Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (24 page)

The Vigilance Committee and its supporters were stunned by the turn of events. A letter to the
New
York
Tribune
, signed “many sympathizers,” complained that “a more barbarous star chamber proceeding was never witnessed in New York.” Abolitionists managed to raise $1,000 to purchase Stephen Pembroke’s freedom. Early in July 1854, a meeting at Pennington’s church celebrated his brother’s return to the city. But his sons remained in slavery; they had been “sold twice before my face,” Pembroke told the gathering.

The debacle underscored once again the dangers facing fugitives in New York City. A “ ‘stool-pigeon’ or traitor,” William Still suspected, had revealed the hiding place. Still concluded that the capture of the Pembrokes revealed serious weaknesses in the New York committee’s methods. He had “spared no pains to render their success sure,” he complained, and the Pembrokes had arrived in New York with “sufficient time, it would seem, for their friends to have placed them beyond the reach of their infernal pursuers.” He chastised Pennington for ignoring “how imminent their danger was.” For “a length of time afterwards,” Still later wrote, the Philadelphia Committee “felt disposed, when sending, to avoid New York as much as possible.”
33

Part of the problem may well have been the collapse of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, with which the Vigilance Committee was closely connected. Its last annual report was published in 1853. Soon afterward, Tappan noted that the society was “doing very little.” In 1854, it dissolved. Many of the members transferred their energies to the American Missionary Association or to a new organization, the American Abolition Society, which adopted the position that the Constitution had actually outlawed slavery. Lewis Tappan became its president. At the same time, Tappan and Charles B. Ray, the head of the Vigilance Committee, had a falling-out over allegations that Ray had misused funds raised for the “ransom” of the Weems family. Tappan discovered that Ray had “invested” some of the money in real estate “for his own benefit.” Ray explained that he felt he deserved monetary compensation for all the time he had spent on the case.
34

Whatever the merits of the dispute, it did not bode well for the vitality of the New York State Vigilance Committee. The organization continued to maintain a presence in New York City until the eve of the Civil War. But in 1857, the Glasgow association that had been sending funds to the committee announced that assistance was “less needed” than in the past, since “a smaller number of fugitives are now passing through [its] hands.” It added, “Some of them, as we are informed, are receiving aid from another Society”—undoubtedly Sydney Howard Gay’s operation.
35

Gay and the men Wendell Phillips called his “runners” had continued to assist fugitives in the early 1850s, but so secretly that information about their activities in these years is virtually nonexistent. Gay’s newspaper, the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
, published information about fugitive slave cases in New York courts and reports of escapes and rescues in other parts of the North, but it said virtually nothing about the underground railroad in New York City. One editorial did praise the work of assisting fugitives as “an important branch” of the struggle against slavery, and noted that activities “that would excite the astonishment and admiration” of readers had of necessity been kept secret—one of Gay’s few public intimations of his own involvement.
36

Gay happened to be in Boston in June 1854 at the time of the rendition of Anthony Burns, mentioned in the previous chapter. He was galvanized by the spectacle of troops marching Burns to the dock amid the “groans and hisses” of crowds lining the streets. “I have seen a sight to remember and . . . to tell of,” he wrote to his wife. He hoped it would be “the opening scene of a new history of Massachusetts.” The event reinforced Gay’s commitment to assisting fugitive slaves. A few months later, William Still resumed sending fugitives to New York. With the New York State Vigilance Committee in disarray, leadership of the underground railroad in the city passed to the group operating out of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s office and headed by Sydney Howard Gay.
37

III

Shortly after the Civil War, in his history of the sectional conflict, the antislavery politician Henry Wilson identified Gay as the leader of a “devoted band” of underground railroad agents in New York, a city with “southern connections, interests, and prejudices against the African race and its friends.” Many recent historical works on the underground railroad, however, completely ignore Gay’s activities. Nonetheless, by the mid-1850s Gay’s office had become the major depot in New York City. It stood at the nexus of two key sets of underground railroad networks: those in southeastern Pennsylvania centered on rural free black and abolitionist Quaker families and William Still’s office in Philadelphia, and the vigilance committees in New England and upstate New York. By this time, when Still referred to the “Vigilance Committee in New York,” he meant Gay’s office, and virtually every slave Still mentioned sending to the city in 1855 and 1856 turned up in Gay’s Record of Fugitives. Compared to the complex networks of southeastern Pennsylvania, however, Gay oversaw a skeletal operation. He relied mainly on the two black men who worked in his office—Louis Napoleon and a printer, William H. Leonard—to both of whom he made numerous small payments for assisting fugitives. Napoleon was Gay’s key associate, meeting fugitives when they arrived, finding lodging for them, and escorting them to the docks or train station for their onward journeys.
38

James S. Gibbons and his wife, Abigail, also offered assistance. On one occasion, Gibbons alerted Gay that Sarah Moore, a fugitive slave who had escaped from North Carolina in the 1840s and was now living in New Haven, was in danger of recapture. Evidently her husband, who had “abandoned her” and taken their three small children with him, had betrayed her to authorities. Gay immediately dispatched Napoleon to find Moore and take her to Albany. But at the railroad depot in New Haven, Napoleon noticed a man who matched Moore’s description of her owner, accompanied by the same federal marshal who a year earlier had arrested Stephen Pembroke and his sons and returned them to slavery. Napoleon decided that he and Moore should get off the train in Springfield and travel to Albany the following day. From there, Moore proceeded alone to Syracuse while Napoleon returned to New Haven. Somehow, Napoleon located the children and arranged with a black woman to “walk off” with them. He then brought the children to Syracuse; he “never saw such a time,” Gay recorded, as when the family was reunited. Gay carefully noted the money he had laid out—$64.74 for lodging and train fares.
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The number of underground railroad agents operating in New York was tiny, but many other individuals proved ready to assist fugitives and knew how to do so. William Thompson, who escaped by boat and train from Virginia, asked to be directed to a black church when he reached New York. “The persons in charge took him in” and sent for someone from Gay’s office. The fugitive John Richardson arrived from Philadelphia thanks to a “colored man by the name of Jackson employed on one of the steamers to N.Y.,” who “gave him a passage here, and put him in Napoleon’s hands.” Charles, mentioned earlier, a fugitive from Petersburg, was discovered by the captain hiding on a vessel and resigned himself to being sent back to his owner. But he “fell in with a coloured man” when the ship reached New York, “who, on learning his story,” helped him escape from the vessel. Blacks working on the docks frequently directed to the antislavery office runaways who arrived on ships or by ferry from the rail depot in New Jersey. Although in the mid-1850s Fernando Wood, a notoriously pro-southern Democrat, was serving as New York’s mayor, some policemen sympathized with fugitives. In an undated note, Gay recorded that “officer Brady” had brought the fugitive Elizabeth Anderson to his office.
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As late as 1855, James McCune Smith called New York a “poor neglected city” when it came to abolitionism. Secrecy was at a premium. Nonetheless, Gay kept detailed records of how much he expended helping fugitives with accommodations, clothing, and train and boat tickets, and where the money came from. “Sydney has the fugitive matter entirely in his own hands,” his wife wrote in a letter to an abolitionist in Boston, “and takes care that no unnecessary expenditure of money is made.” In 1855, Gay recorded donations of $48.66 from the “Ladies’ Society” of Dundee, Scotland, and $94.50 from a “Ladies’ Fair” in New York City. But expenses often exceeded income. When money ran short, Gay had to dig into his own pocket or into the funds the American Anti-Slavery Society provided for publication of the
Standard
. In 1856, “cash received” totaled $277, but expenses, including Napoleon’s pay, amounted to $457, leaving a balance due to Gay of $180.
41

When Gay was absent, Napoleon sometimes had to borrow money hurriedly from other abolitionists. Frequently, he turned to Rowland Johnson, a wealthy Quaker merchant dealing in Chinese goods who lived in Orange, New Jersey, not far from Manhattan. In April 1856, Abigail Hopper Gibbons persuaded Johnson to advance twelve dollars to Napoleon, and she promised it would be “refunded.” The following month, with Gay home because of illness, Napoleon had to ask Johnson for another loan “to defray the expenses of 4 fugitives now here on their way to New Bedford.” Gay was alert to the possibility that some who claimed to be fugitives were impostors. In 1857, a man appeared who claimed to have escaped from Virginia, but “discrepancies in his story made it doubtful.” Nonetheless, Gay found a job for him on a ship and paid someone thirty-seven cents to “get his trunk for him.”
42

Despite simultaneously editing the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
and serving on the executive committee of the AASS and as president of the New York Anti-Slavery Society (an auxiliary of the AASS founded in 1853), Gay devoted much of his time in the 1850s to his underground railroad activities. In a letter of 1853, written after attending an executive committee meeting where he listened to an “attack on the Standard” and a proposal (not approved) to abandon the newspaper or appoint a new editor, Gay thought of resigning as editor and questioned the significance of abolitionist agitation. “We are doing so little, and much of that little wrong,” he mused. But his work with fugitive slaves was certainly significant.
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To be sure, things did not always go smoothly. In August 1855, after Still resumed dispatching fugitives to New York City, Gay wrote a letter asking him to send them with “careful directions to this office,” adding:

There is now no other sure place, but the office, or Gibbs’, that I could advise you to send such persons. Those to me, therefore, must come in office hours. In a few days, however, Napoleon will have a room down town, and at odd times they can be sent there. . . . When it is possible I wish you would advise me two days before a shipment of your intention, as Napoleon is not always on hand to look out for them on short notice. In special cases you might advise me by Telegraph thus: “One M. (or one F.) this morning.”

A little over a year later, William H. Leonard, the black printer who worked on the
Standard
, complained to Still about the timing and accuracy of his messages. “Your favor of Thursday last was rather inopportune,” he wrote. “It was only by chance that I was in the office. They had no person to pilot them to the office. Napoleon not being on hand. Ray not at home. On all such days we are closed.” Leonard also noted that Napoleon had stopped going to the wharf because “the last 2 or 3 lots you sent came by [South] Amboy, when your dispatch directed us to Jersey City. How does it happen?”
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In 1857, Jacob R. Gibbs, who had maintained a place at 59 Thompson Street to which associates who worked on Hudson River ferries directed fugitives, moved to San Francisco. There he described himself as “ex-agent of the underground Rail Road.” His departure placed an even greater burden on Napoleon, who had moved uptown to 97 West Thirty-Third Street after marrying Elizabeth Seaman, a widow with two young children, in 1855. The year after Gibbs moved, Gay remonstrated to James Miller McKim, about Still’s methods:

I hate to complain, but I must state a fact. Still is in the habit of sending men on here by a train that arrives about 3 a.m. Unless it is
absolutely
imperative
, . . . it should not be done. To meet such persons, Napoleon has to be out by one o’clock, go three miles, take the men the three miles back, and to keep them until late in the afternoon. This is very unnecessary labor, which all falls upon an old man [Napoleon was in his mid-fifties] who is paid a mere trifle for doing it. . . . Two or three days ago Still telegraphed late in the day. Napoleon had gone home. . . . And we have nobody in the office . . . to do that duty for him.
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The mention of Ray and Gibbs, both associated with the New York State Vigilance Committee, in these letters by Gay and Leonard underscores the cooperation between the two underground railroad outposts in New York City. Nonetheless, as had been the case since the days of David Ruggles, the day-to-day operations of the underground railroad in New York depended on the efforts of a small, overburdened group of dedicated activists.

IV

Sometime in 1856, Gay jotted down the names of “Agents of the U. G. R. R.” It was a very partial list, consisting of only ten individuals. South of New York, it included only Jacob Bigelow, in Washington, D.C. Gay failed to mention even Thomas Garrett and William Still; because of their central role in sending fugitives to New York, he may have felt their names were superfluous. As in the 1840s, Gay continued to send fugitives to Joseph Ricketson Jr. in New Bedford and Francis Jackson in Boston, but the only person he mentioned in New England was Josephus Silliman, a black laborer living in New Haven. The majority of the agents on the list lived in Albany and Syracuse. Gay’s list underscores the central role that upstate New York had assumed by the 1850s. The vast majority of runaway slaves sent onward from New York City headed to Canada via that region, where antislavery sentiment had spread rapidly and the underground railroad operated with amazing impunity. The
New
York
Times
reported in 1857 that a fugitive slave on his way to Canada had been welcomed in the “vestibule of the Capitol” in Albany and “received many congratulations from the gentlemen there congregated.”
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