1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [68]
For the next few days, as Bagby awaited her court hearing, the jailhouse was the scene of a tense standoff between whites and blacks, with club-wielding sheriff’s deputies trying to keep the two sides from all-out street warfare. At one point, when a white man and a black man began to scuffle, a “colored barber” named J. D. Green charged in with a knife and slashed the white across the hand. Policemen immediately put Green under arrest, but before they could get him away, dozens of whites surged in, yelling, “Lynch him!” From somewhere in the crowd a rope appeared, passed eagerly forward from hand to hand. The officers managed to extricate the trembling Green and push him through the doors of the jail. Later that day, several more black men were clubbed to the ground by deputies and white civilians, while one “colored woman,” provoked beyond endurance by the officers’ taunts, threw a fistful of pepper into their faces and was manhandled into custody.62
Almost no white Clevelanders—not even the staunchest abolitionists—joined the black men and women at the courthouse. This was no time for heroism, they counseled. The same newspaper editions that reported Lucy Bagby’s arrest also carried the news that Georgia had officially seceded, becoming the fifth state to join the Southern confederacy. The Upper South—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Maryland—still hung in the balance, and the slightest breath might push them into secession. White Clevelanders were determined to prove that their city was not “disloyal to the Union” but rather “true and loyal to the Constitution”—in short, that it was ready to sacrifice its principles (and a woman’s freedom) for what seemed the greater good. Even the Cleveland Leader, Ohio’s most radical Republican daily, argued that if Lucy were sent back to her master without hindrance, it would send a message that “will be felt through all the country,” helping unite slave states and free states once more under the same flag. The editors pleaded with blacks not to attempt any rescue: “No, colored citizens, do not undertake such a rash act, but show to the world that you are possessed of noble qualities which enable you to bear and forbear, even under such an unrighteous law.”63
Meanwhile, Cleveland was also determined to show its most hospitable face to Bagby’s master, the young Reverend William S. Goshorn, and to his wealthy father, John, who had joined him in the city. The two Goshorns lodged at the best hotel in town, the Weddell House, where Lincoln and his family would stay three weeks later, and when a Negro waiter refused to serve them breakfast one morning, the proprietor stepped in and fired the man on the spot, much to the Virginians’ satisfaction.64
On the third morning after Bagby’s arrest, the hearing opened and then quickly adjourned when her attorney, a leading white Republican named Rufus P. Spalding, asked for time to visit Wheeling and seek evidence that might disprove that she was truly the Goshorns’ legal property. He returned two days later, on January 24, and ruefully informed the court that his mission had failed: “Nothing now remains that may impede the performance of your painful duty,” he said. Yet, Spalding reflected, the “painful duty” might serve a larger purpose, as news of Ohio’s appeasing gesture reached even the U.S. Capitol: “While we do this, in the City of Cleveland, in the … Western Reserve, and permit this poor piece of humanity to be taken peaceably, through our streets, and upon our railways, back to the land of bondage, will not the frantic South stay its parricidal arm? Will not our compromising legislators cry, ‘Hold, enough!’ ”65
Well-meaning whites made a last-ditch effort to purchase Lucy’s freedom from the Goshorns—even the chief marshal who had arrested her pledged $100 to the cause—but the Virginians declined all offers. They were determined to make a point. The elder Mr. Goshorn rose to have the last word in court, thanking the citizens of Cleveland for the “uniform kindness” they had shown during his