The conductor’s main duty was to keep the road well-marked, and when necessary to change and relocate the nails as emergencies required. “Coupled with the extreme personal danger, the strain on brain and nerve was so great that few conductors could stand it more than ten years without rest, and for that rest they generally went west, and took service on the lines in the free states, where it seemed like mere child’s play, compared with the South,” wrote Coffin, who was close to a nervous breakdown when he left North Carolina in 1842, to settle near Levi and Catherine Coffin, in Indiana. Addison’s brother Alfred continued working for the underground in North Carolina until 1853, when he was exposed, and fled for his life.
One of the most daring escapes of all from the Deep South was the flight of Ellen and William Craft, who, in December 1848, succeeded in traveling by train and steamship from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia in just three days, with the light-skinned Ellen disguised in man’s clothes as an invalid young planter, and William posing as a loyal servant and interlocutor. Once in Philadelphia, the Crafts were taken under the wing of the Anti-Slavery Office, and they soon became among the most popular attractions on the abolitionist speakers’ circuit. While the Crafts’ dazzling escapade had little to do with the ongoing operation of the underground, it exerted a powerful effect on public opinion by portraying African Americans as bold, resourceful, and independent men and women, rather than the barely tamed savages or docile livestock that proslavery propaganda claimed. Northern imaginations were thrilled even more by the daring exploit of a Virginia slave named Henry Brown, whose incredible escape in March 1849 has lost nothing of its edge-of-the-seat suspense after a hundred and fifty years.
A skilled tobacco worker who, by his own account, up to then had been generally well treated and “escaped the lash almost entirely,” Brown was smoldering with resentment, his wife and child having recently been sold away from him, in spite of his efforts to save enough money to buy their freedom. He had become friendly with a white merchant, Samuel Smith, who one day hinted to him, in the cryptic way that such conversations had to take place in the slave states, that as a man with a valuable trade he might be better off free. Making sure that no one else was near, Brown confessed that he had been “meditating” his escape. Could Smith give him any advice? Warily, Smith asked Brown if he were not afraid to speak to him of such things. Brown replied that, no, he wasn’t, because he supposed that Smith “believed that every man had a right to liberty.” He was quite right, Smith assured him. After discussing and discarding several possible options for escape, Brown would write, “The idea suddenly flashed across my mind of shutting myself up in a box, and getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state.” A deeply religious man, he regarded the idea as a revelation direct from God.
Smith managed to send a message to the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office, advising it to watch for a crate that would be arriving on a certain date, and to open it immediately. Meanwhile, a free black friend of Brown’s arranged for a carpenter to build a box three feet long, two feet wide, and two feet, six inches deep, to be lined with baize cloth. The fit would be tight, allowing the two-hundred-pound, five-foot-eight-inch-tall Brown no space to turn himself around. At about 4 A.M. on March 29, Brown climbed into the box. Three gimlet holes were drilled opposite his face for air. He was handed a few biscuits and a cow’s bladder filled with water. After the top was hammered on, the box was addressed to a contact in Philadelphia, and plainly marked “THIS SIDE UP.” Smith had the box delivered to the railway express office, where it was then put on a wagon and driven to the station. By the route that the box would have to follow, Philadelphia lay three hundred and fifty miles away.
The journey north from Richmond was a harrowing ordeal. At Potomac Creek, where the tracks then ended, baggage had to be offloaded and put aboard a steamer. Despite the instructions on the box, Brown was placed upside down, in a “dreadful position” where he remained for an hour and a half, “which from the sufferings I had thus to endure, seemed like an age to me,” he would write. “I felt my eyes swelling as if they would burst from their sockets; and the veins on my temples were dreadfully distended with pressure of blood upon my head.” Brown tried painfully to move his hand to his face, but couldn’t do it. He felt a cold sweat coming over him, and feared that he was close to death. He began fervently to pray. Soon afterward—miraculously, he believed—he heard a passenger complain that he had been standing for two hours and wanted something to sit on, and then threw down Brown’s box so that it landed right side up, and sat on it with a friend. “I could now listen to the men talking, and heard one of them asking the other what he supposed the box contained,” Brown would recall. “His companion replied that he guessed it as ‘THE MAIL.’” At Washington, the box was taken off the steamboat, placed on a wagon and carried to the railroad depot. There, when the driver called for someone to help unload it, another voice replied that he should just throw it off, it didn’t matter if whatever was in it broke, the railway company would pay for it anyway. “No sooner were these words spoken than I began to tumble from the wagon, and falling on the end where my head was, I could hear my neck give a crack, as if it had been snapped asunder and I was knocked completely insensible.” Next he heard someone saying that there was no room left for the box, and that it would have to wait for the next day’s shipment on the “luggage train.” Another voice, belonging to some unknown clerk whose devotion to regulations probably saved Brown’s life, replied that since the box had come with the express, it must be sent on with the express. The box was loaded on, and Brown was thrown once again on his head, though when the baggage was later shifted, he was finally placed upright for the rest of the trip to Philadelphia.
The next morning, twenty-seven hours after Brown left Richmond, several members of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee stood nervously around the crate, where it had been deposited by an Irish cartman on the floor of the Anti-Slavery Office on North Fifth Street. When the lid was pried off, Brown rose to his feet, extended his hand, and asked, “How do you do, gentlemen?” He then promptly fainted. When he came to, it seemed to him like nothing less than “a resurrection from the grave of slavery,” and he burst spontaneously into song:
I waited patiently, I waited patiently for the Lord, for the Lord;
And he inclined unto me, and heard my calling;
I waited patiently, I waited patiently for the Lord
As he sang, smiling men surrounded him, each more anxious than the other to offer help, he would write, and “bidding me a hearty welcome to the possession of my natural rights.”
Appeals to “natural rights” were the last thing that the proslavery lobby in Washington wished to hear. As the decade progressed, that very concept had increasingly been enshrined in personal liberty laws enacted by many Northern states. Such laws discouraged public officials from cooperating in the recapture of fugitives, and for the first time, in some states, extended to runaway slaves the right to a fair trial; although they were never uniformly enforced, the damage they did to Southerners’ trust in the good faith of Northern state governments was severe. The underground, of course, continued to enrage Southerners by acting as if there was no federal fugitive slave law at all. In 1847 an astonishing forty-five fugitives had been fed, sheltered, and paraded through Battle Creek, Michigan, in a single day. “Everybody heard of their coming and every man, woman and child in town was out to see them,” Erastus Hussey, a local underground man-recalled. “It looked like a circus.” And in Delaware, a slave state no less, the underground stationmaster in Wilmington, Thomas Garrett, convicted in May 1848 for facilitating the escape of fugitives, dared to announce to the court that he considered the penalty imposed on him as a license to help fugitive slaves for the rest of his life. “If any of you know a slave who needs assistance, send him to me,” he declared proudly. Admitting that he had always feared to lose what little property he possessed, Garrett added, “But now that you have relieved me, I will go home and put a
nother story on my house, so that I can accommodate more of God’s poor.”
3
The single event that would do the most to shape both the nation’s sectional politics for a decade to come, as well as the growth of the Underground Railroad, had nothing at all to do with slavery, and took place nearly three thousand miles away from Washington. On January 24, 1848, perhaps on the very day that William Chaplin was meeting secretly with Daniel Drayton in Baltimore to plan the Pearl escape, a workman noticed several sparkling flakes of metallic ore in the mill-race that he was digging in the Sierra Mountains of California. Three weeks later, a Mormon merchant strode through the sleepy Mexican hamlet of San Francisco brandishing a bottle full of gold dust, shouting, “They’ve found gold in the American River!” In ways that no one could possibly foresee, the shock waves of the discovery would resonate through every town and city in America, through the marble halls of Congress, through the hardening ideological positions of the North and South, and along the distant lines of the Underground Railroad. Within weeks, news of the strike raced across the continent, around Cape Horn, and over the Pacific Ocean. San Francisco quickly mushroomed into a raucous, half-born city of fifteen thousand where eggs sold for ten dollars a dozen, and canvas tents were rented to gamblers at forty thousand dollars annually, payable in gold dust. By the autumn of the following year, at least ninety thousand gold seekers had poured into California. The vast majority were from the Northern states, and they brought their politics in their knapsacks. (William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator recorded its first California subscriber on February 17, 1849.) Ignoring tradition and counsels of patience, they declared themselves a state and ratified, by an overwhelming vote of twelve thousand to eight hundred, a constitution barring slavery from what abolitionists and proslavery forces alike recognized was the most valuable prize won by the United States in its recent war with Mexico. Southerners were apoplectic at this apparent fait accompli, which would upset the delicate balance of power that had existed since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, by reopening the question of slavery in the western territories. The crisis had been foreshadowed six years earlier, in the debate over the admission of Texas, which some proponents had wanted to see divided up into half a dozen or more slave states. The admission of California would tilt the Senate in favor of the free states. Angry talk of secession boiled through the South. John C. Calhoun wrote menacingly, “We have borne the wrongs and insults of the North long enough.”
The debate that began in February 1850 over the admission of California was among the most memorable ever to take place on the floor of the Senate. In the course of the next eight months, the fate of the nation hinged on the ability of three aging statesmen—the Kentucky Whig Henry Clay, the consumptive South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, and the silver-tongued, profoundly conservative Massachusetts orator Daniel Webster—to strike a compromise between the sectional interests of the North and the South. But at the core of the crisis lay the question of whether Congress had the moral duty to extend freedom westward as the nation grew, or rather a duty to protect slavery there. Calhoun and his allies were threatening secession if slavery were not permitted everywhere in the vast territory that the United States had seized from Mexico. Antislavery Northerners wanted not only the admission of California, but an explicit prohibition of slavery in the new lands.
Clay opened the debate on February 6. A slave owner himself, he professed distaste for slavery in principle, and regret for it in practice. His admirers flatteringly called him “the Great Pacificator” for his skill at winning the confidence of men who loathed each other’s principles. Tall, stooped now with age, he ranged his sardonic eye across the panorama of his colleagues, their faces swollen with plugs of tobacco packed in their cheeks. He gazed at the other titans of his own generation, and at new men such as Jefferson Davis, master of one of the largest plantations in Mississippi, and William Seward, Lincoln’s future secretary of state, who hid fugitive slaves in his home in Auburn, New York, and beyond them toward the nation itself, “so oppressed, so appalled, and so anxious.” To reassure Southerners of his true loyalties, Clay belittled the moral aspect of slavery: “In the one scale, then, we behold sentiment, sentiment, sentiment alone, and in the other, property, the social fabric, life, and all that makes life desirable and happy.” He then revealed his pragmatic intent. He bluntly told them that rash talk of secession made little sense. How would the South be better off if it seceded? Then there would be no remedy at all for the fugitive slave problem. Within the Union, the South at least had a means of redress. He warned that if the South became a separate nation, “There would be no right of extradition; no right to demand your slaves; no right to appeal to the courts of justice to demand your slaves which escape, or the penalties for decoying them. Where one slave escapes now, by running from his owner, hundreds and thousands would escape if the Union were severed in parts.” He asked Northerners to be realistic, too. In practical terms, slavery would never flourish in the arid wastes of New Mexico, no matter what the letter of the law. Banning slavery in Washington, as the abolitionists asked, could not happen without the consent of Maryland and Virginia, and that would never be forthcoming. But the slave trade within the city itself was an embarrassment to all Americans. Ending it was possible, and would do no damage to slavery elsewhere. But this was to be a compromise, after all. In return, the fugitive slave law must be strengthened. Clay would go with “the furthest senator from the South to impose the heaviest sanctions on the recovery of fugitive slaves.”
On March 4, John C. Calhoun rose to speak, wrapped up in a black cloak, his face ashen, and his body corroded by the tuberculosis that would kill him less than three weeks later. Coughing uncontrollably, he passed his speech to a fire-eater of the younger generation, James Mason of Virginia, to read. But the tone was vintage Calhoun, seething with his passionate conviction that slavery was an ideal worth fighting for. The Union was endangered by nothing except “the many aggressions” which the North had perpetrated against the South, he asserted. The “equilibrium” between the two sections that was intended by the Founding Fathers had already been destroyed. The South and slavery had been unfairly shut out of the territories since the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. Too much federal spending also went to the North, while import duties fell unjustly on the cotton-exporting states.
Calhoun’s complaints were deeply felt, but disingenuous. The Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, the protection of native manufactures and its later repeal, the annexation of Texas, the War with Mexico, the removal of Indians from the Deep South, all had served the interests of the South. Slave states chose 30 of the 62 members of the Senate, 90 of the 233 members of the House of Representatives, and 105 of the 295 electors of the president. Even these numbers understated Southern power, since Democratic and proslavery politics were virtually synonymous, and Democrats overwhelmingly controlled both houses of Congress. Seven of the eleven presidents, and similarly disproportionate numbers of senior cabinet officers, House speakers, and presidents of the Senate were Southerners. At the end of the 1840s, the chairmen of all the important committees of Congress were owners of slaves, while seven of the nine members of the Supreme Court were either slave owners or proslavery in attitude. But Calhoun and every other Southerner could see that broader demographic trends favored the North, and that the North led the South in commerce, industry, railroad building, overall wealth, and population, while the South remained almost completely agricultural, with its planters cash-starved, and chronically in debt to Northern creditors. He foresaw five new states being developed, all of them aligned with the North, eventually giving the North an overwhelming majority of forty senators to the South’s twenty-eight. It was imperative, he demanded, that the South be conceded “an equal right in the acquired territory,” and for the North to “do her duty” by enforcing fugitive slave laws. Unless “something decisive” was done to stop abolitionist agitation, it would snap every cord that bound the sections tog
ether.
Abolitionists had expected nothing different from Calhoun or Clay. But Daniel Webster’s speech produced shock and disbelief. Although he was a thoroughgoing creature of the establishment, backed by the Boston and New York business elites, who had extensive investment in the South, he was still considered an antislavery man. Thirty years earlier, had he not stood upon the sacred altar of Plymouth Rock and evoked the spirit of his Puritan forefathers in a scathing denunciation of slavery as an “odious and abominable trade” that disgraced Christianity, and against which every feeling of humanity must revolt? But he too called for compromise. Many considered Webster the finest orator of the age, of whom it was ambiguously said that his “every sentence weighed a pound.” Craggy and “mastiff-mouthed,” priming his famous voice like a long-range cannon, he began to speak, and kept on for three hours, sweating like a gunner in battle, attacking abolitionism and secessionist sentiment with equal brio. Booming, “I speak for the preservation of the Union,” he attacked the abolitionist societies, which he said had “excited feelings,” and “whose operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good or valuable.” He also agreed with Clay and Calhoun that the North had fallen short in its constitutional duty to restore runaway slaves to their masters. No public officials had a right to flout the law, he roared, “None at all; none at all.” Calling upon his fellow senators to enact a strong fugitive slave law that would give the South what it wanted, he cried, “Let us not be pigmies in a case that calls for men!”
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