The Untold Story of Shields Green. Louis A. Decaro, Jr.
a week of this report, this error seems to have spread among lesser journals in North Carolina and South Carolina, and likely elsewhere in the South.56
However, the Pittsburgh reference is worth considering because apparently it had been confused in reports for Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, which was linked with initial reports about Shields Green after the raid. Most notably, a journalist from the Baltimore Sun was among the earliest reporters on the scene at Harper’s Ferry, and described Green in two different reports (dated October 19) as “colored, of Harrisburg,” and also as a “free negro from Harrisburg.”57 Likewise, another report in the Baltimore Daily Exchange initially connected Green with Harrisburg. In his first report, however, either the journalist (or the typesetter) misidentified Green as “Gains”—although the raiders’ names sometimes were confused, particularly in those reports made when the smoke was still clearing in Harper’s Ferry. The article thus states that “Gains” had been “induced” by Brown “to come over to Maryland and work for him,” after which he was further “induced to go into the insurrection.”58 The following day, however, the Daily Exchange filed another report, identifying Green by his correct name, and describing him as “a large man” who also went by the sobriquet “Emperor.” The updated description says that Green was “raised in South Carolina” but was from Rochester, New York, and the Harrisburg connection is not repeated.59
Was there any real connection between Shields Green and Harrisburg? One may very well assume that Green’s claim to have been a free man from Harrisburg was a ploy of some kind. It is a matter of record that Green was clever enough to try to elude capture by means of a ruse following Brown’s defeat.60 But when it was clear that he could not pass himself off as a “captured” slave, Green may have changed tactics, telling the marines that he was a free black man from Pennsylvania. However, if the Harrisburg claim was a ploy on Green’s part, it is not clear what he hoped to gain by it as a black man captured as an ostensible insurrectionist in a slave state. Certainly, the Virginians would not have been willing to surrender him to Pennsylvania authorities. Perhaps by associating himself with Harrisburg, Green hoped to avoid connecting Frederick Douglass to the raid; or maybe he merely hoped to avoid any word reaching South Carolina that he had been apprehended in Virginia.
But what if Green was telling the truth and his reference to Harrisburg has biographical significance? In the Pine and Palm article it is stated that Emperor had made friends in Philadelphia. While it is possible that the reference to Philadelphia is an error, Green may very well have gone there after landing in New York City. Indeed, his possible connection to Harrisburg is interesting, not only given the unusual profile of that city in the antebellum era, but also because there is a well-documented underground railroad connection between Philadelphia and Harrisburg.61
Harrisburg was not a typical Northern city in the 1850s. Although it benefitted from trading on the Susquehanna River, Harrisburg was far more political than commercial in outlook. At the same time, it had become appealing to settlers, both white and black, because of its accessibility by canal and railway. While the majority of its citizens were white, African Americans in Emperor’s time numbered significantly in Harrisburg, being the city with the leading black population in the state. Considering the importance of Harrisburg to blacks in the antebellum era, it may be that Green had some real connection there, just as he claimed to have had free parents in South Carolina.
As the preferred residence for many blacks in Pennsylvania, Harrisburg saw its African American population reach nearly thirteen thousand prior to the Civil War. Although Pennsylvania had other smaller black settlements, most of them were isolated communities of color in rural areas largely comprised of freedmen and refugees from the South. In contrast, Harrisburg was the home of a sizable free population and a sanctuary for fugitives. Black and white abolitionists provided safe havens to fugitives, so if he had found his way to Harrisburg from Philadelphia in the 1850s, Green was among a population of escapees from slavery that numbered well over one hundred—no small number for a moderate-sized antebellum town. Unlike other cities in the North, Harrisburg even had its own black cultural area, which developed along Tanner’s Alley (near today’s Capitol Park and Walnut and Fourth Streets), a thoroughfare where free blacks and fugitives from slavery lived and mingled.62
What makes the Harrisburg connection even more interesting is a single contemporary source, a report that was filed by a Baltimore journalist on October 18, the day after Brown’s capture, appearing the following day in the New York Herald. According to the Herald report, a “Negro named Green, who was conspicuous in the fugitive slave riot at Harrisburg some years ago, was among the insurgents” at Harper’s Ferry.63 This reported claim, that Green had participated in a “fugitive slave riot” in Harrisburg, appears only once in the annals of the Harper’s Ferry raid and therefore it is not quite clear how to evaluate it. Should it be dismissed as yet another error, or should it be considered possibly as granting a new insight into Shields Green’s mysterious story? If it was simply an error, it is peculiarly so because the anonymous reporter who filed it would have had no obvious reason to make such a connection. It seems more likely that this Baltimore reporter probably was among the first journalists on the scene following the raid, and that his reference to Green’s participation in a “fugitive slave riot” actually was based upon an interview with him.
To be sure, the Harrisburg connection, if altogether dismissed, would have no immediate bearing upon the record of Shields Green and the Harper’s Ferry raid. On the other hand, if it is retained as a possibility, then the conventional chronology would have to be significantly adjusted in favor of a much earlier escape from South Carolina, because the only recorded “fugitive slave riot” in Harrisburg took place in 1850. This again raises the issue of Green’s age, for if he was a young man in his twenties at the time of the Harper’s Ferry raid as typically assumed, then he would have been far too young to have participated in the Harrisburg episode nine years before. But if Shields Green was born in the mid-1820s, then he would have had sufficient time to marry, sire a child, and escape in his later twenties, and would have been in his early thirties by the time of the raid in 1859.
The episode at Harrisburg often has been overlooked in narratives of the antebellum era, perhaps because it occurred just prior to the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in the fall of 1850. As such, it cannot be numbered among the more memorable “rescues” and “riots” that occurred in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, from the Christiana (Pennsylvania) “riot” and “Jerry Rescue” (Syracuse, New York) in 1851 to the Oberlin-Wellington (Ohio) incident of 1858. To be sure, the legal outworking of the Harrisburg incident unfolded after the law was passed. But the incident itself—in which Shields Green may have participated as a young man—actually shows the kind of antislavery resistance that slaveholders wanted to prevent in the first place by a reinvigorated fugitive slave law.64
In the summer of 1850, eight men fled from Clarke County, Virginia, passing through Harrisburg on their way north. Undoubtedly, the underground railroad brought these desperate men to Harrisburg, and likely also to the attention of William A. Jones, the leading black citizen. Jones owned property and ran a popular boardinghouse in the city that doubled as an underground railroad stop. Although five of the fugitives left town, three men remained, only to be apprehended by a party of slave hunters and placed in custody. Less than a week afterward, a committee of black citizens led by Jones was able to bring the three fugitives before a judge on a writ of habeas corpus, and then paid two abolitionist lawyers to represent them.
The judge was apparently sympathetic to the fugitives, permitting the slaveholders only to reclaim the horses that the fugitives had taken. Undaunted, the slaveholders entered the jail after the trial with the clear intention of seizing the runaways. This immediately prompted a response from black Harrisburg. When one of the fugitives was seized, the crowd exploded in anger and pushed forward to the jail. During the struggle, a single man was able to get past an iron fence and liberate one of the three fugitives. While sustaining terrible wounds, the hero delivered him to the sympathetic crowd, which promptly armed him and sent him on his way north.
Unable either to escape or to be rescued by the black community, the other two fugitives remained in the Harrisburg jail under armed guard. Unfortunately, they were incarcerated long enough for President Millard Fillmore to sign