The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era

The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery

R. J. M. Blackett

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781469608785
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated action to aid in the recovery of runaway slaves and denied fugitives legal rights if they were apprehended, quickly became a focal point in the debate over the future of slavery and the nature of the union. In Making Freedom, R. J. M. Blackett uses the experiences of escaped slaves and those who aided them to explore the inner workings of the Underground Railroad and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, while shedding light on the political effects of slave escape in southern states, border states, and the North.
Blackett highlights the lives of those who escaped, the impact of the fugitive slave cases, and the extent to which slaves planning to escape were aided by free blacks, fellow slaves, and outsiders who went south to entice them to escape. Using these stories of particular individuals, moments, and communities, Blackett shows how slave flight shaped national politics as the South witnessed slavery beginning to collapse and the North experienced a threat to its freedom.

1. Making Their Way to Freedom

“I find myself in a Position to address you a few lines and I hope that they may find you in as good health as I am myself in.” There is nothing unconventional about this opening salutation except that it was written by a slave to his master soon after he had escaped. It is unusual in another way: the author clearly meant to thumb his nose at his master, to demonstrate his capacity for independent action, and to make clear his desire for freedom. But this sort of communication, written so soon after an escape, ran the risk of destroying the best laid plans. That it did not says something about the individual who executed what was a masterful plan of escape from slavery in 1853. The letter was written by Henry W. Banks to William M. Buck, a forty-three-year-old slave master of Front Royal in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and postmarked from New York City February 15, 1853. Banks, who was described by contemporaries as a mulatto, had been hired by Buck in 1849 from his owner, Edward W. Massey, who lived a short distance from Front Royal. Evidently, Banks had requested the move so he could be near his wife. But he may have had other plans. Less than two years after the transfer, Massey got word that Banks was planning to escape. Massey had him jailed, but Buck intervened and had him released, confident that the rumors were baseless. In April 1852, Massey got wind of another planned escape and this time sold Banks to a local slave trader. Again, Buck came to Banks’s defense: family connections, he predicted confidently, would keep Banks close to home. To convince Massey that there was nothing to the rumor, Buck agreed to post a security of $800 should Banks escape before the expiration of the contract they had first signed in 1849 and renewed every year since. In less than a year, Banks was gone—where to no one knew. Massey was convinced he had fled with his brother Landon and despaired of ever retaking him. His “smartness,” Massey predicted, was a “sure guarantee for his escape.”

Two days after the escape, William Buck received his first letter from Banks, ostensibly from New York City. In it Banks spoke of plans to go to either Albany or Buffalo and, curiously, informed Buck of the escape route he had taken. First, he had gone north to Washington County, Maryland, a few miles short of the Pennsylvania line. But rather than cross into free territory at that point, he instead turned southeast to Baltimore, where he spent two days. From there, he headed north to Philadelphia, where he rested for one night before moving on to New York City. These details, it seems, were meant to throw off any likely pursuers. If Banks had escaped, as he states in his letter, on the 13th, then he could not have arrived in New York two days later, given the stops he says he had made on the way. But Buck was not fooled; he suspected Banks had gone directly to Philadelphia. In fact, he sent an advertisement announcing the escape to Kinzell and Doyle, slave traders in Clear Spring, Washington County, Maryland, in the hope they could cut Banks off before he reached free territory. Unfortunately for Buck, both were away on business in Pennsylvania at the time.

Among slaveholders at least, it was believed that Banks had not acted alone. Edward Massey suspected he had left in the company of his brother. While it is not clear that Banks had worked with others, there seemed to have been a number of other escapes from the area around the same time, suggesting a degree of collusion and planning among the slaves. Two weeks after Banks left the area, Thomas Ashby, William Buck’s stepbrother, was in Philadelphia searching for a slave named George who had escaped about the same time Banks did. George had written a number of letters to family and friends back home from an address in Philadelphia that Ashby described as “one of the receptacles for fugitives and their correspondence.” Ashby tracked him to the address from which the letters were written, but George had already moved on. He hired a policeman with fifteen years’ experience tracking fugitives, but it was, as he told his brother, like “looking for a needle in a haystack” because there were so many places to hide and “such a variety of faces” that confuse and “throw difficulties in the way.” Ashby even contacted Edward D. Ingraham, the city’s commissioner responsible for hearing fugitive slave cases, showing him several of the letters George had written, but Ingraham had few answers to the riddle of George’s whereabouts. In the end, Ashby gave up, suggesting to his brother that he should instead employ someone who knew both Banks and George and could commit to spending “several weeks” in the city.

Following his stepbrother’s advice, William Buck contacted Henry H. Kline, a deputy marshal who almost two years earlier had been a member of the Philadelphia posse that accompanied Edward Gorsuch, a Maryland slaveholder, to Christiana, Pennsylvania, on his ill-fated attempt to reclaim three of his slaves. In spite of his experiences at Christiana, Kline seemed to have remained active in the business of tracking down fugitive slaves. Buck suggested Kline hire a policeman from each of the city’s wards where African Americans lived to help him capture Banks and George. Unfortunately, Kline was away when Buck’s letter arrived. When he finally replied in April, he declined to follow Buck’s advice because, as he observed, many of the policemen were under the influence of abolitionists and were opposed to hunting down fugitives. He also did not think it wise to write Banks a letter in the hope of ferreting him out because, as he informed Buck, blacks in the city protected fugitives and quickly moved them out once they got wind of any danger. Instead, he proposed to hire two or three men he could trust. He had a few leads, he added hopefully, from a “pigeon” who had informed him that Banks was not in the city at the moment but would soon return. This news must have raised Buck’s spirits. If it did, they were soon dashed when Buck received a second letter from Banks in April, posted from a steamship on the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania, saying he had changed his plans and was now on his way to California. Buck shared this latest letter with Edward Massey, who responded that Banks was leading them on a merry dance. This most recent letter, Massey believed, was meant to throw Buck’s “attention away from him.” He knew Banks well enough to know that he was not on his way to California, nor would he settle on a farm or in a small town such as Aspinwall, Pennsylvania, along the Allegheny River, where a brother lived and where he would be most vulnerable, but would choose instead the security and anonymity provided by a large city such as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, or New York. That is where they should concentrate their search. But Ashby’s efforts in Philadelphia had drawn a blank, as had Kline’s. Massey also suspected that Banks had the support of someone who knew the preferred way of reaching California and was feeding him this information.

Banks was also using stamps that were designed to throw Buck and Massey off his track: “He has found means,” Massey observed, “to have a very imperfect stamp put on his letters.” Not only was the stamp imperfect (whatever that means), but the letter was headed “steamship,” without giving the name of the ship. Massey suggested that Buck contact the postmaster at Front Royal to verify that the stamps used by Banks were legitimate. Massey may have been skeptical about Banks’s ultimate destination, but others who Buck had hired to help him recapture Banks were convinced he was headed to his brother’s home in western Pennsylvania. The idea was not too far-fetched. If Banks was not heading to Aspinwall, then he may have been trying to make connections with Maria Cooper and her family, recently freed slaves from Front Royal who had settled in Washington County just south of Pittsburgh. In spite of his best efforts, Buck failed to locate Banks. The trail went cold until November 1853, when Buck received a third letter from Banks informing him that he had arrived safely in Hamilton, Ontario.¹

While Banks’s escape speaks to the fragility of the slave system, it does provide us with an opportunity to explore further the nature and consequences of what Henry Bibb, who had escaped from slavery in Kentucky, called the “work of self emancipation.” At first glance it seems odd that Banks would go to such lengths to stay in touch with his former master. There is no doubt that he felt some attachment to the man who had protected him from the dark unknown of the internal slave trade. Banks even offered in his final letter from Canada to repay Buck the $800 security he had to forfeit when Banks left. But neither his attachment to his wife and friends in Front Royal nor the gratitude he felt for Buck’s treatment of him diminished Banks’s determination to be free. His chances of reaching freedom were increased if he could throw off his tracks any slave catchers Buck might send. His first two letters were meant to do just that. Edward Massey was convinced they were part of a carefully laid plan of deception contrived by a smart slave who for years had been planning to run.²

Both Buck and Massey suspected that free blacks in and around Front Royal had helped Banks escape by providing him with a pass. This seems unlikely; after all, Banks was literate and did not need the assistance of anyone to write him a pass. To the dismay of slaveholders, the pass, which was meant as a mechanism to control the movement of slaves and limit their chances of escape, had been transformed in the hands of slaves into a passport to freedom. Advertisements for runaways frequently made reference to the fact that fugitives could read and write, had written passes for themselves, or had acquired passes from others. We do not know the exact details of the poster Buck sent to Kinzell and Doyle, the slave traders operating out of Clear Spring, Maryland, but by the early 1850s advertisements made frequent reference to the fact that slaves were using their literary skills to effect their escape. When, for example, Prince, a twenty-five-year-old harness maker, escaped with five others from a “camp” in Athens in southeast Tennessee in September 1853, George Washington Reid informed readers of a Nashville newspaper that Prince had a map in his possession, that he could read and write, and that he was making his way to Illinois using a pass that Reid implied he had written himself. Three months later, John Patton, a fellow Tennessean, made public that a slave named Sam had escaped from Williamson County with free papers that were the property of David McLamore. The implication was that Sam had either stolen the papers or McLamore had given them to him to use in his escape to Illinois.³ In March 1851, John Gilliam of Powhatan County, Virginia, advertised for two runaways, Marigold and William, who, he believed, had acquired what he described as “spurious passes” or forged free papers with the help of free blacks that they were using to move around freely and to find work on the canal near Lynchburg and on the railroad. An Orange County, North Carolina, slaveholder, John Glenn, suspected that his slave Jack was making his way through Virginia to a free state using “forged free papers or the pass of some free negro.”⁴

The ease with which slaves moved about the rural South facilitated the transmission of news and pushed slave systems to enact laws to limit their mobility. The problem was exacerbated in urban areas, where slaves had even greater freedom to move around and to consort with fellow slaves and working-class whites. The situation in Nashville, Tennessee, was fairly typical. Periodically during the 1850s, the local authorities would make a concerted effort to clamp down on the movement of slaves in the city by fining those employers who broke the law prohibiting hiring slaves without written permission, and those whites and free blacks who “entertained” slaves or sold them alcohol. William Graham, for instance, was fined $10 plus costs for allowing a slave to sleep in an outhouse without permission, $2 and costs for permitting the same slave to hire his time, and an additional $20 and costs for, as one newspaper put it, “combining with the same slave to hire his own time.”⁵ Periodic police raids had no perceptible long-lasting effects on these connections. Similar connections existed in small towns and settlements throughout the South. In Maddenville, a crossroads close to Stevensburg in Culpeper County, Virginia, for example, a small tavern, general store, and inn owned by Willis Madden, a prosperous free black, provided a meeting place where whites, free blacks, and slaves could “play cards and drink.” It was, Scott Christianson has written, an “important information clearing house for slaves as well. Many regarded it, like the courthouse and the plantation dining room, a gold mine of intelligence about what whites were up to.” It is, Julius Scott argues, in these settings of “people on the move”—places where they congregated—that news of developments elsewhere were orally transmitted, where rumors were legend. When James Redpath, the radical journalist, toured the South in the late 1850s, he was stunned by the speed with which news traveled among slaves in spite of strict surveillance on the plantations and the existence of patrols, which, he observed, did little to stem the movement of slaves “over large tracts of the country.” This system of “secret travel” had its origin, he reported, in the slaves’ “love of gossip and wish to meet their friends and relatives.” The more oppressive the system became, the quicker gossip was replaced by a deep yearning for freedom.⁶ When William Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis’s coachman, escaped from Richmond as Union forces gathered for a possible assault on the Confederate capital in 1862, Union commanders in Fredericksburg consulted him on the layout of the enemy’s defenses. For years, Jackson had moved about the city with relative freedom, working as a messenger for a local bank before he was hired by Davis. When he later toured Britain to promote the cause of the Union, he added the sort of legitimacy to the cause that only someone with first hand information on the inner workings of the Confederacy could.⁷

But Henry Banks’s letters to Front Royal point to another feature of the system of communication employed by slaves. Apparently either slaves or free blacks in Front Royal had gotten word to George and Banks by mail that slave catchers were on their heels. It frustrated Thomas Ashby’s carefully laid plans to intercept the fugitives in Philadelphia. “It is most unfortunate,” he wrote Buck, that “those letters fell into the hands they did. Could they have been intercepted without being known amongst the negroes, a correspondence kept up, purporting to be from either or all, his apprehension would have been without question. Now such a correspondence is out of the question for the reason I fear it is known in Front Royal that I came here for him.” Clearly, Ashby was baffled by the ease with which letters were exchanged between the fugitives and their friends and family in Front Royal. Both he and Massey wondered if the local postmaster was colluding with slaves or if he was simply ignoring his responsibilities under local law to prevent the transmission of such letters. Massey put it bluntly to Buck: the local postmaster should be asked whether it was “best to deliver letters to slaves without informing their masters.” He knew the answer, but that did little to ease his concerns.⁸

Slaves who had left the South used the postal service to communicate with loved ones and friends left behind. The Reverend Robert Ryland had to warn his congregation at the First African Church in Richmond, Virginia, against receiving letters from escaped former members of the church in which they described the best ways to reach freedom.⁹ The use of the mail by abolitionists in the mid-1830s riled slaveholders, who called for prohibiting the dissemination of abolitionist materials by this means. By the 1850s improvements in the postal system and a reduction of rates dramatically lowered the cost of sending a letter. Starting in 1851, mail sent between New York and California, for example, was charged a flat rate of “3 cents per half ounce.” This meant that anyone (and that included fugitive slaves such as Banks) could correspond with distant family and friends cheaply.¹⁰

The streams of communication flowed in both directions. Slaves contemplating escape sometimes made plans with friends and family in the North and Canada before leaving. John Bull and Joe Mayo, two of five runaways found on the steamship Keziah in the James River in 1858, knew where they were going. Bull had arranged with friends in Canada to be hired as a waiter in a local hotel. Mayo was off to New York City to meet his wife, who had escaped a few years earlier. Samuel Green had heard of Canada and the UGRR from Harriet Tubman during one of her trips to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to abduct slaves. Susan Brook, forty, fled Norfolk in April 1854, six months after her son had arrived in Canada. It was three years after Caroline Aldridge’s brother escaped to Canada from Maryland in 1854 before she, at age twenty-three, decided to follow him.¹¹

William Still of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee received numerous requests from runaways in Canada asking him to contact family members left behind to arrange their departure. Samuel Miles, who took the name Robert King after he escaped from Somerset County, Maryland, in August 1855, wrote Still from St. Catherine, Canada, asking him to contact his wife Sarah, who was living in Baltimore, to let her know where he was and to encourage her to leave. Lewis Burrell escaped with his brother Peter from Alexandria, Virginia, in April 1856, leaving his wife Winna Ann and two children, Joseph and Mary, behind. After nearly three years in Canada, Burrell wrote Still, saying that he had found out his wife was then living in Baltimore and that she wanted to leave. But Burrell feared that a letter from Canada would alert both her master and local authorities. Instead, he suggested that Still write to Samuel Madden, a Baptist preacher—and the son of Willis Madden, whose tavern and inn at Maddenville, was a hub, as we have seen, of communication for slaves—who he knew would help. According to Christianson, Samuel Madden “occasionally returned to the area to visit his kin and hold illegal prayer meetings at Berry Hill and other local spots; he also exchanged letters and intelligence on behalf of runaways and their loved ones.” In spite of warnings from Still, John Henry Hill wrote frequently to family and friends in Petersburg, Virginia, arranging for their escape. Hill, a twenty-six-year-old carpenter, had escaped from Richmond in January 1853. A slave in Petersburg, Hill was hired out, agreeing to pay his master, James Mitchell, $150 at the end of the hire in December 1852. Instead, Mitchell took Hill to Richmond where he planned to sell him. Hill put u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Making Freedom
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Making Their Way to Freedom
• 2. The Workings of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law
• 3. Taking Leave
• Conclusion: Counternarratives
• Notes
• Index