Chicago resistance to ICE abuses echoes opposition to Fugitive Slave Act 175 years ago

Jim Gray arrived in chains.

At the railroad station in Ottawa, Illinois, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago.

Gray wore leg irons, his arms bound to his sides, and was led by a rope.

It was Oct 19, 1859.

The month before he had escaped from slavery in New Madrid, Missouri. Caught by an Illinois sheriff "in sympathy with the slave owners," Gray was being returned to bondage. A crowd awaited him, including a local merchant named John Hossack, an immigrant from Scotland.

"What crime has he committed?" Hossack shouted. "Has he done anything but want to be free?"

A question that echoes through the years and across the country today. With federal immigration agents this past year prowling Democratic cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis — kidnapping Latino individuals and dragging them off to exile, and billions being pumped into immigration enforcement, gearing up to grab more people and confine them to enormous facilities now being constructed nationwide, it's impossible not to think of the Fugitive Slave Act, the 1850 law that also created a federal force tasked with snaring people for the crime of wanting to live in freedom.

There was already a law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, empowering owners to retrieve their chattel from the North. But Southerners were upset that California was being admitted to the union as a free state. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a sop to them, meting out punishment to anyone helping Blacks escape slavery, and creating monetary incentives for agents bringing escapees back. The law gave bite to the slave drivers' bark.

Then as now, local communities fiercely resisted this federal intrusion into their constitutional rights. Then as now, street clashes erupted as national law and human decency faced off against each other. This being February — Black History Month — and with the Trump administration waging war on Black History, scrubbing it from the Smithsonian, from college campuses and federal websites in an attempt to declare the civil rights struggle an unmentionable blot upon enforced patriotic zeal, it seemed important to explore the subject in depth, while we still enjoy the right to do so.

"All historical analogies are the same," said Matthew Pinsker, a history professor and director of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College. "There's always some similarities and plenty of differences. This is a battle between the national administration and blue state governments. In the Fugitive Slave days, it was a battle between Washington and Northern states, which passed laws called 'personal liberty laws' that were like the sanctuary city laws that Trump is trying to overturn."

Hundreds of Ottawa residents showed up for Gray's hearing the next day in the courtroom of Justice Dean Caton, who ruled that while Gray had broken no Illinois law, the Fugitive Slave Act demanded he go to Springfield to face charges.

Gray never got there.

As a marshal began to lead Gray from the courthouse, local men sprang into action. The officer was restrained, while Hossack grabbed Gray by the elbow.

"If you want liberty, run!" Hossack urged, dragging Gray from the courthouse. They jumped a fence, climbed into a waiting carriage, and were sped out of town.

Gray escaped north to Canada. But Hossack was arrested and sent to stand trial in federal court in Chicago.

Chicago’s resistance. Strong then, strong now

Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act was particularly strong in Chicago, the city "a sinkhole of abolition" in the words of one downstate editor. A hub of actual railroads, it was also a center for the Underground Railroad, an informal confederation hurrying those escaping slavery north to Canada. When a slave catcher arrived at Chicago in October, 1850, he was informed that his safety could not be guaranteed, and the enslaved servant he had brought with him was helped to escape.

The same month, the Chicago Common Council — predecessor of the City Council — passed a law condemning the Fugitive Slave Act as "cruel and unjust" and ordering the police force — nine men at the time — "not to render any assistance for the arrest of fugitive slaves."

Uncannily similar to the challenge Mayor Brandon Johnson would face 175 years later: how much cooperation must local government give to federal authorities enforcing a despised and unjust law? The council in 1850 minced no words, damning any free state representatives supporting the bill as "fit only to be ranked with the traitors, Benedict Arnold, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed his Lord and master for thirty pieces of silver."

Last October, the City Council passed a similar, if less florid, resolution, focused on trying to protect children from traumatic seizure by ICE agents and urging citizens to report the misconduct they witness.

What was motivating Chicago to push back against the Fugitive Slave Act? While its tempting to just superimpose Chicago's current sanctuary city liberalism onto the mid-19th century city, that wasn't the case. There were only 323 Black people living in Chicago in 1850 — about 1% of the population. Illinois had passed its own "Black Laws" in 1848, forbidding the immigration of free Blacks into the state and, as amended in 1853, forbidding Black visitors from spending more than 10 nights in the city.

"These protectors of fugitive slaves raised no objection to the exclusion of Negro testimony against a white person in the courts of law," historian Bessie Louise Pierce noted in 1940. "They seemed to see no inconsistencies in providing a separate section in the theaters for Negroes, and in segregating the races in the common schools."

To whites, this was more about protecting their own rights than the rights of Black Chicagoans.

"In a state like Illinois, there were people who cared about free Black residents, but there were an awful lot of white people who cared mostly about personal liberty and state and local rights," said Pinsker, whose newly published book "Boss Lincoln" examines the 16th president's mastery of grassroots politics "They didn't want the federal government or Southern slave owners telling them how to run their own lives... you can see a similar emotion rising in a place like Minneapolis, when they feel like masked federal agents [are] roving around the city, picking up people regardless of whether they are criminals or illegal, but just because of the color of their skin."

‘A federalism battle’

The issue has already been settled, legally.

"It's a federalism battle," said Pinsker. "Can states be forced to enforce federal law? That's something the Supreme Court has weighed in on multiple times, and they said no. The sanctuary city advocates are probably going to win in court on the same principles that draw all the way back to Fugitive Slave days."

If history is a guide, ICE loses.

"Frankly, this is a historical analogy that should concern the Trump administration," said Pinsker. "Despite all the talk of the Fugitive Slave law being draconian, it was an abject failure. The moral revulsion of Northerners against it stopped it from being enforced... the decade from its passage and the Civil War, there were very few and scattered successful episodes. Most Southerners felt it was a complete failure."

History is made by individuals standing up to be counted. Renee Good and Alex Pretti now, John Hossack back then.

Hossack's trial began Feb. 28, 1860 in the courtroom of Judge Thomas Drummond on Clark Street. Testimony began with Richard Phillipps, Gray's former owner.

"That boy belonged to me," he testified. "I bought him and paid for him."

The cost? One thousand dollars.

Hossack was found guilty. He had the right to make a statement before sentencing and didn't let the opportunity go to waste.

Hossack addresses the court

"It may appear strange to your Honor that I have no sense of guilt," he began, explaining he came "from the tyranny of the Old World" finding himself "a stranger in a strange land."

He came over to dig the canal, then went into business.

"I am one of the men who have made Chicago what it is today, having shipped some of the first grain that was exported from this city." Hossack said. "I am, Sir, one of the pioneers of Illinois, who have gone through the many hardships of the settlement of a new country. I have spent upon it my best days, the strength of my manhood. I have eleven children, who are natives of this my adopted country. No living man, Sir, has greater interest in its welfare; and it is because I am opposed to carrying out wicked and ungodly laws, and love the freedom of my country, that I stand before you today."

Like those opposing ICE today, he knew what his freedom was based upon.

"Sir, I place myself upon the Constitution, in the presence of a nation who have the Declaration of Independence read to them every Fourth of July, and profess to believe it. In the presence of civilized man, I hold up the Constitution of my adopted country as clear from the blood of men, and from a tyranny that would make crowned heads blush. The parties who prostitute the Constitution to the support of slavery are traitors — traitors not only to the liberties of millions of enslaved countrymen, but traitors to the Constitution itself which they have sworn to support. A foreigner upon your soil, I go not to the platforms of contending parties to find truth. I go, Sir, to the Constitution of my country: the word slave is not to be found."

He quoted the prosecutor claiming it was ungrateful of Hossack to find protection under American law, yet disobey it:

"Surely, I have been protected. The fish in the rivers, the quail in the stubble, the deer in the forest, have been protected. Shall I join hands with those who make wicked laws, in crushing out the poor Black man, for whom there is no protection but in the grave, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest?... As a man who had fled from the crushing aristocracy of my native land, how could I support a worse aristocracy in this land?"

He quoted the Fugitive Slave Act, mandating that reaching free soil did not end a person's slavery.

"That is the provision that is claimed transforms the government into a monster of iniquity," Hossack said. "How these three or four lines can transform this government, ordained to secure justice, into a mean tool to aid the plunderers of cradles, the destroyers of home, the ravishers of women, and the oppressors of men, to carry on their hellish work — how it can do this thing, I cannot see."

At times, Hossack seemed to speak across the years to our present administration and its masked agents.

"Sir, no law can be enacted so bad but that it will find men deluded or base enough to execute it. The law of Egypt that consigned the new-born babe to the slaughter found tools for its execution. The bloody decree of Herod found men ready to obey the law of the country, though it commanded the slaughter of the innocents of a province, Sir, tell me not of men ready and willing to execute the law! My Redeemer, whose name I am hardly worthy to speak, and yet whose name is all my trust, although he knew no sin, yet he was crucified by law."

He continued.

"This law so plainly tramples upon the divine law, that it cannot be binding upon any human being under any circumstances to obey it. The law that bids me do to other men as I would have other men do to me, is too plain, too simple to be misunderstood."

Hossack asks a question that rings today:

"What country is this? Can it be that I live in a land boasting of freedom, of morality, of Christianity? How long, O, how long, shall the people bow down and worship this great image set up in this nation?"

And he ends by noting, presciently:

"When the history of the great struggle shall be candidly written, the rescuers of Jim Gray will be considered as having done honor to God, to humanity, and to themselves."

Hossack faced a $1,000 fine and six months in jail. Judge Drummond gave him 10 days and fined him $100, which citizens of Chicago promptly paid. Chicago feted him as a hero during his captivity — Mayor John Wentworth sprung him, temporarily, to go for a carriage ride and invited him to his home to dinner. Abolitionists turned Hossack's speech into a handbill and distributed it nationwide, and it lives online today. Sadly, the speech still makes for relevant reading.