Bound for Canaan (41 page)

Meanwhile, Pensacola was in an uproar. On June 29, a week after Walker's party had sailed, the
Pensacola Gazette
reported that “the most impudent and daring outrage” had been perpetrated on the peace of the territory by the “abduction” of seven Negroes. The paper complained, “Where is our police? Where is our patrol? How is it that numbers of Negroes can prowl unmolested the limits of the Corporation and from our very dwellings, while persons are in the pay of the Corporation to see that no Negro is at large after the bell rings?” Speculation quickly centered on the abolitionist sailor who had suspiciously left town the same night that the slaves disappeared. Fortunately for the fugitives in the whaleboat, a report that Walker had been seen in Mobile sent pursuers off in the wrong direction. Once that rumor had been dispelled, there was still no way to speed news of the slaves' escape to authorities elsewhere in Florida. No railroad tracks had yet been laid anywhere in the territory, while the first telegraph line in the country had been strung just a month earlier, between Washington and Baltimore. Even had the telegraph been available, there still would have been almost nowhere to send such a message. Florida's emptiness was the fugitives' greatest asset.

Passing through the keys posed the greatest challenge of all for Walker's seamanship. Larger boats detoured seventy-five miles to the south, via Key West, before turning northward again on the Atlantic side of the keys. This option was closed to Walker and his companions. Key West was one of the busiest ports on the Gulf. There was no way to pass it without being noticed. Closer to the Everglades, however, the water was in many places only a foot or two deep, and the bottom so muddy that if a man climbed out to push a beached boat forward he would be sucked under. Channels through the upper keys were shallow and hard to find. Walker likely relied on high tide to pull the whaleboat safely through the pass between Sandy and Clive keys, and on the evening of July 7 they emerged into the turquoise waters of Biscayne Bay.

Their immediate destination was Cape Florida, the southernmost point on Key Biscayne, just below present-day Miami. Walker knew that they would find water there. He dared not set out across open sea with
out a fresh supply, even though they were, if the weather held, less than twenty-four hours from Nassau. They had already sailed and rowed some seven hundred miles in fourteen days. They had every reason to feel confident. Their ordeal would soon be at an end, Walker thought. The seven fugitives would be free men within the day, and Walker, though not a prideful man, could truthfully claim to have accomplished one of the most epic journeys in the history of the abolitionist underground.

But the night fell away to reveal two large sloops, too close to be avoided. They were salvage vessels out of Key West, and each carried a crew of fifteen or more men, outnumbering Walker's parched and bedraggled party by two to one.

Richard Roberts, the skipper of the nearer sloop, the
Eliza Catherine
, shouted to Walker, who as the only white man in the whaleboat he naturally took to be in command, “Where are you from, and where are you bound?”

“From St. Joseph's, bound to Cape Florida,” Walker answered hopefully.

“I am going that way, and will give you a tow,” Roberts replied, running the
Eliza Catherine
alongside the whaleboat and making fast to it with a rope.

Perhaps Walker gazed across the dark sea toward the Bahamas, just beyond the horizon. After nineteen days at sea, he knew how tantalizingly close they were to their destination. He knew that, had they arrived an hour earlier or an hour later, the sloops would have missed them.

There was not much he could do. He bluffed anyway. He first told Roberts that the men in the boat were slaves, and that he was under contract to their owners to open up land on the Miami River. When the fugitives were questioned separately, however, they claimed that Walker himself was their owner. Walker finally admitted that he was an abolitionist, and asserted that he had talked the men into running away. This may not have been true, but by taking the blame onto himself he was giving the men the last thing that it was in his power to give.

After several days under guard in Key West, Walker was taken back to Pensacola in chains for trial. He arrived on the eighteenth of July, just under a month after he left. Until September, he remained in the
calabozo
, as the old Spanish jail was still called, shackled to the wall of the single cell with a twenty-two-pound chain. Although he was so wasted from illness
that he could encircle his shrunken leg with his thumb and finger, Walker was given no bedding for the first month, and chained at night to the other prisoners. The sheer filth of the place tested even his heroic powers of endurance. On one side of the room, the floor remained stained for days with the blood of a slave who had committed suicide by slicing open his belly and throat with a razor.

Walker's first trial, for his involvement in the escape of four of the seven slaves, took place on the morning of November 11. (The three remaining cases were deferred until spring.) The charges against him included every crime of which a slave owner dreamed an abolitionist ought to be accused. The indictment claimed that he had
assisted
Silas Scott in running away,
enticed
Charles Johnson, and
stolen
Catlett and Moses Johnson. They, of course, were never brought to court at all. No black man's testimony was admissible in a case against a white man. Like any sort of lost property, they had been restored immediately to their owners, who were left to punish them however they saw fit. The three slaves belonging to the naval lieutenant Robert Caldwell were apparently not punished at all. The four others were each given fifty blows with a wooden paddle. Walker pleaded not guilty on the grounds that assisting men to escape slavery was not a crime. Not surprisingly, the court treated this as no defense at all. The judge directed the jury to find Walker guilty, and urged them not to allow sympathy to sway them from imposing the severest justice. They took only half an hour to reach a verdict. No one expected them to find Walker innocent. But the sentence they laid upon him shocked even many who loathed everything that Walker stood for. He was first to be exposed for public exhibition in the pillory on the steps of the courthouse, and then to be branded like an animal with the letters “SS,” for “slave-stealer.”

The sentence was carried out on November 16 by Marshal Ebenezer Dorr, a transplanted Maine Yankee, by strange coincidence, and the son of a hero of the American Revolution who had ridden with Paul Revere. The younger Dorr was now, as Walker tersely put it, a “practical slave owner, and a strong advocate of the system.” He led Walker out the door of the courthouse and locked his head and hands into the pillory. For precisely an hour, he was left to the taunts of the mob and to the marksmanship of George Willis, the owner of several of the fugitive slaves, who hurled rotten eggs at Walker's face, a misdemeanor for which the court later fined
Willis the sum of six and a quarter cents. When the prescribed time was up, Dorr brought Walker back inside and placed him in the prisoner's box. He tied Walker's right hand to the wooden railing. Taking a branding-iron “of a slight red heat,” he pressed it into the ball of Walker's hand, and held it there firmly for fifteen or twenty seconds. “It made a spattering noise, like handful of salt in the fire,” Walker stoically recalled. “The pain was severe.” Walker was then sent back to his cell. Dorr soon returned with three writs in hand for trespass and damage to the property of Caldwell and the Willises, to the staggering amount of one hundred and six thousand dollars, a sum so great, in 1844, as to be scarcely imaginable. (Of this sum, the vindictive federal marshal George Willis demanded all but six thousand dollars.) Walker had already surrendered his only possession of any value, his boat, to Caldwell. He was now penniless.

The first notice of Walker's plight appeared in abolitionist newspapers in mid-July. In November, news of his branding sped across the country. Northerners were horrified. Southerners had actually branded a
white man
. Protest meetings were held throughout New England. On December 6, 1844, the
Liberator
published a boldfaced headline: “Jonathan Walker Sentenced, and Branded!!—Horrible, horrible beyond all description.” The
Christian Citizen
proclaimed Walker to be one of a “new order of knighthood,” and that his tortured hand was now “daguerreotyped in the chancery of heaven.” Everywhere, abolitionist speakers declared that the burned-in letters truly stood for “Slave Savior.” A “martyr's fund” was established for Walker's defense. Contributions and letters of support came from as far away as England. Gerrit Smith and Lewis Tappan, the wealthy New York patrons of the abolitionist movement, both made donations. James C. Fuller, the financier of Josiah Henson's Dawn colony, sent twenty-four dollars. Frederick Douglass undertook a speaking tour on Walker's behalf. William Lloyd Garrison cited “the afflicting and hopeless case of the unfortunate Walker” at every opportunity. Lawyers were hired and dispatched to Pensacola.

The notoriety of Walker's punishment proved to be an embarrassment greater than Pensacolans were prepared to bear. Willis's ludicrous demand for damages was finally dropped, and when Walker was again brought to trial in May 1845, for assisting in the escape of the remaining three slaves, the jury—“men untrammeled by prejudice or revenge,” as Walker rather generously described them—found him guilty, but fined
him only fifteen dollars. He was released from jail on June 16, 1845, almost exactly a year from the day that he set sail. Northern abolitionists and Walker's friends on Cape Cod paid his fines and the costs of his prosecution, a total of five hundred ninety-six dollars and five and a half cents, including, among other charges, twenty-five dollars to the city of Pensacola for the “use” of the jail, and eighty-seven and a half cents for the cost of a new lock.

Although Walker probably had no formal connection with the abolitionist underground while he lived in Pensacola, slaveholders had no doubt at all that Walker was a knowing part of a vast and powerful international conspiracy to undermine the institutions of the South. The reaction of the territorial government was paranoid. “It can no longer be denied that systematic and powerful influences are at work throughout a large portion of Europe and many parts of our own country, the direct tendency of which is to impair our rights of property and to involve ourselves and the unconscious objects of this false philanthropy in one common ruin,” the official report of Florida's Legislative Council on the affair stated. “A vicious fanaticism clothed in the garb of religion, is prowling around our borders…whose direct purposes, scarcely concealed, are to deluge our very hearthstones in blood, and to rear an altar to its false principles upon the ruin of all that is precious to us as freemen and dear to us as men.” The report called for harsh punishment of anyone who dared to help slaves to escape. “Henceforward we are compelled to regard negro-stealing, by the instruments of the abolitionists, as a crime of a different character. It is no longer a mere larceny, but a species of treason against the State—a direct assault upon the very existence of our institutions.” The crimes of Negro stealing, and of aiding and abetting Negro stealing—the very work of the Underground Railroad—were to be made punishable by death.

Walker was hailed in the North as a martyr. He was immediately taken up by New York abolitionists when he arrived there on July 11, and was soon drafted for the lecture circuit, where he was billed as the “hero of Pensacola.” In effect, he became the first media star of the abolitionist movement, a figure of talismanic power who had but to hold up his wounded hand to electrify audiences. Although he was not articulate as a speaker, through 1846 he was in constant demand at abolitionist gatherings, and continued touring for several years after that. He appeared
throughout New England and central New York state, recounting his own sufferings in the cause, and exhorting others to follow his example. At the close of every lecture, members of the audience were invited to personally inspect the famous hand itself, which Walker styled the “coat of arms of the United States.”

Images of the hand were printed in dozens of newspapers throughout the United States. The abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a paean to it that was recited for decades in New England schools:

Universally known as “The Branded Hand,” Walker's callused seaman's palm became an emblem of the entire abolitionist movement and, perhaps inevitably, of the Underground Railroad, the most riveting symbol both of the sacrifice that was demanded of men who dared to assist fugitive slaves, and of the punishment that awaited them if they were caught. It was physical proof of slavery's barbarism, bringing home to middle-class white audiences with lurid violence as nothing else yet had done how fatally their freedoms—
white men's freedoms
—were even now being violated by Southern slavery.

T
HE
1850
S