War and the battle cry of freedom
The Civil War was eight years away when a hearing convened in Uniontown to decide the fates of runaway slaves Charlotte, Liz, and Willis Greene, under the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
The year was 1853. The Greenes were the children of Alex and Evalina Greene, former slaves themselves who had purchased their freedom “some years before,” according to the Genius of Liberty newspaper, and settled into a “half-story” log cabin on South Street.
Their children — there were seven of them, all in bondage in nearby Monongalia County, Virginia — not infrequently visited their parents.
Persuaded to stay on in Uniontown by both white and free Black people, according to early 20th century historian James Hadden, the Greene children were apprehended at the behest of their slave masters, the Evans family of Morgantown.
The hearing for Charlotte, Liz, and Willis began on Aug. 25 and concluded two days later. Presiding was federal commissioner R.P. Flenniken.
“During the trial many points in law were raised by counsel for the fugitives,” the Genius reported, “upon which considerable discussion arose.”
The hearing was not the first of its kind in Uniontown. Flenniken was on hand earlier in the year for a case involving runaway slave Edwin Brook and slavers from Culpepper County, Virginia. Brook, who had changed his last name to Slaughter while in Uniontown, was remanded back into servitude.
Fugitive slave cases were roiling the nation in the early 1850s. Just weeks before the Greenes were in the docket, the Genius reported a federal marshal had been arrested by Philadelphia authorities as he attempted to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.
Jeering crowds in Boston attended the attempted return to bondage of a runaway slave. Seized by the crowd which included many free Black people, Frederick Minkins was spirited off to Canada and freedom.
According to Sean Wilentz in “The Rise of American Democracy,” the frenzy over the Fugitive Slave Act reached a violent crescendo in Christiana, Pennsylvania, a village in Lancaster County, when a posse consisting of three federal deputy marshals and slave owner Edward Gorsuch, his son, and several of their relatives attempted the capture of two runaway slaves.
The posse ran into a heap of trouble. Gorsuch was killed and his son was wounded in an exchange of gunfire with some two dozen armed defenders of the slaves.
An incensed President Millard Fillmore “directed a large force of federal marshals to Christiana,” Wilentz writes. The marshals captured 10 whites and 30 Black people in a roundup of conspirators for treason. The government failed to prove its case; the accused were released.
The Genius of Liberty remarked that during the Brook hearing in Uniontown, “the courthouse was crowded, but the whole affair passed off without any excitement.”
The paper reported that the Greene hearing attracted a “large crowd” of Black residents of Uniontown. The paper further reported, “The greatest decorum prevailed.”
“We must distinguish,” Flenniken wrote in his summary of the hearing, “between the consent given to a servant to visit” and an actual runaway.
Conscious of the gravity of his decision — no issue rises “higher in importance” than freedom versus “being a slave” for all time — Flenniken nevertheless found against the Greenes, rooting his decision in the Fugitive Slave Law.
In his 1912 history of Uniontown, James Hadden recounts that a contingent of free Black people gathered at Bakers Alley in town and concocted a plan to rescue the Greenes from their awful fate.
Using an array of cultural and racial stereotypes, Hadden notes the rescue party was dissuaded from carrying out its plan once it reached the Cheat River. The other side of the river, slave state Virginia, loomed dark and foreboding, Hadden wrote, “anything but healthy for a free” Black person.
The Civil War came and changed everything. The Evans’ Uniontown attorney, Joshua Howell, got up a local company of volunteers eager to redeem the Union. Colonel Howell would die in 1864, during the siege of Petersburg.
As for the Greene children, a son, George, also died in the war. Without mention of Charlotte, Hadden notes Liz left Monongalia County for “little” Washington once the guns were silenced, while Willis continued to work for his Morgantown “mistress.” Finally, 15 years after emancipation, he took up residence in Uniontown. Willis Greene died in the city in November 1908.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.