Tragedy on the Erie Canal: The harrowing saga of William and Catherine Harris
By Robert Searing | Curator of history, Onondaga Historical Association Robert.Searing@cnyhistory.org
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Despite widespread and prolonged opposition in many northern cities, President Millard Fillmore affixed his signature to the new Fugitive Slave Act on September 18, 1850. It unleashed a torrent of fear amongst the ever-growing populations of free Blacks and freedom seekers that at any minute slave catchers, who now possessed the ability to forcibly enlist civilians to aid in the recapture of those purported to be enslaved.
In Syracuse, already a hotbed of agitation against the odious legislation for several months, local leaders called for a mass meeting at City Hall on October 4 to further demonstrate their collective resistance. Word of the upcoming gathering reached Rev. Jermain Loguen, who was in Troy on missionary work for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He decided he must return to the city he called home since 1841 to lend his righteous voice to the proceedings.
Following the speech of his friend, Samuel Ringgold Ward, the Black publisher of The Impartial Citizen, Loguen addressed the massive crowd that spilled out of the hall out onto Montgomery and Market streets with the courage and eloquence that characterized his tireless fight against the inhumane institution he’d escaped almost 15 years prior. He declared that he would not be taken into slavery. “What is my life if I am to be a slave in Tennessee . . . I will not live a slave, and if force is employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man.”
For Loguen, those preparations did not include uprooting his wife Caroline and their children and fleeing to Canada, despite the numerous admonitions of friends to do so. Protected as he was in some regard by geography and a strong network of allies, Loguen could make this bold stand. For many other freedom seekers elsewhere in the Union, particularly those in border states like Pennsylvania, the Fugitive Slave Act left them no choice but to continue running further north.
Less than three weeks after Loguen’s stirring call to action, the city of Syracuse found itself at the center of a human tragedy that illustrated perfectly the fear, anxiety, and cruelty engendered by the new legislation. On October 24, 1850, under the headline “Attempted Suicide of a Fugitive,” the readers of the Syracuse Standard, a paper friendly to the cause of abolition, first learned of the tragic ordeal of the Harris family. In response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, William and Catherine Harris and their 3-year-old daughter had fled Philadelphia days earlier in the hopes of gaining safe transport to Canada via Rochester.
Initial reports stated that Harris escaped his own enslavement in South Carolina years earlier, eventually settling in Philadelphia. According to the testimony that Catherine later gave to Syracuse Police Justice Sylvester House, the two were married in 1843 and lived a quiet and peaceful life, and a few years later the couple welcomed the birth of their daughter. Terrified that he might be captured under the auspices of the new law, William made the fateful decision to uproot his family, and they made their way to New York City. There, they procured tickets to Rochester via the Erie Canal.
The real trouble began once they reached Albany on Thursday, October 17. As Mrs. Harris relayed in her testimony, having purchased their tickets for passage to Rochester they boarded their boat. The problems started almost immediately. Captain Hartwell C. Webster refused to return the Harris’s tickets. They were stuck in the cargo hold with large quantities of clams and oysters, delicacies that had become wildly popular all along the canal route in the 25 years since its completion.
The clams and oysters belonged to a merchant named Silas Cowell, who along with one of the boat hand’s, Jeremiah Cluney, began harassing the Harris family that evening. Somehow, they became aware of William’s status as a fugitive. Compounding their predicament was the fact that Mrs. Harris was of markedly lighter skin tone, being described in the New York Tribune [2] as a “mulatto woman, of interesting appearance.”
According to Harris’ testimony, Cluney and Cowell continued threatening to handing them over to slave catchers saying, “no n—– could pass this canal without being taken.” Preying on their fear, these men tormented William and Catherine and their three year-old-daughter for the next two days. They even attempted to extort money from William for passage, aware that the Captain had taken their tickets to Rochester. Mrs. Harris stated that Cluney and Cowell made reference to Syracuse as “the place where they said we would be taken.” After days of ceaseless torment, Catherine Harris could not take it anymore. As she stated in her testimony, she “wants to die rather than be taken by the kidnappers.”
Convinced that the slave catchers were waiting on them in Syracuse, she jumped through the moving boat’s window and into the canal with her daughter in her arms somewhere between Frankfort and Utica. Somehow, she was fished out of the nearly eight feet of water. In the commotion, her daughter slipped out of her grasp. The captain refused to stop the boat to look for her body. William went on deck to beg the captain to stop the boat, but to no avail. Cluney threatened to cut his throat if he did not go back below decks. Their daughter was assumed drowned.
Sometime around 10 p.m., on Monday, Catherine and William retreated to the cargo hold, the depths of their misery unimaginable “awaiting their doom.” In her testimony, Mrs. Harris said Cowell confronted them again saying that the crew was going to “take his head off.” William responded that he would rather do it himself. He took his shaving razor and sliced his own throat. For the next five hours, William lay bleeding next to his wife. All the while, Cluney and Cowell sat there playing cards, yelling racist epithets at him and threatening to “knock his brains out” if he so much as moved.
As the morning sun appeared in the skies outside Canastota on Tuesday, October 22, William was able to jump off the boat and began walking on the towpath towards Syracuse. Catherine recounted being able to see him alongside the boat, while Cluney, acting on the orders of the captain, threatened William with violence if he attempted to rejoin his aggrieved wife. As such, he walked wounded and bleeding alongside the boat for over 20 miles until he collapsed by the Lodi locks, near Beech Street. Catherine reported losing sight of him around this time as the boat continued on into Clinton Square. She remained on the boat as it continued west towards Rochester. There were no slave catchers waiting there. It had all been a grotesque and murderous charade.
According to the reports in the Syracuse Journal, William Harris regained consciousness and threw himself into the canal in front of a moving boat just west of the Lodi locks. The boat’s Captain, V.R. Ogden managed to rescue Harris and bring him into Clinton Square, where he was taken and treated by Dr. Hiram Hoyt, a Syracuse physician with abolitionist sympathies. Though Harris was unable to talk due to the wound on his neck, somehow, he communicated his ordeal to Hoyt, who in turn got word to Rev. John Lisle, a Black preacher in the AME Zion Church and pastor of the Second Congregational Church on Fayette and Almond streets. Rev. Lisle offered to head west towards Rochester to find Catherine, which he did at Montezuma. According to Lisle’s testimony, he encountered no resistance from Captain Webster nor the boat’s crew, a far cry from the harrowing experience of the Harrises.
Upon their return to Syracuse, Catherine provided the testimony upon which this essay is based. As a result of her damning testimony, Justice House issued arrest warrants for Webster, Cluney, and Cowell. The three men were detained in Rochester and brought to Syracuse on charges of assault and harassment. Unconvinced by their testimony, which painted William Harris as a disorderly drunk, they were found guilty, fined and jailed.
According to historian Angela Murphy, the Harrises continued their journey to freedom in Canada, though as a family of two instead of three. Their unimaginable suffering found its way into newspapers all over the union from Wisconsin to Maine, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Virginia, and even Georgia. It helped galvanize the opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law in a way that rhetoric could not.
Here in Syracuse, the memory of the Harrises persisted, actuating more strident resistance. This resistance would come to a head less than a year later in one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience of the period, when a righteous mob freed Jerry from his jail cell just a few steps from the Clinton Street bridge where Dr. Hoyt found William Harris bleeding from a self-inflicted wound.
Attempted Suicide of a Fugitive
“On Tuesday afternoon a colored man named Wm Harris, attempted to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a razor, on the towing path, about two miles east of this city. Harris is from South Carolina, and has been residing in Philadelphia for several years past, but on the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law became alarmed for his safety, and started for Canada, accompanied by his wife and child. In New York he procured a passage ticket for Rochester, but at Albany his ticket was taken from him and destroyed by some persons who threatened to deliver him up unless he paid for his passage again. He succeeded in getting as far as Utica, when his fears were again excited by threats of being taken back to Slavery, and says he was informed by persons belonging to the boat that he would certainly be arrested at Syracuse. He became so much alarmed by these repeated threats, (Whether made in jest or earnest it is now impossible to say) that he determined to commit suicide, and advised his wife to drown herself and their child. Taking his razor he jumped on the towing path and made an attempt to destroy himself by cutting his throat, inflicting a terrible wound, and fainted from loss of blood. His wife, with the child in her arms jumped into the canal about the same time, but was taken out by the hands-on-board the boat. The child was not recovered. The wife was carried west through this city, on the boat, [3] leaving the husband upon the tow path.” Source: Syracuse Standard, October 24, 1850.
Rev. Loguen Denounces the Fugitive Slave Law (Syracuse, NY)
“I was a slave; I knew the dangers I was exposed to. I had made up my mind as to the course I was to take. On that score I needed no counsel, nor did the colored citizens generally. They had taken their stand-they would not be taken back to slavery. If to shoot down their assailants should forfeit their lives, such result was the least of the evil. They will have their liberties or die in their defence. What is life to me if I am to be a slave in Tennessee? My neighbors! I have lived with you many years, and you know me. My home is here, and my children were born here. I am bound to Syracuse by pecuniary interests, and social and family bonds. And do you think I can be taken away from you and from my wife and children, and be a slave in Tennessee? Has the President and his Secretary sent this enactment up here, to you,
Some kind and good friends advise me to quit my country, and stay in Canada, until this tempest is passed. I doubt not the sincerity of such counsellors. But my conviction is strong, that their advice comes from lack of knowledge of themselves and the case in hand. I believe that our own bosoms are charged to the brim with qualities that will smite to the earth the villains who may interfere to enslave any man in Syracuse.
I don’t respect this law- I don’t fear it- I won’t obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it, and the men who attempt to enforce it on me. I place the governmental officials on the ground that they place me. I will not live a slave, and if force is employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man.” Source: The Rev. J.W. Loguen, As A Slave and As a freeman. A Narrative of Real Life (Syracuse, 1859), pp. 391-93; Aptheker 306-308
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