The Quaker campaign against slavery was part of a broader spiritual reformation that was gathering force within the sect, calling upon members to return to a life of deeper simplicity, which also entailed educating their children apart from non-Quakers, avoiding marriage with outsiders, and shunning such “vain customs of the world” as music, theater, and art. In explaining their hostility to slavery, Quakers most often cited the Golden Rule, a potent principle that everyone in the intensely Christian nation could easily understand. More subtly, their opposition to slavery was rooted in their belief that a universal “divine light” was manifest in the soul of every person, female and male, black and white, and that to claim ownership of another human being was not only a moral but a spiritual travesty. In addition, slavery represented an inexcusable indulgence, a contradiction to the kind of plain life that was required by their faith.
Countless Quakers, including Isaac Hopper, were influenced by the widely quoted writings of John Woolman of New Jersey, who in the 1750s argued that emancipation of the slave was crucial to personal salvation. How, Woolman demanded, could a slaveholding Friend expect to gain salvation when he bore the sin of slavery on his soul? “The Colour of a Man avails nothing, in Matters of Right and Equity,” he wrote. “Negroes are our fellow Creatures, and their present Condition amongst us requires our serious Consideration. We know not the Time when those Scales, in which Mountains are weighed, may turn…And whenever gain is preferred to Equity…there is real Cause for Sorrow to all such, whose Love of Mankind stands on a true Principle.” The dawning recognition that slavery might entail real spiritual consequences provoked crisis for many, as it did for Samuel Nottingham, a Quaker who, as a result of marriage, was horrified to find himself the owner of hundreds of slaves, a spiritual and practical catastrophe that left him feeling “pierced through with very many sorrows.”
Around the same time, Quakers began to press for the religious education of slaves, a cause championed most prominently by another Philadelphian, a French Huguenot convert to Quakerism named Anthony Benezet, who around 1750 began tutoring adult blacks at his home on Chestnut Street. Benezet envisioned the eventual and complete integration of black and white Americans, but the prospect of sudden, mass emancipation was more than he—and for that matter almost any other white man of his time—could handle. “How would such a people be prevented from becoming a prey to their ignorance and passions, and a sad annoyance to their neighbors?” he worried. For Benezet, education was the answer. In the course of twenty years of teaching, Benezet helped convert Benjamin Franklin and others to abolitionism, by demonstrating that his students were capable of the same level of achievement as whites, thus undermining popular assumptions about black intellectual inferiority. Far ahead of his time, he also taught his black students that it was slavery rather than any inherent racial differences that bred ignorance and degradation among African Americans. The capstone of his life was the establishment, in 1773, of a school for free black and slave children, of which Isaac Hopper would later, in 1799, become an overseer.
As the century progressed, there was much preaching on the subject of slavery wherever Quakers gathered. In the 1770s, slaveholding was made a “disownable offense” by the Yearly Meetings of Philadelphia, New England, and New York. Other meetings soon followed suit. In eastern North Carolina, members who still held slaves were warned to “be earnestly and affectionately advised to clear their hands of them as soon as they possibly can.” In every Quaker community committees were appointed to “labor with such Friends as remain in the practice of holding their fellow men in a state of slavery, endeavoring to convince them of the iniquity of such practice.” Even so, manumission was a process rather than a single event. Quakers belonging to the Nine Partners Meeting in Dutchess County, New York, later an important link in the Underground Railroad, took seven years to free all their slaves, completing the process in 1782. Quakers in Westbury, Long Island, did not succeed in freeing all their slaves until 1798.
Social pressure within the Quaker community was uniquely effective. Quakers were already segregated by dress, speech, religious services, opposition to taking oaths, and the marriage ceremony. Deviations from orthodoxy were punished with “disownment,” a public and deliberately discomfiting proclamation that the individual concerned was in a state of spiritual disharmony with his, or her, fellow Friends. In the matter of slavery, as well as other doctrinal issues, the Quakers demanded total commitment. As one tract put it, “In the Christian warfare there must be no reservation.”
3
Although the Quaker-led Pennsylvania Abolition Society did not regard itself as a subversive organization, it was a kind of culture dish that brought together men and, if indirectly, a few women who were uncompromising in their opposition to slavery, morally committed to emancipation, and pragmatic in their determination to put fugitives beyond the reach of their masters. No one was more pragmatic than Hopper. A man of instinct and action, he was a type that would often appear along the lines of the Underground Railroad. His home near the riverfront, at the corner of Dock and Walnut streets, was both a clearinghouse and a place of refuge for fugitives and kidnap victims. Hopper explained his motivation by citing biblical precepts that any American could understand, and that the underground would use to justify its defiantly illegal work for decades to come. Once when he was summoned to court as a witness in a slave case and was asked what course of action Quakers were expected to take when a fugitive came to them, he first replied, “I am not willing to answer for anyone but myself.”
“Well,” pressed the magistrate, a Mr. Ingersoll, “what would you do in such a case? Would you deliver him to his master?”
“Indeed I would not!” answered Hopper. “My conscience would not permit me to do it. It would be a great crime; because it would be disobedience to my own dearest convictions of right. I should never expect to enjoy an hour of peace afterward. I would do for a fugitive slave whatever I should like to have done for myself, under similar circumstances. If he asked my protection, I would extend it to him to the utmost of my power. If he was hungry, I would feed him. If he was naked, I would clothe him. If he needed advice, I would give him such as I thought would be most beneficial to him.”
Hopper always preferred a legal attack to a physical one, and to manipulate the law rather than to break it. He was the first abolitionist to vigorously exploit the possibilities of the new, less stringent, state laws to help fugitives. His many successes suggest that his adversaries were still operating under an outdated idea of what was legal and possible, assuming as they always had that the law would continue to protect slaveholding when, in fact, it had decisively shifted, at least in Pennsylvania, in favor of abolition. As one judge told Hopper, when the evidence for and against freedom was evenly balanced, it was always a duty to decide in favor of liberty.
Hopper was unflagging in his search for loopholes. By employing clever tactics that befuddled professional lawyers and unfriendly magistrates alike, he sometimes managed to keep cases pending as long as three or four years, until a fugitive’s claimants were worn out and ready to settle. Urged to become a professional lawyer, he declined, saying that he preferred to resist temptations that might lead him away from the simplicity of Quaker belief. On one occasion he agreed to help a young woman who had escaped from Virginia and had lived free in Philadelphia long enough to raise a family there. Tracked down by her former master, she begged Hopper for help. He knew that under the Fugitive Slave Law, the master was entirely within his rights to carry her back to Virginia. He offered to buy her from the Virginian, but was turned down. Undeterred, Hopper showed up with the woman in city court and promised to “be responsible to the United States” for seeing that she would return the following day for a ruling on her status. He also promised personally to pay a one-thousand-dollar bond if she failed to appear. This was deliberate double-talk on Hopper’s part, since he knew quite well that the United States government had no claim of its own on the woman, an
d no jurisdiction in the case. (Nor, probably, did he have the money.) Nevertheless, this was agreed to as reasonable by the court and the slave owner, both of whom had missed Hopper’s verbal sleight-of-hand. Next morning, all the parties were in court except the fugitive, who with her family had been sent away to safety during the night. When the magistrate stated that Hopper would have to forfeit the bond, the Quaker pointed out to the master’s chagrin that since the federal government was not party to the case, there was no basis for a Philadelphia court collecting a fine in its name.
When the law failed, Hopper could call on a web of friends and collaborators. His network was primitive but efficient. Spies among black dock workers, laborers, and domestics alerted abolitionists when a kidnapping was taking place, or when a constable or a slave master was in the city stalking a fugitive. The story of a fugitive from Virginia named Ben Jackson makes it clear that when necessary Hopper was even able to call on friends in the constabulary and the courts. Jackson had been serving as coachman for a friend when he was caught and arrested by his former master. He was jailed, pending the issuance of a permit authorizing the master to take his property back to Virginia. He managed to get word of his predicament to Hopper, who arranged with the constable on duty at the jail, a man “who sympathized with the poor victim of oppression,” to have the prisoner brought to court ahead of schedule. Almost certainly with Hopper’s connivance, the justice before whom the case was heard—a man who “detested slavery, and was a sincere friend to the colored people”—declared that since the complainant, Jackson’s master, was absent, the “presumptive evidence” indicated that Jackson was a free man, and ordered him released. By the time his master arrived, at the appointed time, Jackson was gone for good.
Hopper clearly relished the dramatic role that he played in more than a few rescues. Once Hopper sneaked up the stairs of a home and snatched a pistol from the hand of a partially blind man who was threatening to shoot anyone who interfered with his flogging of a slave girl. Another time, learning that a boat had left Philadelphia with a kidnapped boy on board, Hopper obtained a horse and raced alongside the Delaware River to the vessel’s next landfall, arriving just in time to seize the boy and bring him home before he had been carried out of Pennsylvania waters. He also perfected ruses that were often used in later years by the Underground Railroad. Once, for example, when he was concealing a fugitive in his home and suspected that slave hunters were lurking about, he hired a black man to run out of the house after dark. As Hopper suspected, several men leaped from the shadows and seized the decoy, while the real fugitive escaped out the back door, and eventually to safety. Hopper even succeeded in having the decoy’s assailants arrested for assault.
He also boldly came to the assistance of a free man named Samuel Johnson, who had married a slave belonging to a Delaware planter named George Black. The Johnsons, who had several children, fled to Philadelphia, where Samuel found work as a wood sawyer, and his wife took in washing. Two years later, Black learned of his slave’s whereabouts and set off in pursuit. Learning that Black was in Philadelphia, Johnson sent his family into hiding while he remained at home, trusting that since he was legally free he could be in no danger. However, Black showed up at his door with two constables, and when they discovered that his wife had fled, they arrested Johnson himself. When he refused to reveal his family’s whereabouts, they beat him and threatened to carry him to the South and sell him. They then tied his hands and dragged him to a tavern in Sassafras Street, where they left him under guard. By now, some of Johnson’s black neighbors had contacted Isaac Hopper, who hurried to the tavern and, with a typical though distinctly un-Quakerly flourish, threatened to break down the door, accusing the guards and the landlord of false imprisonment. “Release that man immediately! Or thou wilt be made to repent of thy conduct,” he reportedly cried. The landlord eventually yielded, and Hopper was allowed to leave with Johnson, who soon rejoined his family in an unspecified “place of safety.”
Hopper and his collaborators pioneered the technique of passing fugitives from hand to hand among members of their extended family, personal friends, Abolition Society activists, and others whom Hopper decided should be asked to live up to their principles, until they reached a permanent haven, usually somewhere in the countryside outside Philadelphia. Their protectors, in effect the first stationmasters of the Underground Railroad, could be expected to provide temporary shelter, assistance in finding work, perhaps some rudimentary education, and advice in adjusting to life in a free but competitive society, where each man was expected to support his own family, and to fend for himself. Hopper’s brother-in-law John Tatem often sheltered fugitives whom Hopper had forwarded to him at his farm in New Jersey, as did a friend named William Reeve, to whom he once sent a fugitive with a letter that concluded with a verse from the Bible: “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
A kind of synergy was developing as local abolitionists evolved practices that would become standard procedure wherever the underground existed. Although fugitives generally seem to have been sent on by foot and unaccompanied, they were sometimes conducted on horseback across the countryside, or transported from place to place hidden in farmers’ market wagons. Disguises were also used to confuse pursuers. As early as 1809, Philip Price of East Bradford, in Chester County, learning that slave hunters were in the vicinity, hurried three fugitives, two men and a woman, into a thicket near his farm. Disguising the woman as a man, he advised them to emerge at dark and to follow a certain rarely used road to a designated place where they would be met by a guide with horses. Price directed his son Benjamin to take one of the horses and lead another, along with some bags, as if intending to bring home a load of grist from the local mill. After collecting the fugitives, he led them to a prearranged “station” near the town of Darby. Chester County Quakers also received fugitives directly from Philadelphia, and settled them as safely as they could on farms in the vicinity. For fugitives, however, the danger of recapture never entirely disappeared. Only a few months after Isaac Hopper had settled the fugitive John Smith “in a very secluded situation” in the Philadelphia hinterland, he was betrayed by a false friend to whom he had confessed his life story. Smith received the tidings that his master was on his trail “with feelings of desperation amounting to phrensy,” and appealed again to Hopper for help. On short notice, Hopper recruited a ship’s captain to take Smith to Boston, illustrating the ability of Philadelphia abolitionists to respond creatively to pressing needs and, more importantly, suggesting that even at this early date they were beginning to conceive of a kind of national geography of freedom that extended far beyond the environs of their own city.
4
Never much of a businessman, Hopper had lived his life as if antislavery work were his only occupation. That, for Hopper, happy era ended abruptly in 1812. Financial problems forced him to devote himself single-mindedly to repaying personal debts that had soiled his reputation and caused his temporary suspension from the Society of Friends, which regarded solvency as a criterion of good character. Despite his efforts, he lost his home and much of his furniture to creditors, and was forced to move into a house owned by his father-in-law, in whose front parlor Sarah Hopper opened a grocery and tea shop to make ends meet. Hopper’s enemies thought that he was silenced for good. But he would be heard from again, in another city and with new allies, and with an undimmed ferocity of faith.
In the meantime, like a kind of moral pollen, the spiritual imperative that motivated Hopper and his collaborators was also falling on other Quakers far from Philadelphia but bound to their coreligionists through the far-flung network of Yearly and Monthly Meetings, through family ties, and more than anything else, by a community of shared values that, for many, demanded personal action. Although no organized underground yet existed much beyond Philadelphia and its surrounding counties, the kind of men who had created it, and the ideas that drove them, were
becoming visible wherever Quakers lived.
Reared in New York in the late 1700s, Timothy Rogers was a born pioneer, who founded the northwest Vermont towns of Ferrisburgh and Vergennes, in a region that would serve for decades as a terminus of the Underground Railroad. In 1797 Rogers recorded in his private diary an incident that vividly illustrates how the moral core of antislavery activism had begun to harden. It also hints at relationships that already had formed among antislavery Quakers in New York’s Hudson Valley, which would in time become one of the trunk lines of the underground. While attending the Quaker Yearly Meeting in New York City, Rogers was approached by Isaac Leggatt, a Friend from Saratoga, in upstate New York, who broached the subject of slavery, offering the opinion that the law would soon free slaves in the state, and asking Rogers if he would be willing to hire a couple of black men in anticipation, even though they were fugitives. Rogers said that he would, on his friend’s recommendation. Leggatt was already in touch with slaves who wished to escape, and was looking for somewhere safe to send them. En route home, Rogers was overtaken by two fugitives who identified themselves as Harry and Francis, and who told him that Leggatt had directed them to follow him to Ferrisburgh. “The next day as we went on, they was stopped with an advertisement,” Rogers confided to his diary. Notices of the black men’s escape had apparently already been distributed around the area, some thirty miles from Saratoga. Then, somewhere north of Danby, Vermont, the three were confronted by a local constable, who recognized the men as fugitives but agreed to allow the party to continue north to Ferrisburgh.
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