The Jerry Rescue, October 1, 1851
Near Syracuse, New York
The first day of October, eighteen fifty-one, was a convention day in Syracuse. The Liberty Party, an anti-slavery organization, had gathered in the city for its state convention. Federal marshals chose that day deliberately.
William Henry, a man who had escaped from slavery in Missouri and had been living in Syracuse for nearly two years, was arrested that morning. He worked as a barrel-maker and had settled here because he had heard that this was an abolitionist town. He was correct about that, but the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty required that he be returned. The arrest was initially dressed as a theft charge. Only after he was placed in manacles was the true reason announced.
Word spread instantly through the convention. The crowd that gathered outside the police justice offices grew through the afternoon. Among those organizing the response were Jermain Wesley Loguen, a minister who had himself escaped slavery in Tennessee and had built a home in Syracuse with a hidden room specifically for people passing north through the Underground Railroad, and Samuel May, a Unitarian minister and prominent abolitionist.
By evening, a crowd of approximately twenty-five hundred people surrounded the building. A first attempt to free Henry failed; he escaped briefly but was recaptured near one of the Erie Canal bridges. He was returned to the justice offices and placed under heavier guard.
Then, after nightfall, a group of men with clubs and axes broke through the door and overpowered the guards. William Henry was carried out, concealed in a wagon, and spirited across the border into Canada. He lived out his life there as a free man.
Twelve of the rescuers were charged under the Fugitive Slave Act. Only one, Enoch Reed, was convicted, on a lesser charge of resisting a federal officer, and he died before his appeal could be heard. The city of Syracuse voted to celebrate October first as Jerry Rescue Day. A monument was placed in Clinton Square in two thousand one, during a reenactment marking the rescue's hundred fiftieth anniversary.
