Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (26 page)

Among other things, the fairs provided a way of harnessing female domestic skills like sewing for political purposes. Their slogan, “Buy for the Sake of the Slave,” offered a foretaste of later consumer activism. Of course, organizing a fair posed less of a challenge to prevailing gender norms than did public speaking or demands for women’s rights. Nonetheless, some male abolitionists objected to the fairs. They criticized their commercialism and considered it unseemly for women to involve themselves in financial transactions. But the annual Boston fair was indispensable to the AASS balance sheet and became the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
’s “main dependence for funds.”
59

Lewis Tappan had spoken of the “friendly rivalry” between the New York State Vigilance Committee and Sydney Howard Gay’s antislavery office, but when it came to raising money through fairs, the rivalry could become very acrimonious. Non-Garrisonian abolitionists cast a jealous eye on the flow of goods and money from Britain to the AASS. James W. C. Pennington decided to do something about it. As a minister and an official of both the American Missionary Association and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Pennington had many reasons to dislike the Garrisonians. In 1850, while lecturing in Britain, he launched a campaign to convince abolitionists there to transfer their fund-raising largesse from the AASS to the New York State Vigilance Committee, of which he served as vice president. The Garrisonians, Pennington asserted, were “infidels” who slandered American churches for their connection with slavery.
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Pennington’s screeds proved particularly effective in Glasgow, where a group of women abolitionists, alarmed by his account of “unorthodoxy and infidelism” in the AASS, seceded from the existing Glasgow Female Anti-Slavery Society to form the Glasgow New Association for the Abolition of Slavery. They echoed Pennington’s charge that Henry C. Wright, a close associate of Garrison, had denied the divinity of the Bible in words “not surpassed in anything to be found in the coarsest pages of Tom Paine.” In December 1851, the Glasgow women dispatched “a beautiful consignment of goods,” not to Boston but to Pennington’s church in New York, for a fair whose proceeds were earmarked for the New York State Vigilance Committee. Similar events took place in Edinburgh. The new groups held their own annual fairs “in aid of fugitive slaves.” Between 1851 and 1853, the New York State Vigilance Committee received over $3,000 from Great Britain. What James Miller McKim called Pennington’s “determined and unscrupulous effort” to turn British abolitionists against the AASS engendered ill will that did not dissipate. Pennington returned to the United States in 1852, to be greeted by charges forwarded from Glasgow Garrisonians that he had misused funds raised in Britain for his church. An investigating committee appointed by the New York Presbytery cleared him of fiscal wrongdoing, but in 1855 he was dismissed from the pulpit of Shiloh Presbyterian Church for drunkenness. He was succeeded by the celebrated fugitive slave Henry Highland Garnet.
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Another controversy within the abolitionist community centered on whether precious resources should be devoted to aiding individual fugitives in the first place. Gerrit Smith called vigilance committees “the most ultra of all abolition organizations.” Others wondered if they were abolition organizations at all. Even in the 1830s and 1840s, a number of abolitionists thought that aiding fugitives diverted attention from their main goal: general emancipation. “Abolitionists,” wrote Nathaniel P. Rogers, the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
’s first editor, “are more concerned in overthrowing the slave system than in helping fugitive slaves to Canada. . . . It is not the object of the anti-slavery enterprise to effect individual emancipations.” His successor, Lydia Maria Child, agreed. It was “not a legitimate use of our society funds,” she wrote, “to pay the expenses of runaways. . . . [O]ur energies must be concentrated on the destruction of the
system
.”
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In the 1850s, thanks to James Pennington’s campaign to have British abolitionists shift their monetary contributions to the New York State Vigilance Committee, this debate became more heated. John B. Estlin, a British abolitionist aligned with Garrison, condemned the idea of transferring aid to “so unimportant an Anti-Slavery agency” as the Vigilance Committee. That group, he hastened to add, was doing good work, “but it effects nothing . . . towards the extinction of slavery.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in a speech at the anniversary meeting of the AASS in New York City in 1857, went so far as to claim that the underground railroad, “founded with the noblest of purposes,” had outgrown its usefulness and ought to be “abolished.” It was “demoralizing the conscience of our people,” he claimed, allowing them to be satisfied with directing slaves to Canada rather than “making their own soil free.” White abolitionists were not the only ones to raise questions about the movement’s priorities. A writer in the
Weekly
Anglo
-
African
wondered why fugitive slaves received so much more “attention and sympathy” than free blacks “who are already residents of these states” and often in dire need of financial assistance.
63

The issue of priorities came to a head in 1857 in a dispute among female abolitionists over plans to organize a Garrisonian anti-slavery fair in New York City. Gay had previously received money from fairs organized by a ladies’ society dominated by “orthodox Quakers” and other women opposed to sending money to the AASS. In 1857, Garrisonian women, led by Abigail Hopper Gibbons and Elizabeth Gay, organized the new Anti-Slavery Fair Association. Money raised would be forwarded to the AASS, except for “one thousand dollars, which is to go to the aid of fugitive slaves passing through the city (Sydney Treasurer and A. S. Office the depot).” Mrs. Gay hoped that this arrangement would draw support from a wide circle of women while still raising money for the AASS. Setting aside some of the proceeds for fugitives, she wrote, was a “
sine
qua
non
with the active women in New York.”

Elizabeth Gay had made baskets and other goods to be sold at the annual Boston bazaar, but she had no experience organizing a fair. She requested assistance from Maria Weston Chapman, the leading spirit in Boston, who had returned from her extended stay in Europe in 1855. Gay was stunned when Chapman refused to cooperate. “We do not feel justified,” Chapman wrote, “in working where we receive only a part of what we desire.” Moreover, “entangling alliances” with women only interested in fugitive slaves were not “honourable to the cause.” In July 1857, when Chapman published the announcement for the “24th National Anti-Slavery Bazaar” in Boston, she included a sentence urging those who “pity the hunted fugitive . . . [to] help us everywhere awaken a stronger sentiment . . . for the millions who cannot fly.” Nonetheless, New York’s Fair Association pressed ahead. The fair opened on Astor Place on December 7, 1857. It “proved a failure.” The weather was inclement, and because of the financial panic that had set in earlier that fall, “nobody has any money to spend.” Only $700 was raised, divided between the AASS and a fund for fugitives.
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Soon, even stranger events unfolded in Boston. In 1858, the imperious Mrs. Chapman unilaterally decreed the end of the Boston bazaar. In its place, a system of “direct cash subscriptions” by wealthy donors would support the AASS. “I do not know of a single person amongst all our friends,” wrote the Boston abolitionist Samuel May Jr., “who approves of her course.” Nonetheless, the first “National Anti-Slavery Subscription Festival” opened in January 1859. It was held in the Boston Music Hall, which had been transformed into a series of drawing rooms, complete with music and refreshments, where visitors passed along donations in envelopes and received the thanks of abolitionist women. Instead of the raucous give-and-take of a commercial bazaar, money now changed hands discreetly. The event was, in the eyes of contemporaries, more ladylike. It was also more geared to Boston’s elite. And it succeeded. The festival raised $6,000, $2,200 more than the last bazaar, of December 1857. In a section of her report addressed to British abolitionists, Chapman noted that Francis Jackson worked for both the AASS and the Boston Vigilance Committee. “But,” she added, “five pounds paid over to him in the former capacity is, in America, worth a thousand paid to him” to aid fugitives.
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Despite these controversies, the underground railroad continued to flourish. And thanks to the meticulous record-keeping of Sydney Howard Gay, it is possible to construct a detailed portrait of the fugitives who passed through New York City in the mid-1850s on their way to Canada and liberty.

7

THE RECORD OF FUGITIVES: AN ACCOUNT OF RUNAWAY SLAVES IN THE 1850S

I
n popular memory, the individual most closely associated with the underground railroad is Harriet Tubman. Born a slave in Maryland in 1822, this remarkable woman escaped in 1849 and during the following decade made at least thirteen forays to her native state, leading some seventy men, women, and children, including a number of her relatives, out of bondage. Tubman’s first rescue took place in 1850, when she received word that a niece, Kessiah Bowley, and her two children were about to be sold. Bowley’s free husband purchased the family at auction, even though he lacked the money to pay the seller. He then spirited them by boat to Baltimore, where Tubman met the family and brought them to Philadelphia and then to Canada. On a later trip, in 1857, Tubman rescued her elderly parents, who had become free but were in danger of being arrested for their own efforts to help slaves escape. Her exploits were not confined to the South. In 1860, she led a crowd that rescued Charles Nalle, a fugitive slave from Virginia who had been seized by a slave catcher in Troy, New York.
1

Tubman’s fame spread quickly in abolitionist circles. She made the acquaintance of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, and Lewis Tappan. By the late 1850s, she had become known as the slaves’ “Moses.” After the Civil War, Douglass would write of Tubman, “Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people.” Nonetheless, Tubman struggled to raise money for her undertakings. She worked in Philadelphia, New York, and Canada as a laundress, housekeeper, and cook, and solicited funds from abolitionists. On one occasion, she camped out in the antislavery office in New York City, asking visitors for donations.
2

Tubman exhibited extraordinary courage. She “seemed wholly devoid of personal fear,” wrote William Still. When Tappan asked how she would feel if she were captured and condemned to “perpetual slavery,” Tubman replied, “I shall have the consolation to know that I had done some good to my people.” But Tubman did not act entirely on her own. Her rescues relied on connections with slaves and free blacks in Maryland and with underground railroad networks in the mid-Atlantic states. Thomas Garrett offered assistance to Tubman as she passed through Wilmington on what he called “her very perilous adventures.” He described her accomplishments at length to correspondents in Britain and passed along money they forwarded for her use.
3

Twice in 1856, Tubman brought fugitive slaves through Sydney Howard Gay’s office in New York City. In May, Gay recorded, “Captain Harriet Tubman” arrived with four fugitive slaves—Ben Jackson, James Coleman, William Connoway, and Henry Hopkins—from Dorchester County on Maryland’s eastern shore, the center of slavery in the state. As young men in their twenties, the four had an “aggregate market value,” Gay estimated, of $6,000. Gay took the opportunity to interview Tubman about her past deeds and the details of this escape. The group started out on foot from Maryland on May 3, 1856. When they reached New Castle, Delaware, having learned that the owners had raised a “hue and cry” and posted a substantial reward for their capture, the fugitives hid for a week in a “potato hole” (presumably a kind of root cellar) at the home of a black woman. At great risk, Tubman traveled back and forth to Wilmington by train seeking assistance; eventually she persuaded “a friend” to bring the slaves to Garrett’s house in that city, where they arrived on May 11. They appeared at William Still’s office in Philadelphia two days later and and then continued on by rail, reaching Gay’s on May 14. Gay dispatched them all to Syracuse, from where they headed to Canada. Three of the four men appear in the Canadian census of 1861, living in or near Toronto.
4

In November 1856, Tubman returned to Maryland, hoping to bring out her sister Rachel. Rachel, however, was not ready to leave, so instead Tubman led William Bailey, his brother Josiah, and another slave, Peter Pennington, out of Talbot County, on the eastern shore. The Bailey brothers worked in the timber business of William Hughlett, who owned thousands of acres of land and forty slaves, among them Josiah Bailey. Hughlett rented other slaves, including William Bailey, from nearby owners. He treated all of them with great cruelty. “He left his master on account of ill-treatment,” Gay wrote of William Bailey, “of which lately he has received more than he could or would bear.” Three weeks before the escape, Josiah Bailey had been “stripped naked” and “flogged severely” because he engaged in a dispute with another slave. Both brothers were married; they left behind their wives and a total of seven children.

Tubman and the slaves embarked for the North on November 15, 1856. With the owners in hot pursuit, Tubman led them on a circuitous journey by foot to Wilmington, ninety miles to the north. Along the way they were joined by another slave, Eliza Manokey, a forty-two-year-old woman who had escaped the previous January and hidden in the woods and then in the homes of free black families. Like the Baileys, she had experienced some of the worst horrors of slavery. “Often suffered for want of food and clothing, and often flogged,” Gay recorded. Her owner had presented Manokey’s four-year-old son as a gift to a nephew, who then departed for Missouri with the child; “the boy clung frantically to his mother . . . but in vain.” Manokey left behind a husband, their seventeen-year-old daughter, and four grandchildren.