Bound for Canaan (56 page)

In a sense, Elgin's crowning moment came in 1857, when the racist Edwin Larwill ran for reelection to Parliament. In preparation, King had organized the registration of hundreds of new black voters. On election day, 320 of them joined King in front of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, in the heart of the Elgin Settlement, and walked proudly into Chatham, seven miles away, where they cast the first votes of their lives against Larwill, and for an abolitionist candidate for Parliament. When all the votes were counted, Larwill had been defeated by nearly eight hundred votes, many of them from whites, and the biggest margin ever recorded in the district. King wrote laconically, “From that time forward all opposition both to me and the coloured people ceased; they were now clothed with political power.”

The Underground Railroad continued to funnel fugitive slaves into Canada up to the eve of the Civil War, and beyond. For a few years more, there would still be gaggles of newcomers at the docks of Windsor and St. Catharines, dressed lumpily in donated clothes, and bewildered by freedom. But by the end of the decade, the homeowners of the Elgin Settlement, the townspeople of Chatham and Toronto, even the disgruntled farmers at the Dawn colony and on the Refugee Home Society's tract, would cease to think of themselves as “fugitives.” They were
Canadians
. The underground had done its work well, and delivered them to safety. Now their lives angled away from the United States, and away from the dragging spiritual inertia of slavery, toward the free future, where their successes and failures were their own. Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb, Mary Ann Shadd, William King, even the bedraggled Hiram Wilson, had all in their own ways taught refugees who bore every physical, emotional, and mental injury known to the world of slavery how to begin thinking and acting like free men and women. Problems remained, of course, but they were the problems of ordinary citizens, not of slaves. There was still prejudice to be overcome, and it did not disappear quickly. But there was no second act to Edwin Larwill. There were no mobs, no lynchings. The racists accepted their defeat at the polls. For years to come, in the Chatham area, blacks would hold the balance of power in local elections. In 1859, another watershed was crossed when Abraham Shadd, the old
underground veteran, was elected the regional councilor for his district, the first black to be elected to public office in Canada.

3

In the Grecian mansion where he lived in Peterboro, New York, Gerrit Smith was also dreaming of a black utopia. He was morally outraged by the state law which required that each African American prove that he owned at least two hundred and fifty dollars' worth of property before he would be permitted to vote. The law effectively disqualified almost every black voter in the state. (No such property qualification had been imposed on whites.) “[T]his mean and wicked exclusion,” Smith wrote, was but another intolerable outrage perpetrated by heartless politicians against “the most deeply wronged class of our citizens.” Smith felt spiritually compelled to respond in some way. But how? The plan that God revealed to him—for Smith's understanding of the world allowed for nothing that was not provided by God—was one that only he of all living men could make a reality. The source of Smith's immense wealth was land speculation. He owned at least 750,000 acres (some said a million acres—even Smith may not have known for sure), mostly in New York state. He proposed to donate 40 acres apiece to three thousand black New Yorkers, a total of 120,000 acres, completely free of charge. The scheme had some things in common with the other pioneer black communities in Canada. With the erection of farmsteads and the planting of crops, the assessed value for the property would lift each settler across the infamous two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar threshold. Not only would this plan enable them to become a significant voting bloc, it would also, he hoped, draw them together in a community rooted in the ennobling, spiritually transformative tillage of the soil.

Smith had an almost religious feeling about land: Paradoxically, although he was one of the largest landowners in the United States, he felt an abiding uneasiness with the principle of private property. He believed that the possession of land was “a natural, universal, and inalienable right,” and that each man had a right to as much of it as he needed. “Alas that good men should be so slow to see that the acknowledged right of
every generation, to the use of the earth, as well as the use of the sea, the light, and the air, is necessarily preliminary to that state of universal comfort, and happiness, for which good men labor and pray!” He enlisted prominent African Americans, including Frederick Douglass, to hold meetings around the state to sign up volunteers. “The sharp axe of the sable-armed pioneer should be at once uplifted over the soil of Franklin and Essex counties, and the noise of falling trees proclaim the glorious dawn of civilization throughout their borders,” Douglass proclaimed in the
North Star
. “Let the work commence at once. Companies of tens and twenties should be formed, and the woods at once invaded.” By the autumn of 1847, Smith had made out 2,000 deeds: 861 in New York City, 215 in Queens County, 197 in King's County, and so on throughout the state. Although the grants were not specifically allotted to fugitives from slavery, many of the recipients were certainly former slaves.

Apart from his generosity with his land, Smith's philanthropy was legendary. “The tide of benefaction was continuously flowing,” as his biographer, Octavius Frothingham, put it. “The small cheques flew about in all directions, carrying in the aggregate thousands of dollars.” Frothingham estimated that it “carried away” forty or fifty thousand dollars a year. On his desk, Smith kept a stack of blank checks in varying amounts, waiting only for his signature. Sometimes he gave away tens of thousands of dollars in a single day. He sent donations to destitute Irish, Poles, and Greeks; orphans; indigent old maids; bankrupt farmers; paupers who needed money to send their children to school; as well as untold numbers of beggars and swindlers. Free blacks were frequent recipients of his generosity. One of them, William G. Allen, a talented flautist whom he had sponsored at the Oneida Institute, had gone on to teach at the Dawn colony.

Nothing was dearer to Smith's heart than abolitionism. He was close to the Tappan brothers, Lewis and Arthur, of New York City, and played host to their ideological nemesis William Lloyd Garrison. He corresponded with, among others, the Ohio firebrand John Rankin, former president Martin Van Buren, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Senator William H. Seward of New York, Lincoln's future secretary of state. He was also a major financial supporter of Oberlin College, in Ohio, the most important racially integrated institution of higher learning in the United States. He counted as personal friends Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, Jermain Loguen, and Lewis Hayden of Boston, who had organized the
Shadrach rescue, and he willingly donated money to anyone with an even half-plausible plan to help free slaves. In one instance, when he learned that a slaveholder was willing to emancipate his fifty slaves if they would be taken to a Northern state and provided for, Smith contacted the man and directed that they be sent to him. On another occasion, he had commissioned a friend to travel to Kentucky to purchase on his behalf an entire family of slaves who had once belonged to Smith's wife's family, and to personally escort them back to Peterboro.

The mansion at Peterboro was a welcoming watering hole for every abolitionist lecturer who traveled through Central New York, as well as for fugitives fresh from the South, who found themselves in what must have seemed a bizarre, if friendly environment. On any given day, Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled, a guest might encounter a party of refined sophisticates from the cities, “a shouting Methodist, a Whig pro-slavery member of Congress, a southern ex-slave holder,” three or four local Oneida Indians, a speculator trying to interest Smith in some investment scheme, “a crazy Millerite or two, who, disgusted with the world, thought it destined to be burned up at an early day,” and a “sprinkling of Negroes from the sunny South on their way to Canada.” In his diary, Smith meticulously recorded the unending parade:

“Mrs. Crampton, a beggar woman, spent last night with us. Charles Johnson, a fugitive slave from Hagerstown, took tea at our house last evening and breakfasted with us this morning.

“Mr. William Corning, a wandering pilgrim, as he styles himself, dines with us. He is peddling his own printed productions.

“Poor Graham, the insane literary colored man, has been with us a day or two.

“Elder Cook and William Haines of Oneida depot arrive this evening. Mr. H. is a ‘medium,' and speaks in unknown tongues.

“Dr. Winmer of Washington City, with five deaf mutes and a blind child take supper and spend the evening with us.

“We find Brother Swift and his wife and daughter at our house, where they will remain until they get lodgings. There come this evening an old black man, a young one and his wife and infant. They say they are fugitives from North Carolina.

“A man from _____ brings his mother, six children and her half sister, all fugitives from Virginia.

“An Indian and a fugitive slave spent last night with us. The Indian has gone on, but Tommy McElligott (very drunk) has come to fill his place.”

One day, in April 1848, the stream of pilgrims had included a rail-thin man with a shock of graying hair that grew thick and low on his bony brow, and extraordinarily penetrating steel-gray eyes. He introduced himself as a wool merchant from Springfield, Massachusetts, and said that he had read in the newspapers about Smith's generous donations of land in the Adirondacks. Their encounter was one of the great moments in antislavery history, with ramifications that would resonate for many years to come, contributing its small but significant impetus to the nation's acceleration toward civil war. They were a study in contrasts, the humorless guest and the gregarious host, with his broad intellectual face, “deep, flexible, musical voice,” and faultless manners. The stranger probably wore his customary crisp white linen shirt and brown woolen coat, and Smith almost certainly a broad collar and black ribbon upon his neck, his invariable costume, whatever the fashion.

It was a bad time for the man from Springfield. He was deeply in debt. (By itself, this hardly distinguished him from a great many of Smith's visitors.) Piles of wool lay unsold in his warehouse. One of his sons was “proclaiming some form of ‘idolatry' in Ohio.” Another was going blind from “an accumulation of blood on the brain.” But at the age of forty-eight, in spite of his personal sufferings and financial reverses, John Brown was convinced that God had chosen him for a special role, and that it was bound up with the abolition of slavery. He told Smith that he trusted utterly in a destiny ordained by God, and that if his maker chose such a fate for him, he would willingly lay down his life for the cause.

The stranger's abolitionist credentials were impeccable. Like Smith, he knew with ferocious certainty that slavery was nothing less than a sin against God. His beliefs were rooted in a granitelike Calvinism that had been chiseled to finished form by the hard experience of a frontier childhood. When he was an infant, his family had carried him west in an ox-drawn wagon from Connecticut to the raw wilderness of frontier Ohio. An early ambition to enter the ministry had fallen prey to a combination of poverty and an eye inflammation that forced him to give up his studies. But there was still much of the minister in him. He despised card playing, dancing, and all forms of entertainment. Church attendance had been compulsory for the workers in the tannery that he once operated, and he
had also insisted that they come to his home every day for Bible readings. Convinced that righteous punishment was an instrument of the divine, he flogged his sons for every infraction: eight lashes for disobeying their mother, three for “unfaithfulness at work,” eight for telling a lie.

At the age of thirty-seven, Brown had taken a personal vow before God to consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery. He and his abolitionist father, Owen Brown, a trustee of Oberlin College, had proven their commitment by serving as conductors on an underground line near Hudson, Ohio, which was known as “a rabid abolition town.” A friend of Brown, interviewed in 1879, said, “I've seen him come in at night with [a] gang of five or six blacks that he had piloted all the way from the river, hide them away in the stables maybe, or the garret, and if anybody was following he would keep them stowed away for weeks.” He had never hesitated to publicly denounce racism, even when he found it within his own church, where African Americans were required to sit on separate seats in the rear. Such discrimination made Brown so mad that he defiantly escorted some of the local blacks to his own family pew, an act that struck the rest of the congregation “like a bomb shell.” In Springfield, he had met Frederick Douglass, who was very impressed with him, having found him living humbly on a back street “among laboring men and mechanics.” Douglass had even mentioned him in his newspaper, the
North Star
, as a man who “though a white gentleman, is in sympathy, a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”

Brown told Smith that he had heard that the settlers in the Adirondacks were having difficulties. Only a handful of black families had taken up residence on the Smith lands. Smith had commissioned Jermain Loguen to inspect the settlement. Loguen reported back that although some of the tracts were “as good land as any man can need,” much of the region was poorly fitted for farming. Worse, he found that local men were charging would-be settlers exorbitant fees to guide them to their property, and swindling them out of their deeds. “My best advice to my brethren,” he warned, “is not to venture in search of their farms, unless they can read and write, or are in the company of tried friends who can do both.” The truth was, much of the land was simply impossible to farm profitably. The core of the settlement, in the township of North Elba, could be reached only by a single difficult road through the spectacular but remote valley of
the Ausable River, and there was no market within scores of miles. In addition, even the most willing settlers needed wagons, livestock, tools, and basic supplies just to survive the next year, an investment that was beyond the means of the propertyless urban poor whom Smith had in mind. Brown made Smith an offer. “I will take one of your farms myself, clear it up and plant it, and show my colored neighbors how much work should be done; will give them work as I have occasion; look after them in all needful ways, and be a kind of father to them.”