The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (41 page)

David Blight is careful in acknowledging the many revisions historians have brought to the subject, especially since
Larry Gara’s landmark study,
The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad
(1961), while insisting on the need to respect the local lore and mythology as a way of understanding the extraordinary “hold of the Underground Railroad on Americans’ historical imagination.”
¹⁸

It should be added that the
fugitive slave issue was absolutely central in bringing on the Civil War, especially after the North’s hostile response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, with large crowds of Northerners attempting to give aid to captured blacks. The popularity of the Underground Railroad is especially remarkable in view of the widespread fear, popularized by the South, that any significant freeing of slaves would lead to a mass migration to the North, where blacks would take jobs away from the higher-paid whites, especially immigrants. Given the profound depth of Northern racism, it’s clear that many whites who were thrilled over the slaves’ escape would not have wanted runaways settling next door or sending their children to the neighborhood school. But the assumption that most fugitives were headed for Canada helped remove some of that concern; the actual
numbers of fugitives, as we will see, were not large; and the very fact that slaves were willing to take such risks undermined the Southern
propaganda regarding paternalistic treatment and happy, contented bondspeople. The fugitive slave narratives enlisted crucial religious themes of redemption, exodus, and salvation, which fell into already well established tropes regarding American conceptions of freedom. As one correspondent wrote, the Underground Railroad would “thrill the heart and quicken the pulse of the eager student of the grand progressive movement of human liberty in the past,” offering “ ‘hairbreath [
sic
] escapes, perilous journeys by land and water, incredible human suffering for a wide readership.’ ”
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Moreover, given the constitutional structure of the Union, it was very difficult to take direct action that could have any effect on the nation’s “problem of slavery.” That point was exemplified in 1833, when the
British Parliament passed a sweeping law for the gradual emancipation of colonial slaves. In America, abolitionists saw the need to limit petitioning to the supposedly constitutional
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, ending the
interstate slave trade, or prohibiting the
admission of Texas as a slave state (and for many years a “
gag law” suppressed all antislavery petitions). From 1856 to 1861, Lincoln and the Republicans restricted their antislavery policy to excluding any further slave states or territories. Therefore, helping fugitives became a vital and popular way of enabling even thousands of Northerners to participate personally in an activity that could give freedom to individual slaves while also renouncing national complicity in the slave system. Indeed, by projecting all of slavery’s evil on slaveholders and slave catchers, there could be a denial of national complicity and complexity and a reassuring assumption that the entire problem would be resolved as soon as individual slaves were freed in the way that runaways were. One of the defects
Blight finds in the Underground Railroad lore and mythology is that it reinforces the conviction that America’s racial issue would end and did end with slave emancipation.
²⁰

Two other major shortcomings concern the omission of the predominant role of free
blacks in the Underground Railroad, and an exaggerated view of the system’s organization and, especially, of the number of fugitives transported. We now know that the great
Harriet Tubman was not exceptional in being a black conductor and that most fugitives preferred finding refuge in black homes or quarters. Blacks in effect ran the Underground Railroad, and black conductors often worked at occupations connected with transportation, as
river men, railroad porters, or coach owners. Nevertheless, it was the white involvement—in particular the enthusiastic white response to the fugitive slave issue—that alarmed and infuriated Southerners and helped lead to secession and war. As
Benjamin Quarles noted, “Slavery was weakened far less by the economic loss of the absconding blacks than by the antislavery feeling they evoked by their flight and the attempts to reclaim them.”
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This point ties in with the small number—according to one historian, “only a trickle”—of the millions of Southern slaves who actually escaped to freedom in the North or Canada. Ironically, the most authoritative and deeply researched book,
John Hope Franklin and Lauren
Schweninger’s
Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation,
underscores the frequency of slaves escaping
locally
to avoid work, to encourage concessions, to see members from broken-up families, or to avoid punishment. While precise numbers are impossible to determine, advertisements for runaways and slaveholder journals, diaries, and records make it clear that few masters could boast that none of their slaves had absconded. There can be no doubt that tens of thousands of slaves ran away each year “into the woods, swamps, hills, backcountry, towns, and cities of the South.”
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This fact, documented in great detail by Franklin and Schweninger, was related to a general pattern of preceived resistance that included theft, damaging equipment, mocking whites while seeming to flatter, playing on conflicts between masters and their white overseers, and lightening unending work with moments of song, intimacy, slowdowns, and relaxation. As human beings, most slaves had one overriding objective: self-preservation at a minimal cost of degradation and loss of self-respect. For most, the goal of “freedom” was simply unrealistic, given the rarity of manumissions, the mechanisms and institutions of social control, and the distance to the North, Canada, or Mexico (small numbers of
American slaves did escape to Spanish
Florida, Mexico, and even Cuba).

According to a very conservative estimate, the total
number of annual runaways in the 1850s would have exceeded 50,000 (1.26 percent of the 1860 slave population; about 5 out of every 400 slaves). But the vast majority of these slaves remained fairly close to their farms or plantations and either returned or were captured within days or weeks. It is probable that between 1830 and 1860, no more than 1,000 or 2,000 fugitives annually made it to the North and achieved freedom.
²³
Since an average of 1,500 would be only .0375 percent of the 1860
slave population, totaling only 45,000 over a thirty-year period—far fewer than the number of
slaves who escaped behind British lines during the American Revolution—it is clear that the Underground Railroad and the flight of
fugitives to the North posed no serious demographic threat to the Southern slave system.

The extraordinary attention devoted to the fugitive issue between Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
(1845) and
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852) gives the impression that it was a new phenomenon. But slaves have fled their owners throughout human history. In seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland, Native American slaves found it easy to abscond, and planters then struggled to prevent African slaves from colluding and escaping with white indentured servants. By the eighteenth century,
urbanization contributed to the problem, because cities like New York, as in medieval Europe, could provide refuge for slaves from the countryside as well as hiding places and supporters for urban slaves who had fled their owners. But, as in the Caribbean, it was wars—especially the
French and Indian War and the American Revolution—that led to the large-scale exodus of slaves from their owners’ control. It is especially remarkable that the massive departure of slaves behind British lines in the Revolution—some were sold in British colonies; most were freed and sent to
Nova Scotia and eventually
Sierra Leone—did not lead to any longer-term weakening of the American slave system.
²⁴

Also in the eighteenth century, the first
maroon communities took shape in unsettled and difficult-to-access regions in the South. These refuges for
runaway slaves were never as large or strong as the
maroon communities in Brazil and parts of the Caribbean. But in some bogs and wild areas of the Deep South, and the
Great Dismal Swamp on the border shared by Virginia and North Carolina, fugitives founded communities that depended in part on raiding and trading with local plantations for food and supplies.
²⁵
Historian
Steven Hahn has imaginatively argued that all of the free black communities, including those in the North and Midwest, were essentially maroon settlements made up by freed or escaped slaves and their descendants, whose identity and political orientation was defined by the national character of American slavery. This is part of a larger thesis that extends from the supposed political activism and resistance of slaves to the flight of tens
of thousands of slaves behind Union lines during the Civil War, a kind of self-emancipation that Hahn terms “the greatest slave rebellion” in human history. Apart from the theory’s exaggerations and omissions, the maroon aspect provides an interesting perspective on the overall relationship between fugitives, free blacks, and slavery.
²⁶

As for
slaveholders, their immediate loss was both
economic and ideological. When one or more slaves absconded, there was an immediate loss of labor that could be difficult or impossible to replace. Hardly less important was the example set and the destabilization of discipline on plantations and small farms. Yet as we have seen, most runaways returned after a fairly short period, so there were strong incentives for masters to bargain for such a return when that was possible. The slaves who actually sought or achieved true freedom threatened a major loss of capital, which increased in the 1840s and 1850s as slave prices soared. Moreover, when a recaptured runaway was sold there could be a considerable loss in value if it became clear to buyers that the slave had left repeatedly or had headed north. On the other hand, the cost of retrieval amounted to a small percentage of the slave’s value. In the 1850s, when some average slave prices rose from $900 to $1,800, the cost of retrieval when successful never usually rose above $75. As we will see, Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law could greatly increase the cost in some highly publicized individual cases. But in general, the most expensive expeditions after slaves—if the slave had a good head start—cost $150 to $200, even counting extensive hiring of slave catchers.
²⁷
Once again, the South clearly overreacted to the supposedly disastrous threat of the fugitive slave issue.

An important clue to the underlying reasons for this overreaction can be seen in the slaveholders’ psychological and ideological reaction to slaves’ running away, a reaction made explicit in thousands of printed advertisements for individual fugitives. Today, following a long but revolutionary shift in moral perception that has stigmatized slavery as a crime, it is very difficult to see the world through slaveholders’ eyes. One famous fugitive expressed the complexity it is so easy for us to miss: “The relation between master and slave is even as delicate as a skein of silk: it is liable to be entangled at any moment.”
²⁸
Convinced of the moral legitimacy of the system, most slave owners sincerely believed that their own best interests were identical with their slaves’ best interests, though most masters admitted
that the institution, like any other, was capable of being abused. The desire for profit and personal power could be mitigated by the desire to be thought of, especially by fellow planters, as good Christians and decent fellows. Moreover, it made good economic sense to keep the slaves’ morale as high as possible and to encourage them to do willingly and even cheerfully the work they would be forced to do in the last resort. Like their Roman predecessors, Southern planters expected gratitude for their acts of kindness, indulgence, and generosity, and even for their restraint in inflicting physical punishment. Several travelers noted that American masters wanted above all to be
“popular”
with their slaves—a characteristically American need that was probably rare in Brazil or the Caribbean.
²⁹

While numerous ads for runaway slaves complain that the escape was triggered by too much generosity, confirming the adage “give-’em-an-inch-and-they’ll-take-a-mile,” many others reveal an almost pathetic faith that a given slave, who was said to have been very friendly and wanting to please, would accept an offer of forgiveness and “come home” like an errant son. Most masters desperately sought a consensual element, a sign of consent and gratitude on the part of at least some slaves. Ads and plantation records also reveal an overriding psychological response of anger.

While the story of Harriet A. Jacobs exhibits some striking parallels with Frederick Douglass (whom she got to know in Rochester), more significant is what it reveals about the profound vulnerabilities of slave women and mothers and about the psychological obsessions of masters like Dr.
James Norcom, who was determined to use his
slaveholder powers as a means of obtaining some kind of “consensual” sex
with the teenage Jacobs.
³¹
Southerners continued to deny the key abolitionist claim that
slaveholding led to the ubiquitous sexual exploitation of slave women. In response, abolitionists needed only to point to travelers’ accounts and to the growing ubiquity in the South of mulatto slave children. Jacobs’s
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
was published in 1861 under the pen name “Linda Brent,” and was long thought to be the work of a white abolitionist, especially
Lydia Maria Child, who edited the work but denied authorship. Even as a supposedly “inauthentic” slave narrative,
Incidents
became the most widely read and persuasive account of a fugitive slave woman’s struggle to maintain some control over her body, her children, and her human values. Thanks to the prodigious research of historian and biographer
Jean Fagan Yellin, who has confirmed Jacobs’s authorship, we now even know the historical identity of the characters, such as Dr.
Norcom (“Dr. Flint” in the narrative).
³²