Dr. Eells

        Late one summer evening in 1842 Berryman Barnett, an African-American Quincyan and agent for the local Underground Railroad, arrived at the Jersey Street home of Dr. Richard and Jane Eells to report that a slave named Charlie was running for freedom and being pursued by a Missouri search party. Racing the darkness, Eells reached the fugitive and the two set off for the Mission Institute of Dr. David Nelson outside of Quincy. Nelson himself had faced the wrathfulness of Missourians who deprecated his tolerance of black humans.
        Outside Quincy and from a distance, a group of the pursuers, sent by the slave’s owner Chauncey Durkee of Monticello, Missouri, saw Eells’s buggy and ordered the doctor to stop. Eells steered the buggy to the edge of a cemetery south of the Institute (today’s Madison Park at 24th and Maine Streets in Quincy) and instructed Charlie to jump and stay hidden. Before morning, however, Charlie was captured and taken back to Monticello.
        The Missouri vigilantes chased Eells home. Confronted by the agitated group at his door, Eells denied he had helped a fugitive slave, claiming he had been home all evening. But one of the pursuers had found the black man Charlie’s still-wet clothing in the doctor’s buggy, evidence of Eells’s complicity in the slave’s attempt to escape. The next morning, a Justice of the Peace bound over Eells for trial. The matter was set to be heard in the Circuit Court of Judge Stephen A. Douglas in Quincy.
        The issue was knotty. Article Six of the Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, from which Illinois had been carved. Despite that decree, the Illinois Territory’s settlers, southerners and northerners alike, remained divided over the question of slavery. There were those who believed in an absolute prohibition of slavery, some who suggested that it applied to children born of slaves after 1787, and others who considered the Ordinance itself unconstitutional.

        When Illinois was admitted as a state, the drafters of its constitution ignored the prohibition of slavery, drafting a document that permitted limited slavery, although it required that anyone held to involuntary servitude be removed from the state within one year.
       Eells’s attorneys contended that the U.S. Supreme Court in a recent ruling, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, held that Congress could not require a state to execute a law of the United States. As a result, they argued, Eells was answerable not under the state’s fugitive slave law but under the federal Fugitive Slave Act, so should be released. Douglas ruled not on those arguments but on the basis that Eells’s arrest had been made with the objective of preserving the peace in accordance with Illinois law. It meant the arrest of Eells was lawful.
        Although he didn’t order Eells imprisoned, Douglas fined him $400, which testimony had indicated was approximately half the value of the slave Charlie. Eells appealed Douglas’s ruling to the full Illinois Supreme Court, whose members two years later concurred in the decision written by Judge James Shields that upheld Douglas.
        His notoriety gained for Eells in 1843 the presidency of the Illinois Antislavery Society and in 1846 the Liberty Party’s nomination for Illinois governor.
        Ultimately, the Eells case went to the U.S. Supreme Court where Salmon Portland Chase of Ohio and William Seward of New York were among the attorneys who argued Eells’s position. Both would become members of President Lincoln’s cabinet, and Lincoln would appoint Chase Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
        The Supreme Court in 1853 affirmed Judge Douglas’s ruling. Eells by then had been dead for seven years.

Dr. Richard and Jane Eells Home, documented Underground Railroad Station, 415 Jersey, Quincy.
Restoration by Friends of the Dr. Richard Eells House

Dr. Eells Case Heard by Supreme
Court Judge Stephen A. Douglas