Bound for Canaan (26 page)

The twenty-year-old Bailey had grown up on plantations on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Three years earlier, he had planned an escape by boat, similar to the lame James Smith's, but had been betrayed at the last minute by a black informer. Luckier than many would-be fugitives, he was brought by his master to Baltimore, where he was put to work learning caulking. (He helped build three ships for the slave trade, the
Delorez
, the
Teayer
, and the
Eagle
.) In Baltimore, perhaps the freest city in the South for blacks, he had lived in a state of negotiated slavery, eventually hiring out his own labor and paying his master a fee of three dollars at the end of each week, and providing for his own board and lodging. By the time he decided to flee northward, he had already acquired a common-law wife, a free woman named Anna Murray. Although he was living a life far
more autonomous than that of a field hand, even relative freedom proved infectious. “I could see no reason why I should, at the end of each week, pour the reward of my toil into the purse of my master,” he wrote in later life. “When I carried to him my weekly wages, he would, after counting the money, look me in the face with a robber-like fierceness, and ask, ‘Is this all?'” Bailey's discontent grew, and it took all the self-control that he could muster to suppress the rage that threatened always to get the better of him.

Sometime in the summer of 1838, he and Anna worked out a plan for his escape. Bailey had saved some money from his work on the docks. Anna sold a featherbed and added the proceeds to his nest egg. On September 3, dressed in a sailor's red shirt and flat, broad-brimmed hat, carrying seaman's papers lent to him by a friend, and feeling as terrified as “a murderer fleeing from justice,” Bailey stepped aboard a train for Wilmington, Delaware. Three times along the way he saw men who knew him, two of them white. Bailey was sure that one of the whites, a German blacksmith, recognized him too, but to the fugitive's immense relief the man apparently hadn't the heart to betray him. At Wilmington Bailey boarded a steamboat for Philadelphia, and by that afternoon he was riding northward on a train to New York. Less than twenty-four hours after he left Baltimore, Manhattan's teeming waterfront came into view.

The “unspeakable joy” that Bailey felt upon his arrival in New York was subverted by raw fear. Soon after landing, he encountered another fugitive slave whom he had once known in Maryland, who warned him forcefully that no one in New York could be trusted. The city, he said, was full of Southerners and hired men on the lookout for fugitives, and even blacks would betray him for a few dollars. The man was even frightened of Bailey, for fear that he too might be a spy. Afraid to ask for work, Bailey roamed the streets day and night, he recalled years later, “without home, without acquaintance, without money, without credit, without work, and without any definite knowledge as to what course to take or where to look for succor.” Finally, with trepidation, he took the risk of divulging his plight to a friendly black sailor named Stewart, who approached him near the Five Points, in front of “The Tombs.” After providing him with some refreshment at his own house nearby, the seaman led Bailey the few blocks to David Ruggles's home, on Lispenard Street. Bailey remained hidden there for several days while Ruggles arranged for Anna Murray to come to
New York from Baltimore. “Notwithstanding my hopeless, houseless, and helpless condition,” Bailey would write, the two were formally married in Ruggles's home, by the Reverend James W. C. Pennington of the Congregational church, who nine years earlier had himself escaped from slavery in Maryland, as the fugitive blacksmith Jim Pembroke.

As was the case for so many others, physical escape had been only the first step in Pembroke's liberation, a process that was to take years, before he had achieved what he regarded as true independence of mind and soul. After leaving William Wright's farm, near Gettysburg, in 1829, Pembroke had spent seven months working for another Quaker family near Philadelphia, and then made his way to New York, where he settled in a small town in the present-day borough of Queens. There, having adopted the name Pennington, he began attending school, and for the first time learned how many slaves there actually were in the United States. “The question completely staggered my mind,” he later wrote, “and finding myself more and more borne down with it, until I was in an agony; I thought I would make it a subject of prayer to God, although prayer had not been my habit, having never attempted it but once.” For three weeks he prayed and fasted, asking himself over and over, “What shall I do for the slave?” He resolved to train for the ministry. After mastering “logic, rhetoric, and the Greek testament, without a master,” and—an even harder task—at last “throwing off the crouching aspect of slavery,” he had recently been licensed to preach.

As Jim Pembroke had done, Frederick Bailey now selected for himself a new name, which both concealed his old identity and symbolized his rebirth as a free man: Frederick Johnson. He had been intending to go to Canada, but Ruggles argued against it. Having learned that the fugitive was an experienced ship's caulker, Ruggles decided to send him to New Bedford instead, telling him that he should easily be able to get work there. After the wedding, Ruggles presented the “Johnsons” with a five-dollar bill and their marriage certificate, proof of a sacrament that was all but denied to slaves in the South. Johnson then hoisted one part of their baggage onto his shoulder and Anna the rest, and with Ruggles in the lead they set out for the waterfront, where Ruggles personally placed them aboard the steamboat
John W. Richmond
bound for Newport, Rhode Island.

The Johnsons were taken in hand at Newport by two friendly
Quakers, who kept them company in the overland stagecoach to New Bedford. Ruggles had provided them with a letter of introduction to Nathan Johnson, a confectioner and one of the most prominent blacks in a city that was home to more than one thousand African Americans out of a total population of some twelve thousand. Frederick Johnson was amazed by what he saw. Having been taught to believe that slavery was the only basis of real wealth, he had expected to find New Englanders as impoverished as “white trash” in the South. But instead he found the houses even of New Bedford's laboring classes more abundantly supplied with conveniences and comforts than were the homes of many slave owners in Maryland. A man endowed with a physical love of work that was matched only by his intellectual energy, he was also impressed by the countless ingenious “contrivances” that here took the place of slave labor, as well as the sheer “earnestness” with which free men attacked their jobs. He knew that he was going to like life in New Bedford. But there was the unexpected problem of his name. Nathan Johnson informed him that there were so many African Americans in New Bedford by the name of Johnson that they already had a hard time being distinguished from one another. Nathan Johnson had recently been enjoying Sir Walter Scott's epic poem “Lady of the Lake,” and had taken a particular fancy to one of its heroic Scottish characters. With the fugitive's willing consent, Nathan Johnson renamed him once again. Henceforth, he would be known—to his future collaborators on the Underground Railroad, and around the world—as Frederick Douglass. As Ruggles's name seeped out of public consciousness, Douglass would become the most famous African American of his generation.

4

While the newly minted Douglasses were settling into life in New Bedford, Ruggles was struggling with ebbing success to keep body and mind together. As early as the summer of 1837, his chronically poor health had compelled him to leave the city for a time and take refuge in the country. By early 1838 he was threatened with total blindness. That November he announced that he would have “to retire from the exciting conflict,” in
hope of regaining his health, particularly his rapidly diminishing eyesight through “the practice of some skillful Oculist.” His illness was also nurtured “by reasons of great mental anxiety, occasioned by frequent causes which are unavoidable in the field in which I labor.” He was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

The troubling case of a fugitive named Tom Hughes finally pushed him over the edge. One evening in August 1838 there was a knock at the door of Isaac Hopper's home on Eldridge Street, in lower Manhattan. Henry Clark, a waiter from Contoit's on Broadway, was standing outside with another black man. (Hopper's address, like Ruggles's, was well known, and easily found by anyone seeking help from the underground.) The stranger's hair was bushy and full, and he had on a black beaver hat, a white coat, light-colored trousers, and a neckcloth. Clark introduced the man as Tom Hughes, and mentioned that he needed a place to stay the night. Hopper assumed that the twenty-two-year-old Hughes was a fugitive. It was a common enough occurrence for Hopper. “When fugitive slaves have called upon me and asked my protection, I could not take any steps to return them into bondage,” Hopper wrote. “In me, it would be a crime to do so.”

Hopper, at sixty-seven, was quite old by the standards of his time. He clung quaintly to idiosyncratic customs, such as ringing a farmer's cow bell when it was time for dinner, saying that it reminded him of his boyhood in rural New Jersey. A fastidious man, he took a cold bath every day and allowed no particle of mud or dust to remain on the knee breeches, long stockings, and buckled shoes that he continued to wear long after they had fallen out of fashion. He was something of an elder statesman for younger members of the abolition movement, who gathered at his bookstore on Broadway to hear how he had once helped to liberate the slave of South Carolina Senator Pierce Butler and other colorful anecdotes of his years in Philadelphia. A living anachronism though he may have been in some respects, his resolve remained undulled after forty years of antislavery work. On at least one occasion he was threatened on the street by a gang of slave hunters armed with bowie knives and pistols, and on another he was knocked down from behind and beaten savagely on Chatham Street, in an incident that left him incapacitated for days. Warned by friends to put up his shutters and flee during the 1834 riots, he replied, “I'll do no such thing. Dost thou think I am such a coward as to forsake my princi
ples, or conceal them, at the bidding of a mob?” Deterred by his calm demeanor, the mob left him in peace, and went off to pillage Lewis Tappan's home instead. As his loathing for slavery deepened, Hopper had come to feel, as had William Lloyd Garrison, that the Northern states might have to secede from the Union lest they be corrupted beyond redemption by the political undertow of Southern slavery. “Far better, in my view, that this should take place, if it can be effected without violence, than to remain as we are; when a peaceable citizen cannot enter your territory on his own lawful business, without the risk of being murdered by a ruthless mob.” This was no mere polemic. In January 1837 his son John, a lawyer, had been dragged from his hotel room in Savannah, Georgia and nearly lynched by a drunken mob after he was recognized by a proslavery constable from New York.

The morning after Tom Hughes's appearance, Hopper, who knew that his own home might be under surveillance, sent the black man to a safer location in the neighborhood. The day after that, an advertisement appeared in the
Sun
, offering a reward for the apprehension of a “mulatto man” who had stolen more than seven thousand dollars from a house on Varick Street. Hopper intuited that Hughes might be the person the ad referred to. When Hopper questioned him, Hughes claimed that although he was the man in question, he was guilty of nothing, saying that it was a common slaveholder's ploy to advertise for a fugitive as an alleged thief rather than as a runaway slave. While Hopper was meeting with Hughes, a fellow Quaker abolitionist named Barney Corse and David Ruggles were calling on the editor of the
Sun
. They learned that the robbery had really taken place, and that Hughes was in fact the culprit.

The money had been stolen from an india rubber belt that Hughes's owner, John P. Darg, had left in his trunk, to which Hughes, until then a trusted servant, had the key. Hughes had been born the bastard son of a wealthy Virginian, and at the age of thirteen was taken to Kentucky by his master's legitimate son, his own half-brother, and sold along with a consignment of five hundred slaves bound for Louisiana. He was purchased by a gambler, and eventually by Darg, who was also a gambler as well as a casual speculator in slaves. Darg, now a resident of Arkansas, was originally from New York, and had come to town to visit his parents. Hughes later claimed, not too plausibly, that he had stolen the money only to bargain for his freedom.

What now followed entangled Hopper, Ruggles, and Corse in a byzantine plot crafted by shadowy proslavery figures in the police department that was intended, it seems, to destroy the city's most prominent underground figures in one decisive sweep. Hopper quickly realized that to lend assistance to a thief could fatally injure the antislavery cause. Confronted with the truth, Hughes confessed to Hopper that he had given portions of the money to Clark, and to another man named Jackson, who had in turn sent part of it to a third man in Albany. Meanwhile, Ruggles, Corse, and Hopper's son-in-law James S. Gibbons called on Darg and offered to help recover the money, if Darg agreed to manumit Hughes. This Darg readily agreed to do. When Darg asked if they knew where Hughes was, Ruggles replied boldly, if untruthfully, “He's on his way to Canada.” In fact, Hughes was holed up in a boardinghouse around the corner from Hopper's home. Corse, meanwhile, was sent to Albany for the money that Jackson had sent there. Upon his return, Corse and Gibbons brought the recovered money to Darg's home. They were in the process of handing it to him when two constables rushed into the room, snatched up the money, and arrested Corse on the spot for “compounding a felony.” Ruggles, who was not even present, was charged as an accomplice and eventually thrown into “a filthy cell, among several individuals of the most abandoned character.” Hughes was taken into custody, and offered his freedom in return for testifying against the Quakers.