On April 5, 1851, the Cambridge Chronicle reported that “an alleged fugitive named Robert Symmes was arrested in Boston on a warrant from Geo. T. Curtis, Esq., U.S. Commissioner. Symmes is alleged to be the slave of James Potter, of Chatham County, Ga.” In his struggle against arrest, Symmes allegedly “inflicted a wound” on the Boston policeman trying to apprehend him. Once Symmes was taken into custody, the lawyers representing him submitted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, but the petition was denied, leaving Symmes in custody at the Boston courthouse. The Chronicle article details the heightened security measures taken at the courthouse to prevent rescue attempts by local abolitionists, stating that “every arrangement was made to subdue immediately any attempt at open resistance.”
Symmes’ arrest, and the subsequent concerns about forcible resistance, came on the heels of another local case – that of Shadrach Minkins, who had been arrested in Boston in February 1851 and accused of being a fugitive from slavery in Virginia. Minkins had been arrested at the Boston coffeehouse where he worked by federal marshals posing as customers, making him the first person to be apprehended in New England under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Passed as part of the Compromise of 1850 between the so-called “slave states” and “free states,” this Act pushed the boundaries of state vs. federal laws around slavery. Under the new law, an enslaved person could no longer claim freedom by passing into a state or territory where slavery was illegal. Instead, federal authorities were empowered to enter into any area of the country to apprehend a person accused of escaping enslavement, and local authorities were legally compelled not to conceal an enslaved person and to aid in their capture and return to the enslaver.
In addition to forcing free states and municipalities to recognize the so-called “property rights” of enslavers from other states, the Fugitive Slave Act effectively allowed federal authorities and their local collaborators to capture and detain any person of Black ancestry as an accused runaway, whether they had been born enslaved or free.
Under the Act, a Black person anywhere in the country could be accused of being a runaway. The federal commissioners assigned to hear these cases allowed no testimony by Black witnesses or the accused themselves, so all that was needed was a sworn statement from a white person claiming that the individual apprehended was their “property.”
In addition, these commissioners would be paid $10 (the equivalent of about $400 today) if the fugitive was determined to be an enslaved person, but only $5 ($200 today) if they were determined to be free, giving them a tremendous incentive to declare Black people as escapees whether or not they had been born into slavery.
In the case of Minkins, a group of leading Black Boston abolitionists entered the courtroom where he was being tried, overwhelmed the guards and seized him, taking him to the relative safety of the Black community on Beacon Hill. Soon after, Minkins was taken across the river to the Cambridge home of the Rev. Joseph C. Lovejoy, whose brother Elijah – also an abolitionist – had been murdered by a proslavery mob in Illinois in 1837. Minkins was removed from Massachusetts and spirited north to Montreal along a path of safe houses that served as part of the Underground Railroad. Shocked by the actions of local abolitionists, federal and local authorities in Boston did not pursue Minkins and his rescuers, but the case got widespread attention and led to heightened security at the Boston courthouse for future cases, including that of Symmes.
Symmes disappears from the historical record after his arrest in Boston, and we are left to wonder whether he, like Minkins, was rescued and transported to safety in Canada or returned to enslavement in Georgia, where the Chronicle reported that “he has a wife and children at Savannah, who are free.”
But the significance of the Fugitive Slave Act continued to be discussed and debated at length by Black and white residents of Boston, Cambridge and the surrounding areas. Should law-abiding Massachusetts citizens help federal authorities in the capture and return of enslaved escapees? Did the “property” rights of those in states where slavery was legal supersede the right of the self-emancipated to seize freedom upon entering a free state? And, even if the Fugitive Slave Act were legally defensible as applied to those who had, in fact, been born into slavery, what would be the repercussions of effectively allowing any Black person, whatever their condition of servitude, to be seized off the street, held captive in a Northern jail and sentenced to a lifetime of enslavement in the South?
By the time of the Act’s passage in 1850, the United States had become increasingly polarized along sectional lines, and the federal mandate for Northern states to enforce the proslavery agenda of Southern states only fueled the fires of sectional division. In and around Cambridge, this provided leading abolitionists of all races with a rallying point as they argued against a legal system that was encroaching more and more egregiously on the antislavery laws of Massachusetts and neighboring states. In the decade leading up to the Civil War, the Fugitive Slave Act served as a stark example of what abolitionists had predicted would be the takeover of the national government by proslavery forces. Resistance to the Act by prominent local Blacks and whites alike helped to consolidate the abolitionist position and create a coordinated effort at legal and extralegal resistance to the slave system.
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