Wilkes-Barre abolitionist William Gildersleeve & Jonathan Jasper Wright
Around the question of “why did Samuel Wright [Jonathan’s father] settle in Northeast PA?” is that the borough (later in the 19th century to become a prominent city) had a significant abolitionist contingent. Like every other Northern city, it also had a large anti-Black population, as well as a group of citizens who didn’t want to get involved in the whole business of slavery.
Like the movement that abolished slavery in Pennsylvania starting in 1780 (as has been discussed here), abolitionism was centered in various churches. Wilkes-Barre’s most famous abolitionist, William Gildersleeve, was born in Georgia, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and moved to Kingston, PA, close to Wilkes-Barre, while still a youth. As an adult he lived in the town of Wilkes-Barre, in a large house on North Franklin Street.
Gildersleeve was a merchant with a store on Market Street, and his house served as one of the two main stops in the Underground Railroad in the town.
His enthusiastic support for Black freedom won him enemies within the town, resulting in a notable tar-and-feather incident.
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, life in non-slave states for an ex-slave became more difficult. The pursuit and arrest of escaped slaves by agents from slave states (or even US Marshals) was now allowed.
This situation sparked a notable story involving Mr. Gildersleeve. In 1853, a posse consisting of three U.S. Marshals and two other men came to Wilkes-Barre in pursuit of a runaway slave, William Thomas, who had escaped from Virginia and was now working in a downtown hotel. The crew found Thomas at the hotel restaurant and after a struggle pursued him down to the Susquehanna River, into which he plunged to evade the would-be captors, who shot at him from the riverbank. [A vivid description of Thomas’ escape can be found here.]
This of course drew a crowd riverside, among which were Gildersleeve and Oristus Collins, a local lawyer and fellow abolitionist. While crowd members variously shouted support to Thomas or his pursuers, Gildersleeve was enraged by the example of federal law enforcement coming into his city to violently arrest and remove someone whose “crime” consisted of escaping bondage in one state and coming to another where the practice no longer existed.
After Thomas eventually eluded the posse, Gildersleeve convinced the local magistrate to arrest the three marshals on counts of assault and inciting an insurrection related to the taking of Thomas and the confrontation at the river. The case of the three men was thrown out by a local judge, Robert Grier, but was appealed and eventually went to the US Supreme Court [at which time Judge Grier had been appointed as well to that institution. [This blog post from Dickinson Law School goes into the various legal proceedings in some detail.]
Gildersleeve testified in the Supreme Court case, and famously published a letter to Judge Grier excoriating him for his protection and endorsement of the marshals’ violent tactics. This letter (of which we will publish a transcript next week) helped make Gildersleeve’s name nationwide as a passionate and articulate abolitionist.
Remember Gildersleeve’s companion down at the river that fateful night? He was a prominent Wilkes-Barre lawyer, Oristus Collins, soon to become a judge. And Judge Collins becomes an important part of our story a decade or so later on, when his office serves as the legal education center for one Jonathan Jasper Wright - who did not attend law school, but like many lawyers of the day, “read the law,” essentially apprenticing in a law office before passing the Bar himself.