Bound for Canaan (57 page)

Smith liked Brown's piety, and his determination. He agreed to sell Brown 244 acres for one dollar an acre, on credit. The following May, bankrupt but afire with faith in his destiny, Brown moved his family—less one child, his youngest, who had just died from pneumonia—from Springfield to the deceptively blooming valleys of the Adirondacks. He was undeterred by the rugged boulder-strewn landscape, thickly forested with maple, oak, and spruce. They settled into a four-room farmhouse that looked out over valleys shimmering with goldenrod and four-thousand-foot-high Whiteface Mountain. Like Smith, he believed in the regenerative power of the wilderness. Far from the ruthless marketplace, the Adirondacks, like the hands of omnipotent God, would lift up the suffering black poor, and himself.

His goal was to transform the rag-tag settlement into a self-sufficient community. He hired black workers, sowed crops, helped rationalize confused boundaries, and prepared to take the community's affairs in hand. Visitors occasionally stumbled into Brown's mountain fastness. One of them, the celebrated author of
Two Years Before the Mast,
Richard Henry Dana, was fascinated by this “tall, sinewy, hard-favored, clear-headed, honest-minded man,” who had the best cattle and best “farming utensils” for many miles around, as well as a teeming mob of children. Most of all, however, Dana was astonished to find the Browns, including even their daughters, dining equably with their black neighbors, addressing them as “
Mr.
Jefferson” and “
Mrs.
Wait,” and so on.

But Smith's dream, and Brown's, would never come to fruition. The problems that Loguen had identified early on only got worse. No more than one hundred people ever managed to make the move to Smith's Adirondack lands, and only thirty-three of them would still be there in 1850. Within a few years, hundreds, if not thousands, of the parcels of land given away by Smith were being sold for taxes. If this left Brown feel
ing defeated once again, he did not record it. He had other, greater things in mind. Fermenting even now, as he sat in his cabin beneath the high peaks of the Adirondacks, was an apocalyptic plan to liberate slaves in numbers never before attempted. A “Subterranean Pass Way,” as he visualized it, would reach deep into the South, through Virginia and Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, even into Georgia. Along the way there would be posts manned by abolitionists and free blacks, all of them armed and ready to fight. It would drain the South of slaves utterly. It would be the apotheosis of the Underground Railroad.

1

One of the saddest incidents in the history of American slavery took place in Cincinnati, on the morning of January 28, 1856. The drama's overture began the previous night, when several dark figures, bundled against the sub-freezing temperature, slipped from the slave quarters of Archibald Gaines's plantation in northern Kentucky, and into a waiting sleigh. The driver, Robert Garner, had stolen it from the plantation where he lived, a few miles away. He sped north through the snowswept hills, flogging the horses until blood flecked their nostrils. Eight lives hung in the balance: Garner, his parents, two young boys and two infant daughters, and their mother, Garner's common-law wife, Margaret, the story's ultimate protagonist, a slight woman with a high forehead, “bright and intelligent” eyes, and scarred cheeks where, she would only say, “White man struck me.” Around 3
A.M.
, they reached the Ohio River at Covington, and
slipped and stumbled down the steep bank, past the ghostly shapes of riverboats locked in the ice. Unseen, they crossed safely to Cincinnati, on the northern shore, putting behind them what should have been the most dangerous part of their break for freedom.

Their destination was the home of Margaret's cousin, Elijah Kite, who lived two miles from the river. The waterfront was as silent now as the snow, as they struggled to make their way through the unfamiliar maze of streets, stopping several times to ask directions. They reached Kite's house just before dawn. After building a fire to thaw his frozen guests, Kite hurried off toward the home of Levi Coffin, a mile and a half away, to set the machinery of the Underground Railroad in motion. Although the fugitives did not know it, Margaret's owner, Archibald Gaines, and a posse were in hot pursuit. By the time Kite reached Coffin's house at Sixth and Elm, they were already in Cincinnati.

Coffin had moved to Cincinnati in 1847, to open a “free labor emporium,” which sold only goods that had not been produced by slave labor. He brought nearly three decades of experience to the city's underground, and had helped to make it one of the most efficient in the country. His collaborators included stevedores and cartmen, black entrepreneurs like the elite seamstress Kitty Doram, churchmen, businessmen, and a reserve of white abolitionist lawyers who donated their time to the defense of fugitives, among them future President Rutherford B. Hayes. By the time the Civil War brought an end to his work, Coffin would estimate that he had handled some three thousand fugitives since his early underground days in North Carolina. He never knew how many fugitives might appear at his door on any given day. If there were only a few, he hid them in his own attic. Bigger parties were scattered in different parts of the city, until they could be sent north. But Kite found Coffin at a loss. Operatives whom he would normally mobilize to help a party as large as the Garners' were already engaged with another group of fugitives who had crossed the river in the night and, as luck would have it, had reached Coffin earlier. He directed Kite to hurry the Garners for the time being to a safer location on the city's outskirts, promising that by nightfall he would have them aboard a northbound “train” of the Underground Railroad.

It was 8
A.M.
when Kite returned home. He may have been followed, or it may have been sheer coincidence, but minutes after his arrival a look
out cried, “They are coming!” The fugitives rushed to bar the doors and windows. A deputy demanded their surrender in the name of the United States government. Robert and Elijah Kite drew guns. Margaret screamed to her mother-in-law, “Before my children shall be taken back to Kentucky, I shall kill every one of them!” Hundreds of blacks had gathered outside, and with decisive leadership they might have rescued the Garners before anything worse happened. But the deputies seized the initiative. Two of them tried to force their way in. Margaret seized a carving knife, and before anyone realized what she was doing she cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter, Mary—newspapers would hint that she was Archibald Gaines's child—nearly decapitating her. Using planks as clubs and battering rams, the deputies broke through the door and windows. Robert shot one of them in the face, but before he could fire again, Gaines yanked the gun from his hand. In the pandemonium, Margaret tried to cut the throats of the two boys, but they scrambled, bleeding but not badly hurt, underneath the bed. She was in the act of swinging a shovel at the head of her ten-month-old infant, Cilla, when the deputies tore it away from her.

The mood of the Garner trial captured a certain shift in the historical wind, pointing like a moral pennant toward the vaster brutality that was soon to come. Guerrilla armies were already on the march in Kansas, as newspapers across the country reported every detail of the case with a prurient fascination that would later be perfected by twentieth-century tabloids. The trial is recounted in poignant detail by Steven Weisenburger in
Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South
. Militant abolitionists hardly saw the slaughter of little Mary Garner as a crime at all, but rather as a form of mercy killing, and they embraced Margaret not as a murderess but as a martyr. “If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right to do so?” the women's rights advocate Lucy Stone asked in a speech in the courtroom. John Jolliffe, the abolitionist attorney who represented Garner, declared that Garner's dead child was not a victim of her mother's hand at all, but of the Fugitive Slave Law, a law so barbarous “that its execution required human hearts to be wrung and human blood to be spilt.” In a provocative and clever move, Jolliffe had state arrest warrants issued against the Garners, charging
Margaret with murder and the others with complicity, to prevent them from being carried back into Kentucky. His aim was not to hang her, but to put the law itself on trial in a free Ohio court. For a time, it seemed that blood might really be spilled on the streets of Cincinnati, as the antislavery city sheriff's office and the proslavery federal commissioner's office fielded rival armed forces. President Franklin Pierce, a proslavery New Hampshire Democrat, even took a role, instructing Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, to mobilize federal troops to ensure that order was maintained, and the Fugitive Slave Law enforced.

Through everything, Margaret Garner sat impassively, perhaps in shock, dressed in dark calico, with a yellow handkerchief wound around her head as a turban. As a slave, of course, she was never called upon to testify, either to defend herself or to explain her actions. To no one's real surprise, the judge ruled in favor of the slaves' owners, and on March 7, five weeks after they began their flight, the Garners were returned in chains to Kentucky. Southerners treated the case as a terrific victory. One Kentuckian was heard to remark, “We've got that damned abolition state under foot now, and by God we'll keep it there.” In Covington, an Ohio reporter observing the Garners' return was set upon by a mob, who beat him to the ground and threatened to set him afloat on the Ohio River on a cake of ice.

But Margaret Garner's terrible odyssey was not yet over. On March 7, the Garners were loaded onto the steamboat
Henry Lewis
, bound for a cotton plantation the Gaines family owned in Arkansas. At four o'clock the next morning, just above Owensboro, Kentucky, the
Henry Lewis
was struck by a northbound steamboat and split in two, knocking passengers out of their beds, and sending them screaming into the icy river. In the chaos, Margaret Garner was seen standing with Cilla in her arms near the gunwale. What happened next was never clear. She may have thrown the baby into the river and jumped in after it, in hope of swimming to the Indiana shore. Or perhaps she intended for them both to die. A black cook jumped into the water and pulled Margaret to safety. But Cilla's body was never found. According to one newspaper report, Margaret displayed “frantic joy” when she was told that her child was drowned.

The surviving Garners were loaded onto another boat the next day, and delivered to their destination in Arkansas. Margaret would live for
two more years, finally dying at the age of about twenty-five, from typhoid fever. Her last words to her husband were, “Never marry again in slavery.”

 

T
he gruesome tragedy of the Garners reminded underground workers, if they needed reminding, that a failed rescue was often a matter of life and death. It was also further proof to a much broader spectrum of Northerners that complacent lip service to the principles of abolition would not be enough to end slavery's horrors. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, in 1850, had awakened whites to the price in personal liberty that they were expected to pay in order to protect slavery in the South.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
had enabled them to grasp the agony of slavery in an emotional way, undoubtedly a factor in the outpouring of sympathy that whites expressed for Margaret Garner's terrible act. Now personal liberty laws that in some states had fallen into disuse were reinstated or strengthened, forbidding the use of state jails to hold fugitives, and barring state judges and officials from helping Southern masters reclaim their lost “property.” In Massachusetts, any official who granted a certificate permitting the removal of a fugitive from the state was instantly and permanently disbarred from holding state office. In other states, officials who violated similar statutes were punished with anywhere from five hundred dollars and six months in jail in Pennsylvania, to two thousand dollars' fine and ten years in prison in Vermont. In much of the North, the hated Fugitive Slave Law became a virtual dead letter. Even where antislavery laws were weaker, local authorities increasingly made the recovery of fugitives as expensive and time-consuming as possible. Benoni S. Fuller, for example, the sheriff of Warrick County, Indiana, bluntly replied to proslavery citizens who complained to him that fugitives were coming through the county by the hundreds, “Let 'em!” What made Fuller's statement particularly striking was that he was no evangelical abolitionist, but a Democrat. Old orthodoxies were boiling away.

In January 1854 another act of Congress pushed still more Northerners beyond their last limits of tolerance. Under pressure from the South and its Northern Democratic allies, Congress had opened the western territories to slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act left the legality of slavery up to voters in each territory, under the slogan of “popular sovereignty.” Northerners who had been willing to leave slavery alone in the
South saw its expansion into the West as an attack on their own interests. Few believed that free labor could compete there with slave labor, any more than it could in the South. Even many deeply racist Yankees were converted into an army of voters committed to the principle of keeping the soil of Kansas and Nebraska free for white immigrants. “[T]his Nebraska business is the great smasher in Syracuse, as elsewhere,” Jermain Loguen, who had helped lead the rescue of Jerry Henry, in 1851, gleefully wrote to Frederick Douglass. “It is smashing up platforms and scattering partizans at a fine rate…The people are becoming ashamed to have any connection with the ungodly course that many of their Congressmen follow…The time is coming when blood is to flow in this cause; and let it come I say.”

Nebraska, the more northerly of the two territories, was in no danger of becoming a slave state. In Kansas, however, the situation was fluid and combustible. There pent-up political passions ignited the pistol-point politics of the frontier, and the inherent violence of slave-owning culture, to produce open warfare between Free Soil and proslavery forces. Even before the territory was formally opened to settlement, proslavery men poured across the state line from Missouri, egged on by demagogues and the Missouri Democratic Party, which declared itself “in favor of making Kansas a ‘Slave State' if it should require half the population of Missouri, musket in hand, to emigrate there, and even sacrifice their lives [for] so desirable an end.”

Free State settlers begged for support, and for guns to defend themselves. Speaking to an assembly in Albany, Gerrit Smith promised the settlers immediate help: “Will we do for them what we can? We will!” Smith's friend, Senator William H. Seward, declared, “We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” Emigrant aid committees sprang up from Maine to Illinois.

Among the thousands who left behind farms, workshops, and schools to respond to the Free Staters' call were five abolitionist brothers living in Ohio. Once in Kansas, the Browns found it a country of expansive beauty in which the rough-hewn cabins of scattered settlers seemed adrift like lonely dinghies upon the tidal sweep of grassy, wind-rippled prairie, broken occasionally by meandering streams shaded by gnarled cottonwoods, oak trees, and sycamores. They staked claims near the hamlet of
Osawatomie, thirty-five miles south of the Free State bastion of Lawrence. Along with settlers like the Browns came the Underground Railroad. By the end of the decade, as many as three hundred Missouri slaves would be carried to freedom through Kansas.

Once they were settled, the Brown brothers wrote to their father back East, describing the dire plight of the Free Staters, and urging him to join them: “[W]hile the interest of despotism has secured to its cause hundreds of thousands of the meanest and most desperate of men, armed to the teeth with Revolvers, Bowie Knives, Rifles & Cannon—while they are not only thoroughly organized, but under pay from Slaveholders—the friends of freedom are
not one fourth
of them
half armed
, and as to
military organization
among them
it nowhere exists in this territory
.”
*
Their father, John Brown, had promised his patron Gerrit Smith, as well as his black neighbors, that he would remain to help build their community at North Elba, in the Adirondacks, whose wild beauty spoke so deeply to something in his own unsettled heart. But his wool business had fallen to pieces, and he was plagued by lawsuits from angry creditors. He had already been compelled for financial reasons to lease a farm on more fertile land in Ohio, far from North Elba. Early in 1855, responding to his sons' call, Brown made the fateful decision to join them. He arrived at Osawatomie in early October, driving a wagon loaded with rifles and swords, determined “to help defeat Satan and his legions.” Kansas would transform him from a failed businessman into a prophet whose private apocalypse would become a battle plan for guerrilla warfare.