Cooper was far from alone in his hostility to abolition. Abolitionist speakers were greeted with rocks, eggs, mob attacks, and public calls for repression. When it was learned that a traveling agent was to speak at Poughkeepsie, in the Hudson Valley, handbills entitled “OUTRAGE” suddenly appeared all over the city, warning that a “seditious lecture” was to be delivered at the Presbyterian church, and calling upon citizens to “unite in putting down and silencing by peaceable means this tool of evil and fanaticism.” Henry B. Stanton claimed to have been mobbed 150 times before 1840. Major antiabolition riots occurred in Newark, New Jersey; Concord, New Hampshire; New Britain and Norwich, Connecticut, and New York City, where rioters burned to the ground the home of the wealthy abolitionist Lewis Tappan, the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In Ohio, antislavery lecturers were tarred and feathered, pelted with broken glass, and attacked by club-wielding thugs. And in November 1837 abolitionism acquired its first white martyr, when the newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy was shot to death while defending his press—his fourth, after three previous ones had been destroyed—from an attacking mob at Alton, Illinois.
If Northerners regarded abolitionists as deluded and sanctimonious troublemakers, Southerners saw them as a mortal enemy determined to destroy both the foundation of their economy and their way of life, by means of agitation that could only lead to a national bloodbath. In the aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion, the South increasingly moved in the direction of authoritarian controls that affected not only (as always) blacks, both slave and free, but also whites whose actions or utterances in any way might be deemed to threaten, however obliquely, the institution of slavery. New laws, vigilante activity, and public pressure increasingly shackled the press, censored literature, and coerced individuals who dared speak out against the prevailing proslavery opinions. Rights commonly taken for granted by other Americans—the right of free speech, free press, and assembly—were increasingly curtailed. With the open acquiescence of federal authorities, mail coming from the North was searched and local postmasters were empowered to destroy anything that they judged subversive. In Charleston, mobs seized mailbags containing antislavery literature and burned them at the post office. The monitoring of free blacks and the movements of slaves sharply increased, while suspicious travelers were interrogated by local vigilante committees, and their belongings investigated by force. Laws in several states provided up to twenty years in prison for the publication or circulation of materials “tending to incite insurrection.” The Vigilance Association of Columbia, South Carolina, offered a fifteen-hundred-dollar reward for the arrest and conviction of any white person circulating “publications of a seditious tendency.” In 1835 Georgia imposed the death penalty for anyone publishing materials that could be construed as inciting slaves to rebellion. A Virginia law of 1836 barred members of abolition societies from even entering the state. Louisiana laws made it a crime to write, publish, or speak anything in court, stage, or pulpit that tended to “destroy that line of distinction which the law has established between the several classes of this community.” All over the South, public figures openly threatened to kill any abolitionist they could lay their hands on, and watchdog committees put bounties of tens of thousands of dollars on the heads of abolitionist leaders. President Jackson bluntly demanded that the Northern states outlaw the activities of the abolitionists, while in 1838 South Carolina congressman Robert B. Rhett published a letter to his constituents in which he declared that either the Constitution should be amended to limit freedom of speech on the subject of slavery, or else the Union must be dissolved.
Southerners confused—and would continue until the Civil War to confuse—the abolitionist movement as a whole with the Underground Railroad. The two were never completely congruent. The American Anti-Slavery Society never advocated breaking the law, although it refused to censure any of its members who assisted slaves in their escape. There were active members of the underground, including at least some Democrats, who never joined any formal organization, just as there were countless abolitionists who refused to break federal law. To use a modern analogy, membership in an antislavery society was no more proof of participation in Underground Railroad than belonging to the Sierra Club means that one would personally sabotage lumber company equipment in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The two networks existed, however, in a symbiotic relationship, with the societies serving as a fertile recruiting ground for clandestine activists, and the Underground Railroad in turn supplying abolitionist lecture halls and fund-raisers with a steady stream of flesh-and-blood fugitives who, like figments come to life from the nation’s collective nightmare, were living proof of slavery’s inhumanity.
Structurally, the aboveground abolitionist movement was a layered pyramid whose national leadership exerted little overall control, and whose center of gravity lay solidly within its sprawling popular base. Wherever they went, antislavery agents preached that success depended on the local units, and specifically on their members’ personal commitment to the cause. Local societies could have no more strength “than is possessed by the INDIVIDUALS of which they are composed and can exist only by the INDIVIDUALS’ self-denial and labor,” the New York Anti-Slavery Society stressed in its annual report for 1837. Every community was advised to appoint two agents, a man and a woman, to canvass each school district in the town, conversing with individuals, from house to house, from shop to shop, in the counting room, in the harvest field, and by the family fireside,” talking to them about slavery and selling them an antislavery almanac; if they couldn’t sell the almanac, they were to give it away free. Another tactic was to go from door to door, carrying petitions calling for the federal government to abolish slavery in the western territories and in the District of Columbia, to reject the annexation of Texas as a slave state, to halt interstate traffic in slaves, and so on. “Nothing is easier than for them in one short year to have every village and neighborhood within their limits reading, thinking and talking on the stirring topic of ‘human rights,’” the executive committee of the state society proclaimed. “And for people to read, think, and talk on that subject is to become thorough converts to the great doctrines of impartial liberty.” Children were not forgotten either. Each school district was urged to purchase a library of antislavery literature. The American Anti-Slavery Society also produced a periodical called The Slave’s Friend, which explained abolition in easy-to-read fashion, accompanied by woodcuts. The pitch was not subtle. One article profiled Henry Wright, who oversaw the society’s juvenile auxiliaries: “He will try to get every little boy and girl to take hold of the great work of pulling slavery up by the roots,” the piece opined. “I think they will all like to take hold, and pull as hard as they can.”
The executive bureau of the American Anti-Slavery Society limited itself mainly to lobbying Congress, hiring agents to organize states that had not yet formed local groups, and publishing antislavery propaganda, while local antislavery groups typically functioned as divisions of their state and county societies. The state societies appointed their own traveling agents, and sponsored regional conventions as well as an annual meeting to which all abolitionists were invited. County societies were expected to hold their own conventions several times a year. Local meetings served as a forum for educating both new members and the general public. Whatever other purpose they served, at every level these gatherings also enabled underground activists to network with like-minded men and women from different parts of their state or county, to whom a fugitive might safely be sent.
For example, one day in the autumn of 1837, an abolitionist in the town of Mexico, New York, was looking out his window when he saw a “colored man” enter the tavern across the street. “Someone asked if that was not one of our people,” the abolitionist—probably a local tinsmith named Starr Clark—wrote in the Friend of Man, on February 28, 1838. He went on to describe what happened next: “I went over to the tavern, and saw the colored man sitting by the fire. After wait
ing till all had left the bar-room, I stepped carelessly toward him, and asked him if he was going to Oswego. No was the answer. Which way are you traveling?—No answer. Do you know what an abolitionist is?—No answer. I took a chair and sat down close to him; told him that I did not wish to intrude upon him, but that I was an abolitionist and friendly towards the colored people. The only answer he gave was that there was a difference in abolitionists. This was all I could get him to say, and I was about to give him up, when I observed to him that if he wanted any assistance, my store was directly opposite, and he could call over. For once he looked up and said, ‘Sir what may I call your name?’ I told him, and now came the change in his countenance. He thrust his hand into his pocket, and drew out two letters directed to me…. The letters were from brethren in the south part of the county, recommending him to me as a fugitive and a Christian; and so we found him to be.” The abolitionist later learned that George had escaped by sea from somewhere in the South and had walked all the way from Pennsylvania to Onondaga County, where he had encountered a chain of abolitionists who passed him northward from friend to friend. On December 5 the local abolitionists helped him on his way to Canada.
By the late 1830s, thanks mainly to the dynamic effect of the proliferating antislavery societies, the Underground Railroad had taken recognizable form. Where apathy had ruled only a few years earlier, fugitives were now forwarded smoothly from town to town, county to county, and state to state. Oliver Johnson could confidently arrange for “Simon” to travel from western Pennsylvania to northern Vermont, a distance of six hundred miles. Starr Clark of Mexico could expect his collaborators elsewhere in Onondaga County to send fugitives to him as a matter of course, and knew that others in Oswego and Canada were standing by to receive them when he was ready to move them on. The fact that Clark felt free to report his own role in a newspaper also makes quite clear that the transit of fugitives was not only an open secret but also virtually risk free through large parts of the North. So secure did he feel that he even mentioned by name two other abolitionists—Hiram Gilbery of Schroepell, and a Deacon Gilbert, who had given the man a pair of boots—who assisted the fugitive along the way.
The fourth annual meeting of the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1838 was, with good reason, an optimistic affair. From a despised fringe group, abolitionists had become a political force to be reckoned with. In 1837 alone, 161 new local societies had been formed in New York, more than any other state, and the state’s abolitionists were contributing more than half the funds necessary to operate the national office in Manhattan. There were forty thousand committed abolitionists in the state, enough to deter the election of proslavery candidates to state office. The once-hostile state assembly had recently passed several resolutions favoring antislavery principles. Thirty-seven of the state’s fifty-seven counties had antislavery societies, and five of them had placed antislavery libraries in every village. New York was not alone. After three years of intensive grassroots effort, public opinion had significantly shifted in other parts of the North as well. Between 1835 and 1836, the number of antislavery societies in the nation grew to more than five hundred, and then doubled again by 1837. That year the American Anti-Slavery Society claimed more than one hundred thousand members, and listed more than a thousand affiliates across the country.
And Gerrit Smith, who only three years earlier had regarded abolitionism as little more than a sideshow in the gallery of American reform, was now entering his third term as president of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. In years to come, his home in Peterboro would become a mecca for the most radical reformers in the nation. Among them would come William Lloyd Garrison, Lincoln’s future Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, the black abolitionists Henry Highland Garnett and Samuel Ringgold Ward, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, John Brown (to whom Smith would sell a farm, and later provide money for his attack on Harpers Ferry), and an untold number of fugitive slaves.
On December 1, 1838, Smith wrote with graceful irony an open letter to newspapers about two guests who had recently enjoyed his hospitality, and in return had exposed their whip-scarred backs to his family and a number of his neighbors: “My Dear Sir, You will be happy to hear, that the two fugitive slaves, to whom in the brotherly love of your heart you gave the use of your horse, and are still making undisturbed progress toward the monarchical land whither republican slaves escape for the enjoyment of liberty. They had eaten their breakfast, and were seated in my wagon, before day-dawn, this morning. Fugitive slaves have before taken my house in their way, but never any, whose lips and persons made so forcible an appeal to my sensibilities and kindled in me so much abhorrence of the hell-concocted system of American slavery.”
CHAPTER 9
A WHOLE-SOULED MAN
Colored people should mark the signs of the times, and be warned!
—DAVID RUGGLES
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David Ruggles soared like a meteorite into the boiling human nebula of mid-1830s New York City, flaming red hot with outrage, creating in his own image a model for the Underground Railroad in the urban North, then burning out with a tragic suddenness that has left his name, indeed his very presence, all but forgotten today. A period sketch of Ruggles shows a man with small features, a narrow mustache, his head encased in a massive stovepipe hat, and rather weak, deep-set eyes framed by narrow wire-rimmed glasses, hinting at the threat of blindness that would plague him throughout his life. Ruggles was born to free parents in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1810, the oldest of five children. At seventeen he moved to Manhattan, and at nineteen owned a grocery store—how he acquired the capital for it is not known—specializing in “fresh Goshen butter” which he offered “for sale by the Firkin, Tub, or single Pound,” as well as superior “Canton and Porto Rico Sugars,” cheese, rum, gin, porter, and cider. In 1833 he gave up his store to become an agent for an antislavery newspaper, the Emancipator. Ruggles traveled at least as far as Pennsylvania selling subscriptions, delivering antislavery lectures that “excited the liveliest emotions in every heart,” and making contacts that would prove valuable to the underground. He had been comparatively well educated, probably at a local sabbath school, an experience that had endowed him with a passion for learning and intellectual self-confidence, but that had hardly prepared him for the ruthless racial battlefield of New York.
As recently as the 1810s, New Yorkers had complained that their new city hall, a quarter mile north of Wall Street, lay inconveniently far out of town. Twenty years later, the city had raced far beyond city hall, every year bursting its limits anew, building and rebuilding, tearing down only to build itself up again in a different way. Manhattan’s population had swelled from 120,350 in 1820 to 188,613, and by the late 1830s was approaching 300,000. It was still a low city, and along the waterfront, which defined its image for the outer world, the masts of sailing ships stood higher than anything else erected by man. Public services were primitive. There was no restriction on the number of people who could be packed into a single dwelling, no sewage system, and precious little police protection for the law-abiding in a society that seemed to grow more violent by the day. But in the dusty, churning air that stank of sewage, pigs, charcoal, and unwashed bodies, there was also a pervasive sense of opportunity not to be missed, of fast money to be made. The mood could be felt in the quickened pace of the high-stepping horses that pulled the green and red omnibuses, in the impatient cries of the men who sold fresh oysters and the girls who hawked hot corn, the fast foods of the day, in the fizz of the popular theaters that were sprouting along the old country road known as the Bowery, in the architectural pomp of the grand buildings that proclaimed the city’s growing sense of power: the spectacular dome of the Mercantile Exchange with its fifteen-foot-high statue of Alexander Hamilton in its grand rotunda, the elegant facade of the New Centre Market, the new city prison, designed to resemble an Egyptian temple and known to all as “The Tombs,” and the colonnaded splendor of city hall, with its c
onfident allusions to imperial power.
The great shaping force of the city’s life was its ever-widening commercial orbit. Workshops near the waterfront manufactured everything from mustard and playing cards, to furniture and locomotives. New canals, the Erie Canal foremost among them, drew commodities of all kinds toward the city from the innermost reaches of the agricultural heartland, and the more distant frontier, while its vast port welcomed both immigrants and ships from every corner of the world. On a single day, no fewer than 921 cargo ships lined the East River waterfront alone, and another 330 lay moored along the bank of the Hudson. The city’s shipyards, the most productive in the country in 1833, that year turned out twenty-six ships and barks, seven brigs, thirty-six schooners, and five steamboats. The port also maintained a lucrative trade outfitting ships, including slavers, even though such business was technically barred by federal law. Nearly five hundred commercial houses specialized in foreign trade, and more than twice that number in domestic.
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