EDITOR’S NOTE: Nullify Now! presents a special tribute to human freedom with the story of Joshua Glover. Learn about resistance to slavery in one of history’s greatest acts of nullification – and how it applies to events today – in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 5, 2011 – get tickets and information here – or by calling 888-71-TICKETS

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It was all About States’ Rights – Northern States’ Rights

The Underground Railroad was a metaphor. Yet many textbooks treat it as an official name for a secret network that once helped escaping slaves. The more literal-minded students end up questioning whether these fixed escape routes were actually under the ground. But the phrase “Underground Railroad” is better understood as a rhetorical device that compared unlike things for the purpose of illustration. In this case, the metaphor described an array of people connected mainly by their intense desire to help other people escape from slavery. Understanding the history of the phrase changes its meaning in profound ways.

Even to begin a lesson by examining the two words “underground” and “railroad” helps provide a tighter chronological framework than usual with this topic. There could be no “underground railroad” until actual railroads became familiar to the American public–in other words, during the 1830s and 1840s. There had certainly been slave escapes before that period, but they were not described by any kind of railroad moniker. The phrase also highlights a specific geographic orientation. Antebellum railroads existed primarily in the North–home to about 70 percent of the nation’s 30,000 miles of track by 1860. Slaves fled in every direction of the compass, but the metaphor packed its greatest wallop in those communities closest to the nation’s whistle-stops.

Looking into the phrase “Underground Railroad” also suggests two essential questions: who coined the metaphor? And why would they want to compare and inextricably link a wide-ranging effort to support runaway slaves with an organized network of secret railroads?

The answers can be found in the abolitionist movement. Abolitionists, or those who agitated for the immediate destruction of slavery, wanted to publicize, and perhaps even exaggerate, the number of slave escapes and the extent of the network that existed to support those fugitives. According to the pioneering work of historian Larry Gara, abolitionist newspapers and orators were the ones who first used the term “Underground Railroad” during the early 1840s, and they did so to taunt slaveholders (1). To some participants this seemed a dangerous game. Frederick Douglass, for instance, claimed to be appalled. “I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad,” he wrote in his Narrative in 1845, warning that “by their open declarations” these mostly Ohio-based (“western”) abolitionists were creating an “upperground railroad”(2).

Publicity about escapes and open defiance of federal law only spread in the years that followed, especially after the controversial Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Anxious fugitives and their allies now fought back with greater ferocity. Douglass himself became more militant. In September 1851, he helped a former slave named William Parker escape to Canada after Parker had spearheaded a resistance in Christiana, Pennsylvania that left a Maryland slaveholder dead and federal authorities in disarray. The next year in a fiery speech at Pittsburgh, the famous orator stepped up the rhetorical attack, vowing, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers” (3). This level of defiance was not uncommon in the antislavery North and soon imperiled both federal statute and national union. Between 1850 and 1861, there were only about 350 fugitive slave cases prosecuted under the notoriously tough law, and none in the abolitionist-friendly New England states after 1854 (4). White Southerners complained bitterly while abolitionists grew more emboldened.

Yet students often seem to imagine runaway slaves cowering in the shadows while ingenious “conductors” and “stationmasters” devised elaborate secret hiding places and coded messages to help spirit fugitives to freedom. They make few distinctions between North and South, often imagining that slave patrollers and their barking dogs chased terrified runaways from Mississippi to Maine. Instead, the Underground Railroad deserves to be explained in terms of sectional differences and the coming of the Civil War.

One way to grasp the Underground Railroad in its full political complexity is to look closely at the rise of abolitionism and the spread of free black vigilance committees during the 1830s. Nineteenth-century American communities employed extra-legal “vigilance” groups whenever they felt threatened. During the mid-1830s, free black residents first in New York and then across other Northern cities began organizing vigilant associations to help them guard against kidnappers. Almost immediately, however, these groups extended their protective services to runaway slaves. They also soon allied themselves with the new abolitionist organizations, such as William Lloyd Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society. The most active vigilance committees were in Boston, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia led by now largely forgotten figures such as Lewis Hayden, George DeBaptiste, David Ruggles, and William Still (5). Black men typically dominated these groups, but membership also included whites, such as some surprisingly feisty Quakers, and at least a few women. These vigilance groups constituted the organized core of what soon became known as the Underground Railroad. Smaller communities organized too, but did not necessarily invoke the “vigilance” label, nor integrate as easily across racial, religious and gender lines. Nonetheless, during the 1840s when William Parker formed a “mutual protection” society in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or when John Brown created his League of Gileadites in Springfield, Massachusetts, they emulated this vigilance model.

These committees functioned more or less like committees anywhere—electing officers, holding meetings, keeping records, and raising funds. They guarded their secrets, but these were not covert operatives in the manner of the French Resistance. In New York, the vigilance committee published an annual report. Detroit vigilance agents filled newspaper columns with reports about their monthly traffic. Several committees released the addresses of their officers. One enterprising figure circulated a business card that read, “Underground Railroad Agent” (6). Even sensitive material often got recorded somewhere. A surprising amount of this secret evidence is also available for classroom use. One can explore letters detailing Harriet Tubman’s comings and goings, and even a reimbursement request for her worn-out shoes by using William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872), available online in a dozen different places, and which presents the fascinating materials he collected as head of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. Anyone curious about how much it cost to help runaways can access the site where social studies teacher Dean Eastman and his students at Beverly High School have transcribed and posted the account books of the Boston vigilance committee. And the list of accessible Underground Railroad material grows steadily (7).

But how did these Northern vigilance groups get away with such impudence? How could they publicize their existence and risk imprisonment by keeping records that detailed illegal activities? The answer helps move the story into the 1840s and 1850s and offers a fresh way to for teachers to explore the legal and political history of the sectional crisis with students. Those aiding fugitives often benefited from the protection of state personal liberty laws and from a general reluctance across the North to encourage federal intervention or reward Southern power. In other words, it was all about states’ rights—Northern states’ rights. As early as the 1820s, Northern states led by Pennsylvania had been experimenting with personal liberty or anti-kidnapping statutes designed to protect free black residents from kidnapping, but which also had the effect of frustrating enforcement of federal fugitive slave laws (1793 and 1850). In two landmark cases –Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) and Ableman v. Booth (1859)—the Supreme Court threw out these Northern personal liberty protections as unconstitutional.

Students accustomed to equating states’ rights with South Carolina may be stunned to learn that it was the Wisconsin Supreme Court asserting the nullification doctrine in the mid-1850s. They may also be shocked to discover that a federal jury in Philadelphia had acquitted the lead defendant in the Christiana treason trial within about fifteen minutes. These Northern legislatures and juries were, for the most part, indifferent to black civil rights, but they were quite adamant about asserting their own states’ rights during the years before the Civil War. This was the popular sentiment exploited by Northern vigilance committees that helped sustain their controversial work on behalf of fugitives.

That is also why practically none of the Underground Railroad agents in the North experienced arrest, conviction, or physical violence. No prominent Underground Railroad operative ever got killed or spent significant time in jail for helping fugitives once they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line or the Ohio River. Instead, it was agents operating across the South who endured the notorious late-night arrests, long jail sentences, torture, and sometimes even lynching that made the underground work so dangerous. In 1844, for example, a federal marshal in Florida ordered the branding of Jonathan Walker, a sea captain who had been convicted of smuggling runaways, with the mark “S.S.” (“slave-stealer”) on his hand. That kind of barbaric punishment simply did not happen in the North.

What did happen, however, was growing rhetorical violence. The war of words spread. Threats escalated. Metaphors hardened. The results then shaped the responses the led to war. By reading and analyzing the various Southern secession documents from the winter of 1860-61, one will find that nearly all invoke the crisis over fugitives (8). The battle over fugitives and those who aided them was a primary instigator for the national conflict over slavery. Years afterward, Frederick Douglass dismissed the impact of the Underground Railroad in terms of the larger fight against slavery, comparing it to “an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon” (9). But Douglass had always been cool to the public value of the metaphor. Measured in words, however —through the antebellum newspaper articles, sermons, speeches, and resolutions generated by the crisis over fugitives—the “Underground Railroad” proved to be quite literally a metaphor that helped launch the Civil War.

Matthew Pinsker is Associate Professor of History and Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History at Dickinson College. He has written two books about Abraham Lincoln and currently is working on a book about the Underground Railroad.

NOTE: This article was originally published in the December, 2010 issue of History Now from the Gilder Lerhman Institute of American History. It’s re-published here with permission of the author and History Now.

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(1) Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (1961; Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 143-4.
(2) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 101 (http://www.docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html). 
(3) Frederick Douglass, “The Fugitive Slave Law: Speech to the National Free Soil Convention in Pittsburgh,” August 11, 1852 (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4385). 
(4) See the appendix in Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law: 1850-1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), 199-207.
(5) Out of these four notable black leaders, only David Ruggles has an adult biography available in print –and it was published this year. See Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
(6) Jermain Loguen of Syracuse, New York. See Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 410.
(7) For these materials and others, visit the Additional Resources Page (below).
(8) See secession documents online at The Avalon Project from Yale Law School
(http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/csapage.asp).
(9) Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, CT: Park Publishing, 1881), 272 (http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglasslife/douglass.html).

The following is an excerpt from the new book, Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America, by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano. The excerpt is drawn from Chapter Five, entitled “The Civil War,” published here with permission from the publisher, Thomas-Nelson:

One of the greatest misconceptions of American history is that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Those who subscribe to this belief see President Abraham Lincoln as the benevolent leader who made unimaginable sacrifices in human blood to wipe out America’s greatest sin. While the human sacrifice is indisputable and the sin was monumental, the war’s purpose was not to free blacks from the shackles of bondage. Rather, the Civil War was fought with one purpose in mind: To preserve the Union at all costs. And, to put it in Lincoln’s terms, with no ifs, ands, or buts. You’d better agree with the president, or else.

THE SETTING

The North and South were divided both morally and economically. As the previous chapters have chronicled, the debate over slavery had firmly gripped the country in the decades preceding the Lincoln presidency. Since the country’s founding, the states and the federal government kept deeply rooted passions concerning slavery and abolition at bay by constantly compromising. The balance of free states and slave states was maintained as slavery expanded. States were given autonomy to deal with the issue of slavery as they saw fit, so long as they did not interfere with another’s property rights. But the Dred Scott case placed the federal government firmly on the side of the slaveholders, redefining the slavery provisions in the Constitution in a way that created a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to obtaining the human moral equality for which so many Americans yearned.

In addition to the country’s division over slavery, there was the concern over which economy the federal government favored—the South’s agrarian economy or the North’s commercial interests. Interestingly enough, the Dred Scott decision did not accurately reflect to which side of the debate the federal government was committed. Northern states had gained control of the federal government as the 1850s drew to a close, and the South found itself on the defensive. Its agricultural economy, sustained by slave labor, was attacked on both moral and economic grounds.

A QUESTIONABLE STANCE

Abraham Lincoln emerged as a candidate for the presidency at a time when national anticipation was at its peak. How would a new president balance the interests of the North and South? In the wake of Dred Scott, would he steer the country toward democracy or slaveocracy? Adding to the uncertainty were Lincoln’s own unclear and often contradictory statements over slavery itself. Lincoln never argued that slavery was unjust. Rather, he asserted that it threatened to weaken the Union and its democratic values. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln stated: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.” A skilled politician, Lincoln appealed to the antislavery interests of Northern abolitionists as well as moderates in border slave states who were opposed to racial equality.

But the common tale that Lincoln was a sympathetic and heroic defender of black freedom is simply a myth. As Union armies met the forces of the Confederacy on the battlefield, he openly argued, “What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.” It is important to analyze the magnitude of what Lincoln says here. He admits that the emancipation of blacks will only happen because it is of assistance to the Union; slaves are only pawns in the game of politics and warfare he is playing. Lincoln places the freedom of blacks on a low priority compared to his desire to unify the nation, and his words here seem more becoming of a Confederate Army officer than the so-called Great Emancipator. Yet it is the latter title that we’ve all been taught to attribute to Abraham Lincoln. In my opinion, such a title is the least deserved sobriquet accorded any president. Lincoln’s rhetoric notwithstanding, Southerners were uncertain about his commitment to protecting their slavery interests. His consistent manipulation of the issue of slavery along the lines of Union preservation earned him the fraudulent title of a political moderate in the North, but Southerners were still adamant about having a Southerner as president.

LINCOLN IGNITES WAR

Despite Southern opposition, Lincoln was nonetheless elected as the sixteenth president of the United States in 1860. Far from over- whelming support, he received only 39 percent of the popular vote, and his name was stricken from the ballot in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. In South Carolina the legislature chose not to have candidates for president on the ballot, in apparent anticipation of secession. Only 1.1 percent of white voters supported Lincoln in Virginia. These were the same states that would secede from the Union the following year.

The Southern states were increasingly discontented as their interests were of secondhand concern to the federal government. Without political influence in Congress, the Southern legislatures still retained the right to nullification and secession. Nullification was the legal theory by which states could declare federal laws unconstitutional, while secession was the right claimed by states to separate from the Union. As soon as Lincoln became president, states’ rights disappeared in the shadow of national power when he declared secession to be illegal. During his first inaugural address, Lincoln associated secession with anarchy as he stated,

Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. . . . In 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was to form a more perfect Union. . . . It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resol[ution]s and ordinances to that effect are legally void.

However, Lincoln chose to ignore the historical underpinnings of the American political system; the right of secession followed from the American Revolution as the colonists separated from the British Empire and declared their independence. President Lincoln also made the faulty assumption that the Union takes precedence over the states, as the goal was “to form a more perfect Union.” He failed to recognize that states are free and independent, and combined they form the Union. As Ronald Reagan would say in his first inaugural address over a century later, “the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.” This subtle distinction is an important aspect of State sovereignty. The United States was founded on the ideals that federal power could be challenged by the states. Lincoln overlooked the fact that the states had formed a voluntary agreement and did not have the ability to surrender their sovereignty forever to a centralized power.

Nullification was also a fundamental state right to prevent federal domination. States enjoyed the right to use nullification as a protective measure against unconstitutional federal laws by making them ineffective against their citizens. Nullification had become a states’ rights tradition, and both the North and the South exercised it prior to 1861. The most famous examples of this in the North centered around Northern states’ personal liberty laws, a series of laws that were passed in response to the Fugitive Slave Act. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court found these laws, and thus nullification, unconstitutional—in the 1842 case Prigg v. Pennsylvania—Northern states, yes, Northern states, continued to enact laws that criminalized the return of fugitive slaves in direct defiance of federal law. Lincoln’s attempt to trample the states’ sovereignty, even the rights of those opposed to slavery, only heightened the conflict between the advocates of a supreme, unchecked federal government and the advocates of a modest central government, tempered by nullification.. South Carolina started the trend of secession in December 1860. Concerned with preserving the Union at all costs, Lincoln was determined to use military force to bring the rebel states into line. But he did not want to be portrayed as an aggressor and needed the South somehow to ignite the conflict. This would make the Southerners look like the aggressors and would give the impression that Lincoln simply had no choice but to declare war as a defense against aggression.

The solution devised by Lincoln triggered a war that would kill seven hundred thousand Americans. Advised by his top military commanders that an incoming ship would be considered a threat to Confederates and would prompt an attack, Lincoln deliberately sent a ship of food provisions as well as additional armed soldiers to Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The Confederates fell for the ploy and fired the first shot. Lincoln responded by sending armed warships and deployed a total of seventy-five thousand troops to invade all of the Southern states.

His plan, however, did not go unnoticed. Northern newspapers were quick to inform the public that Lincoln had instigated the Fort Sumter incident. The Jersey City American Standard wrote, “there is a madness and ruthlessness” in Lincoln “which is astounding . . . this unarmed vessel . . . is a mere decoy to draw the first fire from the people of the South, which act by the pre-determination of the government is to be the pretext for letting loose the horrors of war.” The Providence Daily Post also wrote, “Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.” These headlines and stories were replicated by other newspapers in the North. Lincoln’s plan to bring the country into a war was no longer a hidden political strategy.

A substantial number of free blacks from the North offered to serve in the Union army, but their attempts were met with federal opposition. Freedom and equality were not intertwined in the North, and blacks were constantly reminded of this disparity. Requests by blacks made to the War Department went unheard, often for political reasons. President Lincoln was ultimately concerned with the border slave states possibly abandoning the Union if blacks’ status were elevated to that of a soldier in the Union army.

Lincoln’s position on slavery was made even more evident in the first few weeks of war. The fighting immediately prompted Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to secede from the Union. In a clear display of Lincoln’s priorities, the President proposed to permit the continuation of slavery in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware so long as those states remained in the Union. To save the Union from further division, Lincoln was willing to continue the subjugation of blacks.

In the end, this proposal worked, as those States chose not to secede. However, many citizens from those border states still joined the Confederacy. Both Kentucky and Missouri had two state governments, one supporting the Confederacy and the other supporting the Union.

By May 1861, a total of eleven Southern states had seceded from the Union and established their own nation, the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy was comprised of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The Confederacy’s Constitution contained provisions that expressly protected the institution of slavery, limited the power of the new central government, and clearly reflected state sovereignty. Lincoln refused to recognize the Confederacy, declared secession to be a violation of the Constitution, and effectively declared war on the people of the Southern states that refused to recognize his presidency.

Andrew P. Napolitano [send him mail], who was on the bench of the Superior Court of New Jersey between 1987 and 1995, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His newest book is Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America, (Nelson, 2009) His previous books are A Nation of Sheep, The Constitution in Exile and Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws.

Copyright © 2009 Andrew P. Napolitano

The Establishment Media is hyping the dire prophecy of a Russian professor that the United States will have a bloody civil war and “disintegrate,” after which the secessionist regions will be absorbed by other nations. The Establishment Media Moral: we must patriotically embrace our federal government or face horrendous consequences.

Certainly a full-blown civil war would be hellish. With modern weapons the casualties could exceed all our other wars. The disruption of food production and distribution chains in our specialized economy could trigger famine. To be imperially dominated by other nations could well mean the loss of our civil liberties.

However, our political establishment is playing a rhetorical game when it strives to link secession and civil war. There won’t be a civil war if we the people support a constitutional amendment to allow the fifty states of the United States to peacefully become fifty independent nations through voluntary disunion.

And why should we do that? Because unlike Alexander Hamilton in his parlor-game speculations known as The Federalist Papers, we’ve had generations of firsthand experience with the defects of federal government. We see today that every alleged benefit that Hamilton hypothesized for federal government has been perverted in practice.

Hamilton proposed that a federal government would resist foreign domination. In reality, our politicians prostitute our superpower military at every sufferance. We fought one world war to make the world safe for Imperialism and another to make it safe for Communism. Today our politicians bow to Israel, tomorrow possibly China.

Hamilton’s strength-in-numbers argument failed during the Cold War, when our military stockpiled thousands of nuclear weapons yet still feared a first strike attack. What if, though, Massachusetts had seceded with only ten warheads? Wouldn’t the Soviets have refrained from attacking sovereign Massachusetts for fear of losing ten of their cities?

Disunion would protect the planet from thermonuclear destruction. By consolidating our vast arsenal of nuclear overkill under federal command, however, we equip a lone fallible human to destroy civilization – a power we would not want in the hands of the wisest saint, and wise saints aren’t elected President.

We witnessed the crippling weakness of centralized command in the 9-11 attacks, when the Commander-in-Chief was too busy hiding to bother with scrambling interceptors. And if it can’t protect its own headquarters from airline hijackers, what does a superpower military protect us from?

Moving to economics, Hamilton warned in The Federalist Papers that if the states remained independent, they would enact high tariffs that would cripple prosperity. A federal government, he asserted, would promote free trade. That myth, of course, didn’t survive the first session of Congress.

With Congress as battlefield, every state wages perpetual economic warfare against every other state. Our representatives legislate national tariffs (and regulations, subsidies, and import quotas) to benefit producers in their home states by afflicting consumers in other states, and then compete for “pork barrel” appropriations that loot the national treasury.

As one observer remarked, the attitude of the Michigan automakers in seeking a federal bailout is, “You won’t buy our crummy cars, so we’ll make you pay for them anyway.” Under federal subjugation, the citizens of forty-nine other states must endure such exploitation with little recourse except vengeful reciprocity.

Hamilton also claimed the national debt would encourage the wealthy to “Invest in America.” Instead, politicians “invest” in their patrons at the country’s expense. Raise taxes to pay off debt, and politicians borrow more. Hamilton called the national debt a “blessing,” but aren’t state and local debts “blessings” enough?

Today’s federal government infringes citizen rights far more than did the British Crown of Hamilton’s time. Hamilton’s fantasies about the benevolence of an all-powerful central government may be excused as historical naïveté, but today anyone who insists the federal leviathan is other than maliciously imperious is either blind or bribed.

How can anyone not recognize the monster is uncontrollable, when governors must resign over petty corruption but a President deceived us into war and bankrupted the nation yet stood divinely unimpeachable – as if the ancient pagan ritualism that equated kingship with godhood never went away.

An America of sovereign states, whose governments are more human-sized, will dismiss egomaniacs who proclaim that a citizen’s “glorious duty” is to sacrifice in “full measure” to the Federal Imperium. Let’s abolish the Cult of Federalism, before our wannabe-caesars can extract more of that kind of blood-drenched “glory” from us.

Today it is our corrupt federal government that drags us toward collapse. Disunion will help us become more secure and prosperous, and affirm the ideals of liberty for which the American Revolution was fought. To accomplish this won’t require civil war – just a constitutional amendment, and common sense.

Joe Schembrie is a writer who lives in Bellevue, Washington.

Copyright © 2009 LewRockwell.com