Bound for Canaan

by Fergus Bordewich

  While his conversion to Methodism unlocked in Henson a powerful sense of his own humanity and his spiritual worth, it also strengthened his loyalty to Isaac Riley. When they were a small, evangelical minority within the Church of England, the Methodists had vigorously denounced slavery as a travesty of divine, human, and natural justice. In 1780 Methodist leaders gathered in Baltimore had directed ministers to set free any slaves that they possessed. A second conference a few years later explicitly prohibited Methodists from “buying or selling the bodies or souls of men, women, or children, with an intention to enslave them.” In spite of such views rather than because of them, the next two decades were a time of explosive growth for the Methodists. Having cut their link with the British church, they now offered themselves as a home-grown sect served by itinerant ministers who could turn a field, forest, or tent into a temple of God. The message of individual redemption that they delivered, in language that even the most lowly could understand, resonated deeply with Americans in an era when the secularist passions of the Revolutionary generation had grown stale. In a single generation, Methodists would grow twenty-five fold, to include 172,000 whites, most of them in the South, and some 42,000 blacks, by 1816.

  Once they were no longer subversive outcasts, however, the church’s leaders recognized that opposition to slavery would hamper their growth and their steady elevation to respectability as long as Southerners perceived them as “firebrands of discord.” Instead of insisting that their members separate themselves from slavery as Quakers had, Methodist clerics began apologizing for their former opposition to it. By 1808 the Methodist establishment had abandoned scalding polemics, softening its criticism of slavery—when they made it at all—to mild formulations that even slave owners could tolerate. Preachers now assured Southerners that their slaves were better off than European peasants and many American whites. And to slaves, they piously emphasized prayer, sobriety, kindness, and of course obedience. A similar, cynical process also took place in the Presbyterian church, which as late as 1818 had declared, through its General Assembly: “We consider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature, as utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves and as totally irreconcilable with the spirit and principles of the gospel of Christ which enjoin that all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you do ye even so to them.”

  Not all masters were as accommodating as Isaac Riley. Many barred their slaves from receiving any religious training at all. The fugitive William Wells Brown wrote: “In Missouri, and as far as I have any knowledge of slavery in other states, the religious teaching consists in teaching the slave that he must never strike a white man; that God made him for a slave; and that, when whipped, he must not find fault,—for the Bible says, ‘He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes!’” In the summer of 1821 Levi and Vestal Coffin had started a Sunday school for “the colored people,” mostly slaves, at the Quaker schoolhouse near the New Garden meeting house. But hostile slave owners threatened to prosecute both the Coffins and those masters who permitted their slaves to attend the school, and it was forced to close. Coffin wrote, “They said that it made their slaves discontented and uneasy, and created a desire for the privileges that others had.”

  Henson’s status was significantly enhanced when he exposed some sort of fraud on the part of the farm’s white overseer. Riley thereupon dismissed the man, and replaced him with Henson. Black overseers were hardly typical, but they were not uncommon either. Henson may already have been serving as a driver, or assistant overseer, drivers typically being chosen from among slaves who, like Henson, stood out in physical strength, intelligence, loyalty, and managerial ability. He supervised the raising of crops that included wheat, oats, barley, potatoes, corn, and tobacco, and was entrusted with carting them to the markets in George Town and Washington, where he negotiated their sale on Riley’s behalf. Even after nearly half a century of freedom, Henson would still be proud that he had more than doubled the farm’s yield, and inspired his fellow slaves to “more cheerful and willing labor” than Riley had ever seen. Although, in his autobiography, Henson was careful to avoid the subject, he also must have been responsible for their punishment. As a slave himself, he was under much greater pressure than a white overseer to show that he would not tolerate slacking or misbehavior. William Grimes, a contemporary of Henson, who was a slave on plantations in Virginia and Georgia before escaping to Connecticut, feared black overseers more than white ones: “My master gave me many severe floggings; but I had rather be whipped by him than the overseer, and especially the black overseers,” Grimes related in his 1824 autobiography. Charles Ball, another contemporary, also served as a plantation superintendent in Georgia. “I not infrequently found it proper to punish [my fellow slaves] with stripes to compel them to perform their work,” Ball admitted. “At first I felt much repugnance against the use of the hickory, the only instrument with which I punished offenders, but the longer I was accustomed to this practice, the more familiar and less offensive it became to me; and I believe that a few years of perseverance and experience would have made me as inveterate a negro-driver as any in Georgia.”

  The relationship between Riley and Henson was a curiously codependent one. Henson portrayed his master as a swaggering drunk given to fits of depression and rage, but to whom he was nevertheless sincerely devoted. “I had no reason to think highly of his moral character; but it was my duty to be faithful to him in the position in which he placed me; and I can boldly declare, before God and man, that I was so. I forgave him the causeless blows and injuries he had inflicted on me in childhood and youth, and was proud of the favor he now showed me, and of the character and reputation I had earned by strenuous and persevering efforts.” Like many farmers, Riley was “slave rich” but cash poor, a problem that was probably exacerbated by the tight credit that afflicted many eastern planters after the Panic of 1819, as well as a costly lawsuit with his brother-in-law. Henson painted a picture of the master sunk in boozy despair, and the born-again slave full of solicitous, even condescending compassion: each man both helpless and powerful in his own way, one with the prerogatives of skin color, tradition, and the law, but crippled by incompetence and alcohol; the other a slave, but swollen with self-certitude and evangelical fervor. “Partly through pride, partly through that divine spirit of love I had learned to worship in Jesus, I entered with interest into all his perplexities,” Henson recalled. “The poor drinking, furious, moaning creature was incapable of managing his affairs. Shiftlessness, licentiousness and drink had complicated them as much as actual dishonesty.” Henson chose his adjectives deliberately, one must assume, damning his master with the same language—“shiftlessness,” “licentiousness,” “dishonesty”—that Southern apologists traditionally used to justify the enslavement of blacks.

  Isaac Riley’s financial crisis set in motion a series of events that would change Henson’s life. Showing the extraordinary confidence that he placed in his slave, Riley ordered Henson to “slip away” to the plantation of his brother, Amos Riley, in Kentucky, taking with him eighteen slaves to prevent them from falling into his creditors’ hands. Among these were Henson’s wife, Charlotte, “a very efficient, and, for a slave, a very well-taught girl,” whom he had met at a revival meeting, and four young sons. “[My] heart and soul became identified with my master’s project of running off his negroes,” recalled Henson, who was placed in charge of a one-horse wagon, stocked with oats, meal, bacon, and feed for the animal. Everything depended on the other slaves’ willingness to obey him. “Fortunately for the success of the undertaking, these people had been long under my direction, and were devotedly attached to me in return for the many alleviations I had afforded to their miserable condition, the comforts I had procured them, and the consideration I had always manifested for them…The dread of being separated, a
nd sold away down south, should they remain on the old estate, united them as one man, and kept them patient and alert.”

  Henson’s party followed the new National Road across Virginia, via Culpepper and Harpers Ferry, and then through the mountains of western Virginia, to Wheeling. It must have seemed to Henson as if the entire country was bound for the Ohio Valley. Declared one federal official, “No poor man in the Eastern states, who has feet and legs, and can use them has any excuse for remaining poor where he is, a day or even an hour.” He and his charges would have passed whole convoys of middle-class “movers” driving ox-drawn wagons and “one-horse tumbrils” piled high with stacks of bedding, furniture, spinning wheels, pots, and tools, as well as ragged families who trudged along with two or three half-naked children, a limping, lantern-ribbed pony and, as one traveler put it, a pathetic “bag of old plunder” containing their meager belongings. Isaac Riley’s unshackled bondsmen no doubt looked with compassion upon the coffles of slaves shuffling westward toward the markets and plantations of Kentucky and the Mississippi Valley. The Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, who had lived in Wheeling a few years before Henson’s party passed through, described its streets filled with “droves of a dozen or twenty ragged men bound for the West, chained together and driven through the streets, bare-headed and bare-footed, in mud and snow,” by men armed with whips and bludgeons.

  At Wheeling, Henson sold the horse and wagon and with the proceeds bought “a large boat, called in that region a yawl,” for the long journey down the Ohio River. So far, Henson had little cause to worry about discipline among his charges. But now they were sailing just yards from the shore of a free state. “On passing along the Ohio shore, we were repeatedly told by persons conversing with us, that we were no longer slaves, but free men, if we chose to be so,” he says. At Cincinnati, crowds of free blacks gathered around Henson’s party, urging them to remain in Ohio, telling them that they were fools for continuing on to Kentucky, and surrendering themselves again to slavery. All they had to do was to walk away and disappear into the city. They could easily have found work along the booming riverfront, or in the hinterland, where new towns were being raised, farms carved from the forest, timber cut, and roads laid. There was nothing to stop them but the will of Josiah Henson, and even he felt his resolution giving way. “The duties of the slave to his master as appointed over him in the Lord, I had ever heard urged by ministers and religious men,” he wrote. To run away seemed to him like outright stealing. “And now I felt the devil was getting the upper hand of me.” But he had given Riley his word. “Pride, too, came in to confirm me. I had undertaken a great thing; my vanity had been flattered all along the road by hearing myself praised; I thought it would be a feather in my cap to carry it through thoroughly.”

  Henson determined to act, before he changed his mind. It was, in its way, a pivotal moment in the history of slavery. All the powerful machinery of the slave power was turning in Henson’s heart, and against it the unnatural, troubling prospect of freedom: unexamined, largely unknown, insecure, alluring yet frightening, and problematic. And yet, here were men and women like themselves shouting to them from the riverbank, free. “I sternly assumed the captain, and ordered the boat to be pushed off into the stream,” Henson recalled. “A shower of curses followed me from the shore; but the negroes under me, accustomed to obey, and, alas! too degraded and ignorant of the advantages of liberty to know what they were forfeiting, offered no resistance to my command.”

  2

  A few months after Josiah Henson passed westward on his journey down the Ohio, Levi Coffin crossed the river northward en route to his new home in Indiana. Coffin had made an earlier, exploratory trip there in 1822, in the company of his future brother-in-law Benjamin White. “Town booming,” as it was called, was taking place just about anywhere that buildings could be erected. One unhappy European traveler reported that the Westerners seemed determined to plant their settlements in the dirtiest puddles they could find. To newcomers the atmosphere seemed semibarbarous. Respectable farmers from New England, New York, and the Mid-Atlantic states, along with a smattering of young lawyers and “mechanics” (as skilled working men were called), lived alongside shaggy frontiersmen who wore buckskins and tomahawks or foot-long knives stuck in their belts. Although the rich, black prairie earth was capable of producing forty bushels of wheat or a hundred of corn to the acre, tilling it was “jerking, wracking, shin-cracking labor,” in soil so tangled with roots and grubs that chains broke and plows stuck fast.

  There were very few African Americans in Indiana at this time, perhaps fewer than three thousand, and they were not made to feel welcome. Before statehood, Governor William Henry Harrison had proposed legalizing slavery in the territory, and in later years there were repeated attempts to exclude blacks entirely. A typical memorial to the territorial authorities from settlers in Harrison County stated: “We are opposed to the introduction of slaves or free Negroes in any shape. Our corn Houses, Kitchens, Smoke Houses…may no doubt be robbed and our wives, children and daughters may and no doubt will be insulted and abused by those Africans. We do not wish to be saddled with them in any way.” Although immigration was not in fact restricted, the laws did discriminate harshly against blacks. Voting was limited to white males. Blacks were barred from testifying in court cases involving whites, and their children excluded from public schools. After 1831 blacks wishing to settle in Indiana would be required to register with the local authorities and to post a bond as a guarantee of good behavior.

  On the whole, though, Coffin approved of Indiana. As a Quaker he was pleased by the leveling aspect of frontier society. Equality among whites, or at least white men, was not just a theory but a basic fact, so ingrained in the way life was lived that it was scarcely remarked upon by anyone. Settlers, no matter what their origins, all lived in the same small cabins made of rough bark logs, with a floor made of “puncheons,” or split timber, and a fireplace made of the same construction, plastered with mud. They ate the same stewed pumpkin, cabbage, salt pork, and hominy. And they endured the same abominable trails that turned into morasses of mud every time it rained. At the same time as the sheer difficulty of frontier life tended to strengthen cooperative relationships, the absence of firm government encouraged an aggressive individualism that was rare in more densely populated areas back East. Both tendencies were to play a role in the Underground Railroad, where success and safety depended on both absolute trust in one’s friends and neighbors, and a sometimes self-righteous willingness to take the law into one’s own hands.

  Coffin spent several weeks traveling among the Quaker settlements visiting relatives, and then settled down for the winter teaching school at several locations in the vicinity of Richmond. The next spring, a cousin, Allen Hiatt, asked Coffin to join him in crossing what was then known as the Grand Prairie, to rendezvous with family members who had settled on the Sangamon River, in western Illinois, or “Kaskaskia.” In spite of the Northwest Ordinance, de facto slavery continued to exist in Illinois with little interference from the authorities. Indeed, the state’s first governor, Shadrach Bond, owned thirteen slaves, and his lieutenant governor, twelve. Slaves could freely be brought into the state as long as they were registered at a county clerk’s office. Typically, they were registered as “indentured servants,” whose “contracts” could be freely bought and sold. Whipping was permitted by law, including twenty-five lashes in front of a magistrate if a “servant” was found more than ten miles from his home. Those who refused to work could be sold back into the slave states. Even as Coffin was making his way across the empty heart of the state, pro-slavery settlers from the South were vigorously agitating for a constitutional vote that would convert Illinois officially into a slave state. The proslavery forces eventually were defeated at the polls, in 1824, but only by a comparatively narrow margin of 6,640 to 4,972. That the antislavery forces were successful at all was due mainly to the passionate advocacy of Governor Edward Coles, the Virginian who a
s a young man a decade earlier had begged Thomas Jefferson to speak out for abolition.

  If Indiana was primitive, most of Illinois was still raw wilderness, confusing and forbidding by turns. There were barely seventy thousand settlers in the entire state, most of them along the Mississippi River; Chicago was a hamlet with more Indian wigwams in it than houses. Much of the state was scarcely known at all, except to hunters and trappers. After crossing the Wabash, Coffin and Hiatt followed an Indian trail that wound from northwest to southwest across a limitless prairie, empty but for occasional native villages, and scaffolds that the Indians had built to dry their venison. They wandered over the prairie for six days, at one point, without seeing a single human being. Trails abruptly vanished in swamp and tall grass. Wolves howled in the distance. “Starvation seemed to stare us in the face,” Coffin remembered. At last, having almost abandoned hope, they saw smoke rising from a log cabin, and were overjoyed to discover that it was inhabited by white people, who directed them to the settlement they were searching for. Hiatt’s relatives were preparing to move on still farther west, however. At this point, Levi Coffin might well have passed out of history. The man who was to become, arguably, the Underground Railroad’s most effective single organizer might have become yet another itchy-footed pioneer, drawn ever westward by the lure of better and cheaper land and freedom from the entanglements of society. Hiatt’s relatives “asked me to go too, but I told them that ever since I had come to the West I had heard of a better place a little further on, and now that I had got within forty miles of it, I thought I would turn back,” Coffin would dryly recall. He rejected the frontier and the open spaces, and returned home, choosing commitment, obligation, duty, and a more complex and problematic future darkened by the spreading stain of slavery.