Bound for Canaan (44 page)

Slave owners who considered themselves honest and God-fearing were infuriated by the seeming impunity with which the Underground Railroad allegedly enticed away their valuable property. In truth, they credited the underground with a ubiquitousness and a reach that it did not have. But there were just enough traces of abolitionist activity where it was least expected to fuel fears of a far-flung conspiracy that had penetrated the innermost recesses of the South. There was the black head-waiter in Grenada, Mississippi, who was caught hiding a runaway in the garret of the hotel where he worked, and the Connecticut abolitionist posing as a preacher who was captured at Vicksburg in the very act of smuggling three slaves on board a steamboat bound for Cincinnati, and
the Yankee lumbermen who camped along the Mississippi River and sold cut wood to passing steamboats and, people said, secretly gave refuge to fugitives in return for work.

But the only place in the inner South where organized underground clearly went on without interruption was in the Quaker counties of North Carolina, centering on the New Garden Meeting, near Greensboro, Levi Coffin's home until his departure for Indiana, in the 1820s. Fugitives trickled into the Quaker hamlets from other parts of the state and, it is said, even from as far away as South Carolina, using specially notched coins to enable stationmasters to identify them. For the handful of abolitionists who dared help them, the pressure was close to debilitating. “The life of anxiety and extreme danger I was leading was rendering me nervous, excitable and suspicious of all my surroundings,” recalled Levi Coffin's cousin Addison Coffin, who became an underground conductor at the age of thirteen. “There was a constant sense of danger resting on my heart, a presentiment of impending peril.” After weeks or months concealed on local farms, fugitives were sent on foot or hidden in false-bottomed wagons to the Quaker colonies in Indiana, along the trans-Appalachian route the Coffin family had pioneered decades before. One Indiana-bound emigrant, Joshua Murrow, carried several fugitives all the way in such a wagon, from which he blithely sold off pottery and cornmeal to pay expenses along the way.

Addison Coffin left a vividly detailed account of the ingenious local techniques that were used to mark the way through the confusing tangle of back roads that meandered through rural North Carolina. At each fork, the fugitive was shown how to find a nail driven into a tree precisely three and a half feet from the ground, halfway around the tree. If the right-hand road was to be taken the nail was driven on the right-hand side; if the left, the nail was to the left. Where there were fences but no trees, the nail was driven in the middle of the second rail from the top, on the inside of the fence, and pointing either to the left or right. When nothing else was available, the nail was driven into a stake, or else a stone was so set as to be unnoticeable by day, but easily found at night. “When a fugitive was started on the road they were instructed into the
mystery
,” Coffin wrote. “When they came to a fork in the road, they would go to the nearest tree, put their arms around and rub downward, whichever arm struck the nail,
right or left, that was the road, and they walked right on with no mistake, so with fences, but the stakes or stones had to be found with their feet, which was tolerably easily done. Those who were doubtful as to their ability to remember details, would take a
string
and tie
short
pieces of string to the long one to represent the fork and cross roads, and then by tying knots which they understood make a complete but simple way that was almost unerring in its simplicity.”

The conductor's main duty was to keep the road well-marked, and when necessary to change and relocate the nails as emergencies required. “Coupled with the extreme personal danger, the strain on brain and nerve was so great that few conductors could stand it more than ten years without rest, and for that rest they generally went west, and took service on the lines in the free states, where it seemed like mere child's play, compared with the South,” wrote Coffin, who was close to a nervous breakdown when he left North Carolina in 1842, to settle near Levi and Catherine Coffin, in Indiana. Addison's brother Alfred continued working for the underground in North Carolina until 1853, when he was exposed, and fled for his life.

One of the most daring escapes of all from the Deep South was the flight of Ellen and William Craft, who, in December 1848, succeeded in traveling by train and steamship from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia in just three days, with the light-skinned Ellen disguised in man's clothes as an invalid young planter, and William posing as a loyal servant and interlocutor. Once in Philadelphia, the Crafts were taken under the wing of the Anti-Slavery Office, and they soon became among the most popular attractions on the abolitionist speakers' circuit. While the Crafts' dazzling escapade had little to do with the ongoing operation of the underground, it exerted a powerful effect on public opinion by portraying African Americans as bold, resourceful, and independent men and women, rather than the barely tamed savages or docile livestock that proslavery propaganda claimed. Northern imaginations were thrilled even more by the daring exploit of a Virginia slave named Henry Brown, whose incredible escape in March 1849 has lost nothing of its edge-of-the-seat suspense after a hundred and fifty years.

A skilled tobacco worker who, by his own account, up to then had been generally well treated and “escaped the lash almost entirely,” Brown
was smoldering with resentment, his wife and child having recently been sold away from him, in spite of his efforts to save enough money to buy their freedom. He had become friendly with a white merchant, Samuel Smith, who one day hinted to him, in the cryptic way that such conversations had to take place in the slave states, that as a man with a valuable trade he might be better off free. Making sure that no one else was near, Brown confessed that he had been “meditating” his escape. Could Smith give him any advice? Warily, Smith asked Brown if he were not afraid to speak to him of such things. Brown replied that, no, he wasn't, because he supposed that Smith “believed that every man had a right to liberty.” He was quite right, Smith assured him. After discussing and discarding several possible options for escape, Brown would write, “The idea suddenly flashed across my mind of shutting myself
up in a box
, and getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state.” A deeply religious man, he regarded the idea as a revelation direct from God.

Smith managed to send a message to the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office, advising it to watch for a crate that would be arriving on a certain date, and to open it immediately. Meanwhile, a free black friend of Brown's arranged for a carpenter to build a box three feet long, two feet wide, and two feet, six inches deep, to be lined with baize cloth. The fit would be tight, allowing the two-hundred-pound, five-foot-eight-inch-tall Brown no space to turn himself around. At about 4
A.M.
on March 29, Brown climbed into the box. Three gimlet holes were drilled opposite his face for air. He was handed a few biscuits and a cow's bladder filled with water. After the top was hammered on, the box was addressed to a contact in Philadelphia, and plainly marked “THIS SIDE UP.” Smith had the box delivered to the railway express office, where it was then put on a wagon and driven to the station. By the route that the box would have to follow, Philadelphia lay three hundred and fifty miles away.

The journey north from Richmond was a harrowing ordeal. At Potomac Creek, where the tracks then ended, baggage had to be offloaded and put aboard a steamer. Despite the instructions on the box, Brown was placed upside down, in a “dreadful position” where he remained for an hour and a half, “which from the sufferings I had thus to endure, seemed like an age to me,” he would write. “I felt my eyes swelling as if they would burst from their sockets; and the veins on my temples were
dreadfully distended with pressure of blood upon my head.” Brown tried painfully to move his hand to his face, but couldn't do it. He felt a cold sweat coming over him, and feared that he was close to death. He began fervently to pray. Soon afterward—miraculously, he believed—he heard a passenger complain that he had been standing for two hours and wanted something to sit on, and then threw down Brown's box so that it landed right side up, and sat on it with a friend. “I could now listen to the men talking, and heard one of them asking the other what he supposed
the box contained
,” Brown would recall. “His companion replied that he guessed it as ‘THE MAIL.'” At Washington, the box was taken off the steamboat, placed on a wagon and carried to the railroad depot. There, when the driver called for someone to help unload it, another voice replied that he should just throw it off, it didn't matter if whatever was in it broke, the railway company would pay for it anyway. “No sooner were these words spoken than I began to tumble from the wagon, and falling on the end where my head was, I could hear my neck give a crack, as if it had been snapped asunder and I was knocked completely insensible.” Next he heard someone saying that there was no room left for the box, and that it would have to wait for the next day's shipment on the “luggage train.” Another voice, belonging to some unknown clerk whose devotion to regulations probably saved Brown's life, replied that since the box had come with the express, it must be sent on with the express. The box was loaded on, and Brown was thrown once again on his head, though when the baggage was later shifted, he was finally placed upright for the rest of the trip to Philadelphia.

The next morning, twenty-seven hours after Brown left Richmond, several members of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee stood nervously around the crate, where it had been deposited by an Irish cartman on the floor of the Anti-Slavery Office on North Fifth Street. When the lid was pried off, Brown rose to his feet, extended his hand, and asked, “How do you do, gentlemen?” He then promptly fainted. When he came to, it seemed to him like nothing less than “a resurrection from the grave of slavery,” and he burst spontaneously into song:

As he sang, smiling men surrounded him, each more anxious than the other to offer help, he would write, and “bidding me a hearty welcome to the possession of my natural rights.”

 

A
ppeals to “natural rights” were the last thing that the proslavery lobby in Washington wished to hear. As the decade progressed, that very concept had increasingly been enshrined in personal liberty laws enacted by many Northern states. Such laws discouraged public officials from cooperating in the recapture of fugitives, and for the first time, in some states, extended to runaway slaves the right to a fair trial; although they were never uniformly enforced, the damage they did to Southerners' trust in the good faith of Northern state governments was severe. The underground, of course, continued to enrage Southerners by acting as if there was no federal fugitive slave law at all. In 1847 an astonishing forty-five fugitives had been fed, sheltered, and paraded through Battle Creek, Michigan, in a single day. “Everybody heard of their coming and every man, woman and child in town was out to see them,” Erastus Hussey, a local underground man-recalled. “It looked like a circus.” And in Delaware, a slave state no less, the underground stationmaster in Wilmington, Thomas Garrett, convicted in May 1848 for facilitating the escape of fugitives, dared to announce to the court that he considered the penalty imposed on him as a license to help fugitive slaves for the rest of his life. “If any of you know a slave who needs assistance, send him to me,” he declared proudly. Admitting that he had always feared to lose what little property he possessed, Garrett added, “But now that you have relieved me, I will go home and put another story on my house, so that I can accommodate more of God's poor.”

3

The single event that would do the most to shape both the nation's sectional politics for a decade to come, as well as the growth of the Underground Railroad, had nothing at all to do with slavery, and took place nearly three thousand miles away from Washington. On January 24, 1848,
perhaps on the very day that William Chaplin was meeting secretly with Daniel Drayton in Baltimore to plan the
Pearl
escape, a workman noticed several sparkling flakes of metallic ore in the mill-race that he was digging in the Sierra Mountains of California. Three weeks later, a Mormon merchant strode through the sleepy Mexican hamlet of San Francisco brandishing a bottle full of gold dust, shouting, “They've found gold in the American River!” In ways that no one could possibly foresee, the shock waves of the discovery would resonate through every town and city in America, through the marble halls of Congress, through the hardening ideological positions of the North and South, and along the distant lines of the Underground Railroad. Within weeks, news of the strike raced across the continent, around Cape Horn, and over the Pacific Ocean. San Francisco quickly mushroomed into a raucous, half-born city of fifteen thousand where eggs sold for ten dollars a dozen, and canvas tents were rented to gamblers at forty thousand dollars annually, payable in gold dust. By the autumn of the following year, at least ninety thousand gold seekers had poured into California. The vast majority were from the Northern states, and they brought their politics in their knapsacks. (William Lloyd Garrison's
Liberator
recorded its first California subscriber on February 17, 1849.) Ignoring tradition and counsels of patience, they declared themselves a state and ratified, by an overwhelming vote of twelve thousand to eight hundred, a constitution barring slavery from what abolitionists and proslavery forces alike recognized was the most valuable prize won by the United States in its recent war with Mexico. Southerners were apoplectic at this apparent fait accompli, which would upset the delicate balance of power that had existed since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, by reopening the question of slavery in the western territories. The crisis had been foreshadowed six years earlier, in the debate over the admission of Texas, which some proponents had wanted to see divided up into half a dozen or more slave states. The admission of California would tilt the Senate in favor of the free states. Angry talk of secession boiled through the South. John C. Calhoun wrote menacingly, “We have borne the wrongs and insults of the North long enough.”