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  In August 1831 the most serious of North American slave revolts broke out in Virginia. Led by Nat Turner, the two-day insurgency led to the deaths of fifty-seven white people (including whole families), the levels of violence spreading alarm among the slave holders. Nat Turner was a black preacher, regarded as a prophet by his followers, who believed he was on a divine mission. When captured, he asked, ‘Was not Christ crucified?’ The outcome of the insurgency was predictable. It prompted a white backlash that took numerous black lives. The repression was out of all proportion to the initial violence, with slaves (many of them unconnected to the revolt) killed on the spot, executed or murdered by vengeful mobs. The final indignity was left to the doctors, who anatomised Turner’s body. Almost as if to confirm the slave owners’ deepest concerns about the threat posed by slaves, shortly afterwards Jamaican slaves rose in the latest rebellion. There, 344 slaves were executed, and hundreds killed in the fighting.[11] When news of the Jamaican revolt reached North America, it must have seemed that there was a contagion of slave unrest.

  Two major successful slave revolts at sea had a major impact on US slavery. The rebellions on the Amistad (1839) and the Creole (1841) became the subject of fierce legal and political argument: about the right to compensation for lost slaves, and the central question of black freedom in an Atlantic world deeply divided by delicate diplomatic issues about slave trading. Beyond the specific legal and diplomatic issues, however, both cases, played out in US courtrooms, caused outrage among US abolitionists and strengthened their resolve to press on for black freedom at home.[12] All this – news from Jamaica and slave rebellions at sea – fed into the rising tide of American abolition in the North and helped to persuade growing numbers of people of the intractably wicked nature of slavery itself. What justification could there possibly be for such periodic violations of enslaved people?

  In the thirty years before the Civil War, life in the South was periodically rife with rumours about slave unrest. Anything unexplained or suspicious, rumours of plots, random acts of violence – all were reported as signs of slave insubordination and unrest, and all prompted the familiar reaction by the forces of law and order. Slaves were killed, sometimes after legal hearings or, as likely as not, on the spot, and many more were whipped and punished. Plots were uncovered in Louisiana (1835 and 1837), in the District of Columbia (1838 and 1840) and in Arkansas (1856). In Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee, gangs of slaves attacked property, telegraph lines and jails. In 1860, Texas suffered a six-week-long wave of slave unrest, with slave attacks on towns. The rebels were, of course, executed.[13]

  Slave violence was the slave masters’ greatest fear, but the most common form of slave resistance was escape: running away. Some tried to make a mass escape: 400 slaves from a single parish in Louisiana planned to get to Mexico in 1840. In 1853, 2,500 were involved in a plot to escape from New Orleans. More desperate still, in 1849 a group in Georgia planned to seize a ship and sail to the Caribbean.[14] Most runaways, however, fled on their own.

  No escape route from slavery was easy or without enormous risks for the fugitives, and often for their loved ones. The free states of the North beckoned, but getting there (even with the help of experienced sympathisers) was a task of almost herculean proportions’.[15] Frederick Douglass famously borrowed false papers from a free sailor, then took a train and boat, to northern freedom. More spectacular still, Henry Box Brown shipped himself in a crate from Richmond to Philadelphia. Many slaves simply walked, others stole a horse or travelled by river, some used fake papers – or a combination of all these methods. Fugitives needed friends and allies to help them: people denounced by southerners as ‘slave stealers’. Some, however, proved to be false friends, keen to make money by betraying and selling fugitives back to southern slavery.[16]

  The most famous and organised assistance came from the men and women who organised the Underground Railroad. The term does not literally refer to a single railroad, but was used to describe a complex network of land and sea routes, helpers and safe houses used by those seeking freedom in the North and Canada. Harriet Tubman used the Railroad to free first herself in 1849, then relatives and friends, in an epic tale of astonishing bravery and persistence, but there was a multitude of dramatic and heroic escapes. Large numbers of slaves were hidden on board ships plying their trade from southern to northern ports. They were helped on their way by black dockside workers and crew. Ships from Norfolk, Virginia, regularly carried fugitives. In 1855, the black cook on one ship hid a mother and her child on the journey from Norfolk to New York. Law officers tried to stop these negro-loving captains of Yankee vessels’, but the flow never stopped. Most escaping slaves, however, went by land, aided by prominent abolitionists and prosperous supporters.[17]

  Though the numbers remain unclear, the most persuasive estimate is that, between 1830 and 1860, 150,000 slaves ran away. If we include slaves who ran away for a brief period before returning, the number is much higher. Fugitives posed a persistent worry for southern slave owners.[18] The foundations of the Railroad were laid by the slaves themselves – individuals finding a route north – but it quickly attracted help and support from white friends and activists – often Quakers – with free blacks in the North opening their homes to the fugitive. A quarter of a million free blacks lived in the North on the eve of the war, though their freedom had its limitations. They faced what has been called #x2018;cradle-to-grave discrimination’. For all that, they enjoyed opportunities that were unimaginable to southern slaves. They could secure education, worship as they wished, organise among themselves, write in newspapers, acquire trades and even open businesses. They also had free black leaders and abolitionist friends who rallied support for black people – enslaved and free – throughout the USA. The free black community understandably lured fugitives north from southern slavery.

  The Underground Railroad expanded greatly in the 1830s and 1840s when the increase of new cotton lands created an ever-greater demand for slaves – in its turn prompting fugitives to flee in growing numbers. As abolitionist sentiment grew in the North, the Underground Railroad expanded to incorporate the real railway systems. Ohio – separated by the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, and with links via Lake Erie to the freedom of Canada – was the most active region for the Underground Railroad.

  A host of southern laws and patrols with tracker dogs and ‘slave catchers’ were put in place to stop the flow northwards, and rewards encouraged hunters to seek out and capture fugitives. None of this stopped the flow of fugitives, driven on by hope and fear, while their helpers were emboldened by a resolute commitment to justice. The entire business created added friction between North and South, and by 1850, there was a hardening of hearts on both sides of the line.

  Fugitive slaves were never safe, not even in American courtrooms. The contradictions and confusions between the laws of different states (and the federal government) often meant that they found their newly won freedom denied by the courts, compelling them to return to the place from where they had fled. When courts upheld the concept that the slave belonged to a claimant (i.e. recognising the slave as a thing), they sometimes felt obliged to return a fugitive to a southern owner or their agent. One slave case after another was played out in court, each involving the fate (and conducted in the presence) of apprehensive and worried fugitive slaves, but more profound issues were at stake than the future of one individual. These were, in effect, recurring conflicts between slave and free states and were legal reflections of an acute social and political cleavage. The slave South and the free North were like tectonic plates, in growing tension with each other along the legal borders between the two regions. Fugitive slaves were cause and occasion of a tension that heightened and became more troublesome as the century wore on, as King Cotton continued to demand ever more slaves for the plantations, with growing numbers of cotton’s enslaved victims seeking sanctuary in the North. A fundamental question hovered over everything: could the Union survive half free,
half slave?

  Whatever the risks, fugitives continued to head north, many along the increasingly sophisticated Underground Railroad, but often they escaped alone and unaided. By mid-century, more than a thousand a year, mostly men from the border states, were arriving in the North. Many more failed to make it, and were returned, defeated and punished, to the house of bondage. Others simply fled to the wilderness or into the anonymity of towns and cities, but perhaps the largest number were ‘truants’ – slaves who needed to break away, visit a loved one or friends, or merely hide for a while. Slave owners reluctantly came to accept that slaves escaping was one of the many irritants of life: a vexatious reality they had to keep to a minimum. But southern slave owners were united in their refusal to tolerate the flight of slaves to the North. Their powerful representatives in Congress made sure that their interests were safeguarded by law.

  Tired of the constant haemorrhage of fugitive slaves, the South persuaded Congress to pass the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It was reviled by abolitionists and hated by free blacks. Harsher and more intrusive than earlier laws, it authorised federal law officers to enforce its terms in free states. It enabled aggrieved slave holders to pursue slaves into other states, and imposed heavy penalties on people harbouring fugitives. The law thus greatly increased the risks of recapture and being shipped back to southern slavery. It also terrified free blacks living in the North (with many fleeing to Canada from fear of its consequences). At a stroke, it also emasculated local courts and forced them to accept federal authority in returning slaves. It was a slave owners’ law that seemed designed to antagonise the North. But it also meant that northern officials and private individuals who defended fugitives were defying the law. Designed to satisfy the South, the 1850 law was bad legislation because it brought the law of the land into disrepute. Abolitionists viewed it as an invitation to disobedience, and many made public declarations of their moral obligations to disobey the new law, and to continue to help fugitive slaves. There was a flurry of public disturbances, with crowds fighting to free slaves from the authorities, and armed police enforcing the law, with death and injuries on both sides. Such skirmishes were small-scale, local snapshots of the wider problem: turbulent clashes about particular slaves. They were troubling symbols of the massive conflict to come.

  The implementation of the Fugitive Slave Law in the 1850s was not only a cause of friction, it was also counter-productive. An estimated 900 slaves were returned to bondage in a ten-year period, but something like ten times that number made successful escapes. The law, clearly, did not safeguard the interests of the slave owners, yet it strengthened the resolve of the fugitives and their helpers. Worst of all perhaps, the law, and the physical and moral conflicts it caused, served to widen the gulf between the North and the South. Each side was gradually boxing itself into a corner, allowing little room for manoeuvre or change. The tectonic plates were shifting, with much of the pressure being exerted by the slaves’ refusal to submit, and by their unending flight.

  From the first, the American abolitionist movement faced a massive and apparently intractable problem. Not only was slavery a hugely important element in the wider economy, but untold numbers of American citizens owed their livelihoods, directly or indirectly, to slave labour. Slavery inevitably lay at the heart of US politics: five of the first seven presidents were slave owners, and Congressional politics were often in the hands of slave-holding members or interests. The South was united in its opposition to northern abolition. Northern abolition faced a wall of resistant hostility, from the state governments to local churches and newspapers, right down to the grassroots of southern life. Any anti-slavery sentiment that had existed in the South in the early years of the republic had simply drained away, and demands from the North for abolition were viewed as a threat to an entire way of life. There had been, for example, some early support for colonisation schemes (of returning slaves to Africa), but they floundered and withered in the face of the practical difficulties and failures. Though the South experienced the religious revivalism enjoyed by the North after 1830, it did not join in the northern surge for wider reform. Reform in the South meant the unthinkable – tampering with slavery. While the North experienced periodic campaigns of social and political reform (for women, socialism, temperance, organised labour), southerners seemed happy to rest on their enslaving laurels and even mocked what they regarded as the passing political fashions and fads of their northern neighbours. Southern critics denounced abolition as the subversive heir to revolutionary ideas, and from 1830 onwards, largely in response to the rising voice of abolition in the North, that defence took on a sharper and more belligerent tone.

  From 1830, the growing opposition in the North to slavery was driven forward by the transformation of religious sentiment, which started in New England. Proliferating congregations of Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Unitarians spawned a ‘New Divinity’, which became the bedrock of a new, powerful anti-slavery movement. It paralleled a massive increase in following for the Methodist and Baptist churches: by 1850, for example, there were 1.25 million Methodists in the USA. They formed an army of followers who believed that they could achieve salvation by faith and appropriate behaviour on earth. And what better way was available to them than by attacking the national sin and wickedness of slavery itself?[19]

  The Baptist Church had its origins in the late seventeenth century, but over the next century, missionaries and their revivalist meetings had spread the faith across the American north-east and westward along the path of migration and settlement. There were upwards of 750,000 Baptists by the mid-nineteenth century.[20] Alongside Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Baptist missionaries created a remarkable religious phenomenon that swept across the USA in the years after 1830. Inspired by some charismatic preachers, a wave of Christian revivalism transformed life in all corners of the Republic.

  It was as if the USA was convulsed by a sense of personal and communal sin – and there was a religious crusade afoot to change the nation’s ways. It was a campaign that aimed both to renounce personal sin, and to overcome the corruption and sin that had gripped American life in general.

  Although ‘The Awakening’ in the North had spread the belief that slavery was a sin, in the South, theologians and preachers went in the opposite direction, teasing out biblical justifications for slavery and supporting it from their pulpits. Some even argued that to challenge slavery was to challenge God’s word. Both sides, pro and con slavery, dug deep into their faith to sustain their cause. Christian vernacular and imagery, biblical scrutiny, sermons, prayers and hymns – all and more were marshalled to the task of both attacking and defending slavery. At its starkest, both slaves and slave owners found strength and justification for their cause in their faith. In the end, both sides were to go to war convinced that God was on their side.

  ‘The Awakening’ had a major impact upon the slaves. Black churches were already well established (most notably in Philadelphia), but the Methodist and Baptist initiative of taking their message directly to the slaves set in train that most powerful of American movements: the emergence of a dissenting voice among armies of black Americans. In the Caribbean, as we have seen, Methodists and Baptists had been the first to bring the transforming qualities of their faith to the slaves. What emerged in the USA was that potent mix already evident in the Caribbean: black preachers, the Bible (and the slaves’ own interpretation of its message), and a physical place where slaves could worship and meet beyond the reach and control of their masters. Above all, here was a message that promised a better life, in this world and the next. In the thirty years before the American Civil War, the voice of enslaved Christians was to prove one of the most galvanising and inspirational elements in the rising denunciation of US slavery.

  For their part, slave owners feared slave literacy and warned about slave Christianity: reading, writing, the Bible, gathering to worship, preaching or being preached to – all had an unsettling impact on slaves. They learned
, they discussed, they organised and planned, in and around their churches. Enslaved Christianity became not merely a crucible for private and communal worship, but a means to assemble independently of their owners. Black churches, black preachers, black faith and black congregations, all converged to form a potent and critical force in the way the enslaved coped with the world around them. The church also offered hope – hope of a better life both here and in the hereafter – and it enabled slaves to cope with the harsh realities of slave life.

  The abolitionists’ aim after 1830 was to win support for their belief that slavery was wrong and sinful. Slavery was ‘a sin – always, everywhere, and only a sin’. On 1 January 1831, William Lloyd Garrison launched his abolitionist paper the Liberator, helping to prompt an evangelical religious revival that was fired by the belief ‘that slavery was the most God-defying sin of all’.[21] The Liberator quickly attracted a large readership, notably among blacks. Garrison, along with the wealthy abolitionist and social reformer Gerrit Smith and supported by a number of churches, was intent on ‘immediate abolition’. The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), formed in 1833, was also backed by north-eastern philanthropists and reform sympathisers. All this evolved under the long shadow cast by the slave upheavals in Jamaica and the subsequent move to end slavery in the British colonies. The Jamaican slave revolt – the Baptist War of 1831–2 – seriously alarmed Southern slave owners: they looked at Jamaica and concluded that here, once again, was proof – if more were needed after Haiti – that you tampered with slavery at your peril. Jamaica helped to stiffen their resolve to resist the siren calls for black freedom.