Author Looks at Pre-Civil War Harrisburg

Larry Alexander - Intelligencer Journal

Author Todd Mealy has written a new biography. But it's not about the life of a person, but a city.

"Biography of an Antislavery City: Antislavery Advocates, Abolitionists, and Underground Railroad Activists in Harrisburg, Pa." is the story of the coming of age of a city caught up in the turbulence of the pre-Civil War anti-slavery movement.

"I try to humanize the city," said Mealy, a Penn Manor High School social studies teacher and football coach. "That's why my title is a Biography.' It's hard to capture the whole story of Harrisburg because when you research the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, there are not a lot of resources available, especially when you are focusing on one specific place like Harrisburg."

Mealy, a first-time author who grew up in Harrisburg before coming to Lancaster, began the project five years ago as part of a graduate course he was taking at Millersville University.

Originally, the story was about two black abolitionists, Thomas Morris Chester, who was the only African-American journalist for a major daily newspaper during the Civil War, when he worked for the Philadelphia Press; and William Howard Day, a former New Yorker who spent 30 years in Harrisburg and helped establish fugitive slave settlements in Canada.

"I think African-American abolitionists have been marginalized by the writers of history," Mealy said.

Prior to 1850, black and white abolitionists worked closely together. However, passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Law, which made it a federal crime to assist a black person fleeing from slavery, made the relationship between black and white anti-slavery groups "complex," Mealy said.

Still, both blacks and whites did what they could to assist runaway slaves to reach freedom in northern states like Pennsylvania and New York or across the border in Canada.

Harrisburg was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, a covert network of slavery resistors who defied the U.S. government and fought against the South's "peculiar institution."

"It's a story about abolitionists in the North, not so much those who escaped slavery," Mealy said. "It's a story of resistance."

The book centers on Harrisburg from 1836, when the Underground Railroad in that city was formed, to 1861, the year the Civil War broke out.

"I define the Underground Railroad as a public and defiant network of anti-slavery activists who organized themselves in Harrisburg in 1836," Mealy said.

Although there were certainly abolitionists in the city prior to that, they were not an organized group.

Mealy's biggest challenge in piecing together his story, he said, was the lack of primary sources. The best are diaries and journals, but locating those, he said, was "next to impossible."

Instead he relied mainly on newspapers, including anti-slavery publications by such prominent abolitionists as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

"I spent a lot of time at the state library and the Dauphin County Historical Society," he said.

One of the things Mealy points out is that while the southern states were loud proponents of states' rights in regard to their keeping slaves, they turned a deaf ear to the outcry of northerners when such laws as Pennsylvania's personal liberty law of 1847, which protected both abolitionists and the free-born children of runaway slaves, was declared unconstitutional by the pro-Southern Supreme Court.

One of Mealy's goals for the book was to put pre-Civil War Harrisburg into its rightful place among northern cities.

"The story of Harrisburg is just as important as the story of anti-slavery Philadelphia, or New York City or Boston," he said.

Mealy's book was produced by PublishAmerica and released in December.

The 260-page book costs $21 and is available on-line from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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