Bound for Canaan (13 page)

Henson's party followed the new National Road across Virginia, via Culpepper and Harpers Ferry, and then through the mountains of western Virginia, to Wheeling. It must have seemed to Henson as if the entire country was bound for the Ohio Valley. Declared one federal official, “No poor man in the Eastern states, who has feet and legs, and can use them has any excuse for remaining poor where he is, a day or even an hour.” He and his charges would have passed whole convoys of middle-class “movers” driving ox-drawn wagons and “one-horse tumbrils” piled high with stacks of bedding, furniture, spinning wheels, pots, and tools, as well as ragged families who trudged along with two or three half-naked children, a limping, lantern-ribbed pony and, as one traveler put it, a pathetic “bag of old plunder” containing their meager belongings. Isaac Riley's unshackled bondsmen no doubt looked with compassion upon the coffles of slaves shuffling westward toward the markets and plantations of Kentucky and the Mississippi Valley. The Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, who had lived in Wheeling a few years before Henson's party passed through, described its streets filled with “droves of a dozen or
twenty ragged men bound for the West, chained together and driven through the streets,
bare-headed
and
bare-footed, in mud and snow
,” by men armed with whips and bludgeons.

At Wheeling, Henson sold the horse and wagon and with the proceeds bought “a large boat, called in that region a yawl,” for the long journey down the Ohio River. So far, Henson had little cause to worry about discipline among his charges. But now they were sailing just yards from the shore of a free state. “On passing along the Ohio shore, we were repeatedly told by persons conversing with us, that we were no longer slaves, but free men, if we chose to be so,” he says. At Cincinnati, crowds of free blacks gathered around Henson's party, urging them to remain in Ohio, telling them that they were fools for continuing on to Kentucky, and surrendering themselves again to slavery. All they had to do was to walk away and disappear into the city. They could easily have found work along the booming riverfront, or in the hinterland, where new towns were being raised, farms carved from the forest, timber cut, and roads laid. There was nothing to stop them but the will of Josiah Henson, and even he felt his resolution giving way. “The duties of the slave to his master as appointed over him in the Lord, I had ever heard urged by ministers and religious men,” he wrote. To run away seemed to him like outright stealing. “And now I felt the devil was getting the upper hand of me.” But he had given Riley his word. “Pride, too, came in to confirm me. I had undertaken a great thing; my vanity had been flattered all along the road by hearing myself praised; I thought it would be a feather in my cap to carry it through thoroughly.”

Henson determined to act, before he changed his mind. It was, in its way, a pivotal moment in the history of slavery. All the powerful machinery of the slave power was turning in Henson's heart, and against it the unnatural, troubling prospect of freedom: unexamined, largely unknown, insecure, alluring yet frightening, and problematic. And yet, here were men and women like themselves shouting to them from the riverbank, free. “I sternly assumed the captain, and ordered the boat to be pushed off into the stream,” Henson recalled. “A shower of curses followed me from the shore; but the negroes under me, accustomed to obey, and, alas! too degraded and ignorant of the advantages of liberty to know what they were forfeiting, offered no resistance to my command.”

2

A few months after Josiah Henson passed westward on his journey down the Ohio, Levi Coffin crossed the river northward en route to his new home in Indiana. Coffin had made an earlier, exploratory trip there in 1822, in the company of his future brother-in-law Benjamin White. “Town booming,” as it was called, was taking place just about anywhere that buildings could be erected. One unhappy European traveler reported that the Westerners seemed determined to plant their settlements in the dirtiest puddles they could find. To newcomers the atmosphere seemed semibarbarous. Respectable farmers from New England, New York, and the Mid-Atlantic states, along with a smattering of young lawyers and “mechanics” (as skilled working men were called), lived alongside shaggy frontiersmen who wore buckskins and tomahawks or foot-long knives stuck in their belts. Although the rich, black prairie earth was capable of producing forty bushels of wheat or a hundred of corn to the acre, tilling it was “jerking, wracking, shin-cracking labor,” in soil so tangled with roots and grubs that chains broke and plows stuck fast.

There were very few African Americans in Indiana at this time, perhaps fewer than three thousand, and they were not made to feel welcome. Before statehood, Governor William Henry Harrison had proposed legalizing slavery in the territory, and in later years there were repeated attempts to exclude blacks entirely. A typical memorial to the territorial authorities from settlers in Harrison County stated: “We are opposed to the introduction of slaves or free Negroes in any shape. Our corn Houses, Kitchens, Smoke Houses…may no doubt be robbed and our wives, children and daughters may and no doubt will be insulted and abused by those Africans. We do not wish to be saddled with them in any way.” Although immigration was not in fact restricted, the laws did discriminate harshly against blacks. Voting was limited to white males. Blacks were barred from testifying in court cases involving whites, and their children excluded from public schools. After 1831 blacks wishing to settle in Indiana would be required to register with the local authorities and to post a bond as a guarantee of good behavior.

On the whole, though, Coffin approved of Indiana. As a Quaker he was pleased by the leveling aspect of frontier society. Equality among
whites, or at least white men, was not just a theory but a basic fact, so ingrained in the way life was lived that it was scarcely remarked upon by anyone. Settlers, no matter what their origins, all lived in the same small cabins made of rough bark logs, with a floor made of “puncheons,” or split timber, and a fireplace made of the same construction, plastered with mud. They ate the same stewed pumpkin, cabbage, salt pork, and hominy. And they endured the same abominable trails that turned into morasses of mud every time it rained. At the same time as the sheer difficulty of frontier life tended to strengthen cooperative relationships, the absence of firm government encouraged an aggressive individualism that was rare in more densely populated areas back East. Both tendencies were to play a role in the Underground Railroad, where success and safety depended on both absolute trust in one's friends and neighbors, and a sometimes self-righteous willingness to take the law into one's own hands.

Coffin spent several weeks traveling among the Quaker settlements visiting relatives, and then settled down for the winter teaching school at several locations in the vicinity of Richmond. The next spring, a cousin, Allen Hiatt, asked Coffin to join him in crossing what was then known as the Grand Prairie, to rendezvous with family members who had settled on the Sangamon River, in western Illinois, or “Kaskaskia.” In spite of the Northwest Ordinance, de facto slavery continued to exist in Illinois with little interference from the authorities. Indeed, the state's first governor, Shadrach Bond, owned thirteen slaves, and his lieutenant governor, twelve. Slaves could freely be brought into the state as long as they were registered at a county clerk's office. Typically, they were registered as “indentured servants,” whose “contracts” could be freely bought and sold. Whipping was permitted by law, including twenty-five lashes in front of a magistrate if a “servant” was found more than ten miles from his home. Those who refused to work could be sold back into the slave states. Even as Coffin was making his way across the empty heart of the state, pro-slavery settlers from the South were vigorously agitating for a constitutional vote that would convert Illinois officially into a slave state. The proslavery forces eventually were defeated at the polls, in 1824, but only by a comparatively narrow margin of 6,640 to 4,972. That the antislavery forces were successful at all was due mainly to the passionate advocacy of Governor Edward Coles, the Virginian who as a young man a decade earlier had begged Thomas Jefferson to speak out for abolition.

If Indiana was primitive, most of Illinois was still raw wilderness, confusing and forbidding by turns. There were barely seventy thousand settlers in the entire state, most of them along the Mississippi River; Chicago was a hamlet with more Indian wigwams in it than houses. Much of the state was scarcely known at all, except to hunters and trappers. After crossing the Wabash, Coffin and Hiatt followed an Indian trail that wound from northwest to southwest across a limitless prairie, empty but for occasional native villages, and scaffolds that the Indians had built to dry their venison. They wandered over the prairie for six days, at one point, without seeing a single human being. Trails abruptly vanished in swamp and tall grass. Wolves howled in the distance. “Starvation seemed to stare us in the face,” Coffin remembered. At last, having almost abandoned hope, they saw smoke rising from a log cabin, and were overjoyed to discover that it was inhabited by white people, who directed them to the settlement they were searching for. Hiatt's relatives were preparing to move on still farther west, however. At this point, Levi Coffin might well have passed out of history. The man who was to become, arguably, the Underground Railroad's most effective single organizer might have become yet another itchy-footed pioneer, drawn ever westward by the lure of better and cheaper land and freedom from the entanglements of society. Hiatt's relatives “asked me to go too, but I told them that ever since I had come to the West I had heard of a better place a little further on, and now that I had got within forty miles of it, I thought I would turn back,” Coffin would dryly recall. He rejected the frontier and the open spaces, and returned home, choosing commitment, obligation, duty, and a more complex and problematic future darkened by the spreading stain of slavery.

Back in North Carolina in 1824, Coffin alternated between periods of farming and teaching at various schools in Guilford County. He also married Benjamin White's sister Catherine, an “amiable and attractive young woman of lively, buoyant spirits,” who would cheerfully share his work on behalf of fugitive slaves. Two years later, they would leave North Carolina for good. About this time, Vestal Coffin unexpectedly died at the age of thirty-four. It is not clear whether these events caused a serious interruption in the dispatch of fugitive slaves northward. However, a few years later the slave known as “Hamilton's Saul” would still be working clandestinely with Vestal's young son Addison, so it seems probable that the sys
tem that the elder Coffins created continued to operate, with Levi soon to be positioned to receive fugitives at the Indiana end of the line.

In September 1826 Levi and his wife headed west via the Kanawha Road. They settled in Newport, today known as Fountain City, in eastern Indiana, a village of about twenty families where they would live for more than two decades, and which they would make into one of the most important centers of underground activity in the West. Many Quakers had settled in the surrounding area, as had free blacks, including many sent there by the North Carolina Yearly Meeting. So many of the Quakers were from Guilford County that they named their local meeting New Garden after their former one in North Carolina. Coffin bought property and, seeing the need for a mercantile business, he purchased goods from Cincinnati and opened a store, the first in the town.

Coffin observed that runaway slaves often passed through Newport, probably drawn by the presence of a black community into which they might hope to blend. They “were often pursued and captured, the colored people not being very skillful in concealing them, or shrewd in making arrangements to forward them to Canada,” Coffin wrote. Simply reaching the nominally free soil of Indiana was by no means a guarantee of safety. Slave hunters operated freely under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law. Nor were Quakers all of one mind when it came to harboring fugitives. Many felt that they had done all that their religion required of them by emancipating their own bondsmen and immigrating to a free state. Indeed, the Quaker committee charged with resettling free blacks in Indiana had to beg Quakers to overcome their personal prejudices and “yield to the interests and happiness of our fellow human beings,” by accepting African Americans as neighbors.

Coffin was not among those Quakers who left their convictions behind in North Carolina. When he asked fellow Quakers why they did not help fugitives on their way, they typically temporized, saying that they were afraid of the law. “I told them that I read in the Bible when I was a boy that it was right to take in the stranger and administer to those in distress, and that I thought it was always safe to do right,” Coffin would answer, adding pointedly that he was “willing to receive and aid as many fugitives as were disposed to come to my house.” According to Coffin, the first fugitives arrived at his home in the winter of 1826–27. “Friends in the
neighborhood, who had formerly stood aloof from the work…were encouraged to engage in it when they saw the fearless manner in which I acted, and the success that attended my efforts…. They would contribute to clothe the fugitives, and would aid in forwarding them on their way, but were timid about sheltering them under their roof; so that part of the work devolved on us.” Some seemed genuinely happy to see the work go on, as long as the Coffins took the risk, while others actively tried to discourage them. “They manifested great concern for my safety and pecuniary interests, telling me that such a course of action would injure my business and perhaps ruin me; that I ought to consider the welfare of my family; and warning me that my life was in danger, as there were many threats made against me by the slave-hunters and those who sympathized with them.” To such arguments, Coffin replied, “If by doing my duty and endeavoring to fulfill the injunctions of the Bible, I injured my business, then let my business go. As to my safety, my life was in the hands of my Divine Master, and I felt that I had his approval.”