USA > New York > History of the state of New York, political and governmental, Vol. II 1822-1864 > Part 18
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CHAPTER XVII
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
T HE controversy between New York and Virginia, in which Governor Seward took so resolute a part, was one of the early incidents in the "irre- pressible conflict," to use Seward's own later phrase, over the subject of slavery, and it will be fitting at this point to make a brief interlude in our narrative, with some anticipation of later events, to tell of the "Under- ground Railroad." That famous organization, in which a multitude of New Yorkers were actively con- cerned, was one of the most strenuous and aggressive factors in that irregular warfare against slavery which extended through a score of years preceding the Civil War, and was one of the influences which made that final arbitrament of arms inevitable. Other free States -Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois-were more directly in touch with the institution of slavery ; but none surpassed New York for interest in the "rail- road." The name was faithfully expressive of its great system of secret service maintained for the major purpose of conducting fugitive slaves to Canada and to freedom and, incidentally, to encourage slaves in general to follow their example. Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard University, in his preface to Professor Wilbur H. Siebert's work on the subject, describes the Underground Railroad, in retrospect, as
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"simply a form of combined defiance of national laws, on the ground that those laws were unjust and oppres- sive." The men who operated it flatly refused to recognize property rights in human beings, and they repudiated any and every legal dictum to the contrary. Believing slavery to be an evil they did their best to destroy it, little by little, by liberating its victims. In pursuance of that passionate purpose they developed an elaborate organization which antedated Lincoln's Emancipation proclamation by many years.
Of the great network of hidden agencies thus created, New York State was an important territorial and strategic sector. It was behind the middle west, and especially behind Ohio (which bordered on both Kentucky and Virginia), in the number of its Under- ground routes ; but what it lacked in that respect it more than made up in the eminence of the men who directed the system, from time to time, within its borders. Among them were Frederick Douglass, of Rochester ; Gerrit Smith, of Peterboro, Madison county ; and John Brown, who was ardent and resourceful as an Under- ground operator during the periods of his residence on his Adirondack farm at North Elba. The middle west was a shorter cut from the southern plantations to Canada; but many of the fugitives who passed north- ward by the way of Maryland found in New York a choice of several routes to freedom, each of them manned to the Canadian border by vigilant and hos- pitable zealots for liberty.
The origin of the Underground Railroad is only imperfectly traced by tradition. It is known to have
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operated spasmodically, and on a small scale, long be- fore the advent of the steam railway from which it derived its later name. Congress passed the first Fugi- tive Slave law in 1793, providing for the reclamation of persons escaping from servile labor. This statutory expedient for enforcing the constitutional mandate was made necessary by the difficulties experienced by slave- holders in recovering possession of their escaped slaves in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As early as 1791, public attention was directed to a case in Washington, Pennsylvania, where a slaveholder was compelled to kidnap a colored fugitive to whom he laid claim. But although the law of 1791 imposed a fine of $500 upon any person who should rescue or harbor a fugitive from labor, or resist his capture, it was frequently violated. In the early years of the Nineteenth century escapes from servitude became more common, because the invention of the cotton gin had stimulated the de- mand for slaves in the distinctive cotton States, and the horror of being sold "down the river" drove many pre- viously contented slaves in Virginia and Kentucky into making a desperate dash northward. As early as 1804 secret or "underground" methods of aiding escaped slaves were known in and about Philadelphia. Accord- ing to the best authorities, the northern outlets for slaves were called "the Underground road" as early as 1831; and later the system borrowed its more preten- tious title from the newly introducd railway.
At the close of the first half of the century the activi- ties of the Underground Railroad, stimulated by the Abolitionist propaganda directed by William Lloyd
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1850]
Garrison and Wendell Phillips, had provoked a strong southern demand for repressive legislation which should be effective. The response of Congress was the enactment of the Fugitive Slave law of 1850, a part of the famous Clay Compromises. This measure was in itself a formal recognition by Congress of the gravity of the southern grievance. The dismay and anger of the slaveholders at the growing boldness of the Under- ground traffic had been aggravated by the passage in northern Legislatures of the so-called Personal Liberty acts, which were intended to soften the rigor of the Fugitive Slave law of 1793 or to make its successful enforcement next to impossible. Most of them went no farther than to insure fugitive slaves a jury trial and the protection of counsel; but even this safeguard baf- fled in many cases the attempts at recapture. The second Fugitive Slave law was perhaps the most tempt- ing bait held out to southern Congressmen to secure their acquiescence in the Compromises of 1850. It armed United States Commissioners and Federal Judges and agents with more summary powers over the persons of escaped bondmen. It subjected every person aiding a slave to resist or elude capture to a fine of $1,000 and six months' imprisonment. It provided that ownership of the fugitive should be determined by the simple affidavit of the claimant, and it outlawed every statute of the States that had previously been invoked to hinder or delay the powers of recovery.
If the provocation of this sweeping Federal legisla- tion was the Underground Railroad and the Personal Liberty laws that gave a certain pretext of legality, or at
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[1850
least a moral encouragement, to its conductors, the effect of it was just the reverse of what the promoters of the Compromises expected. From 1850 onward the Underground Railroad extended its branches and moved, figuratively, under a more powerful head of steam. The eastern and northern States answered the challenge of Congress with more drastic Personal Lib- erty laws, by the terms of which State aid of any kind, even to the use of State jails, was denied to the agents of the Federal government. The Abolitionists now had a new and deadly weapon of attack upon the institution of slavery and its defenders. Their fiery denunciation of the Federal government for endeavoring to trans- form the citizenship of the north into slave-catching allies of the southern planters, awoke responsive echoes in many northern hearts that previously had been either cold or indifferent. In New York State, in particular, whose people had been far less responsive to Abolition radicalism than the middle west, the volume of adverse sentiment aroused by the second Fugitive Slave law swelled rapidly.
The date of the new law was September 18, 1850. The first New York city to be heard form in condemnation was Syracuse. On September 26 the Syracuse press carried a call for a meeting of protest, and on October 4 it was held in the City Hall and largely attended. By resolution it ordered the appointment of a vigilance committee of thirteen members, "whose duty it shall be to see that no person is deprived of his liberty without due process of law." Viewed in the retrospect this was, in effect, a public endorsement of the Underground
WILLIAM C. BOUCK
William C. Bouck, 15th governor (1843-44) ; born at Ful- tonham, Schoharie county, January 7, 1786; farmer; town clerk of town of Fulton, 1807; supervisor, 1808-9; sheriff, 1812; member of assembly, 1814-16, 1818; appointed canal commis- sioner in 1821 and held the office for 19 years; defeated candi- date for governor, 1840; elected 1842; assistant treasurer of U. S. at New York City, 1846-49; died at Fultonham, April 19, 1859.
0
HENRY CRUSE MURPHY
Henry Cruse Murphy; born in Brooklyn, N. Y., July 5, 1810; graduated from Columbia college in 1830; lawyer; prose- cuting attorney for Kings county, 1833; mayor of Brooklyn, 1842-1843; delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1846; in Congress, 1843-1845; defeated for reelection in 1845 but reelected and served 1847-1849; minister to the Netherlands, 1857-1861; member New York state senate, 1862-1873; delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1867-1868; died in Brooklyn, N. Y., December 1, 1882.
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Railroad. Syracuse thus became one of the main centers of the whole underground system. This was not wholly due to the bold defiance of its October meeting, nor yet to its location at the geographical heart of the State. Another influence operated to make the city a focus of attention at that time. It was the home of two clergymen who loom large in the history of the Under- ground Railroad. One was the Rev. Samuel J. May, a Unitarian minister and a fearless Abolitionist; the other was Elder J. W. Loguen (afterward Bishop) of the African Methodist Church, who was born to slavery and escaped by the underground route in the 1830's. These two men were moving spirits of the Syracuse meeting, and they made good their pledges by untiring energy as station-masters of the Underground Railroad. A year later their home community again advanced into the limelight as the scene of the "Jerry rescue."
In following the history of New York's subsequent share in the activities of the Underground Railroad, the narrator has to rely upon the evidence of a few men recorded long after its daring and romantic service had ceased. Judged by the standard set at Washington it was a lawless enterprise, and its New York routes were outlined only in the memory of its zealous conductors. Very few contemporaneous documents have come down to us descriptive of its operations. The men connected with it had a double reason for secrecy. They knew that, while they were heeding the voice of conscience and obeying the moral law as they interpreted it, they were violating the written law of the nation. Another consideration constrained them to pursue a policy of
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concealment. Though it is true, as we have observed, that, beginning in 1850, the tide of public opinion in this State began to rise steadily against slavery, its ad- vance was slow; and in the early '50's there was little popular tolerance for Abolitionism and still less for that extreme phase of it which was chiefly concerned with the deliverance of fugitive slaves. Thus the inde- fatigable managers of the Underground Railroad had to reckon not only with the risk of prosecution and punishment by the Federal courts, but with a bitter home prejudice, amounting in many cases to contempt and disgust. In self-defense, therefore, they pushed their plans with unceasing caution. They had no in- scribed records, and they kept their signal codes under . their hats. There was no pretense of running the rail- road on schedule time; but, barring a few exceptional cases, it reached its Canadian destination just the same.
From data collected by many writers and investiga- tion after the Civil War, an enlightening idea can be gained of the underground routes that traversed New York State. One of them followed the Hudson River from New York City up to Albany, westward through Schenectady and Utica, and thence to Lake Ontario, via Oswego, Mexico, or Port Ontario. Another crossed the Pennsylvania border north of Wilkes-Barre, proceeding directly north to Peterboro, the home of Gerrit Smith, and thence to Oswego. Still another crossed the Pennsylvania border just south of Elmira and proceeded northward paralleling Seneca Lake, and then switched westward to Niagara Falls. In addition a very important route was that which entered the State
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from western Pennsylvania and threw off several branches on New York soil westward toward Lake Erie. These were the four main lines operating within the State from various southward points, particularly Phil- adelphia and Washington. They had many lateral branches, however, which were constantly varied to meet unexpected emergencies. The principal interior stations for the entire New York system were Albany, Troy, Syracuse, Rochester, Oswego, and Elmira. New York City was a general receiving point not only for the land routes to Canada but for fugitives for whom trans- portation by water could be obtained to Boston and from that city to Canada.
Of more interest and importance than the geographi- cal outlines of the Underground Railway through this State were the human factors in its silent and secret operations and the methods employed to insure uninter- rupted transit to the fugitives. The conductors and agents displayed an almost preternatural cunning in devising schemes for concealing their colored charges or for baffling pursuers. It is needless to say that night travel was almost the exclusive fashion on this partic- ular railroad. After entering the State the fugitive found refuge with some Underground agent near the border, to whose home he had been directed. There he was lodged, sometimes in an attic bedroom, or per- haps in a barn or a nearby cave. When darkness fell on the following evening the refugee was either driven in a covered wagon to the next station, the home of another agent who had been duly notified in advance of the arrival, or, in case the agent was unable to trans-
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port or accompany the fugitive, the latter was given minute instructions for continuing his journey alone to the next refuge. Where there was special need of vigilance the reports of the coming of fugitives were transmitted along the route by code messages or myste- rious passwords and signals. This freemasonry of com- munication was known as the "grapevine telegraph." Instances where the fugitive was encouraged to prose- cute his northward journey afoot and unattended became more and more rare as the vigilance of the Federal officials and the hubbub raised over the organ- ized violation of law increased. Vehicles of all kinds suitable for the purposes of concealment were mustered into service by well-to-do conductors and engineers of the system. They included covered carriages, deep- bedded farm wagons, and peddlers' rigs. Cases were recorded where fugitives were helped on their north- ward journey in farmers' wagons, in which they lay covered by straw, vegetables, or sacks of grain. To avert suspicion a woman of the agent's family some- times drove the wagons thus laden toward the mar- ket town. Well-known agents of the Underground, as suspicion deepened about them, were compelled to rely upon desperate shifts. There were instances where, as a last resort, fugitives were nailed in boxes and shipped northward as freight. In other cases the white res- cuers and their assistants employed stratagems of dif- ferent kinds. More than one freedman was piloted to safety by dressing him in woman's clothing and taking him northward by train in the capacity of a family nurse.
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In considering the New Yorkers of greater or less repute who were active in or accessory to this work of deliverance, it is proper to begin with Frederick Douglass. He himself had escaped from slavery by a personally conducted underground route. At the age of twenty-one he ran away from his Maryland master, borrowed a sailor's certificate, and took a negro car for New York City, where he arrived on a September day in 1838 without having undergone either molestation or suspicion on the way. It was in 1847 that he settled in Rochester, New York, and from that time until the out- break of the Civil War he was deeply interested not only in the development of the Underground route but also in every organized effort for the protection of former slaves in New York who were subject at any time to recapture. The ease with which Douglass himself had won his liberation intensified his faith in the expediency and feasibility of the Underground system. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave act of 1850 he redoubled his exertions on behalf of escaping bondmen, and he had many willing assistants among men of his own color. Many of these fugitives, observ- ing the immunity of Douglass and others, decided to settle in the northern States. The total number of these colored residents in the north in 1850 has since been estimated at from 20,000 to 40,000; and New York had its share. In the work of assisting runaway slaves Douglass had congenial employment. At his home in Rochester he kept a room ready for colored fugitives, and frequently sheltered several at a time. His income as a publisher and Abolition lecturer was modest, but
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from his own purse or the contributions of sympathiz- ing friends he was always able to furnish his colored guests with the means to continue their journey to Canada. It may be doubted whether any personal influence in this State was more effective than that of Douglass in encouraging the resolute directors of the Underground conductors and in strengthening their hands, and we may well believe that the plantation rumors of the safety and prosperity of Douglass, a self- delivered bondman, inspired many a slave to make a break for liberty. To the end of the Underground chapter he served as a personal link for several routes converging at Rochester, where he was admirably sit- uated for such a purpose ; and in his "Reminiscences" he sheds light upon the internal organism of the whole system.
Of the native sons of New York, Gerrit Smith, of Peterboro, was by far the foremost promoter of the Underground Railroad. Born in Utica at the close of the Eighteenth century, he inherited an estate that made him the most extensive landed proprietor in New York. As early as the late 1820's his philanthrop- ic instincts were revealed in his active sympathy with the anti-slavery movement, then assuming an organized form; and a little later he took an enthusiastic interest in a scheme of negro colonization in northern New York, which afterward was partly realized. He was attending a meeting of the American Colonization Society in Syracuse in 1831 when he was assailed by a mob of pro-southern sympathizers, and this experience, aggravated by a similar one in Utica four years later,
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hardened his attachment to the Abolition cause. Unlike his fellow-agitators of the Garrison-Phillips type, he staked much of his hope for the ultimate success of the Abolition cause upon the agencies and mutations of politics. He was one of the organizers of the Liberty party in western New York in 1840; in 1848 and again in 1852 he was its candidate for the Presidency; and twice, in 1840 and in 1858, he conducted a hopeless campaign for the Governorship of New York on an anti-slavery platform. But it was in his close associa- tion with the dauntless spirits that were warring against slavery by means of the Underground Railroad that his sworn enmity to human bondage was most effectively, if not most conspicuously, displayed. It carried him to hazardous extremes, particularly in the financial aid he gave to John Brown ; and he narrowly escaped arrest and prosecution for complicity in Brown's historic raid at Harper's Ferry. His connection with the Under- ground route took divers forms. Not only did he per- sonally aid in the escapes of colored refugees, but he helped the enterprise even more serviceably by his readiness to finance the movement wherever money was needed and to pay the legal expenses of persons charged with violation of the Fugitive Slave law. In the troubled decade from 1850 to 1860 his connivance in the operations of the railroad knew little relaxation, and as late as 1860 he answered a call to Toronto, where he successfully defended the negro William Anderson, who seven years before had endeavored to escape from servitude in Missouri and had killed the man who tried to recapture him. It was known all
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along the lines of the Underground that Smith's spa- cious home at Peterboro, Madison county, was a per- ennial refuge for runaway slaves. There they were always sure of a hospitable welcome. From thence they were sent to Oswego or Cape Vincent or Mexico Point, where the water passage to Canada was easily effected. Richard Henry Dana told of visiting John Brown's farm at North Elba on a summer day in the '50's, where he was informed by his Adirondack guide that all the country in that section belonged to Gerrit Smith, that it was settled for the most part by fugitive slaves who were engaged in farming, and that Brown held the position of a sort of ruler among them.
John Brown's connection with the Underground Railroad was developed most sensationally, and with the most substantial results, in other States than New York. We need consider here only that phase of his tempestuous and tragic career that began in this State in the late '40's and identified him at times with the New York promoters of the Underground. It was in 1847 that Brown came into close communication with Frederick Douglass. In the following year he made his first call on Gerrit Smith at Peterboro, with whom he was soon on confidential terms and to whom he unfolded his ambitious, though quixotic, schemes for a wholesale negro manumission. Two years before, Smith had offered to give 125,000 acres of his patri- monial estate in Essex county for homes for colored people. Negro colonies, with a quota of fugitives, were soon established there. Early in 1848 John Brown decided to settle his family in the midst of the
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negro colonists. With this idea in mind he made his Peterboro visit on April 8, and he promptly arranged with Smith for the purchase on easy terms of three farms at North Elba, or Timbuctoo, as it was also called. Thither Brown transported his family in the spring of 1849. There he remained, with intervals of absence, until 1851, when he temporarily removed with his dependents to Ohio, only to return to North Elba with them in June, 1855. Two months later he parted with his family to pursue in Kansas the more violent career that ultimately led him to a Virginia scaffold. In the closing years of his life he made only intermit- tent visits to his North Elba home. But in these sub- sequent journeys to this State he found in Douglass, Smith, and the Rev. J. W. Loguen, of Syracuse, ever- ready helpers in the work of securing funds, outfits, and volunteers for his Kansas campaign. It was after one of Brown's earlier sorties from North Elba that he formed in Springfield, Massachusetts, his colored League of Gileadites-his first effort to organize the former bondmen to defend themselves and to advance their interests. That was in January, 1851, and it was his personal response to the new Fugitive Slave law.
On the first of his epochal trips to Kansas, John Brown stopped at Peterboro to enlist Gerrit Smith in his western enterprise, and received from Smith la modest contribution, soon followed by several others. It would appear that Smith was informed as to Brown's plan only to the extent that his Kansas crusade would be directed to rescuing the Territory from slavery-a declaration of purpose that was sufficient,
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in itself, to arouse the Peterboro magnate's sympathy. In 1855 we find Brown attending an anti-slavery meeting at Syracuse to plead the cause of the Kansas emigrants. At this meeting there was a responsive echo to Brown's appeal, but the Rev. Samuel J. May, Lewis Tappan, and Gerrit Smith himself, while favoring generous financial aid for the anti-slavery pioneers in Kansas, deprecated the use of any part of the money for the purchase of arms. Gerrit Smith then believed that the Underground Railway and all auxiliary movements like that of Brown could attain their objects without bloodshed; but it is known that the later experiences of "Bleeding Kansas" changed Smith's viewpoint in that regard.
For reasons that have been sufficiently explained the operations of the Underground Railway were hidden and noiseless, and therefore attracted only a modicum of public notice. But now and then its bolder and more dramatic enterprises provoked a sensational interest throughout the country. To the events of this class belong the arrest of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns, in Boston in May, 1854, and its exciting sequel. When the Burns recapture was made known, Boston was soon ablaze with indignation. The movement to protect Burns from reënslavement was led by such men as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, A. Bronson Alcott, and Richard H. Dana, Jr., and a packed Faneuil Hall meeting called to protest against the arrest was addressed by Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker. Later the Court House, in which Burns was confined, was assailed by a crowd of would-be rescuers, but they
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