Free communities offered tenuous grip on safety in era of slavery

Feb. 5—The law was passed in Washington D.C., but it set off tremors that shook the ground in Mercer County and destroyed a community.

In Washington, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was part of the federal government's ultimately unsuccessful campaign to avoid shattering the United States over the issue of slavery. It was labeled as part of a compromise, but the Southern states — where slavery was permitted — gained a lot more then they lost.

The law required that everyone, even northerners, hand over any escaped enslaved person, under the threat of a $1,000 fine — more than twice the typical annual wage of an unskilled worker — and six months imprisonment. That penalty proved chilling to Mercer County's abolitionists and put an end to the free community of Liberia in present-day Stoneboro.

Other provisions of the law restricted Black people, both free and enslaved, from due process in proving their free status if a slave catcher asserted that they were an escapee, which made a community of free Black people an easy target for any slave catcher who happened to come along.

There was only one solution — Liberia had to evaporate like water droplets on a hot skillet.

"It had a real impact in Mercer County because it gave people cold feet on abolition, and the people of Liberia had to go to Canada," said Slippery Rock University student Stone Helsel.

During the fall semester at Slippery Rock, Helsel completed a project focusing on the abolitionist and 19th century Civil Rights movements.

Helsel focused on the role played by white people in Mercer County during the final years of slavery and the post-Civil War years, especially Liberia and Pandenarium, Mercer County's communities of free Black people during the 1800s.

He found there was a wide range of diversity within the local anti-slavery activists.

"It kind of deconstructed this myth that all white abolitionists were liberal," Helsel said. "People are complex and nuanced."

Helsel's research repudiated the view that neither the pro-slavery nor pro-abolition sides were monolithic.

The abolitionist factions were driven by a wide range of motivations — religious, political, moral — and by a wide range of philosophies. and even when people were opposed to slavery, it didn't necessarily mean they believed that Black people were equal to white people, or even that they should interact with one another.

"The north wasn't this utopia of racial equality," Helsel said. "(The south) had segregation by law. We had de facto segregation."

One faction, known as the colonization supporters, backed sending formerly enslaved people to Africa, even when they had been living in the United States for generations. Abraham Lincoln was, for some years, a colonialist, Helsel said.

"They basically thought there should be no integration," Helsel said. "A lot of them, they were third- and fourth-generation American. This was kind of reflective of the opinion that Black and white people shouldn't mix."

The "Back to Africa" movement came to fruition, with the establishment of an African colony called Liberia, the same name as the Mercer County community founded about 1825.

Liberia continued to thrive for about 25 years until the Fugitive Slave Act shattered it.

Only four years later, the county got another chance to support a community of free Black men and women.

Pandenarium was established in the fall of 1854 by enslaved people freed after the death of Dr. Charles Everett, a Virginia planter and friend of the nation's first few presidents.

After Everett died in 1848, he freed more than 50 slaves. His nephew helped them settle in Mercer County along present-day Route 19 south of Mercer borough, along Indian Run in present-day Lackawannock and Springfield townships.

The community peaked at about 63 people and continued through the Civil War — when many of its men served in the Union Army — and Reconstruction.

But Pandenarium, too, met its end, albeit by a more benign cause than Liberia's. With rocky, hilly soil and frequent floods, farming the land was difficult, Helsel said, so many of its residents packed up and traveled to the Shenango Valley to take advantage of opportunities at steel mills in Sharon and Farrell.

Those moves gave them a measure of freedom they probably didn't have at Pandenarium.

"The people of Pandenarium were physically free, but were they politically free? Were they economically free? I would have to say 'no.'"

The nature of pre-Civil War history is that few Black voices survived, which meant Helsel had to tell the story of Black Americans through the voices and names of white people who provided varying degrees of assistance and varying degrees of opposition to slavery.

But Helsel said those stories provide a service today, by showing how decisions — like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — made in Washington have impacts locally.

"It's important that we use local history as a tool to see how tough issues affect everyday people in a richer, more complex way."