PS Eliza Anderson - Underground Railroad and The Charles Mitchell Case

Underground Railroad and The Charles Mitchell Case

While the events leading up to the Civil War were far away from Puget Sound, they affected the people in the Northwest just the same. The Anderson played her role in these events, including the underground railroad. On September 24, 1860, a young black man named Charles Mitchell, aged 14 years, hid on board the Anderson, seeking passage to Canada to escape slavery. He’d been working on the vessel, and another older black man working on the Anderson as a “temporary steward” had helped him find a hiding place on the steamer. He was discovered either at Steilacoom or Seattle, and was not held right away, because he promised to work off his passage. It happened that acting territorial governor McGill and his family were also on the Anderson. Mitchell confided to McGill’s son that he intended to desert the ship in Victoria, and the son told the father. Governor McGill then told the ships officers, and when they were just four miles out of Victoria, they seized Mitchell and held him in “close confinement”

Once in Victoria, word got out that Mitchell was being held against his will aboard the Anderson. A group of protesters composed of both white and black citizens of Victoria marched down to the dock. A lawyer presented a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to Chief Justice Cameron, who granted the writ. Armed with the writ, sheriff Naylor and a police constable boarded the Anderson, presented the writ to the officer in charge, and demanded that Mitchell be released to them. The officer in charge told them he didn’t think he could do anything until Captain Fleming returned to the vessel. When Captain Fleming returned, he in turn deferred to Governor McGill. What happened next is not entirely clear, but McGill went ashore and either acquiesced in the assertion of the Canadian court’s writ over the vessel, or, as the Pioneer Democrat later insisted, protested vociferously against it. Either way, Mitchell was removed from the vessel by the Canadian authorities and became a free man. This was none to the liking of Olympia’s newspaper at the time, the Pioneer Democrat, which in an article quite free with racially derogatory terms, stated that war would have been justified to prevent Mitchell’s release:

Mitchell had been born in Maryland (a slave state) the son of a white man named Mitchell and an enslaved woman. His mother died and he came to be enslaved by James Tilton, who later was appointed as the territorial surveyor of the Washington Territory. Although in theory the Washington Territory was free soil, the Territorial legislature had declared that after the Dred Scott Decision, the federal government could not bar slavery in the territory. Curiously, although the Pioneer Democrat denounced the action of the Canadian court, blaming the situation on “sharp dressed” black people and misguided whites, the Pioneer Democrat also denied that he was a slave, claiming that he was some type of ward, even though the title of their article used the words “fugitive slave” and the protest by Captain Fleming that it printed described Mitchell as Tilton’s “property.”