Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1850. A mixed message on slavery

By 1850, The Providence Journal was opposed to slavery but felt that states should decide the issue on their own.

The paper's mettle was tested in 1850 with the passage of the federal fugitive slave law, which made it easier for Southern slave owners to reclaim runaway slaves who had fled to free states in the North. The law made it a crime to assist runaways and required citizens to assist federal marshals in capturing them.

After the law was passed, The Journal editorialized against it.

"The execution of this law is creating much excitement among the colored people," the paper wrote on Oct. 4, 1850. "The number of fugitives and the descendants of fugitives is greater than has been generally supposed, and they include a very wide circle in their sympathies. It is said that there are several hundreds of this class in our city. Not a few of them are men who have been here for many years, who have married and raised families here, acquired property, paid taxes, have borne arms in the the public defence, and fulfilled all the duties of good citizens. It is not in human nature that we should look on indifferently at the prospect of strangers coming here, and by the testimony of men entirely unknown to us, drag these people away to servitude. The law is exceedingly well adapted to kidnapping free persons, and with the temptation which the slave market offers to such business, it would be strange if there were not repeated instances of it."

Photo courtesy of R.I. Black Heritage Society

In 1855, George Henry fought for equal education rights when he found himself being taxed for schools in Providence that his children could not attend. Later, in the 1870s, he opposed the state's "intermarriage law." In 1894, he published Life of George Henry, together with a Brief History of the Colored People in America.

But The Journal also opposed defying the law, a course many Northerners had announced they would follow.

"We do not think it is decorous for citizens to meet and declare that they will openly and by violence oppose the execution of any law," The Journal said in an editorial on Oct. 8, 1850. "If such a course be tolerated in regard to a bad law, it will soon be applied to a good law, and finally to all law."