Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (23 page)

Until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, many runaway slaves remained in southern Pennsylvania, “scattered among the rural population” as farm laborers. Graceanna Lewis recalled numerous fugitives who worked in her family’s home and on their farm. But many runaways who had established homes in the region departed in the 1850s. It was “far better” for them to head for Canada, William Still wrote, than to remain in Pennsylvania, given the “dread and danger hanging over the head of the fugitive.”
18

Those fugitives who reached Philadelphia were aided by the city’s revitalized Vigilance Committee. The original Philadelphia Vigilant Committee, founded in 1837, had ceased to function effectively in the mid-1840s. After a series of renditions from the city, participants at a meeting in December 1852 organized the new committee “for the protection and assistance of fugitive slaves.” The abolitionist James Miller McKim opened the gathering by noting that for some years “the friends of the fugitive” had been “embarrassed, for the want of a properly constructed, active” organization. With the old committee “disorganized and scattered,” aid had been extended “by individuals, . . . in a very irregular manner.” The new organization had nineteen members, although as generally was the case, a small acting committee did most of the day-to-day work. This consisted of four persons: the white abolitionist Passmore Williamson; the prominent black businessman Jacob C. White; the black antislavery veteran Nathaniel Depree; and William Still, the group’s secretary. Mindful of earlier allegations of misuse of funds by Dr. James G. Bias, the meeting instructed Still to keep careful records, “especially of the money received and expended on behalf of every case claiming interposition.” Still recorded every expense, down to six cents’ postage on a letter to New Bedford.
19

The Philadelphia Vigilance Committee advertised its meetings in local newspapers and held public events, including a gathering in 1854 to welcome Henry “Box” Brown on a visit to the city where he had first arrived in a crate five years earlier. Its fund-raising meetings and public appeals for money forthrightly announced what it did. “Fugitives from southern injustice are coming thick and fast,” read one such notice in 1854. “The underground railroad never before did so large a business as it is doing now.” Still also helped raise money for the purchase of slaves whose owners agreed to free them. In one poignant instance, a man walked into the antislavery office, explaining that he had purchased his own freedom in 1849 and now sought assistance in retrieving his wife and children. He turned out to be Peter Still, William’s older brother. One of two children who had been left behind when his mother escaped from slavery, he had been sold at the age of six more than forty years earlier, before William’s birth. Peter Still departed with letters of introduction to abolitionists in the North and Canada and managed to secure the daunting sum of $5,000 to liberate his family.
20

In addition to his other activities, William Still was a prolific writer who published articles in black Canadian periodicals. He wrote about fugitives he assisted, although “for prudential reasons” he kept “dark” their names and the details of their escapes. Still’s pieces also included commentaries on national affairs. In 1857, to enlighten those who had “fled for refuge,” he published a long explanation in the
Provincial
Freeman
of the
Dred
Scott
decision. In an essay in June 1854, Still wrote, “A civil war or a dissolution of the Union may be upon us ere we realize it.”
21

Fugitive slaves were hardly safe when they reached Philadelphia. On one occasion in 1856, a sympathetic Philadelphia policeman came to Still’s office to warn the Vigilance Committee to “be on the lookout” for a group of fugitives from Baltimore, for whom a sizable reward had been posted. But, during the 1850s, ten were remanded from the city in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act, and others were removed without any legal proceedings. Early in 1857, Dr. James G. Bias and three other men posted a notice in a Philadelphia newspaper warning “all self-emancipated persons in this community” that “slave-hunters” were “lurking about the city.” Thus, Still generally sent fugitives northward as quickly as he could, sometimes to New England or directly to upstate New York, but in about half the cases to New York City.
22

Although fugitives reached New York by many routes, a considerable majority of the more than 200 persons listed in Sydney Howard Gay’s Record of Fugitives had been forwarded from Philadelphia. Generally, Still put them on a train, telegraphed ahead announcing their impending arrival, and provided instructions on how to reach Gay’s office. An abolitionist from Vermont recalled how, in 1856, while visiting Gay, a dispatch arrived from Still giving notice of “ ‘six parcels’ coming by the train. And before I left the office, the ‘parcels’ came in, each on two legs.” Frequently, someone from Gay’s office met fugitives at the ferry terminal in New Jersey or Manhattan. Usually, this was Louis Napoleon, who lived in lower Manhattan until the late 1850s. Gay knew families willing to harbor fugitive slaves, and for a time, Napoleon rented “a room down town” to accommodate them.
23

It is impossible to know precisely how many fugitive slaves Still dispatched to New York City, since normally he simply entered “forwarded” in his journal, without a destination. On some occasions, he did specifically mention New York. In April 1853, a group of slaves—six men and women from three different owners—arrived in Philadelphia from Baltimore. Still “forwarded them to the Committee in New York” at a cost of $14.50 for “bread, carriage hire and fare.” Charlotte Harris arrived in Philadelphia from Wilmington with her nine-year-old son in July 1853. “They were satisfactorily examined,” Still recorded, “and forwarded to N. Y. Expenses 5.25.” Another fugitive dispatched by Still to New York was John Henry Hill, a literate twenty-five-year-old carpenter from Virginia who somehow managed to escape while being transported to be sold at a slave auction in Richmond. Hill hid out in that city for nine months; eventually he managed to get to Norfolk (with a pass he himself had written) and secured a place on the
City
of
Richmond
, Albert Fountain’s vessel. Hill disembarked in Philadelphia and was soon sent to New York and on to Toronto. His wife and two children, all free, joined him in Canada.
24

Isaac D. Williams escaped from Virginia in 1854, and after many harrowing experiences, he found his way with another fugitive to Still’s office. He later related how Still and his contacts in New York operated. “After a very pleasant sojourn of several days, during which we recruited [sic] ourselves from the hardships we had endured,” Williams wrote, “Mr. Still took us himself to the train and saw us off for New York City, where a man named [Jacob R.] Gibbs was to meet us. He came right into our car at the depot and reshipped us on to Syracuse, where we were to be met by a Mr. [Jermain] Loguen.” Not long afterward they arrived in Canada.
25

II

As the networks assisting fugitives consolidated to the city’s south, the underground railroad in New York, in the words of the
Tribune
, did “a safe and increasing business.” What Lewis Tappan called the “friendly rivalry” between the New York State Vigilance Committee and the group operating out of Sydney Howard Gay’s office heightened activity in the city. Both national abolitionist organizations, the
Times
noted, “own stock in the underground railroad, and make no bones of drumming up passengers for it.” On a single day in 1852, the
Tribune
reported, there passed through the city “no fewer than forty-one human chattels . . . all safely landed in Canada.”
26

A third organization assisting fugitive slaves, the Committee of Thirteen, also operated in New York in the early 1850s. It had been established in the wake of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. This group of black abolitionists from New York City and Brooklyn included Dr. James McCune Smith, the publisher Philip A. Bell, and, before his departure from the city, William P. Powell, owner of the Colored Seamen’s Boarding House. (After Powell sailed for England, Albro Lyons and his wife Mary operated the establishment and continued to provide a hiding place for fugitive slaves.) Two “offshoots” quickly followed, committees of nine in Brooklyn, and five in the village of Williamsburg. All these groups offered legal assistance to fugitives and protection against slave catchers. Junius C. Morel, a member of the Committee of Thirteen, was a resident of the Brooklyn village of Weeksville (located in present-day Crown Heights), whose population of 366 in 1850 made it one of the country’s largest free African American settlements. Weeksville offered a modicum of safety from kidnappers and slave catchers, and the committee used it as a place to hide fugitives.
27

The Committee of Thirteen seems to have survived for only a few years. While it lasted, like other groups involved with the underground railroad, it operated both openly and in secret. In December 1851, it presented a memorial to the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth, who had arrived in New York after the failed revolution of 1848. The committee identified the Hungarian uprising with “the struggles now going on in our own country” against slavery. When Governor Washington Hunt called on the New York legislature to appropriate funds for black colonization, the Committee of Thirteen organized rallies to expose the “ignorance and weakness” of Hunt’s message. In April 1852, the committee held a public gathering at which it urged runaway slaves to leave the city, unless they were prepared to “send to perdition” owners intent on their recapture. Charles B. Ray, who had succeeded Gerrit Smith as head of the New York State Vigilance Committee, spoke at a number of these meetings. But the Committee of Thirteen established a greater reputation for discretion than Ray’s own organization. Early in 1852, the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee forwarded to New York “for safe-keeping and disposal” one of the “Christiana patriots” (evidently a man who had escaped from jail after being arrested for participation in that affray). He carried with him a letter that explained, “We would have sent him to the New York Vigilance Committee; but as his case requires great secrecy, we prefer sending him to the Committee of Thirteen, as we have mutually acted together in these cases.”
28

Nonetheless, in the early 1850s most of the work of aiding fugitives continued to be done by the New York State Vigilance Committee. Beginning in late 1850, it had to deal not only with fugitives from the South, but also with blacks long resident in Pennsylvania and New Jersey who arrived in New York “on their way North or East, to escape from real or supposed danger of being recaptured and returned to slavery.” In 1853, the committee claimed to have aided nearly 700 persons in the preceding two years. Along with forwarding fugitives to Boston, New Bedford, and Albany, it posted placards around the city warning when slave catchers had arrived, and raised funds for the purchase of slave relatives of black New Yorkers. “I have had so many of these cases recently,” Ray wrote to Gerrit Smith at his upstate home, asking for financial aid, that he could not go back to the same donors in the city. Lewis Tappan remained a key “resident director,” as the
New
York
Herald
called him. He attended most of the Vigilance Committee’s meetings, generally held in private.
29

The Vigilance Committee played a major role in one of the more dramatic escapes of this period, the flight of Anna Maria Weems, the teenage daughter of a free black man from Maryland and his slave wife. One daughter had managed to escape to the North and was adopted by Henry Highland Garnet, the fugitive slave who became a Presbyterian minister. In 1852, Anna Maria’s father learned that the owner was planning to sell his wife and their other children. He embarked on a campaign to raise money to purchase their freedom. Charles B. Ray and Lewis Tappan coordinated efforts to gather funds, much of it collected in England as the Weems Ransom Fund, and managed to buy the freedom of the mother and an older sister. Two sons, however, were sold to an owner in Alabama.

Efforts to purchase Anna Maria proved fruitless, and Jacob Bigelow and Ray decided she should be “run off”—a difficult project since she slept in the bedroom of her owners. Eventually, in 1855, Bigelow managed to get her to Washington, where she remained for eight weeks. Then, dressed in boy’s clothing, she was taken by carriage to William Still’s office in Philadelphia. From there Anna Maria proceeded to New York, where Ray and Tappan received her. She spent Thanksgiving at Tappan’s home in Brooklyn Heights. A few days later, accompanied by the black minister Amos N. Freeman, she embarked by train for Canada. On December 1, 1855, they crossed the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge, a recently opened rail link between the two countries, and Anna Maria was delivered to an aunt and uncle who lived in a black settlement. By 1858, the rest of the family, including all her brothers, had been purchased.
30

Despite Tappan’s largesse, the committee, as always, found itself short of funds. It subsisted on local contributions, donations from Great Britain, and money raised by sympathetic groups in upstate New York, such as a “Ladies” society in Rochester, which gathered funds for the “Gentlemen’s Vigilance Committee of New York.” “Fugitives,” Henry Ward Beecher declared in 1852, “make their appearance continually, pleading with a pathos deeper than words, for shelter and aid in their flight,” and while the Vigilance Committee had spent $2,000 in the past year, “much more is needed.” By 1855, the committee had run out of money, and the treasurer had to advance $100 from his own pocket to keep the organization afloat.
31

In one notable instance, the Vigilance Committee’s system of protecting fugitive slaves disastrously broke down. Stephen Pembroke and his teenage sons Robert and Jacob, the enslaved brother and nephews of James W. C. Pennington, absconded on foot from Sharpsburg, Maryland, on May 21, 1854. Upon reaching Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, thirty-three miles away, they boarded a train for Philadelphia, where they arrived the following day. William Still immediately communicated with Pennington and on May 24 dispatched his relatives, along with several other fugitives, by train to the New York State Vigilance Committee. Professional slave hunters, reportedly alerted via carrier pigeon by the Pembrokes’ owners, managed to board the same train. The three fugitives alighted unobserved in Newark and made their way to New York City, where they were put up in a home the Vigilance Committee considered safe. But before daybreak, the slave catchers and a deputy marshal broke in and hurried the three before Commissioner George W. Morton. After a brief hearing that began at nine o’clock in the morning, Morton ordered them returned to the South. That evening, the Pembrokes were taken by ferry to New Jersey “under a strong guard of policemen” and put on a train for Baltimore. It all happened so quickly that no attorney was present to represent the slaves. When Erastus D. Culver turned up at the commissioner’s office, the hearing had already ended.
32