{"id":70,"date":"2018-06-12T14:35:42","date_gmt":"2018-06-12T14:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/slavery\/?page_id=70"},"modified":"2024-01-21T17:20:18","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T17:20:18","slug":"sectional-crisis","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/slavery\/our-research\/sectional-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Sectional Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

1847 || McClintock Slave Riot<\/span><\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"John<\/a>
John McClintock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

John McClintock<\/a><\/span> was one of Dickinson College\u2019s most renowned professors.\u00a0 He began teaching Latin and Greek at Dickinson during the 1830s, a period when the school was struggling to overcome a series of major financial setbacks.\u00a0 McClintock helped restore the college\u2019s reputation. Yet McClintock\u2019s life as a scholar and beloved teacher experienced an abrupt turn on June 2, 1847, when he became embroiled in a deadly fugitive slave episode that played out in Carlisle.\u00a0 That afternoon, two slave catchers from Maryland were in local court trying to secure three fugitive slaves who had recently escaped from nearby Hagerstown, Maryland.\u00a0 McClintock later claimed he had only learned about the hearing by accident as he was taking his daily walk.\u00a0 The professor was well known for his opposition to slavery, but he argued that he could never condone violence or breaking the law.\u00a0 Yet when a riot erupted as the prisoners were being transferred, leaving one of the slave catchers fatally wounded, McClintock found himself accused of being ringleader of the violent antislavery resistance.\u00a0 Southern students at first angrily threatened to leave the college as McClintock was put on trial that summer, along with dozens of Carlisle\u2019s leading black community activists, in a showdown that captured national attention.\u00a0 The college professor was ultimately acquitted but 11 black men were convicted and sentenced to hard labor at the state penitentiary.\u00a0 McClintock worked earnestly to help appeal their convictions, which the state supreme court eventually did overturn.\u00a0 While he was in prison, one of the convicted men claimed privately that he could have implicated McClintock in their crime but that he \u201cwould rather hang than do it.\u201d\u00a0 Was the quiet scholar more involved in the resistance effort than he was willing to admit?\u00a0 We might never know for sure.\u00a0\u00a0 Not long after the 1847 riot, McClintock left Dickinson to become editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review.\u00a0 He later served as a minister in New York and Paris before becoming a university president in New Jersey.\u00a0 During those years, he became a friend of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s and a prominent Unionist, but never commented further on his role in the fugitive slave episode.\u00a0 However, when McClintock died in 1870 a group of black residents in Carlisle, celebrating ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted black men the right to vote, gratefully carried a revealing banner that read:\u00a0 IN MEMORY OF DR. McCLINTOCK, PERSECUTED FOR OUR SAKE.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"McClintock<\/a>
The Liberator, June 18, 1847<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

1849 ||\u00a0 Henry “Box” Brown escapes from slavery<\/span><\/strong><\/h1>\n

In March 1849, a man named Henry Brown traveled from Richmond to Philadelphia in a most unusual way.\u00a0 Brown, a Virginia slave distraught because his enslaved wife and children had just been sold away from him, made a series of secret arrangements to escape to freedom. The help of some brave friends, a wide network of antislavery allies, and a new shipping service advertised by the Adams Express Company made his daring operation possible. Brown planned to hide inside a box until he was safely delivered to the Anti-Slavery office in Philadelphia. The journey itself took just over 24 hours, by wagon, train, and boat.\u00a0 Everyone involved knew the risks, but the heartbroken husband and father insisted on making the desperate effort to flee from enslavement.\u00a0\u00a0Henry \u201cBox\u201d Brown enjoyed his miraculous \u201cresurrection\u201d in Philadelphia on March 24, 1849, in the presence of some leading Underground Railroad or vigilance agents from the North. Two of those men were associated with Dickinson College, most notably, James Miller McKim<\/a><\/span> (Class of 1828), head of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and the escape’s main northern organizer.\u00a0 Charles Dexter Cleveland, a former Dickinson professor, was also present. Nobody from Pennsylvania went to jail for assisting in what became the most celebrated (and notorious) escape for the period, but the sensational episode contributed mightily to Southern calls for a tougher federal fugitive slave law. Henry Brown never reunited with his family but he was never recaptured.\u00a0 He lived as a free man in the United States, England and Canada until his death in 1897.<\/p>\n

\"Box<\/a>
From left to right: Lewis Thompson, James Miller McKim (Class of 1828), Henry “Box” Brown, William Still, and Charles Dexter Cleveland (former Dickinson professor)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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1853 || McAllister Quits as Fugitive Commissioner<\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\n

The Compromise of 1850 included several measures designed to quell the rising tensions between slave states and free states.\u00a0 The most important of these measures –and certainly the most controversial– was a new, tougher federal Fugitive Slave Law (September 18, 1850).\u00a0 The heavily-criticized statute authorized commissioners of the U.S. Circuit Court in Northern states and territories to take extreme steps in order to help secure and return any runaway slaves from the nation’s fifteen Southern slave states.\u00a0 \u00a0Perhaps the most notorious of these “fugitive slave commissioners” was a Harrisburg attorney named Richard McAllister<\/a>, who was a graduate of Dickinson College (Class of 1840).\u00a0 McAllister presided over fugitive slave rendition hearings out of his office in Harrisburg for less than three years (September 1850 to May 1853), but in that short time span he apparently sent back more men, women and children into slavery than any other U.S. commissioner across the entire country over the full fourteen-year period of the law’s existence (1850-1864).\u00a0 McAllister was not only prolific in terms of case management, but also especially demeaning in the way he treated the black families who appeared in his hearing room, and the attorneys who represented them (including some fellow Dickinsonians, like anti-slavery attorney Mordecai McKinney).\u00a0 \u00a0McAllister’s aggressive approach provoked a bitter reaction around Pennsylvania.\u00a0 He became ostracized from his church, was driven into debt and even had his house set on fire before finally resigning from office in disgust in May 1853.\u00a0 McAllister later moved out West and served in the Union army during the Civil War.\u00a0 He eventually settled in Washington, DC and worked as an attorney until his death in 1887.<\/p>\n

\"Fugitive<\/a>
There is no known photograph of Richard McAllister but this political cartoon from 1851 depicts a defiant federal officer attempting to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"McAllister
McAllister wrote US Senator Stephen Douglas in 1857 complaining that his house had been “set on fire” because of his work as commissioner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1857 || Dred Scott Case and Dickinsonians<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1846, Dred and Harriet Scott, an enslaved couple living with their two daughters in St. Louis, Missouri, filed separate freedom suits in state circuit court claiming they had been held illegally as slaves in free states and territories. They lost the first round on a technicality, but won a later round. In 1852, however, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned their freedom suit victory and threw out decades of precedent favoring the \u201conce free, always free\u201d doctrine of interstate comity. The state’s chief justice noted pointedly, \u201cTimes now are not as they were.\u201d\u00a0 Dred Scott then took their case into federal court, and eventually the\u00a0U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him in Scott v. Sandford (1857).\u00a0 It was Chief Justice Roger Taney<\/a><\/span> who announced the court’s sweeping 7-2 opinion against Scott on March 6, 1857.\u00a0 Taney’s opinion for the majority\u00a0 ruled that blacks could not be considered U.S. citizens, that southern states did not have to honor northern laws regarding returned slaves; and that Missouri Compromise of 1820 had itself been unconstitutional because Congress lacked the authority to restrict slavery in the territories.\u00a0 He was joined in this verdict by fellow Dickinsonian, Robert C. Grier.\u00a0 Associate Justice Grier also took it upon himself during the final tense days of the court’s deliberations to keep another Dickinson alum, President-elect James Buchanan<\/a><\/span>, aware of the secret discussions.\u00a0 When the final verdict was announced in March 1857, there were two dissenting justices.\u00a0 One of them, John McLean of Ohio, also had Dickinson connections.\u00a0 He had been a member of the college’s board of trustees for over two decades, from 1833 to 1855. Despite losing, Dred Scott and his family received their freedom in the spring of 1857. Taylor Blow, son of Scott\u2019s first owner and a resident of St. Louis, actually purchased and then manumitted the entire family.\u00a0 Dred Scott died the next year, a free man. His wife and daughters, however, survived the Civil War.\u00a0 Some of their descendants are still alive today.<\/p>\n