Bound for Canaan (62 page)

O
N 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, preaching 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 estimated 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.

Abolitionism taught the country that the problem of race was not on the margins but at the center of its national story. In the underground, blacks and whites discovered each other for the first time as allies in a
common struggle, learning to rely on each other not as master on slave, or child on parent, but as fellow soldiers in a war that most Americans did not yet even know had begun. Apart from the lives saved, the underground's greatest achievement may have been its creation of a truly free zone of interracial activity where blacks not only directed complex logistical and financial operations, but also, in some places, supervised support networks that included white men and women who were accorded no special status owing to their skin color. Perhaps more than any other aspect of our mostly disheartening racial heritage, the story of the Underground Railroad thus stands as an answer to slavery's legacy of hurt and shame, reminding us that our ancestors were not always enemies across an unbridgeable chasm of color, and that even a century and a half ago, we were capable of heroic collaboration.

By understanding how Americans participated in and reacted to the Underground Railroad, we can better understand the difficulties that a society based on law rather than on passions and power has always had in coping with political movements that challenge its most basic assumptions. The underground was the greatest movement of civil disobedience since the American Revolution, engaging thousands of citizens in the active subversion of federal law and the prevailing mores of their communities. Isaac Hopper, David Ruggles, Levi Coffin, Jermain Loguen, and the others were the forerunners of twentieth-century labor organizers, civil rights activists, antiwar protestors of the Vietnam era, and for that matter such contemporary provocateurs as Earth First! and those who take to the streets to protest globalization. Not least, they were also the progenitors of the modern women's movement. As part of the struggle to free the slaves, Northern women began to discover the nature of their own servitude as women, and in speaking out on behalf of enslaved African Americans, they discovered their own voices and began for the first time to challenge the preconceptions and laws that governed their place in society.

While the Underground Railroad and the larger abolitionist movement clearly made a profound contribution to progressive politics by attacking racial discrimination and asserting for the first time that each individual had a personal responsibility for others' human rights, it is less obvious that it was also the seedbed of religious activism in American politics. Most members of the underground uncompromisingly regarded
their work as answering only to a law higher and more sacred than those enacted by mere men. In this, they were hardly different from modern activists who today cite the same “higher law” to justify their attacks against abortion clinics. Indeed, as a lawyer representing the “pro-life” organization Project Rescue declared in court a few years ago, asserting his clients' moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws, “The slave-holding industry had the law on its side, just as today the abortion industry has the law on its side.” The story of the Underground Railroad thus sheds light on, if it fails to answer, uneasy questions about what happens when revealed religion collides with a secular society that shares neither its politics nor its reading of the Scriptures.