Negroes and the Gun (10 page)

As the rhetorical war escalated, armed resistance continued apace. In 1850 in Lawrence County, Ohio, six “well-armed” fugitives fired on a group of Kentucky slave catchers. Like many of these incidents, once the single shot firearms were spent, the Negroes descended on their pursuers with clubs, leaving them for dead and then escaping into the forest.

There was continued confirmation during this period that the results of violent resistance could vary dramatically. Pursued by slavers over the border into Indiana in 1853, a group of ten fugitives resisted with gunfire but were overcome by better-armed whites. With two slaves and one slaver wounded, the blacks were apprehended and carted back to an unrecorded fate.

Under the new Fugitive Slave Law, hunters of human property could now demand the assistance of United States Marshals. But this federal “authority” made little difference to blacks fighting for their lives. A willingness to defy the federal government and fight the marshals too was evident in 1850, in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where a free black couple opened fire on a marshal and posse who were pursuing a fugitive in their care. Their firearms spent, the free man and his wife commenced fighting with axes, giving the fugitive cover to escape. Later, they displayed wounds from the fight as badges of honor.

A similar incident occurred in 1856 when Robert Garner, his wife, their four children, and two other adults fled out of Kentucky to Cincinnati. They were resting at the home of a free black man, Elijah Kite, when their Kentucky masters and a United States Marshal broke through the door. Both Kite and Garner responded with pistol fire, wounding one of the intruders.

The violence then took a horrific turn. Garner's wife was the spark. Seeing that the men might lose the fight, Margaret Garner shouted that she would kill her children before returning them to the yoke. By the time the slavers and their government accomplice gained control, Margaret had strangled the life from her two-year-old daughter. For Northerners, Margaret Garner's infanticide underscored the evils of
slavery. Southerners said it was just another example of the baffling Negro and confirmation of his inferior status in law and in nature. After extended legal squabbling, the Garners were given up to their master, who sold them to slave traders in New Orleans.

Another US Marshal was the target of gunplay when an interracial group in the abolitionist bastion of Oberlin, Ohio, blocked the pursuit of Kentucky fugitive John Price. When the slave catchers and their federal man brought the fight, the resisters brandished guns, to a temporary stalemate. The aftermath reflected the simmering conflict between federal law and technically preempted state statutes that deemed slave catchers kidnappers. State and federal bureaucracies initiated disparate proceedings. The federal process charged the resisters with violating the Fugitive Slave Law. Ohio, on the other hand, indicted the marshal and three Southerners for kidnapping. The conflict eventually was settled with reduced sanctions against combatants on both sides.
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While Negro life in free states and territories was certainly an improvement over slavery, these places fell far short of the promised land. Opposition to slavery did not necessarily mean full political and social embrace of Negroes. This is evident in various free-state laws restricting Negro rights. Ohio's early constitution denied free blacks the right to vote, and in 1807 the state passed a loosely enforced law requiring Negro immigrants to post a $500 bond and a guarantee of their good behavior signed by two white men. The Indiana Territory prohibited Negroes from testifying in court against whites. In 1857, Wisconsin voters reversed a previous statute granting black suffrage. An 1857 Oregon statute prohibited blacks from settling in the state. And Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa all prohibited interracial marriage.

It was the violation of one of those interracial marriage bans in 1845 that sent Rose Anne McGregor of Marion County, Iowa, running for her gun. Rose Anne had the temerity to fall in love with a white man, Tom McGregor, and he with her. They beat the first prosecution for violating the ban by getting the proceedings moved to a Quaker community where a sympathetic grand jury refused to indict them.

Officials then ordered Rose Anne McGregor either to post manumission papers and a $500 bond or to be sold to the highest bidder. The McGregors were defiant and vowed to do neither. While Tom was away, the sheriff and a deputy came out to arrest Rose Anne. She saw them approaching and warned that she was armed and was a crack shot. It was one of those instances where just the threat of gunfire seemed to be enough, at least until nightfall. Under the cover of darkness, the sheriff sneaked to the door, kicked it down, and seized Rose Anne McGregor before she could get a shot off.

Rose Anne was captured, but not for long. As they trotted back to town with
Rose Anne bound up on horseback, she kicked her mount hard in the ribs and held on as the animal bolted off into the night. She soon met up with Tom, and they abandoned their Iowa home in search of a more welcoming environment.
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The black tradition of arms ultimately elevates and enshrines the distinction between self-defense against imminent threats and organized political violence seeking group advancement. But in the fight against slavery, there was little concern for that distinction. In a practical sense, slavery was a state of war, and some in the burgeoning black leadership put it basically that way.

At the 1854 National Emigration Convention of Colored People in Cleveland, Ohio, black abolitionist Martin Delaney cast resistance to slavery as straightforward warfare, declaring, “Should we encounter an enemy with artillery, a prayer will not stay the cannon shot, neither will the kind words or smiles of philanthropy shield his spear from piercing us through the heart. We must meet mankind, then as they meet us—prepared for the worst.”

With an appreciation of the young nation's revolutionary struggle, escaped slave Andrew Jackson defended his own and the broader use of violence in the pursuit of liberty, proclaiming, “If it was right for the revolutionary patriots to fight for liberty, it was right for me, and is right for any other slave to do the same. And were I now a slave, I would risk my life for freedom. Give me liberty or give me death would be my deliberate conclusion.” In Ohio around the same time, John Isome Gaines advocated a slave revolution to overthrow the slaveocracy and install a “government of God that would secure universal liberty and equality.”

Commenting on John Brown's failed 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, black abolitionist Charles Langston invoked America's revolutionary principles, and with a plain note of sarcasm, declared that the “renowned fathers of our celebrated revolution taught the world that ‘resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,' that all men are created equal and have the inalienable right to life and liberty. These men proclaimed death, but not slavery, or rather give me liberty or give me death.” On these principles, Langston argued, Brown's raid and similar acts of resistance were entirely justified.

One of the most famous calls for violent resistance was David Walker's “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.” Walker urged his brothers in bondage to rise up and “kill or be killed.” He declared that “the man who would not fight . . . in the glorious and heavenly cause of freedom . . . ought to be kept with all his children or family in slavery, or in chains to be butchered by his cruel enemies.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by fugitives who escaped to freedom and
became spokesmen for the race. Fugitive activist H. Ford Douglas, publisher of the
Provincial Freeman
, advocated the violent overthrow of slavery in unequivocal terms. Similarly, David Ruggles, founder of the New York Vigilance Committee, urged that blacks “must look to our own safety and protection from kidnappers, remembering that self-defense is the first law of nature.”
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In 1843, the Michigan Negro Convention repeated this theme, calling on blacks to wage “unceasing war” against the tyranny of slavery. Soon after that, in 1844, Moses Dickson formed a shadowy organization called the International Order of Twelve of the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, with the agenda of overthrowing slavery by any means. Pressing an agenda beyond abolition, Reverend Henry Johnson gave a militant speech at the 1845 Colored Suffrage Convention in New York, proclaiming that “the colored population were ready to take the musket, if necessary, to defend our churches, our family associations, and the rights of our neighbors.” The details and activities of many of these individuals and organizations are thinly researched, but a few episodes are more richly recorded.
48

In 1848, Henry Highland Garnet advanced David Walker's earlier appeal and indulged no fine distinctions between self-defense and political violence. Garnet characterized slaves as “prisoners of war in an enemy's country” and urged, “by all the rules of war, you have the fullest liberty to plunder, burn and kill.” Garnet considered slavery a broad and continuing license for violent resistance. “If hereditary bondsmen would be free, they must strike the first blow. . . . It is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means intellectual and physical that promise success. . . . You had better all die—die immediately, than live as slaves and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity. . . . Let your motto be resistance! Resistance! Resistance!”

Garnet presented his address for inclusion in the platform of the National Negro Convention. The body rejected it, with the opposition led by Frederick Douglass and Charles Remond, at that stage still under the sway of the pacifist Garrisonians.
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But both Douglass and Remond eventually advocated violence as a tool for ending slavery. In June 1849, Douglass gave a speech in Boston that fairly shocked his audience of pacifist abolitionists. In language reflecting his emerging militancy, Douglass said that he would welcome slave rebellion in the South and would celebrate any news that “the Sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the South, were engaged in spreading death and devastation.” Although the precise curve of Charles Remond's transformation is unclear, his view had changed by 1851 when he celebrated the violence of three fugitive slaves who shot and killed their pursuing master.
50

Militant rhetoric raised objections from pacifist abolitionist and sparked conflicts that illustrated the difference between black and white stakes in ending slavery.
Henry Highland Garnet was a particular target of pacifist William Lloyd Garrison's paper, the
Liberator
. White abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman denounced Garnet in a lengthy
Liberator
article, suggesting that he had fallen under the influence of “bad counsel.”
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The implication was that Garnet had not developed his own views but had been lured and manipulated into militancy by some shadowy white Svengali. Garnet bristled at the suggestion that “his humble productions have been produced by the Council of some Anglo-Saxon.” In a letter to the
Liberator
that models the objections of modern black contrarians to presumptuous white paternalism, Garnet chided, “I have expected no more from ignorant slaveholders and their apologists, but I really look for better things from Mrs. Maria W. Chapman . . . , editor
pro tem
of the Boston
Liberator
. I can think on the subject of human rights without ‘counsel' either from men of the West or women of the East.”
52

Despite pacifist discomfort, militant abolitionists continued to advance black resistance in heroic terms. The
New York Independent
observed,

The framers of this new [fugitive slave] law counted upon the utter degradation of the Negro race—their want of manliness and heroism—to render feasible its execution but it was the cowardly Negro, the worm and not the serpent upon whom they set their foot. They anticipated no resistance from a race cowed down by centuries of oppression and trained to servility. In this however they were mistaken. They're beginning to discover that men, however abject, who have tasted liberty, soon learn to prize it and are ready to defend it.
53

In some of the most widely reported revolts against the fugitive slave law, blacks, sometimes accompanied by radical white abolitionist allies, defied the authority of the state and attempted to snatch fugitives from the process of the law. In Syracuse, New York, in 1851, black and white abolitionists stormed the courtroom and rescued William McHenry of Missouri, who was offered up to his master under the 1850 law. Federal marshals beat back the crowd and retrieved McHenry, only to lose him again in the tumult.

McHenry was hustled off to Canada. But two dozen people, half of them Negroes, were indicted for violating federal law by aiding in the escape. Suggesting the sentiments of the community, three of the indicted whites were acquitted. Six blacks who were primary instigators, fled to Canada. One of that group, Reverend Jermaine Loguen, had already articulated his contempt for the 1850 law in print: “I don't respect this law. I don't. I won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it and the man who attempts to enforce it on me. I place governmental officials on the ground that they placed me. I will not live a slave, and if force is employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man.”
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