Case I concerns events leading up to the War. A crucial pre-War event in Philadelphia was the Federal court case involving Jane Johnson and her two children, slaves who were passing through Philadelphia with their owner, John Wheeler, and who, with local assistance, escaped. Wheeler brought a suit to Federal Judge John Kintzing Kane, who issued a writ of habeas corpus for Williamson to disclose the whereabouts of the three slaves, but Williamson could not, and Williamson was jailed for contempt. The uproar over the case became national. Judge Kane (APS 1825) was an active APS member, including serving as president (1857-58). Kane’s ruling in the Williamson case states his belief that Williamson was in charge of the free blacks involved in the “abduction” and that slaves were property: no state can restrict the passage of a man and his property, even if that property is human. The case and Jane Johnson’s life were the subject of the novel The Price of a Child by Lorene Cary, selected last year for the One Book, One Philadelphia program. The furor against Kane aroused extremists on both sides of the slavery issue. There are pro- and anti-Kane letters, including a death threat, in Case I. An open, polemical letter penned by Senator Charles Sumner (APS 1867) says that the writ of “freedom and deliverance” which “finds no place in despotism” has been made “by a hocus pocus without precedent, the instrument of imprisonment and oppression.” This use of the writ to incarcerate someone is a “natural fruit of slavery” which corrupts all who support it.

J. Peter Lesley (APS 1856), an ordained minister who became a geologist and was a committed abolitionist. He and his wife Susan corresponded with leading abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, whose letter to Susan states that he doesn’t have information on a particular escaped slave from North Carolina; finding “colored people from the South” is exceedingly difficult as they “change their names and conceal their origin for obvious reasons.” The escaped slave was Frank Walker, son of Mary Walker, herself an escaped slave who had at one time lived with and worked for the Lesleys. Mary Walder’s story is told in To Free a Family by Sydney Nathans. Case I contains one of only three known letters of Mary Walker.

One letter in Case I rejoices in the election of “our Abraham.” South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860. Joseph LeConte (APS 1873), wrote his cousin John Lawrence LeConte (APS 1853) on January 10, 1861m about conditions in South Carolina after Lincoln’s election. The country was “melancholy in the extreme. A dissolution of the union by secession of all the cotton states is all but inevitable.” A slaveholder as well as a scientist and teacher, during the War Joseph helped produce explosives for the Confederacy. After the War, he became a geologist at the new university in Berkeley, California and a founder of the Sierra Club. When he wrote his cousin on Jan. 10, 1861, he hoped there would be “at least no general war.” Three months later, Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter.