"The Jordan is a hard road to travel": Hoosier responses to fugitive slave cases, 1850-1860.

• Author: Kotlowski, Dean J.

On September 18, 1850, President Millard Fillmore signed what one historian labeled "the most hateful statute since the Alien and Sedition Acts," the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. (1) Part of the Compromise of 1850, this law placed federal commissioners in each county in the nation and gave them broad powers--to issue arrest warrants, form posses, and even determine the status of alleged fugitives. It denied legal rights to accused runaways and offered financial incentives to commissioners to return slaves to their masters. Since the law provided no statute of limitations, self-proclaimed slaveholders and their hired agents could enter a community, arrest any African-American, claim that person as a slave, have the claim certified by a U.S. commissioner, and then depart with their property. (2) "What a mockery of justice! Of common sense! Of law!" the anti-slavery Richmond Palladium (Indiana) exclaimed. "Why not issue a license to kidnappers, authorizing them to enter any of the free states and take into slavery any man with colored skin!" (3)

Northern defiance--and support--of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is well known. In Boston, abolitionists and free blacks formed legal and vigilance committees to aid runaways. Even before the law had passed Congress, nine states, all northern, had enacted "personal liberty laws" to guarantee some legal rights to assist accused fugitive slaves. When legal action failed, opponents of slavery sometimes used force to free them. (4) In October 1850, speaking in Boston, the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass vowed that former slaves, such as himself, "without the slightest hope of making successful resistance, are resolved rather to die than to go back." (5) Douglass' rebellious words implied an important reality, namely, the chief enemies of the act, white abolitionists and free blacks, represented a small and somewhat embattled fraction of the Northern population. In 1851, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, who had helped to fashion the Compromise of 1850, reported that the fugitive slave law was being enforced in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. Only in Boston, he asserted, was there opposition. (6)

Within Indiana, historians have examined individual fugitive slave cases, but there have been fewer attempts to analyze them collectively to discern larger patterns. (7) In order to gauge Hoosier responses, this study considers fugitive cases in Indianapolis, Vincennes, Terre Haute, New Albany, and Vernon. These communities were selected on the basis of location, circumstances surrounding the cases, and availability of primary source material.

A number of trends in Indiana stand out. Real fugitive slaves received little sympathy, but communities resisted attempts to kidnap into slavery people who were known to be free. When a longtime resident or a white person faced prosecution, citizens used legal means to defend them. In most cases, judges refused to release suspected runaways, and citizens respected their decisions. Finally, Hoosiers seldom resorted to extra-legal means to release alleged fugitives.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: Sources of Support, Pockets of Resistance

Before examining specific cases, Hoosier assumptions about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 require explanation. Support for the Union, racism, and property rights moved most state residents to respect the law. The presence of Southern emigrants in the lower part of Indiana provided a social anchor for such sentiments. At the same time, the state's small African-American and Quaker populations used clandestine, sometimes illegal, means to resist the "slave catchers."

Many Indianans accepted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 out of support for the Federal Union. The law, a concession to Southern slaveholders, sought to head off the secession of the slave states. "Union" and "compromise" were familiar and respected concepts to Hoosiers. In 1850 Democratic Governor Joseph A. Wright declared that he knew "no North, no South, nothing but the common brotherhood of all working for the common good." (8) To preserve the Union, Wright urged fellow Hoosiers not to be "alarmed at the word 'compromise.'" In a state settled by people from both regions, citizens heeded such advice. Delegates to Indiana's constitutional convention of 1850-51 endorsed the Compromise of 1850 and pressed Indianans to "carry out, in good faith, the conditions of the Compromise on the subject of domestic slavery." (9) Nevertheless, by calling for obedience, delegates seemed to anticipate resistance by some Hoosiers to the fugitive slave law.

Many public officials, whether elected or appointed, state or federal, saw respect for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as an integral part of preserving the Union. In a gesture of cross-sectional--and bipartisan--goodwill, Wright invited his Whig counterpart, Governor John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, to visit Indianapolis in 1851. Interestingly, this "summit" coincided with a fugitive slave case, originating in South Bend, which had found its way into an Indianapolis courtroom. Elisha M. Huntington, the U.S. district judge in Indiana, heard opening arguments concerning the case and ruled against a number of motions advanced by defense attorneys. He then adjourned court and departed to preside over a mass meeting to celebrate the Union, at which various speakers excoriated persons bent on thwarting the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. By the time U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice John McLean had arrived from Washington to preside over the trial, he exhibited "all the nervousness of a presidential aspirant" and "felt sincerely desirous that the Union should be held together, at any sacrifice." (10) The charges of judicial bias, appearing in an abolitionist tract, must not be taken at face value. Nevertheless they illustrate the political nature of both fugitive slave trials and Justice McLean, whose thirst for the White House was well known. (11) They also underscore unionist sentiments among Hoosiers.

Racism also discouraged most Indianans from defying the fugitive slave statute. As scholars have shown, white supremacy was etched into the minds and laws of most Northerners during the antebellum period. Indiana proved no exception. The same constitutional convention that had endorsed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 also crafted a document forbidding additional free African-Americans from immigrating to Indiana. The state legislature passed laws to prohibit blacks from voting, giving testimony against whites in court, serving in the state militia, attending white public schools, and marrying across racial lines. (12) Furthermore, Indiana's legislature never passed "personal liberty laws" to assist African-Americans prosecuted under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. (13)

The absence of personal liberty laws in Indiana partly stemmed from Hoosiers' respect for both property rights and the will of Congress. In Indiana, judges reasoned that masters were entitled to the return of runaway slaves. As will be shown, during fugitive trials in Vincennes and Vernon, newspaper editors proclaimed that Hoosiers were law-abiding people who would not go to great lengths to subvert an act of Congress, especially one that did not affect them directly. (14)

Demographics also contributed to the lack of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Many people living in the southern half of Indiana either were Southern-born or descendants of Southerners. Although Hoosiers of Southern background did not always identify with the institution of slavery and the power of the "slavocracy"--from which many had fled--the sectional crisis of the 1850s encouraged many midwesterners of Southern origin to defend the plantation system and the rights of slaveholders. (15) On the other hand, anti-slavery activity, especially rescues of fugitives, proved strongest in New England and its cultural outposts, the "Burned-Over District" in New York and Ohio's Western Reserve. Few New Englanders settled Indiana, and, according to the historian James H. Madison, "[m]ilitant, radical antislavery sentiment remained weaker in Indiana than perhaps in any other state." (16)

There were pockets of resistance; Indiana judges occasionally sympathized with captured runaways. "There was a firm maintenance" by some officials, argued one historian, that "Indiana was free soil and a protection of legal rights that this implied." (17) During one case, in 1829, an Indianapolis judge confronted with a Virginian's claim for the return of four fugitives responded with a ruling that almost foreshadowed the famed defense in the Dred Scott case three decades later. Since the owner of the purported slaves had voluntarily entered the free state of Indiana, and inasmuch as these slaves now stood upon free soil, they were free. (18) Another magistrate participated in a "slave rescue." In Salem, Indiana, a justice of the peace delayed a fugitive's trial in order to give anti-slavery activists time to release the man from jail. Opponents of the slave catchers freed the prisoner and furnished him with a pair of horses. The man then eluded his would-be captors by hiding out at Skunk River, a nearby Underground Railroad station. He eventually arrived in Canada safe and free. (19)

Other Hoosiers organized to aid fugitive slaves and African-Americans. During the 1830s, Quakers of Decatur and Wayne counties formed anti-slavery societies, and similar organizations emerged over the next two decades in areas where "Friends" had settled. (20) Free African-Americans, denied citizenship rights by whites, formed institutions to look after their own interests. To promote social and moral progress, they founded Masonic lodges and such churches as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which boasted several congregations across Indiana. (21) Deprived of access to public education, Indiana's free blacks formed their own schools, and, in 1847, convened in Indianapolis to...