Authors: Fergus Bordewich
Blacks returned the Canadians' welcome with extravagant loyalty. They were staunch supporters of the most conservative Tories, believing with some reason that continuing rule by royalists best ensured that Canada would remain under the British flag. Blacks took a particular pride in bearing arms and wearing the uniform of colonial militia. For men who had been chattels only a few years or even months before, who would have been executed in the South for daring to carry guns, and flogged just for daring to protect their wives and daughters, or for that matter their own lives, the ability to defend themselves may have been the single most liberating experience of all. Strikingly, black militia companies had the lowest rate of desertion in the colonial forces.
Their mettle was tested in the winter of 1837, when the colonial authorities faced rebellion by reformers who demanded a republic, and an
end to rule by local oligarchies. The rebels recruited volunteersâ“fillibusters,” as they were then calledâin New York state, and moved to invade Canada with small forces across the Niagara and Detroit River frontiers. The Crown recruited heavily in the black townships of Canada West. Nearly a thousand blacks volunteered for service in a single month, including almost every black man in the town of Hamilton. Lieutenant Governor Head wrote that “they hastened as volunteers in wagon loads to the Niagara frontier to beg from me permission” to fight. Among them was Josiah Henson, who joined a company that helped defend Fort Malden. When the rebel schooner
Anne
sailed down the Detroit River firing its guns into the town of Sandwich, a memorable incident in the brief war, Henson was among the men who waded into the river and helped to take the ship's crew prisoner after it ran aground on a sandbar. The rebels were easily defeated, with little loss of life. For years afterward, Canadians remembered how the refugees had rallied to the Union Jack, and black military companies enjoyed something of a patriotic vogue. The Chatham militia, in particular, was a local tourist attraction, impressive in its scarlet uniforms. A British visitor wrote, “They are all runaway slaves (barring the officers); they look fierce and pompous enough; I daresay they would fight like devils with the Yankees.” Blacks remembered the war as a glorious victory, not just over rebels who they feared would carry the spirit of repression north into Canada along with their American-style politics, but also over the scorn of whites who maintained as an article of racist faith that black men lacked the courage to fight. Freedom created its own rituals, in which pride, self-confidence, and defiance increasingly replaced the servile habits of slavery. In 1842 Chatham's black community celebrated the ninth anniversary of emancipation throughout the British Empire with an appropriately martial flourish, as black, red-coated militiamen fired twenty-one rounds from a cannon stationed on the parade ground, a sight that must have chilled the heart of any Southerner there, had one been present.
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While living as a farmer, first at Fort Erie and then at Colchester, Henson was also living a kind of double life as a conductor for the Underground Railroad. He claimed in his autobiography to have led a total of 118 fugitives out of Kentucky, in the course of several rescue missions. Unfortunately, his account of these exploits is sketchy, possibly because money was involved and the exchange of cash for assistance did not fit the template of the selfless abolitionist motivated only by idealism and self-sacrifice. His involvement with the underground began with a sermon. One Sunday, he preached on the duty of former slaves who were safe in Canada to bring about the freedom of those still in servitude. Afterward, he was approached by a refugee named James Lightfoot, who had escaped from Kentucky several years earlier. Lightfoot explained that he had left behind his parents, three sisters, and four brothers on a plantation near Maysville, on the Ohio River. The sermon had left him feeling guilty for having done nothing to help them get to Canada. He was willing to pay someone to go to Kentucky to bring them north. The two men met together several times after that. Henson, in his own words, was moved by “seeing the agony of his heart in behalf of his kindred.” He was also struggling to survive in a land where every man was on his own, and he needed money. There is no reason to doubt Henson's sympathy, but it is likely that the meetings included negotiations over the price that Henson would charge for undertaking such a dangerous venture.
They evidently came to an agreement, for Henson says that he traveled southward on foot through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Whether he was in contact with the underground during the trip he does not say, but it seems clear from later events that he knew where to find it when he wanted it. Once in Kentucky, he succeeded in making contact with Lightfoot's family. But the result was disappointing. Lightfoot's parents were too frail to travel, and his sisters were unwilling to risk the lives of their small children. The four brothers and a nephew were willing, but they were reluctant to abandon their parents and sisters at such short notice. The brothers promised Henson that if he returned for them in a year, they would be ready to go. Meanwhile, Henson had heard of a party of slaves fifty miles deeper into Kentucky, in Bourbon County, who wanted
to escape, but needed a guide. After a week spent working out a plan of escape, he led the group across the Ohio River, and arrived in Cincinnati the third night after their departure, where they “procured assistance,” an allusion, certainly, to the Underground Railroad. The following year, Henson says, he returned to Kentucky and brought away the Lightfoot brothers, as he had promised.
How much Henson was paid for this and for similar jobs that he undertook is unknown. But his profits from such clandestine work may well have helped him to save enough money to lease his share of the land at Colchester, and later to purchase two hundred acres near Dresden. That a man like Hensonâsecure with his family in Canada, and nothing if not acute at assessing risks and rewardsâwould undertake such dangerous work was less unusual than it might seem. It was not uncommon for fugitives to hire agents, white or black, to go south on their behalf, to rescue enslaved members of their family. As Levi Coffin bluntly expressed it, the underground operated on different terms in the South: “It was done for money.” A certain free black man living in Buffalo, who “was well paid for his work,” made a business out of going to the South after the wives of slaves who had found a home in Canada or the northern states. M. C. Buswell, whose family was part of the underground in northern Illinois, remembered a black man known to them only as “Charlie,” a former slave from Missouri, “a bright and determined fellow,” who for several years led fugitives on foot from Missouri across northern Illinois, and ultimately to Canada where, according to Buswell, who encountered him many times, “he succeeded in planting quite a large colony of his people.” How another Canadian, this one a white man, carried out one of the most memorable rescues in the Ohio River valley gives some idea of how Henson may have gone about his clandestine work.
One day in June 1841, Reverend John Rankin was picking raspberries in the garden behind his hilltop home at Ripley, Ohio when he looked up to see standing before him a white stranger dressed in a homespun jacket buttoned to the top of his pants, an outfit common enough in parts of Canada, but outlandish in the Ohio Valley. Even more startling to Rankin was the stranger's companion, the squat black woman “Eliza,” who had fled across the ice-bound Ohio three years earlier, and whom Rankin hadn't expected to see again.
“Oh, master Rankin, I want my daughter,” she said.
The man with her was a French Canadian. The two had walked to Ripley from Cleveland, almost three hundred miles away. They intended to cross the river and bring away Eliza's grown daughter and her four children. She explained that the Canadian, whose name has gone unrecorded, was a rugged fellow who had worked as sailor, fisherman, and farmer, and understood the risks if he was caught. She had promised to pay him well. How she acquired the money Rankin does not say, but it is possible that she raised it by recounting the story of her escape to white church congregations and asking for donations, a common practice.
Without a country, without rights, without scope for their ambitions, without respect, without security, family was all that most slaves had, and its very precariousness made its bonds all the more precious. Eliza's own freedom was the only real capital she possessed, and she had decided to invest it in the salvation of her family. Since communication between slaves and relatives in the North, especially those in Canada, was all but impossible, Eliza's daughter of course knew nothing of this plan.
“Nonsense!” Rankin exclaimed when he had heard them out. He was consistently opposed to gambling the life of a free person who was safe on the uncertain chance of liberating any number of enslaved ones, even family. He looked the Canadian up and down, and then said to Eliza, “As sure as you and that man go over there, they will catch you and sell you down the river, and they will hang him. Now do not try it.”
Eliza made it clear that they would go ahead with or without his help. Resigning himself, Rankin found Eliza temporary work with an abolitionist family near Ripley, and togged out the Canadian in a suit of less conspicuous clothes.
The Canadian found work chopping wood for steamboats and clearing land at the Thomas Davis farm, in Kentucky, where Eliza's daughter was enslaved, two and a half miles from the river. He found accommodations in the river port of Dover, opposite Ripley, which allowed him to observe the habits of the local slave patrols, which, he carefully noted, retired for the night between three-thirty and four
A.M.
Certain that he could bring off the rescue, he returned to Ripley for a final conference with Rankin, and to pick up Eliza, who was essential to the plan, since the daughter might not agree to leave without the assurances of her mother.
Rankin arranged to have Eliza and the Canadian rowed across the Ohio on Friday evening, and to have them brought back again with the
daughter and her children the following night. He also arranged for a wagon to be ready in Ripley to take the whole party north into Highland County as soon as they landed. Eliza was disguisedârather comically, to the younger Rankinsâin a man's brown shad-bellied coat and wide-brimmed hat, with her voluminous skirts stuffed inside in a way that made her look even more rotund than usual. Lowry and Samuel Rankin went across the river with them in a skiff belonging to the Rankins' close collaborator, John Collins, whose house faced the river in Ripley. When the boys shoved off to return to Ripley, Eliza and the Canadian were left alone and as vulnerable as any human beings on earth could be.
Saturday night passed with no trace of Eliza's family. The wagon that was supposed to carry them north departed without them. At last, on Sunday, the Canadian returned alone, and holed up at the Collins house. Collins sent a report up the hill to Rankin with a small boy who had not yet learned to read, and thus could never accidentally betray the contents. In substance, the Rankins were informed Eliza and the Canadian had reached the Davis farm before dawn on Saturday, and hid behind a haystack until Eliza's daughter appeared, on her way to milk the cows. When Eliza rose up before her, the shocked daughter “began to squall and hollow,” until the Canadian “caught her by the neck and said that if she didn't stop he would choke her to death.” When she had calmed down, Eliza returned with her to her cabin, and settled herself beneath the cabin's floor while the daughter explained the situation to her children. The Canadian remained out of sight in the woods.
After nightfall, the Canadian slipped into the cabin, as planned. He discovered that Eliza's daughter now had six children in all, two more having been born since Eliza's escape. Also, the daughter was pregnant. Moreover, she had collected “two or three hundred pounds of stuff in bundles, piled up,” and flatly refused to leave without every piece of it. He and Eliza finally agreed to carry the bundles in relays, hiding them in the woods, then going back for another load. The children toted what they could, the older ones moving faster, the smaller ones straggling behind with an armful of clothing, a pot, or some other trifle. The details hint at a trauma that eluded the white abolitionists: a home suddenly disrupted, the wrenching disorientation of leaving fathers and husbands behind (they weren't even mentioned in the Rankins' accounts), perhaps even ambiva
lence about flight itself on the part of a young woman who had been abruptly torn from her home by a fiercely strong-willed mother who, it must have seemed, had suddenly risen from the dead.
By the time they reached the river, it was too late to cross before daylight. The Canadian settled Eliza's family in a cornfield and then left them, promising to return on Sunday, after the patrols had bedded down for the night. Eliza was charged with keeping the children quiet until he returned. The Canadian had stolen a skiff to cross back to Ripley. Probably on Rankin's advice, he pulled it up onto the Ohio bank, where it could plainly be seen by anyone looking across from Kentucky. When the Davises awoke on Sunday morning, they soon discovered that seven of their slaves had disappeared. Thomas Davis hurried into Dover to alert the patrol and set to scouring the riverbank to see if any skiffs were gone. Mike Sullivan, a flatboat builder, recognized his skiff on the shore at Ripley. As John P. Rankin recorded the story, Sullivan told the slave owner and his party, “Them niggers are right over in that town, they sure are up there in some of them holes that old John Rankin has to hide niggers in.” In fact, Eliza's family was at that very moment lying just a short distance away in Sullivan's own cornfield.
Davis and a posse of Kentuckians took the Dover ferry across to Ripley, where he spent the rest of the morning stalking around town, offering a reward of four hundred dollars to any man “that would only point his finger at the house they were in.” From their perch above the town, the Rankins could see both the tumult in town, as the Kentuckians hurried through the streets, searching for the fugitives, and the cornfield across the river where they were actually hidden. Knowing that their home would be searched, they made an ostentatious show of descending the hundred stone steps down the hill to town to attend church, leaving the door to their house open behind them.