Would-be fugitives were for the most part woefully ignorant of what lay to the north. Discontented slaves in northern Kentucky, Virginia, or Maryland might be only a few days’ or even just a few hours’ walk from the border of a free state. But few had ever seen a map, and in any event the psychological distance from freedom was often a far greater deterrent than the merely physical. To the young Frederick Douglass, who was destined to become the most eminent African American of his era, living as a slave on the western shore of Maryland less than seventy-five miles from the Pennsylvania state line, the prospect of flight was both alluring and intensely terrifying. “The real distance was great enough, but the imagined distance was, to our ignorance, much greater,” Douglass would write. Slave masters who mentioned Canada at all commonly told their slaves that it had bad soil, was frozen all year, and was infested with wild beasts and with geese that would scratch a man’s eyes out. “Slave holders sought to impress their slaves with a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory, and of their own limitless power,” wrote Douglass. “Our notions of the geography of the country were very vague and indistinct…Then, too, we knew that merely reaching a free state did not free us, that wherever caught we could be returned to slavery. We knew of no spot this side of the ocean where we could be safe. We had heard of Canada, then the only real Canaan of the American bondman, simply as a country to which the wild goose and the swan repaired at the end of winter to escape the heat of summer, but not as the home of man.” Douglass had heard of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, and remotely, New York City, but he did not know that there was a State of New York or Massachusetts. “The case sometimes, to our excited visions, stood thus: at every gate through which we had to pass we saw a watchman; at every ferry a guard; on every bridge, a sentinel, and in every wood a patrol or slave hunter. We were hemmed in on every side. The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.” By comparison, freedom seemed a phantom. “On the other hand,” wrote Douglass, “far away, back in the hazy distance where all forms seemed but shadows under the flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-capped mountain, stood a doubtful freedom, half frozen, and beckoning us to her icy domain.”
Canada in the 1830s was not yet a nation. It was still a congeries of six separate British colonies whose total population of fewer than three million people was clustered in a narrow belt along the edge of the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River, and the Atlantic Coast. Although plantation slavery had never developed in Canada, slaves had continued to be legally bought and sold until the appointment of John Graves Simcoe, a passionate abolitionist, as the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada (modern Ontario), in 1791. Of the fourteen thousand inhabitants of the province at that time, perhaps one thousand were blacks, some of them the descendants of slaves who had escaped from rebel masters during the American Revolution, and others of slaves brought north by retreating Tory masters. Simcoe’s blunt declaration that he would never support any law that “discriminates by dishonest policy between the Natives of Africa, America or Europe” was followed by a series of laws and high court rulings over the next decade that made slavery a dead letter more than a generation before it was formally abolished in the British Empire, in 1833.
Word slowly spread that fugitives were safe from recapture in the King’s dominions. American veterans returning from service in the War of 1812 brought home the first detailed information about the routes north. After the war, Canada openly welcomed runaways, especially those who were willing to settle in the strategically vulnerable region near the Michigan Territory, on the assumption that former slaves could be counted on to vigorously resist another invasion by the United States. They were granted land and citizenship on the same terms as other immigrants, as well as the right to vote, a privilege that was enjoyed by free blacks in only a handful of Northern states. By the 1820s fugitives were starting to appear in noticeable numbers around St. Catharines opposite Buffalo, and on the Canadian side of the Detroit River, in the townships that would become the northern terminals of the Underground Railroad. In 1832 the first avowedly abolitionist report on Canada would appear in Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, in the form of a travel diary, transforming what had until now been largely a myth into a real place that was not only a refuge for the desperate but a land of opportunity. Lundy described a landscape rich beyond all expectation with extensive stands of timber, large corn stalks, and stacks of fine timothy hay by the roadside. It was also a country, he affirmed, where blacks were truly “free and equal.”
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The odds against reaching a safe haven in either Canada or the Northern states were slim indeed. No one really knows just how many succeeded. Many fugitives left no trace at all of their movements, and what limited records were kept by those who assisted them have, with a handful of exceptions, almost entirely been lost. Very few successful freedom seekers were from the Deep South. The Canadian census of 1861, encompassing the more populous areas of present-day Ontario, where most blacks settled, found that about 80 percent of the Southern-born blacks then living there came from just three states, Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, all of which shared long borders with the free North. A slave running from northern Kentucky or Maryland might at least hope to be in a free state within a few days, or even hours, while a fugitive from, say, Alabama, Georgia, or the Carolinas would have to spend weeks or months on the road.
Although many fugitives fled in family groups, a majority were men traveling alone, or with a single male companion. Most were in their twenties and teens. To attempt to flee slavery with a wife and children in tow was an act of harrowing risk and heroism whose difficulty can scarcely be imagined. Children, especially, hampered movement, made noise, needed to be fed and to have rest. If he traveled alone, Josiah Henson’s chances would have been better than average. Resourceful and experienced, he could expect to move quickly across country. With five more people to conceal, and five more mouths to feed, the odds would be strongly against them. It was the terrible alternative that almost every fugitive slave faced at some point, and that few other Americans have ever been required to make: to choose between freedom or family, to leave behind wife, children, parents, brothers and sisters, or to risk losing everything.
Henson determined to take the risk. The plan terrified Charlotte. She begged Josiah to stay at home on the Riley plantation in Kentucky, reminding him of possible outcomes that were all too real to slaves. “She knew nothing of the wide world beyond, and her imagination peopled it with unseen horrors,” he would recall. “We should die in the wilderness,—we should be hunted down with bloodhounds,—we should be brought back and whipped to death.” Finally, rather cruelly accusing her of being “a poor, ignorant, unreasoning slave-woman,” he warned her that he would run away no matter what she did. “Exhausted and maddened, I left her, in the morning, to go to my work for the day. Before I had gone far, I heard her voice calling me, and waiting till I came up, she said, at last, she would go with me.”
Henson organized their flight with his customary attention to detail. He had Charlotte make a knapsack large enough to hold his two youngest sons, and practiced carrying them in it for several nights until he was confident that he could endure their weight over long distances. For defense, at considerable risk, he bought a pair of pistols and a knife from a poor white man, a transaction that hints at a degree of ambiguity in relations between the races, and classes, that the conventional history of slavery often misses. In Kentucky, as in other Southern states, the possession of firearms by a slave was a crime punishable by death. However, similar transactions in other fugitives’ reports of their escapes show that it was not uncommon for nonabolitionist whites to ignore race laws when they stood to gain by it.
Henson judged that the most auspicious time to leave the Riley plantation would be on a Saturday night. Sunday was a holiday, and the following two days he was expected to be working at farm
s distant from the main house. Thus, with luck, they might not be missed until Wednesday, when they should be across the Ohio River and well on their way. Dangerous as their proposed journey was, the Hensons did have a few things in their favor. The Riley plantation was close to the river, so they did not face a trek through unfamiliar territory before they reached it. And thanks to Josiah’s trip East the previous year, he also had at least some knowledge of the northern bank of the river.
He had arranged with a fellow slave to row them across the Ohio. “We sat still as death,” Henson recalled. As they skimmed across the water, the Indiana shore must have seemed both beckoning and fraught with danger, a free but nonetheless forbidding land with their unknown fate hidden deep in the dark, shapeless mass of forest that loomed closer with each stroke of the boatman’s oars.
In the middle of the river, the boatman whispered ominously, “It will be the end of me if this is ever found out; but you won’t be brought back alive, will you?”
“Not if I can help it,” Henson replied.
“And if they’re too many for you and you get seized, you’ll never tell my part in the business?”
“Not if I’m shot through like a sieve.”
“‘That’s all,’” the boatman said. “And God help you.”
The Hensons’ luck held, and they crossed without incident. They probably landed somewhere near the present-day town of Grandview, Indiana. Henson did not record his emotions as they stood alone on the riverbank and listened to the rising and falling of the oars as the skiff disappeared into the night. But Charlotte now grew distraught and pleaded with him to return with them to Kentucky and the Riley plantation before they were missed. The product of a time and culture, both slave and free, that demanded stoic fortitude as a proof of “manliness,” and condemned as “womanish” any admission of fear, Henson rarely revealed feelings that would show him in a weak light, usually preferring at moments of crisis to attribute natural reactions of terror and panic to his wife. It is hard to believe, however, that beneath the pose of icy fortitude Josiah was not as frightened as Charlotte was at what might lie in store. Escape from the Riley plantation had been imperative: had they not run away, they would have been sold and separated from each other. But flight was a psychological as well as a geographical odyssey, a journey of self-discovery and self-realization. The Hensons, profoundly devout people, of course believed that their lives ultimately lay in the hands of God. In the act of flight, however, they would discover if they could become the agents of their own fate. After a lifetime spent in the fragile security of the plantation, they were now suddenly more completely alone, and in charge of their own destiny, than they had ever been in their lives. Now even the simplest decision, a moment’s lack of attention—a fork in the road, the problem of finding food, whether to trust a stranger, how long the children could keep going—was heavy with potentially catastrophic consequences.
From the moment they stepped ashore, their fears ceased to be abstract. Many of the settlers in that part of Indiana had come from the South and were notoriously hostile to fugitive slaves. The Hensons’ destination was Cincinnati, 150 miles to the east along confusing and unmarked roads, where Josiah hoped for help from the “benevolent men” who had befriended him in 1829. Until they reached Cincinnati, they could not safely trust anyone, white or black. Even free blacks were known to turn runaways in for the reward, and sometimes to serve as decoys for slave catchers. Henson, who had traveled north of the river before, could have no illusions that their passage would be easy, or their safe arrival assured.
The Hensons probably stayed close to the Ohio, passing the river ports of Troy, Leavenworth, New Albany, and Madison, an area that was then very lightly populated. Had they turned north at Madison, through Versailles and Connorsville, they would have found a ready welcome in the Quaker settlements around Richmond; the fact that they did not suggests that they were probably unaware of any source of assistance outside Cincinnati. Instead, they continued eastward along the river, resting in the forest during the day and walking by night, and dodging for cover whenever they heard someone approaching. After about twelve days on the road, they ran out of food. “All night long the children cried with hunger, and my poor wife loaded me with reproaches for bringing them into such misery,” Henson recalled. “It was a bitter thing to hear them cry, and God knows I needed encouragement myself. My limbs were weary, and my back and shoulders raw with the burden I carried. A fearful dread of detection ever pursued me, and I would start out of my sleep in terror, my heart beating against my ribs, and expecting to find the dogs and slave-hunters after me.” Desperate, Henson ventured into a settlement in search of food, apparently their first contact with other people in the two weeks since they had left Kentucky. He went up to the first cabin he saw and asked if he might buy some bread and meat. “No, I have nothing for niggers,” the owner replied. At the next farm, Henson was initially turned away too. However, the woman of the house called him back, telling her husband, “How can you treat any human being so? If a dog was hungry I would give him something to eat.” Laughing, the man told her that she might “take care of niggers,” if she wished, though he wouldn’t. To Henson’s surprise, the woman quietly gave him some venison and bread, which he wrapped in his handkerchief and carried back to his family in the woods.
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Apart from the sheer physical and mental strain of finding their way through unfamiliar territory, without map, compass, or road signs, fugitives had to run a gauntlet of local constables, slave catchers, informers, and often an unfriendly populace that despised blacks, both free and enslaved. The most dangerous of these were the professional slave hunters who operated throughout both the South and the North. Most were hired for a flat fee by slave owners who could not afford the time to track fugitives themselves. Others worked on a contingency basis, buying discounted fugitives on the run, and then selling those they managed to catch, for a profit. Rewards for the recapture of fugitives ranged from between twenty dollars or less in the South, to fifty dollars for those who were captured in the free border states, to one hundred and twenty-five dollars, plus travel allowance, for fugitives caught as far north as New England and New York. Recaptures were almost everyday events in the border areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. However, no fugitives, no matter how far they ran, or how long they had lived in freedom, could feel entirely safe anywhere south of the Canadian border. In 1832 a North Carolina jailer advertised a man he had captured who had been a fugitive for twenty-five years. William Wells Brown and his mother were apprehended 150 miles into Illinois just as they were congratulating themselves on their daring escape from St. Louis. Alexander Hemsley had lived peacefully for years in Northampton, New Jersey, when a band of Southerners suddenly appeared at his door. As far north as Wisconsin, the fugitive William A. Hall was warned that “there are men here now, even where you are living, who would betray you for half a dollar if they knew where your master is.” Hall fled to Canada.
There was no single prototype for the successful fugitive. Some planned for months or years, painstakingly saving money, hoarding extra clothes, and collecting information about river crossings and back roads. Others simply walked away, and hoped for the best. Jim Pembroke carried only a half pound of cornmeal bread for a week-long odyssey from Maryland to Pennsylvania, and nearly starved. William A. Hall, who fled impulsively after a savage beating, carried no provisions or extra clothes at all, but still managed to reach Chicago from Tennessee in three months. Many fugitives carried false documents, which appear to have been surprisingly easy to acquire. Alfred T. Jones, a semiliterate slave in Madison County, Kentucky, wrote himself a pass that enabled him to travel from Lexington, Kentucky, to Cincinnati. “I could scarcely put two syllables together grammatically, but in fact, one half the white men there were not much better,” Jones related.
In the end, most fugitives relied on pluck, physical stamina, and the north star, the single reliable guide for fugitives who, with on
ly the rarest exceptions, were incapable of reading road signs, where they existed. Charles Ball carefully furnished himself with a “fire-box” containing flints, steel, and tinder; a greatcoat given him by his master; a needle and thread; a linen bag filled with parched corn; and a stolen sword for protection. He guided himself as best he could by the north star during a grueling nine-month odyssey that took him from Georgia to Maryland. Although he started out with a sense of the approximate route that he had to travel, he frequently found roads that he thought were carrying him north were in fact leading him in another direction entirely. Sometimes, when clouds obscured the stars, he discovered to his grief that he had been walking for hours or days in a circle, or zigzag. One night he wandered directionless for hours in pitch darkness, in a bog with the mud and water over his knees, totally lost. Another time, nearly discovered by a party of patrollers, he became so confused that the stars seemed “out of their places,” and he remained for three days concealed in a thicket, for fear that any direction he set off in would prove to be the wrong one. On still another occasion, upon coming to a crossroads, he spent eleven days hidden in the woods, waiting for a clear night so that he could take his bearings by the stars before choosing which fork to take. It took him two months just to reach the vicinity of Columbia, South Carolina, “so near the place from which I had first departed, that I could easily have walked to it in a week, by daylight.”
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