Bound for Canaan (34 page)

The Coffins sheltered the group for two days, and then arranged for teams and conductors to take them onward to the log-cabin home of John H. Bond, another expatriate North Carolina Quaker who lived near the black settlement of Cabin Creek, about twenty miles north. Bond was also a founder of the Union Literary Institute, a biracial school where many fugitive slaves were given their first lessons in literacy before being sent farther north. The group should have been safe by now, but early the next day Coffin learned that fifteen Kentuckians in search of fugitives had entered Richmond. He immediately dispatched a galloper to Bond, to warn him to get the seventeen out of sight as quickly as possible. However, Bond had already sent them on toward another Quaker community in Grant County, to the northwest. With Coffin's message in hand, Bond mounted his horse and raced after them. He found the party still on the road, and turned them around and led them back in broad daylight to Cabin Creek.

While the Kentuckians searched known abolitionist settlements in the vicinity of Newport, Bond was arranging for the fugitives to be scattered in homes around Cabin Creek. There they remained for several weeks, until the Kentuckians gave up their pursuit, and the fugitives could be sent on to Detroit. In the meantime, the slave hunters publicly blamed Levi Coffin, the best known abolitionist in the area, for their disappearance. In the taverns of Richmond, they loudly swore that Coffin must be the “president” of the underground, and threatened to hang him or burn him out of his home. The remark was widely repeated by Coffin's friends and enemies alike, and he frequently received letters addressed simply to “Levi Coffin, President of the Underground Railroad.” The story gave birth to a tenacious legend that Coffin was in fact the overall director of the abolitionist underground. No such title or position ever existed, of course, in a system where stationmasters and “general managers” were usually regarded by their collaborators as only the first among equals. While Coffin took considerable pride in his new nickname, with Quaker modesty he announced that he would accept any position at all on the Underground Railroad—“conductor, engineer, fireman, or brakeman”—that anyone cared to give him.

4

When Levi Coffin told the men from Union County to “switch off your locomotives,” and “let them blow off steam,” remarking that seventeen passengers were as many as “the cars” could bear at one time, he was using a brand-new language that, to Americans of the 1840s, was as fresh as the language of the Internet was to wired Americans at the end of the twentieth century. Until now, there had never been any agreed-upon way of describing how the underground actually worked. In the 1830s, members of the underground sometimes spoke of a “line of posts,” or of a “chain of friends.” Tightly knit family groups, like the Rankins, probably never used special terminology at all. Others invented their own codes. At Tanner's Creek in Indiana, one cell of underground agents, all emigrants from northern England, simply communicated with one another in their native Yorkshire dialect, which was incomprehensible to everyone else around them. Others spoke cryptically about “packages” and “parcels,” or about deliveries of “black ink,” “indigo,” and “finest coal.” Joseph Mayo, a black well digger who was the principal local conductor in Marysville, Ohio, would receive word that fugitives were waiting to be picked up when someone would come to him, perhaps in a crowd, and say, “Joe, I have two black steers and a brown heifer at my house,” or “three bucks and two ewes,” and ask that they be driven into town. Mayo would pick them up, take them on foot to his own house, where he would feed them, and then carry them on the same day to the home of a white abolitionist at New Dover.

The growth of the underground network was almost precisely contemporaneous with the expansion of iron railroads, which were transforming the physical and psychological landscape of America as dramatically as the abolitionist movement was changing the country's moral landscape. Smoke-belching locomotives, shining steel rails, and spiffily uniformed conductors were all new and exciting, and travel by rail a thrilling adventure that compressed time and space in ways that thrilled Americans who were born in the era of Jefferson and Jackson, when most traffic moved at the pace of an ox-drawn wagon. The country's first practical railroad had begun service on a mile-and-a-half-long track near Baltimore, in 1830. Five open cars were pulled by a horse at a fare of nine
cents for a round-trip excursion. It was an immediate success, and by the end of the year thirteen miles were in operation, the beginning of what became the Baltimore & Ohio. The following year, an engine that resembled an upended boiler and a smokestack stuck on a wagon bed towed a half-dozen flatcars the seventeen miles between Albany and Schenectady, New York, terrifying horses, setting fire to the clothes of spectators, and completing its run in the mind-boggling time of just thirty-eight minutes. Early trains were by turns mesmerizing, terrifying, and inspiring. “I saw today for the first time a Rail Way Car,” one man wrote in 1835, scarcely able to contain his excitement. “What an object of wonder! How marvelous it is in every particular. It appears like a thing of life…I cannot describe the strange sensation produced on seeing the train of cars come up. And when I started in them…it seemed like a dream.”

The first use of railroad metaphor to describe underground work is unknown. A persistent but almost certainly apocryphal legend credits its genesis to an irate slave master who after failing to catch a runaway in Ripley, Ohio, is alleged to have exclaimed, “He must have gone off on an underground road!” Quite possibly, the terminology was more deliberately coined by two early Pennsylvania abolitionists, Emmor Kimber and Elijah Pennypacker, who in the early 1830s were engaged simultaneously in helping fugitives and in developing plans for some of the first railroads around Philadelphia. (Kimber invented a device that kept early, weakly powered engines from rolling backward down steep hills.) Whatever the origin of the lingo, the underground readily lent itself to railroad imagery as the iron roads, with their exotic new idiom of “trains,” “engines,” “lines,” “stations,” and “stationmasters,” spread rapidly across the Northern states in the 1830s and 1840s.

By 1840, about 3,000 miles of railroad had been completed, virtually all of it in the East. Indiana had only 20 miles of track, and Ohio just 39. (New York, by comparison, had 453, and Pennsylvania, 576.) Almost immediately, western businessmen began agitating for the extension of railroads to the West. Boosters were certain that these wondrous contraptions would make their isolated towns wealthy overnight, by opening them to the vast markets of the East and South. “Rouse! Fellow citizens, Rouse!” exclaimed the
Richmond Palladium
in 1832, begging for immediate investment in the iron roads. “Let your energies lie no longer dormant—let us not be the last to engage in the good cause…So soon as
this cheap and rapid means of transportation is in operation…large capitalists will be induced to settle amongst us—the price of property will be doubled—the farmer will find a market for his products.”

The imaginative link between railroads and the work of the abolitionist underground ran far in advance of the actual tracks. Underground men from New York to Illinois who had never even seen an actual railroad soon began to describe themselves as “conductors,” and to speak of their wagons as “cars,” and of the fugitives they carried as “passengers.” Slave hunters stymied by defiant African Americans at the Cabin Creek settlement, years before the first mile of track had been laid in Indiana, were sarcastically advised “to look around and see if there was not a hole in the ground where the girls had been let down to the Underground Railroad.” In 1844, George Washington Clark, of Rochester, New York, the “liberty singer,” as he billed himself, was traveling across the northern states singing a song titled “Get off the Track,” to the tune of “Old Dan Tucker”:

Although his song was aimed at recalcitrant churchmen, Clark's audience could hardly help being reminded of the Underground Railroad.

Frederick Douglass, for one, condemned the increasingly open discussion of the Underground Railroad. Loose talk, he warned, only alerted Southerners to its existence, and undermined the hopes of slaves who wanted to escape. “I have never approved of the public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the
underground railroad
, but which, I think, by their open declarations, has been made most emphatically the
upperground railroad
,” he wrote in 1845, in his autobiography. “I honor those good men and women for their noble daring, and applaud them for willingly subjecting themselves to bloody persecution, by openly avowing their participation in the escape of slaves…while, upon the other hand, I see and feel assured that those open decla
rations are a positive evil to the slaves remaining, who are seeking to escape. They do nothing toward enlightening the slave, whilst they do much toward enlightening the master. They stimulate him to greater watchfulness, and enhance his power to capture his slave. I would keep the merciless slave holder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave…Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.”

The consolidation of the underground in the 1840s reflected an evolving American ethos that increasingly emphasized predictability, speed, and efficiency. Elsewhere in the North, this same kind of thinking was creating the modern factory system, rationalizing the production of commodities that until now had been made locally and often by hand, and developing patterns of long-distance distribution that could as reliably deliver a fugitive slave from an Ohio River crossing to Canada as they could a consignment of boots, broom handles, or Colt pistols from Connecticut to the western frontier. By the 1850s, railroad terminology would become the lingua franca of abolitionists, slaveholders, politicians, and other Americans alike, as they argued, with heightening violence, about the hemorrhaging of fugitive slaves toward Canada.

5

In 1844 Levi Coffin made his first trip to Canada, in the company of William Beard, a fellow Quaker who had forwarded many fugitives to Coffin from his home in Union County, Indiana. The two had been delegated by their respective meetings to survey the condition of refugees in the queen's dominions. They set out in mid-September, on horseback, stopping along the way at several black settlements in Ohio and Michigan, where they were warmly greeted by fugitives whom they had sent north earlier. In Detroit, the Quakers visited schools that had recently been established for the city's small but growing black population. The next day, their tenth after leaving Newport, they crossed the Detroit River to Windsor, in Canada West. At Sandwich, they attended a court session, where they had the satisfaction of watching a white man tried and convicted for decoying a fugitive back across the river to the United States,
and into the hands of his master. They then made their way down the river to Amherstburg, where Coffin was pleased to discover that the best tavern in town was kept by William Hamilton, a black man.

In the course of their two months' stay in Canada, the travelers met many former fugitives who had settled in the surrounding towns. Coffin, in particular, was often greeted with cries of “Bless the Lord! I know you!” and he would find himself face to face with someone who had spent a night in his Newport home ten or even fifteen years earlier. Their emotion both flattered him and discomfited his Quaker reserve. “Some would cling to our garments as if they thought they would impart some virtue,” he wrote, with embarrassment. Although he saw some destitution among the refugees, Coffin was happy to learn many of them owned their own farms, and that some were now even worth more than their former masters. At Dawn Mills, near Dresden, eighty miles east of Windsor, they visited the British-American Manual Labor Institute for Colored Children, a model community that had recently been established to help train former slaves for self-sufficiency, with an emphasis on literacy and learning useful trades. Unfortunately, they missed meeting the institute's guiding spirit, himself an escaped slave, and a man who like Coffin was destined to become one of the mythic figures of the antislavery movement: Josiah Henson.

1

When Josiah Henson and his family landed in Canada, within sight of the walls of Fort Erie, with their British cannon protectively pointed across the Niagara River at the United States, they were strangers in an alien land, without family, friends, or money, except for the dollar that they were given by the Scottish captain who had carried them from Sandusky to Buffalo. They spent that on lodgings for the night. The next morning, Josiah began looking for work. Someone told him about a farmer named Hibbard, who lived six or seven miles inland, and whose reputation, as
Henson delicately put it, “was not, by any means, unexceptionably good,” but who needed a man used to hard labor. Modesty was never one of Henson's limitations, and he quickly convinced the man to take him on. When Henson asked Hibbard if there was a place for his family to live, he “led the way to an old two-story sort of shanty, into the lower story of which the pigs had broken, and had apparently made it their resting place for some time. Still it was a house, and I forthwith expelled the pigs, and set about cleaning it for the occupancy of a better sort of tenants.”

If Henson felt disappointment—had he really risked the lives of family just to wind up in a pig sty?—there was no trace of it in his memory of that wondrous day. He scrubbed, scraped, and mopped far into the night to clean the pigs' filth from the floor. He recalled his family's arrival the following day with italicized pride: “I brought the rest of the Hensons to
my house
, and though there was nothing there but bare walls and floors, we were all in a state of great delight, and my wife acknowledged that it was worthwhile, and that it was better than a log cabin with an earth floor.” For the first time in his forty-one years, he now had the right to shut their door against the world of white men. The Hensons remained on Hibbard's farm for three years. A prodigiously hard worker as always, Josiah soon managed to acquire some pigs, a cow, even a horse, the nineteenth-century counterpart of a private automobile, the first conspicuous accoutrements of economic independence. In 1833, Henson went to work for another farmer in the area, named Riseley, “who was a man of more elevation of mind than Mr. Hibbard.”

As a man of property, however modest, Henson now felt sufficiently self-confident to measure himself against other refugees from the South, several hundred of whom lived scattered in the vicinity of his home. What he saw troubled him deeply. Most of them were working as casual farm laborers, and making little effort to improve their situation. “The mere delight the slave took in his freedom, rendered him, at first, contented with a lot far inferior to that which he might have attained,” Henson gloomily observed. Ignorance of contracts, leases, and the most elementary rules of commerce led the refugees repeatedly to make “unprofitable bargains” that prevented them from saving money or acquiring property of their own. “They were content to have the proceeds of their labor at their own command, and had not the ambition for, or the perception of what was within their easy reach, if they did but know it.” Henson was entrepre
neurial by nature, and intensely ambitious. They were the qualities that had made him valuable to his former masters. They now combined with his compulsion to teach and lead as he began to discover a far wider field of action in the American gospel of self-improvement, self-discovery, and economic achievement.

Henson began meeting with some of the more successful black farmers and tenants. Ten or twelve of them eventually agreed to pool their savings, and to purchase land together for a settlement where they would, he wrote, “be, in short, our own masters.” In the autumn of 1834, he set off on foot, eventually trekking almost three hundred miles in search of a suitable site. Vast tracts of densely forested government land were constantly being opened up for settlement all across the broad, flat peninsula that extends across the southern part of present-day Ontario from Lake Erie to the Detroit River. The colonial authorities, still smarting from American invasion during the War of 1812, were eager, even desperately so, to see the region settled with any men loyal to the Crown, white or black. Land was cheap: fifty-acre lots could be purchased for two dollars per acre, with ten years to pay. Henson found what he wanted at Colchester, a short distance inland from the reassuring earthen ramparts of Fort Malden, overlooking the Detroit River where it debouched into Lake Ontario. For seventy-five miles along the shore of Lake Ontario, the only crop he had seen was the one he knew best, tobacco, which had been brought north by refugees like himself. A few of them had even made small fortunes. Everywhere around Colchester, he saw black faces, and heard the familiar drawl of Kentucky. Also at Colchester he met a white man named McCormick, who had already cleared a tract of land that he was happy to lease to Henson and his friends. They could begin sowing crops immediately. It was a more fortuitous decision than Henson expected. It turned out that McCormick had failed to meet the terms of his grant, and lost his claim to it, enabling Henson's group to live there rent-free for the next seven years, raising crops and accumulating savings with which they could later purchase land of their own.

Henson thrived at Colchester. However, he noticed how ignorance of the elementary principles of practical economics undermined the efforts of even the most hard-working refugees. They would often lease a tract of wilderness land, and contract to clear a fixed number of acres. By the time the land was clear—a backbreaking job, involving felling trees, and drag
ging out stumps, root systems, and rocks—the lease had run out, and the owner of the land would reoccupy it, and begin raising crops to which the refugee had no claim. The same refugee would then take up another, identical lease, with the same results, so that after years of labor he still had neither land nor savings. Henson similarly noticed how refugee farmers were ruining the profitable monopoly on the cultivation of tobacco that they had once enjoyed. They were flooding the market with needless overproduction, thus depressing the price, and putting themselves out of business. Henson's experience as a farm manager for the Rileys gave him a grasp of the larger dimensions of the problem that almost all his neighbors lacked. He began lecturing them about wages and profits, urging independent farmers to diversify, and renters to raise their own crops and to save their wages. It was all basic economics, but revolutionary to men and women who had never before had to plan for the future. There was so much that they had to learn.

As he plowed, and sowed, and harvested, a grander dream was taking shape in Henson's mind. He began to envision a community far more ambitious than the simple group of friends gathered at Colchester, a place where refugees from slavery would not only support themselves economically, but would also remake themselves as independent men and women, learning to read and write, to acquire mechanical skills, to become responsible for their own decisions, to develop the magical spirit of enterprise: in short, to think like white men. “It was precisely the Yankee spirit that I wished to instill into my fellow-slaves, if possible.” What he had in mind was destined to become one of the Canadian terminals of the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad was not the end of the journey from slavery to freedom, but the beginning. Paradoxically, it was in Canada that blacks became real Americans. Only there were they completely free to pursue the American dream of personal liberty, the acquisition of property, self-improvement, and the unfettered pursuit of happiness. By and large, what former slaves wanted was legal protection, physical security for themselves and their families, honest wages, recognition of the marriage bond, freedom to worship when and how they pleased, protection for their homes and property, education for themselves and their children, the power of the vote, and personal respect. Many shared feelings similar to those of Alexander Hemsley, once a slave in Maryland who had escaped
to New Jersey, where he had lived for years before being captured by slave hunters. Except for the intervention of Quakers, he would have been sent back to bondage by a local proslavery judge. Even so, the court had stripped him of everything he owned, and, terrified of further harassment, he fled to Canada. “I had been in comfortable circumstances, but all my little property was
lawed
away,” he told a visiting journalist, with deep bitterness. “When I reached English territory, I had a comfort in the law,—that my shackles were struck off, and that a man was a man by law.”

Nowhere in the Northern “free states” was freedom for African Americans fully guaranteed or protected. In 1840, more than ninety percent of Northern free blacks lived in states that either partially or completely disenfranchised them. Only in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire did blacks vote freely. Only Massachusetts allowed blacks to serve as jurors. In Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, testimony by blacks was forbidden in cases involving whites. Several Northern states limited or barred black immigration. Ohio, in particular, required a certificate of freedom from each black resident, barred blacks without such certificates from employment, fined anyone caught harboring a fugitive slave, and required every black entering the state to post a five-hundred-dollar bond, signed by two white men, as security. In some states, blacks were not allowed to be clerks or typesetters, to buy or sell alcohol, to trade farm products without a license, or to inherit property. Even in the New England states, personal discrimination was widespread in education, transportation, public facilities, and eating places. In Canada, freedom was protected by laws that were enforced by a government that supported abolition in both principle and fact. When a group of potential settlers from Ohio met with Upper Canada's Lieutenant General, Sir John Colborne, in 1829, he pointedly declared: “Tell the Republicans on your side of the line that we Royalists do not know men by their color. Should you come to us, you will be entitled to all the privileges of the rest of His Majesty's subjects.” It is impossible to imagine a public official of equal stature in the United States holding such a meeting with blacks for any reason at all.

Refugees in Canada were crossing a cultural watershed that in some ways was more challenging even than the physical ordeal of flight through hundreds of miles of hostile or indifferent territory. In the world of slavery, no matter how hard men and women worked, it made no difference to
their condition. Rarely was there any reward for intelligence, initiative, or ambition. Enterprise was as likely to lead to punishment as it was to profit. For all but a small handful of privileged slaves, the concept of choice barely existed, while a master's caprice, insolvency, or death might without warning lead at any time to traumatic separations, or worse. For the slave, poverty was foreordained.

In Canada, for the first time, former slaves could anticipate prosperity. Life became predictable in the best sense of the term. A man or woman who worked hard could expect to be paid. Families could expect to spend their lives together. A woman could expect to live her life without being raped. Children could expect to receive an education. Although racism certainly existed, a man could nonetheless expect to be treated in public with politeness. If he managed to save money, he could invest it and expect to enlarge his fortune. And if he made a bad business deal, he had as much hope as any white immigrant did of recovering and starting over. Wilson Ruffin Abbott, a free immigrant and businessman from Alabama, became one of the most prominent real estate developers in Toronto. And he was not alone.

The black press promoted Canada as a safe and welcoming destination for blacks, both fugitive and free, who wished to escape from the bigotry of “mock republicans,” contrasting it with the “barbarous and pestilential” shores of Africa. “Is not Upper Canada as salubrious and fertile as any other country under the sun?” the
Colored American
posed in 1839. “Instead of sharks, alligators and tiger, there are wild turkey, and deer, and buffalo. Instead of savages and traders in human flesh, there is civilization, refinement, and religion. A colored man of good character and information and some means, may live in Canada without the least social or civil proscription.” Although in Canada there was in fact color prejudice, the law was color-blind. Blacks had property rights. They could sue. They served on juries. They testified in trials. And they could vote. In 1849, when Colchester blacks (who by then made up one-third of the population) insisted upon their right to vote for the election of local officials, which was opposed by the white office holders, the town chairman was prosecuted and severely fined. A bigoted British immigrant wrote home with astonishment to relatives in England, “Here by the way, I may mention as illustration of the state of society, that everyone is called, it matters not in what position or occupation they stand, as Mr. or Mrs.,
or this Gentleman, or that Lady, even the Niggers.” A black man even carried the Union Jack at the head of an “Orange Tory procession” in London in the summer of 1836. And in 1843, black residents of Toronto successfully petitioned the mayor and the city council to bar a traveling circus from performing blackface acts that ridiculed Afro Canadians.

In the 1820s, Canada had for all practical purposes ceased to sanction the return of fugitive slaves to the United States. In 1826, after months of fruitless negotiations, Albert Gallatin, the American minister to the Court of St. James, wrote resignedly to Secretary of State Henry Clay that Britain refused to depart from “the principle recognized by the British courts that every man is free who reaches British ground.” A series of fugitive slave cases in the mid-1830s hardened the Crown's resolve. In the first of these, in 1833, Canadian officials refused to extradite Thornton and Ruth Blackburn, who were the center of an uproar in Detroit when a crowd of angry blacks had torn them out of the hands of the authorities and spirited them off to Canada. Four years later, the governor of Kentucky demanded the return of a fugitive named Jesse Happy, claiming that since he had escaped on his master's horse he should be treated as a simple thief. In response, Lieutenant Governor Francis Head wrote that “it may be argued that a slave escaping from bondage on his master's horse is a vicious struggle between two parties of which the slave owner is not only the aggressor, but the blackest criminal of the two—it is the case of the dealer in human flesh versus the stealer of horse flesh.” Happy was allowed to remain in Canada undisturbed.