Bound for Canaan (20 page)

By the 1820s, sparks of deliberate underground activity were becoming evident in other parts of the United States as well. Radical Presbyterians were assisting fugitives in southern Ohio as early as 1822, while the tanner Owen Brown, father of the charismatic abolitionist John Brown, was harboring fugitives in his home in Hudson, Ohio by the middle of the decade, as was David Hudson, the town's founder and its wealthiest resident. On January 5, 1826, Hudson's son matter-of-factly recorded in his diary what was evidently a fairly commonplace occurrence: “Two men came this evening in a sleigh, bringing a negro woman, a runaway slave, and her two children.” A few years later, James Adams, the mulatto son of an overseer on a plantation near the Virginia shore of the Ohio River, along with a male cousin, a woman, and her four children, stumbled onto what appears to have been a prototype underground cell near the river port of Marietta, Ohio. Once across the river, Adams and his band passed three nights “at the house of a white friend.” This unidentified man concealed the fugitives on a rocky
hill and told them to keep their eyes on a pole visible near his house on which a white cloth had been attached. If the pole was lowered, it meant danger. Later that day, several armed white abolitionists guided Adams and his companions to a cave which had a wide view of the surrounding country. Three days later, they brought the fugitives knapsacks full of cakes, dried venison, and other provisions, as well as flints and steel to strike it against. They also gave them a compass, which the fugitives had never seen before. One walked with them half a day to show them how to use it, and before he left them he notched the compass and told them to steer north by northwest until they reached Cleveland, six days' march away. During that time, they had no assistance of any kind. Just outside Cleveland, they by chance met a white preacher who recognized them as runaways. He declared himself to be a “friend of all who travel from the South to the North,” and directed them to the home of a shoemaker, who sheltered them for two days. The shoemaker found them a berth on a schooner bound for Canada, free of charge.

The Massachusetts whaling port of Nantucket, with its large population of Quakers, had also welcomed fugitives for years. In 1822, local citizens had systematically thwarted the efforts of a Virginia slave catcher named Camillus Griffith to recover George and Lucy Cooper, who had escaped north on a Yankee ship a few years before. “We are not in Virginia now but in Yankee town, and we want those colored people to man our whale ships and will not suffer them to be carried back to bondage,” a defiant islander told Griffith. A magistrate then warned Griffith that
he
would be arrested if he attempted to carry the Coopers off. Griffith moved on to New Bedford to seize a third fugitive, John Randolph, but the magistrate there refused even to hear the case. Two New Bedford men then pursued Griffith all the way to Boston, where they had him arrested for assaulting Randolph, who meanwhile had been put safely on a ship bound for New York.

Who were these first pioneers of the underground? Many, especially in Pennsylvania, were of course Quakers. Others, increasingly, were evangelical Methodists and Presbyterians, Scotch Covenanters, and New England Congregationalists. Some, like David Hudson, were colonizationists by conviction, but coming to believe in immediate emancipation. Many were racist by present-day standards: William Jay, one of the most eloquent antislavery men in New York, was shocked when some abolitionists began to call for black suffrage. Yet no matter how they felt personally about African Americans, white abolitionists were exhilarated by the conviction that they
were doing what faith demanded of them. They were, after all, assuring their own salvation in a deeply pious era when Judgment Day was an event as real as the annual spring planting and autumn harvest. That they would be judged for their actions, and for their sins, was beyond doubt or debate. “Those who do remain partakers with murderers and man stealers will be involved in their guilt,” the Quakers' North Carolina Yearly Meeting informed its members. However, having done their duty with the divine assistance that they did not doubt was guiding them, they would be purified, ready for salvation when the moment came. At the same time, accurate information about the realities of slavery steadily percolated through the free states from travelers, immigrants, and fugitives themselves. Many formed their lasting impression of slavery in church, from the terrifying stories of floggings, torture, and rapes delivered by an abolitionist preacher, or even from the lips of a fugitive passing through en route to a safer place farther north. The future underground conductor Calvin Fairbank, who grew up in rural New York, was converted to passionate abolitionism as a child in just such a setting. One night, while attending a Methodist revival, Fairbank's family was billeted in the home of two escaped slaves, who told their story at the fireside that night. “My heart wept, my anger was kindled, and antagonism to slavery was fixed upon me,” Fairbank wrote in his 1890 autobiography. “‘Father,' I said, on going to our room, ‘When I get bigger they shall not do that'; and the resolve waxed stronger with my growth.” Fairbank would later serve the longest prison sentence on record for assisting a fugitive slave.

Abolitionists throughout the free states were increasingly discovering in themselves the same kind of imperative to oppose slavery in the most personal way possible. They were getting regular abolitionist news from the roving journalist Benjamin Lundy, who carried the printing cuts, column rules, and subscription book for his newspaper
The Genius of Universal Emancipation
in a pack on his back as he trudged the border states collecting damning evidence of slavery's iniquity. After 1831 William Lloyd Garrison's fierce Boston-based paper the
Liberator
would shape a whole generation's antislavery thinking. They were also reading the same books, often by evangelical ministers who drew damning contradictions between the corrupting sin of slavery and the proclaimed political ideals of the American republic. In
The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable
, a jeremiad first published in 1816 and kept in print for decades, Reverend George Bourne,
a Virginian who was forced to flee to Pennsylvania because of his views, had called for the “immediate and total abolition” of slavery, warning that its perpetuation must ultimately endanger the Union. “For a gradual emancipation,” Bourne wrote, “is a virtual recognition of the right, and establishes the rectitude of the practice. If it be for just one moment, it is hallowed forever; and if it be inequitable, not a day should it be tolerated.”

Among such works, the most influential of all was a collection of letters that Reverend John Rankin of Ohio wrote to his brother, who had become a slave owner in Virginia. These powerfully reasoned essays first appeared in Ripley's newspaper the
Castigator
in 1824 and 1825, were reprinted by William Lloyd Garrison in the
Liberator
in 1832, and later gained still wider readership in book form. In them, Rankin—who was soon to become one of the most effective underground men in the Ohio River Valley—dissected every argument that was commonly used to rationalize slavery. It was not the inherent nature of Africans, he wrote in one letter, but the hand of oppression that had “pressed them down from the rank of men to that of beasts,” preventing in them “that expansion of soul which dignifies man, and ornaments civilized life.” Africans, having originally sprung from the same common parent as whites, also possessed the same aspirations, the same powers of mind, the same profound human feelings. In another, he asked his brother to imagine his own wife in the grip of slavery: “how could you have endured to see her tender frame bleed beneath the lacerating whip! Could you have witnessed her innocent tears and cries, without being overwhelmed with the mingled floods of compassion, resentment, and grief!” Attacking the common assertion that blacks must have been designed by God for slavery, Rankin declared, “Every man desires to be free, and this desire the Creator himself has implanted in the bosoms of all our race, and is certainly a conclusive proof that all were designed for freedom; else man was created for disappointment and misery. All the feelings of humanity are strongly opposed to being enslaved, and nothing but the strong arm of power can make man submit to the yoke of bondage.”

Adam Lowry Rankin, John Rankin's eldest son, initially wished to live a more normal life than was possible in the ferociously evangelical Rankin home. Having settled on a career as a draftsman for a shipbuilding firm, he made a habit of visiting steamboats that stopped at the Ripley wharf in order to examine their construction. One day, as he wandered over a new
boat, an unexpected scene met his eyes belowdecks. Two groups of slaves, twenty-five in each, were chained to the sides of the boat, men on one side and women on the other. At one end of the chain was a young woman with long, fine, wavy hair, who “was as white as any woman of my acquaintance, requiring the closest scrutiny to detect the least touch of African blood,” Rankin wrote in later years. He grasped a stanchion for support. He was quite conscious that he was attracted to her, and horrified that a woman as white as himself was destined for the auction block. Then a sudden insight overwhelmed him. “I asked myself why let all my sympathies be expended upon that one woman? Were the women, her companions in slavery, though they be of darker hue than she, any less the daughters of the Lord Almighty? Were they not as well as their white sisters the objects of Christ's redeeming love?” Rankin might have gone away with a heightened, if still passive, opposition to slavery had not he chanced to overhear conversation between two approaching men, one apparently a slave trader, carrying a small rawhide cane, and the other a prospective client, a tall, well-dressed young man, who turned out to be the unmarried son of a planter on his way to New Orleans to transact some business. The words “Ain't she a beauty?” caught Rankin's ear.

The trader was proposing to sell the woman to his prospective client as a mistress for twenty-five hundred dollars, swearing that he could get three thousand dollars for her in New Orleans. As Rankin watched transfixed, the woman burst into tears and covered her face with her hands. Swearing at her, the trader struck her on the shoulder with his cane and ordered her to stop crying or he would half-kill her. After a little more discussion, the young man offered two thousand dollars. The trader rejected this, but invited the young man to try her out en route to New Orleans. He would have the girl delivered to his stateroom. “You can have a splendid time,” the trader told him. “It will cost you nothing. I have paid her passage and bond.” The trader then ordered the girl to unfasten her dress, striking her on the shoulder with his cane when she hesitated. He invited the young man to feel her breast, and then her thighs. “By this time the young man was carried to the point of yielding and the money paid, the woman relieved of her chain, followed by her new master to his stateroom.” Recalled Rankin, “As I left the boat my indignation reached the boiling point over the wicked transaction and, lifting my right hand toward the heavens, I said aloud, ‘My God helping me there shall be a per
petual war between me and human slavery in this nation of which I am a member and I pray God I may never be persuaded to give up the fight until slavery is dead or the Lord calls me home.'”

On reaching his uncle's house, where dinner had been held up for forty-five minutes awaiting his return, he said that he had no appetite and felt unwell. “I have seen enough to make a strong man sick, much less a boy,” he said. Asked what he meant, Rankin replied that he had seen “fifty chained slaves, borne like hogs to the market, and I am angry.” Replied his uncle, “Let not the sun go down on your anger, my boy.” Young Rankin went up to his room and sat down before his drafting board. He tried to work, but couldn't. Pacing the floor, he finally told himself, “Young man, you made today a most solemn vow before God. Now what are you going to do about it? Will you settle down and drift with the popular current and be satisfied with an expression of your abhorrence of slavery in idle words?” After an internal struggle, he decided to abandon his drafting work and “fight slavery as a minister of Christ.” It was not an idle commitment. He would soon be leading fugitive slaves toward safety through the hills behind his father's farm.

4

Abolitionists, though increasing in number, were still almost everywhere fragmented and isolated in lone outposts or in small groups of like-minded friends or family. But this was about to change. In the last days of December 1833, delegates began arriving in Philadelphia for the first national conference of abolitionists in the country's history. The conference was William Lloyd Garrison's idea. Garrison had founded the Boston-based New England Anti-Slavery Society the previous year, and it already had several thousand members, a dozen local branches, and three full-time grassroots organizers in the field. In October the wealthy Manhattan dry goods merchants Lewis and Arthur Tappan had established a sister organization in New York. Intensely religious, the Tappans were among the most generous and steadfast contributors to the abolitionist and other evangelical causes. The sixty-three delegates from ten states planned to form a national society powerful enough to mount a sustained spiritual
crusade to sway the hearts and minds of America against slavery and, they fervently hoped, to eventually inspire slave owners themselves to voluntarily yield up the two million souls that they held in bondage.

The atmosphere in the city was tense. The delegates were denounced in local newspapers and from hostile pulpits as “fanatics, amalgamationists, disorganizers, disturbers of the peace, and dangerous enemies of the country.” One delegate, the Unitarian minister Samuel J. May, who nearly two decades later would become Jarm Logue's closest partner in the clandestine work of the Underground Railroad, dryly wrote, “we learnt that a goodly number were already there; and the newspapers of the day were seeking to make our coming a formidable affair, worthy the especial attention of those patriotic conservators of the peace who dealt in brickbats, rotten eggs, and tar and feathers.”