The Georgian slave hunters [Knight and Hughes] soon felt the force of this collective resistance all over Boston. They could hardly step from their hotel before street boys pelted them with refuse, screaming obscenities. Others stalked them, throwing stones alongside the boys. The cries went up everywhere: âSlave hunters!â âThieves!â âBloodhounds!â
Poster warning of slave hunters searching for Ellen and William Craft. Love the inclusion of a date at the bottom - including the year! - because who knows how long a poster has been up?
They emerged from a courthouse in Boston to behold a vast, multiracial army of men, women, and children â about 2,000 people, by John Knightâs estimate â together shouting the refrain that Knight had come to loathe: âSlave hunters! Slave hunters! There go the slave hunters!â Some called for feathers and tar.
A hackney coach soon drove up with a pair of white horses, wild with excitement. With the sheriff pushing through the crush, Hughes managed to jump inside, but ânot without losing his hat and getting somewhat hustled about.â Knight, meanwhile, was caught behind and forced to retreat, as protesters hissed and jeered, and tried to break the carriage doors. Eyewitnesses would vividly recall the scene: The crowd became like one body, single-minded, with long, strong arms, as it covered the coach and rocked it from side to side, intent on taking the passenger. One man, a journalist wrote, smashed open a window, aimed his weapon, and, for a quivering moment, had Hughes within his sights. But another protester pulled him down. The driver raised his whip and cracked it high, and with that, the coach convulsed forward, doors akimbo, people hanging off all sides.
The carriage clattered over the Craigie Bridge, speeding through the toll, driver and rider hoping that the fare would deter the protesters, who clung hard. Above all the others, one âcolored manâ straddled the roof, riding âin triumph through the streets of Cambridge.â It was protest in motion.
Only many miles later, in a landscape of cattle markets, slaughterhouses, and racetracks, did the carriage at last outrun the protesters, rolling to a stop at Porterâs Tavern in North Cambridge. But the driver, spooked by the ordeal, refused to continue service, leaving Hughes to find his own way back to Boston, where he finally reunited with Knight at the United States Hotel, their Boston headquarters.
(from Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife, excerpted in the Boston Globe)
I've been thinking about this description of the popular, well-organized, widespread resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act since I read about it last year. (The article and book have more excerpts, including descriptions of exactly how all this got organized - late night meetings, a lot of legwork, a lot of using every tool available, both bureaucratic and physical. I particularly loved the description of how the slavehunters spent half their time in Boston under arrest, for slander (calling William and Ellen slaves), attempted assault, attempted kidnapping, as well as an assortment of nuisance charges - public smoking, swearing, and, after Hughes' escape to Cambridge, fast driving.)
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