WIDEMAN'S PHILADELPHIA FIRE

Wideman's Philadelphia Fire



Wideman''s Philadelphia Fire

In his anonymous editorial, Isaac Hopper, a thirty-one year-old Quaker, alias Friend Hopper, who was an abolitionist, suggested that Mayor Ewing should bear responsibility, at least partly, for Romaine's death, and that the "legality of the permission granted by the mayor of Trenton, is much questioned and will be investigated. Lydia Maria Child, the National Anti-Slavery Standard's editor, encouraged Hopper to write about his experiences assisting blacks pursued by their former masters, hoping that blacks such as Romaine would be immortalized. Child had arrived in New York from Massachusetts in the spring of 1840 and needed a place to stay and "took up my abode with the family of Isaac Hopper."(Child, 1853)

Because Hopper needed a job, Child hired him in June of 1840 as a treasurer and a book agent for the Standard, a paper that "represents itself before the world as the official organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society." On June 11, 1840, Hopper penned his first narrative, "An Interesting Case of Escape." In September of 1840, one reader in a letter to the editor maintained that Friend Hopper had an "immense fund of the most graphical interesting anecdotes, stored away in his excellent memory, and his tact in the relation of them never fails to exite the liveliest attention." Eventually, Hopper received space to print his stories serially. On October 22, 1840, Hopper penned the first of seventy-nine narratives in a bi-weekly column called the Tales of Oppression.

Drawn from "authentic sources, relating to the sufferings of the slaves and their efforts to escape from their fetters, and having a great abundance of such facts in my possession, I have concluded to offer them for publication in your columns," reported Hopper in his preface to the Tales of Oppression. The majority of the Tales featured black men: 55 (70%) referred to them; whereas 17 (22%) of the stories referred to black women, four (5%) to white men, and three (4%) to black children.

Sixteen (29%) of the black men were free or passing for free; 10 (59%) of the women fell into the same category. Over 90% of the blacks gave no ages or Hopper overlooked them; seven of the 11 blacks that did mention their ages were between the age of 25 and 35. About 75% of the blacks featured in the Tales came from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Seventeen percent came from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Mississippi.

Because the National Anti-Slavery Standard published the Tales, scholars can easily find them; the Standard began publication in 1840 and has been on microfilm since 1953. Comprising some 85,000 words, Hopper's Tales of Oppression provided the main source for Child's Life of Isaac T. Hopper, published two years after Hopper's death. According to Child, "the narratives and anecdotes of fugitive slaves, which form such a prominent portion of the book, were originally written by Friend Hopper himself, and published in the newspaper, under the title of ...