came the question: “Why should we leave this land, so dearly bought by the blood, groans and tears of our fathers? Truly this is our home, here let us live and here let us die.”19
That most Connecticut Negroes shared such views is evident. In twenty years, from 1830 to 1850, only ten Negroes altogether sailed from Connecticut ports to Liberia—approximately one per eight hundred of population. It is possible that others sailed from ports in other states, but the total cannot have been great, for the number of emigrants sent to Africa by the Colonization Society from the entire country amounted to less than ten thousand in all the years from 1820 to 1857.20 In Negro eyes, the answer to the slavery problem remained what it had been: in the long run, abolition and equality; in the immediate moment, escape to free soil, preferably to Canada.
Despite all the violence and the legal penalties, there were citizens willing to help runaway slaves in any way they could. The Underground Railroad was now taking definite shape, and not even Connecticut’s own fugitive slave law of 1835 could stop it. This measure, supplementing the federal law of 1793, provided that “no person held to service or labor 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 labor; but shall be delivered up, on the claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” The fugitives who succeeded in reaching the Nutmeg State could look for no official help in their quest for freedom.21
But they could look for direct and immediate aid from dedicated abolitionists like Samuel J. May, who later stated that he had begun receiving fugitives “addressed to my care” at Brooklyn as early as 1834; and that he “helped them on to that excellent man, Effingham L. Capron, in Uxbridge, afterwards in Worcester, and he forwarded them to secure retreats.”22 They could look, too, to a climate of opinion that was slowly shifting in their favor. Under the impetus of William Lloyd Garrison and his Liberator, antislavery speakers were increasingly active, and abolitionist publications were growing in numbers, circulation, and influence. Books like Theodore Weld’s anthology American Slavery As It Is had nationwide impact.23 Connecticut had its own antislavery periodicals, too—the Christian Freeman, published in Hartford from 1836 onward, and the Charter Oak, founded in 1838. There was also one issued at New London, the Slave’s Cry. Their circulations were limited, yet the Charter Oak’s 3000 subscribers in 1839 compared favorably with the approximately 5500 readers enjoyed by the Connecticut Courant, a leading general newspaper, in the same era.24 It was estimated that by this time “the number of anti-slavery publications reached a total of over a million.”25 Much of the abolitionist writing was in the form of tracts, issued by the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which played up the barbarous treatment of slaves by quoting advertisements from Southern newspapers:
Ranaway, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off, I burnt her face, I tried to make the letter M.
Ranaway a negro man named Henry, his left eye out, some scars from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.
Ranaway a negro named Arthur, has a considerable scar across his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the goodness of God.
Ranaway a negro girl called Mary, has a small scar over her eye, a good many teeth missing, the letter A. is branded on her cheek and forehead.
Fifty dollars reward, for my fellow Edward, he has a scar in the corner of his mouth, two cuts on and under his arm, and the letter E. on his arm.26
Just how much influence such publications had in arousing public sympathy for the slave it would be impossible to determine, but it was sufficient to stir the ire of the Southern slavocracy. A meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, adopted resolutions against the “incendiary literature” of Northern abolitionists and mailed copies to “each incorporated city and town in the United States.”27 In Hartford and in New Haven, these Charleston resolutions were supported by mass meetings of proslavery citizens, who further resolved that abolitionists in Connecticut and elsewhere had “no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them in different states.”28
None the less, the abolitionist propaganda made itself felt in many groups, not least the General Assembly. In 1838, that body repealed the notorious Black Law that had struck down Prudence Crandall’s school; and it did so at the insistence of one of the measure’s original backers, Phillip Pearl, who had been converted to the antislavery cause by Theodore Weld. “I could weep tears of blood for the part I took in that matter,” Pearl said. “I now regard the law as utterly abominable.”29
In that same year the Assembly took an even more important step in the direction of freedom by enacting one of the most detailed personal liberty laws in the union. This measure, while not extending automatic emancipation to runaways who reached Connecticut, severely limited the activities of slave-hunters by providing that “no officer, or other person can remove out of the State any fugitive slave under the laws of any other state in the Union” except in accordance with the following:
1. The claimant must fill out an affidavit, setting forth minutely the grounds for claiming the fugitive, “the time of his or her escape, and where he or she then is, or is believed to be.”
2. The claimant must obtain a writ of habeas corpus or a writ to bring the alleged fugitive to court, where the fugitive would be tried by a jury of twelve men, none of whom would be an abolitionist.
3. The claimant must pay in advance all fees and expenses of the proceeding; and if the alleged fugitive were acquitted, the claimant must pay to him “all damages and costs” determined by court or jury.
4. If the alleged fugitive were found to be in fact the claimant’s legal property, then the claimant must remove him from the state with all due haste by “direct route to the place of residence of such claimant.”30
Not everyone in the state was pleased by this enactment. The influential Columbian Register of New Haven, for instance, inveighed against it:
If we put severe penalties upon those who attempt to enforce the laws of the Union, which secured to them their labor, they can put as severe or severer penalties on those who attempt to enforce within their limits the tariff laws, which secure to us our labor. Are the northern manufacturers ready for this? … Why then has the negro Act been selected in preference to the others, for this special legislation? But one answer can be given. The New England Anti-Slavery Society recently voted that southern slave holders are thieves and robbers.31
The law nevertheless reflected a growing concern for justice to the Negro who might or might not be a runaway slave; it demanded legal proof of his status, and it called for a fair trial of the accused fugitive before a jury. It thus helped to focus public attention on the victims of slavery.
By this time, the victims themselves had been escaping to and through Connecticut for four decades in a constantly increasing stream.
CHAPTER 3
FUGITIVES IN FLIGHT
AMONG the first runaways from the South to reach Connecticut was William Grimes. He came into the state on his own two feet, with little guidance from others, for at this early date—just after 1800—the Underground Railroad as even a quasi-organized entity was still years in the future. Yet he had started on his journey north to freedom with the complicity of some Yankee sailors and even a couple of men in positions of authority. According to the account of his life that he wrote in later years, it happened in this fashion:1
Grimes was a mulatto slave in Savannah when his owner decided to go to Bermuda, leaving the bondsman behind “to work for what he could get.” The brig Casket, out of Boston, lay in the harbor taking on a cargo of cotton for New York; Grimes saw a chance to make “a few dollars” by helping with the loading. While engaged in this work, he became friendly