Lolita Buckner Inniss - The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson

THE PRINCETON
FUGITIVE SLAVE

THE PRINCETON
FUGITIVE SLAVE

THE TRIALS OF JAMES COLLINS JOHNSON

LOLITA BUCKNER INNISS

Empire State Editions An imprint of Fordham University Press New York 2019

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Library of Congress Control Number:2019945353

Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

Contents

Preface

I am intrigued and amazed to learn all of this about my family. In my heart, this is a sad conversation, but we all own who we are. The Wallises were not on the right side of history in the case of James Collins Johnson. But this case helped to get a lot of people thinking about the wrongfulness of slavery, and for that much we can be happy.

Philip Severn Wallis, a member of the Princeton class of 1981 and a direct descendant of Philip Wallis (17931844), the enslaver of James Collins Johnson

J ames Collins fled slavery in Maryland in August 1839. He changed his name to James Collins Johnson along the way, apparently to obscure his identity. A few days after he fled, Johnson reached Princeton, New Jersey, where he obtained a job at the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton University. Johnson worked on the colleges campus without incident until 1843, when disaster struck: Johnson was arrested on suspicion of being a fugitive slave after a student recognized him and alerted Johnsons owner. Johnsons owner came to Princeton and had Johnson seized and detained for trial as a runaway slave. Johnson was adjudged a slave and slated for return to slavery. However, he was redeemed from slavery by a local white woman who had significant ties to Princeton.

Johnson spent the next several years repaying the funds advanced for his purchase. He went on to become one of the best-known vendors over his six-decade career on campus. At his death, Johnson was described as the oldest Negro in Princeton. He was buried near what was then the whites-only section of the local cemetery, lying only a few feet away from some of the regions and the countrys most prominent citizens. Alumni and students took up a collection for Johnsons burial and erected a gravestone whose epitaph pays tribute to him as the students friend.

Gravestone of James Collins Johnson, Princeton Cemetery. (Photo credit: Daryl Inniss.)

This is the story that I heard from a Princeton graduate as I sat sunning in the plaza in front of Firestone Library early in my freshman year at Princeton in 1979. As a stereotypical Los Angeles native, I was friendly, relaxed, and eager to talk to anyone who approached me. I was also a But understanding that few peoples lives can be so neatly summed up, I vowed to someday learn more about James Collins Johnson.

My research has shown that the truth of Johnsons life both before and after his arrival in Princeton was likely far less sanguine than most stories suggest. While his life as an ostensibly free man was clearly an improvement over slavery in Maryland, neither the association of his Mid-Atlantic enslavement with oppression nor the association of his escape north to Princeton with freedom is likely accurate. Johnsons life in Princeton was one of tremendous vicissitudes. In one interview he evidenced bitterness when he complained about a white Civil War veteran who had been given a campus vending permit, thus encroaching into his fiefdom. When told that his anger was misplaced because the white veteran had fought for Johnsons freedom, Johnson sharply retorted: I never got no free papers. Princeton College bought me; Princeton College owns me; and Princeton College has got to give me my living.

The story of Johnsons trial, known at the time as the Princeton fugitive slave case, captured local and national popular imagination. Most accounts of Johnsons trial and fuller life story agree on the basic details. Students, alumni, and other college figures framed Johnson as a puckish, picayune, and relatively minor figure who lived a humble, respectable life of service. For these narrators, Johnson symbolizes a fondly remembered earlier time at Princeton. His life is seemingly a counterparadigm for the so-called Great Man Theory that was popularized in the 1840s just as Johnson reached Princeton. According to this theory, history can be explained in substantial part by the impact of great men: highly influential individuals who are historically meaningful because of their power, intelligence, charisma, or wisdom. But the counternarrative argues that the people who constitute the broader society, the lesser-known individuals, are at the heart of the historical moment. By this reckoning, Johnson is much more than a minor historical glyph that appears in the background of better-known figures in the larger panorama of Princeton University history.

Princeton University was founded in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1746 as the College of New Jersey. This is the name by which it was known for 150 years, through its move to the town of Princeton in 1756 and until 1896. From its inception, it served the sons (and, beginning in 1969, the daughters) of Americas social, political, and economic elite. Through the generations, Princeton University became a site of memory and part of the American patrimony. Princeton was the alma mater and the ideological home of many of the nations founding fathers and of other key political and social figures in U.S. history. From June through November 1783, when the Continental Congress met at Nassau Hall, Princeton was the capital of the United States. Scholars at Princeton helped foster the growth of American ideals of political, intellectual, and religious freedom from the mid- and late eighteenth centuries until the early nineteenth century. At the same time that these ideals of freedom were flourishing at Princeton University, James Collins Johnson and other persons of African ancestry, both slave and free, lived in narrowly circumscribed social and political spaces in its shadows. Johnsons presence at Princeton is a reminder that slavery and universities, though seemingly disparate topics, have long been intertwined. This book is part of a burgeoning area of inquiry: slavery and the memory of slavery in the context of universities.

The impact of the African slave trade and the enslavement of African-ancestored people in relation to institutions of higher education in the Atlantic world is an especially contentious thread in history. This contention occurs because the values and high ideals of academe are often framed in implicit but substantial contraposition to the horrors of human bondage. Enslaved people were often the backbone of the laboring class at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century college campuses.of slavery. Many of these institutions have united in a group of over three dozen colleges and universities called the Universities Studying Slavery consortium.