by David H. Finke of Arrow Rock, MO
sent as e-mail to Dan Clark for posting to this blog
Early on, I was aware that service with the UGRR was illegal. The highest court of the land had spoken... a number of times. Local lack of enforcement of the onorous federal statutes was essentially "nullification" -- which we didn't like when the South invoked it. People would participate at their calculated peril... but were undeterred nonetheless, sustained by something transcendant however perceived and described.
So, a doctrine of justifiable/necessary righteous and selfless Civil Disobedience evolved (thanks, Thoreau, for the phrase!) -- for some, a gut impulse toward justice, for others a well-reasoned discourse into natural, civil, constitutional, and ecclesiastical law. One of the favorite papers I ever did in seminary (I would have to work on putting my hands on it... but maybe I will when I enter my Dotage) was about the development and expression of "Higher Law" thought and action in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and the court enforcements of it right up to Dred Scot. I discerned (as I roughly remember it now) at least 4 different lines of argument which otherwise law-abiding citizens invoked in justifying their defiance of duly-enacted federal legislation. (Some, like Garrison, simply the whole federal Constitutional system -- "a league with death and a covenant with hell" -- which supported and weakly regulated a slave regime, and sought to undercut its legitimacy.)
By the way, my primary resources on this were the ancient archives in the basement of the tower at Chicago Theological Seminary: the records of the American Board for Home Missions. They had dozens if not hundreds of printed sermons by Congregationalist ministers, who led the charge on this publically (while Quakers just carried it out quietly and, for the most part, not making a big fuss.) CTS was founded by the First Congregational Church, whose grafitti by its opponents branded it "[Philo] Carpenter's Nigger Church" -- because of their active participation in getting the newly liberated on boats to Canada, once the'd made their way being handed off from Quakers & Congregationalists throughout Illinois. I have a friend near LaSalle-Peru whose family intermarried among those two faiths, undoubtedly going back to their common collaboration around the Princeton, IL, area -- home to a brother of the martyred printer from Alton.
-- The "Higher Law" could be Natural Law, with both classical and medieval antecedents (Aristotle & Thomas). Everyone has an innate desire for freedom; slavery is an unnatural state. The human spirit is its own testament, found in each of us, toward the need to oppose slavery with every fiber of our being.
--It could be Common Law. In English jurisprudence (and some other European powers as well) once a slave set foot on free land, he was thereafter forever free. The "slave power" could not with impunity impose its despicable system on free men in a free land. Especially with the newfound democracy which northerners felt they had against the southern aristocratic tradition, the opposition was intense to having agents of a hostile, foreign, oppressive power come into OUR TOWNS and demand the cooperation of OUR SHERIFF, etc. And in the civil law realm, there were clear statutory enactments in direct opposition to the federal pro-slavery legislation -- so a case could at least be argued cogently in front of judges (who are frequently, of course, swayed by political climates and aspirations.)
--It could be Constitutional Law. In this view, even before Lincoln gave his own elaboration of the Declaration of Independence (a fundamental shift in thought, from the highest reach of government), that document was seen as preceding the Constitution, and has priority over it in declaring all men equal, the unalienable right to liberty, etc.
--It could be Religious Law. Whether rooted in the Hebraic mandate of a Year of Jubilee, or the teaching to Love your Neighbor as Yourself, or seeing (in the words of the Cantique de Noel that we've just been singing) "Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother." A variety of mandates were perceived from the Judeo-Christian tradition (which, of course, has had its defenders of slavery invoking scripture as well. But the prophetic strain of that tradition says, with Peter and the apostles in the Book of Acts, "We must obey God rather than man."
All of these came together in an expression that Augustine and/or Martin Luther King could have given: "An unjust law is no law at all." Hence, UGRR operators were not violating the law, they were upholding it. And even when the highest American human court had spoken, there was still yet The One whose judgments are true and righteous altogether, before whom we tremble and whom we must obey -- and the heck with Chief Justice Taney!
-DHF
January 2, 2009
