Bound for Canaan Page 9

  Rogers conscientiously wrote to the fugitives’ owners, making it clear that no matter what the men’s legal status, he did not intend to return them to bondage. Sometime later, presumably at Ferrisburgh, the men’s owners arrived and demanded their property back. “Their masters came and attempted to run on them with rope, as supposed to bind them,” Rogers recorded. “I being gone and they being frightened, they both ran to the woods. After three days I came home, heard what was done, went four miles to see the masters, found them very angry, threatened great things.” Rogers does not describe in detail what must have been a dramatic and perhaps even violent confrontation at a public tavern, very likely in front of other citizens who may have taken sides in the affair. In any event, Rogers again refused to give up the men. The owners thereupon sued Rogers for five hundred dollars for each of the men under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Law, for the crime of “aiding and assisting” the fugitives’ escape. In his diary, Rogers expressed some annoyance at his friend Leggatt for acting prematurely—“we had been too fast”—but admitted that deliverance of the fugitives took precedence over his personal feelings. “I thought it best to settle, for the black men was starving in the woods…But I had this satisfaction, that I had meant to do all the good I could toward freeing all slaves. So I concluded to not value interest with freedom, and bought them both for seven hundred dollars, that pinched me very much to pay, and then gave them their freedom.” In return, Harry and Francis agreed to work for Rogers for the next six years, as employees.

  The nation’s fewer than one hundred thousand Quakers made up slightly less than 2 percent of the population at the turn of the century, but they exerted a moral influence far beyond their small number. Although their unfashionable dress and antique forms of speech sometimes attracted unfriendly attention, their almost universal literacy (among women as well as men) in an age when reading and writing were uncommon skills, their honesty in business, and their sober habits won them widespread respect. Quaker ideas about the immorality of slavery were carried throughout the country by itinerant preachers, who brought a personal, evangelical passion to their mission, warning those who continued to hold slaves that it would lead them to eternal damnation.

  One of these men, Rogers’s Vermont neighbor Joseph Hoag, carried the message of emancipation up and down the East Coast in the first decade of the new century. One day in 1803 Hoag had received an apocalyptic vision that became famous among Quakers. He was alone in a field when an ethereal mist eclipsed the sun’s brightness, and his mind was “struck into a silence.” A torrent of terrible, “volcanic” images followed, revealing a “dividing spirit” that ravaged first the churches, then the Free Masons, then politics, not stopping “until it produced a civil war,” in which “an abundance of blood was shed in the course of the combat; the Southern States lost their power, and slavery was annihilated from their borders.” Traveling by carriage and horseback, over appalling roads, through the Carolinas and across the Appalachians into the frontier districts of Tennessee, often ill from nameless fevers and wretched food, Hoag preached with a terrific fervor wherever he went. “I was led to show that the Gospel, if complied with, led every true follower of Jesus Christ to endure every burden, break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free,” he proclaimed, “and those who did not comply therewith, were not true Christians, but deceivers of themselves, and therefore, anti-christians.” He preached to everyone he met, drilling away at complacency, sanctimony, and self-justification. He had only contempt for those who “chose to stop, and curl down on their fathers’ sins, making that a couch of security,” by condemning slavery in principle, but accommodating it in practice as a “burden” laid upon them by their ancestors and now impossible to change.

  Hoag’s path also took him through the much more receptive Quaker districts of the North Carolina Piedmont. Quakers had begun migrating into the area around present-day Greensboro since the middle years of the eighteenth century. The first wave arrived from Pennsylvania, followed in the 1770s by contingents of farmers from the overpopulated island of Nantucket, a bastion of abolitionist sentiment, a fact that was to do much to shape the peculiar vigor of abolitionist activity in their new home. Toward the end of the century, a third wave of migrants moved west from the coastal areas of the state as the political atmosphere there became increasingly unfriendly to Quakers. By the 1800s the North Carolina Quakers formed the only sizable abolitionist community south of the border states. Though isolated, an island in an ocean of slaveholders, they were numerous and well organized, and had close links with relatives, friends, and fellow Quakers in the free states. They were uniquely well situated to lay a foundation for the earliest long-distance route of the Underground Railroad.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE HAND OF GOD IN NORTH CAROLINA

  The dictates of humanity came in opposition to the law of the land, and we ignored the law.

  —LEVI COFFIN

  1

  As the nation steadily peeled back the western wilderness, shackled black men and women became an ever more familiar sight trudging southward toward the vast new lands that were being opened up beyond the Alleghenies. “A comfortable living can be found here by the most indolent,” one enthusiastic young Virginian would write home from the Mississippi frontier, where he was carving a new plantation from what had only recently been Indian land. “Tis inferior to none for corn or cotton, and as for meat, it costs nothing, it grows without expense, and very little trouble.” Wherever planters went, the demand for more slaves followed. By 1810 the price for slaves in Louisiana would be almost double what it was in Virginia, and almost four times the price in New Jersey and other Northern states, where legal constraints on slavery were prompting masters to sell off their chattels at deep discount. Slaves were shipped by the thousands from East Coast ports to the markets of New Orleans. To avoid the difficult crossing of the Blue Ridge Mountains many others bound from the Tidewater country for the Deep South followed roads that led them through the Quaker counties of North Carolina. A tanner living near High Point, close to Greensboro, counted “at least five droves” of slaves passing his house to every one of cattle, horses or hogs.

  The shuffling passage of one convoy sometime in 1805, an incident otherwise forgotten by history, was a seminal event in the development of the Underground Railroad. A Quaker boy of seven was standing in front of his father’s farm three miles north of the New Garden meeting house, outside Greensboro, when a line of black men approached from the north, down the Salisbury Road. As his father chopped wood, the boy watched them with a sense of childish curiosity. Although on some of the neighboring farms slaves cut the wood, tended the livestock, planted the fields, and harvested the crops, the sight of men chained together puzzled him. “The coffle of slaves came first, chained in couples on each side of a long chain which extended between them; the driver was some distance behind, with the wagon of supplies,” Levi Coffin recalled many decades later. “My father addressed the slaves pleasantly, and then asked: ‘Well, boys, why do they chain you?’” One of the men, “whose countenance betrayed unusual intelligence and whose expression denoted the deepest sadness,” replied: “They have taken us away from our wives and children, and they chain us lest we should make our escape and go back to them.” After the black men had passed out of sight, the boy bombarded his father with questions. Why, he wanted to know, had the men been taken away from their families? “My father explained to me the meaning of slavery, and, as I listened, the thought arose in my mind, ‘How terribly we should feel if father were taken away from us.’”

  A second incident later brought home the inherent terror of slavery to Coffin in an even more visceral way. Near his home, Coffin encountered a party of westbound emigrants with their wagons. Half a mile behind them, a single black man trudged carrying a bundle. He asked Coffin how far ahead the travelers were, and then continued on his way. Coffin surmised that the man was a runaway slave, having heard of cases where, when slave families were b
roken up by a sale and the wife and children taken away, the father would slip off and trail the emigrants, hoping to find some way of remaining with them once they had reached their destination. In this instance, the man was soon arrested with a forged pass and jailed at Greensboro, where his master came to collect him. Coffin saw the slave again there at a blacksmith’s shop, where a chain was being riveted around his neck, and handcuffs fastened to his wrists. He was deeply moved by the slave’s expression of “piteous, despairing appeal” as the man’s master told him, “Now you shall know what slavery is. Just wait till I get you back home!” What followed remained forever vivid and unnerving in Coffin’s memory. “One end of the chain, riveted to the Negro’s neck, was made fast to the axle of his master’s buggy, then the master sprang in and drove off at a sweeping trot, compelling the slave to run at full speed or fall and be dragged by his neck. I watched them till they disappeared in the distance, and as long as I could see them, the slave was running.”

  It was an epiphany. Suddenly slavery came into sharp focus in the eyes of a boy for whom it was no longer just part of the landscape, like the familiar forests of oak, elm, and sassafras, but something utterly terrifying, the stuff of nightmare. Coffin and his father had talked to these men, had been admitted, if only for a brief time, into their private shame, desperation, and humanity. “How terribly we should feel if father were taken away from us.” The man running for his life behind the carriage was no longer a mere object, a “slave,” like a horse or a cow, but a person like Levi himself, with a particular family, a lost home, lost freedom, and lost hope.

  Like many of their Quaker neighbors, the Coffins had come to North Carolina in the 1770s from Nantucket, home to generations of seafaring men who were well known for both their advanced views on emancipation and their stoical independence. Levi Coffin’s grandfather laid out his farm just west of present-day Greensboro. It was a fertile land, still dark and shadowy where the oak and hickory and elm trees stood in dense groves, and rolling in steep, rhythmic swells where industrious, mostly Quaker, farmers had chopped the foliage away. In the summer months, blackberries, dewberries, huckleberries, and strawberries grew plentifully in tangled thickets wherever the sunlight was strong. Settlements were still small and relatively primitive in the early years of the nineteenth century, and the few roads that traversed the land were no friends to travelers, becoming troughs of dust in dry weather, and canals of red gumbo when it rained. This was not tobacco country, and at least in the Quaker counties family farms on the Northern pattern were much more common than were plantations employing large numbers of slaves. The Coffins raised mainly corn and wheat, along with hogs that were allowed to forage in the thick underbrush that grew along Beale’s Branch, a shallow stream that meandered along the eastern edge of their property. Levi’s father, though primarily a farmer, also taught school, a profession which Levi himself would intermittently follow later on in life. Since Levi could not be spared from farm work, he was schooled at home, along with his sisters, in accordance with the Quaker commitment to equal education. Coffin’s parents and grandparents on both sides were firmly opposed to slavery, and no one in either of the families had ever owned slaves: “All were friends of the oppressed.”

  Although North Carolina Quakers lived scattered through a society that was economically dependent on slavery, they set themselves firmly and somewhat precariously apart from it. In 1780 their representative body (Quakers having no permanent hierarchy), the North Carolina Yearly Meeting, which met at New Garden, had made it a disownable offense for a Quaker to persist in holding slaves. Manumission was simultaneously a divine injunction and an act of personal purification, “to be clear from the least stain of guilt in the blood shed on earth,” and few dared lag behind in conforming to it. However, Quakers who freed their slaves were often publicly attacked outside their own community (and sometimes within it) for undermining public order, and even charged with responsibility for crimes that were supposed to have been committed by freed blacks. North Carolina’s draconian state laws also made manumission a formidable ordeal, requiring any master who wished to free a slave to post a substantial bond for the freed person’s good behavior, and permitted any propertied white man to take a freed slave to the sheriff’s office, where he might be sold to the highest bidder. Others might simply be kidnapped with impunity, as John Howard, a former slave owner who had moved to Ohio, discovered, to his deep distress. Before leaving North Carolina, he had left his freed slaves, as he wrote to a fellow Quaker, “in the care of a man on whose land they lived, who appeared to be friendly to them and gave him the authority of an overseer to protect them in the enjoyment of their liberty til further orders from me; believing it to be the best thing I could do for them under such circumstances a few years after I received a letter…informing that William Phisioe had betrayed his trust and sold two of sd [sic] people to a Slave trader, who had taken them out of the state.”

  In 1808, Quakers attempted to solve their dilemma by making the Yearly Meeting itself the legal trustee of slaves whom its members wished to emancipate, until they could be freed or somehow gotten out of the state. Agents were appointed to oversee these slaves, hire them out, collect their wages, and apply them to community needs. Anyone who hired trusteeship slaves was admonished to use them in accordance with Quaker principles of kindness and respect. Ironically, Quakers thus found themselves the masters of hundreds of slaves, and engaged in an ongoing effort to acquire more, in the name of emancipation. Some slaves willed to the Yearly Meeting were either hurriedly sold off before the Quakers could take possession of them, or simply reenslaved by heirs who valued property more than they did Quaker ideas of spiritual redemption. Nevertheless, as the years passed, donations came by the score—thirty-six slaves from John Kennedy, eighteen from Joseph Borden, forty-nine from the estate of Thomas Outland—from Quakers and non-Quakers alike, and from all across the state, until the numbers became nearly unmanageable, and the cost of their support so expensive that financial assistance had to be sought from wealthy Friends in Pennsylvania and New York.

  While the surviving records are inconclusive, it is likely that as early as the 1810s many of these trusteeship slaves were sent to the free Northwest with emigrant families. Small groups of Quaker “movers” from North Carolina had begun migrating north of the Ohio River around the turn of the century, bound for “the Miamis,” as the western Ohio country was then called, a difficult journey of four hundred or more miles. There were three established roads, all of them difficult. The most popular route led through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky, eventually crossing the Ohio River at Cincinnati. A second route crossed the mountains through Flower Gap, and continued via Lexington, Kentucky, to the Ohio. The third, known as the Virginia route, was initially rough and steep, requiring emigrants to double up on teams for many miles until they reached the Kanawha River in what is now West Virginia, where they could transfer to flatboats for an easy voyage to the junction of the Ohio River at Gallipolis. As Ohio became more crowded in the second decade of the century, the migrants continued farther west and began settling in Indiana, then known as the “Wabash country,” where they provided the nucleus of a strong Quaker community that would become an important center of the abolitionist underground in the decades to come.

  In the early years of the century, the public advocacy of gradual emancipation was still regarded as a respectable, if distinctly minority, opinion in the South. Emancipation societies existed in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, where a society was founded as early as 1797, and later included among its members the Presbyterian minister John Rankin, who would go on to become one of the most famous stationmasters on the Underground Railroad. To differing degrees, these organizations all looked to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the country’s oldest and most experienced, for guidance. Beyond the border states, only in North Carolina, where Quakers provided the critical mass of support, would organized emancipationist se
ntiment survive on a significant scale, and produce men radical enough to break the law.

  The first chapter of the North Carolina Manumission Society was established in 1814 at New Garden. Levi Coffin, still only a teenager, his older cousin and mentor Vestal Coffin, and several of their New Garden neighbors were among the society’s founding members. “[T]he command of the great father of Mankind is, that we do unto others as we would be done by,—and that the human race however varied in color are Justly entitled to Freedom,” the society’s constitution proclaimed. The founders were respectable men, mostly farmers and middle-class craftsmen, including both uncompromising antislavery Quakers like the Coffins and “lenient” slaveholders who considered slavery a definite evil, but were unprepared to relinquish their own property. There was nothing radical about their agenda. They professed their commitment to gradual emancipation, and to legal reforms that would make it easier for those who wished to emancipate their slaves. In an appeal to whites’ self-interest, the society also argued that slavery encouraged wasteful methods of farming that depleted the land, reinforced an extravagant way of life among the wealthier classes, and drove away home-grown “mechanical geniuses” who might otherwise have developed new local industries.

  In 1818, after a rancorous internal debate, the North Carolina Manumission Society voted to amalgamate with the new American Colonization Society. To many, “repatriation” to Africa seemed to be the perfect solution to the national conundrum: what to do with the growing numbers of free blacks. The most optimistic, and there were many heartfelt abolitionists among them, believed that colonization would lead to the painless eradication of slavery. Gravely underestimating the South’s insatiable demand for slaves, they naively believed that by means of an appeal to the Bible and the gentlest political push, masters could be persuaded to free their slaves. Newly minted freedmen would rejoice at the prospect of being shipped off to what whites insisted was their natural home, as if the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Efiks, and Mandingos, and Angolans had all hailed from some African counterpart of Cape Cod or Tidewater Virginia, and were not by now, willy nilly, Americans. Although colonization was rejected by the vast majority of African Americans, it was embraced by a few free blacks who were convinced that they would never be accepted on equal terms by whites, most notably by Paul Cuffe, a prosperous black sea captain and Quaker from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who promoted an abortive effort to settle black emigrants in Sierra Leone, which Britain had established as a haven for former slaves on the West African coast. Less idealistic members of the Colonization Society, and there were a great many of them too, worried that in the event of foreign invasion the country’s slave population of nearly one and a half million would join the enemy, or launch a bloody rebellion as slaves had in Haiti. Behind a smokescreen of high-flown rhetoric—“Every emigrant to Africa is a missionary carrying with him credentials in the holy cause of civilization, religion, and free institutions,” a longtime leader of the Colonization Society and perennial aspirant to the U.S. presidency, Senator Henry Clay, proclaimed—the society’s real aim was much more cynical. Clay reassured slaveholders that colonization would actually help strengthen slavery, by removing from the country the most troublesome African Americans, a most “useless and pernicious” portion of the population: that is, free blacks. Colonization could never come close to keeping pace with the census returns. During its entire history, before its termination on the eve of the Civil War, the American Colonization Society transported fewer than fifteen thousand American blacks to Liberia, which the society acquired with federal assistance in 1818, and developed on the model of Sierra Leone. In its best year, 1832, the society would manage to send only 632 colonists to Africa.