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Making Waves on the Black Atlantic: The Case of John Anderson

2012; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0144039x.2012.669898

1743-9523

Jeannine Marie DeLombard,

Race, History, and American Society

Abstract The once celebrated, now neglected case of John Anderson reveals a rare moment of conflict between two modes of black publicity in Anglo-American law and letters on the eve of emancipation. As a fugitive from justice as well as from service, Anderson marked a disruption in the legal–literary continuum linking the colonial gallows tradition to the antebellum slave narrative. Eluding the due process that affirmed the criminous slave's legal personhood, Anderson ultimately could not perform the civic eligibility modelled by other internationally famous former fugitives such as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. Notes Harper Twelvetrees, ed., The Story of the Life of John Anderson, the Fugitive Slave (London: William Tweedie, 1863). C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 1, The British Isles, 1830–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 535n3. Ibid., 480. Founded by Chesson in 1859, rededicating itself to the cause of the freedpeople in the United States, the LEC renamed itself the London Emancipation Society in November 1862. Jean Fagan Yellin, ‘Incidents Abroad: Harriet Jacobs and the Transatlantic Movement’, in Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 167. Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004), 139, 151–153. ‘Two Negro Murderers Arrested in Canada’, Liberator, 21 September 1860, [151]. The other man was subsequently released due to lack of evidence. The Liberator erroneously describes the 28 September 1853 killing as taking place in 1854. See Patrick Brode, The Odyssey of John Anderson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 38, 9. Efforts had been made to capture Anderson over the winter of 1853–54; he was arrested in March 1860 and released, before being arrested again on 1 September 1860, after which he was shuttled from the Simcoe, Norfolk County jail, to the Brantford jail in Brant County, to the Toronto jail, then back to Brantford. Although previously the extradition request had been tendered by the Missouri governor, on ‘2 October 1860 the United States Department of State formally asked the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lyons, for Anderson's extradition’ (Brode, Odyssey, 37). ‘Monthly Summary’, Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 January 1863, 2. Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999); Nat Brandt and Yanna Kroyt Brandt, In the Shadow of the Civil War: Passmore Williamson and the Rescue of Jane Johnson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007). The modern novels inspired by the Johnson and Garner cases, respectively, include Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child (1996) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). Brode, Odyssey; R.C. Reinders, ‘Anglo-Canadian Abolitionism: The John Anderson Case, 1860–1861’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 19, no. 1 (1975): 72–97; Robert C. Reinders, ‘The John Anderson Case, 1860–61: A Study in Anglo-Canadian Imperial Relations’, Canadian Historical Review 56, no. 4 (1975): 393–415; Paul Finkelman, “Internal Extradition and Fugitive Slaves: The John Anderson Case,” Brooklyn Journal of International Law 18, no 3 (1992): 765–810. Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 12. Brode, Odyssey, 53, 102. ‘John Anderson’, Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 July 1861, 164. ‘The Fugitive Slave, John Anderson’, Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 May 1861, 109. Thomas Henning to Louis Chamerovzow, 17 December 1860, c32/42, Anti-Slavery Papers, Rhodes House, Oxford, quoted in Reinders, ‘John Anderson’, 399; ‘Fugitive Slave’, 109. Thomas Henning was the secretary of the Toronto Anti-Slavery Society; Chamerovzow succeeded Scoble as BFASS secretary and Anti-Slavery Reporter editor. ‘Fugitive Slave’, 109. Ibid., 110; ‘John Anderson’, 164. ‘John Anderson’, 164. Twelvetrees, Story, v–vi. Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 93. William Wells Brown, The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (Boston, 1855); John S. Jacobs, ‘A True Tale of Slavery’, Leisure Hour, 7, 14, 21 and 28 February 1861. Ubiquitous scholarly and abolitionist references to ‘stealing oneself’ notwithstanding, legal historian Thomas D. Morris finds that ‘no statute ever defined running away itself as an act of theft’ due to ‘the conceptual problem’ posed by ‘the intention of the act’: because runaways' intent was not to steal themselves for profit but to ‘transform their position from property to persons’ or some other motive, such as avoiding punishment or reuniting with family, such prohibited acts were a form of disobedience. Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 341. With the exception of accused felons like Anderson, fugitive slaves were, in the language of the Constitution, fugitives merely from service, not justice. See Jeannine Marie DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 60. Richard Slotkin, ‘Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800’, American Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1973): 3–31; Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 36–39; William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 33–44; Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 49–116. Andrews, Free Story, 41. See Slotkin, ‘Narratives’; Ronald A. Bosco, “Early American Gallows Literature: An Annotated Checklist,” Resources for American Literary Study 8 (1978): 81–107; Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and DeLombard, Shadow of the Gallows. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (1788; New York: Penguin, 1988), 332. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. Thomas P. Peardon (1689; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 4. Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 178–246. Douglass, Narrative, 18. Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 97–146. Among the many works on the abolitionist print commoditisation of formerly enslaved African Americans, see Augusta Rohrbach, Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Race, Realism, and the US Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). But see, also, Michael A. Chaney, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). Quoted in Reinders, ‘John Anderson’, 395. ‘ARTICLE X. It is agreed that the United States and Her Britannic Majesty shall, upon mutual requisitions by them, or their Ministers, Officers, or authorities, respectively made, deliver up to justice, all persons who, being charged with the crime of murder, or assault with intent to commit murder, or Piracy, or arson, or robbery, or Forgery, or the utterance of forged paper, committed within the jurisdiction of either, shall seek an asylum, or shall be found, within the territories of the other: Provided, that this shall only be done upon such evidence of criminality as, according to the laws of the place where the fugitive or person so charged, shall be found, would justify his apprehension and commitment for trial, if the crime or offense had there been committed: And the respective Judges and other Magistrates of the two Governments, shall have power, jurisdiction, and authority, upon complaint made under oath, to issue a warrant for the apprehension of the fugitive or person so charged, that he may be brought before such Judges or other Magistrates, respectively, to the end that the evidence of criminality may be heard and considered; and if, on such hearing, the evidence be deemed sufficient to sustain the charge it shall be the duty of the examining Judge or Magistrate, to certify the same to the proper Executive Authority, that a warrant may issue for the surrender of such fugitive. The expense of such apprehension and delivery shall be borne and defrayed by the Party who makes the requisition, and receives the fugitive’. Yale University Law School, The Avalon Project, British–American Diplomacy: The Webster–Ashburton Treaty, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/br-1842.asp. Reinders, ‘John Anderson’, 395–396. ‘The Case of John Anderson’, Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 June 1861, 133. Steven M. Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005), 200. Acknowledging ‘that it may be said to be inconsistent with that high degree of colonial independence, both in legislation and judicature, which has been carried into effect in modern times’, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn found that ‘nothing short of a legislative enactment, expressly depriving us of this jurisdiction, ought to prevent our carrying it into effect when called upon to do so for the protection of personal liberty’. ‘Anderson's Case’, Monthly Law Reporter 23, no. 11 (1861): 654. For contemporary analysis of the legal issues at stake, see ‘Anderson's Case’; ‘Juridical Society – Anderson's Case’, Jurist 7, no. 1 (23 February 1861): 73–74; Thomas Tapping, ‘The Case of Anderson, the Fugitive Slave: The Application for the Writ of Habeas Corpus and Judgment Considered’, Law Magazine and Law Review 11 (1861): 42–73, which included as a sort of an appendix, “an able paper, which in many points corroborates” Tapping's article, ‘The English Writ of Habeas Corpus’, reprinted from Upper Canada Law Journal and Municipal and Local Courts' Gazette 7 (March 1861): 53–59. ‘Case of John Anderson’, 135, 134. Quoted in Tapping, ‘Case’, 45. Somerset's lawyers did not adopt Sharp's argument. See Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery; or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England (London, 1769), 156, and An Appendix to the Representation (London, 1772), 4, 19–20. Twelvetrees, Story, 113. Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999). ‘Foreign Intelligence’, Christian Advocate and Journal, 14 February 1861, 53. For similar juxtapositions, see ‘Foreign News’, Christian Recorder, 16 February 1861, n. pag.; ‘The Cotton Fright in England’, ‘What England Thinks of the Blockade of Southern Ports’ and ‘The Canada Fugitive Slave Case’, New York Herald, 29 January 1861, 2. For a speech in Parliament similarly linking Anderson with southern cotton imports, see ‘Foreign Miscellany: The American Revolution, English Opinion’, Independent [New York], 14 February 1861, 6. Friends' Review, 2 February 1861, 351. While not addressing such portrayals, Brode's account is sensitive throughout to the ways in which Anderson was exploited, even commodified, by his supporters. See Brode, Odyssey, 65, 71, 76, 100, 107. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 81. Twelvetrees, Story, 147–48. Ibid., 148–150. David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Twelvetrees, Story, 113. ‘English Writ’, 71. ‘Extradition Cases: Canadian and British Law Courts’, Albion, 2 February 1861, 55. ‘Men and Things in Canada’, Albion, 23 February 1861, 91. Hamilton Daily Spectator, 14 December 1860, quoted in Brode, Odyssey, 26. Ibid. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJeannine Marie Delombard Jeannine Marie DeLombard is Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto, 104 Manning Avenue, Toronto, M6J 2K5, Canada.