Bound for Canaan (53 page)

The humiliating experience in London gave fiery edge to Stanton's growing recognition of the “oppression I saw everywhere,” and which was only intensified by her own experience of motherhood. After the Stantons moved to Seneca Falls, New York in 1847, she was swept by waves of loneliness, depression, and bitterness at women's foreordained “portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide.” Although increasingly impelled toward some kind of action, she could not say what until the redoubtable Lucretia Mott came to visit in the early summer of 1848. To her, and a small group of like-minded women, all of them Quakers except herself, she poured out her discontent.

In contrast to the profoundly frustrated Stanton, who was an Episcopalian, her friends were all vocal, self-reliant, and accustomed to participating in the affairs of their religious community on an equal basis with men. They were also politically astute, having been active for years in the antislavery cause—Mott since at least 1833—and, in some cases, in the work of the Underground Railroad. They already lived the kind of engaged and intellectually liberated life that Stanton felt so painfully denied. What Stanton brought to the parlor table in the home of Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth McClintock was festering outrage at her exclusion from the public world.

Impulsively, the women decided to call a convention just five days thence, on July 19 and 20, “to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women.” Most of those who came were local women, with the exception of Mott and her husband James, who presided over the meeting, no woman having filled such a position before. The only black person present was the Stantons' friend Frederick Douglass, who lent the authority of antislavery to the next great reform cause of the day, declar
ing that “if that government only is just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land. Our doctrine is that ‘right is of no sex.'” Stanton, who had never addressed a public meeting before, presented the conference's final document. Declaring that “all men and women are created equal,” it protested against man's “usurpations” against woman, the denial of “her inalienable right” to the vote, and her submission to laws in whose formation she had no voice. A few years later, in a speech in New York City, Stanton memorably suggested that only women could truly fathom the helpless suffering of the slave: “Eloquently and earnestly as noble men have denounced slavery…they have been able only to take an objective view…[because as] a privileged class they can never conceive of those who are born to contempt, to inferiority, to degradation. Herein is woman more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be. For while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the Negro there is no such privilege.” Despite the occasional attendance at women's conventions of individuals like the evangelist Sojourner Truth, and later in the decade Harriet Tubman herself, the movement as a whole remained a largely white one.

Women had always done much of the Underground Railroad's unsung work of feeding, sheltering, and nursing fugitives. When they arrived travelworn and hungry at the Hayden home in Boston or the Douglass home in Rochester, it was Harriet Hayden and Anna Douglass who made their beds and cooked their meals. Many women did much more than that. In one Michigan community, women were responsible for giving the alarm if slave catchers appeared, and in Cleveland four of the nine members of that city's very active, all-black Vigilance Committee were women. White women as well as black women sometimes served as conductors. Delia Webster, who was arrested with Calvin Fairbank in 1844, later purchased property on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, in an unsuccessful scheme to run off slaves to Indiana. The Michigan Quaker Laura Haviland frequently escorted fugitives north from Cincinnati to Michigan, where she had founded an interracial school, and made several forays into Kentucky on pretended berry-picking expeditions. When the womenfolk of the Gibbons family arrived for a visit to their Quaker friends the Wrights at Columbia, Pennsylvania, young
Phebe Gibbons reported matter-of-factly in her diary that the family's daughters were “absent, upon on the
underground rail-road
.” Almost everywhere, women circulated antislavery petitions and held fairs where they sold homemade products to raise money for fugitives.

Ironically, no one did more to shape the enduring image of slavery and the Underground Railroad than a woman who opposed giving females the vote and harbored a not-so-secret envy for the genteel manners of Southern aristocrats. The daughter of a prominent New England theologian and the wife of a seminary teacher, Harriet Beecher Stowe seemed to see herself as a sort of literary missionary, an amanuensis to God who, she once said, “hath…sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captive, to set at liberty those who are bruised.” Though often emotionally overwrought and steeped in Victorian sentimentality, her blockbuster novel of 1852,
Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly
, distilled the nation's moral crisis over slavery so that it finally and overpoweringly penetrated the hearts of ordinary Americans in a way that a generation of abolitionist lecturing and the provocation of the Compromise of 1850 had not. Stowe canonized kindly, selfless Quakers as the quintessential heroes of the underground, leaving no room for African-American activists, or for working-class whites like Jonathan Walker and Seth Concklin. But she accomplished something truly extraordinary. She made abolitionism not only respectable, but romantic, and turned the underground from a vague rumor into a Homeric endeavor that was part Christian drama of self-sacrifice, part frontier saga ripped from the pages of James Fenimore Cooper.

Uncle Tom's Cabin
left readers by the millions seething with anger and shame. A decade later, as armies surged across the farmland of Virginia, Abraham Lincoln welcomed Stowe to the White House, where he is said to have greeted her as “the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.” Although the remark may be apocryphal, the Northern armies were filled with men who as boys had wept over the fate of Uncle Tom. Stowe based her eponymous composite hero partly on Josiah Henson, whose story had appeared in print in 1849. She portrayed Tom as a martyr who believed, as Henson had during his years in slavery, that if he accepted his fate in the spirit of Christ-like martyrdom, his earthly sufferings would be repaid with an eternity of divine love in the hereafter. Tom's character in the novel troubled few if any of the leading African Americans
of the day, nearly all of whom shared Stowe's religious beliefs, and recognized the book's importance as propaganda.

The single most memorable passage in the novel, indeed in all nineteenth-century American literature to readers of the day, and one that inspired countless previously neutral Americans to embrace the cause of abolitionism, recounted the flight of the fugitive mother “Eliza” across the frozen Ohio River. Stowe learned the story directly from Reverend John Rankin, to whose home in Ripley, Ohio, just such a mother had come one winter's night in 1838. Although she might never know it, her flight that night was to achieve the dimensions of myth. Rankin's son John was a student of Stowe's husband at Lane Seminary, in Cincinnati, and the families were well acquainted. “One Sunday afternoon,” John Rankin Jr. recalled, “father and I called upon Prof. Stowe, in the presence of Harriet. Father told of the flight of the slave mother and child crossing the river on the ice. Stowe was greatly moved by the narrative, exclaiming from time to time, ‘Terrible! How terrible!'”

In Stowe's rendering, Eliza races toward the banks of the frozen Ohio with a slave trader and his minions in close pursuit: “Right on behind her they came; and, nerved with strength such as God gives only to the desperate, with one wild cry and flying leap, she vaulted sheer over the turbid current by the shore, onto the raft of ice beyond. It was a desperate leap,—impossible to anything but madness and despair…The green fragment of ice on which she originally alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it, but she stayed there not a moment. With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and still another cake;—stumbling,—leaping,—slipping,—springing upwards again! Her shoes are gone,—her stockings cut from her feet,—while blood marked every step; but she saw nothing, felt nothing, til dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side.”

Virtually every literate American (and many who weren't literate) knew Eliza's story, if not from reading the novel itself, then from the numerous dramatic versions that remained staples of the popular stage well into the twentieth century. Unlike the stocky, very dark woman who found her way to Rankin's house, Stowe's Eliza was a fine-mannered, light-skinned mulatto and her son a virtually white child, the offspring of a rape by her master—a potent combination of sentimentality, sexuality, racial coding, and moral outrage that was intended to wrench the heartstrings of nineteenth-century readers in the most violent possible way. In her mar
tyred innocence, Eliza epitomized the tragedy of slavery as evangelical abolitionists saw it. Like the other characters in Stowe's book, Eliza crossed the line into cliché, facilitating the degeneration of stage productions of the novel into the Jim Crow melodramas that also tranformed Uncle Tom into the icon of spineless servility that would disgust later generations. Nevertheless, as characters in the novel, Tom and Eliza were radical inventions with powerful ramifications, for they enabled countless white Americans to identify emotionally with African Americans for the first time.

Uncle Tom's Cabin
also provided the country's first popular view of the Underground Railroad in action. Following her dramatic escape across the ice, the fictional Eliza Harris is directed to the Hallidays, a couple modeled closely on Levi and Catherine Coffin, whom Stowe also knew. “[T]all, straight, muscular” Simeon quotes scripture incessantly, while upon Rachel's peach-fresh face “time had written no inscription, except peace on earth, good will to men.” At their home, Eliza and her son Harry are united with Eliza's husband George, whose “atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away” beneath the sunny rays of the Hallidays' benevolence. When George urges Simeon not to endanger himself on his family's account, Simeon replies, with a loftiness that may have seemed less condescending to Victorian readers, “Fear not, then friend George; it is not for thee, but for God and man, we do it.” It may also have been more revealing of many underground activists' real feelings than Stowe intended.

From the Halliday home, the Harrises and two other fugitives are driven north in a covered wagon by a Quaker backwoodsman named Phineas Fletcher. Slave hunters are in hot pursuit, and a spirited chase takes place through the night. The fugitives and their conductor eventually flee up the side of a mountain that rather implausibly appears in the middle of the Indiana plains. There, poised histrionically upon a naked crag, George proclaims, as much to America as to his snarling pursuers below, “I am George Harris. A Mr. Harris of Kentucky did call me his property. But now I'm a free man, standing on God's free soil; and my wife and child I claim as mine.” A gun battle ensues. Harris shoots the boldest of the slave catchers, and the others flee pell-mell. In keeping with Stowe's all-encompassing Christian agenda, the fugitives take pity on their erst-while enemy, scoop him up in their arms, and carry him to an under
ground safe house where he is nursed back to health. The fugitives, meanwhile, are disguised and delivered to the wharf in Sandusky, where they are escorted aboard a ship under the very noses of slave hunters who are searching for them. Soon, Stowe orotundly concludes, “rose the blessed English shores; shores charmed by a mighty spell,—with one touch to dissolve every incantation of slavery, no matter in what language pronounced.”

Harriet Tubman was unimpressed. She could not read the actual book, of course. But she was once invited to attend a stage performance of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
in Philadelphia, where she was working as a domestic, but she declined. “I haint got no heart to go and see the sufferings of my people played out on de stage,” she said. “I've seen de
real ting
, and I don't want to see it on no stage or in no teater.”

1

On Christmas Eve, 1854, Harriet Tubman made her way on foot over low rain-soaked hills toward her parents' cabin near Poplar Neck, on the middle Choptank. The wet night shrouded her diminutive figure from curious eyes as she approached the Thompson plantation, where it occupied a lonely swath of woodland overlooking the river. How she reached Poplar Neck is unknown. Using false papers, she may have taken a steamer from Baltimore to Cambridge, Maryland, or a point farther up the Choptank, or she may have traveled south from Philadelphia by train, and then overland through Delaware. In any event, sometime before dawn, she slipped into a fodder shed that stood near the Rosses' cabin, and waited. She was a different woman from the tough but untried twenty-seven-year-old who
had fled north in 1849. She was now a seasoned underground veteran who had made at least three trips back into Maryland since the rescue of Kessiah Bowley. If all went well, before the night was out she would see her three enslaved brothers, and then lead them north to freedom.

Tubman had brought out one brother, Moses Ross, in 1851. She had attempted to bring the others, Ben, Robert, and William Henry, the previous spring, but failed. She returned to Philadelphia, where she worked in kitchens for a dollar a week, until in December she learned that the three were to be sold after Christmas. Tubman had a friend write on her behalf to Jacob Jackson, a free black who lived near her brothers at Tobacco Stick, and must have been one of her secret collaborators in Dorchester County. Encoded in the letter was a cryptic message that she trusted Jackson to pass on to her brothers: “Read my letter to the old folks, and give my love to them, and tell my brothers to be always watching unto prayer, and when the good old ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step aboard.” The letter was signed with the name of Jackson's son. Tubman could only hope the white postmaster, who censored Jackson's mail as a matter of course, would ignore the message as pious gibberish. The risk to Jackson was extreme—he was already suspected of having helped other slaves to escape—but perhaps the urgency of the brothers' situation overcame Tubman's usual scruples about safety. In the end, Jackson claimed that the letter made no sense to him, and refused to even take it out of the post office. But he knew what it meant, because he immediately let the Ross brothers know that Tubman was on her way, and to head for Poplar Neck, thirty miles to the north.

Ben and William Henry Ross set off across country as soon as they could, taking with them two male friends, John Chase and Peter Jackson, and Ben's fiancée Jane, who disguised herself in men's clothing. Robert Ross faced an agonizing dilemma. His wife, Mary, went into labor on Christmas Eve with their third child, and he was torn between the pull of family and the hope of freedom. As Tubman recounted the story to her first biographer, Sarah Bradford, Robert waited until the baby was delivered and then, forced to decide between his family and what might be his last chance for freedom, chose the latter. He told his wife that he was just going to try to hire himself out for the holiday, and left her to join his brother. Mary sensed somehow that he was not coming back. “You're going to leave me,” she sobbed. “But wherever you go, remember me and the children.”

The brothers and their friends hurried north along the winding route of present-day Highway 16, through East New Market and Preston, past miles of stubbly cornfields, ice-crusted marsh, and gloomy, gray-green phalanxes of loblolly pines gaunt against the iron-colored sky. That was the visible landscape: over it, like a gossamer web, lay a less palpable human landscape of extended families and hidden underground affinities that may not even have been wholly visible to the brothers, and that indeed may have been linked only through the person of Harriet Tubman herself. They passed the house of Samuel Green, a free black man, who was another one of her local contacts, and farther along, near the ford over Hunting Creek, the farm of the Quaker abolitionist Jonah Kelly, and soon after that, prominent at the crest of a gentle hill, the brick home of Hannah Leverton, the white mill owner's wife who had probably arranged Tubman's flight in 1849. (Before the 1850s were out, Green would be jailed for possessing road maps and a copy of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, and a lynch mob would come looking for the Levertons, and they would be forced to flee for their lives to Indiana.)

By daybreak, Tubman and her brothers had made their rendezvous. Her emotions can only be imagined as they came through the shed's door, exhausted, one by one: Robert, thirty-five and well-built; Ben Jr., the shrewd one, chestnut-colored like herself; and long-legged William Henry, with his handsome oval face, who was also leaving two small children and a wife behind. It was an annual Christmas custom for the sons to gather for dinner at the home of their parents—Ben Sr. and Rit Ross—and the scene that played out that long rainy day is one of the most famous in Tubman's life: Tubman and her brothers in the shed, waiting for the rain to end, and peering through chinks in the walls at their mother, who, ignorant of their presence, appears again and again at her cabin door, distraught and wondering why her children have not come. At some point, one of the brothers' friends, a stranger to the elder Rosses, was sent to tell their father about the group hidden in the corn crib, and he brought them out packets of food. But as much as they wished to bid farewell to their mother—Harriet had not seen her parents for five years—they deemed her love to be their greatest danger, fearing that if they revealed themselves, she would lose control of her emotions, and give them away.

They set out after nightfall, with Ben Sr. walking with them part of the way, wearing a handkerchief tied over his eyes, so that if he was ques
tioned later he could truthfully say that he had not
seen
any of his children that Christmas. Tubman's destination was Wilmington, Delaware, eighty-five miles north, and then Philadelphia, another thirty miles farther on. She knew the route well by now. They traveled along roads that were troughs of red mud, across a soaking land that was intermittently brought to life by flotillas of white gulls and the aerial scrimshaw of Canada geese wheeling high overhead. They somehow sneaked through, or around, the towns of Harmony, Denton, and Greensboro, and then crossed the state line near Sandtown. Given the distance that they had to cover, Tubman may have arranged for wagons to carry them part of the way. But they doubtless walked much of it. When they arrived in Wilmington, Thomas Garrett, the stationmaster there, wrote ahead to the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery office, “Harriet and one of the men had worn the shoes off their feet, and I gave them two dollars to help fit them out, and directed a carriage to be hired at my expense, to help take them out.” He added that two more fugitives had just arrived in Wilmington, and that he was assigning “one of our trusty colored men” to conduct the enlarged party, probably via the secluded valley of the Brandywine Creek, to the home of Allen Agnew across the state line in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

Five days after leaving Poplar Neck, Tubman and her companions entered William Still's office, in Philadelphia. Here they were issued fresh clothing and food by Still's assembly-line operation, and in a rite of passage that for countless fugitives symbolized their transformation from enslaved to free people, they relinquished their birth name of Ross, and adopted the new name Stewart which, curiously enough, was the name of one of Dorchester County's most prominent white families. On December 31, after a day's rest, Still gave three dollars to each member of the party except Harriet, to whom he gave four dollars, and forwarded them by railroad to New York City, where they boarded another train for Albany. There, with help from Stephen Myers, the director of the local Vigilance Committee, they were sent, again by train, to either Syracuse or Rochester, and finally across Lake Ontario by steamship to St. Catharines, near the mouth of the Niagara River, in Canada West.

They were welcomed by Tubman's friend, the unctuous missionary Hiram Wilson, who had cofounded the Dawn Institute with Josiah Henson. Fired by the institute for financial incompetence, he was now the head of the St. Catharines Refugee Slaves' Friend Society, the local
agency of the Underground Railroad. Neither time nor man had been kind to Wilson. Although enemies sneeringly called him a “designing white man” more interested in dominating refugees than helping them, his devotion to what he pompously liked to term “strangers of the sable hue” was genuine enough. Between 1850 and 1856, he took well over one hundred refugees into his own home, and distributed food, clothing, Bibles, medicine, and advice to many more. However, blacks who had established themselves in Canada no longer wanted to think of themselves as the pathetic objects of charity, but as the engineers of their own liberation, a process in which whites, even the most dedicated abolitionists, played an increasingly ambiguous role, when they played any role at all.

2

For refugees in Canada, the decade of the 1850s was one of striving, and considerable success. In 1855 the Boston educator and sometime journalist Benjamin Drew traveled through refugee communities in Canada, interviewing hundreds of former slaves, many of whom had come north on the Underground Railroad. They spoke with as much eloquence about their experience of freedom as they did of their years in bondage. William Grose, who had been living in Canada for several years, told him that he had been astonished to find blacks who owned farms and stores, and that he had since come to know several who had even become rich. “As a general thing, the colored people are more sober and industrious than in the states; there they feel when they have money, that they cannot make what use they would like of it, they are so kept down, so looked down upon,” he observed. “Here they have something to do with their money, and put it to a good purpose.” He added that his whole way of thinking about racial differences had changed: “When in the United States, if a white man spoke to me I would feel frightened, whether I was in the right or the wrong. But now it is quite a different thing,—if a white man speaks to me, I can look him right in the eyes—if he were to insult me, I could give him an answer. I have the rights and privileges of any other man…I am a true British subject and I have a vote every year as much as any other man.”

Some refugees complained of “negrophobia” and discrimination, but
the law remained steadfastly unbiased, and blacks enjoyed ready access to work in virtually every field of employment. It was not unusual for newcomers with even modest means to open a boardinghouse or some other small business. Within months of his escape from Boston via the Underground Railroad, Shadrach Minkins was running a restaurant in Montreal. Jerry Henry quickly found work as a barrel maker and, along with a letter promising to live “a purer, better life,” he was soon able to send a fine hand-carved hickory cane to the mayor of Syracuse as a gift of thanks for his rescue from the hands of his captors. In the burgeoning town of Chatham, “the great resting place of the fugitives after landing on the Canadian shore,” where almost one-third of the population was black, James Bell operated a school on the top floor of his house, grocers Henry and Annie Weaver prospered selling smoked hams, and Monroe Jones was regarded as the best gunsmith in the vicinity: all were escaped slaves. “If any man doubts the genius, enterprise, and fidelity of our people to all the claims of manhood, let him visit the colored population of Chatham,” the Syracuse underground agent Jermain Loguen wrote in an open letter after a tour of Canada, in 1856.

Estimates of the total number of refugees in Canada varied wildly, and still remain controversial. Even as the underground fed fugitives across the border at a steady rate, other crosscurrents of migration caused the Canadian black population as a whole to fluctuate greatly. Each time there was a widely publicized recapture of a fugitive in the United States, a wave of free African Americans would uproot themselves and move to Canada for safety. At the same time, others who had settled in Canada returned to the United States, where wages were higher, or to be closer to their families. Still others, like Harriet Tubman, who kept a home in St. Catharines through much of the 1850s, were part-time residents and moved back and forth across the border at will. In 1848 Hiram Wilson estimated there to be slightly under twenty thousand fugitives in Canada. Five years later, after the mass influx generated by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the black journalist Mary Ann Shadd put the figure at thirty-five thousand. Other estimates ranged as high as forty thousand, and beyond. However, a modern scholar who has closely studied census records of the period concluded that in 1861 there were probably only between twenty thousand and twenty-three thousand blacks in all of Canada West, including those born in Canada, even taking into account the likelihood that some
fugitives deliberately avoided being counted. The real figure is likely to lie somewhere between those proposed by modern analysis and the unscientific estimates of people on the spot.

By the 1850s Canadian blacks comprised a remarkably diverse range of men and women from different parts of the South and North. One of the most ambitious of them all was the journalist Henry Bibb, whose brief, tumultuous career poignantly suggests the opportunities, and the risks, that were opening up for fugitives in Canada, as they invented new lives in freedom. Bibb's handsome, angular face stares out from period daguerreotypes with an impression of lively spontaneity that was rare in nineteenth-century photography. His eyes—they were gray, and apparently very seductive—still engage a viewer with the magnetic intensity with which they reportedly “enchained” antebellum audiences, as he recounted one of the most heartbreaking of all slave narratives.

Bibb was born in northern Kentucky of a slave mother and a white father, a state senator, in 1815. Although without formal education, he was bright and observant. “All that I heard about liberty and freedom to the slaves I never forgot,” he later wrote. “Among other good trades I learned the art of running away to perfection.” When he was eighteen, he fell passionately in love with a girl named Malinda, a “dark-eyed, red-cheeked” mulatto who, in Bibb's revealing choice of words, “moved in the highest circle of slaves.” She inspired in him a degree of devotion, not to say obsession, that would shape the next thirteen years of his life. They formalized their relationship with a personal commitment, since marriage between slaves was not permitted in Kentucky, and Malinda soon bore Bibb a daughter. Hoping to raise his family in freedom, he searched for a way to escape. One day, instead of going to work, he crossed the river to Indiana and boarded a steamboat for Cincinnati. A black man whom he approached on the street led him to the home of a white abolitionist, who fed him and started him on the way to Canada, with recommendations to “friends” along the way. He spent the winter in the black enclave of Perrysburgh, Ohio, and in the spring traveled on to Detroit, where he bought an assortment of dry goods, intending to peddle them on his way back to Kentucky, determined to retrieve Malinda and his daughter.