Bound for Canaan (11 page)

In Coffin's account, it is possible to glimpse the Underground Rail
road literally come into being. What happened in the mountains had also transformed Coffin from a boy into a man. It was his first great adventure, his first journey on his own in behalf of a fugitive, and it reveals much about his character and the steely self-control that he would bring to clandestine work in later years. He had discovered in himself an unexpected capacity for physical endurance—he had traveled 120 miles through rough country, virtually without sleep or rest—and spur-of-the-moment ingenuity, as well as a priceless knack for gaining the trust of strangers. He also learned that he could manipulate men much older and harder than himself, a skill that he would masterfully put to use during a lifetime of involvement with fugitive slaves who would seek his help in Indiana and Ohio. Coffin's narrow face, high forehead, and tightly compressed, rather humorless lips lent him a solemn air, an impression that in later life must have been accentuated by the plain black broadcloth clothing that he always wore. But behind this sober exterior, there lay coiled a bold and venturesome mind. Although as a pious Quaker Coffin would never have admitted it, there was not only something of the actor in him, but also something of the con man. Perhaps too he recalled the biblical verse in Matthew 10:16: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

For Osborne's slave Sam, the outcome was not so fortunate. All this time, he had been living in the thickets behind the Coffin farm, surviving on food supplied by the Coffins. Upon Levi's return, he and Vestal Coffin arranged to send Sam west with another Quaker emigrant named David Grose—“a kind-hearted, benevolent man, of anti-slavery sentiments”—who was also heading for Indiana. The plan was for Sam to travel at night, on foot, and make his way to the Groses' campsite before daylight, to get breakfast and provisions to last him through the day. Where the road forked, Grose was to leave a green bush or some other sign in the road that he had taken to guide Sam. At river fords, he would wait for Sam to come up, then conceal him in the wagon for the crossing.

The Coffins' plan again revealed close collaboration with local blacks, both slave and free. According to Levi Coffin, “Some shrewd young men [probably Levi and Vestal Coffin themselves], not overly conscious about violating the slave laws of the State, believing that every man was entitled to liberty who had not forfeited that God-given right by crime, managed to get hold of free papers belonging to a free colored man in the neigh
borhood, and copied them, counterfeiting the names of the signers as well as they could, not stopping to consider the severe penalty attached to such violations of the law. It was so managed that the papers were given to Sam by a slave, and he was instructed not to use them unless he should get into a tight place.” The papers were stowed safely in his bundle of clothes, in the Groses' wagon.

One night, frightened by wolves, Sam panicked and lost his way. He begged for help at the cabin of a poor white family, who invited him to come inside and rest. The consequences of this seemingly kind reception epitomized the terrible randomness that fugitives faced in a strange country, when hunger, fear, or sheer loneliness compelled them to risk throwing themselves on the mercy of white strangers. Sam might have found a friendly face. Instead, his hosts sent a boy running for the neighbors, who seized him and tied him up, surmising that he was a runaway for whom there might be a large reward. Sam's forged papers were, of course, beyond his reach with the Groses. He never saw them or the Groses again. As was customary, notices describing Sam were placed in various newspapers. Osborne saw one of them and soon afterward arrived in Wytheville, Virginia, where Sam was being held in the local jail, to collect his property. He set out for home with Sam in chains. But Sam never arrived. Osborne claimed that he had sold Sam along the way. Levi Coffin reported that many believed that he had whipped Sam to death, and had left his body in the mountains.

Despite the torture that he may well have suffered at Osborne's hands, Sam never implicated any of the men who had helped him in his flight. However, Osborne later learned that Sam had once been seen driving the carriage of Jesse Stanley, a Coffin cousin, and sought to have Stanley arrested for “Negro stealing,” a crime that at least in principle was punishable by death. The danger to Stanley was serious enough that he hurriedly left the state for Philadelphia. Osborne also ascertained that Sam had been seen on the property of Abel Stanley, Jesse's uncle. Abel Stanley had already sold his farm, in preparation for emigrating to Indiana. However, hearing that Osborne was seeking to have him arrested, he too fled to Pennsylvania, leaving his family to complete the arrangements for their departure.

3

As the story of Jack Barnes shows, in 1821 there were no designated “stationmasters” posted along the emigrant trail that connected North Carolina with the Northwest. Although Addison Coffin suggests that by 1830 (when he was still a boy) stations had been established, it is quite possible that the routes across the mountains always depended mainly on the discretion of emigrants who agreed to carry fugitives along with them. Slaves belonging to the Yearly Meeting had been traveling to the Northwest that way for years, more than four hundred in 1823, and nearly twice that number in 1824, and by 1826 regular “convoys” were being sent west under the auspices of the “African Committee” of the Quakers already established there. In one typical instance, an Indiana man was hired, for thirty dollars plus expenses, to conduct a company of twenty blacks from Guilford County across the Ohio, furnishing his own horse to draw the wagon.

But even with white assistance, fugitives were in danger every mile of the way to the Ohio River. “A gang of ruffians, moved by the prospect of the large reward generally offered in such cases, frequently stopped emigrant wagons and searched them for runaway Negroes,” Levi Coffin wrote, a clear indication that slave owners knew that the emigrant trails were being used to move fugitives. Every month, fresh arrivals in Indiana halted their weary teams at one or another of the frontier settlements that were being cut from the wilderness beyond Cincinnati. For many of them, the trek out of North Carolina had a Manichaean quality; it was not merely a geographical journey, but a spiritual one from the darkness of moral depravity into the light of redemption. One Quaker, Borden Stanton, recalled how he had first heard from traveling Friends about the Ohio country: “It seemed as if they were messengers sent to call us out, as it were from Egyptian darkness (for indeed it seemed as if the land groaned under oppression) into the marvelous light of the glory of God.” Entire meetings picked up and moved en masse, leaving whole regions of the Carolinas empty of Quakers.

There were of course other factors that propelled Quaker emigrants to the free states. Quaker farmers found it increasingly hard to compete with slave owners. As pacifists, Quakers were harassed and fined for refus
ing to muster with local militias. They were also mocked by other whites for performing manual labor—“nigger work”—that ought to have been done by slaves. “Gradually the idea prevailed everywhere that labor was not respectable, and he, or she who labored with their hands had to take second rank,” wrote Addison Coffin. In 1825 Levi Coffin's parents emigrated west to a new Quaker colony that was forming near Richmond, Indiana. He followed them himself the next year, the last in his family to go. In their search for better land and wider opportunity they were like hundreds of thousands of other Americans who were simultaneously migrating westward along rough tracks through the forests, on the steamboats that were now proliferating on the western rivers, and on the horse-drawn boats that plied the new Erie Canal. But for nearly every Quaker, not only family, friends, and played-out fields would be left behind, but the taint of living evil. “If the question is asked,” Addison Coffin declared, “why did the Friends emigrate from North Carolina? It can be answered by one dark, fearful word SLAVERY, than which a darker is not known.”

4

In this second decade of the nineteenth century, there was a gathering sense in the nation that something important was changing. Indelible lines were being drawn across the map of the states, and in the hearts of their citizens, demarcating slave states and free, pushing apart those who only a few years before had found common cause in societies of manumission and colonization, dreams that were by no means dead, but that from now on would increasingly give way to political warfare. For a time, in 1820, it had even looked as if the country might split apart over the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state, as the halls of Congress rang with the passionate defense of slavery, and dire warnings of civil war. North Carolina's Senator Nathaniel Macon spoke with contempt of the Declaration of Independence's assertion that all men were created equal. “Follow that sentiment and does it not lead to universal emancipation?” he demanded of his colleagues. To impose restrictions on slavery, Macon and other Southerners argued, could only lead to a national catastrophe.
His voice thundering through the circular domed chamber of the House of Representatives, the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay proclaimed that the spread of slavery into the western territories would actually benefit the slaves themselves, while reducing whites' fear of free blacks by thinning out their numbers in the more densely populated East. The Union, he warned, must not be put at risk by political assaults on an institution that he alleged was destined eventually to fade away from natural causes.

Earlier in the century it had by no means been a foregone conclusion that Missouri would become a slave state. Its soil was generally inhospitable to large-scale cotton cultivation. But most of its settlers came from the South, and they brought their slaves with them, fanning out from the frontier ports that sprang up alongside the muddy surge of the Missouri River. The three thousand slaves in Missouri in 1810 had grown to ten thousand a decade later, in a total population of sixty-six thousand. The heart of the matter, however, was a constitutional question with far-reaching implications: Did Congress have the power to restrict slavery when it admitted a new state to the Union? Missouri was the first state that would be formed out of the lands acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. If slavery was excluded from Missouri, then it was likely that future trans-Mississippi states would come into the Union on the same terms, a prospect that mortified Southerners, who could see as well as everyone else that the steady piling up of new free states must inexorably undermine the disproportionate power that the South wielded over the federal government. Because the Constitution provided that three-fifths of a state's slave population be counted as citizens in apportioning seats to the House of Representatives, the slave states collectively were able to elect twenty more congressmen than they would have been entitled to on the basis of their white population alone; put another way, every Southerner who owned one hundred slaves enjoyed an additional sixty votes. A far-reaching compromise was finally reached, averting the drift toward secession. Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state. In return, Southerners grudgingly agreed to the exclusion of slavery in the territories north of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north latitude west of Missouri, in effect extending the Mason-Dixon line westward across the continent. At the same time, Maine was admitted to the Union as a free state, thus adding two more free-state senators to balance Missouri's.

The settlement distressed no one more than the aged lion of Ameri
can radicalism, Thomas Jefferson. The former president's once fiery idealism had hardened into a chilly crust of disillusionment. He was paralyzed by the contradictions that had always infected his thinking about slavery. In 1814, when Edward Coles, a neighbor and the former secretary to President James Madison, had approached him, begging him to lend his prestige to a national campaign against slavery, Jefferson first pleaded the limitations of age. He could do nothing, he told Coles. To undertake such “arduous work” at the age of seventy-eight was “like bidding old Priam to buckle the armor of Hector.” He added, “This enterprise is for the young.” He regretted that more could not be done for the cause of the slaves. Someday emancipation would come, he assured Coles. But, morally desirable though it might be, it was not a happy prospect. The “idleness” of free blacks, and their “depredations,” already made them pests to society. Worse yet, “Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.” (This from a man who had fathered several children by his slave Sally Hemings.) In the end, he urged Coles to do nothing extreme, but to treat his slaves kindly, and to lend a calming voice to public debate. Instead, Coles freed his slaves and moved to the free territory of Illinois, as far as he could get from the land of slavery.

Although he didn't admit it to Coles, Jefferson had traded his sunny optimism for a regional chauvinism that foreshadowed the bigoted and self-serving arguments that would lead to the South's secession forty years hence. He never abandoned his professed desire to end slavery in principle, but he was now less concerned with the rights of man than with the rights of the slave owners whom he had once scathingly condemned. He declined to endorse the Missouri Compromise. Reversing his position of 1784, when he argued that slavery ought to be barred from the new lands of the South as well as the North, he now asserted that Congress had no power at all over slavery in the territories. The Union, as Jefferson conceived it, was a confederation based on a compact between “independent nations.” The federal government was a creature of the states' will, existing only by their sufferance, and with strictly limited authority, which did not include the power to legislate on slavery. As slavery became increasingly profitable, Jefferson had come to see that it was impossible to oppose it without undermining the agricultural system that he believed with an
almost mystical passion formed the natural moral and cultural foundation of the American republic. He wrote to a friend from his aerie at Monticello, “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.” Then, speaking directly of slavery itself, he added, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”