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

“A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves” by Eastman Johnson. “The absence of white figures in this liberation subject makes it virtually unique in art of the period — these African Americans are independent agents of their own freedom,” writes the Brooklyn Museum.

     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.

John Hossack (Ottawa Museum)

     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 at the 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 30 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 it's 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.

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