Bound for Canaan (33 page)

In the fall of 1842, the conservatives who controlled the Indiana Yearly Meeting formally disowned Levi Coffin and seven other Quaker activists because of their alleged divisiveness on the subject of slavery. “We were proscribed for simply adhering to what we believed to be our Christian duty,” Coffin responded. “We asked only liberty of conscience—freedom to act according to one's conscientious convictions.” Some of the conservatives were colonizationists by conviction, while others supported only gradual emancipation, but many believed viscerally, as so many Americans still did, that there was something inherently disgraceful about abolitionism itself. They were shocked when hundreds, and ultimately about two thousand of their fellow Quakers, about 10 percent of the Yearly Meeting, seceded in support of Coffin's group to form their own Anti-Slavery Yearly Meeting, based in Newport.

Such was the state of affairs in eastern Indiana when Frederick Douglass arrived at the Coffin home to begin his local tour. At Richmond, he was smothered by a hail of “evil-smelling” eggs when he tried to speak. Worse was in store. A few days later, at Pendleton, in Madison County, he barely escaped with his life. No building could be found for the speakers, so local abolitionists had erected a platform in the woods. As soon as Douglass began to speak, a mob led by a man in a coonskin cap emerged from “a miserable, rum-drinking place,” shouting at him to be silent. Douglass refused, with unconcealed contempt. At this, the mob began to hurl stones and rotten eggs at him and his fellow speakers. When Douglass grabbed hold of a stick, the mob, made furious by the sight of a black man actually preparing to defend himself, began shrieking, “Kill the nigger! Kill the damn nigger!” Douglass was hit with a club that broke his hand, and might have been killed where he fell, thus abruptly ending the career of the century's most influential black American, had not his friend, a white antislavery agent named William A.
White, a nephew of the Coffins, broken the blow. Douglass was for a time left prostrate on the ground, where the attackers continued to pummel him. Although seriously injured, Douglass and William White, whose scalp had been laid open in the melee, managed to escape with the help of local Quakers. Later, when a member of the mob was arrested by the local authorities, two hundred antiabolitionists descended on the jail and set him free.

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The Underground Railroad is often visualized as a fixed system that, once established, was rarely altered. In actuality, routes were always in flux. Even as new routes were opened, old ones became too dangerous, or no longer practical, and were abandoned. Participants died, moved, dropped out, or were driven out of the business by threats. Isaac Beck described an ongoing effort to shorten and simplify routes near Sardinia, Ohio, reducing one section, for example, from forty miles—“too long for a night's travel”—to three comfortable stages, first by recruiting new Quaker agents in one nearby town, and then a pair of Wesleyan Methodists further along the line. When a line from Columbus, Ohio, to Oberlin via the town of Delaware was compromised by a spy, another one was created via the town of Reynoldsburg. In some areas, participants changed their mind about abolition, or simply lost interest. Bushrod Johnson, who was raised a Quaker in Ohio and aided fugitives with his uncle, moved to the South and eventually became a general in the Confederate army. In Henry County, Indiana, the antislavery spirit faded when several of its key participants became involved in spiritualism.

The operation of the Coffins' Newport “station” provides a window into the underground at its most efficient. At a reunion of underground veterans in Newport, in 1874, Levi Coffin stated that during his lifetime he had directly and indirectly aided about thirty-three hundred fugitives to escape from slavery. Of these, he estimated that the annual average of fugitives passing through Newport was “more than one hundred,” or about one every three or four days, a figure that is supported by a contemporary, Daniel Huff, who stated that about two thousand fugitives
were assisted at Newport during the twenty years that Coffin lived there. Of course, the refugee flow was never regular. The total differed from year to year, and probably grew steadily as the underground became more effective.

By comparison, Elijah Anderson, an African American who conducted fugitives on a busy route north of Madison, Indiana, claimed to have handled eight hundred between about 1839 and 1848, an average of eighty-nine a year. The Miller family of Medina County, Ohio, who lived on a more lightly traveled route, assisted about one thousand fugitives during almost three decades of service, or about thirty-three per year. In some areas, there were willing conductors but virtually no fugitives at all. (Or at least none who was willing to trust his safety to whites.) Milton Kennedy, a white man who worked on a steamboat based at Portsmouth, Ohio, openly proclaimed himself an abolitionist, but was disappointed to encounter just two fugitive slaves during his years on the river.

Particularly after the passage of the draconian Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, agents and conductors destroyed what records they may have kept of the fugitives they assisted. One of the rare surviving examples belonged to David Putnam, an underground man based at Point Harmar, near Marietta, Ohio. The cryptic notations in his diary for August 1843 only hint at a galaxy of individual dramas whose details and protagonists have been lost to history:

Putnam and his friends used the call of a hoot owl to signal arrivals. When practical, they also employed explicit written messages, like this one from his friend John Stone, also dating from August 1843:

Fugitives remained with stationmasters for varying lengths of time, usually ranging from a few hours to a few days. When slave hunters were near, they might be kept much longer. The most employable, like Robert Burrel, who ran Levi Coffin's linseed oil mill, might be given work immediately and remain for years. Where the danger of recapture was unusually high, a stationmaster might go to some lengths to create a secure hideout. For instance, John Todd, who lived on the bank of the Ohio River near Madison, built a soundproof double fireplace that was entered from the top, next to the real chimney. And a miller who lived a few miles from the Maryland state line outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, sometimes placed his charges in a tiny room that he had constructed behind the water wheel, which completely concealed the hiding place when the wheel was set in motion. But exotic hiding places were rare. Fugitives were more typically hidden in spare rooms, attics, basements, barns, sheds, hay mows, cornfields, thickets, or creek bottoms. The Coffins simply invited fugitives into their house and put them to sleep in an upstairs bedroom.

Although railroads, steamships, and canals were being used more and more by the underground in the eastern states, in the West transportation was still almost exclusively by wagon or horse, or on foot. Unaccompanied fugitives posed the most serious security concern. Between Lawrenceburg and Madison, Indiana, and in other parts of the country, fugitives were handed a coin with a hole drilled in it, as a token of trustworthiness, and told to hand it over to the agent in the next town. At Logansport, Indiana, local African Americans were assigned to interview fugitives who arrived in town on their own, to ensure that they were not imposters, and then to report to white collaborators who supplied them with provisions and, if necessary, money. Generally, one of the Logansport men would then travel ahead to the next town to arrange for the arrival of the fugitives.

At Newport, Levi Coffin tried to keep a team harnessed and a wagon
ready at all times. When additional teams were needed, his friends generally did not need to be told what to do. “The people at the livery stable seemed to understand what the teams were wanted for, and they asked no questions,” Coffin recalled. If the fugitives were concealed at all, it was most often inside a covered wagon or beneath a load of hay, or among boxes. When necessary, they might be carried in a hearse, or a false-bottomed wagon fitted with a shallow compartment that could hold four or five people in very cramped conditions. More than once, a female fugitive was dressed in men's clothes and hustled through the streets in broad daylight, while a man dressed in her garments was left as a decoy for the pursuers. Quakers sometimes disguised both male and female fugitives in skirts and deep bonnets to transport them through proslavery neighborhoods. Levi Coffin availed himself of this stratagem on at least one occasion, when he sent a fugitive in Quaker disguise along with a committee of Quakers who had been delegated to represent Newport at a meeting to be held in Michigan. “They were very willing to engage in Underground Railroad work, though the Quarterly Meeting had not appointed them to that service,” Coffin wrote, with his characteristic, wispy irony.

Providing for fugitives could be expensive, particularly for large groups. While the initial costs of feeding and transporting them were usually borne by the local agent, money was also raised from among local sympathizers. “It often became necessary to obtain, on a sudden emergency, a considerable amount of funds in order to place large parties of fugitives beyond the power of the slave hunters,” wrote Eber Pettit, a longtime stationmaster based in Fredonia, New York, near Buffalo. “For that purpose certain individuals called on ladies and gentlemen, and stated the case without ever giving such information as could possibly betray the fugitives into any danger, and at such time men of all parties were solicited for aid.” No records survive describing Coffin's fundraising in Newport. However, in his autobiography, writing of his years at Cincinnati, after 1847, he often tells of visiting fellow merchants to ask for ad hoc contributions to feed and forward newly arrived fugitives. In some towns, stationmasters paid conductors set fees. Isaac Beck of Sardinia, Ohio, paid John Hudson, an African-American teamster, twenty-five cents for each trip he made, while Charles Huber, a Williamsburg, Ohio, tanner, paid a mulatto named Mark Sims to drive fugitives to Quaker settlements in
Highland and Clinton counties. Huber also paid a white man, Samuel Peterson, to carry food to runaways hiding on his farm, and to provide them with paregoric to keep their infants quiet if slave hunters were near.

Fugitives usually were forwarded singly or in pairs, though sometimes in much larger groups. John H. Bond of Randolph County, Indiana, once received twenty-five, some riding in a wagon and the others walking beside it. The largest company the Coffins received, seventeen men and women, had all lived in the same part of Kentucky, about twenty miles south of the Ohio River, and had organized their own escape. Their experience makes clear that the underground was sufficiently well-organized to move a party of that size the length of Indiana without mishap, and that it had both the resources and the flexibility to respond to an unexpected crisis. “It was an interesting company,” Coffin thought, all in the prime of life and “of different complexions, varying from light mulatto to coal black, and had bright and intelligent expressions.” They had “for a liberal sum” hired a poor white man to ferry them across the river near Madison. Apparently they had not been in contact with the Madison stationmaster, George DeBaptiste, and had no idea how to find help once they were in Indiana. They spent their first night of freedom wandering without direction across cornfields and farms. In the morning they were spotted by slave hunters, and scattered into the broken, densely wooded hills north of the town. When they emerged, in ones and twos, they were found by local blacks who finally directed them to white abolitionists linked with the underground. Miraculously, none of the fugitives was captured.

White conductors transported the group in two wagons to the next station, and they continued on in this way, traveling at night, until they reached a Quarker settlement in Union County. There a new pair of conductors undertook to carry them thirty miles on into Newport. They arrived early in the morning. Catherine Coffin opened the door and immediately recognized the drivers from Union County. Writing years later, Levi Coffin reconstructed the scene with a hint of humor.

“What have you got there?” Catherine asked.

“All Kentucky,” one of the men replied.

“Well, bring all Kentucky in,” she answered.

Levi, hearing the noise below, quickly came downstairs to find the fugitives seated in the main room.

“Well,” he said, “seventeen full-grown darkies and two able-bodied
Hoosiers are about as many as the cars can bear at one time. Now you may switch off and put your locomotives in my stable and let them blow off steam, and we will water and feed them.”