Bound for Canaan

by Fergus Bordewich

  CHAPTER 3

  A GADFLY IN PHILADELPHIA

  There is no use in trying to capture a runaway slave in Philadelphia. I believe the devil himself could not catch them when they once get here.

  —ANONYMOUS SLAVE MASTER

  1

  A genial New Jersey farm boy named Isaac Tatum Hopper was just one among the many young men packed off by their parents in the hamlets surrounding Philadelphia in the years after the Revolution, in hope that he would make his fortune in the great city. By the end of his life, he would be a legend, a venerated figure who appeared on public platforms with William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, and other abolitionist luminaries. But arriving in the nation’s then-capital in 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, he was merely a sixteen-year-old tailor’s apprentice new to city life, and hoping for adventure. Unusual for his time, even among abolitionists, he was unaffected by color prejudice. He traced his sympathy for blacks to an elderly African farmhand named Mingo who, when Hopper was a small child, had recounted to him in tears how he had been kidnapped from his home across the sea by slave traders. Soon after Hopper’s arrival in Philadelphia, he encountered his first fugitive, an enslaved sailor who had jumped ship and was desperate to escape recapture. Wanting to help in some way, Hopper asked among his neighbors until he heard about a Quaker in rural Bucks County who was reputed to be “a good friend to colored people.” He then found someone to provide the fugitive with a letter of introduction and directions to the man’s house where, Hopper was later assured, the sailor was kindly received and provided with a job. The experience taught Hopper two simple but lasting lessons: that he could make the difference between slavery and freedom for a fellow human being, and that with imagination it was possible to hide a fugitive where no one could find him.

  Nowhere in the United States was the atmosphere of democratic change more palpable than in Philadelphia. As Hopper wandered its cobbled lanes, he mingled with Quakers in their distinctive broad-brimmed hats, immigrants from Ireland and Germany, French refugees from the bloody revolution in Sainte-Domingue, indentured servants, free blacks, and slaves. He marveled at the templelike public buildings that self-consciously evoked the classical inspiration of the Founding Fathers, and at the flotillas of tall-masted brigs moored in the Delaware River, proclaiming that the city of seventy thousand was not just the nation’s only metropolis, but one of the greatest ports in the world. Philadelphia’s wealth was everywhere to be seen. At the same time, the capital also presented a panorama of appalling poverty, crime, and disorder of a magnitude never before encountered in North America. The poor and disenfranchised could be thrown into prison for minor transgressions without evidence or trial, while the constables charged with maintaining order were notoriously corrupt, “ready for any low business, provided it were profitable.” Epidemics aided by inadequate sanitation carried people away by the scores and the hundreds. The French traveler C. F. Volney reported that the area around the docks, where many blacks lived, exceeded “in public and private nastiness anything ever beheld in Turkey.” While thousands of men and women who had spent decades in bondage were experimenting with liberty for the first time in their lives, African Americans were excluded from most schools, denied the right to vote, barred from many public places, and relegated mostly to menial occupations, as chimney sweeps, wood cutters, casual laborers, and domestics.

  Although slavery still existed in Pennsylvania as it did almost everywhere in the United States, nowhere else was the concept of freedom widening so rapidly for so many people. In 1780, more than eighty years before the Civil War, the state’s emancipation law—the country’s first—declared that while slaves born before that year were to remain in bondage, those born after that date would automatically become free when they reached their twenty-eighth birthday. The law also effectively ended slave trading locally by barring the purchase of new slaves within the state, and mandating that any personal slaves brought from out of state would automatically become free after six months’ residence in Pennsylvania. By 1800, all but a few masters within the city had voluntarily manumitted their slaves, while in the surrounding region slave owners were discovering that their once docile property could walk away from them with comparative ease.

  At a time when slavery was flourishing as never before in the South, and still widely tolerated in the North, word spread rapidly that Philadelphia was a haven for those who would be delivered from bondage. In 1800 a naval ship that captured two slave trading vessels off the coast of Delaware delivered 134 Africans to the city to be set free. Quaker planters in the West Indies, yielding to the abolitionist pressure of their coreligionists, sent their manumitted slaves to Philadelphia by the hundreds. Philadelphia courts also freed hundreds more French-speaking slaves who had been brought from Sante-Domingue by their fleeing masters. Fugitives walked off farms in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and they made their way north by land and sea from Virginia and Maryland. For the city’s African Americans, little was certain but uncertainty, however. Success in reaching Philadelphia was still no guarantee of safety. Because the state emancipation act did not apply to runaways, fugitives were detained in the county jail until their owner was notified. If no owner appeared, the law provided that a runaway could be sold or set free at the discretion of the local court. The outcome depended less on precedent than on the vagaries of individual magistrates, whose personal biases, particularly about slavery, were as much a factor in their decisions as their knowledge of the law, or lack of it. Runaways were numerous, vulnerable, and largely unprotected. Fugitives never knew which white person might direct them to a friendly magistrate, help find them a job, and transport them to a farm outside the city where they couldn’t be found; or report them to the authorities, lock them up and send for their master, or kidnap them and sell them into slavery again across the Maryland state line.

  Philadelphia was destined to become the country’s first laboratory of abolition, but it would take a form much different from the orderly one envisioned but never brought to fruition by Thomas Jefferson. The Founding Fathers had provided the early abolition movement with a secular ideology by bestowing upon it the patriotic themes of natural rights and political empowerment. But their repeated efforts to legislate peaceful emancipation had tested the nation’s commitment to its revolutionary ideals, and found it grievously wanting. The hard work of emancipation thus increasingly fell to Americans of a different type. They were not the aristocratic products of the Enlightenment, but men and women driven by a religious imperative that the rationalist Jefferson disdained, in league with the free blacks whom he feared with an almost skin-crawling disgust.

  An engraving of Isaac Hopper made later in life shows a rather short, stout man, oval-faced and clean shaven, with a small, firmly set mouth, and long, wavy hair. (Hopper was friendly with the exiled Joseph Bonaparte, who lived near Philadelphia, and the former king of Italy enjoyed pointing the Quaker out to acquaintances as the nearest resemblance he had ever seen to his brother Napoleon, the deposed emperor of France.) Most of what is known about Hopper’s early life is found in a biography written by his protégée, the abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child in 1853, a year after his death. What comes through, along with an impression of unflappable self-possession and steely determination, is an impish delight in adventure that found its outlet in the hide-and-seek played by hunter and fugitive, and dramatic face-to-face confrontations with furious masters who, it was said, “had abundant reason to dread Isaac T. Hopper as they would a blister of Spanish flies.”

  Although not born a Quaker, Hopper was linked to the Society of Friends through his uncle, a tailor, to whom he was apprenticed, and in 1795, at the age of twenty-four, he was formally received into the sect. He embraced his new faith with the unflagging enthusiasm of a convert, shunning music and dancing as a “useless and frivolous pursuit,” and as a matter of Quaker principle, refusing to pay taxes to maintain the state militia, compelling the authorities to collect the tax i
n kind by carrying off pieces of his furniture. A tenacious traditionalist, he continued to wear buckled shoes, high stockings, knee-length trousers, and broad-brimmed Quaker-style hat long after they had gone out of style. The Quakers soon recognized in Hopper’s combination of stubbornness, conviction, and gentleness of manner a talent for what a much later age would call “social work.”

  In April 1796 Hopper was elected to membership in the Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the first organization in the United States to proclaim abolition as its explicit goal. He was appointed first to a charitable committee whose members visited the homes of the black poor, to collect information on their needs, to help find them jobs, and to arrange education for their children, an experience that greatly deepened his insight into the life of the city’s African Americans, and provided him with innumerable contacts that would later prove invaluable in his underground work. In the meantime, he also served as an overseer for Philadelphia’s first school for black children and as a teacher in a school for black adults, where he taught classes two or three evenings a week. In 1801 the Abolition Society handed him a new and far more challenging assignment: to investigate, and represent before the law, the claims of blacks who asserted that their liberty was being denied them illegally. Some of these were the victims of attempted kidnappings, and others of mistaken identity. Still others, though they dared not admit it publicly in a city where many in authority were ready to send them back to their masters, were really fugitive slaves.

  In the first years of the new century, Hopper and his collaborators inside Philadelphia and in its surrounding countryside became what can fairly be described as the first operating cell of the abolitionist underground. Their numbers were few and their reach was limited, but the techniques that they developed eventually became a model of cooperation across racial and class lines, bringing together middle-class white tradesmen, Quaker farmers, black stevedores, and other African Americans in a collaborative effort that functioned with little or no central direction, and no distinctions of rank. Of course, they did not call their activities the “Underground Railroad”: the invention of iron railways still lay a generation in the future. Hopper and his friends hardly thought of what they were doing as a system at all, but rather as the private actions of a handful of like-minded men—and apparently they were all men at this time, as far as can be known—doing what their individual consciences required them to do. Hopper, the most active of them, certainly had no grand national scheme in mind. He was no strategist. Rather, he led by example, bequeathing to the activists who followed him an ethic of unflinching personal responsibility, boldness, and quiet self-sacrifice.

  In 1804 a black man in his mid-thirties appeared at the offices of the Abolition Society, and explained that he was a slave to Pierce Butler, a senator from South Carolina, but had lived most of the last eleven years with his master in Pennsylvania. Butler now intended to take him to Georgia. The black man, “Ben,” was married to a free woman, and did not want to leave her. The society’s governing committee agreed that since Ben had lived in Pennsylvania far longer than the six months stipulated by law, he was clearly entitled to his freedom. A writ of habeas corpus was obtained, and Isaac Hopper was chosen to serve it upon Butler at his Chestnut Street home. Butler, “a tall, lordly looking man, imperious in manner,” ordered Hopper out, denouncing him as “a scoundrel.” Said Butler, “I am a citizen of South Carolina. The laws of Pennsylvania have nothing to do with me.” It was as if, in Butler’s mind at least, the two men lived not just in different states but in different countries, which in a sense they did. Butler appeared in court to defend his property, as he saw it, maintaining that as a member of Congress, he was allowed to keep his slave in Pennsylvania as long as he pleased. A lawyer appointed by the society to represent Ben argued that the law to which Butler referred had only applied as long as Congress met in Philadelphia, but that it had become a dead letter once the government had moved to the new capital at Washington. To Butler’s fury, his slave was declared a free man on the spot. As the pacifist Hopper continued to hustle about the waterfront on his missions of aid, he probably never imagined that the underground that he was inventing would eventually extend its reach across every Northern state, and that it would help bring the nation to the brink of Civil War.

  2

  The underground borrowed much from both the tightly disciplined organization and the self-contained style of the Society of Friends. Quakers had themselves been a persecuted minority both in England and in the North American colonies, and they knew that their survival depended on protecting the integrity of their community against outsiders, regardless of their internal disagreements. Moral opposition to slavery was a core Quaker tenet, although political activism was not. Even those who disliked Isaac Hopper’s activities at least tolerated them. Many Quakers strongly opposed political engagement and law-breaking, and others, whatever their moral opposition to slavery, were deeply racist. But such internal struggles were almost never aired publicly. Turning in a fellow Quaker to secular authorities for practicing his religion as he saw it was virtually unthinkable. Thus it often would prove easy for fugitives to disappear in plain sight in Quaker communities, even where only a small minority might be directly involved in underground work.

  Hopper’s opponents—and there were many in a city where abolitionist sentiment was far from universal—attempted to dismiss him as a “meddlesome Quaker.” At least once, a magistrate infuriated by Hopper’s unyielding defense of a fugitive slave had him thrown bodily out of the courtroom. For years he lived with threats of assassination, attacks on his family, and arson against his house. But to Hopper none of this seemed to matter. Antislavery work was for him a profoundly religious act. “We may perform works of benevolence and kindness that are ‘acceptable to God and approved of men,’ which require but little self-denial,” Hopper wrote, in one of the few documents in his own hand that still survives. “But when duty calls us to engage in such, that are unpopular, and in the discharge of which we risk the loss of friendship of those we love to be faithful therein, requires more devotion to principle and more firmness than many possess; and yet it is the path which leads to the enjoyment of that peace and consolation which the world can neither give nor take away.”

  Hopper and his allies were heirs to a spiritual revolution that had been gathering force for more than a century. By the early nineteenth century, this revolution was transforming more and more Americans’ ideas about slavery and race on, at least arguably, a far deeper level than the lofty, intellectualizing pronouncements of Enlightenment philosophes. The earliest American critiques of slavery were rooted in powerful biblical injunctions. “It is most certain that all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all their outward Comforts of Life,” Samuel Sewall, a distinguished jurist in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote in 1700, citing Psalms 115:16. “God hath given the Earth unto the Sons of Adam, And hath made of One Blood, all Nations of Men, for to dwell on the face of the Earth.” He also cited Exodus 21:16: “And seeing GOD hath said, He that Stealeth a man and Selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to Death.” It was also held by the Puritans that blacks as well as whites could be among the spiritually “elect,” a principle of profound importance, making clear as it did that the life and welfare of slaves could be sacred in the eyes of God. Puritan churches sometimes even admitted slaves to membership, a privilege that was denied to whites, the majority of them, in fact, who were deemed spiritually unworthy. Cotton Mather, best remembered for his religious bigotry, pressed vigorously for the education of slaves, asserting that “there might be some elected ones among the Negroes.” He declared, in 1706, that “Who can tell, but that God may have sent this Poor Creature into My hands, so that One of the Elect may by my means be Called; by my Instruction be made Wise unto Salvation!”

  Evangelical Methodists and Baptists also stressed the equality of all souls before God,
and would produce many of the staunchest foot soldiers of the abolitionist underground. However, Quakers dominated the early phase of the antislavery movement well into the nineteenth century. Even after actual leadership had passed to other hands, traditions that were associated with Quaker thought and practice—especially the doctrine of nonresistance—continued to exercise significant influence among abolitionists. Beginning in the late 1600s the Quakers had steadily examined the moral consequences of slavery. They had come, by painful stages, to believe that they had an inescapable duty to combat it in every way possible, short of violating their doctrinal commitment to pacifism. As early as 1671, the Quakers’ founder, George Fox, asked his followers to imagine themselves in the plight of the slave, and urged those who owned slaves to “train up their negroes in the fear of God, to use them mildly and gently, and after certain years of servitude to set them free.” The first explicit protest against slavery in the North American colonies was articulated by the Quakers of Germantown, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, who stated, in 1688: “Now, tho’ they are black, we cannot conceive that there is more liberty to have them as slaves, as there is to have other white ones…And those who steal or rob men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alike?” By the middle of the next century, Quakers generally had come to believe that kind treatment alone was inadequate to address the fundamental evil that permeated the whole institution of slavery in all its ramifications.