Forbidden Fruit (10 page)

Peter left Ohio with eighty dollars in his pocket and a worn carpetbag. He traveled
by steamer up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh and then by stagecoach to Philadelphia,
America’s first capital city and home of the country’s first bank, first hospital,
first daily newspaper, first public library, first public grammar school, first U.S.
flag and first antislavery society. He knew from old stories that he should look for
his family in the Delaware Bay area. By chance he met a minister named Byas, who took
him to the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office. There, the man then known as Peter Friedman
told his story to a young black man. As the young man listened to Peter’s incredible
story, his face began to change. The details were so familiar, and the names were
names he knew as well as his own. The young man also had a mother who had been named
Sidney before she became Charity and a father named Levin, and he had grown up hearing
stories about the two boys his mother had left behind, losing them to slavery. Moreover,
the man calling himself Peter Friedman looked exactly like the young man’s own mother.

“By this time I perceived that a wonderful development was about to be made,” the
young man wrote. “My feelings became unutterable, although I endeavored to surpress
[
sic
] them with much effort, but the fact that this Peter was one of my long absent brothers
stared me too full in the face to gainsay or dispute the evidence for one moment.”

The young man was William Still, the youngest of the eighteen children Charity Levin
bore after escaping from Maryland. After moving to Philadelphia in 1844, he had worked
as a mail clerk and janitor for the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery,
becoming chairman of the General Vigilance Committee in 1852. He had built a network
of safe hiding places for fugitives, raised funds for them and carefully monitored
the activity of slave catchers in the city. Under his direction, the committee aided
nearly eight hundred fugitives by the start of the Civil War. However, the former
Peter Gist / Peter Friedman found it difficult to believe that he was Peter Still
and had stumbled upon a relative so easily. But little by little, as he met one family
member after another, he had to accept the truth. His mother was still alive, and
his five brothers and three sisters were comfortable. Charity and Levin had built
a life for themselves in South Jersey, but they never forgot the two boys they’d left
behind and never stopped sharing the tale with other family members.

Newspapers all over the world ran stories about Peter Still, calling him the “Man
Who Bought Himself.” Seth Concklin, a white abolitionist, came across a copy of the
Pennsylvania Freeman
newspaper containing Peter Still’s story and read that Peter had a wife and children
in slavery and would “as soon go out of the world as not to go back and do all he
could for them.” Concklin volunteered to travel on the Underground Railroad and bring
Peter’s wife, Vina, and their children out of Alabama. For most people, even Underground
Railroad conductors, this would have been a bold act. But Concklin had always displayed
a curious blend of caution and recklessness, stinginess and generosity, responsibility
and daring.

After the death of his father, the New York–born Concklin supported his mother and
sisters as a peddler, squeezing all he could from every penny. To help the family
make ends meet, he once arranged for all of them to live in what was considered a
haunted house, staying there rent-free for a year to prove the house wasn’t swirling
with spirits. He was a man who could walk fifty miles in a day and row a boat all
night without resting. He was a man who squeezed pennies but would give his last dollar
to a person with empty pockets. Once he became an abolitionist, he took that all the
way, too.

Looking at history from a twenty-first-century perspective, it is easy to conclude
that the abolitionists were right and the slaveholders wrong. Yet abolitionists made
up only a small minority of nineteenth-century America, clinging to beliefs that most
Americans either opposed or ignored. Some white abolitionists acted purely out of
religious conviction, not caring for the actual company of blacks. Yet in both Syracuse
and Rochester, Seth Concklin had shown a commitment to extreme actions, stopping two
black men from being lynched by drawing the mob’s anger on himself. In Springfield,
Illinois, he aided fugitives escaping on the Underground Railroad, but seldom acted
in concert with others. Liberating Peter Still’s family was the perfect adventure
for a man who had drifted in and out of a Shaker community that believed in Christian
socialism, the gift of many tongues, prophecy and visions, communion with the dead,
power over physical disease, everybody working for the common good and women having
the same power and authority as men.

Peter Still would have preferred working and saving the money to buy his family’s
freedom just as he had worked and saved to buy his own. However, his brother William
opposed paying slave owners for liberty. Peter finally agreed to Concklin’s plan even
though escaping the Deep South meant traveling thousands of danger-crammed miles.
There were some safe houses even in the Deep South, such as stockyard owner Jacob
Burkle’s house on the outskirts of Memphis, only one-quarter mile from the Mississippi
River. However, Concklin would have to provide his own havens. Peter gave him an apron
of Vina’s that he had brought with him and some traveling money. Vina would recognize
the apron and know that Peter had sent Concklin. After memorizing directions to McKiernan’s
plantation, Concklin set out alone from Philadelphia early in January 1851. He had
Vina’s apron in his pocket. After making contact with Peter’s family, he stitched
together a plan that would take the family to Canada.

While buying a rowboat in Cincinnati, Concklin adopted the identity of a Southern
slave owner, calling himself John H. Miller. Traveling in rowboats and on steamboats,
he returned to Alabama. He met with the Stills while getting his shoes mended and
made the arrangements for their escape. He took Vina, Peter Jr., Levin Jr. and Catharine
away in a skiff and for seven nights they rowed, starting at the Tennessee River,
passing Eastport, Mississippi, arriving at Paducah, following the Ohio River to the
Illinois-Indiana border and then heading up the Wabash River. At one point a boatman
ordered Concklin and his party to stop. When they didn’t, someone fired guns at their
boat. On Sunday morning, March 23, 1851, they landed at New Harmony, Indiana, and
journeyed to several resting places. A black man named Charles Grier offered them
his hospitality and then took them sixteen miles to David Stormont, who lived near
Princeton, Indiana.

Southern sympathizers and slave hunters watched Stormont’s log house, suspecting him
of running an Underground Railroad station. When asked if he had helped runaways,
he always replied that he clothed the naked and fed the hungry. Sometimes when he
returned from church, men followed him. It was probably good that they kept their
distance since Stormont took a gun as well as a Bible to church. Mrs. Stormont also
kept a teakettle of boiling water handy, intending to blind anyone who tried to enter
her house.

After leaving the Stormont house, the Still family was captured on Friday, March 28,
by seven men on horseback. They were within thirty miles of Vincennes, the oldest
still-existing lasting settlement in Indiana and the place from which William Henry
Harrison, who was proslavery in the early 1800s, once governed the vast Indiana Territory.

An April 9, 1851, an account in the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
summarized the whole story in three sentences: “At Vincennes, In. on Saturday last
a white man and four negroes were arrested. The negroes belong to B. McKiernan, of
South Florence, Ala., and the man who was running them off calls himself John H. Miller.
The prisoners were taken charge of by the Marshal of Evansville.”

Concklin refused to leave the family, remaining in the wagon as slave catchers drove
the fugitives twenty-five miles south to the jail in Vincennes. Concklin was free
to go, but he remained nearby, visiting the fugitives every day and trying to reassure
them. After McKiernan offered a six-hundred-dollar reward for the “thief” who had
taken his slaves, Concklin was arrested, too. When McKiernan arrived, the five prisoners
were taken from jail, Vina’s sons and Concklin in chains, and placed on a coach to
Evansville, Indiana. There they boarded a steamboat and started down the Ohio River
for Alabama. Near Paducah, Kentucky, Seth Concklin disappeared from the steamboat,
possibly while McKiernan was guarding him alone. His chained, mutilated body soon
washed up on the shores of the Cumberland River. Some claimed he had killed himself,
leaping into the river to avoid standing trial for slave stealing in a courtroom thick
with Alabama hate. Others insisted he’d tried to escape from slave catchers and tumbled
into the river’s mouth, drowning in a tangle of panic and chains.

After hearing various explanations for Concklin’s death—including accidental drowning
and suicide—the Reverend R. N. Johnston, a Concklin acquaintance, decided he’d probably
been hit in the head and thrown overboard. In his memoirs, Johnston wrote:

Meanwhile, McKiernan promptly sent William Still a letter offering to free Peter’s
family for five thousand dollars. The sum seemed so unimaginable nobody thought he
could raise it. But he did. In November 1852, Peter began acquainting himself with
the difficulties of fund-raising for freedom. It was a crowded field, full of people
with stories, most of them true but some false. A Syracuse newspaper even warned people
against “colored men” who were supposedly running a scam, soliciting funds for themselves
instead of enslaved relatives. All the same, Peter Still began making the rounds of
Northeast churches and abolitionists. He told his story. He passed out letters of
introduction from leading abolitionists. He collected checks. He told his story again
and again, talking to anyone who could listen, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author
of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. According to copies of his fund-raising
receipts, he raised funds in Bath, Maine; in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; in Norwich,
Connecticut; in Syracuse, New York; in Toronto; in Boston and many other places in
between. Sometimes he collected as little as forty dollars, and sometimes he collected
as much as $355 in one visit. It had to be a tiring and sometimes heart-wrenching
time.

Finally, after two and a half years, he returned to Philadelphia with the money to
negotiate for the release of his children. He was near collapse, but “with a force
of affection, a perseverance, an earnestness of faith rarely seen,” as the
National Era
put it, he finally arranged for the release of his family.

Early on Saturday morning, December 31, 1854, Peter Still stood at a wharf in Cincinnati,
waiting for the arrival of the steamboat
The Northerner.
The boat docked and Peter’s wife, Vina, stood in the doorway, clutching her black
shawl with one hand and waving to him with the other. His children were there, too,
ready for the carriage ride to the Friedman home and hot breakfast before an open
fire. According to newspaper accounts, one son was twenty-seven and the other twenty-four.
The articles don’t mention the age of the Stills’ daughter, Catharine. For the first
time in her life, Vina enjoyed having someone serve her. Peter and Vina Still and
their children headed east on January 3, 1855, reaching Philadelphia on January 10.
Shortly after that, they came to Peter’s mother’s house in Burlington, New Jersey.
By then Charity Still was in her seventies.

She had never thought she’d see her son again. Now here he was, standing proud.

Peter and Vina Still and their family lived briefly with relatives and then found
work in a Burlington boardinghouse. This enabled them to buy a ten-acre vegetable
farm in Burlington near Peter’s mother. Young Levin Jr. became a blacksmith in Beverly,
New Jersey, and Peter Jr. became a house servant and carriage driver in New Hope,
Pennsylvania. Peter and Vina were among the eleven organizers of Burlington’s Second
Baptist Church, the oldest black Baptist church in the county. Kate Pickard, a teacher
in the female seminary at Tuscumbia, Alabama, recounted their experiences in a book
published in 1856 titled
The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and
His Wife, “Vina,” after Forty Years of Slavery.
The
New York Daily Times
recommended it to “all those who really desire to fathom the heights and depths of
that Iniquity which is threatening the destruction of our Republic.” A
National Era
review of the book called it and other similar works proof that there was no truth
to the “foul slander that the colored man cannot be elevated….” Unfortunately, Pickard’s
book was written while slavery still existed and the Still family remained in danger.
To protect Sidney Still, who had changed her name to Charity, the book never talked
about her flight to freedom and repeated the falsehood that Peter and Levin were free
black children who had been kidnapped near Philadelphia and sold into slavery. Variations
of that story still show up in modern history books.