From the Halliday home, the Harrises and two other fugitives are driven north in a covered wagon by a Quaker backwoodsman named Phineas Fletcher. Slave hunters are in hot pursuit, and a spirited chase takes place through the night. The fugitives and their conductor eventually flee up the side of a mountain that rather implausibly appears in the middle of the Indiana plains. There, poised histrionically upon a naked crag, George proclaims, as much to America as to his snarling pursuers below, “I am George Harris. A Mr. Harris of Kentucky did call me his property. But now I’m a free man, standing on God’s free soil; and my wife and child I claim as mine.” A gun battle ensues. Harris shoots the boldest of the slave catchers, and the others flee pell-mell. In keeping with Stowe’s all-encompassing Christian agenda, the fugitives take pity on their erst-while enemy, scoop him up in their arms, and carry him to an underground safe house where he is nursed back to health. The fugitives, meanwhile, are disguised and delivered to the wharf in Sandusky, where they are escorted aboard a ship under the very noses of slave hunters who are searching for them. Soon, Stowe orotundly concludes, “rose the blessed English shores; shores charmed by a mighty spell,—with one touch to dissolve every incantation of slavery, no matter in what language pronounced.”
Harriet Tubman was unimpressed. She could not read the actual book, of course. But she was once invited to attend a stage performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Philadelphia, where she was working as a domestic, but she declined. “I haint got no heart to go and see the sufferings of my people played out on de stage,” she said. “I’ve seen de real ting, and I don’t want to see it on no stage or in no teater.”
CHAPTER 17
LABORATORIES OF FREEDOM
The eye of the civilized world is now looking down upon us.
—HENRY BIBB, JOURNALIST AND FUGITIVE SLAVE
1
On Christmas Eve, 1854, Harriet Tubman made her way on foot over low rain-soaked hills toward her parents’ cabin near Poplar Neck, on the middle Choptank. The wet night shrouded her diminutive figure from curious eyes as she approached the Thompson plantation, where it occupied a lonely swath of woodland overlooking the river. How she reached Poplar Neck is unknown. Using false papers, she may have taken a steamer from Baltimore to Cambridge, Maryland, or a point farther up the Choptank, or she may have traveled south from Philadelphia by train, and then overland through Delaware. In any event, sometime before dawn, she slipped into a fodder shed that stood near the Rosses’ cabin, and waited. She was a different woman from the tough but untried twenty-seven-year-old who had fled north in 1849. She was now a seasoned underground veteran who had made at least three trips back into Maryland since the rescue of Kessiah Bowley. If all went well, before the night was out she would see her three enslaved brothers, and then lead them north to freedom.
Tubman had brought out one brother, Moses Ross, in 1851. She had attempted to bring the others, Ben, Robert, and William Henry, the previous spring, but failed. She returned to Philadelphia, where she worked in kitchens for a dollar a week, until in December she learned that the three were to be sold after Christmas. Tubman had a friend write on her behalf to Jacob Jackson, a free black who lived near her brothers at Tobacco Stick, and must have been one of her secret collaborators in Dorchester County. Encoded in the letter was a cryptic message that she trusted Jackson to pass on to her brothers: “Read my letter to the old folks, and give my love to them, and tell my brothers to be always watching unto prayer, and when the good old ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step aboard.” The letter was signed with the name of Jackson’s son. Tubman could only hope the white postmaster, who censored Jackson’s mail as a matter of course, would ignore the message as pious gibberish. The risk to Jackson was extreme—he was already suspected of having helped other slaves to escape—but perhaps the urgency of the brothers’ situation overcame Tubman’s usual scruples about safety. In the end, Jackson claimed that the letter made no sense to him, and refused to even take it out of the post office. But he knew what it meant, because he immediately let the Ross brothers know that Tubman was on her way, and to head for Poplar Neck, thirty miles to the north.
Ben and William Henry Ross set off across country as soon as they could, taking with them two male friends, John Chase and Peter Jackson, and Ben’s fiancée Jane, who disguised herself in men’s clothing. Robert Ross faced an agonizing dilemma. His wife, Mary, went into labor on Christmas Eve with their third child, and he was torn between the pull of family and the hope of freedom. As Tubman recounted the story to her first biographer, Sarah Bradford, Robert waited until the baby was delivered and then, forced to decide between his family and what might be his last chance for freedom, chose the latter. He told his wife that he was just going to try to hire himself out for the holiday, and left her to join his brother. Mary sensed somehow that he was not coming back. “You’re going to leave me,” she sobbed. “But wherever you go, remember me and the children.”
The brothers and their friends hurried north along the winding route of present-day Highway 16, through East New Market and Preston, past miles of stubbly cornfields, ice-crusted marsh, and gloomy, gray-green phalanxes of loblolly pines gaunt against the iron-colored sky. That was the visible landscape: over it, like a gossamer web, lay a less palpable human landscape of extended families and hidden underground affinities that may not even have been wholly visible to the brothers, and that indeed may have been linked only through the person of Harriet Tubman herself. They passed the house of Samuel Green, a free black man, who was another one of her local contacts, and farther along, near the ford over Hunting Creek, the farm of the Quaker abolitionist Jonah Kelly, and soon after that, prominent at the crest of a gentle hill, the brick home of Hannah Leverton, the white mill owner’s wife who had probably arranged Tubman’s flight in 1849. (Before the 1850s were out, Green would be jailed for possessing road maps and a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a lynch mob would come looking for the Levertons, and they would be forced to flee for their lives to Indiana.)
By daybreak, Tubman and her brothers had made their rendezvous. Her emotions can only be imagined as they came through the shed’s door, exhausted, one by one: Robert, thirty-five and well-built; Ben Jr., the shrewd one, chestnut-colored like herself; and long-legged William Henry, with his handsome oval face, who was also leaving two small children and a wife behind. It was an annual Christmas custom for the sons to gather for dinner at the home of their parents—Ben Sr. and Rit Ross—and the scene that played out that long rainy day is one of the most famous in Tubman’s life: Tubman and her brothers in the shed, waiting for the rain to end, and peering through chinks in the walls at their mother, who, ignorant of their presence, appears again and again at her cabin door, distraught and wondering why her children have not come. At some point, one of the brothers’ friends, a stranger to the elder Rosses, was sent to tell their father about the group hidden in the corn crib, and he brought them out packets of food. But as much as they wished to bid farewell to their mother—Harriet had not seen her parents for five years—they deemed her love to be their greatest danger, fearing that if they revealed themselves, she would lose control of her emotions, and give them away.
They set out after nightfall, with Ben Sr. walking with them part of the way, wearing a handkerchief tied over his eyes, so that if he was questioned later he could truthfully say that he had not seen any of his children that Christmas. Tubman’s destination was Wilmington, Delaware, eighty-five miles north, and then Philadelphia, another thirty miles farther on. She knew the route well by now. They traveled along roads that were troughs of red mud, across a soaking land that was intermittently brought to life by flotillas of white gulls and the aerial scrimshaw of Canada geese wheeling high overhead. They somehow sneaked through, or around, the towns of Harmony, Denton, and Greensboro, and then crossed the state line near Sandtown. Given the distance that they had to cover, Tubman may have arranged for wagons to carry them part of the way. But they doubtless walked much of it. When
they arrived in Wilmington, Thomas Garrett, the stationmaster there, wrote ahead to the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery office, “Harriet and one of the men had worn the shoes off their feet, and I gave them two dollars to help fit them out, and directed a carriage to be hired at my expense, to help take them out.” He added that two more fugitives had just arrived in Wilmington, and that he was assigning “one of our trusty colored men” to conduct the enlarged party, probably via the secluded valley of the Brandywine Creek, to the home of Allen Agnew across the state line in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
Five days after leaving Poplar Neck, Tubman and her companions entered William Still’s office, in Philadelphia. Here they were issued fresh clothing and food by Still’s assembly-line operation, and in a rite of passage that for countless fugitives symbolized their transformation from enslaved to free people, they relinquished their birth name of Ross, and adopted the new name Stewart which, curiously enough, was the name of one of Dorchester County’s most prominent white families. On December 31, after a day’s rest, Still gave three dollars to each member of the party except Harriet, to whom he gave four dollars, and forwarded them by railroad to New York City, where they boarded another train for Albany. There, with help from Stephen Myers, the director of the local Vigilance Committee, they were sent, again by train, to either Syracuse or Rochester, and finally across Lake Ontario by steamship to St. Catharines, near the mouth of the Niagara River, in Canada West.
They were welcomed by Tubman’s friend, the unctuous missionary Hiram Wilson, who had cofounded the Dawn Institute with Josiah Henson. Fired by the institute for financial incompetence, he was now the head of the St. Catharines Refugee Slaves’ Friend Society, the local agency of the Underground Railroad. Neither time nor man had been kind to Wilson. Although enemies sneeringly called him a “designing white man” more interested in dominating refugees than helping them, his devotion to what he pompously liked to term “strangers of the sable hue” was genuine enough. Between 1850 and 1856, he took well over one hundred refugees into his own home, and distributed food, clothing, Bibles, medicine, and advice to many more. However, blacks who had established themselves in Canada no longer wanted to think of themselves as the pathetic objects of charity, but as the engineers of their own liberation, a process in which whites, even the most dedicated abolitionists, played an increasingly ambiguous role, when they played any role at all.
2
For refugees in Canada, the decade of the 1850s was one of striving, and considerable success. In 1855 the Boston educator and sometime journalist Benjamin Drew traveled through refugee communities in Canada, interviewing hundreds of former slaves, many of whom had come north on the Underground Railroad. They spoke with as much eloquence about their experience of freedom as they did of their years in bondage. William Grose, who had been living in Canada for several years, told him that he had been astonished to find blacks who owned farms and stores, and that he had since come to know several who had even become rich. “As a general thing, the colored people are more sober and industrious than in the states; there they feel when they have money, that they cannot make what use they would like of it, they are so kept down, so looked down upon,” he observed. “Here they have something to do with their money, and put it to a good purpose.” He added that his whole way of thinking about racial differences had changed: “When in the United States, if a white man spoke to me I would feel frightened, whether I was in the right or the wrong. But now it is quite a different thing,—if a white man speaks to me, I can look him right in the eyes—if he were to insult me, I could give him an answer. I have the rights and privileges of any other man…I am a true British subject and I have a vote every year as much as any other man.”
Some refugees complained of “negrophobia” and discrimination, but the law remained steadfastly unbiased, and blacks enjoyed ready access to work in virtually every field of employment. It was not unusual for newcomers with even modest means to open a boardinghouse or some other small business. Within months of his escape from Boston via the Underground Railroad, Shadrach Minkins was running a restaurant in Montreal. Jerry Henry quickly found work as a barrel maker and, along with a letter promising to live “a purer, better life,” he was soon able to send a fine hand-carved hickory cane to the mayor of Syracuse as a gift of thanks for his rescue from the hands of his captors. In the burgeoning town of Chatham, “the great resting place of the fugitives after landing on the Canadian shore,” where almost one-third of the population was black, James Bell operated a school on the top floor of his house, grocers Henry and Annie Weaver prospered selling smoked hams, and Monroe Jones was regarded as the best gunsmith in the vicinity: all were escaped slaves. “If any man doubts the genius, enterprise, and fidelity of our people to all the claims of manhood, let him visit the colored population of Chatham,” the Syracuse underground agent Jermain Loguen wrote in an open letter after a tour of Canada, in 1856.
Estimates of the total number of refugees in Canada varied wildly, and still remain controversial. Even as the underground fed fugitives across the border at a steady rate, other crosscurrents of migration caused the Canadian black population as a whole to fluctuate greatly. Each time there was a widely publicized recapture of a fugitive in the United States, a wave of free African Americans would uproot themselves and move to Canada for safety. At the same time, others who had settled in Canada returned to the United States, where wages were higher, or to be closer to their families. Still others, like Harriet Tubman, who kept a home in St. Catharines through much of the 1850s, were part-time residents and moved back and forth across the border at will. In 1848 Hiram Wilson estimated there to be slightly under twenty thousand fugitives in Canada. Five years later, after the mass influx generated by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the black journalist Mary Ann Shadd put the figure at thirty-five thousand. Other estimates ranged as high as forty thousand, and beyond. However, a modern scholar who has closely studied census records of the period concluded that in 1861 there were probably only between twenty thousand and twenty-three thousand blacks in all of Canada West, including those born in Canada, even taking into account the likelihood that some fugitives deliberately avoided being counted. The real figure is likely to lie somewhere between those proposed by modern analysis and the unscientific estimates of people on the spot.
By the 1850s Canadian blacks comprised a remarkably diverse range of men and women from different parts of the South and North. One of the most ambitious of them all was the journalist Henry Bibb, whose brief, tumultuous career poignantly suggests the opportunities, and the risks, that were opening up for fugitives in Canada, as they invented new lives in freedom. Bibb’s handsome, angular face stares out from period daguerreotypes with an impression of lively spontaneity that was rare in nineteenth-century photography. His eyes—they were gray, and apparently very seductive—still engage a viewer with the magnetic intensity with which they reportedly “enchained” antebellum audiences, as he recounted one of the most heartbreaking of all slave narratives.
Bibb was born in northern Kentucky of a slave mother and a white father, a state senator, in 1815. Although without formal education, he was bright and observant. “All that I heard about liberty and freedom to the slaves I never forgot,” he later wrote. “Among other good trades I learned the art of running away to perfection.” When he was eighteen, he fell passionately in love with a girl named Malinda, a “dark-eyed, red-cheeked” mulatto who, in Bibb’s revealing choice of words, “moved in the highest circle of slaves.” She inspired in him a degree of devotion, not to say obsession, that would shape the next thirteen years of his life. They formalized their relationship with a personal commitment, since marriage between slaves was not permitted in Kentucky, and Malinda soon bore Bibb a daughter. Hoping to raise his family in freedom, he searched for a way to escape. One day, instead of going to work, he crossed the river to Indiana and boarded a steamboat for Cincinnati. A black man whom he approached on the street led him to the hom
e of a white abolitionist, who fed him and started him on the way to Canada, with recommendations to “friends” along the way. He spent the winter in the black enclave of Perrysburgh, Ohio, and in the spring traveled on to Detroit, where he bought an assortment of dry goods, intending to peddle them on his way back to Kentucky, determined to retrieve Malinda and his daughter.
From this point on, Bibb’s life became an odyssey of epic dimensions. Ignoring the pleading of his friends, he set off for Kentucky wearing false whiskers and a disguise. He succeeded in safely reaching his old home, where he arranged with Malinda to meet him in Ohio. Bibb then returned to Cincinnati, where he appealed to abolitionists for money to pay his family’s traveling expenses to Canada. Betrayed by a pair of black informers, he was dragged bodily through the streets and handed over to the authorities, and by them to his owner. Shortly after his return to Kentucky, Bibb escaped again. After a hurried visit to Malinda, he traveled back to Perrysburgh, where he waited in vain almost nine months for her to arrive. Despite what had already happened to him, and again over the protests of friends, he set off once again for Kentucky. He reached Malinda’s cabin safely, but a slave go-between betrayed him for a five-dollar reward.
After this episode, Bibb’s disgusted owner sold the entire Bibb family to a slave trader who transported them to New Orleans. There they were purchased by a Methodist minister named Whitfield, who owned a plantation in upcountry Louisiana. After an attempted escape with his wife and daughter, Bibb was stripped, staked spreadeagled to the ground, and savagely flogged, first with a bull whip, and then with a flat wooden paddle. For weeks afterward, he was also made to wear a heavy iron collar with prongs extending above his head, on the end of which dangled a small, humiliating bell. Perhaps most painful of all, he was never again allowed to sleep with his family. After yet another failed escape, Whitfield sold Bibb away from his wife and child to a company of itinerant “sportsmen,” who took him across the Red River into Texas, where they spent time horse racing and gambling. “Although they were wicked black legs of the basest character, it is but due to them to say, that they used me far better than ever the deacon did,” Bibb wrote, paying him a little money almost every day for attending to their horses, and driving the wagon in which they carried their clothing, baggage, and “gambling apparatus.” At a horse race in the Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, the gamblers sold Bibb to a wealthy Cherokee for nine hundred dollars in gold. When the Indian died suddenly a few months later, Bibb made a great show of grief, and then fled in the night. He followed the Missouri state boundary line due north to Jefferson City, passing in terror through several tribes of Indians, “afraid to enter any of their houses or wigwams,” and unnerved by the “implements of death”—bows and arrows, tomahawks, guns, butcher knives—that they invariably carried. At Jefferson City, Missouri, Bibb sneaked aboard a steamboat bound for St. Louis by mingling unobtrusively with the deck passengers. In St. Louis, a black steward arranged passage for him aboard a boat headed to Ohio. After working for a time as a bootblack and porter in the river town of Portsmouth, Ohio, in January 1842, Bibb finally arrived in Detroit, where he would establish the first secure home that he had enjoyed for almost a decade. But his odyssey was not quite ended. Through everything, he never forgot Malinda and their daughter. In 1846 he set off once more for the South. Although he never saw his family again, he got close enough to learn, devastatingly, that Malinda had finally abandoned hope of rescue, and had become the acquiescent concubine of her master. “From that time,” he wrote, “I gave her up into the hands of an all-wise Providence.”
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