Bound for Canaan (18 page)

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Jarm Logue's mouth never completely healed from the damage it suffered when his master pounded a block of wood into it in a fit of drunken rage. The wound left him with a speech impediment that, years afterward, when he would be admired as a preacher of uncommon power, would serve as a badge of honor, a survivor's memento of the unequal war of master against slave. Jarm, a young man of exceptional intelligence and grit, was, like Josiah Henson, a natural leader. However, in contrast to Henson, whose ethics were rooted in a belief in spiritual elevation through physical submission, Logue was deeply defiant: he was, in short, a revolutionary
in the making. Born around 1813 and raised on a small plantation on Mansker's Creek, near Nashville, Tennessee, he was the son of a slave mother, named Cherry, and the youngest of the three slave-owning Logue brothers who operated a whiskey distillery. His childhood experiences combined sometimes savage and unpredictable violence with a degree of love that may have been rare for slaves in such an environment. Although he would describe the brothers as “drunken, passionate, brutal, and cruel,” he remembered with affection his father, Dave Logue, who treated him as a “pet,” bestowing on him “many little favors and kindnesses.” What trust Jarm had in his father was shattered, however, when after promising never to sell Cherry or her four children, Dave Logue did just that, initially to his brother Manasseth, who in turn sold two of the children to a slave trader. Cherry was left emotionally shattered, and Jarm now understood that in spite of his blood relationship with the Logues, his own future could never be secure.

At first, Jarm merely fantasized a place where he owned his own farm and could “go and come as he pleased.” His first inkling of a world that lay beyond the immediate vicinity of the plantation where he lived came in his late teens, when he met a young white boy whose family had returned from a failed attempt to immigrate to Illinois. As his 1859 biographer reconstructed the conversation, Logue scoffed, “There ain't any place such as Illinois.”

“I say there is such a place!” the boy retorted. “Don't you think I know?”

“What kind of place is it then?”

“All the negroes are free in Illinois—they don't have any slaves there.”

The boy also provided Logue with his first geography lesson, telling him that a traveler to Illinois had to cross many rivers, the biggest of them called the Ohio, which horses and sleighs could pass over when it froze in winter. “Illinois” came to encompass all of Logue's fuzzy ideas of freedom, and it was for there, in 1834, that he struck out after Manasseth's alcoholic assault on him.

He enlisted as partners in his escape two close friends, John Farney and Jerry Wilks, who lived on neighboring plantations. Critical to their success was the assistance of a white man named Ross. In addition to forged free papers, Ross procured for them a pair of pistols, a crime that could have resulted in Ross's execution if it were found out. The slaves
each paid him ten dollars' cash plus a quantity of bacon, flour, and other staples that had been stolen from the slaves' masters. Ross also gave the friends valuable advice. He advised them, surprisingly, to be bold, and to stop at the best houses while still in the slave states, “to act as freemen act.” The big houses were the most willing and able to entertain travelers in what was still an only half-settled frontier region, he explained, and they were also the last place that a fugitive slave would be expected to be found. “If you go dodging and shying through the country, you will be suspected, seized, imprisoned and advertised—but if you ride boldly through, like freemen, you will get through unmolested.”

On Christmas Eve, at two o'clock in the night, Jarm and his friend John Farney set off on horses taken from their masters' stables, leaving behind their third partner, Wilks, who at the last minute could not overcome his loyalty to his master and chose to stay behind. Clad in overcoats, and wrapped against the midwinter cold, they rode through Nashville “at a traveler's trot…like wise freemen, turning neither to the right nor left, carefully avoiding any matters not their own.” That evening they put Ross's advice to the test by asking for a night's lodging at a “baronial mansion.” All went as Ross had predicted. Their host behaved with discomforting politeness, charging them a shilling apiece for a place to lie down. They spent the next night, tense but unmolested, at an ordinary tavern among rough-cut white men “in all stages of intoxication.” The third night, they again put up at a private mansion, whose owner sneered at them as “black rascals,” but nonetheless provided them with shelter.

Logue and Farney twice ran into patrollers. On both occasions they were forced to fight for their passage, once leaving one of the patrollers unconscious on the road. Shaken, they now hastened to get out of the slave states as fast as possible. They rode hard, following back roads and sleeping among haystacks, finally reaching the Ohio River somewhere in the vicinity of West Point or Brandenburg, Kentucky. The river was frozen solid. Following the tracks of horsemen who had gone before, the two fugitives walked their mounts across the ice into what they learned was “Indiana,” a free state of which they had never heard.

A “colored man” who had been watching them as they crossed told them, to their dismay, that they were barely any safer now than they were in Kentucky. He urged the two men to continue on to Canada, another totally unfamiliar place. He added that in the free states there were people
who “will do what they can” for fugitive slaves, and pointed the way to the village of “Corridon”—actually Corydon, in Harrison County—where they should ask for a certain man, an “abolitionist,” who would tell them what to do next. In Corydon, Logue and Farney found the man to whom they had been directed, “a true hearted colored man ready to advise and assist them to the best of his means.” (This may have been a laborer named Oswell Wright, who was born a slave in Maryland and traveled to Indiana with one of his former owners, and was later sentenced to five years in the Kentucky State Penitentiary for guiding a fugitive across the Ohio River.) He too urged them to continue on to Canada. He gave them the name of a James Overrals in Indianapolis, about two hundred miles away, “as he supposed, in a north-westerly direction—but he could say nothing of the intervening country and the inhabitants.”

Unfortunately, almost as soon as they left Corydon, the fugitives lost their way in a vast forest. They stopped to ask for food at a log cabin whose occupant, a friendly white man, recognized them as fugitive slaves in spite of their denials. He warned them that not only were they in a region inhabited by proslavery squatters from the South, but they had taken the wrong road and were actually heading toward Kentucky. He directed them to the road to Indianapolis, adding that in the next village, probably Salem, they would see a brick tavern whose landlord—“your friend,” he told them—would direct them further. The innkeeper welcomed them warmly and directed them to a settlement of African Americans a day's ride in the direction of Indianapolis, probably the “Hut and Patch” area at New Farmington, where fifteen or twenty black farming families lived under the protection of neighboring Quakers. There, he assured them, people would “be glad to receive them.”

In early February, after three weeks' rest in the black settlement, the fugitives set off again across a sodden, drizzly landscape, most likely along the current route of Interstate 65. They arrived a few days later in Indianapolis, where they found Mr. Overrals, who “though colored, was an educated man,” and respected among both whites and blacks for his “large character” and good sense. Overrals sent them on to a Quaker settlement in Hamilton County, about forty miles from Indianapolis, where the two fugitives were received hospitably. The Quakers advised them to head directly north or northwest, so that they would be among immigrants from the Northern states. Logue and Farney traveled now through
a snowswept desolation. With considerable difficulty, they managed to ford the flooded and ice-choked Wabash and St. Joseph rivers. The region was still inhabited by Indians, who sometimes offered the fugitives food and shelter, and other times refused them entirely. Eventually they arrived once again among white settlers, who “treated them as equals under the law, though not always with respect.” At Logansport, north of Kokomo, Logue traded his horse for “boot money,” offered him by a “benevolent looking Quaker,” who in fact took advantage of his ignorance to cheat him. Heading north again, they lost their way once more in another “howling wilderness,” finally arriving at their destination, Detroit, starving and in a state of near destitution, having ridden, Logue estimated, hundreds of miles out of their way. On the morning of their third day in Detroit, the two men at last crossed the Detroit River to Windsor, Canada, penniless, knowing no one. “Nature and humanity surrounded them like a globe of ice,” Logue's biographer exquisitely wrote, “but they rejoiced and thanked God with warm hearts.”

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In the course of Logue's flight it is possible to see the early stirrings of organized assistance to the fugitive, a system in the process of creation. Logue and Farney receive help from all sorts of people, yet many of them are barely, if at all, aware of one another's existence. Ross, who supplies them with weapons and advice, is an isolated loner. The “colored man” whom Logue meets on the bank of the Ohio River knows that the “abolitionist” in Corydon will lend help to fugitives. But he has no nearby collaborator to send the fugitives to closer than Indianapolis, and he is not entirely clear about where the city lies. Meanwhile, the friendly white homesteader seems completely unaware of the black abolitionist in Corydon. However, the homesteader's confidence in the innkeeper at Salem, and the innkeeper's corresponding certainty that the fugitives will find a refuge at the Hut and Patch settlement, hint at an ongoing link among at least those three locations: an Underground Railroad line in embryo, as it were. Similarly, Overrals, in Indianapolis, has links with an incipient network of trustworthy Quakers. The Quakers advise the travelers to make
their way north through a wilderness inhabited by Indians, suggesting that they had little or no contact with the abolitionists to their east until the formation of broad-based antislavery societies later in the decade.

Other fugitives during this period had similar experiences. Josiah Henson, like Logue, received assistance from a wide variety of people who had little or no connection with one another. It is unclear, for example, if the “benevolent men” who assisted the Henson family in Cincinnati were an organized group devoted to facilitating the escape of fugitives, or if their aid to the Hensons was a rare case. The allusion to his primary contact, the “brother preacher” he had met on his first visit, suggests that his protectors were a church group of some kind. Like the Quakers whom Logue encountered in Indiana, however, the “benevolent men” were working in a vacuum. Their assistance extended only thirty miles outside Cincinnati, and they failed to provide the Hensons with even the most elementary information about the difficulties his family would face traversing the wilderness that lay between the interior of Ohio and Lake Erie.

By 1834, however, the year of Jarm Logue's escape, Cincinnati abolitionists began to lay a foundation for later, more organized, underground operations by breaching the color line in a city which, until now, had been distinguished for its pro-southern sentiments. In that year, students at Lane Seminary, a training school for evangelical ministers financed by the philanthropic Tappan brothers of New York, staged nine days of widely publicized debates over slavery. “Like men whose pole star was fact and truth, whose needle was conscience, whose chart was the Bible,” one energized attendee wrote, the participants wound up converting virtually the entire student body, including several sons of slave owners, to immediate abolition. Many were inspired to set up schools and undertake social work in the city's black neighborhoods on a basis of racial equality, shocking the seminary's more conservative trustees. When the trustees ordered all discussion of slavery to cease immediately, scores of students abandoned Lane, and enrolled at Oberlin College, in northern Ohio, where they formed the nucleus of one of the most ardent Underground Railroad communities west of the Appalachians.

Many fugitives still never encountered any white person they felt they could trust. The only help that William A. Hall, for instance, received during his trek to freedom from Tennessee to Chicago, and eventually to Wisconsin, came from other African Americans, one of whom sheltered
him for three days. Another nursed him when he was ill, having “carried him ten miles on his own beast.” William Wells Brown, starving and suffering from frostbite, hoped desperately but without luck to encounter a “colored person” as he trudged northward into Ohio. Only as a last resort did he finally stop an elderly white man dressed in a broad-brimmed hat and a long coat, which Brown perhaps recognized as distinctively Quaker dress. Brown recuperated for two weeks with the Quakers, who gave him clothing, boots and pocket money, and sent him on his way north. He walked the rest of the way to Cleveland with no other assistance except for food that he managed to beg along the way. The warmth with which the Quakers received Brown caused him to suffer paralyzing anxiety, an experience that was shared by many fugitives when they first encountered courteous whites. “I had never had a white man to treat me as an equal, and the idea of a white lady waiting on me at the table was still worse!” Brown wrote. “Though the table was loaded with the good things of this life, I could not eat.” Only when the lady of the home, a “Thompsonian,” provided him with a cup of “composition” did he begin to relax. (William Thompson, a New England farmer with no medical training, had acquired a large following by asserting that illness was the result of “clogging the system,” a state that could be remedied by the application of an assortment of powerful herbal emetics: Brown delicately spared his readers further details.)