Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (31 page)

Before the war, the actions of runaway slaves had powerfully affected the national debate over slavery. Now, fugitives were helping to propel the nation down the road to emancipation. As the
New
York
Herald
noted, the question of the fate of slavery had been “forced upon the administration by these . . . negroes in our army camps.” By 1862, one historian has written, the federal government had “undertaken the work of the underground railroad.” No longer did slaves have to reach the North or Canada to escape from bondage. As new gateways to freedom opened within the South, what the
Liberator
called the “National Underground Railroad” superseded its predecessor. Far more slaves—men, women, and children, of all ages—escaped to Union lines than had reached the free states and Canada during the preceding thirty years. “An end is put . . . to the Underground Railroad,” wrote McKim. “I take this opportunity . . . to thank the contributors to the treasury of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, . . . and to notify them that in all probability we shall have no further call for their aid in this particular line of business.” As for New York City, in 1863 a writer in
Principia
, an abolitionist newspaper published irregularly there during the Civil War, jested that because of wartime prosperity, all the railroads in the North were “doing a flourishing business” except one—the underground railroad “now does scarcely any business at all . . . scarcely a solitary traveler comes along.” Many of the fugitives who had found refuge in Canada now returned to the United States; some enlisted in the Union army. Indeed, reversing the historic pattern, during and after the war black northerners began to seek their fortunes in the South as teachers, employees of the Freedmen’s Bureau, aspirants for political office, or simply individuals in search of economic opportunity. The overthrow of Reconstruction put an end to this North-South black migration; it would not resume until late in the twentieth century.
12

Although increasingly impossible to enforce, the Fugitive Slave Act incongruously remained on the books until its repeal in 1864, more than a year after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. During Reconstruction, it enjoyed an ironic afterlife. Lyman Trumbull, now chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, used the infamous 1850 statute as a model for the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which revolutionized American jurisprudence by establishing the principle of birthright citizenship and extending to black Americans many of the rights previously enjoyed exclusively by whites. To do so, Trumbull drew on the Fugitive Slave Act’s enforcement mechanisms and civil and criminal penalties, and the way it superimposed federal power on state law in order to establish a national responsibility for securing constitutionally protected rights. “The act that was passed that time for the purpose of punishing persons who should aid Negroes to freedom,” Trumbull declared, “is now to be applied . . . to the punishment of those who shall undertake to keep them in slavery.” Thus, as James Wilson of Iowa put it, in the aftermath of the Civil War Congress turned “the arsenal of slavery upon itself,” wielding “the weapons which slavery has placed in our hands . . . in the holy cause of liberty.”
13

II

As the underground railroad faded into history, the men and women who had devoted themselves to its operations followed divergent paths into the future. Some disappeared from the historical record. Albert Fountain, who had transported dozens of slaves to freedom on his ship
City
of
Richmond
, was last heard of in 1862, when Confederate authorities burned his vessel and he was reported by Thomas Garrett to have joined the Union army. Garrett himself, who claimed to have helped nearly 3,000 slaves reach the North and Canada, died in 1871 at the age of eighty-one. The previous year, as part of a celebration of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted black men throughout the nation the right to vote, the black community led Garrett through the streets of Wilmington in a carriage bedecked with a sign reading, “Our Moses.”

Another “Moses,” Harriet Tubman, secured a position with the Union army on the South Carolina Sea Islands. Officially a cook and nurse, she also served as a spy gathering intelligence behind enemy lines. In 1863, Tubman guided two Union gunboats carrying black soldiers up the Combahee River on a raid that disrupted Confederate supply lines and liberated over 700 slaves. For decades, Tubman fought to receive a veteran’s pension for her wartime services, only to be denied. She eventually was awarded a pension, but only as the widow of a Civil War soldier she married after the war. Tubman died at ninety-one in 1913, the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
14

Many prominent underground railroad operatives continued their efforts to improve the lot of black Americans. In 1862, William Still became head of an employment office established by Philadelphia’s black leaders to assist slaves who had escaped to Union lines. After the Civil War, Still prospered as the proprietor of a coal yard; he was so successful that he was invited to join the Philadelphia Board of Trade. Still took part in the fight to integrate the city’s streetcars and secure for blacks the right to vote, as well as helping to organize a home for orphans of black soldiers and sailors and the city’s first YMCA for black youth. Determined to boost sales of his book
The
Underground
Railroad
(1872), a vast compilation of information about runaway slaves and their escapes, he hired a bevy of agents to market it and arranged for it to be displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. When Still died in 1902, a black businessman wrote to his son, “There are costly monuments towering toward the sky to men of the Caucasian race for deeds not so great nor so dangerous as his acts in the under-ground Rail Road.”
15

Still’s coworker in the Philadelphia antislavery office, James Miller McKim, pioneered northern efforts to assist the freedpeople in the South. In 1862, he organized a committee to aid blacks on the Union-occupied Sea Islands. After the war, McKim was instrumental in the creation of the American Freedmen’s Aid Commission, as well as the founding of the
Nation
, a weekly that, initially at least, promoted the cause of the former slaves. Robert Purvis, the former head of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, devoted himself to a wide range of issues, including home rule for Ireland, the rights of Native Americans, and women’s suffrage. Purvis was one of the few black men to support Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in repudiating the Fifteenth Amendment for failing to secure women’s right to vote. “He would rather that his son never be enfranchised,” Purvis declared at a women’s rights convention, “unless his daughter could be also.” Purvis died in 1898, the last surviving founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
16

During the Civil War, Stephen Myers, head of the Albany Vigilance Committee, raised a company of black soldiers, but when New York’s governor, Edwin D. Morgan, refused to accept them, they served instead in the famous Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry. After the war, Myers worked as a hotel steward in Albany and Lake George, and as janitor for the postmaster of New York City. At his death in 1870, an Albany newspaper lauded him as a person who “did more for his people than any other colored man living, not excepting Fred. Douglass.” Jermain W. Loguen, the “underground railroad king” of Syracuse, also recruited black troops. After the war, Loguen returned to Tennessee in search of long-lost family and friends. Increasingly, he devoted himself to church work. Elected as a bishop to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in 1868, he established congregations among freedpeople in the South. Loguen died in 1872, as he was about to leave on a missionary expedition to the West Coast.
17

Of the New Yorkers most closely associated with the underground railroad, Lewis Tappan, although well into his seventies, helped to shape the efforts of the American Missionary Association to establish schools and colleges for blacks in the South. Charles B. Ray continued his work as a missionary among the city’s black poor until his death in 1886. He also helped to organize a black labor convention and aided former slaves who emigrated to Kansas during the “Exodus” of 1879. James W. C. Pennington helped raise black troops during the war and then established black churches and schools in the South during Reconstruction. He died in Florida in 1870. Abigail Hopper Gibbons worked as a nurse in a camp for runaway slaves and wounded Union soldiers in Maryland during the Civil War, and afterward she engaged in activities including finding jobs for war widows, working to reform prisons, and participating in the “purity crusade” that sought to rid New York City of prostitution. At the age of ninety-one, she addressed the state legislature on behalf of a bill establishing a women’s reformatory in the city. During the New York City draft riots of July 1863, while she was away working as a nurse, the Gibbons’ home on West Twenty-Ninth Street was sacked by the mob. Her husband, James, and two of their daughters had to escape over rooftops to safety. The riots demonstrated once again the powerful hold of racism and pro-southern sentiment in New York City.
18

Sydney Howard Gay’s career in journalism flourished after he left the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
. During the Civil War, he served as managing editor of the
New
York
Tribune
. With the editor, Horace Greeley, often away, Gay essentially ran the newspaper, offering strong support to the war effort, pressing the Lincoln administration on emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers, and trying to moderate the mercurial Greeley’s unpredictable enthusiasms. He resigned in 1865 and later worked briefly on the
Chicago
Tribune
and
New
York
Evening
Post
. In the 1870s, when the publisher Charles Scribner engaged the renowned poet William Cullen Bryant to write a “centennial history” of the United States, Bryant, then in his eighties, asked Gay to become his “associate” on the project. Gay did “the real hard work of writing” the four-part history, while Bryant made editorial corrections to the two volumes that were completed before he died in 1878. To Gay’s annoyance, however, the publisher listed Bryant as coauthor on all four, and continued to advertise the work as
Bryant
’
s
Popular
History
of
the
United
States
. In 1882, when Gay penned an autobiographical sketch, he dwelled at length on the publisher’s “mistake” of “attempting to persuade the public that [Bryant] was the author of a work, of one half [of] which not a word was written till after his death.” Nonetheless, along with a subsequent biography of James Madison, the series gave Gay a reputation as a historian. In 1885, three years before his death, the newly founded American Historical Association invited Gay to become a member.
19

Because of excessive detail in the first three volumes, the fourth and final part of the centennial history, which appeared in 1880, had to cover the entire period from 1780 to 1876. Gay used it to fight the battle against slavery one last time. He placed the blame for the Civil War squarely on the leaders of the South, who believed that “the best and truest government was an oligarchy founded upon property in man,” and made the abolitionists, progenitors of a “new era in American history,” the heroes. While remaining silent on his own role, he lauded the underground railroad and estimated that 30,000 slaves had reached “a safe refuge in Canada” in the three decades before the Civil War. Yet signs of disillusionment, or perhaps exhaustion, crept in. Gay said nothing about Reconstruction, except that it was “a work badly begun, unwisely carried on, and . . . still unfinished.” His treatment of aid to fugitive slaves and of abolitionism more generally focused almost entirely on whites. Gay’s idol and sometime tormenter William Lloyd Garrison received his due, as did Isaac T. Hopper, but William Still, Charles B. Ray, even Frederick Douglass, went unmentioned. “The African in America, whether bond or free,” Gay concluded, had learned “the habit of submission” and had “rarely shown any spirit of revolt.”
Bryant
’
s
Popular
History
, as Gay proudly insisted, helped to stimulate public interest in the American past, but it offered an early iteration of the myth of the underground railroad, indeed the entire crusade against slavery, as a white humanitarian enterprise in aid of helpless blacks.
20

Actually, as Gay well knew, the heroic work of white New Yorkers like himself, Hopper, Lewis Tappan, and James and Abigail Gibbons on behalf of fugitive slaves would not have been possible without the courage and resourcefulness, in a hostile environment, of blacks, from the members of the original Vigilance Committee to the black churches that sheltered runaway slaves and the ordinary men and women who watched for fugitives on the docks and city streets and took them into their homes. Not to mention the two black men who had labored alongside Gay in the antislavery office. Information about their subsequent lives is not easy to come by. William H. Leonard continued to work as a printer until his death in 1873. His son William Jr., who followed the same craft, headed a black Republican club in Brooklyn in the 1880s. He later moved to New Jersey, where he became the leader of a black volunteer fire company in Asbury Park, the only one in the state until 1907, when white firemen threatened to “refuse to perform fire duties” unless it were dissolved.
21

As for the indispensable Louis Napoleon, thanks to Gay he worked for a number of years as a messenger and janitor for the
New
York
Tribune
. He retired after the war, living on contributions from old friends in the abolitionist movement. In the 1870s, Napoleon finally achieved a certain notoriety. The
Brooklyn
Eagle
included him in a list of the “Memorable Men” of that city, where he now lived. In 1875, the
New
York
Tribune
published a brief sketch of Napoleon, in a series on “New-York Characters.” “The old man,” it reported, “hobbles painfully” with the aid of a walking stick; “few would have suspected . . . that he had ever been the rescuer of 3,000 persons from bondage.” Napoleon, the writer added, “loves to talk of these exploits of a past era.”