Fugitive Slave Convention

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The Fugitive Slave Convention was held in Cazenovia, New York, on August 21 and 22, 1850.^[1][2] It was a fugitive slave meeting, the biggest ever held in the United States. Madison County, New York, was the abolition headquarters of the country, because of philanthropist and activist Gerrit Smith, who lived in neighboring Peterboro, New York, and called the meeting "in behalf of the New York State Vigilance Committee." Hostile newspaper reports refer to the meeting as "Gerrit Smith's Convention".^[3][4] Nearly fifty fugitives attended—the largest gathering of fugitive slaves in the nation's history.^[5]: 20

This was one month before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed by the United States Congress; its passage was a foregone conclusion, and the convention never even discussed how its passage could be prevented. Instead the question was what the existing fugitive slaves were to do, and how their friends could help them. Many resolutions and position statements were passed; this was the first time slaves still in bondage were publicly encouraged to abscond, stealing their master's fastest horse and money, and using violence if necessary. Participants included Frederick Douglass, until recently himself a fugitive slave, the Edmonson sisters, Gerrit Smith, Samuel Joseph May, Theodore Dwight Weld, his wife Angelina Grimké, and others.^[2]

The original plan had been for William L. Chaplin, the General Agent of the New York State Antislavery Society, to make a dramatic appearance with some fugitive slaves that he was to spirit out off the South. It was not to be; things went awry.^[5]: 11

The meeting was chaired by Douglass.^[1] The local links with the abolitionist movement were Theodore Weld's brother Ezra Greenleaf Weld, who owned a daguerrotype (photography) studio in Cazenovia and to whom we owe a picture of the principal attendees, taken to show Chaplin his supporters meeting. Even more important, the abolitionist philanthropist Gerrit Smith, one of the Secret Six that years later would finance John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, lived only 10 miles (16 km) away, in more rural Peterboro. The first book on Madison County, of 1899, says much of Smith, but mentions neither the Convention nor Ezra Weld.^[6]

The meeting was forgotten until a daguerrotype was discovered in the archives of the Madison County Historical Society in 1994.^[5] Judge Hugh C. Humphreys, who found the daguerrotype, identified the meeting through period newspapers.^[5]: 50