The Underground Railroad and the Quakers Who Broke an Unjust Law in the Open

Everybody is in favor of civil disobedience, provided the law being disobeyed is one they dislike. Ask the same person about a disobedience directed at a law they like, and watch the principle develop footnotes. That is the oldest problem in the ethics of resistance, and it is why a serious person, before claiming the mantle of conscience, owes the public an answer to a plain question: what makes this different from simply doing what I want?

The American case that answers the question best is not a modern one. It is the case of the people who, in the years before the Civil War, sheltered fugitives from slavery in defiance of federal law, and who did it, many of them, not in secret but in the open, giving their names and paying the penalties. They were mostly Quakers, though not only Quakers. Their example gives us a test.

Defining the terms

Let us be precise, because most arguments about this subject are arguments about vocabulary.

Civil disobedience is the deliberate, public breach of a law, undertaken on grounds of conscience, with a willingness to accept the legal penalty. The three working words are deliberate, public and penalty. A person who breaks the law in secret and hopes to escape is not engaged in civil disobedience. He is engaged in evasion, which may or may not be justified, but which is a different thing. A person who breaks the law and then denies the state's authority to punish him is engaged in something closer to revolution.

The Underground Railroad was not a single organization and not, mostly, a set of tunnels. It was an informal and shifting network of people, Black and white, free and formerly enslaved, who helped fugitives from slavery make their way north, and eventually to Canada. Its secrecy varied. In the Deep South it had to be secret. In parts of the North, in communities that had made up their minds, the assistance was close to public.

Conscience, in the sense that matters, is not a feeling but a judgment: a moral conclusion, reached with care, that an act is required. It is the thing the Declaration of Independence invokes when it speaks of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" and of "a long train of abuses." It is not the same as preference, and the difference is going to matter.

Who they were

Levi Coffin, a Quaker born in North Carolina in 1798, settled in Indiana and later in the Cincinnati area, where he ran a business, and where, over many years, he and his wife gave shelter to fugitives. Historians estimate that he and his wife aided thousands of fugitives over the years. He was sometimes called the president of the Underground Railroad, a nickname that began with a slave catcher and that spread among abolitionists. He did not hide that he was doing it. A man in his position could not have run a business and kept the activity entirely secret. He relied on the fact that the people around him knew, and mostly looked away, or agreed.

Thomas Garrett, a Quaker ironmonger in Wilmington, Delaware, a slave state, is the sharpest illustration of the principle. Garrett helped fugitives for decades. In 1848 he was tried at the courthouse in New Castle, Delaware, in suits for damages under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, brought over his help to fugitives. Chief Justice Roger Taney, riding circuit, presided. The juries found against him and awarded damages to the claimants. According to the National Park Service, after the verdict Garrett told the crowd that he would never neglect an opportunity to assist a slave to obtain freedom. He went back to his business and went on with his work.

William Still, a free Black man in Philadelphia, served as the chairman of the Vigilance Committee that aided escaped slaves arriving in the city, and he did something unusual: he kept records. He interviewed the people he aided and recorded their stories and destinations, and in 1872 he published them in a book. He did so because he thought the account mattered, and because the records helped reunite families, including his own: a man who came to the Society in search of his family turned out to be his own brother, Peter, left behind in slavery decades before.

The law they were breaking

The law in question was not an obscure regulation. The Constitution, in Article IV, Section 2, says that a "Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." Congress had implemented it in 1793. The Supreme Court in Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842 held that the power to legislate on fugitives belonged to the federal government, and that states could not obstruct it.

Then came the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the compromise of that year, which made the law harsher. Federal commissioners were to decide claims in summary proceedings, paid ten dollars if they ruled for the claimant and five if for the accused. The accused could not testify. Citizens could be compelled to help in the capture, and anyone who aided a fugitive faced fines and imprisonment. For those who sheltered fugitives, the Act turned a private kindness into a federal offense, and invited the Quakers and others to decide what they owed to a law that required them to take part in what they believed to be a sin.

The principles

Here is the structure I would extract from their example, in order. Call it the six premises.

One. The law has authority, but not unlimited authority. A just society is governed by law, and citizens owe it a presumption of obedience. But the Declaration rests on the idea that there are rights that precede government, and the tradition of the English-speaking peoples holds that a command contrary to the moral law does not bind the conscience. The Book of Acts records the apostles' answer to the authorities who commanded them to stop teaching: "We ought to obey God rather than men." This is not an invitation to disobey whenever one is inconvenienced. It is a claim that obedience has a ceiling.

Two. The injury must be grave. The Quakers did not break the law over a tax rate or a zoning rule. They broke it because the law required them to return human beings to bondage, and because they believed that was a profound wrong. The more serious the wrong, the more it can justify. A small wrong justifies nothing. If the law you want to break is merely one you dislike, the test is not met.

Three. Break the law openly. Garrett did not lie about what he was doing. He said it publicly, in front of the crowd at the courthouse. The openness is not decoration. It is what makes the act a statement to the community and not a private evasion. A person who acts in public invites the community to judge, and to judge the law as well as the lawbreaker.

Four. Accept the penalty. Garrett paid. The damages did not make the law just, but his willingness to pay it showed that he was not asserting a right to be above the law. He was asserting that some laws should not be obeyed and that a good citizen will bear the cost of saying so. A person who disobeys and also demands to be exempt from punishment has changed the claim from conscience to privilege.

Five. Prefer persuasion and use every lawful means as well. The Quakers and their allies petitioned, published, argued, voted where they could and supported the political movement against slavery. Disobedience was not a substitute for these. It was a supplement for the cases in which the law demanded the sin itself.

Six. Do not harm persons. Quaker pacifism supplied the discipline here. The line between sheltering a fugitive and killing a pursuer is the line between civil disobedience and violent resistance, and the movement's best-known conscience, the Quakers, kept to the near side of it.

The test case: Christiana, 1851

Consider how this played out when the second Fugitive Slave Act was a year old. On September 11, 1851, in Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Maryland slaveholder named Edward Gorsuch came with a party to recover four men who had escaped from him. They went to the house of William Parker, a Black man who was a leader in the local community's defense of fugitives. Parker's household and neighbors resisted. In the confrontation Gorsuch was killed and others were wounded.

A federal prosecution followed, and it is a revealing one. Castner Hanway, a local miller who had been present, was charged with treason, on the theory that resisting the Fugitive Slave Act by force was a levying of war against the United States. Hanway had refused to help the slaveholders' party when they demanded it, but he had not himself been among those who fought. The treason trial in Philadelphia, from November 24 to December 11, 1851, ended in an acquittal after the jury deliberated only a short time. The remaining treason charges were dropped.

Look at what this shows. The people who killed Gorsuch were acting in self-defense of their homes and their community, as they understood it, against the kidnapping of free and fugitive people. Whether one calls it justified or not, it was not civil disobedience in the sense I defined, because it was not an act accepting a penalty. And the man who was prosecuted for treason was prosecuted though he had refused to help the posse and had not himself fought. The case shows why the open, nonviolent model matters: it is the model that wins public opinion, because the cause appears in the light of its own moral clarity, not in the light of a fight.

The objection: anyone can claim conscience

Now the steelman, because it is a strong one. The objection says: your six principles sound fine for abolitionists because we know, with hindsight, that they were right. But a principle that is justified only by the result is no principle. It is grading your own exam. Every protester believes that his cause is grave. Every lawbreaker will say that his conscience compelled him. If the test is "do it openly and pay the penalty," then a person who blockades a facility he thinks is committing murder, a person who refuses to pay a tax that funds a war, and a person who ignores a court order he thinks is tyranny all meet it. And then the rule of law, which depends on general obedience, is left defenseless against the sincere.

That is the best form of the objection, and I take it seriously. Four answers.

One. Conscience is not the test, and the Quakers never said it was. The test is the combination: grave injury, openness, acceptance of the penalty, resort to lawful means as well, and no harm to persons. Take away any of them and the claim weakens. Sincerity is necessary but never sufficient.

Two. The principles do not exempt the claimant from the law. That is the key difference. Civil disobedience as the Quakers practiced it asks the legal system for nothing except that it do its job. It does not say that the lawbreaker should go free. It says that the law is wrong, and that the sincere will pay the price of saying so. A society that punishes the sincere is within its rights. Whether it is wise to do so is a different question, answered by the jury and by the public, which is what happened in the Hanway trial.

Three. The rule of law depends on a mechanism for dissent. In the American system the jury is one. A jury that declines to convict on a law that offends the community's conscience is an old safeguard, and the jury in the Zenger case in 1735 is an example from the colonial period, told in John Peter Zenger and the Jury That Defended American Press Freedom in 1735. The rule of law is stronger when it has pressure valves than when it demands obedience to anything on the statute books. A boiler with no valve is not order, only a slow explosion with good paperwork.

Four. The principle must apply to causes you dislike, and that is a feature. A conservative who admires Garrett must admit that someone on the other side may invoke the same principle. The answer is not to abandon the principle. The answer is to apply the criteria, and to say honestly where a particular claim fails them. A claim to grave injury can be tested. A claim to openness can be tested. A claim that the claimant accepts the penalty can be tested. Most claims fail one of these, and that is the system working.

What the example teaches believers

The Quakers' witness has a lesson for people of faith in public life. Some think that faith belongs in a private compartment. Others think that faith licenses anything. The Quaker conductors show a third way: a conscience formed by a tradition, expressed in public, restrained by love of neighbor and respect for the rule of law as a good thing worth preserving even when one breaks a particular law. That posture is harder than either of the alternatives, and it is more effective. The story of how Black churches and white churchmen worked this ground a century later is told in pulpits, boycotts and the church roots of the civil rights movement, and the story of a woman who combined all of these traits in a single career is told in Harriet Tubman Led Rescues, Spied for the Union and Raided the Combahee River. The wartime resistance of a German pastor to a state that demanded the church's submission is the subject of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church that would not bow to the Reich.

Verdict

The Underground Railroad's conductors did not break the law lightly. They did it because the law demanded that they take part in treating persons as property, and they did it in a manner that left the law intact. The test they set is still the right test: grave injury, open act, accepted penalty, lawful means as well, and respect for the persons of others. A cause that meets it deserves a hearing. A cause that skips the steps deserves suspicion.

The case in brief

1. Civil disobedience means a deliberate, public breach of law on grounds of conscience, with acceptance of the penalty; secret evasion and violent resistance are different things.
2. The conductors, among them Levi Coffin, Thomas Garrett and William Still, defied the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, and Garrett was tried and held liable for damages in 1848.
3. Six principles mark the difference between conscience and lawlessness: a grave injury, open acts, the acceptance of the penalty, lawful means as well, no harm to persons, and the law's authority respected in general.
4. The Christiana resistance of September 11, 1851, shows what happens when the line is crossed, and the acquittal of Castner Hanway shows how a jury treated the claim that resisting the law was treason.
5. The objection that anyone can claim conscience is answered by the combination of tests and by the refusal to exempt the claimant from penalty.

What you can do: read the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 on a reliable archive of statutes, then write down which of the six principles any cause you support today would meet, and which it would not.