Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement

For the first months of 1844, the Bryonic [Charles T.] Torrey worked alone, personally collecting fugitives from as far away as Winchester, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and making plans – grandiose ones in light of what happened – to mount rescue expeditions in distant North Carolina and Louisiana. There was a certain compulsive quality to his behavior, as if each success bred a need for another, still greater risk. Not alone among evangelical abolitionists, he was also hooked on the frisson of imagined crucifixion. “Did you ever hear of a Torrey that suffered martyrdom?” he once asked his father. “I hope among our good old Puritan ancestors there were some who had the martyr spirit.” That June, Torrey was identified by a Washington slave dealer, who named him as the man who had carried off slaves from Winchester. Once in custody, he was also convicted for enticing three other slaves away from a Baltimore tavern owner, and sentenced to six years’ hard labor. It was a death sentence. Torrey did not have the constitution of the hardy seaman Jonathan Walker, and prison proved an agony for him. He was racked by “bilious fever,” and his moods swung wildly between depression and Christian exaltation. Then the tuberculosis from which he had suffered early in life crept inexorably and fatally through his lungs. On the night of May 7 he suffered a severe hemorrhage, and on the eighth he died. With [Thomas] Smallwood, he had helped an estimated four hundred slaves to freedom.

On May 8, [1858,] at a secret convention in Chatham, in Canada West, Brown proclaimed the establishment of his provisional government, based on the constitution that he had written at the Douglass home. Of the forty-six men present, the only whites were thirteen of Brown’s followers from Kansas. Among the more prominent blacks were Mary Ann Shadd’s brother Isaac, publisher of the Provincial Freeman, and two leaders of the Detroit underground, William Lambert and Reverend William Monroe, who chaired the convention. However, Tubman, Douglass, and [Jermain] Loguen were all notably absent, a portent, perhaps, that they had second thoughts about Brown’s ambitions. None of them ever disowned him. But they may have concluded that if his plan failed they were certain to be arrested, and the Underground Railroad possibly wrecked, as its lines, methods, and memberships were revealed. The delegates adopted the constitution that Brown had written with little debate, and unanimously elected Reverend Monroe the provisional government’s temporary president, and Brown its commander in chief. Brown left Chatham with the hope that hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadian blacks would eventually join his expedition. Only one did, Osborne P. Anderson, a printer who worked for the Provincial Freeman, and had been elected a member of Brown’s provisional congress.

Drayton was of a rougher cut, with a large cleft chin, gloomy eyes, and brows that knotted over the bridge of his nose: it was a sad face, wrinkled and scored by more than two decades at sea. Strictly speaking, he was not an underground man, at least not in the way that [William] Chaplin was. He was a Philadelphia ship’s captain who desperately needed money. What [Chaplin and Drayton]  were planning was the biggest organized break-out of slaves in underground history thus far….Drayton’s life was one hard-luck story. He was born in poverty, in 1802, in New Jersey, not far from the mouth of the Delaware River. Taking to sea as a cook at the age of nineteen, after several miserable years in a sloop working the mid-Atlantic coast. On its second voyage, the sloop struck a snag near the mouth of the Susquehanna and sank in five minutes, its uninsured cargo a total loss. His next vessel sank off North Carolina with a cargo of coal and several of its crew. Another was blown ashore on Long Island, with a hundred tons of plaster. Still another was lost in a freak snowstorm, in Chesapeake Bay.

Edward Gorsuch was also an angry man.  He had, by his lights, been kind to the four prime field hands who had run away from him on the night of November 6, 1849.  He had even promised them freedom when they reached the age o twenty-eight.  That was an economically sensible decision in the border country of Maryland, where slavery had been in decline for decades, and the steady hemorrhaging of slaves north in Pennsylvania made human livestock a poor long-term investment.  But it was also magnanimous, the sixty-three-year-old Gorsuch thought.  After all, he had every right to sell unwanted slaves southward, if he preferred.  But he was a Methodist, and a Sunday school teacher, and a man of principle.  He was also a deeply proud man, and by the spring of 1851 his failure to find the men--Noah Buley, Nelson Ford, and George and Joshua Hammond--embarrassed him in front of his fellow slave owners, and set a worrisome precedent of his seven remaining slaves.

At least two of [Edward] Gorsuch’s slaves plus [William] Parker, his equally warlike wife Eliza, and several other armed men were holed up on the second floor of the house when the Marylanders and Marshall Kline appeared in the narrow lane outside before dawn on the morning of September 11 [1851]…The tension mounted on both sides as dawn began to break.  Although Gorsuch didn’t know it, several of the men in the garret were panicking and urging surrender.  Eliza, who, William wrote, had endured a slavery “far more bitter” this his own, grabbed a corn cutter and declared that she would cut off the head of anyone who attempted to give up.

The Parkers kept a horn that was to be used in times of emergency.  Eliza now asked William if it was time to call for help.  He told her to go ahead.  Standing at one of the garret windows, she raised the horn and blew a squalling note that friends everywhere within hearing would instantly understand.  One or more of the whites began firing at her, and she fell to her knees, unhurt, and, crouching beneath the sill, she continued to blow blast after blast into the brightening air.

Men and women dropped what they were doing and began to run toward the sound.  They came from every direction, some on horseback, others on foots, armed with guns, clubs, barrel staves, and razor-edged corn cutters, until there were several dozen blacks gathered at the house.

In many river communities, underground work was carried out almost entirely by African Americans. One of the most effective networks of all was based in the port of Madison, Indiana, about eighty miles downriver from Cincinnati. With a few exceptions, it is difficult to form a sharp picture of the men who formed this cell. None of them left memoirs or diaries. Their activities remain visible at all only as they have been refracted through the anecdotes of white abolitionists, often long after the fact, and in a handful of nineteenth-century newspaper articles that omit more than they reveal. It is clear that the man at the cell’s center in the early 1840s was the freeborn Virginian George DeBaptiste, whose picaresque career suggests that he had much more than the average share of charm and nerve. A natural mole, he would not have been out of place in the shadowy world of twentieth-century espionage. The only picture of him, an engraving made later in his life when he had become a successful businessman in Detroit, is revealing: it shows a rather heavy-featured man, with beetling brows and deep-set, grave eyes, and a short, dense beard that enfolds his square jaw like a baseball glove. Born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1814, he was trained as a barber, and by the age of eighteen became the body servant of a professional gambler, with whom he traveled widely around the country, including the Deep South. In 1838 DeBaptiste had settled in Madison, and his barbershop at the corner of Second and Walnut soon became the underground’s local headquarters.

Paranoid rumors of more insurrections raced through the South. Gun sellers made fortunes: in the four weeks after the raid, Baltimore dealers were reported to have sold ten thousand pistols to terrified Virginians. Northern schoolteachers, peddlers, and preachers were subjected to all manners of indignities. Real and apocryphal stories of persecution fed Northern rage. A planter was said to have forced his slaves to execute a Yankee evangelist who was found preaching to them. A peddler was said to have been strung up by the neck six times (but let down before he expired) on suspicion of being an abolitionist. In South Carolina, an Irish stone cutter was allegedly flogged, tarred, and feathered for daring to say that slave labor was degrading to white labor.

Smith managed to send a message to the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office, advising it to watch for a crate that would be arriving on a certain date, and to open it immediately. Meanwhile, a free black friend of Brown’s arranged for a carpenter to build a box three feet long, two feet wide, and two feet, six inches deep, to be lined with baize cloth. The fit would be tight, allowing the two-hundred-pound, five-foot-eight-inch-tall Brown no space to turn himself around. At about 4 A.M. on March 29, Brown climbed into the box. Three gimlet holes were drilled opposite his face for air. He was handed a few biscuits and a cow’s balder filled with water. After the top was hammered on, the box was addressed to a contact in Philadelphia, and plainly marked “THIS SIDE UP.” Smith had the box delivered to the railway express office, where it was then put on a wagon and driven to the station. By the route that the box would have to follow, Philadelphia lay three hundred and fifty miles away.

A small, homely man, often scruffily dressed and taciturn to the point of eccentricity, [Seth] Concklin was born in upstate New York, in 1802, and endured an appallingly grim childhood that left him with the cocky combativeness of a perpetual survivor, coupled to an indelible affinity for every underdog he ever met. His father died when Concklin was still a boy, leaving him responsible for a large, virtually indigent family. One of his sisters was given away to strangers when she could no longer be fed. To support his remaining siblings, he tramped the roads of rural New York peddling trifles. After living for a time in a pacifist Shaker community near Albany, he enlisted in the small, ill-starred republican force that sought to overthrow the British colonial regime in Canada during the so-called Patriot War of 1838-39. Later he served in Florida as a soldier in the First Seminole War, returning home contemptuous of the government’s expansionist propaganda, and with a deep sympathy for the beleaguered Indians. He hated slavery with such a passion that it was said of him that “he was a whole Abolition Society in himself,” and he served for a time as an underground conductor in Springfield, Illinois, where he may have known, or at least met, the up-and-coming young lawyer Abraham Lincoln.

Slave hunters also had to contend with a secret black militia led by William Parker, which mobilized on short notice to fend off slave hunters, and recovered kidnap victims, by force if necessary.  Parker, twenty-nine years old in 1851, was born a slave in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and had escaped to Pennsylvania in 1842 by following the railway tracks from Baltimore to York.  He had spent the intervening years working on farms in Lancaster County.  In 1843, he underwent a transformative experience at an abolitionist rally where he listened raptly to an oration by Frederick Douglass, whom he had known years earlier in Maryland as the simple slave Frederick Bailey.  "I was therefore not prepared for the progress he then showed," Parker later wrote.  "I listened with the intense satisfaction that only a refugee could feel."  Parker became a fighter in the tradition of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, although unlike them he operated in a free state and was supported by an interracial underground that recognized both his personal courage and his strategic skill.  He acknowledged no federal law. When a Quaker neighbor urged him and the other fugitives to quietly head for Canada, he replied that if the laws protected black men as they did whites, he too would be a pacifist.  "If a fight occurs, I want the whites to keep away," He told her.  "They have a country and may obey the laws.  But we have no country."

Still was born free in 1821, near Medford, in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, the youngest of eighteen children. His father, Levin, had purchased his freedom and moved north from Maryland in 1807. His mother, charity, later escaped to join him there, leaving behind their two oldest, enslaved sons. Largely self-taught, William moved to Philadelphia in 1844, where he worked at various menial jobs until, in 1847, he was hired as a clerk and a janitor by the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, at a salary of three dollars and seventy-five cents per week. When the Vigilance Committee was reorganized after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, Still was named its chairman. He coordinated escapes with underground activists as least as far away as Norfolk, Virginia and Washington, D.C., where the frugal Yankee lawyer Jacob Bigelow had rebuilt a clandestine network after William Chaplin’s arrest. Still’s Philadelphia office also served variously as a reception center, a kind of social services agency for needy fugitives, and a clearinghouse for information. He was usually the first person fugitives encountered when they arrived from underground stations in the Pennsylvania hinterland, from the Delaware line, or by sea from the South. Still had greeted William and Ellen Craft after their epic journey from Georgia, and he was on hand to help Henry “Box” Brown out of his packing crate. It was also Still who sent word to William Parker and his men at Christiana that the Maryland slave owner Edward Gorsuch and his party were on their trail.