Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich Page B

until a fugitive’s claimants were worn out and ready to settle. Urged to become a professional lawyer, he declined, saying that he preferred to resist temptations that might lead him away from the simplicity of Quaker belief. On one occasion he agreed to help a young woman who had escaped from Virginia and had lived free in Philadelphia long enough to raise a family there. Tracked down by her former master, she begged Hopper for help. He knew that under the Fugitive Slave Law, the master was entirely within his rights to carry her back to Virginia. He offered to buy her from the Virginian, but was turned down. Undeterred, Hopper showed up with the woman in city court and promised to “be responsible to the United States” for seeing that she would return the following day for a ruling on her status. He also promised personally to pay a one-thousand-dollar bond if she failed to appear. This was deliberate double-talk on Hopper’s part, since he knew quite well that the United States government had no claim of its own on the woman, and no jurisdiction in the case. (Nor, probably, did he have the money.) Nevertheless, this was agreed to as reasonable by the court and the slave owner, both of whom had missed Hopper’s verbal sleight-of-hand. Next morning, all the parties were in court except the fugitive, who with her family had been sent away to safety during the night. When the magistrate stated that Hopper would have to forfeit the bond, the Quaker pointed out to the master’s chagrin that since the federal government was not party to the case, there was no basis for a Philadelphia court collecting a fine in its name.
    When the law failed, Hopper could call on a web of friends and collaborators. His network was primitive but efficient. Spies among black dock workers, laborers, and domestics alerted abolitionists when a kidnapping was taking place, or when a constable or a slave master was in thecity stalking a fugitive. The story of a fugitive from Virginia named Ben Jackson makes it clear that when necessary Hopper was even able to call on friends in the constabulary and the courts. Jackson had been serving as coachman for a friend when he was caught and arrested by his former master. He was jailed, pending the issuance of a permit authorizing the master to take his property back to Virginia. He managed to get word of his predicament to Hopper, who arranged with the constable on duty at the jail, a man “who sympathized with the poor victim of oppression,” to have the prisoner brought to court ahead of schedule. Almost certainly with Hopper’s connivance, the justice before whom the case was heard—a man who “detested slavery, and was a sincere friend to the colored people”—declared that since the complainant, Jackson’s master, was absent, the “presumptive evidence” indicated that Jackson was a free man, and ordered him released. By the time his master arrived, at the appointed time, Jackson was gone for good.
    Hopper clearly relished the dramatic role that he played in more than a few rescues. Once Hopper sneaked up the stairs of a home and snatched a pistol from the hand of a partially blind man who was threatening to shoot anyone who interfered with his flogging of a slave girl. Another time, learning that a boat had left Philadelphia with a kidnapped boy on board, Hopper obtained a horse and raced alongside the Delaware River to the vessel’s next landfall, arriving just in time to seize the boy and bring him home before he had been carried out of Pennsylvania waters. He also perfected ruses that were often used in later years by the Underground Railroad. Once, for example, when he was concealing a fugitive in his home and suspected that slave hunters were lurking about, he hired a black man to run out of the house after dark. As Hopper suspected, several men leaped from the shadows and seized the decoy, while the real fugitive escaped out the back