In October 1850, two white slavecatchers arrived in Boston, determined to bring Ellen and William Craft back South in cuffs and shackles.
Two years earlier, the Crafts, a slave couple from Macon, Georgia, had enacted one of the most daring and celebrated feats of escape in American history. Her hair cropped short, light-skinned Ellen donned men’s clothing and posed as “a most respectable looking gentleman.” Her husband, William, played the part of her black manservant. It worked. Traveling by train and steamship, they arrived in Philadelphia, where Quaker activists took them in, and then traveled onto Boston, where white abolitionists taught them to read and write and helped them find employment—Ellen as a seamstress, William as a cabinetmaker. Their story was well known. There was no denying that they were fugitive slaves.
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Within hours of the slavecatchers’ arrival, an angry mob heckled and menaced the two Georgians, while the Protestant clergyman Theodore Parker hid the couple in his house. Unlike their Quaker brethren in Philadelphia, the Bostonians were not pacifists. Parker kept a loaded gun in his study, and members of the Vigilance Committee—an ad hoc group of concerned citizens—assembled a heavy battery of rifles and powder kegs in his basement. White abolitionists posted “wanted” posters around the city, with sketches of the two “man stealers,” who in turn withstood five days of increasingly taut heckling and threats wherever they traveled. Egging on the crowd, leading abolitionists like Wendell Phillips promised to “trample [the Fugitive Slave] law under out feet.” “As moral and religious men,” another activist warned, “[we] cannot obey an immoral and irreligious statute.” In the end, the abolitionists spirited the young fugitives to Canada, and ultimately to London. The slave catchers returned empty-handed.
Opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave Southerners additional legal resources to reclaim their runaway “property,” seems relevant again today, with President Donald Trump’s rushed and seemingly unconsidered imposition of an immigration ban on citizens of seven majority-Muslim nations. The chaotic action of border officials prompted massive, spontaneous demonstrations at airports all over the country; while more peaceful than the Boston Vigilance Committee, activists assembled with the same spirit of immediacy and outrage.
More fundamentally, protesters and journalists gave a human face to the cause by focusing on the breakup of families—husbands separated from wives, parents from small children, the elderly from the young—and by appealing to the conscience of people who recoiled at the site of ordinary people being detained and shackled because of the color of their skin. It was precisely this focus on slavery’s violent effect on families and individuals that gave abolitionists—until the 1850s, a small, beleaguered and despised group—a powerful framework for opposition. One didn’t need to be a hard-boiled opponent of slavery to root for Ellen and William, a hard-working couple in search of a better life.
Opponents of the Trump administration’s immigration policies should brush off their history books. Therein lies a powerful template for resistance.
Part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law was perhaps the North’s greatest concession to the South. The statute denied accused runaways their right to a jury trial and removed individual cases from state courts to special federal courts. It paid a $10 fee to magistrates when a defendant was remanded to slavery but only $5 when he or she was not returned to the petitioning “owner.” Most abominable to many white Northerners, the law imposed steep fines and prison sentences for citizens who refused to aid federal authorities in the capture of accused fugitives. In effect, it made “man stealers” out of conscientious objectors.
Though resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act was limited, the law excited the passion of citizens who had otherwise been on the sidelines. When slave catchers from Virginia attempted to haul back Shadrach Minkins, a runaway from Norfolk, the attorney Richard H. Dana Jr., whose office overlooked the courthouse, heard the “shout” of a large crowd of white and black protesters that “continued into a yell of triumph, and in an instant after down the steps came two negroes bearing the prisoner between them with his clothes half torn off, and so stupefied by his sudden rescue and the violence of the dragging off that he sat almost dumb, and I thought had fainted. … It was all done in an instant, too quick to be believed.”
When in 1854 federal marshals in Boston arrested Anthony Burns, who had escaped the year before from Virginia, a Vigilance Committee gathered at Faneuil Hall and declared that “resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.” Heavily armed with axes and pistols, they marched to the courthouse, where, in the ensuing scuffle, a federal officer was killed. In response, President Franklin Pierce, a Northern Democrat, mobilized the U.S. Army and Navy to transport Burns back to Virginia, at a cost of $100,000 (equivalent to over $5 million in today’s money). As soldiers ushered the fugitive down the streets of Boston, church bells tolled and homeowners and shopkeepers turned their American flags upside down in a show of defiance. “I saw … the lawyers’ offices hung in black,” observed a bystander. “I saw the cavalry, artillery, marines, and police, a thousand strong, escorting with shotted guns one trembling colored man to the vessel which was to carry him to slavery. I heard the curses, both loud and deep, poured over these soldiers; I saw the red flush in their cheeks as the crowd yelled at them, ‘Kidnappers! Kidnappers!’” Even conservative “Cotton” Whigs who enjoyed close business ties to the plantation South found the incident “odious and hateful.” George Hillard, a prominent attorney, witnessed Burns’s arrest firsthand. “When it was all over,” he confided to a friend, “and I was left alone in my office, I put my face in my hands and wept. I could do nothing less.” Amos Lawrence, a fellow Cotton Whig, spoke for many of his class when he averred, “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
Abolitionists who had long wandered in the political wilderness found that “conservative, Compromise Union Whigs” could be made “stark mad” when confronted with the injustice that slavery imposed on innocent individuals and the violence it did to families. Such stark reality belied the South’s insistence that slavery was a benign institution—a “positive good,” as John C. Calhoun famously argued. Abolitionists encouraged (and helped) onetime slaves like Solomon Northup, William Grimes and Sojourner Truth to publish their autobiographies, thus giving rise to a stirring literary genre—the ex-slave narrative—whose staple components included moving passages about the horrible emotional and physical toll that slavery took on slaves and slave families. Ex-slaves like Truth and Frederick Douglas also took to the stump and became renowned lecture-circuit figures.
It was this same moral appeal that characterized Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a polemical novel published in 1852. Its author, the white middle-class reformer Harriet Beecher Stowe, animated the conscience of white readers with her description of slaves ripped from their families—Tom, a middle-aged black man, sundered from his wife and children; and another, Eliza, who chooses to flee with her son rather than see him sold away. The characters—Tom Locker, the slave-catcher; Simon Legree, the wicked slaveowner who prohibits his slaves from practicing Christianity or reading the Bible—also put a human face on the evil of the peculiar institution.
Stowe would later claim that she worked as God’s instrument, but the inspiration initially came from her sister-in-law, who implored, “Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” That she did. Henry James, who read the tome as a young boy, called it a “triumphant work, much less a book than a state of vision.” There had never been “such a literary coup-de-main as this,” added Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Within a decade, the book sold two million copies just in the United States—an astonishing distribution in that era. As president, Abraham Lincoln thumbed through it as he grappled with the question of how to dismantle slavery; he also checked out of the Library of Congress A Key To Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s follow-up volume, in which she published the primary documents she had used to research her novel.
“This is insane,” immigration attorney Fiona McEntee told a local Chicago television station last evening. “I mean, there’s an 18-month-old U.S. citizen who’s been in secondary inspection— basically in detention—for like seven hours. I mean, we can’t speak to them. They won’t speak to us. They won’t release these people.”
It doesn’t take a genius to know that the optics are bad.
Babies in detention. Elderly women in wheelchairs in windowless rooms without access to attorneys. Husbands and wives separated. Scientists and physicians treated like common criminals. Green card holders—legal residents who followed all the rules, by the letter—accorded the same rough treatment as undocumented aliens who slipped through a border fence. Had the Trump administration announced its policy weeks in advance and given people time to get their affairs in order, the opposition still would have been stiff. But there would not have been spontaneous marches on airports, because the the policy would never have found expression in this many urgent, human stories.
But here is where critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policy can mount a successful opposition. Not through cold-blooded warnings that it will hurt the economy or high-minded appeals to American ideals, but by shining a bright spotlight on individuals and families. Much like marriage-equality activists in recent years, they can engage native-born Americans to share their families’ immigration story, and much like abolitionists of yesteryear, they can illustrate the injustice of Muslim bans, roundups and border walls.
In this way, more than a few more conservative, law-and-order Americans might just wake up “stark-mad” supporters of compassionate and reasoned immigration reform.