The Bone and Sinew of the Land by Anna-Lisa Cox

Author:Anna-Lisa Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

8

“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments”

Gibson County, Indiana, March 1851

The women of the house would have been up and moving before their friend at the door finished talking, one of them calling out the back window for the children, her voice rising urgent and sharp. As their friend rode away to warn their other neighbors, one of the men would have taken the gun off its hooks. Once everyone was safely inside, he would have stood guard, gun in hand. The wolves were on the loose.

These were not the creatures that used to howl around their cabins—the last of the four-legged kind had been shot years before. No, these wolves were the two-legged kind—slave hunters—and they were hunting for prey.

These wolves moved in packs and were quick to kill—not their prey, for those bodies were worth something to them alive, but anyone who aided the hunted. And while the slavers may have been despised, they were not without allies, for they had the general backing of the law and some very wealthy clients besides. As those allies and laws gained strength, more wolves appeared—some of them dressed as marshals, justices of the peace, and other local officials.1

The Lyles family must have breathed a prayer of thanks for friends and the law that allowed them to have their gun but cursed the new law that now endangered their family. For it was March 1851, and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was now in full effect. The federal government, all the way back east in Washington, DC, had made a decision that changed everything for the Lyles family, for the family of Charles and Keziah Grier, and for all people of African descent in the Northwest Territory states—or anywhere in the free states for that matter. It had passed the harshest fugitive law the nation had ever seen. It allowed the federal government to reach its long, sticky fingers into every state, ignoring states’ rights and habeas corpus.2

The Fugitive Slave Law meant that any white man who had a mind to could grab a person off the street or even enter a family’s home and take their children—as long as that person or family had a dark complexion. Once that person was chained up, there was little they could do to ever be free again. According to that new federal law, a white man could chain up a person of African descent and take them to the nearest federal agent, usually the local justice of the peace, whom the federal government paid double for ruling that the seized person was an escaped slave rather than a free citizen.3

In Indiana, the consequences of the law were felt almost as soon as it was passed. John Freeman, one of the wealthiest and most powerful black businessmen in Indianapolis, was targeted. A white man came from Missouri to Indianapolis and seized John Freeman, claiming Freeman had escaped from bondage. To make matters worse,

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