The Untold Story of Shields Green. Louis A. Decaro, Jr.
auspices, from October 1850 to December 1851, there were nine incidents involving seventeen blacks, ranging from minor disturbances to exasperating episodes for black Harrisburg. Was Emperor involved in some of these incidents as well? While the African American community responded to this incident by forming an ad hoc committee to aid fugitives under the new law, the tragic “fugitive slave riot” of August 1850 was a harbinger of the last and most desperate decade of the antebellum era.65
Shortly after Emperor’s death in 1859, a journalist inserted a description of the raider in the Richmond Daily Dispatch, suggesting that it was based upon another source. The description is clearly derogatory, but also provocative. According to his source, Emperor “was an ambitious, vindictive, but very illiterate negro of the African species” who had “died a victim to his own brutish impetuosity.” It is easy enough to dismiss these charges, yet for all of its malicious twaddle, the report also states that Green had been “the head and front of all the negro rescues at Harrisburg, for several years past.” Once again, the reference to Emperor’s activities in Harrisburg tends to reinforce the notion that he had revealed this background himself, and that possibly he had some connection to antislavery activities there, although there is no certainty as to what is meant by “negro rescues.”
In 1885 a longtime Oberlinian named Lewis Clark told a reporter from the Chicago Inter-Ocean that Shields Green had also been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. If this were true, it certainly would have put him in the company of John Brown’s other black raiders, John A. Copeland and Lewis S. Leary. A similar claim, that Green had been “a student and citizen of Oberlin,” was made by another author in the early twentieth century.66 However, Green’s alleged connection to the famous Ohio town has no basis in fact. In 1860 James Mason Fitch wrote in the Weekly Anglo-African that Green “was but little known” in Oberlin except by news of his capture and execution in Virginia. Elias Jones, a longtime resident and activist in Oberlin, likewise denied that Green was ever a part of the community. During the antebellum era, Jones had served as secretary of an antislavery society in Oberlin and insisted that Green could never have been part of the community without him knowing it.67
How old was Shields Green when he fled from South Carolina, and what year did he make his escape? What roads had he traveled by the time he knocked on the door of the Douglass residence in Rochester? The conventional narrative portrays Emperor as one who had run away from slavery and then stumbled his way into the historical spotlight by his association with Frederick Douglass. But it may very well be that he was a militant freedom fighter seeking an opportunity to attack slavery—what Manisha Sinha calls a “fugitive slave abolitionist.” Sinha has observed how, in the final decades prior to the Civil War, a new generation of black abolitionists had come to dominate the movement. While Frederick Douglass was the most renowned of this new leadership, Sinha concludes that there were many other self-emancipated slaves who also emerged as leaders.68 Even assuming that Green was not born into slavery, perhaps he had fallen prey to it. His first act of resistance was flight, but like his abolitionist peers, for him freedom entailed more than attaining personal liberty. In this light, Shields Green may be remembered as among the most radical vanguard of the black antislavery movement, rather than simply as an actor in the Harper’s Ferry episode. Despite these interesting possibilities, however, our knowledge of Emperor remains frustratingly uneven—at a few points bright and clear, but at many other points obscure and uncertain, still hidden in the shadows of the past.
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