Bound for Canaan (49 page)

For the next four days, Jerry was concealed in the Genesee Street home of a white butcher named Caleb Davis, a veteran of the War of 1812 and an outspoken proslavery Democrat, to all appearances the last person anyone could imagine sheltering a fugitive slave. But the sight of Henry
being dragged in chains through Syracuse had converted him to abolitionism literally overnight. Like many who now found themselves being drawn toward the underground, Davis had no special fondness for blacks, but he did have a bedrock sense of Yankee independence, and he felt visceral outrage at the invasion of his town by slave-hunting Southerners and aggressive federal officials. True to form, while Henry was hidden in his own house, Davis was seen on the streets of Syracuse artfully denouncing abolitionists.

On the evening of October 5, Henry was handed a revolver, hidden under the seat of a carriage (its team lent by a former mayor), and with the brawny Davis riding as bodyguard, driven to the town of Mexico, about twenty-five miles north, where he lived for two weeks in the barn of a church elder, until a ship could be found to take him to Canada. A local tanner delivered him to the nearby lake port of Oswego as a consignment of “boots and shoes,” and smuggled him on board under cover of night, virtually beneath the walls of the federal fortress that guarded the entrance to the harbor. He reached Kingston, Ontario, before nightfall the same day.

Twenty-six men, including fourteen whites and twelve blacks, were eventually indicted for their part in the Jerry rescue. Nine others, including Jermain Loguen, who was charged with assault with intent to kill, fled to Canada. The prosecution was a slow-motion fiasco. The trials dragged on into 1852, at a cost to the federal government of fifty thousand dollars. In the end, only one man, a black named Enoch Reed, was found guilty, but he died while his appeal was pending. Every other case ended in either acquittal or a hung jury. Reverend Samuel J. May wrote, “The cases were postponed and adjourned so many times that the expense alone convinced many who supported it that the Fugitive Slave Law was unenforceable.” In the spring of 1852 Loguen was quietly permitted to return to Syracuse, where in the ensuing years he turned his home into an Underground Railroad depot so public that he advertised it in the local newspapers. (In the meantime, Gerrit Smith attempted unsuccessfully but with great propaganda effect to have Marshal Harry Allen prosecuted for kidnapping.)

The government fared no better in its attempts to convict the men arrested in the Boston and Lancaster County affairs. Ten men were arrested in connection with the rescue of Shadrach Minkins, including two of the
fugitive's lawyers and Lewis Hayden. Their trials continued on into 1853. Although eyewitnesses were able to place Hayden at every stage in the rescue, juries failed to convict him, or any of the other defendants. In Pennsylvania, prosecutors initially charged thirty-eight Christiana men with “levying war” against the United States government, the largest indictment for treason in American history. The only man actually brought to trial, however, in December 1851, was the hapless Castner Hanway, one of the whites who had appeared in the midst of the confrontation. Although he was peripheral to what happened, the federal government felt that it had to convict a white man to avenge Gorsuch's death in the eyes of Southerners. After a brilliant defense directed by Thaddeus Stevens, the jury took only fifteen minutes to return a verdict of not guilty. When it became obvious that the other trials were likely to produce the same result, the government declined to prosecute anyone else, and the charges against them were eventually dropped.

Not surprisingly, there was outrage in the South. After the Christiana “tragedy,” as the press dubbed it, a huge public rally in Baltimore called for an end to all commerce with the North, and in the wake of Jerry Henry's rescue, the
Savannah Republican
editorialized, “We warn the press and the people of the North that there is a point, not far distant, when forbearance on our part will cease to be virtuous or honorable, and that they and they alone will be responsible for all the ills that may betide this government.” With the administration's failure to convict anyone for breaking the law, Southerners became convinced that the federal government was deliberately failing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law.

Statistically, they were wrong. During the first fifteen months that the law was in force, eighty-four alleged fugitives were remanded south by commissioners, and only five set free. Although the administration continued to apply the law with vigor throughout the decade, the events of 1851 made it abundantly clear that it was doing so against Northern sentiment. To be effective, the law required the North's acceptance of the authoritarian regime already in place in the South to be extended across the North. And for that there was no Yankee will at all.

4

On May 7, 1852, Isaac Tatum Hopper died in New York City. He was eighty years old. How many fugitives owed their freedom to him, it was impossible to say. He never kept count. Certainly hundreds, very possibly thousands. He had served the abolitionist underground for more than fifty years, from its humble beginnings on the Philadelphia waterfront. Indeed, if any man could be called the father of the Underground Railroad it was he, although, the simplest of men to the last, he would have found such a claim both grandiose and unfair to his now forgotten collaborators. He had caught a cold during a visit to a discharged prisoner, for whom he served as a sort of volunteer counselor and mentor. The cold became an infection. He lingered on for ten weeks. Finally, too weak to rise, he lay in bed gazing at a small China bird that an escaped slave had given to his daughter Abby when she was small, in thanks for his part in her rescue. He remained serene until the end, speaking of death, his biographer Lydia Maria Child, who was by his bedside, recalled, “as if he had been anticipating a trip to Pennsylvania.” In keeping with the simplicity that had been a hallmark of his life, he told his family that he wanted to be buried in a bare pine box made by one of his poor neighbors, who was to be paid the same price that he would have received if it were a luxury one. His last words were intended for his fellow Quakers, friends and enemies alike. “Tell them,” he said, “I love them
all
.”

Hopper's death marked the end of the underground's beginnings. At the turn of the century, the few white men and women (nearly all of them Quakers) who were willing to lend help to the fugitive slave were as gentle and religious as Hopper himself, and as reluctant as he was to break the letter of the law. Radical abolitionism had now become a mighty movement. Public opinion in the North was steadily shifting in favor of the abolitionists, who were seen as the defenders of free speech, free assembly, and personal liberty. The once-ridiculed fringe was now an army of resisters capable of heroism on a mass scale, and the civil disobedience that Thoreau preached in genteel Concord was being dramatically acted out in the streets. Old orthodoxies were boiling away. Public opinion in both North and South was galvanized in ways that made it harder to resolve differences over slavery without violence. As support for the pro-Southern
Democratic Party rose in the South, the political stock of the compromising Whigs in both North and South rapidly waned, never to recover. It was a particularly bad year for Daniel Webster, who saw the support for his presidential ambitions evaporate like spring snows off the hills of Massachusetts. (He too died in 1852, a few months before the election of yet another compliant Northern doughface, President Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire.) Among abolitionists, reasoned moral persuasion seemed increasingly inadequate. It was giving way to the belief that battles ought not to be avoided, but sought and won, if slavery was finally to perish. When William Salmon, who had helped carry the battering ram during Jerry Henry's rescue, was later asked what he would have thought if someone had been killed, he replied truculently, “Why, you talk just like the Tories of the Revolution. I am in for revolution.”

The language of abolitionism was becoming the language of warfare and slaughter. In a speech to the National Free Soil Party convention in Pittsburgh, in 1852, pointedly alluding to Edward Gorsuch's killing at Christiana, Frederick Douglass declared, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter [is] to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.” Gorsuch's corpse was a signpost for the future. Marylanders themselves retaliated in early 1852 when proslavery vigilantes cold-bloodedly murdered a Pennsylvania farmer named Joseph Miller, who had traveled to Baltimore to attempt to gain the release of a free black woman who had been kidnapped from his farm. It was only the beginning of a violent decade that would leave a steadily darkening trail of blood through Kansas, Harpers Ferry, and Bull Run.

The events of 1851 also revealed a new generation of remarkably bold, capable, and self-confident black leaders in men such as Lewis Hayden, Jermain Loguen, and William Parker. There were others like them in Philadelphia, Albany, Detroit, and the towns of the Ohio Valley. In the 1830s their forerunner, David Ruggles, had been driven to a nervous breakdown by the unyielding hostility that surrounded him. These men knew instinctively that the tide of history was running in their favor. The Christiana resistance had been planned and carried out entirely by African Americans, who had faced down the federal government and won, showing for all to see that blacks could and would defend themselves on a field of battle, while Hayden and Loguen had shown themselves able to inspire whites not just to lend moral support and money, but also to engage in a
physical confrontation against their own government. Blacks had always played an assertive and sometimes dominant role within the clandestine purlieus of the underground, but this was the first time that they had done so in the open, and in the heart of two major cities, no less.

All in all, it was a good year for the Underground Railroad. In Boston and Syracuse the underground had temporarily dropped its veil of secrecy to publicly reveal its efficiency, tactical flexibility, and unflinching willingness to make physical sacrifices for what it believed in. Longtime activists were deluged with idealistic volunteers who were inspired by what they had read, or seen firsthand. They were needed, for the flood of refugees only grew that winter. “This road is doing better business this fall than usual,” the African-American journalist Henry Bibb gleefully wrote from Canada, in November 1851. “The Fugitive Slave Law has given it more vitality, more activity, more passengers, and more opposition, which invariably accelerates business. We have been under the necessity of tearing up the old strap rails and putting down the regular T's, so that we can run a lot of slaves through from almost any of the bordering slave states into Canada within 48 hours, and we defy the slave holders and their abettors to beat it if they can…We have just received a fresh lot today of hearty-looking men and women on the last train from Virginia, and there is still room.”

1

Kessiah Bowley—“Kissy,” to her owners—her infant daughter, Araminta; and her six-year-old son, James, attracted a crowd when they were put up for sale in front of the doors of the county courthouse in Cambridge, Maryland, on a December morning in 1850. Two blocks down High Street, beyond the Episcopal church and Bradshaw's Hotel, where slave traders stayed, and the pillared homes of the town's elite, the sails of trading sloops and oyster boats could be seen on the Choptank River, the town's outlet to Chesapeake Bay. Slave sales were not to be missed. In small towns, they were like country fairs. Rural people came to watch them as they would to a cattle show. Men with nothing else to do mingled with serious buyers to follow the bidding, friends convivially swapped cigars and good stories, liquor flowed freely, and by the middle of the after
noon streets and stores were usually well speckled with drunks. Bowley was a young, healthy woman, a good investment, though married to a free black man, a possible source of annoyance to an owner who wanted the complete loyalty of his human property. It is impossible to say how much she knew about what was supposed to happen. Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing. But undoubtedly she looked out with trepidation at the arc of white faces, faces that were sizing up her physique and her fitness for labor, and perhaps for sex. She knew that her entire life would be abruptly changed whatever the outcome.

Somewhere in the crowd, Kessiah's husband John Bowley, a ship's carpenter, was bidding. (In Maryland, unlike some slave states, there was no law against a man buying his family out of slavery.) He must have sworn that he would save her somehow. But how could she trust such a promise? There was no way that a black man, free or not, could count on keeping that kind of promise to his slave wife. But John Bowley kept on without hesitation, as if he had a purse full of money, until every other bidder fell silent. He had won. Although the exact figure is now lost, it was probably around five hundred dollars, the equivalent of about eighteen thousand dollars in current dollars, a hefty sum for a seagoing man.

Kessiah was now told to stand aside somewhere while the auctioneer took his dinner. When he returned, John Bowley was nowhere to be found. His bid, it seemed after all, was just a black man's pathetic ploy to keep hold of his wife. The bidding was restarted. “
Serious buyers only this time!
” Again the numbers climbed. There was a whispered word to the auctioneer. The bidding abruptly stopped. The news rippled through the incredulous crowd. Not only John Bowley, but Kessiah and her children had disappeared.

While the agents of Kessiah's owner, and presumably the local constables, scoured the town for her, she and her husband lay hidden in the house of a woman who lived just minutes' walk from the courthouse. That evening the Bowleys made their way under cover of darkness to the Choptank River. There John Bowley, now a criminal liable to arrest for stealing his own wife and children, placed them in a small boat and set out to sail them to Baltimore, seventy-five miles away. The danger was extreme. Down the Choptank he sailed, then north up Chesapeake Bay past Tilghman, Romancoke, Annapolis, Sparrow's Point. Hundreds of African-American fishermen, oystermen, and crab pluckers worked on the bay, but
few of them were sailing a woman and children across it in an open boat. The bay could be a treacherous place in winter. The weather and the winds could change suddenly, and without warning. But luck was with them.

In Baltimore the Bowleys faded into the teeming and varied world that was the black community. Baltimore's thirty-six thousand blacks, twenty-nine thousand of them free men and women, enjoyed a considerable amount of independence. By 1850 they supported an alternative universe of churches, schools, and benevolent societies at least partly beyond the prowling eyes of watchful whites. Frederick Douglass, writing of his days as a slave in Maryland, considered Baltimore “the very place, of all others, short of a free state, where I most desired to live.” But the Bowleys were still far from safe.

The Bowleys probably found shelter with friends who lived in the black enclave of Fell's Point, where narrow houses jammed together in cobbled lanes that trickled back from the docks. According to plan, they met there with Kessiah's aunt Minty, or Harriet as she had begun calling herself. Harriet and John Bowley had planned the daring rescue together. They must have had a good laugh over its stunning success. It wasn't often that slaves managed to make public fools of their masters, and get away with it. Harriet had herself escaped overland to Pennsylvania in 1849. She could have remained safe in the North, but at great risk to herself, she had slipped back into Maryland when she heard news of Kessiah's impending auction. Her job now was to guide the Bowleys to Philadelphia. It was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary careers in American history.

There were others, almost all of them men except for Harriet, who served as the long distance tentacles of the ever-expanding Underground Railroad, traveling repeatedly into the slave states to pluck away slaves from the belly of the beast. There was John Parker, the black foundry owner by day and conductor by night, who later in the decade worked out of Ripley, Ohio, and Elijah Anderson, the Indiana ironmonger, who was said to have brought twenty or thirty slaves at a time out of Kentucky. There were white men like Seth Concklin, the ill-fated Calvin Fairbank, and the mysterious, gun-toting John Fairfield, who masqueraded as a slave trader, and drove fugitives out of the South in coffles. But there was no one quite like this incredibly single-minded, mystical, diminutive woman
(she was barely five feet tall) who defied every antebellum notion about what women were supposed to be.

Although her speech was “uncouth,” and she referred to herself casually as merely “a poor nigger,” there was a quiet dignity about her that made her indifferent to her surroundings, whether she was dining at Peterboro with Gerrit Smith, or in a kitchen with white help who complained about having to sit down with a black woman. She was strongly muscled from years of hard outdoor physical labor, which had burned her skin a dark chestnut color, and made her look decades older than she was. At thirty, she was mistaken, even by whites who knew her, for a woman twice her age. John Brown, who got to know her only after his bloody days in Kansas, admiringly called her “
General
Tubman,” and wrote of her, “He is the most of a man, naturally, that I ever met with.” More than that of any other actual participant, her story would shape the legend, and the myth, of the Underground Railroad. She eventually became a kind of metaphor for the entire underground, endowed—a remarkable individual by any measure—with virtually superhuman personal qualities, while her uniquely brilliant work evolved into a template for the entire diverse system. Illiterate her entire life, she kept no record of her many rescue expeditions into Maryland, and had no clear memory of their sequence or dates. Her story survived only in the memories and impressions of others, and can only be assembled from fragments, like a shattered mosaic.

The fifth of at least nine children, Araminta “Minty” Ross was born in 1822, near Tobacco Stick on Maryland's Eastern Shore, a flat, watery country of wide vistas, marshy creeks, sodden woodlands, and lonely stands of lofty loblolly pines. Her childhood on the Brodess plantation had a feral, almost anarchic quality. “I grew up neglected like a weed, ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it,” she told the abolitionist Benjamin Drew, who interviewed her in Canada, in 1855. Her hair was never combed and “stood out like a bushel basket” from her head. When she needed to eat, she sometimes fought the hogs for their mash. Discipline was swift and harsh. There were days when she received as many as six or seven beatings. Scars from them remained visible all her life. The threat of sale worried her constantly after she saw two of her sisters taken off in a chain gang. She told Drew, “Every time I saw a white man I was afraid of being carried away.”

She was eleven or twelve years old when something happened that permanently marked her not only physically but in some obscure way spiritually, adding a dimension of pronounced strangeness to what had been an otherwise unremarkable girl. She was in a general store when a white overseer ran in, chasing a slave who had walked away from his work. Furious at seeing the man he was searching for, the overseer grabbed a two-pound lead weight from the counter and hurled it at him. He missed the man, but hit Tubman in the head so hard that it drove a piece of the shawl she was wearing into her skull, and knocked her unconscious. Not considered worth a doctor's attention, she was allowed only a day and a half to rest before being sent back to work in the fields, with blood rolling down her face. For the rest of her life, she suffered from what was probably a form of epilepsy that produced headaches, seizures, and “fits of somnolency,” causing her to suddenly fall unconscious for minutes at a time, and pushing a mind already fertilized by evangelical religion into a feverish mysticism that awed those who came in contact with her. In a prepsychological age steeped in a culture of spiritualism, middle-class abolitionists were fascinated by her powers that seemed to defy explanation, like the “fluttering” that seemed to foretell imminent danger, and her ability to know what happened around her during her sleeping fits. As one awestruck Yankee friend put it, “There is a whole region of the marvelous in her nature.”

Slavery in Maryland was in steady decline during the years of Ross's youth. It was undermined less by any moral revolution than by changing economic conditions which put a higher premium on mobile free labor. Between 1790 and 1850, as Dorchester County's slave population shrunk by almost 20 percent, to just over 4,000, the number of free blacks swelled from 528 to nearly 4,000. Ross adapted readily to the changing environment, revealing a natural independence that would become even more pronounced during her years of clandestine work. While still in her twenties, she negotiated a work-for-hire arrangement with her master that allowed her to rent out her labor as she wished, paying him a set annual fee of fifty or sixty dollars. Despite her size and infirmity, she was a prodigious worker, driving teams, packing and hauling grain on the wharves at Tobacco Stick, dragging heavy sleds laden with produce “like an ox,” and hauling timber for her father, who had purchased his freedom in 1840, and who oversaw the cutting and hauling of lumber for the Baltimore shipyards.

In 1844 she married John Tubman, a free man of mixed race. About
the same time, she changed her first name to Harriet, perhaps as a gesture of affection for her mother, also named Harriet. In the spring of 1849 she learned that she and several of her brothers were likely to be sold. They had never heard of any free states except New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and they had no clear idea how to get there. But they decided to set off anyway. What Harriet told her husband, and what he might have thought about it, she never confided to anyone. In any event, the attempted escape was a fiasco. The three fugitives tried to follow the north star. They argued about directions, and finally gave up and returned in defeat. If Harriet drew any lesson from this dismal experience, it was that the odds against escaping without help were close to insurmountable. She would not make the same mistake again.

In the months that followed, Tubman's mind was overcharged with prophetic visions. She saw horsemen coming for her, like the riders of the apocalypse; she heard the terrifying screams of women and children. She dreamed of flying over fields and towns, rivers and mountains, and looking down upon them like a bird, until she reached at last a great fence, which she feared she hadn't the power to fly over. But just as she was sinking down, and losing her strength, ladies dressed in white would stretch out their arms and pull her across. She found release only in incessant prayer, praying for her sins to be washed away when she went to the horse trough for a drink, praying for them to be swept away whenever she plied a broom.

Characteristically, she did not leave her salvation to chance. In the late autumn of 1849 she fled on her own. Although she was vague on the details, she later described her hundred-mile overland trek through eastern Maryland, and probably Delaware, as having been accompanied, phantasmagorically, by a pillar of cloud during the day, and a pillar of fire by night. She also sought, and received, concrete help from a white woman, almost certainly a mill owner's wife named Hannah Leverton, who was part of a fragile network that linked Dorchester County Quakers with those farther north in Camden, Delaware, and beyond. The white woman wrote two names on a piece of paper, which she gave to Tubman. That night, the woman's husband carried her concealed in his wagon to the outskirts of a town, where he directed her to the home of one of the people whose names had been given to her. She was passed on in this fashion from hand to hand until she eventually reached Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania, in Tubman's mind, was not only a physical or political
landscape, but a profoundly spiritual one. “When I found I had crossed that line,” she said, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven. I had crossed the line.” But she felt an utterly unexpected sense of loss and desolation. In Maryland she was a slave, but she had family. She was now alone in a way that she had never been before. “I was
free
, but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.” What was she without family? she wondered. “I was free, and
they
should be free,” she thought. For the next decade, the rescue of her family became the focus of her life, a private crusade that bordered on obsession. She was convinced that she was a chosen agent of God, who guided her every act, and he was now sending her back to the Eastern Shore. When friends in the underground cautioned her “against too much adventure & peril,” she replied, “The Lord who told me to take care of my people meant me to do it just so long as I live, and so I do what he told me to do.”