Bound for Canaan (19 page)

Soon there would be widening webs of committed antislavery activists in most of the free states. There would be hundreds of men and women, white and black, who saw the succor of fugitives as a personal mission, and their homes as oases of hope for the desperate. They would be able to move fugitives hundreds of miles, carrying them, where necessary, from farm to farm and town to town, and directing them to havens in distant states, or Canada. But as the new decade of the 1830s dawned, assistance was still almost entirely a matter of luck. Most fugitives had never even heard of abolitionists. Jim Pembroke, who escaped from Maryland to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1828, spoke for countless others: “There was no Anti-Slavery Society then—there was no Vigilance Committee. I had, therefore, to select a course of action, without counsel or advice from any who professed to sympathize with the slave.”

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Through the 1820s, only in southeastern Pennsylvania was there anything resembling the Underground Railroad as it came to be understood in later years. In Philadelphia, the Quaker abolitionist Isaac Hopper had long been at the center of a web of black and white collaborators—in effect, an underground cell—who at short notice could move fugitives around from home to home with relative ease, like chess pieces, or quickly spirit them away into the countryside, or into the anonymity of the city's expanding African-American community. Picaresque though they sound, Hopper's exploits were in deadly earnest. In one of his last cases in Philadelphia, he was informed that a fugitive slave and her son were hidden in a closet, terrified and in immediate danger of recapture. They had been enslaved in New Jersey, which although nominally a free state would still hold some African Americans in bondage as late as the 1860s. Their master traced them to Philadelphia, where he procured a constable and went to the house where they were holed up. Leaving a guard at the door, he went off to obtain a search warrant. While he was thus engaged, a crowd of African Americans gathered. Whether by prearrangement or on impulse, they seized the guard—a remarkable illustration of blacks' growing self-confidence in what was very much a white men's city—and held him fast while the fugitives fled to the home of a black family on Locust Street. The slaves' master, still mindful of Pennsylvania's stringent laws, departed again to obtain a new warrant to search the second house. It was at this point that someone sent for Hopper. In accordance with a plan that he presumably worked out with his black friends on the spot, the door was opened, allowing the crowd outside to rush in. With a characteristically theatrical flourish, Hopper ordered the crowd to leave. As they did so, the two fugitives slipped out unnoticed among them, and hurried to the home of Hopper's son. Hopper himself remained at the Locust Street house as a decoy, correctly surmising that as long as he was there, the watchman would assume that the fugitives were still in the house. As soon as he could, Hopper returned home and sent the fugitives “to a place of greater safety.” Significantly, for it shows a technique that would become standard as the Underground Railroad became increasingly systematized, he also
dispatched his son to the home of a farmer thirty miles outside the city, to forewarn him of the fugitives' arrival.

Apart from his invigorating work in the underground, the decade of the 1820s was a sad time for the usually ebullient Hopper. His beloved wife died in June 1822, and a year later his fifteen-year-old son, Isaac, followed. Hopper was also drawn into the deepening rift that split Quakers into two factions, the Hicksites and the Orthodox. The fissure was rooted in doctrinal differences that seem obscure today, but it destroyed lifelong friendships, tormented the spiritual lives of thousands of Quakers, and tore apart meetings, which battled with un-Quakerly rancor over the ownership of community property, including schools and meeting houses. Elias Hicks, a charismatic Long Island farmer who won over most of the Quakers in the Northeast to his views, insisted that the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus must be understood mainly in spiritual terms and as models of the death of self-will within each person, rather than as historical events. His opponents attacked his teachings as doctrinally unsound. Within these arguments, feelings about slavery formed a strong undertow, with the Hicksites more frequently urging that personal spiritual growth demanded a wholehearted commitment to the struggle, and the Orthodox more often urging restraint. “Friends generally seem to deplore the present excitement,” Hopper's close friend and associate in the underground, Charles Marriott, would write to a fellow Hicksite. “For my share I hope it will never subside until slavery be abolished. There is tenfold more to be dreaded from our own relapsing into our former sleep of death.” Because of Hopper's Hicksite leanings, many of his Orthodox customers dropped away, and his tailoring business suffered. Finally, in 1829, he was forced to abandon Philadelphia and relocate to New York, where he opened a bookstore that specialized in Hicksite tracts and antislavery literature.

By the time of Hopper's departure, the sedate Philadelphia of his youth had grown into an industrial metropolis of more than 164,000 inhabitants, whose air was gritty with the smoke of factories and forges, textile mills and ironworks. Twelve thousand or more African Americans (many may not have dared to allow their presence to be recorded) dwelled in the tumbledown shanties and grimy lanes of Moyamensing and Southwark. There was also a small but vibrant middle class of self-employed black barbers, carters, restaurateurs, and oystermen, as well as a handful of wealthy men like the sailmaker James Forten, whose property was valued
at the fabulous sum of forty thousand dollars. African Americans' sense of community and of autonomy within the larger city was steadily deepening, and it was made manifest by scores of benevolent associations, schools, and churches, foremost among them the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, many of whose locations would eventually serve as stations on the underground.

At the same time, as waves of immigrants swelled the city's white population, blacks were increasingly being crowded out of skilled jobs, including dockwork, long a mainstay of the African-American economy. New measures had been proposed to restrict blacks' mobility, to impose special taxes on them, and to allow townships to auction off black felons for a term of years as contract labor. Color prejudice was ingrained even among many who professed opposition to slavery. Quakers rarely invited blacks to join the Society of Friends, and Isaac Hopper was considered remarkable for his willingness to sit down with them at dinner. The new, combustible politics of the street introduced an era that was to be rent by bitter class and racial conflict. In 1828 a white mob gathered outside a dance hall where a fancy-dress African-American ball was taking place and assaulted elegantly dressed women as they stepped from coaches, throwing some of them into the gutter. The following year, a full-scale race riot occurred in Cedar Ward, leaving many blacks dead and causing terrible damage to the homes and property of black families who could ill afford the losses.

Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, local magistrates had been empowered to issue warrants for the “removal” of any Negro or mulatto claimed to be a fugitive from labor, enabling slave hunters from Maryland to operate with impunity in the border regions of Pennsylvania. Free blacks were often arrested in broad daylight and hurried out of the state with no more than the most perfunctory formalities. In 1806 even the eminent founder of the first African Methodist Episcopal Church, Richard Allen, had been seized by a Southerner with a sheriff's warrant, although he succeeded in winning his release. Then, in 1825, Philadelphians were shocked to learn that a kidnapping ring had operated in the city for years, luring black children as young as nine and ten onto sloops moored in the Delaware River, and shipping them into the Deep South, where they were sold. (This kind of trade was by no means restricted to Philadelphia. Jarm Logue's mother, born free, had been kidnapped by itinerant slave traders from a free black settlement in Ohio along with several other children; the
kidnappers traveled south through Kentucky and Tennessee, selling the children out of the back of their wagon to less affluent whites, for whom a slave was an important status symbol, but who couldn't afford the prices of the open market.)

Popular repugnance at the kidnapping of free blacks prompted the passage of new laws in the 1820s that had gradually made it easier for abolitionists who wished to aid fugitives to do so with less risk to themselves, and creating a legal umbrella that sheltered the early phases of underground activity. In March 1820 the Pennsylvania legislature passed the first law in United States history that was deliberately intended to interfere with the Fugitive Slave Act. The legislature's action was rooted in the then nearly universal belief that any state had the constitutional authority to ignore, or nullify, federal laws of which it did not approve. The law made kidnapping any Negro or mulatto a felony punishable by a fine of up to two thousand dollars and up to twenty-one years' imprisonment at hard labor. More critically for those who dared to assist fugitive slaves, it also barred local magistrates from recognizing any matter arising from the national fugitive slave law, under penalty of a substantial fine. The law was tested in 1821 when a judge ruled that a fugitive slave who had killed his former master in the act of attempting to recapture him on Pennsylvania soil was guilty of no crime, since he had acted in both self-defense and to prevent a felony—his own kidnapping.

In 1826, under pressure from the Quaker lobby, the legislature passed a stronger law that made it even more difficult for a master to recover a fugitive slave from Pennsylvania. This law declared that the seizure of a runaway by anyone, including his presumed master, except by a constable with a properly executed warrant, constituted kidnapping. The arresting officer was required to bring the alleged runaway before a court, where, the law stipulated, “the oath of the owner or owners shall in no case be received in evidence, before the judge on the hearing of the case.” This meant that a master could only prove his claim by importing, at his own expense, impartial witnesses to testify on his behalf. Although the federal Fugitive Slave Law remained in force, authorizing any master to seize a fugitive, Pennsylvania law made him liable to indictment as a kidnapper and made public officials who cooperated with it subject to a heavy fine. Men and women who had shied away from breaking United States law could now claim that their activities were protected by Pennsylvania's.

Underground activity steadily continued to grow in the farm country outside Philadelphia. A particularly strong node of activism was developing at Columbia, in Lancaster County, where the Quaker William Wright, a respected descendant of the town's pioneer founder, had established a welcoming atmosphere for African Americans who settled near his home on the Susquehanna. As early as the turn of the century, several Southern masters who wished to emancipate their slaves had brought them to Columbia to be freed, fifty-six in a single batch in 1804, a hundred in another group the following year. Slave catchers and kidnappers followed. Wright is locally credited with hitting on the idea of passing fugitives along from one home to another at intervals of ten or twenty miles, with other friends designated to pilot them in between. He sent them first to his brother-in-law and fellow Quaker Daniel Gibbons, who lived in the quaintly named town of Bird-in-Hand, twenty miles to the east. Gibbons, who was said to have aided as many as two hundred fugitives by 1824, usually hid them overnight in his barn and in the morning assigned each one a new “freedom name” on the spot, a rite that while perhaps liberating to some, burdened as they often were by slave names not of their own choosing, may well have been disturbing to others.

If the fugitives were in no immediate danger of recapture, Gibbons distributed them among the farms in the surrounding area, where many found jobs and put down permanent roots, often helping other fugitives in their turn. If their masters were in pursuit, they were hurried eastward into neighboring Chester County. Gibbons forwarded some to the Quaker farmer Abraham Bonsall and dispatched others to the home of Thomas Vickers, a prosperous Quaker manufacturer of pottery, who lived twenty miles to the east near Caln Meeting, in Chester County. Vickers, a key link between Philadelphia abolitionists and those in the counties to the west, also received fugitives from Isaac Hopper. In short, a kind of synergy was developing in a region that would become perhaps the most supportive of the underground in the United States, absorbing fugitives from the east, the west, and the south, and sharing them out around this Pennsylvanian foreshadowing of Canada. Thomas Vickers's son John, also a potter, would become one of the most active managers in the underground, and his home at Lionville one of its great central stations. Fugitives were recorded there as early as 1818, when he hid two men in his attic. When their masters suddenly showed up, Vickers managed to delay them until
the two men escaped. One of the masters was heard to remark, “We might as well look for a needle in a haystack as for a nigger among Quakers.”

African-American abolitionists played a vital, even aggressive, role in the rural districts of Lancaster and Chester counties, as they did in Philadelphia, sometimes alone and sometimes in partnership with friendly whites. Robert Loney, a freed slave, ferried many fugitives across the Susquehanna River to Columbia, while the white Quaker Daniel Gibbons sent many fugitives to the farm of his collaborator Jeremiah Moore, at Christiana, where they were kept safe until they could be taken in a furniture wagon, in care of “a trusty colored man,” to Ercildoun, eight miles away. Blacks were also much less constrained than pacifist Quakers in their use of force. One day in 1825 a master who was taking two recaptured slaves back to Maryland stopped at York for the night, and came out in the morning to find that his carriage had been cut to pieces by outraged African Americans; the fate of the fugitives went unrecorded. A few years later, in an incident that vividly illustrates the ad hoc quality of much Underground Railroad activity, white witnesses to the abduction of a fugitive in Sadsbury, in eastern Lancaster County, immediately notified blacks in the vicinity, “who assembled under arms after dark, and surrounded the house in ambush.” While the slave owners were at dinner, the landlady at the inn where they put up secretly loosened the slave's handcuffs, enabling him to flee with the help of his protectors outside.