The case of slave john anderson

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Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave
and Post-Slave Studies
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Making Waves on the Black Atlantic:
The Case of John Anderson
Jeannine Marie Delombard
Published online: 21 May 2012.
To cite this article: Jeannine Marie Delombard (2012) Making Waves on the Black Atlantic: The
Case of John Anderson, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 33:2,
191-204, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2012.669898
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Making Waves on the Black Atlantic:
The Case of John Anderson
Jeannine Marie Delombard
The once celebrated, now neglected case of John Anderson reveals a rare moment of con-
flict between two modes of black publicity in Anglo-American law and letters on the eve of
emancipation. As a fugitive from justice as well as from service, Anderson marked a dis-
ruption in the legal–literary continuum linking the colonial gallows tradition to the ante-
bellum slave narrative. Eluding the due process that affirmed the criminous slave’s legal
personhood, Anderson ultimately could not perform the civic eligibility modelled by
other internationally famous former fugitives such as Frederick Douglass and William
Wells Brown.
In December 1862, a month before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation marked the
beginning of the end of the abolitionist slave narrative, Bromley-by-Bow manufacturer
Harper Twelvetrees was compiling one of the final works in the genre, The Story of the
Life of John Anderson, the Fugitive Slave (1863). Published in London by William
Tweedie, which had brought out Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the
Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860), the volume offers in its endpa-
pers other ‘Works on Slavery’ from the same house. Above smaller notices for the
Reverend W.M. Mitchell’s Underground Railroad (1860) and two works devoted to
John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry is a prominent advertisement for The Deeper
Wrong (1862). Omitting the English edition’s more familiar subtitle, Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, the advertisement identified Harriet Jacobs,
the unnamed (but widely known) ‘authoress’ of this ‘autobiography of a slave girl’,
as a member of the Boston congregation of the Reverend J. Sella Martin, another
famous fugitive.1
By the time the advertisement appeared in the Life of John Anderson,
Martin had been appointed pastor to the Free Christian Church founded by Twelve-
trees for the benefit of his chemical factory labourers in their south-eastern London
suburb.2
The overlapping connections did not end there: William Craft, who, with
his wife Ellen, served on the executive committee of Frederick W. Chesson’s
Slavery & Abolition
Vol. 33, No. 2, June 2012, pp. 191–204
Jeannine Marie DeLombard is Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto, 104 Manning Avenue,
Toronto, M6J 2K5, Canada. Email: j.delombard@utoronto.ca
ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/12/020191–14
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2012.669898 # 2012 Taylor & Francis
Downloadedby[Bibliothèquesdel'UniversitédeMontréal]at13:3711August2014

Garrisonian London Emancipation Committee (LEC), had joined Chesson on the
John Anderson Committee chaired by Twelvetrees.3
For his part, Chesson, whom
Jacobs had met while seeking an English publisher in 1858, was instrumental to her
narrative’s eventual foreign publication, conveying the well-travelled stereotype
plates to Tweedie in January 1862. (The delay proved politically and commercially
advantageous: largely overlooked in the build-up to war in the United States,
Jacobs’narrativewasinitsEnglishedition,widelyandextensively reviewedinmainstream
periodicals, ‘ma[king] a signiﬁcant contribution to the abolitionists’ efforts to win public
support in their effort to stop Great Britain from recognizing the Confederacy’.)4
An important behind-the-scenes player in Incidents’ transatlantic publication, Chesson
would play a far more conspicuous, if mysterious, role in Anderson’s Story.5
Three years earlier and an ocean away, Anderson had been introduced to Jacobs’ and
Martin’s Boston abolitionist milieu as one of ‘Two Negro Murderers Arrested in
Canada’.6
Apprehended with (a different) John Brown, alleged murderer of ‘Indian
Sue’, Anderson was reportedly ‘charged with the murder of Seneca T.P. Biggs [sic],
of Fayette, Howard county, Missouri’.7
On 28 September 1853, Seneca Digges had
sought to seize the fugitive, then known as Jack Burton, in the third day of his
escape. Aided by his own slaves, the farmer acted in accordance with state laws author-
ising white Missourians to apprehend runaways. Resisting, Burton stabbed Digges,
who died two weeks later. A little over a month later, Burton crossed into Windsor,
Canada West. Having eluded an early recapture attempt, Burton, now known as
John Anderson, spent six quiet years in his new country before being arrested in
1860 pending extradition to the United States for the Missouri killing.8
Throughout the fall and winter of 1860–1861, Anderson’s case attracted Anglo-
North American attention as Canadian authorities struggled to ascertain whether
the Fugitive Offenders Act of 1849, passed under the 1842 Webster–Ashburton
Treaty, required them to comply with the extradition request. Given that the case con-
tinued to unfold in the opening months of the Civil War, it received remarkably per-
sistent, detailed coverage in both the mainstream and the abolitionist press in Britain,
Canada and (to a lesser extent) the United States. That publicity only increased when,
in June 1861, after nine months of Canadian incarceration, the now famous fugitive
crossed the ocean for a whirlwind English lecture tour. In another 18 months,
however, John Anderson would vanish from the Anglo-American stage altogether,
departing from Liverpool on 26 December 1862 in the Royal African mail steamer
Armenia to Liberia – and into relative obscurity.9
Occurring beyond US borders, the Anderson case has not attracted the same degree
of popular and critical attention as the legal crises involving self-emancipated slaves
Shadrach Minkins, Anthony Burns, Jane Johnson and Margaret Garner.10
The
slender historical scholarship on the case demonstrates how the multiple dislocations
of enslaved people prompted seemingly settled communities to interrogate the terms
and meanings of civic belonging – for white citizens as much as for outsiders of
colour.11
In telling and retelling the tale of one desperate fugitive, Canadians,
Britons and Americans confronted their own unstable positions among constantly
shifting scales of local, national and international afﬁliation. At the same time, this
192 Jeannine Marie DeLombard

work has revealed the generative effects of such disruptive encounters: while provin-
cial, state, national and imperial authorities probed the case’s political and legal rami-
fications, editors and activists in well-established transatlantic reform networks used
print to resist new pressures from Anglo-American commercial and industrial alli-
ances strengthened by the impending Civil War.
As the historical scholarship documents but does not analyse, Anderson’s story
offers a revealing glimpse of the tensions within the transatlantic anti-slavery move-
ment regarding the selection and promotion of representative fugitive slaves as aboli-
tionist spokespersons. One of the key players in the case from the outset was John
Scoble, who resigned from his full-time position as British and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society (BFASS) secretary in 1852 to direct Upper Canada’s Dawn Institute, a settle-
ment for US fugitive slaves. Under Scoble’s leadership, the BFASS had fine-tuned
‘the review procedure’, by which it vetted visiting black orators and authors; thanks
in no small part to the reach of its Anti-Slavery Reporter, the BFASS ‘became the
major clearinghouse for black abolitionists’ by the mid 1840s.12
Scoble’s transatlantic
network ensured that Anderson’s case received intense public and government scru-
tiny – and, ultimately, intervention – from the mother country. (US abolitionism
was represented by border-crossing appearances from Free Soiler Gerrit Smith –
which may explain the perfunctory coverage of the case in William Lloyd Garrison’s
Liberator and the British, Garrisonian Anti-Slavery Advocate.)13
Indeed, the BFASS’s
role was sufficiently prominent that, at the conclusion of the legal proceedings, the
society repeatedly felt compelled to distance itself from Anderson’s English tour, spon-
sored by Chesson’s rival LEC. ‘The arrival of John Anderson in England demands at
our hands a declaration’, stated the July 1861 issue of the Anti-Slavery Reporter, ‘that
the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society are in no way responsible
for his coming’.14
Two months earlier, the journal had expressed concern that,
although ‘a free man . . . at liberty to roam whithersoever it please him’, Anderson,
being ‘without means of existence if he quitted Canada’, threatened to ‘be a charge
upon public or private benevolence’ in England.15
Implicitly responding to Canadian
reports that ‘the cry here is . . . [that] Anderson is not a murderer but a Hero’, the Repor-
ter cautioned against ‘the imprudence in converting such men into “heroes of an
hour”’.16
‘John Anderson has acquired notoriety; not because he killed a man in endea-
vouring to effect his own escape from Slavery’, the journal insisted,
but because, in his person, the public law of the civilized world was outraged, when a
demand was made for his extradition, for the purpose of remanding him back into
Slavery, or to make him an example to others of his race aspiring to freedom.17
Having firmly maintained that the society ‘can be no party to [Anderson’s] being
brought to this country to be lionized’, the Reporter asserted unequivocally upon his
arrival the following month that his departure from Canada under LEC auspices
was ‘a great mistake’.18
‘Those who have taken him by the hand’, the BFASS organ pet-
tishly surmised, ‘can only hope to obtain help for him by converting him into an object
of morbid curiosity, while the damage done to the anti-slavery cause by such an exhi-
bition may be extreme’.19
Extending ‘the warmest thanks to the Committee of the
Slavery & Abolition 193

British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society’ for nobly ‘resist[ing] a foul wrong attempted
to be perpetrated on a subject of the British Crown’, Twelvetrees’ Story appeared
to eschew such factional discord.20
(As we shall see, however, the Story’s abrupt
conclusion suggests the LEC-dominated John Anderson Committee came to share
its colleagues’ concerns about the dangers attending such an ‘exhibition’.)
Murderer. Hero. Outraged legal person. Lionised fugitive. Object of morbid curios-
ity. Anderson posed a conundrum for an ‘[a]ntislavery print culture . . . invested in the
manufacture of acceptable forms of slave agency’.21
The problem was not simply that
Anderson embodied the violent resistance which nearly all whites feared – and many
abolitionists still, at the outbreak of war, rejected. It was also that Anderson’s unique
position as both international slave celebrity and notorious ‘negro murderer’ placed
him at the awkward point of intersection of two established modes of black publicity
in Anglo-American law and letters. If, as a celebrated ‘American Fugitive in Europe’
with a ‘True Tale of Slavery’ to tell (and sell), Anderson resembled Frederick Douglass,
William Wells Brown and John S. Jacobs in modelling a cosmopolitan black citizen-
ship, he had already attained the less idealised, if equally exemplary, form of civic
inclusion that had been accorded to criminals of African descent in early American
law and print culture over the past two centuries.22
Like the abolitionist slave narrative
and the travelogue – their more respectable literary counterparts – the ephemeral
confessions attributed to African American felons ushered the black print subject
out of the chattel status to which s/he was ascribed by slave sale advertisements and
runaway notices, towards legal personhood, civil standing and civic belonging.23
Standing at the crossroads of these two traditions in black life-writing, Anderson
reveals the rhetorical, political and legal challenges facing those who would deploy
print publicity, and personal narrative in particular, to persuade the Anglo-North
American readers that, in Frederick Douglass’s words, ‘a slave’ could indeed be
‘made a man’.24
Print, property, personhood
Coming at the end of over a century of literature devoted to tracing the impress of
American law on the African American self, The Story of the Life of John Anderson is
something of an anticlimax. From the colonial period through emancipation, when
enslaved people (and especially men) of African descent entered print as individua-
lised subjects, their ﬁrst-person narratives were often occasioned by, or responsive to,
their encounters with the law, usually the criminal justice system.25
Portrayals of the
black condemned reach back to Puritan minster Cotton Mather’s Warnings from the
Dead (1693). But the tradition commenced in earnest when Mather appended a jail-
house interview with condemned wife-murderer Joseph Hanno to his Tremenda . . .
A Sermon Delivered unto a Great Assembly, in which Was Present, a Miserable African,
Just Going to be Executed for a most Inhumane and Uncommon Murder (1721).
Seventy-six years later, in the Address of Abraham Johnstone, a Black Man (1797),
the hanging of another former slave provided the occasion to link questionable
legal procedure in capital cases like his with the new nation’s unacknowledged

history of slavery, racism and genocide. The year 1831, which began with Garrison’s
publication of the Liberator, closed with the printing of Thomas R. Gray’s Confessions
of Nat Turner, which the Virginia lawyer turned pamphleteer presented as integral to
the notorious slave insurgent’s conviction and execution. Hanno, Johnstone and
Turner were among the roughly 60 black condemned criminals – including a signifi-
cant number of ‘slave-born men’ – who figured prominently in early America’s
thriving gallows literature tradition.26
Published in conjunction with execution
day rituals, these black criminal confessions were largely superseded in the 1840s
and the 1850s by the more politicised, and now canonical, slave narrative perfected
by African American abolitionist authors such as Douglass, Brown, Craft and the
Jacobses.
It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss the black gallows tradition as a mere pre-
history to the more ideologically satisfying and artistically authentic slave narrative.
For, by exposing the contradictions inherent in the legal fiction of the slave’s mixed
character, the popular broadsides and pamphlets laid the groundwork for antebellum
literary efforts to fashion a black civic persona in print. In Federalist 54, Publius
explains slaves’ ‘mixed character of persons and of property’ in order to defend the
tacit incorporation of the doctrine into the US Constitution’s already notorious
three-fifths clause. He acknowledges that:
in being compelled to labor, not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by
one master to another master; and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his
liberty and chastised in his body, by the capricious will of another – the slave may
appear to be degraded from the human rank, and classed with those irrational
animals which fall under the legal denomination of property.
He goes on to add that:
in being punishable himself for all violence committed against others – the slave is no
less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society, not as a part of the
irrational creation; as a moral person, not as a mere article of property.27
As Publius’s usage indicates, however much the denial of slaves’ personhood in civil
law contexts made them appear to be degraded from human rank, few Americans
seriously questioned slaves’ humanity. For as the gallows tradition illustrates, Ameri-
cans arrested, tried, hanged and prayed for slave and other black felons for almost 200
years precisely because they recognised, on the one hand, their capacity to reason (with
mens rea swiftly becoming the key legal ingredient for criminal culpability) and, on the
other, their candidacy for heaven. The legal regime of slavery denied not the humanity,
but the personhood of those people designated as property. Crime ephemera’s indis-
pensible contribution to the political project of the antebellum slave narrative, then,
was to present a plausible black legal personality to the reading public. Ever since
Locke opened his Second Treatise of Government (1689) by glossing ‘political power’
as the ‘right of making laws with penalties of death . . . and of employing the force
of the community in the execution of such laws’, philosophers (Immanuel Kant) as
well as legal expositors (William Blackstone and James Wilson) had found a kind of
perverse affirmation of political membership in legally sanctioned punishment.28

Under this contractarian logic and the legal fiction of the slave’s mixed character, crim-
inal prosecution of the enslaved implied a tacit, retroactive – albeit purely punitive –
acknowledgment of their prior inclusion in the polity. However mediated, ventrilo-
quised or downright fictive, these black condemned voices entered the civic realm
of print culture and effectively expanded the black malefactor’s acknowledged person-
hood beyond law’s penal purposes. Speaking in the first person, the criminous slave in
print did more than distinguish himself from the chattels he often confessed to steal-
ing; he attained, through his entry into the public sphere, a civic presence that trans-
cended criminality.
Having joined the republic of letters as a recognised legal person and responsible
member of the polity, the black print subject was well positioned to demonstrate
African American capacity for a more expansive, civil form of civic membership. In
the 1840s and 1850s, Britain provided a well-lit transatlantic stage on which to
mount such performances of black civic eligibility, especially after the publication of
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s international best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Caught
up in ‘Tom-mania’, Britain yielded generous audiences, funds and publishing oppor-
tunities to visiting black speakers and writers.29
Conveyed across the ocean by ever
more efficient print technologies, verbal and visual images of African American
authors and orators being feˆted by British aristocracy vividly illustrated the injustice
of the same people being denied liberty, to say nothing of citizenship, in the nation
of their birth. Black celebrities performed cosmopolitan citizenship abroad in order
to demand political inclusion at home.30
At a time when cartoonist Edward Clay’s
widely reprinted caricatures of buffoonish, social-climbing negroes were coming to
life in blackface minstrel shows throughout the United States, the well-publicised
European reception of African American travellers’ shows of black civility countered
dehumanising images of racial inferiority and civil incapacity.
Before they could perform African American civic worth to transatlantic audiences,
however, fugitives had first to make public their own demeaning, profoundly anti-civil
experiences of slavery. Like Douglass narrating the horrific whipping of his Aunt
Hester, each gained fame by relating his or her personal history as a ‘witness’ to and
a ‘participant’ in slavery’s ‘horrible exhibition[s]’ and ‘terrible spectacle[s]’ – typically
enacted within the slave household upon (and sometimes by) parents, children or sib-
lings.31
To achieve celebrity on such terms was to relinquish the privacy widely under-
stood to distinguish the ideal American home from the slave cabins portrayed by
Stowe – hearths extinguished by violence, sexual exploitation and sale.32
Recounting
the painful details of their personal lives, former slaves sought to marshal public
opinion in order to transform the larger African American collective from objects
of private property (slaves) into members of the polis (citizens). The danger, as the
Anti-Slavery Reporter so candidly observed of John Anderson, was that by making
an ‘exhibition’ of the fugitive, such lionising would prevent him from embodying
‘in his person, the public law of the civilized world’ as ‘outraged’ by ‘Slavery’, reducing
him instead to ‘an object of morbid curiosity’. Rather than personifying the metamor-
phosis of chattel into citizen, the fugitive black celebrity risked being transformed into
a new kind of property, this time public rather than private.33

Citizen Anderson?
What makes the legal and print controversy over John Anderson so fascinating is that
it offers one example of how the rhetorical decriminalisation of the black print subject
could go wrong. For, rather than the proto-citizen of the classic antebellum slave nar-
rative, print portrayals of Anderson yielded a subject whose very exemption from legal
culpability rendered him a denationalised, silent and, finally, invisible nonentity.
Having circumvented the prosecution by which criminous slaves had attained official
recognition of their personhood – and through which their print avatars had entered
the public sphere – Anderson not only surrendered the criminality that rendered such
legal personhood legible on US soil, but also, finally, his hard-won membership in the
British polity and Anglo-American culture.
At the heart of the case was the Webster–Ashburton Treaty. Intended to resolve
boundary and other Anglo-American disputes lingering since the 1783 Treaty of
Paris, the 1842 document was ‘A Treaty to Settle and Define the Boundaries between
the Territories of the United States and the Possessions of Her Britannic Majesty in
North America, for the Final Suppression of the African Slave Trade, and for the
Giving Up of Criminals Fugitive from Justice, in Certain Cases’. The question was
whether or not to construe the case of John Anderson as one of the extradition
cases included in that ambiguous final clause. At issue was the proviso of the ‘infamous
Article 10’ that extradition
shall only be done upon such evidence of criminality as, according to the laws of the
place where the fugitive or person so charged, shall be found, would justify his
apprehension and commitment for trial, if the crime or offense had there been
committed.34
From the beginning, abolitionists had feared the treaty would necessitate accommo-
dation of slavery by providing a pretext for mass rendition of fugitive slaves.35
The
verbal reassurances they had extracted from various government authorities availed
little when the Anderson case placed pressure on the letter of the law.
Posing ‘the grave question whether a slave, who has no civil rights whatever, can
possibly be held to have civil responsibilities’, the extradition request highlighted the
same contradiction between contractarian political philosophy and the legal fiction
of slave character dramatised by the black gallows literature tradition.36
In the
British context, the case offered a new test to the precedent set by Somerset
v. Stewart (1772) that, in effect, ‘[n]atural law rejected slavery, English common law
prohibited it, and only positive local law supported it’.37
Viewed in such a light, any
act committed by a fugitive slave to accomplish an escape from involuntary servitude
would appear justifiable self-defence. It was along these lines that Anderson’s lawyer,
Samuel Black Freeman, presented his case before the Court of the Queen’s Bench in
Toronto. For their part, Crown counsel Henry Eccles and Robert Harrison maintained
that Anderson should be returned to Missouri in order to ascertain whether Digges
had had legal authority to arrest him – an argument to which a majority of the
court acceded (Justice Archibald McLean dissenting).

When Canada’s provincial Court of the Queen’s Bench decided to deliver up Ander-
son, affirming the apparent criminality of his act under the terms of the treaty, the
Court of the Queen’s Bench in Westminster (England) intervened by granting a writ
of habeas corpus. Far from being resolved, the international crisis within North
America now acquired a newly urgent transatlantic, imperial dimension.38
In order
to avoid what was suddenly a looming contest over Anglo-Canadian imperial
relations, the (Canadian) provincial Court of Common Pleas expeditiously issued
its own writ of habeas corpus invalidating the commitment due to the insufficiency
of the warrant.39
Insist though it might that the ruling was based on ‘a thoroughly sub-
stantial objection; not a mere technicality’, the court nevertheless avoided challenging
the fiction of slave character, conceding a reluctance to
adopt as a principle of our law, that because a man is a slave in a country where
Slavery is legalized, he is legally incapable of committing a crime, that he is not
to be deemed a ‘person’ who may be charged with an offence.40
The dispute over which legal system had jurisdiction over the quondam slave killer –
Missouri, the United States, Canada West and/or England – effectively liberated the
man once known as Jack Burton from American slavery and Canadian incarceration.
But just as the First Emancipation had not conferred full citizenship upon newly lib-
erated African Americans in the early national North – any more than the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment would for those in the post-
Reconstruction South – civic inclusion would not, ultimately, attend freedom for
John Anderson.
At first, through its intervention, the English court seemed not only to protect
Anderson from both criminal prosecution and re-enslavement, but to offer him pre-
cisely the civil standing denied him in his native land. Noting that ‘these writs of
habeas corpus have been and are to be issued into all the dominions of the crown of
England, when it is suggested that one of the Queen’s subjects is illegally imprisoned’,
Lord Chief Justice Cockburn effectively took up the line of reasoning advocated by
abolitionist Granville Sharp in his lay brief for the series of slave cases that culminated
in Somerset v. Stewart.41
Anderson’s legal designation as ‘British subject’ received sym-
bolic affirmation when, upon his arrival, he was publicly presented with ‘a small bottle
containing some of the free soil of England, on which was inscribed, “John Anderson’s
Certificate of Freedom, presented at Exeter Hall, London, July 2nd, 1861”’, before
being ‘introduced . . . to the meeting, as “Citizen Anderson”’.42
‘Citizen Anderson’ thus seemed to model an alternative approach to civic belonging.
Escaping not only slavery but criminal prosecution in the United States, Anderson was
spared the sort of backdoor entry into the public sphere accorded to criminous slaves
from Joseph Hanno to Nat Turner. And, legally designated ‘one of the Queen’s sub-
jects’, Anderson gained a degree of official recognition rarely accorded to the many
famous fugitives who merely performed a shadowy black citizenship manque´ on the
international stage.
Significantly, however, the international press continued to portray the ex-bondman
not as ‘Citizen Anderson’, but in the ‘mixed character’ of the American slave – capable

of criminal agency, certainly; requiring protection from victimisation by others, most
likely; but civilly competent to participate in the polity as an autonomous, self-pos-
sessed individual? Definitely not. Read alongside these mainstream press accounts
(and allowing for the sluggish transatlantic news cycle), the Anti-Slavery Reporter’s
consternation about Anderson being ‘convert[ed] . . . into an object of morbid curios-
ity’ now seems less admonitory than descriptive. Reporting on what should have been
Anderson’s ‘liberating sojourn’ to Liverpool, these newspaper items have the odd rhe-
torical effect of returning the Missouri runaway to his prior non-agential, thing-like
status.43
‘Anderson, the fugitive slave’, Chicago’s Christian Advocate and Journal
announced in its ‘Foreign Intelligence’ column, ‘cannot be taken from Canada to
England at present, inasmuch as he cannot be conveyed through American territory,
and no other route will be opened before spring’ – going on to report, without any
editorial break, that ‘[s]everal American vessels have been registered at Liverpool
under the British flag, in order to enable them to carry salt to South Carolina and
return with cotton without capture’.44
‘[B]eing regarded as a British subject’45
may
have protected Anderson from extradition and prosecution as a ‘negro murderer’,
but it could not prevent him from being viewed as yet another valuable, but essentially
inert, southern commodity to be imported, by hook or by crook, from North Amer-
ican shores to an eagerly waiting British market.46
Print portrayals of Anderson by his British sponsors similarly affirm the extent to
which, like northern blacks after the First Emancipation, the former slave was per-
ceived as ‘freed’ rather than ‘free’, as ‘acted upon, not acting’ in the context of civil
society.47
Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in Harper Twelvetrees’
cryptic account of the events leading up to Anderson’s removal from both the aboli-
tionist lecture circuit and the very English soil to which he had been invited to lay
claim only a year and a half previously. Speaking at ‘a farewell meeting’ held upon
‘the departure of Anderson for the Republic of Liberia’, Twelvetrees noted that:
‘Since the meeting at Exeter Hall . . . no pains or exertion had been spared by the
[John Anderson] committee to promote his welfare and forward his interests’.48
‘Their task had not been an easy one’, Twelvetrees pointedly observed, prompting
the first of several cheers, for ‘[i]t had been a matter of considerable anxiety to
decide upon the best course to adopt for enabling Anderson to gain his livelihood,
and become an industrious, respected and useful citizen’. As Twelvetrees explained:
Anderson was, day by day, receiving temporary offers from speculators of various
classes; and had it not been for the influence and control of the committee, he
would have fallen a prey to designing men, who would have bargained with him
for using the sorrowful incidents of his life for trading upon the sympathies of
the public. (Hear.) If the committee had done nothing else, there was cause for grati-
tude that they had been enabled to preserve Anderson from contributing to the grat-
ification of sightseers, and leading a worse than useless life. (Hear, hear.) . . . it was
deemed advisable to withdraw Anderson from public life, and decline all invitations
for him to attend public meetings . . . in order to withdraw him from the excitement
occasioned by his residence in the metropolis, Anderson was placed under the care
of Mr. John Pool, of the British Training Institution, Corby . . . As Anderson’s period
of instruction drew near to its close, the anxiety of the committee was again

awakened as to his future employment and mode of life; and in this emergency they
accepted the kind offer of the services of Mr. F.W. Chesson, who . . . [arranged for] a
grant of land, and a free passage to that important and thriving negro Republic
[Liberia].49
Like subsequent speakers at the ‘Farewell Soireé’ who would imagine Anderson
‘becom[ing] a useful citizen of the Republic’ (Ibid., 152) of Liberia, Twelvetrees’ com-
ments – and the Anderson Committee’s actions – suggest the applicability to Britain
of David Kazanjian’s insight regarding colonisationist discourse’s logic of deferral.
Acknowledging African American civic potential, colonisationist rhetoric maintained
that the fulfilment of black citizenship could only occur at some future date, outside
the polity.50
Even more telling here, however, is how the extensive use of the passive
voice, combined with the attribution of agency almost exclusively to the committee
rather than its subject, belies ‘Citizen Anderson’s’ civil competence. Indeed, Ander-
son’s capacity for self-directed action would appear to have ended – not begun –
with his status as a fugitive slave killer and his arrival on English soil.
And, in fact, it was not long after Anderson’s symbolic induction into ‘the rights,
privileges, and immunities’ of a British subject that his newfound identity had been
called into question in virtually every corner of the empire.51
Published in Edinburgh,
Dublin, Melbourne and Cape Town, the London-based Law Magazine reprinted an
article from the Upper Canada Law Journal disputing Anderson’s status. The writer
noted that:
the right to the writ [of habeas corpus] by a person in a colony is grounded on the
fact that the person in custody is a British subject, and the affidavit which stated that
Anderson was a British subject domiciled in Toronto was positively untrue.
The writer also pointed out that ‘he was a foreigner domiciled in Upper Canada, but
not a British subject’, thus denying Anderson the very civic belonging Sharp had
sought to extend to James Somerset nearly a century earlier.52
However authoritative, this simultaneous rejection of Anderson’s membership in
the British political community and assertion of his alienness as ‘a foreigner’ could
retract neither the legal nor the public recognition accorded him since his arrest.
Yet, read in light of Anderson’s contemporaneous struggles with his English sponsors
over proprietorship of his story and his celebrity, his ultimate removal (banishment?)
to Liberia and his concurrent disappearance from the Anglo-American public stage, it
is difficult not to see a correlation between the statelessness to which he was consigned
in the aftermath of the legal proceedings and his failure to retain the civic presence he
had briefly achieved as a fugitive from both US slavery and dubious American justice.
Away from the public scrutiny that had made his life so difficult for the past decade,
John Anderson may well have found his trip to Liberia a ‘liberating sojourn’. But it
bears noting that his fate uncannily fulfilled the desire expressed by the New York
Albion: ‘We hope indeed, that once in England, we may lose sight of Mr. John Ander-
son, who has occupied so much of our valued contemporaries’ space’.53
Tellingly, when
a couple of weeks later the Albion reiterated the hope ‘that we have heard the last of
Anderson’, it did so in an article titled ‘Men and Things in Canada’.54
However

temporarily and punitively, condemned black criminals from Joseph Hanno to Nat
Turner were distinguished from ‘things’ by criminal proceedings that established
their culpable legal personhood as ‘men’. Unlike these American slaves, Anderson,
thanks to the intervention of ﬁrst Canadian and then English abolitionists, eluded
(in the eyes of some observers) ‘the hands of justice, thereby, cheating the gallows of
its prey’.55
But if his release did not have the feared effect of ‘setting him free to
extend his Bowie-knife practice to Canadians’, neither did it, ultimately, prevent the
formerly enslaved black man from becoming as silent and invisible as many white
Americans could only wish that more outspoken, ubiquitous counterparts like Freder-
ick Douglass, William Wells Brown and Harriet Jacobs would be.56
Notes
[1] Harper Twelvetrees, ed., The Story of the Life of John Anderson, the Fugitive Slave (London:
William Tweedie, 1863).
[2] C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 1, The British Isles, 1830–1865 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 535n3.
[3] Ibid., 480. Founded by Chesson in 1859, rededicating itself to the cause of the freedpeople in
the United States, the LEC renamed itself the London Emancipation Society in November 1862.
[4] Jean Fagan Yellin, ‘Incidents Abroad: Harriet Jacobs and the Transatlantic Movement’, in
Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, ed. Kathryn Kish
Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 167.
[5] Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004), 139, 151–153.
[6] ‘Two Negro Murderers Arrested in Canada’, Liberator, 21 September 1860, [151].
[7] The other man was subsequently released due to lack of evidence. The Liberator erroneously
describes the 28 September 1853 killing as taking place in 1854. See Patrick Brode, The
Odyssey of John Anderson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 38, 9.
[8] Efforts had been made to capture Anderson over the winter of 1853–54; he was arrested in
March 1860 and released, before being arrested again on 1 September 1860, after which he
was shuttled from the Simcoe, Norfolk County jail, to the Brantford jail in Brant County, to
the Toronto jail, then back to Brantford. Although previously the extradition request had
been tendered by the Missouri governor, on ‘2 October 1860 the United States Department
of State formally asked the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lyons, for Anderson’s
extradition’ (Brode, Odyssey, 37).
[9] ‘Monthly Summary’, Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 January 1863, 2.
[10] Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1997); Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emer-
son’s Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Steven Weisenburger, Modern
Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1999); Nat Brandt and Yanna Kroyt Brandt, In the Shadow of the Civil War: Passmore Wil-
liamson and the Rescue of Jane Johnson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007). The
modern novels inspired by the Johnson and Garner cases, respectively, include Lorene Cary’s The
Price of a Child (1996) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
[11] Brode, Odyssey; R.C. Reinders, ‘Anglo-Canadian Abolitionism: The John Anderson Case,
1860–1861’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 19, no. 1 (1975): 72–97; Robert C. Reinders,
‘The John Anderson Case, 1860–61: A Study in Anglo-Canadian Imperial Relations’, Canadian
Historical Review 56, no. 4 (1975): 393–415; Paul Finkelman, “Internal Extradition and Fugi-
tive Slaves: The John Anderson Case,” Brooklyn Journal of International Law 18, no 3 (1992):
765–810.

[12] Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 12.
[13] Brode, Odyssey, 53, 102.
[14] ‘John Anderson’, Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 July 1861, 164.
[15] ‘The Fugitive Slave, John Anderson’, Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 May 1861, 109.
[16] Thomas Henning to Louis Chamerovzow, 17 December 1860, c32/42, Anti-Slavery Papers,
Rhodes House, Oxford, quoted in Reinders, ‘John Anderson’, 399; ‘Fugitive Slave’, 109.
Thomas Henning was the secretary of the Toronto Anti-Slavery Society; Chamerovzow suc-
ceeded Scoble as BFASS secretary and Anti-Slavery Reporter editor.
[17] ‘Fugitive Slave’, 109.
[18] Ibid., 110; ‘John Anderson’, 164.
[19] ‘John Anderson’, 164.
[20] Twelvetrees, Story, v–vi.
[21] Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of
Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 93.
[22] William Wells Brown, The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad
(Boston, 1855); John S. Jacobs, ‘A True Tale of Slavery’, Leisure Hour, 7, 14, 21 and 28 February
1861. Ubiquitous scholarly and abolitionist references to ‘stealing oneself’ notwithstanding,
legal historian Thomas D. Morris finds that ‘no statute ever defined running away itself as
an act of theft’ due to ‘the conceptual problem’ posed by ‘the intention of the act’: because run-
aways’ intent was not to steal themselves for profit but to ‘transform their position from prop-
erty to persons’ or some other motive, such as avoiding punishment or reuniting with family,
such prohibited acts were a form of disobedience. Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the
Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 341. With the excep-
tion of accused felons like Anderson, fugitive slaves were, in the language of the Constitution,
fugitives merely from service, not justice.
[23] See Jeannine Marie DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic
Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
[24] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in Autobio-
graphies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 60.
[25] Richard Slotkin, ‘Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800’, American Quarterly
25, no. 1 (1973): 3–31; Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-
Bellum Slave Narratives (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 36–39; William L. Andrews, To
Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1986), 33–44; Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives
in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 49–116.
[26] Andrews, Free Story, 41. See Slotkin, ‘Narratives’; Ronald A. Bosco, “Early American Gallows
Literature: An Annotated Checklist,” Resources for American Literary Study 8 (1978): 81–107;
Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the
Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
and DeLombard, Shadow of the Gallows.
[27] James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (1788; New York:
Penguin, 1988), 332.
[28] John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. Thomas P. Peardon (1689; Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 4.
[29] Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).
[30] Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007), 178–246.
[31] Douglass, Narrative, 18.
[32] Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Phi-
ladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 97–146.

[33] Among the many works on the abolitionist print commoditisation of formerly enslaved African
Americans, see Augusta Rohrbach, Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Race, Realism, and the US Lit-
erary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article:
Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham: Duke University Press,
2001). But see, also, Michael A. Chaney, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in
Antebellum Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
[34] Quoted in Reinders, ‘John Anderson’, 395. ‘ARTICLE X. It is agreed that the United States and
Her Britannic Majesty shall, upon mutual requisitions by them, or their Ministers, Ofﬁcers,
or authorities, respectively made, deliver up to justice, all persons who, being charged with
the crime of murder, or assault with intent to commit murder, or Piracy, or arson, or
robbery, or Forgery, or the utterance of forged paper, committed within the jurisdiction of
either, shall seek an asylum, or shall be found, within the territories of the other: Provided,
that this shall only be done upon such evidence of criminality as, according to the laws of the
place where the fugitive or person so charged, shall be found, would justify his apprehension
and commitment for trial, if the crime or offense had there been committed: And the respect-
ive Judges and other Magistrates of the two Governments, shall have power, jurisdiction, and
authority, upon complaint made under oath, to issue a warrant for the apprehension of the
fugitive or person so charged, that he may be brought before such Judges or other Magis-
trates, respectively, to the end that the evidence of criminality may be heard and considered;
and if, on such hearing, the evidence be deemed sufﬁcient to sustain the charge it shall be the
duty of the examining Judge or Magistrate, to certify the same to the proper Executive Auth-
ority, that a warrant may issue for the surrender of such fugitive. The expense of such appre-
hension and delivery shall be borne and defrayed by the Party who makes the requisition, and
receives the fugitive’. Yale University Law School, The Avalon Project, British–American
Diplomacy: The Webster–Ashburton Treaty, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/br-
1842.asp.
[35] Reinders, ‘John Anderson’, 395–396.
[36] ‘The Case of John Anderson’, Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 June 1861, 133.
[37] Steven M. Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of
Human Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005), 200.
[38] Acknowledging ‘that it may be said to be inconsistent with that high degree of colonial inde-
pendence, both in legislation and judicature, which has been carried into effect in modern
times’, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn found that ‘nothing short of a legislative enactment,
expressly depriving us of this jurisdiction, ought to prevent our carrying it into effect when
called upon to do so for the protection of personal liberty’. ‘Anderson’s Case’, Monthly Law
Reporter 23, no. 11 (1861): 654.
[39] For contemporary analysis of the legal issues at stake, see ‘Anderson’s Case’; ‘Juridical Society –
Anderson’s Case’, Jurist 7, no. 1 (23 February 1861): 73–74; Thomas Tapping, ‘The Case of
Anderson, the Fugitive Slave: The Application for the Writ of Habeas Corpus and Judgment
Considered’, Law Magazine and Law Review 11 (1861): 42–73, which included as a sort of
an appendix, “an able paper, which in many points corroborates” Tapping’s article, ‘The
English Writ of Habeas Corpus’, reprinted from Upper Canada Law Journal and Municipal
and Local Courts’ Gazette 7 (March 1861): 53–59.
[40] ‘Case of John Anderson’, 135, 134.
[41] Quoted in Tapping, ‘Case’, 45. Somerset’s lawyers did not adopt Sharp’s argument. See Gran-
ville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery; or of
Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England (London, 1769),
156, and An Appendix to the Representation (London, 1772), 4, 19–20.
[42] Twelvetrees, Story, 113.
[43] Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic
Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999).

[44] ‘Foreign Intelligence’, Christian Advocate and Journal, 14 February 1861, 53. For similar juxta-
positions, see ‘Foreign News’, Christian Recorder, 16 February 1861, n. pag.; ‘The Cotton Fright
in England’, ‘What England Thinks of the Blockade of Southern Ports’ and ‘The Canada Fugi-
tive Slave Case’, New York Herald, 29 January 1861, 2. For a speech in Parliament similarly
linking Anderson with southern cotton imports, see ‘Foreign Miscellany: The American Revo-
lution, English Opinion’, Independent [New York], 14 February 1861, 6.
[45] Friends’ Review, 2 February 1861, 351.
[46] While not addressing such portrayals, Brode’s account is sensitive throughout to the ways in
which Anderson was exploited, even commodiﬁed, by his supporters. See Brode, Odyssey,
65, 71, 76, 100, 107.
[47] Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England,
1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 81.
[48] Twelvetrees, Story, 147–48.
[49] Ibid., 148–150.
[50] David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early
America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
[51] Twelvetrees, Story, 113.
[52] ‘English Writ’, 71.
[53] ‘Extradition Cases: Canadian and British Law Courts’, Albion, 2 February 1861, 55.
[54] ‘Men and Things in Canada’, Albion, 23 February 1861, 91.
[55] Hamilton Daily Spectator, 14 December 1860, quoted in Brode, Odyssey, 26.
[56] Ibid.

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