Douglass not only battled slavery and racism, but also whites within the abolitionist movement, one of whom even told him to be less articulate in public and to put a little more of the “plantation” in his speeches.
The African Americans
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One of the most fascinating stories that Still recounted, and which received enormous international attention, began on March 23, 1849, when Henry Brown (1816–1889)escaped slavery by having himself mailed from Richmond to Philadelphia in a wooden crate. Outraged that his family, including his pregnant wife, had been sold away to North Carolina, Brown had trusted friends seal him up in a wooden crate and ship him by Adams Express to abolitionists in Philadelphia. When Still and his antislavery colleagues pried open the box, out popped Brown, reaching out his hand, saying, “How do you do, gentlemen?” and then singing the hymn “I waited patiently for the Lord, and He heard my prayer.”
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The notorious Fugitive Slave Act put every free black person in the North at risk of a legally sanctioned kidnapping by suggesting that no person of African ancestry could really be an American citizen, an implication affirmed by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. The South sent its agents—slave catchers and kidnappers—north to recapture runaways and enslave free people.
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Seen through the lens of what today we call the “Black Atlantic,” the arrival of this tiny band of Africans at Jamestown in 1619 symbolizes a complex process that drew every major European power, scores of colonial settlements, and hundreds of ethnic groups on three continents into an economic vortex that enriched both Europeans and African monarchs and merchants, helped spread both Christianity to Africa and Islam to the Western Hemisphere, and made the success of the fragile New World settlements possible.
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By 1570, historian James Sweet says that in Mexico, black Africans actually outnumbered people born in Europe by 3 to 1, including 20,569 Africans and 6,644 Spaniards; 11,067 criollos (persons of pure Spanish descent born in Spanish America); 2,435 mulattos (of mixed black and white ancestry); and another 2,437 mestizos (of mixed European and Native American ancestry). Of these, about 2,000 were free Maroons (descendants of former slaves).
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The great slave-trade historian David Eltis estimates that at least 352,800 slaves had been shipped to the New World by 1625.5
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The significance of the Mum Bett case and the other freedom suits of the 1780s lay more in how they reflected public attitudes in the post-Revolutionary period, rather than in how they shaped opinion or the law. While the various freedom suits did not legally end slavery in the commonwealth, they certainly indicated how juries were likely to decide such cases.
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Dessalines led his countrymen in the creation of the world’s first black republic, renamed the nation of Haiti, officially born on January 1, 1804. It had been the largest and most successful slave revolt in history.