Читать книгу The Underground Railroad in Connecticut - Horatio T. Strother - Страница 9

INTRODUCTION

NEWS traveled slowly in 1831, but few newspapers in the United States failed to report with all possible speed that a bloody slave insurrection, led by Nat Turner, had broken out in Southampton County, Virginia. This dramatic attack against the South’s “peculiar institution” proved in the end to be fruitless. The uprising was put down by armed force, Turner was captured and executed, and scores of Negroes—many of whom had taken no part in the revolt—were murdered in savage retaliation. But “nearly sixty whites” had died in the initial outbreak, and a wave of terror swept through every slave-holding state. Months earlier, in Boston, the first appearance of William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper The Liberator had made the South—and the nation—aware that the entire institution of slavery was coming under unremitting attack from zealous abolitionists in the North, although how effective that attack would be was as yet unclear. Turner’s rebellion was an attack of a different and more terrifying kind. It was too close to home, too immediate a threat to the prosperity of King Cotton and Prince Sugar, too dangerous to life itself, to be forgotten when it was over.

The Southern master knew that he could not rest content with the capture of Turner and his accomplices, and that merely “a harsher and more vigilant discipline” over the slaves could not assure the continued acceptance of slavery as an institution. Something more was needed, some moral principle that would justify slavery forever, in the eyes of all men. That something Professor Thomas Dew attempted to supply in a declaration before the Virginia legislature in that same crucial year: slavery was “not only God’s commanded order, not only the most humane order, but also the most natural order.” This idea, it has been said, “proceeded to envisage the South as on its way to becoming a rigid caste society.”¹

Whether slavery was a civilizing influence or a cause of degradation to masters and chattels alike is not a question today. But in the middle decades of the nineteenth century there were violent partisans on both sides, and no meeting of minds was possible between them. It would have been sheer folly for extreme abolitionists like Garrison or Wendell Phillips to argue the point with such convinced advocates of slavery as John C. Calhoun or Robert B. Rhett. It is safe to say, at the outset, that men like these embittered the sectional conflict that culminated in the Civil War.

For by 1831 the ideological struggle over slavery was well under way; and at the same time, in all the states from the Midwest to New England, abolitionists and humanitarians were developing a chain of escape routes and hiding places for runaway slaves fleeing the South. Only a few ordinary citizens had even a glimpse of this activity; those engaged in it, in the main, knew little more than the stations and byways in their own vicinity; even the fugitives who escaped through these clandestine channels became familiar with only the pathways and the resting places through which they themselves moved. Yet most people, North and South, were aware that, despite the heavy legal and social penalties for assisting runaway slaves, there existed a widespread, loosely knit network of hideouts and secret routes of escape; and that these were known collectively as the Underground Railroad.²

That name, it is said, was first applied to the system in 1831, the year of Turner’s death and The Liberator’s birth. A slave named Tice Davids escaped from his owner in Ripley, Ohio, and immediately disappeared. The master searched the vicinity as thoroughly as he could but found no trace of his runaway bondsman. At length he concluded ruefully, “He must have gotten away by an underground road.” From “road” to “railroad” was a simple transition, especially in that time when the newly established steam railroads were a nine days’ wonder. Besides, the terminology of railroading afforded easy names with which to mask a range of activities that lay outside the law. So the Underground Railroad—more the “name of a mode of operation than the name of a corporation”—had its “conductors” and “passengers,” its “stations” and “station-keepers”; but they, like its “tracks” and “trains,” were concealed from public view. They had to be; it was the only way to be safe.³

The system, of course, had had its origins long before 1831. There had been bondsmen in the colonies since the earliest days; and where there were bondsmen, there were those who sought freedom in escape. Colonial laws dating from the 1640’s are witness to this fact, and the records for the next 150 years are dotted with instances that substantiate it. To what extent these fugitives received outside help in their flight to freedom is unknown, but it appears that by the 1780’s sentiment in favor of the runaways had become fairly widespread, and that there were people prepared to help them. In two letters written in 1786, George Washington spoke of a runaway slave who had reached Philadelphia, “whom a society of Quakers in the city, formed for such purposes, have attempted to liberate”; and again, of the “numbers who would rather facilitate the escape of slaves than apprehend them when runaways.” By that time the subject of escaped bondsmen was sufficiently important to engage the attention of Congress, which passed the first Fugitive Slave Law in 1793. And it is known that underground activities of a more or less planned sort were taking place in Philadelphia and its vicinity by the first decade of the nineteenth century, where Isaac T. Hopper was a leader in the work.⁴

It is not the purpose of this study to treat the Underground Railroad as a whole. But it may be said in general terms that the Railroad had no formal, over-all organization at any time. It consisted rather of a loosely knit plexus of individual centers, where a man or a family or a small group stood ready to receive such fugitives as might be sent them, to feed them and hide them as long as necessary, and then to send or conduct them along a line of escape. Each stationkeeper, as a rule, knew no more of the over-all pattern than fell within his immediate range of activities. He knew that he might receive passengers from any one of several stations below his on the road from slavery; he knew that he might forward them to any one of several other stations farther along the road to freedom. How long he entertained a passenger at his own station, and which one he selected as the passenger’s next stop, depended on local circumstances of the moment—the state of the roads and the weather, the known or suspected presence of slave-hunters in the area, and so on. The decision was the Under-grounder’s own.

In carrying out his work, he made use of all the courage and discretion he possessed and all the means he commanded or could invent. As stationkeeper, he might hide his charges in a secret place in his house, a barn, or even a cave in the woods or a hole in the ground. He might act further as a forwarding agent, letting his passengers travel by themselves according to his directions or turning them over to a conductor. He might himself be the conductor, taking the runaways with him to the next stop—on foot, in a carriage in the guise of servants, or under the cargo in a wagon. Hay wagons were widely used for this purpose, and travel over highways was generally done under cover of darkness; but there was no one universal procedure. Indeed there were places and times when the Underground Railroad was quite literally a railroad. Many a fugitive was simply put aboard the steam cars, with money to pay the fare, where under the eye of a sympathetic trainman he might travel for many miles by the most rapid means then available. Many others made at least part of their journey by water, on ocean-going vessels, river steamers, or humble canal boats. Any form of transport that went north and was reasonably safe could be used; and all were used, here or there, as circumstances made possible or expedient.

The men and women who engaged in this demanding and hazardous work came from all walks of life—farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, teachers, physicians and lawyers, businessmen of every sort. Many were ministers; many more were escaped slaves who had found precarious refuge in the North. Some, perhaps a majority, were convinced and active abolitionists; others seem to have been impelled to the cause in the first instance by more purely religious or humanitarian motives. Their total number, in any given year or over a span of decades, remains unknown, but they were certainly to be counted in the thousands. Few of them had any knowledge of the system beyond their own circumscribed orbits, but here and there a man or woman emerged whose activities spanned the country.

Such a one was Levi Coffin of Ohio, who was reputed to have helped more than three thousand fugitives and who in time came to be known as “president of the Underground Railroad.” Another was the Reverend Samuel J. May, whose range of activity at different times included eastern Connecticut, Boston, and Central New York. Two others of national prominence, both in the Underground Railroad and in the abolitionist cause, were the escaped slaves Frederick Douglass and the famous Harriet Tubman.

But these were the exceptions. The average Under-grounder performed his unpaid and demanding task in secrecy, in danger, and—except for the handful of neighboring co-workers with whom he was in contact—in solitude.

The system these dedicated people constructed was a slow growth, but by the 1850’s it had reached virtually nation-wide proportions. Its stations and routes extended through all the free states from the cornfields of Kansas to the rocky harbors of New England, with tenuous fingers stretching into the stronghold of slavery itself—the South. Its terminals lay scattered along the line of the Great Lakes and the country’s northern border, beyond which lay the one real refuge, the one region that put an end to all fear of re-enslavement—Canada.

For runaways who sought permanent freedom, it had always been Canada. As early as 1705, when the French flag flew beyond the St. Lawrence, escaped slaves had fled there from Albany. Under English law, which came to Canada in 1763, slavery was permitted. But the American Revolution soon followed; in Canadian eyes the United States became an enemy country, and enemy property would not readily be returned. Within twenty years thereafter slavery was ended in Canada by a series of court decisions, holding that the air of this British land was “too pure for a slave to breathe.”⁵

This made Canada more than ever the refugees’ goal, and before the War of 1812 reached its inconclusive end, the words “Canada” and “freedom” were used interchangeably by slaves in all the shanties and quarters in the South. Men who knew what it was to be flogged by merciless masters, women who lived in fear of having their chastity stolen by lecherous overseers, mothers and fathers who dreaded the day when they would be torn from their families and “sold down the river” to the rich new cotton lands of the Mississippi Delta and East Texas, came to know that the way north was the way to freedom. Follow the Drinking Gourd, they said, follow the North Star; up there were people who would see you got safely across the border. Every month the number who made a break for freedom grew larger, until by the time of the Civil War it has been estimated that anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 fugitive slaves had escaped from bondage.⁶ The whole story of those who safely crossed the Mason-Dixon line will not be told here—perhaps it will never be fully known—but in this study it is proposed to examine in detail what happened in a single Northeastern state.