Behind Bayonets

The Civil War in Northern Ohio

John Vacha, David D. Van Tassel

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612774589
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

A valuable addition to the literature on Ohio and the Civil War

Eminent Cleveland historian David Van Tassel had undertaken the challenge of writing an illustrated history of the Cleveland homefront during the Civil War. Unfortunately, he died in 2000 before completing his manuscript. Historian John Vacha completed the final chapters using notes, lists, and ideas that Van Tassel had gathered, and their efforts are presented in Behind Bayonets.

Behind Bayonets focuses on Ohio's substantial role in the Civil War. It is perhaps the only work that uses published and unpublished sources written by northeast Ohioans to comment on the causes, course, and purpose of the war. It does not provide an overview of battles, but it does address soldiers' enlistments and early camp experiences, women's experiences, public reactions to emancipation and the general political interest in the war, local business growth during the war, and Lincoln's assassination and the funeral train's stop in Cleveland.

The authors use moving first-person commentaries and accounts to illustrate and explain these issues and situations. Additionally, the text is lavishly illustrated with rare photographs from the Western Reserve Historical Society's archives.

This regional perspective on the war is a noteworthy addition to Civil War literature, offering insight into what was going on at home while the war was being fought.

The Gathering Storm

CHAPTER 1

THE IDYLLIC IMAGE PROJECTED BY the Perry Monument dedication of Cleveland as beautiful, prosperous, and united at the forefront of Western progress flashed briefly on the nation’s consciousness. It was quickly obscured, however, by the victory of the strident new Republican Party after a hotly contested presidential campaign. The Republican Party embraced every activist group that had inspired social and economic turmoil during the decade following the Mexican War. It included Free Soilers, who opposed the extension of slavery into the territories gained in the war; members of the Liberty Party, who advocated outright abolition of slavery; temperance reformers and anti-immigrant members of the former American (Know-Nothing) Party; and finally the old Whigs, who favored protective tariffs to encourage industry and Federal subsidies for internal improvements. However discordant this mix of peoples and causes appeared to be, its constituents shared to one degree or another a common abhorrance for slavery.

Ohio was a “free” state by command of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the first Constitution of the State of Ohio in 1803. And situated as it was across the Ohio River from the slave states of Kentucky and Virginia (after 1863, West Virginia), Ohio was a magnet to freedom-seeking runaway slaves. Once in Ohio, however, they found their expectations about the quality of freedom to be an illusion: the absence of slavery did not mean citizenship, racial equality, or even civility for blacks, free or fugitive. As one saddened fugitive put it,

Ohio’s not the place for me;

For I am much surprised

So many of her sons to see

In garments of disguise.

Chorus:

Farewell, Ohio!

I can not stop in thee;

I’m on my way to Canada

Where colored men are free.

2. Her name has gone out through the world,

Free labor—soil—and men—

But slaves had better far be hurled

Into the lion’s den.

3. Ohio’s not the place for me;

An awful truth I state—

They say they want the country free,

But the colored man they hate.¹

While Ohio prohibited slavery, it was also under the constitutional obligation to recognize the Southern slave owner’s right to retrieve his human property. Neither did it award its free black residents citizenship. In fact its legislature subsequently passed laws designed to discourage free black settlers, such as demanding a $300 bond and certificate of free status and prohibiting state tax money for schools that enrolled black students. This situation in effect made Ohio, with its network of canals and rail lines, simply a highway for an underground railroad bound for Canada. Nevertheless, some free and fugitive black Americans did settle in Ohio. Those that did tended to concentrate in the southern section of the state, closer to friends who may have preceded them or relatives whose freedom they may have hoped to purchase. Their presence probably exacerbated the anti-abolitionist proclivities of white Ohioans in southern Ohio, many of whom had emigrated from slave states themselves. Northern Ohio was settled largely by New Yorkers and New Englanders, however, and while not entirely free of race predjudice, they were relatively sympathetic (at least in principle) to the egalitarian sentiments of the Declaration of Independence.

John Malvin was a leader among Cleveland’s small and diverse black community. He had seen firsthand the agonies of slavery. Born free in Virginia, he was apprenticed as a boy to a carpenter and, as he recalled, “I was treated little better than a slave myself. For my clothing, I was supplied every year with one pair of shoes, two pairs of tow linen pantaloons, one pair of negro cotton pantaloons, and a negro cotton round jacket,” the roughest, cheapest product of the New England textile mills. “My food consisted of one peck of corn meal a week.”² He recalled several beatings, one when he was caught attempting to run away: “My wrists were tied crosswise together, and my hands were then brought down and tied to my ankles; my shirt was taken off, and in that condition I was compelled to lie on the ground, and he began flogging me. He whipped me on one side till the flesh was all raw and bleeding; then he rolled me over like a log and whipped me on the other side in the same manner. When I was untied I put on my shirt. So severely was my flesh lacerated that my shirt stuck to my back, and I was unable to get it off without the assistance of an old lady who lived on the farm, who applied grease to it.”³

Malvin did get away to Cincinnati, where he worked as a carpenter, saved money, and met and married his wife, Harriet. He did not like the discrimination he found in Ohio and was determined to get to Canada, buy a farm, and be free. He and Harriet worked their way up the Ohio Canal, having to winter in Newark when the canal froze over. In the spring they continued to Cleveland, where they eventually decided to settle. Malvin worked as a cook for several months on a lake schooner and later as night engineer for a steam engine in a mill at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River.

Malvin joined a small group of Baptists in forming the first Cleveland Baptist Society. Among the handful of charter members were Benjamin and Rebecca Rouse, a couple from Massachusetts who had also recently settled in Cleveland, he as agent for the Sunday School Union and she as mother of their five children and zealous champion of humanitarian causes. Benjamin, a gregarious and hearty man, traveled the state successfully organizing Sunday schools. He also speculated in real estate and was sufficiently prosperous by 1852 to build a three-story brick office building on Public Square, which became known as the Rouse Block. The building often served as headquarters for several of Rebecca’s crusading organizations. In the 1840s she had formed the Martha Washington and Dorcas Society for aid to the poor. In 1850 she organized the Cleveland Ladies Temperance Union and later in the decade the Protestant Orphanage Asylum.

When the Rouses, Malvin, and the other members of the small charter group of the Cleveland Baptist Society gathered enough numbers, they planned to build a church. The planners stumbled over the seating of the “colored members.” When some suggested putting them up in the gallery, John Malvin objected vigorously, as he did to other schemes for segregation. As a charter member, Malvin’s word carried weight, and with the support of other charter members the First Baptist on the corner of Seneca (West 3rd) and Champlain Streets was not segregated, nor was the Second Baptist Church (the Erie Street Mission Baptist Church), which Malvin also helped to found and which was later joined by John D. Rockefeller. By the late 1840s few of Cleveland’s hotels, restaurants, or schools were segregated. This was owing in part to the geographic dispersion of the black population throughout the city and its small number (800 by 1860), one-third of whom were skilled workers.

While John Malvin could certainly take a share in the credit for ameliorating the situation of free blacks in Cleveland and in the state, he was but one of a number of politically active leaders. They included John Brown, a barber who accumulated a small fortune in real estate, and Madison Tilley, a contractor whose excavating business employed over 100 men. In 1853 they, along with others, including Oberlin graduate and journalist William H. Day, initiated a call for an “Ohio State Convention of Colored Freemen” that took place in January 1853 in Columbus. The delegates resolved that “as birth gives citizenship, we claim under … the Constitution of this State, our rights as citizens: therefore, laws that have been, or may hereafter be passed, depriving us of citizenship, are unconstitutional, thereby null and void; and as we are taxed, we have and claim the right to vote.”⁴ The delegates also pledged to support a newspaper that would give them a voice; it would be established in Cleveland under the editorial leadership of William H. Day.

On Saturday, April 9, 1853, the first edition of The Aliened American appeared in Cleveland and was distributed all over Ohio and into some communities in New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and western Canada. The paper’s mission, Day announced, was “to visit weekly, the haunts and the homes of the sovereigns of this land, with our demand for simple justice: to aid the educational, mechanical and social development of Colored Americans: and while we furnish News—to favor Literature, Science, and Art…. So far as our principles are concerned, we commence, as we shall continue, independent: independent in religion—independent in politics—independent in everything;—the organ of no Party, and yet a Political paper; and the humble supporter of all good men.” The articles preached self-help and communal cooperation, inspiration, hope, and offered models of manners, such as “a true gentleman … adds most manhood to his gentility; he depends, not upon his riches, nor the fineness of his cloth, but upon his intellect, his honesty and his truth.” There were also articles that inveighed against the injustices done to free colored men. “The Black Man escaping from the savages of Slavedom, finds here discouragement, disfranchisement, prejudice, Negro-hate, in every nook and corner, of every locality, and almost in every individual wearing a sort of whitish skin,” wrote corresponding editor Samuel R. Ward.⁵

That William Day gave effusive thanks for support from mainstream Cleveland newspapers, especially the Forest City Democrat and the Herald, both of which would become Republican organs (the Forest City Democrat became the Cleveland Leader in 1854), was indicative of the sentiments of many of the business, political, and religious leaders of the city. Officers of the Cleveland Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s and later of the Cuyahoga County Anti-Slavery Society included John A. Foote, attorney and later a director of the Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad as well as of the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad; Edward Wade, an attorney, leading abolitionist politician, and U.S. congressman; Solomon Severance, successful dry goods merchant; Rufus Spalding, state supreme court justice; Albert G. Riddle, lawyer and state legislator; Franklin T. Backus, attorney and state legislator; and J. M. Sterling, founder of the First Presbyterian Society. They shared the goal of “the entire abolition of slavery throughout the United States and the elevation of our colored brethren to their proper rank as men.” The brutality of slavery was regularly brought home to northern Ohioans by traveling abolitionist lecturers sponsored by local antislavery societies and by a steady stream of fugitives moving through the villages and towns of northern Ohio on the underground railroad toward a promised land in Canada.

Such agitation inevitably led to violence, and northern Ohio’s most famous abolitionist was also the most violent. John Brown of Hudson (not the barber) had dabbled in many businesses from tanning to sheepherding. He fathered nineteen children but otherwise had nothing to show for his fifty-six years of life except debts and many lawsuits. A lifelong opponent of slavery, he decided to become active in the cause and went to join two of his sons in the struggle for Kansas. That territory had become a bloody battleground between settlers attempting to bring it into statehood as either a slave or free state. Brown carried out a raid on a pro-slavery settlement and butchered five of the settlers; he then fled to Canada, where he and a few supporters drew up a constitution that prohibited slavery and declared war on the institution in the South. Armed with this document and the designation of commander, John Brown toured Ohio and New England to raise money and recruits for his “Army of the Lord.” He was frequently seen in the streets of Cleveland during the spring of 1859, telling his plans to any who might listen and become a recruit.

Then in October 1859 the Leader blared the news that John Brown had captured the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and that members of his little army had been killed or captured by a detachment of U.S. Marines commanded by Col. Robert E. Lee. John Brown was taken prisoner, tried, and found guilty of treason and murder. With this, northern Ohioans began to see Brown not as a fanatical leader of the violent fringe of abolitionism but, now, as a martyr to the cause of freedom. Young James Garfield, teaching at the Hiram Polytechnic Institute, wrestled with his reactions to John Brown on the day of execution, Friday, December 2, 1859: “A dark day for our country. John Brown is to be hung at Charleston, Va. I have no language to express the conflict of emotion in my heart. I do not justify his acts. By no means. But I do accord to him, and I think every man must, honesty of purpose and sincerity of heart.” Reflecting upon Brown’s “devoted Christian character, his love of freedom drawn from God’s Word, and from his Puritan ancestors, his sufferings in Kansas, his bold and daring courage, mixed with mercy, the human purpose of his heart in going to Virginia, his gallant treatment of those he had in his power, his neglect of his own safety, his frankness on the trial,” Garfield could express nothing but empathy for the “gray-haired veteran standing on the fatal scaffold surrounded as he is at this moment by 2,000 American soldiers, and to ensure his death no friends to stand by him, who he is about to die because his heart beat for the oppressed…. Old Hero, Farewell. Your death shall be the dawn of a better day.” In a small pocket diary under the same date Garfield simply entered “John Brown’s Execution. Servitium esto damnatum [slavery be damned].”⁶ The bells of all the Cleveland churches tolled slowly that afternoon to mark the hour of Brown’s execution.

Earlier in the year Clevelanders had witnessed a fugitive slave case that also stirred the nation, the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. The trial took place in the new Cuyahoga County Courthouse opposite the northwest quadrant of Public Square in the spring. It was the result of a dramatic rescue of a fugitive slave from Wadsworth’s Hotel in Wellington, just forty miles from Cleveland. John Price, a fugitive slave from Kentucky, had worked in Oberlin almost two years when someone who had seen the reward posters notified John P. G. Bacon, his former master in Kentucky. Bacon then informed a Federal marshall from Columbus, who joined a pair of Southern slave catchers in Oberlin and lured John Price to the outskirts of town, where they seized him and took him in a carriage to Wellington, the closest stop on the Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad, to catch the next train for a hearing in Columbus. They commandeered an attic room in Wadsworth’s Hotel to hold their captive while waiting for the train.

Meanwhile, witnesses sounded the alarm in Oberlin, and a reported 600 men headed to Wellington, nine miles south of Oberlin. Both town and gown were well represented in the headstrong exodus, which included businessmen, farmers, Oberlin College faculty and students, and the better part of Oberlin’s substantial black population (about 400) on horseback, in carriages, and on foot armed with sticks, pitchforks, and some rifles. The angry mob surrounded the hotel and forced the marshall to give up his prisoner. Price was whisked away back to Oberlin, whence he was spirited on the underground railroad route to Canada. The rescuers made no secret of what they had done or of their identities. Consequently, witnesses identified many of them, and thirty-seven Oberlin and Wellington men were arrested and indicted for violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Three distinguished Cleveland attorneys with strong antislavery credentials volunteered their services for the defense of the rescuers. Judge Rufus P. Spalding, a forme...