Authors: Fergus Bordewich
At thirty-five, Calvin Fairbank was well-built and clean-shaven, with a high, clear forehead, placid eyes, and the self-contained manner of someone who, if not precisely a gentleman in the nineteenth century's rather lofty sense of the term, had spent a great deal of time alone, in serious thought. This was Fairbank's first trip back to the South since his release in 1849 from the Kentucky State Penitentiary, where he had been incarcerated for helping Lewis Hayden and his family to escape to Ohio. Fairbank had spent a day wandering around the city, a mere tourist to all appearances, observing the comings and goings of steamboats along the earthen levee that served as the city's riverfront, and visiting all four of the slave markets. Louisville was a vibrant, rowdy place, a blend of riverfront roughness and genteel pretensions, barely a generation removed from its frontier origins. The constant river traffic between Pittsburgh to the east, St. Louis, and points south as far as New Orleans, lent the city's atmosphere a certain cosmopolitan phizz.
Almost one-fifth of the city's population was African American. Black slaves worked alongside Irish immigrants on the steamboats and levees. Free blacks operated barbershops and worked as draymen, laborers, and housemaids, while slaves were rented out in considerable numbers by their masters as personal servants, blacksmiths, and iron mongers in the city's foundries, and as cooks and waiters in the city's restaurants. Fairbank was more than a casual tourist in Louisville's black world. In the winter of 1851 he was a deeply conflicted man. At his trial in 1845, he had thrown himself on the mercy of the court, strongly hinting that he would forswear any further assistance to fugitive slaves if he was released. While in prison
he had been called a hypocrite, and worse, by fellow abolitionists who had read or heard reports of his recantation. He was free only because bail for his release had been paid by Hayden, now a successful businessman in Boston: Fairbank knew that to visit the South again like this was to invite physical attack. He was well aware of Seth Concklin's fate. But he was bitter at the accusations that had been leveled against him. For an abolitionist who never doubted that he was acting at God's command, to be accused of hypocrisy was deeply shaming and painful.
About one hour after Fairbank was seen at the Centre Street Church, A. L. Shotwell realized that his slave Tamar was missing. The twenty-seven-year-old Tamar was reportedly “as white and fairâ¦as most ladies,” and of a “lively” temperament. She had once almost escaped from Shotwell on a trip to Boston, but had held back for fear of losing her children, who had remained behind in Kentucky. She was shattered when, on her return to Louisville, she asked to see her youngest child, and was told that the infant had died. Shotwell had recently hired Tamar out as a servant to a Judge Purtle. Sometime after eight o'clock, a little after dinner, Purtle heard a window being raised in the basement, and going downstairs to check, he realized that Tamar was gone.
The meeting between Fairbank and Tamar had been secretly arranged by underground contacts in Louisville and in Indiana. In the course of their conversation, Tamar told him, “I came back for my babe. God has it. It is better off than I am. Now I want freedom.” The two walked quickly a few blocks to the riverfront, where at night the spars of dozens of riverboats lined up along the muddy levee resembled a forest of winter-bare trees against the night sky. In spite of the hour, the levee was far from deserted. At almost any time of the day and night, riverboats, the long-distance haulers of their era, were arriving and departing, smokestacks streaming, steam screaming through gauge-cocks, bells ringing, as they maneuvered toward the levee, or backed out into the stream.
With no money to buy or rent a properly equipped boat, Fairbank had earlier in the day identified an apparently abandoned, and as it turned out dangerously leaky, skiff. He never recorded Tamar's feelings, but the trip across the river must have terrified her. Somehow, they shoved off from the bank unnoticed, and using a four-foot plank as a paddle, Fairbank managed to propel the skiff into the river, while Tamar bailed furiously with a cup that she had taken from the judge's home, scooping the water
that bubbled around their shoes and threatened continually to swamp them. Once they were away from the shore, they would have been virtually invisible: they must have known that had a riverboat borne down on them, they would have been killed instantly. It is quite possible that neither of them knew how to swim, since swimming had not yet caught on as a popular pastime, and it was not until late in the century that it began to be taught to children as a matter of course. In addition, there was the ever-present danger of discovery. One can only imagine them, rescuer and slave, mumbling rapid prayers beneath their breath, wondering tensely whether even those furtive sounds, like the splash of the paddle, would carry fatally across the water, but praying all the same, the white man with all the fervency of his conviction that God's own great hand was guiding their flimsy craft, and Tamar with desperation, knowing that if she were caught and returned to Kentucky the consequences, most likely being sold for plantation work, would be terrible.
Fairbank steered as best he could toward the town of Jeffersonville, which was hard to discern until they were well out into the river. Even then, all that could be seen was the dim flicker of kerosene lamps in two or three windows. Fairbank kept up a steady pace, trying to compensate for the pull of the current. They landed a short distance downriver from Jeffersonville, and spent most of the rest of the night shivering in a field outside town. At about four o'clock, Fairbank was pounding on the door of a Jeffersonville livery stable. He told the groggy proprietor that he wanted to rent a buggy for the two-day drive to the town of Vienna. His actual destination was Salem, where he was to hand Tamar over to a black barber named Jackson, a local stationmaster on the Underground Railroad. By eight o'clock, Fairbank was driving fast, still thirty miles short of their destination, when the horse was spooked by a barking dog and bolted, and the carriage broke against a stump. He knew by now that Tamar's disappearance would have been discovered, and a search begun, and that slave catchers would soon start scouring the Indiana side of the river. With no time to lose, at the nearest town Fairbank flagged down a passing freight train. Although the trainmen agreed to take Tamar on to Salem, they asked him to wait for the next passenger train, but he forced himself aboard, and then, Methodist minister that he was, annoyed the trainmen by insisting that they suppress their profanity in Tamar's presence.
When the train stopped at Salem, Fairbank sought out Jackson and handed Tamar over to his keeping. Within days, she would be safe in Canada. Fairbank returned to Jeffersonville, intending to cross back over the river to Kentucky, to Lexington, to recover the body of his father, who had died there of cholera while visiting him in prison before his release. With the same transcendental self-confidence that had allowed him to set off across the Ohio River in a leaky rowboat, he assumed that he would be in no immediate danger. In fact, Tamar's owner, A. L. Shotwell, had already reported her disappearance to the United States marshal in Louisville.
While Fairbank was in Salem, the marshal, a man named Ronald, had been hard at work. He had quickly discovered that Tamar had met Fairbank in Louisville, and had found witnesses who gave him reason to think that the pair had escaped to Indiana. Crossing the river, he soon found the owner of the livery stable where Fairbank had rented the carriage. On Sunday, November 9, Fairbank was walking past the stable on his way to church when somebody called to him. Three or four men including Ronald came up to him. “What do you want of me?” Fairbank asked. “I want you in Louisville,” Ronald replied. “You have been aiding off some niggers.” When Fairbank refused, he later wrote, another man “seized me by my cravat, and twisting so as to confine meâ¦rendering it uncomfortable for me to speak or even to breathe.” In the struggle that ensued, Fairbank cried aloud for help “to preserve the honor of the law of the State.” Although the altercation took place in front of many of the townspeople, no one stepped forward to help him. Within the hour, Fairbank was put in a skiff and rowed back to Kentucky, to a trial, and to a sentence of fifteen years in the state penitentiary, the longest ever imposed on an underground activist. This time there would be no reprieve.
3
Despite their divergent origins, there were striking similarities between the personalities of the rough-hewn ex-slave Harriet Tubman, the soldier-of-fortune Seth Concklin, and the evangelical, middle-class Calvin Fairbank. Apart from their unbreachable commitment to emancipation, all
three were extraordinarily courageous individuals, natural risk takers, and had a knack for holding the trust of wary slaves. Fairbank, at least, shared Tubman's intense piety and her sense of divine direction. Concklin was as much adventurer as idealist, but he shared Tubman's capacity for ruthless self-control and her tolerance of extreme physical discomfort. Why, then, did they ultimately fail, while Tubman was able to continue her work without serious interruption for more than ten years? Being white, they were of course unable to blend in with African Americans as Tubman did. On the other hand, their whiteness conferred a privilege of movement and freedom from random interrogation that more than compensated for its limitations. They lacked, however, Tubman's exquisite instinct for danger, her matchless knowledge of the territory through which she traveled, and her gift for theatrics. In addition, while Concklin and Fairbank were essentially loners, Tubman enjoyed the advantage of a personal network in which she could place complete trust.
There was, of course, another difference between Tubman and the others, the most obvious of all: she was a woman. As a physically nondescript black woman with a field hand's manners and speech, she was far less likely to be suspected than was any man, white or black. More to the point, few Southerners even remotely credited blacks with the intelligence and strategic skill to plan complex rescues carried out over long distances and requiring the management of numbers of people. They assumed, even where there was no evidence, that the disappearance of slaves must have been the work of white subversives working in collusion with disloyal blacks within the borders of their own states. While Southern lawmen were ever on the lookout for clones of Concklin and Fairbank, Tubman again and again slipped by them unnoticed.
It is probably not entirely coincidental that Tubman came to prominence just as the women's rights movement was breaking upon Americans' consciousness. Although she was wholly a product of the particular African American culture of the Eastern Shore, she was in her own distinctive way part of a larger, still inchoate force that was reshaping, if not yet American society, then at least the antislavery movement. Abolitionists who very likely would have ignored Tubman a decade or two earlier, by the 1850s were able to recognize in her a heroism that transcended gender. Abolitionism was the threshold through which American women took their first steps into the nation's political life. Back in the 1830s white
women were expected to be unobtrusively abolitionist, and then only within their own parlors and sewing circles. Rare exceptions were Quaker activists like Lucretia Mott, and the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, daughters of a South Carolina slave owner, who repudiated slavery, moved north, and drew large crowds when they lectured on behalf of abolition. The very nature of the struggle against slavery demanded a new willingness to look at the roots of oppression and to confront authority, whether in the form of husband, church leaders, or public opinion. The experience exposed many women to the hypocrisy of abolitionist males who demanded freedom for slaves but insisted that their own womenfolk remain silent. The combative antislavery lecturer Abby Kelley, for example, found church doors closed to her, and was roundly denounced from pulpits as a “jezebel” because she traveled with men other than her husband. And in 1840 William Lloyd Garrison's nomination of her to the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society so offended evangelicals that they broke away from the organization entirely, leaving Garrison with little support beyond Boston and a few Quaker communities. Increasingly, however, women began to appear at public antislavery meetings alongside men, and often black men at that, a sight that utterly scandalized Americans outside the movement. Frederick Douglass, however, reported with heartfelt pride (and a trace of astonishment) how at a rally for the fugitive George Latimer, “we were all on a level, everyone took a seat just where they chose, there [was] neither men's side, nor women's side; white pew nor black pew, but all seats were free, and all sides free.”
One of the countless women radicalized by the antislavery movement was Gerrit Smith's cherubic first cousin Elizabeth Cady, who spent several languorous but intellectually provocative weeks each summer at his rambling home in Peterboro, absorbing the ceaseless talk of politics and reform. There, for the first time, she found men who were willing to listen to her opinions. She later wrote, “I felt a new inspiration in life and was enthused with new ideas of individual rights and the basic principles of government, for the antislavery platform was the best school the American people ever had on which to learn republican principles and ethics.” She also met there the handsome Henry Stanton, one of the most famous abolitionist speakers in the country, and her future husband. Coming from the cosmopolitan salon of Peterboro, Stanton was flabbergasted by the treatment that she and other antislavery women received at the
World's Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, in 1840. The Americans, among them Lucretia Mott and the usually irrepressible Abby Kelley, comprised a brigade of the most formidable public women in the entire United States at the time. But in keeping with the rigid scriptural notions that permeated the British antislavery movement, not only were they barred from participating as delegates, they were relegated to smoldering silence in a segregated gallery off the convention floor. They were told that the rubric “World's Convention,” Mott recorded in her diary, “was a mere poetical license,” and that women were “constitutionally unfit for public or business meetings.”