Chesapeake (113 page)

‘Turn them loose,’ he insisted, and when this was done, everyone started running toward the border, but they were stopped by a harrowing sight. Toward them came two slave-trackers lashing a black man with a rope around his neck and his hands tied behind his back. It was Pandy, whom Mr. Cline had been abusing for seven years. He had been within a mile of freedom when he stumbled into just the kind of trap Bartley and Eden had foreseen.

Now he passed his mates, his eyes down. He had betrayed himself, but he would not betray them. ‘What you got there?’ Bartley asked casually.

‘Goddamn runaway. Means fifty bucks apiece for us.’

‘He looks a mean one.’

‘Where you headin’?’

‘Risin’ Sun.’

‘Not too far, but watch them niggers. They do like to run.’

‘I got me two guards,’ Bartley said.

‘Guards!’ The men laughed. ‘You cain’t trust no nigger.’

They passed on, back to the farm of Herman Cline.

For the last mile none of the slaves spoke, and Bartley saw that most had tears in their eyes, but when they were well into Pennsylvania one of the men began to sing:

In Philadelphia the abolitionists who spent their time and money rescuing slaves were agog. The telegraph from authorities in Wilmington had brought news of a criminal escape: a white man and a black woman had led eight male slaves to freedom by overpowering three slave-catchers near the Pennsylvania border and tying them upside down from a large oak tree, where they were not found until their horses returned to the stable, alerting search parties. Everyone in the North was awaiting disclosure of who the escapees were.

Bartley had foreseen just such a commotion, and as soon as he set the eight men on the path to Kennett Square, where Quakers would be waiting to absorb them into the established system, he and Eden crept west to the little village of Nottingham. There they threw themselves upon the trustworthiness of a Quaker family named Hicks, whom they had to take into their confidence—‘It would be fatal if thee noised abroad how we forged the documents. Mrs. Cater and I need new clothes, new documents and enough money to get us both home through Baltimore.’ Papers were forged and tickets purchased for a gentleman returning to
Richmond with his wife’s maid. And the two conspirators went south.

Now Rachel and her brother took over. They were a resolute pair, and when the slaves arrived in Philadelphia they quickly dispersed them to various hiding places so that no one could deduce that these were the men who had so humiliated the trackers. Rachel, always anticipating trouble, floated one story that the eight slaves had reached Lancaster and another that they were already in New York, where she had arranged for abolitionists to hold a supposed party at which the eight were to be exhibited.

But she had underestimated the enemy, for as she walked down Market Street after having made arrangements to ship three of the men to Boston, she saw to her horror that Lafe Turlock and Herman Cline were coming toward her, with two policemen in tow. Turning quickly, she pressed herself against a shop window and watched as they passed from sight. That night she read in the paper their advertisement:

Under the law, every citizen of Pennsylvania was obligated to assist Herman Cline in recovering his slaves. Some informant had alerted him to the fact that despite the false leads spread by Rachel, the fugitives had reached Philadelphia and were in hiding there. Federal marshals were already searching rooming houses, and a pro-slavery group of southerners residing in the city had augmented the reward being offered by Cline. It could only be a matter of days before the runaways were apprehended, and men were already speaking of the fact that they must first be returned to northern Maryland for punishment due them for having strung up the trackers.

But the abolitionists were not powerless, especially with Rachel Paxmore goading them on. What they did was to find a Quaker printer not only willing but positively eager to help them. He printed large handbills, four hundred of them, proclaiming the arrival in Philadelphia of the notorious slavers, Lafe Turlock—with a graphic description—and Herman Cline, one of the crudest masters in the state of Maryland. The poster showed woodblock caricatures of the odious pair and ended with this admonition:

These handbills were distributed to every inn, every dining place, tacked onto poles and pasted on storefronts. Every leader of the abolitionist movement received four copies, which were to be displayed in prominent places.

Rachel and her brother Comly later told their mother what had happened in the ensuing days. ‘We knew where they slept, at Mrs. Demson’s, so when they appeared on the street, we had packs of young people standing there, who surrounded them, shouting, “Slavers! Slavers!” Wherever they stopped to eat, we stood near their table and stared at them. If they wanted an ale, they could have one only if every person at the inn knew who they were, and many men would spit on the floor and refuse to drink while they were in the place. We made them anathema.’

Lafe Turlock and Herman Cline! They withstood the torments for three days, then quit the city. They thought at first of trying to find their slaves in New York, but one of the abolitionists shouted at them while they were dining, ‘Don’t think you can escape us! We’ve warned the committees in Lancaster and New York.’

So in the end they had to take passage back to Baltimore. As their boat pulled away from the city, Cline looked at the skyline and almost wept. ‘Just think, Lafe! I work my heart out in those swamps. I get a decent start in life. And then my property runs away. Nine prime slaves. More than twenty thousand dollars. My goddamn niggers are hidin’ in that city, somewheres.’

Lafe said, ‘It was them signs. They riled the people against us.’

‘A man’s whole savings wiped out. Damn, it seems unfair.’

But the reward for the eight slaves still stood, and Rachel was aware that numerous adventurers lusted for this money. ‘What can we do?’ she asked members of the Philadelphia rescue committee.

‘There is only one sure thing,’ a wise old Quaker gentleman assured her. ‘Thee must get them to Canada.’

‘But I thought Boston

‘They are not safe even there. A black man can find safety nowhere in this country. He must go to Canada.’

So Rachel Paxmore and her brother arranged to spirit the eight slaves out of the country. It took time and money and courage. An improvised path had evolved without conscious direction: ‘There’s a doctor in Doylestown, and then you go to Scranton, and beyond New York the safe spot is the home of Frederick Douglass in Rochester.’

Rachel stayed with the men all the way to the Canadian border, and only when they were safely across did she permit the tension which had gripped her for three weeks to show itself. She sat on a fallen tree and wept, her shoulders quivering with the anguish that assailed her. ‘Sister,’ said Comly as he sat on the log beside her, ‘it’s ended. They’re safe.’

But she said, ‘How despicable. That men in the United States who seek freedom must flee to Canada to find it.’

The flight of nine slaves from Herman Cline’s farm on the Little Choptank so angered the other owners in the region that they convened at Devon Island to consider what steps they might take to prevent similar losses of their capital.

‘Cline lost twenty thousand dollars in one night,’ a planter from St. Michaels said. ‘A repetition could wipe us little fellows out.’

‘Has any serious thought been given to driving the Paxmores from this territory?’ asked a burly man who had been forced to chase two of his slaves all the way to the Pennsylvania border before retrieving them. ‘Things have been a lot better along the Miles River since David Baker …’ He left it there, not wanting openly to suggest that the Paxmores be gunned down.

‘What we might do,’ one of the the Refuge Steeds suggested, ‘is use religion. Remind the slaves of their moral obligations to us.’

This proposal met with general approbation, and many of the planters turned to Paul Steed. One asked, ‘Paul, couldn’t you give a series of sermons? I’d sure love to have you come to my place and talk to my hands.’

Others seconded this suggestion, but Steed demurred. ‘I don’t speak well in public. The audience stares at my crooked neck and doesn’t listen to what I say.’

‘Some truth to that,’ the man from St. Michaels agreed. ‘But the idea of church services is still good.’

And then someone remembered a tall, thin, fire-eating Methodist-Protestant minister from across the bay; he’d had outstanding success with revivals and delivered what was regarded as ‘the best nigger sermon in the business.’

‘Are you thinking of Reverend Buford?’ Paul asked, and when the planters said that was the man, Paul said, ‘I know him. He stayed with us here at Devon.’

‘He’s not Catholic,’ a planter said.

‘I wanted to argue religion with him. He’s powerful.’

It was agreed that two Choptank men would cross the bay to enlist the aid of Reverend Buford, and when they saw him at the little town of Hopewell on the James River they were reassured that he was the man
they wanted. Tall, funereal, with a mop of black hair and a stupendous Adam’s apple that punctuated his simplest remarks, making them seem more vivid than they were, he was, as they had remembered, a fiery man. ‘What we want,’ they told him, ‘is your best nigger sermon.’

He was reluctant to leave Virginia, where he found much work to do, but when he heard that the invitation came from Paul Steed, he said with some eagerness, ‘I’ll come. Most intelligent Catholic I ever met.’

‘Well, he needs you, and so do we all!’

‘Nigger trouble?’

‘Nine of Herman Cline’s prime hands run off. Eight was traced to Philadelphia.’

‘They were recovered?’

‘Nope. Abolitionists up there run him and Lafe Turlock out of town. Slaves vanished into thin air. Lost twenty thousand dollars in one night.’

‘I’ve heard of Cline,’ Buford said. ‘Some of our people send their slaves to him, and I have no intention of crossing the bay to aid a monster. Probably deserved to lose his slaves, all of them.’

‘Reverend, it isn’t Cline we’re worried about. It’s us. Decent men like Paul Steed are in danger of losing their entire investments. We need help. Pacification.’

‘We all need it,’ Buford said with surprising anxiety. ‘Who can tell where the passions of this day are going to lead? I pray every night for guidance.’

‘And we pray for your guidance,’ one of the planters said. ‘Come over with us and help quieten things.’

‘If you thought it would do any good, I’d be willing to give my
Theft of Self
sermon.’

‘That’s the very one we want. I heard you give that at Somers Cove three years ago. Very powerful.’

Reverend Buford started delivering
Theft of Self
at the smaller plantations east of Patamoke, intending to build expectations as he moved always closer to the main centers of population. The format was invariable. In the late afternoon, when the day’s work was pretty well concluded, all slaves were assembled in some tree-lined open space. Buford insisted that every white person on the plantation be in attendance, seated in the shade and dressed in their Sunday clothes. He started his preaching from a rostrum, but as his enthusiasm grew, he moved about quite freely, using wild gestures and imploring tones.

His message was simple and effective. He did not dodge the issue that had brought him to the Eastern Shore:

With tremendous force he lined out the teaching of the Bible on slavery. God ordained it; Jesus approved of it; St. Paul said it was one of the gateways to heaven. He was especially strong when he reached the matter of punishment, for some slaves were beginning to ask why it was, if God was all-merciful, that He encouraged beatings? Like all preachers who gave nigger sermons, he lingered over Proverbs 29:19, which stated specifically that a slave ‘will not be corrected by words, for though he understand he will not answer.’

And he developed the further thesis that when a master struck a slave, he was doing the work of God Himself: ‘God directs the master to punish you with stripes when you do not obey.’ He also spent much time on that curious passage at First Peter 2:18, beloved of southern preachers. This little book was one of the most trivial in the Bible, yet chance passages from it condemned a race.