Bound for Canaan (12 page)

The Missouri Compromise made antislavery men seethe too. “Hell is about to enlarge her borders and tyranny her domain,” declared the Quaker editor Elihu Embree. To Embree, and to men like Vestal and Levi Coffin, the slaveholders' victory in Congress made it clear that the institution that they regarded as the most evil on the face of the earth was continuing to metastasize, and that if it was to be thwarted, they would have to undertake risks, personal risks, of an entirely new kind: to do nothing was to court damnation.

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Despite his early sickliness, Josiah Henson grew into a vigorous and self-reliant young man. He was passionately competitive, and proud of his physical strength, claiming that he “could run faster, wrestle better, and jump higher than anybody about me.” His master Isaac Riley looked upon him as “a wonderfully smart fellow” from whom great things were to be expected, Henson says in his “autobiography,” a work originally published in 1849 and revised several times under Henson's supervision, though actually penned by his Boston abolitionist friend Samuel A. Eliot. “My vanity became vastly inflamed, and I fully coincided in their opinion,” Henson goes on. “Julius Caesar never aspired and plotted for the imperial crown more ambitiously than I did to out-hoe, out-reap, out-husk, out dance, out-everything every competitor; and from all I can learn he never enjoyed his triumph half as much. One word of commendation from the
petty despot who ruled over us would set me up for a month.” Pride and naive optimism at least mitigated, if they could never erase, the inherent humiliation of slavery. Henson enjoyed “jolly Christmas times,” “midnight visits to apple orchards,” and occasionally poaching a neighbor's pig or sheep to provide a feast for his fellow slaves, exploits that won him gratitude and friends. One can already see in the brash teenager the qualities that Riley must have prized: the pride in work well done, loyalty to authority, and a remarkable ability to harness his determination and ambition within the slave system. Put another way, Henson was destined for great success as a slave.

Henson's intricate relationship with Isaac Riley embodied the basic problem of slavery. Henson was not just an ordinary field hand, but prized property, like a finely bred piece of livestock, that had to be nurtured, well maintained, and used only in ways that would enhance his value. Indeed, if there is any story that shows that autonomy, even upward mobility, was possible under the constraints of slavery, it is Henson's. He was a man who believed in the system, one that had raised, favored, and on the whole protected him, and given him limited power in the world he knew. He knew quite well that his lot was far better than that of the average agricultural laborer. Yet he would finally risk everything—high status, his family's safety, not to mention his life—to flee north. In the end, even Henson was compelled to face the fact that no amount of favoritism could hide slavery's fundamental nature and its terrifying insecurity. With that recognition, Henson's story became the story of thousands. Once there was someplace to go where fugitives had some real hope of keeping the fruits of their own labor and enjoying the comfort of their family without fear of it being ripped apart, they would flee there, no matter how distant, no matter how low the odds of successful escape.

Before that, however, he would suffer. His life, like so many, both black and white, slave and free, would move from the confines of the eastern hamlet where it had begun and into the larger world of the young nation, a nation that was just awakening to its power, and searching for its geographical limits, and pushing beyond them. Both slavery and abolitionism would grow now with the country, would move west with it, cut through the wilderness, push away the Indians who had lived there before, and transform the land. Westward expansion carried slavery with it into the new territories, and then states, of Alabama and Mississippi, Tennes
see and Kentucky, Florida and Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. It traveled westward like a spreading epidemic, crossing the Appalachians in ox carts and Conestoga wagons, traveling on hardened feet, carried on the steamboats that nosed their way down the Ohio, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Mississippi. It would, in these early years of the century, even insinuate itself into states that were nominally free, where slavery was supposedly barred for all time, into the southern edges of Illinois and Indiana. But abolitionism was on the road too, less visible certainly, still mostly concealed in the hearts and minds of men and women who did not yet know that they were part of a movement that would soon begin to change the country as surely as a million woodsmen's axes would make the forests of the new states vanish.

The seed of Josiah Henson's self-liberation was sown inadvertently when he was eighteen years old, in 1807 or 1808. Something utterly unexpected happened to him in that year. Henson, who had never expressed particular interest in religion, underwent a profound experience that left him burning with an inner sense of divine purpose. Until now, he had never heard a sermon, and his spiritual life, if he had any, probably amounted to little more than the Lord's Prayer. Henson's mother, a devout woman, urged him to go and hear John McKenney, a George Town baker by trade and a Methodist by conviction, who preached to slaves as well as to whites. When Henson arrived, McKenney was discoursing on what Henson (presumably later) learned was Hebrews 2:9: “That he, by the grace of God, should taste of death for every man,” words that would indelibly remain printed in his memory. Henson stood rapt as McKenney's words opened a door onto the previously unimagined realm of Christian myth. Embedded in the preacher's story of crucifixion and ascension, compassion and redemption, was the extraordinary idea—Henson repeated it over and over in his mind—that Christ's salvation was for everyone, not just white men, even for a cocky field hand in the hills of Maryland. He imagined “a glorious being” smiling down at him from high above, welcoming him to the skies, and he felt a “sweetness of feeling” pouring through him, an onrush of divine love. “Nothing will seem so hard after this,” Henson thought. He was so excited that on the way home he flung himself down in the woods outside George Town and prayed to God for further enlightenment. As his religious feelings grew, he began to pray with his fellow slaves, to “exhort” them, and to share
with them “those little glimmerings of light from another world, which had reached my own eye.”

While his conversion to Methodism unlocked in Henson a powerful sense of his own humanity and his spiritual worth, it also strengthened his loyalty to Isaac Riley. When they were a small, evangelical minority within the Church of England, the Methodists had vigorously denounced slavery as a travesty of divine, human, and natural justice. In 1780 Methodist leaders gathered in Baltimore had directed ministers to set free any slaves that they possessed. A second conference a few years later explicitly prohibited Methodists from “buying or selling the bodies or souls of men, women, or children, with an intention to enslave them.” In spite of such views rather than because of them, the next two decades were a time of explosive growth for the Methodists. Having cut their link with the British church, they now offered themselves as a home-grown sect served by itinerant ministers who could turn a field, forest, or tent into a temple of God. The message of individual redemption that they delivered, in language that even the most lowly could understand, resonated deeply with Americans in an era when the secularist passions of the Revolutionary generation had grown stale. In a single generation, Methodists would grow
twenty-five fold
, to include 172,000 whites, most of them in the South, and some 42,000 blacks, by 1816.

Once they were no longer subversive outcasts, however, the church's leaders recognized that opposition to slavery would hamper their growth and their steady elevation to respectability as long as Southerners perceived them as “firebrands of discord.” Instead of insisting that their members separate themselves from slavery as Quakers had, Methodist clerics began apologizing for their former opposition to it. By 1808 the Methodist establishment had abandoned scalding polemics, softening its criticism of slavery—when they made it at all—to mild formulations that even slave owners could tolerate. Preachers now assured Southerners that their slaves were better off than European peasants and many American whites. And to slaves, they piously emphasized prayer, sobriety, kindness, and of course obedience. A similar, cynical process also took place in the Presbyterian church, which as late as 1818 had declared, through its General Assembly: “We consider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature, as utterly inconsistent with the law of God,
which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves and as totally irreconcilable with the spirit and principles of the gospel of Christ which enjoin that all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you do ye even so to them.”

Not all masters were as accommodating as Isaac Riley. Many barred their slaves from receiving any religious training at all. The fugitive William Wells Brown wrote: “In Missouri, and as far as I have any knowledge of slavery in other states, the religious teaching consists in teaching the slave that he must never strike a white man; that God made him for a slave; and that, when whipped, he must not find fault,—for the Bible says, ‘He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes!'” In the summer of 1821 Levi and Vestal Coffin had started a Sunday school for “the colored people,” mostly slaves, at the Quaker schoolhouse near the New Garden meeting house. But hostile slave owners threatened to prosecute both the Coffins and those masters who permitted their slaves to attend the school, and it was forced to close. Coffin wrote, “They said that it made their slaves discontented and uneasy, and created a desire for the privileges that others had.”

Henson's status was significantly enhanced when he exposed some sort of fraud on the part of the farm's white overseer. Riley thereupon dismissed the man, and replaced him with Henson. Black overseers were hardly typical, but they were not uncommon either. Henson may already have been serving as a driver, or assistant overseer, drivers typically being chosen from among slaves who, like Henson, stood out in physical strength, intelligence, loyalty, and managerial ability. He supervised the raising of crops that included wheat, oats, barley, potatoes, corn, and tobacco, and was entrusted with carting them to the markets in George Town and Washington, where he negotiated their sale on Riley's behalf. Even after nearly half a century of freedom, Henson would still be proud that he had more than doubled the farm's yield, and inspired his fellow slaves to “more cheerful and willing labor” than Riley had ever seen. Although, in his autobiography, Henson was careful to avoid the subject, he also must have been responsible for their punishment. As a slave himself, he was under much greater pressure than a white overseer to show that he would not tolerate slacking or misbehavior. William Grimes, a contemporary of Henson, who was a slave on plantations in Virginia and Georgia
before escaping to Connecticut, feared black overseers more than white ones: “My master gave me many severe floggings; but I had rather be whipped by him than the overseer, and especially the black overseers,” Grimes related in his 1824 autobiography. Charles Ball, another contemporary, also served as a plantation superintendent in Georgia. “I not infrequently found it proper to punish [my fellow slaves] with stripes to compel them to perform their work,” Ball admitted. “At first I felt much repugnance against the use of the hickory, the only instrument with which I punished offenders, but the longer I was accustomed to this practice, the more familiar and less offensive it became to me; and I believe that a few years of perseverance and experience would have made me as inveterate a negro-driver as any in Georgia.”

The relationship between Riley and Henson was a curiously codependent one. Henson portrayed his master as a swaggering drunk given to fits of depression and rage, but to whom he was nevertheless sincerely devoted. “I had no reason to think highly of his moral character; but it was my duty to be faithful to him in the position in which he placed me; and I can boldly declare, before God and man, that I was so. I forgave him the causeless blows and injuries he had inflicted on me in childhood and youth, and was proud of the favor he now showed me, and of the character and reputation I had earned by strenuous and persevering efforts.” Like many farmers, Riley was “slave rich” but cash poor, a problem that was probably exacerbated by the tight credit that afflicted many eastern planters after the Panic of 1819, as well as a costly lawsuit with his brother-in-law. Henson painted a picture of the master sunk in boozy despair, and the born-again slave full of solicitous, even condescending compassion: each man both helpless and powerful in his own way, one with the prerogatives of skin color, tradition, and the law, but crippled by incompetence and alcohol; the other a slave, but swollen with self-certitude and evangelical fervor. “Partly through pride, partly through that divine spirit of love I had learned to worship in Jesus, I entered with interest into all his perplexities,” Henson recalled. “The poor drinking, furious, moaning creature was incapable of managing his affairs. Shiftlessness, licentiousness and drink had complicated them as much as actual dishonesty.” Henson chose his adjectives deliberately, one must assume, damning his master with the same language—“shiftlessness,” “licentiousness,” “dis
honesty”—that Southern apologists traditionally used to justify the enslavement of blacks.

Isaac Riley's financial crisis set in motion a series of events that would change Henson's life. Showing the extraordinary confidence that he placed in his slave, Riley ordered Henson to “slip away” to the plantation of his brother, Amos Riley, in Kentucky, taking with him eighteen slaves to prevent them from falling into his creditors' hands. Among these were Henson's wife, Charlotte, “a very efficient, and, for a slave, a very well-taught girl,” whom he had met at a revival meeting, and four young sons. “[My] heart and soul became identified with my master's project of running off his negroes,” recalled Henson, who was placed in charge of a one-horse wagon, stocked with oats, meal, bacon, and feed for the animal. Everything depended on the other slaves' willingness to obey him. “Fortunately for the success of the undertaking, these people had been long under my direction, and were devotedly attached to me in return for the many alleviations I had afforded to their miserable condition, the comforts I had procured them, and the consideration I had always manifested for them…The dread of being separated, and sold away down south, should they remain on the old estate, united them as one man, and kept them patient and alert.”