“Poor Graham, the insane literary colored man, has been with us a day or two.
“Elder Cook and William Haines of Oneida depot arrive this evening. Mr. H. is a ‘medium,’ and speaks in unknown tongues.
“Dr. Winmer of Washington City, with five deaf mutes and a blind child take supper and spend the evening with us.
“We find Brother Swift and his wife and daughter at our house, where they will remain until they get lodgings. There come this evening an old black man, a young one and his wife and infant. They say they are fugitives from North Carolina.
“A man from _____ brings his mother, six children and her half sister, all fugitives from Virginia.
“An Indian and a fugitive slave spent last night with us. The Indian has gone on, but Tommy McElligott (very drunk) has come to fill his place.”
One day, in April 1848, the stream of pilgrims had included a rail-thin man with a shock of graying hair that grew thick and low on his bony brow, and extraordinarily penetrating steel-gray eyes. He introduced himself as a wool merchant from Springfield, Massachusetts, and said that he had read in the newspapers about Smith’s generous donations of land in the Adirondacks. Their encounter was one of the great moments in antislavery history, with ramifications that would resonate for many years to come, contributing its small but significant impetus to the nation’s acceleration toward civil war. They were a study in contrasts, the humorless guest and the gregarious host, with his broad intellectual face, “deep, flexible, musical voice,” and faultless manners. The stranger probably wore his customary crisp white linen shirt and brown woolen coat, and Smith almost certainly a broad collar and black ribbon upon his neck, his invariable costume, whatever the fashion.
It was a bad time for the man from Springfield. He was deeply in debt. (By itself, this hardly distinguished him from a great many of Smith’s visitors.) Piles of wool lay unsold in his warehouse. One of his sons was “proclaiming some form of ‘idolatry’ in Ohio.” Another was going blind from “an accumulation of blood on the brain.” But at the age of forty-eight, in spite of his personal sufferings and financial reverses, John Brown was convinced that God had chosen him for a special role, and that it was bound up with the abolition of slavery. He told Smith that he trusted utterly in a destiny ordained by God, and that if his maker chose such a fate for him, he would willingly lay down his life for the cause.
The stranger’s abolitionist credentials were impeccable. Like Smith, he knew with ferocious certainty that slavery was nothing less than a sin against God. His beliefs were rooted in a granitelike Calvinism that had been chiseled to finished form by the hard experience of a frontier childhood. When he was an infant, his family had carried him west in an ox-drawn wagon from Connecticut to the raw wilderness of frontier Ohio. An early ambition to enter the ministry had fallen prey to a combination of poverty and an eye inflammation that forced him to give up his studies. But there was still much of the minister in him. He despised card playing, dancing, and all forms of entertainment. Church attendance had been compulsory for the workers in the tannery that he once operated, and he had also insisted that they come to his home every day for Bible readings. Convinced that righteous punishment was an instrument of the divine, he flogged his sons for every infraction: eight lashes for disobeying their mother, three for “unfaithfulness at work,” eight for telling a lie.
At the age of thirty-seven, Brown had taken a personal vow before God to consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery. He and his abolitionist father, Owen Brown, a trustee of Oberlin College, had proven their commitment by serving as conductors on an underground line near Hudson, Ohio, which was known as “a rabid abolition town.” A friend of Brown, interviewed in 1879, said, “I’ve seen him come in at night with [a] gang of five or six blacks that he had piloted all the way from the river, hide them away in the stables maybe, or the garret, and if anybody was following he would keep them stowed away for weeks.” He had never hesitated to publicly denounce racism, even when he found it within his own church, where African Americans were required to sit on separate seats in the rear. Such discrimination made Brown so mad that he defiantly escorted some of the local blacks to his own family pew, an act that struck the rest of the congregation “like a bomb shell.” In Springfield, he had met Frederick Douglass, who was very impressed with him, having found him living humbly on a back street “among laboring men and mechanics.” Douglass had even mentioned him in his newspaper, the North Star, as a man who “though a white gentleman, is in sympathy, a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”
Brown told Smith that he had heard that the settlers in the Adirondacks were having difficulties. Only a handful of black families had taken up residence on the Smith lands. Smith had commissioned Jermain Loguen to inspect the settlement. Loguen reported back that although some of the tracts were “as good land as any man can need,” much of the region was poorly fitted for farming. Worse, he found that local men were charging would-be settlers exorbitant fees to guide them to their property, and swindling them out of their deeds. “My best advice to my brethren,” he warned, “is not to venture in search of their farms, unless they can read and write, or are in the company of tried friends who can do both.” The truth was, much of the land was simply impossible to farm profitably. The core of the settlement, in the township of North Elba, could be reached only by a single difficult road through the spectacular but remote valley of the Ausable River, and there was no market within scores of miles. In addition, even the most willing settlers needed wagons, livestock, tools, and basic supplies just to survive the next year, an investment that was beyond the means of the propertyless urban poor whom Smith had in mind. Brown made Smith an offer. “I will take one of your farms myself, clear it up and plant it, and show my colored neighbors how much work should be done; will give them work as I have occasion; look after them in all needful ways, and be a kind of father to them.”
Smith liked Brown’s piety, and his determination. He agreed to sell Brown 244 acres for one dollar an acre, on credit. The following May, bankrupt but afire with faith in his destiny, Brown moved his family—less one child, his youngest, who had just died from pneumonia—from Springfield to the deceptively blooming valleys of the Adirondacks. He was undeterred by the rugged boulder-strewn landscape, thickly forested with maple, oak, and spruce. They settled into a four-room farmhouse that looked out over valleys shimmering with goldenrod and four-thousand-foot-high Whiteface Mountain. Like Smith, he believed in the regenerative power of the wilderness. Far from the ruthless marketplace, the Adirondacks, like the hands of omnipotent God, would lift up the suffering black poor, and himself.
His goal was to transform the rag-tag settlement into a self-sufficient community. He hired black workers, sowed crops, helped rationalize confused boundaries, and prepared to take the community’s affairs in hand. Visitors occasionally stumbled into Brown’s mountain fastness. One of them, the celebrated author of Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana, was fascinated by this “tall, sinewy, hard-favored, clear-headed, honest-minded man,” who had the best cattle and best “farming utensils” for many miles around, as well as a teeming mob of children. Most of all, however, Dana was astonished to find the Browns, including even their daughters, dining equably with their black neighbors, addressing them as “Mr. Jefferson” and “Mrs. Wait,” and so on.
But Smith’s dream, and Brown’s, would never come to fruition. The problems that Loguen had identified early on only got worse. No more than one hundred people ever managed to make the move to Smith’s Adirondack lands, and only thirty-three of them would still be there in 1850. Within a few years, hundreds, if not thousands, of the parcels of land given away by Smith were being sold for taxes. If this left Brown feeling defeated once again, he did not record it. He had other, greater things in mind. Fermenting even now, as he sat in his cabin beneath the high peaks of the Adirondacks, was an apocalyptic p
lan to liberate slaves in numbers never before attempted. A “Subterranean Pass Way,” as he visualized it, would reach deep into the South, through Virginia and Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, even into Georgia. Along the way there would be posts manned by abolitionists and free blacks, all of them armed and ready to fight. It would drain the South of slaves utterly. It would be the apotheosis of the Underground Railroad.
CHAPTER 18
THE LAST TRAIN
I cannot now serve the cause I love so well better than to die for it.
—JOHN BROWN
1
One of the saddest incidents in the history of American slavery took place in Cincinnati, on the morning of January 28, 1856. The drama’s overture began the previous night, when several dark figures, bundled against the sub-freezing temperature, slipped from the slave quarters of Archibald Gaines’s plantation in northern Kentucky, and into a waiting sleigh. The driver, Robert Garner, had stolen it from the plantation where he lived, a few miles away. He sped north through the snowswept hills, flogging the horses until blood flecked their nostrils. Eight lives hung in the balance: Garner, his parents, two young boys and two infant daughters, and their mother, Garner’s common-law wife, Margaret, the story’s ultimate protagonist, a slight woman with a high forehead, “bright and intelligent” eyes, and scarred cheeks where, she would only say, “White man struck me.” Around 3 A.M., they reached the Ohio River at Covington, and slipped and stumbled down the steep bank, past the ghostly shapes of riverboats locked in the ice. Unseen, they crossed safely to Cincinnati, on the northern shore, putting behind them what should have been the most dangerous part of their break for freedom.
Their destination was the home of Margaret’s cousin, Elijah Kite, who lived two miles from the river. The waterfront was as silent now as the snow, as they struggled to make their way through the unfamiliar maze of streets, stopping several times to ask directions. They reached Kite’s house just before dawn. After building a fire to thaw his frozen guests, Kite hurried off toward the home of Levi Coffin, a mile and a half away, to set the machinery of the Underground Railroad in motion. Although the fugitives did not know it, Margaret’s owner, Archibald Gaines, and a posse were in hot pursuit. By the time Kite reached Coffin’s house at Sixth and Elm, they were already in Cincinnati.
Coffin had moved to Cincinnati in 1847, to open a “free labor emporium,” which sold only goods that had not been produced by slave labor. He brought nearly three decades of experience to the city’s underground, and had helped to make it one of the most efficient in the country. His collaborators included stevedores and cartmen, black entrepreneurs like the elite seamstress Kitty Doram, churchmen, businessmen, and a reserve of white abolitionist lawyers who donated their time to the defense of fugitives, among them future President Rutherford B. Hayes. By the time the Civil War brought an end to his work, Coffin would estimate that he had handled some three thousand fugitives since his early underground days in North Carolina. He never knew how many fugitives might appear at his door on any given day. If there were only a few, he hid them in his own attic. Bigger parties were scattered in different parts of the city, until they could be sent north. But Kite found Coffin at a loss. Operatives whom he would normally mobilize to help a party as large as the Garners’ were already engaged with another group of fugitives who had crossed the river in the night and, as luck would have it, had reached Coffin earlier. He directed Kite to hurry the Garners for the time being to a safer location on the city’s outskirts, promising that by nightfall he would have them aboard a northbound “train” of the Underground Railroad.
It was 8 A.M. when Kite returned home. He may have been followed, or it may have been sheer coincidence, but minutes after his arrival a lookout cried, “They are coming!” The fugitives rushed to bar the doors and windows. A deputy demanded their surrender in the name of the United States government. Robert and Elijah Kite drew guns. Margaret screamed to her mother-in-law, “Before my children shall be taken back to Kentucky, I shall kill every one of them!” Hundreds of blacks had gathered outside, and with decisive leadership they might have rescued the Garners before anything worse happened. But the deputies seized the initiative. Two of them tried to force their way in. Margaret seized a carving knife, and before anyone realized what she was doing she cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter, Mary—newspapers would hint that she was Archibald Gaines’s child—nearly decapitating her. Using planks as clubs and battering rams, the deputies broke through the door and windows. Robert shot one of them in the face, but before he could fire again, Gaines yanked the gun from his hand. In the pandemonium, Margaret tried to cut the throats of the two boys, but they scrambled, bleeding but not badly hurt, underneath the bed. She was in the act of swinging a shovel at the head of her ten-month-old infant, Cilla, when the deputies tore it away from her.
The mood of the Garner trial captured a certain shift in the historical wind, pointing like a moral pennant toward the vaster brutality that was soon to come. Guerrilla armies were already on the march in Kansas, as newspapers across the country reported every detail of the case with a prurient fascination that would later be perfected by twentieth-century tabloids. The trial is recounted in poignant detail by Steven Weisenburger in Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South. Militant abolitionists hardly saw the slaughter of little Mary Garner as a crime at all, but rather as a form of mercy killing, and they embraced Margaret not as a murderess but as a martyr. “If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right to do so?” the women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone asked in a speech in the courtroom. John Jolliffe, the abolitionist attorney who represented Garner, declared that Garner’s dead child was not a victim of her mother’s hand at all, but of the Fugitive Slave Law, a law so barbarous “that its execution required human hearts to be wrung and human blood to be spilt.” In a provocative and clever move, Jolliffe had state arrest warrants issued against the Garners, charging Margaret with murder and the others with complicity, to prevent them from being carried back into Kentucky. His aim was not to hang her, but to put the law itself on trial in a free Ohio court. For a time, it seemed that blood might really be spilled on the streets of Cincinnati, as the antislavery city sheriff’s office and the proslavery federal commissioner’s office fielded rival armed forces. President Franklin Pierce, a proslavery New Hampshire Democrat, even took a role, instructing Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, to mobilize federal troops to ensure that order was maintained, and the Fugitive Slave Law enforced.
Through everything, Margaret Garner sat impassively, perhaps in shock, dressed in dark calico, with a yellow handkerchief wound around her head as a turban. As a slave, of course, she was never called upon to testify, either to defend herself or to explain her actions. To no one’s real surprise, the judge ruled in favor of the slaves’ owners, and on March 7, five weeks after they began their flight, the Garners were returned in chains to Kentucky. Southerners treated the case as a terrific victory. One Kentuckian was heard to remark, “We’ve got that damned abolition state under foot now, and by God we’ll keep it there.” In Covington, an Ohio reporter observing the Garners’ return was set upon by a mob, who beat him to the ground and threatened to set him afloat on the Ohio River on a cake of ice.
But Margaret Garner’s terrible odyssey was not yet over. On March 7, the Garners were loaded onto the steamboat Henry Lewis, bound for a cotton plantation the Gaines family owned in Arkansas. At four o’clock the next morning, just above Owensboro, Kentucky, the Henry Lewis was struck by a northbound steamboat and split in two, knocking passengers out of their beds, and sending them screaming into the icy river. In the chaos, Margaret Garner was seen standing with Cilla in her arms near the gunwale. What happened next was never clear. She may have thrown the baby into the river and jumped in after it, in hope of swimming to the Indiana shore. Or perhaps
she intended for them both to die. A black cook jumped into the water and pulled Margaret to safety. But Cilla’s body was never found. According to one newspaper report, Margaret displayed “frantic joy” when she was told that her child was drowned.
The surviving Garners were loaded onto another boat the next day, and delivered to their destination in Arkansas. Margaret would live for two more years, finally dying at the age of about twenty-five, from typhoid fever. Her last words to her husband were, “Never marry again in slavery.”
The gruesome tragedy of the Garners reminded underground workers, if they needed reminding, that a failed rescue was often a matter of life and death. It was also further proof to a much broader spectrum of Northerners that complacent lip service to the principles of abolition would not be enough to end slavery’s horrors. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, in 1850, had awakened whites to the price in personal liberty that they were expected to pay in order to protect slavery in the South. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had enabled them to grasp the agony of slavery in an emotional way, undoubtedly a factor in the outpouring of sympathy that whites expressed for Margaret Garner’s terrible act. Now personal liberty laws that in some states had fallen into disuse were reinstated or strengthened, forbidding the use of state jails to hold fugitives, and barring state judges and officials from helping Southern masters reclaim their lost “property.” In Massachusetts, any official who granted a certificate permitting the removal of a fugitive from the state was instantly and permanently disbarred from holding state office. In other states, officials who violated similar statutes were punished with anywhere from five hundred dollars and six months in jail in Pennsylvania, to two thousand dollars’ fine and ten years in prison in Vermont. In much of the North, the hated Fugitive Slave Law became a virtual dead letter. Even where antislavery laws were weaker, local authorities increasingly made the recovery of fugitives as expensive and time-consuming as possible. Benoni S. Fuller, for example, the sheriff of Warrick County, Indiana, bluntly replied to proslavery citizens who complained to him that fugitives were coming through the county by the hundreds, “Let ’em!” What made Fuller’s statement particularly striking was that he was no evangelical abolitionist, but a Democrat. Old orthodoxies were boiling away.
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