Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2 page)

There were enough escapes that the southern physician Samuel A. Cartwright claimed to have identified a malady previously unknown to medical science: “drapetomania,” a “disease causing Negroes to run away.” (Frederick Law Olmsted, the New York journalist and landscape architect who wrote popular accounts of his visits to the South in the 1850s, noted that white servants had long been known to abscond. Perhaps, he suggested sarcastically, blacks had caught this disease from them.) Each escape had its own character and faced its own dangers, but those of Douglass and Pennington were in some ways typical. Most fugitives, like them, were young men who escaped alone. Those with immediate families often sought to retrieve their wives and children after reaching the North. Some, like Douglass, planned for months; others, like Pennington, decided to run away because of an immediate grievance—in his case, his owner’s threat to whip his mother for insubordination.
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All fugitive slaves faced daunting odds and demonstrated remarkable courage. Slave patrols and armed private groups dedicated to apprehending fugitives could be found throughout the South. Their numbers were augmented following Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, which resulted in the death of over fifty whites. The authorities regularly searched ships, railroad cars, and highways for fugitives. In the slave states, to aid a runaway slave carried severe legal penalties. Most slaves had little knowledge of geography or how to locate sympathetic persons outside their immediate neighborhoods, although many seem to have been aware that there were people, black and white, willing to help them. They often envisaged dangers even greater than those that actually existed. In the first of his three autobiographies, published in 1845, Douglass recalled that he imagined watchmen everywhere—“at every ferry a guard, on every bridge a sentinel, and in every wood a patrol of slave hunters.” He memorably explained his anxiety by asking the reader to imagine himself in “a land given up to be a hunting-ground for slaveholders . . . where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey!”
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It is impossible to think of fugitive slaves without also thinking of the underground railroad. Douglass later referred to David Ruggles as the only “officer of the underground railroad” he encountered during his escape. The term, in fact, did not yet exist in 1838 when Douglass reached the North, and it remains unclear exactly when it originated. One account attributes its first use to an article in a Washington newspaper in 1839, quoting a young slave who said he hoped to escape on a railroad that “went underground all the way to Boston.” Whatever its origin, the phrase soon became ubiquitous. In 1842, an Albany abolitionist newspaper reported that twenty-six fugitives had passed through the city, and that “all went by the ‘underground railroad.’ ” By 1853, the
New
York
Times
could observe that “the ‘underground railroad’ ” had “come into very general use to describe the organized arrangements made in various sections of the country, to aid fugitives from slavery.” That same year, a North Carolina newspaper offered its own definition: “An association of abolitionists whose first business is to steal, or cause to be stolen, seduced or inveigled . . . slaves from southern plantations; . . . to steal him from an indulgent and provident master; to carry him to a cold, strange, and uncongenial country, and there leave him . . . to starve, freeze, and die, in glorious freedom.” There was even a popular song entitled “The Underground Railroad”; one newspaper predicted it would “have a great ‘run.’ ”
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During the 1850s, journalists throughout the country credited the underground railroad with far more organization and impact than it actually enjoyed. The southern press attributed escapes of all kinds—by land and sea, to the North, Canada, or southern cities—to the underground railroad. In 1860, the
New
York
Herald
, a fierce opponent of abolitionism, described the underground railroad as essentially a fund-raising racket that preyed on the misplaced sympathy of well-meaning whites. But, it continued, “the underground railroad is no myth. [It] stretches through every free state in the Union and has its agents and emissaries on the borders of every slave state.”
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This book is a study of fugitive slaves and the underground railroad in New York City. The nation’s major metropolis, New York before the Civil War consisted of Manhattan and the Bronx, with most of the population concentrated below Thirty-Fourth Street. The city was a crucial way station in the metropolitan corridor through which fugitive slaves made their way from the Upper South through Philadelphia and on to upstate New York, New England, and Canada. Since the underground railroad, by definition, can only be understood as an intercity, interregional enterprise, I also devote attention to other key sites in this northeastern network. I discuss as well the national debate and federal legislation relating to fugitive slaves, and how the fugitive issue played a crucial role in precipitating the Civil War.

Along with Douglass and Pennington, some of the most famous fugitives in American history, including Harriet Jacobs and Henry “Box” Brown, passed through New York City. So did Harriet Tubman, who made several forays into Maryland to rescue slaves and sometimes brought them through New York on their way to Canada. But efforts, public and clandestine, to aid runaways in New York have only recently begun to attract serious study. Most histories of the underground railroad devote little attention to activities there. Graham Hodges’s recent biography of David Ruggles offers a pathbreaking history of the Vigilance Committee during the 1830s, but this part of his narrative, understandably, ends when Ruggles left New York in 1840. In the early 1840s, the
Colored
American
, a black-owned newspaper published in the city,
and Ruggles’s own
Mirror
of
Liberty
, major sources of information about the committee and its activities on behalf of fugitives, ceased publication. For most of the remaining years of the antebellum era, details about the operations of the underground railroad in the city are fragmentary and hard to come by.

The reasons for this relative paucity of information are not difficult to understand. Unlike communities in upstate New York, New England, and parts of the Midwest, where the antislavery movement flourished, New York had close economic ties to the slave South and a pro-southern municipal government. Nominally, the city housed the national headquarters of the two major abolitionist organizations, the American Anti-Slavery Society and, after it divided in 1840, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Both usually held their annual conventions in the city, often on the same days in May. But apart from that week, members of abolitionist societies were few and far between. Along with David Ruggles, this small cadre included the wealthy merchant Lewis Tappan, the black ministers Charles B. Ray and Theodore S. Wright, the abolitionist editor Sydney Howard Gay, and other men and women whose activities this book relates.

Throughout our history, white Americans have prided themselves on enjoying greater freedom than any other people in the world. For blacks the situation has always been more complicated. It took a very long time for the North as a whole, and New York City in particular, to emerge as sites of freedom as far as blacks were concerned. Not until 1827 did slavery in New York come to an end, and even after that, via the capture and return of fugitive slaves, southern and federal law protecting slavery reached into the city and all the free states. This was an era when hundreds of thousands of immigrants entered the United States through New York City, seeking economic opportunity or fleeing religious and political persecution. Despite the hardships they encountered, New York was truly a gateway to freedom for most of them. Many hundreds of fugitive slaves also passed through New York. But especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 went into effect, few could remain in the city without running a serious risk of being returned to bondage. For them, freedom had to be enjoyed somewhere else.

Even after slavery ended in New York, the South’s peculiar institution remained central to the city’s economic prosperity. New York’s dominant Democratic party maintained close ties to the South, and some local officials were more than happy to cooperate in apprehending and returning fugitive slaves. Abraham Lincoln carried New York State in the election of 1860 thanks to a resounding majority in rural areas, but he received only a little over one-third of the vote in New York City. More than once, proslavery mobs ran amok, targeting abolitionist homes and gatherings and the residences and organizations of free blacks.
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The Vigilance Committee held annual meetings at which it announced how many fugitives had been assisted in the previous year, but it faced a chronic shortage of funds and much of its work was conducted by a handful of individuals, in far greater secrecy than was common in parts of the North with more pervasive antislavery sentiment. “We dared not” hold meetings publicly, Anthony Lane, the treasurer of the Vigilance Committee in the 1840s and 1850s, later recalled, since fugitive slaves were frequently present and the owners or their agents “in the city, in hot pursuit.”
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The
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
, published in New York, included notices about the escapes of slaves in other parts of the country, but very little about the underground railroad in its own city. A few fugitive slaves, including Frederick Douglass, wrote memoirs that offer important information about their experiences passing through New York City. But overall, the story of the underground railroad in New York is like a jigsaw puzzle many of whose pieces have been irretrievably lost, or a gripping detective story where the evidence is murky and incomplete.

Fortunately, however, Sydney Howard Gay, the editor of the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
and a key underground railroad operative from the mid-1840s to the eve of the Civil War, kept a detailed record of the assistance he and an interracial group of coworkers provided to fugitives in 1855 and 1856.
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Gay’s outpost operated independently of the city’s Vigilance Committee, although it sometimes cooperated with it. Until recently, few scholars were aware of the existence of Gay’s manuscript, which contains accounts of the escapes of over 200 runaways who passed through New York and of how Gay and his associates undertook to help them. Gay’s Record of Fugitives, discussed in chapter 7, has never before been analyzed in detail for the rare account it offers of the inner workings of the underground railroad in New York and its connections south and north of the city. Along with riveting stories that reveal the motives and experiences of fugitives, Gay’s record makes clear that by the 1850s New York had become a key site in a well-organized system whereby escaping slaves who reached Philadelphia from Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia were forwarded to Gay’s office and then dispatched to underground railroad operatives in Albany, Syracuse, Boston, and Canada.

After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, materials such as Gay’s made individuals vulnerable to federal prosecution. Unfortunately for the historian, a number of persons active in the underground railroad burned their papers in 1850. Gay’s Record of Fugitives was known only to a few intimates, but he certainly took a calculated risk in transcribing and preserving it.
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Overall, during the years from 1835, when the New York Committee of Vigilance was founded, to 1860, the eve of the Civil War, between 3,000 and 4,000 fugitive slaves may have received assistance while passing through the city.
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These numbers, based largely on public claims, sometimes as part of fund raising by the Vigilance Committee, may well be exaggerated. But the precise figure is less important than the fact that throughout the antebellum era, slaves continued to escape, helped in New York and other northern communities by little-known men and women, operating against formidable odds.

II

To what extent a clandestine network of agents in northern communities, with outposts in the South, actually existed, has long been a point of dispute among historians. Soon after the Civil War, a number of abolitionists published their reminiscences, hoping to remind readers of their accomplishments and to reinforce the national commitment to protecting the freedom slaves had acquired during the Civil War. Several such works highlighted organized efforts to assist runaway slaves. Some went overboard with the railroad metaphor, portraying the underground railroad, in the words of one writer, as extending “across all the northern states” with “its side tracks, connections and switches; its stations and conductors . . . ; its system of cypher dispatches.” Although these memoirs included much information about slaves’ determination to be free, they tended to make white abolitionists the central actors of the story.
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One notable exception was William Still’s
The Underground
Railroad
, a compilation of material about fugitive slaves who passed through Philadelphia that was undertaken at the request of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and published in several editions beginning in 1872. A black abolitionist, Still had been hired as a clerk in the society’s office in 1847, and by the following decade he was directing the activities of the city’s Vigilance Committee. He kept a journal, analogous to Gay’s, with a detailed account of hundreds of fugitive slaves, many of whom appear in both documents. Fearing prosecution, Still at various times hid his records in a barn and a local cemetery. Drawing on his journal, Still’s book contains a treasure trove of information, although the absence of any discernible principle of organization somewhat limits its usefulness. Still carefully placed the experiences of the fugitives at the center of the story while giving full credit to those who assisted them, and explained how he forwarded them to freedom. In the 1870s, Robert Smedley, a physician in southeastern Pennsylvania, conducted interviews with surviving abolitionists about the underground railroad. After his death his manuscript was finalized and published by the black abolitionist Robert Purvis and Marianna Gibbons, a member of a white abolitionist family. The book emphasized the key role of the region’s rural Quaker families in assisting fugitives.
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