In Detroit, Bibb was drawn almost immediately into the work of the Underground Railroad, probably by one of its leading local figures, Reverend William Monroe of the Second Baptist Church, with whom Bibb studied grammar and public speaking. (He had already taught himself to write during his years in slavery, by copying words he noticed onto scraps of discarded paper.) Unique within the underground, by the 1850s and perhaps earlier, the Detroit group practiced elaborate rituals of membership that seem to have been roughly modeled on those of the Masons. Induction into what its members called the “African-American Mysteries” was cloaked in what another underground leader, the erudite radical William Lambert, described in an 1886 interview as a “good deal of frummery” in order to “give the deepest impression of the importance of every step.” There were three degrees of membership. Any man who attained the first degree, known as “Captive,” became eligible to conduct fugitives. Initiations into the “Mysteries” took place in a building near the riverfront, and were filled with grotesque symbols of slavery. First the candidate was told to stand outside a door while certain questions were solemnly put to him.
“What do you seek?”
“Deliverance,” he was to answer.
“How do you expect to get it?”
“By my own efforts.”
“Have you faith?”
“I have hope.”
Next, the candidate was shackled at the wrists, “clad in rough and rugged garments, his head was bowed, his eyes blindfolded, and an iron chain placed about his neck.” He was led through the door. Then, kneeling at an altar, he took a vow of secrecy and faith. The blindfold was removed, and he found himself surrounded by all the members of the lodge. He was required to wear the shackles to each meeting thereafter, until he qualified for the second degree, known as “Redeemed,” when he was required to submit—symbolically, one presumes—to the whip, the most loathed symbol of slavery, after which the shackles were finally struck off. For men who had worn shackles on Southern plantations, this must have been an incredibly intense, perhaps retraumatizing, experience, as they ritually relived the helpless, claustrophobic darkness of bondage, and were then released by, and into, a brotherhood of men of their own slavery-hardened kind. The highest degree, the “Chosen,” was subdivided into five phases: “Rulers,” “Judges and Princes,” “Chevaliers of Ethiopia,” “Sterling Black Knight,” and “Knight of St. Domingo.” To achieve this last stage, which was probably devised by the intellectual Lambert, the candidate had to memorize a lengthy text “dealing with the principles of freedom and the authorities on revolution, revolt, rebellion, government.” Bibb left no record of his own participation in such rituals, although he is known to have escorted many fugitives across the Detroit River to Canada.
However, there is no doubt that in Detroit Bibb underwent another profound experience that changed his life. He discovered his voice, and that with words he could forge the grief and rage that he felt over the loss of Malinda and his daughter into a weapon with which he could strike back publicly at the monolith of slavery. He first began to tell his life story to antislavery audiences in Detroit, then elsewhere in Michigan, and finally as far east as New England. Words were his salvation. He declared, “If I had a thousand tongues, I could find useful employment for them all.”
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act drove Bibb and his new wife, Mary, a well-educated black Quaker, across the Detroit River for greater safety in Canada. Although he physically moved only a few miles to the town of Sandwich, Bibb both emotionally and politically turned his back on the United States, and thereafter became the most eloquent of all fugitive advocates for emigration to Canada. His protest against slavery also took a bold new form. With financing from Gerrit Smith, he established Canada’s first black newspaper. Its name trumpeted Bibb’s intent: the Voice of the Fugitive. In its maiden issue, on January 1, 1851, he declared: “We need a press, that we may be independent of those who have always oppressed us. We need a press that we may hang our banners on the wall, that all who pass by may read why we struggle, and what we struggle for.” The Voice served as an unofficial organ of the Underground Railroad, and Bibb’s handsome, slender figure often could be seen at the Windsor wharf, where the ferry from Detroit docked, interviewing refugees as they stepped ashore. His articles were detailed and explicit. “Four able bodied men have just arrived in the promised land,” he announced in a typical notice, on March 26, 1851. “They look well, are in good spirits, rejoicing at the prospect of being rewarded hereafter for their honest labor, in a free country. Two of them are off this morning to chopping cord wood, the others are looking for employment.” Other articles announced the arrival of shipments of donated foodstuffs and clothing, advice on where to find work, and news of conditions in the black settlements, informing recent arrivals, for example, that they would find a good school at Colchester, and at Sandwich a temperance society as well as schools, churches, and a black-owned grocery store. The paper also offered fugitives advice on more general subjects, like education, crop prices, free trade, and ladies’ fashions.
In 1851, Bibb organized and chaired the landmark North American Convention of Colored People, which brought together in Toronto fifty-three leading black abolitionists, and a few whites, from Canada and the United States. In his keynote address, Bibb posed the central question to which all the labors of the Underground Railroad inexorably led: “What is the future of the black race on the North American continent?” What was ultimately to become of the twenty thousand (or thirty thousand) refugees whom the underground had delivered into the queen’s dominions? Was Canada to become the black homeland in North America? Or was it but a way station, where they would mark time until slavery was overthrown in the United States? “[T]he eye of the civilized world is looking down upon us to see whether we can take care of ourselves or not,” Bibb told the assembly. “If it should be seen, that under a free Government, where we have all our political and social rights, without regard to our color…we should prove ourselves to be incapable of self-government, it would bring down reproach and disgrace upon the whole race with which we are connected, and would be used as an argument against emancipation.”
For Bibb, part of the solution was the development of an archipelago of agricultural colonies in Canada and Jamaica, where large numbers of former slaves could learn self-sufficiency and independence, and which, he added, would also “give a new impulse to the Under-ground Railroad.” His own contribution, oratory apart, was the founding of the Refugee Home Society, in partnership with white abolitionists, to develop thirty thousand acres of farmland around Sandwich, exclusively for fugitives, to whom the land would be sold at cost. Bibb editorialized in the Voice of the Fugitive, “If we would be men and command respect among men, we must strike for something higher than sympathy and perpetual beggary. We must produce what we consume.” His ideological debt to Josiah Henson and the founding principles of the Dawn colony was made clear by his choice of the old man as the society’s president. Bibb himself would serve as its recording secretary, and its real leader.
Among those who attended the Toronto convention was a woman who would soon upset the entire black cosmos of Canada West. Mary Ann Shadd, at twenty-nine, was also a product of the underground world, although of a very different background from Bibb. Her father, Abraham, an affluent shoemaker, had served as an underground conductor in West Chester, Pennsylvania, throughout her childhood, and she no doubt grew up familiar with the sight of furtive refugees recuperating in the family home. She was, like Bibb, very light-skinned, and her small, often angry eyes burned like coals when she was impassioned. She was a born muckraker: well-educated, unabashedly opinionated, and highly articulate, she had already made a name for herself in African-American circles by publishing a remarkable attack on the influence of “corrupt” and “superstitious” black clergy over black communities. Inspired by what she heard at Toronto, she abandoned her job as a teacher in New York City and moved to Canada. When Bibb invite
d her to accompany him back to the Detroit River settlements, where there was a desperate need for teachers, she leaped at the chance. She settled at Windsor, opening a school in a drafty barracks left from the War of 1812, and taking on many of her students free of charge. Henry Bibb had no idea what he was in for.
Initially, the two got along well. They shared many of the same qualities: both were young, literary, and emblematic of a rising generation of black leaders who were already looking beyond slavery to a permanent Canadian home for refugee blacks. But their relationship soon soured. Bibb pragmatically believed that fugitives were most likely to be happy, at least initially, among their own people, and that for the foreseeable future they had to depend on the financial support of friendly whites to survive. Shadd argued that full black equality could only be achieved through complete integration with whites, and she was caustic about segregated communities of any type, no matter what the motivation, believing that they condemned blacks to second-class status. She also denounced outside fundraising as “begging” that “materially compromis[es] our manhood, by representing us as objects of charity.” There were also personal differences. Although she lacked Bibb’s capacity for personal leadership, Shadd was a type rare in her era, an independent, middle-class woman with a mind entirely her own, self-confident to a fault, unafraid to confront men on their own ground, and set on a professional career.
By 1852 Shadd’s relationship with Bibb had disintegrated completely. She came to believe that the Refugee Home Society was nothing less than a scheme to enrich Bibb and his supporters. She claimed that neighbors derided the society lands as “Bibb’s plantation,” and that the settlers who occupied the land were for the most part “shiftless” whiskey drinkers. She wildly denounced Bibb himself as an out and out fraud who had used donations to buy himself a house, a farm, and a boat, and had ignored the needs of the fugitives for whom he was “begging.” She even added, gratuitously, in a letter to a white missionary whom she knew would spread her accusations far and wide, “His chickens have been roosting on good fugitive clothes the entire season,” while the needy went about in rags. Although Bibb’s manifold talents appear to have stopped at the threshold of financial management, there is no evidence, apart from Shadd’s polemics, to prove that he was personally corrupt, or that his white colleagues in the project were anything but sincere. Wounded, he retorted in kind, referring to his nemesis as “Shadd-as-Eve-the-Evil,” and asserting dismissively that the only opposition to his projects came from “a set of half cracked, hot headed individuals.” In March 1853 Shadd established her own competing newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, the first ever in North America to be published by a black woman. Although the black abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward was listed as editor, most of the copy was written by Shadd herself, who distinguished its columns with her trademark crackling invective. The controversy between Bibb and Shadd ultimately served no one well, but it did show to fugitive slaves who had never enjoyed political life of any kind just what it meant to exercise the freedoms of speech and the press in a public debate over the way in which blacks were to be free. In their polemics, it is possible to see the foreshadowings of debates that would continue through the twentieth century, and beyond: over integration versus self-imposed segregation, over the financial obligations of whites to blacks, over the consequences of dependency on public welfare.
Caught amid the collateral damage of this journalistic warfare were the reputations of the Dawn colony and Josiah Henson, Bibb’s friend, whom the Provincial Freeman cruelly described as a “nigger driver” doing the bidding of white financial backers. There was no more evidence that Henson was personally dishonest than there was to convict Bibb. However, the old man’s limited management ability had finally proved inadequate to the complexities of overseeing a two-hundred-person community, developing a local economy, and operating the manual labor school. Financial records were chaotic, at best. A sawmill long championed by Henson had come to nothing. When the manager to whom Henson had leased it absconded with three boatloads of lumber, the unpaid workers vented their anger on the mill, and tore it down to its foundations. “Thus they ruthlessly destroyed this valuable building, the establishment of which had cost me so many anxious hours,” Henson would gloomily recall. “When it was gone, I felt as if I had parted with an old idolized friend.” Meanwhile, mounting debts kept him on a treadmill of fund-raising as far afield as Boston and London, precisely the image of “begging” from whites that so incensed Shadd.
Another problem was more subtle. Henson could proudly point out that the institute had educated some five hundred students since it opened in 1841, and that not one of them had been arrested for even a misdemeanor by the local police. But he had idealistically envisioned the colony as a sort of black utopia that would grow steadily more populous over time. What happened, in fact, was that immigrants typically acquired the skills that the institute offered—basic literacy, and a crash course in farming—and then moved on to someplace where they could earn more money. Dawn was a stepping stone to a better life in freedom, but it was rarely a final destination. Management of the institute was eventually taken over by a British abolitionist, John Scoble, who was supposed to reorganize the community’s finances, but who, in Henson’s words, squandered its meager resources on “the most expensive cattle in the market, at fancy prices,” and on “expensive farming utensils.” Scoble also pulled down the school buildings, “as they were too primitive to suit his magnificent ideas.” They were never rebuilt.
Perhaps Dawn’s fatal weakness, however, was Henson himself. The indomitable leader who had carried his children on his back across hundreds of miles of frontier wilderness to freedom, who had returned to Kentucky to lead away fugitive slaves, and who through force of personality had brought into existence one of the most ambitious black settlements in Canada, had in his mid-sixties become an imperious and self-righteous patriarch who could admit no wrong, telling critics simply that his hands were too full “feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and instructing the ignorant” to bother with carping complaints. He had also grown increasingly vain, boasting of his (probably slight) acquaintanceship with “some of the noblest men and women in England,” and dilating at embarrassing length upon his having enjoyed a picnic on the grounds of the prime minister’s estate, during one of his fund-raising trips to Britain. While he remained immensely popular as a preacher, in demand by both black and white congregations, Shadd’s attacks effectively marked the end of his political influence outside Dawn.
For Henry Bibb, the controversy with Shadd ended in personal catastrophe. In October 1853 fire wiped out the office of the Voice of the Fugitive. Bibb was virtually ruined. Arson was assumed. Bibb suspected Shadd’s partisans, but the culprits were never found. For a time he managed to put out an occasional single-sheet edition, but the paper never recovered its former influence. Bibb was still only thirty-nine years old, and as charismatic as ever, and for a man who had escaped from slavery seven times, the recovery of his fortunes and reputation might well have proved possible. Much was still expected of him. But in August 1854 he died suddenly from an undetermined illness, at the lowest ebb in his life as a free man, eclipsed by the star of Mary Ann Shadd. Meanwhile, if Shadd’s coruscating attacks did not cripple the Refugee Home Society by themselves, they didn’t help. In 1855, the touring abolitionist Benjamin Drew, who admired Bibb, found just twenty disappointed families living on the society’s lands, complaining about the terms of land purchase, restrictions on the reselling of property, and the ban on alcohol. No more than sixty families would ever settle there.
Bound for Canaan Page 48