This is a story about Swain School founder William W. Swain being involved in a ploy to protect an escaped slave from being returned to bondage. I am even more proud to be a Swainie after reading. On Nov. 4, 1822, Camillus Griffith, a slaveowners agent, came to New Bedford in search of a man of color he had known in Virginia as William. Since his arrival in New Bedford in 1817 or 1818, this William had called himself John Randolph, and he is so listed in the 1820 New Bedford census, with two others in his household. Griffith claimed that Randolph had helped two slaves escape from a Virginia plantation on board the Regulator, a New Bedford coasting vessel owned by John Avery Parker and Weston Howland. Griffith had already been to Nantucket in search of the two supposed slaves, Arthur and Lucy Cooper. Nantucketers, it is said, refused to allow Griffith to take the couple, and so he set his sights on New Bedford and Randolph. Unluckily for Griffith, a Boston district court judge told him he would need no warrant to arrest the people he claimed. To seize Randolph, he asserted power of attorney from the estate to which the slaves were said to belong. Griffith went to Randolphs New Bedford home and, according to the New Bedford Mercury, dragged (Randolph) from his family, manacled, and forced towards perpetual bondage, and all for no other crime than the exercise of that freedom to which, by the law of nature every man is entitled. When New Bedford magistrates refused to hear his case, Griffith decided to approach a higher court, in Taunton or Boston. At that news Randolph, Griffith claimed, tried to escape through a window. When I attempted to stop him, Griffith later testified, I received some blows, and was in the act of leading him into the carriage when he was rescued from me by ten writs of debts alleged to be due by him. The writs of debt were a ploy seized upon by William W. Swain and Thomas Rotch as a way to keep Randolph out of court until they figured out how to stop Griffith. For his part, Randolph claimed that Griffith had beaten him, handcuffed him and held him prisoner; with this evidence, Swain and Rotch charged Griffith with assault and battery and false imprisonment, and had him thrown in jail. The first two trials, at Taunton in December 1822 and April 1823, hinged largely on whether Randolph could be considered a slave. There were those in New Bedford at the time, and later, who claimed he could not be a slave if he were living in Massachusetts, no matter what the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law said. Griffith claimed that the federal law gave him the right to do whatever he needed to do to reclaim Randolph. Furthermore, he argued, the writs of debt were invalid because slaves could not legally incur debt. The justices in both trials disagreed. Griffith had not proved Randolph was a slave, they said, and so they had no choice but to regard him as free and Griffith as guilty of assault. By the time of the second trial, Griffith had secured a witness who said he had known Randolph as a slave in Virginia and in his New Bedford life. Yet Griffith had not acquired the necessary legal documents by which to seize him, the justices ruled, and turned the question whether Randolph could be considered property in Massachusetts to the Supreme Court next October. This final court set aside the earlier verdict, but even by the time of the second trial Randolph was nowhere in the area to be found. - See more at: southcoasttoday/apps/pbcs.dll/article…
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 13:56:31 +0000
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