Bound for Canaan (15 page)

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In the summer of 1831 a seismic shift took place beneath the racial landscape of the United States. That August a charismatic Virginia slave named Nat Turner, believing that he was guided by a divine hand, led a band of followers in the nation's bloodiest slave revolt ever. Before it was suppressed, less than three days after it had begun, at least sixty white men, women, and children had been killed, many of them brutally hacked to death in their beds or while they begged for mercy. “'[T] was my object to carry terror and devastation wherever we went,” Turner would confess before his own execution. Between one hundred and two hundred African Americans would also be executed in retribution, most of them guilty of no wrongdoing. Near Southampton, an innocent black traveler was shot to death and decapitated, and his head stuck on a pole at a county
crossroads. In Dupin County, North Carolina, more than ten blacks were summarily executed because of an alleged conspiracy, and in nearby Murfreesboro, a black man was beheaded for having predicted that there would someday be a war between the black and white peoples. Harriet Jacobs, a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, hid in terror from an orgy of white-on-black rape and savagery in which men, women, and children were randomly whipped “till the blood stood in puddles at their feet,” and “no two people that had the slightest tinge of color in their faces dared to be seen talking together.” Another woman who was enslaved near the Virginia–North Carolina border recalled that in the months after Turner's rebellion “the brightest and best men were killed.”

Fulfilling the worst fears of race war that had beset Southern whites since the slaughter in Haiti in the early years of the century, Turner's insurrection effectively put an end to what lingering support for emancipation remained in the South, and led directly to ever more stringent restrictions on blacks, as well as on whites who dared to publicly challenge the institution of slavery. Rumors of insurrection raced through the South. In Raleigh, North Carolina, every free black in the city was put under arrest. Virginians debated how they could expel the fifty thousand free blacks who resided in the state, while the state legislature enacted a “police bill” that denied free blacks the right to trial by jury, allowed for their sale and transportation if they were convicted of a crime, and barred all blacks from preaching or attending religious meetings unless they were escorted by whites. Where schools for slaves existed, they were suppressed. The Virginia House of Delegates declared, in 1832, “We have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which light can enter…[their] minds. If we could extinguish the capacity to see the light, our work would be completed; they would then be on a level with the beasts of the field, and we should be safe.”

Earlier in the year—Southerners saw the coincidence in timing as irrefutable evidence of an unholy conspiracy linking antislavery Northerners to rebellious slaves—the Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had proclaimed a new doctrine of uncompromising radicalism in the national debate over slavery. Garrison's doctrine would soon reshape the way countless white Americans in the free states thought about slavery, as well as what they were personally prepared to do to bring it to an end. Calling for a “revolution in public sentiment,” he proclaimed, in the first
issue of the
Liberator
, the nation's first newspaper dedicated to immediate abolition: “I
will be
as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of a ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

Less visibly, but no less significant for the enslaved, scattered numbers of Americans who hated slavery enough to risk their reputations and their property to lend assistance to fugitive slaves were slowly beginning to discover one another. This process would soon accelerate dynamically as like-minded people, white and black, reached the point of critical mass that would transform a multitude of charitable personal acts into a movement guided by a shared idea of moral action transcending racial, class, and geographical differences, and that found its ultimate expression in the Underground Railroad. But all this was happening far beyond the narrowly circumscribed awareness of slaves isolated on Southern plantations. Except for the fragile hope of assistance from “benevolent men” of the type Josiah Henson had met during his visit to Cincinnati in 1829, fugitive slaves were largely on their own.

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Tens of thousands of slaves ran away from their owners every year. Jarm Logue, a slave in Tennessee, decided to flee after his drunken master rammed a wooden wedge into his mouth and pounded it in with his fist, badly mangling him. Moses Roper was driven to flee from his Georgia master by a combination of harsh punishment, poor food, and a desire to see his mother, from whom he had been taken away as a child. William Wells Brown, who would one day become the country's first African-American novelist, ran when he learned that his financially hard-pressed master had sold Brown's mother and all the rest of her children, and that he was soon to be sold as well. Slaves ran because they had been beaten too of
ten, because they were terrified of a sadistic overseer, because they couldn't bear to be sold away from family and friends one more time, because they had come to believe that their labor was worth a salary. Many, like the father whom the young Levi Coffin saw skulking behind the wagon that was carrying his enslaved family west, fled with a desperate hope of reuniting with wives, children, or parents who had been taken away from them. Christmas was the most popular time for slaves to escape. Typically, they could expect several days off and a travel pass to attend a prayer meeting, or to visit friends or relatives in distant communities, and they might not be missed for days. (Underground Railroad operatives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, just north of the Maryland state line, always prepared for an influx of fugitives immediately after the holidays.)

The very fact that slaves wanted to run away at all often confounded their masters, who believed—this was constantly affirmed by the ideologues who shaped the South's thinking about slavery—that bondage was ordained in the natural and God-given order of things. In this, they shared the conviction of twentieth-century totalitarians that dissent from a regime of pervasive and relentless control was a psychiatric problem rather than an elemental human desire for freedom. Newspaper notices for fugitive slaves subtly reflected slave owners' self-delusion: while fugitives were sometimes advertised as “incorrigible” or “defiant,” far more were described by their owners as “inoffensive,” “cheerful,” and “well-disposed,” as if flight itself were proof of blacks' childish inability to adapt to their ordained condition. One overseer explained with perplexed annoyance in a message to his employer that a slave had run off “for no other cause than that he did not feel disposed to be governed, by the same rules and regulations that the other Negroes…are governed by.” Occasionally whites enticed slaves to escape for criminal motives. In
Life on the Mississippi
, Mark Twain recounted the terrible story of a gang of con men who would promise a slave that if he ran away and allowed them to sell him, they would give him a portion of the profit, and that upon his return to them a second time they would send him safely to a free state. Sometimes the gang would sell a man three or four times over, earning thousands of dollars in the process. Then, when they felt that they had used him up, they would murder him, toss his body in the Mississippi, and start over with a new victim.

Most runaways did not run very far. In the parlance of the time, most “lurked,” or “lay out,” near towns and cities, or the slave quarters of
neighboring plantations, where they had friends who could provide them with food and occasional shelter, until they were either caught or returned voluntarily to their master. The Tennessee slave Jarm Logue, for instance, hid out in a cave for a week after a fistfight with his drunken master, getting food and news from his friends, and trying to learn what was in store for him if he went home. Logue, as his biographer would put it, now found himself in a situation that “greatly disappointed and embarrassed both parties.” Logue was not in a position to escape, and his master was in no economic condition to dispense with his abilities. Logue returned to his home when word got to him that his master would ignore what had happened between them. For the average master, coping with “absentees” was essentially just one more headache of managing a plantation. In 1826 a Mississippi planter named John Nevitt recorded in his diary a steady, workaday pattern of slaves disappearing and returning. The slave Peter, who went off on February 2 was “brought home” by a neighbor on April 24, and “whipped and ironed” as punishment. The following year Bill ran away on February 28 and came back on March 3. Maria ran away on April 21, and was caught a week later by two other slaves who were dispatched to find her. John was gone from July 1 to July 20. Rubin ran away on October 1, but returned the next day.

In a region that operated under a system of police control that was specifically designed to terrorize blacks into helpless submission, few succeeded in remaining free for long. Steamboats were searched systematically for stowaways, and in ports throughout the South black travelers and workers were subject to immediate arrest if they could not prove their status. Each slaveholding community supported a force of “patrollers,” legally sanctioned vigilante squads that were charged with monitoring the movements of blacks and punishing any who broke the rigid system of rules that governed the lives of all, both slave and free. In 1830 a single South Carolina community, Georgetown, spent more than three hundred dollars in salaries—a substantial sum, at that time—for the local guards. John Capeheart, a Norfolk constable and freelance slave hunter from the 1830s to the 1850s, reported, “It was part of my business to arrest all slaves and free persons of color, who were collected in crowds at night, and lock them up. It was also part of my business to take them before the Mayor. I did this without any warrant, and at my own discretion. Next day they are examined and punished. The punishment is flogging. I am one of the men
who flog them. They get not exceeding thirty-nine lashes. I am paid fifty cents for every Negro I flog. The price used to be sixty-two and half cents. I am paid fifty cents for every Negro I arrest, and fifty cents more if I flog him. I have flogged hundreds. I am often employed by private persons to pursue fugitive slaves. I never refuse a good job of that kind.”

Patrollers typically had the legal authority to ride onto anyone's property, search any home, and to shoot any black who did not surrender on command. Where African Americans were barred from testifying against whites in court, patrollers terrorized black families with complete impunity. “If a slave don't open his door to them at any time of night they break it down,” the fugitive Lewis Clarke told a Northern audience. “They steal his money if they can find it, and act just as they please with his wives and daughters. If a husband dares to say a word, or even look as if he wasn't quite satisfied, they tie him up and give him thirty-nine lashes.” Even where laws discouraged the use of excessive force against runaways, they were often ignored. Patrollers gathered in a tavern in southern Virginia told a Northern traveler that they had just returned from an unsuccessful expedition to kill a fugitive slave who had been lurking for the past year in the neighborhood of a nearby plantation. When he asked if it was not against the law to shoot an unarmed man, the visitor was matter-of-factly informed “that the laws of that state were as pointedly against it, as they were in any state, but the damned Negroes were so bad that nobody took notice of it—that it was a common thing to shoot them there…and it was not common in those cases to make any inquiry—a hole was dug, the Negro thrown in, covered up, and that was an end of it.”

Fear of the patrollers, sometimes called “paddy rollers,” or “patter-rollers,” even infiltrated black folk culture. The suggestive lyrics of one tune might have been sung as a warning to fugitives that danger was near:

Particularly in the Deep South, fugitives who sought more than a temporary respite from bondage tended to run in any direction that seemed to offer a hope of escape. Some followed river valleys eastward to one or another of the Atlantic coast ports, in hope of escaping the South by sea. Some tried to lose themselves in the free black populations of New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah. Others fled to remote areas within the South, like Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp and the Florida wilderness, where they might form “maroon” communities of their own, where children were born and lived out their entire lives without ever emerging. Still others joined multiracial societies that managed to exist beyond the rim of white control, such as the stew of fragmented Indian tribes, fugitive slaves, and renegade whites who inhabited the marshes of Robeson County, North Carolina. Drives to flush out runaways from forests and swamps were popular sporting events in some parts of the South. In West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, for instance, professional slave hunters would arrive in the morning, and along with local slave owners they would gallop through the countryside behind packs of dogs, running down fugitives as if they were rabbits.