around Norwalk were sparked by “ministers, magistrates, lawyers, doctors, merchants and hatters.”13 Undoubtedly there were many ordinary persons who agreed with Mrs. Frances Breckenridge of Meriden: “Some of the sympathy for the slave might as well be given to the owner. Let any Northern housekeeper select the most idle, insolent, thievish and exasperating servant she ever knew or heard of and multiply by a dozen or two and she will have a faint idea of one of the trials of the Southern housekeeper.”14 Or with the two men who, having worked on a Southern plantation where there were slaves, came back to report that they “didn’t think niggers wuz fit fer ennythin but ter be made ter wuk fer white folks.”15
All during the decade, indeed, the Connecticut Colonization Society continued to preach its gospel of salvation-through-separation. One of its leading spokesmen was Willbur Fisk, president of the newly established Wesleyan University in Middletown, who declared in 1835:
African Colonization is predicated on the principle that there is an utter aversion in the public mind, to an amalgamation and equalization of the two races; and that any attempt to press such equalization is not only fruitless, but injurious… . Hence this society lifts up the man of color, at once from his connections and disabilities; and places him beyond the influence of the shackles of prejudice.16
Other colonizationists set forth the view that no good would befall the escaped slave in Canada, that Africa was his only hope. As one of them phrased it:
A few months since I was traveling near to Canada, and desiring to see the result of freedom, as they found it in their northern flight, with their eyes fixed on the pole star … I inquired about them, and I found that when they first came there they were docile and full of hope, but soon their appearances changed, they lost their buoyancy of spirits,—became indolent, unwilling to submit to the restraints of society which the whites submit to, and as a necessary consequence, a large number of them were in the penitentiary, and others are in the greatest state of want and wretchedness… . There is no advantage gained by going to Canada. Go and sit with the colored man, and ask him where do you find your best friends? And he will tell you among the colonizationists.17
But the free Negroes of Connecticut were saying no such thing. Hartford’s colored inhabitants adopted a resolution that the Colonization Society was “actuated by the same motives which influenced the Pharaoh when he demanded that the male children of Israel be destroyed.” Those of New Haven declared that they would “resist all attempts made for their removal to the torrid shores of Africa, and would sooner suffer every drop of blood to be taken from their veins than submit to such unrighteous treatment by colonizationists.”18 From the free Negroes of Lyme came “the sincere opinion that the Colonization Society was one of the wildest projects ever patronized by enlightened men.” From Middletown, where Joseph Gilbert and Jehiel Beman were among Negro leaders, came the question: “Why should we leave this land, so dearly bought by the blood, groans and tears of our fathers? Truly this is our home, here let us live and here let us die.”19
That most Connecticut Negroes shared such views is evident. In twenty years, from 1830 to 1850, only ten Negroes altogether sailed from Connecticut ports to Liberia—approximately one per eight hundred of population. It is possible that others sailed from ports in other states, but the total cannot have been great, for the number of emigrants sent to Africa by the Colonization Society from the entire country amounted to less than ten thousand in all the years from 1820 to 1857.20 In Negro eyes, the answer to the slavery problem remained what it had been: in the long run, abolition and equality; in the immediate moment, escape to free soil, preferably to Canada.
Despite all the violence and the legal penalties, there were citizens willing to help runaway slaves in any way they could. The Underground Railroad was now taking definite shape, and not even Connecticut’s own fugitive slave law of 1835 could stop it. This measure, supplementing the federal law of 1793, provided that “no person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up, on the claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” The fugitives who succeeded in reaching the Nutmeg State could look for no official help in their quest for freedom.21
But they could look for direct and immediate aid from dedicated abolitionists like Samuel J. May, who later stated that he had begun receiving fugitives “addressed to my care” at Brooklyn as early as 1834; and that he “helped them on to that excellent man, Effingham L. Capron, in Uxbridge, afterwards in Worcester, and he forwarded them to secure retreats.”22 They could look, too, to a climate of opinion that was slowly shifting in their favor. Under the impetus of William Lloyd Garrison and his Liberator, antislavery speakers were increasingly active, and abolitionist publications were growing in numbers, circulation, and influence. Books like Theodore Weld’s anthology American Slavery As It Is had nationwide impact.23 Connecticut had its own antislavery periodicals, too—the Christian Freeman, published in Hartford from 1836 onward, and the Charter Oak, founded in 1838. There was also one issued at New London, the Slave’s Cry. Their circulations were limited, yet the Charter Oak’s 3000 subscribers in 1839 compared favorably with the approximately 5500 readers enjoyed by the Connecticut Courant, a leading general newspaper, in the same era.24 It was estimated that by this time “the number of anti-slavery publications reached a total of over a million.”25 Much of the abolitionist writing was in the form of tracts, issued by the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which played up the barbarous treatment of slaves by quoting advertisements from Southern newspapers:
Ranaway, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off, I burnt her face, I tried to make the letter M.
Ranaway a negro man named Henry, his left eye out, some scars from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.
Ranaway a negro named Arthur, has a considerable scar across his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the goodness of God.
Ranaway a negro girl called Mary, has a small scar over her eye, a good many teeth missing, the letter A. is branded on her cheek and forehead.
Fifty dollars reward, for my fellow Edward, he has a scar in the corner of his mouth, two cuts on and under his arm, and the letter E. on his arm.26
Just how much influence such publications had in arousing public sympathy for the slave it would be impossible to determine, but it was sufficient to stir the ire of the Southern slavocracy. A meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, adopted resolutions against the “incendiary literature” of Northern abolitionists and mailed copies to “each incorporated city and town in the United States.”27 In Hartford and in New Haven, these Charleston resolutions were supported by mass meetings of proslavery citizens, who further resolved that abolitionists in Connecticut and elsewhere had “no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them in different states.”28
None the less, the abolitionist propaganda made itself felt in many groups, not least the General Assembly. In 1838, that body repealed the notorious Black Law that had struck down Prudence Crandall’s school; and it did so at the insistence of one of the measure’s original backers, Phillip Pearl, who had been converted to the antislavery cause by Theodore Weld. “I could weep tears of blood for the part I took in that matter,” Pearl said. “I now regard the law as utterly abominable.”29
In that same year the Assembly took an even more important step in the direction of freedom by enacting one of the most detailed personal liberty laws in the union. This measure, while not extending automatic emancipation to runaways who reached Connecticut, severely limited the activities of slave-hunters by providing that “no officer, or other person can remove out of the State any fugitive slave under
