Chicago and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

(By Paul Finkelman in the Encyclopedia of Chicago)

Physically distant from the South, and populated mostly by northerners, many with antislavery sentiments, Chicago was a relatively safe haven for fugitive slaves. After the adoption of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law by the United States Congress, the city's African American community formed a “Liberty Association” with regular patrols to subvert the legislation by preventing the seizure of blacks in the city by slaveholders and their agents. In October 1850 a slave catcher from Missouri arrived in the city and was informed by leading citizens that his safety was at risk if he stayed. Meanwhile, a slave he had brought with him to help capture the runaway also escaped. On October 21, 1850, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution condemning the new law as “cruel and unjust” and directing the city's police “not to render any assistance for the arrest of fugitive slaves.” On October 23 Senator Stephen A. Douglas, in a major speech, condemned the city council resolution. An attempt to rescind the resolution failed and on November 29, 1850, the city council reaffirmed its opposition to the law and its refusal to allow city officials to enforce it. In 1860 John Hossack was convicted in federal district court in Chicago of aiding a fugitive slave who had escaped to Ottawa, Illinois. The jury recommended mercy and Judge Thomas Drummond imposed a fine of only $100 and a sentence of 10 days in jail.

Compassion in wartime

(Letter to Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, March 18, 1864)

I am so pressed in regard to prisoners of war in our custody, whose homes are within our lines, and who wish to take the oath and be discharged, that I hope you will pardon me for again calling up the subject. My impression is that we will not ever force the exchange of any of this class; that taking the oath, and being discharged, none of them will again go to the rebellion, but the rebellion again coming to them, a considerable percentage of them, probably not a majority, would rejoin it; that by a cautious discrimination the number so discharged would not be large enough to do any considerable mischief in any event; would relieve distress in, at least some meritorious cases; and would give me some relief from an intolerable pressure. I shall be glad therefore to have your cheerful assent to the discharge of those whose names I may send, which I will only do with circumspection.
Yours truly
A Lincoln

In using the strong hand, as now compelled to do, the government has a difficult duty to perform. At the very best, it will by turns do both too little and too much. It can properly have no motive of revenge, no purpose to punish merely for punishment's sake. While we must, by all available means, prevent the overthrow of the government, we should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society...

'The Constitution is an anti-slavery instrument'

(From The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass)

... I was then a faithful disciple of Wm. Lloyd Garrison, and fully committed to his doctrine touching the pro-slavery character of the Constitution of the United States, also the non-voting principle of which he was the known and distinguished advocate. With him, I held it to be the first duty of the non-slaveholding states to dissolve the union with the slaveholding states, and hence my cry, like his, was "No union with slaveholders." With these views I went into western New York, and during the first four years of my labors there I advocated them with pen and tongue to the best of my ability. After a time, a careful reconsideration of the subject convinced me that there was no necessity for dissolving the union between northern and southern states, that to seek this dissolution was no part of my duty as an abolitionist, that to abstain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery, and that the Constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, was in its letter and spirit an antislavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence as the supreme law of the land.

This radical change in my opinions produced a corresponding change in my action. To those with whom I had been in agreement and sympathy, I came to be in opposition. What they held to be a great and important truth I now looked upon as a dangerous error. A very natural, but to me a very painful thing, now happened. Those who could not see any honest reasons for changing their views, as I had done, could not easily see any such reasons for my change, and the common punishment of apostates was mine.

My first opinions were naturally derived and honestly entertained. Brought directly, when I was escaped from slavery, into contact with abolitionists who regarded the Constitution as a slaveholding instrument, and finding their views supported by the united and entire history of every department of the government, it is not strange that I assumed the Constitution to be just what these friends made it seem to be. I was bound, not only by their superior knowledge, to take their opinions in respect to this subject, as the true ones, but also because I had no means of showing the unsoundness of these opinions. But for the responsibility of conducting a public journal, and the necessity imposed upon me of meeting opposite views from abolitionists from outside of New England, I should in all probability have remained firm in my disunion views. My new circumstances compelled me to re-think the whole subject, and to study with some care not only the just and proper rules of legal interpretation, but the origin, design, nature, rights, powers, and duties of civil governments, and also the relations which human beings sustain to it. By such a course of thought and reading I was conducted to the conclusion that the Constitution of the United States--inaugurated to "form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty"-- could not well have been designed at the same time to maintain and perpetuate a system of rapine and murder like slavery, especially as not one word can be found in the Constitution to authorize such a belief. Then, again, if the declared purposes of an instrument are to govern the meaning of all its parts and details, as they clearly should, the Constitution of our country is our warrant for the abolition of slavery in every state of the Union.

Lincoln in Gethsemane

(Found in Herndon's Life of Lincoln)

"I attempted," says Judge Gillespie, "to draw him into conversation relating to the past, hoping to divert him from the thoughts which were evidently distracting him. 'Yes, yes I remember,' he would say to my references to old scenes and associations; but the old-time zest was not only lacking, but in its place was a gloom and despondency entirely foreign to Lincoln's character as I had learned to know. I attributed much of this to his changed surroundings. He sat with his head lying upon his arms, which were folded over the back of his chair, as I had often seen him sit on our travels after an exciting day in court. Suddenly he roused himself. ‘Gillespie,’ said he, ‘I would willingly take out of my life a period in years equal to the two months which intervene between now and my inauguration to take the oath of office now.' 'Why,' I asked. 'Because every hour adds to the difficulties I am called upon to meet, and the present administration does nothing to check the tendency toward dissolution. I, who have been called to meet this awful responsibility, am compelled to remain here, doing nothing to avert it or lesson its force when it comes to me.'”

"I said that the condition of which he spoke was such as had never arisen before, and that it might lead to the amendment of such an obvious defect in the Federal Constitution. 'It is not of myself I complain,' he said with more bitterness than I ever heard him speak, before or after. 'But every day adds to the difficulty of the situation, and makes the outlook more gloomy. Secession is being fostered rather than repressed, and if the doctrine meets with a general acceptance in the border States, it will be a great blow to the government.'”

"Our talk then turned upon the possibility of avoiding a war. 'It is only possible,' said Mr. Lincoln, 'upon the consent of this government to the erection of a foreign slave government out of the present slave States. I see the duty devolving upon me. I have read, upon my knees, the story of Gethsemane, where the Son of God prayed in vain that the cup of bitterness might pass from him. I am in the garden of Gethsemane now, and my cup of bitterness is overflowing.'”

"I then told him that as Christ's prayer was not answered and his crucifixion had redeemed the great part of the world from paganism to Christianity, so the sacrifice demanded of him might be a great beneficence. Little did I think how prophetic were my words to be, or what a great sacrifice he was called to make.”

"I trust and believe that that night, before I let him go, I shed some rays of sunlight into that troubled heart. Ere long he came to talk of scenes and incidents in which he had taken part, and to laugh over my reminders of some of our professional experiences. When I retired, it was the master of the house and chosen ruler of the country who saw me to my room. 'Joe,' he said, as he was about to leave me, 'I suppose you will never forget that trial down in Montgomery County, where the lawyer associated with you gave away the whole case in his opening speech. I saw you signaling to him, but you couldn't stop. Now, that's just the way with me and Buchanan. He is giving away the case, and I have nothing to say, and can't stop him. Good-night.'"

Told on the 'circuit'

One of Abraham Lincoln’s stories told on the ‘circuit’ in Illinois (From Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals):

Another story, relayed years later by John Usher, centered on a man “who had great veneration for Revolutionary relics.” Learning that an old woman still possessed a dress “she had worn in the Revolutionary War,” he traveled to her house and asked to see it. She took the dress from a bureau and handed it to him. He was so excited that he brought the dress to his lips and kissed it. “The practical old lady rather resented such foolishness over an old piece of wearing apparel and she said: ‘Stranger, if you want to kiss something old you had better kiss my ass. It is sixteen years older than that dress.’ ”

Our Founding

Excerpt of Excluded Provision Against Slavery and

the Slave Trade from the Declaration of Independence

The King of England "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of distant peoples who never offended him; captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither...Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce... he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." (emphasis in original)