Hayes found his way into another fugitive slave case in 1855, this time in defense of a young girl whom abolitionists detained in Columbus, Ohio. This case demonstrated how complicated the federal system worked in adjudicating this sectional divide, which helps us understand Hayes’s eventual embracing of state governments over continued federal intrusion.

            Slave owner Henry M. Dennison’s wife died, leaving behind an infant. Dennison requested transportation to his property in Virginia for the slave Rosetta Armstead to care for the child. To accomplish the transfer, he assigned his friend Dr. Jones Miller to accompany Armstead to Virginia. The cold March weather prevented navigation on the Ohio River, so Miller made the decision to transport Armstead through Ohio by train.[i]

            Miller’s decision to transport the slave Armstead into a free state became the action upon which local opposition contested the Fugitive Slave Act.  Although the federal law stated that northern agents must assist in the return of escaped slaves, Armstead did not escape. And following the Somerset axiom, slavery could not exist on Ohio’s territory. These conflicting, but not contradictory laws, became the battleground upon which attorneys argued Armstead’s fate.[ii]

            The story of Armstead’s freedom gives insight into how opposition to federal law occurred at the state level. It also helps us understand how citizens interpreted the meaning of these laws and the nature of slavery. As Dr. Miller transported Armstead through Ohio, the train stopped in Columbus. Dennison argued Miller received assurance that the train was non-stop to Wheeling and the Columbus stop was unscheduled. Upon learning that the train planned to stop for Sunday in Zanesville, Miller determined to get off at Columbus and stay with friends. While there, Miller explained that “black women were seen hovering about the house like birds of ill omen, and presently the Sheriff of the county appeared with a habeas corpus, and by so infamous a prostitution of that writ of priceless value to a true America. . . [I was] lodged in a jail.” Miller and Dennison clearly viewed this action as an injustice to the institution of slavery and they argued Armstead had “asseverations that she did not want to be free.” They also thought Ohio abolitionists were acting unlawfully since they followed a “merciless and marauding code,” which stated, “no ‘man’s house is his castle.’”[iii]

            By no means was this an opinion confined solely to slavery states. The editing board of the anti-abolitionist Ohio Statesman elucidated further on a prominent view regarding the slavery question and comity between the states. “It surely has come to a pretty pass,” the Statesman wrote, “if a citizen of a neighboring State cannot longer travel through ours without molestation.” It made a further appeal to unity with the Know-Nothing adherents, showing a separation between its opinion on slavery and states’ rights:

It is not a question whether slavery is right or wrong—that is a question on which our people are not divided, but it is a question of comity between sister States; and in this instance one of inexcusable interference by Know Nothings, whose hearts are not the hearts of a world-wide love for mankind, as every body knows. Kentucky is full of Know Nothing charters, and we should like to know how they will relish this treatment from their sworn “Brothers” this side the Ohio river. The sworn brotherhood must be foully false to each other, for one “Brother” to take by force from another “Brother” what he considers his property!”

 

This argumentation fell in line with predominant Southern thought that the states should operate in unison to uphold the federal guarantee of the protection of property. In this thinking, slaves (as property) were federally protected and only state law overturned this, an inversion of the Somerset axiom. The sheriff, nonetheless, took Armstead before the local probate court, which declared her free.[iv]

            The probate court put Armstead in the care of L.G. Van Slyke who found her employment at a doctor’s office. Dennison made one more appeal to Armstead and asked if she would come to Virginia on her own free will, which she declined. After a few days, two men entered the doctor’s office and approached Armstead. They feigned interest in the office’s accommodations, and the Belmont Chronicle reported that after serving the warrant for her arrest, “asked the Dr. if he intended to resist their taking her with them.” When he answered in the affirmative, he went to consult a friend. “As soon as he left,” reported the paper, “the two men seized Rosetta, one on each side, and bore her to the carriage which was in waiting.” Upon learning of her arrest, Van Slyke telegraphed his contacts in Cincinnati to arrest the men. The Ohio Statemsan remarked, “It seems that stealing negroes under process of law, is a game that two can play at. . . We hope they will not tear Resetta [sic] to pieces in the strife of who shall have her.”[v]

            The case became a point of conflict between state and federal actors. The Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas judge, James Parker, issued a writ of habeas corpus to bring Rosetta before his judgment. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported, “so far as it was concerned there was no evidence that Rosetta was held to service or labor by the laws of Kentucky. . . . The girl was thereupon ordered to be discharged from the custody [of] the Marshal, and restored to the custody of her guardian appointed in Columbus. . . . Loud cheers followed this announcement in the Court.” The court placed Armstead at the Woodruff House under the custody of Van Slyke, however, and the U.S. Marshal H. H. Robinson subsequently served a warrant from the district’s U.S. commissioner. He went to the balcony and declared, “Fellow citizens:--In the name and by the authority of the United States, I, as U.S. Marshal of the southern district of Ohio, command each good citizen to keep the peace and insure my protection.” The fight between federal and local responsibility came down to the definition of fugitive slave. From Armstead’s defense and abolitionist viewpoint Rosetta was not a fugitive slave, thus the commissioner’s court did not have jurisdiction. From Dennison’s defense, Rosetta was forcibly taken from his agent’s custody through a defiance of federal law so should go before the commissioner’s court.[vi]

            Armstead, nonetheless, went before the U.S. Commissioner John Pendery, and Van Slyke hired Rutherford B. Hayes, along with Salmon P. Chase and Timothy Walker, to defend the young girl. Hayes provided the closing argument. In describing this, The Anti-Slavery Bugle wrote, “The want of faith in this reputed owner, giving a simple, truthful girl, a choice to be free, and then being reckless of his promise, despising his pledged word, and suing out a writ she was a fugitive, was worse than the most ultra fanaticism of those classed as Abolitionists.” Once again, Armstead went free. Perhaps overcome by joy from the federally appointed commissioner’s decision, Van Slyke attributed the outcome to Hayes’s “eloquent and masterly closing speech.” But the outcome more likely flowed from the evidence that Armstead did not flee and was not a fugitive.[vii]

            The larger question, then, regarding this case is to what extent the state or the federal government asserted its place within the law. The fact that the case went before the federal court at all, despite the overwhelming evidence that Armstead was not a fugitive slave, points to the position of the federal government as the true arbiter of the slavery question. The Anti-Slavery Bugle had to concede that the overall abolitionist movement was not served well by this case despite Armstead’s freedom, stating, “the States are more essential than the Federal Government to the preservation of Liberty, if one of the parties must give way, let it be the Federal Power.” The Bugle advocated a corrective course of action:

To avoid this conflict, always dangerous, the true course is to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act, the chief source of all the mischief—an Act, without warrant in the Federal Constitution, repugnant to the Common Law, and utterly inconsistent with the proper maintenance of State Sovereignty.

 

Although the Bugle’s analysis was shortsighted in that this course of action would produce results favorable to abolitionism only as long as the state government in question was favorable to “Liberty,” the publication understood the larger peril at play.[viii]

            The Louisville Times saw the matter differently since federal law presumably enforced slavery. After Dennison was arrested following the case for sending agents to take Rosetta from the doctor’s office in an attempt to bring her to Kentucky, he was “fined $1,000,” and “is now under bail to answer in a suit for $10,000 damages, because he claimed his slave and failed to get her from judicial corruption.” The Times pleaded:

Fellow-citizens of Kentucky, and of the South, can you read this coldly? Can you pass this by as merely one of the news items of the day? Or, rather, do you not see that, if we tamely submit to aggression after aggression, these usurpers of justice, these piratical advocates of Lynch law, will remove their mock courts to our very soil, and perpetrate in our midst similar outrages? A river only separates us from them, and they need but to be convinced of our apathy, to pronounce the laws of freedom to our slaves, and fines and imprisonment for us, their masters.[ix]

 

            The battle over this law is clearly seen along this Ohio/Kentucky border, but the fight was much larger than this law. Hindsight gives us an indication that the South feared a nation without slavery. However, even before Lincoln famously commented that the nation could not be half slave and half free, but that “it will become all one thing or all the other,” the North felt that there was a legitimate chance of slavery engulfing the North. After the Fugitive Slave Act created a mechanism for the North to uphold the South’s rights to slavery, the Kansas-Nebraska Act nullified the Missouri Compromise, and Dred Scott seemed to overturn Somerset by extending slavery’s rights throughout the nation; the North truly felt slavery was becoming national. These developments hardened even moderate Northerners and strengthened further the sectional political divide, Hayes included.[x]

            In fact, it created a unique impression on Hayes who worked against federal intrusion upon Ohio’s laws. When he argued for Somerset principles and the importance of Ohio determining that individuals are free on its soil, he was arguing within this state and federal conflict. As the federal government further extended its influence on northern states, Hayes undoubtedly felt that it infringed upon states’ rights. This furthered his intransigence against the institution of slavery, but, more importantly, it instilled in him a desire to uphold fine lines between state and federal jurisdictions.

 

[i] Ohio Statesman, March 24, 1855, pg. 1.

[ii] The Anti-Slavery Bugle, April 14, 1855, pgs. 1- 3.

[iii] Ohio Statesman, March 16, 1855, pg. 1.

[iv] Ohio Statesman, Morning, March 16, 1855, pg. 1.

[v] Meigs County Telegraph, Pomeroy, Ohio, March 27, 1855, pg. 2; Belmont Chronicle, March 29, 1855, pg. 2; Ohio Statesman, March 24, 1855, pg. 1.

[vi] Cincinnati Enquirer, March 29.

[vii] The Anti-Slavery Bugle, April 7, 1855, pg. 3; Hoogenboom, 97.

[viii] The Anti-Slavery Bugle, April 21, 1855, pg. 3.

[ix] Reprinted from the Louisville Times in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, April 21, 1855, pg. 3.

[x] Hyman and Wiecek, 192.