Fugitives usually were forwarded singly or in pairs, though sometimes in much larger groups. John H. Bond of Randolph County, Indiana, once received twenty-five, some riding in a wagon and the others walking beside it. The largest company the Coffins received, seventeen men and women, had all lived in the same part of Kentucky, about twenty miles south of the Ohio River, and had organized their own escape. Their experience makes clear that the underground was sufficiently well-organized to move a party of that size the length of Indiana without mishap, and that it had both the resources and the flexibility to respond to an unexpected crisis. “It was an interesting company,” Coffin thought, all in the prime of life and “of different complexions, varying from light mulatto to coal black, and had bright and intelligent expressions.” They had “for a liberal sum” hired a poor white man to ferry them across the river near Madison. Apparently they had not been in contact with the Madison stationmaster, George DeBaptiste, and had no idea how to find help once they were in Indiana. They spent their first night of freedom wandering without direction across cornfields and farms. In the morning they were spotted by slave hunters, and scattered into the broken, densely wooded hills north of the town. When they emerged, in ones and twos, they were found by local blacks who finally directed them to white abolitionists linked with the underground. Miraculously, none of the fugitives was captured.
White conductors transported the group in two wagons to the next station, and they continued on in this way, traveling at night, until they reached a Quarker settlement in Union County. There a new pair of conductors undertook to carry them thirty miles on into Newport. They arrived early in the morning. Catherine Coffin opened the door and immediately recognized the drivers from Union County. Writing years later, Levi Coffin reconstructed the scene with a hint of humor.
“What have you got there?” Catherine asked.
“All Kentucky,” one of the men replied.
“Well, bring all Kentucky in,” she answered.
Levi, hearing the noise below, quickly came downstairs to find the fugitives seated in the main room.
“Well,” he said, “seventeen full-grown darkies and two able-bodied Hoosiers are about as many as the cars can bear at one time. Now you may switch off and put your locomotives in my stable and let them blow off steam, and we will water and feed them.”
The Coffins sheltered the group for two days, and then arranged for teams and conductors to take them onward to the log-cabin home of John H. Bond, another expatriate North Carolina Quaker who lived near the black settlement of Cabin Creek, about twenty miles north. Bond was also a founder of the Union Literary Institute, a biracial school where many fugitive slaves were given their first lessons in literacy before being sent farther north. The group should have been safe by now, but early the next day Coffin learned that fifteen Kentuckians in search of fugitives had entered Richmond. He immediately dispatched a galloper to Bond, to warn him to get the seventeen out of sight as quickly as possible. However, Bond had already sent them on toward another Quaker community in Grant County, to the northwest. With Coffin’s message in hand, Bond mounted his horse and raced after them. He found the party still on the road, and turned them around and led them back in broad daylight to Cabin Creek.
While the Kentuckians searched known abolitionist settlements in the vicinity of Newport, Bond was arranging for the fugitives to be scattered in homes around Cabin Creek. There they remained for several weeks, until the Kentuckians gave up their pursuit, and the fugitives could be sent on to Detroit. In the meantime, the slave hunters publicly blamed Levi Coffin, the best known abolitionist in the area, for their disappearance. In the taverns of Richmond, they loudly swore that Coffin must be the “president” of the underground, and threatened to hang him or burn him out of his home. The remark was widely repeated by Coffin’s friends and enemies alike, and he frequently received letters addressed simply to “Levi Coffin, President of the Underground Railroad.” The story gave birth to a tenacious legend that Coffin was in fact the overall director of the abolitionist underground. No such title or position ever existed, of course, in a system where stationmasters and “general managers” were usually regarded by their collaborators as only the first among equals. While Coffin took considerable pride in his new nickname, with Quaker modesty he announced that he would accept any position at all on the Underground Railroad—“conductor, engineer, fireman, or brakeman”—that anyone cared to give him.
4
When Levi Coffin told the men from Union County to “switch off your locomotives,” and “let them blow off steam,” remarking that seventeen passengers were as many as “the cars” could bear at one time, he was using a brand-new language that, to Americans of the 1840s, was as fresh as the language of the Internet was to wired Americans at the end of the twentieth century. Until now, there had never been any agreed-upon way of describing how the underground actually worked. In the 1830s, members of the underground sometimes spoke of a “line of posts,” or of a “chain of friends.” Tightly knit family groups, like the Rankins, probably never used special terminology at all. Others invented their own codes. At Tanner’s Creek in Indiana, one cell of underground agents, all emigrants from northern England, simply communicated with one another in their native Yorkshire dialect, which was incomprehensible to everyone else around them. Others spoke cryptically about “packages” and “parcels,” or about deliveries of “black ink,” “indigo,” and “finest coal.” Joseph Mayo, a black well digger who was the principal local conductor in Marysville, Ohio, would receive word that fugitives were waiting to be picked up when someone would come to him, perhaps in a crowd, and say, “Joe, I have two black steers and a brown heifer at my house,” or “three bucks and two ewes,” and ask that they be driven into town. Mayo would pick them up, take them on foot to his own house, where he would feed them, and then carry them on the same day to the home of a white abolitionist at New Dover.
The growth of the underground network was almost precisely contemporaneous with the expansion of iron railroads, which were transforming the physical and psychological landscape of America as dramatically as the abolitionist movement was changing the country’s moral landscape. Smoke-belching locomotives, shining steel rails, and spiffily uniformed conductors were all new and exciting, and travel by rail a thrilling adventure that compressed time and space in ways that thrilled Americans who were born in the era of Jefferson and Jackson, when most traffic moved at the pace of an ox-drawn wagon. The country’s first practical railroad had begun service on a mile-and-a-half-long track near Baltimore, in 1830. Five open cars were pulled by a horse at a fare of nine cents for a round-trip excursion. It was an immediate success, and by the end of the year thirteen miles were in operation, the beginning of what became the Baltimore & Ohio. The following year, an engine that resembled an upended boiler and a smokestack stuck on a wagon bed towed a half-dozen flatcars the seventeen miles between Albany and Schenectady, New York, terrifying horses, setting fire to the clothes of spectators, and completing its run in the mind-boggling time of just thirty-eight minutes. Early trains were by turns mesmerizing, terrifying, and inspiring. “I saw today for the first time a Rail Way Car,” one man wrote in 1835, scarcely able to contain his excitement. “What an object of wonder! How marvelous it is in every particular. It appears like a thing of life…I cannot describe the strange sensation produced on seeing the train of cars come up. And when I started in them…it seemed like a dream.”
The first use of railroad metaphor to describe underground work is unknown. A persistent but almost certainly apocryphal legend credits its genesis to an irate slave master who after failing to catch a runaway in Ripley, Ohio, is alleged to have exclaimed, “He must have gone off on an underground road!” Quite possibly, the terminology was more deliberately coined by two early Pennsylvania abolitionists, Emmor Kimber and Elijah Pennypacker, who in the early 1830s were engaged simultaneously in helping fugitives and in developing plans for some of the first railro
ads around Philadelphia. (Kimber invented a device that kept early, weakly powered engines from rolling backward down steep hills.) Whatever the origin of the lingo, the underground readily lent itself to railroad imagery as the iron roads, with their exotic new idiom of “trains,” “engines,” “lines,” “stations,” and “stationmasters,” spread rapidly across the Northern states in the 1830s and 1840s.
By 1840, about 3,000 miles of railroad had been completed, virtually all of it in the East. Indiana had only 20 miles of track, and Ohio just 39. (New York, by comparison, had 453, and Pennsylvania, 576.) Almost immediately, western businessmen began agitating for the extension of railroads to the West. Boosters were certain that these wondrous contraptions would make their isolated towns wealthy overnight, by opening them to the vast markets of the East and South. “Rouse! Fellow citizens, Rouse!” exclaimed the Richmond Palladium in 1832, begging for immediate investment in the iron roads. “Let your energies lie no longer dormant—let us not be the last to engage in the good cause…So soon as this cheap and rapid means of transportation is in operation…large capitalists will be induced to settle amongst us—the price of property will be doubled—the farmer will find a market for his products.”
The imaginative link between railroads and the work of the abolitionist underground ran far in advance of the actual tracks. Underground men from New York to Illinois who had never even seen an actual railroad soon began to describe themselves as “conductors,” and to speak of their wagons as “cars,” and of the fugitives they carried as “passengers.” Slave hunters stymied by defiant African Americans at the Cabin Creek settlement, years before the first mile of track had been laid in Indiana, were sarcastically advised “to look around and see if there was not a hole in the ground where the girls had been let down to the Underground Railroad.” In 1844, George Washington Clark, of Rochester, New York, the “liberty singer,” as he billed himself, was traveling across the northern states singing a song titled “Get off the Track,” to the tune of “Old Dan Tucker”:
Let the ministers and churches
Leave the sectarian lurches
Jump on board the car of freedom
Ere it be too late to need ’em
Sound the alarm, Pulpits, thunder
Ere too late you see your blunder.
Although his song was aimed at recalcitrant churchmen, Clark’s audience could hardly help being reminded of the Underground Railroad.
Frederick Douglass, for one, condemned the increasingly open discussion of the Underground Railroad. Loose talk, he warned, only alerted Southerners to its existence, and undermined the hopes of slaves who wanted to escape. “I have never approved of the public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad, but which, I think, by their open declarations, has been made most emphatically the upperground railroad,” he wrote in 1845, in his autobiography. “I honor those good men and women for their noble daring, and applaud them for willingly subjecting themselves to bloody persecution, by openly avowing their participation in the escape of slaves…while, upon the other hand, I see and feel assured that those open declarations are a positive evil to the slaves remaining, who are seeking to escape. They do nothing toward enlightening the slave, whilst they do much toward enlightening the master. They stimulate him to greater watchfulness, and enhance his power to capture his slave. I would keep the merciless slave holder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave…Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.”
The consolidation of the underground in the 1840s reflected an evolving American ethos that increasingly emphasized predictability, speed, and efficiency. Elsewhere in the North, this same kind of thinking was creating the modern factory system, rationalizing the production of commodities that until now had been made locally and often by hand, and developing patterns of long-distance distribution that could as reliably deliver a fugitive slave from an Ohio River crossing to Canada as they could a consignment of boots, broom handles, or Colt pistols from Connecticut to the western frontier. By the 1850s, railroad terminology would become the lingua franca of abolitionists, slaveholders, politicians, and other Americans alike, as they argued, with heightening violence, about the hemorrhaging of fugitive slaves toward Canada.
5
In 1844 Levi Coffin made his first trip to Canada, in the company of William Beard, a fellow Quaker who had forwarded many fugitives to Coffin from his home in Union County, Indiana. The two had been delegated by their respective meetings to survey the condition of refugees in the queen’s dominions. They set out in mid-September, on horseback, stopping along the way at several black settlements in Ohio and Michigan, where they were warmly greeted by fugitives whom they had sent north earlier. In Detroit, the Quakers visited schools that had recently been established for the city’s small but growing black population. The next day, their tenth after leaving Newport, they crossed the Detroit River to Windsor, in Canada West. At Sandwich, they attended a court session, where they had the satisfaction of watching a white man tried and convicted for decoying a fugitive back across the river to the United States, and into the hands of his master. They then made their way down the river to Amherstburg, where Coffin was pleased to discover that the best tavern in town was kept by William Hamilton, a black man.
In the course of their two months’ stay in Canada, the travelers met many former fugitives who had settled in the surrounding towns. Coffin, in particular, was often greeted with cries of “Bless the Lord! I know you!” and he would find himself face to face with someone who had spent a night in his Newport home ten or even fifteen years earlier. Their emotion both flattered him and discomfited his Quaker reserve. “Some would cling to our garments as if they thought they would impart some virtue,” he wrote, with embarrassment. Although he saw some destitution among the refugees, Coffin was happy to learn many of them owned their own farms, and that some were now even worth more than their former masters. At Dawn Mills, near Dresden, eighty miles east of Windsor, they visited the British-American Manual Labor Institute for Colored Children, a model community that had recently been established to help train former slaves for self-sufficiency, with an emphasis on literacy and learning useful trades. Unfortunately, they missed meeting the institute’s guiding spirit, himself an escaped slave, and a man who like Coffin was destined to become one of the mythic figures of the antislavery movement: Josiah Henson.
CHAPTER 12
OUR WATCHWORD IS ONWARD
I hear that Queen Victoria says if we will all forsake our land of chains and slavery and come across the lake, She will be standing on the shore with arms extended wide
—ABOLITIONIST BALLAD
1
When Josiah Henson and his family landed in Canada, within sight of the walls of Fort Erie, with their British cannon protectively pointed across the Niagara River at the United States, they were strangers in an alien land, without family, friends, or money, except for the dollar that they were given by the Scottish captain who had carried them from Sandusky to Buffalo. They spent that on lodgings for the night. The next morning, Josiah began looking for work. Someone told him about a farmer named Hibbard, who lived six or seven miles inland, and whose reputation, as Henson delicately put it, “was not, by any means, unexceptionably good,” but who needed a man used to hard labor. Modesty was never one of Henson’s limitations, and he quickly convinced the man to take him on. When Henson asked Hibbard if there was a place for his family to live, he “led the way to an old two-story sort of shanty, into the lower story of which the pigs had broken, and had apparently made it their resting place for some time. Still it was a house, and I forthwith expelled the pigs, and set about cleaning it for the occupancy of a better sort of tenants.”
If Henson felt disappointment—had he really risked the lives of family just to wind up in a pig sty?—there was no trace of it in his memory of that wondrous day. H
e scrubbed, scraped, and mopped far into the night to clean the pigs’ filth from the floor. He recalled his family’s arrival the following day with italicized pride: “I brought the rest of the Hensons to my house, and though there was nothing there but bare walls and floors, we were all in a state of great delight, and my wife acknowledged that it was worthwhile, and that it was better than a log cabin with an earth floor.” For the first time in his forty-one years, he now had the right to shut their door against the world of white men. The Hensons remained on Hibbard’s farm for three years. A prodigiously hard worker as always, Josiah soon managed to acquire some pigs, a cow, even a horse, the nineteenth-century counterpart of a private automobile, the first conspicuous accoutrements of economic independence. In 1833, Henson went to work for another farmer in the area, named Riseley, “who was a man of more elevation of mind than Mr. Hibbard.”
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