Slavery and the hope for freedom
It must have been a happy occasion that at times was tinged with apprehension and even dread.
Three of Alex and Evalina Greene’s seven children were visiting their parents’ home on South Street in Uniontown. And though it’s uncertain how long they stayed, we do know when their visit came to an end – on Aug. 27, 1853.
It was on that day that Charlotte, Liz, and Willis Greene were ordered from the free state of Pennsylvania back to Morgantown, then a small village in the slave state of Virginia – back to their “masters.” The three Greene children were runaway slaves.
Slavery, of course, was the country’s “original sin,” a stark violation of the principle that “all men are created equal” proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence. And while what happened to the Greene children in Uniontown is 170 years in the past, it may yet help us to understand and to shed light on the present, for their story is woven deeply into the experience we all share as Americans.
And so:
Before their return to bondage, Charlotte, Liz, and Willis were afforded a hearing before a government official. The hearing, conducted under the term of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, likely took place at the courthouse in Uniontown. Presiding was federal commissioner R.P. Flenniken.
It was not the first time Flenniken had presided over a case in Uniontown in which a runaway slave was remanded into the custody of a white slave owner. There had been at least one other instance, just months earlier.
No one knew in summer 1853 that eight years down the road the very existence of slavery would send the country hurtling into four years of a bloody Civil War. The war, which would claim 600,000 lives, marked a turning point for the nation as a whole and for former slaves like the Greene children and for millions of African-Americans, then and later.
For the Greenes and for the free Black residents of Uniontown, all that was known for sure in 1853 was that slavery was a terrible fact of daily life.
The Fugitive Slave Act was one manifestation – and maybe the most conspicuous – of the tension in the country over slavery. For abolitionists, it was a pact with the devil himself, in that it turned the entire population – North and South – “into one large slave patrol,” in the words of political historian Sean Wilentz in his brilliant book, “The Rise of American Democracy.”
It infuriated some, including the former slave (and runaway) Frederick Douglass, who said, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make a half-dozen or so dead kidnappers.”
Less radical anti-slavery Northerners would not go nearly as far. 3Instead, they argued in the political struggles of the period, that the law showed up Southern disdain for basic rights enshrined in the Constitution, including the right to a jury trial. Once again in Wilentz’s words, the fugitive slave act represented “a brazen violation” of the due process clause of the Constitution.
For many in the North, the law was viewed as a way to placate Southern alarm over growing anti-slavery agitation. For these folks, it was a means to keep the Union from flying apart.
According to Wilentz, some thought the Fugitive Slave Act was the “necessary price of sectional peace.” As such, it had to be enforced. The fire-eating nationalist Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts declared, “It is treason … and nothing else” to obstruct the law’s enforcement.
For slave-holding Southerners, the act was a means to an end: assurance that their “peculiar” institution would not only survive but flourish in the years ahead.
As much as masters may have wanted their chattel slaves back, it was maybe more important to have free-soilers of the North share in the act of holding humans in bondage. The price of Union was northern complicity in slavery.
“Respect and enforce the Fugitive Slave Law as it stands,” one Southerner thundered. “If not, WE WILL LEAVE YOU.”
Wilentz writes, “For border state men [for instance in Virginia], it was one issue in the [1850] compromise debates that truly hit home, as the vast majority of runaways came … from areas neighboring the free states.”
Meanwhile, “for Deep South men, [the runaway slave law] was a grave matter of honor surpassing any economic consideration, an assertion of slave holders’ rights against Yankee extremists.”
Next week: Return to bondage for the Greenes.
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently, of “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.