Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich Page A

soon as they possibly can .” In every Quaker community committees were appointed to “labor with such Friends as remain in the practice of holding their fellow men in a state of slavery, endeavoring to convince them of the iniquity of such practice.” Even so, manumission was a process rather than a single event. Quakers belonging to the Nine Partners Meeting in Dutchess County, New York, later an important link in the Underground Railroad, took seven years to free all their slaves, completing the process in 1782. Quakers in Westbury, Long Island, did not succeed in freeing all their slaves until 1798.
    Social pressure within the Quaker community was uniquely effective. Quakers were already segregated by dress, speech, religious services, opposition to taking oaths, and the marriage ceremony. Deviations from orthodoxy were punished with “disownment,” a public and deliberately discomfiting proclamation that the individual concerned was in a state of spiritual disharmony with his, or her, fellow Friends. In the matter of slavery, as well as other doctrinal issues, the Quakers demanded total commitment. As one tract put it, “In the Christian warfare there must be no reservation.”
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    Although the Quaker-led Pennsylvania Abolition Society did not regard itself as a subversive organization, it was a kind of culture dish that brought together men and, if indirectly, a few women who were uncompromising in their opposition to slavery, morally committed to emancipation, and pragmatic in their determination to put fugitives beyond the reach of their masters. No one was more pragmatic than Hopper. A man of instinct and action, he was a type that would often appear along the lines of the Underground Railroad. His home near the riverfront, at the corner of Dock and Walnut streets, was both a clearinghouse and a place of refuge for fugitives and kidnap victims. Hopper explained his motivation by citing biblical precepts that any American could understand, and that the underground would use to justify its defiantly illegal work for decades to come. Once when he was summoned to court as a witness in a slave case and was asked what course of action Quakers were expected to take when a fugitive came to them, he first replied, “I am not willing to answer for anyone but myself.”
    â€œWell,” pressed the magistrate, a Mr. Ingersoll, “what would you do in such a case? Would you deliver him to his master?”
    â€œIndeed I would not!” answered Hopper. “My conscience would not permit me to do it. It would be a great crime; because it would be disobedience to my own dearest convictions of right. I should never expect to enjoy an hour of peace afterward. I would do for a fugitive slave whatever I should like to have done for myself, under similar circumstances. If he asked my protection, I would extend it to him to the utmost of my power. If he was hungry, I would feed him. If he was naked, I would clothe him. If he needed advice, I would give him such as I thought would be most beneficial to him.”
    Hopper always preferred a legal attack to a physical one, and to manipulate the law rather than to break it. He was the first abolitionist to vigorously exploit the possibilities of the new, less stringent, state laws to help fugitives. His many successes suggest that his adversaries were still operating under an outdated idea of what was legal and possible, assuming as they always had that the law would continue to protect slaveholding when, in fact, it had decisively shifted, at least in Pennsylvania, in favor of abolition. As one judge told Hopper, when the evidence for and against freedom was evenly balanced, it was always a duty to decide in favor of liberty.
    Hopper was unflagging in his search for loopholes. By employing clever tactics that befuddled professional lawyers and unfriendly magistrates alike, he sometimes managed to keep cases pending as long as three or four years,