Douglass knew what Ward and Simons were talking about. Collins and Foster kept telling him, “Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy.” They also advised him to “have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not; ’tis not best that you seem too learned.” Douglass could not deny the realism of their advice, for when he expressed himself in his own terms, with correct grammar and moral judgment, he could hear audiences, who expected someone raw from the lash and crude in speech, grumbling, “He’s never been a slave, I’ll warrant ye.” But Douglass would not, and could not, conform. Not only a talent for oratory, but a sense of dignity, of integrity, was coming to life in him. He told Foster, “I must speak just the word that seemed to me the word to be spoken by me.”
Douglass was one of the most charismatic members of an emerging generation of black intellectuals who were beginning to give African Americans a national voice through antislavery lecturing, journalism, and the ministry. More than anything else, however, it was the steady growth of independent black churches that provided the African American with what John Mercer Langston, the founder of the Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society, a black organization, called the “opportunity to be himself, to think his own thoughts, express his convictions, make his own utterances, test his own powers.” Between 1836 and 1846, African Methodist Episcopal congregations grew from eighty-six to nearly three hundred, and spread from the church’s original base in Philadelphia as far west as Indiana. Black Baptist churches, meanwhile, had grown from just ten in 1830 to thirty-four in 1844. Not surprisingly, black churches were usually outspoken in their denunciation of slavery, and many of them were woven into the web of the abolitionist underground, like the Bethel AME church in Indianapolis, a key station on the Underground Railroad, and Cincinnati’s Zion Baptist Church, which regularly sheltered fugitives in its basement. Not all black churches were so engaged. Many shied away from politics altogether. Douglass withdrew from his own church because it was insufficiently antislavery. Also, few black ministers met his demanding intellectual standards. Most, he once rather nastily asserted, “have not the mental qualifications to instruct and improve their congregations.”
At the same time, black newspapers, self-improvement societies, debating societies, schools, and reading rooms were also proliferating. Black abolitionists were usually in the forefront of this movement. At a typical meeting, in December 1842, the black Philomathian Society of Albany, New York, debated the proposition “Is the human mind limited,” under the supervision of the abolitionist William H. Topp. In Philadelphia, a library intended for blacks who were excluded from the city’s white institutions was founded by Robert Purvis, who also headed the local Vigilance Committee. David Ruggles had organized a similar library in New York. In several states, committees organized by blacks led petition campaigns for black suffrage, fought discrimination on public transportation and in schools, and demanded the passage of personal liberty laws that would help protect fugitives once they reached the North. In contrast to white abolitionism, with its evangelical overtones, the antislavery passion of black Americans came out of the personal experience of bondage and of the ingrained racism that governed their daily lives. As one former slave put it, it was “more than a figure of speech to say that we, as a people, are chained together.” Some blacks openly advocated armed rebellion against slavery, citing as an example the successful mutiny of slaves aboard the Amistad, in 1839, as proof that the slave masters could be overthrown. It was the slaves’ “solemn and imperative duty to use every means, both moral, intellectual, and physical that promises success,” Henry Highland Garnet declared in 1843, at a national convention of black leaders. Douglass, still deeply influenced by the pacifism of his mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, had not yet reached this point. But he would.
The antislavery movement provided Douglass and a host of his fellow speakers with a forum for their views and life experience that African Americans had never enjoyed before. The stories that they told of floggings, sadistic overseers, shattered families, and prostituted mothers and sisters overwhelmed skeptical Yankees for whom slavery was an unpleasant but abstract national problem, and turned thousands of them into active abolitionists. Douglass soon became one of the movement’s most popular lecturers. “All the other speakers seemed tame after Frederick Douglass,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, after a convention at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. His immensely popular autobiography, first published in 1845, made his name close to a household word.
The Douglasses, who now had three children, two daughters and a son, had moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, to give Frederick easier access to the railroad. Leaving Anna and the children at home, he lectured widely in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. When he could not find a church or hall that would allow him to speak, he would take his stand in the street and keep talking for as long as people paid attention to him. Mobbing had dropped off in New England by 1840, but discrimination was still rife. Douglass was several times dragged off trains for refusing to ride in the “Jim Crow” car that was reserved for blacks. On one occasion, on the line between Boston and Portland, a conductor sent six men to remove him from the first-class carriage for which he had paid his fare, finally lifting him out of the train while he still clung to part of his wooden seat.
In the spring of 1843, the New England Anti-Slavery Society resolved to hold a series of one hundred conventions, beginning in Vermont and New Hampshire, and ending in Ohio and Indiana. Douglass was selected as one of the corps of traveling speakers who would cross the country. He was thrilled. This was his breakthrough, his opportunity to carry his message to a national audience. “I never entered upon any work with more heart and hope,” Douglass wrote. “All that the American people needed, I thought, was light. Could they know slavery as I knew it, they would hasten to the work of its extinction.” Beginning in Vermont, where he lectured in the old abolitionist stronghold of Ferrisburgh, near the home of Rowland T. Robinson, he and his fellow speakers moved on to central and western New York state, and then by steamer to Cleveland, Ohio, where he joined in a convention with some of the most prominent African-American speakers of the time, including Charles L. Remond, Henry Highland Garnet, Amos Beaman, Charles M. Ray, and others. “From Ohio,” he wrote, “we divided our forces and went into Indiana.”
The final leg of the tour proved to be an unexpected ordeal. Douglass was used to the racism of the East Coast, but he was unprepared for the savagery that he met with in Indiana. Richmond, only seven miles south of Levi Coffin’s Newport, was a hotbed of proslavery sentiment. When Quakers arrived there with six wagonloads of legally freed slaves from North Carolina, a local newspaper denounced this addition to what it called “a worse than useless population,” asserting, “This town is one of the great headquarters for these blacks, that the semi-abolitionists of the South, who are horror-struck by the idea of colonization, are continually throwing off their own hands and sending here to steal their living from the hospitable citizens of our place. It is a disgrace upon our town, and a dead weight to its improvement.” In neighboring Jackson County, Indiana every African American who came into a certain store was “seized and tied up and held until it could be ascertained whether or not a reward was offered for him among the notices of runaway slaves displayed at the local post office.” When a white mob rampaged through black neighborhoods in Dayton, Ohio a short distance across the state line, in 1841, the Richmond Palladium sneeringly blamed it on abolitionists, who it alleged had “excited all the latent passions of mobocracy.” There was even racism among Quakers. Many were repelled by the aggressive polemics of the abolitionist movement, and by 1840 some Yearly Meetings were urging their members to withdraw from all antislavery activity. One Henry County, Indiana Quaker was quoted as saying that she would faint if a black man ever appeared at her door, while another announced that she would be afraid to step outside to visit a neighbor’s house if the slaves were freed.
In the fall of 1842, the conservat
ives who controlled the Indiana Yearly Meeting formally disowned Levi Coffin and seven other Quaker activists because of their alleged divisiveness on the subject of slavery. “We were proscribed for simply adhering to what we believed to be our Christian duty,” Coffin responded. “We asked only liberty of conscience—freedom to act according to one’s conscientious convictions.” Some of the conservatives were colonizationists by conviction, while others supported only gradual emancipation, but many believed viscerally, as so many Americans still did, that there was something inherently disgraceful about abolitionism itself. They were shocked when hundreds, and ultimately about two thousand of their fellow Quakers, about 10 percent of the Yearly Meeting, seceded in support of Coffin’s group to form their own Anti-Slavery Yearly Meeting, based in Newport.
Such was the state of affairs in eastern Indiana when Frederick Douglass arrived at the Coffin home to begin his local tour. At Richmond, he was smothered by a hail of “evil-smelling” eggs when he tried to speak. Worse was in store. A few days later, at Pendleton, in Madison County, he barely escaped with his life. No building could be found for the speakers, so local abolitionists had erected a platform in the woods. As soon as Douglass began to speak, a mob led by a man in a coonskin cap emerged from “a miserable, rum-drinking place,” shouting at him to be silent. Douglass refused, with unconcealed contempt. At this, the mob began to hurl stones and rotten eggs at him and his fellow speakers. When Douglass grabbed hold of a stick, the mob, made furious by the sight of a black man actually preparing to defend himself, began shrieking, “Kill the nigger! Kill the damn nigger!” Douglass was hit with a club that broke his hand, and might have been killed where he fell, thus abruptly ending the career of the century’s most influential black American, had not his friend, a white antislavery agent named William A. White, a nephew of the Coffins, broken the blow. Douglass was for a time left prostrate on the ground, where the attackers continued to pummel him. Although seriously injured, Douglass and William White, whose scalp had been laid open in the melee, managed to escape with the help of local Quakers. Later, when a member of the mob was arrested by the local authorities, two hundred antiabolitionists descended on the jail and set him free.
3
The Underground Railroad is often visualized as a fixed system that, once established, was rarely altered. In actuality, routes were always in flux. Even as new routes were opened, old ones became too dangerous, or no longer practical, and were abandoned. Participants died, moved, dropped out, or were driven out of the business by threats. Isaac Beck described an ongoing effort to shorten and simplify routes near Sardinia, Ohio, reducing one section, for example, from forty miles—“too long for a night’s travel”—to three comfortable stages, first by recruiting new Quaker agents in one nearby town, and then a pair of Wesleyan Methodists further along the line. When a line from Columbus, Ohio, to Oberlin via the town of Delaware was compromised by a spy, another one was created via the town of Reynoldsburg. In some areas, participants changed their mind about abolition, or simply lost interest. Bushrod Johnson, who was raised a Quaker in Ohio and aided fugitives with his uncle, moved to the South and eventually became a general in the Confederate army. In Henry County, Indiana, the antislavery spirit faded when several of its key participants became involved in spiritualism.
The operation of the Coffins’ Newport “station” provides a window into the underground at its most efficient. At a reunion of underground veterans in Newport, in 1874, Levi Coffin stated that during his lifetime he had directly and indirectly aided about thirty-three hundred fugitives to escape from slavery. Of these, he estimated that the annual average of fugitives passing through Newport was “more than one hundred,” or about one every three or four days, a figure that is supported by a contemporary, Daniel Huff, who stated that about two thousand fugitives were assisted at Newport during the twenty years that Coffin lived there. Of course, the refugee flow was never regular. The total differed from year to year, and probably grew steadily as the underground became more effective.
By comparison, Elijah Anderson, an African American who conducted fugitives on a busy route north of Madison, Indiana, claimed to have handled eight hundred between about 1839 and 1848, an average of eighty-nine a year. The Miller family of Medina County, Ohio, who lived on a more lightly traveled route, assisted about one thousand fugitives during almost three decades of service, or about thirty-three per year. In some areas, there were willing conductors but virtually no fugitives at all. (Or at least none who was willing to trust his safety to whites.) Milton Kennedy, a white man who worked on a steamboat based at Portsmouth, Ohio, openly proclaimed himself an abolitionist, but was disappointed to encounter just two fugitive slaves during his years on the river.
Particularly after the passage of the draconian Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, agents and conductors destroyed what records they may have kept of the fugitives they assisted. One of the rare surviving examples belonged to David Putnam, an underground man based at Point Harmar, near Marietta, Ohio. The cryptic notations in his diary for August 1843 only hint at a galaxy of individual dramas whose details and protagonists have been lost to history:
Aug.
13/43
Sunday Morn.
2 o’clock
arrived
Sunday Eve.
81/2
dep. For B.
16
Wednesday Morn.
2 ''
arrived
20
Sunday eve.
10 ''
dep. For N.
Wife & Children
21
Monday morn.
2 ''
arr. From B.
'' eve.
10 ''
left for Mr. H.
22
Tuesday eve.
11 ''
left for W.
A.L.&S.J.
28
Monday morn.
1 ''
arr.
left 2 o’clock
Putnam and his friends used the call of a hoot owl to signal arrivals. When practical, they also employed explicit written messages, like this one from his friend John Stone, also dating from August 1843:
Belpre Friday Morning
David Putnam
Business is arranged for Saturday night be on the lookout and if practicable let a carriage come and meet the cariwan
J.S.
Fugitives remained with stationmasters for varying lengths of time, usually ranging from a few hours to a few days. When slave hunters were near, they might be kept much longer. The most employable, like Robert Burrel, who ran Levi Coffin’s linseed oil mill, might be given work immediately and remain for years. Where the danger of recapture was unusually high, a stationmaster might go to some lengths to create a secure hideout. For instance, John Todd, who lived on the bank of the Ohio River near Madison, built a soundproof double fireplace that was entered from the top, next to the real chimney. And a miller who lived a few miles from the Maryland state line outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, sometimes placed his charges in a tiny room that he had constructed behind the water wheel, which completely concealed the hiding place when the wheel was set in motion. But exotic hiding places were rare. Fugitives were more typically hidden in spare rooms, attics, basements, barns, sheds, hay mows, cornfields, thickets, or creek bottoms. The Coffins simply invited fugitives into their house and put them to sleep in an upstairs bedroom.
Although railroads, steamships, and canals were being used more and more by the underground in the eastern states, in the West transportation was still almost exclusively by wagon or horse, or on foot. Unaccompanied fugitives posed the most serious security concern. Between Lawrenceburg and Madison, Indiana, and in other parts of the country, fugitives were handed a coin with a hole drilled in it, as a token of trustworthiness, and told to hand it over to the agent in the next town. At Logansport, Indiana, local African Americans were assigned to interview fugitives who arrived in town on their own
, to ensure that they were not imposters, and then to report to white collaborators who supplied them with provisions and, if necessary, money. Generally, one of the Logansport men would then travel ahead to the next town to arrange for the arrival of the fugitives.
At Newport, Levi Coffin tried to keep a team harnessed and a wagon ready at all times. When additional teams were needed, his friends generally did not need to be told what to do. “The people at the livery stable seemed to understand what the teams were wanted for, and they asked no questions,” Coffin recalled. If the fugitives were concealed at all, it was most often inside a covered wagon or beneath a load of hay, or among boxes. When necessary, they might be carried in a hearse, or a false-bottomed wagon fitted with a shallow compartment that could hold four or five people in very cramped conditions. More than once, a female fugitive was dressed in men’s clothes and hustled through the streets in broad daylight, while a man dressed in her garments was left as a decoy for the pursuers. Quakers sometimes disguised both male and female fugitives in skirts and deep bonnets to transport them through proslavery neighborhoods. Levi Coffin availed himself of this stratagem on at least one occasion, when he sent a fugitive in Quaker disguise along with a committee of Quakers who had been delegated to represent Newport at a meeting to be held in Michigan. “They were very willing to engage in Underground Railroad work, though the Quarterly Meeting had not appointed them to that service,” Coffin wrote, with his characteristic, wispy irony.
Providing for fugitives could be expensive, particularly for large groups. While the initial costs of feeding and transporting them were usually borne by the local agent, money was also raised from among local sympathizers. “It often became necessary to obtain, on a sudden emergency, a considerable amount of funds in order to place large parties of fugitives beyond the power of the slave hunters,” wrote Eber Pettit, a longtime stationmaster based in Fredonia, New York, near Buffalo. “For that purpose certain individuals called on ladies and gentlemen, and stated the case without ever giving such information as could possibly betray the fugitives into any danger, and at such time men of all parties were solicited for aid.” No records survive describing Coffin’s fundraising in Newport. However, in his autobiography, writing of his years at Cincinnati, after 1847, he often tells of visiting fellow merchants to ask for ad hoc contributions to feed and forward newly arrived fugitives. In some towns, stationmasters paid conductors set fees. Isaac Beck of Sardinia, Ohio, paid John Hudson, an African-American teamster, twenty-five cents for each trip he made, while Charles Huber, a Williamsburg, Ohio, tanner, paid a mulatto named Mark Sims to drive fugitives to Quaker settlements in Highland and Clinton counties. Huber also paid a white man, Samuel Peterson, to carry food to runaways hiding on his farm, and to provide them with paregoric to keep their infants quiet if slave hunters were near.
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