Note from Stephen Puleo: I’ve been thrilled by the wonderful reader reactions to The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner’s Fight for a More Perfect Union, many of whom have written to let me know how much they enjoyed the book. But as with any work of history, some revealing stories had to be dropped for space and narrative reasons. And with Charles Sumner’s involvement in so many issues, the “some” becomes “many” – vignettes that shed light on this accomplished and complex man. Periodically, I’ll feature a “dropped story” in this blog space.
Dropped Story 2: A Charles Sumner Letter Electrifies the Nation
In one of the most celebrated and highly celebrated episodes of the antislavery era, Sumner uses his influence to free Pennsylvania abolitionist Passmore Williamson from jail.
In late May 1855, following the end of the Congressional session, Charles Sumner left Boston for a journey to the West, a section of the country he had long desired to see, but never had the opportunity to do so. With an uncertain political situation in Boston – would the Know Nothings continue to gain power? – and with tensions running high in Washington D.C. in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act passage, Sumner decided a prolonged break from politics would suit him and reinvigorate him for the anti-slavery battles ahead.
His journey westward presented him with a first-hand look at slavery, the institution he sought most to undermine. He traveled through Kentucky and Tennessee, and witnessed slavery often, convincing him time and again of its barbarity and vowing to redouble his efforts to eradicate it.
Glad to leave the slave states behind him, Sumner boarded a steamboat on the Mississippi and visited numerous places, along the river and wide of its banks. He then toured the Great Lakes, going as far as Lake Superior. On August 11, a beautiful Saturday morning aboard the steamer North Star, Sumner read the newspapers for the first time in two weeks. One story caught his attention and outraged him – so much so that he immediately wrote a letter to a Philadelphia man languishing in prison, which years later a fellow senator said, “not only cheered the prisoner in his cell, but electrified the Christian world.”
Vacation or not, Charles Sumner again was compelled to speak his mind on an injustice caused by slavery.
The prisoner was Passmore Williamson, a 33-year-old Philadelphia Quaker and abolitionist, whose arrest and incarceration would become one of the most publicized cases of the antislavery era, one that would inspire much of the North and infuriate most of the South.
An ardent abolitionist since he was twenty-years old, Williamson received word in July that John H. Wheeler, United States minister to Nicaragua, was traveling through Philadelphia to New York City, from where he would embark on a voyage to the Central American country. Accompanying Wheeler were three Virginia slaves whom he had purchased two years earlier, Jane Johnson and her sons, Daniel, age 12, and Isaiah, 7. Wheeler warned Jane at least twice that she was to talk to no one during their travels through Philadelphia.
But she disregarded his orders, and while Wheeler and other members of his party ate and drank at Bloodgood’s Hotel awaiting the trip to New York on July 18, Jane at least twice informed passing black men that she was a slave and, since she was in a free state, desired her freedom. Wheeler finished at the hotel, rejoined his slaves, and they boarded the Washington, a ship that was scheduled to sail from Philadelphia to New York at 5:00 p.m.
Williamson had been handed a hasty note from one of the people Jane contacted, boarded the ship at 4:30 p.m., located Jane and her sons, and announced that they were free according to Pennsylvania law. “If you want your freedom, come now,” he said. “If you go back to Washington, you may never get it.”
As a crowd gathered around the group, the final bell for going ashore rang and Williamson told Jane she must act at once if she desired her freedom. Jane rose from her seat only to be pushed down by Wheeler, who said, “Now don’t go, Jane.” As she tried to rise a second time, Williamson restrained Wheeler, and Jane and her sons – who were now crying in fear – were whisked off the ship into a waiting carriage by a group of black men who had followed Williamson aboard.
After Williamson released him, Wheeler tried to pursue his slaves, but was physically restrained by two blacks who threatened to “cut his throat from ear to ear,” according to one journalist’s account.
With the slaves liberated, Williamson presented his card to Wheeler and said he would assume full legal responsibility for his actions.
Wheeler wasted no time in making him pay.
Within hours, Wheeler had petitioned his old friend, federal and pro-slavery Democrat Judge John K. Kane, asking for a writ of habeas corpus against Passmore Williamson to produce Jane, Daniel, and Isaiah. Wheeler maintained that Virginia law granted him property rights over his three slaves. Pennsylvania authorities had no more right to confiscate his slaves than they would to impound a carriage or a horse that had conveyed him from Virginia to Pennsylvania – crossing state lines did not deprive an individual of guaranteed property rights.
Judge Kane issued the writ, which was served on Williamson on the morning of July 20. Williamson responded that he did not possess – and never had – the “bodies” of the three slaves, and therefore was unable to comply with the order to produce them in court. He knew only from compatriots that Jane and her sons were safe, but not their location.
Lawyers for both sides went back and forth for several days before Judge Kane, on the morning of July 27, charged Williamson with contempt of court, with his remarkable order containing two demonstrable falsehoods: that Jane Johnson did not desire her freedom, and that she was forcibly abducted against her will by Passmore Williamson. For his part, Williamson denied “that the prisoners were within his power, custody, or possession at anytime whatsoever.” For refusing to tell the truth, Kane sentenced Williamson him to prison for an indefinite period of time.
On July 27, at Moyamensing Prison, a cell door slammed shut on Passmore Williamson.
During the more than 100 days Williamson spent in prison, his case became a cause for both North and South, both for its legal implications on the slavery question and for the personal toll prison took on Williamson. Before public pressure caused Judge Kane to relent and release Williamson on November 3, the prisoner had missed the birth of his third child, nearly lost his business, and suffered a serious decline in his health.
Throughout Williamson’s imprisonment, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society kept up a drumbeat of publicity, selling a lithograph of Williamson in his cell, and spreading the story throughout the nation. He was allowed visitors, and Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were among a flood of well-wishers who trekked to see him. Expressions of sympathy poured in from virtually every northern state and Great Britain. Resolutions and petitions from various anti-slavery societies condemned Judge Kane and commended Williamson for his courage and integrity. Ministers preached sermons with Williamson as the hero of their message.
And then there was Charles Sumner’s August 11 letter to Williamson that eventually became public. Sumner called Williamson’s conviction and imprisonment an “unmitigated outrage” and Kane’s decision allowing a slave-master to voluntarily import his slave into the free states as “more odious than preposterous.”
Yet, Sumner assured Williamson, there was a sliver of positive news in his imprisonment – slaveholders had overplayed their hand and it would cost them. They had shown “overflowing madness” with their cruel enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, “felonious administration” with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but now they had enraged almost all Northerners “in the imprisonment of an unoffending [American] citizen.”
He urged Williamson to stay strong behind bars. “It is a privilege to suffer for truth,” he said in admiration.
Sumner’s letter lent the weight of a United States senator to Williamson’s cause, and as word trickled out of its arrival at the prison, Northern newspapers and public opinion stepped up their attacks on Judge Kane and hammered away at the injustice of Williamson’s confinement. Two weeks after Sumner’s letter became public, the New York Tribune deemed the judge to be one of the most tyrannical legal despots of all time. Judge Kane had imprisoned a brave and good man in what was the most outrageous abuse of power the paper had ever seen. The Tribune and other northern papers called for Kane’s impeachment, pointing out that Williamson’s “only hope of release is in the weight of public indignation and loathing.” Sumner urged friends to continue the public pressure to rescue Williamson from “an unjust judgment.”
Kane, clearly succumbing to northern pressure, and perhaps dismayed that he had become something of a folk hero in the South, finally ordered Williamson released on November 3. The Philadelphia Daily Sun saw the benefits of Williamson’s three-month prison sentence. “[It] has made more abolitionists, and excited a more rancorous feeling against slavery than all the debates, feuds, and broken compromises in the past.”
Charles Sumner “rejoiced” that this latest travesty would demonstrate to all citizens that slaveholders were possessed with madness, but “madness which precedes a fall.”
Nonetheless, for the remainder of 1855 and into 1856, the North-South battle over slavery moved to “bleeding Kansas,” where violence and mayhem rocked the territory following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Such violence would eventually lead, in May 1856, to Charles Sumner’s caning on the floor of the Senate, a shocking episode that set the nation irrevocably on the road to Civil War.