Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (4 page)

Nearly every prominent white abolitionist, as well as antislavery politicians like William H. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens, at one time or another assisted fugitive slaves; many sheltered them in their homes. So did just about every major black abolitionist.
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Douglass, of course, became the era’s greatest orator, editor, and writer in the cause of abolition and human rights. Pennington, while less well known, published
A
Text
Book
of
the
Origin
and
History
of
the
Colored
People
(1841), a challenge to American racism, and participated in numerous efforts to achieve abolition and equal rights for northern blacks. Both provided aid to fugitives. Douglass concealed runaway slaves in his home in Rochester and forwarded them to Canada. “On one occasion,” he later recalled, “I had eleven fugitives under my roof.” Pennington also aided individual fugitives and helped to raise money in Great Britain for New York’s Vigilance Committee.
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Urban vigilance committees and rural antislavery activists hid runaway slaves and sent them on their way, and on occasion violently rescued fugitives from the clutches of slave catchers. They also defended fugitives in court, published accounts of their experiences, and raised money to purchase their freedom and that of their families. The public activities of these groups had an important impact on the evolving sectional conflict. Vigilance committee lawyers played a crucial role in persuading northern courts to recognize the “freedom principle”—the doctrine that once a slave (other than a fugitive) left a jurisdiction where local law established slavery, he or she automatically became free. Underground railroad operatives were deeply involved in campaigns for equal citizenship for northern free blacks, including the right to vote, access to public education, and economic opportunity. “Vigilance” involved all these activities and more.

Abolitionists of all persuasions considered aid to fugitives a form of practical antislavery action. Indeed, “practical” became a favorite description of underground railroad activities. “This was practical abolition,” David Ruggles declared, in describing the work of the New York Vigilance Committee in aiding escaped slaves, protecting free people from kidnappers, and combating the illegal slave trade. One Philadelphia abolitionist described William Still as “a sincere practical advocate of the cause of human rights.”
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“Practical” meant that vigilance committees devoted themselves not simply to the dramatic escapes that have come to characterize our image of the underground railroad, but to day-to-day activities like organizing committees, raising funds, and political and legal action. Many of these activities took place in full public view, not “underground.”

While many individuals assisted a fugitive at one time or another, only a small number devoted themselves primarily to that task, and even the most energetic “station masters” engaged in many other activities, from editing or writing for abolitionist newspapers to lecturing, fund raising, and attending antislavery conventions. Rather than an independent institution, in other words, the underground railroad formed part of what Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, called the “antislavery enterprise,” the broad spectrum of individuals, outlooks, and activities devoted to bringing about the end of slavery.
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In the slave states and many parts of the free, assisting a fugitive slave carried considerable risk. The abolitionist Charles T. Torrey, a Yale-educated minister, died in the Maryland state penitentiary in 1846 after being convicted of helping fugitives escape from Washington, D.C. William Brodie, a black sailor from New York, was heavily fined by a Georgia court, and when unable to pay, he was sold into slavery. Thomas Garrett, who made no secret of his aid to fugitives in Delaware, had to pay a substantial fine after being sued by the owner of runaways. Such cases occurred in the North as well. An Ohio judge fined John Van Zandt, a farmer, $1,500 for assisting nine fugitives from Kentucky. His case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1847 upheld his conviction. William Henry Johnson, a black hairdresser active in the underground railroad in Philadelphia, abandoned the city in 1859 for Norwich, Connecticut, “to escape imprisonment for having assisted fugitive slaves.”
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Nonetheless, it is striking how few underground railroad activists north of the Mason-Dixon Line suffered legal consequences for their activities, which often were widely publicized. Northern officials seem to have had little interest in prosecuting those who assisted fugitive slaves. Indeed, rather than operating entirely in secret, the underground railroad was a quasi-public institution. In many northern communities the identity of those most closely involved in aiding fugitives was widely known. Underground railroad activists frequently reported their accomplishments in local newspapers. The Cleveland Vigilance Committee even had a banner, described in
Frederick
Douglass
’
Paper
: “The divine Hercules with a club; the monster slavery prostrate at his feet; a woman in the distance, with her manacles broken; he points to the motto, ‘LIBERTY.’ ” The
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
felt compelled to warn vigilance committees about their “disposition to boast publicly of the success with which the slave hunter has been foiled,” thereby revealing too much about their methods. The “frequent exposure through the public prints, of the modes of escape of fugitives, and of the expedients employed to prevent recapture,” the paper observed, played into the hands of “pursuers” and made the task of the runaway “tenfold” more difficult.
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III

Running away, of course, constituted only one part of a spectrum of slave resistance that ranged from day-to-day contestation with owners and overseers to outright rebellion, but it had the strongest and most persistent political impact. Most fugitives, it seems safe to say, were thinking of immediate or long-standing grievances, not the national implications of their actions, when they embarked on their journeys to freedom. But the actions of fugitive slaves exemplified the political importance of slave resistance as a whole and raised questions central to antebellum politics, understood not simply as electoral campaigns but as the contest over slavery in the broad public sphere. At the most basic level, running away from slavery gave the lie to proslavery propaganda. His encounters with fugitives, William Still related, led him to realize how many slaves had “deeply thought on the subject of their freedom,” were aware of the existence of Canada and “other places of retreat,” and had begun to plan escapes “very early in life.” Some had made provision in advance for their lives in freedom. Among a group of fugitives discovered on a ship heading north from Virginia in 1858, one was bound for New York to meet his wife and another had arranged with friends for a job at a Canadian hotel.
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Because escapes refuted the widely circulated idea of the contented slave, southern newspapers often exaggerated the role of northern agents in enticing slaves to run away. The Reverend Thornton Stringfellow, a Virginia cleric known for his proslavery sermons, even claimed that having been persuaded by outsiders to escape, fugitives were “constantly returning to their masters” because of the hardships they encountered in the North. Newspaper advertisements seeking the recapture of fugitives frequently described runaways as “cheerful” and “well-disposed,” as if their escapes were inexplicable. But these notices inadvertently offered a record of abusive treatment—mentions of scars and other injuries that would help identify the runaway—that provided powerful material for abolitionist propaganda. One of the most successful antislavery tracts, Theodore Weld’s
American
Slavery
As
It
Is
, relied on sources from the slave states, including numerous excerpts from fugitive slave advertisements, to condemn the institution. Weld congratulated the authors of these public announcements for their “commendable fidelity to truth” in candidly detailing the “mutilations” visible on fugitives’ bodies.
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“There is a spirit among the slaves themselves,” wrote James Miller McKim, a leading Philadelphia abolitionist and longtime member of that city’s vigilance committee, “that is helping on the work of emancipation.” For the abolitionist crusade, fugitive slaves provided an infusion of new leadership, a point of unity in a movement badly fractured between advocates and opponents of political action, among other divisions, and a challenge to rethink the traditional commitment to nonviolence. In the 1840s and 1850s, fugitive slaves, including Douglass, Pennington, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry Bibb, Henry Brown, and many others, emerged as eloquent abolitionist lecturers, writers, and editors. Their advent, the historian Benjamin Quarles has written, was “a godsend to the cause.” Those who had experienced slavery, the country’s most prominent abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, declared in 1850, were “the best qualified to address the public,” and speeches by fugitive slaves attracted large audiences in the North and Great Britain. Fugitive slave narratives—accounts written by runaways of their ordeals and accomplishments—emerged in these years as a popular literary genre.
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Renditions of escaped slaves reinforced abolitionists’ claim that the Slave Power reached into the North, and that slavery threatened all Americans’ cherished civil liberties, particularly the right of a person accused of a crime to state his or her case before a jury (something explicitly denied to alleged runaways in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850). In national politics, the actions of fugitives and their allies forced onto center stage explosive questions about the balance between federal and state authority, the extent to which the laws of slave states extended into the North, and the relationship of the federal government to slavery. These issues were debated and litigated at every level of society, from local petition drives and court cases to the halls of Congress and the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington. The rendition of fugitives emerged as a source of contention at the very founding of the republic—it was discussed at the constitutional convention, and the first national measure to provide for their recapture became law in 1793, only four years after George Washington’s inauguration. Later, the fugitive issue helped to launch the careers of major antislavery politicians, including Salmon P. Chase and William H. Seward, members of Lincoln’s cabinet who had become widely known before the Civil War for their efforts on behalf of runaway slaves.

The status of fugitive slaves also became a significant point of contention in Anglo-American and Mexican-American diplomacy. After the War of Independence and War of 1812, the federal government made concerted efforts to retrieve slaves—numbering in the thousands—who had escaped to the British, or obtain monetary compensation for their owners. The unwillingness of the government in London to countenance the return of these slaves and those who subsequently escaped to Canada or British possessions in the Caribbean inspired innumerable complaints from Washington. Despite pressure from American administrations, Mexico, which abolished slavery in the 1820s, also refused to extradite fugitives to the United States. Treaties with Indians, however, frequently stipulated their responsibility to return escaped slaves. The federal government’s active efforts to assist slaveholders who had lost fugitives reinforced the abolitionist contention that the Slave Power effectively determined national policy, just as the return of fugitives by northern officials revealed the complicity of the free states in the evil of slavery.
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So many slaves escaped from the Upper South, the
New
York
Times
suggested in 1855, that slavery there would soon be “so unprofitable that it will hardly be worth preserving.” The rising number of fugitives from Maryland and Kentucky created apprehension in the cotton kingdom about the vulnerability of slavery on the border with the free states. It provided the immediate catalyst for the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which required citizens to assist in the capture of fugitives and overrode local laws and procedures that impeded their return. Effective enforcement of that law quickly became a major demand of the South as sectional tension escalated during the 1850s, and a source of deep resentment in much of the North. Ironically, when it came to fugitive slaves, the white South, usually vocal in defense of local rights, favored vigorous national action, while some northern states engaged in the nullification of federal law. Northern assistance to fugitive slaves and the unwillingness of local juries to convict persons who took part in widely publicized rescues influenced congressional debates over slavery and emerged as a key point of contention during the secession crisis. And the spectacle of thousands of black northerners fleeing to Canada after the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 offered a jarring counterpoint to the familiar image of the United States as an asylum for those denied liberty in other countries.
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“What measure of abolitionists,” asked the
Friend
of
Man
, an antislavery newspaper, in 1840, “is regarded with more sympathy and favor, than efforts to assist the fugitives? Thousands will lend a helping hand
here
, who will do nothing else for the slave.” Individual encounters with fugitive slaves and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law forced ordinary northerners who had no connection with the abolitionist movement to confront the question of the relationship between individual conscience and legal obligation. Of course, many, probably most, northerners, even those who hated slavery, felt that respect for the law and constitution must override sympathy for fugitives. Typical was Abraham Lincoln, who wrote in 1855 that he hated “to see the poor creatures hunted down,” but out of reverence for the rule of law, “I bite my lip and keep quiet.” But in March 1861, Lincoln felt compelled to devote a portion of his first inaugural address to the question of fugitive slaves and to propose changes in federal law that would secure greater legal rights for accused runaways. None of this would have happened without the actions of the slaves who sought to escape to freedom and the northerners, black and white, male and female, who took part in organized efforts to assist them. All in all, the fugitive slave issue played a crucial role in bringing about the Civil War.
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