Bound for Canaan (42 page)

1

In February 1848 William Chaplin and Daniel Drayton met each other for the first time, in Washington, D.C. This was the Underground Railroad as Southerners imagined it: a clandestine meeting, a sinister organization reaching across state lines, a plot to run off slaves. Chaplin, a polished and strikingly handsome, if slightly balding, man of fifty-two, was the agent of radical New York abolitionists who regarded the existence of slavery in the nation's capital as an intolerable affront to its democratic ideals. Like his predecessor Charles Torrey, who had died two years earlier in a Baltimore prison after being convicted for aiding the escape of fugitives, Chaplin was a believer in direct action. Drayton was of a rougher cut, with a large cleft chin, gloomy eyes, and brows that knotted over the bridge of his nose: it was a sad face, wrinkled and scored by more
than two decades at sea. Strictly speaking, he was not really an underground man, at least not in the way that Chaplin was. He was a Philadelphia ship's captain who desperately needed money. What they were planning was the biggest organized break-out of slaves in underground history thus far.

Chaplin told Drayton that he wanted a boat to transport “a family or two,” who were technically free but tied up in litigation, and were afraid of being sold south before their case was resolved. Drayton would be undertaking a great Christian service to carry them north. That was well and good, Drayton replied. He did not lack sympathy for the enslaved. But he would need to be paid.

Drayton's life was one long hard-luck story. He was born in poverty, in 1802, in New Jersey, not far from the mouth of the Delaware River. Taking to sea as a cook at the age of nineteen, after several miserable years as a shoemaker, he eventually saved enough money to buy a half-interest in a sloop working the mid-Atlantic coast. On its second voyage, the sloop struck a snag near the mouth of the Susquehanna and sank in five minutes, its uninsured cargo a total loss. His next vessel sank off North Carolina with a cargo of coal and several of its crew. Another was blown ashore on Long Island, with a hundred tons of plaster. Still another was lost in a freak snowstorm, in Chesapeake Bay.

He would be well paid for his work, Chaplin assured him. It was, Drayton would say, in his ghostwritten memoir, “an offer which the low state of my pecuniary affairs, and the necessity of supporting my family, did not allow me to decline.”

Much, if not most, of the actual planning was done by a slave named Thomas Ducket and by Daniel Bell, a free black iron-monger who worked at the Washington Navy Yard, who feared that his enslaved family was about to be sold. They alerted slaves not only in Washington, but also in outlying Georgetown, and across the Potomac in Alexandria, that a Yankee boat would soon be available to take anyone who wanted to leave. Chaplin had not been entirely honest with Drayton: three weeks before the planned departure, he wrote his close friend Gerrit Smith that he expected as many as seventy-five fugitives to join in the escape, not a family or two.

Back in Philadelphia, Drayton recruited another down-on-his-luck skipper named Edward Sayres, who owned a small coaster called the
Pearl
.
Drayton offered him one hundred dollars to sail from Washington to Frenchtown, New Jersey, on the Delaware River, where the fugitives were to be set ashore. This was far more than Sayres could expect to earn for any ordinary cargo. The third member of the crew was a naive boy named Chester English, who had never been more than thirty miles from home, and had a craving to see the tourist sights of Washington.

On the evening of Thursday, April 13, 1848, the
Pearl
docked at the foot of Seventh Street on the Anacostia River, within the present grounds of the Washington Navy Yard, but then comparatively isolated beyond open fields and sheltered by a steep earthen bank. That night, the city was in a tumult over news of the republican revolution that had recently taken place in France. It seemed to patriotic Washingtonians that the fulsome spirit of their own democracy was finally cresting, as they always dreamed that it would, on the far side of the Atlantic. In Congress, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi declared, unconscious of the irony of his words, “that the age of tyrants and of slavery was rapidly drawing to a close, and that the happy period to be signalized by the universal emancipation of man from the fetters of civic oppression…was at this moment visibly commencing.” As bonfires roared and impromptu processions wound through the streets, the news of Drayton's arrival crackled through the underground.

Soon after dark, small groups of shadowy figures began to arrive over the fields. English, who had been told that they were going to load a cargo of ship timber, was now posted at the hatch, and ordered to close it after each passenger. In all, seventy-seven fugitives boarded the
Pearl
. At ten o'clock, Drayton ordered Sayres and English to cast off. There was no wind at all, and they made little headway as the night slipped past. The sun was already rising when they passed Alexandria. Then, for the first time, Drayton went into the hold, where he counted thirty-eight men and boys, twenty-six women and girls, and thirteen children, “pretty thickly stowed.” One belonged to a congressman from South Carolina. Another was a coachman for the secretary of the treasury. Two were slaves owned by a local black hackman. Fifteen-year-old Mary Ellen Steward was the property of Dolley Madison, the widow of President James Madison.

The wind now rose at last, and once past Fort Washington, the
Pearl
ran steadily southward past George Washington's Mount Vernon, past Quantico, past Robert E. Lee's birthplace at Stratford Hall, past St. George's
Island. But as they approached Point Lookout at the mouth of the Potomac, the winds shifted unfavorably. Drayton's plan was to sail north up Chesapeake Bay, and then cross the northern portion of the Delmarva peninsula through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, to the Delaware River. He and Sayres agreed to anchor until the winds changed in a small cove known as Cornfield harbor. Exhausted after a night and a day without rest, they and English flung themselves onto their bunks and went to sleep.

Consternation had swept Washington when it was learned that slaves belonging to no fewer than forty-one different masters had disappeared in the night. In spite of the
Pearl'
s agonizingly slow passage down the Potomac, the plan might still have worked, but Drayton's ill-luck won out yet again. The scheme was betrayed by an informer. A black hackman named Judson Diggs, who had driven two fugitives to the boat, went to the authorities in hope of collecting a reward. A waterborne posse of thirty armed men hurriedly set off in the
Salem
, a small steamboat belonging to one of the slave owners. After searching the river all Sunday afternoon and most of the night, they were about to return to Washington when they arrived at Cornfield harbor.

The screech of a steamer's whistle blasted Drayton from his sleep. He heard a voice shout, “Niggers, by God!” and the banging of gun butts on the deck. As Drayton emerged from his cabin, he was seized and hauled onto the
Salem,
along with Sayres and the hapless English. The fugitives were kept under guard aboard the
Pearl,
as it was towed back upriver to Washington.

Just after dawn on February 18, the posse marched its captives into the city in an antebellum version of a Roman triumph. Drayton and Sayres were driven ahead in the lead, lashed together, and guarded by a man on each side. The fugitives trudged behind them, also tied in pairs. Several women carried babies in their arms. The first scattered onlookers swelled into a howling mob by the time they approached the center of town. As they passed Gannon's slave pen, one of Washington's largest, a man rushed at the two Yankees, waving a knife in their faces. At Pennsylvania Avenue, thousands were yelling, “Lynch them! Lynch them! The damned villains!” Only when they reached the “Blue Jug,” the three-story city jail at the corner of Fourth and G Streets, did Drayton begin to believe that he would come through the ordeal alive.

In the course of the day, proslavery men fired by rumors of the cap
ture of the “slave-stealers” flooded into Washington from the outlying districts and laid siege to the most prominent symbol of abolitionism in the city, the office of the antislavery newspaper the
National Era
. They milled in the streets threatening to wreck the building and to burn down the home of its editor, Gamalial Bailey. Both Bailey and his newspaper were saved only by a freezing rain, which dissipated the mob. The next morning, shaken by the demonstrations, President James K. Polk, a Tennessee slave owner, ordered federal employees into the streets to restore order. Order, of course, meant not just the immediate suppression of potentially uncontrollable mob violence, but the lasting protection of slavery in the capital of the only nation in the world dedicated, on paper at least, to the proposition that all men were created equal.

 

W
ashington, although it was now a city of forty thousand, was still groping for a shape. Rows of one-story structures straggled alongside frowsy patches of waste ground, muddy streams, and spacious avenues that seemed to begin in nothing and lead nowhere. Charles Dickens, who visited Washington early in the decade, hated the place, calling it “the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.” He wrote disgustedly, “put green blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a white one in every window; plough up all the roads; plant a great deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought
not
to be; erect three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the more entirely out of anybody's way the better…leave a brick-field without the bricks, in all central places where a street may naturally be expected: and that's Washington.” Manners were remarkably informal. Anyone could visit the president at the Executive Mansion, and White House levees were open to the respectable public, although they were rather glum affairs and not popular, since the straitlaced Polks disdained dancing and served no liquor or food. The grand monuments that would impress future visitors existed, when at all, mainly in the minds of architects. South of the White House, the cornerstone of the Washington Monument had just been laid, and on a low eminence to the east, the ambitious Corinthian facade of the Capitol terminated anticlimactically in a frail wooden dome.

Slavery was seamlessly woven into the fabric of life in the capital, although abolitionists had tried for years without success to legislate it out
of existence. A free African American active in the underground, dryly wrote, “I knew that I was in the midst of a slaveholding community, in which, even the white man, who had more liberty and freedom than I, dare not raise his voice in favor of freedom for the African's descendants in Christian America, although he might raise it as high as he pleased for the Greeks and Poles.” Like a foul, persistent odor, the harsh fact of slavery intruded everywhere. In 1849 slave hunters would even force their way into Mrs. Ann Sprigg's popular boardinghouse near the Capitol, and arrest one of the black waiters in front of the guests, who included a first-term Whig congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. The waiter had been working to purchase his freedom and had paid off all but sixty dollars of the price when his master changed his mind, and ordered him to be collected and readied for sale. Some of the largest slave-trading establishments in the United States stood within sight of the Capitol building, advertising their trade with signboards that unabashedly proclaimed: “
Cash! Cash! Cash! And Negroes Wanted.
” Although the number of permanent resident slaves was small—somewhat more than two thousand out of the city's eight thousand black inhabitants—interstate traders used it as a convenient transshipment point for slaves who were gathered annually in northeastern Virginia and Maryland, and sent by steamboat or on foot, chained in coffles, to the plantation states of the Deep South. The owner of one establishment told the Quaker traveler Joseph Sturge that he shipped between fifteen hundred and two thousand slaves south from Washington each year.

As Stanley Harrold has shown in
Subversives,
a masterful history of abolition in the District of Columbia, nowhere did underground activity provoke slaveholders more than in the nation's capital, the city which to all the world symbolized, for better or worse, the true nature of the United States: a beacon of freedom for all, or a government criminally complicit in the tyranny of man over man. The
Pearl
incident, with its mass escape of more than seventy slaves, was only the latest provocation. Earlier in the decade, a secret ring operated by Charles T. Torrey, a flamboyant young Congregationalist minister from Albany, New York, and a former slave named Thomas Smallwood had systematically run off hundreds of slaves from the area under the very nose of Congress. Torrey and Smallwood relied more on daring and luck than on technique. Lacking the kind of extensive family-and church-based networks enjoyed by, say,
John Rankin or Levi Coffin, they were reduced to the risky expedient of hiring local men to drive rented wagons and carriages as they needed them, often at short notice and, apparently, with little planning. “We had to pay teamsters a very high price in order to induce them to risk themselves and teams in so dangerous an enterprise,” Smallwood would write, paying up to fifteen dollars per person to carry a passenger just to the first underground station, thirty-seven miles from Washington. Unfortunately, several of their mercenary collaborators revealed themselves to be swindlers and spies, demanding fees from fugitives in Smallwood's name, and then betraying some of them to their masters for the reward. Smallwood, more circumspect than the doomed Torrey, sensed danger, and moved his family to Canada.

For the first months of 1844, the Byronic Torrey worked on alone, personally collecting fugitives from as far away as Winchester, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and making plans—grandiose ones in light of what happened—to mount rescue expeditions in distant North Carolina and Louisiana. There was a certain compulsive quality to his behavior, as if each success bred a need for another, still greater risk. Not alone among evangelical abolitionists, he was also hooked on the frisson of imagined crucifixion. “Did you ever hear of a Torrey that suffered martyrdom?” he once asked his father. “I hope among our good old Puritan ancestors there were some who had the martyr spirit.” That June, Torrey was identified by a Washington slave dealer, who named him as the man who had carried off slaves from Winchester. Once in custody, he was also convicted for enticing three other slaves away from a Baltimore tavern owner, and sentenced to six years' hard labor. It was a death sentence. Torrey did not have the constitution of the hardy seaman Jonathan Walker, and prison proved an agony for him. He was racked by “bilious fever,” and his moods swung wildly between depression and Christian exaltation. Then the tuberculosis from which he had suffered early in life crept inexorably and fatally through his lungs. On the night of May 7 he suffered a severe hemorrhage, and on the eighth he died. With Smallwood, he had helped an estimated four hundred slaves to freedom.