For the first months of 1844, the Byronic Torrey worked on alone, personally collecting fugitives from as far away as Winchester, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and making plans—grandiose ones in light of what happened—to mount rescue expeditions in distant North Carolina and Louisiana. There was a certain compulsive quality to his behavior, as if each success bred a need for another, still greater risk. Not alone among evangelical abolitionists, he was also hooked on the frisson of imagined crucifixion. “Did you ever hear of a Torrey that suffered martyrdom?” he once asked his father. “I hope among our good old Puritan ancestors there were some who had the martyr spirit.” That June, Torrey was identified by a Washington slave dealer, who named him as the man who had carried off slaves from Winchester. Once in custody, he was also convicted for enticing three other slaves away from a Baltimore tavern owner, and sentenced to six years’ hard labor. It was a death sentence. Torrey did not have the constitution of the hardy seaman Jonathan Walker, and prison proved an agony for him. He was racked by “bilious fever,” and his moods swung wildly between depression and Christian exaltation. Then the tuberculosis from which he had suffered early in life crept inexorably and fatally through his lungs. On the night of May 7 he suffered a severe hemorrhage, and on the eighth he died. With Smallwood, he had helped an estimated four hundred slaves to freedom.
Both proslavery forces and abolitionists regarded the trial of the Pearl prisoners Drayton and Sayres as a case of national significance. The prosecutor, District Attorney Philip Barton Key, was a slave owner and a lion of Washington society, as well as the son of Francis Scott Key, the composer of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Against each of the Yankee captains Key lodged forty-one indictments for slave stealing, one for each of the masters whose slaves were found aboard the Pearl, and seventy-four indictments for transporting slaves out of the District of Columbia. (Three of the seventy-seven passengers were free blacks traveling with family members.) But Key was after bigger game than the two unfortunate seamen. At the time of his capture, Drayton had half-admitted that he had been hired by abolitionists. Key hoped to force Drayton to implicate William Chaplin, the suspected head of the underground in Washington, and his patron, the New York philanthropist Gerrit Smith. Although Smith was not, in fact, directly involved in the Pearl affair, Chaplin kept him well-informed of his activities, and regularly solicited money from him to purchase the freedom of slaves. To catch Smith would deal a death blow to what Key considered the slave-stealing underground conspiracy. For their own part, the abolitionists had two goals: to turn Drayton into a martyr like Charles Torrey and, at all costs, to protect Chaplin. Were he to be indicted, it would expose not only his local collaborators, but also his support network of well-connected whites, including several senators and congressmen.
Drayton’s trial began on July 27. His lead attorney, Massachusetts congressman Horace Mann, contended implausibly that the Pearl fugitives had spontaneously decided to escape on the same day, and had coincidentally managed to find their own way to the ship. Slyly, he further suggested that they might have been inspired to escape by the patriotic speech of Senator Foote of Mississippi the previous night, in honor of the French uprising against Louis Philippe. At the mere mention of slavery, the judge abruptly stopped Mann, warning that he would not permit any “harangue against slavery” to be heard in the courtroom, another unpleasant reminder to Americans, who were following the trial avidly in their newspapers, that the right of free speech did not exist when it came to the subject of slavery.
Key maintained that Drayton was a liar and a thief. He easily demonstrated that Drayton knew that his passengers were runaway slaves, that he knew that he was committing a crime when he allowed them aboard, and that he had deliberately hidden them in the Pearl’s hold. Likening the fugitives to machinery, he added, “Suppose a man had taken it into his head that the northern factories were very bad things for the health of the factory-girls, and were to go with a schooner for the purpose of liberating those poor devils by stealing the spindles, would he not be served as this prisoner is served here?”
Despite transparently false testimony by “witnesses” introduced by Key, Drayton was found guilty. To Key’s chagrin, however, nothing could be proved against Chaplin. Neither Sayres nor English had ever met him. Indeed, English was so obviously ignorant of the whole business that he was released without trial. Under intense pressure from the prosecution, Drayton continued to refuse to implicate anyone else. His silence did not come free of charge. Drayton was no Jonathan Walker, motivated solely by moral commitment to the cause of the slave. He had undertaken Chaplin’s commission for money, not as an exercise in self-sacrifice. Chaplin had promised Drayton that if he were arrested, his wife and six children would be taken care of. Now Drayton was reassured that the abolitionists would continue to work for his release, and to pay his fines if he continued to keep silent.
Sayres was convicted of assisting in the escape of slaves, and sentenced to a fine of one hundred and fifty dollars on each count. Initially, the uncooperative Drayton received an unprecedented twenty years’ imprisonment, for theft. But the prosecution’s conduct had been so grossly and obviously improper that the sentence was overturned on appeal by a panel of federal judges who actually included a slave master who owned two of the fugitives who had been aboard the Pearl. In the spring of 1849, Drayton was resentenced to more than ten thousand dollars in fines and costs and, like Sayres, to remain incarcerated until that amount was paid. Since both men were penniless, they still faced years in prison, a pointed warning to anyone who served the underground of the punishment they faced if caught.
In the most human sense, the Pearl incident was a tragic failure: more than forty of the fugitives captured on the sloop were eventually shipped off to the slave markets of New Orleans. But it also represented something more far-reaching. The case broke upon the nation’s capital in the midst of one of American history’s great political realignments. The tectonic plates of public opinion were shifting as Americans by the hundreds of thousands were questioning their received beliefs about slavery and individual rights, and searching for new, firm terrain upon which to root their convictions. On the nation’s most visible battlefield, in Congress, positions were hardening. Defenders of slavery portrayed the Pearl incident as just the latest naked outrage in a coordinated abolitionist assault against the South. Some talked of civil war. South Carolina’s cadaverous John C. Calhoun, the elder statesmen of states’ rights radicals, for whom abolitionism was not politics at all but a kind of illness—“a disease of the body politic”—the fugitive slave problem was “the gravest and most vital of all questions to us and the whole Union.”
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Throughout the South, anxiety about abolitionism insinuated itself like a virus into every community, marking every stranger as a potential carrier, curling up inside every relationship where a person’s sentiments about race were in doubt. Antislavery societies, once respectable, had melted away. Mail from the North was routinely opened by local post offices, and anything that could be remotely construed as challenging slavery was confiscated and destroyed. Families who opposed slavery left for the free states, or learned to keep silent. “It just seems like I can’t stand it; and we don’t dare to let anybody know it but our good friends,” Susan B. Hubbard, the daughter of a North Carolina Quaker accused of harboring a fugitive, confided to a friend. “Trouble, trouble; oh, just for me to think of leaving, and I can’t take time to tell my friends farewell; it seems like it would break my heart.” In Smyrna, South Carolina, a Presbyterian minister was tarred and thrown out of the town by the Vigilance Committee simply for reading in church a copy of the Baltimore Synod’s official letter on slavery, even though it contained nothing contrary to South Carolina law. When a cache of abolitionist material was discovered in Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, its owners were driven out of town, and the literature itself was publicly burned. “In that day for a man to speak out openly and proclaim
himself an enemy of Negro slavery was simply to proclaim himself a madman,” Twain wrote. “For he was blaspheming against the holiest thing known to a Missourian, and could not be in his right mind.”
Loyalty to the South increasingly came to mean conformity to the interests of slave owners. In the Deep South especially, defenders of slavery no longer sighed with embarrassment that it was a necessary evil, as they did years before, but now praised it, as Calhoun did, as “a good—a positive good,” adding, “We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most stable and safe basis for free institutions in the world.” Calhoun firmly believed that God and nature alike had set limits beyond which blacks were incapable of improvement, and that efforts to emancipate them were not only immoral but irrational. He maintained that no truly civilized society could exist unless its more valuable members were supported by the labor of the lesser, thus relieving masters from manual labor and enabling them to reach the intellectual and spiritual heights for which they were destined. To upset this arrangement was to tamper with the divine order, he believed. “To destroy the existing relation between the free and servile races at the South would lead to consequences unparalleled in history,” he asserted, in 1849. “They cannot be separated, and cannot live together in peace or harmony or to their mutual advantage except in their present relation. Under any other, wretchedness and misery and desolation would overspread the whole South.”
The hardening ideology of the South rested on the axiom that African Americans were doomed to slavery not only by the economic interests of the South, but also by sacred doctrine and biology. “God has made the Negro an inferior being, not in most cases, but in all cases, for there are no accidents or exceptions in His works,” wrote Dr. J. H. Van Evrie, a popular scholar of racial theory. In an era that had scant knowledge of archaeology or anthropology, and that almost universally believed mankind to be only about six thousand years old, Africans were typically conflated with the biblical descendants of Ham, or Canaan, the Bible’s supposed progenitor of the black “race.” Slaveholders pointed triumphantly to Genesis, in which it was written, supposedly for all time: “And He said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” They further pointed out that the Patriarchs from Abraham through Moses were large slaveholders, and that God had clearly sanctioned slavery when his angel commanded the runaway slave Hagar to return to her mistress. More pertinent still, in Leviticus the Bible had explicitly authorized the enslavement of nonbelievers. And that was just the Old Testament. Christ himself had obviously approved of slavery, its apologists triumphantly asserted, since he had nowhere specifically condemned it.
Cogent as the biblical arguments were, they were no longer entirely convincing by themselves. As the abolitionists tirelessly reminded Americans, the Bible also asserted the sanctity of universal brotherhood. If there was such a thing as a common human race, then the logic of abolitionism was incontrovertible. But if the African could be shown to have a different biological nature from whites, moral appeals for emancipation were irrelevant. A developing school of racial thinkers was also now lending the weight of up-to-date “science” to proslavery politics. Some, led by the immensely influential Dr. Josiah C. Nott of Alabama, theorized that there must have been separate Creations, and that Africans, like American Indians, Malays, and others, were therefore not human beings at all, but different species entirely. Even internationally respected scholars such as Louis Agassiz, the father of modern anthropology, maintained that “the brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a 7 month’s infant in the womb of the white.” Differences in physical appearance among the races, he theorized, reflected innate differences in moral character and intelligence.
S. A. Cartwright, a prominent Southern doctor who lectured on the physiology of Africans, asserted that when punished blacks did not feel physical pain as whites did, “[nor] any unusual resentment more than stupid sulkiness.” He also concluded that the disposition of slaves to run away was also a disease, a form of dementia that he labeled “drapetomania.” “Like children,” he wrote, “they are constrained by unalterable physiological laws, to love those in authority over them.” Similarly, James D. B. DeBow, a widely respected economist and editor, solemnly (if bizarrely) assured readers of his book The Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States that the physiology of the Negro was entirely different from that of whites: “The great development of the nervous system, and the profuse distribution of nervous matter to the stomach, liver, and genital organs, would make the Ethiopian race entirely unmanageable, if it were not that this excessive nervous development is associated with a deficiency of red blood in the pulmonary and arterial systems, from a defective atmospherization or arteriolization of the blood in the lungs.”
Meanwhile, the plantation economy continued to expand. Although there were about 350,000 slaveholders in the South, the wealth of the cotton states was concentrated in the hands of just three or four thousand families, who received three-quarters of the returns from the yearly exports. Two-thirds of Southern whites owned no slaves, but most aspired to as a mark of economic and social advancement. “Niggers and cotton—cotton and niggers; these are the law and the prophets to the men of the South,” a Scottish traveler wrote home from Mississippi. By 1850, cotton flourished across a four-hundred-thousand-square-mile swath of America from South Carolina to Texas. Production spiraled ever upward, doubling between 1815 and 1820, from 150,000 to 300,000 bales, doubling again by 1826, and yet again between 1830 and 1837. By 1859, it would reach nearly five million bales, to make up more than half of the nation’s total exports. As always, more cotton demanded more slaves. Between 1820 and 1850, the number of slaves in Alabama grew from 41,879 to 342,844, in Mississippi from 32,814 to 309,878, and in Louisiana from 69,064 to 244,809. (The state with the largest number of people in bondage in 1850, however, was still slave-exporting Virginia, with 472,528, up from 425,148 in 1820.) As the price of slaves continued to rise, buyers clamored for relief, pressuring their representatives in Washington to reopen the international slave trade to bring down prices. A Georgia planter, one of the many who equated slavery with progress, complained that the state of Virginia was more immoral than the slave trade, and more “unchristian” too, because when he went there to “buy a few darkies,” he had to pay between one thousand and two thousand dollars apiece. Had federal law been reasonable and allowed it, he said, he could easily have gone to Africa and bought better stock for fifty dollars a head. To such entrepreneurs, as to ideologues like John C. Calhoun, slavery was not a vestige of the medieval past, it was the future.
Slave owners who considered themselves honest and God-fearing were infuriated by the seeming impunity with which the Underground Railroad allegedly enticed away their valuable property. In truth, they credited the underground with a ubiquitousness and a reach that it did not have. But there were just enough traces of abolitionist activity where it was least expected to fuel fears of a far-flung conspiracy that had penetrated the innermost recesses of the South. There was the black head-waiter in Grenada, Mississippi, who was caught hiding a runaway in the garret of the hotel where he worked, and the Connecticut abolitionist posing as a preacher who was captured at Vicksburg in the very act of smuggling three slaves on board a steamboat bound for Cincinnati, and the Yankee lumbermen who camped along the Mississippi River and sold cut wood to passing steamboats and, people said, secretly gave refuge to fugitives in return for work.
But the only place in the inner South where organized underground clearly went on without interruption was in the Quaker counties of North Carolina, centering on the New Garden Meeting, near Greensboro, Levi Coffin’s home until his departure for Indiana, in the 1820s. Fugitives trickled into the Quaker hamlets from other parts of the state and, it is said, even from as far away as South Carolina, using specially notched coins to enable stationmasters to identify them. For the handful of abolitionists who dared help them, the pressure was close to debilitating. “The l
ife of anxiety and extreme danger I was leading was rendering me nervous, excitable and suspicious of all my surroundings,” recalled Levi Coffin’s cousin Addison Coffin, who became an underground conductor at the age of thirteen. “There was a constant sense of danger resting on my heart, a presentiment of impending peril.” After weeks or months concealed on local farms, fugitives were sent on foot or hidden in false-bottomed wagons to the Quaker colonies in Indiana, along the trans-Appalachian route the Coffin family had pioneered decades before. One Indiana-bound emigrant, Joshua Murrow, carried several fugitives all the way in such a wagon, from which he blithely sold off pottery and cornmeal to pay expenses along the way.
Addison Coffin left a vividly detailed account of the ingenious local techniques that were used to mark the way through the confusing tangle of back roads that meandered through rural North Carolina. At each fork, the fugitive was shown how to find a nail driven into a tree precisely three and a half feet from the ground, halfway around the tree. If the right-hand road was to be taken the nail was driven on the right-hand side; if the left, the nail was to the left. Where there were fences but no trees, the nail was driven in the middle of the second rail from the top, on the inside of the fence, and pointing either to the left or right. When nothing else was available, the nail was driven into a stake, or else a stone was so set as to be unnoticeable by day, but easily found at night. “When a fugitive was started on the road they were instructed into the mystery,” Coffin wrote. “When they came to a fork in the road, they would go to the nearest tree, put their arms around and rub downward, whichever arm struck the nail, right or left, that was the road, and they walked right on with no mistake, so with fences, but the stakes or stones had to be found with their feet, which was tolerably easily done. Those who were doubtful as to their ability to remember details, would take a string and tie short pieces of string to the long one to represent the fork and cross roads, and then by tying knots which they understood make a complete but simple way that was almost unerring in its simplicity.”
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