Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (13 page)

Charles B. Ray, who succeeded David Ruggles as the Vigilance Committee’s secretary and its key activist in assisting fugitives, maintained contact with underground railroad activists south and north of New York. Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1807 to a mother who was herself a runaway slave, Ray was educated in the town’s integrated public schools. In 1832, after being forced to withdraw from Wesleyan Seminary in Massachusetts because white students objected to his presence, Ray moved to New York City, opened a boot and shoe store, and soon became involved in the Vigilance Committee. Ray edited the
Colored
American
from 1838 until its demise in 1841. Four years later he became pastor of New York’s predominantly white Bethesda Congregational Church on Wooster Street; Lewis Tappan spoke at his investiture. Ray served on the executive committee of the American Missionary Association, which paid him an annual salary of $600 to work as a missionary among poor black New Yorkers. Like Wright, Ray for several years was a member of the executive committee of the American and Foreign and an early supporter of the Liberty party. The homes of both men (Ray’s at 153 Baxter Street, Wright’s at 28 John Street) and their churches (both of which moved a number of times as the city expanded northward) provided hiding places for runaway slaves and hosted Vigilance Committee meetings. “Many a midnight hour,” Ray later wrote of fugitives, “have I, with others, walked the streets, their leader and guide.” On occasion, he traveled to Albany to ensure that fugitive slaves sent from New York arrived safely and were forwarded to Canada.
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Another Vigilance Committee operative connected with the American Missionary Association and the American and Foreign (at least to the extent that they employed him in 1849 to paint their offices on John Street) was Jacob R. Gibbs. Born a slave in Maryland around 1807, Gibbs purchased his freedom as a young man and established a thriving house-painting business in Baltimore. He was frequently hired to paint the mansions of nearby planters. “Long before there was an underground railroad,” according to a later reminiscence by one of his associates, Gibbs helped slaves in the city and surrounding countryside to escape, distributing forged free papers from a collection he had assembled. In 1840, Gibbs joined a group of over 200 blacks who emigrated from Baltimore to Trinidad and British Guiana, where slavery had recently been abolished. From the latter, he sent back glowing reports of opportunities for black newcomers. But he soon returned to the United States, married, and resumed his clandestine activities.

In the early 1840s, Gibbs operated as the Baltimore agent of Charles T. Torrey, a New England–born abolitionist who moved to Washington, D.C., in 1841, lived in the home of a free black family, and with an interracial group of coworkers began shuttling slaves to the North. Gibbs sometimes accompanied the fugitives from Baltimore to Philadelphia, from which they proceeded to New York, Albany, and Canada. Some commentators credited Torrey with inventing the underground railroad as an organized system with outposts on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Torrey’s luck ran out in June 1844, when he was arrested in Baltimore. He died in the Maryland State Penitentiary two years later at the age of thirty-three. In the wake of Torrey’s arrest, Gibbs prudently moved to New York City with his family. He quickly emerged as a “leading spirit” of the Vigilance Committee, meeting fugitive slaves at the docks and arranging lodging for them. A few years later he purchased a home in New Haven, but he maintained a place in New York where he hid escaped slaves.
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The death of Theodore S. Wright in 1847 led to the committee’s reorganization as the New York State Vigilance Committee, with Isaac T. Hopper as president. The choice of the elderly Hopper (he turned seventy-six that year) represented less an expectation of energetic leadership than a mark of the esteem he enjoyed among abolitionists of all persuasions because of a long career aiding fugitive slaves. He had “more experience in such cases than any other man in America,” David Ruggles had noted. However, Hopper, who was associated with the Garrisonians, not the American and Foreign, served only briefly. In 1848, Gerrit Smith, among whose numerous activities was leadership of the state’s Liberty party, succeeded him as president. Unlike its predecessor, the revamped committee publicized its network of upstate connections. They included Luther Lee of Syracuse, the editor of the
True
Wesleyan
, which sought to link Methodist theology with abolitionism, and Noadiah Moore, a farmer and businessman active in the Liberty party whose home near Lake Champlain, only seven miles south of the Canadian border, sheltered fugitives sent from New York City. Most of the committee’s money now came from upstate cities and towns such as Auburn, Syracuse, and Niagara Falls, the heartland of New York abolitionism. But the organization’s affairs continued to be conducted by an executive committee in New York City. By the time Smith assumed the presidency, a new way of describing those who assisted fugitives had come into general use. The New York State Vigilance Committee, declared the
Baltimore
Sun
at the time of its first anniversary meeting in 1848, “is the celebrated underground railroad.”
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“Any person who approves of the objects of the Committee,” the reorganized group’s constitution declared, “may become a member.” But the state committee’s leadership continued its “great and glorious” predecessor’s close association with non-Garrisonian antislavery organizations. Charles B. Ray remained as corresponding secretary, and close associates of the Tappans held other key offices, including Simeon S. Jocelyn, the president of the American Missionary Association, as vice president, and William Harned, a Philadelphia-born Quaker and the Missionary Association’s corresponding secretary as treasurer. In 1848, 1849, and 1850, Jocelyn presided over the Vigilance Committee’s annual meetings, “composed mostly of colored people.” When the committee issued an appeal for funds in 1849, it listed Harned’s address as treasurer as 61 John Street, the same building that housed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the American Missionary Association. This site became a gathering point for runaway slaves. Tappan later recalled a day when he went to his office there and found eighteen fugitives who had been sent from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. “The agent of the Underground Rail Road,” he related, arranged for their transportation to Albany and Canada.
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The reorganized committee forthrightly declared its intention to “receive, with open arms, the panting fugitive.” But it continued to encounter financial problems. A fund appeal in 1849 noted that while the wealthy Gerrit Smith had donated $500, in general the “friends of the slave” had failed to respond “promptly and generously” to previous solicitations. (Smith’s gift came with strings attached: if, he made it clear, members of the committee voted for mainstream politicians and not the candidates of the Liberty party, he would not give again.) Nonetheless, by 1850, three years after its founding, the New York State Vigilance Committee claimed to have provided 1,000 fugitives with shelter, board, and transportation. Unfortunately, the committee offered no details as to whom it assisted or how. But such affirmations outraged defenders of slavery. One pamphlet outlining the South’s grievances as sectional tensions worsened asked, “Are these people aware how deeply they have criminalized themselves in these avowals [of] . . . their felonious thieveries?”
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The Vigilance Committee, sometimes in conjunction with the American and Foreign, also devoted considerable effort to bringing court cases in the South claiming freedom for persons illegally held as slaves. One such litigation involved a free black woman who had been kidnapped in Baltimore and sold to an owner in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she lived for many years as a slave. Her brother finally succeeded in purchasing her freedom. The committee launched a lawsuit in North Carolina, obtained an affidavit from the Clerk of the Court of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, attesting to the woman’s free birth, and won the release from bondage of her eight children and six grandchildren.
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The New York State Vigilance Committee, a British antislavery group noted, “is almost synonymous with the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.”
47
For this very reason, another group devoted to assisting fugitives emerged in the city, this one centered around followers of William Lloyd Garrison. Its leading figure was Sydney Howard Gay, editor of the weekly
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
, the official publication of the AASS. In the 1840s, the “anti-slavery office” that housed the newspaper became a second outpost of the underground railroad in New York City.

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A PATCHWORK SYSTEM: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN THE 1840S

I

B
orn in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1814, Sydney Howard Gay came from a long line of distinguished New Englanders. One ancestor arrived in Massachusetts with John Winthrop; others included the Puritan luminaries John Cotton and Increase and Cotton Mather, as well as the revolutionary-era patriot James Otis. As time went on, the family suffered setbacks, most notably when Gay’s grandfather, Martin Gay, was banished and his property confiscated for siding with the British during the War of Independence. Martin Gay’s son Ebenezer, however, remained in Massachusetts, prospered as a banker, and fathered eleven children, among them Sydney. Ebenezer Gay departed early each morning for his office, before, he remarked, “hell is let loose.”
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“My ancestry,” Sydney Howard Gay wrote toward the end of his life, “is the best part of me.” Painfully conscious of the challenge of living up to his distinguished lineage and suffering as a youth from bouts of ill health, Gay had difficulty finding a direction in life. He enrolled at Harvard in 1829 but withdrew after a year. In the 1830s, he traveled to China, hoping to establish himself as a merchant, but soon returned to Hingham. The crusade against slavery, he later wrote, “gave the first serious aim to my life.” In 1838, “I announced myself” an abolitionist, “to the astonishment of all,” as “I had never seen an anti-slavery paper . . . and had never heard but one anti-slavery lecture.” Gay was soon writing articles for a Hingham newspaper denouncing the local minister for failing to attack slavery.

Gay became an antislavery lecturer, traveling in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio, sometimes accompanied by such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass and Abby Kelley, the latter a pioneer of abolitionism and feminism who challenged the nineteenth century’s definition of woman’s “place” by becoming an itinerant orator against slavery. Gay spread the Garrisonian abolitionist gospel, criticizing the “new organization” founded by the Tappans and comparing the Liberty party unfavorably with “the veriest pro-slavery priest in all Southland” because it favored abolitionists voting and holding office under a proslavery constitution. Abolitionist lecturing required personal courage. A mob broke up one meeting in an Indiana town, after which Gay’s traveling companion, the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, reported, “No harm was done but liberty was murdered.” Gay dispatched articles to Garrison’s
Liberator
about these tours. As a result of his labors, he believed, “the great principles of anti-slavery have become known, where before they were unknown.”
2

In 1845, Gay married Elizabeth Neall, the daughter of Daniel Neall, a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker and a vice president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Five years earlier, Daniel Neall had attended a Quaker meeting in Delaware, where, according to a newspaper account, he addressed a meeting of black “gentlemen and ladies.” A mob seized Neall that evening, applied a painful coat of tar and feathers, and carried him around the town of Smyrna on a rail. In keeping with Quaker principles, Neall did not resist; instead, he invited members of the mob to visit him in Philadelphia, where he would “gladly give them meat and drink.” A few weeks later, two of them did arrive, to apologize for the assault. In her own right, Elizabeth Neall was a person of strong views and fierce independence, a committed abolitionist and proponent of women’s rights. In 1840, at the age of seventeen, she flouted prevailing mores by traveling to London with four other women, but no male companion, to represent Pennsylvania at the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Received as “women-fanatics,” they, along with other female delegates, were relegated to seats in the balcony (where Garrison joined them). Her engagement to Gay, a “worldly person” (that is, a non-Quaker) was initially opposed by her father and shocked many of her coreligionists. Like her husband, Elizabeth Neall Gay was a staunch Garrisonian who declared herself ready to “wage a war of extermination” against the “new organization.”
3

The Gays settled in New York City, where Sydney in 1844 became editor of the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
. He also served on the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society and helped to organize the society’s annual meeting in the city. Gay commuted daily from their home on Staten Island to the newspaper’s office at 142 Nassau Street, not far from the headquarters of the rival American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. For a modest salary, Isaac T. Hopper managed the office, where he regaled Gay and others with tales drawn from his treasury of “anti-slavery lore.”
4

Quakers, of course, had been pioneers of antislavery thought in colonial America, and Quakers like Hopper and James and Abigail Gibbons formed an important part of the small Garrisonian contingent in New York City. Without them, Lewis Tappan wrote in 1844, “the Garrison party” would “soon become extinct.” African Americans considered Quakers different from other whites. James Williams, who escaped from slavery in Alabama in 1837 and made his way on foot to Pennsylvania, was advised by a free black man there not to trust any white person “unless he wore a plain, straight collar on a round coat, and said ‘thee and thou.’ ” By the 1830s, however, many Quakers recoiled from the militant language of the abolitionist agitation, fearing it unnecessarily produced strife within the larger society and among the Friends themselves.
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