Courtesy of Wikimedia
Describing the stark choice that confronted the 55 men who met in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, James Madison once wrote about the Constitution that “Every word … decides a question between power & liberty.”
Source: “Charters,” The National Gazette, January 19, 1792; available in The Writings of James Madison, 1790-1802, Volume 6, Edited by Gaillard Hunt, available via Google Books
Jesse Torrey (House Divided)
Sources
Important primary sources include Jesse Torrey’s A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, in the United States (1817) and The Moral Instructor and Guide to Virtue and Happiness (1819). Torrey’s book was published in London as American Slave Trade in 1822.
Places to Visit
No structures or sites related to Jesse Torrey, Jr. exist. Torrey was born in New Lebanon, New York.
Images
Some of the images that Torrey created and published in A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, in the United States (1817) are in the slideshow below.
Thomas Roderick Dew (College of William and Mary)
Life & Family
Thomas Roderick Dew did not have any children. He married Natilia Hay in 1845, but died the following year in Paris, France.
Sources
After Nat Turner’s revolt in 1832, Dew published Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature, 1831-1832. In 1853 it was republished in The Pro-Slavery Argument, as maintained by the most distinguished Writers of the Southern States. In addition, Dew’s lectures at the College of William and Mary were published as Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations (1853). Dew also wrote several other books, including Lectures on the Restrictive System (1829). His correspondence is in the Dew Family Papers at the Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary.
Peter Wallenstein’s essay in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery (1997) provides an overview of Dew’s perspective on slavery. Other secondary sources include Eugene D. Genovese’s Western Civilization through Slaveholding Eyes: The Social and Historical Thought of Thomas Roderick Dew (1986), Lowell Harrison’s “Thomas Roderick Dew: Philosopher of the Old South,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 57 (1949): 390-404, and Stephen Mansfield’s “Thomas Roderick Dew at William and Mary: ‘A Main Prop of That Venerable Institution,’ ” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 75 (1967): 429-442.
Places to Visit
Dew taught classes at the College of William and Mary, which you can visit in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Images
A picture of Dew’s portrait (see image above) is avaliable in the “Office of the President. Thomas Roderick Dew, 1830-1967” at the College of William and Mary. While Dew was originally buried in France, he was reburied at the College of William and Mary in April 1939. An image of this event is available in the Memorial Services Records at the College of William and Mary.
Solomon Northrup (House Divided)
Sources
A key primary source is Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (1853). In addition, see “An Account of Solomon Northup” from the New York Times on January 20, 1853 and an advertisement for Northrup’s book in the August 26, 1853 issue of the Liberator. You can read other accounts in the “North American Slave Narratives” collection at the Documenting the American South project.
Places to Visit
A historical marker on Northrup is located in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Images
An image is available on Northup’s House Divided profile. Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave also included several images, such as “Scene in the Slave Pen at Washington” and “Chapin Rescues Solomon From Hanging.”
Edmondson Sisters (Washington Post Magazine)
Sources
A key secondary source is Mary Kay Ricks’ Escape on the Pearl: The Heroic Bid for Freedom on the Underground Railroad (2007). In addition, a short essay from the Washington Post Magazine has been reposted on this flickr page. Other sources include The Case of the Edmondson Sisters (1848) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Edmondson Family and the Capture of the Schooner Pearl (1856).
Places to Visit
The Edmondson sisters were imprisoned at the Bruin Slave Jail, which is on the National Register of Historic Places and located at 1707 Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia. In 1854 Harriet Beecher Stowe explained in The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that she used information about the jail to help write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In addition, you will find a statue of the two sisters at Edmonson Plaza (1701 Duke Street). The statute was unveiled in June 2010 and serves as a memorial to those suffered while in the jail. You can learn more about the Bruin Slave Jail from a short overview at the Alexandria Black History Museum’s website. Also see this short essay from the Virginia African American Heritage Program. Visitors should note that this building is not open to the public.
The Franklin and Armfield slave dealers office, which is now home to the Freedom House Museum, is located several blocks away at 1315 Duke Street.
Images
The image of the Edmondson sisters was posted online at this page on Flickr. The image is originally from the Washington Post Magazine. In addition, a daguerreotype from 1850 is available at the Syracuse University Library. Other abolitionists, including Samuel J. May, Gerrit Smith, and Frederick Douglass, are also in the picture. The original daguerreotype is held at the Madison County Historical Society.
William Still (House Divided)
Sources
A key primary source is William Still’s The Underground Rail Road (1872). In addition, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has Still’s “Journal C of Station No. 2 of the Underground Railroad, 1852-1857” and the “Minute Book of the Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia.” have been digitized and are available online. Several historians have focused on Still’s work as an abolitionist, including Larry Gara’s “William Still and the Underground Railroad” Pennsylvania History (1961) and Stephen G. Hall’s “To Render the Private Public: William Still and the Selling of the Underground Rail Road,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (2003). Other important sources on the Underground Railroad include Robert Clemens Smedley’s History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania (1883), Wilbur Henry Siebert’s The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom (1898), and David Blight’s Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory (2004).
Places to Visit
A historical marker for William Still is located in Philadelphia at 244 South 12th Street. While in the city, you can visit Underground Railroad museums at the Belmont Mansion and the Johnson House. In addition, William Still is part of an exhibit at the African American Museum and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Other interesting museums in Philadelphia include the National Constitution Center. In addition, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is located in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Images
Franklin and Armfield Slave Dealers (House Divided)
Sources
The Virginia African American Heritage Program has a short essay about the Franklin and Armfield office on their website. In addition, Edward E. Baptist uses Isaac Franklin and John Armfield as an example in his article “”Cuffy,” “Fancy Maids,” and “One-Eyed Men”: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review (2001). Robert H. Gudmestad also discuses the two slave dealers in A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (2003).
Places to Visit
Franklin and Armfield’s office became a National Historic Landmark in 1978 and is now home to the Freedom House Museum. The museum opened in 2008 and is located in Alexandria, Virginia at 1315 Duke Street. You can also find a historical marker about Franklin and Armfield outside the museum. In addition, the Bruin Slave Jail is located several blocks away at 1707 Duke Street. In 1854 Harriet Beecher Stowe explained in The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that she used information about the jail to help write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Edmondson sisters were one of many slaves who were imprisoned at this jail. In addition, you will find a statue of the two sisters at Edmonson Plaza (1701 Duke Street). The statute was unveiled in June 2010 and serves as a memorial to those suffered while in the jail. You can learn more about the Bruin Slave Jail from a short overview on the Alexandria Black History Museum’s website. Also see this short essay from the Virginia African American Heritage Program. Visitors should note that this building is not open to the public.
Images
The Franklin and Armfield’s Slave Prison image is a detail from a broadside available at the Library of Congress.
Dickinson Gorsuch (House Divided)
Sources
The key primary sources on on Dickinson Gorsuch and the Christiana Riot are William Still’s The Underground Rail Road (1872), David R. Forbes’ A True Story of the Christiana Riot (1898), and Jonathan Katz’s Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana Pennsylvania, September 11, 1851: A Documentary Account (1974). Important secondary sources include William Uhler Hensel’s The Christiana Riot and the Treason Trials of 1851: An Historical Sketch (1911), Thomas Slaughter’s Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (1991), and Fergus M. Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement (2006). You can also read Mark G. Jaede’s short essay about the riot in the Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion (2007).
Places to Visit
The historic marker for the Christiana Riot was dedicated in May 1998 and is located south of Christiana on the Lower Valley road. In addition, the riot is mentioned on “The Underground Railroad and Precursors to War” historic marker at the intersection of Pennsylvania Route 462 and West Market Street in York, Pennsylvania. While William Parker’s house no longer exists, you can view a 3-D model on House Divided.
Images
Images related to the Christiana Riot are in the slideshow below:
Sources
Newspaper articles and other publications related to the event were published in The Boston Slave Riot, and Trial of Anthony Burns in1854. Other important primary sources include Charles Emery Stevens’ Anthony Burns: A History (1856), E. H. Gray’s Assaults Upon Freedom! A Discourse, Occassioned by the Rendition of Anthony Burns (1854), Theodore Parker’s The New Crime Against Humanity: A Sermon Preached at the Music Hall, in Boston, on Sunday, June 4, 1854 (1854) , and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Massachusetts In Mourning: A Sermon, Preached in Worcester, on Sunday, June 4, 1854 (1854). Henry David Thoreau also responded to Burns’ situation with an essay entitled “Slavery in Massachusetts” in 1854. In addition, the Massachusetts Historical Society has several collections with material related to Burns’ case, such as two broadsides . The Charles Cushing Barry Papers contain the checks used to purchase Burns’ freedom in 1855. (You can see a detail image of the checks on this page . Other collections with material related to Burns’ case include the Dana Family Papers, the John A. Andrew Papers, and the Theodore Parker Papers. In addition, this online finding aid provides an overview of all the collections relevant to African American History at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Important secondary sources include Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease’s The Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Burns (1975), Virginia Hamilton’s Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave (1988), and Albert J. Von Frank’s The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (1998).
Places to Visit
Lewis Hayden was a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee and participated in the failed attempt to rescue Burns in 1854. While the Lewis and Harriet Hayden House is on the Black Heritage Trail in Boston, it is a private residence. See the Boston African American National Historic Site website for more information. Other interesting places to visit include the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Images
Joshua Glover (House Divided)
Sources
The Wisconsin Historical Society has several primary sources related to Glover, including a 1852 Reward Advertisement from the St. Louis (MO) Republican and an April 1854 article from the (Stevens Point) Wisconsin Pinery. Also see Henry E. Legler’s 1898 essay, “Rescue of Joshua Glover, a Runaway Slave.” Key secondary sources include H. Robert Baker’s The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (2006) and Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald’s Finding Freedom: The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Runaway Slave (2007).
Places to Visit
A historical marker about Glover’s rescue is located at the intersection of East Kilbourn Avenue and North Jackson Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Images
The Wisconsin Historical Society also has another image of Glover.
Moncure Conway (House Divided)
Narrative
Though his family connections alone guaranteed a bright legal future, the young Moncure Conway was an indifferent law student. Despite the urging of his numerous cousins to take up his place as an active defender of the South, he was already having significant problems justifying his beloved Virginia’s maintenance of slavery. Despite this, he served in 1850 as the secretary of the Southern Rights Association in Warrenton, and seemed in his momentary embracing of the recently published racial theories of Louis Agassiz to be searching for any justification for human bondage. Despairing of the law, he pleased his parents at last when on his nineteenth birthday he became a Methodist circuit rider preacher, assigned to the Rockville, Maryland area. During the next three years he rode northern Maryland, literally expanding contacts with the world, which included an influential friendship with a family of Quakers. Most importantly he indulged in the obsessive reading that was to adjust both his ideas about religion and slavery. Under the influence of writers such Ralph Waldo Emerson, he left the Methodist circuit in February, 1853, went north to Boston and enrolled in the Unitarian dominated Harvard Divinity School. While there he met and befriended Emerson and Thoreau and settled his mind against slavery. He was still a southerner, however, and became involved in the famous case of Anthony Burns, a recaptured slave being returned from Boston to Virginia under the new and hated federal Fugitive Slave Law. He refused publicly to rally in support of the action with other southern students but also declined in private to aid abolitionist friends in accosting Burn’s Virginia slave owner — whom he knew slightly from earlier days in Fredericksburg — thereby offending both sides.
He graduated from Harvard Divinity and took up a post as minister of the First Unitarian Church of Washington D.C. in late October 1854. All his time in the capital did, however, was to convince him that war over the sectional question was inevitable. In January 1856, he gave his solution for the avoidance of such a violent outcome. He preached from his pulpit the minority opinion that disunion was preferable to civil war and that an independent South would be left to work out emancipation through the moral example of the free labor North. This pleased few members of his congregation on either side of the question and as the sermon gained in national notoriety he was dismissed the following October. He was soon in the pulpit again, however, this time in Cincinnati, Ohio. A far more liberal membership welcomed him and his anti-slavery work there and he continued his development in both study and writing. He also met and married Ellen Dana in June 1856, beginning a sustaining and enduring partnership that was to last almost forty years.
Life & Family
Moncure Conway was related to the Washingtons, the Madisons, and the Lees. His uncle on his mother’s side sat as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Both his father, Walker Peyton Conway, a prominent slaveholding landowner and his mother, Margaret Daniel Conway, had converted after their marriage to Methodism and the Conway children were exposed at an early age to disciplined evangelicalism. Moncure Conway first was schooled at home then attended the thriving Fredericksburg Classical and Mathematical Academy, a school that had educated Washington and other famous Virginians. He then followed his brother Peyton to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a fifteen-year-old sophomore. The Methodist affiliated institution cemented his faith and he fell somewhat under the influence of professors George Crooks and John McClintock. He did not share the latter’s fierce abolitionism and almost left the college when McClintock was involved in a notorious riot in the town that freed recaptured slaves and resulted in the death of a slave catcher. He graduated with the class of 1849 and returned home to Virginia to study law with a family friend in Warrenton.
Sources
The Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections contains a large collection of Conway’s papers and books. Some of this material is available online at Their Own Words, including his Personal Journal (1851-53), Testimonies Concerning Slavery (1864),
Republican Superstitions as Illustrated in the Political History of America (1872), and Autobiography, Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway (1904). Not all of the correspondence in the Conway collection at Dickinson has been digitized. Other material in the collection includes Conway’s letters and some of his descendants (several letters are from 1940s and 1950s). This finding aid has details on the material in the collection. Key secondary sources include Helen Gallaher, Moncure Daniel Conway: Author and Preacher, 1832-1907: A Bibliography (1938), John D’Entremont’s Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway, The American Years 1832-1865 (1987), and Jonathan Earle’s “The Making of the North’s ‘Stark Mad Abolitionists’: Anti-Slavery Conversion in the United States, 1824-54,” Slavery & Abolition 25 (2004): 59-75.
Places to Visit
You can visit the Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and the Moncure Conway House in Falmouth, Virginia.
Artifacts
Several items are at Dickinson College Archives, including a cover of a French game that Conway gave to his daughter, Mildred. This finding aid details the other material in the collection.
Images
A number of photographs are on Conway’s House Divided profile. As for this family picture from 1877, the people who are in it are identified on the back side. In addition, the Moncure Conway Foundation has a 1862 Carte De Visite of Eliza and Dunmore Gwinn, who had been slaves owned by Conway’s family in in Falmouth, Virginia but had escaped in 1861.
Harriet Robinson Scott (House Divided)
Sources
The online Dred Scott Case Collection (Missouri State Archives & Washington University) contains over 100 documents and provides information on trials from the first Circuit Court Case in 1846 to the Supreme Court decision in 1857. In addition, the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project created the “Freedom Suits Case Files, 1814-1860,” which has 301 petitions from individuals who attempted to prove in court that they were free. Other books and pamphlets are online at the Library of Congress’ Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 collection and at Cornell University’s Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection. In addition, you can read the full opinions of all Supreme Court justices in Benjamin Chew Howard’s Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the Supreme Court of the United States (1857). Other primary sources include Thomas Hart Benton’s Historical and Legal Examination of that Part of Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott Case (1857) and Paul Finkelman’s Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (1997).
The best secondary source on Harriet Scott is Lea VanderVelde’s Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (2009). Other important secondary sources on the case include Don E. Fehrenbacher’s The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (1978), Walter Ehrlich’s They Have No Rights: Dred Scott’s Struggle for Freedom (1979), Mark A. Graber’s Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (2006), and David Thomas Konig’s “The Long Road to Dred Scott: Personhood and the Rule of Law in the Trial Court Records of St. Louis Slave Freedom Suits,” UMKC Law Review (Fall 2006).
Places to Visit
In St. Louis the courthouse where the first two Dred Scott trials were held is part of the National Park Service’s Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Once inside the courthouse you can see the “Legacy of Courage: Dred Scott & the Quest for Freedom” exhibit. For more information, see the Old Courthouse section of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial website. A photo gallery of the Old Courthouse is available here.
Images
The 1857 image of fugitive slaves was originally published in William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872). This section of Still’s book describes the incident depicted in that image. As for the 1862 image, it was appeared in Harper’s Weekly Magazine on November 8.
October 28, 1857 – “Twenty-eight fugitives Escaping from the Eastern Shore of Maryland” – See image record on House Divided.
November 1862 – Captured African-Americans Being Driven South, artist’s impression – See image record on House Divided.
Abraham Lincoln (House Divided)
Life & Family
Abraham Lincoln was a southerner who led the North during the Civil War. Born on February 12, 1809, the same day as scientist Charles Darwin, Lincoln began his life on a farm in Kentucky before moving as a young child to Indiana and eventually to Illinois. He settled in Springfield, married Mary Todd, and raised four boys (two of whom died before he did). Lincoln was six-feet, four inches tall and weighed about 180 pounds. He was well respected as a politician and attorney and well-liked for his story-telling abilities. Lincoln served one term in Congress where he gained notice for opposing the Mexican War but otherwise had no experience in Washington before becoming president. During the 1850s, Lincoln helped organize the Republican Party in Illinois and distinguished himself as an anti-slavery orator, especially during the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. Two years later, Lincoln and Stephen Douglas faced each other again, this time as part of the dramatic four-way presidential contest of 1860. Lincoln won an electoral majority and seven Deep South states seceded. President Lincoln refused to bend and war erupted at Fort Sumter in April 1861. As a wartime leader, Lincoln has been widely revered for his actions to save the nation, free the slaves and for his astounding ability to communicate the values of democratic self-government in simple, elegant phrases. He won reelection in 1864 but was shot and killed by actor John Wilkes Booth in mid-April 1865, just over one month into his second term.
In December 1859 Lincoln wrote a short autobiographical sketch and sent it to Jesse W. Fell. You can listen to this letter through the audio player below:
Sources
Important primary sources include the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln at the University of Michigan, and the Papers of Abraham Lincoln. Key secondary sources on the Lincoln Douglas Debates include David Zarefsky’s Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate (1990) and Allen C. Guelzo’s Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (2008). Other important sources on Lincoln include David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln (1996) and Michael Burlingame’s Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008).
Places to Visit
Springfield, Illinois has a number of historic sites on Lincoln, such as the National Park Service’s Lincoln home, the Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices, the Lincoln Tomb, and the Lincoln Depot. You can also see the Old State House where Lincoln gave his famous House Divided speech in 1858. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum is also located in Springfield. If you are in Washington DC, you can visit Ford’s Theatre and the Lincoln Memorial. While in Gettysburg you can tour the David Wills’ house and see the bedroom where Lincoln stayed the night before he delivered the Gettysburg Address in November 1863. In addition, the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park is located in Hodgenville, Kentucky.
Artifacts
The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana at the Library of Congress has a number of items, including Lincoln’s life mask from February 1865 and the contents of Lincoln’s pockets on the evening of his assassinations. In addition, this collection contains material related to Lincoln’s opponent in 1858, such as Stephen Douglas’ life mask from 1857. The Library of Congress also has the bible that Lincoln used during his inauguration on March 4, 1861. President Barack Obama used the same bible in January 2009 when he took the oath of office. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History also has a number of items, such as Lincoln’s Top Hat and a model of his patent (“Improvement for Buoying Vessels Over Shoals“). In addition, the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum contains over 250 artifacts, including Lincoln’s beaver-fur stovepipe hat, Tad Lincoln’s toy cannon, the skirt to Mary Lincoln’s wedding dress, and Mary’s blood-stained fan from Ford’s Theatre.
Images
William Howard Day (House Divided)
Sources
A short profile of Day starts on page 366 of G. F. Richings’ Evidences of Progress among Colored People (1902). In November 1865 Day delivered a speech at Harrisburg’s Grand Review, which was organized to honor African Americans who served in the Civil War. You can read more about this event in an excerpt from Ceremonies at the Reception of Welcome to the Colored Soldiers of Pennsylvania (1865).
Places to Visit
You can find a historical marker about the November 1865 USCT Grand Review that Day helped organize in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A historical marker about Day is also located in Steelton, Pennsylvania at the intersection of Lincoln Street and Carlisle Street. While the William Howard Day Cemetery is also located in Steelton, Day was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Penbrook, Pennsylvania.
Images
A photograph is available from Day’s profile on House Divided.
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