Bound for Canaan (58 page)

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While abolitionists armed themselves in Kansas, across the North the Underground Railroad was reaching a level of efficiency and speed that it would maintain until the Civil War changed the landscape of slavery forever. It was aided greatly by the advent of a new national political party,
whose members added a fresh cohort of activists to its work. In 1854 remnants of the old Whig Party, Free Soilers, dissident Democrats, and unaffiliated abolitionists came together in a coalition to challenge the hegemony of the South. Although the Republican Party shunned abolitionist rhetoric, its opposition to the expansion of slavery into the western territories was unequivocal. The rising Illinois railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln, for one, rejected the South's claim that slavery was based on moral principle, but he also made it clear that he supported neither freeing the slaves nor making them “politically and socially, our equals.” In certain areas, especially after 1856, when the party fielded its first presidential candidate, the explorer John C. Frémont, it would transform the underground. Recalled Isaac Beck, a longtime underground conductor in Ohio, “The great Fremont campaign and the organization of the Republican Party diffused anti-slavery sentiments so widely in Northern states that [the Underground Railroad] was necessary no longer or rather every Republican became a ‘Railroader.'”

In much of the North, the Underground Railroad was operating with an openness that would have been unimaginable only a few years before. Some sense of the increasing volume of traffic handled by the underground lines may be gleaned from Thomas Garrett, the stationmaster at Wilmington, Delaware, who was one of the few to keep a tally of his passengers over a long span of time. In 1848 Garrett admitted in court to having assisted more than 1,400 slaves to freedom since he began his underground work in 1822, an average of 56 per year. Between 1848 and 1854, he assisted another 450, an average of 75 per year, and by 1860, he claimed to have helped a grand total of 2,750, an average of 225 per year before the Civil War brought an end to his work. Reports from other parts of the country, though fragmentary, also suggest that underground travel was approaching a peak in the middle years of the decade. Between mid-1854 and early 1855, the all-black Committee of Nine, which oversaw underground work in Cleveland, Ohio, forwarded 275 fugitives to Canada, an average of one per day, while the
Syracuse Journal
reported in October 1855 that about 140 fugitives had passed through the city since January, an average of slightly fewer than one every two days. The Detroit Vigilance Committee, possibly the busiest in the United States, reported 1,043 fugitives crossing to Canada from May 1855 to January 1856, an average of 130 per month. By contrast, in Massachusetts, liberty laws had
made the state so safe for fugitives that by the last years of the decade, the Underground Railroad was virtually obsolete: despite its financial resources and abundance of volunteers, the Boston Vigilance Committee saw its share of fugitives dwindle from 69 in 1851, its busiest year, to just 9 in 1858.

Technology was also transforming the work of the underground, as the rapid spread of iron railways dramatically accelerated the speed of underground travel across the Free States. Wherever trains were available, the underground used them. The black lumber merchant William Whipper shipped fugitives from Columbia, Pennsylvania, directly to the Canadian border hidden in special compartments in his fleet of freight cars. Travel by rail from Philadelphia to Canada, a journey that had once taken weeks on foot or in the beds of jolting farm wagons, now took as little as two days. In the West, fugitives coming out of Missouri could be put on a train in western Illinois in the morning and be in Canada by nightfall the same day. (Railroads were used so commonly by fugitives passing through Illinois that in March 1855 a bill was proposed in the legislature, calling for blacks to be barred completely from traveling on trains within the state, without first showing a certificate of freedom; significantly, it failed to pass.)

Certain railroad companies were led by antislavery men and facilitated the passage of fugitives as a matter of policy. H. F. Paden, a conductor on the Sandusky, Mansfield & Newark Railroad, was frequently directed by the company's local representatives, who doubled as underground agents, to pick up fugitives at stations along the line, en route to the Lake Erie port of Sandusky, Ohio. In one instance, Paden was informed that nine fugitives would board his train for Sandusky at 10
P.M.
They were placed in different cars for most of the journey. Then, about forty miles south of Sandusky, Paden moved them all quietly to the last car, turned out the lights, and locked the doors. At Sandusky, the white passengers got off at the platform, and the train rolled back on a siding. At midnight, Paden unlocked the car and led the fugitives to a safe house owned by an African American, who later packed them into sleighs and drove them thirty miles across the frozen lake to Pelee Island, in Canadian territory.

The fact that fugitives could travel openly with relative safety by train was another indication of the broad shift that was taking place in public
opinion. By the middle years of the decade, the “underground” was no longer a clandestine phenomenon at all in much of the North, but an open part of local life. When the Supreme Court issued its infamous Dred Scott decision, in 1857, removing all existing territorial restrictions on slavery, members of the underground, and for that matter most of the North, expressed dismay, but in practice simply ignored it. The
Pennsylvania Freeman
regularly published appeals for donations to be sent to the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee specifically for Underground Railroad work, asking that they be directed by name to William Still.
Frederick Douglass' Paper
(the successor to the
North Star
) regularly published detailed reports on underground activity in articles that were signed by agents themselves. In one of these, on November 5, 1854, George DeBaptiste, one of the underground's leaders in Detroit, reported, “We have had, within the last ten or fifteen days, fifty-three first class passengers landed at this point, by the Express train from the South. We expect ten more tonight.” In another, on December 11, George Weir Jr. of Buffalo, New York, wrote that “a train of cars belonging to the
Underground Railroad
had just arrived, bringing eight passengers, six men and two women, all direct from ‘Old Kentuck.' Of course the doors of the depot were thrown open, and in they marched, rank and file, led by T. R. Esq., one of the conductors on the road.” In December 1855 Douglass himself reported from Syracuse that “three good bouncing fat Negroes stepped aboard the train on the Underground Railroad, and are now safe in the Queen's dominions. It is proposed by the directors of that road, to lay down a double track, as the business is getting to be very large—more than can be done on a single one.”

The source for this last information could have been no one else but Jermain Loguen, who advertised his underground work and his address in local papers, and identified himself on his business cards as “Underground Railroad Agent.” Loguen handled up to two hundred fugitives annually, and estimated that in the course of the 1850s he helped about fifteen hundred in all, most of them during the last few years of the decade. (Fugitives normally arrived in Syracuse as ordinary passengers by train or via the Erie Canal, although in 1857 he received one woman directly from the South, packed in a box.) In addition to serving as the underground's public face in Syracuse, Loguen lectured on slavery throughout central and western New York, and made several investigative trips to Canada, where
he studied the condition of refugees and established a reception center under the supervision of a fugitive slave.

At home, Loguen and his wife Caroline existed in an almost constant state of sleepless exhaustion, tending to refugees who showed up at their rambling clapboard house on suburban East Genesee Street with frostbitten feet, sick children, and “in such conditions of destitution and uncleanness, as subjected her to the most disagreeable inconvenience.” One night, Frederick Douglass himself by chance encountered a group of nine fugitives at the Syracuse railway station, who asked if he could direct them to Loguen's home. Douglass led them there himself, and described their reception: “We had scarcely struck the door when the manly voice of Loguen reached our ear. He knew the meaning of the rap, and sung out ‘hold on.' A light was struck in a moment, the door opened and the whole company, the writer included, were invited in. Candles were lighted in different parts of the house, fires kindled, and the whole company made perfectly at home. The reception was a whole souled and manly one, worthy of the noble reputation of Brother Loguen, and showed that he remembers his brethren in bonds as bound with them.” So committed were the Loguens to their work that they continued to receive fugitives even as their thirteen-year-old daughter Latitia lay dying of tuberculosis.

The only known photograph of Loguen, a formal portrait taken after the Civil War, shows a broad, self-confident, rather light-skinned face whose fleshiness hints at his once powerful body's middle age decline. He had spent several worried months in Canada after the Jerry Rescue, not returning to Syracuse until 1852, when he felt assured that he would not be prosecuted for his part in the affair. In 1856 the local Vigilance Committee formally designated his home as the main reception center for arriving fugitives, replacing that of his friend Reverend Samuel J. May. Loguen had found his historic vocation: his whole life—as a slave, a fugitive, a minister, an agitator—had prepared him perfectly for the role that he now undertook. He wrote to Douglass, “Had I not been terribly wronged, as you and all our race, I think I should have been a very still, quiet man. Oppression has made me mad; it has waked up all my intellectual and physical energies.”

Loguen was not alone. He was one of a fraternity of remarkably similar black men, including William Still in Philadelphia, Lewis Hayden in Boston, Henry Bibb in Canada, and the Detroit triumvirate of William
Lambert, George DeBaptiste, and Reverend William Monroe, among others, all roughly the same age, most former slaves, and all of them having come to political maturity as activists in the interracial world of the underground. There had always been teamsters, farmhands, and sailors who had worked hand-in-hand with white underground operatives. But these were different. They were self-made men who had achieved success through native ability: Hayden, Lambert, and DeBaptiste as businessmen, Bibb as a journalist, Loguen and Monroe as ministers, Still as a manager. Outside the churches, few black men like these had existed before in American history.

In contrast to many white agents, for whom their own moral elevation was an end in itself, Loguen and other African Americans regarded emergency aid as only the first step in the liberation of escaped slaves. As a fugitive himself, Loguen knew that to become truly autonomous, former slaves needed good work, and education. In Canada Josiah Henson and his imitators had attempted to address these needs with their ambitious attempts to establish comprehensive training schools, and model communities. Loguen, anticipating the principle of affirmative action, vigorously appealed not just for charitable donations, but for jobs for blacks: “Who, then, in and about Syracuse will take into their shops and on their farms, our colored youth, and discipline and educate them to the industry and arts of life, as white children are educated?” he asked in a widely published letter. “We ask not for them professional employment, but we do ask our white brethren who engross the avenues of laborious industry, to open to our gifted and unfortunate young men the paths of life…[L]abor, honest labor, must be connected with the education of our heads and hearts, or we can never come to the natural level of our race.”

Loguen could not have carried out his work so openly without the support of influential segments of the white community. Syracuse was now so thoroughly “abolitionized” that the city council voted that if the Central Rail Road, which ran through the middle of town, ever carried a recaptured fugitive back toward slavery, its rails should be physically taken up from the streets. Public fund-raisers for the underground were even held in the council's chambers. For one of them a local band composed a song titled “The Underground Railroad Quickstep,” and dedicated it to Loguen. So famous did Loguen become that Syracuse was sometimes referred to as “the Canada of the United States,” and in 1860 the
Weekly
Anglo-African
, a journal of the AME Zion Church, went so far as to proclaim him the “Underground Railroad King.”

Reports of Loguen's activities eventually reached the ears of his nominal owner in Tennessee, the widow of Manasseth Logue, from whom he had escaped in 1834, taking his master's fleetest horse with him on his flight to Canada. He received an astonishing letter from Sarah Logue, addressed to him by his slave name, “Jarm,” a deliberate indignity, certainly, and a reminder that in the state of Tennessee he was still legally a slave. “I write you these lines to let you know the situation we are in—partly as a consequence of your running away and stealing Old Rock, our fine mare,” she wrote. “Though we got the mare back, she was never worth much after you took her; and now as I stand in need of some funds, I have determined to sell you; and I have had an offer for you, but I did not see fit to take it. If you will send me one thousand dollars and pay for the old mare, I will give up all claim I have to you. In consequence of your running away, we had to sell Abe and Ann [Loguen's brother and sister] and twelve acres of land; and I want you to send me the money that I may be able to redeem the land that was the cause of our selling, and on receipt of the above sum of money, I will send you your bill of sale. If you do not comply with my request, I will sell you to someone else, and you may rest assured that the time is not far distant when things will be changed with you.”