Meanwhile, their white allies had been doing their best to prevent or at least weaken the proposed changes to the constitution before it was ratified in an election. When a group of Quakers—some of them with considerable wealth and power—heard of the planned resolution, they held a special meeting out of concern and fear for the people of African descent in their state. They all agreed that if Resolution 13 passed in its current form, it “would lay upon the negro and his descendants a heavy burden… strengthening the power in the southern states to hold that class of human beings more securely in Slavery or cause them to leave the American shores and take up their abode in Africa from which land the white man took away their predecessors with force and violence.” So they wrote a “remonstrance” to the delegates gathered and working on that new constitution. It was an impassioned plea, calling on the drafters to remember that they all called themselves Christians and thus that they should not “be found making such unjust distinctions on the grounds of color or cast, when He who is Lord over all… makes none, in his merciful offer of redeeming love.” And hoping that the delegates “minds will yet be brought to see the injustice of such measures and refrain from adopting them.”25
But the Quakers were not the only whites allying themselves with equality and the cause of African American rights. Others in Indiana and the Northwest Territory states were battling against the forces of prejudice by naming it and making powerful arguments about its danger to the nation. As some white politicians argued at this time, if prejudice could be applied to a group of people to remove them from citizenship because of something as inconsequential as hair texture, then it could be applied to any group, or anyone, at any time. Indeed, it could happen to people who now called themselves white. Thus, prejudice countered the goals of a democratic republic. Prejudice divided people and returned the nation to the concepts of inequality and privilege that held sway before the Revolution—the idea that some were made superior and others inferior, when all should be given an equal chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.26
This integrated effort seems to have shifted some opinions, for the final draft of the new constitution did not include the terrible proposal that would have destroyed the right of African Americans to purchase land in Indiana. But the other changes looked likely to be approved by the majority of whites voting in Indiana.
And Seth Concklin was walking into this storm of rising prejudice, asking abolitionists in Indiana to help him in harboring the Stills if he got them out of the slave states. No one, not even Levi Coffin, a hero of the Underground Railroad, would take the risk, not with the recent passage of the new Fugitive Slave Law and Indiana’s new constitution all but ratified. Some may even have worried that Concklin’s plan, if successful, would push whites in Indiana to adopt that terrible new constitution.27
Finally, Concklin got a lead. He was staying with Levi Coffin in southern Indiana when an abolitionist preacher named Nathan Johnston visited from Gibson County. Reverend Johnston knew of some abolitionists near Princeton, a town fairly close to both the Wabash and the Ohio Rivers, and he suggested that Concklin investigate his options there.28
After traveling hundreds of miles and talking to many people, in the end the only help Concklin could find close to the Ohio River were the Stormonts in Gibson County. But the Stormonts knew they could not do it alone—they needed the Griers’ help.
This must have been one of the hardest decisions Keziah and Charles Grier had ever faced. This was not the old days, when there were fewer settlers around their homestead and they could more easily put refugees on the Ohio River to freedom. Surely they had known some of the free blacks working the Ohio River or sympathetic whites on those waters. The right riverboat men would refuse the chance at the large rewards offered for escaping people and instead smuggle people up the Ohio to Pittsburgh.
But so much had changed. The new Fugitive Slave Law meant that the federal government could levy massive fines against anyone helping refugees escaping from bondage—a risk the Griers and the Stormonts shared. Rewards were higher for capturing people trying to escape from bondage, and the law was strengthened by the invention of the telegraph, which could get information out of a plantation in the South to all those newly empowered white lawmen in the North faster than a refugee could run.
The Griers also had to deal with the fact that they were in Indiana, a state that had a growing disrespect for the lives of free African Americans such as themselves. And they were no longer young. Charles was almost seventy now, a rare old age for a man to reach in that region. If they were discovered helping Seth Concklin and the Stills, their age would not save them; nor would the fact that they had been pioneers in the earliest days of the state. They would almost certainly be murdered.
They had worked so hard on those first forty acres of wilderness, always putting something aside, always with an eye to their future and the future of their children. Now they owned 230 acres of rich good land, 80 acres of it cleared. It was cleared so well that they no longer had need of an ox team but could use horses—swift and nimble in front of the plow. It must have been pure pleasure to watch the blade cut through the soil so smoothly. And not all their horses were for plowing. They had five now, for they could afford them for work, for their wagons, and for riding. Keziah and Charles had managed to create a new family from nothing, a farm from nothing, a home from nothing.29
And they risked losing all of that if they agreed to Seth Concklin’s plan. They would have less than nothing, for they could lose their lives and endanger the lives of all their children still living with them.
But even if Keziah Grier barely knew Seth Concklin, she knew Peter Still’s pain. She and Charles would have been wounded just as Peter Still was wounded—his heart hurting with loss and worry for his family. Both Charles and Keziah had almost certainly been torn from family when they were brought north. Did they often wonder what had happened to their kin? Had they wished they could do something? Now they both knew that their parents would be long dead and any family left behind long scattered.
Whatever the reason, Keziah and Charles said yes to Concklin. They would help him, and they would help the Stills.
As Concklin left on his journey deep into slave lands, looking for Peter Still’s family, the Griers must have known—as William and Peter Still did—that there was little chance they would ever see him again. But they must have hoped, for in revealing themselves and promising their aid, they were sending their secret with him all the way into the South. And they knew that slavers had many terrible ways to force a suspected abolitionist to give up the names of all the people who were helping him.
To everyone’s surprise, Concklin succeeded. He managed to make it down to the Alabama plantation where Vina Still and her children were held. But even after he found her, Vina would not go with him until he had shown her the cape that she had given her husband all those months before. She knew all too well that it was not just free people who could be lured away by kidnappers.30
In the end it was too risky to take steamships, so, together, Concklin and the Still family traveled hundreds of miles, rowing in a small skiff for hours every day. Vina’s two sons, Levin and Peter, helped, but it must have been exhausting and terrifying work, every moment expecting someone on the river to hail them. And someone did, north of the Ohio River, as they traveled up the Wabash. Just as they neared the point where they were supposed to go ashore, men with guns yelled at Concklin to stop.31
At this point Seth was not only rowing against a strong current; he was rowing against the wind and rowing alone. Even though they were now traveling through a free state, it was no longer safe for Peter Still’s sons to help him, and he was keeping all of the Stills hidden under a blanket on the bottom of the boat.
Despite the yells of the men on shore, Concklin kept rowing as hard as he could, making his way up the river at a painfully slow pace. He hoped that the noise of the high wind would convince the men that he could not hear th
em. William Still later wrote of Concklin that he was “a man who seemed wholly insensible to fear.” But when the men on the bank started shooting at him, he must have been terrified, even as he refused to stop.32
And now, here they were: Seth Concklin and all of Peter Still’s family, standing at the Griers’ door. The surprise and delight at seeing them must have been immense. But the story Concklin told of being shot at on the river would have been very worrying. It meant that the wolves were watching. Had the telegraph done its job already?
The Griers must have been watched by slave hunters for years. They were too black, too wealthy, too visible. Some refugees had already been lost along the deadly stretch between the river and the Stormonts’ house; there were so many wolves. If they could just get this group to the Stormonts’, they would be safer, for as Concklin had written William Still, “No one had ever been lost between Stormon’s [sic] and Canada.… [T]he wolves have never suspected Stormon.”33
It was sixteen miles from the Griers’ house to the Stormonts’, sixteen miles of hard walking through a late-winter landscape with little cover to keep them safe. Then again, Charles Grier would have been used to getting people through even in the winter, for people came seeking freedom when the Ohio River froze, and they could not refuse to help them just because there were no leaves on the trees or corn high in the fields to shelter their journey.34
At sixty-nine, Charles would have been slowing down, but he was still strong, and very careful. He had to be.
Finally, it was dark enough to set out. As they walked quietly out, Keziah must have wished she could do something, something to keep them safe, to watch over them, to make sure Vina and her children found their father and that Charles would make it back home to her.
All of them knew that those sixteen miles would take hours to cover. But once the Still family was safe at the Stormonts’, Charles could walk the sixteen miles home in the light however he pleased, just an old established farmer out on some business.
She and Malinda and all those still at home would not have slept much until he returned. But finally he did. And then they waited.
The group now at the Stormonts’ would need to rest up a bit before heading north toward Detroit. But they took a significant risk in remaining there for more than two days, each hour a chance for the telegraph to spread the alarm and—worse yet—descriptions.
Vina and her group were terrified, but the Stormonts were more than a bit excited. This was probably the most famous escaping family they had ever helped. They even told their friend, Reverend Nathan Johnston, who was preaching in Princeton that day, to visit their house and see who they had there. He was delighted to see Seth Concklin again. And he was very impressed by Vina Still, whom he later recalled as “a woman of great natural ability and rare common sense.” But he could also see that the entire group that had just made it out of the slave state was “anxious about their safety as they knew that though they were now in a free state they were not free from the danger of being captured and taken back into slavery again.”35
They were right to be afraid. By the time they finally left and made their way north, the telegraph had done its deadly work, and every lawman and slave hunter in the region had descriptions of Concklin and Peter Still’s family. Worse yet, a huge reward of $1,000 had been offered for their capture and return to Alabama.36
It was cold and raining when they left, and the party was soon chilled. As they walked in the rain, someone saw them. Someone noticed a white man and four African Americans looking very much like a group that was being hunted, and they were captured some miles north of Vincennes, separated from Concklin, and imprisoned. Concklin would not give up, however, and tried to rescue them, coming to the jail with a writ of habeas corpus. Sometimes this could stall proceedings, but not in this case. The Still family’s enslaver, Bernard McKiernan, had made it to Indiana and was waiting in Evansville—a town on the Ohio River due south of Princeton—with assurances from the Evansville sheriff that he would get the Stills.37
Before Concklin knew what was happening, Vina and her children had been taken away, and he had been thrown into prison with the enthusiastic aid of the sheriff of Evansville, a man by the name of John S. Gavitt. Before long, news of their capture had spread throughout Indiana. Levi Coffin wept, writing, “The hopes of the dear family all blasted by the wretched bloodhounds in human shape. And poor Seth, after all his toil and dangers, shrewd and wise management, and almost unheard of adventures.… Then to be given up to Indianians, to these fiendish tyrants, to be sacrificed. O Shame! Shame!!”38
The Griers surely wept for Concklin and the Stills as well, but they were also trying to survive. Something had caused Seth Concklin so much suffering and terror that he was willing to reveal the Stormonts, writing to them to beg for help.39
And now people of African descent in Gibson County were guarding their doors, gun in hand. There had always been whites in the Northwest Territory states who hated anyone who tried to aid or support the cause of refugees from bondage, but this new federal Fugitive Slave Law emboldened them.
Even in Ohio, which had struck down so many of its Black Laws just two years earlier, white politicians were speaking out against African American Underground Railroad agents like the Griers. James Loudon spoke to his fellow statesmen, arguing that in order to destroy such African American agents, it “may be necessary to call on the light troops in the vicinity, and even upon the militia.”40
Concklin was marched in chains through Princeton by Sheriff Gavitt to be put on a boat to Alabama. But first the sheriff kept him and his friends in jail for a little while, separating the family members from each other and—as he later put it—“questioning” them. No one knows what tactics he used, what threats he made, but he later claimed that the young Levin Still finally admitted that Concklin was helping them to freedom. Yet Sheriff Gavitt did not break Levin Still completely, for Levin never gave him the Griers.41
Then Sheriff Gavitt put the Stills on a ship back into bondage. They were gone. But the danger was not, and the Lyles family as well as the Griers knew they could not let down their guard. The men must have taken watch in shifts, staying up all night to protect their homes and families. They knew that soon every form of torture would be used on that boat to convince Concklin and the Stills to give up their secrets. As Reverend Johnston wrote to Peter and William back in Philadelphia, “Poor Concklin! I fear for him. When he is dragged back to Alabama I fear that they will go beyond the utmost rigor of the law and vent their savage cruelty upon him.”42
The Stormonts were targets as well, now that their secret was revealed. But David and Mary Stormont stood firm, refusing to give up the Griers and their secrets even when they heard the terrible news of what had happened to Concklin.
Concklin never made it to Alabama. His body was found bound in chains, washed up on the muddy shore of the Ohio River, his head stove-in.43
Seth Concklin had failed to save his own life and rescue the Still family, but he had never broken faith with the Griers. He never gave away their secret, willing to die before he would endanger them and all the African Americans around them.
And the Still family did not give them up either, even though their enslaver, McKiernan, was willing to do just about anything to get information. He knew that once he had names, he could send a telegram, and Sheriff Gavitt would be at the door of those in southwestern Indiana who might have helped the Stills. Vina Still later reported that once they were returned to McKiernan, he had her sons stripped in front of her and whipped, given two hundred lashes until their backs were raw. McKiernan considered this just punishment for their trying to flee, but giving up information about the Griers may have saved the Still sons from such retribution. Yet none of them gave up the Griers.44
Still McKiernan questioned them. He was sure that if he did not discover who had helped them, they might try to run again—and succeed. This was war, and McKiernan planned on using all the most inhuman tools of wartime
against the Stills.
McKiernan decided to first threaten Vina Still with rape, and then her daughter Catherine. Vina Still knew that this was a deadly threat. Lydia, the young enslaved woman he had been assaulting in his home, was almost beaten to death when McKiernan’s wife discovered what he had been doing to her.45
Vina Still may have been aware that their fame offered them some sort of a shield, their existence and plight now known by many across the nation. But she must have thought that even this was not enough. So she threatened Bernard McKiernan, telling him that if he tried to take her daughter, she would kill him. Vina knew that her threat could result in her being “killed on the spot,” but somehow she got McKiernan to back down. Vina Still had managed to give some protection to her daughter and continued to protect the Griers.46
Meanwhile, Peter was doing everything he could to get his family out of danger. When McKiernan offered to sell them for the obscene sum of $5,000, Peter traveled around the country to raise the money, and in 1854 he was finally able to purchase their freedom. At the last minute, McKiernan, who had done so much to keep them in bondage, tortured them one more time, refusing to let Vina and Peter take their beloved little grandchild with them.47
Did the Stormonts come running to tell the Griers of the news? Keziah and Charles Grier were finally safe. They had been in danger every day since the Stills had been taken, knowing that any day something might break one of the Stills as they tried to survive in bondage. And then the wolves would come.
The Bone and Sinew of the Land Page 19