Bound for Canaan (16 page)

Some fugitives sought refuge with Native Americans. Before the acquisition of Spanish-ruled Florida by the United States, numbers of them settled among the Seminoles there. Indeed, the First Seminole War, in 1816, climaxed with the bloody capture of “Fort Negro,” a mixed black and Indian community on the Apalachicola River, by American and Creek Indian troops led by Andrew Jackson. (Nearly three hundred were killed outright, many of them when the fort's ammunition dump exploded; the survivors were marched back into slavery.) Native Americans offered no sure promise of protection, however, since slaveholding was not uncommon among them, and they might be as likely to enslave fugitives for their own use, or to sell them back to their masters, as to welcome them as freemen. One youngster, a free black named Samuel Scomp, who had been kidnapped from his home in Philadelphia, escaped from a slave driver in Alabama in 1825, hoping to find refuge with the Choctaw, but the first Indian he met handed him back to his captor, who beat him savagely for running off. When the Choctaw sold their lands in Mississippi to the United States in 1830, their chief, Greenwood Leflore, remained behind with his nearly four hundred slaves, making him one of the largest slave owners in the state. The Cherokee in particular, who occupied large
parts of Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina until their expulsion by federal forces in the late 1830s, treated the adoption of black slavery as a part of their process of “civilization,” akin to their establishment of modern courts and schools, the transition to European-style architecture, and the creation of a written language.

In the early 1830s, the free states of the North offered fugitive slaves the opportunity to live an autonomous life on the margin of society, and personal freedom that was protected only erratically by law. William Grimes, in his 1825 memoir, expressed with trenchant sarcasm the bitterness of freedom seekers like himself who had endured the racism of the North: “I do think there is no inducement for a slave to leave his master, and be set free in the northern states. I have had to work hard; I have been often cheated, insulted, abused, and injured; yet a black man, if he will be industrious and honest, he can get along here as well as any one who is poor, and in a situation to be imposed on.” Fugitives could count on little or no organized help from antislavery whites, even if they could find them. While their numbers were growing, such men and women were still few and far between even in the Quaker communities of Pennsylvania. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois all discouraged even the entry of free blacks. Only a few years earlier, the state supreme court of New Jersey had declared it “a settled rule…that black color is the proof of slavery,” a principle that facilitated the work of Southern slave catchers. In most Northern states slave hunters were able to operate with little official interference, although as a practical matter the pursuit of fugitives was often a costly and time-consuming proposition. As one frustrated slave hunter complained, obviously expecting sympathy from his Southern friends, Ohioans who opposed slavery were “disposed to throw objections in the way of retaking slaves,” and even when he managed to track one down “it was very difficult to get him.” Even so, African Americans living as far north as Detroit, New York, and Boston went in constant fear of recapture. As if the real dangers of flight were not daunting enough, many fugitives carried the added burden that whites who appeared to offer them help might really be slave hunters in disguise.

Would-be fugitives were for the most part woefully ignorant of what lay to the north. Discontented slaves in northern Kentucky, Virginia, or Maryland might be only a few days' or even just a few hours' walk from
the border of a free state. But few had ever seen a map, and in any event the psychological distance from freedom was often a far greater deterrent than the merely physical. To the young Frederick Douglass, who was destined to become the most eminent African American of his era, living as a slave on the western shore of Maryland less than seventy-five miles from the Pennsylvania state line, the prospect of flight was both alluring and intensely terrifying. “The real distance was great enough, but the imagined distance was, to our ignorance, much greater,” Douglass would write. Slave masters who mentioned Canada at all commonly told their slaves that it had bad soil, was frozen all year, and was infested with wild beasts and with geese that would scratch a man's eyes out. “Slave holders sought to impress their slaves with a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory, and of their own limitless power,” wrote Douglass. “Our notions of the geography of the country were very vague and indistinct…Then, too, we knew that merely reaching a free state did not free us, that wherever caught we could be returned to slavery. We knew of no spot this side of the ocean where we could be safe. We had heard of Canada, then the only real Canaan of the American bondman, simply as a country to which the wild goose and the swan repaired at the end of winter to escape the heat of summer, but not as the home of man.” Douglass had heard of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, and remotely, New York City, but he did not know that there was a State of New York or Massachusetts. “The case sometimes, to our excited visions, stood thus: at every gate through which we had to pass we saw a watchman; at every ferry a guard; on every bridge, a sentinel, and in every wood a patrol or slave hunter. We were hemmed in on every side. The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.” By comparison, freedom seemed a phantom. “On the other hand,” wrote Douglass, “far away, back in the hazy distance where all forms seemed but shadows under the flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-capped mountain, stood a doubtful freedom, half frozen, and beckoning us to her icy domain.”

Canada in the 1830s was not yet a nation. It was still a congeries of six separate British colonies whose total population of fewer than three million people was clustered in a narrow belt along the edge of the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River, and the Atlantic Coast. Although planta
tion slavery had never developed in Canada, slaves had continued to be legally bought and sold until the appointment of John Graves Simcoe, a passionate abolitionist, as the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada (modern Ontario), in 1791. Of the fourteen thousand inhabitants of the province at that time, perhaps one thousand were blacks, some of them the descendants of slaves who had escaped from rebel masters during the American Revolution, and others of slaves brought north by retreating Tory masters. Simcoe's blunt declaration that he would never support any law that “discriminates by dishonest policy between the Natives of Africa, America or Europe” was followed by a series of laws and high court rulings over the next decade that made slavery a dead letter more than a generation before it was formally abolished in the British Empire, in 1833.

Word slowly spread that fugitives were safe from recapture in the King's dominions. American veterans returning from service in the War of 1812 brought home the first detailed information about the routes north. After the war, Canada openly welcomed runaways, especially those who were willing to settle in the strategically vulnerable region near the Michigan Territory, on the assumption that former slaves could be counted on to vigorously resist another invasion by the United States. They were granted land and citizenship on the same terms as other immigrants, as well as the right to vote, a privilege that was enjoyed by free blacks in only a handful of Northern states. By the 1820s fugitives were starting to appear in noticeable numbers around St. Catharines opposite Buffalo, and on the Canadian side of the Detroit River, in the townships that would become the northern terminals of the Underground Railroad. In 1832 the first avowedly abolitionist report on Canada would appear in Benjamin Lundy's
Genius of Universal Emancipation
, in the form of a travel diary, transforming what had until now been largely a myth into a real place that was not only a refuge for the desperate but a land of opportunity. Lundy described a landscape rich beyond all expectation with extensive stands of timber, large corn stalks, and stacks of fine timothy hay by the roadside. It was also a country, he affirmed, where blacks were truly “
free and equal.”

3

The odds against reaching a safe haven in either Canada or the Northern states were slim indeed. No one really knows just how many succeeded. Many fugitives left no trace at all of their movements, and what limited records were kept by those who assisted them have, with a handful of exceptions, almost entirely been lost. Very few successful freedom seekers were from the Deep South. The Canadian census of 1861, encompassing the more populous areas of present-day Ontario, where most blacks settled, found that about 80 percent of the Southern-born blacks then living there came from just three states, Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, all of which shared long borders with the free North. A slave running from northern Kentucky or Maryland might at least hope to be in a free state within a few days, or even hours, while a fugitive from, say, Alabama, Georgia, or the Carolinas would have to spend weeks or months on the road.

Although many fugitives fled in family groups, a majority were men traveling alone, or with a single male companion. Most were in their twenties and teens. To attempt to flee slavery with a wife and children in tow was an act of harrowing risk and heroism whose difficulty can scarcely be imagined. Children, especially, hampered movement, made noise, needed to be fed and to have rest. If he traveled alone, Josiah Henson's chances would have been better than average. Resourceful and experienced, he could expect to move quickly across country. With five more people to conceal, and five more mouths to feed, the odds would be strongly against them. It was the terrible alternative that almost every fugitive slave faced at some point, and that few other Americans have ever been required to make: to choose between freedom or family, to leave behind wife, children, parents, brothers and sisters, or to risk losing everything.

Henson determined to take the risk. The plan terrified Charlotte. She begged Josiah to stay at home on the Riley plantation in Kentucky, reminding him of possible outcomes that were all too real to slaves. “She knew nothing of the wide world beyond, and her imagination peopled it with unseen horrors,” he would recall. “We should die in the wilderness,—we should be hunted down with bloodhounds,—we should be brought back and whipped to death.” Finally, rather cruelly accusing her of being “a poor, ignorant, unreasoning slave-woman,” he warned her that
he would run away no matter what she did. “Exhausted and maddened, I left her, in the morning, to go to my work for the day. Before I had gone far, I heard her voice calling me, and waiting till I came up, she said, at last, she would go with me.”

Henson organized their flight with his customary attention to detail. He had Charlotte make a knapsack large enough to hold his two youngest sons, and practiced carrying them in it for several nights until he was confident that he could endure their weight over long distances. For defense, at considerable risk, he bought a pair of pistols and a knife from a poor white man, a transaction that hints at a degree of ambiguity in relations between the races, and classes, that the conventional history of slavery often misses. In Kentucky, as in other Southern states, the possession of firearms by a slave was a crime punishable by death. However, similar transactions in other fugitives' reports of their escapes show that it was not uncommon for nonabolitionist whites to ignore race laws when they stood to gain by it.

Henson judged that the most auspicious time to leave the Riley plantation would be on a Saturday night. Sunday was a holiday, and the following two days he was expected to be working at farms distant from the main house. Thus, with luck, they might not be missed until Wednesday, when they should be across the Ohio River and well on their way. Dangerous as their proposed journey was, the Hensons did have a few things in their favor. The Riley plantation was close to the river, so they did not face a trek through unfamiliar territory before they reached it. And thanks to Josiah's trip East the previous year, he also had at least some knowledge of the northern bank of the river.

He had arranged with a fellow slave to row them across the Ohio. “We sat still as death,” Henson recalled. As they skimmed across the water, the Indiana shore must have seemed both beckoning and fraught with danger, a free but nonetheless forbidding land with their unknown fate hidden deep in the dark, shapeless mass of forest that loomed closer with each stroke of the boatman's oars.

In the middle of the river, the boatman whispered ominously, “It will be the end of me if this is ever found out; but you won't be brought back alive, will you?”

“Not if I can help it,” Henson replied.

“And if they're too many for you and you get seized, you'll never tell my part in the business?”

“Not if I'm shot through like a sieve.”

“‘That's all,'” the boatman said. “And God help you.”

The Hensons' luck held, and they crossed without incident. They probably landed somewhere near the present-day town of Grandview, Indiana. Henson did not record his emotions as they stood alone on the riverbank and listened to the rising and falling of the oars as the skiff disappeared into the night. But Charlotte now grew distraught and pleaded with him to return with them to Kentucky and the Riley plantation before they were missed. The product of a time and culture, both slave and free, that demanded stoic fortitude as a proof of “manliness,” and condemned as “womanish” any admission of fear, Henson rarely revealed feelings that would show him in a weak light, usually preferring at moments of crisis to attribute natural reactions of terror and panic to his wife. It is hard to believe, however, that beneath the pose of icy fortitude Josiah was not as frightened as Charlotte was at what might lie in store. Escape from the Riley plantation had been imperative: had they not run away, they would have been sold and separated from each other. But flight was a psychological as well as a geographical odyssey, a journey of self-discovery and self-realization. The Hensons, profoundly devout people, of course believed that their lives ultimately lay in the hands of God. In the act of flight, however, they would discover if they could become the agents of their own fate. After a lifetime spent in the fragile security of the plantation, they were now suddenly more completely alone, and in charge of their own destiny, than they had ever been in their lives. Now even the simplest decision, a moment's lack of attention—a fork in the road, the problem of finding food, whether to trust a stranger, how long the children could keep going—was heavy with potentially catastrophic consequences.