Imprisoned in Vincennes
On the evening of March 28th, 1850, the Stills and their companion, Conklin, had been traveling northward from the Ohio River for five days when they were lured by the promise of a warm hearth at a homestead on the south side of Vincennes, Indiana. Just as they had taken their ease out of the rain, they heard the sound of hooves outside and shortly a band of seven men entered, armed with discovered a band of seven men, armed with bowie-knives and pistols. After interrogating the four, binding them with ropes, transporting them by wagon, and imprisoning them in the Vincennes jail, the “marauding band” made swift inquiries about whether any profit could be made over their capture. Plainly, they had made their arrests on suspicion alone.
The band’s chief “telegraphed in all directions to ascertain if four negroes, answering the description of these had anywhere been missed; and also what reward was offered for their capture” (299). Here we see a party of opportunists operating in the gray ambiguities of law, jurisdiction, and enforcement. Despite the dubiousness of their authority, the telegraph’s expediency empowered them to act with impunity. Although in the pre-telegraphic days, slave patrols might pursue individuals far into the north, they could not as easily detain travelers that they deemed suspicious, having no way to obtain evidence writs, warrants, or other empowering intelligence (whether substantive or spurious) that might ward their southward return against local northern authorities.
The chief marauder described in Pickard’s tale used the network crudely but effectively to summon intelligence from the four cardinal directions. At once, the “lightning postboy” returned a message that suggested they indeed matched the descriptions of four self-emancipated. In effect, the marauder’s telegraph seemed to summon the southern states’ rigged laws that imperiled Black travelers, almost as if the geographic contours of slavery had been tugged northward beyond the wending of the Ohio River. The technology had utterly disrupted the linear sense of geography as it pertained to freedom, and at the same time deranged the legal sequence of warrant-pursuit-capture.