Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (15 page)

The underground railroad depended for its effectiveness on political and personal networks. Gay’s role as a national spokesman for Garrisonian abolitionism and his marriage to Elizabeth Neall provided him with direct connections to Pennsylvanians who sent fugitive slaves to New York. Philadelphia and its rural hinterland were among the few centers of Garrisonism outside New England, and home to a significant Quaker community, some of whose members, like Gay’s in-laws, were active participants in the underground railroad. The region was the scene of violent confrontations between fugitives and slave catchers. In 1841, two police officers and a slaveowner arrested a female fugitive hiding in the house of a Quaker near Lancaster. A dozen blacks attacked the carriage. The officers shot and killed one of the group, but the slave was “rescued and carried off.”
18

Many members of Philadelphia’s politically active free black community remained loyal to Garrison after the 1840 split, including Robert Purvis, head of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. Purvis and his wife Harriet, the daughter of James Forten, the most prominent black Philadelphian of the previous generation, maintained a close friendship with James and Abigail Gibbons and the Gays. Weakened, however, by lack of funds and charges of embezzlement (later disproved) against Dr. James G. Bias, a dentist and folk healer who tended to the medical needs of many fugitive slaves, Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee began to disintegrate in the early 1840s. It all but ceased operations in 1844 when Purvis moved his family from the city to a country estate. The committee would be reorganized and become active again in the early 1850s. In the interim, aid to fugitives passing through Philadelphia depended on the actions of individuals, especially James Miller McKim, the white Presbyterian minister who ran the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and edited its weekly newspaper, the
Pennsylvania
Freeman
.
19

Two of the most celebrated fugitive slaves in American history arrived in New York City in the 1840s (albeit in very different ways) from Philadelphia. One was Harriet Jacobs, later the author of an autobiography published with the assistance of Lydia Maria Child. The book shocked mid-nineteenth-century readers by relating years of sexual abuse by Jacobs’s owner and her decision to become the mistress of another white man for protection. Jacobs had absconded in 1835 from her owner’s home in Edenton, North Carolina, and for seven years she hid in a small crawlspace above her free grandmother’s kitchen in the town. In 1842, a “friendly captain” arranged for her transportation to Philadelphia, where Robert Purvis and the Vigilance Committee received her and sent her on to New York. The following year, she was reunited with her brother John S. Jacobs, who had escaped from his owner, a member of Congress from North Carolina, in 1838. John S. Jacobs settled in Boston, where, he wrote, “the hunted fugitive feels himself somewhat secure,” and became a noted abolitionist lecturer.
20

Gay had not yet moved to New York when Harriet Jacobs arrived, but by 1846 her brother was enlisting Gay’s aid in countering her owner’s efforts to capture her. John S. Jacobs also sought Gay’s help in securing the release of a free-born friend being illegally held as a slave in North Carolina. By this time, Gay had established a reputation for assisting blacks in need. Jacobs wrote that he knew of no one else on “whom I could depend for prompt attention to the case.” In 1854, Harriet Jacobs, then living in Boston, contributed two dollars to support the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
. Four years later, Gay wrote to Robert Purvis inquiring about her whereabouts, but Purvis replied that he had “lost . . . all trace of the woman.” The light-skinned Purvis described Jacobs as “a beautiful creature, quadroon in color,
just
enough
of Negro admixture to preserve real beauty from the . . . ugliness of whites in this country.”
21

Equally dramatic was the tale of Henry “Box” Brown, a skilled tobacco processor in Richmond whose wife and children, the property of a different owner, were suddenly sold to a Methodist minister in North Carolina to raise funds to satisfy a debt. With his family gone, Brown devised a plan to have himself shipped north in a crate. In March 1849, Samuel “Red Boot” Smith, a Massachusetts-born white shoemaker, packed Brown into a rectangular box “even too small for a coffin” (it measured only three feet long) and dispatched him by rail and steamboat to Philadelphia. Brown paid Smith, who had incurred considerable debts gambling, forty dollars for his assistance. Upon Brown’s arrival, after a trip of more than 250 miles that took nearly twenty-four hours, McKim tapped on the crate, asking, “All right?” “All right, sir,” came the reply. The lid was removed, and out stepped Brown, “with a face radiant with joy.” “Good morning, gentlemen,” he exclaimed, and launched into a “hymn of praise.” McKim described the escape in an excited letter to Gay:
22

Here’s a man who has been the hero of the most extraordinary achievement I ever heard of. . . . Nothing that was done on the barricades of Paris exceeded this in cool and deliberate intrepidity. . . . Nothing saved him from suffocating but the free use of water . . . and the constant fanning of himself with his hat. . . . He was twice put with his head downwards. . . . This nearly killed him.

McKim took Brown to his home “for a bath and some breakfast.” A few days later he dispatched Brown (minus his box) to Gay’s office in New York City, with instructions to forward him to Francis Jackson, the treasurer of the AASS, who hid Brown in his house in Boston. From there, Brown boarded a train to New Bedford, where his sister lived with “friends” (probably fugitives) from Richmond. Joseph Ricketson Jr., the most active white abolitionist in the city, awaited his arrival. “I received your valuable consignment of 200 pounds of humanity this evening,” Ricketson reported to Gay. Ricketson put Brown up in his home and offered him a job.
23

McKim urged Gay not to publicize Brown’s exploit, fearing that it would compromise the shipping company and “prevent all others from escaping in the same way.” But within a month, accounts of the escape had appeared in numerous newspapers, including the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
. Perhaps to deter inquiries into the operations of the underground railroad in the city, abolitionists did not mention that Brown had passed through New York, a fact also omitted from Brown’s autobiography, published in 1849 (and mostly written by the white abolitionist Charles Stearns, whose turgid style seems inappropriate for an illiterate fugitive slave). Brown lived in Boston for a year. He regaled antislavery gatherings with the story of his escape and performed the hymn he had sung upon being released from his box. He took to the road with
Henry
Box
Brown
’
s
Mirror
of
Slavery
, a “moving panorama”—a popular form of entertainment using an enormous painting with numerous subdivisions. The individual scenes, which were accompanied by music and Brown’s narration and singing, included images of Africa, the Middle Passage, various kinds of labor, and a final “grand tableau” of Universal Emancipation. After physically repelling an attempt to recapture him while he was in Providence to present his panorama, Brown departed in 1850 for England, where he became a fixture on the antislavery circuit. He never saw his wife and children again.
24

Brown’s story inspired other slaves to replicate his mode of escape, not always successfully. In 1856, a slave who tried to emulate Brown suffocated. The following year, however, a “female refugee” from Kentucky arrived “boxed up” in Canada, and another woman in a box was received by Jermain W. Loguen, who directed the underground railroad in Syracuse. In 1860, a crate roughly thrown onto a train platform in Indiana shattered, revealing a black man being shipped from Nashville to Cincinnati. In a striking illustration of the differences in the legal environment on two sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, McKim suffered no repercussions for his well-publicized role in the escape, but Red Boot Smith was arrested soon afterward for “boxing up” two more runaways, and was imprisoned in Virginia. Upon his release in 1856, Smith traveled to Philadelphia, where “colored citizens” held a meeting to honor him as a “martyr to the cause of freedom.”
25

Brown was one of many fugitives Gay directed to his Garrisonian associates in Boston. That city had one of the nation’s most active abolitionist communities, which had long offered aid to runaways. In 1846, a slave known only as Joe escaped from a ship in Boston harbor and reached shore, but he was quickly captured by crew members. A large protest meeting, chaired by former president John Quincy Adams, followed at Faneuil Hall, and that gathering established a vigilance committee. The prominent reformer Samuel Gridley Howe became its chair; the abolitionist John W. Browne, the “general agent”; and its members included such luminaries as Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, along with black abolitionists Lewis Hayden (himself a fugitive slave) and William C. Nell.
26

The Boston Vigilance Committee survived for only two years (it would be revived after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850). While it lasted, John W. Browne communicated regularly with both Gay and Theodore S. Wright of the New York Vigilance Committee and received fugitives dispatched by both. As always, providing for them posed a financial challenge. On December 2, 1846, six fugitives arrived at Browne’s office “sent to the care of our committee” by Wright in New York. Browne promised to find employment for them, but informed Gay that he hoped “the committees south of here” would “not send” so many to Boston. Two weeks later, nevertheless, Gay forwarded Joseph Johnson, a slave who worked on a ship based in New Bern, North Carolina. Johnson’s opportunity to escape arose when the vessel, bound for Barbados, was “wrecked at sea” and another ship rescued the crew members and brought them to New York. Johnson decided he would prefer to “remain in a free state” and found his way to Gay. “We are afraid to keep him here,” Gay explained, because the owner frequently visited the city. Browne gave Johnson “clothing and boots” and got him a job on a ship plying the route between Boston and New York. Shortly thereafter, in early January 1847, Gay sent two more men to Boston. One he had “kept here at considerable expense for some time”; the other had arrived on New Year’s Day hidden on a ship from Norfolk.
27

Both Gay and Browne feared that imposters were claiming to be fugitives in order to receive money. Browne sent to New York one man who said he had a wife and child in New Jersey and needed funds to purchase nine children still in slavery, but Browne wanted Gay to check on the man’s story. Gay reported that the man arrived at his office drunk and could not be trusted. Gay, however, felt great solicitude for actual fugitives. He warned abolitionists in Massachusetts when slave catchers arrived in New York in pursuit of runaways he had directed there, and asked Browne to inform him regularly of the “safe arrival of the persons whom I sent to you. I feel some little anxiety when a fugitive goes from here to know whether he is drowned, caught by his master, or got safe to Boston.”
28

Gay sometimes used extraordinary means to help slaves achieve freedom. With Elias Smith, an antislavery lecturer from New England who worked on the
Standard
, and William H. Leonard, a black printer at the newspaper, Gay rescued from jail three slaves owned by the captain of the Brazilian vessel
Lembrança
. The ship had arrived in New York harbor in July 1847, and black stevedores notified William P. Powell, a black abolitionist who operated the Colored Seamen’s Boarding House, that slaves were being held on board. While “a crowd of colored persons” gathered at the wharf, Powell dispatched Louis Napoleon to obtain a writ of habeas corpus. As a result, the slaves were brought to court and temporarily lodged in prison. John Jay II, a graduate of Columbia College and the son of the abolitionist William Jay and grandson of Chief Justice John Jay, appeared in court to represent the slaves. He demanded that they be freed in accordance with the state law barring slave transit. The captain insisted that a treaty between Brazil and the United States required each country to respect the property rights of citizens of the other.

After a series of hearings, a judge vacated the writ of habeas corpus and ordered the slaves returned to the ship. But by this time, as the
New
York
Tribune
put it, “the birds had flown.” Reportedly, Gay and his companions, with the aid of an abolitionist incarcerated in the same prison for failing to pay a debt, had gotten the jailer intoxicated and removed the men, who were soon on their way to Boston. A month later they embarked for Haiti. The escape inspired a rare burst of humor in the
New
York
Evangelist
. The underground railroad, it quipped, “runs directly under the prison in New York, and . . . the slaves let themselves down through a stone trap-door into one of the cars.” Shortly thereafter, another judge decided that the men could not be returned to Brazil in any case, since they had been brought to that country in violation of the international ban on the slave trade.
29

II

As in the 1830s, both the New York Vigilance Committee and the group around Sydney Howard Gay tried their best to defend fugitive slaves through the legal system. In doing so, they made local courts the sites of political contests over slavery. The legal context for such initiatives changed dramatically in the 1840s with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in
Prigg
v
.
Pennsylvania
, its first relating to fugitive slaves.