No matter what Lincoln said, slaves who had access to any news at all realized that the chaos of war offered their best chance ever to escape. The borderlands began hemorrhaging slaves. On April 9, 1861, three days before the attack on Fort Sumter, the Detroit Daily Advertiser reported that 300 fugitives had passed through the city en route to Canada within the previous few days, 190 of them on April 8 alone. Houses and churches in Windsor were filled to overflowing, and it was only with difficulty that sleeping space of any kind could be found for them. Any action that weakened the South became a patriotic cause. Recalled one Cleveland underground man, “the excitement was such that the most radical Democrats would contribute to assist fugitives.”
Congress had almost unanimously declared in July 1861 that the purpose of the war was to defend the Constitution, not “overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions” of the states. However, as early as May, General Benjamin Butler, the federal commander at Fortress Monroe, at the mouth of the James River, in Virginia, was forced to confront the problem of fugitives when a Confederate colonel insisted that he return slaves who had fled into Union lines. Butler, a New York lawyer, replied that the Fugitive Slave Law did not apply in “a foreign country, which Virginia claimed to be,” and refused to yield them up. The War Department’s equivocation on the issue became the most powerful tool of emancipation the nation had yet produced: Butler was ordered not to deliberately interfere with the “servants” of peaceful citizens, but permitted to allow “contraband” slaves into his lines, and to put them to work.
Without quite meaning to do so, the federal government had undertaken the work of the Underground Railroad on a scale that would help destroy the plantation economy of the Confederacy. John Brown’s dream of a Subterranean Pass Way became an open highway wherever federal troops marched. Slaves poured by the thousands and tens of thousands into refugee camps behind Union lines. “The war ended the usefulness of the railroad,” the Detroit underground leader William Lambert told an interviewer in 1886, adding that the last fugitive he saw passed through that city in April 1862. “The line of freedom crossed the lakes and moved south, keeping step by step with the battle line of the union.” On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in all areas still in rebellion and not yet in Union hands. (However, it did not apply in slave states, such as Maryland and Kentucky, that had not seceded.) The proclamation was an open invitation to slaves to flee: what had once been treason was now government policy. That May, the Union began arming black troops.
As the lines of the Underground Railroad fell into disuse, its agents, conductors, and stationmasters offered themselves to the war effort. Five of John Rankin’s sons and a grandson, all of them underground veterans, would serve in the Union forces. Frederick Douglass, Jermain Loguen, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary (she had married a black Canadian businessman) worked vigorously throughout the war to recruit black volunteers for the Union cause. Harriet Tubman, serving as a spy in Union-occupied South Carolina, would become the first woman in American history to lead a detachment of troops in battle. Josiah Henson’s son Tom, who had taught him to read his first words, joined the Union navy, and was never heard from again. Joseph Hayden, who as a child had ridden out of slavery in Kentucky beneath the seat of the carriage driven by Calvin Fairbank, also saw service in the navy, on the Gulf Coast, and would die there in 1865. William Still resigned his job with the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office, and formed a company to supply coal to the Union army. Gerrit Smith, who recovered rapidly from his breakdown once the threat of prosecution was past, donated between twenty and twenty-five thousand dollars (between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand dollars in present-day terms) to the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission, to provide soldiers with medical care and Bibles on the front lines. Levi Coffin and many other Quakers worked heroically to improve living conditions in the often appallingly unsanitary refugee camps where so many “contrabands” lived out the war.
By 1863 the western battlefront had moved deep into Tennessee and Mississippi. But Kentucky remained an anomaly. Since it had never seceded from the Union, the federal government was scrupulous in respecting its laws, including those upholding slavery. Indeed, poor Calvin Fairbank, who had been arrested for “abducting” the slave Tamar, in 1851, was still in the state penitentiary thirteen years later, having endured during that time more than one thousand beatings, and a total of 35,105 stripes from a leather strap (he maintained a record). He was not released until 1864, by special order of the governor.
Bypassed by the war, Arnold Gragston continued his clandestine trips across the Ohio River. Although his nocturnal activities took an obvious toll on his daytime work, his master never asked him what he had been doing. Gragston suspected, in fact, that he might actually be some kind of “secret abolitionist” himself. “Sometimes,” he speculated, “I think he did know and wanted me to get the slaves away that way so he wouldn’t have to cause hard feelin’s by freein’ ’em.” Although Gragston never kept count, he guessed that he carried hundreds of fugitives across the river during the four years that he served the underground. However, one night in 1863, after rowing a cargo of fugitives to Ohio, he was spotted as he stepped back onto the Kentucky shore and, fearing that he was finally about to be caught, took to a fugitive’s life in the fields and woods.
Gragston was his own last passenger. “Finally I saw that I could never do any more good in Mason County, so I decided to take my freedom, too,” Gragston recalled. “I had a wife by this time, and one night we quietly slipped across and headed for Mr. Rankins’ bell and light. It looked like we had to go almost to China to get across the river; I could hear the bell and see the light on Mr. Rankins’ place, but the harder I rowed, the farther away it got, and I knew if I didn’t make it I’d get killed. But finally I pulled up by the lighthouse, and went on to my freedom.” It is possible that his journey north was the last triumphant escape on the Underground Railroad.
There was, of course, no official termination to the Underground Railroad. But if ever it had a symbolic end, it can be said to have come in April 1870, when blacks throughout the United States celebrated the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which extended suffrage to African Americans. At a huge interracial rally in Cincinnati, seventy-three-year-old Levi Coffin publicly relinquished the title of “president” of the Underground Railroad that had been conferred on him thirty years earlier by Southern slave hunters. “Our underground work is done,” he declared, “and as we have no more use for the road, I would suggest that the rails be taken up and disposed of, and the proceeds appropriated for the education of the freed slaves.”
On the same day, in Detroit, George DeBaptiste placed a sign in his store window that read: “Notice to Stockholders of the Underground Railroad: This office is closed. Hereafter all stockholders will receive dividends according to their merits.”
EPILOGUE
ON MARCH 10, 1913, Harriet Tubman died from pneumonia in the institution she had founded for aged and indigent African Americans at her home, in Auburn, New York. She had devoted much of the later years of her life to painstakingly raising funds for its establishment, a far less colorful labor than her years as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, but heroic in its own way, and consistent to the end with her lifelong devotion to the welfare of her people. In her ninety-one years, she had endured more privation and danger than almost any of her friends in the underground, yet she had outlived them all.
Thomas Garrett, who had declared after his conviction for harboring fugitives that he would go home and add another story to his house so that he could shelter more, was the first to go, in January 1871, at the age of eighty-one. Former fugitives whom he had helped to freedom were among the fifteen hundred people who crowded the Friends Meeting House in Wilmington, Delaware, for his funeral.
Jermain Loguen was next. After the Civil War, he traveled widely through Kentucky and Tennessee, pre
aching and setting up schools and churches for newly freed slaves, with the same whirlwind energy that he had brought to his underground work in Syracuse. In 1868 he was appointed a bishop of the AME Zion Church. Four years later, while preparing to set out for the Pacific Coast for a new round of missionary work, he died of tuberculosis, at the mineral springs near Saratoga, New York. He was about fifty-five years old.
Gerrit Smith continued his philanthropy in the years after the postwar period, including large donations to newly founded Howard University, for the education of African Americans. When he died suddenly from a stroke just after Christmas 1874, at the age of seventy-seven, the New York Times declared: “The history of the most important half-century of our national life will be imperfectly written if it fails to place Gerrit Smith in the front rank of the men whose influence was most felt in the accomplishment of its results.”
George DeBaptiste opened a catering business after the war. In his obituary, the Detroit Tribune noted that he “labored zealously for the improvement of the colored people of this city,” and especially for the desegregation of Detroit’s public schools. He died from cancer of the stomach, in February 1875. He was about sixty years old.
Levi Coffin continued to work for the welfare of former slaves, twice traveling to Europe to raise money for the Freedmen’s Aid Commission. After a long illness, he died in September 1877, at the age of seventy-nine. At his funeral, heavily attended by both black and white Cincinnatians, a relative, Charles Coffin, said of him, “The great question with him was not, is it popular, but is it right?”
The hardy Yankee seaman Jonathan Walker, the “Man with the Branded Hand,” died almost completely forgotten, in April 1878, at his home in Muskegon, Michigan, where he had eked out a living as a fruit farmer. He was seventy-nine.
Josiah Henson remained popular as a preacher at both black and white camp meetings in Canada. During a visit to England in 1877, he was introduced to Queen Victoria as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom,” a public role that he came to relish in his later years. He preached his final sermon at the age of ninety-four, on the last Sunday of April 1883. Three days later, he collapsed. At dawn on May 5, he lay in bed surrounded by children and grandchildren. He whispered to them before he died, “I couldn’t stay if I would, nor I wouldn’t if I could.”
Reverend John Rankin’s last months were spent in agony resulting from a cancer that slowly ate away his face, and entered his brain. He died in March 1886, aged ninety-three. He was buried in Ripley, Ohio, where from his hilltop home he had assisted so many refugees from slavery. A poem was read at his funeral: “Dear hero of our age, thy work is o’er/ Thou canst and needst no more thy warfare wage.”
In 1873 Lewis Hayden, the leader of the Shadrach rescue, became one of the first African Americans to be elected to a Northern state legislature, in Massachusetts. He remained an active community leader in Boston until his death in April 1889, when he was about seventy-eight years old.
George DeBaptiste’s coleader of the Detroit underground, William Lambert, continued to prosper in the tailoring business, eventually amassing a fortune of seventy thousand dollars. Toward the end of his life he became increasingly irrational, and in newspaper interviews claimed that “nearly 1,000,000 free negroes” had been inducted into the “secret rituals” of the underground, and that he had assisted 40,000 fugitives to freedom through Detroit. In 1890, at the age of seventy-one, he hanged himself.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary remained passionate and confrontational on behalf of civil rights causes for the rest of her life. In 1869 she was the first woman to enroll in the law school of Howard University. Five years later, she was among the first group of suffragettes to attempt, though without success, to vote in the District of Columbia. She was a popular feminist speaker until her death, at the age of seventy, in 1893.
Frederick Douglass lived long enough to see many of the gains that African Americans had made as a result of the Civil War undone by the politics of Jim Crow. An ardent supporter of the Republican Party after the war, he was rewarded with appointment as federal marshal for the District of Columbia by President Rutherford B. Hayes, and he later served as U.S. ambassador to Haiti. At the age of seventy-seven, on February 20, 1895, he returned home from a women’s rights convention in Washington, chatted for a while with his wife, then gasped, clapped a hand over his heart, and fell to the floor. Within twenty minutes, he was dead.
William Still’s coal business flourished, and he eventually became a prominent figure in Philadelphia business circles, serving as a member of the city’s Board of Trade, founding one of the first YMCAs for young African Americans, and lending his support to numerous charitable causes. He died of a heart attack in 1902, aged eighty-one.
With the death of Harriet Tubman, the living memory of the Underground Railroad passed into the realm of legend. But by then its real meaning had already been forgotten, as commitments made to the freed slaves were sacrificed to political expediency, and reconciliation among whites became more important than redress for the damage done to blacks by slavery. Even most abolitionists shared the laissez-faire philosophy of their time, and with it the assumption that slaves, once freed, ought to be able to make their own way in the open market without additional assistance from whites. With the abandonment of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the nation’s best chance to create the conditions for black economic and political equality were lost. The idealism of the antebellum era gave way to the revisionist mythology of the South’s “Lost Cause,” and the heroic role of African Americans in the Underground Railroad (and the Civil War) was consigned to a footnote in the nation’s collective memory. By the twentieth century, when the Underground Railroad was remembered at all, it was usually as a kind of national fairy tale, in which the fugitives themselves were cast only as bit players, and abolitionists stripped of their disturbing radicalism. Only in recent years have historians and local researchers, many of them African American, begun to chip away the encrustation of myth that encases the Underground Railroad, to reveal this extraordinary chapter in the nation’s history.
Looking back from the perspective of a century and a half, the meanings of the Underground Railroad seem both subtle and varied. Its most important achievement, obviously, was helping tens of thousands of enslaved Americans on their way to freedom. Just how many, however, is still uncertain. Every Southerner who lost a slave tended to blame the Underground Railroad. In the 1850s slave state census records reported about one thousand runaways per year, and on the eve of secession, a New Orleans newspaper asserted that 1,500 slaves had escaped from the South every year for the previous half century, at a cost of at least forty million dollars, more than one billion dollars in present-day terms. Not all slave escapes were recorded, but neither did all fugitives necessarily find their way to the Underground Railroad, or even to the free states. Modern estimates of the number of fugitives assisted by the underground between 1830 and 1860 range from 70,000 to 100,000, of whom perhaps one-third or one-quarter were delivered to Canada. When the often neglected period from 1800 to 1830 is added in, the total must be increased somewhat, but it is unlikely that the underground handled more than 150,000 passengers, at the outside, and 100,000 may be much closer to the mark.
It is similarly difficult to determine just how many Americans participated in the Underground Railroad. Its first historian, Wilbur Siebert, in his 1898 work The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, identified 3,211 individuals by name, nearly all of them white men. But he failed to take into account the large numbers of African Americans—possibly the majority—who risked their lives to help fugitives, or the fact that women who provided refugees with food, clothing, and advice were as much a part of the underground as were their husbands and brothers. There were, in addition, numerous support personnel, such as lawyers, businessmen, and the suppliers of clothing, who may not have harbored or conducted fugitives, but were essential to the system’s operation. At a minimum, three or four times the number e
stimated by Siebert must actually have worked intimately in the Underground Railroad.
But the importance of the underground cannot be judged just by numbers, or even by the inspiring quality of its great saga of dramatic escapes, recaptures, and feats of individual courage. The Underground Railroad came into existence in an America in which democracy was the property of white men alone, and in which free as well as enslaved blacks lived under conditions that had more in common with what we today call totalitarianism than many Americans might care to admit. The nation’s founders, as W. E. B. DuBois once wrote, made a Faustian bargain with the evil of slavery, “truckling, and compromising with a moral, political, and economic monstrosity,” in the hope that the democracy they invented would never have to pay a price for their accommodations. The abolitionist movement and its driving wedge, the Underground Railroad, forced Americans to think in new ways about that history of compromise, to face its moral consequences, and to realize that all Americans were, in some sense, prisoners to slavery, and shackled to the fate of the slave. Without the confrontational activists of the underground, the abolitionist movement might never have become anything more than a vast lecture hall in which right-minded, white Americans could comfortably agree that slavery was evil.
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