Bound for Canaan (36 page)

That night, after the patrols had retired, the Canadian rowed silently back across the river to Kentucky in Collins's skiff. He beached it under a clump of trees just below the fence that was the Mason and Bracken county line. Eliza herself had kept watch all day and night, never having shut her eyes. Just before dawn on Monday morning, they shook awake Eliza's daughter and her children, and hurried them to the river so quickly that—by the Canadian's design, surely—almost all the luggage they had
packed the day before was left behind before the daughter realized what was happening. There on the riverbank, Eliza handed a wallet of gold to the Canadian. He took it without looking inside, and pulled for Ohio.

They were met on the Ohio shore by Collins and “Jolly Bob” Patton, a deacon of the Reform Church, who had arranged with one of the elders, Thomas McCague, one of the wealthiest men on the river, for the fugitives to be hidden in McCague's sedate brick home. McCague's slaughterhouse at that time was killing more hogs than all Cincinnati, and he was never suspected as a member of the underground. His house was used only in an emergency like this, when slave hunters were expected to be in close pursuit. The gate had been left unlatched. As they entered, the Canadian took his adieu, and headed back to Canada on foot. He was never seen in Ripley again.

The fugitives were taken upstairs to a large room on the third floor. Now the problem was to get them up to the Rankin house somehow without being seen. Six black children with a pregnant woman, accompanied by known abolitionists, climbing the steps to the Rankin farm, could hardly be missed. They would obviously have to be split up. The smallest children were carried unsuspected up the hill in the McCagues' elegant carriage. Others were led by different guides by roundabout routes, avoiding freshly tilled fields where they would leave tracks. Once the party was reassembled in the Rankins' kitchen, they were placed in a wagon belonging to a cooperative traveling salesman. With John P. Rankin and the sons of two other underground men as guards, the triumphant Eliza and her family, utterly numb by now with exhaustion and fear, set off for Hillsboro, thirty-five miles north on the road to Columbus, and thus passed out of recorded history, although she would live on for generations to come as a fictional construct born from the imagination of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

John P. Rankin and his friends returned to Ripley just before dawn. “In the morning mother had us up to regular breakfast, and soon it was school time,” he recalled. “We hustled ourselves down and were at school just as gay and lively as any other boys there, and never whispered a word to each other.”

3

In March 1841 the
Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Standard
of Newport, Indiana, reported to its readers, “We have no means of ascertaining the exact number of fugitives who have passed over Lake Erie this season, but we are confident it is greater than it was the last, when eight hundred was the estimated number. They have gone singly and in pairs; in tens and twenties, and even in larger companies.” The
Advocate
was talking, as it made clear, only about refugees who had crossed Lake Erie, and only those who were known to the organized underground. Unknown numbers also crossed the St. Lawrence from northern New York and Vermont, and coasted the rocky shores of New England from Boston to Nova Scotia. But the underground lines funneled the largest proportion of Canada-bound fugitives into the lake ports between Oswego, New York and Detroit, and from there by water directly to Canada. (In winter, underground men from Buffalo, New York, drove fugitives in their farm wagons to Canada across the frozen Niagara River, and Sandusky, Ohio, conductors carried them in speeding sleighs across the ice on Lake Erie.)

Conductors who were in a hurry, or desperate, sometimes literally flung fugitives onto a passing ship, and hoped for the best. In one such instance, a steamboat captain named Chapman, en route from Cleveland to Buffalo, was hailed about three miles offshore by four men in a small boat, two of them merchants with whom he had done business the day before, and the others black strangers. One of the whites threw on board a purse containing fifteen dollars in silver, and asked Chapman to land the black men in Canada, telling him to take his pay out of it, and to give the passengers what was left. The sight of the new passengers didn't please the captain, who, imbued with the racial prejudices of his time and place, found them “very black, coarse in feature and build, stupid in expression, and apparently incapable of any mental excitement except fear.” Fortunately, however, Chapman was a man with a heart, and he ran in near the Canadian shore, and landed the men on a beach, where they were met by the agents of the underground, “though,” Chapman recalled years later, “at the time I had never heard of that institution, and my vessel was pressed into service, and constituted an ‘extension of the track' without my knowing it.” Chapman handed the men the entire fifteen dollars, and
told them they were free. What he then witnessed startled the captain. “They seemed to be transformed; a new light shone in their eyes, their tongues were loosed, they laughed and cried, prayed and sang praises, fell upon the ground and kissed it over and over. I thought to myself, ‘My God! Is it possible that human beings are kept in such a condition that they are made perfectly happy by being landed and left alone in a strange land with no human beings or habitations in sight, with the prospect of never seeing a friend or relative?' Before I stepped upon my deck I had determined to never again be identified with any party that sustained the system of slavery.”

For the most part, however, the underground relied on trusted captains and crews. In the 1840s the
Mayflower
transported fugitives from Sandusky, Ohio, to Amherstburg, in Canada, with such regularity that it became known as the “abolition boat.” (The
Mayflower
was the venue of a memorable incident in August 1854, when, as it was nearing the dock at Buffalo, the ship's barber, a fugitive slave named Hoover, recognized his former master in the company of several police officers; Hoover ran to the bow of the
Mayflower,
and leaped from it onto the stern of the nearest ship—named the
Plymouth Rock,
no less—and then climbed up from it onto the ferry bound across the Niagara River to Canada, thus making his escape.) Samuel B. Cuyler of Pultneyville, New York boldly led fugitives to the town landing in broad daylight to meet the
Ontarian
, whose captain was a cousin by marriage, and paid their fares with funds donated by local abolitionists. Horace Ford delivered fugitives to a black barber named John Bell, in Cleveland, who in the evening would put them aboard a certain Canadian passenger boat captained by an Englishman, “who would wink at our enterprise and say nothing about it though he must have understood the situation.” Captains bound for Detroit often put fugitives in small boats as they passed beneath the British guns of Fort Malden, and had crewmen row them ashore.

For many fugitives, the lake crossing must have had a weirdly theatrical quality, after weeks or months of furtive flight. Few had ever seen such a vast expanse of water as the Great Lakes, or traveled on anything as grand as a mid-century steamboat. Shallow and turbulent Lake Erie was the center of steamship activity on the lakes, and giant craft like the twenty-two-hundred-ton
City of Buffalo
with their deep hulls and low
superstructure rivaled in size and elegance anything on the Atlantic at that time. Fugitives, naturally, were much more likely to travel on deck, or with the cargo, but they could not help being dazzled by these floating palaces, which were luxurious beyond the experience even of the common white man, opulent with gilded fretwork, dazzlingly illuminated crystal chandeliers, ornamental paintings, acres of luxurious red plush, and furniture of mahogany or rosewood. They were also harrowingly dangerous. Nearly 30 percent of all the steamboats built before 1849 were lost to accidents. Boilers exploded, scalding passengers to death by the score. Boats were blown apart by storms, collided with other boats, and caught fire and burned like tinder. (On steamboats that plied the rivers of the South, the owners typically preferred Irishmen to slaves as firemen, because if the boiler exploded and killed them their deaths would bring no financial loss to the management.)

Of all the underground gateways to Canada, the busiest was Detroit. By 1837 forty-two regularly scheduled steamers touched at its port. (Many fugitives, of course, also arrived in Detroit by overland routes from Indiana and Illinois.) The opening of the Erie Canal, in 1825, helped make Detroit a natural hub for westbound emigrants, and the fastest growing city in the region. Between 1830 and 1840 its population tripled from three thousand to more than nine thousand, and it would more than double again by 1850, to twenty-one thousand. Arriving fugitives found a city that was inventing itself literally day by day. Against a backdrop of church steeples framed against the majestic western sky, enormous steamers, sidewheelers, brigs, sloops, small three-sailed
chaloupes
, ten-oared
bateaux
laden with cargoes for the frontier hinterland, and flitting canoes crowded the noisy waterfront. Everywhere, new streets were being laid out, big new brick houses were under construction, and the plank sidewalks were crowded with emigrants from the East and Europe pouring through on their way to the frontier. Fugitives also found one of the best organized underground operations in the country.

By the 1840s most fugitives were forwarded across the Detroit River by the city's Vigilance Committee, founded by the redoubtable black abolitionist William Lambert, a Quaker-educated tailor from New Jersey, who had come to Detroit to seek his fortune in 1838. Lambert was also a superb businessman, and would amass a fortune before his death in 1891.
In 1840 he had addressed the Michigan State Legislature, calling forcefully but unsuccessfully for the franchise to be extended to blacks. Three years later, he organized and chaired the state's first convention of black citizens, whose final statement, a radical one by the standards of the era, boldly declared that the people “have the right at all times, to alter or reform [their government], and to abolish one form of government and establish another, whenever the public good requires it.” It was, in essence, an open call for slave rebellion. Lambert's closest collaborator in clandestine work was William C. Munroe, minister at Detroit's first black religious institution, the Second Baptist Church, whose handsome new neo-gothic building on Beaubien Street was an ornament of Detroit's increasingly sophisticated cityscape. Messages from conductors in his congregation often had a quaintly biblical flavor. “Pastor, tomorrow night at our 8:00 meeting, let's read Exodus 10:8,” one might read, meaning that a conductor would be arriving at 8
P.M.
with ten fugitives, eight men and two women. From the church, it was but a five-minute walk to the waterfront, and then a ten-minute ferry ride across the mile of water that separated the United States and Canada.

Detroit was nothing if not cosmopolitan, and few passengers took any special note of the black faces among the melange of French Canadians, brisk Americans, “sad-eyed Indians folded in their blankets,” and “long-waisted damsels of the city” who packed aboard what a British visitor described as the “pretty little steamer, gaily painted, with streamers flying,” that shuttled back and forth between Detroit and Windsor. For countless fugitives, the brief trip on what some called “freedom's ferry” was the final stage of the journey that had taken them from somewhere deep inside Kentucky, western Virginia, or Tennessee, across the Ohio River, and northward for hundreds of miles through the hostile or indifferent countryside of the Northern states, often no more than a few days, or even hours, ahead of pursuers bent on carrying them back to slavery. Few fugitives cared that their landfall in Canada was a scrubby, somnolent hamlet where, in sharp contrast to booming Detroit, a handful of small boats idled among yawping seagulls, and bobbing flotillas of mallards. Unpromising though the town of Windsor seemed, as fugitives stepped ashore they became transformed into refugees, impoverished perhaps, but safe and free, in the words of one abolitionist, “where the deep gloom of a
worse than Egyptian night departed, and gave place to the bright sun of British liberty.”

4

Most refugees discovered upon their arrival in Canada that they had traded one kind of insecurity for another. Most arrived penniless. Fortunate ones found work quickly. Others wandered for days, weeks, even months before settling down. Jarm Logue's experience was typical of many. Having left behind his beloved mother, Cherry, and several siblings still enslaved to the whiskey-brewing (and whiskey-swilling) Logue family, he and a single companion had ridden on an epic journey northward from Tennessee, fighting their way through two bands of patrollers, crossing the frozen Ohio River, and trekking through the desolate wilderness of northern Indiana, before reaching Detroit. When he crossed the Detroit River to Canada in the winter of 1835, Logue was alone and desperate for work. He swapped his mare for a broken-down nag and a few shillings and continued overland to the town of London, where he traded the nag to a farmer for board and another handful of coins. Still unable to find work, and now horseless, he hitched a ride to the port of Hamilton, on Lake Ontario. As he gazed across the iron gray sheet of water—a vista of surpassing bleakness beneath the overcast skies of winter—he felt overwhelmed by despair. “There I stood,” he wrote years later to Frederick Douglass, “a boy of twenty-one years of age (as near as I know my age) the tempest howling over my head, and my toes touching the snow beneath my worn-out shoes—with the assurance that I was at the end of my journey—knowing nobody, and nobody knowing me or noticing me, only as attracted by the then supposed mark of Cain on my sorrow-stricken face. I stood there the personification of helpless courage and finited love.” Like refugees of all times and places, he had never imagined that freedom could feel so painful.