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How an Island Community Protected the Coopers
Article published in the Nantucket Inquirer, October 29, 1822.
By Barbara Ann White
Two hundred years ago, on October 24, 1822, the family of Arthur Cooper narrowly escaped being dragged back to slavery in Virginia by bounty hunter Camillus Griffith. It was the lead story in the Inquirer’s coverage of local news the following week. The headline used the word “kidnapping,” indicating that the editor, Samuel H. Jenks, deemed the attempted recapture of the Coopers unlawful, despite the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 that required states to assist in the return of people “held to service or labor.” Massachusetts, however, had made the process of enslavers trying to reclaim escapees more difficult than most states, making Massachusetts a frequent destination for those fleeing enslavement. The Inquirer noted that the law was “fraught with such monstrous injustice” as it would condemn the free-born wife and “above all, their children, born in a free state.”
The 1858 Map of the Counties of Barnstable, Dukes, and Nantucket, Massachusetts by H.F. Walling includes a cadastral inset of Nantucket, showing the location of Arthur Cooper’s home on Angola Street and the distance the family would have traveled to Prison Lane (now Vestal Street). NHA Collection
Arthur Cooper was one of four targets for Griffith, all of whom had fled to New Bedford on the sloop Regulator between 1815 and 1818. Arthur Cooper had been known as “George” when he was enslaved. It is not clear if his wife, Mary, was freeborn or formerly enslaved as the sources are contradictory, but Griffith claimed that she was one of the people for whom he was searching. Arthur Cooper moved to Nantucket in 1820, where he would have found it easy to find work as the island’s whaling industry was growing steadily. The Black community was also growing with around 274 people out of a total population of 7,266. The Coopers rented a home on Angola Street in the area known as New Guinea, where the Black community was establishing itself.
Vigilance was ever-present in the Black community; there was nowhere in the country where fugitives were truly safe. The arrival of Griffith and his party was quickly noticed in the small community. The Black community gathered in the early morning at the Cooper house determined to prevent the family from being arrested at all costs. The Inquirer noted the crowd of men, women, and children “were so exceedingly incensed.” The situation was tense, with the potential to become violent.
The article provides no details as to how a few white Nantucket men arrived on the scene or who they were. In fact, the only name in the entire article is that of a deputy marshal of Massachusetts named Bass; the reporter made jokes at his expense, writing that “Bass was no salmon” and that he had been “smoked” by some of the crowd. But readers knew who the participants were. The reference to a “magistrate” was a giveaway that he was the well-known Alfred Folger. If the writer was trying to protect everyone involved for possibly breaking the law, it was thinly veiled and easily discovered.
Arthur Cooper, circa 1830, by Sarah “Sally” Gardner. NHA Collection. Gift of Eliza Ann King, 1899.131.1.
Later accounts fill in the details, gleaned from a variety of newspapers, an autobiography, and other historical records. The white men were all members of the Society of Friends, the majority related to each other. William Mitchell, the father of astronomer Maria Mitchell, was a participant. He credited Oliver C. Gardner with engineering the Coopers’ escape. Others involved were Gardner’s brothers-in-law, Francis G. and Thomas MacKrel Macy. These men all lived on Prison Lane, now Vestal Street.
It is easy to imagine the fear that gripped the Cooper family on that fateful day when Camillus Griffith and three men appeared at their front door to arrest them and drag them to a boat in the harbor. The young couple had four children, ranging from ages three to thirteen. In addition, Mary was nine months pregnant with their fifth child. As they scrambled out a back window and across the fields, what did they think were their odds of escaping? The noise from the crowd of at least a hundred, if not over two hundred, angry people trying to prevent their capture must have added to the tension and fear. How long did it take them to scurry, probably to a home on Prison Lane, over a quarter mile away? An account written five decades later and published in the March 16, 1878, issue of the Inquirer and Mirror described the scene. Reprinted from the New Bedford Standard, it quoted Camillus Griffith from files at the State House, written shortly after the incident. The bounty hunter stated that his party of four was in the act of removing the Cooper family when “a large assemblage” gathered around the house “and seemed to set us at defiance.” He sent men to guard the back of the house, but said he became alarmed by the “threats of the mob.” So he called the men back to rejoin him at the front of the house for their own safety. One wonders how seriously the Massachusetts lawman, Mr. Bass, who had been assigned the task by a judge, took his job. Might they passively have thwarted Camillus Griffith from arresting the Coopers? Maybe he turned a blind eye to the party of escapees that included at least eight people. It seems possible from the wording of the 1822 article, which noted that Bass acted “against his conscience; for he declared that he disliked slavery exceedingly!” How and when had Bass made his views known?
Griffith described Sylvanus Macy and Alfred Folger questioning his documents, querying whether they might be forged. He noted that their delaying tactics had allowed the Coopers to escape, with Arthur himself disguised in a Quaker coat and hat. The bounty hunter said that Sylvanus Macy told him that “they wanted those colored people to man their whale ships and would not suffer them to be carried back to bondage,” thus suggesting a financial motive for the Quakers’ intervention. He testified that Alfred Folger
“observed to me that the laws of their State did not recognize any persons as slaves, and if I attempted to molest these people or remove them, he should consider it his duty as a magistrate to arrest me and my party.” That was the end. The Coopers had escaped, the community of neighbors had succeeded, and the white men had engineered a successful escape. Griffith concluded, “I had the mortification to be entirely defeated.” The white men who defied the bounty hunters and protected the Coopers were not motivated by money. They were motivated by their membership in the Society of Friends, the Quakers. The plight of a family undoubtedly known to them had elicited their sympathy and outrage. They also had taken account of the situation on Angola Street, knowing it could easily have become violent, and worked to defuse it. The Quakers’ historic stance on enslavement is complicated and not straightforward. As the abolition movement gained traction over the next decades, most Quakers chose to remain uninvolved. Some abolitionists, such as Anna Gardner, whose family sheltered the Coopers, were disowned for their public involvement in politics; many joined the Unitarian church. But those developments came considerably later than the attempted kidnapping of the Cooper family. Ambiguities about the attempted kidnapping persist, and details of the story are unclear. Not every account may reflect historical truth, particularly with the passage of time, as most accounts were written years later. We do not know, for example, the length of time that the Coopers were in hiding, nor the details of their hiding places. Anna Gardner wrote in her autobiography that Cooper “and his family were concealed for weeks in our attic and cellar,” implying that the Gardner house was the only place the Coopers stayed. That is certainly possible. But it is also possible that the family moved around. Several sources, for example, maintain that the Coopers were hidden for a time at the house of Alfred Folger. The people of New Guinea must have actively assisted in keeping the family’s whereabouts secret. There was no certainty that Griffith wouldn’t reappear with a larger force, lending credence to the narrative that the family remained hidden for a considerable amount of time. What is clear is that Mary Cooper gave birth to her fifth child, Arthur Jr., less than a week after their frightening escape. The initial news story included the information that the Coopers “remain concealed among the vast subterranean vaults which have been made by peat-diggers!” This was a deliberate falsehood written to throw the bounty hunters off the scent as such vaults did not exist.
Almost the entire Black community rose in opposition that morning to the threat, but it is difficult to document which individuals might have led the community’s resistance. Perhaps there were no leaders and it was a spontaneous response, since there was little
Arthur Cooper was an active member of the Nantucket community. His signature here is from an 1845 petition in favor of integrating the island’s public schools. Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, Massachusetts Archives, Passed Acts time to plan. Yet, this was an active community with leaders in its midst. For example, that same year leaders in the community organized a Sabbath school to educate at least thirty Black children. Three of those children were probably Eliza Ann, Cyrus, and Randolph Cooper. Leaders in the Black community also organized a church in a room that year, possibly in the Second Congregational Church, before building the African Meeting House two years later. Besides doing manual labor, Cooper was employed as a shipping agent, furnishing sailors to the whaleships of George and Joseph Starbuck. In 1833, he was able to buy his house on Angola Street. He was one of the three founders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, built on upper York Street in 1832, and an elder there for the rest of his life.
Arthur Cooper, unsurprisingly, became an activist in the abolition movement; he chaired a meeting against the colonization of Black Americans in Africa. The church where he served as an elder was a meeting spot for reform movements. His name appears on multiple petitions held in the state archives championing civil rights and justice. During the struggle to integrate the Nantucket public schools in 1842, he ran unsuccessfully for the school committee alongside nine other Black men. After Mary died in 1826, Arthur married Lucinda Gordon, a woman who had been captured at the age of eighteen in Africa and who was eventually sold to someone in Newport, Rhode Island. It is not known how or when she became free or came to the island. Arthur Cooper died at age 64 in 1853, his second wife outliving him by many years. They are buried in a family plot in the Historic Coloured Cemetery on Mill Hill.
