Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (28 page)

Some fugitives reunited with relatives who had previously run away. Elizabeth Harris, who arrived at Gay’s office from Delaware in December 1856, was the wife of James Harris, a fugitive who had passed through the city a month earlier. Shortly after Gay dispatched Mrs. Harris to upstate New York, William Still received a letter from Auburn, announcing that the couple would remain there, working for an abolitionist family. Rebecca Jones, who reached New York from Norfolk with her three children in April 1856, was heading for Boston, where she hoped to find her husband, who had escaped six years earlier “in company with the noted slave Shadrach.” (Their reunion proved unsuccessful. Six months later, Jones notified Still that she was heading for California and had no intention of resuming the relationship.) Frances Hilliard, a slave from Richmond who had been sold a number of times by slave traders as a “fancy article,” arrived in New York via Philadelphia in August 1855, a year after helping her husband escape from a private jail operated by his owner, the slave trader Bacon Tait. The husband had hidden on a British vessel and made his way to Liverpool and then Canada where, Hilliard told Gay, she was “anxious to join him.” Caroline Taylor’s free husband William was at sea, employed as a coal heaver on the U.S. naval vessel
Saranac
, when the couple planned her escape. She was able to pay Albert Fountain $100, “drawing the money from the Navy Agent on her husband’s order,” to transport herself and two young daughters out of Virginia. Gay dispatched them to New Bedford, to await the husband’s return.
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A few fugitives, like Frederick Douglass before them, had free spouses or fiancés, who could readily join them on free soil or had already traveled there. Albert Hennison of Richmond, who arrived at Gay’s office in March 1856, had previously sent his free wife to New York, “thinking he might get away.” Isaiah Robinson, who escaped by boat from Norfolk along with his sister and her three children, was married to a free woman who planned to meet him in Boston, where other relatives already lived. David Cale, of Middletown, Delaware, sent his free wife ahead by rail while he walked to Wilmington, where he boarded a train and met her in Philadelphia. Daniel Johns, a blacksmith and minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, fled Cambridge, Maryland, leaving behind his wife Ann and five children, all free. The 1861 Canada census records him under his new name, Joseph Cornish, living in the black settlement St. Catherine’s, near Niagara Falls, with Ann, but makes no mention of their children.
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Most fugitives’ relatives, of course, were slaves and could not simply pick up and leave the South. Even so, many runaways hoped that family separations would not prove permanent. Charles Carter told Gay that he was “determined to get” his wife and four children “somehow.” Emeline Chapman escaped from Washington, D.C., in September 1856, leaving her two small children with “free people who promised to bring them north.” Catherine Pitts, who absconded from Berlin, Maryland, with an infant in her arms, related that her husband and brother had advised her to “cut sticks” (escape) because she was about to be sold. Pitts’s husband took his wife and child in a wagon to Delaware, where they managed to board a steamboat headed for Philadelphia. “Expects her husband and brother to follow her with a child she left behind,” Gay noted when she arrived at his office in New York.
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Although unusual in the number of forays, Tubman was not the only fugitive to return to the South in an effort to bring out family members. Otho Taylor escaped from Washington County, Maryland (on the Pennsylvania border), in April 1856 with his wife, two children, and four other slaves, and soon reached Canada via Philadelphia and New York. He turned up again at Gay’s office the following September. Gay recorded what had happened: Taylor “went to Canada, and earned about $80, and then returned to bring away his parents, and brother and sister, but did not succeed. They had been promised their freedom and preferred to remain till the time was up.”
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After Gay’s account of Harriet Tubman’s exploits, the next longest entry in the Record of Fugitives relates the dramatic escape of twenty-five-year-old Frank Wanzer, his fiancée Emily Foster, and a married couple, Barnaby and Mary Elizabeth Grigby, and Wanzer’s subsequent return to bring out relatives still in slavery. Having hired a carriage and pair of horses, the group departed on Christmas Eve, 1855, from Loudoun County, Virginia, northwest of Washington, accompanied by two other men on horseback. They traveled day and night, braving frost, hunger, and “very severe weather.” They barely avoided recapture. After covering 100 miles, they lost their way in Maryland and inquired at a mill for the road to Pennsylvania. The miller realized they were fugitive slaves, and the party soon found itself surrounded by seven white men on horseback, who “demanded of them to give account of themselves.” The fugitives, however, including the women, were heavily armed; when they brandished knives and double-barreled pistols, their pursuers decided not to “meddle” with them. To increase their speed, the group abandoned the carriage and continued on horseback, followed by the mounted whites. They decided to disperse, and the whites took off after the two single men, while the couples hid in the woods until nightfall, when they resumed their journey. At one house, they were “fired upon but fortunately were not hit.” Eventually, they proceeded on foot; the feet of one of the men “were frozen from the exposure.” They finally reached Philadelphia, by way of Columbia, Pennsylvania, on January 16, 1856, and New York two days later. Gay forwarded them to Syracuse, where Frank and Emily were married, and they then proceeded to Toronto.

Wanzer, however, was determined to return to Virginia. In July 1856, armed with three pistols, he traveled by train from Toronto to Columbia and walked the rest of the way. A dozen slaves agreed to leave with him, but only three kept the appointment—his sister, her husband, and another man. The party turned up at William Still’s office on August 18 and at Gay’s the following day, and were dispatched to Canada.
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Such return journeys, of course, were unusual and extremely dangerous. More frequently, those who reached free soil tried to enlist friends or underground railroad agents to rescue relatives. By the 1850s, many escaped slaves appear to have been able to communicate with loved ones in the South. “There is an underground telegraph,” the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson observed, “as well as an underground railroad.” Winnie Patsy arrived at Gay’s office in May 1856 from Norfolk via Wilmington and Philadelphia with her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Her husband had escaped by boat a few months earlier and ended up in New Bedford, from where he arranged for the same captain to bring out his wife and child. Many fugitives sought William Still’s assistance for such endeavors. Phillis Gault, who ended up in Boston with her son Dick after escaping from Norfolk in 1855, wrote Still two and a half years later, asking if he could arrange to “steal little Johny.” Still’s response, if any, does not survive; most of the time, however, there was little he could do. Lewis Burl, who escaped from Virginia in 1856 and made his way to Philadelphia, New York, and Canada, wrote to Still in 1859 that his wife, who was now living in Baltimore, was ready to abscond if she could “find a friend to help her.” Burl implored Still to act, adding, “I will pay you for your trouble.” “As in the case of many others,” Still later wrote, “the way was so completely blocked that nothing could be done for the wife’s deliverance.” From Toronto, James Morris begged Still to help his “dear wife and child” escape from Norfolk. “I have received two letters from my wife since I saw you,” he related, “and the second was awful. I am sorry to say she says she has been treated awful since I left.” Still could do nothing: “This sad letter made a mournful impression, as it was not easy to see how her deliverance was to be effected.”
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While the popular image of the underground railroad tends to focus on lone fugitives making their way north on foot, in fact more slaves who passed through New York in the mid-1850s escaped in groups than on their own. Many absconded on Captain Albert Fountain’s ship, the
City
of
Richmond
, or other vessels. One locale that seemed particularly vulnerable to mass escapes was Chestertown, in the heart of Maryland’s eastern shore. No fewer than twenty-two of the slaves noted by Gay hailed from this town or its immediate vicinity. In two months in 1855, the
Chestertown
News
reported parties of seven, ten, and eleven slaves escaping to the North; the following year a group of eight departed, taking with them $300 worth of silks and jewelry. Many of these slaves passed through New York, including seven men and two women in October 1855, and a woman and her five children the following month, part of a group of eleven fugitives who had reached Pennsylvania and been sent northward by various routes. Not surprisingly, these “stampedes” alarmed Chestertown slaveowners. In 1858, a public meeting there warned anyone “detected in interfering with slave property” and “all who aid, abet, or sympathize with them” of dire consequences if they did not desist.
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Gay’s records offer a glimpse of the many methods slaves employed to flee their owners and the ingenuity their escapes involved. In addition to the groups who secured passage on boats like the
City
of
Richmond
, many fugitives arranged individually with captains for their passage (often for a sizable fee), were hidden on ships by sympathetic crew members, or stowed away without anyone’s knowledge. A few fugitives traveled openly by boat. Albert McCealee, owned by a merchant tailor in Charleston, booked passage to Savannah, “disguising himself as a Spaniard.” When he arrived in that city, Gay related, “he enjoyed the largest liberty as a foreigner unacquainted with the rules of the place such as smoking cigars. He visited all the principal taverns and was suspected by no person.” Then he and another slave of the same owner boarded a ship for New York, with McCealee’s light-skinned companion “easily pass[ing]” for white.
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Some fugitives emulated Frederick Douglass and departed from Baltimore or other cities by train. Charles Holliday left Baltimore “by the cars” (as Gay referred to the railroad) and “came through immediately” to Philadelphia. Nathaniel West, who worked in Barnum’s City Hotel in Baltimore, “bought a ticket at the depot, and came off in the cars like a gentleman.” Harriet Eglin and her cousin Charlotte Giles of Baltimore borrowed five dollars “on the credit of Charlotte’s mistress” and arranged for a white man, who had been told they were free, to buy their train tickets to Little York, Pennsylvania. Eglin and Giles traveled wearing large mourning hats and veils to conceal their appearance. Their owners placed several notices in the
Baltimore
Sun
offering rewards for their recapture and later unsuccessfully sued both the individual who had helped them and the railroad company itself for damages. In May 1856, seven fugitives boarded a train in Mt. Pleasant, Maryland, hoping to reach Wilmington. They “were questioned but not stopped” and soon made their way to Philadelphia and New York.
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Another common mode of escape involved appropriating horses or carriages. John T. Jones left Chestertown in December 1855 in a buggy owned by his owner’s niece and soon arrived in Wilmington, from which Thomas Garrett sent him to Philadelphia. Mary Cummens, her adult son James, eleven-year-old daughter Lucy, and another slave, all owned by the wealthy planter Jacob Hollingsworth of Hagerstown, Maryland, rode off in his horse-drawn carriage to Shippensburg, where they boarded a train to Harrisburg and Philadelphia. Gay forwarded the Cummens family to Canada, where Mary and Lucy were living in Hamilton, just south of Toronto, in 1861. Thomas Jones, a house servant in Martinsburg, Virginia, hired a horse and departed on Christmas night, 1855. He crossed the Potomac, then turned the horse loose and walked two days and nights to Harrisburg, his clothing “frozen to his body.” He arrived in Philadelphia on New Year’s Eve and in New York on January 4.
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Many slaves had no alternative but to try to escape on foot, sometimes over very long distances. Simon Hill, a slave in Appomattox County, Virginia, told Gay that he “took . . . to the woods, and bent his steps northward and in about two weeks reached Philadelphia,” a distance of well over 200 miles. John Richardson walked over fifty miles from Baltimore to Columbia, Pennsylvania, from where he “took the cars to Philadelphia.” Even those who initially escaped by other means ended up having to walk significant distances. The brothers Albert and Anthony Brown, owned by a Virginia oysterman, appropriated one of his boats and sailed up Chesapeake Bay until head winds forced them to make landfall just north of Baltimore. From there, they walked by night, following railroad tracks. They traveled with the aid of a compass, but abandoned the instrument at some point “lest it should excite the suspicions of two white persons whom they saw approaching.” When they arrived in Wilmington, “friends” sent them on to Philadelphia and New York. William Brown walked for five weeks from Prince George’s County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., to Columbia, Pennsylvania. His journey took place in November and December 1855, and as Gay recorded, “he suffered severely . . . from cold and wet, being often obliged to ford ponds and streams. His clothes sometimes froze to him, and he would lie all day in the sun to thaw and dry them.” Most of those who escaped on foot were men, but Emeline Chapman walked the 120 miles from Washington to Harrisburg.
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