Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (21 page)

The following month, similar events unfolded in Syracuse, a city in the heart of upstate New York’s burned-over district. A vigilance committee formed after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act openly vowed to resist enforcement. On October 1, 1851, a federal marshal arrested Jerry McHenry, who had escaped from North Carolina eight years earlier and settled in Syracuse. A Liberty party convention happened to be meeting in the city; it adjourned to besiege the commissioner’s office. A group that included the abolitionists Gerrit Smith and Samuel J. May and the fugitive slave Jermain W. Loguen met to plan a rescue. May, a Garrisonian and advocate of moral suasion, nonetheless felt he “could not preach non-violence to the crowd clamoring for his release.” That night, about fifty men, a cross section of the city’s population—blacks and whites, clergymen, physicians, lawyers, and laborers—stormed the police station and rescued McHenry. Five days later, he crossed the border into Canada. Indictments soon followed. Loguen fled to Canada, where he remained for a year, and four men were brought to trial, but the government obtained only one conviction, for the relatively minor crime of interfering with a legal process. A year after the rescue, May organized an anniversary celebration attended by 5,000 persons. The “rescue of Jerry,” he wrote, had the same “significance” as “the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor.”
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Boston itself witnessed several confrontations over the rendition of fugitives. The Vigilance Committee of the 1840s had fallen into abeyance, but a new one emerged in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act. It consisted of over 200 Bostonians (all men), ranging from abolitionists and business and religious leaders to persons of “the humblest pursuits and callings.” Among the members was Francis G. Shaw, a wealthy businessman whose son, Robert Gould Shaw, would die commanding the celebrated black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry during the Civil War. Austin Bearse, the captain of a schooner, the
Moby
Dick
(Herman Melville’s novel appeared in 1851), served as the committee’s “doorkeeper.” On one occasion, Bearse and an interracial party of men sailed out to a North Carolina vessel anchored offshore, seized a fugitive whom they had learned was on board, and spirited him off to the city, from which he was sent to Canada. Nearly all the members of the committee were white, but a group of black abolitionists, including Lewis Hayden and William C. Nell, did most of the day-to-day work of arranging shelter (generally in the homes and churches of black Bostonians) and transportation for fugitives who arrived in the city. A list compiled by the revitalized committee indicates that between 1850 and 1858 it aided over 400 fugitive slaves.
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In December 1850, members of the Boston Vigilance Committee learned that slave hunters had arrived seeking to apprehend William and Ellen Craft. Two years earlier, the couple had escaped from Georgia by train, with the light-skinned Ellen Craft disguised as a sickly planter accompanied by his personal slave. The committee distributed broadsides identifying the slave catchers, harassed them on the streets, and had them arrested for defamation for calling the Crafts slaves. The pursuers left the city, and the committee paid for the Crafts to flee to Canada and then England, where they became popular speakers on the antislavery lecture circuit. They did not return to the United States until 1869. In February 1851, a slaveowner arrived in Boston seeking to retrieve Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped from Virginia in 1850 and found a job in a Boston coffeehouse. Two deputy U.S. marshals arrested Minkins, the first fugitive seized in New England under the new law. But as the hearing before a U.S. commissioner progressed, a crowd of men led by Lewis Hayden entered the courtroom “like a black squall” and carried Minkins off. Eight, including Hayden, were put on trial for taking part in the rescue, but none was convicted. Minkins ended up in Montreal.
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Only twice did Boston’s activists fail. In April 1851, authorities arrested Thomas Sims, a seventeen-year-old fugitive from Georgia, a month after he reached the city by stowing away on a coastal vessel. In the wake of the Minkins rescue, the police placed him under heavy guard, and although the Vigilance Committee concocted various rescue plans, none came to fruition. As he boarded the ship that would return him to bondage, a man cried out, “Sims! Preach liberty to the slaves!” When Sims arrived in Georgia, he was punished by a whipping in a public square and then sold to an owner in Mississippi. He remained a slave until escaping to Union lines in 1863. Fourteen years later, Sims obtained a job as a messenger for the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., through the efforts of Charles Devens, who as a federal marshal had arrested him in 1851 and now served as Rutherford B. Hayes’s attorney general.
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Like New York, Boston was home to merchants and cotton manufacturers who prospered from trade with the South, and many newspapers applauded the rendition of Sims as a vindication of the rule of law. But the strength of the abolitionist movement and the militancy of a free black community willing to resort to violence to defend runaway slaves made it extremely difficult and expensive to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Only one additional runaway was returned from the city. Anthony Burns, a twenty-one-year-old slave in Richmond, escaped by boat to Boston early in 1854 with the aid of a sympathetic sailor. His whereabouts became known when a letter Burns wrote to his brother was intercepted by the brother’s owner. Burns’s owner traveled to Boston and appeared before Edward G. Loring, a prominent jurist acting as U.S. commissioner. Hundreds of persons gathered at the courthouse, but guards repulsed a rescue attempt. Following the letter of the law, Loring ordered Burns returned to slavery. It took some 1,600 men—police, militia units, and three companies of infantry and marines—to march Burns to a waiting ship. Crowds gathered along the way, hissing at the procession. Within a year, abolitionists had raised the money for his purchase, and Burns returned to Boston. He soon departed for Oberlin, Ohio, where he attended college and studied for the ministry. He moved to Canada in 1860 and died there two years later.
50

The
Burns
case polarized Massachusetts politics. In the
Liberator
, Garrison lamented that neither the governor nor the mayor had spoken out against the rendition. But coming at the height of the northern uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opened parts of the old Louisiana Purchase to slavery, the case reinforced antislavery sentiment. Ten abolitionists were indicted for rioting; all won acquittal. A new personal liberty law, enacted in 1855 over the governor’s veto, barred state and local officials from assisting in renditions, granted accused fugitives a jury trial, and required any state judge who accepted appointment as a federal commissioner to resign from the bench. Loring himself was dismissed from a position at Harvard Law School and four years later removed from his judgeship, although President James Buchanan appointed him to the federal judiciary, where he served until his death in 1877. Anthony Burns proved to be the last person remanded to slavery from anywhere in New England.
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Nothing remotely like these confrontations occurred in New York City. No apprehended fugitive was rescued by force in the city during the 1850s. Nonetheless, the outposts of the underground railroad intensified their operations, aided by the completion of the rail network in the state, which facilitated sending fugitives to Albany and on to Canada. In the decade before the Civil War, New York City consolidated its position as a crucial hub in a complex set of networks that stretched along the metropolitan corridor of the East Coast, assisting fugitives from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Despite the new federal law, over 1,000 fugitive slaves passed through New York City in the 1850s, aided by the underground railroad on their journey to freedom.
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THE METROPOLITAN CORRIDOR: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN THE 1850S

I

I
n 1858, a correspondent for the
New
York
Tribune
identified Philadelphia and New York as “the great central stations of that glorious humanitarian institution of modern times, the Underground Railroad.”
1
And the effectiveness of the underground railroad in New York City during its heyday in the 1850s stemmed in considerable measure from the revitalization of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee under the leadership of William Still.

The youngest of eighteen sons and daughters of a Maryland slave father who had purchased his freedom and a fugitive slave mother, Still was born in Medford, New Jersey, in 1821. He moved to Philadelphia in 1844, where he worked as a handyman until the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society hired him as a “clerk” and janitor at its office in 1847. These titles belied his wide-ranging responsibilities. Still ran the society’s headquarters and was Philadelphia’s key operative in assisting fugitives, sometimes hiding them in his own home. He kept detailed records of their stories and destinations and how he aided them, which became the basis for his 1872 book,
The
Underground
Railroad
. Although it recorded illegal actions, Still’s journal was known in antislavery circles and beyond. Indeed, the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee publicly announced that its books were open for inspection, including “accurate accounts of the number of escapees, the amount of expenditures, receipts, etc.” The most detailed record now extant of how the underground railroad operated, Still’s journal lists well over 400 fugitives he received and sent on their way between 1853 and early 1857.
2

Still’s work depended on a network of white and black agents that by the early 1850s reached deep into the slave states of the Upper South. A number of sea captains “did good service” for Still on the maritime underground railroad. Thousands of vessels, of every size, shape, and description, sailed regularly between ports up and down the Atlantic coast. Numerous blacks, free and slave, worked on the region’s docks and ships. Still used black sailors to carry letters between fugitive slaves in Canada and their families who remained in bondage and to local white persons the runaways had indicated could be trusted.
3

Norfolk, Virginia, had a particularly active network. The owners of some ships, a Norfolk newspaper complained in 1850, “actually [made] the abduction of slaves a matter of trade and a source of profit.” A clandestine “society among the slaves” helped fugitives find hiding places, directed them to ships, and provided forged passes. Black stevedores and crew members secreted them on board. In April 1855, a slave mother and child arrived in New York on a ship from Norfolk, having been hidden by the black cook. When the boat docked, the cook went ashore and hired a carriage to remove them. Still identified Henry Lewey, a slave known as Blue Beard, as the “dextrous” manager of the underground railroad in Norfolk. Lewey’s wife Rebecca escaped on one voyage to Philadelphia and passed through New York in March 1856. Blue Beard himself later joined her in Canada. Norfolk’s city fathers found it impossible to discover the names of those who assisted fugitives. When a ship en route from Norfolk to Philadelphia was driven ashore during a storm in 1855, leading to the discovery of five fugitives on board, a local newspaper hoped that when a case against the captain came to trial, “some clue may be obtained which will lead to the discovery of the president, directors and agents of the underground railroad from Norfolk.”
4

Strict state and local laws, of course, prohibited aiding slaves to escape by sea. Ships were sometimes searched, and captains and crew members jailed. In 1856, a “New York negro” who worked on a schooner about to sail from Richmond was arrested after the discovery of two absconding slaves on board. Two years later, a Virginia court sentenced William D. Bayliss, who carried fugitives, for a fee, in a false bottom on his schooner
Keziah
, to forty years in prison. He remained incarcerated in Richmond until Union forces liberated the city in 1865. Virginia passed a stringent new law for ship inspection in 1856; a local newspaper warned “the negro-loving captains of Yankee vessels” to take note. But far too many ships sailed to inspect them all.
5

No one transported more fugitives to the North by sea than the intrepid Albert Fountain of Virginia. Little information exists about him other than his underground railroad activities. Fountain’s schooner, the
City
of
Richmond
, which could carry forty cabin and fifty steerage passengers, established a regular packet service from Richmond and Norfolk to New York City in the early 1850s. He often stopped at Wilmington to drop off or pick up fugitives there. In Philadelphia, Fountain landed fugitives at night near League Island at the foot of Broad Street, where William Still arranged for them to be met. Thirty of the fugitive slaves who reached New York in 1855 and 1856 had escaped on Fountain’s ship. A black ship carpenter worked with Fountain, informing potential runaways when his vessel was sailing. Fugitive slaves certainly appreciated Fountain’s efforts. Thomas Page, who escaped from Norfolk on the
City
of
Richmond
in 1856, asked Still two years later to “give my love” to Fountain and to urge him to visit Boston, “as there are a number of his friends that would like to see him.”

Like other captains, Fountain was not “averse to receiving compensation for his services,” up to $100 per slave. He even offered to rescue the families of fugitives for a hefty fee. (Slave traders were not the only ones profiting from financial transactions involving slaves.) “Captain F.,” Still wrote, “was certainly no ordinary man.” On one occasion, when Fountain was about to sail from Norfolk with twenty-one slaves on board, the mayor and other officials arrived to inspect the ship. Fountain took an axe and began splintering boards on the deck, convincing them that no one had been hidden below.
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