Bound for Canaan (61 page)

He met death stoically on the morning of December 2. At eleven o'clock, he was led out of the jail and seated on a small wagon carrying a
white pine coffin. He handed a note to one of his guards: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this
guilty land: will
never be purged away; but with blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.” Escorted by six companies of infantry and a company of cavalry, he was driven to a scaffold that had been built for him in an open field. At about eleven-fifteen, a cloth sack was placed over his head, and the rope adjusted around his neck. Then, while he stood atop the trap door in a pair of bright red slippers, the soldiers marched and countermarched until their officers finally got them into position. Brown told his guard, “Don't keep me waiting longer than necessary.” They were his last words. At eleven-thirty, the trap was pulled away, and with “a few slight struggles,” he yielded up his life.

Shields Green and John Copeland were hanged two weeks later. Green, born and formerly enslaved in the South, falsely told the authorities that he had been born in Rochester, New York. In a sense, perhaps, he had been. He preferred to die remembered as a free man. The Oberlin graduate went silently to his death. Green engaged in loud and earnest prayer until the moment the trap opened beneath his feet and, as a reporter put it, he was “launched into eternity.”

In death, John Brown did more to quicken the mind of America on the subject of slavery than any man of his time. “We shall be a thousand times more Anti-Slavery than we ever dared to think of being before,” shouted the
Newburyport ( Massachusetts) Herald
. In a deeply pious age, his death was viscerally understood as a martyrdom, a living part of the eternal Christian drama. “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified,” Henry David Thoreau opined, in a speech in Concord, on the day of Brown's execution. “This morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”

 

P
aranoid rumors of more insurrections raced through the South. Gun sellers made fortunes: in the four weeks after the raid, Baltimore dealers were reported to have sold ten thousand pistols to terrified Virginians. Northern schoolteachers, peddlers, and preachers were subjected to all manner of indignities. Real and apocryphal stories of perse
cution fed Northern rage. A planter was said to have forced his slaves to execute a Yankee evangelist who was found preaching to them. A peddler was said to have been strung up by the neck six times (but let down before he expired) on suspicion of being an abolitionist. In South Carolina, an Irish stone cutter was allegedly flogged, tarred, and feathered for daring to say that slave labor was degrading to white labor.

Brown, even before his death, was accused by many Americans of sheer madness for undertaking such a hopeless endeavor as the attack on Harpers Ferry. But if any American was seriously detached from reality in these waning years of peace, it was President Buchanan, ever an apologist for slavery. In his annual message to Congress, delivered barely two weeks after Brown's execution, Buchanan sounded a note of delusory optimism. Barely mentioning “the recent sad and bloody occurrences at Harpers Ferry,” he implored Americans of North and South to “cultivate the ancient feelings of mutual forbearance and good will toward each other,” and to allow agitation over slavery to “give place to other and less threatening controversies.” He went on in his inimitable way, smugly reiterating his belief in the inalienable right of any American citizen to own slaves, and to carry them into any territory of the United States, rights which he praised as “so manifestly just in themselves and so well calculated to promote peace and harmony among the States.”

Buchanan's words were, in their spineless way, a fitting epitaph for the age of slavery, for the long acquiescence of Northern political interests to the South. They were the last gasp of the “doughfaces,” of the temporizers, hypocrites, and opportunists who had for generations helped to protect and preserve American slavery. What followed was Abraham Lincoln, secession, and war.

4

The work of the underground did not end with John Brown's capture and execution. Later in December, Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia told the state legislature that the underground still posed a greater threat to slavery than John Brown's raid. “It is no solace to me,” he said, “that our border slaves are so liberated by this exterior system, by this still, silent
stealing system that they have no need to take up arms for their liberation.” Slaves continued to flee their masters, and masters continued to hunt them down. Bold rescues still occurred: in April 1860, in Troy, New York, a crowd of thousands that included Harriet Tubman snatched the fugitive Charles Nalle from federal marshals. Federal commissioners would continue to remand recaptured fugitives into the hands of their owners as late as April 1861, just days before the outbreak of the Civil War. Even on the cusp of war, the “trains” of the Underground Railroad continued to run, and new recruits continued to join the clandestine ranks. One of the last was Arnold Gragston, a nineteen-year-old slave living in Mason County, Kentucky. Sometime in 1859, Gragston was “courtin'” on a neighboring plantation when the woman he was visiting told him that she knew a girl who wanted to cross the Ohio River to Ohio, and asked if he would take her. “I was scared and backed out in a hurry,” Gragston told an interviewer, later in life. “But then I saw the girl, and she was such a pretty little thing, brown-skinned and kinda rosy, and lookin' as scared as I was feelin', so it wasn't long before I was listenin' to the old woman tell me when to take her and where to leave her on the other side.” Gragston finally agreed to row the girl across to Ripley, Ohio, the following night. All the next day, however, his mind tossed back and forth between visions of his master “laying a rawhide across my back, or shootin' me,” and of the desperate girl beseeching him with huge eyes.

“I don't know how I ever rowed the boat across the river—the current was strong and I was trembling,” Gragston recalled. “I couldn't see a thing there in the dark, but I felt that girl's eyes.” Where would he put her out of the boat? he worried. Would there be anyone there to meet them? Would it be a friend or enemy? Gragston had never been to Ohio, and knew nothing about the north bank of the river. “Well, pretty soon I saw a tall light and I remembered what the old lady had told me about looking for that light and rowing to it. I did, and when I got up to it, two men reached down and grabbed her.” Gragston's entire body shook with terror. “Then one of the men took my arm and I just felt down inside of me that the Lord had got ready for me. ‘You hungry boy?' is what he asked me, and if he hadn't been holdin' me I think I would have fell backward into the river.”

Gragston overcame his fear and soon became a regular conductor, crossing the river three or four times a month, always on moonless nights,
usually carrying two or three passengers in each load. But apart from his first passenger, the girl with the huge eyes, he never again saw the face of anyone he helped. He was given a password, “Menare,” which he supposed was taken from the Bible, and with it he would identify his passengers, who would invariably meet him either in a darkened field or in an unlit house. He usually delivered them to a man whom he knew as “Mister Rankins,” in Ripley. Although the Reverend John Rankin was still alive, and his home on the hill above Ripley was still illuminated at night with a light that Gragston “remembered” as a “lighthouse in his yard, about thirty feet high,” the slave's contact was more likely one of the old minister's younger sons, who served as conductors in the years before the Civil War. Gragston came to relish the excitement and danger. And, like so many underground agents before him, he discovered that his courage had given him the power to bestow the gift of freedom. “Even though I could have been free any night myself,” he said, “I figgered I wasn't getting along so bad so I would stay on Mr. Tabb's place and help the others get free.”

Gragston was still a relative beginner in the underground when Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican president of the United States, on November 6, 1860. On December 20, South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed six weeks later by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. In his inaugural address, Lincoln made clear his determination to preserve the Union, and stated that he neither intended to abolish slavery nor repeal the Fugitive Slave Law. But the time for reconciliation had run out. On April 12, 1861, South Carolina militiamen fired on Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. Immediately afterward, four more states—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee—joined the Confederacy. About three hundred sixty thousand Union soldiers and two hundred sixty thousand Confederates would die before the war was over.

No matter what Lincoln said, slaves who had access to any news at all realized that the chaos of war offered their best chance ever to escape. The borderlands began hemorrhaging slaves. On April 9, 1861, three days before the attack on Fort Sumter, the
Detroit Daily Advertiser
reported that 300 fugitives had passed through the city en route to Canada within the previous few days,
190
of them on April 8 alone. Houses and churches in Windsor were filled to overflowing, and it was only with difficulty that
sleeping space of any kind could be found for them. Any action that weakened the South became a patriotic cause. Recalled one Cleveland underground man, “the excitement was such that the most radical Democrats would contribute to assist fugitives.”

Congress had almost unanimously declared in July 1861 that the purpose of the war was to defend the Constitution, not “overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions” of the states. However, as early as May, General Benjamin Butler, the federal commander at Fortress Monroe, at the mouth of the James River, in Virginia, was forced to confront the problem of fugitives when a Confederate colonel insisted that he return slaves who had fled into Union lines. Butler, a New York lawyer, replied that the Fugitive Slave Law did not apply in “a foreign country, which Virginia claimed to be,” and refused to yield them up. The War Department's equivocation on the issue became the most powerful tool of emancipation the nation had yet produced: Butler was ordered not to deliberately interfere with the “servants” of peaceful citizens, but permitted to allow “contraband” slaves into his lines, and to put them to work.

Without quite meaning to do so, the federal government had undertaken the work of the Underground Railroad on a scale that would help destroy the plantation economy of the Confederacy. John Brown's dream of a Subterranean Pass Way became an open highway wherever federal troops marched. Slaves poured by the thousands and tens of thousands into refugee camps behind Union lines. “The war ended the usefulness of the railroad,” the Detroit underground leader William Lambert told an interviewer in 1886, adding that the last fugitive he saw passed through that city in April 1862. “The line of freedom crossed the lakes and moved south, keeping step by step with the battle line of the union.” On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in all areas still in rebellion and not yet in Union hands. (However, it did not apply in slave states, such as Maryland and Kentucky, that had not seceded.) The proclamation was an open invitation to slaves to flee: what had once been treason was now government policy. That May, the Union began arming black troops.

As the lines of the Underground Railroad fell into disuse, its agents, conductors, and stationmasters offered themselves to the war effort. Five of John Rankin's sons and a grandson, all of them underground veterans,
would serve in the Union forces. Frederick Douglass, Jermain Loguen, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary (she had married a black Canadian businessman) worked vigorously throughout the war to recruit black volunteers for the Union cause. Harriet Tubman, serving as a spy in Union-occupied South Carolina, would become the first woman in American history to lead a detachment of troops in battle. Josiah Henson's son Tom, who had taught him to read his first words, joined the Union navy, and was never heard from again. Joseph Hayden, who as a child had ridden out of slavery in Kentucky beneath the seat of the carriage driven by Calvin Fairbank, also saw service in the navy, on the Gulf Coast, and would die there in 1865. William Still resigned his job with the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office, and formed a company to supply coal to the Union army. Gerrit Smith, who recovered rapidly from his breakdown once the threat of prosecution was past, donated between twenty and twenty-five thousand dollars (between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand dollars in present-day terms) to the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission, to provide soldiers with medical care and Bibles on the front lines. Levi Coffin and many other Quakers worked heroically to improve living conditions in the often appallingly unsanitary refugee camps where so many “contrabands” lived out the war.

By 1863 the western battlefront had moved deep into Tennessee and Mississippi. But Kentucky remained an anomaly. Since it had never seceded from the Union, the federal government was scrupulous in respecting its laws, including those upholding slavery. Indeed, poor Calvin Fairbank, who had been arrested for “abducting” the slave Tamar, in 1851, was still in the state penitentiary thirteen years later, having endured during that time more than one thousand beatings, and a total of 35,105 stripes from a leather strap (he maintained a record). He was not released until 1864, by special order of the governor.

Bypassed by the war, Arnold Gragston continued his clandestine trips across the Ohio River. Although his nocturnal activities took an obvious toll on his daytime work, his master never asked him what he had been doing. Gragston suspected, in fact, that he might actually be some kind of “secret abolitionist” himself. “Sometimes,” he speculated, “I think he did know and wanted me to get the slaves away that way so he wouldn't have to cause hard feelin's by freein' 'em.” Although Gragston never kept count, he guessed that he carried hundreds of fugitives across the river
during the four years that he served the underground. However, one night in 1863, after rowing a cargo of fugitives to Ohio, he was spotted as he stepped back onto the Kentucky shore and, fearing that he was finally about to be caught, took to a fugitive's life in the fields and woods.