Bound for Canaan (51 page)

In the early 1850s Still's office was aiding an average of sixty fugitives per month. He interviewed every one of them in detail, noting down their places of origin, family histories, former names, and the like. (These documents remain the best record of daily underground operations anywhere in the country.) In the spring of 1850, a recently freed slave from Alabama named Peter Friedman walked into Still's office seeking information about his parents, from whom he had been separated as a child. The illiterate Friedman was startled to see a poised and polished young black man sitting at a desk writing letters, something that he had never witnessed in Alabama. Still began to question him at length, in his usual fashion. Both men were wary, Still suspecting that Friedman might be a spy sent by slave masters to hunt down fugitives, and Friedman, knowing nothing about abolitionists, fearing that he was being led into a trap of some kind. Something about Friedman's story seemed eerily familiar to Still. Finally, after learning the names of Friedman's parents, and that they had disappeared from Maryland forty years before, leaving Peter and another brother behind, he looked the stranger in the face, a near mirror of his
own, though twenty years older and weather-beaten, and said, “Suppose I should tell you that I am your brother?”

Still explained to the incredulous Friedman that their eighty-year-old mother was still alive, as were ten of her children, and living across the Delaware River in New Jersey. After an emotional family reunion at Charity's farm, Friedman explained that he had left behind his own enslaved wife and three children in Alabama, and was hoping to work diligently to earn the money to buy them himself. Against the Stills' protests, he returned to Alabama, where he spent several months pretending to be a slave-for-hire, saving money, and looking for a way to bring his family north. He began to grasp that it would take years to save the thousands of dollars that it would cost to purchase them. He returned to Philadelphia deeply discouraged.

In the meantime, news of the brothers' reunion, and of Peter's seemingly hopeless quest to recover his family had appeared in the local newspapers. One of the people who read about it was a crusty underground veteran named Seth Concklin, whose life thus far sounds like a Cook's tour of the underside of antebellum America. A small, homely man, often scruffily dressed and taciturn to the point of eccentricity, Concklin was born in upstate New York, in 1802, and endured an appallingly grim childhood that left him with the cocky combativeness of a perpetual survivor, coupled to an indelible affinity for every underdog he ever met. His father died when Concklin was still a boy, leaving him responsible for a large, virtually indigent family. One of his sisters was given away to strangers when she could no longer be fed. To support his remaining siblings, he tramped the roads of rural New York peddling trifles. After living for a time in a pacifist Shaker community near Albany, he enlisted in the small, ill-starred republican force that sought to overthrow the British colonial regime in Canada during the so-called Patriot War of 1838–39. Later he served in Florida as a soldier in the First Seminole War, returning home contemptuous of the government's expansionist propaganda, and with a deep sympathy for the beleaguered Indians. He hated slavery with such a passion that it was said of him that “he was a whole Abolition Society in himself,” and he served for a time as an underground conductor in Springfield, Illinois, where he may have known, or at least met, the up-and-coming young lawyer Abraham Lincoln.

Concklin had not long before advanced a plan to break the abolition
ist William Chaplin out of prison in Washington, but it was never adopted. Now he offered to personally bring Peter Friedman's family out of Alabama. He was forty-nine, an age when many men were already being described as “old.” Perhaps he saw this as his last chance at adventure before he slipped into old age. Since he was poor all his life, money meant nothing to him. He wanted no payment beyond expenses, and in fact pledged to contribute his own savings, a total of twenty-six dollars. Friedman agreed to the proposal, albeit reluctantly, for he recognized the risks for his family if Concklin failed. He gave Concklin a detailed description of the plantation near Florence, Alabama, where his wife, Vina, and their children lived. He then handed Concklin the one hundred dollars that he had raised so far and a cloak belonging to Vina, to show her as an identifying token.

Concklin traveled first to Cincinnati, where he stayed with Levi Coffin, who had moved to the city in 1847. Using the Coffin home as a base, he explored the north bank of the Ohio River as far west as Illinois for the best place to bring Friedman's family ashore, once he got them out of Alabama. That he had to do this on his own suggests both the inherent limitations and the ingrained localism of the underground. Coffin could offer Concklin useful introductions to agents only as far away as southwestern Indiana, while he met outright resistance from western underground men when he tried to raise money for what they told him was “a case properly belonging east of Ohio.” Initially, Concklin hoped to land the family in southern Illinois, but he was dismayed to find that region infested with proslavery sentiment and exceptionally strong support for the Fugitive Slave Law. In Indiana, physical attacks against blacks were on the increase, and proslavery vigilantes belonging to the secretive Knights of the Golden Circle were doing their best to disrupt the Underground Railroad. Frustrated but undaunted, Concklin decided that he would have to bring Friedman's family up the Wabash River and well into Indiana before he could deliver them to a secure underground line.

At the end of January 1851, Concklin made a scouting trip up the Tennessee River to Florence, which he found to be a dismal hamlet consisting of twenty white families, a couple of warehouses, and a post office. Calling himself “Miller,” he roamed the area, ostensibly seeking work. At the McKiernan plantation, he made contact with an enslaved cobbler, a friend of Peter Friedman, who arranged a rendezvous with Vina. She was
unnerved at the prospect of setting off into the unknown with a total stranger. But she put her trust in the cloak that Peter had given Concklin, and agreed to go with him.

Concklin had by now decided against an escape by steamer as far too risky. They would have to row themselves to Indiana instead. He returned to Cincinnati where he purchased a large, six-oared skiff—“a first-rate clipper,” he called it in a letter to William Still—and brought it back with him on board a steamboat to Florence. By prearrangement, Vina and her children slipped away in the night to meet Concklin on a deserted stretch of riverbank outside the town. Before them lay more than four hundred miles of rowing. The two boys, Levin and Peter, and Concklin were all strong oarsmen, and before daylight they had passed through Colbert Shoals and Bee Tree Shoals, a treacherous obstacle course of flinty rocks that were the curse of larger craft. By daylight they had reached Eastport, Mississippi, where the river made its great bend north back into Tennessee, forty miles from Florence. Whenever they came within sight of another boat Concklin made sure to stand at the helm like a proper slave master, keeping the two boys at the oars, while Vina and her daughter, Catherine huddled at their feet beneath blankets. They floated through one of the wildest, most defiantly uncivilized regions of the state, past primeval forests of beech, black gum trees, and evergreen magnolias; past cane bottoms and cypress marsh and small clearings where hardscrabble farmers raised a few cattle and hogs in brushy pastures of wild grass; past Shiloh, where barely a decade later one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War would leave thousands dead; past the towns of Cerro Gordo, Clifton, Reynoldsburg, and Paris Landing; and finally, fifty-one hours after their departure, into the great Ohio River.

Thus far, they had been traveling with the current. Now they had to row upstream. They reached New Harmony, Indiana, fifty miles up the Wabash from the Ohio River, at 10
A.M.
on Sunday, March 23, after traveling for seven days without a break, chilled to the bone and utterly exhausted. Concklin now exchanged the boys' shabby Southern clothing for “pants of Kentucky jean and black cloth coats,” and clothed the women in plaid shawls such as free Yankee blacks would wear. That night they reached the nearest station of the Underground Railroad, where they were fed, and rested for a day. The next day, another “friend,” probably David Stormont of Princeton, arrived to conduct them northward to his
own home. After another day's rest there, they continued on foot to an underground station north of Vincennes. Although it was a notoriously proslavery area, Concklin deemed that they were by now so far from the river that it was safe to travel in the daytime. It was his first mistake.

Vina and her children drove northward in a driving rain, while Concklin walked some distance behind, close enough to keep them in view. Just before they reached the next underground station, they were hailed by a group of white men and challenged to explain themselves. Concklin quickly came up and claimed, first, that the four “slaves” were his and then, contradicting himself, that he was merely accompanying them north after they had been emancipated by his “brother in Kentucky.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, the whites found all this less than convincing and ordered the party to turn around and head back to Vincennes. Concklin could easily have escaped at this point, but he continued to follow doggedly on foot. After nightfall, he slipped into the wagon and was in the process of untying the fugitives when he was seen. One of the whites pulled out a revolver and told him that he would shoot him if he tried it again.

Vina and her children were placed in the Vincennes jail, while the local authorities decided what to do with them. Since there was no charge against Concklin, a free white man, he was left to his own devices. He still had some hope of rescuing the four, and he brazenly visited them every day, despite Vina's pleas that he save himself and flee. By now, however, the Evansville sheriff's office had received a copy of a circular telegram that had been sent by the fugitives' owner, Bernard McKiernan, to be on the lookout for Vina's family, offering a reward of four hundred dollars for their capture, and one of six hundred dollars for the “thief” who absconded with them. Concklin was now arrested, and McKiernan sent for. When the slave owner arrived a few days later, Concklin and the fugitives were handed over to him without even the formality of a hearing. Fearing a rescue attempt, they were hurried by stagecoach to Evansville, and there placed immediately aboard a southbound steamboat, the
Paul Anderson
, accompanied by McKiernan, his personal agent, and the flamboyant Evansville sheriff, John Smith Gavitt—proslavery man though he was, he would die bravely leading a Union cavalry charge against Confederate troops in 1861—who was there to protect the slave owner under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Law and, doubtless, to collect the reward once they reached Alabama.

Sometime during the downriver trip, as the free state of Illinois slipped by on the port side and the slave state of Kentucky on the starboard, McKiernan told Concklin that he would see him hanged in Alabama “if it cost him $1,500.” Concklin replied that he was not at all sorry for what he had done. He was doing his Christian duty, and felt a clear conscience.

The
Paul Anderson
docked for the night at Smithland, at the mouth of the Cumberland River, where many of the passengers disembarked. There were contradictory reports about what happened after that. The only thing that was certain was that the next morning Concklin's corpse was found floating in the muddy, crud-filled water alongside the wharf. His hands were shackled, and his head was crushed.

Sheriff Gavitt later said that he had left McKiernan and the shackled Concklin together on the hurricane deck and gone to bed. When McKiernan was questioned, he said that he too had fallen asleep, and that when he woke Concklin was gone. He suggested that maybe Concklin had tried to escape and jumped overboard and drowned, rather than face trial in Alabama. Then how had his head been staved in? Perhaps he had been hit by the paddle wheel of a passing steamboat, McKiernan supposed. No one bothered to ask much more. His body was taken to a sand bank and buried in his clothes, still chained. Later, when they heard about his death, Concklin's friends assumed that McKiernan had murdered him in cold blood, and thrown his body overboard. Proslavery forces gloated. “There was none of that pretended philanthropy which induces a disregard for the rights of property,” the
Vincennes Gazette
smugly editorialized.

In a curious way, Concklin's death helped free Peter Friedman's family after all. Though less well remembered, the apparent murder of Seth Concklin became, like the rescues of Shadrach Minkins and Jerry Henry, and the Christiana prosecutions, one of the most widely discussed events of that tumultuous and pivotal year. For many months thereafter, Friedman traveled profitably among abolitionist gatherings, telling the story of his enslavement and Concklin's martyrdom, and appealing for donations (as he had originally planned) to buy his family out of slavery. By 1855 he had managed to accumulate the five thousand dollars that McKiernan demanded: one thousand for each member of his family, plus one thousand for the expenses he claimed to have incurred tracking down Concklin. Reunited, and changing their family name to Still, they settled on a farm in New Jersey to live out their days in long overdue peace.

Seven months after Concklin's death, another brave man was lost to the underground. On the evening of November 2, 1851, worshippers couldn't help noticing the tall white man dressed in a black broadcloth coat at prayer in the Centre Street Church, in Louisville, Kentucky. The fact that he was white wasn't by itself particularly unusual. Whites came to the church from time to time to hear the Reverend Bird Parker who, though he was as black as the rest of his congregation, was renowned in town for the sonorous gravity of his preaching. Proslavery whites were also keeping a watchful eye on black churches at a time when talk about slave uprisings was on everyone's lips. Although the risings never quite seemed to materialize, fear was nonetheless close to fever pitch. But this white man was a stranger.