Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (25 page)

In Albany, the key underground railroad agent was the black activist Stephen Myers, who had been aiding fugitives since the 1830s. Born in 1800, Myers worked for a time as a steward on steamboats plying the Hudson River between Albany and New York. He became a leading abolitionist, editing an antislavery newspaper and taking part in the unsuccessful campaign to repeal the property qualification limiting black voting in New York. Myers lectured widely in the capital region and western Massachusetts. But in the 1850s, most of his activity centered on assisting fugitives. Indeed, the census of 1860 lists his occupation as “agent”—Myers served as “general agent” of the twelve-man, predominantly black Albany Vigilance Committee, whose members included, among others, a tailor, boat captain, pharmacist, lumber merchant, two barbers, a minister of the African Wesleyan Church, and a Catholic priest. Myers’s wife, Harriet, worked with him, providing food and clothing for fugitives in their Albany home.
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In 1858, the Albany correspondent of the
Journal
of
Commerce
in New York City complained that he had witnessed Myers marching “six runaway negroes . . . through the streets” in broad daylight. They were headed for the offices of a local Republican newspaper, where they were “hospitably entertained.” By 1860, Myers reported that since 1852 he had assisted 654 runaway slaves. In one letter to Francis Jackson of the Boston Vigilance Committee, Myers noted that he received fugitives from “three different branches of the underground road”—presumably via Boston, New York, and southern Pennsylvania. He dispatched most by rail, headed for Syracuse and Canada West (on one occasion on a train carrying Mormon migrants bound for Utah), or north to Montreal. He also found employment for some on nearby farms, where he considered them safe.
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Mindful that in 1842 he had been charged with fiscal malfeasance by a white-owned newspaper (a “false, wicked, low and contemptible” accusation, he insisted), Myers had his account books examined by a “committee of gentlemen” each month. He raised money via “subscriptions and agents” and received assistance not only from abolitionists but also from antislavery politicians, including Thurlow Weed, the editor of the influential
Albany
Argus
(who donated $100 each year), Senator William H. Seward, and the state’s first Republican governors, John A. King and Edwin D. Morgan. Myers was particularly grateful for the monetary and other assistance he received from William Jay and his son John Jay II. He informed the latter in 1860 that his new grandson had been named William John Jay Myers: “I desire to have one colored child to bear that name.” Myers kept 10 percent of what he collected as a salary. “It is a wonder to all his friends,” a writer in the black newspaper
Weekly
Anglo
-
African
wrote in 1859, that Myers “raises enough money to meet his actual expenses, to say nothing of remunerating him for the industrious and sacrificing labors of himself and his family.” Sometimes, he did not. “We are in debt and have not one dollar in hand,” Myers lamented in January 1860.
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Gay directed more fugitive slaves to Syracuse, halfway between Albany and the border with Canada, than to all other destinations combined. The site of the Jerry McHenry rescue of 1851, Syracuse was known as the Canada of the United States because of its pervasive antislavery atmosphere. Ira H. Cobb, a merchant and one of the agents listed by Gay, lived in the same housing complex as the county sheriff; evidently, he did not fear arrest for his underground railroad activities. In Jermain W. Loguen, Syracuse boasted one of the most effective underground railroad operatives in the entire North. Born a slave on a small plantation in Tennessee in 1813, Loguen had escaped in 1834. His owner’s family knew how to hold a grudge. Twenty-six years later, in 1860, the wife, who still held Loguen’s mother as a slave, wrote to him asking for $1,000 for the horse he took while escaping, in which case she would relinquish all claim to him. Loguen replied with indignation: “You say, ‘you know we raised you as we did our own children.’ Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping post? . . . I meet the proposition with unutterable scorn and contempt.”

In 1834, after a harrowing journey, Loguen reached Canada. Seven years later he moved to Syracuse, where he became an African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister. From then on, Loguen later wrote, “scarcely a week passed” when he did not shelter fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. He himself fled across the border after taking part in the McHenry rescue; he was in danger, if arrested, of being sent back to the South. Loguen returned to Syracuse, however, in 1852, and soon became known as the city’s “underground railroad king.” In his autobiography, published in 1859 as a fund-raising venture, with considerable assistance from a local white abolitionist, he claimed to have aided more than 1,500 fugitives. When Loguen died, an obituary in a black newspaper declared, “With the exception of William Still of Philadelphia, he was instrumental in freeing more slaves from the American house of bondage than any other man.”
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Loguen’s operations were flagrantly public. A local Democratic newspaper complained that he “drives along his wagonloads of deluded fugitives” in open daylight. In a letter published in
Frederick
Douglass
’
Paper
, Loguen referred to himself as “the agent and keeper of the Underground Railroad Depot” in Syracuse. Sympathetic local newspapers reported on the arrival of groups of runaways “at Loguen’s” and published annual reports on the number of fugitives who had passed through the city (200 in 1855 according to one account). Loguen held “donation parties” to raise money, placed notices in newspapers seeking employment for fugitives who “would like to stop on this side” of the Canadian border, and publicized the presence of slave catchers in the city, calling on residents to run them out of town.

Loguen opened his financial records to the public. Most of the money came from bake sales and bazaars organized by Ladies’ Aid Societies in upstate New York, but some funds arrived from England and Ireland. In 1857, six abolitionists published a “card” in local newspapers, stating that the work previously done by the Fugitive Aid Society would henceforth be undertaken alone by Loguen, and asked for donations to support him and his family and to maintain “this depot on the Underground Railroad.” Henceforth, “all fugitives from slavery, coming this way, may be directed to him.” In 1859, Loguen held a fund-raising event at his home. The house, according to a newspaper report, was “crowded with visitors and friends of the Underground Railroad,” including “about thirty fugitives” who had found employment in and around Syracuse.
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The underground railroad agents in Syracuse with whom Gay was in contact ran the gamut of abolitionist outlooks. Loguen served on the business committee of the AASS. “Set me down as a
Liberator
man,” he wrote in 1854, with the one exception that “my hands will fight a slaveholder.” (Garrison, a pacifist, still hoped that Loguen would come to realize “that it is solely because of war and violence that slavery exists.”) Loguen also lectured in upstate New York for the Liberty and Radical Abolition parties and worked for Lewis Tappan’s American Missionary Association. Samuel J. May, to whom Gay also directed fugitives, paid for the passage of individuals to Canada out of his own pocket and was president of the Syracuse Fugitive Aid Society until it dissolved. His home served as the main reception center for fugitives until Loguen’s house replaced it. May was a follower of Garrison, although he did not subscribe to the doctrine of disunion and in 1856 endorsed John C. Frémont, the Republican candidate, for president. The Reverend Lucius C. Matlack, the editor of the
True
Wesleyan
, and another contact of Gay’s in Syracuse, served on the executive board of the New York State Vigilance Committee, dominated by Tappanites. Ira H. Cobb, one of the underground railroad agents listed by Gay, was also connected with the American Missionary Association. As in other locales, aid to fugitives brought together Syracuse abolitionists who disagreed on other issues, and Gay worked with all of them.
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Harmony, however, did not always reign in the underground railroad. One name is conspicuous by its absence from Gay’s Record: Frederick Douglass. Nor is there any mention of Rochester, where Douglass worked with a group of abolitionists to speed fugitives on their way from Albany and Syracuse to the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge. This may be because Douglass and the Garrisonians, including Gay, had experienced a bitter falling-out in the early 1850s over the former’s embrace of political action and his conversion to the idea that because it did not contain the word “slave” (speaking of those in bondage as “other persons”), the Constitution could be construed as an antislavery document. Gay had earlier employed Douglass as a correspondent, helped generate subscribers for his first newspaper, the
North
Star
, and corresponded with him about assistance to fugitive slaves. Now, in an editorial in September 1853, the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
condemned Douglass for “vanity and jealousy” and declared that he had “proven treacherous to his old friends and deliberately allied himself with the worst enemies” of the antislavery cause.
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James McCune Smith quickly weighed in on Douglass’s side, accusing white abolitionists of racism. The dispute exemplified the growing strains in the 1850s between black and white abolitionists, as the former claimed that white colleagues did not do enough to combat racial prejudice. Many abolitionists were appalled by the controversy. A meeting of Chicago blacks in December 1853 condemned the “unchristian and unfeeling” articles about Douglass being published in the Garrisonian press, including the
Standard
and
Liberator
. What the Canadian abolitionist Thomas Henning called “the painful discussion” continued into 1855, which may be why Gay made no mention of Douglass in his Record. Many years later, in a letter to the historian Wilbur Siebert and again in his autobiography, both written in the 1890s, Douglass recalled his role in aiding fugitive slaves who traveled the “route to freedom” via Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Syracuse, and Rochester. He identified as the key operatives William Still, David Ruggles, Jacob R. Gibbs, Stephen Myers, and Jermain Loguen (all African Americans), but not Gay.
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Given the chronic problem of funding, it is not surprising that some of the controversies that embroiled the underground railroad in the 1850s revolved around money, specifically how funds collected at antislavery fairs should be allocated. Charity fairs or “bazaars” to raise money for a variety of causes sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1820s and 1830s, a natural outgrowth of the accelerating market revolution. But the abolitionist movement perfected and institutionalized the practice. Fund-raising fairs became a staple of the movement and the primary focus of female antislavery activity. Women organized these events, at which they sold goods with the proceeds going to abolitionist organizations and local vigilance committees. Generally, fairs were held just before Christmas; indeed, abolitionists helped to establish the practice of a Christmas “shopping season” when people exchanged presents bought at commercial venues. In this spirit the fairs purveyed a large assortment of dolls, toys, and other gifts for children. The items on sale also included antislavery publications and images, and goods of all kinds. The 1842 fair in Philadelphia had a “poultry stall, including a fine porker, . . . butter, cheese, chestnuts, and shellbarks,” and a “refreshment table” piled high with pies, cakes, pickles, and other items “from our country friends.”
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Fairs, the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
noted, were “among the most efficient agencies in the anti-slavery cause.” In addition to raising money, “hearts are kindled, lagging sympathies wakened afresh, and new minds every year brought within the circle.” However, the newspaper continued, while fairs in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania proved extremely successful, in New York City “there is no foundation for such an enterprise.” This was not strictly correct; in 1851, a black group calling itself the North Star Association of Ladies organized a fair to raise money for the Committee of Thirteen. They received donations of goods from “Ladies” in Albany, Philadelphia, and Lenox and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and netted $292. It is true, however, that New York never hosted fairs as large or lucrative as those in Philadelphia and Boston.
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The grandest and most successful of these fairs was the National Anti-Slavery Bazaar in Boston, which by the mid-1850s was attracting thousands of visitors and raising over $5,000 annually for the AASS. Maria Weston Chapman was the key organizer of the Boston fair, doing so from abroad between 1848 and 1855, when she lived in Paris with money inherited from her late husband, Henry, a wealthy Boston merchant. The poet James Russell Lowell paid tribute to the fashionable and talented Chapman:

Chapman and her Boston coworkers organized a network that extended into rural New England, New York, and Pennsylvania and across the Atlantic to Britain and France. Dozens of local societies contributed goods to the Boston fair, often items of clothing and embroidery produced by abolitionist sewing circles. Increasingly, however, the fair moved upscale, becoming a commercial extravaganza focusing on selling “fancy” goods from around the world, including items dispatched from Paris by Mrs. Chapman. (She instructed her Boston coworkers on how much to mark up each item.) British female abolitionists contributed enormously to the success of the Boston fair, sending boxes of merchandise each year. The “foreign goods” at the 1849 fair included “Afghan blankets and cushions from Edinburgh, Garden Chairs and elegant Sofa Cushions from Perth, . . . Exquisite Honiton Lace, Basket work, and dolls in costume from Bristol.” Other items in the 1850s included perfumes, silks, porcelain, jewelry, and works of art. Indeed, the fair, one participant later recalled, prided itself on attracting the patronage of “the most aristocratic families,” and for “having wares that were to be found in no Boston shops.” Local merchants complained that the fair “undersold them and injured their business” at the holiday season.
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