The Endless War Against Uncle Sam

     Buried or forgotten in American history are the stories of when individual states and cities openly defied the federal government, often over one draconian law or another. Of course, the supreme example of this is the Civil War itself in which several southern states broke off from the Union over the right to own and use slaves. In fact, roughly 170 years ago, slavery and abolition was the main sticking point between states and cities and the federal government and it wasn't just the southern slave-owning states that openly defied Uncle Sam. And in order to fully understand how the federal government has and had run counter to the interests and ideologies of certain states and cities, one has to study New York City and especially Boston, Massachusetts.
     The New York City Draft riots in the summer of 1863 were about just that- The draft for the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln was deeply unpopular in New York City especially because of the draft. This conflict of ideologies isn't so unusual even in a modern prism because Lincoln was a moderate Republican and New York City was dominated by the Democrats in Tammany Hall. Boss Tweed was still eight years away from getting toppled partly by the cartoons of Thomas Nast and its open corruption (George Washington Plunkitt of Seneca Village, a state lawmaker, once famously distinguished between his and Tweed's brand of graft, or what he called "honest graft", from dishonest graft that never served the public interest).
     But the infamously corrupt Tammany Hall, through its sachems, bosses and ward heelers (enforcers), were also brilliantly devious. In order to keep voters going to the polls to vote for their candidates (usually several times an election day), Tammany would court both the poor Irish immigrants still streaming in because of the Potato Famine as well as free African Americans and fugitive slaves. The Big Tent of Tammany may have been stained with graft but it was at least a big, all-inclusive tent. Tammany bosses such as Tweed knew better than most that a black man's vote (or several) was just as good as a white man's.
     This was canny and very smart because it gave Irish and black laborers alike the perception or at least the illusion that they had a powerful political machine giving them the voice that was denied them by Nativist No Nothings and other political factions. But then the draft came to New York City in 1863.
     Due to a confluence of events, several draft offices and newspaper buildings were torched and the week-long riot resulted in the deaths of over 100 people.  Many of the men serving the Union Army were white, lower class laborers who already resented being drafted into a war for which they had no stomach and all in the name of emancipating the very people they resented for taking their job opportunities. Several of the dead were African Americans lynched and/or burned alive in the streets of Manhattan.
     As well as being a city's defiance of federal law, it's also a supreme exemplar of the successful manipulation of class warfare. The Irish resented African American laborers but not the fat cats at the top who used the black workers to undercut their wages. They also seemed to lose sight of the fact that the wealthy had a Get Out of the Draft card in the form of a buy out whereby these men and their sons could escape conscription by simply paying $300 to the government and sending someone else who didn't have that kind of money in their place. It remains the largest racially-motivated riot in American history.
     But the instance of civil disobedience that most readily springs to mind is that of Boston in the mid 19th century. My ongoing research into the history of slavery for a prequel to my novel GODS OF OUR FATHERS informs me that Boston, 120 years before the busing riots and a decade before the Confederacy did so, went to war against the government. As part of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or the Great Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act was signed into law by Millard Fillmore on September 18, 1850. Cities and states, especially in Boston, Massachusetts, enacted state and municipal statutes that were in direct contravention of the Fugitive Slave law.
     For instance, even if a fugitive slave was captured in Boston, federal officials were forbidden from using state facilities to detain or even try the slaves. There was the case of three slave catchers from Georgia who were sent to Boston to reacquire the Crafts. This was supposed to be the first big test of the new slave law.
     However, the slave catchers, even with the weight of the entire federal government at their backs, were beset with delays from foot-dragging city marshals, harassment from the city's residents and countless arrests by the local constabulary. Finally after several weeks, the trio went home empty-handed.
     By the following February, a slave owner had gotten a line on a runaway slave of his, Shadrach Minkins, from a letter the latter had written to his brother. This resulted in the arrival of a forbidding character named Jonathan Capeheart. Nothing has been preserved as far as I know about what happened to Capeheart after his arrival in Boston but he was able to swear out a warrant for Minkins' arrest with the city marshal.
     They got Minkins almost exactly 169 years ago to the day, February 15, in a sting operation at the coffee house where he waitered. But two hours after his capture, members of the Boston Vigilance Committee, a major abolitionist group, stormed the federal courtroom and literally carried Minkins out bodily, installing him in and out of various safe houses. By 3 AM the next day, he'd already been driven to Concord, eventually ending up in Canada.
     The Crafts and then Minkins were to be the first major test of the deeply unpopular Fugitive Slave law. Boston was in the center of the Beltway's baleful crosshairs and with each foiled slave catcher frustrated on the City on a Hill, the federal government grew more and more obsessed with Boston. Unlike New York City, in which blacks were openly lynched over a civil war being fought on their behalf, Boston shielded and protected African Americans, especially slaves who'd run away from places such as Norfolk, Virginia (where Minkins and the Crafts were enslaved).
     It wouldn't be until the successful capture, conviction and expulsion of Anthony Burns three years later (That served as the historical backdrop for GODS OF OUR FATHERS, as Minkins' capture and breathtakingly brief detention serve as the backdrop for its prequel, BEFORE GODS, THERE WERE TITANS.) that the law was successfully enforced. With the Minkins example still fresh in everyone's minds, President Franklin Pierce took no chances and, 24 years before Posse Comitatus, sent 2000 federal troops to Boston\ at the exact moment the Boston Police Department was unified and professionalized
     While the New York City Draft Riot that came a little over nine years later became the largest racially-charged riot in all American history, with the Burns arrest and mock trial (the Fugitive Slave Law forbade black defendants from testifying on their own behalf), Boston burned for much longer than a week. In all, it cost the federal government just over a million dollar in today's currency to reunite one slave with his owner. An example had to be made even if the Fugitive Slave Law wouldn't remain on the books for much longer.
     So even in the early to mid 19th century, several sanctuary cities, led by Boston, had defied a federal government viciously pursuing enforcement of deeply unpopular and cruel laws.
     The difference between that time and ours is, at least federal officials such as Fillmore and Daniel Webster staunchly supported the Slave Act of 1850 (even if they privately opposed slavery) out of a sincere commitment to forestall a civil war with the slave states. This bullshit with sanctions against today's sanctuary cities is out of concern for no war and is carried out because of one man's demented racism.