Bound for Canaan (7 page)

Whitney later wrote, “There were a number of very respectable gentlemen at Mrs. Greene's who all agreed that if a machine could be invented which would clean cotton with expedition, it would be a great thing both to the inventor and to the country. I involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan of a machine in my mind.” It was the cotton gin, which would ultimately transform American slavery, project it into its boom time, and transform it into a pillar of the nineteenth-century American economy. Within ten days, Whitney had made a model, and soon after that a full-size machine, “with which one man will clean ten times as much cotton as he can in any other way before known,” Whitney exulted. “It makes the labor fifty times less, without throwing any class of People out of business.” The machine he created had an elegant simplicity. The cotton was picked up on a roller studded with metal teeth that carried it around to a metal grill; when the cotton was scraped off, the seeds dropped away. Simply by turning a hand crank, one slave could now do the work of a dozen. On large plantations, a water wheel could be used instead and the gin could do the work of hundreds.
On June 20, 1793, Whitney addressed his letter of application, along with a fee of thirty dollars, to Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state, whose office was charged with issuing patents. “Mr. Jefferson,” Whitney wrote to his father, “agreed to send the patent as soon as it could be made out.” He established a factory in New Haven, and was soon shipping gins southward, where they would lead to a spectacular burgeoning of cotton cultivation, which would soon be matched by an exploding demand for slaves.

American cotton exports grew from almost nothing in the early 1790s to six million pounds in 1796, to twenty million pounds by 1801, and they would only continue to grow. Cotton was an ideal crop for the lands that were now being opened up in the Southeast, once the Indian inhabitants were removed, by either persuasion or force. It required only about two hundred frostless days, and twenty-four annual inches of rainfall, and was so simple to cultivate that even men and women fresh from Africa could quickly be taught the monotonous techniques of hoeing, planting, and picking. It was also a very efficient crop, in terms of the economics of slavery. Cotton kept slaves at work almost continuously, tilling fields, cleaning the crop, and preparing new land for the next year's planting. Mississippi's production alone would swell from 20,000 bales in 1821, to 962,006 in 1859, almost one-quarter of the nation's total output. And in each of the four decades before 1840 the slave population of Mississippi more than doubled.

The phenomenal expansion of the cotton economy carried slavery with it across the coastal states, through the still half-settled Mississippi Territory, and beyond, until the “Cotton Kingdom” stretched from the Atlantic coast to Texas. By 1800, when slavery in New York was on the brink of extinction, Georgia would tally more than fifty-nine thousand slaves, and they would reach almost half a million by the eve of the Civil War. Slave traders made fortunes buying up “surplus” slaves, and long, grim lines of them chained together in awkward lockstep became a familiar sight on the roads leading westward from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas to the slave markets of the frontier Southeast. The new states wanted slaves, and more slaves. Lawyers, doctors, ministers, even the better class of “mechanics” dreamed of one day owning a plantation and slaves. “A plantation well stocked with hands, is the
ne plus ultra
of every man's ambition who resides at the south,” one Northern traveler ob
served. “Young men who come to this country, ‘to make money,' soon catch the mania, and nothing less than a broad plantation, waving with the snow white cotton bolls, can fill their mental vision.”

Although the movement for voluntary manumission lingered on, deluding those who supported it into thinking that they were having a serious impact on slavery as a whole, it was becoming clearer that slavery was not going to disappear. Even as states passed legislation limiting the transatlantic slave trade, the actual number of slaves in the United States continued to grow steadily. Voluntary manumissions freed thousands, but they were merely a drop in the demographic bucket as the total number of slaves swelled due to natural increase from just under 900,000 in 1800, to about 1.2 million in 1810, to slightly more than 2 million in 1830, more than doubling in just thirty years. Their number would double again by the outbreak of the Civil War.

4

On the morning of Jefferson's inauguration in 1801, there were already signs that the optimism of the Revolutionary era was a spent force. As idealism collided with economic imperatives, southerners began to insist that the right to own slaves was their most important liberty, and that to deprive them of it would be to subject them to “slavery.” The excesses of the French Revolution, followed soon afterward by the horrifying spectacle of successful slave insurrection against French rule on the island of Sante-Domingue (present-day Haiti), in 1791, raised slave owners' anxiety to the level of near panic. In the course of the decade, thousands of refugees fled to the United States, bearing tales of slaughter and rapine that fueled Americans' worst fears of what a slave rebellion might bring. George Washington's government advanced seven hundred thousand dollars to aid the embattled white planters, while rumors of an impending French invasion that would arm the slaves swept through the South. Jefferson predicted that the “revolutionary storm” would sweep through the United States, bringing massacres in its wake. He warned that if American slaves were not freed and deported, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.” Southern suspicions of secret collaboration between abolitionists
and slaves were further whetted by statements like those of a Presbyterian preacher named David Rice, who praised the rebels as “brave sons of Africa…sacrificing their lives on the altar of liberty,” and by the president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, who proclaimed that a “Negro war” in the United States would benefit the antislavery cause.

Southerners' worst fears seemed about to be realized in the summer of 1800 when the plot for a supposed rebellion was uncovered in Virginia. The mastermind was a free blacksmith named Gabriel, who after his capture confessed that the rebels' plan had been “to subdue the whole of the country where slavery was permitted.” All whites except Quakers, Methodists, and Frenchmen were to be massacred. The fury of rattled and vulnerable whites knew no bounds. “[W]here there is any reason to believe that any person is concerned, they ought immediately to be hanged, quartered, and hung upon trees on every road as a terror to the rest,” one planter declared. A hunt for the conspirators resulted in the arrest of hundreds of blacks, usually with little or no evidence. Twenty-six eventually were executed, even though no white person suffered actual harm. In the aftermath, free blacks were particularly singled out, and their very freedom treated as a subversive threat to those still enslaved. New laws prohibited voluntary manumissions without prior official approval, and compelled newly freed blacks to leave the state or face reenslavement. In North Carolina, the law barred the manumission of any slave “under any pretense whatsoever” except for meritorious service, and then only by license from the county court, along with the posting of a two hundred pound bond to guarantee each freedman's “good behavior.” Free blacks who traveled without authorization could be arrested, fined, and even sold into slavery, like William Hyden, a New York-born mulatto who en route to Washington, D.C., was arrested as an alleged runaway, and put up for sale in Virginia, even though potential buyers complained that he was “too white.” They might also be reenslaved if they defaulted on a fine, or failed to pay their taxes, and they were barred from organizing schools, and from meeting together for almost any other activity that whites felt threatened by. White abolitionists, too, were increasingly treated as subversives. Members of abolition societies were prohibited from sitting on juries hearing suits brought by slaves, who claimed they had been manumitted by a will or other legal instrument, making it virtually impossible for a slave to win freedom in court, no matter how just his or her cause.

Meanwhile, free blacks now began to appear for the first time as a significant proportion of the population in Northern cities. Between 1765 and 1800, the number of free blacks in Philadelphia grew almost sixty-five times over, from 100 to 6,436, more than 9 percent of the city's population. A similar though less dramatic pattern occurred in other cities. In New York, the number of free blacks tripled between 1790 and 1800 to 3,500, when more than half the city's black residents were free. Some, of course, had been manumitted by local masters. Others had escaped to freedom in the chaos of the Revolutionary War, or won their independence by fighting in the ranks of the colonial forces. As Southern states made life more difficult for free blacks, expelling numbers of those who had been freed by their masters, many of them turned their eyes northward as well. Still others, growing numbers of them, were fugitives; advertisements in Southern papers began to mention that a fugitive had last been seen “on the Pennsylvania road.”

For fugitive slaves, and eventually for the development of the Underground Railroad, the growth of Northern cities was crucial. There, fugitives could hope to disappear among friends, and former slaves learned the autonomy and self-reliance that were necessary to build lives in freedom. A free African American could even dare to defy a white, as an unnamed mulatto in New York did, in 1798, when confronted by a pursuing white man named Finch, who claimed that a black thief had fled into the mulatto's cellar. The mulatto “stood at the Door with some kind of weapon in his hands and Declared he would knock the said Finch's Brains out if Offered to come in.” In cities, blacks also came into contact, often for the first time, with white people who treated them as near equals, and for whom slavery was a spiritual abomination. As Jefferson, the country's most graceful, if flawed, advocate of the Rights of Man ascended to its highest office on the steps of the Capitol, in the cobbled lanes of Philadelphia, fugitive slaves, free blacks, and white Quakers were discovering one another, and recognizing one another as allies in the struggle that was to come.

1

A genial New Jersey farm boy named Isaac Tatum Hopper was just one among the many young men packed off by their parents in the hamlets surrounding Philadelphia in the years after the Revolution, in hope that he would make his fortune in the great city. By the end of his life, he would be a legend, a venerated figure who appeared on public platforms with William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, and other abolitionist luminaries. But arriving in the nation's then-capital in 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, he was merely a sixteen-year-old tailor's apprentice new to city life, and hoping for adventure. Unusual for his time, even among abolitionists, he was unaffected by color prejudice. He traced
his sympathy for blacks to an elderly African farmhand named Mingo who, when Hopper was a small child, had recounted to him in tears how he had been kidnapped from his home across the sea by slave traders. Soon after Hopper's arrival in Philadelphia, he encountered his first fugitive, an enslaved sailor who had jumped ship and was desperate to escape recapture. Wanting to help in some way, Hopper asked among his neighbors until he heard about a Quaker in rural Bucks County who was reputed to be “a good friend to colored people.” He then found someone to provide the fugitive with a letter of introduction and directions to the man's house where, Hopper was later assured, the sailor was kindly received and provided with a job. The experience taught Hopper two simple but lasting lessons: that he could make the difference between slavery and freedom for a fellow human being, and that with imagination it was possible to hide a fugitive where no one could find him.

Nowhere in the United States was the atmosphere of democratic change more palpable than in Philadelphia. As Hopper wandered its cobbled lanes, he mingled with Quakers in their distinctive broad-brimmed hats, immigrants from Ireland and Germany, French refugees from the bloody revolution in Sainte-Domingue, indentured servants, free blacks, and slaves. He marveled at the templelike public buildings that self-consciously evoked the classical inspiration of the Founding Fathers, and at the flotillas of tall-masted brigs moored in the Delaware River, proclaiming that the city of seventy thousand was not just the nation's only metropolis, but one of the greatest ports in the world. Philadelphia's wealth was everywhere to be seen. At the same time, the capital also presented a panorama of appalling poverty, crime, and disorder of a magnitude never before encountered in North America. The poor and disenfranchised could be thrown into prison for minor transgressions without evidence or trial, while the constables charged with maintaining order were notoriously corrupt, “ready for any low business, provided it were profitable.” Epidemics aided by inadequate sanitation carried people away by the scores and the hundreds. The French traveler C. F. Volney reported that the area around the docks, where many blacks lived, exceeded “in public and private nastiness anything ever beheld in Turkey.” While thousands of men and women who had spent decades in bondage were experimenting with liberty for the first time in their lives, African Americans were excluded from most schools, denied the right to vote, barred from
many public places, and relegated mostly to menial occupations, as chimney sweeps, wood cutters, casual laborers, and domestics.

Although slavery still existed in Pennsylvania as it did almost everywhere in the United States, nowhere else was the concept of freedom widening so rapidly for so many people. In 1780, more than eighty years before the Civil War, the state's emancipation law—the country's first—declared that while slaves born before that year were to remain in bondage, those born after that date would automatically become free when they reached their twenty-eighth birthday. The law also effectively ended slave trading locally by barring the purchase of new slaves within the state, and mandating that any personal slaves brought from out of state would automatically become free after six months' residence in Pennsylvania. By 1800, all but a few masters within the city had voluntarily manumitted their slaves, while in the surrounding region slave owners were discovering that their once docile property could walk away from them with comparative ease.

At a time when slavery was flourishing as never before in the South, and still widely tolerated in the North, word spread rapidly that Philadelphia was a haven for those who would be delivered from bondage. In 1800 a naval ship that captured two slave trading vessels off the coast of Delaware delivered 134 Africans to the city to be set free. Quaker planters in the West Indies, yielding to the abolitionist pressure of their coreligionists, sent their manumitted slaves to Philadelphia by the hundreds. Philadelphia courts also freed hundreds more French-speaking slaves who had been brought from Sante-Domingue by their fleeing masters. Fugitives walked off farms in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and they made their way north by land and sea from Virginia and Maryland. For the city's African Americans, little was certain but uncertainty, however. Success in reaching Philadelphia was still no guarantee of safety. Because the state emancipation act did not apply to runaways, fugitives were detained in the county jail until their owner was notified. If no owner appeared, the law provided that a runaway could be sold or set free at the discretion of the local court. The outcome depended less on precedent than on the vagaries of individual magistrates, whose personal biases, particularly about slavery, were as much a factor in their decisions as their knowledge of the law, or lack of it. Runaways were numerous, vulnerable, and largely unprotected. Fugitives never knew which white person might direct them to a
friendly magistrate, help find them a job, and transport them to a farm outside the city where they couldn't be found; or report them to the authorities, lock them up and send for their master, or kidnap them and sell them into slavery again across the Maryland state line.

Philadelphia was destined to become the country's first laboratory of abolition, but it would take a form much different from the orderly one envisioned but never brought to fruition by Thomas Jefferson. The Founding Fathers had provided the early abolition movement with a secular ideology by bestowing upon it the patriotic themes of natural rights and political empowerment. But their repeated efforts to legislate peaceful emancipation had tested the nation's commitment to its revolutionary ideals, and found it grievously wanting. The hard work of emancipation thus increasingly fell to Americans of a different type. They were not the aristocratic products of the Enlightenment, but men and women driven by a religious imperative that the rationalist Jefferson disdained, in league with the free blacks whom he feared with an almost skin-crawling disgust.

An engraving of Isaac Hopper made later in life shows a rather short, stout man, oval-faced and clean shaven, with a small, firmly set mouth, and long, wavy hair. (Hopper was friendly with the exiled Joseph Bonaparte, who lived near Philadelphia, and the former king of Italy enjoyed pointing the Quaker out to acquaintances as the nearest resemblance he had ever seen to his brother Napoleon, the deposed emperor of France.) Most of what is known about Hopper's early life is found in a biography written by his protégée, the abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child in 1853, a year after his death. What comes through, along with an impression of unflappable self-possession and steely determination, is an impish delight in adventure that found its outlet in the hide-and-seek played by hunter and fugitive, and dramatic face-to-face confrontations with furious masters who, it was said, “had abundant reason to dread Isaac T. Hopper as they would a blister of Spanish flies.”

Although not born a Quaker, Hopper was linked to the Society of Friends through his uncle, a tailor, to whom he was apprenticed, and in 1795, at the age of twenty-four, he was formally received into the sect. He embraced his new faith with the unflagging enthusiasm of a convert, shunning music and dancing as a “useless and frivolous pursuit,” and as a matter of Quaker principle, refusing to pay taxes to maintain the state militia, compelling the authorities to collect the tax in kind by carrying off
pieces of his furniture. A tenacious traditionalist, he continued to wear buckled shoes, high stockings, knee-length trousers, and broad-brimmed Quaker-style hat long after they had gone out of style. The Quakers soon recognized in Hopper's combination of stubbornness, conviction, and gentleness of manner a talent for what a much later age would call “social work.”

In April 1796 Hopper was elected to membership in the Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the first organization in the United States to proclaim abolition as its explicit goal. He was appointed first to a charitable committee whose members visited the homes of the black poor, to collect information on their needs, to help find them jobs, and to arrange education for their children, an experience that greatly deepened his insight into the life of the city's African Americans, and provided him with innumerable contacts that would later prove invaluable in his underground work. In the meantime, he also served as an overseer for Philadelphia's first school for black children and as a teacher in a school for black adults, where he taught classes two or three evenings a week. In 1801 the Abolition Society handed him a new and far more challenging assignment: to investigate, and represent before the law, the claims of blacks who asserted that their liberty was being denied them illegally. Some of these were the victims of attempted kidnappings, and others of mistaken identity. Still others, though they dared not admit it publicly in a city where many in authority were ready to send them back to their masters, were really fugitive slaves.

In the first years of the new century, Hopper and his collaborators inside Philadelphia and in its surrounding countryside became what can fairly be described as the first operating cell of the abolitionist underground. Their numbers were few and their reach was limited, but the techniques that they developed eventually became a model of cooperation across racial and class lines, bringing together middle-class white tradesmen, Quaker farmers, black stevedores, and other African Americans in a collaborative effort that functioned with little or no central direction, and no distinctions of rank. Of course, they did not call their activities the “Underground Railroad”: the invention of iron railways still lay a generation in the future. Hopper and his friends hardly thought of what they were doing as a system at all, but rather as the private actions of a handful of like-minded men—and apparently they were all men at this time, as far
as can be known—doing what their individual consciences required them to do. Hopper, the most active of them, certainly had no grand national scheme in mind. He was no strategist. Rather, he led by example, bequeathing to the activists who followed him an ethic of unflinching personal responsibility, boldness, and quiet self-sacrifice.

In 1804 a black man in his mid-thirties appeared at the offices of the Abolition Society, and explained that he was a slave to Pierce Butler, a senator from South Carolina, but had lived most of the last eleven years with his master in Pennsylvania. Butler now intended to take him to Georgia. The black man, “Ben,” was married to a free woman, and did not want to leave her. The society's governing committee agreed that since Ben had lived in Pennsylvania far longer than the six months stipulated by law, he was clearly entitled to his freedom. A writ of habeas corpus was obtained, and Isaac Hopper was chosen to serve it upon Butler at his Chestnut Street home. Butler, “a tall, lordly looking man, imperious in manner,” ordered Hopper out, denouncing him as “a scoundrel.” Said Butler, “I am a citizen of South Carolina. The laws of Pennsylvania have nothing to do with me.” It was as if, in Butler's mind at least, the two men lived not just in different states but in different countries, which in a sense they did. Butler appeared in court to defend his property, as he saw it, maintaining that as a member of Congress, he was allowed to keep his slave in Pennsylvania as long as he pleased. A lawyer appointed by the society to represent Ben argued that the law to which Butler referred had only applied as long as Congress met in Philadelphia, but that it had become a dead letter once the government had moved to the new capital at Washington. To Butler's fury, his slave was declared a free man on the spot. As the pacifist Hopper continued to hustle about the waterfront on his missions of aid, he probably never imagined that the underground that he was inventing would eventually extend its reach across every Northern state, and that it would help bring the nation to the brink of Civil War.

2

The underground borrowed much from both the tightly disciplined organization and the self-contained style of the Society of Friends. Quakers
had themselves been a persecuted minority both in England and in the North American colonies, and they knew that their survival depended on protecting the integrity of their community against outsiders, regardless of their internal disagreements. Moral opposition to slavery was a core Quaker tenet, although political activism was not. Even those who disliked Isaac Hopper's activities at least tolerated them. Many Quakers strongly opposed political engagement and law-breaking, and others, whatever their moral opposition to slavery, were deeply racist. But such internal struggles were almost never aired publicly. Turning in a fellow Quaker to secular authorities for practicing his religion as he saw it was virtually unthinkable. Thus it often would prove easy for fugitives to disappear in plain sight in Quaker communities, even where only a small minority might be directly involved in underground work.

Hopper's opponents—and there were many in a city where abolitionist sentiment was far from universal—attempted to dismiss him as a “meddlesome Quaker.” At least once, a magistrate infuriated by Hopper's unyielding defense of a fugitive slave had him thrown bodily out of the courtroom. For years he lived with threats of assassination, attacks on his family, and arson against his house. But to Hopper none of this seemed to matter. Antislavery work was for him a profoundly religious act. “We may perform works of benevolence and kindness that are ‘acceptable to God and approved of men,' which require but little self-denial,” Hopper wrote, in one of the few documents in his own hand that still survives. “But when duty calls us to engage in such, that are unpopular, and in the discharge of which we risk the loss of friendship of those we love to be faithful therein, requires more devotion to principle and more firmness than many possess; and yet it is the path which leads to the enjoyment of that peace and consolation which the world can neither give nor take away.”