Free Forbidden Fruit by Betty DeRamus Page A

antislavery circuit, they also became tempting targets
     for the slavery supporters on their trail.
    Everywhere they went, they met people who recognized the power of their story as an
     antislavery tool, a saga of adventure and romance that could touch people’s souls.
     Unlike most fugitives, though, the Crafts used their real names and described real
     events, real places and real people, anxious to make their stories believable. Runaway
     slave, writer and antislavery activist William Wells Brown wrote about them in the Liberator in January 1849. Other stories soon appeared in the New York Herald, the Newark Daily Mercury, the National Slavery Standard and elsewhere. William and Ellen Craft became America’s most notorious fugitive slave
     couple. However, as was the custom in nineteenth-century America, it was William who
     did the talking at public meetings while Ellen merely stood onstage, her whiteness
     forcing whites to identify with her plight. William spoke to swelling crowds at the
     African Meeting House just off Joy Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill in the heart of
     the black community. It was the first still-standing black church established in America.
     He also spoke in the Hopedale community in Mendon, Massachusetts, a Christian enclave
     set on six hundred acres of land. When they toured with William Wells Brown, Brown
     sometimes charged admission.
    Then suddenly, with one stroke of his pen, U.S. president Millard Fillmore changed
     life for Ellen and William Craft and for thousands of other black and white Americans.
     On September 18, 1850, he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, passed by Congress as part
     of the Compromise of 1850.
    Like cholera or some other virulent disease, the new federal law would infect thousands
     of people. It had been gaining strength for months. Henry Clay proposed it in the
     Senate in January 1850 as part of a compromise package. Under it, California would
     come into the Union free and citizens of the territory acquired from Mexico could
     choose whether or not they wanted slavery. To appease the antislavery forces, the
     slave trade was prohibited in the District of Columbia and California joined the Union
     as a free state. To satisfy Southern slaveholders weary of having their runaways sheltered
     by Northern communities, a stricter Fugitive Slave Act made it easier to recover runaway
     slaves.
    The new law was not just tough. It was a slab of stone. It set up a federal system
     of judges, commissioners and marshals to recapture escaped slaves, even in free states.
     Anyone claiming to own a runaway slave could take the slave into custody after establishing
     ownership before a federal commissioner. Any bystander, white or black, could be fined
     one thousand dollars or jailed for six months for refusing to help a marshal capture
     a fugitive slave.
    “Did those framers of the constitution intend that northern freemen should leave their
     shops, their plows, their merchandise, to give chase to fugitive slaves?” newspaper
     editor and runaway slave Henry Bibb sneered in the January 1, 1851, issue of Voice of the Fugitive.
    Apparently, that was just what framers of the new law expected. Also, special commissioners
     received ten dollars for each fugitive returned to slavery and only five dollars for
     those turned loose. Slaves weren’t entitled to jury trials or judicial hearings; in
     fact, they had no chance to defend themselves. That meant free blacks as well as fugitives
     like the Crafts could be kidnapped and thrown into slavery. So eager were some slave
     catchers to arrest supposed fugitives that two men seized a fourteen-year-old white
     girl in Chester County, Pennsylvania, mistaking her for a mulatto. After traveling
     twelve miles, they put her out of their carriage. Patrick Sneed, a black Niagara Falls
     waiter, also was briefly arrested on the “pretended charge” of a murder committed
     in Savannah, Georgia.
    The law was supposed to ease tensions