When the train stopped at Salem, Fairbank sought out Jackson and handed Tamar over to his keeping. Within days, she would be safe in Canada. Fairbank returned to Jeffersonville, intending to cross back over the river to Kentucky, to Lexington, to recover the body of his father, who had died there of cholera while visiting him in prison before his release. With the same transcendental self-confidence that had allowed him to set off across the Ohio River in a leaky rowboat, he assumed that he would be in no immediate danger. In fact, Tamar’s owner, A. L. Shotwell, had already reported her disappearance to the United States marshal in Louisville.
While Fairbank was in Salem, the marshal, a man named Ronald, had been hard at work. He had quickly discovered that Tamar had met Fairbank in Louisville, and had found witnesses who gave him reason to think that the pair had escaped to Indiana. Crossing the river, he soon found the owner of the livery stable where Fairbank had rented the carriage. On Sunday, November 9, Fairbank was walking past the stable on his way to church when somebody called to him. Three or four men including Ronald came up to him. “What do you want of me?” Fairbank asked. “I want you in Louisville,” Ronald replied. “You have been aiding off some niggers.” When Fairbank refused, he later wrote, another man “seized me by my cravat, and twisting so as to confine me…rendering it uncomfortable for me to speak or even to breathe.” In the struggle that ensued, Fairbank cried aloud for help “to preserve the honor of the law of the State.” Although the altercation took place in front of many of the townspeople, no one stepped forward to help him. Within the hour, Fairbank was put in a skiff and rowed back to Kentucky, to a trial, and to a sentence of fifteen years in the state penitentiary, the longest ever imposed on an underground activist. This time there would be no reprieve.
3
Despite their divergent origins, there were striking similarities between the personalities of the rough-hewn ex-slave Harriet Tubman, the soldier-of-fortune Seth Concklin, and the evangelical, middle-class Calvin Fairbank. Apart from their unbreachable commitment to emancipation, all three were extraordinarily courageous individuals, natural risk takers, and had a knack for holding the trust of wary slaves. Fairbank, at least, shared Tubman’s intense piety and her sense of divine direction. Concklin was as much adventurer as idealist, but he shared Tubman’s capacity for ruthless self-control and her tolerance of extreme physical discomfort. Why, then, did they ultimately fail, while Tubman was able to continue her work without serious interruption for more than ten years? Being white, they were of course unable to blend in with African Americans as Tubman did. On the other hand, their whiteness conferred a privilege of movement and freedom from random interrogation that more than compensated for its limitations. They lacked, however, Tubman’s exquisite instinct for danger, her matchless knowledge of the territory through which she traveled, and her gift for theatrics. In addition, while Concklin and Fairbank were essentially loners, Tubman enjoyed the advantage of a personal network in which she could place complete trust.
There was, of course, another difference between Tubman and the others, the most obvious of all: she was a woman. As a physically nondescript black woman with a field hand’s manners and speech, she was far less likely to be suspected than was any man, white or black. More to the point, few Southerners even remotely credited blacks with the intelligence and strategic skill to plan complex rescues carried out over long distances and requiring the management of numbers of people. They assumed, even where there was no evidence, that the disappearance of slaves must have been the work of white subversives working in collusion with disloyal blacks within the borders of their own states. While Southern lawmen were ever on the lookout for clones of Concklin and Fairbank, Tubman again and again slipped by them unnoticed.
It is probably not entirely coincidental that Tubman came to prominence just as the women’s rights movement was breaking upon Americans’ consciousness. Although she was wholly a product of the particular African American culture of the Eastern Shore, she was in her own distinctive way part of a larger, still inchoate force that was reshaping, if not yet American society, then at least the antislavery movement. Abolitionists who very likely would have ignored Tubman a decade or two earlier, by the 1850s were able to recognize in her a heroism that transcended gender. Abolitionism was the threshold through which American women took their first steps into the nation’s political life. Back in the 1830s white women were expected to be unobtrusively abolitionist, and then only within their own parlors and sewing circles. Rare exceptions were Quaker activists like Lucretia Mott, and the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, daughters of a South Carolina slave owner, who repudiated slavery, moved north, and drew large crowds when they lectured on behalf of abolition. The very nature of the struggle against slavery demanded a new willingness to look at the roots of oppression and to confront authority, whether in the form of husband, church leaders, or public opinion. The experience exposed many women to the hypocrisy of abolitionist males who demanded freedom for slaves but insisted that their own womenfolk remain silent. The combative antislavery lecturer Abby Kelley, for example, found church doors closed to her, and was roundly denounced from pulpits as a “jezebel” because she traveled with men other than her husband. And in 1840 William Lloyd Garrison’s nomination of her to the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society so offended evangelicals that they broke away from the organization entirely, leaving Garrison with little support beyond Boston and a few Quaker communities. Increasingly, however, women began to appear at public antislavery meetings alongside men, and often black men at that, a sight that utterly scandalized Americans outside the movement. Frederick Douglass, however, reported with heartfelt pride (and a trace of astonishment) how at a rally for the fugitive George Latimer, “we were all on a level, everyone took a seat just where they chose, there [was] neither men’s side, nor women’s side; white pew nor black pew, but all seats were free, and all sides free.”
One of the countless women radicalized by the antislavery movement was Gerrit Smith’s cherubic first cousin Elizabeth Cady, who spent several languorous but intellectually provocative weeks each summer at his rambling home in Peterboro, absorbing the ceaseless talk of politics and reform. There, for the first time, she found men who were willing to listen to her opinions. She later wrote, “I felt a new inspiration in life and was enthused with new ideas of individual rights and the basic principles of government, for the antislavery platform was the best school the American people ever had on which to learn republican principles and ethics.” She also met there the handsome Henry Stanton, one of the most famous abolitionist speakers in the country, and her future husband. Coming from the cosmopolitan salon of Peterboro, Stanton was flabbergasted by the treatment that she and other antislavery women received at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, in 1840. The Americans, among them Lucretia Mott and the usually irrepressible Abby Kelley, comprised a brigade of the most formidable public women in the entire United States at the time. But in keeping with the rigid scriptural notions that permeated the British antislavery movement, not only were they barred from participating as delegates, they were relegated to smoldering silence in a segregated gallery off the convention floor. They were told that the rubric “World’s Convention,” Mott recorded in her diary, “was a mere poetical license,” and that women were “constitutionally unfit for public or business meetings.”
The humiliating experience in London gave fiery edge to Stanton’s growing recognition of the “oppression I saw everywhere,” and which was only intensified by her own experience of motherhood. After the Stantons moved to Seneca Falls, New York in 1847, she was swept by waves of loneliness, depression, and bitterness at women’s foreordained “portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide.” Although increasingly impelled toward some kind of action, she could not say what until the redoubtable Lucretia Mott came to visit in the early summer of 1848. To her, and a small group of like-minded women, all of them Quake
rs except herself, she poured out her discontent.
In contrast to the profoundly frustrated Stanton, who was an Episcopalian, her friends were all vocal, self-reliant, and accustomed to participating in the affairs of their religious community on an equal basis with men. They were also politically astute, having been active for years in the antislavery cause—Mott since at least 1833—and, in some cases, in the work of the Underground Railroad. They already lived the kind of engaged and intellectually liberated life that Stanton felt so painfully denied. What Stanton brought to the parlor table in the home of Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth McClintock was festering outrage at her exclusion from the public world.
Impulsively, the women decided to call a convention just five days thence, on July 19 and 20, “to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women.” Most of those who came were local women, with the exception of Mott and her husband James, who presided over the meeting, no woman having filled such a position before. The only black person present was the Stantons’ friend Frederick Douglass, who lent the authority of antislavery to the next great reform cause of the day, declaring that “if that government only is just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land. Our doctrine is that ‘right is of no sex.’” Stanton, who had never addressed a public meeting before, presented the conference’s final document. Declaring that “all men and women are created equal,” it protested against man’s “usurpations” against woman, the denial of “her inalienable right” to the vote, and her submission to laws in whose formation she had no voice. A few years later, in a speech in New York City, Stanton memorably suggested that only women could truly fathom the helpless suffering of the slave: “Eloquently and earnestly as noble men have denounced slavery…they have been able only to take an objective view…[because as] a privileged class they can never conceive of those who are born to contempt, to inferiority, to degradation. Herein is woman more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be. For while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the Negro there is no such privilege.” Despite the occasional attendance at women’s conventions of individuals like the evangelist Sojourner Truth, and later in the decade Harriet Tubman herself, the movement as a whole remained a largely white one.
Women had always done much of the Underground Railroad’s unsung work of feeding, sheltering, and nursing fugitives. When they arrived travelworn and hungry at the Hayden home in Boston or the Douglass home in Rochester, it was Harriet Hayden and Anna Douglass who made their beds and cooked their meals. Many women did much more than that. In one Michigan community, women were responsible for giving the alarm if slave catchers appeared, and in Cleveland four of the nine members of that city’s very active, all-black Vigilance Committee were women. White women as well as black women sometimes served as conductors. Delia Webster, who was arrested with Calvin Fairbank in 1844, later purchased property on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, in an unsuccessful scheme to run off slaves to Indiana. The Michigan Quaker Laura Haviland frequently escorted fugitives north from Cincinnati to Michigan, where she had founded an interracial school, and made several forays into Kentucky on pretended berry-picking expeditions. When the womenfolk of the Gibbons family arrived for a visit to their Quaker friends the Wrights at Columbia, Pennsylvania, young Phebe Gibbons reported matter-of-factly in her diary that the family’s daughters were “absent, upon on the underground rail-road.” Almost everywhere, women circulated antislavery petitions and held fairs where they sold homemade products to raise money for fugitives.
Ironically, no one did more to shape the enduring image of slavery and the Underground Railroad than a woman who opposed giving females the vote and harbored a not-so-secret envy for the genteel manners of Southern aristocrats. The daughter of a prominent New England theologian and the wife of a seminary teacher, Harriet Beecher Stowe seemed to see herself as a sort of literary missionary, an amanuensis to God who, she once said, “hath…sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captive, to set at liberty those who are bruised.” Though often emotionally overwrought and steeped in Victorian sentimentality, her blockbuster novel of 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, distilled the nation’s moral crisis over slavery so that it finally and overpoweringly penetrated the hearts of ordinary Americans in a way that a generation of abolitionist lecturing and the provocation of the Compromise of 1850 had not. Stowe canonized kindly, selfless Quakers as the quintessential heroes of the underground, leaving no room for African-American activists, or for working-class whites like Jonathan Walker and Seth Concklin. But she accomplished something truly extraordinary. She made abolitionism not only respectable, but romantic, and turned the underground from a vague rumor into a Homeric endeavor that was part Christian drama of self-sacrifice, part frontier saga ripped from the pages of James Fenimore Cooper.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin left readers by the millions seething with anger and shame. A decade later, as armies surged across the farmland of Virginia, Abraham Lincoln welcomed Stowe to the White House, where he is said to have greeted her as “the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.” Although the remark may be apocryphal, the Northern armies were filled with men who as boys had wept over the fate of Uncle Tom. Stowe based her eponymous composite hero partly on Josiah Henson, whose story had appeared in print in 1849. She portrayed Tom as a martyr who believed, as Henson had during his years in slavery, that if he accepted his fate in the spirit of Christ-like martyrdom, his earthly sufferings would be repaid with an eternity of divine love in the hereafter. Tom’s character in the novel troubled few if any of the leading African Americans of the day, nearly all of whom shared Stowe’s religious beliefs, and recognized the book’s importance as propaganda.
The single most memorable passage in the novel, indeed in all nineteenth-century American literature to readers of the day, and one that inspired countless previously neutral Americans to embrace the cause of abolitionism, recounted the flight of the fugitive mother “Eliza” across the frozen Ohio River. Stowe learned the story directly from Reverend John Rankin, to whose home in Ripley, Ohio, just such a mother had come one winter’s night in 1838. Although she might never know it, her flight that night was to achieve the dimensions of myth. Rankin’s son John was a student of Stowe’s husband at Lane Seminary, in Cincinnati, and the families were well acquainted. “One Sunday afternoon,” John Rankin Jr. recalled, “father and I called upon Prof. Stowe, in the presence of Harriet. Father told of the flight of the slave mother and child crossing the river on the ice. Stowe was greatly moved by the narrative, exclaiming from time to time, ‘Terrible! How terrible!’”
In Stowe’s rendering, Eliza races toward the banks of the frozen Ohio with a slave trader and his minions in close pursuit: “Right on behind her they came; and, nerved with strength such as God gives only to the desperate, with one wild cry and flying leap, she vaulted sheer over the turbid current by the shore, onto the raft of ice beyond. It was a desperate leap,—impossible to anything but madness and despair…The green fragment of ice on which she originally alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it, but she stayed there not a moment. With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and still another cake;—stumbling,—leaping,—slipping,—springing upwards again! Her shoes are gone,—her stockings cut from her feet,—while blood marked every step; but she saw nothing, felt nothing, til dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side.”
Virtually every literate American (and many who weren’t literate) knew Eliza’s story, if not from reading the novel itself, then from the numerous dramatic versions that remained staples of the popular stage well into the twentieth century. Unlike the stocky, very dark woman who found her way to Rankin’s house, Stowe’s Eliza was a fine-mannered, light-skinned mulatto and her son a virtually white child, the off
spring of a rape by her master—a potent combination of sentimentality, sexuality, racial coding, and moral outrage that was intended to wrench the heartstrings of nineteenth-century readers in the most violent possible way. In her martyred innocence, Eliza epitomized the tragedy of slavery as evangelical abolitionists saw it. Like the other characters in Stowe’s book, Eliza crossed the line into cliché, facilitating the degeneration of stage productions of the novel into the Jim Crow melodramas that also tranformed Uncle Tom into the icon of spineless servility that would disgust later generations. Nevertheless, as characters in the novel, Tom and Eliza were radical inventions with powerful ramifications, for they enabled countless white Americans to identify emotionally with African Americans for the first time.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin also provided the country’s first popular view of the Underground Railroad in action. Following her dramatic escape across the ice, the fictional Eliza Harris is directed to the Hallidays, a couple modeled closely on Levi and Catherine Coffin, whom Stowe also knew. “[T]all, straight, muscular” Simeon quotes scripture incessantly, while upon Rachel’s peach-fresh face “time had written no inscription, except peace on earth, good will to men.” At their home, Eliza and her son Harry are united with Eliza’s husband George, whose “atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away” beneath the sunny rays of the Hallidays’ benevolence. When George urges Simeon not to endanger himself on his family’s account, Simeon replies, with a loftiness that may have seemed less condescending to Victorian readers, “Fear not, then friend George; it is not for thee, but for God and man, we do it.” It may also have been more revealing of many underground activists’ real feelings than Stowe intended.
Bound for Canaan Page 46