War Over Fugitive Slaves

No person held to Service or Labor in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due. 

The above quote comprises a part (Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3) of the United States Constitution—that ringing call for freedom, unity and Republican government we have all been taught to revere—that contains several things worth noting. First, though it is known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” is ever mentioned. We see the word “person” and we see the words “Service of Labour” but we don’t see “slavery” either here or elsewhere in our founding document. This indicates, as Andrew Delbanco in his new book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul Before the Civil War(Penguin: 2018), emphasizes, that there was a certain delicacy or reticence (shame?) on the part of the Founding Fathers where slavery was concerned. That’s probably because of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, no less than 25 of them were slave owners, including those great fathers of freedom, Washington and Jefferson. So, as Washington himself knew (during the revolution, he had asked for help tracking down his own wayward slaves, worried that Tories would take his escaped slaves with them to the British side), the problem for southern states especially, in their decision to join the Union, was whether or not they could recover that mobile “property” that made up so much of their wealth. In fact, more than ½ million of the new nation’s 3 million people were slaves, and in the five southern colonies, “slaves accounted for two in every five persons” (45). Moreover, Delbanco quotes historian Eric Foner to the effect that by the 1850s, the economic value of “enslaved men, women and children when considered as property exceeded the combined worth of all the banks, factories and railroads in the United States” (26-7). So when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, there wasn’t much argument or even discussion about the Fugitive Slave clause, nor about notprohibiting “the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” (Art. 1, Sect. 9, Clause 1), i.e. importing more slaves, nor about the now-infamous three-fifths compromise—which provided that representation for those slave states could be padded by adding to the number of “free” persons “three-fifths of all other persons.” Because even though the “persons” in question were considered to be equivalent to cattle where their rights and well-being were concerned, they were still numerous enough for the slave states to want to use them to achieve “fair” representation. And this gets to a wonderful distinction (or contradiction) discussed by James Madison: that though slaves may be “classed with those irrational animals which fall under the legal denomination of property,” at the same time “in being punishable himself for all violence committed against others, the slave is no less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society…as a moral person, not as a mere article of property” (87). Which meant not only that slaves were held accountable to the law for their actions, but that slave owners were exemptfrom responsibility for what their “property” did, since that “property” was considered fully capable of exercising free will—which was human. 

            Of course, the problem with these “properties who were human” was that they also had the disturbing inclination to want to be free. And so, many escaped from their bondage in the southern states to the north (though it should be emphasized that northern states were nearly as racist and discriminatory towards Africans as their southern neighbors; hence (128) “Connecticut restricted the franchise to white males in 1818, a year earlier than Alabama”). And this was the problem that southern states fretted and fumed over, insisting on the passage of several additions to the Fugitive Slave Clause to make it easier to reclaim their “property.” The first was the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, signed by Washington himself.  It authorized a slave owner’s agent to “seek rendition of his property in federal or state court” and fined anyone who obstructed with this return of a runaway (20). But this didn’t stem the tide, especially when several northern states enacted “personal liberty laws” to help protect the fugitives who increasingly sought safety there. These laws—in states from Vermont to Pennsylvania, from Michigan to Wisconsin—allowed escaped slaves to contest their capture not just physically, but in jury trials, a process that slave owners ringingly denounced as “unconstitutional.”  And so, the issue ultimately came to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Joseph Story in March 1842, ruled in the case of Margaret Morgan, a slave who had fled in 1832 to Pennsylvania to join her free black husband. This induced, in 1837, a white woman from Maryland who had inherited both Margaret and her children, to hire Edward Prigg to arrest Margaret as her property and take her back to Maryland with her children. But since Pennsylvania’s personal liberty law allowed the state to charge Prigg with kidnapping, he was arrested, tried and convicted, and it was this case that made it to Justice Story’s court. Faithfully following the Constitution, Story ruled that Pennsylvania’s (and therefore all) personal liberty laws were unconstitutional, and affirmed the right of slave masters to recover their escaped slaves from free states. But he left a little loophole: those northern states could make laws forbidding their authorities to assist slave catchers, thus making the recovery of fugitive slaves much more difficult, if not impossible. 

            This is how the situation stood just before the Civil War, though several more fugitive slave cases, and several books—notably Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of his life, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—added fuel to the fire. So did the continual addition of new states in the West, particularly that of Texas, which in late 1845 was approved for entry as a slave state, the 16^thslave state out of 28 states overall. So, too, did the waiting states “acquired” by the U.S. after the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the Mexican War in February of 1848—which added to the United States “an area almost twice as large as the Northwest Territory” in an expansion that comes to no less than 30% of the present-day United States. Whether those states entered as slave or free mattered critically to the expansion of the South’s “peculiar institution” because raising cotton so depletes the soil that new lands for cultivation, and thus slavery, were constantly required. Seeing the writing on the wall, the great abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, called for the immediate dissolution of the American Union, a union he said was based “on the prostrate bodies of three millions of the people, and cemented with their blood” (218). On the other side, of course, was John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senator and a former vice-president, and he had a theory which he claimed justified slavery—the “mud-sill” theory. Here’s how Calhoun put it: 

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government;and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand(240; emphasis added).

I think that’s very cute. So, obviously, did many southern gentlemen, who continued to press for slave states to be admitted, and continued to press for laws making it easier to return their fleeing slaves. They managed to get yet another Fugitive Slave Act passed, this one in September of 1850, which denied whatever was left of the Bill of Rights to escaped slaves: denied habeas corpus; denied them the right to testify in their own defense; denied them trial by jury; denied them presenting exonerating evidence such as having been raped by their masters; criminalized sheltering a fugitive; required local authorities to help in their capture and return; and gave the power to extradite them to Federally-appointed commissioners. 

            Still, slaves kept escaping and abolitionists and freed slaves in the north kept increasing their commitment to defending them, and even attacking those who tried to apprehend them. Cases like that of Margaret Garner only added to their commitment, for the pregnant Garner, having escaped from Kentucky over the Ohio River in 1856 with her husband and four children, was so desperate when slave catchers and U.S. Marshals tracked them all down that she “took a kitchen knife and cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter, then slashed at her 3 surviving children, trying to kill them too rather than leave them to the life of degradation she had known” (319). No matter: the judge ordered her rendition back to Kentucky, whereupon she was sold, and died in Mississippi two years later. She was later immortalized in Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved.What her case and other cases made clear was that the values of emancipation of slaves held by much of the north, and the continuation of chattel slavery held by the south could never be reconciled peacefully. They could only be settled by war. 

            Yet thought the pre-war years brought a kind of de facto emancipation, President Lincoln still clung to the hope that “border states would join the Union, and therefore, no emancipation would be needed” (363). Indeed, Lincoln in March of 1862, with the war imminent, even sent a message to Congress “recommending a program of compensatedemancipation,” intending to compensate slave owners for their financial losses of slaves, to resolve the situation. Delbanco quotes the reaction to this recommendation by the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, who derided it as “the most diluted, milk and water gruel proposition…ever given to the American nation” (366). Which indeed it was. No matter. Within days, Lincoln signed on to the article of war introduced into Congress, and added the penalty of court-martial for any officer who sent fugitive slaves back to their owners. Then, once Lincoln had the cover of a major victory for the Union troops (which came at Antietam Creek), he issued his formal Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. By the end of the war, more than 400,000 former slaves were being protected by Union troops, and on June 28, 1864, the Fugitive Slave Law was finally repealed by Congress. 

            Still, Delbanco is passionate about what slavery meant and still means to this nation. In one of his most moving passages, he writes:

There is no calculating the unsettled debts of slavery. Since the Civil War, black Americans have been subjected to more than a century and a half of ingenious variations—if not quite replications—of the lethal assault to which they had been subjected by slavery itself. There is no enumerating them (385).

‘No enumerating them,’ Delbanco says, but he tries, and they include “the forced labor system that took hold after Reconstruction in the South…chain gangs, uncompensated workers into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories.” They also include the “millions excluded from social welfare programs after the Great Depression…de jure and de facto segregation…the gross disproportion of young black men languishing in prisons…and daily insults to self-respect delivered to black Americans for no other reason than the fact of their blackness” (ibid). We might add the not-so-hidden evidence in our current political climate of an enduring and pervasive racism that has animated the Right and even average Americans desperate to revive their precious world of white privilege. But perhaps it is not necessary to add anything more. The War Before the War makes the sickening case quite well. So well that every American should be required to read and absorb what it says.  

Lawrence DiStasi

The Delayed Fruits of War

Though the book by Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,Harvard U Press: 2018, focuses mostly on the time period from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and ends with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, its relevance to today is quite clear both from her last chapter and her Epilogue. So let’s take that last chapter first. It recounts the horrifying events of April 19, 1995 when a Ryder rental truck “filled with fertilizer exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City” (211). The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children in the day care center, and wounded more than 500. Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, was quickly found, tried and convicted, and sentenced to death. McVeigh took pains to claim that he did it on his own, though a few others were found who had helped him. But the press took him at his word, characterizing McVeigh as a “lone madman,” who therefore could be dismissed, along with his action, as outside any organized plot or movement. He fit the profile of those, like Lee Harvey Oswald, whose fevered, wounded brain led him, on his own, to a crazy, violent act. 

            Here is where Kathleen Belew’s whole book and thesis comes into play. She immediately counters the accepted version as follows:

However, in no sense was the bombing of Oklahoma City carried out by one man. The hell McVeigh described represented the culmination of decades of white power organizing. McVeigh, trained as a combatant by the state, belonged to the white power movement. He acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives and supported by resistance cell organizing. The plan for the bomb came directly from The Turner Diaries, the book that had structured the activity of the white power movement since the late 1970s (210). 

Belew goes on to point out that, in fact, the Murrah Building had previously been cased by members of CSA (the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord), who then attempted and failed to blow it up with rocket launchers in 1983. But wouldn’t the FBI have known this? In fact, they did, but given the horrible publicity they had garnered for the killing of Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge (more on this later), and the deaths of 76 people at Waco, TX in the fire that concluded the long siege against Branch Davidians there, government agents were “reluctant to portray the Oklahoma City bombing as the work of a movement,” so the FBI decided not to pursue movements of white power violence, but only “individual actors” (211). The result, as seen in Belew’s Epilogue: the white power movement was allowed to grow explosively and fester while the federal government kept its distance and focused almost exclusively on “crazy” individuals—leading, almost inexorably, to the movement’s encouragement by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and its prodigious growth under his leadership. Indeed, to read the entire book by Belew is to begin to better understand how a fraud like Donald Trump could be elected and supported by his “base,” many of whom no doubt support white power’s aims. 

            But to get back to some of the stunning particulars amassed by Belew—let us go back to the Vietnam War and its aftermath, for in Belew’s telling, the alleged failure of the U.S. in that war, coupled with racist remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, led directly to the white power movement—most of whose members were, in one way or another, veterans of that war. One such character was Louis Beam. A Viet war veteran and member of the Klan, Beam was a gifted speaker and writer (Essays of a Klansman), who saw the Vietnam War as “emblematic of all that had gone wrong” with the country: shortage of jobs, no welcome for vets when they came home, stagflation, and a host of other ills that marginalized them. Beam openly called for violence to cure these ills. In 1982, he wrote: “You’re damn right I’m mad. I’ve had enough! I want these same traitors to face their enemy now, the American fighting man they betrayed, all three million of us” (31). He mentioned the tools available to such vets to fight their war in the homeland: “ an M-16, three sticks of dynamite taped together, a can of gas,” adding “Over here, if you kill the enemy you go to jail. Over there in Vietnam, if you killed the enemy, they gave you a medal. I couldn’t see the difference” (35). Beam began by forming his own Texas chapter of David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK), training recruits in paramilitary violence. One of their first targets were Vietnamese refugees who had settled in Galveston Bay as shrimp fishermen, often outcompeting locals. Along with neo-Nazis, Beam’s group began to intimidate the Vietnamese outsiders, firebombing homes, beating shrimpers, and firing guns at boats in the Bay. White power publications characterized the refugee influx as a “flood” and tried to characterize the alleged invasion of Galveston Bay as a kind of rape: “Galveston Bay is just like a fine woman…If you rape her, she’s never good anymore” (44). White activists also alleged that Vietcong spies had infiltrated the fishermen, thus justifying them to fight against ‘communist infiltration into the U.S.’ Eventually, a lawsuit in Texas led to an injunction against such Klan militarism, and the forced disbanding at Beam’s Camp Puller and elsewhere in Texas.  But Beam was by no means finished:  claiming that he was going to Idaho on vacation, he linked up with Aryan Nations members there, and focused much of his efforts with several white power groups, setting up his “cell-style” strategy of “leaderless resistance.” He became a leading member of The Order, seeking to make the Pacific Northwest their center of white power, and eventually a separate nation. 

            Meantime, neo-Nazis and Klansmen elsewhere were proving that, to some extent, they could be immune to the law because much of America supported their racist aims. An action in Greensboro, North Carolina illustrates this dramatically. A group called the Communist Workers Party (CWP) in November 1979 decided to stage a “Death to the Klan” rally at a black housing project. Having heard about this, neo-Nazis and Klansmen formed a caravan and headed to Greensboro to confront the rally. These confrontations had been increasing in the years leading up to Greensboro, with both sides making clear their intention to fight, with arms if necessary. In Greensboro, the Klan’s car caravan arrived loaded with armed men, and after some initial screaming and racial slurs, Mark Sherer, hanging out the window of a pickup truck, fired the first pistol shot into the air. More shots were fired, fighting broke out at an intersection, and then shotguns, rifles, and semiautomatic weapons were distributed to the fourteen Klansmen, one of whom, Jerry Paul Smith, dropped to one knee and fired into a now panicked crowd. Others followed suit, one bragging “I got three of ‘em,” another with a 12-gauge shotgun claiming “I hit four of the five that were killed and wounded six more” (63). Within minutes the Klansmen and neo-Nazis drove off, and well after that, the police arrived to find five protestors dead, and many more wounded. The local DA pressed charges against fourteen of the Klansmen and neo-Nazis who had been arrested. In the trial, begun on Aug. 4, 1980, the defense alleged that the attackers were “fighting communism,” and only fired in “self-defense.” And with peremptory challenges allowed in North Carolina, all black jurors were dismissed, so the jurors were white and Christian and sympathetic to any fight against commies and/or blacks. 

Perhaps predictably, on Nov. 17, 1980, the Greensboro jury unanimously delivered a not-guilty verdict. As Belew summarizes it, “a court had effectively condoned the intentional killing of communists” (71). And because of the Iran hostage crisis, news coverage was spotty enough that few, including this writer, ever heard of the Greensboro Fourteen (as they were christened by the white power movement, which took the acquittal as a green light for more violence) until reading about it here. Two more Greensboro trials followed, one in 1984 under civil rights laws in federal court, the other by widows of those slain seeking monetary damages. In the first, though FBI informants proved that “self-defense” was nonsense due to foreknowledge of the caravan’s intent, the defendants were again exonerated, this time of the charge that their action was racially motivated. The court ruled their action not racial but political, and they were freed. In the second case, several gunmen were found jointly liable for one of the five deaths, but the City of Greensboro paid the settlement, covering costs for both Klansmen and neo-Nazis. 

Up until this point, Belew makes clear that the rationale for white power activists was defending their country against outsiders, radicals, communists. Many even joined mercenary armies and fought against alleged ‘commies’ in Rhodesia, Central America, and the Caribbean, partly to redeem the American defeat in Vietnam. But in 1983, all that changed. In what Belew calls a “tectonic shift” for the movement, the white power movement declared war on the state. They would now fight for a “white homeland,” trying to destabilize the federal government which seemed to protect outsiders, and waging revolutionary race war (104). Three major figures led this new anti-government movement: the aforementioned Louis Beam, Richard Butler and Robert Miles (both of whom claimed to have fought in WWII). All three were talented speakers and writers and in their publications outlined the white power movement’s new strategy of “cell-based organization” with no leaders. This, first, made it more difficult for provocateurs to infiltrate, and second, would protect leaders like Beam, Butler, and Miles who could no longer be charged with giving orders for actions. Henceforth, as Beam wrote, “all members of phantom cells or individuals will need to react to objective events…No one need issue an order to anyone” (108). Why? Because all individuals would hold common ideas and values, most of them laid out in the aforementioned Turner Diaries. First published serially, this novel literally worked as a “how-to manual for the movement, outlining a detailed plan for race war”. It actually presents 

“the use of nuclear weapons to clear first the United States and then the world of nonwhite populations…At various moments, the novel describes the forced migration of all people of color out of California (the all-white home after the revolution), the genocide of Jews, the nuclear bombing of high-density black populations in the South, and the public lynching of all people in interracial relationships (110). 

In real life, Beam and his associates hoped that a campaign of violence could “sway a white public in their favor,” allow them to implement movement objectives from a “white homeland in the Pacific Northwest…to a white world secured by the annihilation of all people of color” (113). Shortly thereafter, in November 1984, another major step was taken when The Order was founded at Hayden Lake, Idaho by Robert J. Mathews. Steeped in paramilitary training, and funded by robberies and counterfeiting, the Order’s ultimate goal was the familiar one: create a white separatist nation in the Northwest, and later the entire north American continent excepting Mexico. Order members “pledged themselves to race war until victory or death” (116). At about the same time, the Order’s Declaration of War against the government named “congressional betrayal of soldiers in the Vietnam War as a key justification of their violent campaign” (117). Needless to say, one of their major efforts involved amassing arsenals of all kinds of weapons. Another was amassing money with which to buy weapons (those they didn’t steal), land, and publicity. Their main effort was armed robbery. The first caper was a porn shop that netted them only $369, but they soon aimed at banks, one in Seattle netting them $25,000, and then the big hit, also in Seattle, of an armored car from which they stole more than $500,000. Assassination was also on their agenda, the most famous of which was the killing of Alan Berg, a Denver talk-show host for KOA-AM radio. Berg was a Jewish liberal who spoke out against white power. On June 18, 1984, an order member named Bruce Pierce fired a machine gun at Berg standing in his driveway, cutting him to pieces (123). 

            The FBI tracked several members of the hit squad. First they raided the house of Gary Yarbrough in Sandpoint, Idaho, finding the MAC-10 machine gun that had killed Berg, plus assorted weapons, 100 sticks of dynamite, and a shrine to Adolf Hitler. They then tracked him and Mathews to Portland, and took Yarbrough, though Mathews escaped to a safe house on Whidbey Island in Washington. Agents finally found him there, he chose to fight, and died when the house caught fire after illumination flares from a helicopter ignited the house, with him in it. Yarbrough was tried and convicted in 1985, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The following year, he and other members of the Order were convicted of racketeering charges due to armored truck robberies, and Yarbrough got another 60 years added to his sentence. He died in a hospice center in Pueblo, CO in 2018. 

            Finally, another trial, this one in Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1987, fits the paradigm outlined earlier. After failing to produce a case that could net the leaders of the white power movement, the government finally initiated Operation Clean Sweep that culminated in the April 21, 1987 Fort Smith trial alleging that “the white power movement had attempted to overthrow the government through outright revolution” (171). This was the only real try at prosecuting white power as a movement. Fourteen men were indicted on charges that ranged from conspiracy to manufacture of illegal weapons to conspiracy to murder federal officers. Among them were Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Robert Miles, plus Richard Snell (who blew up a natural gas pipeline and killed a state trooper), and Order members Pierce, Lane, Barnhill, Lane and Scutari. Two apprehended members of CSA testified forthe government under plea bargains. In the face of the indictments, Louis Beam decided to flee the country, though, before fleeing, he married a 19-year-old, Sheila Toohey, his fourth wife. Together, they took up residence in Chapala, Mexico, until agents apprehended Beam, while his wife looked on from their house. Claiming that she thought her husband was being robbed, she used her husband’s rifle to shoot a Mexican officer three times. While her husband was extradited to the U.S., Sheila Beam was tried, but a Mexican judge found her not guilty by reason of self-defense, and deported her to the U.S. Her story, as a frail white woman needing a white male to defend her, but willing to kill for him and their child, greatly affected the trial’s outcome. In the trial, Beam defended his actions and ideas as a vet having come home from war believing it was his duty to kill enemies. He also made it clear that he would continue his fight, including killing “if so directed.” Then, after three days of deliberation, the jury delivered “not guilty” verdicts for all fourteen defendants accused of trying to overthrow the government. All the men were not only free, but the judge ordered “the firearms in question returned to the person who turned them over to the government” (183). 

The entire white power movement celebrated yet another court victory. The FBI agent in charge, Jack Knox, by contrast, resigned from the FBI in frustration. This, and the negative publicity about the FBI’s handling of both the deaths at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and the Waco, Texas assault, led directly to Timothy McVeigh and his deadly bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. 

            The conclusions of Kathleen Belew’s riveting book are clear. First, the fallout from the Vietnam War has proven to be far more lethal than even those who protested it thought. That is, to the carnage in Vietnam itself must now be added the roots of a lethal movement of returning vets bringing the war home that still operates in the white power movement. Second, though evidence has piled up for decades that this movement is highly organized and deadly serious, the courts and American juries seem generally unable to take it seriously and instead have consistently demonstrated sympathy for white defendants and their rationalizations for murder and plans for mass murder. Third, due to the parallel militarization of government forces in combating white power, the public’s sympathy, especially after the deaths at Ruby Ridge and Waco, has remained with the perpetrators rather than with law enforcement. And finally, the successful characterization of violent perpetrators like Timothy McVeigh as “nut cases acting alone” has meant that no organized government response has been able to put a halt to what can only be seen as organized white terrorism. In short, there is no doubt about the aims of this movement: the writings and testimony and actions of its leaders are crystal clear. What is in doubt is how long it will take the U.S. government to take organized and serious action against it. This is especially so since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and his comments about the organized mayhem and murder that took place in Charlottesville in August of 2017. Any look at the hyper-drive that organizing and a huge internet presence for white supremacy received from such comments should persuade anyone of that. What is needed is for Americans to become more aware of the threats that still remain—and a reading of Bring the War Homeis almost a must here—and make it clear to their elected representatives that racism, Nazism, and white supremacy may once have been acceptable in some regions of this country, but can have no place at all in a genuine democracy. Period. 

Lawrence DiStasi