A cold, hard Southern tyrant, Mason of Virginia, created the black statute; a sleek, pleasant Northern traitor, Fillmore of New York, then sitting in the Presidential chair, unleashed it, and it burst forth in mischief and ruin, upon the homes of the poor. Such a law! The fugitive to be haled before a Commissioner; no Judge, no Jury; his former slavery sworn to by any unknown claimant, he was to be sent into bondage; five dollars to the Commissioner if he set him free, ten dollars if he made him a slave. Six months imprisonment, and fifteen hundred dollars fine to any person who gave a fugitive food to eat, water to drink, a room to rest in. Happy, free America!
At first Boston was horrified at the law, and aghast at the course of Webster. But the first shock over, Boston became filled with patriotic ardor, and the black statute not only rose in favor, but slavery itself became the theme of eulogy. It was about that period that an eminent Philadelphia surgeon rushed one morning, with a glowing face, before the college-class, and holding up a horrid mass before their astonished eyes, screamed, in a voice trembling with passionate enthusiasm: “Oh, gentlemen! gentlemen, what a be-a-utiful cancer!” With an enthusiasm not less rapturous than his, the Whig and Democratic politicians of that period expatiated upon the charms of the obscene and filthy oligarchic wen which hung from the neck of the South, and the black, accursed conglomerated pustule of a Fugitive Slave Law, which inoculated from it, now deformed the whole face of the North. Slavery was a perfectly paradisaical and divine institution; agitation against it must cease: the Fugitive Slave Law was instinct with the purest and noblest patriotism—the fugitive men, women and children must be hunted down by it with alacrity, or the South would dissolve the Union. To this effect the beautiful emasculate eloquence of Everett moved forth in balanced cadence; to this effect raved rancorous in Bedlam beauty, the intervolved, inextricable, splendor-spotted snarl and coil of Choate’s bewildering orations; to this effect, all up and down the land, for two years, rolled Webster’s dark and orotund malignant thunder. Everywhere in their train a host of blatherers and roarers spouted and bawled—stop agitation—execute the Slave Law—save the Union! It was a period of absolute insanity. The Union was not in the slightest danger—proof of that, the stocks never fell. The South would no more have dared to dissolve the Union than a man would dare to swim in the Maelstrom. But the Southern insanity of tyranny demanded the North for its man-hunting ground; the northern insanity of avarice yielded the demand to get southern trade; between the slaver and trader, the politicians’ insanity of power made its game; and the pretext for all was the salvation of the Union. Millions of the people cried, “Save the Union!” A thousand presses reëchoed the cry. An immense majority of the clergy echoed it again from their pulpits. The things ministers said in defence of slavery and its black statute were only less incredible than the manner in which they were received. For instance, the Rev. Dr. Dewey, an eminent divine, was reported to have declared in a public lecture that he would send his own mother into slavery to save the Union; a storm of rebuke at once burst upon him from the anti-slavery people, and this sentiment was not considered satisfactory even by citizens of the highest respectability: whereupon Dr. Dewey explained that he had not said he would send his own mother into slavery to save the Union, but that he had said he would consent that his own brother or his own son should go into slavery to save the Union—and the citizens of the highest respectability considered this sentiment as highly satisfactory! So amidst such talk and such applause as this, the pro-slavery furore pothered on, and the North was incessantly urged to enforce the black statute as the price of safety to the nation, and incessantly reminded of the priceless privileges the Union secured to us. Perhaps it did—but not least prominent among them was the priceless privilege of paying the debts of South Carolina, and the other priceless privilege of hunting men and women on the soil of the old patriots and Puritans.
Meanwhile the Reign of Terror had begun, and the hellhound of a law was ravening on its victims. It raged chiefly in the great cities, and from these the fugitives, their years of safety over, were flying by thousands to the wild Canadian snows. But the Abolitionists were upon the law. Upon it Theodore Parker dashed the bolted thunder of his speech. Upon it burst the inextinguishable Greek fire of eloquence from the fortressed soul of Wendell Phillips. Upon it, in a word, all the men and women, the Britomarts and Tancreds of the glorious minority, hurtled like a storm of swords. The Free Soilers, too, were up, and did gallant service. Giddings, Seward, Wilson, Burlingame, Mann, Sewall, Chase, Sumner, all the gentlemen and chevaliers of that league, were in the field. Charles Sumner shook Faneuil Hall with words that beat with the blood of all the ages. In New York, Beecher burst upon the monster with tempests of generous flame, and the Hebraic speech of Cheever fought with the prowess of the Maccabees. All over the North, in country towns and in some city pulpits, there were valiant clergymen, whose souls went forth in arms. The Free Soil presses everywhere, became catapults and mangonels, showering a hail of invective and argument upon the law. But the monster, panoplied in legal forms, and girt with a myriad of defenders, was hard to kill. Beaten from some places, crippled sorely, it still lives, and even at this hour, in New York, in Philadelphia, and in other cities, drags down and devours its victims. At the period under notice, its power was strong in Boston. Boston, in the branding phrase of Theodore Parker, had gone for kidnapping. Her Webster, her city officers, her aristocracy, her courts, her prominent newspapers, her traders and her rabble, were all hostile to the unhappy fugitives. That law, however, was doing the most powerful anti-slavery service ever done in America. But its results—for it broke up the Whig party, sowed death in the bones of the Democratic party, sent Charles Sumner to Congress, made the Republicans a power in the land, and taught the people a detestation of slavery which they had never known before—its results were not then fully deposited, or at least clearly seen; they were still operant to their end; and all noble hearts were bowed in sickening sorrow, for it seemed as if liberty, humanity, civilization, all, were going down forever.
It was, then, this hell-dog of a law that had made it no longer safe for the fugitives in Boston. And who is he who shall undertake to paint the agony of those men and women? He must dip his pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse who aims to do it. Their years of security were over. The first news of the passage of the law drove scores of them to Canada, and day by day they were flying. Numbers of their people had already been taken from other cities into slavery, when the first slave case, that of Shadrach, occurred in Boston. Ten or twelve gallant black men burst into the court-room, and took Shadrach from his foes. Boston howled. Soon another fugitive, Sims, was dragged before the Commissioner. No rescue for him; the court-house was ringed with chains, under which the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and other Judges, crawled to their seats; the cutlasses and bludgeons of the Government begirt the captive, and fifteen hundred Boston gentlemen offered to put muskets to their shoulders, if desired, to insure his being taken into bondage. “The Fifteen Hundred Scoundrels,” Wendell Phillips christened this brigade of wretches, praying that bankruptcy might sit on the ledger of every one of them. Nine days the Abolitionists and Free-Soilers fought the case, impeded the Jedburgh justice—the bitter mockery of that infamous trial; then Sims was environed with cutlasses and pistols, marched, at early dawn, to the vessel a Boston merchant volunteered for his rendition, and sent into slavery. The only news of him after that, was that he had been scourged to death at Savannah. His capture and murder completed the ghastly alarm of the Boston fugitives. From that hour they lived in an atmosphere of unimaginable fear and gloom. Frequent reports that kidnappers were in town, harried many of them off to join the thirty thousand fugitives who had fled from the tender mercies of America to seek refuge in the bleak wilds or towns of Canada. Churches were suspended; business arrested; families were broken up; wives and husbands separated; fathers had to leave their sons; sons their fathers; parents their children; for the peril was often immediate, and there was no time for delay. At every fresh rumor that kidnappers were in town, the colored people would hurry up from their occupations to their homes—some to fly, aided by their richer brethren, or by the compassion of the anti-slavery people—others to gather in the streets in excited discussion—and others, with that desperate and splendid courage which is one of the distinctive virtues of the negro, to fortify their dwellings, and prepare for a death-grapple with their hunters. Thick-crowding cares and fears, distress, alarm, foreboding, agony, few friends, a thousand foes, this was their bitter portion.
Such, briefly and faintly sketched, was the state of affairs among these poor people in the City of the Fugitive at that period. What wonder men of heart desponded? It was not a despised Abolitionist, but an Abolitionist whom none despise—the Lord of Civilization standing calm above the ages, he whose spirit slowly wins the world from wrong; it was Francis Bacon of Verulam who said that when Commerce dominates in the State, the State is in its decline. Commerce dominated then. Science, arts, laws, religion, morality, humanity, justice, liberty, the rights, the hearts of mankind—all must give way to it. Rapacious and insolent, it ruled and flourished over all.
Yet there were rays of hope and auguries of better days in Boston even then, and the new was stirring in the old. Emerson was saturating the intellectual life of the city, and through it the mind of America, with the nobleness of his thought. Theodore Parker, gigantesque in learning, courage, devotion to mankind, less a man than a Commonwealth of noble powers, was in his pulpit, with a strong and growing hold on the minds and hearts of the people. The Abolitionists were toiling terribly with all their splendid might of conscience, their genius and their eloquence, to rouse the North to a settlement with the Slave Oligarchy. The Free-Soilers were indefatigably laboring to prevent the base and brutal Democrats from crowding out free American labor from the Territories and incoming States with the labor of Congo and Ashantee; and laboring also to get the Government out of the control of the Slave Power. In a word, Liberty was fighting her battle with Trade, and even the defeats of Liberty are victories.
Add to all that a fair ray of hope and promise still lingered at that period in the air of Boston, cast from a little society of Socialists, under the leadership of William Henry Channing, which had been dissolved about two years before. They had lit their torch from the old faith that Human Life has its Science, discovering which we rear earth’s Golden Age. It was the old idea of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras; it was the dream of Campanella and More; it was the divine and deathless purpose of Bacon, and the holy labor of Fourier. The Socialists in Boston had made a limited but profound impression with it, which had outlasted their dissolution. The light of the torch still lived when the torch itself was extinguished; and amidst the sordor and selfishness and cruelty of the period, it showed that the tradition and the promise of the Good Time Coming were immortal.
CHAPTER II.
THE FENCING SCHOOL.
Among other things in Boston at that period there was a fencing school and pistol gallery, kept by an old soldier of the First Empire, Monsieur Hypolite Bagasse. The way to it was up a long, narrow boarded alley which led out of Washington street, ran straight for about twenty steps, and then with the natural disposition of every street, avenue, alley, lane or court in Boston, made an effort to achieve the line of beauty and of grace by slanting off to the left, in which bent it was followed by the blind, brick walls, covered in one spot with a patch of theatre posters on the left hand side of it, and by a large dingy old brick building, preternaturally full of windows, on the right hand side of it. In this building was the fencing school.