{"id":836,"date":"2019-10-21T21:58:23","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T21:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/?p=836"},"modified":"2019-10-31T13:13:55","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T13:13:55","slug":"richard-hildreths-atrocious-judges-1856","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/2019\/10\/21\/richard-hildreths-atrocious-judges-1856\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Hildreth’s Atrocious Judges (1856)"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I begin drafting my historiography chapter, it is important that I demonstrate how prominent\u2013\u2013and infamous\u2013\u2013the U.S. Commissioners handling fugitive cases were during the 1850s, before segueing to their evolving legacy during the postwar period. While my previous post<\/a> explored how the contemporary cartoon literature harnessed the tropes of tyrannical authority and unchecked power when depicting commissioners and hearings under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, this post unpacks how one anti-slavery journalist, attorney and novelist applied those themes in his contemporary writings.<\/p>\n

Helping to crystalize the image of the tyrannical commissioner was Richard Hildreth\u2019s provocative tome Atrocious Judges <\/i>(1856). A Bostonian and anti-slavery attorney, Hildreth was no stranger to the law\u2019s practical operations, having squared off in the hearing room against Commissioner George T. Curtis, as well as helping to spearhead the campaign to remove one of the city\u2019s other commissioners, Edward Loring. Compiling a series of biographical sketches of English judges authored by the British politician Lord John Campbell, Hildreth explicitly linked the abusive judges of 16th and 17th century England\u2019s notorious Star Chamber to what he asserted was their \u201conly American parallel\u201d\u2013\u2013U.S. Commissioners operating under the mandate of the 1850 law. [1]\n

Hildreth\u2019s edited volume only heightened the apprehensions about commissioners\u2019 powers that had been festering among many Northerners for more than five years. An advertisement for Hildreth\u2019s book pointedly likened rendition hearings under the 1850 statute to \u201can American Star Chamber,\u201d while another notice applauded the author\u2019s timely warning about the perils of \u201cjudicial tyranny.\u201d Joining the fray, the New York Tribune<\/i> lent its support to Hildreth, drawing on longstanding Jeffersonian concerns about the dangers of an unchecked judiciary. The 1850 law, the Tribune<\/i> warned, \u201chas studded the country all over with a host\u2026 of judicial mercenaries,\u201d who were empowered to \u201cset at defiance the State Courts and the State authorities\u201d and \u201cspend any amount of the public money in hiring blackguard cutthroats to assist them and the Marshal in doing it.\u201d There was no tangible difference, the paper concluded, between \u201cthe atrocious Judges of Charles II and his brother and the atrocious Judges of the times of Fillmore and Pierce,\u201d except that Northerners were not fighting a monarch, but rather attempting to \u201cshake off\u201d the tyranny of \u201cslaveholding domination.\u201d [2]\n

Several years earlier, Hildreth had also brought his scorn for commissioners into the realm of fiction, in an\u00a0expanded 1852 edition of his novel The White Slave<\/i>, which included a new chapter in the wake of the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. While Harriet Beecher Stowe did not raise the specter of commissioners in\u00a0Uncle Tom’s Cabin<\/em> (1852), just months later, Hildreth did precisely that in his reissue of The White\u00a0<\/em>Slave\u00a0<\/em>(originally published as The Slave<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>in 1836), penning a scathing and detailed description of one fictional commissioner\u2019s operation. Taking stock of the \u201cslave catching commissioner,\u201d his constable and a Circuit Court judge who entered as a \u201csecret partner,\u201d Hildreth sardonically observed that the three unscrupulous men \u201cplay beautifully into each other\u2019s hands.\u201d These “patriots and Union-saviours,” Hildreth disdainfully noted, succeeded in establishing “a general slave-catching and kidnapping business.” Set in Philadelphia, the trio of dubious characters were seemingly modeled off Philadelphia Commissioner Edward D. Ingraham, the notorious slave catcher George F. Alberti and Circuit Court justice Robert Grier. It was likely no coincidence that the name of Hildreth\u2019s fictitious constable, Grip Curtis, closely resembled that of Boston commissioner George Ticknor Curtis, whom the novelist especially loathed. However, this\u00a0brief fictional description of a commissioner’s operation helps illustrate contemporary familiarity with the law’s operations. [3]\n

While Hildreth is undoubtedly a crucial figure for my opening chapter, my challenge moving forward will be to find the best way to incorporate both Atrocious Judges\u00a0<\/em>and Hildreth’s fictional work in my section on commissioners’ contemporary notoriety.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n[1]\u00a0Richard Hildreth (ed.), Atrocious Judges: Lives of Judges Infamous as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression <\/i>(New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1856), 35, 158-161, [WEB<\/a>]; Robert M. Cover, \u201cAtrocious Judges: Lives of Judges Infamous as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression,\u201d Columbia Law Review<\/i> 68:5 (May 1968): 1003-1008; Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process <\/i>(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 149-158, 179; Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity <\/i>(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 255; Robert N. Strassfeld, \u201cAtrocious Judges and Odious Courts Revisited,\u201d Case Western Reserve Law Review <\/i>56:4 (Summer 2006): 899-900;\u00a0Manisha Sinha, The Slave\u2019s Cause: A History of Abolition<\/i> (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 528.<\/p>\n[2]\u00a0New York Evening Post<\/i>, December 24, 1855; \u201cA New Book by Richard Hildreth,\u201d Washington, D.C. National Era<\/i>, January 1, 1856; \u201cAtrocious Judges,\u201d New York Tribune<\/i>, March 1, 1856.<\/p>\n[3] Richard Hildreth, The White Slave; Another Picture of Slave Life in America\u00a0<\/i>(London: George Routledge & Company, 1852), 236, [WEB<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I begin drafting my historiography chapter, it is important that I demonstrate how prominent\u2013\u2013and infamous\u2013\u2013the U.S. Commissioners handling fugitive cases were during the 1850s, before segueing to their evolving legacy during the postwar period. While my previous post explored how the contemporary cartoon literature harnessed the tropes of tyrannical authority and unchecked power when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3689,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39567],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-primary-sources","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3689"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-wingert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}