Search Results

This chapter discusses the spaces, places, and mechanics of the slave trade. These include the use of red flags upon which are pinned small manuscript descriptions of slaves to be sold off; family separations caused by the interstate slave trade; the use of slaves to pay debts; descriptions of slave traders and slave jails; and the story of Anthony Burns, a former slave who successfully escaped from slavery in Richmond in 1854 but was captured in Boston.

The Civil War made Thomas Wentworth Higginson a writer. It gave him scenes and characters as well as a field of action that featured himself and hundreds of former slaves. With increasing radicalism he had become devoted to the elimination of slavery, and war came just in time to make violent means acceptable and save Higginson from treason. In 1854 he had tried unsuccessfully to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns from a Boston jail and in the process probably became an accessory to murder, though he was never charged. In 1859, he served as one of the Secret Six who funded John Brown's raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry. On the eve of war, he began an historical investigation into slave insurrections, and he published pieces on Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, pieces that sought to transform Southern demons into Northern heroes.

There was no straight line from a racist society to one that supported full equality, and there was no guarantee that a right established one year could not be changed the next. That rang true in the United States and particularly in New England following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. This chapter analyzes the four most important fugitive slave cases of the region: William and Ellen Craft, Frederick Minkins, Thomas Sims, and Anthony Burns. The result of those cases—two successful, two not—was a change in New England. Antislavery became socially acceptable, and there was an increased willingness among white New Englanders to accept the equal rights of African Americans. But racism hadn't died. What was different were attitudes about New England and about the slave South. In the short term black New Englanders benefited, but there were limits to progress.

How is it that Frederick Douglass did not find it necessary to foreground his racial identity until late in life, as he suggests in the 1892 supplement to Life and Times? This chapter proposes two ways to account for Douglass’s suggestion: one, antebellum legal culture was not invested in regulating the identities of its citizens, and so the meaning of identifying terms, such as “black man,” may have been contested, but was also left largely unspecified. Two, Douglass seems to rely on a thinking close to Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Emmanuel Benveniste, which suggests that the living body always remains silent while, in another register, the speaking body enters the world of discourse. Agamben reads the split between bodies as conditional for testimony; Douglass, however, consistently sought a vocabulary that would express his once-enslaved body and allow it to be recognized as, simply, that of a citizen. Douglass’s testimony looks toward an identity between living body and speaking body, and toward a legal climate that would instantiate the language that was always just out of his reach.

This chapter discusses the role of the legal system, including the Supreme Court, in upholding the constitutionality of slavery. It first examines the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842, in which the Supreme Court reversed the conviction in state court of Edward Prigg, a professional slave-catcher, for kidnapping Margaret Morgan, who escaped from slavery in Maryland to the free state of Pennsylvania. Ruling that state officials could not hinder enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the Court also held that state officials could decline to aid slave-catchers, leading to mass demonstrations in Boston over the “rendition” of escaped slaves George Latimer and Anthony Burns. The chapter includes a recounting of the infamous Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney held that no Black person was a citizen and that Blacks were “an inferior order of beings” who had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of the impact of the Dred Scott ruling on the presidential campaign of 1860, in which Abraham Lincoln denounced the decision and provoked the slave states to secede from the Union and launch the Civil War.