Bound for Canaan

by Fergus Bordewich

  The Coffins’ plan again revealed close collaboration with local blacks, both slave and free. According to Levi Coffin, “Some shrewd young men [probably Levi and Vestal Coffin themselves], not overly conscious about violating the slave laws of the State, believing that every man was entitled to liberty who had not forfeited that God-given right by crime, managed to get hold of free papers belonging to a free colored man in the neighborhood, and copied them, counterfeiting the names of the signers as well as they could, not stopping to consider the severe penalty attached to such violations of the law. It was so managed that the papers were given to Sam by a slave, and he was instructed not to use them unless he should get into a tight place.” The papers were stowed safely in his bundle of clothes, in the Groses’ wagon.

  One night, frightened by wolves, Sam panicked and lost his way. He begged for help at the cabin of a poor white family, who invited him to come inside and rest. The consequences of this seemingly kind reception epitomized the terrible randomness that fugitives faced in a strange country, when hunger, fear, or sheer loneliness compelled them to risk throwing themselves on the mercy of white strangers. Sam might have found a friendly face. Instead, his hosts sent a boy running for the neighbors, who seized him and tied him up, surmising that he was a runaway for whom there might be a large reward. Sam’s forged papers were, of course, beyond his reach with the Groses. He never saw them or the Groses again. As was customary, notices describing Sam were placed in various newspapers. Osborne saw one of them and soon afterward arrived in Wytheville, Virginia, where Sam was being held in the local jail, to collect his property. He set out for home with Sam in chains. But Sam never arrived. Osborne claimed that he had sold Sam along the way. Levi Coffin reported that many believed that he had whipped Sam to death, and had left his body in the mountains.

  Despite the torture that he may well have suffered at Osborne’s hands, Sam never implicated any of the men who had helped him in his flight. However, Osborne later learned that Sam had once been seen driving the carriage of Jesse Stanley, a Coffin cousin, and sought to have Stanley arrested for “Negro stealing,” a crime that at least in principle was punishable by death. The danger to Stanley was serious enough that he hurriedly left the state for Philadelphia. Osborne also ascertained that Sam had been seen on the property of Abel Stanley, Jesse’s uncle. Abel Stanley had already sold his farm, in preparation for emigrating to Indiana. However, hearing that Osborne was seeking to have him arrested, he too fled to Pennsylvania, leaving his family to complete the arrangements for their departure.

  3

  As the story of Jack Barnes shows, in 1821 there were no designated “stationmasters” posted along the emigrant trail that connected North Carolina with the Northwest. Although Addison Coffin suggests that by 1830 (when he was still a boy) stations had been established, it is quite possible that the routes across the mountains always depended mainly on the discretion of emigrants who agreed to carry fugitives along with them. Slaves belonging to the Yearly Meeting had been traveling to the Northwest that way for years, more than four hundred in 1823, and nearly twice that number in 1824, and by 1826 regular “convoys” were being sent west under the auspices of the “African Committee” of the Quakers already established there. In one typical instance, an Indiana man was hired, for thirty dollars plus expenses, to conduct a company of twenty blacks from Guilford County across the Ohio, furnishing his own horse to draw the wagon.

  But even with white assistance, fugitives were in danger every mile of the way to the Ohio River. “A gang of ruffians, moved by the prospect of the large reward generally offered in such cases, frequently stopped emigrant wagons and searched them for runaway Negroes,” Levi Coffin wrote, a clear indication that slave owners knew that the emigrant trails were being used to move fugitives. Every month, fresh arrivals in Indiana halted their weary teams at one or another of the frontier settlements that were being cut from the wilderness beyond Cincinnati. For many of them, the trek out of North Carolina had a Manichaean quality; it was not merely a geographical journey, but a spiritual one from the darkness of moral depravity into the light of redemption. One Quaker, Borden Stanton, recalled how he had first heard from traveling Friends about the Ohio country: “It seemed as if they were messengers sent to call us out, as it were from Egyptian darkness (for indeed it seemed as if the land groaned under oppression) into the marvelous light of the glory of God.” Entire meetings picked up and moved en masse, leaving whole regions of the Carolinas empty of Quakers.

  There were of course other factors that propelled Quaker emigrants to the free states. Quaker farmers found it increasingly hard to compete with slave owners. As pacifists, Quakers were harassed and fined for refusing to muster with local militias. They were also mocked by other whites for performing manual labor—“nigger work”—that ought to have been done by slaves. “Gradually the idea prevailed everywhere that labor was not respectable, and he, or she who labored with their hands had to take second rank,” wrote Addison Coffin. In 1825 Levi Coffin’s parents emigrated west to a new Quaker colony that was forming near Richmond, Indiana. He followed them himself the next year, the last in his family to go. In their search for better land and wider opportunity they were like hundreds of thousands of other Americans who were simultaneously migrating westward along rough tracks through the forests, on the steamboats that were now proliferating on the western rivers, and on the horse-drawn boats that plied the new Erie Canal. But for nearly every Quaker, not only family, friends, and played-out fields would be left behind, but the taint of living evil. “If the question is asked,” Addison Coffin declared, “why did the Friends emigrate from North Carolina? It can be answered by one dark, fearful word SLAVERY, than which a darker is not known.”

  4

  In this second decade of the nineteenth century, there was a gathering sense in the nation that something important was changing. Indelible lines were being drawn across the map of the states, and in the hearts of their citizens, demarcating slave states and free, pushing apart those who only a few years before had found common cause in societies of manumission and colonization, dreams that were by no means dead, but that from now on would increasingly give way to political warfare. For a time, in 1820, it had even looked as if the country might split apart over the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state, as the halls of Congress rang with the passionate defense of slavery, and dire warnings of civil war. North Carolina’s Senator Nathaniel Macon spoke with contempt of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all men were created equal. “Follow that sentiment and does it not lead to universal emancipation?” he demanded of his colleagues. To impose restrictions on slavery, Macon and other Southerners argued, could only lead to a national catastrophe. His voice thundering through the circular domed chamber of the House of Representatives, the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay proclaimed that the spread of slavery into the western territories would actually benefit the slaves themselves, while reducing whites’ fear of free blacks by thinning out their numbers in the more densely populated East. The Union, he warned, must not be put at risk by political assaults on an institution that he alleged was destined eventually to fade away from natural causes.

  Earlier in the century it had by no means been a foregone conclusion that Missouri would become a slave state. Its soil was generally inhospitable to large-scale cotton cultivation. But most of its settlers came from the South, and they brought their slaves with them, fanning out from the frontier ports that sprang up alongside the muddy surge of the Missouri River. The three thousand slaves in Missouri in 1810 had grown to ten thousand a decade later, in a total population of sixty-six thousand. The heart of the matter, however, was a constitutional question with far-reaching implications: Did Congress have the power to restrict slavery when it admitted a new state to the Union? Missouri was the first state that would be formed out of the lands acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. If slavery was excluded from Missouri, then it was likely that future trans-Missis
sippi states would come into the Union on the same terms, a prospect that mortified Southerners, who could see as well as everyone else that the steady piling up of new free states must inexorably undermine the disproportionate power that the South wielded over the federal government. Because the Constitution provided that three-fifths of a state’s slave population be counted as citizens in apportioning seats to the House of Representatives, the slave states collectively were able to elect twenty more congressmen than they would have been entitled to on the basis of their white population alone; put another way, every Southerner who owned one hundred slaves enjoyed an additional sixty votes. A far-reaching compromise was finally reached, averting the drift toward secession. Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state. In return, Southerners grudgingly agreed to the exclusion of slavery in the territories north of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north latitude west of Missouri, in effect extending the Mason-Dixon line westward across the continent. At the same time, Maine was admitted to the Union as a free state, thus adding two more free-state senators to balance Missouri’s.

  The settlement distressed no one more than the aged lion of American radicalism, Thomas Jefferson. The former president’s once fiery idealism had hardened into a chilly crust of disillusionment. He was paralyzed by the contradictions that had always infected his thinking about slavery. In 1814, when Edward Coles, a neighbor and the former secretary to President James Madison, had approached him, begging him to lend his prestige to a national campaign against slavery, Jefferson first pleaded the limitations of age. He could do nothing, he told Coles. To undertake such “arduous work” at the age of seventy-eight was “like bidding old Priam to buckle the armor of Hector.” He added, “This enterprise is for the young.” He regretted that more could not be done for the cause of the slaves. Someday emancipation would come, he assured Coles. But, morally desirable though it might be, it was not a happy prospect. The “idleness” of free blacks, and their “depredations,” already made them pests to society. Worse yet, “Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.” (This from a man who had fathered several children by his slave Sally Hemings.) In the end, he urged Coles to do nothing extreme, but to treat his slaves kindly, and to lend a calming voice to public debate. Instead, Coles freed his slaves and moved to the free territory of Illinois, as far as he could get from the land of slavery.

  Although he didn’t admit it to Coles, Jefferson had traded his sunny optimism for a regional chauvinism that foreshadowed the bigoted and self-serving arguments that would lead to the South’s secession forty years hence. He never abandoned his professed desire to end slavery in principle, but he was now less concerned with the rights of man than with the rights of the slave owners whom he had once scathingly condemned. He declined to endorse the Missouri Compromise. Reversing his position of 1784, when he argued that slavery ought to be barred from the new lands of the South as well as the North, he now asserted that Congress had no power at all over slavery in the territories. The Union, as Jefferson conceived it, was a confederation based on a compact between “independent nations.” The federal government was a creature of the states’ will, existing only by their sufferance, and with strictly limited authority, which did not include the power to legislate on slavery. As slavery became increasingly profitable, Jefferson had come to see that it was impossible to oppose it without undermining the agricultural system that he believed with an almost mystical passion formed the natural moral and cultural foundation of the American republic. He wrote to a friend from his aerie at Monticello, “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.” Then, speaking directly of slavery itself, he added, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

  The Missouri Compromise made antislavery men seethe too. “Hell is about to enlarge her borders and tyranny her domain,” declared the Quaker editor Elihu Embree. To Embree, and to men like Vestal and Levi Coffin, the slaveholders’ victory in Congress made it clear that the institution that they regarded as the most evil on the face of the earth was continuing to metastasize, and that if it was to be thwarted, they would have to undertake risks, personal risks, of an entirely new kind: to do nothing was to court damnation.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE SPREADING STAIN

  It is quite easy to imagine, then, what was the state of my mind, having been reared in total moral midnight.

  —JAMES PENNINGTON, FORMER SLAVE

  1

  Despite his early sickliness, Josiah Henson grew into a vigorous and self-reliant young man. He was passionately competitive, and proud of his physical strength, claiming that he “could run faster, wrestle better, and jump higher than anybody about me.” His master Isaac Riley looked upon him as “a wonderfully smart fellow” from whom great things were to be expected, Henson says in his “autobiography,” a work originally published in 1849 and revised several times under Henson’s supervision, though actually penned by his Boston abolitionist friend Samuel A. Eliot. “My vanity became vastly inflamed, and I fully coincided in their opinion,” Henson goes on. “Julius Caesar never aspired and plotted for the imperial crown more ambitiously than I did to out-hoe, out-reap, out-husk, out dance, out-everything every competitor; and from all I can learn he never enjoyed his triumph half as much. One word of commendation from the petty despot who ruled over us would set me up for a month.” Pride and naive optimism at least mitigated, if they could never erase, the inherent humiliation of slavery. Henson enjoyed “jolly Christmas times,” “midnight visits to apple orchards,” and occasionally poaching a neighbor’s pig or sheep to provide a feast for his fellow slaves, exploits that won him gratitude and friends. One can already see in the brash teenager the qualities that Riley must have prized: the pride in work well done, loyalty to authority, and a remarkable ability to harness his determination and ambition within the slave system. Put another way, Henson was destined for great success as a slave.

  Henson’s intricate relationship with Isaac Riley embodied the basic problem of slavery. Henson was not just an ordinary field hand, but prized property, like a finely bred piece of livestock, that had to be nurtured, well maintained, and used only in ways that would enhance his value. Indeed, if there is any story that shows that autonomy, even upward mobility, was possible under the constraints of slavery, it is Henson’s. He was a man who believed in the system, one that had raised, favored, and on the whole protected him, and given him limited power in the world he knew. He knew quite well that his lot was far better than that of the average agricultural laborer. Yet he would finally risk everything—high status, his family’s safety, not to mention his life—to flee north. In the end, even Henson was compelled to face the fact that no amount of favoritism could hide slavery’s fundamental nature and its terrifying insecurity. With that recognition, Henson’s story became the story of thousands. Once there was someplace to go where fugitives had some real hope of keeping the fruits of their own labor and enjoying the comfort of their family without fear of it being ripped apart, they would flee there, no matter how distant, no matter how low the odds of successful escape.

  Before that, however, he would suffer. His life, like so many, both black and white, slave and free, would move from the confines of the eastern hamlet where it had begun and into the larger world of the young nation, a nation that was just awakening to its power, and searching for its geographical limits, and pushing beyond them. Both slavery and abolitionism would grow now with the country, would move west with it, cut through the wilderness, push away the Indians who had lived there before, and transform the land. Westward expansion carried slavery with it into the new territories, and then states, of Alabama and Mis
sissippi, Tennessee and Kentucky, Florida and Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. It traveled westward like a spreading epidemic, crossing the Appalachians in ox carts and Conestoga wagons, traveling on hardened feet, carried on the steamboats that nosed their way down the Ohio, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Mississippi. It would, in these early years of the century, even insinuate itself into states that were nominally free, where slavery was supposedly barred for all time, into the southern edges of Illinois and Indiana. But abolitionism was on the road too, less visible certainly, still mostly concealed in the hearts and minds of men and women who did not yet know that they were part of a movement that would soon begin to change the country as surely as a million woodsmen’s axes would make the forests of the new states vanish.

  The seed of Josiah Henson’s self-liberation was sown inadvertently when he was eighteen years old, in 1807 or 1808. Something utterly unexpected happened to him in that year. Henson, who had never expressed particular interest in religion, underwent a profound experience that left him burning with an inner sense of divine purpose. Until now, he had never heard a sermon, and his spiritual life, if he had any, probably amounted to little more than the Lord’s Prayer. Henson’s mother, a devout woman, urged him to go and hear John McKenney, a George Town baker by trade and a Methodist by conviction, who preached to slaves as well as to whites. When Henson arrived, McKenney was discoursing on what Henson (presumably later) learned was Hebrews 2:9: “That he, by the grace of God, should taste of death for every man,” words that would indelibly remain printed in his memory. Henson stood rapt as McKenney’s words opened a door onto the previously unimagined realm of Christian myth. Embedded in the preacher’s story of crucifixion and ascension, compassion and redemption, was the extraordinary idea—Henson repeated it over and over in his mind—that Christ’s salvation was for everyone, not just white men, even for a cocky field hand in the hills of Maryland. He imagined “a glorious being” smiling down at him from high above, welcoming him to the skies, and he felt a “sweetness of feeling” pouring through him, an onrush of divine love. “Nothing will seem so hard after this,” Henson thought. He was so excited that on the way home he flung himself down in the woods outside George Town and prayed to God for further enlightenment. As his religious feelings grew, he began to pray with his fellow slaves, to “exhort” them, and to share with them “those little glimmerings of light from another world, which had reached my own eye.”