Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (14 page)

Some Quakers embraced racial egalitarianism. Abigail Hopper Gibbons joined the otherwise entirely black Manhattan Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 rather than the Ladies’ New York City Anti-Slavery Society, which did not admit black members. Others adopted a patronizing attitude, rarely inviting blacks to join the Society of Friends and making those who chose to do so sit on separate benches. In 1839, the small group of abolitionist Quakers in New York City, including Hopper, James and Abigail Gibbons, and Barney Corse, formed the New York Association of Friends for the Relief of Those Held in Slavery and the Improvement of the Free People of Color. In 1840, the organization opened a school for black students at which Hopper, his wife, and James S. Gibbons taught. The Quaker abolitionists encountered a “hostile attitude” from their New York coreligionists, who, they claimed, shared the “popular prejudice against Anti Slavery operations.” Many Friends, the group pointed out, were merchants “deeply involved” in buying and selling goods produced by slave labor. In 1842, Quakers attending the New York Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends “disowned” Hopper and James S. Gibbons for, among other things, assisting with the publication of the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
. Lydia Maria Child, who taught at the black school the radical Quakers founded, later commented that most Quakers had seen their principles “buried in the mere shell of lifeless forms.” But, she added, “when a Quaker
has
a soul, what large ones they have!” Gay relied on the small Quaker abolitionist cadre for support when he assumed the editorship of the
Standard
.
6

Gay had taken on a daunting task. In 1840, when the Tappanites took control of the
Emancipator
, the AASS established the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
to spread the organization’s principles. It began “without a subscriber, and without so much as a dollar in the treasury.” Finding a permanent editor proved difficult. For a time, Nathaniel P. Rogers, who ran a New Hampshire abolitionist newspaper, served as editor from afar. In 1841, Lydia Maria Child replaced him, becoming the first woman to edit a political newspaper in the United States. Born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1802, Child had achieved an international reputation as the editor of the
Juvenile
Miscellany
, a periodical for children, and the prolific author of novels and popular nonfiction works for women, such as
The
American
Frugal
House
Wife
. When she and her husband, David Lee Child, became followers of William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s, Mrs. Child turned her talents to abolitionist writing. Her tract
An
Appeal
in
Favor
of
That
Class
of
Americans
Called
Africans
(1833) was a powerful call for immediate abolition, a repudiation of racism, and an attack on the American Colonization Society. As the title suggests, Child insisted that blacks were as much Americans as whites and that their future lay in the United States. Her association with abolitionism destroyed Child’s literary career, as her audience abandoned her. She assumed the editorship of the
Standard
both to spread the antislavery message and to support herself and her husband.

Under Child, the
Standard
flourished. She expanded its coverage beyond abolitionist news to include articles on foreign affairs and women’s rights, as well as fiction, poetry, and sketches of the sights, institutions, and people of New York City. Her aim, she wrote, was to make the
Standard
“a good
family
anti-slavery newspaper.” During Child’s editorship the subscription list grew to 6,000, more than double that of Garrison’s own
Liberator
.
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Rogers and Child could not resolve the tension between appealing to as many readers as possible and adhering to the Garrisonian party line, a minority outlook even in abolitionist circles. Rogers spent his editorship rehashing the schism of 1840. Child opted for a more inclusive approach, promising to “avoid all personality and controversy,” so far as this could be done without a “compromise of principle.” She criticized the American and Foreign for its “false” positions, but reprinted a “handsome and well-deserved tribute” to Lewis Tappan for his work for the
Amistad
captives. The Garrisonian leadership in Massachusetts complained that the paper lacked “fire.” For her part, Child resented the “Boston clique’s” assumption that they could “do my thinking for me.” She suspected that her critics believed that the paper needed “a
man
at the helm.” After two years, she resigned and was replaced by her husband. But he, too, soon departed, tired of interference from Boston. “There is not a saint beneath the sun,” James S. Gibbons commented, “who would not sometimes grow impatient at the perpetual fault-finding of . . . we abolitionists. . . . We make the editor’s chair as uncomfortable as possible.”
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Clearly, when Gay became editor in 1844, he assumed a position fraught with difficulty. Moreover, New York City remained a hostile environment for abolitionists. Most of the
Standard
’s readers lived outside the city; in the metropolis itself, with a population of around half a million, the paper had 102 subscribers. “You don’t know, you can’t, in Boston,” Gay wrote to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips in 1848, “just what my position is. . . . You are surrounded by a people growing in anti-slavery; I by a people who hate it.” Even among the city’s small band of abolitionists, Gay found himself isolated, since nearly all were affiliated with the “new organization” or the Liberty party. “As to abolitionists [meaning Garrisonians] in this blessed city,” he wrote in 1844, “there are none to my knowledge, except [Oliver] Johnson [who worked on the paper] and . . . the colored office-boy.” Even those close to the
Standard
strayed from the Garrisonian outlook, which eschewed involvement in politics. James S. Gibbons, for example, announced his intention to vote for Henry Clay, the Whig presidential candidate, in 1844.
9

Gay’s lack of self-confidence compounded his problems. He worried that his work was not appreciated in Boston (Garrison had the annoying habit of omitting Gay’s name as corresponding secretary when listing the officers of the AASS). Abolitionists there seem to have assigned Wendell Phillips the task of responding to Gay’s stream of self-deprecatory letters and occasionally visiting New York to convey support and make sure he did not fall under the influence of Lewis Tappan. (On one visit, Phillips assured Gay that Garrison had denounced him “
only
” on “three or four” occasions.)
10

Gay accepted the paper’s role as “the exponent of the opinions and policies” of the AASS. As a result, he found himself defending positions, such as the idea of disunion as a way of separating northerners from the evil of slavery, that were unpopular even among many Garrisonians. The
Standard
’s circulation declined steadily, and Gay had to rely on infusions of money from Boston to keep the paper afloat. “The Standard is on its last legs,” Gay wrote in 1846. Despite all this, the paper survived. For most of the years leading up to the Civil War, it remained the only abolitionist newspaper in New York City, and unlike his predecessors, Gay managed to persevere as editor for well over a decade.
11

Long after the end of slavery, Gay recalled the Boston abolitionists as “the most charmed circle of cultivated men and women it has ever been my lot to know.” But they could also act in distinctly uncultivated ways, especially in the 1840s, when, in the words of Lewis Tappan, “the warfare between the Old Organization . . . and the New Organization, including the Liberty Party” continued “unrelenting.” Early in 1850, Samuel J. May, a Garrisonian abolitionist based in Syracuse, sponsored a meeting to broker peace between the factions. But the four-day gathering broke up in acrimony. The delegates could not even agree on a resolution endorsing cooperation among abolitionists. One thing on which the participants did concur, however, was that the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause “ought never to have been adopted, and ought now not to be obeyed.” Aiding fugitives was an activity in which warring abolitionists could and did cooperate. Later that year, the new Fugitive Slave Act would unite all abolitionists in opposition.
12

Sydney Howard Gay’s desire to assist fugitive slaves originated before his arrival in New York City. On his 1844 speaking tour, Gay wrote of his admiration for the antislavery men and women who welcomed runaways into their homes, and of the courage of the fugitives themselves. In Indiana, he encountered a group of twenty absconding slaves with armed slave catchers in hot pursuit. Although not an activity contemplated in the “infancy” of the abolitionist movement, he mused, assistance to fugitives had become “an efficient anti-slavery instrumentality,” and eastern abolitionists ought to do more along these lines. Gay also appears to have been inspired by Charles T. Torrey, who, as noted in the previous chapter, helped slaves escape from Washington until his capture in 1844. In an editorial after Torrey’s arrest, Gay opposed going into the South to help slaves escape, fearing that such actions might “produce civil war.” In the same piece, however, Gay agreed that the constitutional obligation to return fugitives must not be obeyed, and wrote of personally assisting a “trembling slave” who had made his way “alone and unaided” to New York City. He also kept in touch with David Ruggles after the latter settled in Massachusetts. The
Standard
’s office on Nassau Street, like that of the Vigilance Committee on nearby John Street, became a key outpost of the underground railroad.
13

Gay worked closely with Louis Napoleon, a black porter employed in his office who also made his living at various times as a furniture polisher and whitewasher. In the early 1840s, Napoleon lived at 33 Spruce Street, around the corner from Gay’s office; later in the decade he moved to 27 Leonard Street, not far from the ferry terminal where passengers (sometimes including fugitives) from Philadelphia and points farther south alighted. Napoleon left far less of a historical record than Gay or Tappan, and what information exists about him is fragmentary and contradictory. Some accounts describe him as having been born a slave in New York or Virginia and having remained in bondage until adulthood. The most reliable sources, however, give his date and place of birth as April 1, 1800, in New York. An article about his funeral in the
New
York
Sun
—headlined “Not the French Emperor but an Old Friend of the Fugitive Slaves”—identified Napoleon’s father as Jewish and his mother as a slave at the time of his birth. Thus, he was born free under the gradual emancipation law enacted in 1799, but had to serve a long apprenticeship, which he did for a time at a tobacco warehouse in Manhattan.

By the 1830s, Napoleon had become actively involved in aiding fugitive slaves. He made trips to Maryland to help slaves escape, and scoured New York’s docks searching for those who had concealed themselves on vessels and for slaves illegally brought to the city for shipment elsewhere. When he died, he was credited with having helped over 3,000 fugitives escape from bondage. Philip A. Bell, the publisher of the
Colored
American
who later emigrated to California and established that state’s first black newspaper, identified Napoleon and Vigilance Committee president Theodore S. Wright as the two “originators” of the underground railroad in New York City.
14

Since the New York City Anti-Slavery Society had affiliated with the Tappanites, the city’s band of Garrisonians in 1845 established the Manhattan Anti-Slavery Society. (This group should not be confused with an earlier body of the same name, composed of black women plus Abigail Hopper Gibbons.) The venerable Isaac T. Hopper served as president, Gay as corresponding secretary, and Mrs. Gibbons sat on the Board of Managers. Among the Board’s tasks was “to appoint a Vigilance Committee, of not less than ten members, whose special duty it shall be to extend aid to self-emancipated slaves.” Given that a Vigilance Committee dominated by followers of Lewis Tappan already existed in New York City, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the new group was intended as a Garrisonian alternative.
15

The relationship between the two stations of the underground railroad in New York City might best be described as mostly friendly, occasionally unfriendly, competition. Abolitionists, Lewis Tappan later recalled, “vied with each other in devising means” to aid fugitive slaves and other blacks. From time to time, Gay cooperated with members of the other committee and even lent his name to its fund-raising appeals. A circular seeking contributions, issued by the New York State Vigilance Committee in 1849, stated that donations would be acknowledged in two newspapers, the
True
Wesleyan
and
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
. In 1849, Tappan himself sent a Miss Archer, “a slightly colored young lady from Jamaica,” to Gay, so that he could assist her in securing a position as a teacher.
16

That the feuding wings of New York City’s abolitionist movement could mostly work in tandem in aiding fugitive slaves owed a great deal to the influence of Charles B. Ray, the key figure during the 1840s in the New York Vigilance Committee. Despite his close association with the Tappans and the Liberty party, Ray, in the words of Oliver Johnson, Gay’s associate at the
Standard
, “did not in any degree share the hostility to Garrison manifested by many others,” and tried to maintain cordial relations with all New York abolitionists. Ray’s stance reflected that of most black abolitionists, who viewed sectarian divisions within the movement as a diversion from the goal of abolition. To be sure, many feuding white abolitionists, despite their heated exchanges, shared antislavery platforms. But blacks were especially put off by what Charles Lenox Remond called abolitionists’ “open warfare” against one another. On his speaking tour of Great Britain in 1846, Frederick Douglass, at the time a full-fledged Garrisonian, insisted on meeting persons “of every antislavery creed.” Criticized by members of the “Boston clique” for consorting with allies of Tappan, Douglass responded that he would speak against slavery “in any meeting when freedom of speech is allowed and where I may do anything towards exposing the bloody system.” In 1849, Douglass addressed the annual meeting of the New York State Vigilance Committee despite its orientation toward the “new organization.”
17