Bound for Canaan

by Fergus Bordewich

  The Coffins were already frustrated with the North Carolina Manumission Society’s piecemeal approach. They were now affronted by its union with an organization dominated by slaveholders. Their disgust only grew when the society’s convention that year was held on the estate of a large slaveholder. “Many of us were opposed to making colonization a condition of freedom,” Levi Coffin would recall. “We had no objection to free Negroes going to Africa of their own will, but to compel them to go as a condition of freedom was a movement to which we were conscientiously opposed and against which we strongly contended.” However, the proposal was carried by a small majority. The convention broke up in confusion, and the Coffins along with the rest of their New Garden branch quit the room. Wrote Coffin, “We felt that the slave power had got the ascendency in our society, and that we could no longer work in it.”

  Levi and Vestal Coffin were shortly to become the founders of the earliest known scheme to transport fugitives across hundreds of miles of unfriendly territory to safety in the free states. It is unclear whether their plan was organized in a formal way from the start, or if it initially reflected more of an unspoken understanding among the New Garden men, nearly all of them from the same Nantucket stock, all of them Quakers, all men who had worked side by side with one another for years, most of them tightly linked to one another by blood or marriage. In any event, Vestal Coffin’s son Addison, himself later a conductor on the Underground Railroad, traced its formation in Guilford County specifically to a “long and exciting suit at law” which roiled the community between 1818 and 1820. It began when a free black man named Benjamin Benson was kidnapped from Delaware by one John Thompson, a slave trader, brought to the New Garden area, where he was sold to a wealthy farmer. A slave known locally as “Hamilton’s Sol” learned what Thompson was about, and quickly got word to Vestal Coffin, clear indication that slaves and radical Quakers were already engaged in some form of communication. Coffin made contact with the authorities in Delaware, confirming the facts of the kidnapping. The state of Delaware, where Quaker influence was strong, appointed Coffin and two other Quakers to represent Benson, and they saw to it that a warrant was issued for Thompson’s arrest in North Carolina. Forewarned, Thompson sent Benson to Georgia, where he was sold. Thompson then denied in court that Benson had ever existed, and was acquitted. “The result created much excitement,” wrote Addison Coffin. “It was the first open act of the slave spirit to override law and justice. [But] the three commissioners had Nantucket blood in them, and were not to be overawed, or frightened.”

  While the Benson case was sharpening the divisions between pro-and antislavery groups in Guilford County, a free black man named John Dimery became the first known fugitive to be spirited away from Guilford County to the free states. Dimery had been freed by his master in another part of the state, and had come to live at New Garden, with his wife. After the death of Dimery’s old master, in 1819, two of his sons came to New Garden on the pretense of buying stock. Having located Dimery’s house, they burst in upon him in the middle of the night. Dimery shouted to his daughter to run for “Mister Coffin” as fast as she could. “Father had just stepped outside to get wood to start a fire,” Vestal Coffin’s son Addison wrote. “Without stopping for coat or hat he ran at full speed, providentially meeting Isaac White, a special friend. He just said, ‘Come,’ and they both ran like the wind.” Coffin and White caught up with the kidnappers at a neighbor’s home nearby. The Quakers ordered them to release Dimery, or be taken before the nearest magistrate. While the kidnappers were debating what to do, the woman of the house had been quietly untying the rope that bound Dimery’s hands. Suddenly he sprang from their grasp and through the door, and disappeared into the woods. Fearing arrest, the kidnappers mounted their horses and rode off. As for Dimery, Addison Coffin reports only that he “was started on the Underground Railroad that night and soon landed at Richmond, Indiana.” Written some eighty years after the event, Coffin’s casual reference to the Underground Railroad suggests a much more organized system than can possibly have existed in 1819. But it makes quite clear that the Quakers of Guilford County knew where they wanted to send a fugitive who needed their help, and how to do it.

  Meanwhile, Vestal Coffin and his allies succeeded in proving that Benjamin Benson did in fact exist, and that he had been in the slave trader Thompson’s possession. When Thompson was ordered to produce Benson in court, it “fell like a bombshell among the slave holders.” It cost Thompson one hundred and sixty dollars, a great sum at the time, to bring Benson back to Greensboro where, to the outrage of local slave owners, he was restored to freedom.

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  No blueprint for the network that the Coffins and their associates created survives, no map showing routes of escape, no list of safe houses. Most likely, the first efforts were experimental, impulsive. Although no organizational link can be proved between the North Carolina underground and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the Coffins very probably modeled their activities on what they learned from their Northern brethren. The legal activities of Philadelphia Quakers on behalf of kidnapped blacks were well publicized, and their clandestine work was common knowledge. Ties between North Carolina and Pennsylvania Quakers were close: Quakers traveled to Philadelphia with some regularity, and they relied on Philadelphia money to help support and move to the West the slaves who were held in trusteeship by the North Carolina Yearly Meeting. And when their own underground work was exposed, it was to Philadelphia that they fled.

  By 1820 the New Garden area was already well known for its friendliness to fugitive blacks. The Coffins and their friends now began to deliberately seek out fugitives, and hide them in the junglelike undergrowth that screened the stream behind the Coffin farms. “The [Benson] case naturally placed my father in the front rank of anti-slavery men,” wrote Addison Coffin. Unfortunately, not much more is known about Vestal, who died prematurely at the age of thirty-four, in 1826, leaving behind little trace of himself except what may be gleaned from the autobiographies of his son and Levi Coffin. No picture of him survives, although perhaps there was something in his face of the cool, amiable self-possession, anchored by firm, narrow lips, and deeply chiseled lines about the mouth that may be seen in photographs of Addison. “Seemingly, without being conscious of how it came about,” continued Addison, “he was expected to do all the dangerous work, to take all the responsibility and leadership; others were ready and willing to share the cost, do all the business, fetch and carry, if he would be the leader in the hours of trial.” Young Levi Coffin, meanwhile, was responsible for supplying the fugitives with food and other necessities: “My sack of corn generally contained supplies of bacon and corn bread for the slaves, and many a time I sat in the thickets with them as they devoured my bounty, and listened to the stories they told of hard masters and cruel treatment.” The streambed was, in places, only a few hundred feet from the Salisbury Road, and fugitives hidden there could sometimes hear the conversations of the patrols who were hunting them as they passed.

  Levi would spend the next forty years putting into practice all that Vestal had taught him before he died, assisting fugitives with such single-minded ardor that he would come to be called by some the “president” of the Underground Railroad. As Addison Coffin put it, Levi “took his first lessons under my father, and many were the secret conferences they held after night, never meeting in the same place the second time, to prevent espionage or betrayal.” They often met in a thicket where a fugitive was concealed, to lay plans for getting him started safely toward the North. Hamilton’s Sol, a middle-aged slave belonging to one of the Coffins’ neighbors, and known for his absolute trustworthiness, worked intimately with them. The Coffins recorded disappointingly few details about this remarkable man who was crucial to the establishment of the underground, but what they did say hints intriguingly at the role that slaves might play in the smooth functioning of the system. It was a relationship that pre-figured many that followed and that was in many areas cen
tral to the success of the Underground Railroad.

  Sol would examine every coffle of slaves to which he could gain access, to ascertain if there were any victims of kidnappings among them. When he found one, he would try to bring him or her at night to a rendezvous in the thickets to meet with the Coffins. One longs to hear Saul’s version of these events. It was he, after all, who took the greatest chances, risking not only a fine and exile, but certain torture for assisting a fugitive. Why did this man, who might easily have escaped to a free state with the Coffins’ help, choose to remain a slave? Was he held back by family ties, as so many would-be fugitives were? Or by loyalty to friends? Or by an altruistic determination to help others to freedom? It is impossible to say. But this extraordinary, highly efficient relationship continued for many years, with succeeding generations of the Coffin family, until in 1835 Saul himself was finally compelled, more by circumstances than by desire, to become a passenger on the route that he had pioneered.

  At least in the beginning, the Coffins were careful only to offer help to kidnapped free men, like Benjamin Benson. In time, however, they became willing to take greater risks. As in Philadelphia and its surrounding area, activists relied almost entirely on other family members, and a few other close personal relationships. Clandestine activity that began on an ad hoc basis incrementally extended its reach, less by design than by circumstance, across hundreds of miles of territory to the free states. A story Levi Coffin recounted in his autobiography suggests both the limitations and the ingenuity of the budding underground. At the center of the story, which takes place in 1821, is a fugitive slave named Jack Barnes. This man, about whom little else is known, was freed by his master’s will, but then seized by the dead man’s heir as part of the estate. He fled to New Garden, having heard that the Quakers there “were opposed to slavery and friendly to colored people.” He remained in the area, working on various Quaker farms, and earning general respect for his industriousness, intelligence, and “manly deportment.” When advertisements for his capture appeared in the local newspaper, Barnes begged for help in getting to a free state. According to Levi Coffin, a council was held by “Jack’s friends,” by which he certainly meant the circle of New Garden abolitionists who had broken away from the Manumission Society. They arranged for him to travel to Indiana with yet another Coffin, Levi’s cousin Bethuel, who was leaving immediately via the rugged Kanawha Road through western Virginia.

  To confuse matters, another fugitive, known only as Sam, was hiding from his master, a harsh and unpopular man named Osborne, in the thickets behind the Coffin farm. Having learned that Bethuel Coffin’s emigrant party had been seen in company with a black man, Osborne rushed to the conclusion that it must be Sam, and set off in pursuit. Learning of this, the Coffins feared that when Osborne caught up with the travelers, he would recognize Jack Barnes and have him arrested for the posted reward. It was decided that Levi would take a fast horse, overtake the emigrants, and somehow try to interfere with Osborne’s plans. Levi, at twenty-three, had never before been more than twenty miles from home.

  The country through which he would travel was still largely wilderness. Climbing up from the Piedmont, he was met by one of the most majestic panoramas in the eastern United States, the vast tidal sweep of the corrugated crests of the Blue Ridge Mountains receding westward like the waves of a frozen sea toward a horizon of hypnotic blue haze. Along the way, Coffin ran into Osborne himself. This was not such a remarkable coincidence as it might seem. There was only one road and travelers were few. Picking his words carefully to avoid entangling himself in an un-Quakerly lie, Coffin told Osborne misleadingly that he had an uncle whose farm lay over the mountains, and that he planned to travel by the same road that he supposed Osborne would be following. “I had certainly deceived him, but told no untruth,” Coffin wrote. Delighted, Osborne asked Coffin to join him, saying, “See here, young man, I want you to go with me, and help capture the nigger.” Coffin agreed. “I was all excitement,” wrote Coffin, “for I felt that the crisis was near. Now was the time to act.” He obviously relished the play acting, entertaining the slave owner as they rode, telling him stories and recounting jokes that kept him constantly laughing.

  Somewhere deep in the mountains, Osborne and Coffin stopped for the night at a tavern. Coffin, showing himself already a shrewd judge of men, took aside the innkeeper, a man named Howells, who was also a local magistrate, and explained the situation to him. He told Howells that Osborne had such a reputation for cruelty that even slaveholders who knew him would not aid him in capturing the fugitive. When he finished, Howells declared, “If it is the Negro you describe, he ought to be free; I would not detain him a moment, but would much rather help him on his way.” He agreed to go along with Coffin and Osborne, and to collect a crew of reliable men who would provide whatever assistance was needed. (Forty years later, mountaineers such as these would refuse to fight for slavery and the Confederacy, and break away to form the new state of West Virginia.) Bethuel Coffin was of course startled to find his young cousin suddenly appearing at the crack of dawn, along with a party of armed strangers. In the event, Osborne failed to recognize the fugitive Barnes, and acknowledged grudgingly that it was not his man. After some time spent talking, joking, and partaking of Bethuel’s peach brandy, Osborne, Howells, and the rest of the party departed, while Levi remained with the emigrants, and explained the entire series of events that had brought him there. Barnes continued on safely with Bethuel’s group, while Levi later rejoined Osborne and headed back toward North Carolina. Afterward, Coffin reflected on the meaning of what had transpired. “In looking back over the work of the past few days, I felt that the hand of God was in it. He had blessed my efforts; he had guided my steps; he had strengthened my judgment. My heart was full of thankfulness to my Heavenly Father for his great mercy and favor; my eyes filled with tears, and I wept for joy.”

  In Coffin’s account, it is possible to glimpse the Underground Railroad literally come into being. What happened in the mountains had also transformed Coffin from a boy into a man. It was his first great adventure, his first journey on his own in behalf of a fugitive, and it reveals much about his character and the steely self-control that he would bring to clandestine work in later years. He had discovered in himself an unexpected capacity for physical endurance—he had traveled 120 miles through rough country, virtually without sleep or rest—and spur-of-the-moment ingenuity, as well as a priceless knack for gaining the trust of strangers. He also learned that he could manipulate men much older and harder than himself, a skill that he would masterfully put to use during a lifetime of involvement with fugitive slaves who would seek his help in Indiana and Ohio. Coffin’s narrow face, high forehead, and tightly compressed, rather humorless lips lent him a solemn air, an impression that in later life must have been accentuated by the plain black broadcloth clothing that he always wore. But behind this sober exterior, there lay coiled a bold and venturesome mind. Although as a pious Quaker Coffin would never have admitted it, there was not only something of the actor in him, but also something of the con man. Perhaps too he recalled the biblical verse in Matthew 10:16: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

  For Osborne’s slave Sam, the outcome was not so fortunate. All this time, he had been living in the thickets behind the Coffin farm, surviving on food supplied by the Coffins. Upon Levi’s return, he and Vestal Coffin arranged to send Sam west with another Quaker emigrant named David Grose—“a kind-hearted, benevolent man, of anti-slavery sentiments”—who was also heading for Indiana. The plan was for Sam to travel at night, on foot, and make his way to the Groses’ campsite before daylight, to get breakfast and provisions to last him through the day. Where the road forked, Grose was to leave a green bush or some other sign in the road that he had taken to guide Sam. At river fords, he would wait for Sam to come up, then conceal him in the wagon for the crossing.