Freedom's Detective Read online

  It was all legal and efficient on paper; in addition to its moral defects, however, the Fugitive Slave Act showed that the United States remained unlike France and other European states in its limited capacity for centralized surveillance and law enforcement. The statute attempted to adapt the American paradigm of semiprivatized local law enforcement, the sheriff’s posse, to a national mission. In practice, that mission—shutting down what had come to be known as the Underground Railroad—was highly unpopular in the North, where the law met often furious opposition. Rather than channel the sordid business of slave capture into a proper, lawful system, the Fugitive Slave Act seemed to incentivize more, and more brutal, freelance “slave-hunting.”

  * * *

  John Doy and his companions were about to experience that firsthand. As they negotiated the bend in the road, they were set upon by twenty men on horseback, who had been waiting in ambush behind a high hill and were now galloping toward them—weapons drawn. Leading the charge were Missouri-based slave catchers. Doy recognized some from their previous assaults on Lawrence.

  Flummoxed and outgunned, Doy stalled. He demanded that the mounted men blocking his way exhibit the requisite documents—“process,” in the argot of the day—from a federal commissioner, proving their authority to stop his wagons and seize his passengers.

  As he argued, Doy suddenly spotted a familiar face among his assailants. He recognized the young man as one of thousands of “emigrants” from Massachusetts to Lawrence, many inspired by the goal of populating the Kansas Territory with antislavery citizens who would vote for its admission to the Union as a Free State, under the “popular sovereignty” provision of the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act. The young man ran a restaurant in downtown Lawrence, which he had started by dishing out food on a wooden plank laid across two barrel tops. To all appearances, he shared the views of his neighbors and clientele.7 At every opportunity, he voiced support for abolition, even contributing five dollars to the community’s “fund for freedom.” Now, there he was, among the Missourians, abetting their seizure of freedom-seeking black men, women, and children.

  The familiar face belonged to Hiram C. Whitley. And it was now clear to John Doy and his companions that Whitley had not been their friend, much less loyal to the antislavery cause. He was a traitor who had given the Missourians advance notice of Doy’s mission, then joined them in waylaying the wagons—no doubt motivated by the cash bounty slave holders or traders usually offered for black people captured in Kansas.

  “What? You, here, Whitley? A Free State man!” Doy spluttered. All that he could think to do was repeat his question, “Where’s your process?”

  “Here it is,” Whitley replied—whereupon he produced a revolver and tapped its barrel against the abolitionist’s forehead.

  * * *

  Hiram Coombs Whitley was indeed a product of New England’s free soil, born in the tiny hamlet of China, Maine, on August 6, 1832.8

  His father, William Whitley, was a native of Glasgow, Scotland, whose parents took him with them to America shortly after his birth in 1796. While still a teenager, William Whitley did battle for the United States against the British Empire in the War of 1812; he later learned medicine. After years practicing as a country doctor, William Whitley married Hannah Dixon McCoombs, a native of the rugged Maine coast who was sixteen years his junior but shared his Scottish roots. From a harsh girlhood experience, the starvation her part of Maine endured during the War of 1812, she learned a fierce love of the United States, and preached it to her son Hiram from an early age.

  In 1839, the Whitleys joined what was then a large flow of New Englanders to promising lands in the Great Lakes region. The family settled in Kirtland, a village twenty-five miles northeast of Cleveland famous as the home Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, had chosen for his Latter-day Saints when they abandoned Western New York in 1831. During the national financial panic of 1837, a Kirtland-based Mormon-run financial institution collapsed; and, amid unrest in the church, Smith departed for a new Zion farther West, taking most of his two thousand followers with him.

  By the time the Whitleys arrived, Kirtland was inhabited mainly by the “old” settlers who preceded the Mormons, though the Saints’ red-roofed temple, completed in 1836, still towered over their homes and farms. William Whitley established a new medical practice, earning enough to send young Hiram to school at the Western Reserve Seminary, which, despite its links to the Presbyterian Church, briefly rented out the top floor of the former Mormon temple, before moving to a permanent site in town.9 Young Hiram was evidently a good student; he learned elegant penmanship and acquired a vigorous, expressive writing style.

  Bright though he was, Whitley did not entirely relish learning. Still less did he aspire to the career for which the Western Reserve Seminary prepared its young charges: teaching school. To the contrary, he was restless, pranksterish; he enjoyed racing, wrestling, and playing hooky. He was also interested in money, and from his early teens he earned a few dollars each month as a part-time hired hand on local farms.

  One spring day in 1850, seventeen-year-old Hiram C. Whitley was lazing, barefoot, by the side of a road rather than attending his final year of classes at the seminary. A man approached him with an opportunity to earn five times as much money as he was getting at the local farms. All Whitley had to do was help the man drive cattle from the Cleveland area over the Allegheny Mountains to a market near Philadelphia. Without pausing to put his shoes on, Whitley said yes and was soon hiking beside the herd, helping move them during a nearly four-hundred-mile journey. Whitley wielded a long whip called a “black snake”; it had a bit of silk on the end that he learned to snap in the air, making a sound like a rifle shot that frightened wayward animals back into line.10

  Whitley returned to Kirtland when the drive was over—sixteen dollars richer. The journey marked the end of his schooling, and of his stable home life. He would leave again and again on cattle drives over the Alleghenies, eventually completing the grueling round-trip more than a dozen times. In addition to the opportunity for financial independence, cattle driving put Whitley in regular contact with fresh mountain air and posed a physical challenge, both of which he loved. Just over five feet, ten inches tall, the young man was growing tough, both mentally and physically—more formidable than people might guess by looking at his slender frame.

  Abandoning their hopes that he would become a teacher, Whitley’s parents tried to steer him into a respectable alternative: agriculture. In 1854, when he was twenty-two, they sent him to a relative’s farm near Canton, Massachusetts, twenty miles south of Boston. After a few months, however, Whitley again felt the familiar yen for adventure and rough travel. He struck out for the fishing port of Gloucester, where he found work on mackerel and cod-fishing boats, and pursued that dangerous, but poorly paid, career for the next two years.

  * * *

  In early 1856, Whitley found himself back in the Boston area, where, shortly before his twenty-fourth birthday, he married Catherine Webster Bates, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a carpenter from East Cambridge.11 A minister of the liberal, antislavery Universalist Church officiated at the ceremony, in keeping with Whitley’s Yankee bride’s beliefs—but in implicit rejection of, or indifference to, Whitley’s parents’ Presbyterianism.

  For Whitley, marriage to a woman steeped in egalitarian religious doctrine did not imply any spiritual conversion, though matrimony was a concession to convention. Whitley opened a saloon in East Cambridge, but business was slow due to competition from experienced, better-known establishments. In June 1856 Whitley approached a local citizens’ committee to seek a catering contract for their annual dinner. He was told that the committee preferred to use a rival business, owned by one R. M. Campbell, which supplied the previous year’s event. Whitley assured them he now owned Campbell’s establishment, the latter having gone bankrupt and sold out to him. The committee hired Whitley.12

  In truth,
R. M. Campbell was still solvent and very much in business. What actually seems to have happened is that, to retire a debt, Campbell gave Whitley and a business partner the saloon they were now operating, but Whitley had felt entitled to more. When Campbell learned of Whitley’s chicanery, he published an open letter in the Boston Herald declaring that Whitley had procured the catering contract through “absolute falsehoods.” Campbell asked customers to shun Whitley and continue doing business with him.

  Whitley did not apologize, as some men might have done, or keep a low profile until the scandal blew over. It was “not in his nature,” as a Bostonian who knew him would later write, “to yield a single point, in controversy, where he feels assured of his position.”13 He published two open letters of his own, in which he not only denied Campbell’s accusations but heaped invective upon him, insinuating that, if anyone was a liar, it was Campbell.14 Whitley sarcastically thanked the “asinine” Campbell for disavowing a connection to him, saying that this was “an immense favor.” He claimed to have evidence “in my possession” to prove his ownership of Campbell’s business, and warned the competitor to “mind his own business, keep quiet, go to church regularly, and above all, pay his honest debts!”

  This was probably a bluff; it seemed to work, though. Campbell fired off two more letters in the Boston Herald, but seemed hesitant to prolong the matter by taking Whitley to court. Campbell concluded his rebuttal with a final offer to Whitley: “I am ready to meet him face-to-face...and prove any assertions and brand him with his infamy, or failing to do so I am willing to bear all he can heap upon me.”

  Whitley never seems to have accepted this challenge. Instead, he declared in print that he would not “demean” himself by further dispute with Campbell, and, in the spring of 1857, left Massachusetts. He was bound for the Kansas settlement named in honor of the wealthy antislavery Boston businessman, Amos Lawrence, who had sponsored the first Free State emigrant groups in 1854. Whitley promised his new wife he would send for her once he got settled.15

  * * *

  Whitley did not have to shoot John Doy on that day in January 1859. Surrounded and outnumbered, the abolitionist and his companions surrendered. The “border ruffians,” as Missouri-based raiders were known in Kansas, tied up John and Charles Doy, and W. F. Clough, the neighbor who had aided them by driving the second wagon, and packed them off to Missouri, where they were jailed and indicted for slave-stealing. One of the thirteen African Americans the Doy party had been attempting to take to free territory managed to escape; the others, though, wound up in the custody of slaveholders in Missouri who claimed them, or were sold to slave traders and taken to New Orleans.

  For his part, Whitley slipped back into Lawrence after the ambush and resumed operating his eatery as if nothing had happened. He told no one what had really gone on prior to the Doy expedition: two slave catchers from Missouri had been scouting Lawrence in disguise for weeks. They had a clandestine meeting with their paid informers in the town a few days before the Doy expedition departed. Whitley had joined the conspiracy in return for a share of the bounty. And he had exploited contacts among Lawrence’s black population to learn the details of Doy’s plan, which he and his coconspirators then communicated to their confederates on the other side of the Missouri line, before Whitley ultimately joined them on the road outside town. Whitley felt perfectly confident that none of this damning information would ever come to light, because the Doys would soon be lynched or imprisoned in Missouri. True, the Missourians had released W. F. Clough, the driver of the second wagon, after only a couple of days in jail; he had promptly returned to Lawrence. That was no reason for Whitley to worry, however. He had made a point of ingratiating himself with Clough during the kidnapping, by protecting him from more violent members of the Missouri gang. In addition, before turning him loose, the Missourians had paid Clough fifty dollars for his silence, possibly at Whitley’s recommendation.

  Whitley had not reckoned with the possibility Clough might double-cross him. When that erstwhile member of the Doy party got back to Lawrence, the town was in an uproar over the ambush and kidnapping, with many citizens convinced that the attack had been an inside job, and crying for violent retaliation. Remorseful, fearful of being targeted by the mob, or both, Clough identified Whitley as one of the men who had ambushed Doy’s party.

  On February 1, 1859, Whitley found himself under arrest on charges of kidnapping and highway robbery. During a preliminary hearing that day at the court in Lawrence, Clough testified in copious detail about Whitley’s role in the ambush. Authorities produced Clough’s stolen gun, which they had found hidden under Whitley’s pillow at his home. The judge ordered Whitley held on $500 bond, pending trial.

  A day later, local officials in Lawrence brought the prisoner to a meeting of the Lawrence town council—attended by an angry crowd of citizens.16 Many in the assembly had survived an attack by pro-slavery forces in 1856 that left much of Lawrence a smoking ruin. Some of them, in turn, had joined John Brown and his sons in a bloody retaliatory raid against a pro-slavery settlement, Pottawatomie Creek. It was, in short, a vehemently antislavery crowd, embittered by horrific conflict, and accordingly eager to vent its fury on Whitley.

  Perhaps thinking that he could talk his way out of this predicament, just as he filibustered R. M. Campbell back in East Cambridge, or perhaps just following his argumentative instincts, Whitley demanded a chance to speak in his own defense. The antislavery Kansans refused; one leaped atop a table and called for the meeting to declare itself a jury and try him on the spot. Someone else slammed the doors shut to prevent Whitley’s escape. But the cries to hang the spy subsided when a member of the gathering pointed out, amid the chaos, that the court was still working on Whitley’s case. Under the circumstances, a journalist present later reported, “many thought it would be improper at that time to lynch him.”17 As a compromise, the assembly appointed a committee to take Whitley’s confession, then adjourned.

  Hiram C. Whitley was not about to confess to anything. He posted the bond and fled Lawrence, for Pikes Peak, the mountainous region six hundred miles to the west, which was then still part of the Kansas Territory, and the scene of the most frantic gold rush to hit the North American continent since the California frenzy a decade earlier. Whitley hid out among prospectors and land speculators for the next six months, until he got word that it might be safe to come back to eastern Kansas and rejoin Catherine, his wife. She had arrived in Lawrence a few months after he did.

  In late July, meanwhile, John Doy had broken out of jail in Missouri, aided by ten abolitionists from Lawrence, who rode across the border to extract him. The daring escape made headlines across the country.

  Whitley, however, had not heard the news. On a hot afternoon in August 1859, as he was passing through Lawrence—probably planning to retrieve Catherine and move with her to another Kansas town more sympathetic to slavery, or to Missouri—a burly man with a thick black beard approached him on a downtown street.18

  It was John Doy, burning with rage and bent on revenge. Doy tackled Whitley, stuck a revolver in his face, and told him he could either come clean or die.

  Cornered, Whitley finally told Doy and a hastily assembled committee of Lawrence antislavery leaders about the plot to ambush the Doys and their African American charges the previous January. To be sure, he minimized his own role, identifying instead two other Lawrence men as masterminds of the conspiracy. The first was the town’s former postmaster, who had indeed shown his true pro-slavery colors by helping to ambush Doy and deliver him to Missouri—then remained permanently in the latter state. The second was a less prominent man, an emigrant from New Hampshire who had lived in the abolitionist stronghold for years.

  Doy and the others already knew about the postmaster’s betrayal and defection, but were surprised to hear about the New Hampshire man. They refused to believe he had deceived them. They had watched with their own eyes as he helped the African A
mericans raise money, gather tools and provisions, and load John Doy’s wagons.19

  Whitley insisted he could prove the New Hampshire man’s duplicity, if they would simply search his home. They would find a stack of letters containing orders from the Missourians in his trunk, Whitley said. Sure enough, when Doy and his friends went to the man’s house, they discovered the documents. Confronted with the incriminating letters, the New Hampshire–born infiltrator confessed, including the shocking detail that he had treacherously bade the Doy convoy’s African American passengers farewell as they pulled out of Lawrence, knowing full well what was in store for them. The abolitionists told him and Whitley to get out of Lawrence, and never come back.20

  * * *

  Hiram C. Whitley was lucky to be alive. If he wanted to stay that way, though, he would have to find a new home, preferably far away. As the now-admitted betrayer and kidnapper of abolitionist whites and freedom-bound blacks, he would be persona non grata in Lawrence, or any other antislavery settlement in Kansas. Having saved his skin by fingering the slave catchers’ agent in the abolitionists’ camp, he was now an informer in the eyes of the pro-slavery faction, and therefore not welcome in their Kansas and Missouri strongholds, either. Going back to Massachusetts, and Catherine’s family, would certainly take him a long distance from all that trouble. Alas, people there might remember his ugly dispute with R. M. Campbell.

  Whitley, accompanied by Catherine, headed south, for a fresh start in a part of the country where word of his involvement in the Doy case had almost certainly not yet reached: New Orleans. The port on the Gulf of Mexico was shot through with crime and corruption, and prone to deadly yellow fever epidemics. Yet New Orleans was more economically vibrant and more cosmopolitan than any other Southern city. And it offered Whitley another advantage, if news of his dubious conduct in Kansas ever did catch up with him. Southern states generally snubbed Northern requests to extradite slave catchers accused of illicitly trying to capture free blacks.