Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (22 page)

Most of the slaves who reached Philadelphia and New York had come by land. Many arrived from Washington, where after the death of Charles T. Torrey in 1846 and the departure of William L. Chaplin in 1850, Jacob Bigelow emerged as the key figure in a secret group of underground railroad operatives. A retired lawyer who had arrived in the nation’s capital from Massachusetts in 1843 and helped to found the city’s first gas company, Bigelow later wrote that he devoted “one-half of my time . . . to aid the oppressed.” He raised money to purchase the freedom of slaves threatened with sale and arranged for fugitives to be sent to Wilmington and Philadelphia. In 1854, he asked Still to send a reliable man, “a white man would be best,” willing to lead small groups of slaves out of the nation’s capital “once or twice a week.” The man would be paid and, Bigelow added, “might make a good living at it.”

Unlike Torrey and Chaplin, Bigelow kept a low profile. In a city with strict laws against aiding fugitives and a police force on the lookout for runaways, he lived in constant fear of arrest. In 1855, he outlined to Still the difficulties of hiding slaves in the nation’s capital. The home of “any colored citizen” could be “ransacked by constables . . . at any hour of day or night,” and police offered “sharp colored men” rewards of up to $200 to betray fugitives. Bigelow signed his letters “William Penn,” and urged Still to keep them in a safe place. In the letters, which alerted Still to the arrival of what Bigelow variously called freight, merchandise, or people “most anxious to travel,” he inserted in brackets strong statements avowing his opposition to any actions that violated the law. When he began this practice, he told Still not to take the bracketed words seriously—they were “intended to have no significance whatever to you, only to blind the eyes of the uninitiated.”
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Another key underground railroad operative south of the Mason-Dixon Line was Thomas Garrett, who operated an iron, coal, and hardware business in Wilmington, Delaware. A Quaker and follower of William Lloyd Garrison, Garrett kept meticulous count of the fugitives he aided over the course of three decades. By the outbreak of the Civil War he claimed that his “slave list” had surpassed 2,200. On one occasion, twenty-one slaves who had escaped together departed from Garrett’s house through the rear entrance just as “the masters in pursuit arrived at his front door.” Garrett seems to have served as the inspiration for the character of Simeon Halliday, a Quaker who helps slaves on their way to Canada, in
Uncle
Tom
’
s
Cabin
. Some abolitionists referred to him as “President of the U. G. R. R.”
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With large free black and Quaker communities, Wilmington, situated only five miles from the Pennsylvania state line, was a unique island of antislavery sentiment within a slave state, as much, Garrett wrote, “as in Boston, and quite as freely expressed.” “The abolitionists are extremely active,” wrote a local newspaper in 1849, “and we have reason to believe that the underground railroad extends a considerable distance down the state, and that branches have even entered Maryland.” Free blacks in Wilmington were known to tear down handbills posted by slave catchers offering rewards for fugitives.

Garrett worked with a small group of black and white associates, including John Hunn, a Quaker who later described himself as “supt. of the underground railroad from Wilmington down the peninsula.” They transported fugitives across the nearby state line in wagons, on boats, on foot, and by rail, and then put them on the “cars” (the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad) to Philadelphia. Garrett alerted Still by letter when to expect them, and Still sent men to meet them at the railroad station, the docks if they were coming by boat, or the border if they traveled on foot.
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Slavery had a small presence in Delaware—the census of 1860 recorded only 1,800 slaves in the state. Most of those Garrett assisted came from farther south, especially Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Despite the waning of slavery in Delaware, however, aiding fugitives remained dangerous. A free black man, Samuel Burris, was sentenced in 1847 to be sold into slavery for fourteen years for this offense. (A white Quaker purchased Burris at auction and spirited him off to Philadelphia.) In 1848, with Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney presiding, the U.S. Circuit Court fined Garrett $5,400 (later lowered to $1,500) and John Hunn $2,500 after two owners sued them for helping a black family of eight to escape. Garrett told the court that he thought the blacks were free, but “had I believed every one of them to be slaves, I should have done the same thing.” Turning to the spectators, he declared, “If any of you know of any slave who needs assistance, send him to me.”
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As time went on, the underground railroad in Delaware became less and less secretive. By 1855, Garrett could write that he dispatched fugitives “in open day on their way North,” with little fear of the consequences. Two years later a newspaper reported a “general stampede” (as the press called group escapes) from Dover, the state capital, “by the underground railroad.” In 1855 and 1856, Sydney Howard Gay recorded the arrival in New York of nearly fifty fugitives who had been assisted by Garrett.
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Overall, however, it was common south of the Mason-Dixon Line for assistance to come from individuals unconnected with any network. Not surprisingly, fugitives tended to approach black persons for help in initiating or conducting their escapes. “Some colored people” offered Albert and Anthony Brown provisions on their way from Maryland to Wilmington, and “friendly colored people whom they happened to fall in with” gave shelter to a couple escaping from Alexandria when the wife became ill. Henry Chambers, a Maryland slave who accompanied his owner on a visit to Wilmington, was told by a local black man “how he could get clear” of slavery. The cook on a vessel sailing from Richmond asked Henry Johnson “if he would not like his freedom,” and then concealed him on board for the journey to New York. Another ship’s cook, with the approval of the captain so long as “his name not be used,” hid William Thompson on board for a fee of five dollars. A group of sailors in Petersburg offered a slave named Charles passage to New York in exchange for helping them load the vessel.
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Some white southerners were also willing to assist fugitive slaves. White friends in Washington gave James Anderson the money that enabled him to hire Joseph Becket, a free black man who, for a fee, guided fugitives to the Pennsylvania border. Andrew Jackson, a slave from Cecil County, Maryland, told Gay that “a white man . . . piloted him some 4 or 5 miles on the road, only charging him 25 c. for his trouble.” A white woman provided extraordinary assistance to David Lewis of Leesburg, Virginia. Lewis had permission to take his owner’s horse to visit his mother. His female companion hired a carriage and, along with her daughter, accompanied him on a journey to Harrisburg, posing as a woman traveling with her coachman. Thus, they were able to traverse the fifty miles to the Pennsylvania border “unmolested by day light,” and to stay overnight in a hotel in Chambersburg, where the proprietor told them “they would find friends in Harrisburg.”
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Not all slaves who passed through Delaware and eastern Maryland went directly to Philadelphia. Their first stop was often Chester County in southeastern Pennsylvania, “the most enlightened county in the state” according to one abolitionist, but also a place that witnessed frequent incursions from slave catchers and kidnappers from Maryland, and whose local press castigated free blacks as a burden to society. Nonetheless, Chester was home to a sizable free black community whose churches sheltered fugitives, and to numerous farm families, mostly Quakers, who forwarded them to Still or directly to underground railroad operatives in upstate New York. Black and Quaker underground railroad networks in the county overlapped. Some of the blacks involved in the Christiana riot of 1851 worked as tenants on Quaker-owned farms. Samuel Ringgold Ward, who escaped from Maryland in the 1820s with his parents and became a prominent abolitionist, later wrote that when slave catchers arrived, “Quakers threw all manner of
peaceful
obstacles in their way, while the Negroes made it a little too
hot
for their comfort.” Family connections linked the Quakers involved in these activities. Thomas Garrett’s wife Rachel was the sister of Isaac Mendenhall, an underground railroad activist in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. A group of Quaker abolitionists in and around that village a dozen miles from Wilmington organized themselves as the Progressive Friends. Garrett regularly attended meetings there in the 1850s. So did Oliver Johnson, who worked with Sydney Howard Gay on the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
.
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The Lewis family was typical of the Quaker clans in Chester County connected to the underground railroad. Graceanna Lewis, a niece of a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society and later the country’s leading female botanist and ornithologist, grew up in an abolitionist Quaker household. “There was never a time,” she later wrote, “when our house was not a shelter for those escaping slavery.” A member of the Progressive Friends, she published an accusatory missive to other Quakers bearing the formidable title
An
Appeal
to
Those
Members
of
the
Society
of
Friends
Who
,
Knowing
the
Principles
of
the
Abolitionists
,
Stand
Aloof
from
the
Anti
-
Slavery
Enterprise
. Among other fugitives, Lewis hid four men, including William Parker, on their way to Canada after the Christiana riot.

Lewis and her friends formed a “sewing society” to ensure that they had large quantities of “clean and nicely mended clothing on hand” so that fugitives could travel by rail without looking like slaves. She often forwarded them by wagon to nearby Phoenixville, where the Quaker farmer Elijah F. Pennypacker, according to Still, assisted “the majority of fugitives” proceeding through southeastern Pennsylvania. Farther west, the Quaker couple William and Phoebe Wright of York Springs (who had sheltered James W. C. Pennington in the late 1820s) received runaways from Delaware, Maryland, and Washington on their farm a dozen miles from the Maryland border. So did the black abolitionist William Whipper, who ran a successful lumber and shipping business in nearby Columbia and owned a small railroad. Whipper sent many fugitives by rail to the Wrights, directly to Still in Philadelphia, or north to New York State and Canada. By the 1850s, what had been a “rough network” of safe houses in southern Pennsylvania had evolved into a well-organized system for assisting fugitives.
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Once they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into southern Pennsylvania, fugitives encountered many persons prepared to help them on their way, including militant free blacks willing, as evidenced at Christiana, to employ violence to do so. The Record of Fugitives compiled by Sydney Howard Gay in 1855 and 1856 reflects the wide range of individuals in that region who assisted fugitives on their way to Philadelphia and New York. Among them were the baggage master at the Harrisburg railroad station, who “befriended” runaways and sent them to Philadelphia, and a white person in Little York who took a fugitive man and wife to a black church. Names of many of the underground railroad operatives in southeastern Pennsylvania appear in Gay’s Record, including William Whipper in Columbia and the Quakers William Wright, Mahlon B. Linton, Rowland Johnson, and Elijah Pennypacker. The role of the Friends in assisting fugitives was known to absconding slaves. In December 1855, Henry Cooper escaped on foot from Middletown, Maryland, to Pennsylvania. When he reached North Chester, he “stopped at a house and inquired for Quakers.”
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The experience of one large, extended family of fugitives illustrates how the underground railroad operated in southeastern Pennsylvania in the years before the Civil War. On the night of October 16, 1855, Harriet Shepherd and her five children, ranging in age from three to seventeen, along with her brother John Bright and his wife and three teenage sons and a stepson, “borrowed” two horse-drawn carriages and departed from Chestertown, Maryland, “for a free country.” The next morning they arrived in Wilmington, a little over fifty miles to the north, where they “bought some cakes” at a local store and asked a “colored man . . . to direct them to a Quaker.” He brought them to Thomas Garrett, who sent them “hastily onward for fear of pursuit.” That evening the group reached the Longwood Meeting House in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where a meeting of the Progressive Friends was in progress. One of the members put them up for the night, and on October 28 the two families arrived at Graceanna Lewis’s home in Kimberton. “The case seems to us one of unusual danger,” Lewis wrote to William Still, and she decided to separate the two families. Lewis sent Shepherd and her children “off of the usual route, and to a place where I do not think they can remain many days.” Soon, they proceeded to Philadelphia, where they arrived on November 8. The Brights were sent to the home of Elijah Pennypacker in Phoenixville, from where their sons and stepson continued on to stay with Mahlon B. Linton in Newtown, north of Philadelphia. This family did not reach William Still’s office until early December. All were eventually forwarded to Gay’s office in New York and sent on their way northward.
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