, the lincolnncoln who appealed to the better angels of our nature. , at same lincoln had taken that time, a firm stance against the expansion of slavery into the American West and was making plans against fort sumter. He was not compromising. Weve come here today and tomorrow to figure out compromise that could have saved the civil war from happening. Or not. To decide whether loyalty to state is more important to loyalty to country or not. One of the many reporters a lot of us have been talking to last and these last few months have been the gift that keeps on giving to historians whether we wanted it or not. One asked me, what would you say to general kelly if you talked to him . What came out of me was have you ever been to gettysburg, have you ever been to that cemetery . Comedy many of those guys died for their state . How many of those guys died for their state . Have you ever read the gettysburg address . What did lincoln collect what did lincoln call it . A nation. Just pointing that out. On the eve of the civil war, and even after secession, theres ample commentary from so many people. Jefferson davis gave a speech in late april to the Confederate Congress as confederate president , using the term property in slaves about seven times in the speech, explaining to the Confederate Congress and the world why they had to secede from the union, to protect the special interest in property in slaves. It doesnt matter how many times you quote this, but millions and millions of americans grow up believing it mustve been Something Else. William seward who, in 1858 we forget seward now. A character in a movie. Sewards famous iron law speech or his irrepressible conflict speech, seward said the same things lincoln said about a house divided. Lincoln said it first in the 1858 campaign. Later that house divided cannot stand. They both said house slave and free i cant resist when in doubt, i always quote Frederick Douglass. Douglass had this to say. In his final autobiography, late in life, as he was remembering the secession crisis, remembering the 18591861 historical moment, and he goes on at some length as he always has before saying, finally, the cause of the slaves and the cause of the nation has been wrapped in the same bundle. Finally, he said. Then he said, in every way possible, the columns of my paper and on the platform by letters to friends at home and abroad, i did all that i could to impress this conviction upon the country, but nations seldom listened to advice from individuals, however reasonable. They are taught less by theories then by facts and events. Taught by events. One of the things i want to do with this conference is to assess four or five of those major events, major turning points, major problems by which we have charted, at least in retrospect, the road to disunity. Im going to introduce jim oakes in just a moment, but just a couple other thoughts. This is a conference that asks, how is the present embedded in the past and how is the past embedded in the present . Theres so many cliches about all this. It is what we do every day. We are always searching for how we can use the past to understand the present or how we think in the present to understand the past. It has always been thus. We are sometimes reticent about doing it because historians are careful people usually. We like to do our research. We like to spend years in an archive before we make our judgment, and we should. Something has happened. Historians have never been asked so many times as in the last 8, 9, 10 months, whats going on, where are we, is this unprecedented, is this 1859, 1857, 1898 . Where are we . Many of you in this room i want to ask for a show of hands. Youve been interviewed here and beyond. The aha was keeping a list after charlottesville of all the interviews and opeds from historians. There never been a moment when there been so many of these. Piece yesterday from the Washington Post by former student of mine that is still graduate student. Graduate students are doing opeds in the Washington Post. Good for them. Go for it. They took us seriously when we talk about public history. We . Here are are americans on the verge of some sort of social disintegration . Maybe . Do we know . Are we having a longterm political breakup or a collective nervous breakdown . As a writer recently asked, are we having 1860 all over again . Analogiesrect are risky, they always are. Are we having another crisis of fear as Stephen Channing was called the secession crisis . Not a bad idea. Are we having a war of words in the comment sections on the internet . Yeah, what else are they for . On talkshow television. Are we a society engaged in a kind of war of words . Are we having a cold civil war as other writers have suggested . Are we seeking the usual catharsis out of our dilemmas, troubles . We dont know. But we do have a collective sense of fear about the nature of american democracy and where it fits at this stage. I want to challenge you in this conference weve assembled some amazing historical, legal, political minds. A lot of the people we have invited are not shy and they will not be shy. Forre saving plenty of time q and a. We welcome your comments and questions succinct comments and questions. We will have strong moderators, me being the main one. We will keep on schedule. I want some of you who volunteer, i want you to make lists of what parallels do, if whatever parallels do come up. Good ones, bad ones, misguided ones. What is a parallel . Is it about nativism, is it about immigration, the disintegration of conspiracy parties, is it conspiracy theories . The 1850s had conspiracy theories the slave power conspiracy, the black republicans conspiracy. Is it about the idea of disunion . Is it about constitutionalism . Is it about race and slavery . Make a list of parallels. There are probably some we have not thought about. Ive invited a keynote speaker who i think is perfect for this occasion. He told me last night he was a little nervous, but thats good. Jim oakes grew up in new york city. He went to college in the cuny system. He did his phd at berkeley, went west for graduate school. His books are many. He wrote the ruling race the history of american slaveholders. Jim has written about all sides of the question of slavery over the years and of union and disunion. Then came an enormously teachable book that i used to teach all the time, slavery and freedom, and interpretation of the old south. An argument book. All of his books are argument books. Then came the radical in the republican, a comparative study of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and their political ideologies, the best of that little shop of that little genre of comparative lincoln and Frederick Douglass books. Then, his big magnum, Freedom National the destruction of slavery in the United States, which may be forceful argument that the Republican Party and the antislavery persuasion of the 1850s were ready to be more than most of us having knowledge. Also out of that he wrote the book the scorpion sting, which was a condensed argument in Freedom National. Also an enormously teachable book. Thats the metaphor that republicans use so much about how they would cordon off slavery and it would kill itself. Like a scorpion sting. It didnt exactly happen that way but thats the language they used. I just want to say a couple of other things about jim. He is one of my favorite historians for a lot of reasons. Not always because i agree with them, that does not matter. He invited me to do a keynote at his conference about four years ago. Able work against slavery. It was all about antislavery. I didnt want to do it. I thought he should have been his own keynoter on that conference. I stupidly said yes and i wrote a keynote that he didnt particularly like. I dont even know what i said now. I think i was just trying to shower a little humility about the boldness of some of his arguments. I do not know what i was saying. Afterward, we became in some ways even better friends because of the arguments. Thats what this business is out. There is no historian i respect more for his research and the boldness of his writing. If you want to find that, look at some of his essays, some of the pieces hes written in journals like jacobin, with titles like the war of northern aggression. Irony. Yes, there were northerners out to destroy slavery. Or a piece called slavery is theft. He wrote one of the best essays in all the scholarly literature on capitalism. His heroes are other historians. To talk with jim is to talk about the great historians. Who is in, who is not in the pantheon . It is fun, as long as you dont have too many old friends in there. He loves smiled former mentor because of his great book the balance of freedom, that endeared me to jim. I know of no other historian who loves a historiographical argument quite like jim does. We all learn every time we have one of these debates when jim stimulates it. For this conference, if we are going to face this issue of disunion, what really happened, what was the crisis of the 1850s . I could not think of a better person than jim oakes. Welcome, jim. It is all yours for 50 minutes. [applause] jim thank you. I liked your talk, david. I dont know what you are talking about. I will argue with you about that. Thank you all for coming. Thanks, david, for allowing us to set this up. Thanks to michelle and melissa and joe and daniel for making this possible. The title of my talk is a historiographical argument im trying to say it is a mistake to reduce the crisis of the 1850s to a struggle over the expansion of slavery into the western territories. To do that, im going to be talking a lot about fugitive slaves. Some about the implications for the present what not as much as you might like. Some. Wait a second. Between the mexicanamerican war and the civil war, there occurred a familiar series of events. James houston calls it the sequence. Each event feeding on its paving the way for the next. All of them taken together constituting the socalled crisis of the 1850s. Every american historian can recite these events. , theilmot proviso armistice of the 1850s, the kansasnebraska slave act, the caning of charles sumner, the emergence of the Republican Party, bleeding kansas, the dred scott decision, the breakup of the Democratic Party, and finally the election in 1860 of the first president ever committed to putting slavery on a course of ultimate extinction. That, in brief, is the sequence of the events that was a that transform to dispute over the expansion of slavery in into aican cession fullblown sectional crisis which destroyed one major party, ripped another in half, and sent a nation reeling into civil war. Not for nothing to classical accounts of the civil war begin with the sequence of events set in motion by the mexicanamerican war. To the extent we can think of the crisis of the 1850s as a distinct phenomenon, it must have had origins. It was the beginning of one process but the end of another. The culmination of a struggle over slavery whose origins can be traced at least to the american revolution. If we need to go back to 1846 to explain the secession crisis, we need to go back to 1776 to explain the crisis of the 1850s. This is why historians, myself included, have begun reconstructing a long emancipation that took 88 years. Some explore the discontinuities between the first and second waves of the movement, some highlight free blacks and the struggle for equality, others trace long history of antislavery politics beginning in the revolution and others the long shadow of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 for the fate of slavery and antislavery. Many of us are trying to lower the historiographical wall between abolitionists and antislavery politicians, revealing the convergence of radical and mainstream politics without denying the differences between them. We dont all agree about the particulars, but we are all committed to historicizing the struggle against slavery so that the crisis of the 1850s, the civil war, and emancipation no longer seem like the accidental byproduct of a contingent series of events. Contingencies, there certainly were, but their effects were not random good their effects were not random. David potter asked years ago why was it that each event in the sequence seemed to exacerbate the problem of slavery . To answer that problem, i think it helps to think of the crisis of the 1850s as the outcome of a larger process that might be called the expansion of the north. The explosive counterpoint to the rise of the cotton kingdom in the south. Gradual emancipation began but did not end with the gradual emancipation of slavery itself. Instead it refers to a broader differentiation, economic, political, legal, between the north and south, a process that, while never complete, goes a long way to explaining the crisis of the 1850s. In sharp contrast to the cotton states, a dynamic relationship between town country across the north undermined patterns of rural life and attracted millions of immigrants to northern cities and factories. The locus of commerce in northern ports shifted away from the caribbean toward an eastwest pattern of commerce. The products of Northern Farms and factories with the purchasing power of northern consumers. Over time, the northern economy became steadily more independent of the slave economy. Planters purchased most of their shoes from northern markets but the Southern Market accounted for only about 15 of the shoes that northern factories produced. It was a source of growing frustration among southern nationalists that by the 1850s the slave economy was far more dependent on the north and the north was upon the south. Like the fear of southern economic dependence, the fear of growing northern political independence led proslavery southerners to make increasing demands for federal protection of slavery in the territories, of fugitives in the north, of slaves and washington, d. C. , on the high seas. In their determination to protect slavery, southern leaders did not make the mistake of assuming that states were more important than the federal government. On the contrary, it was proslavery claims on federal power that stoked Northern Resistance and created irreconcilable fissures in the the northern and southern wings of the two major parties, the whigs and the democrats. The results were ominous. The collapse of the whig party, the Democratic Party split into hostile factions, and the emergence of a Republican Party that was completely independent of the south. As Northern Farms and businesses were economically emancipating themselves from slavery, northern politicians were doing the same thing. These developments strained the formal ties that had legally bound the northern states to southern slaveholders. In the aftermath of 1787, northern states had passed a series of laws allowing slaveholders to sojourn with their slaves in northern states. Slaveholders could bring their slaves with them, often for months at a time, to states where slavery had been or was being abolished. Northerners began to restrict these rights, so by the 1850s, it was legally dangerous for southern slaveholders to travel with their slaves through most northern states. The greatest legal obstacle to the gradual emancipation of the north was the fugitive slave clause of the constitution, an obstacle that proved, in the end to be one of the biggest causes of tension in the 1850s, second only to the territorial expansion of slavery. We will return to the slave issue later on but, for now, i want to emphasize that the events we call the crisis of the 1850s needs to be viewed against a broader background of the contrasting trajectories of the north and south the growth , of the cotton kingdom we are familiar with the growth of the and the gradual emancipation of the north, a less familiar part of the story. We are not here only to consider new approaches to the crisis of the 1850s. We are also supposed to be looking back in the hopes that there are lessons for today to be discerned in the extreme polarization of politics in the 1850s, the realignment of parties, the intense divisions over slavery, lessons that might help us navigate or better understand our own age when the two major parties are internally divided and the politics of race has once again become central to polarization. I confess that this second charge, to discern some contemporary relevance in the prices of the 1850s has been nothing less than daunting. I spent much of the last summer struggling with how to approach the relevance dilemma and i thought it might be helpful to take you on a detour, reconstructing my thought slideshow,means of a though a fairly somber one. Lets call it what i was thinking about on my summer vacation. [laughter] james we flew to budapest on the evening of august 11. When we landed the next morning, i turned on my ipad to read the news and found out this happened. Those folks were there to venerate the statue of that honorable man, confederate general robert e. Lee, a statue that, like many other confederate memorials, was targeted for removal. It was interesting to be in budapest at the moment when the fight in monuments and statues reached its peak in the u. S. Turns out moving statues is it turns out moving statues is something the hungarians know all about. When the soviet union collapsed in 1989, all of the soviet era statues around budapest were taken down. But they were not destroyed. They were all moved here to a place called statue park on the outskirts of town. Tourists like me could go and see all of the statues, a whos who of the global communist menace. They are statues of karl marx, friedrich engels, various hungarian monuments to the working class, the defeat of the nazis, etc. Heres comrade lenin. He looks like a carnival barker in a sideshow. Heres a simple obvious lesson for today. Its possible to take down sensitive statues and monuments without erasing history, whether it is the history the statues overtly claim to represent or the history they represent to the people of hungary. The soviet occupation of their country. A week later, we were in prague. While there, we walked several times through Wenceslaus Square, thousands989 tens of of czechs took to the streets in what is known as the velvet revolution. It was from a balcony overlooking this crowd that vaclav havel announced the end of the regime. While we were in prague, back in the United States, this happened. On august 19, 15,000 people went into the streets of boston in a counter protest that effectively shut down another march by White Supremacists less than a week after charlottesville. I am seeing these pictures of crowds of protesters in boston on my ipad while i am sitting in Wenceslaus Square looking at a guidebook of earlier protesters in prague. Some thoughts start swirling in my head. Blogore thing struck me in prague. Onged in the place known as the land and wall. He lenin for those of you who dont know, the lenin wall is a joke. In the 1980s, they painted over it with pictures of john lennon. The protest was known as lennonism. Heres a picture from the 1980s. You can see the picture of john lennon up there. There are quotations from beatles songs, all you need is chance. E peace a im a loser for some reason. The wall is still there. It remains the site of cultural protest where pictures of john lennon and beatles lines are interspersed with graffiti. Heres a picture i took. [laughter] james i have to get that out there. Cspan is probably [laughter] james the two images that stuck in my head while i was in europe were the images of charlottesville in boston, and i started to think about the historical significance of crowds in the streets. Here is what struck me. When historians look at this picture of the crowd in charlottesville, we recognize those people. We read histories of white attitudes toward the black image, ranges of whiteness. The ku klux klan, lynching, jim crow, redlining, and we know what these White Supremacists represent. What they stand for. Thats why, when the controversy over the confederate monuments erupted, 70 historians were ready and willing to jump and the public discussion and explain that those are not monuments to benign southern cultural heritage, they were erected at the height of the jim crow era, there are no monuments to reconstruction or two generals who went astray and joined the Republican Party after the war. Historians could do that because we know who those people are and where they came from. What about these people . Do we know where they came from . To these thousands of antiracist protesters have a history . I think they do. Here is one piece of it. In the spring of 1854, in the same week that Congress Passed the kansasnebraska act, an estimated 50,000 protesters took to the streets in boston to protest the rendition of a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns. This picture is from the late 19th century. Heres one my colleague gave me from the time that is less dramatic but probably more accurate. The crowd is more orderly. It is still a compelling image. You can see the enormous number of federal troops it took to return a single slave and the the faces of thousands upon thousands of protesters lining the street. Where did those protesters come from . How did a single runaway slave named Anthony Burns promote such provoke such a reaction . Mind you, burns was not the only one. Theres a history here of fugitive slaves and abolitionists and antislavery politics that has to be recovered if we are to arrive at a more complete understanding of the crisis of the 1850s. Recovery in that act of recovery, we might discern some contemporary significance. Neither of these was an isolated incident. Both have to be understood in their broader historical context. Ive been scratching my head about this problem for a long time. Decades, really, trying to figure out how to think about, talk about the significance of slave resistance. My apologies in advance if this exercise in contextualization initially takes me a long way from the crisis of the 1850s. I will get back to it. Lets start with a simple historical observation. Slaves always ran away. Evidence of this stretches as far back in Human History as records will take us. The code of hammurabi prescribed a death sentence for fugitive slaves and if anyone harbored a fugitive slave, the householders shall be put to death. In ancient greece, runaways were branded on their cheeks to make their rendition easier. In rome, they were crucified. Professional slave catchers fanned out across sicily in the second century much as they did in pennsylvania and ohio in 1850s. In the italian city states, they were defined as thieves. By running away, the slaves were steeling themselves. Across the mediterranean, muslim slave traders and masters had the problem of runaway slaves. The same was true throughout the atlantic world. West african slaves ran away from their captors, brazilian slaves escaped from their portuguese masters, slaves and slaves in trinidad and Santo Domingo and cuba ran away from their dutch, english, french, and spanish owners. There isnt any place on earth where historians have looked and not found evidence of runaway slaves. North america was no different. Slaves escaped their masters in florida, their native american masters across the continent, as well as their Anglo American masters in the british colonies and their american masters in the south. By some estimates as many as 50,000 slaves a year ran away. The vast majority of those escapes were local and temporary. Most attempts to flee were unsuccessful, maybe not so much by the 1850s. Only a tiny fraction of runaway slaves ever made it to freedom, except during wars, when the number of runaways often swelled to previously unheard of proportions. It is estimated that 23,000 athenian slaves ran away during the peloponnesian war. The fact that running away was so common is one indication that slaves did not like being enslaved. It is also an indication that as a form of resistance running away had real limitations, and thats because it, especially in peacetime, was a solitary, often individualistic form of resistance. Sometimes slaved ran away and form colonies as they did in spanish florida, sometimes they ran away in groups and on some occasions those attempts became slaves such as the 77 who attempted to escape from washington, d. C. In 1848. As brazen and courageous as it was, the escape attempt was foiled. Even if it had succeeded, it would not have made a statistical dent in the slave system itself. It is the political significance of the escape that matters. It would be foolish to assert nat turner was inconsequential because there was only one of him. Similarly, it is a mistake to assume that fugitive slaves made no difference because there were so few of them. It is also clear that the significance of running away began to change in the 18th century. It changed because a form of resistance that was largely solitary and individualistic became organized in ways that were politically consequential. Historians have done impressive work examining the motives of those who ran away but they but they are not always appreciated the importance of organization. This is a mistake that abolitionists and antislavery politicians did not make. Here is William Stewart in a speech on the advent of the Republican Party in 1855. Slavery cannot be perpetual, it will either be overthrown peacefully under the constitution or it will work the subversion of the constitution together with its overthrow. Seward didnt think a war was necessary and in auburn he was thinking out loud about what it would take to get slavery abolished. The will exists because the evil has become intolerable and the need of a remedy is universally a knowledge. What, then, is wanted . Organization, nothing but organization. Armies, abolitionists, and Political Parties provided three distinct means of organizing fugitive slaves. In the 18th century, armies began offering emancipation to hundreds, later thousands, ultimately tens of thousands of runaway slaves. Beginning in the late 18th century, the impressive apparatus of the Abolitionist Movement was deployed to organize fugitive slaves in several ways. These in turn led to a third form of organization, the political party. Each of these forms depended on, presupposed, the agency of the slaves. They depended on slaves running away, something they had always done, but now running away to communities of free blacks in the north that enticed them and harbored them. As a historian put it recently, the first and most continuous combatants in the fight against slavery where the slaves themselves. My question is, how is one form of that struggle organized into an issue that was central to the crisis of the 1850s . Before the birth of the modern era, armies enslaved their enemies. For thousands of years war was the largest source of slaves. The records of the ancient world are littered with examples of cities the siege and entire populations in slaved. Slavedre populations and. In the early modern atlantic world, devastating wars of enslavement even as the number of africans hurled into the atlantic slave trade reached its peak in the 18th century, a startling reversal of the longstanding relationship between war and slavery was getting underway. In the 1720s, spanish troops made slaving raids into the carolinas. A decade later, the spanish began offering emancipation in return for military service of slaves who escaped their masters. By the 1770s, the practice was widespread. Americans complained loudly when lord dunmore and other imperial officials offered to free slaves who came within british lines, but the americans themselves did similar things. Continental congress offered to pay masters who emancipated 3000 slaves for military service. Several states adopted a similar policy. War had gone from being the largest Single Source of slaves to being the largest Single Source of emancipated slaves. That required a political decision, not strictly a military one. By the closing decades of the 18th century, there was Something Like a consensus among statesmen that belligerents could offer freedom to slaves in exchange for military service. The irony is that the consensus in favor of emancipation generated a host of issues, some diplomatic and some political. Although the United States agreed that slaves who had escaped to the british were fully emancipated, for example, the two nations spent decades arguing over the status of slaves who had escaped to british lines at the beginning of the war but were on american soil when the war ended. There was spillover into domestic politics. At the virginia ratifying convention, Patrick Henry launched an attack on the 1787 solution on the grounds that it opened the door to largescale emancipation in wartime. The purpose of the constitution, Henry Mark Henry reminded his listeners, was to strengthen federal authority over affairs and national defense, but it was precisely the implied powers of the government during wartime that were so threatening to slavery. With the clause, federal authorities may liberate every slave as they please. For the congress not ask that every slave be freed to fight. Did we not see a little of this in the last war . Have not verious state legislatures passed laws guaranteeing that every slave went into the army will be free . Several states had indeed offered freedom in exchange for military service. His own state of Virginia Free 500 such slaves. In 1837, John Quincy Adams breathed new and threatening life into Patrick Henrys warnings. Then a congressman from massachusetts, adams reversed his earlier opposition to military emancipation and repeatedly declared that, under the war powers clause of the constitution, the federal government could do exactly what Patrick Henry warned against. Emancipate every southern slave and an effort to repel a Foreign Invasion or suppress a domestic insurrection. War and rebellion nullified the souths claim to confiscation of the souths claim to the protection of slave property, or what amounts to the same thing, absolving north of any requirement to protect slavery. War would render the fugitive slave craws in operative. Emancipation became a minor but recurring theme in the wide writings of abolitionists and the speeches of antislavery politicians. Alongside the political controversy of slaves escaped in wartime, there developed a second source of political conflict over this one caused by the abolition of slavery in the northern states. There had been no fugitive slave clause in the articles of confederation because, as we all know, when americans declared independence in 1776, slavery was legal in all 13 of the rebellious colonies. Until then the right of recapture and imperial policy ensured that a slave was legally matterto rendition no what colony he or she escape to. By the time they gathered in philadelphia for a Constitutional Convention, the situation had changed. Slavery was being abolished throughout new england and, perhaps most threateningly, in the large state of pennsylvania, which was surrounded on three sides by five different slave states where slavery was still legal. Now there was a problem. An re pennsylvania passed abolition statute, slaves in neighboring states had no particular incentive to flee across state lines. After 1780, slaves in new york, new jersey, delaware, virginia could cross state lines and find themselves in a state where slavery was being abolished, where the presumption of freedom was being established, where free black communities of emancipated slaves were coming into existence to attract and harbor slaves from neighboring states. New york slaveholders in the Hudson Valley were likewise concerned that slavery was being abolished in connecticut and massachusetts. Rmont had adopted a gradual emancipation in the constitution of 1787. It is ironic that the fugitive slave clause inserted into the 1787, one of the strongest protections of slavery in that document, could only recognize the rights of slaveholders in some states by acknowledging that slaveholding was being abolished and others. Within a few years, it became clear that northerners and southerners had a very different understanding of what they had voted for and of what obligations the fugitive slave clause imposed on governments. By the late 1790s, as more and more slaves from Southern States escaped into northern states, as those free black communities began to emerge, southerners in Congress Responded with amendments to strengthen the 1793 statute, amendments northern representatives now were against. By guaranteeing the right of southern masters to come into free states and claim their escaped slaves, the 1793 act created the potential for political and legal conflict whenever a slave escaped into a free state. In 1825, the Pennsylvania Legislature decreed that any slave coming into the state was presumptively free. Then, fugitive slaves had provoked a number of Political Parties whether in peace time or during the war. Those provocations depended largely on individual acts of escaped and there was no organized political opposition to the rendition of fugitive slaves. That began to change in the 1830s, and the force behind the change was radical abolitionism. By the late 1830s, abolition was well on its way to becoming the largest, most wellorganized movement in American History up to that time. Up to 2000 state and local chapters of national antislavery organizations, claiming perhaps 200,000 members. Abolitionists sponsored lecture tours, held fairs, published newspapers, and initiated dozens of lawsuits. They did Something Else as well. They actively solicited and published the autobiographies of fugitive slaves, not only exposing the horrors of fugitive slavery but highlighting their escapes. Abolitionists had been sponsoring the publication of such narratives since the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the late 18th century. Drawing on that precedent, abolitionists in the 1830s significantly expanded the number of slave autobiographies they published. Slaves that escaped naturally gravitated toward abolitionism. Often with the help of free black immunities and activists within the movement. You can see the results here. These publications worked to sensitize large portions of the northern electorate to the plight of fugitive slaves. As a result, the political significance of running away increased dramatically in the 1840s. For a long time, historians would not use slave autobiographies as source material on the grounds they were propaganda, consciously and deliver only published as andaganda i abolitionists endorsed by leading radicals of the Antislavery Movement. Careful Fact Checking by subsequent scholars has helped to legitimize slave autobiographies as invaluable sources. But they were propaganda, which is precisely why they were important. The dramatic increase of escaped slave narratives in the 1840s and 1850s was important for building sympathy for fugitive slaves. While these autobiographies are important to us as documentary sources, their political significance was in their efficacy as propaganda. One of the first of this last slaveof antibellum narratives was published in 1838 under the title recollections of slavery from a runaway slave, the author was listed only as a runaway slave. Cotton plantation 25 miles inland from charleston, he never knew his mother or his father, was tossed about from owner to owner, beaten by some of them and sent to charleston to hire himself out on the dock. There, he met a black seaman who offered to stone him away on a to stow themed away on a ship. In boston, he made his way to a boarding house run by and for free blacks, who immediately helped the fugitive find work and life in the north. It was a familiar story, no less poignant for that. What made it different was the editorial comments made at the end of the last installment of the narrative. The editors first warned the mans owners not to set up a claim for this piece of property which was now in possession of its rightful owner. Self ownership had entered antislavery ideology. Then, the editors openly about openly avowed their propagandistic purposes in publishing the narrative. We wish our friends had all had the opportunity we enjoyed of hearing this story from his own lips. It would not be necessary for at least another year to exhort them to active, selfdenying efforts against the slave. That was the point. Was it effective . I cannot prove it, but i think so. In 1836, the office of James Gillespies abolitionist newspaper was attacked by an antiabolitionist mob in cincinnati. The following year, William Lloyd garrison was beaten and dragged through the streets of boston. It was shortly after these events that the abolitionists embarked on their aggressive effort to solicit and publish fugitive slave narratives. 15 years or so later, in 1854, 50,000 people swarmed into boston, not to drag abolitionists through the streets but to protest the rendition of Anthony Burns. The crowd was just one indication of a broader politicization of fugitive slaves. A familiar pattern of Northern Resistance and southern provocation had developed. Passed a newtates round of personal liberty laws in the 1840s, southerners demanded more rigorous enforcement by the federal government. A demand met in 1850 by the passage of a harsh new fugitive slave act, the northern reaction to which was as swift as it was intense, suggesting a heightened sensitivity to the plight of fugitive slaves. Some of that reaction was extralegal. Weeks after the law was passed, the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker spirited william and ellen craft out of the country. Much of the activism was a work of free blacks. A few months after the craft rescue in 1851, a group of black men rescued a waiter from federal marshals and got him to canada. Later that same year, two doesnt lack men shot a slaveholder and his son who were trying to recapture their slaves who had escaped from maryland to pennsylvania. Vigilance committees sprang into action to thwart slaveowners. The underground railroad, which had been operating for decades, became another means of subverting enforcement of the law. The federal governments response to these and other violent incidences was so overbearing that it further politicize the issue. The spectacle of northern troops sent to police the streets of boston, of marines rushed to a small town in pennsylvania, served only to intensify northern hostility to the law. Despite the spectacular crowds and violent incidents caused by the efforts to enforce the 1850 law, one of the least appreciated means of slaves being returned was among the most peaceful and least violent, the deliberate refusal to enforce the law among northern communities, particularly black communities. When federal officials tried to prosecute individuals for violating the law, they could not find northern juries to convict. In the 1850s, state legislators passed another round of laws guaranteeing habeas corpus and the right to a jury trial for escaped slaves. Often on the grounds that blacks were entitled to the Due Process Rights that were among the privileges of citizenships. Some states went so far as to make it a crime for state and local police to enforce federal law. Others banned slave catchers from using jails to house their fugitive slaves. To be sure, the biases of the fugitive slave act are obvious in the rendition numbers. In the decades after its passage, federal marshals returned 3000 slaves to slavery and freed only 11. The numbers are misleading because they dont reveal how many slaveholders were unable to bring their slaves before federal marshals to begin with. I have no idea how many slaves escaped in the 1850s. Paul finkelman estimates that 10,000 slaves escaped to the north in the 1850s. Only 332 of them returned by federal marshals. As the secessionists would later insist, the problems were not with the mechanism of the fugitive slave law, but how often the law was simply not enforced. All the while, the political significance of running away was assuming its final institutional form in party politics. One group of antislavery politicians, led by salmon chase had long insisted that the fugitive slave act of 1793 was unconstitutional because the fugitive slave clause of the constitution contains no enforcement mechanism. The federal government had given itself and enforcement power that under the constitution belong to entirely to the states. William seward took a different approach. He agreed that the 1793 law was unconstitutional, not because enforcement belonged to the states, but because the federal statute lacks the due process protections for fugitives. It is a law, seward complained, that deprives the alleged refugee of the writ of habeas corpus and any due process for the claim set up by his pursuer and finally degrades him into a chattel which may be seized and carried away wherever found, even though exercise and the rights and responsibilities of a free citizen of the commonwealth in which he resides and of the United States, a law which denies the citizen all the safeguards of personal liberty so as to render less frequent the reason the existing fugitive slave act was so poorly enforced in the north, seward concluded, is not at all the leniency of its provisions. Its provisions were john carney in. Rather, he said, the fugitive slave act was poorly enforced because it is unjust, unconstitutional, and immoral and thus the and thus our people condemn it. By then, some of the most process of lori the most proslavery members of Congress Like Jefferson Davis consider the fugitive slave law a dead letter because it would not be enforced in northern communities. South carolina senator butler introduced a new bill strengthening federal enforcement efforts that chase and seward already considered excessive. Seward responded four days later with a series of amendments to the 1793 law that would guarantee juries, trials, and habeas corpus. Northern whigs endorsed his call and even chase agreed that it that if the federal government was going to enforce the fugitive slave clause, it should guarantee due process to the accused to those accused of running away. Over slavery in the territories or abolition in washington, d. C. , the debate over fugitive slave renditions was kind of a proxy fight. Nearly everyone on all sides agreed that the constitution did not allow the federal government to abolish slavery in a state. Antislavery politicians try to thwart slavery wherever they could. Fugitive slave rendition was one place. Southerners were fully aware of it. Maryland senator thomas pratt denounced the jury trial commitment the jury trial amendment as a practical denial of the whole right of the slaveholder over his slave if he gets beyond his state. Everybody knows, pratt continued that fugitive slaves are being discharged from new york on the flimsiest pretext is. All the attacks against the south, the escape of fugitive slaves is doing more harm because it is the most calculated to incite the public mind. The debate takes up 30 pages of the congressional globe, 90 large columns of small print. After sewards attempt to add due process to the 1793 law failed, northern senators across a large chunk of the spectrum like cotton whigs to radicals, proposed similar amendments requiring jury trials and habeas corpus in the proposed 1850 law. One of those amendments was beaten back even though northern congressman voted against the act by a 21 margin. It squeaked the passage thanks to a minority of northern supporters. By the middle of the decade, just about every politician identified with the new Republican Party was opposed to the fugitive slave act of 1850. The only question was whether they wanted it repealed outright, leaving enforcement to the states, or revised to guarantee Due Process Rights to accused fugitives. Lincoln beganam to signal his endorsement of sewards approach. Unlike the strict constructionist chase, lincoln accepted the argument that the clause in the constitution implied a federal responsibility to enforce it. The question was how to enforce it. Lincoln preferred a statute that did not expose the free knee grow denny more danger the free negro any more danger of going into slavery than our expose an innocent person to the danger of being hung. He would call for revision of the 1850 statute to remove what he called its objectionable provisions, not only the absence of due process protections, but the requirement that northern civilians participate in fugitive slave renditions. In 1859, lincoln went even further and warned that secession would bring a halt to all fugitive slave renditions in the northern states. In a speech in in a speech northerners would be relieved of any constitutional obligation to return to future slaves. He addressed himself to any kentuckians who might be listening. I often hear it intimated that divide the union whenever a republican is elected president of the United States. Makeomplained that regions it difficult for you to recapture your fugitive slaves but he asked do you think you can better yourself on that subject by leaving a seer under no obligation whatever to return the specimens of property . You will have divided the union because we would not do right with you. When we cease to be under obligations to do anything for you, how much better off do you think he will be . Do you think you wikll be . Lincoln renewed his call for a substantial revision of the 1850 guarantee Due Process Rights to fugitives and restrict enforcement for fugitive slaves. Excuse me, the restrict enforcement of federal officials of solving northern states and civilians of any obligation to participate in the caption a return of fugitive slaves. There was nothing at all unusual about lincolns secession proposal. Antislavery politicians have been demanding Due Process Rights for accused fugitives for at least a decade. You do not have to spend much time raising reading the debates to appreciate lincolns proposal was more likely to inflame then calm the south. Very first item in south carolinas declaration justifying secession dusted to by name 14 northern states that had recently passed personal liberty laws. Glared either nullify act of congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. The governor endorsed secession on the ground that slave property was no longer safe within the union. Why remain . He asked. The personal liberty laws were a symptom of a much larger problem, as is explained to the governor of kentucky. He was sent by the state of alabama to persuade kentucky to secede. Among the recent gave was the fact that the fugitive slave act, quote, remains a dead letter upon the statute books. The majority of another states, through their legislative enactments, have openly nullified it and imposed heavy fines and penalties among all persons who aid in enforcing the law. The federal officers who attempt to discharge their duties under the law, as well as the owner of the slave, are set upon by mobs and are fortunate if they escape without serious injury to life or limbs. And the state authorities, instead of eating in the enforcement aiding in the enforcement of the law, refuse the use of their jails and give countenance to the mob and aid the fugitive to escape. Lincoln responded to these complaints by reiterating his postal for a future federal personal liberty law in his first inaugural address. There is much controversy about delivering up fugitives. Everyone who swears an oath to the constitution is, of course, swearing to uphold the fugitive slave cause. The question was how the clause was to be upheld. There was disagreement over who should enforce it. Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or state of authority, lincoln asked. The constitution does not expressly say, but in any law upon the subject, he added, practically quoting from sewards 1850 speech, ought not all the safeguards be introduced so that a free man may not in any case be surrendered as a slave . And might it not be well at the same time to provide by law for the enforcement of that clause in the constitution which guarantees that the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the citizens of the several state. So long as the 1850 law remained on the books, it should be obeyed, lincoln said, but there are some laws that communities find so morally offensive that they will never be fully obeyed. The fugitive slave law, he conceded, is, in another echo of seward, was as well enforced as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. And secession would make the already lax enforcement even worse because, quote, after the separation, fugitive slaves now only partially surrendered will not be surrendered at all. 10 weeks later, lincoln called his cabinet to a special session where he approved general butlers decision not to return fugitive slaves to their owner from the ground that virginia had seceded from the union and the federal government was no longer under any obligation to return escaped slaves. Behind that decision lay a long and complicated history of untold numbers of enslaved people who took advantage of wars to escape from bondage of 75 years of political conflict over fugitive slaves, of free black communities that harbored them, of abolitionists who publicized the stories the fugitives had to tell, of northern legislatures that passed personal liberty laws and antislavery politicians who voted against the fugitive slave act. A generation of young men who enlisted in the union army and marched into the south in spring and summer of 1861 had come of age reading about slaves who packed themselves into boxes, hid themselves in cargo holds, tramped through swamps and thickets to escape from their owners, or scrambled to get themselves to england or canada before the slave catchers caught up with them. Those same young men had listened to their parents talk about the battle of christiana, and they knew that tens of thousands of their elders had flocked to boston to prevent protest the rendition of a single fugitive slave from being taken back by the man who claimed him as property. None of those people went into the civil war tabula rasa. Not the three enslaved men from Hampton Roads who guessed correctly that if they could get the fortress to the fortress, they might not be returned to slavery, not the republican lawmakers who took control of both houses of congress, not the relatively young and untried man who had just been elected president , and not the northern democrats, whod announced lincoln and his party for pretending that their refusal who denounced lincoln and his party for pretending that their refusal to return fugitive slaves the solitary act of running away had become politicized so thoroughly that by the middle of the 19th century fugitive slaves played a central role in what we call the. Crisis of the crisis of 1850s no doubt, there are many lessons to be drawn from that history, and no doubt we will be hearing about several of them over the next two days. One of those lessons seems clear that nothing that happened to slavery during the civil war can be fully understood without reference to the decades of struggle over slavery that preceded the war. Another is that the crisis of the 1850s cannot be reduced to a struggle over the expansion of slavery into the western territory. Better to think of it as a momentous struggle over the future of slavery within the american empire, that means within the northern states as well as the territory. That, i think, is why the fugitive slave the fate of fugitive slaves in the northern states was so central to that crisis. Discerning the lesson for today is a trickier business, because where we are is never really the same as where they were. We have no need of a movement to shut down slave auction houses, for example. But we might find some guidance, or at least inspiration, in the 19th century struggle against the commodification of human beings or a 21st century struggle against the commodification of health care, schools, and prisons. The abolitionists understood, just as we need to understand, that economic inequality and Racial Injustice are flip sides of the same problematic coin. And maybe, just maybe, there is something to be learned from the way thousands upon thousands of ordinary men and women who fled from their bondage went from being a perennial problem for masters everywhere to being a Divisive Political issue that led, in the end, to the destruction of slavery itself. The historical question is, how did that happen. The lesson for today, the lesson that applies to anyone engaged in the struggle for social justice and equality is simply this organization, organization, nothing without organization. Thank you. [applause] we have some time for questions. [indiscernible] jim, thank you for that deep history, and especially for the story of fugitive slaves, the narrative. That expansion narrative what is now so easily taught, the civil war was caused by the west. Im going to open it up to the audience. The mic, please. You used a phrase about the commodification of human beings and then you said the commodification of health care, schools, and what was the third item . Prisons. Thank you. Who is next . Come on. Yes . Theres a mic somewhere. Got it. We should have two of them floating around. Thank you very, very much for this analysis of the need for organization. I was curious as to what role the organization of the Suffrage Movement and the womens Rights Movement of that period were also linked into the need for organization, organization, organization. It is a very important question. I think that, besides failing to take into account the seriousness of the fugitive slave issue, we fail to appreciate how central gender politics was to the politics of slavery and i had in an earlier version of the paper its already too long. I asked how is it the defensive northern patriarchy came to be associated with the defense of free labor. There is a sense in which northern families being transformed by the force of women who were associated with the Abolitionist Movement and the feminist movement at the same time. There is a series of laws that are being passed in the 1840s and 1850s to reform domestic patriarchy, and they are closely allied, those two movements. It is not an accident, as joe stalin likes to say, that Uncle Toms Cabin has gender running all the way through it as a central theme. Its an indication both of the popularity of antislavery, but also the centrality of gender to it. I think the place of women and the Womens Movement in the Antislavery Movement explains a lot of the way they talked about slavery in the 1850s and about antislavery politics. But its a gigantic subject that requires books that have yet to be written. Whos next . Sorry. Richard. Weighing in. Hes written a great book on the fugitive slaves. I like what youve done, mainly because i agree with you. [laughter] but i wondered if you would think about something. The level of support for fugitive slave laws in the north. I think its a serious element. This was contested ground. I think more than what comes out in your talk. There were 10,000 people who turned up to hear webster lecture. There were cannons fired in boston in support of the war. There was considerable support in the north. I wondered if you could add that to your mix, what does that tell us about the politics of the decade . I think thats also important. I think theres an enormous fight over fugitive slaves, over every one of these issues. To go back to your question, there is a book, i think it is named the democrats and republicans had different conceptions of gender. I think the democrats are important to this. My point is that they are beginning to lose. A lot of the eruption of extreme racial ideology, of racism that is coming out of the north, is coming out because there is an increasing sense of frustration that they are losing this fight. They are there, and they are very important, and they are still rising in favor of it. They will be there all the way through the war and in reconstruction as well. Northern democrats dont disappear, but they are not the majority in the north, at least politically, they are not. Thats what the Election Results suggest, but it is in the an enormous fight. It is a fight it is an enormous fight. It is a fight that takes place mostly in the north. Thermal full of Anthony Burns out of boston was a big political fight the removal of Anthony Burns out of boston was a big political fight, right . When we write about antislavery, i think we underestimate that the number of parties that are being engaged in every one of these issues. Antislavery politicians are responding to proslavery southerners. They are responding to northern democrats. They are responding to radicals within the movement. Northern democrats are a big part of that and it. They support the fugitive slave law, absolutely. Right in the middle. With respect to abolitionism or antislavery efforts, on the one hand, and gender politics, on the other, it seems that there was both a confluence of interest as well as a difference or a split in interest. In this, im reminded of the figure, abbie kelly, who is often pictured with Frederick Douglass they traveled a lot together, as speakers. As i understand it. But after emancipation and after the civil war, she was essentially written out of history, as i understand it, because she took the position that the rights of freed slaves needed to take precedence or priority over the rights of women. And even though, prior to the civil war, she was regarded as a leading feminist, indeed one of the few women who would be prominently featured in speaking roles, but then after the civil war, she was written out of history. And i think there is a question there. [laughter] find that question. Its not my bailiwick. [indiscernible] then you see all sorts of fractures after the civil war that you didnt see before the civil war. There are plenty of fractures before the civil war as well. I dont know what to say other than that. Whether she was written out of history, i cant say. I dont know enough to know whether she was actually written out of history. There is a good biography of abby kelley. I forget who wrote it. Kelley was a radical garrisonian, and those conflicts with others who became political abolitionists is probably the root of this division. She is not written out of works on the history of abolition. In the public memory, she may have been. Thats an interesting point. A very interesting point. Who is next . Something about writing out of history it gets back to a question, a very important question. It is true there are a significant number of northerners my concern is the constant reiteration of the claim made. Youve heard it especially in the last couple of months because so much of this is in the news that northerners there was no meaningful antislavery sentiment in the north. That abolitionists were a tiny group of beleaguered that nobody in the north really cared about slavery. Im really working against that. Im not trying to say all northerners opposed slavery. Just to resist the notion that there was no meaningful, largescale body of people in the north who were opposed to slavery and opposed to fugitive slave law. Did i see a hand back here . Thank you very much for the talk. I was curious, as you talked about the way that the constitutional debates, whether the fugitive slave law is constitutional, played out between seward and im sure calhoun had his responses as well. Is there a sense of how much the common american or however you want to define that was taking up these constitutional debates . With the west in terms of the fugitive slave law, do you have a sense of whether the common opponents and supporters of the law are having this kind of constitutional debate amongst themselves, or is that more among the elite . My sense is that, something that constitutional politics was central to the political debate of the period from the internal improvements debates to the slavery debates. Im going by and number of historians who have argued by a number of historians who have argued this. The person who ive learned the most about it from is in the audience now. They always the constitutional issues were central. John c calhouns answer to all of those was that the constitution recognizes and protects slavery as a right of property, and therefore the north has an obligation and the federal government has an obligation to go into northern states and return. Of slaves and return fugitive slaves. He is arguing that there is a constitutional right of property. Every one of these arguments tends to slide into a constitutional argument, and many the garris onion garrisonian differences are difference over the constitution. Does it allow you to do some things and not others . Is there another extreme version of the abolitionists, who say the constitution is an antislavery document and lets abolish slavery immediately . All these issues fall out in some way as a constitutional question at the time. One more question . Thank you. I really enjoyed it. I was struck by what you said right here. [laughter] i was struck by what you said about lincoln warning that secession would free the northerners from any obligation to fulfill stipulations of the fugitive slave law. To what extent did the people who showed up at the Anthony Burns liberation or throughout the decade to what extent do they think of themselves as being freed by an unjust law of those obligations . Im interested in the way to fugitive slave law was itself a bond of union, a fraying one, but a bond nonetheless. This is part of my point. I didnt end up nailing the point on the head. The attempt by the various northern states that is reflected in these popular opposition to the fugitive slave law suggests the continuing effort by the north to emancipate itself from southern slavery. Its never fully successful. There are democrats who support it. I cant tell the motivations of individuals and the motivations of a crowd are extremely difficult to deal with, though i tend to focus on what are the arguments each group is making and what are they saying about this and that. Motivations can be all over the place. But you can chart why some of the personal liberty laws were so threatening to southerners. Thats why i pointed it out. It names those laws, those states. Thats the next size of the constitution thats an exercise of the constitution. This came up in an review i had to give in this silliness by general kelly. These arguments being made he is saying states are more important, but the states rights argument works for both sides. What the northern states are doing in passing personal liberty laws is claiming the states right to determine the procedures by which fugitive slaves are returned or not returned to their owners. Those states rights isnt an argument. If the south didnt secede for states rights, it wanted the federal government to force slavery down the throats of others. When you didnt, they claimed states rights. States rights is a bogus issue as far as cause of the civil war is concerned. All those people will email you, what about states rights by northerners . States rights to do what . We are going to take a coffee break. To be continued, of course. Please help me thank jim. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2018] a tweet from mad men across the water asking about it issue that resounds today. His question is about how many inple were fathered by gis the annan, how are they treated 45 years after the u. S. Departure . You can be featured during live program. Join our conversation on facebook on cspan. Com facebook. And on twitter cspan history. This weekend on american artifacts we see artifacts featured in a new u. S. , ecm in washington, d. C. Scheduled to open in 2019. Here is a preview. Good government job has a handbook, right . And so, this is called a resident officer handbook. By a uniquewas used class of newly minted Foreign Service officers in 1950. Normally a new class of officers, they thought went to various parts of the world but this class was unique. They all went to the same place in 1950 and they all went to germany. Why would they all go to germany in 1950 . Well, there was world war ii. Here isre looking at diplomatic efforts in germany, because of the political instability in germany. The competing forces between communism and bringing democracy back to germany. These officers were very specifically trained by using this handbook in a way to the american values, also the values and the benefit of having a democratic government as opposed to adopting a communist government. These officers were quite owne that, by their personal example, they were representing america as well. So, they were instructed quite clearly to, you know, not in a to behave yourself but to recognize that people are watching you, because you are an american. The handbook does goes into some detail on different programs that they were supposed to implement, as well as someo of the more bureaucratic parts of their job. In the table of contents, the handbook covers things like citizen participation in government or women in public affairs. And other things like religious affairs or community councils. In addition, there were programs for education and refugees. And other sort of finance types of programs. Think about the state on the ground that american Foreign Service officers were dealing with. You were just at war with this country but this is a country that you want to maintain a very strong, bilateral relationship with an established an economic relationship with. And so, i think this book was designed to help them. Exactly so, the Diplomacy Center began really back in the year 2000 during secretary albrights tenure. And since then, the program has really grown. It is a publicprivate partnership. Private foundation that has been over the years raising money, garnering support on the state department side. The office came into being, the collection has come into being. And we are moving forward in partnership with the foundation andevelop the exhibitions Public Programs for the museum continuing to collect artifacts. We are looking forward to opening to the public in a few years. At 6tch the entire tour p. M. And 10 p. M. Eastern sunday on american artifacts. This is American History tv, only on cspan 3. Tonight on afterwards. Georgetown University Law professor Peter Edelman looks at the way the court penalized through excessive fines and fees in his book not a crime to be poor, the criminalization of property in america. Hes interview by hank johnson. Was poverty in issue in terms of the war on drugs or the victims of the war on drugs . How did poverty play into that . No men around. What happens to families. What happens to the men whove been locked up in all the collateral consequences of cant get jobs. They are not allowed to live in public housing. 45,000 laws across the country require consequences of one kind or another. It destroy some of these lives. If they werent poor when they went into prison, they are definitely povertystricken for the rest of their lives. Its totally connected to poverty. Watch afterwards tonight at 9 p. M. Eastern on book tv on cspan 2. President Dwight D Eisenhower signed his Civil Rights Act of 1957 which created the u. S. Commission on civil rights. Next on American History tv, to mark its anniversary, current and former chairs discuss history and future and talk about the mission, how its scope has changed and the way commissioners interact with the public and government. The library of congress hosted the event. It is about an hour and 20 minutes. Thank everyone for coming. Thrilling to have everyone in this room who is deeply committed to civil rights together. Thrilled to be here to commemorate our 60th anniversary year at the u. S. Commission on civil rights. With a fewtart special recognitions in addition to my gratitu f
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