Volume 5 — NEW OUTRAGE FOR THE SAKE OF SLAVERY.

Letter to Passmore Williamson, in Moyamensing Prison, August 11, 1855.

Mr. Sumner occupied several weeks of this summer in a tour to the West, ascending the Mississippi to St. Paul, and then, from Detroit, visiting Lake Superior. While on board a steamer in Lake Superior, he learned by the newspapers that Passmore Williamson, an excellent citizen of Philadelphia, had been flung into prison for the offence of reminding a person claimed as slave, that, being brought to Philadelphia voluntarily by her pretended master, she was free, according to well-known principles of jurisprudence. The indignation of Mr. Sumner found expression in the following letter, which he addressed to the new victim of Slavery.

This remarkable case will be found in a volume published at Philadelphia, in 1856, with the following title: “Case of Passmore Williamson. Report of the Proceedings on the Writ of Habeas Corpus issued by the Hon. John K. Kane, Judge of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, in the Case of the United States of America ex rel. John H. Wheeler vs. Passmore Williamson, including the several Opinions delivered, and the Arguments of Counsel, reported by Arthur Cannon, Esq., Phonographer.” From this it appears that John H. Wheeler, of Virginia, in a petition to Hon. John K. Kane, Judge of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, dated July 18, 1855, sets forth, that he is “the owner of three persons held to service or labor by the laws of the State of Virginia, said persons being respectively named Jane, aged about thirty-five years, Daniel, aged about twelve years, and Isaiah, aged about seven years, persons of color, and that they are detained from the possession of your petitioner by one Passmore Williamson, resident of the city of Philadelphia, and that they are not detained for any criminal or supposed criminal matter,” and asks a writ of Habeas Corpus commanding Mr. Williamson to bring before the Judge the bodies of the said Jane, Daniel, and Isaiah. The writ was at once allowed, and the next day followed by another, to which Mr. Williamson made return, that “the within named Jane, Daniel, and Isaiah, or by whatsoever names they may be called, nor either of them, are not now, nor was at the time of the issuing of said writ or the original writ, or at any other time, in the custody, power, or possession of, nor confined nor restrained their liberty by him, the said Passmore Williamson. Therefore he cannot have the bodies of the said Jane, Daniel, and Isaiah, or either of them, before your Honor, as by the said writ he is commanded.”

In the course of the proceedings, Mr. Williamson, who was Secretary to the Acting Committee of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, testified as follows.

“I was informed that three slaves were at Bloodgood’s Hotel, who wished to assert their right to freedom; I went to the hotel, and saw a yellow boy on the steps fronting on Walnut Street; I made inquiry of him, and he stated that such was the case, but referred me up stairs to one of the waiters for further information; the latter informed me that the slaves, with their master, had just gone on board the steamboat at the end of Walnut Street wharf, for the purpose of going to New York in the five o’clock line. I went on board the boat, looked through the cabin, and then went up on the promenade deck; I saw that man” (pointing to Mr. Wheeler) “sitting sideways on the bench on the farther side; Jane was sitting next to and three or four feet from him; the two children were sitting close to her. I approached her and said, ‘You are the person I am looking for, I presume’; Wheeler turned towards me and asked what I wanted with him; I replied, Nothing, that my business was entirely with this woman; he said, ‘She is my slave, and anything you have to say to her you can say to me.’ I then said to her, ‘You may have been his slave, but you are now free; he brought you here into Pennsylvania, and you are now as free as either of us; you cannot be compelled to go with him, unless you choose; if you wish your liberty, all you have to do is to walk ashore with your children.’ Some five minutes were consumed in conversation with Wheeler, Jane, and a stranger, when the bell rang, and I told her, if she wished to be free, she would have to act at once, as the boat was about starting. She took one of her children by the hand and attempted to rise from her seat; Wheeler placed his hands upon her shoulders and prevented her; I then, for the first time, took hold of her arm and assisted her to rise; the colored people who had collected around us seized hold of the two children, and the whole party commenced a movement towards the head of the stairs leading to the lower deck, Mr. Wheeler having at the start clinched Jane, and during the progress repeatedly and earnestly entreated her to say she wished to stay with him; at the head of the stairway I took Wheeler by the collar and held him to one side. The whole company passed down and left the boat, proceeding peacefully and quietly to Dock and Front Streets, where Jane and her children, with some of her friends, entered a carriage and were driven down Front Street; I returned to my office. After the colored people left Dock Street in the carriage, I saw no more of them, have had no control of them, and do not know where they are. My whole connection with the affair was this.”

At the conclusion of Mr. Williamson’s cross-examination, he declared to the Court “that in the proceedings he had not designed to do violence to any law, but supposed that he had acted throughout in accordance with the law, and the legal rights of the respective parties.”

On his return to the writ of Habeas Corpus, Mr. Williamson was held to bail in the sum of $5,000 for perjury, and subsequently committed, without bail, for contempt,—the alleged contempt being the declaration that the parties were never in his custody. In the course of the hearing, the Judge remarked that “the conduct of those who interfered with Mr. Wheeler’s rights was a criminal, wanton, and cruel outrage.” His final decree, July 27, 1855, was as follows: “Let Mr. Williamson, the respondent, be committed to the custody of the marshal without bail or mainprise, as for a contempt of the Court in refusing to answer to the writ of Habeas Corpus, heretofore awarded against him at the relation of Mr. Wheeler.” On the motion looking to a committal for perjury the Judge “withheld an expression of opinion,” observing, that, “Mr. Williamson being under arrest, he may be charged at any time by the grand jury.”

The respondent attempted to regain his freedom by an application to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. After solemn hearing, the application was refused, the Hon. J. S. Black, afterwards a member of President Buchanan’s cabinet, giving the opinion of the Court. The State Court was in obvious sympathy with the National Court, and both were sympathetic with Slavery. Meanwhile Mr. Williamson continued a prisoner, until, at last, November 3, 1855, his case was again presented to the Judge who committed him, when, in reply to formal interrogatories, he declared: “I did not seek to obey the writ by producing the persons therein mentioned before the Court, because I had not, at the time of the service of the writ, the power over, the custody, or control of them, and therefore it was impossible for me to do so.… I sought to obey the writ by answering it truly; the parties not being in my possession or control, it was impossible for me to obey the writ by producing them.” The Judge announced the contempt purged and the party released from custody.

While the immediate object of this proceeding was to compel Mr. Williamson to produce the bodies of Jane, Daniel, and Isaiah, claimed as slaves in Philadelphia by a person who had voluntarily brought them there, it is impossible to explain the action of the Judge except by his desire to establish the protection of the National Government over slave-masters travelling with their slaves in Free States. The claimant, at the discharge of Mr. Williamson, stated by his counsel that he “sought an adjudication, by the highest judicial tribunal of the country, of the questions, whether Mr. Wheeler was entitled to pass over the soil of Pennsylvania with his property? and whether or not a wrong had been committed in the forcible abduction thereof?”[24]

Mr. Williamson was in the Moyamensing Prison from July 27th to November 3, 1855.

Lake Superior, On Board the North Star, Saturday, August 11, 1855.

MY DEAR SIR,—With astonishment and indignation I have learned the story of your imprisonment; and now, from this distant retreat, where I am for the moment, make haste to send you my sympathy.

From beginning to end, from side to side, and in every aspect, this transaction can be regarded only as a clear, indubitable, and utterly unmitigated outrage. The new-fangled doctrine, that a slave-master can voluntarily import his alleged slave—of course with all the revolting incidents of Slavery—into the Free States, is not more odious than preposterous. It is scouted by reason, and disowned by universal jurisprudence. You were right in disregarding it. In stepping forward to remind persons claimed as slaves on this pretext that all such claim is baseless, you did a good work. It was this knowledge which filled them with confidence to regain their God-given liberty. And for this it appears that you have been brought before a man, “dressed in a little brief authority,” who has cast you into prison.

This outrage is rendered more outrageous by the way in which it was done. It was perpetrated through perversion of the great writ of Habeas Corpus. This writ of freedom and deliverance, which in England is often styled the Palladium of the Constitution, which is recognized as a distinctive feature of Constitutional Government, which finds no place in despotism, and which is the very master-key appointed to unlock prison-doors and let the oppressed go free, has been made in your case, by a hocus-pocus without precedent, the instrument of imprisonment and oppression.

Strange and disgraceful as all this is, it must be considered the natural fruit of Slavery. Any person, whosoever he may be, whether simple citizen or magistrate, who undertakes to uphold this wrong, seems forthwith to lose his reason. He may be just, humane, and decent in other things, but in the support of Slavery he becomes unjust, inhuman, and indecent,—often in obvious unconsciousness of his degradation. The blindness which makes him insensible to wrong so transcendent naturally makes him insensible to the lesser wrong by which it is maintained. What is the writ of Habeas Corpus, the trial by jury, the privilege of debate, or your liberty or mine, in the estimation of a person who has already screwed himself to the pitch of injustice necessary for the vindication of an institution which separates parent and child, which stamps woman as a concubine, which shuts the gates of knowledge, and which snatches from the weak all the hard-earned fruits of incessant toil?

But there must be an end to these things; and as Shakespeare found a jewel in the toad’s head, so do I find a cheering omen even in the injustice which has made you its victim. There is an old saying, handed down from distant antiquity, that “whoso the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”; and I have often of late been impressed by its truth. The Slave Oligarchy is mad, and their overflowing madness runs through every agent and tool. In all that they do—especially in the Fugitive Slave Bill and its cruel enforcement, the Nebraska Bill and its felonious administration, and now in the imprisonment of an unoffending citizen—I rejoice to believe that there is unmistakable evidence of that madness which precedes a fall. Verily the day is at hand when returning justice will once more bear sway; then, among the triumphs of Freedom, will be a reckoning with unjust judges.

Meanwhile accept my congratulations on the portion of responsibility and dignity which is yours. It is a privilege to suffer for truth; and I envy not the meanness of that soul which would hesitate to prefer your place within the stone walls of a prison to the cushioned bench of the magistrate by whose irrational and tyrannical edict you have been condemned.

Believe me, my dear Sir, with much regard,

Very faithfully yours,

Charles Sumner.

Passmore Williamson, Esq., Moyamensing Prison, Philadelphia.