A “colored man” who had been watching them as they crossed told them, to their dismay, that they were barely any safer now than they were in Kentucky. He urged the two men to continue on to Canada, another totally unfamiliar place. He added that in the free states there were people who “will do what they can” for fugitive slaves, and pointed the way to the village of “Corridon”—actually Corydon, in Harrison County—where they should ask for a certain man, an “abolitionist,” who would tell them what to do next. In Corydon, Logue and Farney found the man to whom they had been directed, “a true hearted colored man ready to advise and assist them to the best of his means.” (This may have been a laborer named Oswell Wright, who was born a slave in Maryland and traveled to Indiana with one of his former owners, and was later sentenced to five years in the Kentucky State Penitentiary for guiding a fugitive across the Ohio River.) He too urged them to continue on to Canada. He gave them the name of a James Overrals in Indianapolis, about two hundred miles away, “as he supposed, in a north-westerly direction—but he could say nothing of the intervening country and the inhabitants.”
Unfortunately, almost as soon as they left Corydon, the fugitives lost their way in a vast forest. They stopped to ask for food at a log cabin whose occupant, a friendly white man, recognized them as fugitive slaves in spite of their denials. He warned them that not only were they in a region inhabited by proslavery squatters from the South, but they had taken the wrong road and were actually heading toward Kentucky. He directed them to the road to Indianapolis, adding that in the next village, probably Salem, they would see a brick tavern whose landlord—“your friend,” he told them—would direct them further. The innkeeper welcomed them warmly and directed them to a settlement of African Americans a day’s ride in the direction of Indianapolis, probably the “Hut and Patch” area at New Farmington, where fifteen or twenty black farming families lived under the protection of neighboring Quakers. There, he assured them, people would “be glad to receive them.”
In early February, after three weeks’ rest in the black settlement, the fugitives set off again across a sodden, drizzly landscape, most likely along the current route of Interstate 65. They arrived a few days later in Indianapolis, where they found Mr. Overrals, who “though colored, was an educated man,” and respected among both whites and blacks for his “large character” and good sense. Overrals sent them on to a Quaker settlement in Hamilton County, about forty miles from Indianapolis, where the two fugitives were received hospitably. The Quakers advised them to head directly north or northwest, so that they would be among immigrants from the Northern states. Logue and Farney traveled now through a snowswept desolation. With considerable difficulty, they managed to ford the flooded and ice-choked Wabash and St. Joseph rivers. The region was still inhabited by Indians, who sometimes offered the fugitives food and shelter, and other times refused them entirely. Eventually they arrived once again among white settlers, who “treated them as equals under the law, though not always with respect.” At Logansport, north of Kokomo, Logue traded his horse for “boot money,” offered him by a “benevolent looking Quaker,” who in fact took advantage of his ignorance to cheat him. Heading north again, they lost their way once more in another “howling wilderness,” finally arriving at their destination, Detroit, starving and in a state of near destitution, having ridden, Logue estimated, hundreds of miles out of their way. On the morning of their third day in Detroit, the two men at last crossed the Detroit River to Windsor, Canada, penniless, knowing no one. “Nature and humanity surrounded them like a globe of ice,” Logue’s biographer exquisitely wrote, “but they rejoiced and thanked God with warm hearts.”
2
In the course of Logue’s flight it is possible to see the early stirrings of organized assistance to the fugitive, a system in the process of creation. Logue and Farney receive help from all sorts of people, yet many of them are barely, if at all, aware of one another’s existence. Ross, who supplies them with weapons and advice, is an isolated loner. The “colored man” whom Logue meets on the bank of the Ohio River knows that the “abolitionist” in Corydon will lend help to fugitives. But he has no nearby collaborator to send the fugitives to closer than Indianapolis, and he is not entirely clear about where the city lies. Meanwhile, the friendly white homesteader seems completely unaware of the black abolitionist in Corydon. However, the homesteader’s confidence in the innkeeper at Salem, and the innkeeper’s corresponding certainty that the fugitives will find a refuge at the Hut and Patch settlement, hint at an ongoing link among at least those three locations: an Underground Railroad line in embryo, as it were. Similarly, Overrals, in Indianapolis, has links with an incipient network of trustworthy Quakers. The Quakers advise the travelers to make their way north through a wilderness inhabited by Indians, suggesting that they had little or no contact with the abolitionists to their east until the formation of broad-based antislavery societies later in the decade.
Other fugitives during this period had similar experiences. Josiah Henson, like Logue, received assistance from a wide variety of people who had little or no connection with one another. It is unclear, for example, if the “benevolent men” who assisted the Henson family in Cincinnati were an organized group devoted to facilitating the escape of fugitives, or if their aid to the Hensons was a rare case. The allusion to his primary contact, the “brother preacher” he had met on his first visit, suggests that his protectors were a church group of some kind. Like the Quakers whom Logue encountered in Indiana, however, the “benevolent men” were working in a vacuum. Their assistance extended only thirty miles outside Cincinnati, and they failed to provide the Hensons with even the most elementary information about the difficulties his family would face traversing the wilderness that lay between the interior of Ohio and Lake Erie.
By 1834, however, the year of Jarm Logue’s escape, Cincinnati abolitionists began to lay a foundation for later, more organized, underground operations by breaching the color line in a city which, until now, had been distinguished for its pro-southern sentiments. In that year, students at Lane Seminary, a training school for evangelical ministers financed by the philanthropic Tappan brothers of New York, staged nine days of widely publicized debates over slavery. “Like men whose pole star was fact and truth, whose needle was conscience, whose chart was the Bible,” one energized attendee wrote, the participants wound up converting virtually the entire student body, including several sons of slave owners, to immediate abolition. Many were inspired to set up schools and undertake social work in the city’s black neighborhoods on a basis of racial equality, shocking the seminary’s more conservative trustees. When the trustees ordered all discussion of slavery to cease immediately, scores of students abandoned Lane, and enrolled at Oberlin College, in northern Ohio, where they formed the nucleus of one of the most ardent Underground Railroad communities west of the Appalachians.
Many fugitives still never encountered any white person they felt they could trust. The only help that William A. Hall, for instance, received during his trek to freedom from Tennessee to Chicago, and eventually to Wisconsin, came from other African Americans, one of whom sheltered him for three days. Another nursed him when he was ill, having “carried him ten miles on his own beast.” William Wells Brown, starving and suffering from frostbite, hoped desperately but without luck to encounter a “colored person” as he trudged northward into Ohio. Only as a last resort did he finally stop an elderly white man dressed in a broad-brimmed hat and a long coat, which Brown perhaps recognized as distinctively Quaker dress. Brown recuperated for two weeks with the Quakers, who gave him clothing, boots and pocket money, and sent him on his way north. He walked the rest of the way to Cleveland with no other assistance except for food that he managed to beg along the way. The warmth with which the Quakers received Brown caused him to suffer paralyzing anxiety, an experience that was shared by many fugitives when they first encountered courteous whites. “I had never had a white man to treat me as an equal, and the
idea of a white lady waiting on me at the table was still worse!” Brown wrote. “Though the table was loaded with the good things of this life, I could not eat.” Only when the lady of the home, a “Thompsonian,” provided him with a cup of “composition” did he begin to relax. (William Thompson, a New England farmer with no medical training, had acquired a large following by asserting that illness was the result of “clogging the system,” a state that could be remedied by the application of an assortment of powerful herbal emetics: Brown delicately spared his readers further details.)
Soon there would be widening webs of committed antislavery activists in most of the free states. There would be hundreds of men and women, white and black, who saw the succor of fugitives as a personal mission, and their homes as oases of hope for the desperate. They would be able to move fugitives hundreds of miles, carrying them, where necessary, from farm to farm and town to town, and directing them to havens in distant states, or Canada. But as the new decade of the 1830s dawned, assistance was still almost entirely a matter of luck. Most fugitives had never even heard of abolitionists. Jim Pembroke, who escaped from Maryland to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1828, spoke for countless others: “There was no Anti-Slavery Society then—there was no Vigilance Committee. I had, therefore, to select a course of action, without counsel or advice from any who professed to sympathize with the slave.”
3
Through the 1820s, only in southeastern Pennsylvania was there anything resembling the Underground Railroad as it came to be understood in later years. In Philadelphia, the Quaker abolitionist Isaac Hopper had long been at the center of a web of black and white collaborators—in effect, an underground cell—who at short notice could move fugitives around from home to home with relative ease, like chess pieces, or quickly spirit them away into the countryside, or into the anonymity of the city’s expanding African-American community. Picaresque though they sound, Hopper’s exploits were in deadly earnest. In one of his last cases in Philadelphia, he was informed that a fugitive slave and her son were hidden in a closet, terrified and in immediate danger of recapture. They had been enslaved in New Jersey, which although nominally a free state would still hold some African Americans in bondage as late as the 1860s. Their master traced them to Philadelphia, where he procured a constable and went to the house where they were holed up. Leaving a guard at the door, he went off to obtain a search warrant. While he was thus engaged, a crowd of African Americans gathered. Whether by prearrangement or on impulse, they seized the guard—a remarkable illustration of blacks’ growing self-confidence in what was very much a white men’s city—and held him fast while the fugitives fled to the home of a black family on Locust Street. The slaves’ master, still mindful of Pennsylvania’s stringent laws, departed again to obtain a new warrant to search the second house. It was at this point that someone sent for Hopper. In accordance with a plan that he presumably worked out with his black friends on the spot, the door was opened, allowing the crowd outside to rush in. With a characteristically theatrical flourish, Hopper ordered the crowd to leave. As they did so, the two fugitives slipped out unnoticed among them, and hurried to the home of Hopper’s son. Hopper himself remained at the Locust Street house as a decoy, correctly surmising that as long as he was there, the watchman would assume that the fugitives were still in the house. As soon as he could, Hopper returned home and sent the fugitives “to a place of greater safety.” Significantly, for it shows a technique that would become standard as the Underground Railroad became increasingly systematized, he also dispatched his son to the home of a farmer thirty miles outside the city, to forewarn him of the fugitives’ arrival.
Apart from his invigorating work in the underground, the decade of the 1820s was a sad time for the usually ebullient Hopper. His beloved wife died in June 1822, and a year later his fifteen-year-old son, Isaac, followed. Hopper was also drawn into the deepening rift that split Quakers into two factions, the Hicksites and the Orthodox. The fissure was rooted in doctrinal differences that seem obscure today, but it destroyed lifelong friendships, tormented the spiritual lives of thousands of Quakers, and tore apart meetings, which battled with un-Quakerly rancor over the ownership of community property, including schools and meeting houses. Elias Hicks, a charismatic Long Island farmer who won over most of the Quakers in the Northeast to his views, insisted that the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus must be understood mainly in spiritual terms and as models of the death of self-will within each person, rather than as historical events. His opponents attacked his teachings as doctrinally unsound. Within these arguments, feelings about slavery formed a strong undertow, with the Hicksites more frequently urging that personal spiritual growth demanded a wholehearted commitment to the struggle, and the Orthodox more often urging restraint. “Friends generally seem to deplore the present excitement,” Hopper’s close friend and associate in the underground, Charles Marriott, would write to a fellow Hicksite. “For my share I hope it will never subside until slavery be abolished. There is tenfold more to be dreaded from our own relapsing into our former sleep of death.” Because of Hopper’s Hicksite leanings, many of his Orthodox customers dropped away, and his tailoring business suffered. Finally, in 1829, he was forced to abandon Philadelphia and relocate to New York, where he opened a bookstore that specialized in Hicksite tracts and antislavery literature.
By the time of Hopper’s departure, the sedate Philadelphia of his youth had grown into an industrial metropolis of more than 164,000 inhabitants, whose air was gritty with the smoke of factories and forges, textile mills and ironworks. Twelve thousand or more African Americans (many may not have dared to allow their presence to be recorded) dwelled in the tumbledown shanties and grimy lanes of Moyamensing and Southwark. There was also a small but vibrant middle class of self-employed black barbers, carters, restaurateurs, and oystermen, as well as a handful of wealthy men like the sailmaker James Forten, whose property was valued at the fabulous sum of forty thousand dollars. African Americans’ sense of community and of autonomy within the larger city was steadily deepening, and it was made manifest by scores of benevolent associations, schools, and churches, foremost among them the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, many of whose locations would eventually serve as stations on the underground.
At the same time, as waves of immigrants swelled the city’s white population, blacks were increasingly being crowded out of skilled jobs, including dockwork, long a mainstay of the African-American economy. New measures had been proposed to restrict blacks’ mobility, to impose special taxes on them, and to allow townships to auction off black felons for a term of years as contract labor. Color prejudice was ingrained even among many who professed opposition to slavery. Quakers rarely invited blacks to join the Society of Friends, and Isaac Hopper was considered remarkable for his willingness to sit down with them at dinner. The new, combustible politics of the street introduced an era that was to be rent by bitter class and racial conflict. In 1828 a white mob gathered outside a dance hall where a fancy-dress African-American ball was taking place and assaulted elegantly dressed women as they stepped from coaches, throwing some of them into the gutter. The following year, a full-scale race riot occurred in Cedar Ward, leaving many blacks dead and causing terrible damage to the homes and property of black families who could ill afford the losses.
Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, local magistrates had been empowered to issue warrants for the “removal” of any Negro or mulatto claimed to be a fugitive from labor, enabling slave hunters from Maryland to operate with impunity in the border regions of Pennsylvania. Free blacks were often arrested in broad daylight and hurried out of the state with no more than the most perfunctory formalities. In 1806 even the eminent founder of the first African Methodist Episcopal Church, Richard Allen, had been seized by a Southerner with a sheriff’s warrant, although he succeeded in winning his release. Then, in 1825, Philadelphians were shocked to learn that a kidnapping ring had operated in the city fo
r years, luring black children as young as nine and ten onto sloops moored in the Delaware River, and shipping them into the Deep South, where they were sold. (This kind of trade was by no means restricted to Philadelphia. Jarm Logue’s mother, born free, had been kidnapped by itinerant slave traders from a free black settlement in Ohio along with several other children; the kidnappers traveled south through Kentucky and Tennessee, selling the children out of the back of their wagon to less affluent whites, for whom a slave was an important status symbol, but who couldn’t afford the prices of the open market.)
Popular repugnance at the kidnapping of free blacks prompted the passage of new laws in the 1820s that had gradually made it easier for abolitionists who wished to aid fugitives to do so with less risk to themselves, and creating a legal umbrella that sheltered the early phases of underground activity. In March 1820 the Pennsylvania legislature passed the first law in United States history that was deliberately intended to interfere with the Fugitive Slave Act. The legislature’s action was rooted in the then nearly universal belief that any state had the constitutional authority to ignore, or nullify, federal laws of which it did not approve. The law made kidnapping any Negro or mulatto a felony punishable by a fine of up to two thousand dollars and up to twenty-one years’ imprisonment at hard labor. More critically for those who dared to assist fugitive slaves, it also barred local magistrates from recognizing any matter arising from the national fugitive slave law, under penalty of a substantial fine. The law was tested in 1821 when a judge ruled that a fugitive slave who had killed his former master in the act of attempting to recapture him on Pennsylvania soil was guilty of no crime, since he had acted in both self-defense and to prevent a felony—his own kidnapping.
Bound for Canaan Page 17