CHAPTER I.

THE REIGN OF TERROR.

If, on or about the twenty-fifth of May, 1852, a fugitive from Southern tyranny were to arrive in Boston, he would probably very soon discover two things—first, that he must seek refuge with the people of his own color, in the quarter vulgarly known as Nigger Hill; secondly, that though they had once lived there in safety, neither he nor they could live there in safety any more.

There were, at that period, about three thousand colored people, a large proportion of them fugitives, residing in Boston, and the greater part of them lived in the quarter above mentioned. It was on the slope of Beacon Hill—one of the three hills which gave to the town its old name of Trimount. On the crown of the hill towered the domed State House; behind and around it rose, street on street descending, the dwellings of the aristocracy; and behind them, a deep fringe of humble poverty, rose, street on street, the dingy dwellings of the fugitives. There was a maxim of statesmanship then current: “Take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor.” It had been acted upon. The rich had been taken care of, and they had taken such care of these poor, that at that period there was no safety for them, as for two years previous there had been no safety for them in the city of Boston. Sidney’s Latin blazed in gold on the walls of that State House: _Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem_—The State seeks by the sword the calm repose of liberty. But the holy legend was dim, and not with the sword of Sidney, nor with the sword of the Spirit, sought Boston the calm repose of liberty for the poor fugitives who had fled from the meanest and the vilest tyranny that ever blackened the world.

Yet it was the city of fugitives, and fugitives had laid its old foundations down in pain and prayer. Winthrop and Dudley, Bellingham, Leverett, Coddington, the star-sweet Lady Arabella, with their compeers, men and women of true and gentle blood, and fugitives all, had reared it from the wilderness. Fugitives who taught a tyrant that he had a joint in his neck, had fled thither when the reborn tyranny again arose in their own land. Fugitives dwelling there who remembered in their own sufferings the sufferings of others, had helped frame the noble statute of 1641, welcoming to State and city any strangers who might fly thither from the tyranny or oppression of their persecutors. Fugitive hands—the hands of the Huguenot Faneuil—had dowered it with the cradling Hall of Liberty named with his name. Over it all, and through it all, and tincturing its history in the very grain, was the tradition of the fugitive. Still, in modern days, fugitives fled thither from the broken hopes, the baffled efforts, the lost battles of continental freedom. German fugitives, Italian fugitives, French fugitives, Irish fugitives, flying from their persecutors, arrived there and nestled under the broad wing of the old statute. At that period, too, the great Hungarian fugitive, Kossuth, had come, with a host of other Hungarian fugitives at his back, and the town, like the land, had roared and blazed in welcome. All these fugitives, of whatever nation, were safe in Boston. No tyrant could molest them. But the fugitives from the South—the black Americans, men and women, who had fled thither for protection from a tyranny in no wise different from any other, save in its sordid vileness and abominable excess of cruelty and outrage—there was no safety for them.

They were, for the most part, humble people—their souls crushed and bruised, as Plato says, with servile employments. Their lives had been obstructed by slavery; slavery had nurtured in them some vices, had dwarfed and crippled in them many virtues. They were, in the mass, uncouth, grotesque, ungainly, repulsive to the eye; they were degraded, imbruted, low, ignorant, weak and poor; and, therefore, the heart of every gentleman should have leaped, like Burke’s sword from its scabbard, to avenge even a look that threatened them with insult. Yet, on the other hand, there were many among them too comely and noble to need the defence the hearts of chevaliers fling around those to whom Man and Nature have been unkind. “In the negro countenance,” says Charles Lamb, “you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces, or rather masks, that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls—those ‘images of God cut in ebony.’” The gentle Londoner could have said it all, and more, of the negro faces one met in Boston, and he might have added a far prouder word for the character that matched the faces. For all that is manliest in manhood, all that is womanliest in womanhood, rose here and there, with tropic energy, uncrushed by the load of past slavery and present social wrong, among those people. Piety, rude and simple, it may be, yet fervent and mighty as ever clasped with tears the Savior’s feet, or rose through eternity to faint in the raptures of prayer before the throne of Jehovah; love, none more loyal and tender, for the father, the mother, the husband, the wife, the child, the home, the country; compassion, quick and strong for mutual succor; flush-handed hospitality; courtesy born not of art but nature; patience; cheerfulness; self-respect; laborious industry; ambition to rise and to excel, despite of fettering disabilities and thick-strewn obstacles; heroic bravery and endurance, such as blanch the cheeks and shake the hearts of those who read or hear the pains and perils negroes have dared for their own freedom, and nobler still, the freedom of their fellows—these, and many other virtues, bourgeoned and blossomed in the hearts and lives of the black fugitives. For these people, whatever pro-slavery snobs and sciolists might say of them, or however they might prate of their inferiority, were, nevertheless, of worthy blood. Take as one sure proof of the negro’s native elegance and gentility of soul, his love and talent for music. The old genius of Africa which taught the lips of Memnon those weird auroral tones which enchanted the valley of the Nile, still haunts the broken souls of the race on this continent. America has no distinctive music but her negro melodies. Listening to those merry rigadoon tunes, wonderful for their jovial sweetness and facile celerity of movement, or to those melancholy or mournful chants, ineffable in pathos, which thrill the spirit with their wild, mysterious cadences, he would have little wit who could deny the spiritual worth of the race whose fugitives at that period found no safety in Boston.

No safety. None at all. Yet Boston had it to remember that one of the first five martyrs of her freedom and of the freedom of America, was a negro—Crispus Attucks. But Boston’s remembrance of that fact seemed at that time to be almost confined to a certain literary slop-pail who periodically emptied himself upon the fame of the hero whom John Hancock and Samuel Adams had thought worthy of funeral honors. Boston had, for many years, paid her debt of gratitude to Attucks by treating the men and women of his race something after the fashion that Jews were treated in the Middle Ages. They had their Ghetto at the west end of the town; there they lived by sufferance, despised, rejected, borne down by a social scorn which, to the noblest of them, was daily heartbreak, and which the lowliest of them could not bear without pain. They had a narrow range of humble employments and avocations, such as window-cleaning, white-washing, boot-blacking, cab-driving, porterage, domestic service, and the like; keeping a barber’s shop or an old clothes shop, was perhaps the highest occupation open to them; and these they pursued faithfully and industriously. They were shut out of the mechanic occupations; shut out of commerce; shut out of the professions. They were excluded from the omnibuses; excluded from the first-class cars; excluded from the theatres unless the manager could make a place for them where seeing or hearing was next to impossible; excluded from some of the churches by express provision, and from most, if not all, of the others, by tacit understanding; excluded from the common schools, and allotted caste-schools where to learn anything was against nature; excluded from the colleges; excluded from the decent dwellings; excluded from the decent graveyards; excluded from almost everything. They were, however, freely admitted to the gallows and the jail. But these, somehow or other, saw less of them than of the race that despised them.

For all the years anterior to the period under notice, these people had been, speaking in a general way, safe in Boston. There had, to be sure, been occasional instances of private kidnapping, little known; and there had been an abortive attempt to legally clutch into slavery one negro, Latimer. Still, Boston cherished, sentimentally, at least, free principles, and the New England traditions and laws, all favoring liberty, had been strong enough in her borders to protect the fugitives. Moreover, the caste prejudices against them had for twenty years or so preceding been slowly breaking down. During that time, thanks to one heroic saint, Emerson—thanks to one saintly hero, Garrison—the dawn of a new era was broadening up the northern sky, and all things had begun to come under the sovereignty of reason. Emerson had shed the new and free disclosing light of a poet’s soul and a scholar’s mind on the great problems of spiritual and secular life: straightway the primal soul held session; the old decisions were unsettled; everything was to be reëxamined; thought awoke; the breeze streamed; the sun shone; the Dutch canal fled into a rushing river; all that was generous, all that was thoughtful, all that was intrepid in New England uprose from lethargy; and while he—

— “with low tones that decide, And doubt and reverend use defied— With a look that solved the sphere, And stirred the devils everywhere— Gave his sentiment divine,”—

the contest of reason against authority and precedent began, and amidst much theological mud-flinging and unable-editor jeering, continued from year to year, awakening the distinctive intellectual life of America. On the other hand, Garrison had impeached Slavery before the nation, as the giant foe of civil and political liberty, democracy, society, humanity, in a word, civilization; and amidst a roaring storm of rancor, and the howls of slavers and traders, that tremendous trial also began, and continued from year to year. At the outset, Boston merchants, convulsed with sordid fear lest their southern trade should suffer by this arraignment of the oligarchy, gathered in a mob to hang the gallant citizen—had, in fact, the rope already around his neck, when the Mayor put him in jail, as a dastardly way of saving him. At the outset, too, the gentle Governor of Georgia issued an official proclamation offering five thousand dollars reward for his assassination. Happy, free America! But Garrison had in his heart all that made patriots and Puritans, and amidst a tempest of persecution unequalled since the Dark Ages, dauntless with pen and voice, he held his course against Slavery like the thunder storm against the wind. To his aid gathered a little group of gentlemen and gentlewomen, writers and orators of marked power. Abby Kelley, fair and eloquent for liberty as ever the Greek Hypatia for science: Lydia Maria Child, whose generous and exquisite literary genius all know: Mrs. Chapman, her thought shining in a terse, crystalline diction, like gold in a mountain stream: Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Carolinians, who knew what Slavery was, and knew how to flash the heart’s light upon it: Beriah Green, a master of the old ignited logic: Theodore Weld, a resplendent and indomitable torrent of brave speech: Edmund Quincy, wit, humorist, satirist, gentleman, with the best spirit of the days of Queen Anne in his thought and style: Wendell Phillips, with a fiery glory of classic oratory, strange, but for him, to the air of America: Burleigh, Francis Jackson, in later years Theodore Parker, these, and a score of others gathered around Garrison, sacrificing name and fame, genius, scholarship, wealth, everything they had to sacrifice, to the heroic task of redeeming their country from its shame and wo. Outside of this organization was Channing, with words like morning: John Quincy Adams, too, during those years, fought the battle of free speech in the halls of Congress: Webster, also, poured the lightning and thunder of his mind against the extension of slavery, though never, save in the abstract, against slavery itself: the Whig party backed him; the men of the Liberty party, and in later years the Free Soil party, came to the side issues of the war. But these were not the Abolitionists proper; the Abolitionists were those who stood with Garrison, and their work was with Slavery itself. Against it they reared Alps of testimony and argument; they exposed it utterly; they bent every energy to the task of rousing the nation to its annihilation. Part of their task was the elevation of the fugitives in Boston, and it was owing to their efforts that the caste prejudices were breaking down. The comparative triumph of the present time, whose signal is that the black child sits on equal terms in the Boston schools with the white, was not then achieved, but still, at the period under notice, much had been done. The cars were open to the negro, the omnibuses, the decent dwellings, some mechanic occupations, some of the churches; and one or two colored lawyers had been admitted to the Boston Bar. The theatres still held out; the “respectable” churches, of course—spite of the black bishops of the days of Paul and Augustine; commerce, also; the schools and colleges, likewise; but the Abolitionists were battering on the wall, and it was breaking, breaking, breaking slowly down.

Suddenly over these struggling tides of light and darkness swept the black refluent surge of barbarism. In the year 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. The great Humboldt justly called it “the Webster law”—for with Webster against it, it either could not have passed, or having passed, it never could have been executed. Webster hostile to it, and the North would have risen around him as one man. But the time had come for the Presidential candidates to make their game, and on the seventh of March, 1850, Webster made his game. The draft of a speech for freedom lying in his desk, he stood up in the Senate, spoke a speech for slavery, which was at war with every other speech of his previous life, and his game was made. He made it, played it, lost it, died, and lies cursed with forgiveness, and buried in tears.

A cold, hard Southern tyrant, Mason of Virginia, created the black statute; a sleek, pleasant Northern traitor, Fillmore of New York, then sitting in the Presidential chair, unleashed it, and it burst forth in mischief and ruin, upon the homes of the poor. Such a law! The fugitive to be haled before a Commissioner; no Judge, no Jury; his former slavery sworn to by any unknown claimant, he was to be sent into bondage; five dollars to the Commissioner if he set him free, ten dollars if he made him a slave. Six months imprisonment, and fifteen hundred dollars fine to any person who gave a fugitive food to eat, water to drink, a room to rest in. Happy, free America!

At first Boston was horrified at the law, and aghast at the course of Webster. But the first shock over, Boston became filled with patriotic ardor, and the black statute not only rose in favor, but slavery itself became the theme of eulogy. It was about that period that an eminent Philadelphia surgeon rushed one morning, with a glowing face, before the college-class, and holding up a horrid mass before their astonished eyes, screamed, in a voice trembling with passionate enthusiasm: “Oh, gentlemen! gentlemen, what a _be-a-u_tiful cancer!” With an enthusiasm not less rapturous than his, the Whig and Democratic politicians of that period expatiated upon the charms of the obscene and filthy oligarchic wen which hung from the neck of the South, and the black, accursed conglomerated pustule of a Fugitive Slave Law, which inoculated from it, now deformed the whole face of the North. Slavery was a perfectly paradisaical and divine institution; agitation against it must cease: the Fugitive Slave Law was instinct with the purest and noblest patriotism—the fugitive men, women and children must be hunted down by it with alacrity, or the South would dissolve the Union. To this effect the beautiful emasculate eloquence of Everett moved forth in balanced cadence; to this effect raved rancorous in Bedlam beauty, the intervolved, inextricable, splendor-spotted snarl and coil of Choate’s bewildering orations; to this effect, all up and down the land, for two years, rolled Webster’s dark and orotund malignant thunder. Everywhere in their train a host of blatherers and roarers spouted and bawled—stop agitation—execute the Slave Law—save the Union! It was a period of absolute insanity. The Union was not in the slightest danger—proof of that, the stocks never fell. The South would no more have dared to dissolve the Union than a man would dare to swim in the Maelstrom. But the Southern insanity of tyranny demanded the North for its man-hunting ground; the northern insanity of avarice yielded the demand to get southern trade; between the slaver and trader, the politicians’ insanity of power made its game; and the pretext for all was the salvation of the Union. Millions of the people cried, “Save the Union!” A thousand presses reëchoed the cry. An immense majority of the clergy echoed it again from their pulpits. The things ministers said in defence of slavery and its black statute were only less incredible than the manner in which they were received. For instance, the Rev. Dr. Dewey, an eminent divine, was reported to have declared in a public lecture that he would send his own mother into slavery to save the Union; a storm of rebuke at once burst upon him from the anti-slavery people, and this sentiment was not considered satisfactory even by citizens of the highest respectability: whereupon Dr. Dewey explained that he had not said he would send his own mother into slavery to save the Union, but that he had said he would consent that his own brother or his own son should go into slavery to save the Union—and the citizens of the highest respectability considered _this_ sentiment as highly satisfactory! So amidst such talk and such applause as this, the pro-slavery furore pothered on, and the North was incessantly urged to enforce the black statute as the price of safety to the nation, and incessantly reminded of the priceless privileges the Union secured to us. Perhaps it did—but not least prominent among them was the priceless privilege of paying the debts of South Carolina, and the other priceless privilege of hunting men and women on the soil of the old patriots and Puritans.

Meanwhile the Reign of Terror had begun, and the hellhound of a law was ravening on its victims. It raged chiefly in the great cities, and from these the fugitives, their years of safety over, were flying by thousands to the wild Canadian snows. But the Abolitionists were upon the law. Upon it Theodore Parker dashed the bolted thunder of his speech. Upon it burst the inextinguishable Greek fire of eloquence from the fortressed soul of Wendell Phillips. Upon it, in a word, all the men and women, the Britomarts and Tancreds of the glorious minority, hurtled like a storm of swords. The Free Soilers, too, were up, and did gallant service. Giddings, Seward, Wilson, Burlingame, Mann, Sewall, Chase, Sumner, all the gentlemen and chevaliers of that league, were in the field. Charles Sumner shook Faneuil Hall with words that beat with the blood of all the ages. In New York, Beecher burst upon the monster with tempests of generous flame, and the Hebraic speech of Cheever fought with the prowess of the Maccabees. All over the North, in country towns and in some city pulpits, there were valiant clergymen, whose souls went forth in arms. The Free Soil presses everywhere, became catapults and mangonels, showering a hail of invective and argument upon the law. But the monster, panoplied in legal forms, and girt with a myriad of defenders, was hard to kill. Beaten from some places, crippled sorely, it still lives, and even at this hour, in New York, in Philadelphia, and in other cities, drags down and devours its victims. At the period under notice, its power was strong in Boston. Boston, in the branding phrase of Theodore Parker, had gone for kidnapping. Her Webster, her city officers, her aristocracy, her courts, her prominent newspapers, her traders and her rabble, were all hostile to the unhappy fugitives. That law, however, was doing the most powerful anti-slavery service ever done in America. But its results—for it broke up the Whig party, sowed death in the bones of the Democratic party, sent Charles Sumner to Congress, made the Republicans a power in the land, and taught the people a detestation of slavery which they had never known before—its results were not then fully deposited, or at least clearly seen; they were still operant to their end; and all noble hearts were bowed in sickening sorrow, for it seemed as if liberty, humanity, civilization, all, were going down forever.

It was, then, this hell-dog of a law that had made it no longer safe for the fugitives in Boston. And who is he who shall undertake to paint the agony of those men and women? He must dip his pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse who aims to do it. Their years of security were over. The first news of the passage of the law drove scores of them to Canada, and day by day they were flying. Numbers of their people had already been taken from other cities into slavery, when the first slave case, that of Shadrach, occurred in Boston. Ten or twelve gallant black men burst into the court-room, and took Shadrach from his foes. Boston howled. Soon another fugitive, Sims, was dragged before the Commissioner. No rescue for him; the court-house was ringed with chains, under which the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and other Judges, crawled to their seats; the cutlasses and bludgeons of the Government begirt the captive, and fifteen hundred Boston gentlemen offered to put muskets to their shoulders, if desired, to insure his being taken into bondage. “The Fifteen Hundred Scoundrels,” Wendell Phillips christened this brigade of wretches, praying that bankruptcy might sit on the ledger of every one of them. Nine days the Abolitionists and Free-Soilers fought the case, impeded the Jedburgh justice—the bitter mockery of that infamous trial; then Sims was environed with cutlasses and pistols, marched, at early dawn, to the vessel a Boston merchant volunteered for his rendition, and sent into slavery. The only news of him after that, was that he had been scourged to death at Savannah. His capture and murder completed the ghastly alarm of the Boston fugitives. From that hour they lived in an atmosphere of unimaginable fear and gloom. Frequent reports that kidnappers were in town, harried many of them off to join the thirty thousand fugitives who had fled from the tender mercies of America to seek refuge in the bleak wilds or towns of Canada. Churches were suspended; business arrested; families were broken up; wives and husbands separated; fathers had to leave their sons; sons their fathers; parents their children; for the peril was often immediate, and there was no time for delay. At every fresh rumor that kidnappers were in town, the colored people would hurry up from their occupations to their homes—some to fly, aided by their richer brethren, or by the compassion of the anti-slavery people—others to gather in the streets in excited discussion—and others, with that desperate and splendid courage which is one of the distinctive virtues of the negro, to fortify their dwellings, and prepare for a death-grapple with their hunters. Thick-crowding cares and fears, distress, alarm, foreboding, agony, few friends, a thousand foes, this was their bitter portion.

Such, briefly and faintly sketched, was the state of affairs among these poor people in the City of the Fugitive at that period. What wonder men of heart desponded? It was not a despised Abolitionist, but an Abolitionist whom none despise—the Lord of Civilization standing calm above the ages, he whose spirit slowly wins the world from wrong; it was Francis Bacon of Verulam who said that when Commerce dominates in the State, the State is in its decline. Commerce dominated then. Science, arts, laws, religion, morality, humanity, justice, liberty, the rights, the hearts of mankind—all must give way to it. Rapacious and insolent, it ruled and flourished over all.

Yet there were rays of hope and auguries of better days in Boston even then, and the new was stirring in the old. Emerson was saturating the intellectual life of the city, and through it the mind of America, with the nobleness of his thought. Theodore Parker, gigantesque in learning, courage, devotion to mankind, less a man than a Commonwealth of noble powers, was in his pulpit, with a strong and growing hold on the minds and hearts of the people. The Abolitionists were toiling terribly with all their splendid might of conscience, their genius and their eloquence, to rouse the North to a settlement with the Slave Oligarchy. The Free-Soilers were indefatigably laboring to prevent the base and brutal Democrats from crowding out free American labor from the Territories and incoming States with the labor of Congo and Ashantee; and laboring also to get the Government out of the control of the Slave Power. In a word, Liberty was fighting her battle with Trade, and even the defeats of Liberty are victories.

Add to all that a fair ray of hope and promise still lingered at that period in the air of Boston, cast from a little society of Socialists, under the leadership of William Henry Channing, which had been dissolved about two years before. They had lit their torch from the old faith that Human Life has its Science, discovering which we rear earth’s Golden Age. It was the old idea of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras; it was the dream of Campanella and More; it was the divine and deathless purpose of Bacon, and the holy labor of Fourier. The Socialists in Boston had made a limited but profound impression with it, which had outlasted their dissolution. The light of the torch still lived when the torch itself was extinguished; and amidst the sordor and selfishness and cruelty of the period, it showed that the tradition and the promise of the Good Time Coming were immortal.