In May 1851, downtown Syracuse bore witness to many dramatic events that would help to shape the course of slavery from thereon out, not just in that one city in central upstate New York, but also across the nation. Famously, when Secretary of State Daniel Webster took to the balcony of the Frazee Building on Montgomery Street on the 26th of that month, he vowed, among other things, to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act everywhere, even in Syracuse “in the midst of the next anti-slavery convention, if the occasion should arise.”¹ He did not have to wait long for this smoldering fuse to ignite a powder keg of abolitionist anger; four months later, on October 1, fugitive slave Jerry (born William Henry) was arrested by U.S. Marshals while the Liberty Party convention was in town. Thus followed the famous rescue of Jerry, an event in which numerous prominent members of the Liberty Party participated in myriad ways. Although the events that unfolded in Syracuse at the beginning of May 1851 have received less attention, they should nevertheless be regarded as no less important in the history of American abolitionism. This is certainly true of the dramatic events that unfolded when the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS) came to the Salt City for its eighteenth annual meeting on May 7–9, a meeting at which Frederick Douglass made an announcement that shocked the world of abolitionism.²

Was the U.S. Constitution pro-slavery? This, as Douglass once stated, was the QUESTION OF QUESTIONS so far as the Anti-Slavery cause was concerned.”³ It was not the “only barrier between the different Radical Anti-Slavery Organizations of the country,”⁴ but it certainly helped to explain why the barriers existed. In January 1850, Douglass continued to publicly align himself with an affirmative answer to the question. “To say that the constitution is Anti-Slavery,” he observed during a debate that month, “is an assumption against an overwhelming array of testimony, and against the Constitution itself.”⁵