Bound for Canaan (38 page)

Little more than a year after the groundbreaking, on December 12, 1842, the British-American Institute opened with twelve students. Wilson mainly taught academics, while Henson, ever the preacher, “expounded spiritual truths.” As enrollment grew, Wilson recruited teachers from among his friends from Oberlin. Students both lived and had their classes in the school building, a long, low structure of hewn logs in a small clearing near the riverbank. They spent a half day in the classroom and the rest of the day at “practical” activities, cutting timber and cordwood, or carrying on farming operations on the institute's two hundred acres of cleared land. (An additional hundred acres would be acquired in 1844.) By the latter half of the decade, the settlement stretched for nearly half a mile along both sides of the Sydenham. Between sixty and eighty students were usually enrolled in the institute at any given time, ranging in age from five to twenty-five, and older, in its two divisions, junior and adult. Initially, the institute's endeavors flourished. Two “enterprising men of color” from North Carolina and Virginia were manufacturing rope from locally grown hemp. A black millwright from South Carolina was building a steam-driven grist mill, while two machinists were at work making the boilers and furnaces, using bricks that were also being made on the site. Henson traveled to Boston where he raised one thousand dollars to build a sawmill, and to develop markets for the export of the colony's fine hard-woods. All the profits from these several enterprises were to be “sacredly devoted to the cause of education,” and within a few years, Henson hoped, would pay off the colony's debts—between four and five thousand dollars in the mid-1840s—and eliminate the need for begging and borrowing from abroad. Attracted by the opportunity for education and work, refugees continued to arrive, turning the surrounding area into what was, in effect, a swarming terminal of the Underground Railroad.

The colony's reputation spread widely. Before the decade was out, there were five hundred black settlers in the immediate vicinity of the institute, occupying fifteen hundred acres of their own land, apart from the school's holdings. By Henson's estimate, another thirty-five hundred settlers lived within one day's travel from Dawn. They were, he asserted, “with few exceptions refugees from slavery.” One of them was a fugitive named John Brown, who had escaped from bondage in Mississippi a few
years earlier, and had arrived at Dawn after living for a time with abolitionists in Michigan, and then working with a crew of Cornish miners in the copper mines on Lake Superior, where he had heard about the thriving new colony. Given work at the sawmill, he helped to cut the walnut planks that Henson would personally escort to the Crystal Palace Exhibition, the first world's fair, in London, England, in 1851.

As a slave in Maryland and Kentucky, Henson had dreamed as perhaps all slaves did of having land that belonged to him alone. Now, at the age of fifty-three, apart from managing the institute, he held two hundred acres of prime farmland in his own name, in a true community of men like himself for whom such dreams had once seemed impossible and pathetic, men who understood the mysteries of money and deeds, profit and loss, leases and percentages, the magic of the written word, and the majestic truths of the Bible. An even rosier future was undoubtedly in store. In November 1847, he proclaimed, “Trusting in the God of Heaven, and not in an arm of flesh, our watchword is ONWARD.”

1

It's easy to imagine how it must have begun, on the beach at Pensacola, one steaming day in the middle of June, 1844. The strapping seaman Jonathan Walker is at work on his whaleboat, where he has pulled it up on sand that is so blindingly white that it is painful to look straight at it in the sun's glare. Walker's friend, the slave Charles Johnson, has come by. Although he is young and fit, his body is marred by ugly “scrofulous risings” on his chest, as the wanted poster would later put it. Perhaps Walker has hired his labor, rented him, so to speak, so that they work together hour after hour, brushing dark green paint onto the overturned hull, talk
ing and laboring. Perhaps the plan begins with a seemingly casual question. Johnson wonders aloud if Walker has ever heard of sailors helping slaves to get to the North, and what he thinks about it, and if he ever knew any sailors like that. Or maybe it is Walker himself, with his Yankee twang, asking Johnson if he ever thought of running away from his master, if he ever wanted to be free.

Florida resembled the Texas frontier more than it did the interior of the cotton-growing South. Ceded to the United States by Spain only in 1821 and still governed as a territory—it would become a state in 1845—Florida had a population more Spanish and African than Anglo-Saxon. Almost half the territory's fifty thousand inhabitants were black, all but a handful of them slaves. Pensacola occupied a scant two dozen city blocks. Life focused on the port, one of the best on the Gulf Coast, and on the several military posts in the vicinity, most prominent among them the massive red brick bastions of Fort Pickens, whose heavy guns commanded the approaches to the harbor. The writ of law did not carry far beyond the city's thinly populated outskirts, however. Since the days of Spanish rule, the swamps that surrounded Pensacola had been home to bandits and renegades of every stripe. Although Florida had been a comparatively tolerant place under Spanish rule, in keeping with the policies of the slave states to its north, the territorial government had begun to enact more racially repressive laws that limited the movements and opportunities of free blacks, and forced many of them back into slavery as punishment for offenses as minor as the failure to pay fines.

Johnson soon learned, if he had not known it all along, that Walker was an abolitionist who believed that slavery was an “awful depravity,” a “national poison” that “ranked with the highest wrongs and crimes that ever were invented by the enemy of man.” Unlike many abolitionists, Walker was genuinely comfortable in the company of African Americans. Probably he had served with black seamen, who were numerous in the merchant marine. He also viscerally identified with slaves in ways that intellectual, middle-class abolitionists rarely could. He knew from painful experience what it was like to be helpless, vulnerable, and dependent on strangers for his survival. Indeed, he saw slaves and sailors fundamentally as comrades in suffering. “I think that next to the slave, the sailor is thrown most shamefully into the scale of oppression, wrong, and neglect,” he later wrote. Shipowners, like slave owners, he believed, were only in
terested in profit, and cared nothing for the privation that sailors suffered for their benefit, while the captains under whom they served were often as abusive as overseers. Any sailor who stood up to them was treated as a mutineer, and just as liable as a slave to be punished by a whip laid across his bare back.

As Walker's biographer, Alvin F. Oickle, has shown, Walker grew up about as poor as anyone could, on a hardscrabble farm that clung precariously to the played out, sandy soil of Cape Cod. He went to sea as a boy, and by the time he was first seen striding the dusty streets of Pensacola with his rolling nautical gait, he had traveled the world from Russia to the South Seas. His life at sea was a litany of hairsbreadth escapes. In 1817, at the age of eighteen, he survived a nearly fatal bout of tropical fever in the East Indies. At twenty-one he was blown overboard from the yardarm of a ship into the frigid North Atlantic. He survived a yellow fever epidemic in Havana. In 1835 he and one of his sons were attacked by Mexican bandits who seized their boat and shot the elder Walker in the abdomen and the wrist. Walker and his son survived by swimming out to sea and treading water until night, and then hiking, stark naked, for twenty-four hours without fresh water until they reached help. He had been an abolitionist for more than a decade, after being converted by Reverend Samuel J. May, an ally of William Lloyd Garrison, in 1831, and he may have assisted fugitive slaves passing through Cape Cod as early as 1832.

Walker first appeared in Pensacola in 1836, piloting a sloop laden with potatoes, beets, bricks, and “other notions,” which he offered for sale. Compared to a bleak existence on Cape Cod, he found Florida's “soft and genial climate” positively luxurious, and he decided to stay on. His family joined him in 1837, and for the next five years he worked as a carpenter, boatwright, and caretaker for the property of a railroad, planned but never built, that was intended to link Pensacola with the plantation country in Alabama. He was known as a Bible-reading man, always a badge of respect in that evangelical age. But his outspoken interest in blacks attracted unfavorable attention. People thought him merely eccentric for tending a sick black man who was being held in the city jail as a runaway, and repeatedly praying with another prisoner, a slave who was falsely accused of raping a white woman. Although things like this could fairly be construed as Christian acts, Walker was known, more disturb
ingly, to consort with blacks “on terms of equality and intimacy,” the
Pensacola Gazette
later reported, even allowing them to eat with his family, and to be served by his own daughters. He had twice been called in by the mayor “in consequence of the reports in circulation that I was on good terms with the colored people.” Both times, he was warned that he might be the victim of violence if he did not respect local “rules and customs.” In 1842 Walker moved his family back to Massachusetts, but he came south again in the fall of 1843, to work as a shipbuilder in Mobile, Alabama. Then, just days before the meeting with Charles Johnson, he showed up in Pensacola, this time with a twenty-five-foot schooner-rigged whaleboat, with the idea of salvaging copper from a wreck at the bottom of the harbor. But the prospect of human salvage soon engaged his interest.

Johnson told Walker that he and three other slaves wanted him to take them to the free states. Walker was willing, but he knew that they could not travel far north along the Atlantic seaboard without being discovered. Instead, he proposed a daring plan. He volunteered to take Johnson and his friends to the British-ruled Bahamas, where slavery had been abolished eleven years earlier. They knew that fugitives could expect a welcome there. Both men would have remembered how less than three years earlier 135 slaves had mutinied on the brig
Creole
, en route to New Orleans, and sailed it to freedom in the Bahamas. Walker knew that the risks were immense. They would have to traverse almost one thousand miles in an open boat, without shelter from the weather, and unable to conceal themselves from passing ships. Walker told Johnson that if they made good, they could pay him whatever they thought his help had been worth. He asked for nothing else.

Escape by land from the Deep South was close to impossible. It is clear from interviews carried out among fugitives in Canada in the 1850s and 1860s that only a very small proportion of them came from anywhere south of Kentucky and Virginia. To reach the nearest free state overland, which was Ohio, Johnson and his friends would have had to travel seven hundred miles due north, through the slave states of Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky, all of them hostile to fugitives, and closely patrolled by slave catchers and local constables. Nowhere along the way could a fugitive count on finding assistance. (There was the rare exception: one celebrated fugitive would travel all the way from Huntsville, Alabama, to Ohio
clinging to the tops of railway cars.) A handful made their way across Texas and over the border into Mexico. The only other direction left open to them was the sea.

The sea was, in a sense, a commercial extension of the Northern states, and every Yankee ship that touched at a Southern port like a piece of free territory that suddenly came within the physical reach of restive slaves. Merchants based in New York and Boston dominated commerce everywhere along the coast, while New Englanders, New Yorkers, and free black sailors crewed the thousand-ton brigs and low-slung coasters that shipped cargoes of plantation-grown tobacco and cotton, New Jersey bricks, Georgia turpentine, Pennsylvania coal, and Hudson River ice among the hundreds of Southern ports between Norfolk and Galveston. Ashore, they mingled with enslaved as well as free black stevedores, carters, fishermen, pilots, and caulkers, blurring the edges of segregation and providing potential fugitives with access to inside information about friendly captains, abolitionism, and life in the free states. Southern ports were also entry points for subversive material. As early as 1809, several hundred pamphlets “of an insurrectionary character” were carried into Charleston by the black steward of a New York ship. Twenty years later, the black radical David Walker recruited sailors to smuggle his
Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
, with its call to arms, into Southern ports.

Escape by sea held an obvious appeal. A land journey that could take months, and was unlikely to succeed, might by sea take only a week or two, and from some ports just days. One of the more remarkable seaborne escapes took place in September 1832, when a band of eighteen enslaved men sailed a stolen boat directly from Northampton County, Virginia, to New York City. More commonly, fugitives slipped aboard Yankee ships as stowaways, or tried to negotiate their passage with a member of the crew. Slaves in coastal regions were alert to the arrival of any Northern ship. “No sooner, indeed, does a vessel, known to be from the North, anchor in any of these waters—and the slaves are pretty adroit at ascertaining from what state a vessel comes—than she is boarded, if she remains any length of time, and especially overnight, by more or less of them, in hopes of obtaining a passage in her to a land of freedom,” wrote Daniel Drayton, a New Jersey skipper whose notoriety as an abolitionist ultimately eclipsed Jonathan Walker's. Moses Roper, a very light-skinned man who could pass for white, succeeded in enlisting as a steward on a schooner bound for
New York. William Grimes, a slave in Savannah, was invited aboard a Boston-based brig by members of the racially mixed crew and kept hidden from the ship's officers until it arrived in the North. Charles Ball was permitted to board a ship, also at Savannah, with the help of a black sailor, and lay concealed in the hold among bales of cotton until it reached Philadelphia. These men were among the lucky few.

So far from the free states, assistance was almost always indispensable to a successful escape. Many, if not most, fugitives initially depended on ad hoc networks of family and friends who came together only temporarily to help them on their way to a coastal port. Long distance travel out of the port cities was an inverted image of the underground system as it existed in the North: while the web of agents willing to assist fugitives was steadily consolidating and expanding in the 1840s, in the South help from whites remained fragmented and driven more by the market value of slaves' desire to escape bondage than it was by idealism. Increasingly dangerous as the decade wore on, underground work usually hinged on the mercenary motives and the mercurial moods of captains and crews. Broaching the subject of flight, especially to a white man, was the riskiest step of all, since it would expose everyone involved to arrest. Contact had to be made so delicately that even the fugitive's target might not really understand what he was up to. Very few captains were willing to risk their commands on behalf of fugitive slaves: departures of suspect ships were vulnerable to expensive delays; sailors could be jailed indefinitely; captains themselves could be fined, threatened with trial, and barred completely from Southern ports. A North Carolina law mandated hanging for taking a fugitive out of the state, while captains outbound from Louisiana faced up to ten years in prison if they were caught aiding a fugitive. Such draconian legislation had the intended effect. Sea captains all along the coast understood that there would be consequences for becoming involved with a fugitive. In September 1846, in a case that would attract considerable attention in both the North and the South, the skipper of the Yankee brig
Ottoman
panicked when he discovered a stowaway slave en route to Boston from New Orleans. After failing to find a New Orleans–bound ship onto which he could off-load the fugitive, the captain handed him over to the pilot boat in Boston harbor, until the owners of the
Ottoman
arranged to ship him out on the outward-bound
Niagara
. After the
Niagara
ran aground, the fugitive stole a boat, but was recaptured, and
shipped out again on the
Vision
. Upon his return to New Orleans, the officers of the
Vision
were arrested for “possession” of a runaway.

Captains who did knowingly take fugitives on board expected to be paid well for it, by the fugitives. During the peak period of underground activity, in the 1850s, several captains worked closely with the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery office, ferrying fugitives north from Norfolk and the Chesapeake region. One of these regularly carried away at least two slaves on each voyage, and once took an astonishing total of twenty-one. Fugitives embarking in this manner from Norfolk, Virginia, where they could count on assistance from a cell of black underground agents, were expected to pay up to twenty-five dollars each for arranging passage, bribing harbor guards and officials, and obtaining forged passes, apart from the fees demanded by the captains themselves, which varied considerably. One captain took one hundred dollars from the fugitive John Hall for passage to Philadelphia, and 240 dollars from a separate party of four, consisting of a man, his wife, their son, and a friend. In another instance, four adult fugitives with a child paid a North Carolina skipper a total of 125 dollars to carry them from Norfolk to Philadelphia.