and Spanish America and quickly cascaded into radical abolitionism, Fenianism, Chartism, the 1848 revolutions, the 1857 Revolt in India, and the most Heavenly Kingdom of the Taiping rebels. As Henry Highland Garnet described it: “This age is a revolutionary age. . . . [N]ow they [revolutions] are daily passing before our eyes and change after change, revolution after revolution, will undoubtedly take place until all men are placed upon equality.”1 In such an era, radical abolitionists constantly spoke the word “revolution.” They reported on past and present revolutions. Activists like David Ruggles described the immediate abolition of slavery as a “mighty revolution” to come. Turning the world upside down seemed necessary and natural. As Wendell Phillips metaphorically put it: “A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. . . . [T]his is the history of modern society.”2 During this revolutionary age, it was only “natural” for VC members to take the lead in thinking about revolution, hoping for it, and enacting it. The committees had brought together the most radical among the abolitionists—from utopian theorists to practical direct-actionists—in the only organizations committed solely to helping enslaved people cancel their captivity. 162

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By the 1850s, after years of underground work and after years of peaceful, public agitation in which the “slave power” only grew stronger, VC activists became eager to bring the epoch of revolution to the United States. Curiously, the VCs began as nonviolent organizations, branches of Garrisonian abolitionism. But many members began to eschew dogmatic commitments to nonresistance in the mid-1840s, renouncing them almost entirely by the 1850s. But “revolutionary” abolitionism meant far more than mere espousal of rebellious violence. Revolution means to “overturn, overturn, overturn,” as the prophets had said (Ezekiel 21:27). Revolutionary abolitionism was as much the exegesis of that overturning as enactment of it. VC members, both Garrisonian and non-Garrisonian, speculated deeply on prospects of and strategies for overturning. They concocted theories of revolution, studied the history of revolutions, and searched for the best historical models for an antislavery revolution in America. Importantly, VC theorists, white and Black, fugitive and free, wrote the first histories of slave rebellion, marronage, and the Haitian Revolution in their search for models. By the late 1850s, amid the further aggressions of the slave power and violence in Kansas, some VC activists felt prepared to use their practical experience and theoretical study to assist a real revolution against slavery. John Brown, in his efforts to carry out that overturning of slavery in 1859, relied upon the revolutionary abolitionism crafted by the VCs during twenty years of hard organizing, theorizing, debate, and struggle. THE GROW TH OF REVOLU TIONARY SEN TIMEN T At first, VCs refused to use “carnal weapons” to fight the “diabolical” slave power. The failure and violent repression of Nat Turner’s Rebellion had convinced many of the impossibility of slave revolution in a white-majority society. With “hope defeated of a successful revolution,” lamented Mifflin Gibbs (Philadelphia Vigilance Committee) in the wake of Turner, fugitive desertion and public agitation seemed the only ways to resist slavery.3 Thus, the first leaders of VCs, like David Ruggles, Robert Purvis, and John Browne, became staunch nonresisters, eschewing the language of violence. Purvis proclaimed in 1838: “Do we believe that ‘they who would be free must strike the first blow’? Do we desire achievement of our God-given rights through blood and carnage?—No!”4 Quakers quietly hid runaways, without having to resort to violence. Ruggles sometimes mobilized force to seize fugitives from the clutches of slave hunters, usually doing so with a gang of comrades, he himself going unarmed.5 This sort of nonresistance had 163

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a radical content. It meant active resistance to unconscientious laws without resort to the corrupting violence of the powerful. It meant resistance to the American fetish of the gun. It meant revolution against a hate-filled, false social order by means of love and truth. Lucretia Mott called this “belligerent nonresistance.”6 In the 1830s, most VC members adhered rigidly to the strictures of nonresistance, even if “belligerently.” But by the 1840s, strict commitment to nonresistance began to dissolve. Stunning slave rebellions at sea first inspired VC members to reconsider the possibilities of “aggressive abolitionism.” Lewis Tappan and Simeon Jocelyn (briefly member of the New York State Vigilance Committee), among others, involved themselves heavily in the case to free the Amistad captives, who had organized a successful slave-ship rebellion in 1839. Inspired by the rebellion, Purvis commissioned a portrait of the rebel leader, Cinqué, which he kept in his home. The slave-ship rebellion on the Creole, led by Madison Washington, proved just as important. Washington had escaped to the PVC in 1841, going from there to Canada. But he returned to Philadelphia to consult with Purvis on how best to rescue his wife from enslavement in Virginia. Purvis advised against such rescue plans. Nevertheless, Washington went south, purportedly inspired by the Cinqué portrait Purvis had in his home. He was captured in Virginia and put on a ship, with his wife other enslaved people, bound for the New Orleans market. Washington organized a successful slave-ship rebellion, however, and safely navigated the vessel to British territory in Nassau.7 The Amistad and Creole revolts inspired the “Addresses to Slaves,” composed by Gerrit Smith, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry Highland Garnet, which called for an abolitionist movement led by fugitives.8 Even the New York Vigilance Committee, in a report written shortly after the Creole revolt, defended the means used by Cinqué, Washington, and their comrades: “We rejoice in the deliverance of the enslaved, who dared to vindicate their natural rights, even by such desperate means.”9 Thus, by observing the acts of rebellious slaves, sometimes interacting with them, VCs began to endorse emancipation by any means necessary, including “desperate means.” Revived interest in David Walker’s ideas further advanced the formation of revolutionary abolitionist ideology. In the early 1830s, Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), which called for slave revolution, had wide circulation. Antislavery sailors distributed the pamphlet in the South, while Garrison reprinted excerpts from it. Yet violent repression of the pamphlet’s circulation, distaste for open avowals of violence, and the untimely death of 164

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Walker led to a waning of the Appeal’s influence.10 By the late 1840s, Garnet and Thomas Smallwood began to revive Walker’s legacy. Garnet had fled slavery as a child and helped VCs throughout the 1840s. In the revolutionary year 1848, he republished Walker’s Appeal, including a moving biography of the Black revolutionary. Inspired by his burgeoning militancy, a then-obscure abolitionist named John Brown printed Garnet’s edition of the Appeal at his own expense.11 Smallwood, who with Charles Torrey organized the underground in Washington, D.C., praised the Appeal as among “the boldest productions against slavery ever written.” He introduced his own 1851 autobiography by reprinting Garnet’s biography of Walker. Smallwood implied by this gesture that activists must measure their own life’s work by the standard set by Walker.12 Through Smallwood and Garnet, Walker’s ideas influenced a new cohort of militants, such as William Cooper Nell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and John Brown.13 Moreover, invocations of Walker gave legitimacy to the two men’s independent theories of abolitionist revolution. Garnet formulated his concept of revolutionary abolitionism in his “Address to the Slaves of the United States” (1843), which John Brown printed alongside the Appeal. The address had been, in part, influenced by the practice of the VCs. Garnet took inspiration from the idea, which they largely formulated, that the enslaved can “do the work of emancipation better than others.” Moreover, he based his own writing upon the addresses to slaves written by Garrison and Gerrit Smith, which urged them to resist through flight. Yet Garnet began to move beyond the politics of the Underground Railroad. Though he himself helped runaways and would continue to do so, Garnet now argued that flight prevented immediate confrontation with the slave power. Nor would running help in the long term, for “THE PHARAOHS ARE ON BOTH SIDES OF THE BLOOD RED WATERS.” The masters controlled politics, north and south, and would use the war machine of American imperialism to subsume under slavery all lands that its victims tried to flee to. This despotic empire had to be battled in its very heart by a slave-led movement. A revolutionary abolitionist tradition long existed, Garnet insisted, in the figures of Denmark Vesey, Toussaint Louverture, Nat Turner, Cinqué, and Madison Washington. The tradition had to be reinvoked, carried forward, and adjusted to concrete circumstances. “What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency.”14 Garnet was rhetorically telling the enslaved what they already knew; he was really telling abolitionists what they ought to know. 165

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Smallwood’s early contributions to revolutionary abolitionist thought have been long ignored. More than just an Underground Railroad “conductor,” Smallwood had been one of the most creative abolitionist thinkers before 1850. His politics had roots in experience and prodigious reading. He had felt the hell of slavery and did the most dangerous work of the Underground Railroad. Though Smallwood claimed himself to be “independent of the abolitionists in my operations,” he knew the tactical and moral debates of all factions better than anybody. He supported the American Colonization Society in the 1820s but broke with it in 1830. He worked with the political abolitionists of the Albany Vigilance Committee. Smallwood cooperated with Garrisonian PVC members and knew their positions. He admired the revolutionary poets Lord Byron, John Milton, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, “the champions of freedom,” and drank deep from the philosophy of David Walker.15 In his own abolitionist politics, he mixed Garrisonian anti-institutionalism, a unique style of political abolitionism, practical abolitionism, and the revolutionary abolitionism of Walker and Garnet. For Smallwood, any practical act dispossessing the master class had to be supported by abolitionists. Running away was a revolutionary act, for it expropriated labor power and property from the master without compensation.16 Unlike the political abolitionists he kept in touch with, Smallwood refused a political strategy limited to domestic concerns. He crafted an antislavery foreign policy as well: support for any nation that checked American expansion, especially Mexico.17 Smallwood also developed Garrison-like positions. He formulated his own liberation theology, rooted strongly in the vengeful God of the Old Testament, and had little patience for churches. He believed the Constitution to be a proslavery document.18 Smallwood premised his revolutionary abolitionism upon a revolutionary anti-imperialism. To him, American politicians were diabolical “sorcerers, . . . magicians, and astrologers,” and the US state an interventionist empire: “The United States is the most hypocritical, guileful, and arrogant nation on the face of the earth. . . . Its people rend earth and air with protestations of freedom! They taunt other nations with tyranny! . . . They send emissaries among the people of other nations to emit their poisonous principles. . . . The people of the United States arrogate to themselves the right to meddle with the affairs of others.”19 Full of passionate intensity, he vowed to gladly fight in the army of any nation that went to war with the United States. Moreover, he warned Americans “against the dreadful consequences that will inevitably overtake them if they continue to oppress the African race and shed the blood of Indians.” “I believe,” he continued, “the long 166

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suspended blow against that republic and the final emancipation of their victims are close at hand, and will be attended with a terrible and bloody breakup of their present system.”20 Smallwood did not see freedom as national, slavery as sectional, as the Free-Soilers did. He saw slavery as national, freedom as racial, a state of affairs that could only be changed by war or insurrection. Insurrectionary activities across the world in the 1850s convinced VC activists that they had to keep up with the times. James Russel Lowell, for instance, wrote sympathetically of the uprisings of Mayan peasants.21 Curious about Seminole resistance to American settler-colonialism, Seth Concklin had traveled south to see for himself “what the United States Government was doing in Florida among the Indians.”22 In China, peasants under a leader who claimed to be the brother of Christ staged the largest insurrection in human history, against the Qing monarchy and its Western collaborators. Sydney Howard Gay, who had experiences in China as a seaman, expressed sympathy for the Taiping rebels but denounced the depredations of Western merchants and missionaries.23 Mary Ann Shadd Cary reported in the Provincial Freeman, no doubt with a tinge of Christian chauvinism: “We may hope that the introduction of even the spurious Christianity of the ‘rebel party’ may prove the precursor of freedom to those who are in bonds. It would be a singular spectacle to see China renounce domestic slavery under the influence of a semi-Christianity, whilst America, boasting of her freedom and her religious and political institutions, clings to the abomination.”24 In 1857, Muslim and Hindu Sepoys rose up against their superiors, initiating an all-India revolt against British rule. Garrison published editorials critical of British repression. Douglass urged fellow abolitionists to “fight like Sepoys.”25 Initially unsure of what side to take on the revolt, Elizur Wright conversed with an Irish worker who emphasized the universal violence of British colonialism and the necessity of resistance just to survive.26 The Irish laborer Henry Kemp (Boston Vigilance Committee), who worked with sailor Austin Bearse to rescue dozens of runaways on the Boston wharf, went furthest. Despite being a committed Garrisonian, he raised funds for Irish insurrectionists associated with the Young Ireland Movement. When fellow Garrisonians (who supported the pacifist, liberal accommodationist wing of Irish nationalism) questioned Kemp for his activities, he replied: “I am an Irish abolitionist. I do not hold to freedom for myself and my countrymen and go for the slavery of the colored man or any man.”27 Garrison had enjoined abolitionists to “support every unpopular reform the world over—to pity and plead for the poor oppressed Irishmen, for all who suffer, whether at the South, 167

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or on the British shores, or in India.”28 When those movements turned to revolutionary violence, VC members felt they had little choice but to emulate their example. By the early 1850s, fugitives began to shape the politics of violence decisively. Historians Kellie Carter Jackson and Robert Churchill have rigorously stressed this development, though it must be added that this fugitive influence was most concentrated in the VCs.29 Eighty-one runaways narrated to William Still that they had fled slavery armed and ready to fight; some killed slavecatchers and justified doing so.30 Fugitives in New Bedford and southeastern Pennsylvania formed armed defense organizations and killed slavecatchers. Fugitive VC workers, like Douglass and Jermain Loguen, began to publicly justify the right of runaways to kill their pursuers.31 Abolitionists followed fugitives. At BVC meetings, runaway Lewis Hayden furiously preached the need for armed self-defense and aggressive slave rescues, initially receiving disapproving glances from his comrades. By the mid-1850s, however, he had an entire faction on his side.32 Many white VC members, like Theodore Parker, invoked the “natural right” of self-preservation to justify fugitive violence.33 White abolitionists, like Henry Bowditch (BVC), learned the philosophy of self-preservation in the heat of praxis. When slave hunters arrived in Boston to capture William Craft, Bowditch asked Craft how he could help. As Bowditch remembered it, Craft gave him a gun and told him, “use this pistol upon anyone who shall propose to arrest me.” Initially “shocked at the idea of my possibly killing a human being,” Bowditch nevertheless quickly found that helping fugitives defend themselves complied with the maxim “do for others what you wish done for yourself.”34 During his 1855 trip to Canada, William Cooper Nell was surprised to see that fugitives in that supposed safe haven carried pistols “loaded and capped” just in case.35 A new type of morality began to grow within the abolitionist movement, one not based upon transcendent principles, but upon the actions of the oppressed. As Gerrit Smith asserted: “It may not be the slave’s duty to lose life or take life in order to exempt himself from slavery. But if he is authorized to go to these extremities, it is absurd to say that I sin if I carry my help to him to the same extremities.”36 Because the enslaved used arms to defend their freedom, it was right and necessary for VC members to use arms to help them defend their freedom. Even doctrinaire pacifists began to follow fugitives in the use of arms. The Garrisonian leaders in the VCs adhered, after 1850, only pragmatically to nonresistance. As Thomas Wentworth Higginson put it, “the Garrisonians were 168

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generally non-resistants, but those who believed in the physical rescue of fugitive slaves were nevertheless their pupils.”37 Garrisonians preferred not to rely upon force but, when fugitives or their allies did use violence, refused to condemn it. William Parker, the leader of the Christiana Insurrection, spoke reverentially of Philadelphia Garrisonians as men and women “ever ready” to help fugitive slaves by whatever means.38 Quaker Thomas Garret described himself as a “limited” nonresistant, for he believed that effective resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law could hardly be nonviolent in every instance.39 In Boston, Garrison himself took open-minded positions on violence. At an 1850 abolitionist meeting Garrison attended, Black Bostonians “resolved to arm and to resist the kidnapper to the death.” He encouraged these activists in their resolve.40 In the BVC itself, an extreme pacifist faction initially overpowered committee meetings, often urging against slave rescues. But by 1851, a direct-action faction—led by Black and white Garrisonians and others—circumvented the pacifists by coordinating their own slave rescues and armed patrols. Pacifist Samuel Sewall (BVC) assessed this new logic thus: “much as I abominate bloodshed, I think it far better that two or three slave-hunters should be killed than that a man should be dragged back into slavery.”41 Many Garrisonian VC members came to such pragmatic sympathies quite easily. They had seen fugitives resort to violence and acknowledged the “natural right” of self-defense. They believed that the “higher laws” of divine justice ought to be followed at all costs. Garrisonian solidarity with fugitive armed defense, a solidarity overlooked by historians, quickly evolved into insurrectionary abolitionism. At an 1852 antislavery meeting in Boston to mark the first anniversary of the Sims rendition, abolitionists, many of them BVC members, put forth a resolution vowing to expand their movement to “assist in the formation in every town of vigilance committees.” After the resolution was read, Garrison himself moved to add an amendment to it: “Every fugitive slave is justified in arming himself for protection and defence,—in taking the life of every marshal, commissioner, or other person who attempts to reduce him to bondage; and the millions who are clanking in chains on our soil find ample warrant in rising en masse, and asserting their right to liberty at whatever sacrifice of the life of their oppressors.”42 By pushing to include this amendment, Garrison affirmed that principled defense of revolutionary abolitionism ought to underpin VC praxis. In short, the brash editor of the Liberator, so oft caricatured as an impractical prince of peace, believed that the deepening of the vigilance movement went hand in hand with the deepening of a potentially insurrectionary movement headed by the enslaved. 169

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Openness to violent means combined with a deepened hatred of the American polity. Since the 1840s, Garrison called for the dissolution of the Union. In the 1850s, other activists adopted similar positions. After the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857), which affirmed that African Americans had “no rights which a white man is bound to respect,” many agreed with Robert Purvis that “the United States, in its formation and essential structure as well as in its practice, is one of the basest, meanest, and most atrocious despotisms that ever saw the face of the sun.”43 Activists like Joshua B. Smith, Isaac Mason, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary urged emigration to Canada or to free Haiti. As one fugitive who had happily emigrated to Canada told abolitionists, “My American blood has been scourged out of me; I have lost my American tastes; I am an enemy to tyranny.”44 Anger further boiled over as the slave empire implemented designs to expand into Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. Thomas Smallwood angrily proclaimed, “the people of the Unites States arrogate to themselves the right to meddle in the affairs of others.” Another Black VC worker, William Watkins, an advocate of Haitian immigration, asserted in 1850, “the influence of the American government abroad is only an influence for evil.”45 Many fugitives and Black abolitionists, especially refugees in Canada, hoped that nonslaveholding nations like Britain, Mexico, and Haiti might strangle the American slave nation through geopolitical pressure.46 Slavery had to go down, and if need be, the United States with it too. John Murray Spear declared that the American Republic “must sink to rise no more forever.”47 Elizur Wright hoped that “the yankee branch [of Western civilization] . . . will soon pass into history as a dry rotten limb, and be blown off,” either by slave insurrection or foreign invasion.48 Fugitives told abolitionists they would fight on the side of any nation at war with the United States.49 In the late 1850s, during the height of his involvement with the Chatham VC in Canada, Martin Delany wrote a novel prophesying an anti-imperial slave revolution, Blake; or, The Huts of America. Its protagonist, Henrico Blacus, a runaway slave of Caribbean origin, wanders across the American South encouraging enslaved people and maroons to foment insurrection. Blacus later travels to Cuba to organize slave revolution there, to prevent US designs to annex the island, and to encircle the slave power from without.50 Out of disenchantment with the American project came new visions of geopolitics, revolution, and Black solidarity. VC members adhered to a wide assortment of antislavery creeds, from pure pacifism to political abolitionism. But by the mid-1850s, a nondoctrinaire style of abolitionism began to prevail within the committees. This new style discarded 170

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the Garrisonian fetish of nonresistance, on one hand, and the political abolitionists’ fetish of law on the other. Advocates of this new abolitionism were veterans, like Wendell Phillips and J. Miller McKim, as well as younger idealists like Higginson, Hayden, Still, and Theodore Parker. They carried on Garrison’s war against unjust institutions and laws yet rejected full nonresistance. They remained open minded about antislavery political parties, yet preferred direct action to the indirect route of high politics. They loathed the really existing American state and were open to its dissolution. They saw “law and order, police and military, on the wrong side” and found “good citizenship a sin, and bad citizenship a duty.” Some saw themselves as doing “revolutionary work.” They believed, as Higginson did, that each slave rescue, each act of resistance by fugitives, had the power “to educate the mind to the attitude of revolution.”51 Richard Henry Dana (BVC), himself the most conservative of the VC associates, lamented that those who had begun to resist the Fugitive Slave Law with force were prepared to go too far, “prepared for revolution.”52 Such readiness for revolution was in part practical, in part theoretical and imaginative. In the 1850s, building upon their education in the VCs and following in the footsteps of Garnet and Smallwood, vigilance activists deepened the revolutionary side of the abolitionist imagination. They worked out their own visions of abolitionist revolution and even tried to carry them out. REVOLU TIONARY SPECUL ATION COMES OF AGE Wanting to ignite their own revolution, VC workers crafted a rich body of revolutionary speculation. Abolitionist speculated during the “classical” era of revolutionary sociology, in which the category “revolution” had arrived on the scene as a driver of history, a horizon of politics, and a thing to be theorized in order to either foment or avoid.53 In novel ways, abolitionists conjured up their own theories. They studied the history of revolutions and other social movements, including slave rebellions, and assessed the prospects for an overturning in the United States. And, of course, they learned from fugitives, who had their own revolutionary theories. Sociological speculation on the nature and causes of revolutions was, in some respects, the next step in the sociology that runaways first created— observation of the objective conditions of slavery had to foreground any serious imaginings of the prospects for an overthrow of those conditions. Just as meaningfully, whereas European thinkers were theorizing the revolutionary role of the “bourgeoisie” or prophesying the “proletariat” as the next revolutionary subject, runaways and abolitionists studied whether the enslaved could make history. 171

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Some VC members crafted eccentric and spiritual theories of revolution. Spiritualist John Murray Spear (BVC), in his various works, crafted a theory premised upon the interconnections between spiritual “influx,” nature, and society. Through continual influxes from the spirit world, humanity and nature both had a progressive tendency toward emancipation—nature’s emancipation from matter and mechanism, humanity’s emancipation from nature, man’s emancipation from man, and woman’s emancipation from man.54 Revolutions pushed this process forward, he argued. In every age, a party of progress emerged to overthrow the party of regression and established new institutions, which, though often flawed, improved upon what had come before. In the modern age, a new “party” of progress had emerged, backed by “the wretched of the aforesaid earth,” who would initiate the final revolutionary wave, ending in socialism: “there will be revolution after revolution; there will be overturning after overturning” until full liberation of mind, body, nature, and love “is finally brought about.” The final liberation of the wretched of the earth would be guided by an association of spirits who would dictate how the postrevolutionary society would be planned. Spear’s vision of emancipation was profound. Women would rule the new era, for “the former eras have been commenced and to a very considerable extent perpetuated by the masculine sex.” Property and organized religion would be abolished, as would disease, hatred, and unhealthy living. Race and slavery would be abolished—“the darkest complexioned man shall not be crushed on account of his color, but you shall live, eat, and drink together, and not know any difference.” In short, through revolution and overturning, “the vast amount of wealth now used for up-building useless walls, bringing people into imaginary circles with labors to keep them there,” would be “turned inward to the common stock, and aid in the blessing of man.”55 As profound as his vision of emancipation was, Spear did not say who would lead the overturning or how. Richard Hildreth (BVC) developed a more secular, historically grounded theory of revolutions in his work Theory of Politics (1854). All power—physical, political, and spiritual—became subsumed in history under economic power, the control of surplus wealth. Modern history revolved around the rise and fall of various classes who sought this control. Hildreth divided modern history into “the age of nobles” (feudalism), “the age of kings” (absolutism), and “the age of the burghers” (bourgeois rule, whose most advanced stage had been reached in the United States). The burghers mobilized the masses in the great revolutions, from England (1649) to America (1776) to France (1789). But, Hildreth noted, the burgher-led mass mobilizations “during these centuries caught slight, 172

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occasional glimpses of another order,” one that would be ruled by “the mass— the delvers, agricultural and mechanical, those who work with their hands—in numbers, at all times and everywhere, the great body of the people.” The “occasional glimpses” of worker rule came from the failed efforts of the Diggers and Ranters of the English Revolution and those of the Jacobins during the French Revolution. Hildreth believed the nineteenth century would usher in a new wave of revolutions, ultimately leading to “socialism,” the age “of the working classes.” That new age commenced with “the strong hand of the slaves” in Haiti. The Haitian Revolution ignited the South American Wars of Independence as well as Indigenous and peasant uprisings in Guatemala and Mexico. Haiti ushered in the age of abolition, from England to South America. The vectors of revolution had shifted from Europe to the Americas, and Hildreth hoped the next great movement, an antislavery revolution, would take place in North America. Yet he did not know how to bring it about. He noted the “constant whisper of an insurrection” among enslaved people but thought successful rebellion impossible. Despite his visionary theories of historical movement, largely rooted in Atlantic-wide revolutions and slave revolts, Hildreth argued that slave flight and abolitionist political parties could be the only options for combatting “American despotism.”56 Garrisonians conjured up some of the first models for abolition revolution by reworking their policy of “disunion” into a self-consciously revolutionary strategy.57 Originally, Garrison had formulated disunion as a means of purifying the North and isolating the South. The North would break from the Union, severing its ties from slavery and weakening the ability of federal power to protect slaveholders. By the mid-1840s, the justifications for disunion had evolved. Garrison now argued that northern secession would “release the North from all obligations to that piratical institution, whether to return fugitives or to suppress insurrections.”58 Disunion would “be followed by [either] a general escapade of slaves” or a slave rebellion against a planter class dispossessed of the luxury of federal military power.59 Garrison proclaimed in 1844 that even “if the national compact dissolved, the land filled with the horrors of servile and civil war—still slavery must be buried in the grave of infamy, beyond possibility of a resurrection.”60 More than that, disunion meant, “THE OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION,” which had been entwined with slavery from its beginning. Considering that Garrisonians supported Indigenous rights and opposed “manifest destiny,” the call for disunion meant nothing short of the dissolution of the American settler-empire.61 For sure, disunion had been an impractical, 173

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millenarian plan, for northerners and southerners alike remained committed to the Union, at least until the 1850s. Yet this strategy had many adherents among the practical abolitionists of the VCs. Even some fugitives who sympathized with the Garrisonians burned the Constitution and affirmed “the oppressors rod shall be broken.”62 Desiring the breaking of the oppressors’ rod, some committee members and fugitives clung religiously to disunion dreams; others turned to history to find earlier revolutionary models that had worked. Committee members studied the American Revolution but had mixed opinions on it. Theodore Parker was among those who believed the American War of Independence to be a genuine revolution against “tyranny,” with legacies that ought to be reinvoked.63 Similarly, William Cooper Nell and Wendell Phillips invoked the memory of runaway Crispus Attucks—killed during the Boston Massacre—as the forerunner to abolitionist direct action.64 Others believed the American Revolution to be “incomplete,” to be perfected through abolition. William Wells Brown asserted that through a mass slave revolt, “the revolution that was commenced in 1776 would then be finished.”65 Alternatively, a few VC members viewed American independence as a downright counterrevolutionary movement.66 John Rock (BVC) asserted that the Revolution was merely a conspiracy of slaveholders “who resorted to forcible measures to create a new government which has used every means to oppress and degrade.”67 Hildreth similarly viewed it as an intrigue of slaveholders, suspicious of the Somerset decision and desperate to escape the debts owed to English lenders.68 Charles K. Whipple described the Revolution as “evil,” the source of America’s genocidal aggression, racism, militarism, intemperance, and profanity.69 One fugitive, born on George Washington’s estate and whose story Nell recorded, put abolitionists straight on the matter: “Let us, then, shed no more tears at the tomb of Washington at Mt. Vernon—let us no more boast of liberty—let us break every yoke and let the oppressed go free!”70 VC members studied their own country’s revolution, writing histories and giving lectures on it. They looked for models and found too few. “I was too much interested in the heroes of 1853 to care much for those of the old revolution,” reminisced BVC member Moncure Conway.71 The 1848 revolutions in Europe greatly inspired VC members.72 At an 1850 NYVC meeting, fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward lectured on revolutionary movements in “France, Ireland, and Hungary” and urged “sympathy for all who suffer under oppression.” Of course, he mentioned that the enslaved were the most oppressed and deserved the most sympathy.73 During his trip to Europe in the early 1850s, which the PVC had endorsed, J. Miller McKim sought out 174

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French revolutionaries to hear about their experiences.74 George Luther Stearns became involved with the BVC after meeting Samuel Gridley Howe at informal political meetings devoted to discussing the latest news from revolutionary Europe.75 Daniel Drayton tried to run off seventy slaves from Washington, D.C., just as news of the 1848 revolutions arrived in America. Some VC members speculated that Drayton and the fugitives had been influenced by “the spirit of reform and progress . . . abroad and all over the nations of Europe.”76 In the wake of counterrevolution, radical European refugees flocked to the United States, seeking aid and promoting their ideals. Occasionally, VCs aided these revolutionary exiles just as they aided runaways, finding them homes, work, and security.77 The flood of refugees from European despotism invigorated VC rhetoric. Fugitives and committee members began to speak of “refugees from American despotism.”78 These refugees fled a despotism more obscene and despicable than that of Europe. Merely by fleeing and fighting slavery, they engaged in acts that “exceeded” anything “done on the barricades of Paris.”79 Aiding them remained the most urgent task. Proslavery interests rightfully feared the stimulating effect 1848 had on abolitionism. As one antiabolitionist writer commented: “The year 1848 was characterized by the usual venom which the antislavery societies industriously endeavored to distill into the community. Fred. Douglass, Edmund Quincy, Francis Jackson, Abby Kelley, Garrison, Phillips, [Parker] Pillsbury, Lucy Stone, Theodore Parker, and a retinue of negro orators, escaped slaves, and others, regularly held their meetings and indulged in their customary rhodomontades.”80 Thus, abolitionists and slaveholders alike viewed fugitive-abolitionists as most distinctly embodying the “spirit of ’48” in America. Though inspiring, European revolutions offered few models for VC members to emulate. In America, despotism and class power took slightly modified forms. The United States needed a different model of revolution, argued James Russel Lowell, based upon his own observations of the revolutionary upheavals in France. Lowell, though himself no extreme radical, sharply understood 1848 as resulting from the specificities of class formation in Europe. The uprising in 1789 had been the failed revolution of the Third Estate against the aristocracy, which spurred the political waking of the middle and working classes. “The revolution of 1830 was the work of the middle class,” now aligned with the aristocracy to oppress the working classes. “The revolution of 1848 had been achieved by the working class” to end despotic rule by the other two classes. With no feudal backwardness, America, according to Lowell, took a different trajectory. The revolt of 1776 had not been against aristocracy but “rather a separation from 175

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Great Britain, [which] did not produce any striking social change.”81 The “large capitalists and monopolists of the north” and the “monopolists of the South” merely strengthened their power over other classes. White workers, though oppressed by these “monopolists,” had been hoodwinked by racism, religion, apathy, and occasional privileges. Unlike their European counterparts, they were not the oppressed of the oppressed, nor did they have revolutionary traditions. They could not be the revolutionary force as they had been in Paris. As the oppressed of the oppressed, with traditions of struggle behind and before them, slaves and Black workers were the class of social transformation in America. Lowell understood the particularities of contradiction and applied a sort of theory of class struggle to the American context: “The condition, not only of the American slave, but [also] of the colored man in America, is such as preserves in their sharpest completeness the dividing lines of both race and class. The causes which are now producing anarchy in Europe may be expected to combine in bringing yet more shocking results here.” A workers’ revolution in the United States could only be a slaves’ revolution. White workers could be revolutionaries, but only as supporters of the slave revolution.82 Abolitionists studied and understood the Haitian Revolution.83 VC members like William Wells Brown traveled to Haiti, did archival research, and read “everything of importance” about its island’s history.84 Some translated works by foreign authors on the revolution.85 Others communicated with Haitian activists or visited Haiti, hoping to promote emigration there.86 Wells Brown, Wendell Phillips, James McCune Smith, and others disseminated this new knowledge in notorious lectures on the Haitian Revolution delivered across the North.87 These abolitionist historians understood Haiti as a dual revolution against slavery and against colonialism. They acknowledged it as the only successful slave uprising in human history, initiating an international process of emancipation. Phillips argued that the Haitians “inaugurated the idea of immediate emancipation.”88 Immediate, uncompensated, radical emancipation, an idea historians attribute to Garrisonians, had been, according to the Garrisonians themselves, a Haitian creation. Moreover, VC members lauded the anticolonial dimensions of Haiti. They understood that independence from slaveholding empires was just as important as the formal abolition of slavery. Wells Brown wrote in detail about Haiti’s postcolonial efforts to maintain its autonomy. He did not see its postcolonial trajectory as a “tragedy” but as a work in progress.89 Elizur Wright, who corresponded with Haitian activists about the revolution, joyed in that country’s continuous efforts to thwart the desires of slave-power imperialism: 176

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“the ebon brothers [of Haiti] . . . for more than half a century have held the most toothsome island on the globe against the whole white ‘race,’ including the very same slave power which has ruled us all that time.” Haiti did far more for universal liberty, and more to thwart American tyranny and empire, than “liberty loving” Americans ever did, Wright implied.90 Activists searched Haitian history for revolutionary methods. Wright saw in a slave-abolitionist alliance emancipationist potential equal to the Jacobin-slave alliance of 1794. The only ingredient required to actualize this potential was a political crisis, akin to 1789, which would create the opening for enslaved revolutionaries and their abolitionist sympathizers to force emancipation onto the agenda.91 Others attributed the success of the Haitian Revolution to ingenious, tenacious leaders. American abolitionism required similar leadership to carry on its own revolution. Robert Morris often lamented to his Black comrades, “we need a black general,” meaning a Toussaint Louverture, to marshal the forces of antislavery.92 During the 1860s, Wells Brown wrote biographies of the major Haitian leaders, hoping to suggest models for activist leadership in the United States.93 More importantly, VC members discovered through Haiti the creativity of the masses. They noted the creative role maroons and runaways played in igniting and perpetuating the revolutionary process on the island. They noted how Black soldiers “took to the mountains” to fight a protracted peoples war against impossible odds.94 The great “lesson of history” proved in Haiti, argued Wright, was that no matter how “passive” or “cowardly” slaves appeared to be, they could be “educated to insurrection” at an instance.95 The enslaved were cunning and patient. They knew the power of their masters and the difficulties of revolt.96 Like their counterparts once in Haiti, “the American slaves are only waiting the opportunity of wiping out their wrongs in the blood of their oppressors.”97 VC members paid much attention to marronage, a slave-resistance method widely practiced in North America, which had revolutionary consequences elsewhere. They heard about marronage from runaways. Many fugitives narrated to William Still of their hiding in forests and swamps, sometimes in groups, before heading north. One half-Seminole maroon even narrated to the PVC the earlier efforts of Seminole maroons to resist the American conquest of Florida.98 At antislavery meetings, J. Miller McKim would give accounts of “fugitive slaves fresh from the dismal swamp,” that is, the large, longstanding maroon community in Virginia.99 In 1852, William Cooper Nell described helping William Lloyd Garrison and Robert Walcutt “fit out a Fugitive Slave just from Virginia. . . . His narration of scenes in the Dismal Swamp and his own experience [of ] 177

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toils and privations were very affecting—his was no fancy sketch.”100 As abolitionist James Redpath observed, the only knowledge of marronage, particularly in the Dismal Swamp, came from “the uniform testimony of the runaways.”101 Abolitionists elaborated on such knowledge learned. Edmund Jackson (BVC) wrote a short study of the Virginia maroons, which Nell included in his seminal 1855 history of Black activism from the American Revolution to the antislavery movement.102 Influenced by such works, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a second antislavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), whose protagonist was a messianic, revolutionary maroon from the swamp.103 The meek Uncle Tom was now replaced by the rebellious Dred in the abolitionist imagination. Others put the story of maroon resistance into an international perspective. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote a fictional story about Brazilian maroons, emphasizing their ability to create liberated zones of national autonomy, where they resisted slavery for decades.104 Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote extensive histories of marronage in Surinam and Jamaica. He stressed maroons’ creative strategies, military tactics, and their extraordinary ability to combat some of the most powerful empires of human history. For him, the example of maroons across the Americas proved “it is Cassy and Dred” (from Dred), not saintly Uncle Toms, “who are the normal protest of human nature against systems that degrade it.”105 VC members envisioned marronage as antislavery strategy. For sure, American marronage never reached the scale achieved in Jamaica or Brazil. Enslaved people “had no mountain passes to defend like the maroons of Jamaica—no impenetrable swamps like the maroons of Surinam,” observed Higginson. But “where they had these, even on a small scale, they had used them.”106 Autonomous strategies of maroon survival strengthened the Underground Railroad. The Dismal Swamp provided a place of concealment for fugitives until they could find safe passage north. Plantation workers communicated and traded with maroons, facilitating the “underground telegraph.” These communities, as VC members saw it, opened a second front for radical antislavery. Edmund Jackson (BVC) praised the Virginia maroons as the first “modern political party” based upon the principle of “free soil.”107 “Free soil” need not mean fantasies of free Indian land for white Americans, nor did a “free soil party” have to be an electoral party; it could be something more than that, a rebuke to the Constitution and American empire. Stephen Myers (AVC) wrote, “the North Star is clearly unconstitutional, as decidedly so as the dismal swamp.”108 In his mind, the Underground Railroad and the Dismal Swamp together constituted a dual 178

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counterforce to American institutions. Some VC members hoped to expand American marronage into genuinely revolutionary strategy. Higginson studied the “peculiar tactics” and ingenious “bush-fighting” of Caribbean maroons. He hoped that American slaves would “retreat to the mountains and establish a maroon colony there, like those in Jamaica and Guiana.”109 This would facilitate further exodus of people northward, or even lay the foundations for a mass insurrection. Committee members carefully studied the great slave rebellions, though they did not always draw the same conclusions. Nell wrote on Vesey’s and Turner’s plots, emphasizing the violent suppression of the rebellions and the heroic martyrdom of the leaders.110 Joshua Coffin, a Quaker PVC worker, wrote a detailed study of slave insurrections across the Americas, emphasizing the bloodshed and violence they wrought. Coffin did not advocate slave insurrection but warned his contemporaries that the enslaved had a long, transnational tradition of rebellion. If slavery did not end peacefully, which it ought to, it would end the other way.111 Wells Brown also wrote of insurrectionary movements across the Americas, in addition to biographies of Vesey and Turner. He sought to provide younger activists with heroes to model themselves upon. He further sought to reveal slaves’ “frequent insurrectionary efforts” and suggested that an “undeveloped discontent” still pervaded “the black population of the South.”112 That discontent had to be further developed and organized. Edmund Jackson, in 1851, wrote a short study of Vesey’s conspiracy, based upon his own experiences in Charleston in 1822, at the height of the insurrection scare, concluding that slaveowners feared insurrection intensely. A perfectly planned uprising could topple the whole system: “If the original design [of Vesey] had been attempted, and the city taken by surprise, the negroes would have achieved a complete and easy victory. Nor does it seem at all impossible that such might have been or yet may be the case, if any well-arranged and resolute rising should take place.” Jackson, despite his nonresistance leanings, was hopeful that, “through the exodus of repeated slave insurrections, the oppressed are destined, by inscrutable laws, to eventually secure their freedom.”113 Higginson wrote the definitive early histories of Turner’s, Vesey’s, and Gabriel’s plots, which other abolitionist historians, including Wells Brown, relied upon. Nell, who had written his own short accounts of these insurrections, assisted Higginson with research and even offered to lend him research materials, including his copy of fugitive Henry Bibb’s history of the Vesey plot.114 Different from other accounts, Higginson was less interested in showing the 179

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insurrectionary spirit of slaves—he took that for granted—and more interested in the strategic savvy of the great American rebels. He searched for strategic models. Of Gabriel’s plot, Higginson noted its “ingenuity and thoroughness.” He especially appreciated Prosser’s efforts to collaborate with French “Jacobins,” “United Irishmen,” and “abandoned whites.”115 An abolitionist-slave, whiteBlack alliance could strengthen a servile insurrection. Higginson lauded Vesey’s plot as “the most elaborate insurrectionary project ever formed by American slaves.” The rebellion had great leadership—Vesey, the visionary; Peter Poyas, “the organizing mind”; and Gullah Jack, the Angolan “conjurer,” beloved by the enslaved masses. They secured access to arms, recruited a cadre of devoted revolutionaries, secretly prepared the masses to support the uprising, and even hoped to garner support from Haiti.116 The perfect insurrection had to be planned with multiple fronts. Turner’s Rebellion offered the tactic of terror. Use initial, hideous bloodshed to terrify slaveholders in order to have “more terror than bloody battles, and so spare the need of future bloodshed.”117 Scare them into submission. Higginson further speculated that Turner had built an alliance with Virginia maroons. The Dismal Swamp would be the base of operations, the maroons the cadre, of the revolution. Thus, all three plots, though they failed, offered possible models for later uprisings. Higginson himself promoted Turner’s supposed maroon strategy as the most viable plan for insurrection.118 Fugitives nurtured the insurrectionary imagination of abolitionists. As Pan-African thinker C. L. R. James wrote, with remarkable intuition, in 1949, “the slaves, learning from Nat Turner’s failure, sent a never-ending stream of representatives north to the free negroes and through them to the Abolition Movement, supplying it with revolutionary personnel and revolutionary politics.”119 A few fugitive intellectuals wrote histories of insurrection. Other runaways spoke of experiencing the bloody repression of Turner’s Rebellion. Though some doubted the efficacy of Turner’s plans, none doubted the justness of them. Peter Still spoke of enslaved people’s hopes that “the year of jubilee” may come by means of a rising.120 In a remarkable correspondence with William Still, fugitive John Henry Hill made known his own developing insurrectionary thought. Hill had escaped Virginia in 1853 to the PVC before moving on to Canada. There, he received fugitives sent by Still and served on the Provincial Freeman’s board of directors. He formed a “military company” with Afro-Canadian comrades (some of them fugitives helped by the PVC) “to do something for their elevation as a nation.”121 Hill educated himself, hoping to use words to “have some influence upon American slavery” and to make slaveholders “tremble.” 180

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John Henry Hill. From William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872), 189.

Initially, he believed flight the primary means of resistance and the British Empire the primary bulwark against American slaveholders. Yet, as Still said of Hill, “incessantly his mind ran out towards the oppressed.”122 Within three years, Hill began to take more radical positions. England, he now believed, could not fully be relied upon as an antislavery bulwark, for “she loves her commercial trade” with America far more than any antislavery imperative. “Let us now look for ourselves,” Hill wrote, turning fully toward his people for the sign of liberation.123 For him, that sign came in 1856, with a wave of insurrectionary plots (imagined and real) in Maryland, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Texas.124 “Our pappers contains long details of insurrectionary movements among slaves at the South,” Hill noted. He continued: “Now friend Still I believe that Prayers affects great good, but I believe that the fire and sword will affect more good in this case. Perhaps this is not your thoughts, but I must acknowledge this to be my Polacy. The world are being turned upside down, and I think we might as well take an active part in it as not. We must have something to do as other people, and I hope this moment among the Slaves are the beginning. I wants to see something go on while I live.”125 Fire and sword was 181

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no empty reference. Isaiah 66:15–22 prophesies the punishment of the wicked and “the new heaven and new earth” that God “will make” for the righteous. The lot of the wicked was to be terrifying: “For by fire and by his sword will the lord plead with all flesh: and the slain of the lord shall be many.” Fire and sword; revolution; Jubilee; overturn, overturn, overturn; the world turned upside down—all were terms those in the movement used to conceive a process they wanted to set in motion. BE YOND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD Slaveholders pressed to expand their territory and power knowing that slave resistance and abolitionism had become threats to their “way of life,” yet VC members hardly felt empowered by this. In fact, frustration prevailed in the mid1850s. “I admit the movement to abolish American slavery is a failure,” wrote Gerrit Smith to Wendell Phillips in 1855.126 They had failed to change America’s racist civil society, much less its racist psyche. Money contributions to the American Anti-Slavery Society plummeted in 1855. Preachers still preached in pulpits of power. Proslavery politicians beat their opposition with fists and canes, as they did to Senator Charles Sumner in the Capitol in 1856. The slave power threatened to expand into Kansas. The Dred Scott decision affirmed anti-Blackness as gospel and law, asserting the right of a white person to own a slave anywhere in the Union. Dislike for the intrusive Fugitive Slave Law advanced in the North. Yet the American state showed its power to circumvent public opinion and abolitionist resistance when it deployed federal troops to take Thomas Sims (1851) and Anthony Burns (1854) back to slavery. Nevertheless, many VC members believed, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson did, that the botched Burns rescue attempt demonstrated “the great want of preparation, on our part, for this revolutionary work.”127 Deeply frustrated, VC members began to escalate sectional conflict into abolitionist war. Some cast their lot with the Republican Party, formed in 1854. Most, though, viewed party politics as insufficient, even if necessary. Inspired by fugitive resistance and revolutionary theories, VC workers tried to advance beyond the Underground Railroad toward true “revolutionary work.” VC members seriously debated whether the Republican Party could actualize the antislavery revolution through electoral means.128 For years, the committees had tried to keep the North free soil. Now, the party promised that western territories would remain free soil too. The Republicans, who unveiled their mature platform at their 1856 national convention in Philadelphia, called for the 182

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nonextension of slavery westward. Their position on abolition, however, was ambiguous, in fact, nonexistent. Yet some abolitionists believed nonextension would mean for slavery encirclement, eventually strangulation.129 Nonextension would come about through a broad electoral coalition of manufacturers and farmers, colonizationists, anti-immigrant “Know Nothings,” ex-Whigs, disaffected Northern Democrats, and political abolitionists—all discontent with the South’s monopoly on political power.130 VC members maintained pragmatic ties with the new party. Lawyer John Albion Andrew (BVC) became the most loyally committed to the Republicans, later becoming the wartime governor of Massachusetts. Theodore Parker maintained close ties as well. Black VC activists, such as Stephen Myers, Robert Morris, and Lewis Hayden, ardently supported the Republicans too.131 Uncritical devotion, however, remained exceptional. Garrison said Republicans stood “on a level with the Fugitive Slave Law,” as they made no commitment to repeal it—a tough critique of the party that some Black VC activists, like John Rock, also held.132 McKim saw the advent of this new party as a positive advance, but did not become active in it. Gerrit Smith thrashed it for being uncommitted to immediate emancipation. He formed his own counterparty, the Radical Abolitionist Party, which contested Republicans in presidential elections.133 Higginson maintained close ties with Republicans and tried pushing them toward radical strategies, such as disunion. “But the Republican Party was by no means ready for a movement so extreme,” he said.134 As much as possible, VC members tried to maintain the nonsectarian attitudes they had attempted in the 1840s. The VCs began to cautiously move beyond the Underground Railroad. More militant members began to see transportation of fugitives to Canada as a cowardly act, urging that the North had to be made “free soil” through armed struggle against slavecatchers and their allies.135 BVC members, frustrated after the failed Burns rescue, formed the Anti-Man-Hunting League for just these purposes. Black abolitionists, like Jermain Loguen and Frederick Douglass, urged fugitives to stay and fight in the United States. Nevertheless, they both helped any runaway who desired to go to Canada, they themselves fleeing there in times of danger (Loguen after the Jerry Rescue, Douglass after John Brown’s Raid). Higginson, by 1855, preached that the Underground Railroad had to be abandoned. “The Underground Railroad to Canada,” he proclaimed, “is demoralizing the conscience of our people, accustoming them to think that all their duty to freedom consists, not in making their own soil free, but in pointing the way to some other.” He called for revolutionary aggression in the North, in 183

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Kansas, and later in the heart of the slave empire. “The antislavery movement is not a reform; it is a revolution,” he exclaimed.136 Thomas Hamilton, an AfroCanadian collaborator with the VCs, went the furthest. The Underground Railroad, he wrote, did not simply stifle the North, it defused the militancy in the South: “The abolitionism of the North, so far from making war on, or being inimical to the institution of slavery, has been for the last twenty years its great safety valve; the escape pipe through which the most dangerous element incident to slavery found vent. Prior to the existence of abolitionism, outbreaks and fearful mutterings and threatenings among the slaves were frequent.”137 Instead of enslaved militants having to flee to northern abolitionists, militant abolitionism somehow had to be inflamed again in the South, as it had been in the days of Gabriel, Vesey, and Turner. For some VC members, going beyond the Underground Railroad meant aiding in the struggle to make Kansas Territory a free state. BVC members—such as George Luther Stearns, Samuel Gridley Howe, Higginson, and Parker—directed the Massachusetts Kansas Aid Committee (MKAC), a militant branch of the New England Emigrant Aid Society, which organized the free Kansas movement. The MKAC funded and transported “free soil” settlers to Kansas Territory. The society’s movement hoped to make Kansas free soil by flooding northerners into the territory, who would then vote to be admitted to the Union as a free state. In practice, the free Kansas movement had to confront, through armed conflict, southern settlers, who hoped to make the territory a slave state.138 Stearns headed the MKAC. He claimed to have raised $48,000 to help Massachusetts citizens colonize Kansas as a free territory.139 Gerrit Smith also contributed thousands of dollars for the cause.140 The Boston Anti-Man Hunting League, at one of its meetings, requested that its members (most of them BVC members as well) donate money to “a friend from Kansas” to “procure 200 Sharpe’s repeating rifles.”141 Howe not only did work for the MKAC in New England but also went to Kansas to survey the settling and the fighting.142 Martin Stowell, an Anti-Man Hunting League member who had been involved in the successful Jerry Rescue and the failed Burns attempt, went to Kansas to fight.143 Higginson went to Kansas as well and arranged for the passage of emigrants, equipment, and arms to the territory. He also organized Underground Railroad operations, encouraging activists moving between Kansas and Boston, to take western fugitives with them.144 Higginson was impressed by the courage of the free-soil settlers as well as by their willingness to wage war against proslavery settlers. He believed that their militancy would invigorate revolutionary 184

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abolitionism: “Ever since the rendition of Anthony Burns, I have been looking for men. I have found them in Kansas.”145 Among the real “men” VC members found was John Brown. Higginson, Howe, and Stearns all met Brown for the first time through their work with the MKAC.146 Not all committee members supported the Kansas crusade, and for good reasons. As Oliver Johnson (NYVC) later explained it, Garrisonians rejected the society’s free Kansas movement on four grounds. First, supporters and leaders of the movement fought for the nonextension, not abolition, of slavery. It was thus a violent reform, not a revolution. Second, the movement, even if it made the territory into a “free” state, would only make Kansas “work humbly and meekly, in the harness of the Constitution, to help the master catch his runaway slave, to suppress slave insurrections by armed force, and to allow slaveholders to count three-fifths of their chattels as a basis of political power!” Third, Garrisonians rejected the Kansas war because it aimed to extend American state and empire. The New England Emigrant Aid Society hideously lauded, as Johnson noted, “the grizzly ferocity of the Anglo-Saxons” in their extension of white free soil on stolen Indigenous lands.147 Leaders of the Kansas movement even contemplated conquering Central America to prevent those regions from becoming slave states. (Among VC members, only Parker vehemently supported such imperialistic designs).148 Finally, the Kansas movement was a white man’s war against slaveholders. As Johnson concluded, paraphrasing Byron, white men should “not begin a war; if it must come the South [that is, the enslaved people there] should strike the first blow.”149 The Kansas war abrogated the right of Black self-determination, the right of the enslaved to lead their own liberation struggle. Among the MKAC, Higginson took seriously this critique. At a speech, which Garrison attended, in 1858, following his Kansas adventures, Higginson admitted: “We white Anglo Saxon Abolitionists are too apt to assume the whole work as ours. . . . We forget the heroes of St. Domingo. We forget the maroons of Surinam.”150 Thus, though the Kansas movement encouraged some VC members (and John Brown) in their revolutionary thoughts, its critics also helped refine revolutionary critiques of American settlerism and strengthened faith in the self-activity of enslaved people. More so than the Kansas movement, runaways and slave rebels inspired John Brown’s turn to revolutionary abolition. Even before the 1850s, “Nat Turner and Cinques stood first in his esteem” as heroes to be imitated.151 According to W. E. B. Du Bois, Brown had studied “the organized resistance to slave catchers in Pennsylvania, and the history of Haiti and Jamaica” as well as the major slave 185

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rebellions in North America.152 Brown had “always” been an “active underground railroad man.”153 He helped fugitives in Ohio in the 1830s. In 1850, in Springfield, Massachusetts, he helped organize an all-Black VC, the League of Gileadites. League members, which included Frederick Douglass’s close confidant Harriet Bailey, resolved to arm themselves “with suitable implements” to aid, rescue, and defend all suspected fugitives.154 In the mid-1850s in Missouri, Brown guided “slaves from the frontier through Kansas and Nebraska.”155 William Lambert claimed that Brown regularly brought fugitives to his secretive vigilance association in Detroit. He also claimed that Brown “became so well known and had to run such risks that he was sent to the east, where he worked on the Philadelphia branch.”156 Brown learned about revolutionary abolitionism from Henry Highland Garnet’s address to slaves and from his biography of David Walker. In fact, he took up Garnet’s and Walker’s views on the need for slave revolution as his own, long before leaving for Kansas. The Kansas movement had taught Brown that white men were willing to take up arms for the nonextension of slavery. Runaways and slave rebels showed him that the enslaved were willing to fight, perhaps even carry out a real revolution.157 VC members put Brown in touch with an array of likeminded radicals. Black comrades in the League of Gileadites introduced him to other fugitive agitators, including Douglass and Loguen.158 Gerrit Smith, who gave the impoverished Brown land to live on in the late 1840s, introduced him to other VC activists. In Canada, he met up with Harriet Tubman and Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Through them, Brown had connection to the fugitive communities in Canada West.159 Through his work in the Kansas movement, Brown met BVC members Parker, Stearns, Howe, and Higginson. They, in turn, introduced him to BVC militants and transcendentalists, like Hayden, Andrew, Benjamin Sanborn, Emerson, and Thoreau.160 While escorting fugitives to Canada via Detroit, Brown basically became a Colored Vigilant Committee member. Likely, he knew all of that organization’s members, not to mention their secretive Pan-Africanist ranks and rituals, and probably even memorized the oath that all its members had to recite “dealing with the principles of freedom and the authorities on revolution, revolt, rebellion, government.”161 Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, these activists had been Brown’s community of support. They offered help in times of need, provided funds for his schemes in Kansas, and listened to his private views on religion, slavery, and the need for abolitionist vengeance. As Brown soon came to realize, only VC members had the experience, funds, and daring spirit necessary to help him organize insurrection. 186

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Of the “Secret Six,” men who in 1858–59 funded and helped Brown organize his raid on Harpers Ferry, five had been VC members—Smith, Higginson, Parker, Stearns, and Howe. Hayden also served as an informal seventh member of this group.162 All six of these men had skills and knowledge Brown needed. Smith and Stearns, both independently wealthy, supplied most of the cash, though the other conspirators raised funds as well.163 Having helped fugitives, the Secret Six knew the value of discretion. They made known Brown’s purported plans to few, and they “brooded and schemed” behind closed doors, often at Hayden’s residence.164 All shared Brown’s faith in force and direct action. Smith had been involved in the Jerry Rescue. Hayden, Higginson, and Parker had tried to rescue Burns. All were sympathetic to armed struggle. Hayden had likely killed a police officer during the Burns attempt. Higginson, the year before he began working with Brown, had bragged that just “ten men” with drawn swords could “revolutionize the world.”165 Howe had genuine revolutionary experience, having in his youth fought alongside Lord Byron for Greek independence in the 1820s.166 He had direct knowledge of guerilla warfare and was “looked upon by his fellow conspirators as an authority” on the subject.167 Brown “had for many years been studying the guerilla system of warfare,” though only in books.168 He therefore welcomed Howe’s authority. Though none of the Secret Six went south with Brown, they offered him contacts with other activists, weapons, and most importantly, money. “I am always ready to invest money in treason,” Higginson wrote Brown in 1858.169 Though Brown trusted the Secret Six, with whom he coordinated, he kept his full plans to himself. At first, he claimed to simply desire doing “[Underground] Rail Road business on a somewhat extended scale.”170 He later told them he would “penetrate Virginia with a few comrades . . . to get together bands and families of fugitives, and then be guided by events. If he could establish them permanently in those fastnesses, like the maroons of Jamaica and Surinam, so much the better; if not he would make a break from time to time, and take parties to Canada.”171 Similarly, Brown said to Alexander Milton Ross that he would set up a maroon community “in the mountains of Virginia, which would produce so much annoyance to the United States Government and create such a feeling of dread and insecurity in the minds of slaveholders that slavery would be abolished.”172 Brown never said he was planning a slave insurrection. He had good reason to be ambiguous. He had studied Denmark Vesey’s brilliant plot, which had been foiled because too many people knew, and one gave up the secret.173 To prevent that, Brown kept his plans secret until right before 187

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embarking for the raid in the fall of 1859. The only person to whom he confided his full plans early on was Thomas Thomas, a fugitive Brown had known from the League of Gileadites. Early in the planning, he purportedly sent Thomas “to look up Madison Washington,” whom Brown “wanted as leader among the colored recruits that were to join the band of liberators.”174 The Black revolution, Brown likely believed, needed to have experienced leadership by the self-liberated. Even to those select few, usually fugitives, to whom he revealed his desires for insurrection, Brown held back specifics. As William Wells Brown wrote, “what were the plans and purposes of the old man is not precisely known, and perhaps will never be.”175 Frederick Douglass, a longtime intimate of John Brown, later speculated that his true plans had multiple dimensions, including public agitation, marronage, the Underground Railroad, and insurrection.176 Brown’s men would first induce large numbers of fugitives to escape. “They would retain the strong and the brave, and send the weak ones to the North by the Underground Railroad.” The “strong and brave” would remain to engage in guerilla warfare and, if possible, to foment a popular insurrection. In the North, abolitionists would step up their public agitation and would further support the movement by continuing the Underground Railroad. If need be, northern activists “shall send down recruits from time to time.”177 Brown’s plans could not have been thought out alone. His plots indeed “had been long maturing—brooded over silently and secretly,” as Wells Brown rightly observed.178 Yet the inclusion of multiple abolitionist strategies could only have come about by his brooding “silently and secretly” on what he had learned from others in the VC movement. John Brown was not the only person imagining revolution. In 1858, Lysander Spooner (BVC), a lawyer-turned-anarchist, concocted his own plan for slave revolution, which he shared with select BVC members, including some from the Secret Six. His plot took the form of a draft circular, “To the Non-slaveholders of the South,” which Spooner hoped to print and distribute widely. In it, he outlined a plan for bringing VCs to the South. The plan advised slaves “to form Vigilance Committees or Leagues of Freedom, in every neighborhood or township whose duty it shall be to stand in the stead of the government, and do that justice for the slaves, which government refuses to do.” Spooner dreamed that these “Vigilance Committees” would be, so to speak, revolutionary workers councils on the plantations. They would hoard stolen weapons, secretly train slave cadres for war, steal provisions and tools, and “teach the slaves to burn their masters’ buildings, to kill their cattle and horses, to conceal or destroy farming 188

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utensils, to abandon labor in seedtime and harvest.” When the time was ripe and the southern economy sufficiently sabotaged, the “Vigilance Committees” would rise up—with the support of poor white allies—and seize power. The committees would take the lead “in the division of the property” and would arrogate judicial powers to “arrest, try, and chastise (with their whips) all slaveholders.”179 Spooner sent the draft of his plan to Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.180 Phillips replied, “your scheme would be a good one if it only were practicable.” Phillips feared that poor white indifference to a slave-led workers revolt, in addition to fierce repression by federal armies, would spell the doom to any such movement.181 Higginson told him the same: “in Revolutions the practical end always comes first and the theory afterwards.” He advised Spooner not to publish the plan.182 Higginson wanted no suspicions raised about the other abolitionist plot to move operations South. Independently of the Secret Six, John Brown began to put his own plans in motion, first in Canada. “In the Canadian Provinces there are thousands of fugitive slaves. . . . They have carried the Underground Railroad and the Underground Telegraph into nearly every southern state. Here, obviously, is a power of great importance for a war of liberation,” wrote Brown’s comrade, James Redpath.183 In April 1858, Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Martin Delany organized a convention for Brown in Chatham, Canada. During a meeting mainly of fugitives as well as members of the CVC and the Chatham VC, Brown revealed his intentions for invasion and insurrection: “the plan of the Liberators was not extradition into the north, but emancipation in the south.”184 The convention drafted a provisional constitution for the newly liberated United States. It would be governed by “all the persons of mature age, whether proscribed, oppressed, and enslaved citizens, or of proscribed and oppressed races.” The constitution abolished the aristocratic senate and had provisions for the redistribution of property to the liberated. It also limited the right to bear arms to those loyal to the government of the oppressed. Thus, even Brown and his comrades disavowed the American fetish of the gun.185 The meeting did its work—Brown gained some funds and sympathizers. Much to the frustration of Shadd Cary, Brown—ever the masculine patriarch—excluded women from attending the meeting. Wells Brown later remarked, “had she [Cary] been a man, she would have probably been with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.”186 John Brown desired to execute his plans speedily in 1858. By spring of that year, he had weapons, funds, and a large community of support among fugitives and VC operatives. He also had his band of handpicked recruits fully assembled. 189

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These men consisted largely of fugitives, whom he met in Oberlin and Canada, as well as comrades who had fought with him in Kansas.187 He hoped to strike his blow against slavery before the end of the year. The Secret Six concurred. But an associate of Brown’s, John Hugh Forbes, threatened to publicly reveal the plot. Though the Secret Six thought the threat to be a bluff and encouraged him to proceed, Brown called off his plans for a year. His men dispersed, and he went into hiding in Kansas and Iowa (where he helped fugitives escape). During that year of laying low, Brown nevertheless encouraged the Secret Six to continue stockpiling weapons and money. He even dispatched his Kansas comrade James Redpath—an advocate of slave insurrection, who worked with several Black BVC members to promote Haitian immigration—to help with fundraising.188 In early 1859, Brown returned north, first to Canada, with a dozen runaways he had helped, then proceeded through Ohio to New York.189 Back in the North, Brown turned to VC activists to make his final preparations. In New York, he met up with Douglass, Loguen, and Gerrit Smith, who gave him four hundred dollars.190 During meetings with Douglass, Brown met Shields Green, a fugitive from South Carolina, whom he eventually convinced to take part in his liberation war.191 Brown even spoke to VC women in New York about his plans, something he rarely did. For sure, he knew that women had been just as vigilant as men in helping fugitive slaves. He also knew that women did much of the antislavery movement’s fundraising and could be a potential revenue source. In New York City, Brown spoke of his plans to Abby Hopper Gibbons, the daughter of Isaac Hopper and a longtime VC supporter. Gibbons gave no support, “convinced that the scheme was not practical.” Yet as a veteran VC helper who understood the necessity of secrecy, she “did not speak of this interview, even in her own family circle.”192 In Rochester, Brown also purportedly revealed his plans to Underground Railroad worker Lucy Coleman. Impressed with his perfect “hatred of slavery,” which she shared, Coleman “seriously contemplated, at one time, going into the mountains of Virginia, and helping him to establish homes for the fugitives who would escape from slavery.” Although Brown would never let a woman accompany him, Coleman seems to have imagined that he would. Eventually, she decided that the plan was ill conceived and suicidal. Brown was simply too driven by the fanatical thought that “God had commissioned him,” that God would protect him, no matter what he did, in his holy adventures to overthrow the slave power. As Coleman exclaimed, “I had long before that time given up all faith in special providences and ceased to regard the Hebrew laws as binding upon me . . . and 190

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I did not join him.”193 Even if he did see “Hebrew laws” as binding upon him, Brown did not see the imperious laws of the United States as binding, which is more important. In Massachusetts, Brown delivered speeches to raise more funds. In Concord, for instance, he lectured before a large audience that included Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott. Alcott wrote of the meeting, “our best people listen to his words . . . and some of them contribute something in aid of his plans without asking particulars, such confidence does he inspire.”194 Brown got two new recruits as well. Francis Jackson Meriam had recently taken a trip to Haiti to help Redpath in his efforts to promote emigration there. He took inspiration from the island’s revolutionary past and brought a portrait of Toussaint Louverture with him back to America, which he displayed proudly.195 Having heard of Brown’s plans from Redpath, Meriam begged Hayden for permission to go south. The grandson of BVC treasurer Francis Jackson, Meriam was young, idealistic, a bit deranged, but wealthy. Hayden reluctantly assented to his pleas only on the condition that Meriam pay up five hundred dollars for the cause.196 Brown himself convinced two others to join him. In Springfield, he recruited Alexander Milton Ross to go to Richmond and stir up support among the enslaved there.197 He also met Harriet Tubman while in Boston and “communicated his plans to her,” likely in full. After “several interviews,” Brown convinced her to go South to recruit for his movement.198 As the only woman explicitly included in his plans, Tubman was the one woman whom he trusted and respected as a comrade. Yet the only way Brown displayed this high esteem was by addressing her and treating her as if she were a man. Perhaps Brown’s most important visit was to Philadelphia, the location of the strongest VC. There, he carefully organized secret meetings of handpicked Black abolitionists, all of whom had been involved in the PVC or other committees. He sent out invitations hinting that he needed ideas as well as “money and men” for some new abolition project.199 Brown met with them at night, in the spring of 1859, “at the residence of the Rev. Stephen Smith in Lombard Street.” Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, William Henry Johnson, and William Still all attended.200 Brown revealed his plans, possibly in their entirety. Douglass harbored doubts. Still envisioned “a venture sure to end in disaster, and as an attempt involving more desperation than valor.”201 Johnson pledged to join, but Brown refused, for Johnson would have left behind a pregnant wife.202 Brown gained little in recruits or money from the meeting, leading historians to see it as unsuccessful.203 But he got something more important, knowledge. 191

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Indeed, VC activists had always been far better at raising knowledge than raising funds. The main “object” of the Philadelphia meetings “was to find out the Underground Railroad routes and stations, to ascertain the persons who were actually to be relied upon, places to stop at, means of conveyance, and especially to learn of the coloured men who could be trusted.”204 PVC members divulged all that Brown desired to know, supporting his actions even while quietly doubting their likelihood of success. Still “was especially valuable in this time, because of his knowledge” of the secret routes and helpers between Pennsylvania and the Upper South.205 Thus, not only did the VCs create the activist community Brown relied upon to plan his raid, but they also helped opened up and organize the secret routes and modes of communication into the South, which he would try to use as the basis for his slave revolution. Up to the very day of Brown’s revolt in Harpers Ferry, VC members kept busy. Still continued to help fugitives, as usual. Tubman seems to have fallen sick at this time, though other evidence suggests that she went South to spread word among the enslaved about a coming strike for freedom.206 Ross did go south “to watch the course of events and to enlighten the slaves as to his [Brown’s] purposes.”207 He spoke with Black workers, but most seemed more interested in escaping north than in joining a rash, adventurist revolution. Douglass lectured confidently in Philadelphia.208 William Henry Johnson—young, rebellious, and brash—organized a military parade of Black men in Philadelphia, just as Brown trekked to Virginia. Brown himself had beforehand told him to cancel the planned parade so as not to raise suspicions. Johnson ignored him and went ahead, perhaps overconfident in the success of a coming revolt, possibly angry that Brown rebuked his desire to fight in Virginia.209 Thus, VC members went about their usual business of agitation. Yet tensions were high. Douglass, publicly confident, privately awaited the course of events with much trepidation. For Gerrit Smith, the anxiety and tension of these times pushed him to the verge of nervous collapse. After the failure of Brown’s revolt and the subsequent suspicion and suppression, VC cadres remained mobilized and alert. Many of those implicated in the revolutionary plot needed shelter and protection from the counterrevolutionary state. John Brown Jr. hid at the home of William Bowditch (BVC).210 Thomas W. Henry, a free Black preacher from Virginia who had ties with the PVC via the AME church, fled to Philadelphia after planters accused him of collaborating with Brown.211 Francis Jackson Meriam, who had accompanied Brown, managed to escape arrest and arrived at William Still’s home “a tired, 192

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footsore, famished, powder begrimed fugitive.”212 Still sent him on to the BVC. Francis Jackson urged those helping his grandson to avoid Boston and tell him to “go out of the country for present.”213 The BVC put Meriam in the hands of Thoreau, who took him by wagon to Canada.214 Similarly, “Captain Osborne Anderson, who had been in the hottest of the battle at the Ferry,” came to Still for protection. J. Miller McKim washed him up, gave him a new suit, and purchased train tickets to Canada. Anderson “passed safely over the border via the Underground Railroad.”215 Even northern VC members with ties to Brown had to turn fugitive. Douglass, who had been lecturing in Philadelphia, fled via the Underground Railroad to Rochester, where he destroyed his papers, and then on to Canada. Still sent anxious correspondence to Rochester activists—carried by friends, not by post, “lest it might be intercepted”—to know if Douglass had evaded arrest.216 Johnson also fled Philadelphia during this time.217 Stearns and Howe, members of the Secret Six, like many of the runaways they had helped, fled to Canada.218 Slowly dying of tuberculosis, Theodore Parker had retreated to the warm climate of Italy to live out his last days. Almost immediately after the Chatham convention, Martin Delany set out on a yearlong trip to explore Liberia and the Abeokuta regions of present-day Nigeria.219 Still, who had been directly implicated in the Brown plot (a note mentioning his name had been found on one of Brown’s captured comrades), likely contemplated flight himself but did not do so—too many raiders, VC comrades, and runaways were coming to his door in desperate need. Other committee members also had to defend themselves from the mobs of white supremacy and national chauvinism, enraged at this final abolitionist effort to unite the enslaved and divide the nation. Mobs threatened abolitionists, disrupted meetings, cursed, and accused. When Wendell Phillips delivered his inflammatory lecture on Toussaint Louverture in Philadelphia right after John Brown’s Raid, a mob tried to halt the proceedings.220 In these sorts of situations, Tubman took direct action. At a public meeting commemorating Brown in Boston, disrupted by a violent crowd, Tubman “was one of the women who escorted the speakers from the hall in order to prevent attempts to mob them.”221 In New York, the Democratic Vigilance Association, a proslavery, pro-Union vigilante group, “issued a ferocious manifesto” urging “condign punishment” upon Gerrit Smith “in connection with others supposed to be implicated in a plot to rouse the slaves.”222 The association was likely encouraged by the public knowledge that the governor of Virginia desired to have Smith 193

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“hanged on the spot.”223 Smith had an armed watch posted around his house to protect him not only from vigilantes but from the police as well. Meanwhile, amid fear and anxiety, he languished in his home, eventually to succumb to a nervous breakdown.224 VC members extended help to family members of Brown and other raiders soon to be executed. McKim organized a relief fund to “aid in defraying the expenses of JOHN BROWN and his companions, and for the relief of those connected with and dependent on these brave men.”225 A group of Haitian activists donated three hundred dollars.226 Parker wrote consoling letters to the mothers of lost raiders. He defended the cause for which John Brown’s men fought, always adding: “Slaves have a natural right to destroy their oppressors, and that it may be a duty of freeman to help them. This is only the beginning.”227 William Cooper Nell organized fundraisers for the families of “[ John] Copeland, [Lewis] Leary, and [Shields] Green,” the “colored American heroes of Harper’s ferry.” He also wrote short biographies of the three Black raiders.228 VC members paid special attention to Brown’s soon-to-be widow, Mary. They spoke with, escorted, and wrote her encouraging letters. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote to Mary, lauding her for her fortitude amid pain and for her courage to publicly defend her husband, the slandered “hero of the nineteenth century.”229 Committee members accompanied Mary on her southward journey to visit her husband. Upon learning that Brown did not want her to meet him, Mary stopped her journey in Philadelphia, staying at William Still’s home under the care of Still, Harper, McKim, and Lucretia Mott.230 Other VC workers tried to help the incarcerated insurrectionist. Brown, however, seeking heroic martyrdom, refused all help. Bronson Alcott “offered to go down to Virginia, and, if possible, open communication with Brown in prison,” yet Brown refused.231 Lydia Maria Child offered to serve as his nurse— he had been wounded during the raid. Brown refused.232 Thomas Wentworth Higginson went to Mary Brown, suggesting that she should convince her husband to allow a rescue. Brown, however, made clear, through his lawyer, that no rescue plan should be executed.233 It is not surprising that VC members made such efforts on behalf of their imprisoned brother. Abolitionists showed solidarity with their own. Many of their comrades had spent time in prison or even died there as martyrs to the cause of liberation. Abolitionists had plotted prison breaks; fugitives had escaped from prison many times. As Harper solemnly consoled Mary Brown, “from the prison comes forth a shout of triumph over that power whose ethics are robbery of the feeble and oppression 194

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of the weak.”234 The imprisonment of John Brown brought to seething boil abolitionist hatred of prisons as the torture house of the oppressed, the martyrs, and the just. Naturally, VC members fought on the public front in the protracted pamphlet war over John Brown’s historical legacy. Most asserted, in numerous pamphlets, articles, books, letters, and lectures that Brown was not a crazed fanatic but one of the great revolutionaries of world history, one of the great martyrs of universal freedom, a bringer of divine justice. Wendell Phillips lauded him as an old English revolutionary, “a regular Cromwellian dug up from two centuries.”235 Osborne Anderson situated Brown in an “unbroken chain of sentiment,” from Moses, to French Revolutionists, to Toussaint Louverture, “to the untutored Gabriel, and [to] the Denmark Veseys, Nat Turners, and Madison Washingtons.”236 Clearly, Brown was part of a universalistic revolutionary tradition. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, in public lectures, similarly praised his contribution to human civility and civilization in universalistic terms: “He [Brown] wanted pure politics. Pure religion. Civilization is versatile. The antislavery work invited all ages and sexes.”237 Harper also reveled in the universalism of Brown. In a letter to him, Harper proclaimed, “you have rocked the bloody Bastille,” the prison house of enslavement. “I would prefer slavery to go down peaceably,” she continued, “but we cannot tell what the future may bring forth. God writes national judgments upon national sins.” As early as 1856, in a poem, Harper had already made clear what she meant by “national sins” and “national judgments”: And the land that forges fetters Binds the weak and poor in chains Must in blood and tears of sorrow Wash away her guilty stains. Slavery should “go down peaceably” through human volition. But if that did not happen, God’s retribution, as had happened repeatedly in history, would be bloody and just.238 A minority of VC members criticized Brown’s violent methods, though they always made sure to praise his moral goal to overturn oppression. In public lectures, Mott stressed that she honored “John Brown the moral hero,” not “John Brown the soldier.”239 Similarly, John Albion Andrew praised the moral aims of Brown but, as a staunch Republican, opposed any “revolutionary process of emancipation.”240 William Henry Furness did not fully denounce Brown’s style 195

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of physical force but stressed in his sermons that moral force was still superior. Nonetheless, fearing mob violence, Furness delivered all his sermons armed in 1859–60.241 Charles K. Whipple (BVC), an ultra-pacifist, come-outer, and editorial assistant at the Liberator, bluntly criticized Brown, noting that his plot had been a complete “failure.”242 He further clarified that violent revolt was immoral, unlikely to succeed in America, and should not be led by whites. “The slave is able to put a stop to” slavery on their own terms, Whipple wrote, and it was the job of white reformers merely to offer “help to the slave in recovering his freedom.”243 Attuned to the fact that the enslaved overwhelmingly chose flight over insurrection, Whipple returned to the Underground Railroad as a revolutionary strategy. He urged the formation of maroon communities and the extension of the Underground Railroad.244 Nevertheless, he, like others, applauded Brown for “really feeling for those in bonds ‘as bound with them.’” Moreover, Whipple praised him as “in advance of Church and State” and also in advance of the compromising church abolitionists, political abolitionists, and the Republican Party.245 The praxis of Brown, hence, affirmed many VC members’ commitment to a full exodus from America’s backward institutions. The critiques of Brown, even among Garrisonian pacifists, were thus mild and minimal within the VCs. Moncure Conway, an ultra-pacifist, led the way in fiercely criticizing Brown, believing that his Garrisonian comrades would agree. To his surprise, “then came the voices of antislavery men in the east— even Garrison, equally the apostle of peace and of liberty, applauding Brown with such enthusiasm.”246 In fact, William Lloyd Garrison openly welcomed slave insurrection, now that moral suasion appeared off the agenda. Robert Purvis, another stalwart pacifist, also refused to criticize Brown.247 H. C. Wright took this attitude to its furthest extremes, lauding Brown as the new Christ. Moreover, he affirmed, “it is the right and duty of those enslaved fellow beings . . . to resist their enslavers and ravishers, and if need be, exterminate them.”248 Wright even said he would welcome “an army of fifty thousand direct from Africa” if they came to liberate America.249 “Rebellion, insurrection, and treason against slaveholders, and every authority and influence that sustains them, are fast coming to be expressive of our highest allegiance to God and humanity,” he concluded.250 In short, VC members, for the most part, closed ranks on the issue of John Brown and revolution. Most were firmly committed to principles of peace and to the process of revolution, but few would forsake the process for the sake of the principle. Or, as Cuban poet and romantic nationalist Jose Marti best explained the logic in his impassioned essay on Wendel Phillips, American 196

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abolitionists “would hear of no peace except on immediate and extreme terms.”251 When peace was not possible, abolitionists would take the less perfect, though no less extreme, path. Even while ferociously defending Brown from the pulpit, press, and state that slandered his motivations and means, VC members did not dull their own debates on means. They invigorated those debates over violent versus nonviolent strategies. Committee members, particularly Phillips, McKim, and Garrison, provoked debate within the “pacifist” AASS. They made speeches and passed resolutions showing solidarity with Brown, while hardly rebuking the means he employed.252 The pacifist abolitionist and utopian socialist Adin Ballou publicly denounced these VC leaders for converting the “conscientious, peaceable” abolitionist movement into a “revolutionary movement with which our religion will allow us to have nothing to do.” “At first,” he continued, “the [American Anti-Slavery] Society restricted itself from all action that was unpeaceful, insurrectionary, and unconstitutional. Now it is avowedly a revolutionary organization seeking to overthrow the Federal Union and Government, as a necessary means of abolishing slavery.” Deeply frustrated, Ballou sardonically suggested that the society should just “pass resolutions recommending the formation of revolutionary vigilance committees, military companies, etc.,” and purge all the principled pacifists. The response of VC members, especially McKim—who had led the AASS from its founding—was quite simple. The AASS, they argued, was always revolutionary. It had been built upon the principle of “NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS” and their northern collaborators. That principle always implied “A UNION WITH SLAVES!” that is, “to take sides with the slave in all his efforts, whether by flight or insurrection, to free himself from the Hell and horrors of American slavery, as sustained by American Christians and republicans.” The praxis of abolition was thus governed by the doctrine “PEACABLY IF WE CAN, FORCIBLY IF WE MUST.”253 Within the BVC, Theodore Parker debated Francis Jackson on the question of John Brown’s use of violence. Jackson had been, perhaps, the purest pacifist among VC leaders and had been deeply disturbed by his grandson’s decision to join Brown. Moreover, Jackson, like Parker terminally ill, was dismayed to see the peaceful revolution he had devoted his life to bring about descend into a violent one. So he denounced Brown in correspondence with Parker. From Italy, Parker, in his final outburst of intellectual fervor, defended the principle of violent revolution in a series of letters. He invoked natural law to justify the right of the enslaved to revolution: “A man held against his will as a slave has a 197

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natural right to kill everyone who seeks to prevent his enjoyment of liberty.” Freemen, in turn, possess the “natural right to help the slaves recover their liberty, and in in that enterprise to do for them all which they have a right to do for themselves.” Unfortunately, Parker—and this separated him from most other VC members—also invoked racism to justify Brown’s course of action. “The negroes will take their defense into their own hands,” he wrote, adding, only “if they can find white men to lead them.”254 The private polemics between the two men were fierce but comradely. Jackson, noting the urgency of Parker’s pen and perhaps recognizing that Parker’s position would win the day, had his comrade’s letters published as a pamphlet.255 Even up to the approach of death, the two veteran activists debated hotly and encouraged each other to keep on fighting, to bear “the burthen in the heat of the day.”256 VC members made John Brown into a myth. They led the pamphlet war to defend him from calumny, creating the legend of the living Brown as messenger of God’s revolution. In death, they created the myth of Brown’s moldering, martyred body as the symbol of that revolution.257 Emerson likened Brown to Christ, a trope that other apologists also employed.258 Sidney Howard Gay received a letter from a Haitian group, “actionnaires du Progres,” notifying him of a John Brown memorial ceremony in Port-au-Prince.259 McKim, Mary Brown, Higginson, Phillips, and others helped coordinate the procession of John Brown’s body from Harpers Ferry to its final resting place in Elba, New York, stopping in many towns and cities, including Philadelphia and New York. They stood guard over the body, organized meetings, and held funeral services.260 They made the body of John Brown a public spectacle, a fearful truth, the material for a later song of war. Thoreau said of this long funeral procession: “What a transit was that of this horizontal body alone, but just cut down from the gallows tree! We read that at such a time it passed through Philadelphia, and by Saturday had reached New York. Thus, like a meteor it shot through the union from the southern regions towards the north! . . . He [ John Brown] has earned immortality. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.”261 While his body was rotting in a North Elba grave, Brown’s truth kept shining on. VCs and fugitives played a fundamental role in making abolitionism a movement revolutionary first in its ideas, then in its deeds. Abolitionism, John Rock (BVC) noted, was a natural progression from the “moral insurrection of thought,” led by Garrison, to John Brown, the “insurrectionist of the sword.”262 198

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He placed particular stress on the continuities of the “insurrectionist” spirit. “Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of Arms,” concurred Wendell Phillips, in his lecture on Harpers Ferry.263 James Redpath explained the concreteness of this progression through historical examples. John Ball, the preacher, preceded the peasant rebels of 1381, he noted; the “encyclopedists . . . prepared the way for the French Revolution.” Garrisonian moral suasion paved the way for VC-led physical force. Insurrections of mind, meditation on the meaning of revolution, matured into attempted actions. “Revolutions never go backwards,” Redpath deduced.264 Nor did abolitionists go backward. But northern abolitionists at first did not possess all the experience and ideas needed to progress from moral revolt to physical revolt—they learned them. These were not to be learned from Anglo-Saxon traditions of “liberty,” Phillips vehemently asserted, alluding to Haiti: “We [Anglo-Saxons] were serfs for three centuries and we waited till commerce and Christianity and a different law melted our fetters. We were crowded down into a villanage [sic] which crushed out our manhood so thoroughly that we had not vigor enough left to redeem ourselves. . . . Blue-eyed, haughty, contemptuous Anglo-Saxons, it was the black—the only race in the record of history that ever, after a century of oppression, retained the vigor to write the charter of its emancipation with its own hand.”265 It was obvious that enslaved people would have to be the guides of any possible revolutionary abolitionism. As Redpath wrote of the North American context: “The negroes and the southrons have taught us. The slaves of the Dismal Swamp, the maroons of Florida . . . have pointed out the method.”266 The methods they pointed out culminated in many imagined overturnings and a failed insurrection plot, but it had all begun with the act of running away.

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MARCHING ONWARD History of course offers us much more data . . . and much more difficulty. For the very movements that could provide us with insights are those movements not traditionally taught in the schools or made available without glamorized distortions by show business: the movement against the slave trade, the abolitionist movement, the feminist movement, the labor movement. But even our skimpy knowledge of these phenomena shows us something: the need for unified effort and the value of a vision of a society better than the existing one. —Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman The vigilance committees achieved a great deal in their time, causing a lot of ruckus while making ever more visible the profound fissures in American society. VC workers engaged in all sorts of radicalism and imaginative work, from women’s rights to transcendentalism, for they saw truly the need to fight on multiple fronts, against “all oppressions under the sun,” while enriching further the human imagination through novel, music, and rhyme. Some members went so far as to critique the United States as an empire that needed to be thrown down. vigilance activists did all these things, knowing them to be related to their most important task, fugitive aid. Beyond writing, radicalism, and prophecy, VC members did things more eminently practical. They organized the Underground Railroad, helped thousands liberate themselves, and defended others from reenslavement. They recruited runaways into their movement and encouraged them as writers. And they transformed antislavery societies into organizations committed to fugitive aid. The antislavery vanguard they helped create was a motley front of devoted activists—middle class and working class, women and men, slave and free, white and Black. Though never becoming a mass movement, the tight alliance between fugitive abolitionism, fugitive aid, and concerted public agitation drove fear and anger into the hard hearts of 200

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the oppressors. Southern anxieties, exacerbated over many years, made for a fire-breathing slave power that sought survival through expansion and made necessary the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.1 “It was the fugitive slave law that began the war,” declared Moncure Conway (BVC).2 The law unintentionally kindled white northern fear of an aggressive, expansionist, despotic slave power. Just as importantly, it radicalized abolitionist vigilance networks. VC members and fugitives resisted the law with increasing persistence. They speculated on the possibilities for antislavery revolution and tried pushing such speculations into reality by assisting John Brown in his adventurist plans. In doing so, they made Brown into martyr and myth. “On either side of the grave of a largely imaginary John Brown,” continued Conway, “wrathful northerners and panic-stricken southerners were speedily drawn up into hostile camps.”3 Southern fears of slave insurrectionists since the Haitian Revolution, fugitives, and “fanatical” abolitionists since the 1830s were among the causes of the breakup of the Union. Brown wanted to make the South “free soil” in 1859. Abraham Lincoln, elected US president in 1860, wanted to make western territory “free soil.” Together, the visions of the two men, and the differing human impetus behind them, had made the slave power’s unilateral declaration of independence inevitable. MARCHIN G THE STRUGGLE ONWARD With the outbreak of civil war in 1861, VC members still followed the footsteps of fugitives and continued in their revolutionary work. Amid the chaos of war, enslaved people deserted their workplaces like never before, a virtual “general strike,” as W. E. B. Du Bois notoriously named it.4 Vigilance workers helped out in this great exodus. John Albion Andrew, onetime member of the Boston Vigilance Committee but now governor of Massachusetts, wrote angry rebukes to the War Department for ordering Union troops to return runaways to their owners. In 1861, Andrew’s own military appointee, Major General Benjamin Butler, allowed runaways to work for the Union as “contrabands” of war. The new policy encouraged thousands to desert plantations for Union lines.5 All through the 1850s, Conway (the son of a Virginia slaveholder) had been helping courageous workers sneak from his father’s plantation to freedom. At the outbreak of war, Conway discovered, much to his delight, that all of his father’s workforce had deserted to Union lines. With the help of William Henry Channing (BVC), he guided the ”contraband” fugitives to safety in Ohio.6 Harriet 201

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Tubman continued to assist freedom seekers in the South, only now she went deeper than ever, into the heart of South Carolina.7 Ex-slave Thomas James, who had first encouraged Frederick Douglass to speak publicly, “established a day school and a Sunday school” for “contrabands” amassed in Louisville, Kentucky.8 Thomas Sims, after the BVC had failed to rescue him in 1851, had spent the entirety of the 1850s being sold from owner to owner until winding up in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He maintained secret communications via mail with BVC members, hoping they could purchase his freedom, as they had done for Anthony Burns. But when the Siege of Vicksburg began in 1863, Sims took matters into his own hands once again, fleeing to Union lines.9 In 1862, Harriet Jacobs went down to Virginia to teach and care for hundreds of “contrabands” who had struck for freedom.10 In Pennsylvania, William Still resigned from the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee to pursue other business opportunities. He still helped fugitives, but he now headed an “office for obtaining employment for coloured persons.” In that capacity, Still found work and livelihoods for “contraband” runaways who streamed into Philadelphia during the war.11 Some VC members continued to imagine a revolutionary death to slavery, though it eventually ended in unforeseen ways. Joshua Coffin observed that enslaved people throughout the Atlantic World had a long insurrectionary tradition, which they would activate if the opportunity arose. Robert Purvis hoped for “a conflict like that between the anti-slavery missionaries and proslavery planters of Jamaica,” that is, a conflict that could precipitate both slave insurrection and abolitionist sympathy. Elizur Wright studied the Haitian Revolution as a model. He believed that a mass slave revolt would force the US government to proclaim universal emancipation as the Jacobins had done in 1793–94.12 Early in the war, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, now a Union officer, also hoped for a wartime “insurrection” to put an end to the slavery question once and for all. Instead, he saw that the enslaved patiently observed the conflict between whites of the North and whites of the South, seizing their best opportunities for freedom. He noticed how the enslaved, by mass flight to Union lines, forced the North to recognize their right to freedom over their masters’ right to property. Eventually, flight, wartime necessity, and pressure from abolitionists combined to make emancipation inevitable.13 As Higginson rightly assessed, enslaved workers, instead of precipitating a quixotic revolt, which North and South would unite in suppressing, they patiently “waited till the course of events should open a better way. When it came, they accepted it.”14 Emancipation, or at least the intention of it, finally came as a wartime measure in 1863. With the 202

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Emancipation Proclamation, as one PVC member declared in 1864, “an end is put, by a stroke of the pen to the Underground Railroad.” It “virtually disbanded our vigilance committees.”15 Many VC members had come to believe that emancipation would be wrought by mass slave revolution. Ironically, it came, in part, through mass slave desertion—the very thing the committees had been abetting for almost thirty years.16 After the disbanding of the VCs, a number of former members put their energies into recruiting Black soldiers. Once allowed to serve, these men became the vanguard of what, by 1863, had finally become a war for the extermination of slavery.17 Fugitive Lewis Hayden (BVC), who worked during the war as a janitor in the Massachusetts statehouse, first “suggested to Governor Andrew to organize a colored regiment of Massachusetts volunteers.” Andrew took Hayden’s proposal seriously and pressed the War Department to allow the creation of “colored” regiments. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the government acceded to Andrew’s demand (one that others, like Douglass, had long made), leading to the formation of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry.18 Hayden recruited troops for that famed and feared regiment, as did BVC activists Robert Morris, Leonard Grimes, and Mark De Mortie, who himself joined its ranks.19 John Rock, a militant Black Garrisonian who rightly believed that the Republican Party used Black people “to advance its interests,” nevertheless recruited for the 54th.20 Stephen Myers “enlisted the 1st company of colored men from Albany.” Since the governor of New York refused to accept them, “they went to the front as part of the 54 Mass. Regiment.”21 Other VC members did similar work. Mary Ann Shadd Cary recruited Black soldiers, unable to be one herself.22 George Luther Stearns, formerly one of the Secret Six, as early as October 1861, urged fellow BVC activists to form a committee to advocate for the mass recruitment of Black soldiers and emancipationist war policies.23 He later recruited Black soldiers in Massachusetts, for the 54th, as well as throughout the North and in Canada. In 1864, Stearns organized regiments of recently freed people in Tennessee. Henry Highland Garnet and William Wells Brown assisted him.24 Now a colonel in the Union army, Higginson helped carry the “general strike” forward, leading a regiment of South Carolina runaways.25 As he later explained it, because of “years of intimate acquaintance with fugitive slaves in Massachusetts, . . . it never occurred to me to doubt that they would fight like any other men for their liberty, and so it proved.”26 The work of mobilizing Black soldiers, fugitive and freeborn, was thus seen as a kind of work born in the pedagogy of the VCs. 203

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Fugitive-abolitionists previously associated with the committees now helped in the war effort. Tubman, as is well known, recruited fugitive soldiers and worked as a Union spy.27 Kit Nickless, helped by the PVC, served in a South Carolina regiment of fugitives and freedmen. Another runaway, once rescued at the Boston wharf by Austin Bearse and protected from police by Hayden, later “joined a colored regiment, went south, and was killed in battle.” He had risked his life to free himself and had now died to free others.28 Abraham Galloway, a North Carolina fugitive-abolitionist helped by the PVC who also worked with the Boston Anti-Man Hunting League, returned to his home state to fight as a soldier. Like Tubman, he served as a Union spy, recruited fugitive “contrabands” to fight, and became a highly respected political leader among the thousands of runaways congregated in New Bern, North Carolina.29 After the war, former members of the VCs made significant contributions to Radical Reconstruction in the North and the South. They fought northern racism in public transit, in polling places, and in public life.30 In the South, they advocated free public education and full suffrage. The less anti-institutional among them worked within the apparatus of the Republican Party, using it now as a means to deepen the emancipation that had finally come about. Samuel Gridley Howe helped lead, alongside Robert Dale Owen, the Freedmen’s Enquiry Commission, established to facilitate the South’s transition from a slave society to a free society. In this capacity, Howe interviewed fugitives, to demonstrate their abilities to live as free people, and recommended free education and full suffrage.31 The idea to establish this commission had come from J. Miller McKim, who himself shared his extensive knowledge on West Indian emancipation and on the freedmen in South Carolina.32 The commission evolved by 1865 into the Freedmen’s Bureau, which used state power to implement some of the radical reforms that abolitionists, like Howe, had so long demanded.33 Black VC associates seized their chance to take real political power in the brightest period of interracial democracy seen in America. In 1873, Hayden won a seat in the Massachusetts legislature.34 William Henry Johnson (PVC) became a prominent Republican state committee member as well as “master workman” in the Knights of Labor. He helped organize a civil rights committee in New York, and he himself drafted much of what became that state’s 1873 Civil Rights Act.35 Fugitive John Henry Hill, who had once told Still the world must be “turned upside down,” returned from Canada to Petersburg, Virginia, and became a justice of the peace.36 After the war, Abraham Galloway, a former fugitive, ran for and won a seat in the North Carolina Senate in 1868. 204

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As senator, he voted for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, passed legislation guaranteeing ex-slaves the right to land, and supported a bill to form armed militias to combat Ku Klux Klan terrorism. Galloway also introduced two bills, both of which failed to pass, allowing full suffrage for women, white and Black.37 In the creative moment of Reconstruction, Galloway tried to make the revolutionary abolitionism nurtured by the VCs into a political program for Black self-determination. Former VC members planted abolitionist pedagogy in the newly liberated slave states. “After the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet,” W. E. B. Du Bois memorably wrote.38 They, like other abolitionists, flooded southward to teach freed people and to make real the dream of free education, which had never existed in the South. McKim promoted the education and uplift of freedmen as a leader of the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association.39 Lydia Maria Child edited a schoolbook for freedpeople to use as they tried to educate themselves. The volume contained short, accessible essays on such subjects as “Ethiopia,” “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” “Emancipation in the West Indies,” and the “Day of Jubilee,” composed by activists like Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.40 Harper herself taught in the South. But she also listened to what freedpeople had to teach, just as she had done during her days helping the PVC. She wrote down what ex-slaves, particularly freedwomen, said about the challenges of freedom and their desires to learn in her poetry collection Sketches of Southern Life (1872).41 Graceanna Lewis had collected and mended so many pieces of “cast off clothing,” intended for fugitives, that “there was enough left unused to send South to the schools of Freedmen.”42 Runaways who had been self-educated or educated through antislavery activism also did sustained work on the teaching front. Jacobs taught in Virginia. Jermain Loguen and Thomas James (BVC) went to Tennessee to preach and teach.43 At the behest of Leonard Grimes, Peter Randolph (BVC) went to Virginia, whence he had escaped. Randolph preached, taught, and worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau. He led protest meetings and demanded money, education, land, and political power for ex-slaves, “so that we could run our own railroads and steamboats.”44 Having learned from and educated freedom seekers for many years, veterans of the VCs were the ideal helpers and guides to freedpeople in search of knowledge. As they had before the Civil War, VC members took seriously the need for land reform as reparationist policy. In a remarkable correspondence with Lewis and Harriet Hayden, former fugitive Lewis Clarke argued that extensive 205

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land redistribution would be the only means of recompense for “what has been done to us for 200 years.”45 Edmund Quincy made similar demands, as did others like Howe, Elizur Wright, James McCune Smith, and Peter Randolph, knowing well that they who controlled land controlled laborers as well.46 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toured throughout the Deep South, from 1867 to 1869, delivering lectures on “Literacy, Land, and Liberation” to freedpeople. William and Ellen Craft returned to the United States in 1868 and, with money raised largely in Ireland and Britain, bought 1,800 acres of Georgia land. There they set up an educational cooperative to teach freedmen and freedwomen farming and letters free of charge.47 Well before the Civil War, VC activists had worked to procure employment, land, and education for fugitives; in the wake of the war, they merely continued these longtime efforts. Many former VC activists thus comprehended the necessity of land ownership. It meant reparations for centuries of unpaid labor; it meant independence. In addition, it was a means for a substantial emancipation. As Higginson knew, land redistribution “is an essential part of abolition. To give these people only freedom without the land is to give them only the mocking of freedom which the English or Irish peasant has.”48 The reference to the “Irish peasant” makes clear that some abolitionists knew that, without land, freedpeople might remain in a condition similar to colonized people. In fact, later Black radicals, like Stokely Carmichael, pointed to their dispossession of land to prove that they were, in fact, in a “colonial situation.”49 MARCHIN G THE TRU TH ONWARD The optimism and jubilation that animated the ranks of abolitionists did not last long. Slaves had been freed and had achieved rights, knowledge, and in some places even power, but the tide of reaction flooded swiftly upon them. White vigilantism ravaged the South. Racism still prevailed in the North, making clear to abolitionists that it would long outlast slavery.50 The program of Reconstruction became unpopular among white voters nationwide, just as radical abolition had been unpopular before it. By 1877, the Republican Party pulled out from its all-too-short experiment with Reconstruction. The white ruling classes of the North and the South reconciled, reviving and entrenching white supremacy, thus ensuring America’s rise to imperial prominence under the rule of capital.51 The realities of abolitionist democracy came to an end; antislavery prophecies were banished again to the wilderness. “The discipline of the plantation has been 206

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exchanged for the penalties of prisons and chain-gangs,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper observed.52 The “prison house” of bondage reincarnated in the bondage of the prison. Peter Randolph bitterly lamented the tragic defeat of Black self-determination: “Instead of forty acres and a mule, they [freedmen] had to return to their former masters, barefooted and hat in hand, and ask permission to work for victuals and clothes. When this part of the freedmen’s condition is considered rightly, there will be an opportunity for regrets and tears of repentance.”53 But there was no repentance. The radical vectors of abolitionism had been beaten back, coming to be viewed scornfully by America’s rulers and those who followed them. By the late 1870s, instead of receiving congratulations, aging VC members faced the swelling condescension of their contemporaries and the looming condescension of posterity.54 Abolitionists had not only made their own history, but they had also written and archived their own history. After Reconstruction, the history they had made faced distortion by a new postwar narrative of “reconciliation.” Slavery, the story went, had been a benign, bucolic “way of life” on the decline. Southerners fought to preserve their “agrarian” lifestyle from industrial civilization; northerners only sought to “preserve” the grand Union bequeathed by the Founding Fathers. Thus, both sides fought to preserve noble values, though the war itself should have been avoided. Abolitionists and fugitives—irrational, pathological, emotional agitators all—had needlessly provoked an avoidable civil war. This narrative began to develop immediately after the overthrow of Reconstruction and had become entrenched by the dawn of the twentieth century.55 VC activists, now in their twilight years, fought a war of words against this falsification of history in reminiscences and histories. Henry Bowditch, Moncure Conway, William Henry Johnson, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, among many others, wrote memoirs of their lives. William Wells Brown, Samuel J. May, and the sons of William Lloyd Garrison wrote monumental histories of their movement, placing abolitionism at the center of American life and making the Civil War a grand struggle over slavery. When Alexander Milton Ross sent Garrison his memoir, which, among other things, detailed many adventures “enabling slaves to escape,” Garrison encouraged him to “send a copy to the librarians of Cornell University.” The school had received from the aging agitator Samuel J. May a “large collection of antislavery books, pamphlets, tracts, journals, &c,” donated for the use of “future historians of the great struggle.” Before he died in 1860, Theodore Parker bequeathed his entire library to the Boston Public Library. In addition to manuscripts and over 12,000 volumes, the 207

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library included “a large collection of books and pamphlets bearing on American slavery.” Parker had originally desired to donate his most prized possessions to Harvard University but then decided that his books and pamphlets served the people better in a public library than an academic enclosure.56 To fight the battle over history, abolitionists had to write their own history and, when possible, craft their own archives. Many of the old abolition army, even those not involved in VCs, engaged in this act of historical recovery. But VC activists did more.57 They wrote fugitives and the Underground Railroad into the history of abolitionism and did not always obscure the role of northern Black abolitionists. Higginson stressed in his postwar writings that he and others received their political education from fugitives.58 Austin Bearse, the sailor who had rescued fugitives from the Boston wharf, wrote a history of the BVC, focusing on the daring escapes and rescues enacted by him and his fellow maritime workers.59 His abolitionism was not simply one of middle-class reformers. When late-nineteenth-century historians, a generation removed from the antislavery struggle, wrote of the Underground Railroad, VC activists gave interviews, advice, and sometimes even edited their work. Higginson, for instance, instructed the eccentric vegetarian-pacifisttheosophist Henry Salt on the workings of the Underground Railroad in Concord. His expert testimony went straight into Salt’s anarchistic biography of Thoreau, a wonderful book whose influence on such figures as the libertarian socialist Edward Carpenter and the anticolonial mass leader Mohandas K. Gandhi is well known.60 Wells Brown placed radical, interracial abolitionism within the sweep of global African history. Just as Ethiopia and Egypt had once brought culture to the barbaric Greeks, so abolitionists, particularly Black abolitionists, brought genuine notions freedom and equality to racist, oligarchic America.61 In short, in response to the silencing of their history, VC members helped invent the “romance” of the Underground Railroad, those daring stories of escape and illegal solidarity with the enslaved. The “romance” was often real. More significantly, fugitives associated with VCs kept writing slave narratives after Reconstruction, giving second life to the genre. Isaac Williams, Thomas James, George Teamoh, James Williams, and James L. Smith, just to name a few, wrote postemancipation autobiographies. In part, the new narratives were a revival of fugitive “sociology” in a period when many desired to forget slavery as it really was. When an elderly Peter Randolph published his autobiography in 1893, he added as an appendix his systematic 1855 study, Sketches of Slave Life, which he had written while working with the BVC.62 In other cases, 208

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self-liberated authors merely desired to write themselves into the history of the illegal activism they, by necessity, had long kept secret. In his last autobiography (1881), Frederick Douglass finally divulged his escape methods and VC associations, knowledge he refused to put into slaveholders’ hands while slavery existed. As he clarified in an 1893 letter, “my connection with the Underground Railroad began long before I left the South and was continued whether I lived in New Bedford, Lynn, or Rochester.”63 Thus, in the twilight of his life, Douglass identified the Underground Railroad as his first and most sustained form of activism.64 Others, more modest, left little record of their extraordinary lives. John Jones had escaped Virginia in 1844; settled in Elmira, New York; helped his brothers escape; and then helped hundreds of others flee as head of the Elmira VC. In 1888, Mark Twain interviewed Jones about his life. Supposedly, “Twain was so touched . . . that he took no notes and was unwilling to make any use of it because he said it should only be told in Mr. Jones’ own language.” Aging and in poor health, Jones never had the opportunity to write his story, though in 1896, he did briefly narrate his activist life, in correspondence with historian Wilbur Siebert, the first academic historian of the Underground Railroad.65 None did more for the movement of historical reconstruction than William Still. In 1871, as one of the final acts at the final meeting of the Pennsylvania AntiSlavery Society, its members resolved that Still should “publish his personal reminiscences and experiences of the Underground Railroad.”66 He assented to this great labor, realizing that “there is not a man on this continent, I believe, who has the narratives, letters, and facts for a book as I have.”67 Still toiled and troubled at his study, often more than twelve hours a day, for an entire year. He laboriously transcribed the PVC records, as well as his correspondence, alongside his own commentaries. He penned short biographies of twenty-five abolitionists who had assisted him in the work of the PVC. His eight-hundred-page book, The Underground Railroad (1872), was unlike any postwar history or memoir of abolitionism.68 Still captured the diversity and versatility of the antislavery vanguard. His biographies show that many prominent “radical” abolitionists were also “practical” abolitionists. Still emphasized the role of women and Black activists in the Underground Railroad and in the public antislavery movement. He stressed the importance of Black women, as fugitives, as public agitators, and as Underground Railroad “conductors.” He even criticized fellow abolitionists for not including “the labors of any eminent colored woman” in their “written work portraying the Anti-Slavery struggle.”69 Moreover, Still wrote about the obscure labors of sailors, dockworkers, hotel waiters, and free Black people in 209

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the South who secretly aided fugitives, sometimes worked for VCs, but who never formally participated in the public antislavery movement. Most importantly, Still documented the stories of over nine hundred fugitive slaves he had assisted. The “grand little army of abolitionists,” he observed, waged a necessary, “untiring warfare” in public, but “the pulse of four million slaves and their desire for freedom” was the true motive force behind radical abolition.70 Still had reconstructed the history of the Underground Railroad, but it was a history some white Americans either did not want to know or desired to forget. His book opens with the resolution of the PASS, charging him to write the history. For Still, the book was not a popular romance written by a creative artist; it was a duty, his final act for the movement. The book portrays the abolitionist vanguard as a righteous “little army,” not a mass movement. It shows fugitives as the mass base of abolitionism. It lays out the complicity of “Church and State” in upholding slavery, and, as Garrison said of the volume, “it illustrates the subservience of the Nation to the Slave Power.”71 Though Still reservedly supported the Republicans during and after the war, in his account, slaves and abolitionists receive all the credit for fighting the nation’s greatest sin. The book is dense with documentary history, often difficult to read, and was thus likely only read by those who shared its central assumptions from the beginning. Moreover, Still’s writing was an act of Reconstruction, the political movement that had become increasingly unpopular throughout the 1870s. Still hoped that freedmen and freedwomen would read the book in order to relocate family and friends who had fled decades earlier. He also hoped to prove to the public that African Americans had long been fighting for their own freedom, had long lived industriously as free people in Canada, and would become capable citizens in a reconstructed South. Until the end of his life, Still vigorously promoted his book, selling over 10,000 copies, mostly to fellow abolitionists and Black readers across the country.72 Although hoping for a broader readership, he called specifically upon African Americans to remember their harsh and heroic past. As Still wrote in the preface to the 1878 edition of The Underground Railroad: “These facts must never be lost sight of. The race must not forget the rock from whence they were hewn, nor the pits from whence they were digged. Like all other races, the newly emancipated people will need all the knowledge of their past which they can get. The bondage and deliverance of the children of Israel will never be allowed to sink into oblivion while the world stands.”73 By 1878, the true significance of that “deliverance” would surely have sunk into “oblivion” were it not for the work of Still and other abolitionists as historians. 210

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As historians, abolitionists made their scorned tradition readily available to future generations so they could carry on the unfinished battles against white supremacy, prisons, patriarchy, colonialism and the rising tide of global imperialism. “History showed,” wrote an aging Higginson in the 1890s, “that imperialism, being tyrannical and against freedom, had always worked to destroy itself.”74 Certainly, the imperialism of the slave power had destroyed itself through visions of grandeur and aggression mixed with fascistic fear of abolition. In his 1916 critical portrait of the United States, Indian anticolonial nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai wrote about abolitionism and the Underground Railroad, even giving extensive quotations from Still’s 1872 documentary history. He described Still’s book glowingly as “a full and comprehensive history of this movement. . . . It narrates in the words of the fugitives themselves, the difficulties, sufferings, fears of runaway slaves, and of the various devices which they used to escape from bondage to freedom.” “The history of the emancipation of the Negro,” Rai concluded, “is of abiding interest to my countrymen.” Abolitionist history writing was originally movement literature, and it remained so. Wobblies, Black Power activists, and Black Feminists all relied upon these works in their search for grounding, inspiration, and historical knowledge. Pan-Africanists of many nationalities looked to such histories for one of the many roots of their own movement. The Kenya-based, Guyana-born anticolonial activist Ras Makonnen (1909–83), for instance, saw heroic precursors to Pan-Africanism in “all those slaves who had use of the Underground Railway escape route from the slave states, many of whom were fed up and were prepared to resort to armed combat.” Abolitionist history writing remained literature of the captive and the oppressed. Prison activists, from the 1950s to the present, studied the Underground Railroad vigorously and have praised such militant abolitionists as William Parker, Lewis Hayden, Harriet Tubman, and William Still as the precursors to their own movement to abolish the third American slavery, the slavery of the prison.75 Abolition history, like its protest literature, was methodical, not propagandistic. Without it, W. E. B. Du Bois, banned from the archives for his skin color, could never have written John Brown or Black Reconstruction. Indeed, he, like so many other radical historians, mobilized abolitionist sources as truthful accounts, a counterforce to racist social science—the “propaganda of history,” as Du Bois called it.76 Abolitionists, thank heavens, knew what they were doing in writing down their radical tradition. As William Lloyd Garrison (BVC) wrote in an 1873 letter to Edmund Quincy (BVC): “The millennial state, if it ever come on earth, is yet 211

THE M OST ABSOLU TE ABOLITION

in the far distant future. There are innumerable battles yet to be fought for the right, many wrongs to be redressed, many evil customs abolished, many usurpations overthrown, many deliverances wrought; and those who shall hereafter go forth to defend the righteous cause, no matter at what cost or with what disparity of numbers, cannot fail to derive strength and inspiration from an intelligent acquaintance with the means and methods used in the Anti-Slavery movement.”77 The future “millennial state” feels ever farther away, while the era of abolitionism recedes further and further into the past. Still, in the “battles yet to be fought,” the abolitionist tradition has offered us one inspirational guide for the long path from here to there.

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NOTES ABBREVIATIONS AC CLBC EWP FHL GSP HSP HU LGC MASR MHS PASP

Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library Charles L. Blockson Collection, Temple University, Philadelphia Elizur Wright Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Moorland Springarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC Leon Gardiner Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Records, New-York Historical Society Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PFP Post Family Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections, River Campus Libraries, Rochester University, Rochester, NY SCRBC Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York SHGP-CU Sidney Howard Gay Papers, Columbia University, New York SHGP-NYPL Sidney Howard Gay Papers, New York Public Library TPP Theodore Parker Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston WHSC Wilbur H. Siebert Collection, Ohio History Connection, Columbus WPP Wendell Phillips Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

IN TRODUCTION 1. William Still, The Underground Railroad: Authentic Narratives and First-Hand Accounts, ed. Ian Frederick Finseth (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2012), 205; James P. Boyd, “William Still: His Life and Work to This Time,” in Still’s Underground Rail Road Records . . . , rev. ed., comp. William Still (Philadelphia: William Still, 1886), xviii. 2. Still, Underground Railroad, 205; William Still, “Journal C,” PASP, 151; Isaac D. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow of Slave Life (East Saginaw, MI: Evening News Printing and Binding House, 1883), 29, 44. 3. Benjamin Drew, The Refugee; or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada Related by Themselves (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856), 54–67. 4. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 74–75, 77.

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N OTES TO PAGES 3–5 5. Ibid., 36. 6. Ibid. 7. Richard M. Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); David Grimstead, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Matthew Karp, “The People’s Revolution of 1856: Antislavery Populism, National Politics, and the Emergence of the Republican Party,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9, no. 4 (2019): 524–45. 8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003); Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life as Told by His Children, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 77. 9. Gary Collison, “The Boston Vigilance Committee: A Reconsideration,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 12 ( June 1984): 104–16; Dean Grodzins, “Constitution or No Constitution, Law or No Law: The Boston Vigilance Committee, 1841–1861,” in Massachusetts and the Civil War, ed. Matthew Mason, Katheryn P. Veins, and Conrad E. Wright (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 47–73. 10. Margaret Hope Bacon, But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012); Richard Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Jean Yellin Fagan, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Carol M. Hunter, To Set the Captives Free: Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen and the Struggle for Freedom in Central New York, 1835–1872 (New York: Garland, 1993); David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018); Christopher L. Webber, American to the Backbone: The Life of James W. C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists (New York: Pegasus, 2015); Jeffrey Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Box Brown (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2003); Kate Clifford Larson, Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Random House, 2004); Elizabeth Varon, ‘“Beautiful Providences’: William Still, the Vigilance Committee, and Abolitionists in the Age of Sectionalism,” in Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love, ed. Richard Newman and James Mueller (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 229–45. 11. Graham Russel Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: Norton, 2015). 12. Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 15. 13. Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961); David Blight, ed., Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory (New York: Harper Collins, 2004); Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad (New York: Harper Collins, 2005). 14. Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 421–61; Henrietta Buckmaster, Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolitionist Movement (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941); Merton Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana

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N OTES TO PAGES 6–9 State University Press, 1990); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1998); C. L. R. James, American Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harvest, 1981). 15. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 75. 16. Sinha, Slave’s Cause; Graham Russel Hodges, “Black Self-Emancipation, Gradual Emancipation, and the Underground Railroad in the Northern Colonies and States, 1763–1804,” in Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America, ed. Damian Alan Pargas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018), 21–34; Richard Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 17. Liberator, 14 October 1842. 18. For work that moves beyond “exceptional” fugitive writers, see Blackett, Captive’s Quest for Freedom. 19. Liberator, 18 November 1859. 20. Still, Underground Railroad. 21. See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Jesse Olsavsky, “The Abolitionist Tradition in the Making of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Marxism and Anti-Imperialism,” Socialism and Democracy 32, no. 3 (2019): 14–35. 22. Claudius Fergus, Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and Abolition in the British West Indies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); John Lynch, Simon Bolivar: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Laurent Du Bois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Wendell Phillips, “Under the Flag,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Addresses: First Series (Boston: Lothrop, Lee, and Shephard, 1891), 411. 23. James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (London: Verso, 2014); Ira Berlin, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Carl Lawrence Paulus, The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017); Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 24. Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or Death, trans. A. Faulkner Watts (New York: Edward Blyden, 1972). 25. Sinha, Slave’s Cause; Blackett, Captive’s Quest for Freedom; Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Jonathan Daniel Wells, Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019); Richard Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); David G. Smith, On the Edge of Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Issue in South Central Pennsylvania, 1820–1870 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Freedom’s Seekers: Essays on Comparative Abolitionism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

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N OTES TO PAGES 9–16 26. Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Andrew Delbanco, The War before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (London: Penguin 2019). 27. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 81; Roediger, Seizing Freedom. 28. Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Thomas Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Angela Murphy, The Jerry Rescue: The Fugitive Slave Law, Northern Rights, and the American Sectional Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Christopher Bonner, “Runaways, Rescuers, and the Politics of Breaking the Law,” in New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, ed. Keisha Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley Farmer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 201–16; Steven Lubet, Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 29. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage, 2006). 30. K. Jackson, Force and Freedom; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 542. 31. Herbert Aptheker, “Militant Abolitionism,” in Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy: A Reader, ed. Eric Foner and Manning Marable (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 57–97. 32. Herbert Aptheker, Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston: Twayne, 1979); Sinha, Slave’s Cause. 33. Moncure Conway, Testimonies Concerning Slavery (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865), 79. 34. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 77. 35. See, especially, Marisa J. Fuentas, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Sadiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. 36. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 76. 37. Ibid., 47. 38. George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1880, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 2:60. 39. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1964), 179; Howard Zinn, “Abolitionists, Freedom Riders, and the Tactics of Agitation,” in The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists, ed. Martin Duberman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 428–31.

1. THE POLITICS AND POLITIC AL ECON OMY OF RUNNIN G AWA Y 1. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 13. 2. Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2015); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Zach Sell, Trouble in the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

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N OTES TO PAGES 16–20 3. William C. Kashatus, William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 221–78. For a brief summary of the New York records from the 1850s, see Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 190–210. 4. Detroit Tribune, 17 January 1887. 5. Liberator, 13 February 1857, 28 May 1858. 6. R. C. Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania (Lancaster, PA: John A. Hiestand, 1883), 53–58. 7. Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 10. 8. Boyd, “William Still,” (xxix. 9. Joseph A. Borome, “The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92, no. 3 (1968): 320–51; John White Browne, “Boston Committee of Vigilance: Agents’ Records, 1846–1847,” WPP; “Records of the Vigilance Committee of Boston,” AC. 10. Still, “Journal C,” PASP; Sidney Howard Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU. Gay’s “Record” is reprinted, with commentary, in Don Papson and Tom Calarco, Secret Lives of the Underground Railroad in New York City ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014). 11. Still, Underground Railroad. 12. John W. Browne to Sidney Howard Gay, 27 March 1847, SHGP-CU. 13. Liberator, 13 February 1857; Still, Underground Railroad, xx. 14. Kate R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife Vina after Forty Years of Slavery (Syracuse, NY: William T. Hamilton, 1856), 248–49. 15. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU. 16. Still, Underground Railroad, 296, 318. 17. Albany (NY) Patriot, 27 November 1844. 18. Henry Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 64. 19. Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia, Accounts, 1854–1857, HSP, 20. 20. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU; Still, Underground Railroad; Papson and Calarco, Secret Lives of the Underground Railroad in New York City, 242–46. 21. Republished in Antislavery Bugle, 6 June 1857. 22. Drew, Refugee, 43–44, 54–67, 72–77, 78–82. 23. Still, Underground Railroad, 205; Williams, Sunshine and Shadow. 24. Elizur Wright to Hiram Wilson, 21 February 1837, Hiram Wilson Papers, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. 25. Borome, “Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” 320–51; Browne, “Boston Committee of Vigilance: Agents’ Records,” WPP; Records of the Vigilance Committee of Boston, AC; Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance for the year 1842, with Interesting Facts Relative to the Proceedings (New York: G. Vale, 1842). 26. “Sketch of Jonathan Thomas,” MASR; Still, Underground Railroad, 100–101, 280–81. 27. Still, Underground Railroad, 117; Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 45. 28. Drew, Refugee, 40. See also William Craft and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft (London: William Tweedie, 1860), 83–84. 29. Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 12.

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N OTES TO PAGES 21–24 30. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 247–49. 31. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston, Harriet Jacobs: 1861), 245. 32. On the construction of Still’s book, see Julie Roy Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 61–97. 33. Still, “Journal C,” PASP, 13–22. 34. “Sketch of Jonathan Thomas,” MASR. 35. Catherine Stewart, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers Project (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Charles Perdue, Thomas Barden, and Robert Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976); George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972). 36. Still, Underground Railroad, 149. 37. Jesse Olsavsky, “Women, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Militant Abolitionism, 1835–1859,” Slavery & Abolition 39, no. 2 (3 April 2018): 357–82. 38. F. G. De Fontaine, History of American Abolitionism: Its Four Great Epochs (New York: D. Appleton, 1861), 6. 39. This chapter is based upon a quantitative database I have constructed from the following documents: Borome, “Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” 320–51; Browne, “Boston Committee of Vigilance: Agents’ Records,” WPP; “Records of the Vigilance Committee of Boston,” AC; Still, “Journal C,” PASP; Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU; Still, Underground Railroad; and Francis Jackson, Account Book of Francis Jackson, Treasurer, the Vigilance Committee of Boston (Boston: Library of the Bostonian Society, 1924). It will be cited below as Author’s Fugitive Database. Data on fugitives has been gathered on eighteen categories: 1) name; 2) year escaped; 3) age; 4) gender; 5) state escaped from; 6) city escaped from; 7) occupation; 8) family members left in slavery; 9) family members searched for in the North; 10) escape by land or water; 11) Underground Railroad “agents” who helped them; 12) group or individual escape; 13) hiding places; 14) use of weapons; 15) use of disguise or forged pass; 16) where a vigilance committee sent them; 17) involvement in antislavery movement; and 18) reasons for flight. 40. African Repository, 1 September 1843. 41. Author’s Fugitive Database. 42. J. M. McKim, “The Slave’s Ultima Ratio,” in The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston: National Antislavery Bazaar, 1857), 325. 43. Henry Watson, Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1850), 32. 44. Drew, Refugee, 249. 45. Mahommah Baquaqua, Biography of Mahomma G. Baquaqua . . . (Detroit: George E. Pomeroy, 1854); Mary Cox and Susan Cox, eds., Narrative of Dimmock Charlton . . . (Philadelphia, 1859). 46. Author’s Fugitive Database. 47. Ibid. 48. Joseph Clarke Robert, The Tobacco Kingdom: Plantation, Market, and Factory in Virginia and North Carolina, 1800–1860 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965). 49. Still, Underground Railroad, 150, 215. 50. Ibid., 286.

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N OTES TO PAGES 24–27 51. Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 29–30. 52. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU; Still, “Journal C,” 236. 53. American Anti-Slavery Society Fugitive Slave Records, SHGP-CU; Still, Underground Railroad. 54. Still, Underground Railroad, 342, 353. 55. Peter Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit (Boston: James H. Earl, 1893), 191; Watson, Narrative, 20; Drew, Refugee, 114. 56. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 191. 57. Barbara Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); David Cecelski, Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 58. William I. Bowditch, The Rendition of Anthony Burns (Boston: Robert F. Walcutt, 1854), 30; American Anti-Slavery Society Fugitive Slave Records, SHGP-CU; Still, Underground Railroad, 152, 299. 59. Still, Underground Railroad, 109. 60. Ibid., 183; Still, “Journal C,” 179. 61. “Sketch of Jonathan Thomas,” MASR; Still, Underground Railroad. 62. Still, Underground Railroad, 115; Jonathan Walker, A Picture of Slavery for Youth (Boston: J. Walker, n.d.), 8. 63. Still, Underground Railroad, 111–12. 64. Charles Emery Stevens, Anthony Burns: A History (Boston: John Jewett, 1856), 162, 176. 65. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 191. 66. Francis Jackson, “Fugitive Slaves,” in The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston: National Anti-Slavery Bazaar, 1858), 29–43. 67. Lewis Clarke and Milton Clarke, The Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1846), 77. 68. Robert, Tobacco Kingdom, 165–208; Calvin Schermerhorn, Unrequited Toil: A History of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 128–35. 69. Charles DeFord, “The Tobacco Trade for 1853,” Debow’s Review 16, no. 5 (1854): 478. 70. “Cities of the South—Richmond,” Debow’s Review 28, no. 2 (1860): 194. 71. Robert, Tobacco Kingdom, 197. 72. H. Brown, Narrative, 33. 73. Still, Underground Railroad, 225; Still, “Journal C,” 166. 74. H. Brown, Narrative, 33. 75. Ibid., 37. 76. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 51–53. 77. Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856), 102–3; Robert, Tobacco Kingdom, 205–8. 78. Author’s Fugitive Database. 79. Still, Underground Railroad, 149. 80. Ibid., 286.

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N OTES TO PAGES 27–29 81. Ibid., 295–96; Still, “Journal C,” 54. 82. Still, Underground Railroad, 286. 83. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 119. 84. Lewis G. Clarke, “Narrative by Lewis G. Clarke, October 1842,” in The Black Abolitionist Papers, ed. C. Peter Ripley, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985–92), 3:393; Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 157; Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave (Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849), 112. 85. Still, Underground Railroad, 216. 86. Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 7. 87. Still, Underground Railroad; Still, “Journal C,” 175. 88. Still, Underground Railroad, 204. 89. Ibid., 148, 294, 379. 90. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 111. 91. C. S. Brown Spear to Wilbur Siebert, n.d., WHSC. 92. Author’s Fugitive Database. 93. Still, Underground Railroad, 198; Still, “Journal C,” 114. 94. Still, Underground Railroad, 292. 95. Ibid. 96. John C. Rand, One of a Thousand: A Series of Biographical Sketches of One Thousand Representative Men Resident in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston: First National, 1890), 294; Lewis Hayden to Sydney Howard Gay, n.d., SHGP-CU. 97. Still, Underground Railroad; William Parker, “The Freedman’s Story,” in Atlantic Monthly 17 (1866): 154. 98. Still, Underground Railroad, 44. 99. William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850), 125. 100. Thomas Smallwood, A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood, (Colored Man): Giving an Account of His Birth—The Period He Was Held in Slavery—and Removal to Canada, Etc., together with an Account of the Underground Railroad (Toronto: James Stephens, 1851), 52–53. 101. James Redpath, The Roving Editor; or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (Boston: A. B. Burdick, 1859), 266. 102. Still, Underground Railroad, 65–66. 103. Amy Post, “The Underground Railroad,” in William F. Peck, Semi-Centennial History of the City of Rochester (Syracuse, NY: Mason, 1884), 462. 104. Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery: The Rise of American Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 105. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Damien Alan Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 106. Smallwood, Narrative, 52–53. 107. Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston, 1853), 154–55. 108. William G. Eliot, The Story of Archer Alexander from Slavery to Freedom (Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1885), 19–22.

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N OTES TO PAGES 30–32 109. H. Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 154–55. 110. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 74. 111. Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 30. 112. Author’s Fugitive Database. 113. Ibid. 114. Drew, Refugee, 96. 115. Edward Baptist, “Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor: Hands, Whipping Machines, and Modern Power,” in Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, 31–62. 116. William Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green, formerly a Slave, Written by Himself (Springfield, MA: L. M. Guerney, 1853), 7. 117. Still, Underground Railroad, 245. 118. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 27; John Thompson, Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave; Containing His History of 25 Years in Bondage, and His Providential Escape (Worcester, MA: C. Hamilton, 1856), 20. 119. John S. Jacobs, “A True Tale of Slavery,” Leisure Hour 478 (21 February 1861): 86. 120. Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 28. 121. American Anti-Slavery Society Fugitive Slave Records, SHGP-CU. 122. Liberator, 1 March 1844. 123. W. L. Chaplin to Jo Norton, 5 December 1840, WHSC. 124. Still, Underground Railroad, 111; Still, “Journal C,” 81. 125. “Escape of William Curtis and Samuel Glenn,” MASR. 126. Author’s Fugitive Database. 127. Still, Underground Railroad, 291. 128. Ibid., 334. 129. Ibid., 188; Still, “Journal C,” 187. 130. Still, Underground Railroad, 332. 131. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 49; A. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 7; Douglass Taylor, “From Slavery to Prison: Benjamin Rush, Harriet Jacobs, and the Ideology of Reformative Incarceration,” Genre 35 (2002): 429–48. 132. Still, Underground Railroad, 378. 133. Ibid., 332. 134. On “dissemblance,” see Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 37–48. 135. Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (London: W. W. Norton, 1999), 70–71. 136. Still, Underground Railroad, 294. 137. Ibid. 138. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 46; H. Jacobs, Incidents, 71; Watson, Narrative, 14. 139. “Reply of C. S. Brown Spear,” n.d., WHSC. 140. H. C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty Nine Years a Free Man (Rochester, NY: William Alling, 1857), 29.

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N OTES TO PAGES 32–35 141. Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman (Rochester NY: William Alling, 1857), 33. 142. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 114. 143. National Antislavery Standard, 1 February 1843. 144. “Escape of William Curtis and Samuel Glenn,” MASR. 145. Still, Underground Railroad, 92, 95 100; Olmstead, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 20–21; “Daybook of the Richmond Police Guard,” Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; “Minutes of the Society for the Prevention of Absconding and Abducting of Slaves,” Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections, ibid. 146. Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Antislavery Labors in the United States, Canada, and England (London: John Snow, 1855), 160–61. 147. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 209–43; Adam Malka, Men of Mob-town: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). 148. Jesse Olsavsky, “Runaway Slaves, Militant Abolitionists, and the Critique of American Prisons, 1830–1860,” History Workshop Journal ( June 2021): 1–22. 149. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 110. 150. Smallwood, Narrative, 52. 151. Redpath, Roving Editor, 16–17. 152. Still, Underground Railroad, 115. 153. Ibid., 274. 154. Dillon, Slavery Attacked; Sinha, Slave’s Cause; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 83. 155. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 26. 156. James L. Smith, Autobiography of James L. Smith (Norwich, CT: Press of the Bulletin Company, 1881), 37–38; Stevens, Anthony Burns, 169. 157. Still, Underground Railroad; Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 11. 158. Thompson, Life, 78. 159. Liberator, 28 May 1858. 160. Still, Underground Railroad, 99. 161. Redpath, Roving Editor, 284–85. See also Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1907), 7–8. 162. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 6–7. 163. For examples of slaves unaware of abolition, see Pennsylvania Freeman, 17 November 1853; and Redpath, Roving Editor, 70–71. 164. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Antislavery Office, 1849), 41–42; Israel Campbell, An Autobiography: Bond and Free; or, Yearnings for Freedom (Philadelphia, 1861), 216. 165. Antislavery Convention of American Women, An Address to Free Colored Americans (New York: William Dorr, 1837), 16. 166. S. J. Celestine Edwards, From Slavery to a Bishopric; or, The Life of Bishop Walter Hawkins (London: John Kensit, 1891), 68.

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N OTES TO PAGES 35–38 167. Watson, Narrative, 34; Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 8–9. 168. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 69–70. 169. Alexander Milton Ross, Memoirs of a Reformer, 1832–1892 (Toronto: Hunter, Rose, 1893), 64; Washington, Up from Slavery, 7–8; Antislavery Convention of American Women, Address to Free Colored Americans, 17. 170. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 116. 171. Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the United States in 1841 (Boston: Dexter S. King, 1842), 71. 172. Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 11. This will be discussed in greater detail in chapters 2 and 3. 173. Eber Petit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad (Fredonia, NY: W. Mckinstry, 1879), 91. 174. J. L. Smith, Autobiography, 30. 175. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 138; J. L. Smith, Autobiography, 30. 176. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Travelers and Outlaws (Boston, 1889), 187. 177. H. Brown, Narrative, 30–31. 178. Drew, Refugee, 332. 179. Petit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad, 91. 180. My concept of “maroon” comes from Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York University Press, 2014). See also Marcus Nevius, City of Refuge, Slavery, and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763–1856 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020); and Katheryn Benjamin Golden, “‘Armed in the Great Swamp’: Fear, Maroon Insurrection, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp,” Journal of African American History 106, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 1–26. 181. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 13. 182. Still, Underground Railroad, 173. 183. Thompson, Life, 78–80. 184. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 34–35; J. Jacobs, “True Tale of Slavery.” 185. Still, Underground Railroad, 226. 186. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU. 187. Still, Underground Railroad, 183. 188. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU; Still, Underground Railroad, 83–87. 189. Pennsylvania Freeman, 10 March 1854. 190. Andrew Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky (Syracuse, NY: Daily and Weekly Star Office, 1847), 9. 191. Craft and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. 192. Still, Underground Railroad, 169. 193. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 12; Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery (New Bedford, MA: Benjamin Lindsey, 1847), 33. 194. Camp, Closer to Freedom; Pargas, Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom. 195. Still, Underground Railroad, 175. 196. Ibid., 247; Still, “Journal C,” 236. 197. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 10; Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 8. 198. Author’s Fugitive Database.

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N OTES TO PAGES 38–42 199. Still, Underground Railroad, 88. 200. Ibid., 379. 201. Ibid., 307. 202. A. Jackson, Narrative and Writings, 11. 203. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU. 204. American Anti-Slavery Society Fugitive Slave Records, SHGP-CU. 205. Ibid.; Still, Underground Railroad, 274. 206. Damian Alan Pargas, “Urban Refugees: Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Informal Freedom in the American South,” Journal of American History 7 (2017): 262–84; Viola Muller, “Runaway Slaves in Antebellum Baltimore: An Urban Form of Marronage?” International Review of Social History 65, no 28 (2020): 169–95. 207. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground. 208. Still, Underground Railroad, 95. 209. Author’s Fugitive Database. 210. John Andrew Jackson, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1862), 25. 211. Author’s Fugitive Database. 212. Still, Underground Railroad, 135; Still, “Journal C,” 15. 213. Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 46; Cecelski, Waterman’s Song; Thomas Jones, The Experience of Thomas Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years (Springfield, MA: H. S. Taylor, 1854); Timothy Walker, Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). 214. Friends Intelligencer, 16 April 1898; “Escape of William Curtis and Samuel Glenn,” MASR; Still, Underground Railroad, 349–50. 215. Stevens, Anthony Burns, 173–74. 216. Douglass, Narrative, 64. 217. Daniel Drayton, Personal Memoir of Daniel Drayton (New York: American and Foreign Antislavery Society, 1853), 20, 22. 218. George W. Putnam to Wilbur Siebert, 27 December 1893, WHSC. 219. Still, Underground Railroad, 152–53. 220. Drayton, Personal Memoir, 20, 22. 221. Still, Underground Railroad, 174. 222. Author’s Fugitive Database. 223. Francis Jackson to Sydney Howard Gay, 3 December 1846, SHGP-CU. 224. American Anti-Slavery Society Fugitive Slave Records, SHGP-CU. 225. Stevens, Anthony Burns, 176. 226. J. Jackson, Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, 26. 227. Elizabeth Buffum Chase, Antislavery Reminiscences (Central Falls, RI: E. L. Freeman and Son, 1891), 30–31. 228. F. Jackson, “Fugitive Slaves,” 35. 229. Drayton, Personal Memoir, 22.

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N OTES TO PAGES 42–44 230. Author’s Fugitive Database. For the symbolic significance of the ship, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 12–13. 231. Author’s Fugitive Database. This stunning proportion of group escapes is also emphasized in Kashatus, William Still, 221–78. 232. Drew, Refugee, 53. 233. Still, Underground Railroad, 310. 234. Ibid., 148; Still, “Journal C,” 37. 235. Still, Underground Railroad, 224. 236. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dover, 2003), 110. 237. Black, Life and Sufferings, 27–28. 238. Chase, Antislavery Reminiscences, 30–31. 239. Author’s Fugitive Database. 240. Still, Underground Railroad, 61–62. 241. Author’s Fugitive Database. 242. J. Jacobs, “True Tale of Slavery,” 85. 243. Still, Underground Railroad, 236–37. 244. Ibid., 218–19. See also C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown (C. S. Brown, 1849), 124–26. 245. Still, Underground Railroad, 65–66. 246. Craft and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 27. 247. Still, Underground Railroad, 243. William Craft similarly followed his wife’s lead in plotting their escape. See Craft and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 27. 248. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU. 249. Author’s Fugitive Database. 250. Still, Underground Railroad, 208; Still, “Journal C,” 208. For a similar example, see W. L. Chaplin to Jo Norton, 5 December 1840, WHSC. Harriet Jacobs said that many enslaved women made such plans. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 66. 251. Still, Underground Railroad, 80. 252. Ibid., 169. 253. Ibid., 148. 254. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU. 255. Ibid. 256. H. Jacobs, Incidents; Still, Underground Railroad, 407. 257. Still, Underground Railroad, 192. 258. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU. 259. Still, Underground Railroad, 370. 260. “Escape of William Curtis and Samuel Glenn,” MASR. 261. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 178. 262. Author’s Fugitive Database; Liberator, 24 July 1857. 263. Still, Underground Railroad, 204. 264. Craft and Craft Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. 265. Still, Underground Railroad, 155.

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N OTES TO PAGES 44–48 266. Ibid., 180–81. 267. Petit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad; H. Jacobs, Incidents, 170. 268. Author’s Fugitive Database. 269. American Anti-Slavery Society Fugitive Slave Records, SHGP-CU. 270. J. Jacobs, “True Tale of Slavery,” 126. 271. Author’s Fugitive Database. See also Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 169–88. 272. Still, Underground Railroad, 65. 273. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU; Still, Underground Railroad, 83–87. 274. Author’s Fugitive Database; “Letter of George W. Clark, Liberty Singer,” n.d., WHSC; John Anderson, The Story of the Life of John Anderson, the Fugitive Slave (London: William Tweedie, 1855). 275. Still, Underground Railroad, 383. 276. Ibid., 363. 277. Ibid., 214. 278. Ibid., 67. 279. Ibid., 148. 280. Still, Underground Railroad. 281. H. Brown, Narrative, 29. 282. Lunsford Lane, The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly a Slave of Raleigh, N.C., Published by Himself (Boston: J. G. Torrey, 1842), 8; H. Brown, Narrative, 16. 283. H. Brown, Narrative, 17. 284. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 58. 285. Francis Fredric, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky; or, Fifty Years of Slavery in the Southern States of America (London: Wertheim McKintosh, and Hunt, 1863), 16. 286. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 10. 287. Author’s Fugitive Database. 288. Still, Underground Railroad. 289. Author’s Fugitive Database. 290. William H. Ferris, The African Abroad; or, His Evolution in Western Civilization Tracing His Development under Caucasian Milieus (New Haven, CT: Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor, 1913), 695; Petit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad, 47. 291. Lewis G. Clark to Harriet and Lewis Hayden, 3 January 1880, HU. 292. Still, Underground Railroad, 347. 293. John Quincy Adams, Narrative of the Life of John Quincy Adams When in Slavery (Harrisburg, PA, 1877), 15. 294. Drew, Refugee, 105. 295. Watson, Narrative, 33. 296. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU. 297. Lane, Narrative, 18. 298. Still, Underground Railroad. 299. Quoted in Hunter, To Set the Captives Free, 49; Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 11; Stevens, Anthony Burns, 171–72; Jones, Experience, 14. 300. Still, Underground Railroad, 177–78. 301. Ibid., 137.

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N OTES TO PAGES 49–53 302. Drew, Refugee, 33. 303. Ibid., 186. 304. Still, Underground Railroad, 137. 305. Ibid., 327. 306. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 10. 307. Titas Charkraborty, Matthias van Rossum, and Marcus Rediker, eds., A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Global Capitalism, 1650–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). 308. William Still to Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 13 April 1871, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, HU.

2. RADIC AL AND PRACTIC AL ABOLITION, 1835–1849 1. Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray (New York: J. J. Little, 1887), 23–24. 2. Ibid. 3. Collison, “Boston Vigilance Committee,” 104–16; Grodzins, “Constitution or No Constitution,” 47–73; Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 91–119; Kashatus, William Still, 61. 4. Richard Newman, “‘Lucky to Be Born in Pennsylvania’: Free Soil, Fugitive Slaves, and the Making of Pennsylvania’s Anti-Slavery Borderland,” Slavery and Abolition 32, no. 3 (September 2011): 413–30. 5. Hodges, David Ruggles, 153; Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 63–91. 6. Daniel A. Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years (Nashville: AME Sunday School Union, 1888). 7. Thomas James, The Wonderful Eventful Life of Rev. Thomas James, by Himself, 3rd ed. (Rochester, NY: Post Express Printing, 1887); Henry Highland Garnet, A Memorial Discourse (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), 21; Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 21–22; J. C. W. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly a Slave in the State of Maryland, United States (London: Charles Gilpin, 1844), 54. 8. Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Harrold, Border War, 30–32; Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (New York: Bold Type, 2020). 9. Pennington, Fugitive Blacksmith, 54. 10. Graham Russel Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1633–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); James Horton and Lois Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes and Meyer, 1999); Robert H. Churchill, The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 25–51. 11. Alexander Crummell, “Eulogy on Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, D.D.,” in Africa and America: Addresses and Discourses (Springfield, MA: Wiley, 1891), 275. 12. Howard Bell, “A Survey of the Negro Contention Movement, 1830–1861” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1953), 24. 13. Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, 141; Post, “Underground Railroad,” 460.

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N OTES TO PAGES 53–55 14. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The Black Troops: Intensely Human,” in The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1823–1911, ed. Howard N. Meyer (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 179. 15. David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, ed. Peter Hinks (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Herbert Aptheker, “One Continual Cry”: David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World—Its Setting and Its Meaning (New York: Humanities Press for AIMS, 1965). 16. Newman, “‘Lucky to be Born in Pennsylvania,’” 413–30; Edward Needles, An Historical Memoir of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1848), 88–89; Robert Purvis, A Tribute to the Memory of Thomas Shipley, the Philanthropist (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1836); Isaac Parrish, Brief Memoirs of Thomas Shipley and Edwin Atlee (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1838); Margaret Hope Bacon, History of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery; the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage; and for Improving the Condition of the Colored Race (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 1959); Paul Polgar, Standard Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolitionist Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 17. Elias Hicks, Letters of Elias Hicks, including also Observations on the Slavery of the Africans and Their Descendants and on the Use of the Produce of Their Labor (Philadelphia: T. Ellwood Chapman, 1861). 18. Walt Whitman, “Elias Hicks, Notes (Such as They Are),” in November Boughs (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1888), 119–36. 19. Crummell, “Eulogy on Rev. Henry Highland Garnet,” 269–307; James McCune Smith, “A Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet,” in Garnet, Memorial Discourse, 17–27. 20. Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank, eds., Quakers and Abolition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 21. Sarah Hopper Emerson, The Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons, Told Chiefly through Her Correspondence (New York: G. Putnam and Sons, 1897), 126; Elias Hicks, Journal of the Life and Religious Labours of Elias Hicks, Written by Himself (Philadelphia: Isaac T. Hopper, 1832). Lydia Maria Child, Isaac T. Hopper, a True Life (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1853). 22. Hicks, Journal. 23. Child, Isaac T. Hopper, 203–6. 24. Ibid., 206. 25. Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (New York: Charles Francis, 1843), 61. 26. Ibid., 61. 27. Daniel E. Meaders, ed., Isaac Hopper’s Tales of Oppression (Cherry Hill, NJ: Africana Homestead, 2009). 28. North Star, 14 April 1848. 29. Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 92; Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life as Told by His Children, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 150, 174; Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told, 194; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 195–228. 30. Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1:159–62, 210; Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 2:150, 174.

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N OTES TO PAGES 55–58 31. National Antislavery Standard, 30 December 1841. 32. Bills and Receipts, Jacob C. White Sr. Financial Documents, LGC. 33. Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 241. 34. Stephen Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (London: Penguin, 2016), 61–63; Harrold, Border War, 47–48. 35. Right and Wrong in Boston: Report of the Boston Female Antislavery Society (Boston: Boston Female Antislavery Society, 1836), 36. 36. Liberator, 24 March 1832. “Resolutions to Suppress Meetings of Negroes, 1838,” Slavery and Abolition Collection, SCRBC. 37. Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1:240. 38. Wilson, Freedom at Risk. 39. Liberator, 14 May 1836. 40. Hodges, David Ruggles, 88–89. 41. The First Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, for the Year 1837 Together with Facts Relative to their Proceedings (New York: Piercy and Reed, 1837), 11. 42. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 359; Edward H. Magill, When Men Were Sold: The Underground Railroad in Bucks County, Pa., an Address Delivered before the Bucks County Historical Society (Boston: Charles Alexander, 1898), 21. 43. First Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 11. 44. Hodges, David Ruggles, 89. 45. Lucia Weston to Deborah Weston, 4 October 1836, AC. 46. Liberator, 10 December 1852; Nina Moore Tiffany, Samuel Sewall: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 62–65; Leonard Levy, “The Abolition Riot: Boston’s First Slave Rescue,” New England Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 1852): 92; James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 55. 47. National Antislavery Standard, 17 June 1841. 48. Liberator, 11 June, 2 July 1841; “Kidnappers Released, 1841,” Boston Vigilance Committee Broadside, New-York Historical Society. 49. Liberator, 28 August 1846. 50. Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting Held at Faneuil Hall, September 26, for the Purpose of Considering the Recent Case of Kidnapping on Our Soil (Boston: White and Potter, 1846). 51. William Wells Brown, Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (Boston: A. G. Brown, 1882), 10–11; H. Brown, Narrative, 107–8. 52. Liberator, 24 May 1844. 53. Richard J. M. Blackett, “‘. . . Freedom, or the Martyr’s Grave’: Black Pittsburgh’s Aid to the Fugitive Slave,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 61, no. 2 (1978): 118–19; Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (Boston: Lee and Shephard, 1883), 43. 54. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 241–43. 55. Detroit Tribune, 17 January 1887; “Annual Report of the Colored Vigilance Committee of Detroit,” in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:397–400; Katherine DuPre Lumpkin, ‘“The General Plan Was Freedom’: A Negro Secret Order on the Underground Railroad,” Phylon 28, no. 1 (1967): 63–77; Roy Finkbeine, “A Community Militant and Organized: The Colored Vigilant Committee

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N OTES TO PAGES 58–61 of Detroit,” in A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland, ed. Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 260–81. 56. Richard Webb, The National Antislavery Societies in England and the United States (Dublin: Charles Hedgelong, 1852), 53. 57. Borome, “Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” 323; National Enquirer 10 August, 7 September 1837; Liberator, 11 June 1841; John W. Browne, “Committee of Vigilance, Agents’ Records, 1846–1847,” WPP. 58. Friend of Man, 22 December 1836; Colored American, August 21, 1841; ibid., 29 September 1838. 59. John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1864); Liberator, 18 October 1850. 60. Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (Philadelphia, 1852); Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite; Harry C. Silcox, “The Black ‘Better Class’ Political Dilemma: Philadelphia Prototype Isaiah C. Wears,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113, no. 1 (1989): 45–66; Andrew Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderlands, 1817–1863 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016). 61. Bacon, But One Race. 62. William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, Rising (Cleveland: George M. Rewell, 1887), 1105–12. 63. C. S. Smith, The Life of Daniel Payne (Nashville: AME Church Sunday School Union, 1894); Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray; A. W. Wayman, Discourse on the Death of Reverend Walter Proctor of Philadelphia (Washington, DC, 1861). 64. George E. Walker, The Afro-American in New York City, 1827–1860 (New York: Garland, 1993), 35; Cradle of Liberty, 4 April 1840; Liberator, 10 April 1840; ibid., 26 January 1838; Colored American, 15 September 1838. 65. Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 107. 66. Borome, “Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” 351; W. V. Hensel, The Christiana Riot and the Treason Trials of 1851 (Lancaster, PA: New Era, 1911), 25. 67. Dorothy Porter and Constance Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell, Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist: Selected Writings, 1832–1874 (Baltimore: Black Classic, 2002), 5–61. 68. Hodges, David Ruggles. 69. Borome, “Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” 351; Payne, Recollections, 72; Colored American, 18 August 1838. 70. Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:177–78. 71. Liberator, 28 October 1842, 6 September 1844. 72. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 149. 73. Hodges, David Ruggles, 134. 74. J. Jacobs, “True Tale of Slavery,” 125–27. 75. National Antislavery Standard, 31 March 1848. 76. Lewis Tappan, The Life of Arthur Tappan (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1870), 313; Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1909), 101. 77. Oliver Johnson to Mrs. Thomas, 24 May 1873, Miscellaneous American Letters and Papers,

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N OTES TO PAGES 61–63 SCRBC; Oliver Johnson, Correspondence between Oliver Johnson and George F. White in the Society of Friends (New York, 1841); New York Association for the Friends of Freed People of Color, Minute Book, 1839–1844, FHL; Hugh Foulke, Life of Samuel J. Levick, Late of the City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: William H. Piles and Sons, 1896), 29. 78. Account Book of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, HSP; Anon to J. Miller McKim, 8 July 1848, Maloney Collection, McKim-Garrison Family Papers, New York Public Library; Ira V. Brown, “Miller McKim and Pennsylvania Abolitionism,” Pennsylvania History 30, no. 1 (1963): 55–72. 79. In Memoriam: John W. Browne (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Lee, 1860), 54. 80. First Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 12. 81. Liberator, 11 June 1841. 82. Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Records, vol. 1, 61, HSP. 83. Purvis, Tribute to the Memory of Thomas Shipley, 12. 84. First Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 12. 85. Bacon, But One Race, 95. 86. Mirror of Liberty, January 1839. 87. Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 5. 88. First Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 12–13; Elizur Wright to William Lloyd Garrison, 9 June 1837, EWP; Friends Intelligencer, 16 April 1898. 89. Ruggles’s exploits are narrated in Hodges, David Ruggles, and Foner, Gateway to Freedom. On kidnapping, see Report of the Select Committee on the Petition of Various Citizens to Prevent Kidnapping (New York, 1840); and Wells, Kidnapping Club. 90. Hodges, David Ruggles, 130; Isaac Hoppers to Sarah H. Palmer, 31 October 1846, FHL. 91. Mirror of Liberty, January 1839. 92. National Enquirer, 29 April 1837; Pennsylvania Freeman, 29 October 1846; William Jay, “Mr. William Jay’s Argument That Congress Have No Constitutional Right to Legislate on the Subject of Delivering up Fugitives from Justice or from Labor,” 1838, Jay Family Papers, Columbia University, New York; Frederick Douglass, Eulogy of the Late Hn. William Jay (Rochester, NY: A Strong, 1859). 93. Mirror of Liberty, August 1838. 94. Ibid., January 1839. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., August 1838, January 1839. 97. Asa J. Davis, “Two Autobiographical Fragments of George Latimer,” Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society 1 (Summer 1980), 1–14. 98. Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom, 71–74. 99. “Record of Doings of the Latimer Committee,” AC. 100. Latimer Journal, and North Star, 1842–44, Papers Related to George Latimer, MHS. 101. Julia Bernier, “Never Be Free without Trustin Some Person: Networking and Buying Freedom in the Nineteenth Century United States, Slavery and Abolition 40: 2 (2019), 341–60; William Craft to Theodore Parker, 24 January 1851, TPP. 102. Liberator, 12 December 1845. 103. Lane, Narrative, 17, 23. 104. Memorial of Sarah Pugh: A Tribute of Respect from Her Cousins (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1888), 17.

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N OTES TO PAGES 63–66 105. William Chaplin to Gerrit Smith, 25 March 1844, GSP; C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 116–17. 106. William Craft to Theodore Parker, 24 January 1851, TPP; Francis Jackson to Arthur G. Hosmer, 3 June 1830, MASR. 107. Borome, “Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia”; Ascott R. Hope, Heroes in Homespun: Scenes and Stories from the American Emancipation Movement (London: Wilsons and Milne, 1894), 16–117. 108. Friend of Man, 22 December 1836. 109. Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance. 110. Liberator, 11 June 1841, 23 December 1842. 111. True Wesleyan, 24 March 1849; “Circular of the New York State Vigilance Committee,” Broadside, New-York Historical Society. 112. Newman, “‘Lucky to Be Born in Pennsylvania’”; Collison, “Boston Vigilance Committee,” 104–16. 113. Browne, “Committee of Vigilance, Agents’ Records,” WPP. 114. Vigilance Committee Records, 1846–1847, Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League Records, MHS. 115. Borome, “Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia.” 116. Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, PASP. 117. Robert Purvis to Wilbur H. Siebert, 23 Dec. 1895, WHSC. 118. Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 38. 119. Liberator, 7 July 1843. 120. African Repository, 1 September 1843; “350 Slaves Turned Freeman!!” Albany Vigilance Committee Broadside, 1842, Library Company of Philadelphia. 121. North Star, 14 April 1848. 122. Churchill, Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence, 51–139. 123. Newspaper Scrapbook, 1880–1899, CLBC. 124. Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, PASP. 125. In Memoriam: Sarah A. McKim, 1813–1891 (New York: Devinne, 1891), 4–5; In Memoriam: Mary A. W. Johnson, Wife of Oliver Johnson (New York: 1872), 5–6. 126. Payne, Recollections, 72. 127. C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 162. 128. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 348. 129. Anna Davis Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1884), 265; Mary Grew, James Mott: A Biographical Sketch (New York: William Tomlinson, 1868), 11–12. 130. Helen Campbell, “Philadelphia Abolitionists,” Continent 3, no. 1 ( January 1883): 5; Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, PASP. 131. Watson, Narrative, 39; Liberator, 1 November 1850. 132. Green, Narrative, 20–21; Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 24. 133. Edward, From Slavery to a Bishopric, 60. 134. Ibid., 65. 135. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 244. 136. Charles Blockson, The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania ( Jacksonville, NC: Flame International, 1981), 43–44. 137. Robert Purvis to Wilbur Siebert, 23 December 1895, WHSC. 138. Bills and Receipts, Jacob C. White Sr. Financial Documents, LGC.

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N OTES TO PAGES 66–68 139. Hallie Q. Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (Xenia, OH: Aldine, 1926), 27. 140. Francis Jackson to Sidney Howard Gay, 11 April 1847, SHGP-CU; Sidney Howard Gay to John W. Browne, 15 December 1846, ibid.; Black, Life and Sufferings, 38–48. 141. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania. 142. Jermaine Loguen to Gerrit Smith, 23 March 1849, GSP. 143. Watson, Narrative, 39. 144. Thompson, Life, 110; Ellis Gray Loring to Caroline Weston, 22 February 1846, AC. 145. Browne, “Committee of Vigilance, Agents’ Records,” WPP. 146. Ibid. 147. “Committee of Vigilance, Subscription Book, 1846,” WPP. 148. Mirror of Liberty, January 1839; Browne, “Committee of Vigilance, Agents’ Records,” WPP; Lydia Maria Child, ed., The Freedman’s Book (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 173. 149. Sidney Howard Gay to Richard Webb, 26 March 1847, SHGP-CU. 150. Lewis Tappan to S. H. Gay, 24 October 1846, SHGP-CU. 151. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 47 William Jay, The Fugitive Slave Bill (Birmingham, UK: R. Hudson, 1850), 1–2. 152. Vigilance Committee Records, 1846–1847, Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League Records, MHS; Joseph Ricketson to Deborah Weston, 29 April 1849, AC; Isaac Mason, The Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave (Worcester, MA, 1853), 51–56; Thompson, Life, 106–7; Isaac Hopper to Sarah Hopper, 28 December 1847, Isaac Hopper Papers, FHL. 153. Katherine Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). 154. J. L. Smith, Autobiography, 50. 155. Sidney Howard Gay to John W. Browne, 3 January 1847, SHGP-CU. 156. W. W. Brown, Rising Son, 333. 157. Gerrit Smith Miller to Wilbur Siebert, 18 January 1932, WHSC. 158. Colored American, 20 February 1841; Hiram Wilson to George Whipple, 16 August 1849, Hiram Wilson Papers, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. 159. Pennsylvania Freeman, 7 May 1840; British and Foreign Antislavery Reporter, 8 March 1843. 160. A Short Sketch of the Life and Services of Jonathan Walker, the Man with the Branded Hand (Muskegon, MI: Chronicle Printing House, 1879), 3; Samuel Gridley Howe, Slavery at Washington, a Narrative of the Heroic Adventures of Drayton, an American Trader in the Pearl Coasting Vessel (London: Ward, 1848). 161. Henry “Box” Brown and James A. Smith to Gerrit Smith, 15 September 1850, GSP. 162. William Wells Brown to Sidney Howard Gay, 5 June 1849, SHGP-CU. 163. Borome, “Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” 335. 164. For more on Baquaqua’s life before reaching New York, see Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York University Press, 1998), 65, 76, 204; and Baquaqua, Biography, 54. 165. John W. Browne to Sidney Howard Gay, 10 September 1847, SHGP-CU; Papson and Calarco, Secret Lives of the Underground Railroad in New York City, 61. 166. Baquaqua, Biography, 56. 167. Vigilance Committee Records, 1846–1847, Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League Records, MHS.

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N OTES TO PAGES 68–70 168. Robert F. Wallcutt to Sidney Howard Gay, 31 August 1842, SHGP-CU. 169. Baquaqua, Biography, 57. 170. Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting, 3. 171. J. Jackson, Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, 26. 172. “Kidnappers Released, 1841,” Boston Vigilance Committee Broadside, New-York Historical Society. 173. Douglass, Life and Times, 142–45. 174. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 243; Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855), 348. 175. J. Jackson, Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, 31. 176. Colored American, 21 July 1848. 177. Liberator, 11 June 1841. 178. J. Jacobs, “True Tale of Slavery,” 126. 179. National Antislavery Standard, 25 March 1847. 180. Short Sketch of the Life and Services of Jonathan Walker, 7, 26; Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker (Boston: Antislavery Society Office, 1846). 181. Wendel Phillips to Sidney Howard Gay, March 1849, SHGP-CU. 182. C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 148–49; “Reply of C. S. Brown Spear,” n.d., WHSC. 183. Memorial of Sarah Pugh, 16. 184. Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting, 3. 185. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 355; Joshua Coffin to Maria Weston Chapman, 26 September 1842, AC. 186. Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1895), 223–25. 187. Joshua Coffin to Maria W. Chapman, 26 September 1842, AC. 188. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 228–29. 189. Pennsylvania Freeman, 15 January 1846; James McGowan, Station Master on the Underground Railroad: The Life and Letters of Thomas Garrett (Moylan, PA: Whimsie, 1977), 26–27. 190. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 355; Robert Purvis to Wilbur Siebert, 23 December 1895, WHSC. 191. On slavery and abolition in the District of Columbia, see T. Stephen Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2007); Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington D.C., 1828–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Stanley Harrold, “On the Borders of Slavery and Race: Charles T. Torrey and the Underground Railroad,” Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 2 (2000): 273–92; E. Fuller Torrey, The Martyrdom of Charles T. Torrey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); and Tamika Nunley, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). 192. Smallwood, Narrative, 13–18, 28. 193. L. A. Chamerovzow, The Slave’s Underground Railroad to Freedom (Edinburgh, UK: Murray and Stuart, 1855), 2; John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive, ed. L. A. Chamerovzow (London, 1855), 215.

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N OTES TO PAGES 71–73 194. Smallwood, Narrative, 42; Borome, “Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” 350. 195. J. C. Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, Who Died in the Penitentiary of Maryland, Where He Was Confined for Showing Mercy to the Poor (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1847); Smallwood, Narrative. 196. Pennsylvania Freeman, 12 February 1852. 197. Vigilance Committee Records, 1846–1847, Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League Records, MHS. 198. “Committee of Vigilance, Subscription Book, 1846,” WPP; Vigilance Committee Records, MHS; Douglass, Eulogy of the Late Hn. William Jay, 12. 199. “New York State Vigilance Committee Record, 1849,” Onondaga Research Library, Syracuse, NY; North Star, 19 May 1848; “Antislavery Appeal of William Harned, 1849,” Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College, Haverford, PA; North Star, 18 May 1849. 200. “The Vigilance Committee: Appeal, 1844,” New York Vigilance Committee Broadside, New-York Historical Society; National Antislavery Standard, 28 December 1843. 201. National Antislavery Standard, 7 April 1842; Colored American, 28 March 1840. 202. Pennsylvania Freeman, 12 February 1852. 203. Jacob C. White to David Ruggles, 6 December 1838, LGC. 204. National Antislavery Standard, 20 May 1841; British and Foreign Antislavery Reporter, 1 May 1843. 205. Liberator, 28 August 1846. 206. National Antislavery Standard, 27 August 1841. 207. Pennsylvania Freeman, 12 March 1840. 208. Liberator, 14 February 1845. 209. Pennsylvania Freeman, July 5, 26, December 27, 1838; Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, PASP. 210. National Antislavery Standard, 19 November 1840. 211. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 1848–1861 (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1935), 325–33. On the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, see Elizabeth Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 212. Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, PASP; Fourteenth Annual Report of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1848), 10. 213. Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, PASP. 214. Colored American, 21 August 1841. 215. Liberator, August 19, 1842; National Antislavery Standard, September 8, 1842. 216. Wilbur Siebert, “Society to Help Slaves Escape to Freedom,” n.d., WHSC. 217. William Still, An Address on Voting and Laboring Delivered at Concert Hall (Philadelphia: Jason Rodgers, 1874), 7. 218. National Antislavery Standard, 13 May 1841. 219. Report of the Select Committee on the Petition of Various Citizens to Prevent Kidnapping; On Liberty Laws, see Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 220. Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 103. 221. Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

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N OTES TO PAGES 74–77 222. Manisha Sinha argues that historians have exaggerated antislavery factionalism. See Slave’s Cause, 461–99. 223. Daniel Neall, “The Tarring of Daniel Neal,” n.d., SHGP-CU; Beverley Tomek, Pennsylvania Hall: A Legal Lynching in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 224. Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 21. 225. National Antislavery Standard, 15 September 1842; Newspaper Scrapbook, 1880–1899, CLBC; “A Negro Writes of an American Pogrom, 1842,” in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, ed. Herbert Aptheker, vol. 1 (New York: Citadel, 1968), 220. 226. See, for instance, D. Smith, On the Edge of Freedom, 5. 227. National Antislavery Standard, 22 October 1840; Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, 241. 228. Maria Weston Chapman, How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery (Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society, n.d.), 4. 229. Liberator, 18 June 1847. 230. Eleventh Annual Report of the Boston Female Antislavery Society (New York: American AntiSlavery Society, 1844), 24–5. 231. Fourth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society (Boston: James Loring, 1844), 5. 232. Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 79–80. 233. Ibid., 91–119. 234. Liberator, 11 June 1841; National Antislavery Standard, 6 May 1841. 235. Henry Greenleaf Pearson, The Life of John A. Andrew, Governor of Massachusetts, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1904), 42; William Lloyd Garrison Jr., “Boston Anti-Slavery Days,” in Bostonian Society Publications, vol. 2 (Boston, 1905), 94. 236. Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 88. 237. C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 183; Frederick Douglass to Sydney Howard Gay, 8 January 1848, 11 October 1849, SHGP-CU. 238. Liberator, 10 December 1852, 26 August 1853. 239. Proceedings of the Antislavery Convention of American Women (New York: William S. Dorr, 1837); Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Margaret Hope Bacon, “The Double Curse of Sex and Color: Robert Purvis and Human Rights,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113, no. 1 (1997): 53–76. 240. Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray, 73; C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 91. 241. Charles T. Torrey to J. Miller McKim, 1844, AC. 242. Address of the Committee Appointed by a Public Meeting; Borome, “Vigilant Committee,” 324–27; Liberator, 28 August 1846. 243. Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Records, vol. 1, 46, HSP. 244. Isaiah Wears, “A Tribute to Robert Purvis,” 1898, Letters and Papers of James Still, Isaiah Wears, and William Still, HSP. 245. Howard Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1861 (New York: Arno, 1969). 246. Eleventh Annual Report of the Boston Female Antislavery Society, 21. 247. Sidney Howard Gay to Edmund Quincy, 16 September 1845, SHGP-CU.

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N OTES TO PAGES 77–80 248. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Memoir of William Henry Channing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 258. 249. Theodore Parker to Samuel Gridley Howe, 30 September 1846, Theodore Parker Collection, HU. 250. Peter Wirzbicki, “Black Transcendentalism: William Cooper Nell, the Adelphic Union, and the Black Abolitionist Intellectual Tradition,” Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 2 (2018): 269–90. 251. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Letter to the Kidnapping Committee, 23 September 1846,” in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Joel Myerson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 1995. 252. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 30–31. 253. American Anti-Slavery Society Ledger, 1844–1863, SHGP-CU. For a fuller account of Hayden’s life, see Stanley J. Robboy and Anita Robboy, “Lewis Hayden: From Fugitive Slave to Statesman,” New England Quarterly 46, no. 4 (1973): 591–614. 254. William Lloyd Garrison to Sidney Howard Gay, 31 March 1846, SHGP-CU. 255. Sidney Howard Gay to Caroline Weston, 4 January 1847, ibid. 256. C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 162. 257. Watson, Narrative, 41. 258. Henry Brown, Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery, Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide (Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849), 59. 259. Lewis Hayden to Sidney Howard Gay, 21 January 1846, SHGP-CU. 260. William Wells Brown to Francis W. Bird, 19 April 1849, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:35. 261. Colored American, 28 March 1840. 262. Blight, Frederick Douglass. 263. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 348; Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar; Rosetta Douglass Sprague, “Anna Murray-Douglass—My Mother as I Recall Her,” Journal of Negro History 8, no. 1 (1923): 94. 264. T. James, Wonderful Eventful Life, 6; Liberator, 23 December 1842. 265. Borome, “Vigilante Committee of Philadelphia,” 349. 266. Leigh Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 169. 267. J. Jacobs, “True Tale of Slavery.” 268. William G. Hawkins, Lunsford Lane; or, Another Helper from the South (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1864), 176–78. 269. Liberator, 1 November 1844; C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 152. 270. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 61. 271. J. L. Smith, Autobiography, 62–68; Henry “Box” Brown and James A. Smith to Gerrit Smith, 15 September 1850, GSP. 272. W. W. Brown, Rising Son, 401. 273. Lewis Hayden to Wendell Phillips, 21 February 1848, WPP. 274. Lewis Hayden to Sidney Howard Gay, 21 January 1846, SHGP-CU. 275. Eric Foner describes the Underground Railroad as a “quasi-public institution.” See Gateway to Freedom, 21. 276. North Star, 19 May 1848. 277. National Antislavery Standard, 5 May 1842.

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N OTES TO PAGES 80–82 278. Liberator, 23 December 1842. 279. Antislavery Bugle, 24 January 1842. 280. North Star, 19 May 1848. 281. Liberator, 26 May 1843. 282. Colored American, 24 July 1841. 283. North Star, 18 May 1849. 284. Nathaniel P. Rogers, Collection from the Miscellaneous Writings of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1849), 138. 285. Colored American, 25 August 1838. 286. Liberator, 3 April 1840. 287. National Antislavery Standard, May 13, 1841; Liberator, September 1, 1848; Colored American, December 12, 1840. 288. Pennsylvania Freeman, 12 April 1838. 289. Ibid., 28 December 1848. 290. Lucretia Mott, “Diversities,” The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston: Massachusetts Antislavery Fair, 1844), 175–78; Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, PASP. 291. Right and Wrong in Boston, 92–94. 292. C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 173–74. 293. Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 170. 294. See Fifteenth Annual Report of the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1849), 9. 295. Ellis Gray Loring to Peter Still, 11 November 1853, Peter Still Papers, 1850–1875, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, NJ; Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 333. 296. William Lloyd Garrison, to Sidney Howard Gay, 6 June 1849, SHGP-CU. 297. Edwin H. Coates to Maria Weston Chapman, 15 December 1839, AC; Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 41; Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 81; C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 152. 298. Pennsylvania Freeman, 18 October 1849. 299. Rebecca Bunker to Elizabeth Neal Gay, 27 November 1842, SHGP-CU. 300. Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray, 33; New York State Vigilance Committee to Gerrit Smith, 10 March 1849, GSP. 301. Liberator, 19 July 1839. 302. Tappan, Life of Arthur Tappan, 181–82. 303. Third Annual Report of the Massachusetts Female Antislavery Society (Boston, 1843), 6. 304. Pennsylvania Freeman, 12 March 1840. 305. Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Records, vol. 1, 65, HSP. 306. Pennsylvania Freeman, 4 October 1849. 307. Liberator, 4 October 1849; African Repository, 1 June 1838. 308. Porter and Uzelac, William Cooper Nell, 18. 309. Governing Documents and Records of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, AC; Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life as Told by His Children, vol. 3 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 246.

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N OTES TO PAGES 82–84 310. National Antislavery Standard, 9 October 1845. 311. Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 90; Webb, National Antislavery Societies, 16, 52–53. 312. C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 151. 313. Ibid., 155. 314. Governing Documents and Records of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, AC. 315. Joshua Coffin to Maria W. Chapman, 26 September 1842, AC; Elizabeth Neal to Abbey Foster, 13 January 1842, SHGP-CU. It may have been the case that Coffin had been working in the South before Torrey. See Anna L. Coffin to Wilbur Siebert, 12 November 1898, WHSC. See also Lewis Tappan to Gerrit Smith, 30 March 1839, GSP; and The Case of William L. Chaplin (Boston: Chaplin Committee, 1851). 316. Drayton, Personal Memoir. 317. Charles D. Cleveland to Wendell Phillips and Francis Jackson, 18 February 1854, Lysander Spooner Papers, New-York Historical Society. 318. Horace Mann, “Notes and Summary of the trial of Daniel Drayton,” Slavery and Abolition Collection, SCRBC; Howe, Slavery at Washington. 319. Elizabeth Varon, Disunion: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 209; Harrold, Subversives, 116–46. 320. Cleveland to Phillips and Jackson, 18 February 1854. 321. Newspaper Scrapbook, 1880–1899, CLBC; Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey in Slavery and Freedom (London: Penguin, 2012), 224–26; Richard J. Powell, “Cinqué: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” American Art 11, no. 3 (1997): 68; Stanley Harrold, “Romanticizing Slave Revolt: Madison Washington, the Creole Mutiny, and Abolitionist Celebration of Violent Means,” in Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, ed. John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 89–108; Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 322. Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 41. 323. “Circular on Funeral of Torrey, May 14, 1846,” AC; Charles Dexter Cleveland to A. A. Phelps 30 June 1846, AC; John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Funeral of Torrey,” in Old Portraits and Modern Sketches (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1888), 171–74; Luther Lee, The Supremacy of the Divine Law: A Sermon Preached on the Occasion of the Death of Charles Turner Torrey (New York, 1846). 324. North Star, 1 March 1848. 325. Lewis Hayden and Ellis Gray Loring, “Letter on Calvin Fairbank, 1849,” AC. 326. American Anti-Slavery Society Ledger, 1844–1863, SHGP-NYPL; Calvin Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank during Slavery Times (Chicago: R. R. McCabe, 1890), 55. 327. American Anti-Slavery Society, Miscellaneous Accounts, 1849–1850, AC. 328. Stanley Harrold, ed., The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to Slaves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 153–63. 329. Albany (NY) Patriot, 21 November 1843. 330. Oliver Johnson to Gerrit Smith, 37 January 1842, GSP; Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate, 17 March 1842. 331. Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, 177; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2005), 2.

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N OTES TO PAGES 84–90 332. Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism 171. 333. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 228–29. 334. C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 151–52. 335. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society (Boston: Dow and Jackson, 1850), 47–49. 336. Pennsylvania Freeman, 18 October 1849. 337. North Star, 16 May 1850.

3. THE PEDAGOGY OF RADIC AL ABOLITIONISM, 1850–1861 1. The Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of William Lloyd Garrison, By the Colored Citizens of Greater Boston (Boston: Garrison Centenary Committee of the Suffrage League of Boston, 1906), 26. 2. Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: The Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Varon, Disunion, 199–235; Blackett, Captive’s Quest for Freedom, 3–42; Harrold, Border War, 138–56; Churchill, Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence, 139–71; Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholders’ Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relation to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 231–53; Milt Diggins, Stealing Freedom along the Mason Dixon Line: Thomas McReary, the Notorious Slave Catcher from Maryland (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2016). 3. George W. Putnam to Wilbur Siebert, 27 December 1893, WHSC; Theodore Parker, The Boston Kidnapping: A Discourse to Commemorate the Rendition of Thomas Sims, Delivered on the First Anniversary Thereof (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1852). 4. True Wesleyan, 28 June 1851; S. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 73–75. 5. Selections from Speeches and Writings of Prominent Men in the United States, on the Subject of Abolition and Agitation (New York: J. P. Wright, 1851). 6. Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 3:305. 7. Tappan, Life of Arthur Tappan, 310. 8. Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, NY: W. J. Moses, 1869), 27. 9. Francis Jackson to Theodore Parker, 11 June 1854, AC. 10. J. Jacobs, “True Tale of Slavery,” 138. 11. “The Fugitive Slaves Appeal!!,” 1850, Circular, WHSC. 12. Liberator, 4 October 1850, 10 December 1852. 13. Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, Shadow and Light, an Autobiography (Washington, DC, 1902), 23; Pennsylvania Freeman, 31 October 1850. 14. W. Parker, “Freedman’s Story,” 160–61, 282. 15. Theodore Parker, comp. “Antislavery Scrapbook,” AC; Pennsylvania Freeman, 27 March 1851; Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar. 16. Liberator, 2 August 1850. 17. Milton C. Sernett, North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 130. 18. Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, 190–92.

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N OTES TO PAGES 90–93 19. Liberator, 31 January 1851. 20. This is from Samuel J. May’s letter of recommendation for the Crafts, quoted in Special Report of the Bristol and Clifton Ladies Antislavery Society (Bristol, CT, 1842), 12; James Williams, The Life and Adventures of James Williams with a Full Description of the Underground Railroad (San Francisco: Women’s Union, 1873), 2. 21. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn; Jackson, Force and Freedom, 43–49. 22. W. Parker, “Freedman’s Story,” 160–61. 23. Hensel, Christiana Riot. 24. W. Parker, “Freedman’s Story,” 285. 25. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 127. 26. Douglass, Life and Times, 201–2; Pennsylvania Freeman, 12 June 1852. 27. National Antislavery Standard, 22 January 1852. 28. Pennsylvania Freeman, 12 June 1852. 29. Liberator, 11 April 1851. 30. The Fugitive Slave Bill: Its History and Unconstitutionality, with an Account of the Seizure and Enslavement of James Hamlet (New York: William Harned, 1851). 31. Pennsylvania Freeman, 9 December 1852; Kashatus, William Still, 76–80. 32. Liberator, 25 October 1850; Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 169. 33. “Contributions of the Churches in Massachusetts for Fugitive Slaves,” MASR; Pennsylvania Freeman, 27 March 1851, 12 February 1852. 34. Detroit Tribune, 17 January 1887. 35. W. W. Brown, Rising Son, 406–7. 36. F. Jackson, Account Book. 37. Wendell Phillips Garrison to Wilbur Siebert, 30 October 1893, WHSC; Lewis Hayden to Sydney Howard Gay, n.d., SHGP-CU. 38. William H. Leonard to William Still, 26 November 1856, William Still Letters, HSP. 39. John W. Jones to Wilbur Siebert, 16 January 1897, WHSC; Abner C. Wright to Wilbur Siebert, 20 June 1945, ibid. 40. Petit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad, 54; Jermain Loguen, The Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Freeman (Syracuse, NY: J. G. K. Truair, 1859); Hunter, To Set the Captives Free. 41. Martin Townsend to Wilbur Siebert, 4 September 1896, WHSC; Wilbur Siebert, “Stephen Myers,” n.d., ibid.; Stephen Myers to Francis Jackson, 22 May 1858, AC. 42. Finkbeine, “A Community Militant and Organized.” 43. National Antislavery Standard, 22 January 1852. For more on the New York City networks, see Foner, Gateway to Freedom. 44. Austin Bearse, Reminiscences of the Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 1–6. 45. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1898), 85, 130. 46. Ibid.; Tilden E. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). 47. Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 37; National Antislavery Standard, 4 April 1857; J. Miller McKim to Elijah Pennybacker, 22 February 1858, FHL.

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N OTES TO PAGES 94–97 48. Boyd, “William Still,” xxxi. 49. Jay, Fugitive Slave Bill; Lysander Spooner, A Defense for Fugitive Slaves (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1850). 50. Jay, Fugitive Slave Bill; Spooner, Defense for Fugitive Slaves. 51. A. G. Browne, Sketch of the Official Life of John Albion Andrew (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1868); Pearson, Life of John A. Andrew, 57; Tiffany, Samuel Sewall. 52. Mason, Life, 55–55. 53. “Interview with Rev. Thomas Clement Oliver of Windsor Ontario, Canada West, 31 July, 1895,” WHSC; True Wesleyan, 26 October 1850. 54. Richard Henry Dana, Two Years before the Mast (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 55. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 105–22. 56. In Memoriam. Robert Morris Sr. Born June 8 1823, Died December 12, 1882 (Boston: 1882), 2; Pauline E. Hopkins, “Famous Men of the Negro Race: Robert Morris,” in Colored American Magazine (Boston: Colored Cooperative Publishing, 1901), 337–43. 57. Abner C. Wright to Wilbur Siebert, 20 June 1945, WHSC. 58. “Obituary to George Latimer, 1896,” ibid. 59. Stevens, Anthony Burns, 203–9. 60. Colored Republicans to the Rescue: William H. Johnson, Republican State Committeeman at Large (New York, 1888); William Henry Johnson, Autobiography of William Henry Johnson (Albany, NY: Argus, 1900), 125–26. 61. George W. Putnam to Wilbur Siebert, 27 December 1893, WHSC; “Hitherto Unknown Details of the Inner Working of the Local Vigilance Committee,” n.d., ibid. 62. Papson and Calarco, Secret Lives of the Underground Railroad in New York City, 51–55; Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom, 70–74. 63. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 44–45. 64. Narrative of Facts in the Case of Passmore Williamson (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, 1855). 65. F. Jackson, “Fugitive Slaves,” 37–38. 66. Still, Underground Railroad, 440; H. Campbell, “Philadelphia Abolitionists,” 5–6. 67. North Star, 9 March 1849. 68. Still, Underground Railroad, xxiv. 69. Narrative of Facts in the Case of Passmore Williamson, 1. 70. M. S. P. Cotton to Maria Chapman, 22 December 1851, AC. 71. J. Jacobs, “True Tale of Slavery,” 138. 72. Edward, From Slavery to a Bishopric, 60; Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Wilbur Siebert, 24 July 1896, WHSC. 73. F. Jackson, Account Book. 74. Nina Moore Tiffany, “Stories of Fugitive Slaves I,” New England Magazine 1 (1890): 528. 75. “Hitherto Unknown Details of the Inner Working of the Local Committee of Vigilance,” n.d. WHSC; F. Jackson, Account Book; Black, Life and Sufferings, 36. 76. Frank Wilmot, Disclosures and Confessions of Frank A. Wilmot, the Slave Thief and Negro Runner with an Accurate Account of the Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Barclay, 1860), 15. 77. J. Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 212.

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N OTES TO PAGES 97–100 78. Stevens, Anthony Burns, 29–31. 79. Francis Jackson to Theodore Parker, 11 June 1854, AC. 80. Liberator, 6 June 1851, 25 February 1859; F. W. Grinnel, “Eastern Massachusetts and the Underground Railroad,” n.d., WHSC. 81. Theodore Parker to Francis Jackson, 3 September 1854, TPP. 82. Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia, Accounts, 1854–1857, HSP. 83. Still, Underground Railroad, 351. 84. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 180–81; Friends Intelligencer, 16 April 1898. 85. Circular of the Finance Committee, Boston Vigilance Committee, 1851, in Theodore Parker, comp., “Antislavery Scrapbook,” AC. 86. Still, Underground Railroad, 109. 87. Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia, Accounts, 1854–1857, HSP. 88. Rollins, Life and Services, 83. 89. F. Jackson, Account Book. 90. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 4 April 1857. 91. F. Jackson, Account Book; Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania 178–79. 92. Still, Underground Railroad, 526. 93. Pennsylvania Freeman, 17 February 1853. 94. Frederick Douglass to J. Miller McKim, 5 September 1844, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Three: Correspondence, ed. John R. McKivigan, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 30. 95. Graceanna Lewis, An Appeal to Those Members of the Society of Friends Who, Knowing the Principles of the Abolitionists, Stand Aloof from the Anti-Slavery Enterprise (N.p., n.d.). 96. Bacon, But One Race; In Memoriam: Sarah A. McKim. 97. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 348; Blackett, Captive’s Quest for Freedom, 269–308. 98. William C. Kashatus, Just over the Line: West Chester County and the Underground Railroad (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Blackett, Captive’s Quest for Freedom, 269–307. 99. See, for example, William Still to Elijah Pennybacker, 24 November, 1855; J. Miller McKim to Elijah Pennybacker, 22 February 1858; and Thomas Garret to Elijah Pennybacker, 11 June 1856, Elijah Pennybacker Correspondence, FHL. 100. Magill, When Men Were Sold; Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania; Still, Underground Railroad. 101. C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 119; Frank Preston Stearns, The Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1907), 88; Chase, Antislavery Reminiscences, 30–31; F. Jackson, “Fugitive Slaves,” 29–43; George Putnam to Wilbur Siebert, 5 November 1893, WHSC. 102. Liberator, 9 September 1859. 103. National Antislavery Standard, 7 October 1854. 104. Bearse, Reminisces of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, 34. 105. Ibid.; “Statement of Stockholders Loss in Yacht Flirt,” 1857, AC; Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League Records, 1846–1887, MHS.

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N OTES TO PAGES 100–103 106. Still, Underground Railroad, 115. 107. National Antislavery Standard, 20 January 1855. 108. Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Wilbur Siebert, 24 July 1896, WHSC. 109. Liberator, 25 June 1858. 110. Still, Underground Railroad, 278–79. 111. Ferris, African Abroad, 709–10. 112. Still, Underground Railroad, 183–85. 113. McGowan, Station Master on the Underground Railroad, 6–9; Still, Underground Railroad, 449. 114. Conway, Testimonies Concerning Slavery; Moncure Conway, Autobiography, Memories, and Experiences (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1904). 115. Thomas Garret to Joseph Dugdale, 29 November 1856, Joseph Dugdale Papers, FHL; Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 4–6. 116. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 35. 117. Mary Bibb to Gerrit Smith, 23 July 1848, GSP; James Mott to Isaac Post, 8 January 1855, PFP; Pennsylvania Freeman, 17 February 1853; Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro; Payne, Recollections, 121. 118. Liberator, 24 December 1858; National Antislavery Standard, 20 January 1855; Thomas J. Mumford, Samuel May, and George B. Emerson, Memoir of Samuel Joseph May (Boston: American Unitarian Society, 1876), 218. 119. Hiram Wilson to Hannah Gray, 22 March 1853, WHSC; “The First Annual Meeting of the Antislavery Society of Canada, 1852,” ibid.; Henry Bibb to William Still, 15 January 1852, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2:204–5. 120. Minutes and Proceedings of the General Convention for the Improvement of the Colored Inhabitants of Canada (Windsor, Canada: Bibb& Holly, 1853), 8; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 256–58; Daniel G. Hill, The Freedom-Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada (Agincourt, ON: Book Society of Canada, 1981). 121. Antislavery Bugle, 14 January 1854; Thomas Henning to Sydney Howard Gay, 25 October 1851, SHGP-CU; Hiram Wilson to George Whipple, 24 November 1851, Hiram Wilson Papers, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. 122. Williams, Sunshine and Shadow, 44. 123. Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 124. Daniel Payne, Diary, 1856, Daniel A. Payne Collection, HU; William Still to Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 9 July 1857, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, ibid. 125. Hope, Heroes in Homespun. 126. “Circular of Mary Ann Shadd Cary,” October 1858, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2:392–93. 127. Letter from the Vigilance Committee, Maloney Collection, McKim-Garrison Family Papers, New York Public Library; Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Minutes, 1846–1856, HSP. 128. Proceedings of the American Antislavery Society at Its Second Decade (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1854), 162; Pennsylvania Freeman, 20 October 1853. 129. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton

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N OTES TO PAGES 103–105 Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Hannah Rose Murray, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 130. North Star, 11 December 1851; Richard Blackett, Beating against Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth Century Afro-American History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 57; “Speech by J. W. C. Pennington,” 12 June 1850, and “J. W. C. Pennington to the Editor, Christian News,” 6 September 1850, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 1:185–87. 131. Pennsylvania Freeman, 25 December 1851. 132. William Powell to Mary Ann Duval, 25 March 1851, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 1:255–57. 133. Mumford, May, and Emerson, Memoir of Samuel Joseph May, 213. 134. National Antislavery Standard, 14 October 1854; W. W. Brown, Rising Son, 19–20. 135. Provincial Freedman, 11 November 1854. 136. Pennsylvania Freeman, 15 December 1853; National Antislavery Standard, 25 November 1854; North Star, 23 March 1855; Sydney Howard Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU; Friend of the Fugitive, 1 April 1853; Mary Grew to the Bristol Ladies Antislavery Society, October 1852, SHGP-CU. 137. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon, 1958), 66–67. 138. Gara, Liberty Line. 139. On networks in south-central Pennsylvania, see D. Smith, On the Edge of Freedom. 140. William I. Bowditch to Wilbur Siebert, 5 April 1893, WHSC; S. C. Wightington to Wilbur Siebert, 30 March 1893, ibid. 141. Lumpkin, “‘General Plan Was Freedom’”; Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1880); Laura S. Haviland, A Woman’s Life Work (Chicago: Publishing Associations of Friends, 1889); Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank, 63. 142. Still, Underground Railroad; Liberator, 13 February 1857. 143. Francis Jackson to Judge Russel, 19 February 1859, AC; Grinnel, “Eastern Massachusetts and the Underground Railroad,” n.d., WHSC; Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, 2:132. 144. “Hitherto Unknown Details of the Working of the Local Committee of Vigilance,” n.d., WHSC; Liberator, 11 April 1851. 145. W. B. Williams to Wilbur Siebert, 30 March 1896, WHSC. 146. W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 125–26. 147. Chase, Antislavery Reminiscences, 39. 148. Gay, “Record of Fugitives,” SHGP-CU. 149. Frederick Douglass to Wilbur Siebert, 27 March 1893, WHSC; Sidney Howard Gay to Robert Morris, 11 February 1860, Robert Morris Papers, Boston Athenaeum; Cox and Cox, Narrative of Dimmock Charlton. 150. Still, “Journal C,” PASP. 151. Liberator, 31 January 1851. 152. Theodore Parker to Francis Jackson, 20 April 1851, AC; Records of the Vigilance Committee of Boston, ibid. 153. Bearse, Reminisces, 39. 154. Wendell Phillips to Elizabeth Pease, 9 March 1851, WHSC; National Antislavery Standard, 20 January 1855. 155. Narrative of Facts in the Case of Passmore Williamson, 1; Still, Underground Railroad, 292.

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N OTES TO PAGES 106–109 156. Hope, Heroes in Homespun, 133. 157. Stearns, Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns, 87–88. 158. On how Black abolitionists pioneered self-defense strategies, see K. Jackson, Force and Freedom, 39–63. 159. Theodore Parker, The Function and Place of Conscience in Relation to the Laws of Men (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1850). 160. Mumford, May, and Emerson, Memoir of Samuel Joseph May, 221. 161. Justin D. Fulton, Memoir of Timothy Gilbert (Boston: Lee and Shephard, 1866), 42. 162. Ibid., 47. 163. Frederick Willis, Alcott Memoirs (Boston: Richard Badger, 1915), 76. 164. Ibid., 75. 165. Ferris, African Abroad, 695. 166. Francis Jackson to Wendell Phillips, 5 April 1860, WPP. 167. Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, “Rehearsal for War: Black Militias in the Atlantic World,” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 1 (April 2005): 1–34. 168. Robert Morris, “Speech of Robert Morris Esq. before the Committee on the Militia, March 3d., 1853,” Morris Papers, Boston Athenaeum; William Watkins to the Editor of the Boston Herald, 22 April 1853, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:153–55; William Watkins, Our Rights as Men, an Address Delivered in Boston before the Legislative Committee on the Militia (Boston: Benjamin F. Roberts, 1853). 169. Still, Underground Railroad, 133–44. 170. Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 247–48. 171. W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 31, 194–96. 172. Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League Records, 1846–1887, MHS; Henry I. Bowditch to Anon., 10 August 1854, AC. 173. National Antislavery Standard, 30 May 1857. 174. Robert H. Churchill, “When Slave Catchers Came to Town: Cultures of Violence along the Underground Railroad,” Journal of American History 105, no. 3 (December 2018): 514–37. 175. “Interview with Rev. Thomas Clement Oliver of Windsor Ontario, Canada West, 31 July, 1895,” WHSC. 176. W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 117–18; The Arrest, Trial, and Release of Daniel Webster, a Fugitive Slave (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, 1859). 177. National Antislavery Standard, 18 June 1853. 178. Grand Jury Indictment, Jerry Rescue, 1851, GSP; Charles Merick, “Reminiscences of the Jerry Rescue,” 1893, WHSC; Earl E. Sperry, The Jerry Rescue, October 1, 1851 (Syracuse, NY: Onondaga Historical Association, 1924); Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 211. 179. H. V. Johnson, From Dixie to Canada: Romances and Realities of the Underground Railroad (Buffalo, NY: Charles Wells Moulton, 1894), 46; Murphy, Jerry Rescue. 180. Richard Henry Dana Jr., Journal, 1849–53, MHS. 181. Collison, Shadrach Minkins; In Memoriam: Robert Morris Sr. 182. T. James, Wonderful Eventful Life, 12–13. 183. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Contemporaries (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1899), 297; Liberator, 6 June 1851.

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N OTES TO PAGES 109–112 184. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Narrative of the Burns Case,” n.d., AC. 185. Von Frank, Trials of Anthony Burns. 186. Blackett, Beating against Barriers, 57–59; Still, Underground Railroad, 175–76. 187. Voltairine De Cleyre, “Direct Action,” in The Selected Works of Voltairine De Cleyre: Poems, Essays, Sketches, and Stories, 1885–1911 (Chicago: AK Press, 2016), 228. 188. Still, Underground Railroad, 309. 189. William Cooper Nell to Amy Kirby Post, 5 December 1850, in Porter and Uzelac, William Cooper Nell, 180; Liberator, 5 January 1855. 190. National Antislavery Standard, 28 Oct 1854. 191. Edward Everett Hale, James Freeman Clarke: Autobiography, Diary, and Correspondence (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1899), 246. 192. Higginson, Contemporaries, 227. 193. Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 3. 194. Accounts of the Antislavery Standard, 1860–1862, New York Public Library; American Anti-Slavery Society Ledger, 1844–1863, ibid. 195. Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Minutes, 1846–1856, HSP. 196. Proceedings of the American Antislavery Society at Its Second Decade, 121. 197. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, 47–49; Proceedings of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society at the Annual Meetings Held in 1854, 1855, 1856 (Boston: Office of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1856), 27–28. 198. Pennsylvania Freeman, 20 May 1852. 199. Wendell Phillips, Speeches before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1852), 1; Pennsylvania Freeman, 27 March 1851. 200. Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Minutes, 1846–1856, HSP. 201. Mrs. Charles Webb to Wilbur Siebert, 7 September 1896, WHSC; Female Antislavery Sewing Society, Minutes, Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College, Haverford, PA. 202. “Address to the People of Massachusetts, by the Board of Managers of the Boston Antislavery Society, 1851,” Broadside, MHS; “Nineteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 22 January, 1851,” WHSC. 203. National Antislavery Standard, 4 April 1857. 204. Liberator, 26 August 1859; Proceedings of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society at the Annual Meetings Held in 1854, 1855, 1856, 26. 205. Wendell Phillips, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Addresses: First Series, 468–95; Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon, 1958), 25. 206. William Still to Elijah Pennybacker, 6 November 1858, Elijah Pennybacker Correspondence, FHL. 207. Liberator, 8 April 1864. 208. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 117–20. 209. Records of the Vigilance Committee of Boston, AC. 210. Liberator, 14 July 1854. 211. Conway, Autobiography, 184–86; Proceedings of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society at the Annual Meetings Held in 1854, 1855, 1856, 27–28.

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N OTES TO PAGES 112–116 212. New York Tribune, 14 May 1858; Redpath, Roving Editor. 213. James Freeman Clarke, Antislavery Days: Sketch of the Struggle which Ended in the Abolition of Slavery in the United States (New York: John W. Lovell, 1883), 81–82. 214. Susan L. Crane to Wilbur Siebert, 23 September 1896, WHSC; Francis Jackson to Lydia Maria Child, 9 September 1860, ASC. 215. William L. Chaplin to Gerrit Smith, 11 November 1848, GSP; George Putnam to Wilbur Siebert, 5 November 1893, WHSC; Lydia Maria Child, The Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 144–45. 216. Still, Underground Railroad, 178–79; Blackett, Captive’s Quest for Freedom, 316–18. 217. Still, Underground Railroad. 218. Pennington, Fugitive Blacksmith, 58. 219. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Mary Thacher Higginson, 1921), 89; Washington, Up from Slavery, 7–8. 220. Ross, Memoirs of a Reformer, 18–79, 154–55; Ross, Recollections and Experiences of an Abolitionist from 1855 to 1865 (Toronto: Rosswell and Hutchinson, 1875); “Letter of George W. Clark, the Liberty Singer,” WHSC; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 115. 221. Still, Underground Railroad, 94. 222. Ibid., 187. 223. Rafia Zafar, ed., God Made Man, Man Made Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990), 113. 224. Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Freeman, 250; Anthony Burns to Richard Henry Dana, 30 August 1857, Dana Family Papers, MHS. 225. J. L. Smith, Autobiography, 57. 226. Mr. J. Anderson to Sidney Howard Gay, 30 August 1859, SHGP-NYPL. 227. Jean Yellin Fagan, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 102–3. 228. Pennington, Fugitive Blacksmith, 44; Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 181. 229. Pennsylvania Freeman, 9 January 1851. 230. Still, Underground Railroad, 70. 231. I. Campbell, Autobiography, 216–17. 232. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 30–32, 42. 233. Jacob, Incidents, 6. 234. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, n.d., PFP. 235. Lydia Maria Child to Harriet Jacobs, 13 August 1860, ibid.; Jacobs to Post, n.d.; Memorial of Sarah Pugh, 100. 236. Henry Bibb to Gerrit Smith, December 1848, GSP; Jermain Loguen to Gerrit Smith, 23 March 1849, ibid. 237. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 107–8. 238. See Christopher Hager, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 239. John Greenleaf Whittier, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (New York: Isaac Knapp, 1838).

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N OTES TO PAGES 116–120 240. Kate R. Pickard to Peter Still, 28 September 1855, Peter Still Papers, 1850–1875, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, NJ. 241. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 167–205. 242. Jeremiah Asher, An Autobiography, with Details of a Visit to England (Philadelphia: Jeremiah Asher, 1862), 226. 243. Jermain Loguen to Gerrit Smith, 23 March 1849, GSP. 244. For the focus of “authenticity,” see Dickson D. Bruce, The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 211–57. 245. I. Campbell, Autobiography, v. 246. Lane, Narrative, iv. 247. Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 68. 248. Drew, Refugee, 263. 249. Watson, Narrative, 40. 250. Thompson, Life, vi. 251. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 6. 252. Henry Bibb to Gerrit Smith, December 1848, GSP; Jermain Loguen to Gerrit Smith, 23 March 1849, ibid.; J. Anderson to Sydney Howard Gay, 30 August 1859, SHGP-NYPL. 253. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1959). 254. J. Brown, Slave Life in Georgia; A. Jackson, Narrative and Writings; Williams, Sunshine and Shadow. 255. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (New York: Random House, 1965). 256. William Wells Brown, Narrative. 257. Wright quoted in D. Bruce, Origins of African American Literature, 240. 258. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 103–24. 259. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 32, 147–217; Peter Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life (Boston, 1855). 260. Teresa Goddu, Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 55–82. 261. Still, Underground Railroad, 329. 262. Liberator, 26 August 1859. 263. Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance. 264. William Troy, Hair Breadth Escapes from Slavery to Freedom (Manchester: W. Bremer, 1861); Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 169–88; Redpath, Roving Editor; Samuel Gridley Howe, The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1864); Drew, Refugee. 265. Ross, Memoirs of a Reformer, 114. 266. William I. Bowditch to Sidney Howard Gay, n.d., SHGP-CU. 267. J. Miller McKim, A Sketch of the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia Contained in Two Letters (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh and Allegany Antislavery Society, 1838); Charles K. Whipple, The Family Relation as Afflicted by Slavery (Cincinnati: American Reform, Tract, and Book Society, 1858); Lewis Gunn, Address to Abolitionists (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1838). 268. Samuel J. May, The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861). 269. J. Walker, Picture of Slavery for Youth, 1.

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N OTES TO PAGES 120–125 270. Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 271. Eric Herschthal, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021). 272. Tocqueville, Democracy in America; Lorenz von Stein, The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789–1850, trans. Kaethe Mengelberg (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster, 1964). 273. George Fitzhugh, The Sociology of Slavery; or, The Failure of Free Society (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1854), 222; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 730. 274. Richard Hildreth, Despotism in America: An Inquiry into the Nature, Results, and Legal Basis of the Slaveholding System in the United States (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1854); Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 715; Jesse Olsavsky, “The Abolitionist Tradition in the Making of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Marxism and Anti-Imperialism,” Socialism and Democracy 32, no. 3 (2019): 14–35. 275. Hammond quoted in D. Bruce, Origins of African American Literature, 226. 276. Staughton Lynd, The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968); Raffaele Laudani, Disobedience in Western Political Thought: A Genealogy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Peter Wirzbicki, Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 142–77. 277. Charles Stearns, The Fugitive Slave Law of the United States (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1851), 23. 278. Meaders, Isaac Hopper’s Tales of Oppression, 198. 279. Drew, Refugee, 63. 280. Theodore Parker to E. E. Knowles, 21 June 1854, TPP; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 6 April 1855; T. Parker, Function and Place of Conscience. 281. Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 3:303. 282. “The Vigilance Committee: Appeal, New York June, 1844,” Circular, New-York Historical Society. 283. Lydia Maria Child, The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act (Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860), 22. 284. Bearse, Reminisces, 14–15. 285. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 208–9. 286. Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Freeman, 91. 287. Liberator, 1 April 1853.

4. ALL SHALL BE THROWN DOWN 1. John Murray Spear, The Educator: Being Suggestions, Theoretical and Practical, Designed to Promote Culture and Integral Reform, with a View to the Ultimate Establishment of a Divine Social State on Earth (Boston: Office of Practical Spiritualists, 1857), 12–15; Governing Documents and Records of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, AC; Ellis Gray Loring to Wendell Phillips, 23 September 1841, WPP. 2. A. Bronson Alcott, The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston: Little and Brown, 1938), 243. 3. Spear, Educator. 4. Wendell Phillips, “Welcome to George Thompson,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Addresses: Second Series (Boston: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard, 1891), 29.

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N OTES TO PAGES 125–129 5. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 172. 6. Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Freeman. 7. Henry Salt, Life of Henry David Thoreau (London: Walter Scott, 1896), 113; Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 114. 8. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Narrative of the Burns Case,” n.d., AC. 9. National Antislavery Standard, 28 October 1854; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 192. 10. Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, 127. 11. True Wesleyan, 18 May 1850. 12. North Star, 27 May 1852. 13. Rand, One of a Thousand, 295. 14. Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray, 25. 15. Charyl Janifer La Roche, “Secrets Well Kept: Colored Conventions and the Underground Railroad,” in The Colored Conventions: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, ed. P. Gabrielle Foreman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 258. 16. Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 304. 17. Sidney Howard Gay to Edmund Quincy, 13 June 1844, SHGP-CU. 18. Mirror of Liberty, August, 1838. 19. Newspaper Scrapbook, 1880–1899, CLBC. 20. Colored American, 16 June 1838. 21. Oliver Johnson, William Lloyd Garrison and His Times (Boston: B. Russel, 1879), 205. 22. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 332. 23. Boyd, “William Still,” xxxi. 24. Still, “Journal C,” PASP, 122. 25. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 209–10. 26. Colored American, 16 June 1838. 27. F. Jackson, Account Book, 34. 28. Arthur Otis Gay to Sidney Howard Gay, 10 September 1860, SHGP-CU; Sidney Howard Gay, “Miscellaneous Notes and Drafts,” SHGP-NYPL. 29. Sidney Howard Gay to Edmund Quincy, 24 February 1846, SHGP-NYPL; Sidney Howard Gay to Maria Weston Chapman, n.d., ibid. 30. Lewis Hayden to Sydney Howard Gay, n.d., SHGP-CU; Lucretia Mott to Elizabet Neal Gay, n.d., ibid.; Sarah Pugh to Sidney Howard Gay, 21 August 1845, ibid. 31. See Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 32. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 161. 33. See Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Brett Granger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). For the critique of this trend, see Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt. 34. “Sketch of Jonathan Thomas,” MASR; Still, Underground Railroad, 100–101, 280–81. 35. Still, Underground Railroad, 316. 36. H. Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 154–55; J. Jackson, Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, 26.

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N OTES TO PAGES 130–132 37. Still, Underground Railroad, 369. 38. Fredric, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky, 56. 39. Still, Underground Railroad, 350; William Wells Brown, Narrative, 136. 40. Still, Underground Railroad, 101. 41. North Star, 22 June 1849. 42. Lewis Hayden, “Testimony of Lewis Hayden Delivered at the Massachusetts Statehouse,” in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:266–68. 43. Drew, Refugee, 105; J. Jackson, Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, 14–15. 44. William Bowditch, The Antislavery Reform: Its Principal and Method (Boston: Robert F. Wallcutt, 1850), 11. 45. Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Freeman, 106. 46. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 201. 47. Pennsylvania Freeman, 12 August 1847. 48. Still, Underground Railroad, 39. 49. See, most importantly, Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 50. Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life, 68. 51. Ross, Memoirs of a Reformer, 43–44. 52. C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown, 127; Thomas Jones, “The Experience of Rev Thomas Jones,” in North Carolina Slave Narratives, ed. William L. Andrews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 224, 243. 53. Quoted in Jesse Olsavsky, “The Underground Railroad,” in Frederick Douglass in Context, ed. Michael Roy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 283. 54. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 105; Drew, Refugee, 98. 55. Still, Underground Railroad, 303. 56. Daniel Payne, “Slavery Brutalizes Man,” Lutheran Herald and Journal of the Fort Plain, N.Y., Franckean Synod 1, no. 15 (1 August 1839): 113. 57. See Christopher Cameron, “Slavery and African American Irreligion,” Journal of Southern Religion 18 (2016), jsreligion.org/vol18/cameron; Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 3–40. 58. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 61. 59. Jonathan Walker, A Brief View of Chattelized Humanity and Its Supports (Boston: Dow and Jackson, 1847), 31, 33; J. Jacobs, “True Tale of Slavery,” 140–41. 60. Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 41–42. 61. Douglass, Narrative, 118–25. 62. Charles K. Whipple, “The Church and the Clergy,” in Friends of Freedom, Liberty Bell (1844), 193; George W. Putnam to Wilbur Siebert, 27 December 1893, WHSC; James Russel Lowell, “The Church and the Clergy Again,” in The Antislavery Papers of James Russel Lowell, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1902), 29. 63. Watson, Narrative, 29–31, 39; Antislavery Convention of American Women, Address to Free Colored Americans, 27. 64. Douglass, Narrative, 119–20.

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N OTES TO PAGES 132–135 65. Richard Hildreth, Theory of Politics: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Governments and the Courses and Progress of Political Revolutions (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1854), 151; “The Hon. Elizur Wright,” EWP. 66. North Star, 22 June 1849. 67. Liberator, 18 March 1837. 68. “Contributions of the Churches in Massachusetts for Fugitive Slaves,” MASR; Roy E. Finkbeine, “Boston’s Black Churches: Institutional Centers of the Antislavery Movement,” in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 169–89. 69. Thomas W. Henry, From Slavery to Salvation: The Autobiography of Rev. Thomas W. Henry of the AME Church, ed. Jean Libby ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 51. 70. Daniel Payne, Diary, 1856, Daniel A. Payne Collection, HU; Daniel Payne to Gerrit Smith, 25 April 1859, GSP. 71. William Watkins, “Address to the Colored Churches in the Free States,” November 1836, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:192. 72. Theodore S. Wright, “Speech by Theodore S. Wright Delivered at Blecker Street Church, Utica New York, 20 October 1836, ibid., 185. 73. Daniel A. Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville: AME Sunday School Union, 1891), 142. 74. T. James, Wonderful Eventful Life, 10–21. 75. Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:177–78; James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1970), 112, 225. 76. Fulton, Memoir of Timothy Gilbert, 113. 77. Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott, 234. 78. Luther Lee, Autobiography of Rev. Luther Lee (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1882), 238. 79. L. C. Matlack, Secession. A Personal Narrative of Proscription for Being an Abolitionist (Syracuse, NY, 1856), 33. 80. North Star, 15 January 1852; Henry Ward Beecher, The Fugitive Slave Law (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1851); Beecher, Wendell Phillips: A Commemorative Discourse (New York: Howard and Hulbert, 1884), 415–16. 81. National Antislavery Standard, 13 May 1841; Liberator, 1 September 1848; Colored American, 12 December 1840. 82. Francis Jackson to Theodore Parker, 27 August 1854, AC; “Contributions of the Churches in Massachusetts for Fugitive Slaves,” MASR. 83. National Antislavery Standard, 28 January 1853. 84. Julia Ward Howe, Reminisces, 1819–1899 (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1900), 244. 85. Frothingham, Memoir of William Henry Channing, 203. 86. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 131; Swami Vivekananda, Swami Vivekananda on Himself (Bombay, India: Saxon Press, 1959), 141. 87. George Washington Williams, History of Twelfth Baptist Church, Boston, Massachusetts, from 1840 to 1874 (Boston: James Earl, 1874); Pennsylvania Freeman, 25 August 1853; Liberator, 26 August 1859; Noah Davis, A Narrative of the Life of Noah Davis, a Colored Man (Baltimore: John F. Weishampel, 1859), 61–62; Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom, 141–42; Pennsylvania Freeman, 20 October 1853.

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N OTES TO PAGES 135–138 88. Pennsylvania Freeman, 25 August 1853. 89. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 104. 90. Cone, Black Theology of Liberation; Gustavo Guitierrez, A Theology of Liberation (New York: Orbis Books, 1988); Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd, Liberation Theology for Quakers (Philadelphia: Pendle Hill, 1996). 91. Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends, 1853–1873, FHL; Theodore Parker to the Progressive Friends of Pennsylvania, 9 September 1859, Joseph Dugdale Papers, ibid. 92. Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends, 1853–1873, FHL. 93. Ibid.; “Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends, 1857,” Circular, SCRBC. 94. Eunice Schuster, Native American Anarchism: A Study of Left Wing Individualism (Northampton, MA, 1912); Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); Holly Jackson, American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation (New York: Crown, 2019), 99–118; John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). 95. Parker Pillsbury, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles (Boston: Cupples and Upham, 1884), 323. 96. Henry M. Parkhurst, Proceedings of the Anti-Sabbath Convention, Held in the Melodean March 23rd and 24th, 1848 (Boston, 1848), 7. 97. Ibid., 32. 98. Proceedings of the American Antislavery Society at Its Second Decade, 135. 99. Lucretia Mott, “Progress in the Religious World, 1848,” in Lucretia Mott: Her Complete Speeches and Sermons, ed. Dana Greene (New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1980), 60; Lee, Autobiography, 220. 100. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism (New York: Arno, 1975), 64, 79, 111. 101. Charles T. Torrey, Home! Or a Pilgrim’s Faith Revived! (Salem, MA: John P. Jewett, 1885), 131; J. Williams, Life and Adventures, 99; Memorial of Sarah Pugh, 38. 102. Porter and Uzelac, William Cooper Nell, 22–23, 355–56. 103. In Memoriam: Mary A. W. Johnson; Anne Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 104. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 49, 54. 105. Spear, Educator. 106. William Cooper Nell to Amy Post, PFP. 107. Still, Underground Railroad; H. C. Bruce, New Man, 32; Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 114; William Andrews, Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Testimony, 1840–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 108. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991). 109. Ibid., 65–95. On abolitionist critiques of capitalism, see Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 347–59. 110. Frederick Douglass, “Agitate, Agitate,” 1853, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 396. 111. Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of our Antislavery Conflict (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869), 309–10. 112. N. R. Johnston, Looking Back from Sunset Land; or, People Worth Knowing (Oakland, CA, 1848), 120; Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 377–409.

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N OTES TO PAGES 139–141 113. Liberator, 12 November 1847; Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 147; von Frank, Trials of Anthony Burns, 23–30. 114. For more on Irish racism in America, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1995). 115. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society At the Annual Meetings Held in 1854, 1855, 1856, 8–10. 116. National Antislavery Standard, 3 February 1855. 117. Bearse, Reminisces. 118. Lydia Maria Child, The Patriarchal Institution, as Described by Members of Its Own Family (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860), 49. 119. Hildreth, Theory of Politics, 269. 120. Parkhurst, Proceedings of the Anti-Sabbath Convention, 34–36. 121. G. Walker, Afro-American in New York City, 35. 122. W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 259. 123. J. Walker, Brief View of Chattelized Humanity, 26–31. 124. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 3 November 1854; Liberator, 10 March 1843. On abolitionist antiracism, see Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 299–339. 125. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, A Plea for Emigration (Detroit: George W. Pattison, 1852); Garnet, Memorial Discourse; Henry Highland Garnett, The Past and the Present Condition and Destiny of the Colored Race: A Discourse (Troy, NY, 1848); Beverley Tomek, ed., New Directions in the Study of Afro-American Re-Colonization (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017). 126. Isaiah Wears, “A Tribute to Robert Purvis,” 1898, Letters and Papers of James Still, Isaiah Wears, and William Still, HSP; Robert Purvis, Speeches and Letters of Robert Purvis, Published by Request of the Afro-American League (Philadelphia, n.d.), 26; Dorothy Porter Wesley, “Integration versus Separatism: William Cooper Nell’s Role in the Struggle for Equality,” in D. Jacobs, Courage and Conscience, 206–24. 127. Isaiah Wears to Frederick Douglass, 1855, Letters and Papers of James Still, Isaiah Wears, and William Still, HSP. 128. Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Records, vol. 1, 46, HSP; Frederick Douglass to J. Miller McKim, 5 September 1844, in Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Three, 1:30. 129. National Antislavery Standard, 8 May 1856; Paul Teed, “Racial Nationalism and Its Challengers: Theodore Parker, John Rock, and the Antislavery Movement,” Civil War History 41, no. 2 (1995): 142–60. 130. T. James, Wonderful Eventful Life, 15; William Still, A Brief Narrative of the Struggle for the Rights of the Colored People of Philadelphia on the City Railway Cars and a Defense of William Still (Philadelphia, 1867); Philip S. Foner, “The Battle to End Discrimination against Negroes on Philadelphia Streetcars: (Part I) Background and Beginning of the Battle,” Pennsylvania History 40 (1973): 261–90; Foner, “The Battle to End Discrimination against Negroes on Philadelphia Streetcars: (Part II) The Victory,” ibid., 355–79; William Cooper Nell, Triumph of Equal School Rights in Boston (Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1856). 131. Robert Purvis, Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1838); Stephen Myers to Gerrit Smith, 22 March 1856, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers 4:326–28.

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N OTES TO PAGES 141–144 132. Robert Morris, “Speech of Robert Morris Esq. before the Committee on the Militia, March 3d., 1853,” Robert Morris Papers, Boston Athenaeum; W. Watkins, Our Rights as Men; Bell, Survey of the Negro Convention Movement. 133. La Roche, “Secrets Well Kept,” 248. 134. Hodges, David Ruggles; John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: J. D. Lippincott, 1870), 118; Carl Guarnari, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 135. F. Jackson, Account Book; Guarnari, Utopian Alternative. 136. Frothingham, Memoir of William Henry Channing, 261. 137. Isaac Hopper to Sarah Hopper Palmer, 8 January 1850, Isaac Hopper Papers, FHL; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 102–13; Charles B. Ray to Gerrit Smith, 24 May 1847, GSP. 138. Gerrit Smith, An Address to the Three Thousand Colored Citizens of New York, Who Are Owners of One Hundred and Twenty Thousand Acres of Land (New York, 1846); Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray, 21. 139. William Wells Brown, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (Boston: James Redpath, 1863), 258. 140. Colored American, 13 July 1839; W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (New York: International Publishers, 1962), 64. 141. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, “Abolition Lecture 2,” undated draft, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, HU. 142. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, “Modern Civilizations. Our Relations and Duty,” undated draft, ibid; Colored American, 15 September 1838; Pennsylvania Freeman, 23 October 1851. 143. J. B. Smith to James Redpath, 6 February 1862, Redpath Correspondence, SCRBC; James Redpath to William J. Watkins, 11 February [1862?], ibid.; Mason, Life, 67–68; W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 21; Jacob C. White to William H. Parham, 6 October 1862, LGC. 144. Haitian Abolition Society to Elizur Wright, n.d., EWP. 145. National Antislavery Standard, 28 October 1854. 146. Olsavsky. “Women, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Militant Abolitionism,” 357–82; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 1:324–33. Many historians overlook the role of the Underground Railroad as a meaningful space for women’s activism. See, for example, Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); and Martha S. Jones, “We Are All Bound Up Together”: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). One of the few attempts to start connecting the resistance of enslaved women to abolitionism is Delores M. Walters, ed., Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 147. Still, Underground Railroad, 183, 199, 208. 148. F. Jackson, Account Book. 149. Joseph A. Allen to Wilbur Sibert, 10 August 1896, WHSC; “Hitherto Unknown Details of the Inner Working of the Local Committee of Vigilance,” n.d., ibid.; George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1903), 181–82. 150. Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 367–68; Lucretia Mott to Elizabet Neal Gay, SHGP-CU; Sarah Pugh to Sidney Howard Gay, 21 August 1845, ibid. 151. Rogers, Collection from the Miscellaneous Writings of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, 138.

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N OTES TO PAGES 144–148 152. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary; Daniel Payne, Diary, 1856, Daniel A. Payne Collection, HU; William Still to Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 9 July 1857, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, ibid. 153. Boyd, “William Still,” xxxi. 154. Liberator, 24 December 1858; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: Feminist Press, 1990). 155. Lydia Maria Child to Harriet Jacobs, 13 August 1860, PFP; Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, n.d., ibid.; C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown; Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray, 65–66. 156. Lucy N. Coleman, Reminiscences (Buffalo, NY: H. L. Greens, 1891), 50. 157. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 328. 158. Still, Underground Railroad, 332. 159. David Ruggles, The Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment by American Churches (New York: David Ruggles, 1835). 160. Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Freeman, 14. 161. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 6. 162. Child, Patriarchal Institution, 49. See also Whipple, Family Relation as Afflicted by Slavery, 12. 163. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1986). 164. Clarke and Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, 111. 165. John Murray Spear, Twenty Years on the Wing (Boston: William White, 1873), 19–21; Spear, Messages from a Superior State (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1853). 166. Frothingham, Memoir of William Henry Channing, 268–69. 167. Memorial of Sarah Pugh, 129; Francis Jackson to Wendell Phillips, 10 December 1841, WPP. 168. Stanton, History, 342. 169. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2009), 187–216. 170. Harper, Brighter Coming Day, 218–19; Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Chicago: Haymarket, 2021). 171. Olsavsky, “Runaway Slaves, Militant Abolitionists, and the Critique of American Prisons,” 1–22. 172. H. Jacobs, Incidents, 71; Watson, Narrative, 14. 173. Still, Still’s Underground Railroad Records, (295, 401. 174. Drew, Refugee, 131. 175. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 135. 176. Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, 26; H. Jacobs, Incidents, 49; Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 19–20. 177. James Freeman Clarke, Present Condition of the Free Colored People of the United States (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1859), 22–23. 178. Hildreth, Despotism in America, 60. 179. Howe, Slavery at Washington, 4–5. 180. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 298–99; Drew, Refugee, 363; William Chaplin to Jo Norton, 5 December 1840, WHSC. 181. Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker; Case of William L. Chaplin; A History of the Trial of Miss Delia Webster (E. W. Blaisdell, 1845).

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N OTES TO PAGES 148–151 182. Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank; Still, Underground Railroad, 84–86; Lewis W. Paine, Six Years in a Georgia Prison (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1852). 183. Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 258–59. 184. First Report of the Prison Association of New York (New York: Jared Bell, 1844); Laura E. Richards, Samuel Gridley Howe (New York: D. Appleton, 1935), 165; In Memoriam: John W. Browne, 84. 185. Samuel Gridley Howe, An Essay on Separate and Congregate Systems of Prison Discipline (Boston: William Ticknor, 1846), iv; Samuel Gridley Howe, “Scenes from a Slave Prison,” in Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston: National Antislavery Bazaar, 1843), 175–80. 186. McKim, Sketch of the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia; Howe, “Scenes from a Slave Prison,” 175–80; untitled item, British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter 5, no. 5 (1844): 35. 187. Isaac Hopper, “Discharged Convicts,” Prisoners’ Friend 1, no. 2 (1848): 87–88. 188. “Meeting on the Treatment of Criminals,” Prisoner’s Friend 1, no. 11 (1849): 511; Frederick Douglass, “Address to the People of the United States,” in “Appeal to the British People,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 674. 189. Charles K. Whipple, Non-Resistance Applied to the Internal Defense of a Community (Boston: R. F. Wallcutt, 1860), 4; “Abolition of Capital Punishment,” Prisoner’s Friend 1, no. 8 (1849): 312; Charles Burleigh, Thoughts on the Death Penalty (Philadelphia Merrihew and Thompson, 1847); Frederick Douglass, “Resolutions Proposed for Anti-Capital Punishment Meeting,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, 369; Wendell Phillips, “Capital Punishment,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Letters: Second Series, 77–110; Liberator, 10 May 1844. 190. Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 208; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 28 November 1844. 191. William Lloyd Garrison, Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison (Boston: R. F. Walcutt, 1852), 284. 192. “Circular on Funeral of Torrey, May 14, 1846,” AC; Charles Dexter Cleveland to A. A. Phelps 30 June 1846, ibid.; Pickard, The Kidnaped and the Ransomed, 282. 193. “Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting, 1851,” Frederick Douglass Collection, SCRBC. 194. Child, Letters from New York, 217. 195. Ibid., 258. 196. Spear, Educator, 15. 197. John Murray Spear, ed., Voices from Prison: Being a Selection of Poetry from Various Prisoners Written within the Cell (Boston: J. M. Spear, 1847). 198. Spear, Messages from a Superior State, 51, 127. For more on prison as a form of enclosure, closely related to plantations and factories, see Peter Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). 199. Parkhurst, Proceedings of the Anti-Sabbath Convention, 123. 200. George Putnam to Wilbur Siebert, 5 November 1893, WHSC. 201. K. Jackson, Force and Freedom; Theodore Parker to Francis Jackson, 20 April 1851, AC; Records of the Vigilance Committee of Boston, ibid. 202. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Narrative of the Burns Case,” n.d., AC. 203. Whipple, Non-Resistance Applied to the Internal Defense of a Community, 18–20. 204. Walt Whitman, “Song of the Answerer,” in Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern Library, 1921), 192.

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N OTES TO PAGES 151–154 205. Wendell Phillips, “The Philosophy of the Abolition Movement,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Addresses: First Series, 132. 206. James McCune Smith, introduction to Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 9–23. 207. J. Miller McKim to Sidney Howard Gay, 20 March 1849, SHGP-CU. 208. Liberator, 21 April 1865. 209. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House, 1892), 179, 225. 210. Phillips, “Philosophy of the Abolition Movement,” 132. 211. Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave, in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853). 212. Emily Pierson, Jamie Parker, the Fugitive (Hartford, CT: Brockett, Fuller, 1851). 213. George Lippard, New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (Cincinnati: Queen City, 1853), 116–19. 214. David S. Reynolds, George Lippard (New York: Twayne, 1982). 215. George Lippard, The Empire City; or, New York by Night and Day, Its Aristocracy and Its Dollars (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1864), 84–85. 216. Pennsylvania Freeman, 29 January 1852; Coffin, Reminiscences, 426. 217. W. B. Williams to Wilbur Siebert, 30 March 1896, WHSC. 218. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1878), in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (reprint, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1958), xviii. 219. Charles Edward Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Her Letters and Journals (London: St. Dunstan’s House, 1889), 263. 220. H. Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 23, 36. 221. Ibid., 6–7, 123–25, 378; Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of William Lloyd Garrison, 26. 222. Fulton, Memoir of Timothy Gilbert, 34. 223. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Richard Henry Dana, 9 November 1852, Dana Family Papers, MHS. 224. H. Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 106, 116–18, 376, 378. 225. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 29 April 1853; Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Minutes, 1846– 1856, HSP; Pennsylvania Freeman, 29 April 1852. 226. On Black historiography, see Stephen G. Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 227. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 228. W. W. Brown, Rising Son. 229. James W. C. Pennington, A Textbook of the Origins and History of the Colored People (Hartford, CT: L. Skinner, 1841); W. W. Brown, Rising Son; Lydia Maria Child, The History of Women in Various Ages and Nations, vol. 1, Comprising the Women of Asia and Africa (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1835), 217; James Russel Lowell, “Sympathy with Ireland,” in Antislavery Papers of James Russel Lowell, 1:101. 230. William Cooper Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Walcutt, 1855).

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N OTES TO PAGES 154–158 231. W. W. Brown, Black Man; Delany, Condition, Elevation, and Destiny of the Colored People; John W. Lewis, The Life, Labors, and Travels of Charles Bowles of the Free Will Baptist Denomination (Watertown, MA: Ingalls and Stowell, 1852). 232. W. W. Brown, Black Man, 6. 233. William Wells Brown to Gerrit Smith, 4 September 1862, GSP. 234. Zafar, God Made Man, Man Made Slave, 114. 235. John Wallace Hutchinson, Story of the Hutchinsons (Tribe of Jesse) (Boston: Lee and Shephard, 1896); Boston Post, 2 June 1896. 236. Lydia Maria Child to Harriet Jacobs, 13 August 1860, PFP; Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, n.d., ibid.; C. S. Brown, Memoir of Rev. Abel Brown; Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray, 65–66. 237. Liberator, 24 December 1858. 238. Sidney Howard Gay to Richard Webb, 26 March 1847, SHGP-CU; Lewis Tappan to Gerrit Smith, 30 September 1839, GSP. 239. Bela Marsh, ed., Lays of Liberty; or, Verses for the Times (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1854); William Wells Brown, The Antislavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Antislavery Meetings (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1848). 240. “Letter of George W. Clark, the Liberty Singer,” WHSC. 241. George W. Clark, preface to The Liberty Minstrel (New York: Jackson and Chaplain, 1845). 242. Petit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad, 47. 243. Pennsylvania Freeman, 17 August 1848; “Songs Composed by Henry Box Brown on His Escape from Slavery,” Smith Family Papers, New York Public Library. 244. I. Campbell, Autobiography, 288. 245. Thompson, Life, 19. 246. “Reply of C. S. Brown Spear,” n.d., WHSC; Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray, 65–66. 247. Clark, Liberty Minstrel, 140. 248. James Weldon Johnson, introduction to The Books of American Negro Spirituals (New York: Viking, 1954), 46. 249. Fredric, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky, 47–53; H. Jacobs, Incidents, 108; Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life, 69. 250. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 17–19; Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist (New York: International, 1942), 32; Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 6. 251. J. Jackson, Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, 35–37. 252. Samuel Gridley Howe and Robert Dale Owen, Preliminary Report Touching the Condition and Management of Emancipated Refugees (New York: John F. Trow, 1863), 10. 253. For a similar interpretation, see James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (New York: Orbis Books, 2003). See also Amiri Barak, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 32–50. 254. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Fields and Osgood, 1870), 197–223. 255. Lucy McKim-Garrison, introduction to Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson, 1867). 256. Ibid., xviii.

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N OTES TO PAGES 158–161 257. See especially Dean Grodzins, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Paul E. Teed, Revolutionary Conscience: Theodore Parker and Antebellum America (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010). 258. Theodore Parker to Rev. Mr. Martineau, 11 November 1850, TPP. 259. Francis Jackson to Theodore Parker, 5 March 1855, ibid. 260. Bronson Alcott, The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture (Boston: James Munroe, 1836). 261. Willis, Alcott Memoirs, 76; Alcott, Journals. 262. Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, vol. 2 (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1874), 438. 263. Higginson, Contemporaries, 28. 264. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm; Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 132–96. 265. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 169. 266. See Higginson, Magnificent Activist. 267. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “African Proverbial Philosophy,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 4, no. 12 (1854): 362–70. 268. Alcott, Journals, 238. 269. Joel Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 429. 270. Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of His Life (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1914), 151–52; Conway, Autobiography, 141; F. Jackson, Account Book. 271. Liberator, 18 November 1859. 272. Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Thoreau: Political Writings, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 151–52. 273. For assessments of Transcendentalist politics, see Ethan J. Kytle, Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); and Sandra Petrulionis, To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 274. Wirzbicki, Fighting for the Higher Law, 62–87, 142–77. 275. H. H. Furness, ed., Records of a Lifelong Friendship, 1807–1882: Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Henry Furness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 112; Ann E. Damon to Wilbur Siebert, n.d., WHSC. 276. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 174. 277. Ibid. 114. 278. George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, ed. Douglass Wilson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), 50–51. 279. Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting. 280. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, “Abolition Lecture 2,” undated draft, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, HU. 281. Conway, Testimonies Concerning Slavery, 49. 282. Hubert Harrison, “Christianity Still Enslaves the Minds of Those Whose Bodies It Has Long Held Bound,” in A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. Jeffrey Perry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 44; Gary Dorrien, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

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N OTES TO PAGES 161–167 283. Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Tradition in African American Literature,” in Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974–1979 (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 137–49; Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire Prisons and Torture (New York: Seven Stories, 2005).

5. TOWARD REVOLU TIONARY ABOLITIONISM 1. Quoted in Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 191. 2. Phillips, Speeches before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, 4. 3. Gibbs, Shadow and Light, 81. 4. Purvis, Tribute to the Memory of Thomas Shipley, 9. 5. Hodges, David Ruggles. 6. Lucretia Mott, “I Am No Advocate of Passivity,” in Lucretia Mott: Her Complete Speeches and Sermons, 262. 7. Newspaper Scrapbook, 1880–1899, CLBC; Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 224–26; Powell, “Cinqué,” 68; Harrold, “Romanticizing Slave Revolt,” 89–108; Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 414. 8. Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism. 9. Fifth Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, 10. 10. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren; Aptheker, “One Continual Cry.” 11. Henry Highland Garnet, Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life (New York: J. H. Tobitt, 1848); J. C. Smith, “Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet,” 52. 12. Smallwood, Narrative, ix. 13. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 231–32; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Black Troops,” 179. 14. Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States,” in Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, 179–88. 15. Smallwood, Narrative, iv, ix, 28. 16. Ibid., ix, 19. 17. Ibid., 46–48. 18. Ibid., 50. 19. Ibid., 46, 47, 48. 20. Ibid., 50–51. 21. Lowell, “Sympathy with Ireland,” 100–101. 22. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 395. 23. Arthur Otis Gay to Sidney Howard Gay, 10 September 1860, SHGP-CU; Sidney Howard Gay, “Miscellaneous Notes and Drafts,” SHGP-NYPL. 24. Provincial Freeman, 22 April 1854. 25. Liberator, 16 October 1857; National Antislavery Standard, 9 January 1858; Rajmohan Gandhi, A Tale of Two Revolts: India’s Mutiny and the American Civil War (London: Haus, 2011); Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 376. 26. Elizur Wright to Mrs. Wright, 2 December 1857, EWP. 27. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society At the Annual Meetings Held in 1854, 1855, 1856, 8–10.

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N OTES TO PAGES 168–173 28. Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 2:408. 29. K. Jackson, Force and Freedom, 80–106; Churchill, Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence, 139–225. 30. Still, Underground Railroad. See also Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 176, 179. 31. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 6 April 1855; North Star, 23 January 1851; Hunter, To Set the Captives Free, 78. 32. Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank, 79. 33. T. Parker, Function and Place of Conscience. 34. Vincent Y. Bowditch, Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1902), 207. 35. National Antislavery Standard, 20 January 1855. 36. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 211. 37. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “William Lloyd Garrison,” in Magnificent Activist, 156. 38. W. Parker, “Freedman’s Story,” 160–61. 39. McGowan, Station Master on the Underground Railroad. 40. Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 3:303. 41. Tiffany, Samuel Sewall, 80. 42. Wendell Phillips, “Sims Anniversary,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Addresses: First Series, 71. For the interpretation of Garrisonian abolitionists as being hostile to Black violence, see K. Jackson, Force and Freedom. 43. Quoted in Bacon, But One Race, 129. 44. Drew, Refugee, 39. 45. Smallwood, Narrative, 20; Frederick Douglass Paper, 22 December 1854. 46. See Gerald Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. before Emancipation (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 47. Spear, Educator, 418. 48. Elizur Wright, The Lesson of St. Domingo: How to Make the War Short and the Peace Righteous (Boston: A. Williams, 1861), 20. 49. Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, 321; Pennsylvania Freeman, 21 August 1851. 50. Martin Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America (Boston: Beacon, 1970). 51. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 144. 52. Richard Henry Dana Jr., Journal, 1849–1853, Dana Family Papers, MHS. 53. Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (London: Haymarket Books, 2012), 89–133. 54. Spear, Twenty Years on the Wing. 55. Spear, Messages from a Superior State, 108, 144, 145; Spear, Educator, 394–97. 56. Hildreth, Theory of Politics. 57. James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in The Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 69–70. 58. Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 3:138; William Lloyd Garrison, “No Compromise with Slavery,” in Friends of Freedom, Liberty Bell(1844), 215. 59. Conway, Testimonies Concerning Slavery, 85. 60. Garrison, “No Compromise with Slavery,” 215.

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N OTES TO PAGES 173–176 61. Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 2:152; Natalie Joy, “The Indians’ Cause: Abolitionists and Native American Rights,” Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 2 (2018): 215–42. 62. W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 95; “The Fugitive Slaves Appeal!! To the Clergy of Massachusetts at the Meeting of Fugitive Slaves Held in Boston,” 1850, WHSC. 63. Grodzins, American Heretic, 10–12. 64. Wendell Phillips, “Crispus Attucks,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Letters: Second Series, 69–77; Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution; Mitch Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 65. William Wells Brown, St. Domingo: Its Revolution and its Patriots (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855), 38. See also Elizur Wright, The Sin of Slavery and Its Remedy (New York, 1833), 2. 66. For a critique of the American Revolution, see Gerald Horne, The Counterrevolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 67. Liberator, 16 March 1860. 68. Richard Hildreth, The “Ruin of Jamaica” (Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society, n.d.), 5. 69. Charles K. Whipple, Evils of the Revolutionary War (Boston: New England Non-Resistance Society, 1839). 70. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 223. 71. Conway, Autobiography, 144. 72. On the influences of 1848 upon abolition, see McDaniel, Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, 183–210; and Larry J. Reynolds, Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 73. North Star, 16 May 1850. 74. Proceedings of the American Antislavery Society at Its Second Decade, 149–50. 75. Stearns, Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns, 70. 76. Howe, Slavery at Washington, 4. 77. William Lloyd Garrison to Theodore Parker, 8 November 1857, TPP. 78. Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, 157. 79. J. Miller McKim to Sidney Howard Gay, 14 November 1849, AC. 80. De Fontaine, History of American Abolitionism, 42. 81. James Russel Lowell, “The French Revolution of 1848,” in Antislavery Papers of James Russel Lowell, 1:47–48. 82. James Russel Lowell, “Proslavery Logic,” ibid., 199. 83. Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015); Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 84. W. W. Brown, Rising Son, 140. 85. William Henry Furness to Sidney Howard Gay, 17 March 1847, SHGP-CU. 86. Mason, Life, 67–68; Haitian Abolition Society to Elizur Wright, n.d., EWP; J. B. Smith to James Redpath, Boston, 6 February 1862, James Redpath Correspondence, SCRBC. 87. Phillips, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” 468–95. 88. New York Tribune, 14 May 1858.

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N OTES TO PAGES 176–180 89. W. W. Brown, Rising Son, 173–243. See also Sidney Howard Gay, “Haiti and Toussaint L’Ouverture,” SHGP-NYPL. 90. E. Wright, Lesson of St. Domingo, 19; Haitian Abolition Society to Elizur Wright, n.d., EWP. 91. E. Wright, Lesson of St. Domingo. 92. In Memoriam: Robert Morris Sr., 2. 93. W. W. Brown, Black Man. 94. James McCune Smith, A Lecture on the Haytian Revolution with a Sketch of the Character of Toussaint L’Overture (New York: Daniel Fanshaw, 1841); W. W. Brown, St. Domingo, 23. 95. E. Wright, Lesson of St. Domingo, 18. 96. Conway, Testimonies Concerning Slavery, 4. 97. W. W. Brown, St. Domingo, 33. 98. Still, Underground Railroad. 99. Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Records, vol. 3, 256, HSP. 100. Porter and Uzelac, William Cooper Nell, 311. 101. Redpath, Roving Editor, 288–96. 102. Edmund Jackson, “The Virginia Maroons,” in The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston: Massachusetts Antislavery Fair, 1852), 143–51; Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 227–29. 103. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Boston, 1855). 104. F. E. W. Harper, “Zombi, or Fancy Sketches,” Anglo-African Magazine. 2, no. 2 (February 1860): 35–37. 105. Higginson, Travelers and Outlaws, 168; Liberator, 5 November 1858. For more on the abolitionists’ relationship with the Dismal Swamp, see Nevius, City of Refuge, 89–103. 106. Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 248. 107. Jackson, “Virginia Maroons,” 151. 108. Stephen Myers to Francis Jackson, 22 May 1858, AC. 109. Higginson, Letters and Journals, 87. 110. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 225, 253–56. 111. Joshua Coffin, An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, and Others, which Have Occurred or Been Attempted in the United States and Elsewhere, during the Last Two Centuries (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860). 112. W. W. Brown, Black Man, 142. 113. Edmund Jackson, “Servile Insurrections,” in The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston: National Antislavery Bazaar, 1851), 163–64. 114. Porter and Uzelac, William Cooper Nell, 579. 115. Higginson, Travelers and Outlaws, 197. 116. Ibid., 221. 117. Ibid., 286. 118. Patrick Breen, This Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Douglas Egerton, He Shall Go Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Vanessa Holden, Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community

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N OTES TO PAGES 180–185 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2021). On the relation between the Dismal Swamp and Nat Turner’s strategy, see Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 278–80. 119. C. L. R. James, “Stalinism and Negro History,” Fourth International (November 1949); James, “Herbert Aptheker’s Distortions,” ibid. (December 1949). 120. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 161. 121. Still, Underground Railroad, 196; Robert Jones to William Still, 9 August 1856, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2:345–47. 122. Still, Underground Railroad, 133. 123. Ibid., 137. 124. On this wave of conspiracies, see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943), 345–47. 125. Ibid., 143. 126. Gerrit Smith to Wendell Phillips, 20 February 1855, Smith Family Papers, New York Public Library. 127. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 144. 128. For the abolitionists’ relationship with the Republicans, see Harrold, American Abolitionism, chap. 7. 129. Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting. 130. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 131. Kantrowicz, More Than Freedom, 231–34. 132. McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 36. 133. Gerrit Smith, “To The Radical Political Abolitionists,” 1855, GSP. 134. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 237. 135. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Massachusetts in Mourning: A Sermon (Boston: James Munro, 1854). 136. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The New Revolution: What Commitment Requires,” in Magnificent Activist, 113; Liberator, 28 March 1858. 137. Weekly Anglo-African, 5 November 1859. 138. Eli Thayer, The New England Emigrant Aid Company and Its Influence through the Kansas Contest upon National History (Worcester, MA: Franklin Price, 1887). 139. Stearns, Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns, 118. 140. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 236. 141. Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League Records, 1846–1887, MHS. 142. Thayer, New England Emigrant Aid Company, 16; Laura E. Richards, ed., Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, the Servant of Humanity (Boston: Dana Estes, 1909), 414–50. 143. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 168. 144. Ibid., 150–52, 166; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 22 November 1856, GSP. 145. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, A Ride through Kansas (New York, 1856), 14. 146. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, 2:215–21; Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Dr. S. G. Howe, the Philanthropist (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1891), 255. 147. Oliver Johnson, The Abolitionists Vindicated in a Review of Eli Thayer’s Paper on the New England Emigrant Aid Company (Worcester, MA: Franklin P. Price, 1887).

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N OTES TO PAGES 185–188 148. Thayer, New England Emigrant Aid Company; Theodore Parker, The Great Battle between Slavery and Freedom Considered in Two Speeches (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1856), 89; On reformers supporting filibustering, see Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 149. O. Johnson, Abolitionists Vindicated, 12. Lydia Maria Child took a similar position. See Child to Sidney Howard Gay, 21 December 1859, SHGP-CU. 150. Liberator, 28 May 1858. 151. Richard Webb, The Life and Letters of Captain John Brown (London: Smith, Elder, 1861), 22. 152. Du Bois, John Brown, 97; Clavin, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the American Civil War, 52–53; K. Jackson, Force and Freedom, 108–9. 153. Richard T. Hinton, John Brown and His Men; with Some Account of the Roads They Traveled to Reach Harper’s Ferry (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1894), 172. 154. Du Bois, John Brown, 115–18; Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, 169. 155. James Freeman Clarke, Memorial and Biographical Sketches (Cambridge, MA: Riverside), 146. 156. Lumpkin, “‘General Plan Was Freedom,’” 75; Detroit Tribune, 17 January 1887. 157. The authoritative biography of John Brown is Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist. 158. Wendell Phillips Garrison, The Preludes of Harpers Ferry (Boston, 1891), 13–14; Douglass, Life and Times, 274. 159. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 131; Jackson, Force and Freedom, 109. 160. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, 2:215–21; Sanborn, Dr. S. G. Howe, 255. 161. Detroit Tribune, 17 January 1887. 162. On Black abolitionists in John Brown’s Raid, see K. Jackson, Force and Freedom, 106–35. 163. Jeffrey Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). 164. Archbald Grimke, “Antislavery Boston,” in New England Magazine 3 (September 1890): 458. 165. Proceedings of the State Disunion Convention Held at Worcester, Massachusetts, January 15, 1857 (Boston, 1857), 29. 166. Samuel Gridley Howe, An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution (New York: White, Gallagher, and White, 1828). 167. Stearns, Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns, 164; Howe, Memoir of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, 9, 14. 168. Ross, Recollections and Experiences of an Abolitionist, 22. 169. Thomas Wentworth Higginson to John Brown, February 1858, AC. 170. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 218; J. Clarke, Memorial and Biographical Sketches, 146. 171. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 142. Sylviane Diouf also speculates that maroon resistance had a strong influence on John Brown’s plans. See Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 256. 172. Ross, Recollections and Experiences of an Abolitionist, 22. 173. Osborne P. Anderson, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry (Boston, 1861), 7–8. 174. Garrison, Preludes of Harpers Ferry, 13. 175. W. W. Brown, Rising Son, 340. 176. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 249. 177. Frederick Douglass, “John Brown Speech,” undated draft, SCRBC. 178. W. W. Brown, Rising Son, 340.

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N OTES TO PAGES 189–193 179. Lysander Spooner, “To the Non-slaveholders of the South,” undated draft, AC. 180. Theodore Parker to Lysander Spooner, 30 November 1858, AC. 181. Wendell Phillips to Lysander Spooner, 16 July 1858, AC. 182. Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Lysander Spooner, 30 November 1858, AC. 183. James Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 162. 184. Ibid., 165. 185. Ibid., 165–68. 186. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 130. 187. Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom and Blacks on John Brown (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2001). 188. Albert J. von Frank, “John Brown, James Redpath, and the Idea of Revolution,” Civil War History 52, no. 2 (2006): 142–59. 189. Redpath, Public Life of Capt. John Brown, 240. 190. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 238–39. 191. Douglass, Life and Times, 276. 192. S. Emerson, Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons, 261. 193. Coleman, Reminiscences, 57. 194. Alcott, Journals, 315–16. 195. Clavin, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the American Civil War, 47. 196. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 306. 197. Ross, Recollections and Experiences of an Abolitionist, 55. 198. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 81–82. 199. James N. Gloucester to John Brown, 9 March 1859, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:378–79. 200. Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1911), 323. 201. Boyd, “William Still,” xxii; Kashatus, William Still, 171. 202. W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 194–96. 203. Kashatus, William Still, 171. 204. Hinton, John Brown and His Men, 170. 205. Villard, John Brown, 323. 206. Larson, Harriet Tubman, 174. 207. Ross, Recollections and Experiences of an Abolitionist, 55. 208. Douglass, Life and Times, 269. 209. W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 194–96. 210. William I. Bowditch to Wilbur Siebert, 5 April 1893, WHSC. 211. Henry, From Slavery to Salvation, 52–53. 212. Boyd, “William Still,” xxii. 213. Francis Jackson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1859, AC. 214. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 469. 215. Boyd, “William Still,” xxiii. 216. Douglass, Life and Times, 269; William Still to Amy Post, 21 October 1859, PFP. 217. Colored Republicans to the Rescue, 4–5.

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N OTES TO PAGES 193–196 218. Richards, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, 440. 219. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, 83. 220. Philadelphia Ledger, 14 December 1902. 221. Statement of Mrs. Florence L. Carter, Harriet Tubman Research Papers, n.d., SCRBC. 222. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 241; Gerrit Smith and the Vigilant Association of New York (New York: John A. Gray, 1860); New York Democratic Vigilant Association, Rise and Progress of the Bloody Outbreak at Harper’s Ferry (New York: John F. Trow, 1859). 223. Ross, Recollections and Experiences of an Abolitionist, 64. 224. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 241. 225. J. Miller McKim to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 14 November 1859, AC. 226. Liberator, 14 September 1860. 227. Theodore Parker to Eliza Eddy, 19 November 1859, TPP. 228. Liberator, 24 February 1860; Porter and Uzelac, William Cooper Nell, 606–12. 229. Harper, Brighter Coming Day, 48. 230. John Brown to J. Miller McKim, 25 November 1859, AC; Boyd, “William Still,” xxiii. 231. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy, vol. 2 (Boston: Robert Brothers, 1893), 443. 232. Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child, 103–4. 233. Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators, 223. 234. Harper, Brighter Coming Day, 48. 235. Wendell Phillips, “Harper’s Ferry,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Addresses: First Series, 276. 236. Anderson, Voice from Harper’s Ferry, 2. 237. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, “John Brown,” n.d., Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, HU. 238. Harper, Brighter Coming Day, 49, 83. 239. Mott, “I Am No Advocate of Passivity,” 261. 240. John Albion Andrew, Speeches of John A. Andrew at Hingham and Boston, together with His Testimony before the Harper’s Ferry Committee (Boston: Republican State Committee, 1860); Pearson, Life of John A. Andrew, 101–4. 241. William Henry Furness, Put Up Thy Sword: A Discourse Delivered before Theodore Parker’s Society, at the Music Hall, Boston, Sunday, March 11, 1860 (Boston: R. F. Walcutt, 1860); McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 87. 242. Charles K. Whipple, The Non-Resistance Principle; with Particular Application to the Help of Slaves by Abolitionists (Boston: R. F. Walcutt, 1860), 23. 243. Ibid., 20, 22. 244. Ibid., 23–24. 245. Ibid., 3. 246. Conway, Autobiography, 299–301. 247. Robert Purvis, “Speech of Robert Purvis at the Annual Meeting of the American Antislavery Society, 1860,” in Speeches and Letters, 19. 248. Henry Clarke Wright, No Rights, No Duties; or, Slaveholders, as Such, Have No Rights; Slaves, as Such, Owe No Duties (Boston, 1860), 19. 249. Ibid., 6.

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N OTES TO PAGES 196–201 250. Henry Clarke Wright, The Natick Resolution; or, Resistance to Slaveholders the Right and Duty of Southern Slaves and Northern Freeman (Boston, 1859), 31. 251. Jose Marti, “Wendell Phillips,” in Inside the Monster: Writings on the United States and American Imperialism, ed. Philip Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 62. 252. Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1860), 13–15; The Antislavery History of the John Brown Year; being the Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the American Antislavery Society (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861), 180. 253. Liberator, 4 November 1859. 254. Theodore Parker, John Brown’s Expedition, Reviewed in a Letter from Rev. Theodore Parker at Rome to Francis Jackson, Boston (Boston: The Fraternity, 1860) (emphasis in original). 255. Francis Jackson to Sidney Howard Gay, 22 December 1859, SHGP-CU. 256. Francis Jackson to Sidney Howard Gay, November 1860, ibid. 257. For a partial survey of the literature that made John Brown into a “legend,” see Janet Kemper Beck, Creating the John Brown Legend: Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Child, and Higginson in Defense of the Raid on Harpers Ferry ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009). 258. H. C. Wright, Natick Resolution, 9. 259. “Actionnaires du Progres” to Sidney Howard Gay, 17 January 1860, SHGP-CU. 260. Mary Brown to Governor Wise, 10 November 1859, McKim-Garrison Family Papers, New York Public Library; Villard, John Brown, 548–49; H. H. Furness, “Retrospective on William Henry Furness,” n.d., Furness Family Papers, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Henry, From Slavery to Salvation, 54; Sernett, North Star Country; W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 31; Wendell Phillips, “The Burial of John Brown,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Addresses: First Series, 289–94; Memorial of Sarah Pugh, 95; Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, 167. 261. Henry David Thoreau, “The Last Days of John Brown,” in Thoreau: Political Writings, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 163–70. 262. Liberator, 16 March 1860. 263. Phillips, “Harper’s Ferry,” 263. 264. Redpath, Roving Editor, 299. 265. Phillips, “Harper’s Ferry,” 281. 266. Redpath, Roving Editor, 306.

CON CLUSION 1. For a convincing argument that fears of slave resistance helped spark the Civil War, see Paulus, Slaveholding Crisis. 2. Conway, Autobiography, 229. 3. Ibid., 303. 4. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction. 5. Ira Berlin, ed., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, ser. 1, vol. 1, The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 353–54; Pearson, Life of John A. Andrew, 285.

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N OTES TO PAGES 201–205 6. Conway, Autobiography, 357–63. 7. Larson, Harriet Tubman, 203–29. 8. T. James, Wonderful Eventful Life, 17. 9. Nina Moore Tiffany, “Stories of the Fugitive Slaves II–IV,” New England Magazine 2 (March 1890–August 1890): 388; Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child, 144–45; Francis Jackson to Lydia Maria Child, 9 September 1860, AC. 10. Liberator, 10 April 1863. 11. William Still, “Report by William Still, 22 May 1862,” in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 5:139–41. 12. Purvis, Speeches and Letters, 18; Coffin, Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections; E. Wright, Lessons of St. Domingo. 13. James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). 14. Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 248. 15. National Antislavery Standard, 14 December 1861. 16. Berlin, Slaves No More, 1–77; Roediger, Seizing Freedom; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 17. Douglass Edgerton, Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 18. Stearns, Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns, 286. 19. Ferris, African Abroad, 711. 20. Liberator, 16 March 1860. 21. Wilbur Siebert, “Stephen Myers,” n.d., WHSC. 22. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 156. 23. George L. Stearns to Lysander Spooner, 1 October 1861, Lysander Spooner Papers, NewYork Historical Society. 24. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 98; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 367. 25. Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment. 26. Higginson, “Black Troops,” 180. 27. Larson, Harriet Tubman, 203–29. 28. Bearse, Reminisces, 39. 29. Still, Underground Railroad, 150–52, 187; Cecelski, Waterman’s Song, 179–203. 30. Hugh Davis, “We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less”: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 31. Sanborn, Dr. S. G. Howe, 286, 290; Samuel Gridley Howe, The Refugees from Slavery: Report to the Freedman’s Inquiry Commission (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1864). 32. McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 332, 343. 33. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 219; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Collins, 1988), 153–70. 34. Robboy and Robboy, “Lewis Hayden,” 591–613. 35. W. H. Johnson, Autobiography, 259; Colored Republicans to the Rescue. 36. Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2:347. 37. Cecelski, Waterman’s Song, 179–203.

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N OTES TO PAGES 205–209 38. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 25. 39. I. Brown, “Miller McKim and Pennsylvania Abolitionism,” 71; J. Millier McKim, The Freedmen of South Carolina (Philadelphia, 1862). 40. Child, Freedmen’s Book. 41. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sketches of Southern Life (Philadelphia: Ferguson Bros., 1891). 42. Graceanna Lewis, “Underground Railroad Memoir,” n.d., Lewis-Fussel Family Papers, FHL. 43. T. James, Wonderful Eventful Life, 15–20; Jermain Wesley Loguen to Robert Hamilton, 25 July 1865, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 5:354. 44. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 84. 45. Lewis G. Clark to Harriet and Lewis Hayden, 3 January 1880, HU. 46. Howe and Owen, Preliminary Report Touching the Condition and Management of Emancipated Refugees, 14; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 328. 47. Boyd, Discarded Legacy, 119–20; Richard Blackett, “Fugitive Slaves in Britain: The Odyssey of William and Ellen Craft,” Journal of American Studies 12, no. 1 (1978): 62. 48. Quoted in McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 715. 49. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Knopf, 1992). 50. William H. Parham to Jacob C. White, 6 October 1862, LGC. 51. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 48. 52. Frances Harper, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (Philadelphia, 1892), 259. 53. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 69. 54. C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 55. Blight, Race and Reunion. 56. Alexander Milton Ross to William Lloyd Garrison, 11 August 1875, AC; Thomas W. Higginson, “Report to the Trustees of the Boston Public Library on the Parker Library,” in The Works of Theodore Parker, vol. 15 (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1907), 1–10. 57. Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember. 58. Higginson, Contemporaries, 227. 59. Bearse, Reminisces. 60. Smedley, Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania; Siebert, Underground Railroad; Salt, Life of Henry David Thoreau, 77–78. 61. W. W. Brown, Rising Son. 62. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, 7, 65. 63. Frederick Douglass to Wilbur Siebert, 27 March 1983, WHSC. 64. Olsavsky, “Underground Railroad,” 281–93. 65. Susan L. Crane to Wilbur Siebert, 14 September 1896, WHSC; John W. Jones to Wilbur Siebert, 17 December 1896, 16 Jan 1897, ibid. 66. Still, Underground Railroad, xix. 67. William Still to Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 13 April 1871, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, HU. 68. For one exploration of Still’s text as a kind of abolitionist memoir, see Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember, 61–97.

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N OTES TO PAGES 209–212 69. Still, Underground Railroad, 538. 70. Ibid., xviii. 71. Boyd, “William Still,” xliii; William Lloyd Garrison to William Still, 7 April 1872, Peter Still Papers, 1850–1875, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, NJ. 72. Stephen G. Hall, “To Render the Private Public: William Still and the Selling of the Underground Railroad,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 27, no. 1 (2003): 35–55; Kashatus, William Still, 212–14. 73. Still, Underground Railroad, xviii. 74. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Higginson Answers Captain Mahan,” in Magnificent Activist, 407–8. 75. Lala Lajpat Rai, The United States of America: A Hindu’s Impressions and a Study (Calcutta: R. Chatterjee, 1916), 129, 137; Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 97; Kwame Nkrumah, Revolutionary Path (London: PanAf, 1973), 425; Malcolm X, Autobiography, 179; Russel Shoatz, Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russel Maroon Shoatz (Oakland, CA: PM, 2013); A. Davis, Abolition Democracy. 76. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 711–31. 77. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life as Told by His Children, vol. 4 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 258 (emphasis added).

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INDEX Note: Page numbers in italic denote figures. Alcott, Bronson, 93, 106, 124, 136, 141, 158–59, 191, 194 American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), 50, 55, 58, 60, 77, 80, 111, 133, 182, 197 American Revolution, 154, 174, 178 Amistad revolt, 72, 83, 164 Andrew, John Albion, 63, 94, 101, 183, 195, 201 archives, 11, 13, 154, 208, 211 Banks, Henry, 1–2, 19 Bearse, Austin, 100, 122, 136, 153, 167, 204, 208 Bias, James G., 58, 65, 133 Bible, 48, 54, 79, 130, 132, 134 Black Power, 103, 133, 211 Black Star Line, 42 Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League, 4, 107, 183–84, 204 Brown, Abel, 58, 63, 65, 74–76, 82, 84–85, 154 Brown, David Paul, 57, 61, 94 Brown, Henry “Box,” 12, 19, 26, 36, 44, 46, 68, 78–79, 103, 116, 156, 159 Brown, John, 9–10, 13–14, 17, 114, 165, 183, 185–98, 201, 211 Browne, John W., 18, 61, 64, 66–67, 100, 136, 140, 148, 163 Buchanon, Jenny, 28, 31 Burns, Anthony, 25, 34, 40, 88, 94, 109, 112, 117, 150, 158–59, 182–87, 202 Burns Rendition, 9, 128

Channing, William H., 77, 84, 134, 141, 146, 148, 159, 201 Chaplin, William, 83, 128, 148–49 chattel economy. See slave economy Child, Lydia Maria, 36, 96, 98, 116, 122, 139, 145, 150–51, 194, 205 Christiana Insurrection, 9, 88, 91–92, 169 Cinqué, 83, 164–65, 185 Clark, George W., 155–56 Clarke, Lewis, 28, 32–33, 36, 49, 79, 137, 145, 153, 205 Clarke, Milton, 26, 30, 119, 153 Clay, Henry, 28, 128 Cleveland, Charles D., 61, 83–84, 151 Coffin, Joshua, 83, 179, 202 Colored Vigilant Committee, 4, 17, 58, 92, 186 “Come-Outers,” 136 Concklin, Seth, 100, 138, 167 Cone, James, 133 Connor, James, 28, 31 Conway, Moncure, 101, 112, 126, 161, 174, 196, 201, 207 Craft, Ellen, 37, 43–44, 67, 78, 90–91, 102–3, 141, 206 Craft, William, 37, 43–44, 63, 67, 78, 90–91, 102–3, 141, 158, 168, 206 Creole revolt, 72, 83, 164 Dana, Richard Henry, 94, 143, 153, 171 Davis, Angela, 27, 146 direct action, 53–54, 62–63, 67, 94, 102, 109–10, 122, 158, 161–62, 169, 171, 174, 187, 193 Douglass, Frederick, 3, 6, 9, 12, 35, 40–42, 47–48, 69, 75–80, 83, 91, 95, 98–99, 105, 117–18, 130–35, 138, 147–53, 147, 175, 183, 190–93,

Campbell, Israel, 115–18, 156 Caribbean, 8, 16, 67, 143, 170, 179

275

Douglass, Frederick (continued) 202–5, 209. See also North Star, Seneca Falls Convention Drayton, Daniel, 42, 83, 148, 175 Drew, Benjamin, 3, 6, 19 Du Bois, W. E. B., 9, 15, 34, 112, 121, 143, 185, 201, 205, 211 Durham, Jeremiah, 21, 68–69

Gibbons, Abby Hopper, 190 Gibbons, Daniel, 17 Great Dismal Swamp, 36, 38, 177–78, 180, 199 Green, Shields, 190, 194 Grimes, Leonard, 95, 106, 112, 135, 148, 154, 203, 205 Haiti, 9–10, 68, 126, 143, 162, 170, 173, 176–77, 180, 191, 199 Haitian Revolution, 8, 11, 52, 143, 154, 163, 173, 176–77, 201–2 Hanson, William Augustus, 59, 142 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 93–94, 95, 96, 101, 112, 144–46, 154, 178, 194–95, 205–7 Hawkins, Walter, 35, 65 Hayden, Lewis, 29, 77–79, 84, 87, 92, 96, 100, 105–6, 111, 127–29, 150, 153, 158, 168, 171, 183, 186–87, 191, 203–5, 211 Hicksite. See Quaker(s) Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 53, 93, 110, 113, 123, 126, 134–35, 144–45, 154, 157–60, 165, 168, 171, 178–89, 194, 198, 202–3, 206–8, 211 Hildreth, Richard, 93, 121, 132, 139, 147, 172–74 Hill, John Henry, 39, 48–49, 107, 180–81, 181, 204 Hilliard, Frances, 43–44 Hopper, Isaac, 54, 56, 61, 75, 121, 136–37, 141, 148–51, 190 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 93, 148, 153, 175, 184–87, 193, 204, 206 Hutchinson family, 154–55

1848 Revolutions, 8, 162, 165, 174–75 Elizabeth Ann, 24, 27 Emancipation Proclamation, 203 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8, 77, 158–60, 186, 191, 198 Fairbank, Calvin, 84, 104, 148 Fanon, Frantz, 84 female fugitives, 27, 40, 57, 80, 137, 144 Female Vigilant Association (FVA), 72, 96 feminism, 6, 8, 14, 61, 66, 76, 98, 143, 146, 152, 160–61, 200, 211 Fenian Movement, 162 Founding Fathers, 24, 89, 207 Fugitive Slave Law, 5, 9, 14, 17, 54, 56, 75, 86, 88–94, 97, 103, 111, 120, 126, 134, 137, 150, 155, 160, 169, 171, 177, 182–83, 201 Furness, William Henry, 111, 133, 159–60, 195–96 Galloway, Abraham, 204–5 Garnet, Henry Highland, 10, 52–54, 57–60, 76, 79–80, 95, 128, 140–41, 154, 162–66, 171, 186, 191, 203 Garret, Thomas, 54, 70, 101, 135, 153, 169 Garrison, William Lloyd, 3, 7, 10, 50–51, 54–58, 65–70, 73–81, 84, 87–88, 112, 122, 127, 135–37, 149–50, 162–70, 173–77, 183–85, 196–98, 207, 210–11 Garrisonianism, 55–61, 63, 73–78, 82–85, 90–94, 99, 107, 124–25, 136, 139, 163, 166–76, 185, 196, 199, 203 Garvey, Marcus, 42 Gay, Sidney Howard, 66–68, 75–78, 82, 92, 105, 111, 128–29, 143, 167, 198

Jackson, Francis, 21–22, 61, 71, 77, 84, 92–93, 111–13, 127, 135–36, 175, 193, 197–98 Jackson, John Andrew, 39–40, 69, 157 Jacobs, Harriet, 12, 21, 27, 35–37, 44–46, 60, 68– 69, 78, 89, 115–18, 131, 144–47, 157, 202, 205 Jacobs, John S., 45, 60, 69, 79, 84, 114, 131 James, C. L. R., 180 Jay, John, 62 Jay, William, 62, 71, 94 Jerry Rescue, 9, 88, 102, 108–12, 183–84, 187 Johnson, Oliver, 61, 155, 185 Johnson, William Henry, 107, 139, 191–92, 204, 207

276

Kemp, Henry, 100, 139, 167 Ku Klux Klan, 205

Nell, William Cooper, 60, 65–66, 75–77, 93, 101, 110, 114, 127, 137, 140–41, 153–54, 165, 168, 174, 177–79, 194 New England Emigrant Aid Society, 184–85 New England Freedom Association, 4, 58, 60, 63, 71, 76, 79–80 New York Manumission Society, 53, 61 Nickless, Kit, 1–2, 11, 19, 204 Nixon, Sam, 25, 37, 101 North Star, 75, 127, 178 Norton, Jo, 47, 155

Lambert, William, 17, 58, 93, 186 Lane, Lunsford, 46, 60, 63, 79, 118 Latimer, George, 63, 73, 95–96, 138, 154 Latin America, 16, 142 Lewis, Graceanna, 98–99, 114, 205 liberation theology, 55, 147, 149, 161, 166 Liberator, 55–56, 60–61, 84, 127, 162, 169, 196 Liberia, 35, 193 Lincoln, Abraham, 10, 14, 201 Loguen, Jermain, 2–3, 6, 9, 17–18, 48, 66, 93, 95, 98, 102, 108, 112, 115, 117, 122, 125, 130, 135, 141, 145, 168, 183, 186, 190, 205 Loring, Ellis Gray, 63, 66, 94, 96 Lowell, James Russel, 93, 160, 167, 175–76

Pan-Africanism, 92, 103, 119, 142, 180, 186, 211 Parker, Eliza, 90–91 Parker, Theodore, 77, 90–93, 105–6, 122, 127–28, 134–36, 141, 153, 158–60, 168, 171, 174–75, 183–89, 193–94, 197–98, 207–8 Parker, William, 17, 90–91, 99, 107, 169, 211 Payne, Daniel, 52, 59, 70, 80, 115, 131–33 Pennington, James W. C., 52, 60, 103, 109, 128, 141, 153–54 Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 53–54, 61 Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (PASS), 1, 13, 55, 91, 209 Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), 64–65 Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, 1–2, 4, 52, 90, 126, 163, 202 Phillips, Wendell, 3, 8, 80, 85, 93, 100, 106, 112, 116, 125, 127, 135, 140, 149, 151–52, 162, 171, 174–76, 182, 189, 193, 195–99 police/policing, 3, 7–8, 32–33, 40, 52, 100, 105–9, 147–50, 166, 171, 173, 187, 194, 204 political economy, 15–49, 120 Powell, William, 59–60, 68, 81, 103 prison abolition, 6, 14, 84, 147, 149–50, 161 prisons, 8, 32, 108, 124, 137, 147–51, 161, 195, 207, 211 Proctor, Walter, 35, 65 Progressive Friends. See Quaker(s) Provincial Freeman, 19, 102, 127, 144, 167, 180 Purvis, Robert, 17, 52, 55–57, 59, 61, 64–65, 70–71, 74, 76, 82–83, 93, 99, 111, 122, 127, 140–42, 154, 163–64, 170, 196, 202

Malcolm X, 13 Maritime Underground Railroad/Railway, 69, 83–84, 100, 104 maroons, 1–2, 10, 32, 36–39, 130, 154, 170, 177–80, 185, 187, 196, 199 marronage, 17, 91, 159, 163, 177–79, 188 Marsh, Bela, 116, 128, 134, 137, 155 Mason, Isaac, 94, 143, 170 Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS), 55, 111, 139 McKim, J. Miller, 61, 75, 92–93, 99, 102, 111, 114, 127–28, 136, 149, 151, 157, 171, 174, 177, 183, 193–94, 197–98, 204–5 Melville, Herman, 60, 151 Meriam, Francis Jackson, 191–93 Moore, Esther, 65, 72, 80, 96 Morris, Robert, 94, 107–9, 154, 177, 183, 203 Mott, Lucretia, 54–58, 61, 65, 72, 76, 78, 80–81, 93, 96, 99, 101, 126, 129, 135–36, 143, 145, 164, 194–95 Myers, Stephen, 93, 127, 141, 178, 183, 203 Napoleon, Louis, 92, 96–97, 111 National Antislavery Standard, 54, 75, 149 Neal, Daniel, 61, 74

277

Quaker(s), 14, 66–67, 69, 73–74, 91, 99, 104, 114, 135, 153, 163, 169, 179; Hicksite, 54–55, 61, 65, 69–70, 85, 99, 121, 135; Progressive Friends, 135–36, 146 Quincy, Edmund, 82, 116, 136, 175, 206, 211 Rai, Lala Lajpat, 211 Randall, Edinbur, 40, 96 Randolph, Peter, 25, 37, 77, 79, 95, 115, 119, 130–31, 135, 157, 205–8 Ray, Charles B., 50–51, 59, 76, 78, 81, 83, 93, 127, 139, 141–42 Ray, Charlotte, 144, 154 Reckless, Hester, 60, 65, 72, 76, 80, 96, 99, 143 Reconstruction, 3, 13, 204–11 Redpath, James, 29, 34, 120, 178, 189–91, 199 Robeson, Paul, 103, 112 Rock, John, 141, 174, 183, 198, 203 Ross, Alexander Milton, 113–14, 120, 131, 187, 191–92, 207 Ruggles, David, 54–71, 74–80, 127, 141, 145, 162–63 Scott, Hetty, 42, 46 “Secret Six,” 187–90, 193, 203 self-defense, 9, 14, 45, 57, 90–91, 106–9, 122, 150, 152, 168–69 Seneca Falls Convention, 143, 145 settler-colonialism, 160, 167 Sewall, Samuel, 57, 63, 94, 169 sexual violence, 21, 29, 31, 48, 115, 144–45 Shadd, Abraham, 71, 99, 101 Shadd Cary, Mary Ann, 96, 102, 127, 140, 142–44, 161, 167, 170, 186, 189, 195, 203 Shadrach Rescue, 88, 108, 110, 153 Shoatz, Russel Maroon, 1 Sims, Thomas, 40, 89, 109, 112–13, 141, 169, 182, 202 slave economy, 6, 8, 23, 25, 27 Smallwood, Elizabeth, 70–71 Smallwood, Thomas, 70–71, 83, 165–67, 170–71 Smith, Gerrit, 61, 63, 66–67, 71, 75, 83, 93, 108–10, 115, 122, 125, 134, 141, 164–68, 182–86, 190–93 Smith, James L., 34, 36, 79

278

Smith, James McCune, 93, 151, 176, 206 Smith, Joshua B., 90, 140, 143, 170 Sparrow, Arianna, 87, 153 Spear, John Murray, 124, 137, 139–40, 145, 150, 170, 172 spiritualism, 124, 128, 136–37 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 143, 146 Stearns, Charles, 116, 121 Stearns, George Luther, 175, 184–87, 193, 203 Steward, Austin, 52–53, 147 Still, Letitia, 96, 143 Still, Peter, 18, 26, 58, 65, 81, 100, 116, 129, 138, 180 Still, William, 1–2, 6, 9, 11–13, 16–24, 27, 33–34, 38, 40, 41 Stowell, Martin, 139, 184 Taiping Rebellion, 8, 162, 167 Tappan, Lewis, 61, 66, 74–75, 81, 164 Thomas, Jonathan, 21–22 Thompson, John, 34, 37, 66, 118 Thoreau, Henry David, 112, 126, 151, 158–60, 186, 191, 193, 198, 208 Torrey, Charles T., 57–58, 70–71, 74–76, 81–84, 148–49, 156, 165 Toussaint Louverture, 91, 112, 165, 177, 191, 193, 195, 205 Tubman, Harriet, 37, 89, 101, 112, 137, 144–47, 157, 161, 186, 191–93, 202–4, 211 Turner, Nat, 6, 13, 36, 156, 165, 179–80, 184–85, 195. See also Turner’s Rebellion Turner’s Rebellion, 16, 36, 52, 55–56, 108, 163, 180. See also Turner, Nat Twain, Mark, 30, 209 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 48, 113, 153 underground telegraph, 34–35, 112, 178, 189 utopian, 8, 77, 104, 124, 128, 136, 141, 151, 158, 162, 197 Vesey, Denmark, 165, 179–80, 184, 187, 195. See also Vesey’s Revolt Vesey’s Revolt, 52–53. See also Vesey, Denmark vigilance committees (VCs): Albany, 4, 19, 58, 74, 82, 93, 104, 128, 166, 203; Boston, 4, 10,

18, 53, 57, 76, 87, 124, 167, 201; Boston AntiMan-Hunting League, 4, 107, 184, 204; Chatham, 4, 98, 102, 170, 189, 193; Detroit’s Colored, 4; Elmira, 4, 92, 95, 104, 112, 209; New England Freedom Association, 4, 58, 60, 63, 71, 76, 79–80; New York, 4–5, 18, 50, 91, 126, 164; New York State, 4, 64, 90, 126, 164; Philadelphia, 1–2, 4, 11–12, 16, 52, 90, 126, 163, 202; Syracuse, 2–4, 17–19, 92–93, 102, 104, 108, 112, 133, 136, 143

Watson, Henry, 23, 35, 48, 60, 65–66, 78, 118, 132, 134, 147 Wells Brown, William, 29, 58, 60, 67–68, 78–80, 94–95, 99, 103, 110, 112, 116, 119, 128, 138, 143, 151, 154–56, 174–79, 188–89, 203, 207–8 Whipper, William, 2, 76, 114 Whipple, Charles K., 105, 127, 149–51, 174, 196 white supremacy, 4, 53, 121, 193, 206, 211 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 116, 127, 155 Williams, Isaac D., 1, 2, 3–6, 9–13, 19, 35, 38, 98, 121, 208 Williams, James, 91, 116, 136, 208 Wright, Elizur, 19, 119, 132, 136, 143, 155, 167, 170, 176, 202, 206 Wright, Theodore S., 59, 78, 133, 141

Walcutt, Robert F., 116, 128, 177 Walker, David, 7, 53–58, 164–66, 186 Walker, Jonathan, 68–69, 83, 120, 131, 140, 148 Wanzer, Frank, 37, 45 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, 32, 52–53, 73, 76, 79–80, 86, 101, 118, 126, 132, 174 Washington, Madison, 37, 83, 152, 164–65, 188, 195

Young Ireland Movement, 139, 167

279