Jim Pembroke, who lived only a short distance below the Mason and Dixon Line, in Hagerstown, Maryland, knew only that Pennsylvania was a free state. “But I know not where its soil begins, or where that of Maryland ends,” wrote Pembroke, who became known in freedom as Reverend James Pennington. “My only guide was the north star, by this I knew my general course northward, but at what point I should strike Penn, or when and where I should find a friend, I knew not.” Pembroke had been born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1807, and was given along with his mother and an older brother as a wedding gift to a son of his master, a wheat farmer. Trained as a mason and blacksmith, by adulthood he had become a valued craftsman within the limited cosmos of plantation life. Like Josiah Henson, Pembroke viewed his work as a moral endeavor. “I had always aimed to be trustworthy; and feeling I had aimed to do my work with dispatch and skill, my blacksmith’s pride and taste was one thing that had reconciled me so long to remain a slave.” He endured the daily insults of slavery until, one day, his master savagely caned him simply for looking him straight in the eye. “After this,” Pembroke wrote, “I found that my mechanic’s pleasure and pride were gone,” and he decided to run for Pennsylvania. The thought of fleeing threw him into a confusing tumult of “hope, fear, dread, terror, love, sorrow,” and deep depression. He knew the risks. Other slaves in the neighborhood who had run away and been caught had been punished with severe flogging and exile to the Deep South. But he also felt that if he did not make his attempt now, driven by shame and rage, he might never make it at all.
Pembroke’s first sensation of freedom was sheer terror. He spent his first day of it squatting fearfully behind a corn shock, very hungry, and almost more depressed than he could bear, “chilled to the heart,” and unnerved by fears of utter destitution. He passed the second day hiding under a bridge, eating sour apples that gave him diarrhea. The third night, he discovered that the road he had been following led southward toward Baltimore rather than north to Pennsylvania, and that he had been walking most of the time in the wrong direction. Impulsively, he now decided to continue on to Baltimore, in hope of sneaking aboard a boat that would carry him north. He soon encountered a young white man with a load of hay, who instantly recognized that Pembroke was a runaway and warned him that there were slave patrols nearby, directing Pembroke to a certain house, where an “old gentleman” would “further advise” him. Pembroke was so confused by having lost his direction, however, that he forgot what the young man told him and, worrying that he might become even more lost, decided to stay on the road that he was following. After he traveled only a short distance, the boy’s warning was proved apt when Pembroke was stopped and seized by several white men when he was unable to produce free papers.
Pembroke’s captors held him in a nearby tavern and immediately identified him as a “runaway nigger.” Knowing that if he told them the truth, he would receive a hundred lashes from his master, and as likely as not be sold away to the Deep South, he continued to maintain that he was a free man until his captors decided that he would go with one of them and remain at his house until they learned if there was a reward for his capture. Left under the observation of the owner’s small son, Pembroke managed to make his escape after dark, fleeing into nearby woods, and eluding his pursuers after a desperate race. Unable to see the north star through the rain, Pembroke zigzagged all night through tangles of vines and briars, utterly terrified of recapture. At one point he even heard horsemen nearby, discussing their search for him. “Every nerve in my system quivered, so that not a particle of my flesh was at rest,” he recalled. Too frightened to travel by road, Pembroke continued across country. He was almost starving now, having eaten nothing for days except raw dry corn that he painstakingly chewed kernel by kernel. In desperation he decided to risk traveling by daylight, and to find out where he was. Shortly after dawn on the sixth day, he arrived at a toll gate that was operated by an elderly woman. She informed him, to his immense relief, that he was already in Pennsylvania. When Pembroke asked her where he might find work, she directed him to the farm of a Quaker “who lived about three miles away, whom I would find to take an interest in me.”
The Quaker, William Wright, later the leader of the Underground Railroad in the Gettysburg area, provided the fugitive blacksmith with room and board in return for chopping wood. In the course of his six months’ sojourn with the Wrights, they taught him to read and write, and introduced him to arithmetic, astronomy, and the Bible. They eventually decided that the danger of recapture made it imperative for Pembroke to move farther away from the state line. After reluctantly leaving the security of his benefactors, Pembroke made his way “in deep sorrow and melancholy” toward Philadelphia, where, probably with an introduction from Wright, he found shelter in the home of another Quaker farmer, where he spent the next seven months, more or less taking charge of the farm. Then, passing through Philadelphia, he made his way to New York, where he would eventually achieve a prominent career in the ministry and, in 1838, play a small but poignant role in the northward flight of Frederick Douglass. He would also become a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad.
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The Hensons, too, like Pembroke, would find people to “take an interest” in them. Josiah left his family hidden in the woods outside Cincinnati while he went into the city in search of the “benevolent men” he had met the previous year. Since Henson’s last visit, the “bright, beautiful” little city had been torn by dreadful racial strife. City officials had directed all the city’s three thousand blacks to register with the authorities, post a cripplingly expensive five-hundred-dollar bond for good behavior, or identify themselves publicly as slaves. Those who failed to do so would have thirty days to leave the city. Blacks reacted initially with despair. If the laws were enforced, they protested, “we, the poor sons of Ethiopia, must take shelter where we can find it. If not in America, we must beg elsewhere…where Heaven only knows.” When they continued to protest, white dockworkers raided the shanty towns, assaulting black families and demolishing their homes. In the aftermath, more than half of Cincinnati’s black residents left the city, mostly for Canada. Henson’s friends nevertheless welcomed him warmly, and just after dusk he brought his wife and children safely in. “We found ourselves hospitably cheered and refreshed,” Henson recalled. “Carefully they provided for our welfare until our strength was recruited, and then they set us thirty miles on our way by wagon.”
On their own once again, Henson and his family continued northward, heading for Lake Erie, about 150 miles farther north. Their friends in Cincinnati do not seem to have prepared them very well for what lay ahead. The interior of the state then was still largely unsettled. The Hensons traveled for days along the old military road that was cut for the War of 1812 and ran from Dayton to Detroit, through vast hardwood forests of oaks, poplars, and walnuts, clambering over fallen trees, picking their way through banks of briars, and racked with anxiety about being recaptured, attacked by wild animals, or murdered by Indians. Josiah’s many talents do not seem to have included wilderness survival skills. Although they were surrounded by abundant wildlife—flocks of five hundred wild turkeys were not uncommon in the region at that time, and shoals of fish in some rivers were known to cover half an acre—the Hensons again ran out of food. They were saved by a chance encounter with a band of unexpectedly friendly Indians, probably a last remnant of the Wyandot or Shawnee. The Indians, who had never seen black people before, surprised the terrified Hensons by feeding them “bountifully,” and providing them with a “comfortable wigwam” for the night.
Henson was not exaggerating the dangers of the trek. Two years later, the peripatetic abolitionist editor Benjamin Lundy walked south from Michigan Territory through the same part of northern Ohio. “The worst traveling ever experienced,” he wrote in his journal; “but one house in 20 miles…swale & swamp. Had to wade from half leg to knee deep more than 20 times while snow falling fast & it was freezing rapidly!!…cloak, coat, pantaloons, st
ockings, all a glare of ice. Feet benumbed!!—nothing to strike a fire!!!”
Buoyed by the help they received from the Indians, the Hensons set off the next day, guided by several tribesmen who accompanied them to ensure that they didn’t get lost again. They got their first sight of Lake Erie near Sandusky, then called Portland, a town of about five hundred inhabitants. Henson hid his family in the bushes and made his way to the shore, where he could see a small ship with gangs of men loading cargo. “Promptly deciding to approach them, I drew near, and scarcely had I come within hailing distance, when the captain of the schooner cried out, ‘Hollo there, man! You want to work?’ ‘Yes, sir!’ shouted I…In a minute I had hold of a bag of corn, and followed the gang in emptying it into the hold. I took my place in the line of laborers next to a colored man, and soon got into conversation with him. ‘How far is it to Canada?’ He gave me a peculiar look, and in a minute I saw he knew all. ‘Want to go to Canada? Come along with us, then. Our captain’s a fine fellow. We’re going to Buffalo.’ ‘Buffalo; how far is that from Canada?’ ‘Don’t you know, man? Just across the river.’ I now opened my mind frankly to him, and told him about my wife and children. ‘I’ll speak to the captain,’ said he. He did so, and in a moment the captain took me aside, and said, ‘The Doctor says you want to go to Buffalo with your family.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Where do you stop?’ ‘About a mile back.’ ‘How long have you been here?’ ‘No time,’ I answered, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘Come, my good fellow, tell us all about it. You’re running away, ain’t you?’ I saw he was a friend, and opened my heart to him.”
The captain promised that once the grain was loaded, he would pull off from shore, and then send a boat back to pick up Henson and his family, telling him, “There’s a lot of regular nigger-catchers in the town below, and they might suspect if you brought your party out of the bush by daylight.” That night, Henson watched with his heart in his throat as the boat left its moorings and, sails unfurled, cruised out into the lake, leaving him behind, so he thought. “Suddenly, however, as I gazed with weary heart, the vessel swung round into the wind, the sails flapped, and she stood motionless. A moment more, and a boat was lowered from her stern, and with steady stroke made for the point at which I stood.” In a few minutes, the boat was on the beach, and he recognized his black friend among the sailors.
“Three hearty cheers welcomed us as we reached the schooner,” Henson recalled, “and never till my dying day shall I forget the shout of the captain—he was a Scotchman—‘Coom up on deck, and clop your wings and craw like a rooster; you’re a free nigger as sure as the devil.’” Henson “wept like a child,” feeling God’s presence wash through him, and a happiness so powerful that it was indistinguishable from pain.
The next evening, they reached Buffalo. In the morning the captain pointed across the water to a copse of trees. He told Henson, “They grow on free soil, and as soon as your feet touch that you’re a mon. I want to see you go and be a free man. I’m poor myself and have nothing to give you; I only sail the boat for wages; but I’ll see you across.” He arranged with a ferryman to take Henson and his family across. Then, with the mingled warmth and condescension common to many abolitionists, he put his hand on Henson’s head, and said, “Be a good fellow, won’t you?” Promising the captain to use his freedom well, Henson and his family pushed off for the opposite shore.
It was the twenty-eighth of October, 1830, in the morning, when Henson’s feet first touched Canadian soil. “I threw myself on the ground, rolled in the sand, seized handfuls of it and kissed them, and danced round till, in the eyes of several who were present, I passed for a madman.” Henson had not just completed a successful escape. He had also begun the birth of a man who for the first time in his life was truly autonomous, not just legally free but also psychically free, a man who now knew with absolute certainty that he could survive without a master. “He’s some crazy fellow,” said a Colonel Warren, who happened to be there. “O, no, master!” exclaimed Henson, whose language was instinctively still that of slavery. “Don’t you know? I’m free!” The white man burst into a shout of laughter. “Still I could not control myself. I hugged and kissed my wife and children, and, until the first exuberant burst of feeling was over, went on as before.”
CHAPTER 7
FANATICS, DISORGANIZERS, AND DISTURBERS OF THE PEACE
My God helping me, there shall be a perpetual war between me and human slavery.
—ADAM LOWRY RANKIN, ABOLITIONIST
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Jarm Logue’s mouth never completely healed from the damage it suffered when his master pounded a block of wood into it in a fit of drunken rage. The wound left him with a speech impediment that, years afterward, when he would be admired as a preacher of uncommon power, would serve as a badge of honor, a survivor’s memento of the unequal war of master against slave. Jarm, a young man of exceptional intelligence and grit, was, like Josiah Henson, a natural leader. However, in contrast to Henson, whose ethics were rooted in a belief in spiritual elevation through physical submission, Logue was deeply defiant: he was, in short, a revolutionary in the making. Born around 1813 and raised on a small plantation on Mansker’s Creek, near Nashville, Tennessee, he was the son of a slave mother, named Cherry, and the youngest of the three slave-owning Logue brothers who operated a whiskey distillery. His childhood experiences combined sometimes savage and unpredictable violence with a degree of love that may have been rare for slaves in such an environment. Although he would describe the brothers as “drunken, passionate, brutal, and cruel,” he remembered with affection his father, Dave Logue, who treated him as a “pet,” bestowing on him “many little favors and kindnesses.” What trust Jarm had in his father was shattered, however, when after promising never to sell Cherry or her four children, Dave Logue did just that, initially to his brother Manasseth, who in turn sold two of the children to a slave trader. Cherry was left emotionally shattered, and Jarm now understood that in spite of his blood relationship with the Logues, his own future could never be secure.
At first, Jarm merely fantasized a place where he owned his own farm and could “go and come as he pleased.” His first inkling of a world that lay beyond the immediate vicinity of the plantation where he lived came in his late teens, when he met a young white boy whose family had returned from a failed attempt to immigrate to Illinois. As his 1859 biographer reconstructed the conversation, Logue scoffed, “There ain’t any place such as Illinois.”
“I say there is such a place!” the boy retorted. “Don’t you think I know?”
“What kind of place is it then?”
“All the negroes are free in Illinois—they don’t have any slaves there.”
The boy also provided Logue with his first geography lesson, telling him that a traveler to Illinois had to cross many rivers, the biggest of them called the Ohio, which horses and sleighs could pass over when it froze in winter. “Illinois” came to encompass all of Logue’s fuzzy ideas of freedom, and it was for there, in 1834, that he struck out after Manasseth’s alcoholic assault on him.
He enlisted as partners in his escape two close friends, John Farney and Jerry Wilks, who lived on neighboring plantations. Critical to their success was the assistance of a white man named Ross. In addition to forged free papers, Ross procured for them a pair of pistols, a crime that could have resulted in Ross’s execution if it were found out. The slaves each paid him ten dollars’ cash plus a quantity of bacon, flour, and other staples that had been stolen from the slaves’ masters. Ross also gave the friends valuable advice. He advised them, surprisingly, to be bold, and to stop at the best houses while still in the slave states, “to act as freemen act.” The big houses were the most willing and able to entertain travelers in what was still an only half-settled frontier region, he explained, and they were also the last place that a fugitive slave would be expected to be found. “If you go dodging and shying through the country, you will be suspected, seized, imprisoned and advertised—but if you ride boldl
y through, like freemen, you will get through unmolested.”
On Christmas Eve, at two o’clock in the night, Jarm and his friend John Farney set off on horses taken from their masters’ stables, leaving behind their third partner, Wilks, who at the last minute could not overcome his loyalty to his master and chose to stay behind. Clad in overcoats, and wrapped against the midwinter cold, they rode through Nashville “at a traveler’s trot…like wise freemen, turning neither to the right nor left, carefully avoiding any matters not their own.” That evening they put Ross’s advice to the test by asking for a night’s lodging at a “baronial mansion.” All went as Ross had predicted. Their host behaved with discomforting politeness, charging them a shilling apiece for a place to lie down. They spent the next night, tense but unmolested, at an ordinary tavern among rough-cut white men “in all stages of intoxication.” The third night, they again put up at a private mansion, whose owner sneered at them as “black rascals,” but nonetheless provided them with shelter.
Logue and Farney twice ran into patrollers. On both occasions they were forced to fight for their passage, once leaving one of the patrollers unconscious on the road. Shaken, they now hastened to get out of the slave states as fast as possible. They rode hard, following back roads and sleeping among haystacks, finally reaching the Ohio River somewhere in the vicinity of West Point or Brandenburg, Kentucky. The river was frozen solid. Following the tracks of horsemen who had gone before, the two fugitives walked their mounts across the ice into what they learned was “Indiana,” a free state of which they had never heard.
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