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The Jerry McHenry Rescue and the Growth of Northern Antislavery Sentiment during the 1850s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Jayme A. Sokolow
Jayme A. Sokolow
Affiliation:
Jayme A. Sokolow teaches in the Department of History, Texas Tech University, Box 4529, Lubbock, Texas 79409.
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Extract

In his second annual message to the Congress on 2 December 1851, President Millard Fillmore defended his administration's enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Although “lawless and violent mobs” had resisted federal officers trying to enforce the statute, he happily noted that resistance was sporadic and ineffectual:

I congratulate you and the country upon the general acquiescence in these measures of peace which has been exhibited in all parts of the Republic … [T]he spirit of reconciliation which has been manifested in regard to them [the 1850 compromise measures] in all parts of the country has removed doubts and uncertainties in the minds of thousands of good men concerning the duration of our popular institutions and given renewed assurance that our liberty and our Union may subsist together for the benefit of this and succceding generations.

Fillmore also received support from both the Democrats and Whigs; at their national conventions in 1852 they pledged to honor the Compromise of 1850 and earnestly hoped that sectional differences would wane.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , December 1982 , pp. 427 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 Richardson, James D., Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, 10 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907), 5, 137Google Scholar.

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15 New York Tribune, 12 Oct. 1850.

16 Loguen, pp. 391–92.

17 Ibid., p. 395.

18 Ibid., pp. 396–98; May, Emerson, and Mumford, p. 218; Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1872), 2, 306Google Scholar.

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22 W. H. Burleigh to Gerrit Smith, 17 Oct. 1850, in Harlow, Ralph Volney, Gerrit Smith, Philanthropist and Reformer (New York: H. Holt, 1939), pp. 289–90Google Scholar. Burleigh was a staunch defender of higher law doctrines, believing that “every true lover of humanity is bound to refuse it [the Fugitive Slave Law] obedience, and is bound to go on persevering in obedience to the higher law.” See Anti-Slavery Bugle, 12 July 1851.

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35 Syracuse, Star, 3, 4, 5, 8 10 1851Google Scholar. The sheriff, according to Jermain Loguen, was quite sympathetic to the rescue. During the afternoon of 1 October he confidently told one of Jerry's supporters, “I am a public officer and must keep the peace – but betwixt you and me there is no difficulty.” See Loguen, p. 410.

36 Baker, pp. 111–12; Strong, pp. 281–86; May, Emerson, and Mumford, pp. 220–21; Loguen, pp. 417–18; Ward, Samuel Ringgold, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, & England (London: J. Snow, 1855), pp. 117–28Google Scholar.

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38 Anti-Slavery Bugle, 25 Sept. 1852; Frederick Douglass' Paper, 29 Oct. 1852. By 19 November 1851 a federal grand jury in Buffalo had indicted twenty-six people for participating in the Jerry Rescue. In January of 1853 Enoch Reed was found guilty but died while an appeal was being heard. W. S. Salmon was tried and acquitted and a jury was divided on two other defendants. The remaining cases were postponed and later dropped because it proved impossible to empanel a jury which had no decided opinions about the Fugitive Slave Law. The rescuers had Henry Allen, the United States marshall who arrested Jerry, indicted on a charge of kidnapping; he was quickly acquitted because the jury agreed Allen was legally executing a Federal law. For accounts of the indictments and the trials, see the National Intelligencer, 21 Nov. 1851; Samuel Joseph May to William Lloyd Garrison, 15 Oct. 1851, in Garrison, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life Told by his Children, 4 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894), 3, 335Google Scholar; Loguen, pp. 426–42; Trial of Henry W. Allen, U.S. Deputy Marshall, for Kidnapping, with Arguments of Counsel & Charge of Justice Marvin, on the Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law, in the Supreme Court of New York (Syracuse: Daily Journal Office, 1852)Google Scholar.

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42 Richards, Leonard L., “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970)Google Scholar. For a similar argument see Ratner, Lorman A., “Northern Concern for Social Order as Cause of Rejecting Anti-Slavery, 1831–1840,” The Historian, 28 (1965), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Powder Keg: Northern Opposition to the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1831–1840 (New York: Basic Books, 1968)Google Scholar.

43 Richards, pp. 134–50. I have excluded considering the New York City riot of 1836 because, as Richards admits, it was atypical of antebellum anti-abolitionist violence.

44 Aronson, Sidney, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service: Standards of Selection in the Administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Aronson constructed a two-tiered classification of high- and middle-ranking occupations. The highest category includes occupations such as merchant, banker, bank cashier, landed gentry, college president, lawyer, professor, minister, and doctor. The middle category involves occupations such as clerk, shopkeeper, editor, tavernkeeper, and teacher. Richards also uses the Aronson classification system.

45 Ward, pp. 429–34; Loguen, pp. 133–226.

46 Richards, pp. 134–50. Gerald Sorin, in his study of antebellum New York abolitionists, also discovered that they included many farmers, manufacturers, and artisans who pursued careers requiring broadly applicable skills not dependent upon traditionally determined status. See Sorin, , The New York Abolitionists: A Case Story of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

47 The Anti-Slavery Record, 2 (07 1836), 73–82Google Scholar.

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53 For excellent analyses of the slave power conspiracy concept, see Nye, Russel B., Fettered Freedom (Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 282–315Google Scholar; Davis, David Brion, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar; The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 102–48Google Scholar.

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