Bound for Canaan (22 page)

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In the middle years of the 1830s, abolitionism was transformed from a sentiment, a set of beliefs held by a small number of men and women in the Northern states, and upon which even fewer were prepared to act, into an organized national movement, an expanding array of antislavery societies whose members would provide the white rank and file of the Underground Railroad, linking them together with isolated cells and African-American communities into a system that, in time, would spread across more than a dozen states. It was not by coincidence that, apart from
the Quaker settlements, abolitionism flourished most vigorously where evangelical revivalism was most active, or found its most ardent foot soldiers in Americans like Gerrit Smith, for whom religion infused politics and politics religion in a seamless transcendental web. At a time when the old Calvinist doctrine of divine predestination was rapidly fading and the nation's secular ideology treated individual enterprise as a sacred duty, abolitionism—especially in its ultimate form, the Underground Railroad—offered the chance to live out prayer in action, to put faith to
practical
effect. “This is the carrying out of practical Christianity; and there is no other,” William Goodell declared in the
Friend of Man
on September 6, 1837. “Christianity is
practical
in its very nature and essence. It is a life, springing out of a soul imbued with its spirit…Come, then, and help us to restore to these millions, whose eyes have been bored out by slavery, their sight, that they may see to read the Bible. Do you love God whom you have not seen? Then manifest that love, by restoring to your brother whom you have seen, his rightful inheritance, of which he has been so wrong and so cruelly deprived.”

Northerners were torn. Decent citizens hardly knew what they feared more, the troublemaking abolitionists, or the threat of mob violence. Most dearly wished that the abolitionists would simply shut up and go away. When they failed to, no one quite knew what to do. “The abolitionists are wrong in forcing upon the world measures so decidedly in the face of public opinion,” the
Poughkeepsie (NY) Journal
editorialized, after a mob drove an abolitionist speaker from the pulpit of the local Presbyterian church. “That they possess the abstract right to discuss the subject of slavery no man denies, and 'tis unfortunate that they are not permitted to do so, but still more unfortunate that in defense of an abstract right, the exercise of which can do no good, men will jeopardize the supremacy of the laws and hazard the existence of the Union. On the other hand, it is to be regretted that the abolitionists were not let alone.”

Debate grew intense and bitter across the Northern states, rending families, church congregations, and entire towns. “I well remember hearing conversations, arguments, and often very bitter words between the elder members of our large connection, when they would meet
en famille
at our home, and what had always been a pleasure to me as a child became a source of dread,” recalled Mary Ellen Graydon Sharpe, whose father, Alexander Graydon, an elder of the Presbyterian church, became a central
figure in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania underground. “My parents and one uncle stood firm for the slave and the duty of abolition; while all the others considered them fanatics and hurled abuse upon them in no very gentle manner. My grandfather once said to my father, in my presence, ‘I can not see, Alexander,
why
you have taken up such wild ideas! Why do you attempt to force public opinion? Why not let well enough alone?' and I can even now hear my father's firm reply: ‘If the old society should work a hundred years it could not lift more than a few hundreds of poor slaves out of bondage a year, while this system is piling up its tens of thousands of agonized men, women, and children every year of its existence. No, we will work until slavery is wiped out and is no longer a foul blot on our escutcheon.' From that time our home was thrown open for all whose sympathies were with the slave, and became the
central station of the underground railroad
.”

Since its founding in 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society had undertaken a massive national effort to carry out what a later generation would term “consciousness raising,” to convert white Americans to immediate emancipation. At different points, this would involve the shipment of quantities of abolitionist literature into the South, the lobbying of state governments for legislation to strengthen the rights of African Americans, and persistent local agitation. In the middle of the decade, the society undertook a massive petition campaign calling upon Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, the one part of the country over which the national government had undisputed authority. Petitions on other slavery-related questions soon followed. But year after year, the House of Representatives by overwhelming majorities adopted a “gag rule,” in the process originating the term, stating that all petitions that related to slavery must be tabled without discussion or referral to committee. Abolitionists knew this would be the outcome, but they kept the petitions coming. By March 1838 Congress had received so many petitions that they filled to the ceiling a room twenty feet wide by thirty feet square. The petitions had no impact on federal legislation, but the refusal of Congress to even consider them helped to radicalize Northern public opinion by vividly illustrating the grip that proslavery interests held upon the national government. Abolitionist rhetoric would henceforth be stippled with evocative descriptions of the nation “fettered and gagged” like a slave.

The core of the society's efforts, however, centered on a brigade of
militant traveling agents who were selected to carry out a vast systematic grassroots campaign, one of the first in the nation's history. (Many agents built on experience gained organizing for the temperance movement in the 1820s.) Most were young clergymen, and they were expected to treat their duties as an extension of their spiritual vocation. “Jesus Christ has a right to
any
man whom he pleases to call,” Elizur Wright, an official of the society, wrote to one candidate, “and we trust that you will regard this as
His
call.” Agents traveled for months on end through assigned territories, speaking once or twice daily, often for hours at a time, on the sinfulness of slavery, building local affiliates, gathering names on petitions, and collecting donations. They focused mainly on rural areas. “Let the great cities
alone
,” advised Theodore Dwight Weld, one of the most successful of all the agents. “They must be burned down by
back fires
.” (Like many Christian reformers of the time, white abolitionists often exhibited an almost pathological fear of cities, which by the 1830s were evolving into recognizably modern conglomerations of diverse ethnic and religious groups, who had a penchant for ignoring evangelical recipes for proper behavior. “Reformations commence and flourish most where the moral atmosphere is clearest,” one correspondent wrote to the
Friend of Man
, in August 1836. “They do not commence in crowded and morally pestilential cities, but in the country…where the mockery of human art has not shut God out.”)

While the traveling agents did not carry an explicit mandate to develop routes for the Underground Railroad, by holding rallies and organizing local abolition societies, they often brought newly converted abolitionists into contact with those who were already engaged in clandestine activity. Agents sometimes took personal responsibility for forwarding fugitives. For example, on January 27, 1837, Oliver Johnson wrote from Jenner Township, in Somerset County in western Pennsylvania, where he was doing organizational work, to an ally in Vermont, asking permission to dispatch a fugitive to him at his home near Burlington. Johnson's remarkable letters concerning a man whom he identified only as “Simon” are among the few documents from this period that explicitly describe the Underground Railroad in operation. Johnson, a rather somber twenty-eight-year-old from Peacham, Vermont, was a founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and sometimes edited the
Liberator
during Garrison's absences. His contact in Vermont was Rowland T. Robinson, a
deeply devout Quaker with hollow eyes and a beard that jutted out like a fist from his gaunt face. Johnson knew his man. Robinson was a founder of the Vermont Anti-Slavery Society, and he was always willing to find a place for a fugitive on the large farm where he raised merino sheep, within sight of Lake Champlain and the blue silhouette of the Adirondack Mountains. Fugitives were already being sent with some regularity from downstate New York to Robinson or one of the other abolitionist farmers in the neighborhood, whose families spanned several generations of antislavery activism. Robinson's extensive network of correspondents included other radical Quakers, among them Isaac Hopper, as well as William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, and C. C. Burleigh.

Fugitives commonly would work for Robinson for up to several months until they had saved money to move on to Canada, or elsewhere in New England, or New York. Rokeby, Robinson's farm, was thus less a way station on the Underground Railroad than a terminus, a place beyond the reach of slave catchers, in a state that had explicitly stated as early as 1786 that any attempt to take a fugitive slave out of the state would be “in open violation of the laws of the land.” While the underground was as secret as its participants could keep it in the border counties of Delaware, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, there was nothing clandestine about it at all in northern Vermont. One of Robinson's closest associates was the Vermont secretary of state, Chauncey Knapp, and in the spring of 1837, Robinson would actually correspond with a North Carolina farmer, making it quite clear that the man's former slave was living at Rokeby, and that he hoped to purchase his freedom for a hundred and fifty dollars. This the master rejected as inadequate, but he confessed with chagrin that “he at this time is entirely out of my reach.” Robinson harbored scores, if not hundreds, of fugitives during his long Underground Railroad career. In writing to him, Johnson supposed that he could take one more.

Read with care, Johnson's letter provides a window onto the operation and the reach of the Underground Railroad at the end of the 1830s. In addition to a detailed physical description of the man he was sending, Johnson supplied Robinson with a personal testimonial. “I was so well-pleased with his appearance, and with the account given of him by Griffith [a local Baptist], that I could not help thinking that he would be a good man for you to hire,” he wrote. “Mr. Griffith says he is of a kind disposition, and knows how to do all most all kinds of farm work. He is used to
teaming, and is very good to manage horses. He says that he could beat any man in the neighborhood where he lived, in Maryland, at mowing, cradling, or pitching…Would you not like to have him go to you in the spring?” Simon would have to walk all the way to Philadelphia, but he would be furnished with the names of abolitionists on whom to call upon the way. “If you say, ‘let him come' I will endeavor to make the best possible arrangements in regard to the journey,” Johnson concluded. Robinson replied in the affirmative, and on April 3 Johnson wrote back that he'd given Simon directions to Philadelphia, “where he will put himself under the direction of our friends, who will give him all needful information concerning the route to New York, at which place he will be befriended by the ‘Committee of Vigilance,' or by members of the [Executive] Committee.”

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In the aftermath of the Utica riot, upstate New York state became a primary target of the abolitionist organizing effort. “Half the moral power of the nation lies within 24 hours easy ride (mostly steam boat) of New York City,” Henry B. Stanton, a secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, declared. “There the fulcrum must be placed by which we are to overturn the nation.” In a similar vein, Theodore Weld wrote to Rowland T. Robinson in June, 1836, “New York is the
Empire State
. Its extent of territory, its position with reference to the South—its numerous population, its vast political sway—its commercial relations with the South, &. &. All make it a matter of immediate moment that it should be
abolitionised
as speedily as possible…No state in the Union is now so ripe for lecturers as
this.
”

Dozens of traveling agents were deployed across New York. In January and February 1836, Theodore Weld spoke sixteen times at Utica's Bleecker Street Presbyterian Church, from which the abolitionists had been expelled only three months before. To the dismay of the Democrats who had counted on mob violence to put an end to abolitionism, crowds jammed Weld's lectures, and no fewer than 600 enrolled in the Utica Anti-Slavery Society, making it the largest in the state. In Rochester, Weld in
creased membership in local antislavery societies more than five-fold, from 150 to 850. In Lockport, he was almost shouted down by hostile demonstrators, but after a marathon four-hour speech, 440 people signed the new constitution of the Niagara County Anti-Slavery Society; a year later, the society would have 21,000 members, with branches in nine of the county's twelve townships. Although Weld was forced out of Troy by mobs throwing stones and rotten eggs and forbidden by the mayor to speak in the city again, he moved on to Greenwich in Washington County, where he spoke for five successive evenings, and signed up 118 members for the local affiliate. He then added 90 more new members at the nearby towns of Fort Ann and West Granville. Other agents reported equally stunning successes, often in spite of mob opposition. J. M. Blakesley formed an 85-member antislavery society in Sardinia, in the far western part of the state, and recruited another 200 in the town of Colden, which had a total population of only 1,000 people. Lumond Wilcox signed up more than 300 in the towns of Delaware County, which had never heard of immediate emancipation before. In July William Chaplin signed up more than 100 members in Auburn after just a single lecture. Genesee County was thoroughly “abolitionized” by L. Q. Curtis, who boasted that twenty of its twenty-four towns now had antislavery societies with memberships ranging between 40 and 300. All told, the agents' success was astonishing.