wields the power of the office into which that oath inducted him to lengthen the cords and strengthen the stakes of slavery. But why receive the dark and damnable deeds of such officials, hirelings and tools of despotism as Fillmore,⁷Millard Fillmore Webster⁸Daniel Webster and H. K. Smith,⁹Henry Kendall Smith (1811—54) was U.S. commissioner appointed by the Circuit Court of New York under the Fugitive Slave Law to deal with cases of fugitive slaves. He presided over the Daniel case in Buffalo and remanded Daniel Davis to be sent back to his owner in Kentucky. Smith was born in St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, but educated in Baltimore. He moved to Buffalo in 1833 to practice law. After a number of unsuccessful runs for political positions, Smith won the Buffalo mayor’s office (1850-51) as a Democrat. FDP, 21 August 1851; Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’Alroy Jones, Biographical Dictionary of American Mayors, 1820-1980 (Westport, Conn., 1981), 333 as expositions of the constitution? As well might one risk the moral training of his children in the hands of such preachers of the gospel of bloodhoundism, as Cox,¹⁰Samuel H. Cox Lord[,]¹¹Nathan Lord (1792-1870) was a Congregational minister and president of Dartmouth College from 1828 to 1863. Lord had at first backed the Liberty party, but soon after the Mexican-American War he became a decided supporter of slavery as an institution. Lord believed that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible and was therefore divinely ordained and not to be questioned. He published his views in Letter of Inquiry to Ministers of All Denominations on Slavery (1854) and A Northern Presbyter’s Second Letter (1855). In 1863 Lord published views denouncing John Brown’ s raid at Harpers Ferry, and the ensuing censure, particularly from his board of trustees, forced him to resign his position. DAB, 11:409. Taylor,¹²Nathaniel William Taylor (1786–1858), a preacher and educator at the Yale Divinity School, was a promoter of New School Calvinism, or New Haven theology, which strove to make New England Congregationalism compatible with revivalism. Taylor and like-minded clergymen such as Lyman Beecher posited that sin was not predestined, but that humans could choose to do good or evil. On the issue of slavery, New England Congregationalists tended to support the American Colonization Society and its methods, and generally, Taylor seemed to be a colonizationist and antiabolitionist. At the end of his life, Taylor joined those who protested the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and became active in the Republican party. Sidney Earl Mead, Nathaniel William Taylor, 1786–1858: A Connecticut Liberal (1942; Hamden, Conn, 1967); John Terrill Wayland, “The Theological Department in Yale College, 1822–1858” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1933), 78–79, 419–22; NCAB, 7:187; DAB, 18:338–39. Spring¹³Gardiner Spring (1785–1873), a Presbyterian clergyman, was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He began his career as a lawyer, but later became a minister in New Haven, Connecticut. Spring held that slavery was recognized in the Constitution and opposed the abolitionists, but when the Civil War began, he committed himself to the Union cause and persuaded the Old School Presbyterian General Assembly to support the federal government. DAB, 17:479-80. and Hawks.¹⁴Francis Lister Hawks (1798–1866) was an Episcopalian minister born in New Bern, North Carolina. He first became a lawyer, then entered the ministry in 1827. Hawks served in churches in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New York before moving to Mississippi, where he was one of the original trustees of the University of Mississippi. He also served churches in Louisiana, but later moved back to New York, where in 1862 his sympathy for the South led him to resign and move to Baltimore. DAB, 8:412–16. In future letters, if acceptable, I shall argue these points in detail.
I was at Buffalo a day or two after the bloody brutality of Daniel’ s arrest was perpetrated. Rust, the paid bloodhound, (but too dishonest to go on all fours,) is a most cowardly knave.¹⁵In 1851 a bounty hunter named Benjamin S. Rust and three other men attacked Daniel Davis, an accused fugitive slave working as a second cook aboard the steamship Buckeye State near Buffalo, New York. In the ensuing struggle the four men beat Davis, severely burning his face. Davis appeared before U.S. Commissioner Henry K. Smith, where Rust proffered an affidavit declaring him to be an agent for George J. Moore of Louisville, Kentucky; authorizing him to pursue Moore’s slave Davis, who had escaped on 25 August 1850; and describing Davis physically. The affidavit was signed by the Jefferson County, Kentucky, clerk and judge of the county court. In his hearing Commissioner Smith did not allow Davis to produce witnesses who could attest that he was not the slave described in the affidavit. Under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Judge Alfred Conkling of the New York district court found in favor of Davis’s status as a free man. Douglass and others lauded the decision in the case as proof that the Constitution could be used as a tool to fight slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law. FDP, 21 August, 4 September 1851. You will judge as much, when I tell you, that, though armed to the teeth, he took besides a billet of wood, to strike poor Daniel over the head as he mounted the ladder from the kitchen to the deck. The dastard, though thoroughly armed, did not dare to wait for his victim to come upon deck. A dogberry¹⁶Dogberry is the name of the inept and self-important constable in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. Justice named Gold, fined this fellow but $50.¹⁷George J. Moore, Daniel Davis’s alleged owner, hired Benjamin S. Rust of Louisville, Kentucky, to find his fugitive slave. The police arrested Rust for assaulting Davis and brooght him before Police Justice Gold. Gold issued a writ of habeas corpus so that Davis could be brought into court to testify against Rust. Both Davis and Rust spent a week in jail. Gold fined Rust fifty dollars for assault. FDP, 21 August 1851. What do you think of that? Henry K. Smith was as sober as usual when he sat on the judgment seat. How sober that is, those who know his habits can tell you. The wretch was but a short half hour in consigning this man to bondage. He overruled the long established doctrine of the courts, that a man bringing, or suffering to be brought, his slave into a free state, thereby frees him.¹⁸In 1842 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that state officials were not required to assist in the return of fugitive slaves, rendering efforts to recover slaves essentially ineffective. Also, Connecticut passed a law that forbade judges and justices of the peace to take cognizance of such cases; Indiana, New York, and Vermont had laws that provided for trial by jury in cases involving fugitive slaves; and Pennsylvania and Ohio had passed laws to prevent kidnapping. John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York, 1994), 192; Campbell, Slave Catchers, 10. He then threatened that any of our people who should resist the law, should be shot down (a game that two can play at.) You know that black men fought in the Revolutionary War, and in the war with Great Britain.¹⁹Blacks served in both the U.S. Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Approximately 3,000 of the 300,000 soldiers in the Revolutionary War were blacks, most coming from the North. In the War of 1812 the military allowed blacks to serve, but until 1814 there was no real push to recruit them. Then, New York passed an act to raise two regiments of men of color, with each consisting of about 1,000 men. The soldiers received the same pay as whites, and if a slave served with the permission of his master, he received his freedom at the end of the war. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 76–77, 108.—Jackson, who was Smith’s pattern of a President and a General, called out black men to aid him twice.²⁰In 1814 Andrew J ackson (1767–1845) led the Tennessee militia against a rebellion of Creek Indians. After being commissioned a major general in the U.S. Army and needing to strengthen his forces in the autumn of 1814, Jackson appealed to the free blacks of Louisiana to join him. He promised them the same pay as whites and said their noncommissioned officers would be chosen from their ranks. Several units joined, and they played an important role in the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson placed black troops on the left bank of the Mississippi River, just to the right of the advancing left column of the British. As the British assaulted Jackson’s position, these troops opened up a counterattack that was disastrous for the British. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 109–10. Now this bloated son of an alien²¹Henry K. Smith’s father was an Englishman who owned a sugar plantation on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. Holli and Jones, American Mayors, 333. talks about shooting down the men whose fathers fought for the liberties he enjoys, at second hand. Thank God, there is a Hell for such fellows hereafter!
The Mayor of Buffalo²²James Wadsworth (1819–91), a Democrat and supporter of slavery, was mayor of Buffalo in 1851 and 1852. Ann Hoffman, Complete Listing of Buffalo Mayoral Candidates, 1832–1873 (Buffalo, N.Y., 1975), 1. was probably elected by the votes of the black men. He promised them friendship, in the matter of the Fugitive Law. No half-paid subaltern of the police, no waferish lackey, no paid or unpaid tool of despotism, no regular, professional man-hunter, could, or did, howl upon the track of the poor, down-stricken, helpless Daniel, as did Mayor Wadsworth—He did so in clear and manifest violation of the statute of New York. Had he his deserts according to the law, he would be fined and imprisoned.
Daniel has sued Rust for civil damages.—The uncircumcised have subscribed almost enough to purchase Daniel. They can afford that. But the whole matter is to be argued before Judge Conkling,²³Alfred Conkling (1789–1874) is best known as a New York jurist. In 1825 John Quincy Adams appointed him as a federal judge for the northern New York district. He sat on the bench for twenty-seven years. In 1851 Conkling drew the ire of many antislavery activists when he bound over for trial the rescuers of William “Jerry” McHenry and then allowed himself to be removed from the subsequent trials. Conkling later served as U.S. minister to Mexico (1852) and practiced private law upon his return. His son, Roscoe, became a Republican U.S. congressman and senator and sometime political ally of Douglass after the Civil War. FDP, 30 October 1851, 5 February 1852; BDAC, 816; DAB, 4:345–46. not Lundy. Whether