Resistance to Blood-houndism: Addresses Delivered in Syracuse, New York, on January 7—8, 1851
RESISTANCE TO BLOOD-HOUNDISM: ADDRESSES DELIVERED
IN SYRACUSE, NEW YORK, ON 7—8 JANUARY 1851
New York Daily Tribune, 11, 14 January 1851. Another text in North Star, 23 January
1851.
From 7 to 10 January 1851, the City Hall in Syracuse, New York, was the site
of a series of public meetings convened in answer to a published call for a
“New York State Anti-Fugitive Slave Bill Mass Convention.” The sessions
of the convention were generally well attended, with veteran abolitionists,
such as the Reverend Samuel J. May, Gerrit Smith, and Douglass, assuming
leading roles. The high point of the program was the appearance of William L.
Chaplin, who had just been released on bail from a Maryland prison after
being held on charges of aiding slaves to escape from the vicinity of the
District of Columbia. Dr. Lyman Clary of Syracuse was elected president of
the convention, but Douglass, one of the vice presidents, presided in his
absence on 9 January 1851. Douglass spoke on the first and second days of the
convention. The Syracuse Liberty Party Paper praised Douglass’s address on
the afternoon of 7 January as “in the opinion of those who have often heard
him one of the best he ever made. He was often interrupted by applause and
the fierceness or rather ‘blood and murder’ which characterized his address,
seemed to give it high relish with the greater portion of the Convention.”
Although the meeting raised more than one thousand dollars to help repay the
individuals who had raised Chaplin’s bail, the convention was marred by
dissension between Garrisonian abolitionists and supporters of the Liberty
party over methods to oppose enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. In
an editorial in the North Star, Douglass reflected that the convention had
been “just such a meeting as the advocates of slave-catching (alias Blood-houndism,)
will probably set up a fiendish shout of delight over. ” New York
Daily Tribune, 9, 16 January 1851; NASS, 9, 16 January 1851; NS, 16
January, 6 February 1851; Lib., 24 January 1851.
First Day [7 January 1851]
AFTERNOON SESSION
[Appointment of committee on enrollment of members; songs; speech by
William Lawrence Chaplin]
FREDERICK DOUGLASS rejoiced that this Convention had been called, and
that so many had responded to the call. If ever there was a time of trial—of
deep solemnity—to those who wish well for the Slave, this is the time. It is
a time to test the fidelity of men and women who hitherto have professed to
believe in Human Brotherhood.
We have come together to consult as to our duty in reference to the
Fugitive Slave Law. This law has had pledged to its support the military
and naval power of this Government. It is the only law which, for a long
time, it has been deemed necessary, that the Executive should openly
pledge for its support the whole power of the army and navy—aye, even to
collusion with our citizens, whom he might have to slaughter in its execu-
tion.1Douglass probably alludes to President Millard Fillmore's letter of 9 November 1850 to Robert Collins, the owner of William and Ellen Craft, which was widely reprinted in the press. Fillmore assured Collins that whenever the Fugitive Slave Law “shall be opposed, or the execution thereof obstructed in any State by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of Judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in civil officers, with powers which the law authorises and requires them to call to their aid, it would be his duty to call forth the Militia and use the Army and Navy for the purpose of overcoming such forcible combinations against the laws." New York Daily Tribune, 20 November 1850; NASS, 28 November 1850; Lib., 29 November 1850. This is the law. It is one about to be rigorously pressed.
Six months ago, this would not have been believed. People would not
then believe the bill could be enacted. Mason introduced it,2James Murray Mason (1798—1871), grandson of revolutionary patriot George Mason, received his education in the Georgetown, D.C., schools and at the University of Pennsylvania and the College of William and Mary. After establishing a law practice at Winchester, Virginia, in 1820, he served in the Virginia House of Delegates, the state constitutional convention of 1829, and the US. House of Representatives (1837-39). In 1847 he was elected to the Senate, where he remained until Virginia seceded. Although he had been a presidential elector for Andrew Jackson in 1832, Mason became a close associate of John C. Calhoun and one of the most articulate and effective defenders of southern rights. On 3 January 1850 he “gave notice of his intention. . . to introduce a bill to provide for the more effective execution" of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause, an intention that was carried out the following day. After months of debate, Mason's much amended bill passed in the Senate on 24 August 1851 and in the House on 12 September 1851. Mason supported secession in 1860 and served briefly in the Confederate Congress before being appointed commissioner to England. On 8 November 1861, while traveling on the British steamer Trent, Mason and John Slidell, the Confederacy's diplomatic representative to France, were captured by Captain Charles Wilkes of the United States Navy and sent to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. This affair so strained relations between the United States and Great Britain that many feared war would break out. Upon his release in January 1862, Mason proceeded to England, but his efforts to gain British recognition of the Confederacy and intervention on her behalf were unsuccessful. At the close of the war he went to Canada, where he stayed until 1868. Emory Thomas, The Confederate Nation (New York, 1979), 173-79; Campbell, Slave Catchers, 15-23; Ezra J. Warner and W. Buck Yearns, Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress (Baton Rouge, 1975), 169-70; NCAB, 2: 93; DAB, 12: 364-65. and discussed
it; but it was so flagrantly opposed to the Constitution, so scandalous a
violation of the plainest principles of justice, that no one of the people at the
North believed it could pass. The people of the North, are a hopeful people.
The bill passed the Senate—but it could not pass the House. It did pass—
but, still hoping, as ever, the good people said Millard Fillmore would not
sign it. But Fillmore did sign it.3After receiving written assurance from his attorney general that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was constitutional, President Millard Fillmore signed the measure on 18 September. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 23. Then, again, the hopeful people of the
North said it would remain a dead letter—that the Northern people did not
want these men—and then the North were so repugnant to its operation.
But we soon learned that a respectable man in New York was inveigled into
a small room, went through a mock trial, and in three hours was on his way
to bondage!4In October 1848. James Hamlet (c.1822—?) escaped from Baltimore, Maryland, where his owner, Mrs. Mary Brown, had hired him out as a laborer in a city gunpowder factory. After her son moved to New York City and spotted Hamlet on the street, Mrs. Brown authorized her son-in-law, Thomas J. Clare, to claim Hamlet on her behalf. Hamlet was arrested on 26 September 1850 at a store in lower Manhattan, where he worked as a porter, and thus became the first alleged fugitive to be arrested under the provisions of the week-old Fugitive Slave Law. Though the young mulatto denied that he was still a slave and asserted that “he had entitled himself to his liberty," his testimony was prohibited by law; within three hours of his arrest he was being returned to Baltimore in the custody of a federal marshal. Hamlet's seizure was strongly denounced by New York City's black population, among whom a Committee of Thirteen, including John J. Zuille, James McCune Smith, and George Downing, had already organized to oppose the Fugitive Slave Law. On 1 October the committee sponsored a public meeting at Zion Chapel on Church Street. Some fifteen hundred spectators listened as speaker after speaker, with one exception, advocated armed resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. The meeting was informed that the $800 needed to purchase Hamlet's freedom had already been raised. Most of it had been contributed by the merchant subscribers to the New York Journal of Commerce, whose editorials were urging obedience to the Fugitive Slave Law at the same time that the journal established a fund to be used to purchase the freedom of fugitives convicted under the act. Hamlet was reunited with his wife and two children before nearly five thousand people at a reception in his honor in New York’s City Hall Park on 5 October. Too moved by the occasion to make a speech, Hamlet waved a white handkerchief to the crowd and was triumphantly escorted to the ferry that would carry him and his family to their home in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1851, 24; New York Herald, 28 September 1850; NASS, 3, 10 October 1850; The Fugitive Slave Bill: Its History and Unconstitutionality; with An Account of the Seizure and Enslavement of James Hamlet . . . (New York, 1850), 1-6 ,36; Campbell, Slave Catchers, 56, 75; Freeman, “Free Negro in New York City," 46, 84-85. The hopeful North again said that this would be the last case.
But this proved untrue. We hear of cases now every day. The work under
the law had butjust begun. The South see a quieting down on the subject—
they see prominent clergymen preaching from the pulpit obedience to this
law—they see newspapers which once spoke “brave words” for the slave,
now excluding Abolitionism from their columns.
The question before us is, Whether we are to make resistance to the
execution of this law? Whether we are to recognize the principle that every
man is innocent and free until he is proven to be otherwise, or to admit the
Virginia doctrine that every black man is a slave until proved otherwise?5The most concise statement of this fundamental legal principle is in the anonymously authored public letters from “Junius” to leading eighteenth-century English government officials. In his letter to Lord Chief Justice Mansfield of 21 January 1772, “Junius” declared that “favourable circumstances, alledged before the judge, may justify a doubt whether the prisoner be guilty or not; and where the guilt is doubtful, a presumption of innocence should in general, be admitted." Junius: Stat Nominus Umbra, 2 vols. (1793; London, 1801), 2: 242.
The South have President Fillmore, the Army and the Navy on its side—
and they are determined to press this law to the “bitter end.”6“Bitter end" is a nautical term for the portion of a ship's cable that stays on board during mooring. William A. Craigie and James R. Hurlbert, A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1938-44), 1: 213. This Conven-
tion must say what ought to be done. I am a peace man. I am opposed to the
shedding of blood in all cases where it can be avoided. But this Convention
ought to say to Slaveholders that they are in danger of bodily harm if they
come here, and attempt to carry men off into bondage. I say to any Fugi-
tive, that nothing short of the blood of the slaveholder who shall attempt to
carry him off, ought to satisfy him. The Convention should say so.
Dr. Channing,7William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), eminent Unitarian clergyman, was born in Newport, Rhode Island, and educated at Harvard. Upon graduation in 1798, Channing tutored in the David Meade Randolph family of Richmond, Virginia, for eighteen months. He became a regent at Harvard in 1802 and, after ordination the following year, obtained a pastorate at Boston's Federal Street Church, where he preached until his death. Channing was the spokesman for Unitarianism in its early years, an influential literary critic, and a noted commentator on social and moral issues. A temperance and peace advocate, Channing held moderate antislavery views that were attacked by both the militant abolitionists and supporters of slavery. His willingness to express his views from the pulpit especially exposed him to criticism by proslavery forces. Lawrence Lader, The Bold Brahmins: New England's War Against Slavery: 1831-1863 (New York, 1961), 82-83; DAB, 4: 4-7. whose memory he esteemed so highly, once said that
we could frown slaveholders down—the idea being that the indignant
flashes of our eyes would frighten them out of countenance. I am for the
fullest exercise of moral power—for doing all with moral power that can be
done, and for using no other power when that is sufficient for the end. But
if any one should attempt to take me into Slavery, I should strike him
down—not with malignity, but as complacently as I would a bloodhound,
and think I was doing God service. The slaveholder has no right to live. We
must keep them away. They keep us away from the South. They say they
will hang us if we go there—and we keep away. We must make them
understand that it is equally important for their safety that they keep away
from us on errands of this character.
He referred to the case of Hughes, in Boston. He did not deem it safe to
remain, and he left. A few cases like that would make the law a dead letter.
Make two or three dead men—that will make the law a dead letter. These
men have thrown it in the teeth of the black men, that they are unfit for
freedom—that they have not the spirit to revolt against any degree of
oppression. Are we not invited to the work of slaying kidnappers by this
theory in regard to ourselves? There will be no more kidnappers from
Macon, Georgia. Mr. D[ouglass] went on with a very minute and interest-
ing statement of the manner in which Knight and Hughes were treated at
Boston—making them heartily sick of their expedition.8Douglass alludes to the case of William and Ellen Craft, two fugitive slaves who had sought refuge in Boston after escaping their master, Robert Collins of Macon, Georgia, in Decetnber 1848. Two agents for Collins, Willis H. Hughes (?-1851) and John Knight, arrived in Boston in October 1850 to attempt to recapture the Crafts under the new Fugitive Slave Law. The Boston Vigilance Committee and the local black community took immediate action to defend the fugitives. Each time Hughes and Knight attempted to approach the Crafts, the southemers were arrested, once for slander and once for attempted kidnapping. Large crowds of blacks besciged the agents' hotel and shadowed their movements. This harassment, coupled with thinly-veiled threats against their lives delivered by the Reverend Theodore Parker, eventually unnerved Hughes and Knight and persuaded them to return to Georgia empty-handed. The Crafts soon after fled to England. Lib., 6 December 1850, 24 January 1851; R. J. M. Blockett, “Fugitive Slaves in Britain: The Odyssey of William and Ellen Craft," Journal of American Studies, 12: 41-44 (April 1978); Jacobs, “Boston Negro," 273-74.
What we must do is to make it unsafe for a slaveholder or his agent, or a
United States officer to undertake to kidnap any man or woman among us.
And to show that it is unsafe, we must set some examples. In illustration he
referred to the recent case in Pennsylvania, where a band of colored men
beat off the kidnappers.9At 2:00 A.M. on 27 December 1850, a Maryland slave owner, a deputy U.S. marshal, and four assistants forced their way into the home of a black family in Coatsville, Pennsylvania, to search for an escaped slave. The residents of the house used an axe and other weapons at hand to hold off the officers while the fugitive escaped. The invaders finally abandoned the battle and retreated from the house, but not before several on both sides had been injured. New York Daily Tribune, 4 January 1851; Lib., 10 January 1851. The slaveholder went home without his prey and
declared he would not renew the attempt. The business was accomplished.
The rights of the assailed were protected, but only by their own strong
arms.
If in Syracuse you allow one to be taken off, another will soon follow.
When any human being will so far sink his manhood as to become a wolf, a
tiger, a bloodhound, he is not fit to live. I do believe that two or three dead
slaveholders will make this law a dead letter. I have said that the South
know how to keep Abolitionists away—they say they will hang them on the
next tree—and in that way, and in that way only, can we keep these
bloodhounds from their errand of robbery at the North.
EVENING SESSION
[Prayer by Rev. Robert R. Raymond; public address read by Gerrit Smith.]
DOUGLASS was opposed to it, in its assertion of the unconstitutionality of
slavery, or rather its assertion that the Constitution is an Anti-Slavery
instrument—and in reference to much it said of the colored people of the
North.10Douglass alludes to the passage in the public address, written by Gerrit Smith and presented by him to the convention for adoption, which declared that in the U.S. Constitution “there is an abundance of pro-slavery. But, we affirm, that in the instrument itself, there is none." NS, 23 January 1851. He believed the framers of the Constitution enacted the Fugitive
Bill in effect. But he abjured the Constitution and the Union under it. The
Union was dissolved, or fast dissolving. If you cannot have national parties
in Church or State, where is your Union? We cannot go on without destroy-
ing all the rights and liberties of the North. Every step thus far, has been
downward. He had made progress within one year, as to his views of the
manner in which slaveholders should be treated. He once thought human
life of more value than anything else. But he now thought Liberty of more
value. And he who would so far sink his manhood as to turn bloodhound,
ought to die. He is not fit to live. If these bloodhounds were on the track of a
man, and I knew his place of concealment, and was required to reveal it on
pain of death, I ought not to reveal it—I ought to die. Brother Chaplin11William L. Chaplin (1796-1871) was born in Groton, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard. Chaplin abandoned a law practice to serve as the general agent and corresponding secretary of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society in the late 1830s. Following the schism of the American abolition movement in 1840, Chaplin worked for the Liberty party as a lecturer and as an editor of one of its newspapers, the Albany Patriot. As a close collaborator with Gerrit Smith, Chaplin opposed the Liberty party's merger into the Free Soil coalition and continued to labor for an undiluted abolitionist political program. In August I850 he was arrested in the District of Columbia for aiding fugitive slaves. After being bailed out of jail by Smith and other friends. Chaplin enjoyed brief notoriety as a victim of the slave power. In the 1850s and 1860s he shifted most of his efforts from the antislavery to the temperance cause. Washington (D.C.) New National Era, 11 May 1871; Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 3 vols. (Boston, 1872-77), 2: 80-82; Lawrence J. Friedman, “The Gerrit Smith Circle: Abolitionism in the Burned-Over District," Civil War History, 26: 20—21, 36 (March 1980).
thinks such meetings as these held all over the State of New York, would
make the Fugitive Law a dead letter. That depends upon what should be
said and done—what is determined upon—at those meetings. If they
determined to resist, they do good.
Second Day [8 January 1851]
MORNING SESSION
[Prayer by Rev. Lyndon King; speech by Gerrit Smith]
FREDERICK DOUGLASS said he was compelled to differ from the resolu-
tion.12Because various objections had been voiced to the public address reported by the convention's business committee, Gerrit Smith offered a series of resolutions to test the sentiments of the delegates. Douglass objected to the first of Smith‘s resolutions, which declared “that the Address is right in maintaining that the Constitution is an Anti-Slavery instrument." New York Daily Tribune, 14 January 1851. He objected to the introduction of this matter. An extra infamous act
had been passed by Congress. The object of this Convention was to pro-
mote disobedience to this kidnapping law. Men were here who were deter-
mined to disobey this law. We are not all Liberty party men, though that
party may be right. It would not be well to have it understood that our action
was that of the Liberty party. There is common ground, common feeling,
common sentiment, we may adopt. That the law is unconstitutional—
unrighteous—that it ought not to be executed—that we will resist: here is
common ground, enough for all to stand on. Nullify this enactment, resist
this enactment, create a public sentiment which will make this act nuga-
tory, and you strike a blow at Slavery.
He did not believe the Constitution was anti-Slavery—he wished he
could. It is said the word slave is not in the Constitution. Why, the word
slave is not in this Fugitive Slave Bill—not even in its title. Don’t you know
what this law means? Do any of you think this law an anti—Slavery docu-
ment? No! You know it is not. We had better own up, that there may here be
an honest difference of opinion—that men may honestly think that the
Constitution is pro-Slavery.