Jacobs’s life in the North would not be without pain, but it would be free. Although she lived until 1897, she would never marry. She would eventually be reunited with her brother John, now a sailor himself, with her daughter, Louisa, who had been sent north by Sawyer to serve as maid in the home of a relative, and with her son, Joseph. But she would never have the family life that she craved. She would find work as a nursemaid, and she would have kind employers who protected her when, after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, she feared recapture. Eventually, she would move to Rochester, New York, where she would oversee the local antislavery reading room, just above the editorial office of Frederick Douglass’s paper the North Star. In 1861, she would publish an account of her years in Molly Horniblow’s attic, a book that she could proudly proclaim was written by none but her own hand, and that offered perhaps the ultimate metaphor for the spiritual claustrophobia of American slavery.
3
Jonathan Walker had expected only four passengers aboard his boat in Pensacola. But on the night of June 19, eluding the eyes of suspicious whites, and of the armed patrols who were supposed to monitor the movements of slaves after dark, seven dark forms made their separate ways to the beach, and one by one slipped onto Jonathan Walker’s whaleboat. There was Charles Johnson and his fast-talking brother Moses, plus two more Johnson brothers, and bowlegged Silas Scott, a brother of Silas, and their friend Anthony Catlett. Each of the men, Walker would later learn, was valued at six hundred dollars. Taken together, they were worth forty-two hundred dollars, a very substantial sum. Silas Scott and Moses Johnson were the property of a transplanted Ohioan, Robert C. Caldwell, who had once studied for the ministry, and was now a second lieutenant in the navy. The others belonged to George Willis, a federal marshal, and to his brother Byrd C. Willis. Walker turned none of them away.
In the light of what happened later, it seems likely that Walker was already ill before the trip began. But the plans had been made, he had given his word, and he was confident—this man who had survived shipwreck, shooting, and tropical fevers—that he was up to the task. In silence, he steered the boat into the harbor, out past the anchored ships with their masts suggesting a forlorn forest of naked trees in the dark, out past the hidden shoals that edged the coast, out beneath the looming battlements of Fort Pickens, toward the barrier islands that sheltered the bay from the open sea. Just before daylight there was a sudden scare. Their voyage was almost terminated before they had even left the bay. The whaleboat was hailed by a pair of fishermen off the low hump of Santa Rosa Island. Asked where he was bound, Walker shouted, “To Mobile!” Then he heaved about and set off up the bay, in the opposite direction. Although they must have been puzzled by this odd behavior, the fishermen let it pass. In this saltwater no-man’s-land traveled by smugglers and outlaws, it was unwise to ask too many questions of strange boats in the night.
Walker did not describe his boat in detail, but it was probably a typical New England whaleboat made of light half-inch-thick cedar planks, with the buoyancy to ride over rather than through the waves. Walker did not underestimate the challenge of the journey ahead. But he had reason for confidence. Small though his boat was, barely more than twenty-five feet in length, it was a sturdy craft with fore and main spritsails, and very likely also with a rope-operated device that enabled him to raise the top of the mainsail a few feet higher on the mast, to capture additional wind. Such boats were designed to be sailed in the open ocean, and to withstand almost any kind of weather. In 1821 shipwrecked sailors from the Nantucket whaler Essex had managed to sail six thousand miles in almost one hundred days in just such a boat, from the central Pacific to the coast of South America. Walker had laid in several barrels of bread, a hundred and twenty pounds of pork and bacon, a keg of molasses, cheese, and a barrel of fresh water. It would have been plenty for five men. It was not enough for eight.
The first three days were an ordeal. Headwinds pressed them back toward Pensacola. Repeated squalls lashed the craft as it tacked painstakingly eastward. There was no shelter, no way to keep dry. Sleep must have been virtually impossible, certainly for the already weakened Walker, whose navigational skill was in constant demand. On June 26, the stormy weather finally broke, and the party made its first landfall at St. Andre’s harbor, near present-day Panama City, barely one hundred miles east of Pensacola. They had averaged about fifteen miles a day, far less than Walker had hoped for. For the first time in a week, however, the men at least were able to dry their clothes, cook food, and replenish their water supply. Restored, they put to sea again that evening. The following day, they at first made better time, but Walker then made a misjudgment that cost them precious hours. Hoping to avoid having to tack around Cape San Blas, he steered into St. George’s Sound, in the vicinity of present-day Port St. Joe, intending to manhandle the whaleboat across the neck of the peninsula at the southern end of the sound. But when they reached it, they found the distance over the sand was too great. They were forced to retrace their course around the peninsula, and to fight their way around Cape San Blas after all. In the midst of these maneuvers, they were spotted by another boat, the first that had approached them since they left Pensacola Bay. Several of the fugitives were sent ashore to hide in the spiky grass, as a precaution. But their luck held, and the strangers turned away before the fugitives were noticed.
On July 1 Walker and his party reached Cedar Key, nearly four hundred miles from Pensacola. Things were far from well in the whaleboat. On top of his original illness, Walker was now felled by sunstroke, which typically produces crippling headaches, fever, distorted vision, and, if untreated, delirium. He needed shelter and rest. Neither was possible. For days on end, Walker lost track of time. He would later recall, “I remember looking at the red horizon in the West, soon after sundown, as I thought for the last time in this world, not expecting to behold that glorious luminary shedding its scorching rays on me more.” When he was lucid, he offered what direction he could, but the fugitives’ freedom now depended as much on the strength of their backs at the oars as it did on Walker’s impaired navigational skill. They were desperately short of water. They made several landfalls, hoping to replenish their supply, but without any luck.
Walker’s laconic account of the voyage conveys little of what the mood was like, but especially during those first rain-soaked days when their progress was so agonizingly slow, it must have been grim. For the seven fugitives, the whaleboat had become as claustrophobic as the attic of Harriet Jacobs, a strange illusion of freedom hemmed in on every side by a prison of sea and sky. With them traveled seven lifetimes of slavery, of thwarted lives, broken families, fragile hopes. Their physical discomfort was extreme. They were crusted with salt, wet most of the time, and in constant danger of dehydration. There was never enough water. There was no room to lie down. Men slept where they sat, when they could sleep at all. But there was no way to turn back now, for either the fugitives or for Walker.
Fortunately, the weather held good. In spite of Walker’s infirmity, they made fairly good headway down the west coast of the peninsula, sailing when there was breeze and rowing when there was none, past long miles of some of the world’s most spectacular sand beaches, gleaming white off the port side. They were now averaging something like fifty miles a day. As long as they avoided being seen, and found water, they would be safe. The odds were now on their side. Nearly everyone in the Territory lived either along its northern edge, or in Key West, at the far end of the chain of islets that curled westward into the Gulf like a monkey’s tail. The rest of the peninsula was virtually empty of people, apart from the mysterious Seminoles and Miccosukees who lived unseen in the trackless interior. For days on end, mile after mile, the coastline had been a bright ribbon of white sand on the eastern horizon. Now, as the whaleboat neared the peninsula’s tip, the sand disappeared, to be replaced by the deep, vast gloom of mangrove swamps.
Walker’s discomfort was extreme. In addition to the effects of sunstroke, his entire
face was blistered from sunburn. As he lay numbly in the rocking whaleboat, parched and half-mad from the sun, he could not help asking himself why he was here, so far from the windscoured but familiar fields of Cape Cod, among fugitive strangers, facing sure and swift punishment if he was caught. The implacable answer was always the same, and it kept him going, struggling for consciousness when nothing else could: slavery, “the most heinous, unjust, oppressive, and God-provoking system that ever cursed the dwellers of earth.” Calmly, he concluded that what he was doing must “secure approbation of that great ‘Judge of all earth, who doeth right,’ and before whose presence I soon expected to appear.”
Meanwhile, Pensacola was in an uproar. On June 29, a week after Walker’s party had sailed, the Pensacola Gazette reported that “the most impudent and daring outrage” had been perpetrated on the peace of the territory by the “abduction” of seven Negroes. The paper complained, “Where is our police? Where is our patrol? How is it that numbers of Negroes can prowl unmolested the limits of the Corporation and from our very dwellings, while persons are in the pay of the Corporation to see that no Negro is at large after the bell rings?” Speculation quickly centered on the abolitionist sailor who had suspiciously left town the same night that the slaves disappeared. Fortunately for the fugitives in the whaleboat, a report that Walker had been seen in Mobile sent pursuers off in the wrong direction. Once that rumor had been dispelled, there was still no way to speed news of the slaves’ escape to authorities elsewhere in Florida. No railroad tracks had yet been laid anywhere in the territory, while the first telegraph line in the country had been strung just a month earlier, between Washington and Baltimore. Even had the telegraph been available, there still would have been almost nowhere to send such a message. Florida’s emptiness was the fugitives’ greatest asset.
Passing through the keys posed the greatest challenge of all for Walker’s seamanship. Larger boats detoured seventy-five miles to the south, via Key West, before turning northward again on the Atlantic side of the keys. This option was closed to Walker and his companions. Key West was one of the busiest ports on the Gulf. There was no way to pass it without being noticed. Closer to the Everglades, however, the water was in many places only a foot or two deep, and the bottom so muddy that if a man climbed out to push a beached boat forward he would be sucked under. Channels through the upper keys were shallow and hard to find. Walker likely relied on high tide to pull the whaleboat safely through the pass between Sandy and Clive keys, and on the evening of July 7 they emerged into the turquoise waters of Biscayne Bay.
Their immediate destination was Cape Florida, the southernmost point on Key Biscayne, just below present-day Miami. Walker knew that they would find water there. He dared not set out across open sea without a fresh supply, even though they were, if the weather held, less than twenty-four hours from Nassau. They had already sailed and rowed some seven hundred miles in fourteen days. They had every reason to feel confident. Their ordeal would soon be at an end, Walker thought. The seven fugitives would be free men within the day, and Walker, though not a prideful man, could truthfully claim to have accomplished one of the most epic journeys in the history of the abolitionist underground.
But the night fell away to reveal two large sloops, too close to be avoided. They were salvage vessels out of Key West, and each carried a crew of fifteen or more men, outnumbering Walker’s parched and bedraggled party by two to one.
Richard Roberts, the skipper of the nearer sloop, the Eliza Catherine, shouted to Walker, who as the only white man in the whaleboat he naturally took to be in command, “Where are you from, and where are you bound?”
“From St. Joseph’s, bound to Cape Florida,” Walker answered hopefully.
“I am going that way, and will give you a tow,” Roberts replied, running the Eliza Catherine alongside the whaleboat and making fast to it with a rope.
Perhaps Walker gazed across the dark sea toward the Bahamas, just beyond the horizon. After nineteen days at sea, he knew how tantalizingly close they were to their destination. He knew that, had they arrived an hour earlier or an hour later, the sloops would have missed them.
There was not much he could do. He bluffed anyway. He first told Roberts that the men in the boat were slaves, and that he was under contract to their owners to open up land on the Miami River. When the fugitives were questioned separately, however, they claimed that Walker himself was their owner. Walker finally admitted that he was an abolitionist, and asserted that he had talked the men into running away. This may not have been true, but by taking the blame onto himself he was giving the men the last thing that it was in his power to give.
After several days under guard in Key West, Walker was taken back to Pensacola in chains for trial. He arrived on the eighteenth of July, just under a month after he left. Until September, he remained in the calabozo, as the old Spanish jail was still called, shackled to the wall of the single cell with a twenty-two-pound chain. Although he was so wasted from illness that he could encircle his shrunken leg with his thumb and finger, Walker was given no bedding for the first month, and chained at night to the other prisoners. The sheer filth of the place tested even his heroic powers of endurance. On one side of the room, the floor remained stained for days with the blood of a slave who had committed suicide by slicing open his belly and throat with a razor.
Walker’s first trial, for his involvement in the escape of four of the seven slaves, took place on the morning of November 11. (The three remaining cases were deferred until spring.) The charges against him included every crime of which a slave owner dreamed an abolitionist ought to be accused. The indictment claimed that he had assisted Silas Scott in running away, enticed Charles Johnson, and stolen Catlett and Moses Johnson. They, of course, were never brought to court at all. No black man’s testimony was admissible in a case against a white man. Like any sort of lost property, they had been restored immediately to their owners, who were left to punish them however they saw fit. The three slaves belonging to the naval lieutenant Robert Caldwell were apparently not punished at all. The four others were each given fifty blows with a wooden paddle. Walker pleaded not guilty on the grounds that assisting men to escape slavery was not a crime. Not surprisingly, the court treated this as no defense at all. The judge directed the jury to find Walker guilty, and urged them not to allow sympathy to sway them from imposing the severest justice. They took only half an hour to reach a verdict. No one expected them to find Walker innocent. But the sentence they laid upon him shocked even many who loathed everything that Walker stood for. He was first to be exposed for public exhibition in the pillory on the steps of the courthouse, and then to be branded like an animal with the letters “SS,” for “slave-stealer.”
The sentence was carried out on November 16 by Marshal Ebenezer Dorr, a transplanted Maine Yankee, by strange coincidence, and the son of a hero of the American Revolution who had ridden with Paul Revere. The younger Dorr was now, as Walker tersely put it, a “practical slave owner, and a strong advocate of the system.” He led Walker out the door of the courthouse and locked his head and hands into the pillory. For precisely an hour, he was left to the taunts of the mob and to the marksmanship of George Willis, the owner of several of the fugitive slaves, who hurled rotten eggs at Walker’s face, a misdemeanor for which the court later fined Willis the sum of six and a quarter cents. When the prescribed time was up, Dorr brought Walker back inside and placed him in the prisoner’s box. He tied Walker’s right hand to the wooden railing. Taking a branding-iron “of a slight red heat,” he pressed it into the ball of Walker’s hand, and held it there firmly for fifteen or twenty seconds. “It made a spattering noise, like handful of salt in the fire,” Walker stoically recalled. “The pain was severe.” Walker was then sent back to his cell. Dorr soon returned with three writs in hand for trespass and damage to the property of Caldwell and the Willises, to the staggering amount of one hundred and six thousand dollars, a sum so great, in 1844, as to be scarcely imaginabl
e. (Of this sum, the vindictive federal marshal George Willis demanded all but six thousand dollars.) Walker had already surrendered his only possession of any value, his boat, to Caldwell. He was now penniless.
The first notice of Walker’s plight appeared in abolitionist newspapers in mid-July. In November, news of his branding sped across the country. Northerners were horrified. Southerners had actually branded a white man. Protest meetings were held throughout New England. On December 6, 1844, the Liberator published a boldfaced headline: “Jonathan Walker Sentenced, and Branded!!—Horrible, horrible beyond all description.” The Christian Citizen proclaimed Walker to be one of a “new order of knighthood,” and that his tortured hand was now “daguerreotyped in the chancery of heaven.” Everywhere, abolitionist speakers declared that the burned-in letters truly stood for “Slave Savior.” A “martyr’s fund” was established for Walker’s defense. Contributions and letters of support came from as far away as England. Gerrit Smith and Lewis Tappan, the wealthy New York patrons of the abolitionist movement, both made donations. James C. Fuller, the financier of Josiah Henson’s Dawn colony, sent twenty-four dollars. Frederick Douglass undertook a speaking tour on Walker’s behalf. William Lloyd Garrison cited “the afflicting and hopeless case of the unfortunate Walker” at every opportunity. Lawyers were hired and dispatched to Pensacola.
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