Monthly Archives: May 2022

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Fourteen, Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes, Part Two

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A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Fourteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Two
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
_The_Pro-Slavery_Riot_on_November_7_1837_Death_of_Rev_E_P_Lovejoy--Alton-Illinois-Wikimedia-Commons-59K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Eight. The picture comes from Wikimedia Commons.

ABOLITIONIST ELIJAH P. LOVEJOY WAS KILLED BY A MOB in Lincoln's Illinois twenty-four years before the War Between the States.

He had been a "schoolteacher and minister from Maine" educated "at Colby College and Princeton" who early on was more concerned about "the evils of blasphemy and drinking" than slavery.1 In those years, he was living in St. Louis, Missouri and described himself as: not in favor of immediate emancipation, and not an abolitionist.

That changed in April, 1836 when Lovejoy saw the charred remains of a free black man, Francis McIntosh, "a porter on a ship docked in St. Louis," who had been drinking and killed a policeman after an altercation following a fight between two whites.2

McIntosh had been taken to jail but a mob formed that night and came for him. The sheriff "fled, leaving McIntosh alone and locked in a cell." The mob

broke in, carried McIntosh to a locust tree on the commons, and tied him to the tree with a chain. Rails, planking, and wood shavings were piled around his legs. Some of the wood was wet, chosen so it would not burn too quickly.3

An "elderly black man was given 75 cents to keep the fire burning through the night."4

The next day Minister Lovejoy "went to the scene" and a few days later, on May 5, 1836, the headline of his newspaper, the Observer, was: "Awful Murder and Savage Barbarity." In the article he wrote:

'We stood and gazed for a moment or two upon the blackened and mutilated trunk---for that was all which remained---of McIntosh before us, and as we turned away, in bitterness of heart, we prayed that we might not live.'5

Lovejoy did not question McIntosh's guilt but did not like the mob violence.

A judge whose name was "Luke Lawless," believe it or not, was in charge of an investigation and blamed violent black men and "publications like the Observer." Nobody was charged.6

Lovejoy was converted and "began his campaign, calling for the emancipation of all enslaved people, and despite growing public outrage, he would not stop."7

St. Louis was a "booming frontier town" and Missouri was a slave state, one of six slave states that would later fight for the Union the entire war.

There was much strong Confederate support in Missouri and duel governments; and Missouri was represented in the Confederate Congress, and had a star in the Confederate flag, but did not secede.

Lincoln and the North were glad to have six slave states fight for them. Three of those Union slave states still had slavery months after the war ended. Those three did not end slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment kicked in, in December, 1865.

The six Union slave states prove the war was not fought over slavery. If it was, the North would have abolished slavery in the Union slave states immediately but they did the opposite. They supported the Corwin Amendment, which left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, in the places where slavery already existed. Illinois was one of the five Union states ratifying the Corwin Amendment before the war made it moot.

The other Union slave states besides Missouri, were Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which came into the Union as a slave state, ironically, within weeks of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

The owners of the Observer had asked Lovejoy to stop his antislavery rants but he refused. After several attacks on his home and offices, the owners encouraged him to move "his family and the newspaper across the Mississippi River to Alton, in the free state of Illinois" which he did. He arrived with his family safely but while the Observer's press was on the docks "a small group crossed the river from St. Louis and dumped it into the river."8

A "former sea captain from Massachusetts spearheaded the effort to replace the press."9

There is a bit of farce in a sea captain from Massachusetts helping to replace Lovejoy's abolitionist press at a time when Boston, Massachusetts was one of the largest slave trading ports on the planet along with New York, and Portland in Lovejoy's home state of Maine. All were carrying on a vigorous illegal slave trade and still making huge fortunes as they had when the slave trade was legal.

W.E.B. Du Bois writes in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870:

'The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late [1862] the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.'10

The above quotation refers to 1862, which was a year into the War Between the States, and 54 years after the slave trade was outlawed by the United States Constitution.

Subscriptions to the Observer increased and Lovejoy received money from other abolitionists around the country. He was now a full-fledged radical abolitionist:

He sent letters to leading newspapers throughout the United States asking for their positions on slavery, then published their answers with his own critical commentary. He published a passionate letter he had written in the voice of a slave. He attacked Alton's Fourth of July festivities with a bitter editorial that anticipated Frederick Douglass's famous address, 15 years later, "What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?" He editorialized against the slave trade in Washington, D.C., saying that slavery in the nation's capital made every man a slaveholder. He became secretary of a local antislavery group, and he proposed establishing an antislavery society in Illinois. A rumor circulated that from his pulpit one Sunday he had sworn that if his wife died, he would 'marry a black woman before Saturday.'11

What is missing from a virtue-signaling abolitionist like Elijah Lovejoy is a realistic plan to end slavery. Even Lincoln admitted he did not know how to end slavery at that time.

Northern states purported to phaseout slavery with gradual, compensated emancipation but most Northern slaves were sold back into slavery in the South just as they were to be freed, such as before the slave's 21st birthday. This is a disgraceful but absolute fact. Alexis de Tocqueville joked that Northerners did not end slavery. They just changed the slave's master from a Northern to a Southern one.

The 1830s was a time of violence against abolitionists who were denounced as "'amalgamationists, dupes, fanatics, foreign agents, and incendiaries,'" according to Leonard L. Richards, "author of a study of antiabolitionist mob action in Jacksonian America."12

William Lloyd Garrison "was dragged through Boston at the end of a rope" in 1835. He luckily was rescued by some individuals and put in jail for the night for his own protection.13

Alton, Illinois was in a financial crisis in 1837 but Lovejoy showed no sympathy for them. He charged them with being speculators and said we have "'become a nation of gamblers.'" Other publications editorialized against Lovejoy.14

On September 5, 1837 Lovejoy wrote to his mother that "'my press has again been mobbed down.'"15

Before dawn on November 7, 1837 "a new press for the Observer arrived on the steamboat Missouri Fulton." It was guarded as "it was hoisted to the top floor of a stone warehouse."16

That night "about 60 volunteers again guarded the warehouse" but things were quiet so most left after a while.17

At 10 p.m. the mob arrived: "'We want that printing press!'"

The mob threw rocks and battered the warehouse door. Many were drunk and firing guns. A man was killed which added to the mob's fury.18

A "makeshift" ladder outside the warehouse allowed James Rock to climb and "set fire to the wooden roof" with flaming pitch. As it burned

Lovejoy and Royal Weller ran from the building and aimed up at Rock, but Dr. Thomas Hope and Dr. Horace Beale, covered by darkness, had perfect sight of the open door, and they shot both.19

Weller survived but "Lovejoy took five bullets, including three in his chest and one in his stomach. He staggered back into the warehouse and fell dead at the feet of his defenders."20

The fire was put out and the press pushed into the street and destroyed.

By the wee hours, the crowd was mostly gone, and at daylight, Lovejoy's dead body was carried home in a wagon that was mocked by bystanders the whole way.

Two days later, at age 34, Lovejoy was "buried in Alton between two oak trees. A cold, heavy rain fell on the small group that gathered for the funeral."21

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Fifteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Three

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Thirteen, Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes, Part One)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 163.

2 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 164.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 165.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 179. Du Bois is quoting the Continental Monthly, January, 1862, p. 87, the article "The Slave-Trade in New York."

11 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 166.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 167.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 168.

20 Ibid.

21 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 169.

 

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Chap-Eight-NOTES-1-80k
Chap-Eight-NOTES-2-95K
Chap-Eight-NOTES-3-52K

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Thirteen, Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes, Part One

Posted on by | 3 Comments
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Thirteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part One
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Chap-Eight-MAIN-5-11-22-84K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Eight. The picture comes from page 162.

DESPITE HOW GOOD COMPLICITY IS in proving the North's slave trading and barbarism toward its insurrectionist slaves such as burning them at the stake or tying them to a wagon wheel and beating them to death with crow bars, this book is still written by virtue signaling New Englanders who are determined to establish that the War Between the States was fought over slavery.

It never occurs to those people that their book, Complicity, proves the war was not fought over slavery.

The authors show in great detail that the North was utterly dependent on Southern cotton, "the backbone of the American economy." Southerners grew the cotton and Northerners did everything else:1

Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams  of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves---in the South.2

But it never occurs to them that without Southern cotton their country was dead. The imminent economic devastation already had Northerners calling for war, which Lincoln was glad to give them in March and April, 1861, when he sent five hostile naval missions to Pensacola, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina to get it started.

Several Northern newspapers such as the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post saw exactly what Lincoln was doing. In an editorial entitled "WHY?" published the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, April 13, 1861, it wrote:

We are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.

Northerners were about to lose their shipping industry because most of it was cotton, and they would lose their manufacturing industry because most of it manufactured for its captive market in the South.

Southerners wanted to buy higher quality goods from Europe at competitive market prices and not be forced to buy overpriced Northern goods from Northern monopolies with prices jacked up by Yankee tariffs.

So, Complicity's Chapter Eight opening statement that "The start of the Civil War as a political war over slavery..." is as false as their previous statement that America was founded in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620.

I am proud to say that America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia in the South in 1607, thirteen years before the Puritans finally got around to coming here.

Complicity gets back on track stating that immediate abolition of slavery like William Lloyd Garrison wanted "would mean social and economic chaos."3

In 1831

the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was that promoted by the American Colonization Society, which had chapters in the North and the South. The society's goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America, no matter how strongly they felt about slavery, thought that blacks and whites could or should ever coexist in the same society.4

Abraham Lincoln supported the American Colonization Society and believed all his life that blacks should be sent back to Africa or into a climate they could survive. See Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); and Forced into Glory, Abraham Lincoln's White Dream by Lerone Bennett, Jr. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000).

This chapter's "Hated Heroes" are radical abolitionists such as Prudence Crandall, Elijah Lovejoy, and John Brown, though John Brown is a murderer who did more than anybody else to cause a war in which 750,000 died and over a million were maimed.

One of the major reasons for Southern secession was the North's support of Brown's violence and plans for wide-scale murder in the South. Their celebrating him as a hero convinced Southerners they would not be safe in a Union dominated by supporters of John Brown.

Nor would they be safe in a Union controlled by the Republican Party. The Republican Party printed hundreds of thousands of Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis, which called for the throats of Southerners to be slit in the night. It distributed them coast to coast as a campaign document in the election of 1860.

Prudence Crandall in 1831 was a twenty-eight year old Quaker who "opened a school in Canterbury, Connecticut, to which she would soon welcome black girls and, by doing so, invite its destruction."5

Crandall's school started all white but a young black woman, Sarah Harris, asked to be admitted and after soul searching, Crandall admitted her.

Whites started leaving Crandall's school so she threw out the remaining whites and advertised in Garrison's Liberator that "her school would reopen 'for the reception of young ladies and little misses of color.'"6

Most in Canterbury opposed Crandall:

Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby, refused to treat her black students. A week after the Liberator ad appeared, gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Judson, also a close neighbor and, like Harris, a former trustee of Crandall's school, spoke at a hastily called town meeting. No school for 'nigger girls' would ever stand across the street from his house, he reportedly vowed, promising that if black students did show up he would use a colonial law to have them arrested as paupers.7

Two abolitionists wanted to speak but were shouted down and "confronted with 'fists doubled in their faces' and driven from the church where the meeting was held."8

In the next year there were attempts to "crush the school" that went from "town meetings to court trials to the appeals court" and

Crandall and her students increasingly became targets of community anger. Local merchants would not do business with the school, and the stage driver refused to transport its students. Boys threw manure into the school's well; neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water. Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building---Crandall kept one of the rocks on her mantel---and its students were followed through the streets, hooted at and harassed.9

There was hostility to black education across the North.

The Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire opened in March 1835 and by the summer a "demolition crew hitched a long train of oxen to the academy and dragged it off its foundation" reportedly with students still inside.10

In New Haven, Connecticut in September 1831, residents "voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale." Their rationale was:

'What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician?'11

In May 1833 "The Connecticut legislature passed the 'Black Law,' making it illegal for out-of-state students of color to attend a school without local permission."12

Legislators

called in a Hartford phrenologist, an expert in the then-credible "science" of determining character from the shape of a person's skull. The phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens. Although the committee report that backed the law decried the 'horrid traffic' in human slavery and admitted a need to help 'the unhappy class of beings, whose race has been degraded by unjust bondage,' it concluded: 'We are under no obligations, moral or political, to incur the incalculable evils of bringing into our own state colored immigrants from abroad.'13

Canterbury's "citizens rang church bells, fired guns, and lit bonfires to celebrate the new law" then a month later "on June 27, 1833, authorities arrested Crandall and her younger sister Almira, who had joined her as a teacher, for breaking the law."14

Almira was let out as a minor and Crandall was offered bail by numerous supporters but she would not accept it and dared them to put her in jail.

She only spent one night because "Respectable white women did not go to jail." Townspeople

complained bitterly that abolitionists spread the lie that Crandall had been placed in the cell that a notorious wife strangler had recently occupied. Later, Crandall explained that she'd been put in a room that the condemned man had stopped in on his way to being hanged.15

She said the jailer had been "'very polite.'"

There were two more court actions. In the first, there was a hung jury.

In the second, Crandall was found guilty, but appealed.

Prominent citizens were part of the trial on both sides and it ended up being an important case because it was decided that blacks could not be citizens. It was quoted later as a precedent in the Dred Scott case.

There was much rhetoric in the appeal in July 1834. The law was called "'obnoxious'" by Crandall's lawyer, William W. Ellsworth, because, supposedly, only Southern states had laws like it: "'It rivets the chains of grinding bondage and makes our State an ally in the unholy cause of slavery itself.'"

The hypocrisy of New Englanders even in this time period is breathtaking. Apparently Ellsworth did not know that Connecticut and the rest of New England were enthusiastic slave traders who had, until recently, been sending their ships to Africa to return with poor Africans chained to their decks in vomit and feces to make the money that built New England and the North.

And after the slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808, New Englanders carried on a vigorous illegal slave trade, so much so that W.E.B. Du Bois said Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.

Also Ellsworth, on his hypocritical high horse, apparently hadn't heard about the Northern and Western states that had "obnoxious" laws forbidding blacks from even visiting much less living there.

Ellsworth's opposing attorney, chief prosecutor Andrew Judson said:

'The consequences will inevitably destroy the government itself, and this American nation---this nation of white men---may be taken from us and given to the African race!'16

The Appeals Court dismissed the case on technicalities.

Crandall "held on to her school" during the trials. After she lost she said:

'It is my opinion that the colored scholars under my care made as good, if not better progress than the same number of whites taken from the same position in life.'17

Crandall had a lot of courage and determination but:

On the night of September 9, 1834, Crandall, her husband, and some of her students were inside the Canterbury schoolhouse when they heard loud voices outside and then banging on the doors. Glass was shattered and windows were ripped from their frames. Men invaded the first floor of the school and started overturning furniture.18

The attackers "may have tried to set the building on fire."

Crandall gave up and moved west "following in the path of her father, who, threatened for supporting her and her school, had already moved west."

She settled in Elk Falls, Kansas, and died in 1890.19

 

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Fourteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Two

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Twelve, Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad)

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 7.

2 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvi.

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 155.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 157.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 158.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 159.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 160.

16 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 161.

17 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 163.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Chap-Eight-NOTES-1-80k
Chap-Eight-NOTES-2-95K
Chap-Eight-NOTES-3-52K

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Twelve, Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad

Posted on by | 5 Comments
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Twelve
Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
5-5-22-Blog-Pict-125K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Seven. The picture come from page 138.

NORTHERN KIDNAPPING GANGS were "organized gangs who, like outlaws from the Old West, became legends in their own time."1 Their prey were free blacks in the North whom they would kidnap in various ways and sell into slavery in slave states.

One of the most notorious gangs was led by a woman, Patty Cannon, "said to be so strong she could jerk a 300-pound sack of grain to her shoulders, or a grown man off his feet." Her chief accomplice was her son-in-law identified as "'the celebrated Joseph Johnson, negro trader.'"2

They operated "from the Delmarva Peninsula of Maryland and Delaware, both [Union] slaves states, to free Pennsylvania where the Philadelphia waterfront was one of their favorite hunting grounds."3

Kidnappers, like slave ship captains, murdered their victims when they thought they needed to. In April, 1829, "the skeletons of one adult and three children were discovered on a farm that Patty Cannon had occupied. One of the children, thought to be about seven years old, had a crushed skull."4 Cannon had clubbed "the child to death in an effort to get rid of incriminating evidence" according to the testimony of a former gang member.5

In New York, in 1835, kidnappings "led to the creation of the first important black self-defense association." It was led by David Ruggles who later provided "the most famous fugitive slave in American history, Frederick Douglass" shelter.6

The Fugitive Slave Act, which was part of the Compromise of 1850, "gave new federal protections to slave catchers and, by extension, better cover to kidnappers posing as slave catchers." As a result, many free blacks in the North left for Canada.

Another gang, the vigilante "'Gap Gang'" in Lancaster, Pennsylvania "terrorized free blacks for years" and participated in an 1851 gun battle known as the Christiana Riot that left a slave owner and three blacks dead.7

The opposition to the Gap Gang was led by William Parker, an escaped slave, who had lived in Pennsylvania for a decade and "had begun to fight back against the Gap Gang." In his memoir, he wrote:

Kidnapping was so common . . . that we were kept in constant fear. We would hear of slaveholders or kidnappers every two or three weeks; sometimes a party of white men would break into a house and take a man away, no one knew where; again a whole family might be carried off. There was no power to protect them, nor prevent it.8

Parker thought most whites in the area were "'negro-haters' who didn't much care who the Gap Gang seized."9

In Cincinnati in January 1856:

[A] Kentucky slave owner and federal agents cornered a group of fugitives, including a mother named Margaret Garner who had vowed never to let her children return to slavery. As the agents broke into their hiding place, Garner cut her young daughter's throat and was trying to kill two of her boys.10

A "federal magistrate ruled that Garner and her surviving children should be returned to their owner" who sold them South. Tragically:

On the journey, literally down the river into slavery, Garner's youngest child died along with two dozen other people in a boat accident. Garner eventually was sold in New Orleans.11

More common methods of kidnapping were to lure victims "under the guise of law. Kidnappers might accuse their victims of petty crimes or enlist accomplices to testify, falsely, that they were escaped slaves." Blacks "accused of being runaways had almost no legal recourse."12

Blacks in Philadelphia in 1799:

felt sufficiently threatened by kidnappings that they submitted a petition to Congress equating them with the African slave trade. Callous men, it said, 'are employed in kidnappings those of our Brethren that are free' and 'these poor, helpless victims like droves of cattle are seized, fettered and hurried into places provided for this horrid traffic, such as dark cellars and garrets, as is notorious at Northurst, Chester-town, Eastown and divers other places.13

Patty Cannon, mentioned earlier, "became locally famous as 'the fascinating hostess' at the tavern owned by her daughter's second husband, Joe Johnson." A Cannon biographer wrote that "'Patty Cannon was fond of music, dancing and sensual pleasures'" and was "'As strong as a man, she was witty, black-eyed and the reputed brains and accomplice of a notorious kidnapping ring.'"14

Her husband, Jesse Cannon, "was rumored to have been sentenced to have his ears nailed to a pillory, and upon release to have his earlobes cut off."15

In 1826, Joseph Watson, mayor of Philadelphia:

received letters from two plantation owners in Rocky Springs, Mississippi. A man named Ebenezer Johnson had shown up there weeks earlier trying to sell several youths. One of the plantation owners, John Hamilton, told the mayor he'd become suspicious of Johnson after sixteen-year-old Samuel Scomp secretly told him he'd been kidnapped from Philadelphia. As proof, Scomp removed his shirt to show Hamilton the scars from beatings he said he'd suffered on his journey south.16

Hamilton got a magistrate "who demanded to see Johnson's ownership papers" which consisted of a bill of sale from his brother Joe. Both Johnsons were part of the Cannon gang.17

The Mississippians, "more suspicious than ever"

let Ebenezer leave, supposedly to get better proof of ownership. But Hamilton kept the young slaves and, while Johnson was gone, he and a neighbor questioned them more closely. They took a sworn statement from Scomp and included it in their letter to Mayor Watson, urging him to publish the details and start an investigation. Watson did both, and later took his own deposition from Scomp.18

Scomp said he was never a slave but an apprentice in New Jersey who ran away to Philadelphia to find work.

A "mulatto man" named Smith offered him a quarter to "help unload watermelons."

Scomp was led to a sloop where two other men tied his hands. One said Scomp was an escaped slave. The other was Joseph Johnson, a member of the Cannon gang and Smith's accomplice in this scheme.19

Smith brought in four more captives that day, and that night, the sloop sailed. A woman was added and the now-six captives ended up at Patty Cannon's house then on another ship for Alabama then headed 600 miles to Mississippi.

Along the way a small boy died from frostbite and beatings.

Hamilton could easily have kept all the captives but he was a wealthy planter who "disapproved of illegal slave dealings."

Mayor Watson, in Philadelphia, "obtained indictments against the Johnson brothers and two accomplices" but back in Mississippi, Ebenezer Johnson sued Hamilton for the return of his supposed property.

Ultimately, Scomp and "another of the originally kidnapped boys" got back to Philadelphia.

In December, 1826, Mayor Watson "received another letter from Mississippi, this one from Natchez, sent by former governor David Holmes and a friend. It said new slaves in the neighborhood were claiming to have been kidnapped from Philadelphia by Joseph and Ebenezer Johnson. Enclosed was a statement from  one of the victims, a boy named Peter Hook."20

Hook's story mirrored Scomp's.

Hook said "he was born in Philadelphia and in June 1825 had been lured aboard Joe Johnson's boat by a black man. He'd soon found himself chained in the hold with four other boys" and later "they were chained to the floor of an attic." Two girls were captives "elsewhere in the attic."

They were in the attic for six months.

Hook said he was sold in the Natchez area with three other boys "for $450 apiece."

Watson "got more arrest warrants" but by 1828, "only 10 of the three dozen kidnap victims eventually identified had been returned."21

The black man who had lured Scomp and Hook onto Johnson's boat was John Purnell. He was convicted of "two counts of kidnapping," fined $4,000 and "sentenced to 42 years in jail." Another black man died waiting on his trial.

The Johnson brothers escaped with their kidnapping loot to start their own plantations.

Patty Cannon stayed in the area but the skeletons of some of her victims were discovered on her former farm.

She was indicted with Joe and Ebenezer but only Patty was jailed. She died "amid rumors that she'd poisoned herself." One account said she had admitted to "killing 11 people with her own hands, and to poisoning her husband."

In 1841, in a book The Narrative and Confessions of Lucretia P. Cannon, the "first murder was of an infant girl killed in April 1822. In its formal language, the indictment noted, 'Patty Cannon with both her hands about the neck of the said infant . . . did choke and strangle, of which said choking and strangling the said female child . . . then and there instantly died.'"22

Cannon "was buried in a pauper's grave," her body exhumed later and "her skull studied by phrenologists." Her skull was later "passed on to the public library in Dover, Delaware."23

Other kidnapping gangs continued to operate such as George V. Alberti's that was "more cunning."

Alberti was eventually convicted of fraud because he tried to deliver a victim "to an apparently honest slave owner" who said the victim was not who Alberti said he was.

That didn't end his career but later he was convicted in another case and the judge said at his sentencing:

'Think for a moment how great the magnitude of stealing an infant, born in a free state, and binding it in the galling chains of slavery for a little money . . .  This case is without parallel in atrocity, and is the most aggravated, legally, of any of its kind that has been presented to an American court of justice.'24

He was fined $1,000 and sentence to ten years hard labor but later the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania, William Bigler, pardoned him.

Alberti "said that he'd captured more than 100 blacks" in his kidnapping career.

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Thirteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part One

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eleven, Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates, Part Two)

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 139.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 139-140.

6 Ibid.

7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 141-142.

8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 142.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 142-43.

13 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 143.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 145.

15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 146.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 147.

19 Ibid.

20 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 148.

21 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 149.

22 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 151.

23 Ibid.

24 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 152.

 

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Chap Seven NOTES 1 5-5-22 153K
Chap Seven NOTES 2 5-5-22 39K