At the same time, this racially integrated board, composed of women and men from the North and the South, seems to have wanted something its members knew was almost impossible for their students. They wanted normality, even if that meant that they had to do extraordinary things to make that possible. So instead of banning the courtship, they formalized it, writing an amendment that read, “The sexes shall refrain from spending time with each other—provided that the public sitting room shall be free for such as choose to occupy it on first day (Sunday) from one to three P.M. and from half past six to half past seven on Thursday evening.” They originally wrote until “half past eight on Thursday evenings,” but someone must have remembered that they were having a hard enough time getting students to rise at the required time of 5:00 a.m., and letting them stay up that late might make things worse.61
But more than one board member must have remembered the giddy times of their own courtship. How they had wanted nothing but the company of the person they had lost their heart to. Some of these board members were also parents of young people attending that school, and they knew that having only two chances to meet in a week would be very hard indeed. So the next resolution added, “Males and females may walk out in company only by permission of the Principal or male or female Superintendent.”62
Finally there was the issue of the language.
This was a difficult decision. But it was also tied to this board’s ideals and the ways in which they were trying to model a better way of being than currently existed in much of the nation. So they wrote the resolution, “No distinction shall be allowed on account of complexion and especially every member of the Institution shall carefully avoid all unkind, reproachful, or opprobrious names, or language.”63
Adding this resolution to their school constitution may have seemed frivolous, given the reality of race relations in much of the nation. After all, millions of people were being held enslaved just south of their state, and Cincinnati had been wracked by open warfare fueled by prejudice. But this decision was essential for this integrated board, for they were intent upon moving America forward into a place of fairness, justice, and kindness toward all. They not only wanted to abolish slavery, they wanted a better nation, a nation free of prejudice, a nation where all were equal. And so they started with themselves and their school, hoping that they could lead their nation by example, showing the way forward on the frontier.
8
“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments”
Gibson County, Indiana, March 1851
The women of the house would have been up and moving before their friend at the door finished talking, one of them calling out the back window for the children, her voice rising urgent and sharp. As their friend rode away to warn their other neighbors, one of the men would have taken the gun off its hooks. Once everyone was safely inside, he would have stood guard, gun in hand. The wolves were on the loose.
These were not the creatures that used to howl around their cabins—the last of the four-legged kind had been shot years before. No, these wolves were the two-legged kind—slave hunters—and they were hunting for prey.
These wolves moved in packs and were quick to kill—not their prey, for those bodies were worth something to them alive, but anyone who aided the hunted. And while the slavers may have been despised, they were not without allies, for they had the general backing of the law and some very wealthy clients besides. As those allies and laws gained strength, more wolves appeared—some of them dressed as marshals, justices of the peace, and other local officials.1
The Lyles family must have breathed a prayer of thanks for friends and the law that allowed them to have their gun but cursed the new law that now endangered their family. For it was March 1851, and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was now in full effect. The federal government, all the way back east in Washington, DC, had made a decision that changed everything for the Lyles family, for the family of Charles and Keziah Grier, and for all people of African descent in the Northwest Territory states—or anywhere in the free states for that matter. It had passed the harshest fugitive law the nation had ever seen. It allowed the federal government to reach its long, sticky fingers into every state, ignoring states’ rights and habeas corpus.2
The Fugitive Slave Law meant that any white man who had a mind to could grab a person off the street or even enter a family’s home and take their children—as long as that person or family had a dark complexion. Once that person was chained up, there was little they could do to ever be free again. According to that new federal law, a white man could chain up a person of African descent and take them to the nearest federal agent, usually the local justice of the peace, whom the federal government paid double for ruling that the seized person was an escaped slave rather than a free citizen.3
In Indiana, the consequences of the law were felt almost as soon as it was passed. John Freeman, one of the wealthiest and most powerful black businessmen in Indianapolis, was targeted. A white man came from Missouri to Indianapolis and seized John Freeman, claiming Freeman had escaped from bondage. To make matters worse, whites in the state had just ratified a new constitution that took many rights away from African Americans and strengthened the old laws that banned them from testifying against white people. Combined with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, it made freedom very fragile in Indiana. Even for John Freeman. Everyone who could testify to his being legally free was of African descent, so they could not defend him. It took a year and most of his substantial wealth, as well as the financial support of many others, to prove he was free.4
The act shook even the bravest of freedom’s defenders in the United States. As Frederick Douglass stated just after its passage, “The night is a dark and stormy one.… We have lost some of our strong men.… [M]en who were our pride and hope, we have heard have signified their unwillingness to return again to their National field of labors in this country.”5
H. Ford Douglass was an equal rights advocate who, like Frederick Douglass, had freed himself in the 1830s and come north. He knew that his lack of free papers and very public speaking on the fact that he had freed himself endangered his liberty. Yet even after the Fugitive Slave Act had become law, he stood up to speak at the Ohio convention being held in the Second Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio. He had to respond to another speaker, a Mr. Day, who was calling on all of them to remember that as Americans who had fought and defended the nation since the Revolutionary War, they should be protected by the constitution. H. Ford Douglass argued that “the gentleman may wrap the stars and stripes of his country around him forty times, if possible, and with the Declaration of Independence in one hand, and the Constitution of our common country in the other, may seat himself under the shadow of the frowning monument of Bunker Hill, and if the slaveholder, under the Constitution, and with the ‘Fugitive Bill,’ don’t find you, then there don’t exist a Constitution.” This would be one of the last speeches made by H. Ford Douglass before he left for Canada.6
And the threat was worse in the rural areas like the Lyles family’s home county of Gibson. This was their home now and had been for almost twenty years. They had purchased good land near the village of Princeton and close to the Patoka River, and many others had joined them there.7
And now, how could a young son be sent to the far field to hoe weeds around the corn without fear? He was so strong and firm, his muscles just coming in. Did their nightmares see him on an auction block? How could their daughter walk to a friend’s house? She was so lovely, she could be captured and on a fast steamer for those terrible houses in New Orleans before she was even missed. They must have tried to keep the terror from ruling them, but it would have had its effect, for their fears were not just imagined.
They would have all heard the terrible story of the pioneering African American couple kidnapped in Gibson County in the 1840s, despite having lived in the area for twenty years. If it had not been for the Kn
owles family leaving late from a church camp meeting with the Reverend Hiram Hunter, all would have been lost. But luckily they met the kidnappers in the darkness. It took some hard knocks from the reverend’s fists and all the other men in the party to overpower the abductors, but it was a good thing they did, for the couple had been bound and gagged and tied to the bottom of their own wagon, unable to even cry for help.8
Was it Keziah Grier or her friend Mary Stormont who first thought of keeping a kettle of water simmering over the fire, no matter what the weather? If the wolves got in, they could throw the hot water in their faces to protect themselves.9
But this was March 1851, and the wolves were gathering for an attack. Word was now circulating that a man named Seth Concklin, and the refugee family he had brought out of Alabama, had been captured a few miles north of Vincennes. Seth Concklin had been thrown in jail and fearing for his life had appealed to the Stormonts for aid, for as Underground Railroad agents they had secretly sheltered him just days earlier. Until that day no one had suspected that the white Stormonts, who had lived in Gibson County for so long, were Underground Railroad agents. And the Griers were next to them on the line, conveying Concklin and the fleeing family to safety. Now the wolves were swarming over three counties, from Evansville to New Harmony, hungry for blood.10
Did Keziah and Charles regret their decision to help? Few would have known that they were continuing to do their work, despite all the changes. The fewer who knew the better.
But the Stormonts knew. Like the Griers, they were early settlers in the area. They and the Griers were alike in some interesting ways, for both David Stormont and Keziah Grier had been born in South Carolina. Somehow the two couples—one black, one white—discovered that they shared a deep sympathy for refugees fleeing bondage. Both families were willing to put their lives in each other’s hands, trusting and hoping that their dangerous secrets would be safe.11
The Griers were part of a secret and organized network that stretched into Canada, managing one of the riskiest links of their branch of the Underground Railroad, a section close to the Wabash River down there in southwestern Indiana in a region that was crawling with “Christian wolves.”12
It must have been the Stormonts who told them about the request all those months ago, a request that was coming all the way from Philadelphia. A request so risky and dangerous that no one else along the Ohio River, no matter how fiercely abolitionist, would support it.13
A young man called Seth Concklin had come from Philadelphia, contacting every Underground Railroad agent he could find close to the Ohio River in both Ohio and Indiana with a crazy story about an attempted rescue of Peter Still’s family. Everyone knew Peter Still, the long-lost older brother of William Still, one of the most famous African American abolitionists in the nation. Closely connected to Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and many others, William Still had long been running a well-respected center in Philadelphia to help refugees from enslavement. No one could have been more surprised than he was to find his own brother, Peter, entering his office. It took them a while to figure out that they were kin, but when they did, their joy was great, and the entire abolitionist community on the East Coast knew of it.14
Peter had not run away but had managed to raise a large sum to purchase himself. But he had been separated from his enslaved wife and children, who were still in Alabama. There were few worse places. Just fifty years before, even southern states had legally encouraged freedom, but whites in Alabama had turned their backs on those ideals and made freeing enslaved African Americans all but illegal. In Alabama, a white man could donate a cow to an orphanage, or a white woman could donate her books to a church, but should they wish to emancipate the people they owned or even to allow those people to purchase themselves, Alabama law all but forbade it.15
It seemed hopeless, but Concklin approached the Still brothers and offered to go into Alabama and rescue Peter’s wife, Vina, and their three children, all now almost grown, “without pay or reward.” As William Still later wrote, “The magnitude of this offer can hardly be appreciated. It was literally laying his life on the altar of freedom for the despised and oppressed whom he had never seen.” Peter Still was deeply moved, but at first “the very idea of such an undertaking seemed perfectly appalling.” The Still brothers knew exactly what terrors the slave South could hold and the damage it could inflict on a young, idealistic abolitionist such as Concklin. And then there was the safety of Peter’s wife and children if he entrusted them to Concklin’s care.16
Concklin’s offer did seem a kind of madness. He intended go into Alabama, get Peter’s family, and then, posing as their owner, immediately catch a steamboat that would take them up the rivers of the South all the way to the Ohio River and safety.
Seth Concklin had two sisters who loved him dearly, but otherwise he was unconnected to anyone, with no wife or family of his own. And he had a trade, having worked as a miller for a few years now. Indeed, he planned to go to Alabama in the guise of a miller looking for work in the region where Vina Still and her children were enslaved. While full of courage and heart, Concklin could also offer strength. Millers were massively strong, for all day they hauled large bags of wheat and flour. Both Peter and William knew that strength would be needed. But they also knew that no amount of strength could stand alone against the powers of the slave states.
The Stills did everything they could to dissuade Concklin, telling him of all the friends they had lost trying to do exactly what he was offering to do. Those allies had been killed or were still rotting in prisons. As William Still later recounted, “In short, he was plainly told that, without a very great chance, the undertaking would cost him his life.”17
But Concklin would not give up. He kept his offer open even when Peter Still refused him outright.
The situation seemed hopeless. Peter Still tried to distract himself from his terror for his family. He reunited with his mother and brothers, whom he had been separated from when he was just a child. But he was clearly miserable. Finally, one of his brothers asked if he could survive without his wife and children, and Peter said that he would rather die. So he decided to go back into the slave states to visit them and see what he could do.
The danger of this journey was great, but greater still was his family’s joy on seeing him again. He had thought to risk an offer to purchase their freedom, but with his color and the law both against him, as well as the immense cruelty he saw on all the plantations around him, he became sure that such a plan would result in his disappearance and death. He talked with his wife about Concklin’s offer, and then he and Vina talked it over with their children, who were now all in their teens. They finally agreed to try Concklin’s plan, for “they were ready to assent to any proposition that looked like deliverance.” Vina Still, ever wise, gave her cape to her husband just before he left, telling him that if Concklin managed to make it to them, he should show the cape to her so that she would know he was indeed their rescuer.18
Finally, Concklin was able to go to work to rescue one of the most famous enslaved families in America. But he could not find much help among the abolitionists along the Ohio River. All they could see was a well-built young white man talking of Vina Still and her children in Alabama and a plan that seemed one step away from insanity.19
And Concklin’s timing could not have been worse. In the time that had elapsed since his original offer, not only had the federal 1850 Fugitive Slave Law gone into effect, but Indiana had just approved a new constitution so prejudiced that it looked to all but destroy the lives of the free people of African descent in that state.
That constitution included the infamous Resolution 13. As the white men at the Indiana constitutional convention worked on it, they considered various ideas for waging political warfare against the people who had pioneered that state before statehood. One was to close Indiana’s borders to any free people of African descent who planned to stay for any length of time. And anyone, white or black, wh
o hired those free African Americans who dared to enter Indiana would face heavy fines. And then there was the clause that would make it illegal for African Americans to purchase property in the state.20
Of course, next door Illinois had put in place an immigration ban on free African Americans in 1813 before it was even a state. And by 1847 it had decided to draft its own new constitution, which—yet again—closed its borders to free African Americans when ratified in 1848.21
But some in Indiana desired to take a more brutal route. James Rariden argued during the 1851 convention that they should wage “a war of extermination” to kill off all African-descended people. To strengthen his argument, he added that whites in Indiana would merely be following in the footsteps of the Puritans, who killed the “Indians who were infinitely more magnanimous and less impudent than this colored race.” While other delegates were more cautious about expressing such views, the majority made their prejudice clear by drafting and approving Resolution 13 to the Indiana state constitution, which was blatantly hostile to people of African descent.22
It was plainly a reaction to protests for racial equality and the gains made by African Americans like the Griers and the Lyles family in that state. In Ohio some Black Laws had just been weakened after years of struggle, and in Indiana the black convention movement was now strong—known nationally for its fervor, rooted in the wealth of the African American farmers and other African American entrepreneurs now rising across the state.23
On the eve of the election that they were all certain would pass the terrible new 1851 state constitution, Indiana’s great equal rights organizer and orator John Britton stood before hundreds of black Hoosiers at their annual convention, urging them not to give up. While Britton was from Indianapolis, many there that day were landowning farmers in Indiana, some of them very wealthy indeed. And they reflected the reality that in Indiana and the Northwest Territory states, the vast majority of African Americans still lived in rural areas. Britton urged them all to stand firm, knowing they had truth and justice on their side. He reminded them, “As Americans we are entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities of citizenship as other citizens, according to the letter and spirit of the constitution of the United States.… [Yet] we are deprived of these inherent rights, set forth in the declaration of independence, and confirmed by the Constitution of the United States.”24
The Bone and Sinew of the Land Page 18
