UP FROM SLAVERY

THE STORY OF SHADRACH MINKINS IS ALSO THE STORY OF HOW BLACK AMERICANS BECAME SUBJECTS, NOT JUST OBJECTS, OF HISTORY

Author: By Wil Haygood, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 9, 1997

Page: N17

Section: Books

A group of defiant Boston blacks quickly gathered and made their way to the courthouse. They hatched a plot that seemed so unimaginable and wobbly as to have been formed on the spot. A courthouse ruckus ensued; marshals were surprised and overtaken; Minkins was snatched and whisked away. Emotion, then, had cut both ways.

Abolitionists across the country felt emboldened. Boston was scorned in hateful editorials, the pro-slavery outsiders having sniffed conspiracy and plot. The rescue, of course, was a stunning rebuke to federal law, which now required the authorities to cooperate in returning runaway slaves to their owners. Minkins hid in Boston and Cambridge before taking the Underground Railroad to Canada, where he lived out his life, becoming a kind of hero of the anti-slavery movement, his lively tale crisscrossing the border for years and years.

Now Gary Collison, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, has combed archives and old newspaper clippings for details of that little-known incident. His story sweeps in such familiar characters as Daniel Webster and Frederick Douglass, along with the forgotten or anonymous black Bostonians who saved Shadrach Minkins, all of them caught in the swirling currents of Boston's anti-slavery movement.

The Civil War was 10 years away, and slavery was being howled at in Boston salons. In 1850, a group of Northern and Southern politicians put together a cold-blooded compromise on slavery issues that included the Fugitive Slave Law, under which bounty hunters were given jurisdiction in non-slaveholding states to recapture slaves.

One notable backer of the law was Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Aging, grasping for votes from the Whig Party in hopes of becoming president in 1852, Webster made a fool of himself in backing the law. He actually thought he was slick. He had run for the presidential nomination in 1848, but Southerners laughed him away as too liberal. Now he'd play the slave angle.

Instead he drew the wrath of his home region's anti-slavery citizens. A group of black cooks in Boston refused to help prepare a dinner Webster orchestrated for a Turkish dignitary. And man-about-New-England Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ``The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan.''

It was May 1850 when Minkins escaped from Norfolk, Va., though Collison couldn't find out how. In Boston, Minkins scuffled until he found work at the Cornhill Coffee House. A welcome job, but a risky location. The coffeehouse, notes Collison, was near the city's seat of government -- ``an area frequented by Southern businessmen visiting the city.''

That year, the Fugitive Slave Law alarmed ex-slaves living in the North. Its effect was quickly felt: An estimated 2,000 free blacks bolted to Canada. In Boston, there were meetings at the African Meeting House, at Faneuil Hall. It was at Faneuil Hall that the defiant Frederick Douglass called for ``a half dozen or more dead kidnappers.'' (Douglass, the blunt and brooding former slave who had purchased his own freedom, would go on to say he personally hated Boston: He claimed he couldn't move about without being called ``nigger.'') The Boston Daily Evening Traveller reported that ``Quite a number of families, where either the father or mother are fugitives, have been broken up, and the furniture sold off, with a view of leaving for safer quarters in Nova Scotia or Canada.''

For all his conscientious research, Collison tests a reader's patience by taking so long to get to the crux of his narrative. But when he does, it is hard not to be caught up in this improbable saga. On Feb. 12, 1851, a Norfolk constable and slave catcher by the name of John Caphart arrived in Boston; an abolitionist poster warning of his advent described him as wearing ``a dark blue piratical looking long cloak, a light brown body coat, and a pair of dirt-colored pantaloons.'' He got two marshals to stake out Minkins where he worked. They did, having a casual meal. Meal finished, they surprised Minkins and arrested him.

As the onetime slave was hustled off to the courthouse, word spread quickly ``through the surrounding streets and into the black neighborhoods on Beacon Hill.'' Lawyers were summoned for Minkins. Blacks were fearful Minkins would be taken to the Charlestown Naval Yard, and shipped South from there, back into slavery. Nearly two dozen black men climbed the courthouse steps. They milled about angrily. One man, walking stick in hand, hollered, ``Boys, are you ready? Now is the time or never.''

They then stormed the courtroom, shocking the few federal officers on hand. Someone yelled to Minkins he'd be shot if he tried to escape. ``The rescuers, four or five half-carrying Minkins, stampeded through the doorway, crossed the hall, and raced pell-mell down the stairs to the first floor.'' Minkins was whisked away, down streets where onlookers were gathering. ``Minkins and his noisy rescuers had evaporated as silently as raindrops after a summer shower.'' The last anyone locally saw of Shadrach Minkins, he was in Cambridge. He turned up next in Canada.

Collison picks up Minkins's trail in Montreal. There Minkins does odd jobs, marries, divorces. He becomes proprietor of a restaurant and calls it ``Uncle Tom's Cabin.'' A shy and semi-literate man, he courts no publicity; nor does he become involved in Underground Railroad activities. There is nary a quote from Minkins himself in the entire book.

In fact, Collison is continually hampered by the lack of definitive information. Where he can't find the answer to a question he himself poses -- about how Minkins arrived in Boston, or why he chose Boston -- he chooses to speculate. In the end, his book becomes more a tribute to a handful of brave Boston souls than a biography of Minkins himself.

Those brave souls, the people who became actors in history that day, were all black. In the halls of the United States Senate, this fact was noted by an outraged Henry Clay, who lamented a defiance of the law perpetrated, he said, ``by negroes; by African descendants; by people who possess no part, as I contend, in our political system.''

Minkins never crossed the border into America again. ``Behind him, on the US side of the border,'' writes Collison, ``the law of the land made him liable at any moment to be seized, bound and, after a brief hearing, stripped of his human and political rights and declared a mere piece of property, a thing.''

Shadrach Minkins died in Canada on Dec. 13, 1875. Without a country, but considerably more than ``a thing'': a free man.