Bound for Canaan (8 page)

Hopper and his allies were heirs to a spiritual revolution that had been gathering force for more than a century. By the early nineteenth century, this revolution was transforming more and more Americans' ideas about slavery and race on, at least arguably, a far deeper level than the lofty, intellectualizing pronouncements of Enlightenment
philosophes
. The earliest American critiques of slavery were rooted in powerful biblical injunctions. “It is most certain that all Men, as they are the Sons of
Adam
, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all their outward Comforts of Life,” Samuel Sewall, a distinguished jurist in the Massachusetts Bay
Colony, wrote in 1700, citing Psalms 115:16. “God
hath given the Earth unto the Sons of Adam, And hath made of One Blood, all Nations of Men, for to dwell on the face of the Earth
.” He also cited Exodus 21:16: “And seeing GOD hath said,
He that Stealeth a man and Selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to Death.
” It was also held by the Puritans that blacks as well as whites could be among the spiritually “elect,” a principle of profound importance, making clear as it did that the life and welfare of slaves could be sacred in the eyes of God. Puritan churches sometimes even admitted slaves to membership, a privilege that was denied to whites, the majority of them, in fact, who were deemed spiritually unworthy. Cotton Mather, best remembered for his religious bigotry, pressed vigorously for the education of slaves, asserting that “there might be some elected ones among the Negroes.” He declared, in 1706, that “Who can tell, but that God may have sent this Poor Creature into My hands, so that One of the Elect may by my means be Called; by my Instruction be made Wise unto Salvation!”

Evangelical Methodists and Baptists also stressed the equality of all souls before God, and would produce many of the staunchest foot soldiers of the abolitionist underground. However, Quakers dominated the early phase of the antislavery movement well into the nineteenth century. Even after actual leadership had passed to other hands, traditions that were associated with Quaker thought and practice—especially the doctrine of nonresistance—continued to exercise significant influence among abolitionists. Beginning in the late 1600s the Quakers had steadily examined the moral consequences of slavery. They had come, by painful stages, to believe that they had an inescapable duty to combat it in every way possible, short of violating their doctrinal commitment to pacifism. As early as 1671, the Quakers' founder, George Fox, asked his followers to imagine themselves in the plight of the slave, and urged those who owned slaves to “train up their negroes in the fear of God, to use them mildly and gently, and after certain years of servitude to set them free.” The first explicit protest against slavery in the North American colonies was articulated by the Quakers of Germantown, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, who stated, in 1688: “Now, tho' they are black, we cannot conceive that there is more liberty to have them as slaves, as there is to have other white ones…And those who steal or rob men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alike?” By the middle of the next century, Quakers
generally had come to believe that kind treatment alone was inadequate to address the fundamental evil that permeated the whole institution of slavery in all its ramifications.

The Quaker campaign against slavery was part of a broader spiritual reformation that was gathering force within the sect, calling upon members to return to a life of deeper simplicity, which also entailed educating their children apart from non-Quakers, avoiding marriage with outsiders, and shunning such “vain customs of the world” as music, theater, and art. In explaining their hostility to slavery, Quakers most often cited the Golden Rule, a potent principle that everyone in the intensely Christian nation could easily understand. More subtly, their opposition to slavery was rooted in their belief that a universal “divine light” was manifest in the soul of every person, female and male, black and white, and that to claim ownership of another human being was not only a moral but a spiritual travesty. In addition, slavery represented an inexcusable indulgence, a contradiction to the kind of plain life that was required by their faith.

Countless Quakers, including Isaac Hopper, were influenced by the widely quoted writings of John Woolman of New Jersey, who in the 1750s argued that emancipation of the slave was crucial to personal salvation. How, Woolman demanded, could a slaveholding Friend expect to gain salvation when he bore the sin of slavery on his soul? “The Colour of a Man avails nothing, in Matters of Right and Equity,” he wrote. “
Negroes
are our fellow Creatures, and their present Condition amongst us requires our serious Consideration. We know not the Time when those Scales, in which Mountains are weighed, may turn…And whenever gain is preferred to Equity…there is real Cause for Sorrow to all such, whose Love of Mankind stands on a true Principle.” The dawning recognition that slavery might entail real spiritual consequences provoked crisis for many, as it did for Samuel Nottingham, a Quaker who, as a result of marriage, was horrified to find himself the owner of hundreds of slaves, a spiritual and practical catastrophe that left him feeling “pierced through with very many sorrows.”

Around the same time, Quakers began to press for the religious education of slaves, a cause championed most prominently by another Philadelphian, a French Huguenot convert to Quakerism named Anthony Benezet, who around 1750 began tutoring adult blacks at his home on
Chestnut Street. Benezet envisioned the eventual and complete integration of black and white Americans, but the prospect of sudden, mass emancipation was more than he—and for that matter almost any other white man of his time—could handle. “How would such a people be prevented from becoming a prey to their ignorance and passions, and a sad annoyance to their neighbors?” he worried. For Benezet, education was the answer. In the course of twenty years of teaching, Benezet helped convert Benjamin Franklin and others to abolitionism, by demonstrating that his students were capable of the same level of achievement as whites, thus undermining popular assumptions about black intellectual inferiority. Far ahead of his time, he also taught his black students that it was slavery rather than any inherent racial differences that bred ignorance and degradation among African Americans. The capstone of his life was the establishment, in 1773, of a school for free black and slave children, of which Isaac Hopper would later, in 1799, become an overseer.

As the century progressed, there was much preaching on the subject of slavery wherever Quakers gathered. In the 1770s, slaveholding was made a “disownable offense” by the Yearly Meetings of Philadelphia, New England, and New York. Other meetings soon followed suit. In eastern North Carolina, members who still held slaves were warned to “
be earnestly and affectionately advised to clear their hands of them as soon as they possibly can
.” In every Quaker community committees were appointed to “labor with such Friends as remain in the practice of holding their fellow men in a state of slavery, endeavoring to convince them of the iniquity of such practice.” Even so, manumission was a process rather than a single event. Quakers belonging to the Nine Partners Meeting in Dutchess County, New York, later an important link in the Underground Railroad, took seven years to free all their slaves, completing the process in 1782. Quakers in Westbury, Long Island, did not succeed in freeing all their slaves until 1798.

Social pressure within the Quaker community was uniquely effective. Quakers were already segregated by dress, speech, religious services, opposition to taking oaths, and the marriage ceremony. Deviations from orthodoxy were punished with “disownment,” a public and deliberately discomfiting proclamation that the individual concerned was in a state of spiritual disharmony with his, or her, fellow Friends. In the matter of slav
ery, as well as other doctrinal issues, the Quakers demanded total commitment. As one tract put it, “In the Christian warfare there must be no reservation.”

3

Although the Quaker-led Pennsylvania Abolition Society did not regard itself as a subversive organization, it was a kind of culture dish that brought together men and, if indirectly, a few women who were uncompromising in their opposition to slavery, morally committed to emancipation, and pragmatic in their determination to put fugitives beyond the reach of their masters. No one was more pragmatic than Hopper. A man of instinct and action, he was a type that would often appear along the lines of the Underground Railroad. His home near the riverfront, at the corner of Dock and Walnut streets, was both a clearinghouse and a place of refuge for fugitives and kidnap victims. Hopper explained his motivation by citing biblical precepts that any American could understand, and that the underground would use to justify its defiantly illegal work for decades to come. Once when he was summoned to court as a witness in a slave case and was asked what course of action Quakers were expected to take when a fugitive came to them, he first replied, “I am not willing to answer for anyone but myself.”

“Well,” pressed the magistrate, a Mr. Ingersoll, “what would
you
do in such a case? Would you deliver him to his master?”

“Indeed I would not!” answered Hopper. “My conscience would not permit me to do it. It would be a great crime; because it would be disobedience to my own dearest convictions of right. I should never expect to enjoy an hour of peace afterward. I would do for a fugitive slave whatever I should like to have done for myself, under similar circumstances. If he asked my protection, I would extend it to him to the utmost of my power. If he was hungry, I would feed him. If he was naked, I would clothe him. If he needed advice, I would give him such as I thought would be most beneficial to him.”

Hopper always preferred a legal attack to a physical one, and to manipulate the law rather than to break it. He was the first abolitionist to vig
orously exploit the possibilities of the new, less stringent, state laws to help fugitives. His many successes suggest that his adversaries were still operating under an outdated idea of what was legal and possible, assuming as they always had that the law would continue to protect slaveholding when, in fact, it had decisively shifted, at least in Pennsylvania, in favor of abolition. As one judge told Hopper, when the evidence for and against freedom was evenly balanced, it was always a duty to decide in favor of liberty.

Hopper was unflagging in his search for loopholes. By employing clever tactics that befuddled professional lawyers and unfriendly magistrates alike, he sometimes managed to keep cases pending as long as three or four years, until a fugitive's claimants were worn out and ready to settle. Urged to become a professional lawyer, he declined, saying that he preferred to resist temptations that might lead him away from the simplicity of Quaker belief. On one occasion he agreed to help a young woman who had escaped from Virginia and had lived free in Philadelphia long enough to raise a family there. Tracked down by her former master, she begged Hopper for help. He knew that under the Fugitive Slave Law, the master was entirely within his rights to carry her back to Virginia. He offered to buy her from the Virginian, but was turned down. Undeterred, Hopper showed up with the woman in city court and promised to “be responsible to the United States” for seeing that she would return the following day for a ruling on her status. He also promised personally to pay a one-thousand-dollar bond if she failed to appear. This was deliberate double-talk on Hopper's part, since he knew quite well that the United States government had no claim of its own on the woman, and no jurisdiction in the case. (Nor, probably, did he have the money.) Nevertheless, this was agreed to as reasonable by the court and the slave owner, both of whom had missed Hopper's verbal sleight-of-hand. Next morning, all the parties were in court except the fugitive, who with her family had been sent away to safety during the night. When the magistrate stated that Hopper would have to forfeit the bond, the Quaker pointed out to the master's chagrin that since the federal government was not party to the case, there was no basis for a Philadelphia court collecting a fine in its name.

When the law failed, Hopper could call on a web of friends and collaborators. His network was primitive but efficient. Spies among black dock workers, laborers, and domestics alerted abolitionists when a kidnapping was taking place, or when a constable or a slave master was in the
city stalking a fugitive. The story of a fugitive from Virginia named Ben Jackson makes it clear that when necessary Hopper was even able to call on friends in the constabulary and the courts. Jackson had been serving as coachman for a friend when he was caught and arrested by his former master. He was jailed, pending the issuance of a permit authorizing the master to take his property back to Virginia. He managed to get word of his predicament to Hopper, who arranged with the constable on duty at the jail, a man “who sympathized with the poor victim of oppression,” to have the prisoner brought to court ahead of schedule. Almost certainly with Hopper's connivance, the justice before whom the case was heard—a man who “detested slavery, and was a sincere friend to the colored people”—declared that since the complainant, Jackson's master, was absent, the “presumptive evidence” indicated that Jackson was a free man, and ordered him released. By the time his master arrived, at the appointed time, Jackson was gone for good.

Hopper clearly relished the dramatic role that he played in more than a few rescues. Once Hopper sneaked up the stairs of a home and snatched a pistol from the hand of a partially blind man who was threatening to shoot anyone who interfered with his flogging of a slave girl. Another time, learning that a boat had left Philadelphia with a kidnapped boy on board, Hopper obtained a horse and raced alongside the Delaware River to the vessel's next landfall, arriving just in time to seize the boy and bring him home before he had been carried out of Pennsylvania waters. He also perfected ruses that were often used in later years by the Underground Railroad. Once, for example, when he was concealing a fugitive in his home and suspected that slave hunters were lurking about, he hired a black man to run out of the house after dark. As Hopper suspected, several men leaped from the shadows and seized the decoy, while the real fugitive escaped out the back door, and eventually to safety. Hopper even succeeded in having the decoy's assailants arrested for assault.