There were a total of one hundred and ninety books/pamphlets on display at L’Exposition de Paris 1900, Exposition des Nègres d’Amérique, or the Negro Exhibit during the 1900 Paris Exhibition organized by Washington, DC attorney, Thomas Calloway with important social, political and photographic contributions by W.E.B. DuBois.
Thomas Calloway and Nellie Nolan Calloway, photo by C.M. Bell, 1890s
The assistant Librarian of Congress, Daniel Murray, wrote hundreds of letters asking people to donate literary works for the Exhibit. He and his family frequented Harpers Ferry. His wife, Anna Evans Murray, was related to one of John Brown’s men, through her mother, Henrietta Leary Evans.
Anna J. Cooper from Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South, 1892
Barbara Pope, while not in attendance, had four short stories entitled “Storiettes” included in Daniel Murray’s collection.
The literary bond between several African American female authors whose works appeared at the Paris Exposition, may have been more deeply forged during the Colored Women’s League meeting at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in July 1896. Among those in attendance was Anna J. Cooper.
National League of Colored Women, July 1896, Harpers Ferry, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park collection
On August 18, 1896, Barbara’s short story “The New Woman” was published by Waverley Illustrated, during the League’s convention. This was one of the four short stories which later became part of the Barbara’s contribution to the Negro Exhibit.
National Reflector, July 3, 1897
She and her sister, Louise, perhaps working as journalists, were coincidentally rusticating in Silcott Springs, Virginia – about 20 miles away.
Washington Bee, July 18, 1896
Ten years later, in August, 1906, Barbara Pope and W.E.B. DuBois worked together again to further the cause of the civil rights organization, the Niagara Movement, at Harper’s Ferry.
This month, January 2023, the United States experienced something extremely rare in its history – the Speaker of the House of Representatives’ election took more than one voting session to secure. It took fifteen tries to get the current Republican Speaker of the House to get elected. There were only two similar election delays over the past 150 years – those of Rep. Fredrick Huntington Gillett in 1923 (9 rounds over 3 days) and Rep. Nathaniel Prentice Banks in 1856 (133 rounds and close to two months) – both from Massachusetts.
According to the United States House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives website, the reason why the election took so long in Banks’ case was due to:
Sectional conflict over slavery and a rising anti-immigrant mood in the nation contributed to a poisoned and deteriorating political climate. As a sign of the factionalism then existing in the House, more than 21 individuals initially vied for the Speaker’s post when the Members first gathered in December, 1855.
In 1858, Banks ran for Governor of Massachusetts and became known for his abolitionist position. He signed a bill allowing a self-emancipated man, Anthony Burns
to remain in Massachusetts. In addition, he vetoed a Massachusetts bill that would lift restrictions on militia enrollment to only whites after John Brown and his followers’ Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. He then considered running for president, but lacked sufficient support.
Less than three years later, President Lincoln appointed Banks Major General for the Union Army. It was in May 1862 that General Banks retreated from Front Royal, Virginia to Winchester after a battle with Confederate General Thomas Jackson.
Hotchkiss, Jedediah, D. C Humphreys, and J.B. Lippincott & Co. Map illustrating the Shenandoah – including Winchester (excerpt) [Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1880] Photograph
At that time, Marcia Blue Weaver and her husband, Fairfax Weaver, lived in Marcia’s Winchester home, paid, in part, from resources she inherited from her emancipator aunt, Sarah Opie Parker (widow of Revolutionary War soldier, Thomas Parker) and Sarah’s brother and Marcia’s likely father, Hierome Opie. Thomas Parker was the uncle of Richard Parker and great-uncle of Richard E. Parker who was the judge presiding over the John Brown trials. Therefore, Marcia Weaver was legally, if not biologically connected to the judge who sentenced John Brown to death. Sarah and Thomas’ only child, Eliza, died in 1814.
Marcia and Fairfax’s two children, Sarah Rebecca and James Weaver, also lived in Winchester. According to descendant, Lynn Lewis, Sarah married William Lovett in 1848. By 1862, they had eight young children.
The Weaver and Lovett families followed General Banks out of Winchester, along with many people of color – enslaved and free – as well as some Union supporters.
Forbes, Edwin, Artist. The first battle of Winchester–The charge on the stonewall. United States Virginia Winchester, 1862. Photograph.
According to Marcia’s great-grandson, Professor A. Mercer Daniel, in his article “The Lovetts of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia,” Federal soldiers took the family wagon and some other personal property. According to Sarah R. Herrod, Daniel’s aunt and Marcia’s granddaughter, “They followed General Banks’ retreat of the Union Army with a wagon full of belongings and when they got to Martinsburg, Union soldiers pressed the wagon into service to haul the guns and made father, grandmother and mother and eight children get out of the wagon and left us wholly unprepared to go further.” The families made their way to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania where they lived for four years, before returning to Winchester, after the Civil War.
By 1870, the Sarah and William Lovett family had moved to Harpers Ferry from Winchester. Upon their return from Chambersburg, Marcia Blue and Fairfax remained in Winchester, along with their son, James.
Many of Sarah and William’s children began attending Storer, a school established in Harpers Ferry for the benefit of the recently emancipated but open to all, including their son, Thomas, who, along with his wife Lavinia, would open the famous Hilltop House Hotel in 1888.
“History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”
From “The Gilded Age, a Tale of To-Day” by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, American Publishing Company, 1874.
On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was in Buffalo, New York for the Pan American Exposition as part of his re-election tour.
A man named Leon Czolgosz waited in a receiving line for the President and upon reaching the head of the line, Czolgosz shot the President twice with a revolver he had purchased four days before.
Two women became famous for their portraits of President McKinley shortly before he died. President McKinley sat for one of them, Lillian Thomas, a talented painter, born in Cleveland, Ohio and living in Washington, DC –
and Frances Benjamin Johnston, a well-known photographer, who was at the Pan American Exposition and took photos of President McKinley within hours of his being shot.
The Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photograph collection at the Library of Congress includes a Thomas Marceau photo of Lillian Thomas.
Lillian Thomas photo by Thomas Marceau, 1900
McKinley died on September 14, 1901 and McKinley’s Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, became President.
In October 1901, United States President Theodore Roosevelt invited Tuskeegee Institute President Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner along with Philip B. Stewart.
The dinner was a significant event and applauded by many.
Theodore Roosevelt, like William McKinley before him, often conferred with Booker T. Washington about race, political and education topics. As president and founder of the Tuskeegee Institute, Washington was well-regarded around the country.
Despite Washington’s accomplishments, some, particularly those from the southern United States, accused the President of degrading the office by inviting him.
Of those letters in support of President Roosevelt’s decision to invite Booker T. Washington, one deserves particular mention – that from Abion W. Tourgee to President Roosevelt.
Albion Tourgee was an attorney for Homer Plessy in the tragic 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson which sent equal treatment under the law in the United States tumbling backwards, setting a legal precedent that was not overturned until almost 60 years later by Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954.
In Tourgee’s letter to Roosevelt, he expressed hopes for the country and praised Roosevelt for his actions. Roosevelt, on the other hand, revealed to Tourgee that he hadn’t thought much about it and extended the invitation on impulse.
By 1904, Roosevelt was campaigning for re-election on his own behalf. While he campaigned, another man, James Thomas Heflin, was seeking election for a position he held as a result of the death of his predecessor, U.S. Representative Charles W. Thompson, of Alabama. Heflin represented the district in which the Tuskegee Institute was located. Booker T. Washington was his constituent.
Heflin was against women’s suffrage, but in favor of labor and states’s rights. He was against interracial marriage and helped draft the Alabama state constitution which included language disfranchising African Americans from the right to vote.
While on the campaign trail, Heflin made statements suggesting that it would not have been a bad thing if Roosevelt and Washington had been blown up by someone like Czolgosz.
Although Heflin’s comments were generally condemned, there were no repercussions for his statements and convinced officials and the public that he was making a joke. He won re-election.
Upon Heflin’s re-election, he introduced several bills intending to harm federal elections, encourage Jim Crow cars, and bills to reduce competition in cotton futures trading.
To that end, he introduced legislation to establish Jim Crow cars in the Maryland and the District of Columbia. He falsely claimed that many African Americans in the District of Columbia supported such a measure.
At least three people responded to the Evening Star reports by Heflin. Those people were E.M. Hewlett, M. Grant Lucas and Barbara E. Pope, an educator and author who later became a member of the Niagara Movement and brought her own Jim Crow case in Virginia shortly before the 2nd Niagara Movement’s meeting Harper’s Ferry.
President Roosevelt’s sentiment set forth in his letter to Tourgee, was belied by his actions in 1906, when he summarily discharged, without honor and without an opportunity to defend themselves, the entire regiment of 167 men in Brownsville, Texas. These soldiers were prevented from serving in the military and resulted in the denial of several pensions for those who had served more than 20 years.
Roosevelt’s announcement appeared to be timed to be made after the 1906 election.
Excerpt from Roosevelt’s hostility to the colored people of the United States The record of the discharge of the colored soldiers at Brownsville. n. p . Washington, 1906. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.24001000/
This incident, which occurred the same week as the 2nd Niagara Movement Meeting in Harper’s Ferry, WV (August 15-18, 1906) – the 1st being held in Buffalo, NY in 1905, was indicative of rising tensions in the country, increased voting rights disfranchisement for African Americans, and epidemic level lynching numbers. Despite criticism, Roosevelt did not publicly apologize for his decision.
It was not until the Nixon Administration in 1972, after decades of investigation, when Congress determined the soldiers were innocent. Nixon pardoned the solders and granted them honorable discharges, yet none of the surviving soldiers were given backpay, although some financial restitution was paid.
By 1908, Heflin was well-known for his support of the “lost cause” and spoke at related events. In April 1908, upon the pretense of defending a white woman on a DC railcar on which he was riding, he forced an African American man, Louis Lundy, from the railcar and shot at him through a railcar window, hitting him and an innocent bystander, Thomas McCreery, both of whom were injured.
Heflin’s family came to the aid of McCreery, the white man who was injured. Heflin’s brother, Dr. Heflin went to great lengths to assist him. Louis Lundy, the target of Heflin’s rage, received no special care.
Ultimately, Heflin was indicted, but the charges were later dismissed.
These incidents were mere bumps in Heflin’s decades long career. None of these transgressions impacted Heflin’s election prospects. When Woodrow Wilson was President, Heflin introduced legislation resulting in national recognition of Mother’s Day in 1914. He remained in the United States Congress until he was barred from participating in a U.S. Senate campaign in 1930.
African Americans continued to attend meetings in the White House, but were not invited to social events until the wife of Congressman Oscar Stanton De Priest of Chicago, Jessie Williams De Priest, was invited to a tea scheduled for June 12, 1929 by Louise Henry Hoover, President Herbert Hoover’s wife. Congressman DePriest was the first African American elected to Congress not from a southern state. When he was elected in 1928, he was the first African American elected to Congress in the twentieth century.
Mrs. Hoover was careful to ensure that the tea would be comfortable for Mrs. DePriest and the other guests. The invitation list was prepared in secret and it wasn’t until after the tea was held that the public was aware of the event.
The DePriests and The Hoovers received hostile responses because of The Tea. Many Americans remained of the belief that social interaction between those separated only by skin color, suggested that such interaction signaled social equality.
Congressman DePriest served from 1929-1935 and departed from Washington, DC when he was not re-elected. The DePriests returned to Chicago.
Below is an advertisement for a St. Valentine’s Ball at the United States Hotel in Harper’s Ferry on February 14, 1856. One of the event’s managers, John Avis, would be John Brown’s jailor 3 years later.
Virginia Free Press, February 14, 1856
He was also a childhood playmate of Martin Delany, of Charles Town.
Detail from “Life and public services of Martin R. Delany” by Frank Rollin, pen name of Frances Anne Rollin (1845-1901)
On August 30, 1899, a funeral was held for 8 of John Brown’s men who were killed or soon died after the October 1859 raid in Harper’s Ferry, in North Elba, New York. Two additional men who were killed by hanging in March 1860, were also memorialized during the funeral.
Lewis Sheridan Leary, who was with John Brown during his infamous raid in Harper’s Ferry, was one of the men killed at the Ferry. Leary was born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina on March 17, 1835 and met John Brown in Cleveland. During the Brown party’s retreat across the Shenandoah River after the raid, Leary was shot and died several hours later from his wounds. Several weeks before the raid, John Brown sympathizers living in Philadelphia, sent great “blanket shawls” to the Kennedy farm as gifts.
“On the night of the raid each man had taken one of these shawls and used it instead of an overcoat. … The men had evidently been buried in these shawls, for great masses of woollen (sic) texture were found enveloping each body.”
Lewis Sheridan Leary courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Ten of John Brown’s men were killed during the raid (Watson and Oliver Brown, William and Dauphin Thompson; Stewart Taylor; John Henry Kagi; Jeremiah G. Anderson; William H. Leeman; Dangerfield Newby and Lewis Sheridan Leary. Those who survived either escaped or were captured. Those captured were tried, convicted and executed in Charles Town. Two of John Brown’s men who were killed during the raid, Jerimiah Anderson and Watson Brown, were considered “fine anatomical specimens” and were sent to a Winchester, Virginia medical school for anatomical study. Watson Brown’s body was later recovered in 1881 and was buried next to his father in North Elba, NY. Anderson’s body was never recovered.
The remaining eight bodies which were recovered from near the Potomac or Shenandoah rivers, were denied burial in any of the local Harpers Ferry cemeteries. Soon after the raid, James Mansfield (who, at the time of a 1901 article in The New England magazine, still lived in Harpers Ferry) was given instructions to bury the bodies. He bought two boxes and divided the bodies between them and ultimately buried them about .5 miles from Harpers Ferry along the Shenandoah river where they remained until 1899, when the two boxes were found and transported for burial at North Elba, NY.
On August 30, 1899, there was a funeral held for John Brown’s men in North Elba.
Leary was married to Mary Patterson, whom he met at Oberlin. Mary Patterson Leary later married Charles Henry Langston. They had a child named Caroline, who married James Nathaniel Hughes. They had a child, James Mercer Langston Hughes, known as Langston Hughes, in February 1902.
In 2013, a book was published, entitled “My Dear Boy : Carrie Hughes’s Letters to Langston Hughes, 1926-1938” which reproduced dozens of letters by Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston Hughes Clark, mother of Langston Hughes. While Carrie was not the daughter of Sheridan Leary, Langston Hughes had a special attachment to the shawl worn by him during the raid. Langston Hughes lived with his grandmother, Leary’s widow, for several years and it was with this shawl that she covered him while he slept.
According to the book, “Former president Teddy Roosevelt honored [Mary Leary] at a commemorative ceremony in Osawatomie, Kansas, where he delivered his re-nowned ‘New Nationalism’ speech, on August 31, 1910.” p. 45 FN 2.
Langston inherited the shawl from his grandmother and he put it into a safe deposit box in New York City in 1928. In about 1930, Langston’s mother was in dire need of money and suggested that he sell the shawl.
Say here in Cleveland Antiques are all the rage and I was just wondering if we could not sell the Harper’s Ferry Shawl? I almost know we could and it would give us all a few dollars. Do you know where it is or do you have a receipt or anything for it. A man told me here last week I ought to get $500.00 for it. I have been in some of the antique shops here and they have old rugs, spreads, quilts &ct. I don’t know just thought I’d ask about it.
My Dear Boy, at p. 51.
He didn’t sell it. On April 30, 1943, he donated the shawl to the Ohio Historical Society, where it remains.
The original 1901 article, “The Final Burial of the Followers of John Brown” by Thomas Featherstonhaugh in The New England magazine, is available for purchase from Steam at Harper’s Ferry. Please inquire at info@steamatharpersferry.com.
Steam at Harper’s Ferry has 5 editions of The National Intelligencer newpaper dating from April 10 through April 22, 1823. They are all addressed to “E.D. Howe Painesville via Pittsburg.” This newspaper was a leading political publication and was founded in Washington, DC in 1800. The founder, Samuel Harrison Smith was married to Margaret Bayard Smith who wrote the book “The First Forty Years of Washington Society.”
E. D. (Eber Dudley) Howe was the founder and editor of the Painesville Telegraph which was published and edited by him in Painesville, Ohio from 1822 to 1835. The paper continued its publication until 1987. While living in Painesville, his wife, sister and niece converted to Mormonism. Howe became interested in the religion’s history, which was founded by Joseph Smith, Jr. in the 1820s. His interest resulted in the 1834 publication of a book entitled “Mormonism Unvailed” (sic).
Howe was an abolitionist and his home was used as a station for the Underground Railroad. His wife was one of the first women in the region to join the anti-slavery movement.
Though it is most likely that Howe read the newspaper because of its political content, he may have been just as interested in the slave sales advertised within its pages. On the front page, for example, there is an advertisement for
“A NEGRO WOMAN, about 25 years of age. She is a good cook, washer, and ironer and can be recommended as strictly honest. Apply at the new City Auction and Commission Rooms, corner of 7th Street and Pennsylvania avenue, Opposite the Centre Market. , P. Mauro, auctioneer.”
On the same page is an article about Major General La Fayette,:
“The President of the United States, in commemoration of the distinguished services of Major General La Fayette, during the Revolutionary War, has directed that the fortress recently erected at the Narrows, near New York, an hitherto called Fort Diamond, shall hereafter be known by the name of Fort La Fayette[Note: Fort La Fayette was used for Confederate prisoners from 1861 – 1866]. The ceremony in conformity thereto, took place on Monday last, at 1 o’clock, P. M.”
Fort La Fayette was used for Confederate prisoners from 1861 – 1866.
Promoting revolution and slavery in the nation’s capital circa 1823.
These newspapers and others are available for purchase from Steam at Harper’s Ferry. Please contact us for prices and shipping fees.
To give you an idea about how old this original copy of American Railroad Journal is, consider that it is one year older than when the B&O reached Harper’s Ferry. Published in New York, it was edited by D.K. Minor.
It contents include:
Suspension Bridges
Hydraulics as a Branch of Engineering
Public Lands
Agriculture
Literary Notices
Foreign Intelligence
Poetry (!)
There is an unusual account of the proper storage for butter that has been salted, yet not intended to be eaten for several months.
The quantity of salt for butter that is not to be eaten for several months after salting, should not be less than half an ounce of salt, mixed with 2 drachms of sugar and two drachms of nitre, to sixteen ounces of butter. The sugar improves the taste, and the nitre gives the butter a better color, while both of them act with the salt in preserving the butter from rancidity.
Miscellaneous news
Temperance Meeting of Mechanics – We were led by the call of a public meeting, published in the papers, and numerously signed by some of our most respectable mechanics, to look in at Chatham-street Chapel last evening, and we know not when and where we have seen a more gratifying spectacle, than was afforded by the gathering there, in such a cause, of more than 2000 persons, most of whom were, we have little doubt, mechanics.
…
It is to be regretted that the taste for music is not more prevalent in this country. It has a humanizing and gentle influence upon the character of a people, and affords a source of refined and innocent delight which nothing else can supply. A taste for music encourages all the social virtues; it furnishes an amusement which delights without danger, and affords instead of the dull and sating pleasures of dissipation, a source of delight as refined as it is endless. The ladies are particularly interested in this matter. – When a taste for music becomes more general in the other sex, they may depend not only on having more of their company, but having that company rendered more agreeable by the charms of gentleness, refinement and harmony.
It has a great masthead and is in good condition.
This and other original Victorian Era newspapers are available for purchase at Steam at Harper’s Ferry. Contact us for purchase price and delivery options. In most cases, there is only one copy.
Steam at Harper’s Ferry has a copy of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper dated June 24, 1876. Among its contents is an article about Queen Victoria’s visit to the London Hospital:
On Queen Victoria’s recent visit to the London Hospital she spoke to a boy eight years of age, who had his leg broken by having been run over. After he left the hospital the child wrote of his own accord, and without his father’s or another’s knowledge, a letter to the Queen, bought a stamp and posted it. The letter bore no other address than the words “Lady Queen Victoria.” The letter was delivered to the Queen, and Her Majesty, finding on inquiry that the writing of the letter was the boy’s own act, sent him a gift of 3 pounds through the Rev. T.J. Boswell. Since this incident was made public the London cab-drivers find it impossible to get through the city for the crowd of small boys waiting to be run over.
Hard to know whether to laugh or cry…
This newspaper, along with many others, is available for purchase at Steam at Harper’s Ferry.
One of many reasons why Steam at Harper’s Ferry opened was to offer an opportunity to learn about Harper’s Ferry in all its historic glory. Steam sells many historic newspapers from the Victorian Period, but the one especially loved is The Ladies’ Garland, published by John S. Gallagher. One recent acquisition is dated October 21, 1826, volume 3, no. 37.
This particular edition contains an article on Female Education, reprinted from the Edinburg Review. Here is a sample:
“A great part of the objections made to the education of women, are rather objections made to human nature, than to the female sex ; for it is surely true, that knowledge, where it does produce any bad effects at all, does as much mischief to the one sex as to the other, and gives birth to fully as much arrogance, inattention to common affairs, and eccentricity among men, as it does among women. – But it by no means follows, that you get rid of vanity and self-conceit, because you get rid of learning. Self-complacency can never want an excuse ; and the best way to make it more tolerable, and more useful, is to give to it as high and as dignified an object as possible. But at all events, it is unfair, to bring forward against a part of the world, an objection which is equally powerful against the whole. When foolish women think they have any distinction, they are apt to be proud of it ; so are foolish men. But we appeal to any one who has lived with cultivated persons of either sex, whether he has not witnessed as much pendantry, as much wrong-headedness, as much arrogance, and certainly a great deal more rudeness, produced by learning, in men, than in women. …
We are quite astonished on hearing men converse on such subjects, to find them attributing such beautiful effects to ignorance. It would appear from the tenor of such objections, that ignorance has been the greatest civilizer in the world. Women are delicate and refined, only because they are ignorant ; they attend to their children, only because they know no better ! Now, we must really confess we have all our lives been so ignorant as not to know the value of ignorance ! … Let any man reflect too upon the solitary situation in which women are placed, the ill treatment to which they are sometimes exposed, and which they must endure in silence, and without the power of complaining – and he must feel convinced, that the happiness of a woman will be materially increased, in proportion as education has given to her the habit and means of drawing her resources from herself.”
Purchase this and other limited editions of The Ladies’ Garland at Steam at Harper’s Ferry.
This week, I finished reading the second book from an additional favorite author, Lyndsay Faye, “Seven for a Secret,” the second of the Timothy Wilde series, the first being “Gods of Gotham“, both of which take place in 1840s New York.
A quote that Ms. Faye included in her book was one that struck me particularly. Here is the complete paragraph from pages 206 & 207 of the Narrative:
“There may be humane masters, as there certainly are inhuman ones—there may be slaves well-clothed, well-fed, and happy, as there surely are those half-clad, half-starved and miserable; nevertheless, the institution that tolerates such wrong and inhumanity as I have witnessed, is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one. Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not—may expatiate with owlish gravity upon the bliss of ignorance—discourse flippantly from arm chairs of the pleasures of slave life; but let them toil with him in the field—sleep with him in the cabin—feed with him on husks; let them behold him scourged, hunted, trampled on, and they will come back with another story in their mouths. Let them know the heart of the poor slave—learn his secret thoughts—thoughts he dare not utter in the hearing of the white man; let them sit by him in the silent watches of the night—converse in trustful confidence, of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and they will find that ninety-nine out of every hundred are intelligent enough to understand their situation, and to cherish in their bosoms the love of freedom, as passionately as themselves.” [emphasis added.]
This Narrative was published in 1853, one year after the publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly.” Theodore Weld wrote “American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of A Thousand Witnesses” and it was published in 1839. I can’t help but think that Solomon Northrup was directing this comment toward Harriet Beecher Stowe and Theodore Weld followers. These two authors fell from different branches on the abolitionist tree. Harriett Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist along the lines of gradual emancipation and “returning” the slaves to Africa, otherwise known as colonization. Theodore Weld, who attended Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, Lyman Beecher’s school, the Lane Theological Seminary School located in Cincinnati, Ohio, was of the immediate emancipation branch. Weld broke away from the school in 1834 when the school’s trustees prohibited the discussion of slavery, and Weld held debates anyway for 14 days in February 1834, while Lyman Beecher was out of town. When Weld was kicked out of Lane, he took the financial backing of the Tappan brothers. Lewis and Arthur, with him to Oberlin College.
In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise Act, was passed to strengthen the existing Fugitive Slave Act of 1783, which was also passed to enforce Article 4, Clause 3 of the United States, which stated:
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
This was the foundation upon which fugitive slaves were to be returned to their owners. Article 4 on the whole is fundamentally an article outlining the relationship between the states and the federal government. On the up side, it requires the states to recognize the laws of public acts, records and court proceedings of other states. This article is extremely important to civil rights in the United States, starting with slavery, to inter-racial marriage, violence against women and same-sex marriage.
Harriet Beecher Stowe often stated that it was the Fugitive Slave Act which compelled her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Every once in a while, I have to remind myself that the federal government used slave labor (and was sometimes sued for non-payment for services), so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that congressional representatives at the time would, more likely than not, reflect the sentiments of that government. In the newspaper, Radical Abolitionist, dated July 1856, Dr. James C. Jackson, of Glen Haven, NY said:
What new thing is it with us, that a man like Charles Sumner is knocked down?
And if you don’t recall, Charles Sumner was nearly killed on the Senate floor two days after giving his speech, The Crime Against Kansas: The Apologies for the Crime; The True Remedy, in May 1856, the same month John Brown and his volunteers killed five men associated with the pro-slavery Law and Order Party in Pottawatomie, Kansas. So much for the other parts of the Constitution – the Second Amendment.
It was in this same publication that the Radical Abolitionists nominated Gerrit Smith (one of John Brown’s Secret Six) for President of the United States. It was also reported that at the Republican Convention, Mr. Lincoln of Illinois received 110 votes for Vice President, second to Mr. William Dayton of New Jersey who received 259 votes in the informal ballot.
Dr. Beriah Green, a close associate of Gerrit Smith, who made a speech at the Radical Abolitionist convention, made what I think sums up the federal government’s complicity in slavery correctly.
It has been affirmed, more than once, by names making a prominent figure in the sphere of politics, and enjoying a large amount of the general confidence, that slavery, from the very commencement of our political history, has been especially, prominently, and constantly, a cherished and petted “institution” of what bears the name of Government. … The thing has not only been endured by the Government – it has not only been cherished by the Government, but it has been regarded as pre-eminently, controllingly, the object to which, in the measures they might devise, they have been devoted. … I know it is claimed that the people at large are deceived and devoted to freedom ; … There will always be found a striking correspondence between those who grant office and those who hold office. We have therefore to refer this to a majority of those who wield power in this republic. …. If we look a little more earnestly, we shall be constrained to admit, that slavery without us, has its origin in slavery within us. A man will give expression to his own appropriate character. What he may be, within himself, he will be … in the objects he may pursue. … The fetters, the chains and the whips – whatever belongs to slavery, as it presents itself to they eye, has its origin within the depths of the human spirit.
Readers are reminded that the Republican Party platform at the time did not propose the suppression of the slave trade between the states, it did not propose the prohibition of slavery in the District of Columbia (which was, and continues to be, in many ways, under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress), and failed to propose a repeal of the Fugitive Slave bill.
You are called Black Republicans. What right have you to that name? Among all the Candidates you have selected, or talked of, I have not seen or heard of a single black one. (Laughter.) Nor have I seen one mentioned with any prospect of success, who is friendly to the black man in his sympathies, or an advocate for the restoration of is rights. … And then there is the man who was struck down in the Senate; and he is the man you would be first to elevate, if acting on the tactics of Napoleon. … If you want to give us an example of your Black Republicanism – of your determination to resist and defy the Slave power, take Charles Sumner, and make him master at Washington.
to be continued …
The Radical Abolitionist, July 1856, Volume I, Number 12, edited by William Goodell, is available for purchase at Steam at Harper’s Ferry.
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