Bound for Canaan

by Fergus Bordewich

  Back in North Carolina in 1824, Coffin alternated between periods of farming and teaching at various schools in Guilford County. He also married Benjamin White’s sister Catherine, an “amiable and attractive young woman of lively, buoyant spirits,” who would cheerfully share his work on behalf of fugitive slaves. Two years later, they would leave North Carolina for good. About this time, Vestal Coffin unexpectedly died at the age of thirty-four. It is not clear whether these events caused a serious interruption in the dispatch of fugitive slaves northward. However, a few years later the slave known as “Hamilton’s Saul” would still be working clandestinely with Vestal’s young son Addison, so it seems probable that the system that the elder Coffins created continued to operate, with Levi soon to be positioned to receive fugitives at the Indiana end of the line.

  In September 1826 Levi and his wife headed west via the Kanawha Road. They settled in Newport, today known as Fountain City, in eastern Indiana, a village of about twenty families where they would live for more than two decades, and which they would make into one of the most important centers of underground activity in the West. Many Quakers had settled in the surrounding area, as had free blacks, including many sent there by the North Carolina Yearly Meeting. So many of the Quakers were from Guilford County that they named their local meeting New Garden after their former one in North Carolina. Coffin bought property and, seeing the need for a mercantile business, he purchased goods from Cincinnati and opened a store, the first in the town.

  Coffin observed that runaway slaves often passed through Newport, probably drawn by the presence of a black community into which they might hope to blend. They “were often pursued and captured, the colored people not being very skillful in concealing them, or shrewd in making arrangements to forward them to Canada,” Coffin wrote. Simply reaching the nominally free soil of Indiana was by no means a guarantee of safety. Slave hunters operated freely under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law. Nor were Quakers all of one mind when it came to harboring fugitives. Many felt that they had done all that their religion required of them by emancipating their own bondsmen and immigrating to a free state. Indeed, the Quaker committee charged with resettling free blacks in Indiana had to beg Quakers to overcome their personal prejudices and “yield to the interests and happiness of our fellow human beings,” by accepting African Americans as neighbors.

  Coffin was not among those Quakers who left their convictions behind in North Carolina. When he asked fellow Quakers why they did not help fugitives on their way, they typically temporized, saying that they were afraid of the law. “I told them that I read in the Bible when I was a boy that it was right to take in the stranger and administer to those in distress, and that I thought it was always safe to do right,” Coffin would answer, adding pointedly that he was “willing to receive and aid as many fugitives as were disposed to come to my house.” According to Coffin, the first fugitives arrived at his home in the winter of 1826–27. “Friends in the neighborhood, who had formerly stood aloof from the work…were encouraged to engage in it when they saw the fearless manner in which I acted, and the success that attended my efforts…. They would contribute to clothe the fugitives, and would aid in forwarding them on their way, but were timid about sheltering them under their roof; so that part of the work devolved on us.” Some seemed genuinely happy to see the work go on, as long as the Coffins took the risk, while others actively tried to discourage them. “They manifested great concern for my safety and pecuniary interests, telling me that such a course of action would injure my business and perhaps ruin me; that I ought to consider the welfare of my family; and warning me that my life was in danger, as there were many threats made against me by the slave-hunters and those who sympathized with them.” To such arguments, Coffin replied, “If by doing my duty and endeavoring to fulfill the injunctions of the Bible, I injured my business, then let my business go. As to my safety, my life was in the hands of my Divine Master, and I felt that I had his approval.”

  3

  In the middle of April 1825, Josiah Henson’s party arrived at the plantation of Amos Riley, which extended across a wide tract of rolling, lightly wooded hills on Big Blackford’s Creek, near Owensboro, Kentucky. In contrast to Indiana and Ohio, whose embryonic towns were already increasingly dominated by middle-class farmers and tradesmen, Kentucky was a volatile region with a tradition of violence that frightened many visitors from more civilized places. A European who traveled widely in North America in 1823 and 1824, Karl Anton Postl (like a sort of early nineteenth-century John Gunther, having written Austria As It Is, he was now at work on The Americans As They Are) compared Kentucky’s climate favorably to the South of France, praising its undulating hills and valleys, and the “inexhaustible fertility” of its soil. The people, on the other hand, frankly repelled him. The Kentuckian was a frontiersman, not a Tidewater aristocrat, and his home was more likely to be a rude and battered cabin than it was a mansion, strewn with guns and saddles, whips and farm implements. The state’s fifty-seven thousand inhabitants, of whom some fifteen thousand were slaves, were mainly emigrants from Virginia and the Carolinas, in Postl’s words, “a proud, fierce, and overbearing set of people,” who “established themselves under a state of continual warfare with the Indians, who took their revenge by communicating to their vanquishers their cruel and implacable spirit.” Postl complained further about Kentucky’s epidemic of insecure land titles, ferocious hostilities between the state’s different courts of law, a governor who was “a disgrace to his station” along with a son who ought to “be hung in chains,” the country’s worst paper currency, and the utter disregard of religious principles.

  Henson’s life in Kentucky began auspiciously enough. Amos Riley was a very rich man by Kentucky standards, owning between eighty and one hundred slaves, and occupying a large and fertile plantation five miles from the Ohio River, the most important interstate highway of its day. On Isaac Riley’s recommendation, Henson was appointed a “manager,” which probably meant that he oversaw one or more large teams of field slaves. At the age of thirty-six he had risen higher than most slaves could ever hope to. His family probably enjoyed somewhat better housing and diet than the hands that he supervised, as well as a certain amount of freedom to move about the plantation unmolested. He was also able to attend camp meetings in the area, since he soon began to preach in a more or less formal way, “speaking from the fullness of a heart deeply impressed with its own sinfulness and imperfection.”

  Nehemiah Adams, a Northern minister who was recuperating from an illness in the South, attended numerous Methodist prayer meetings that probably resembled those that Henson frequented. Typically, Adams reported, a white brother presided and read a portion of Scripture, but the slaves conducted the meeting. Each worshipper, after prostrating himself in prayer, stood up and repeated a hymn, two lines at a time, and then began again to pray, as the spirit moved him, with intense “earnestness of manner,” expressing gratitude to Christ for his love, a “touching sense” of unworthiness, supplications for mercy, and the desire to be kept free from sin. The unemotional Adams was nearly overwhelmed by the “involuntary shoutings from the whole meeting, in which I almost wished to join, for the thoughts expressed were so awakening and elevating.” He was especially moved to hear one slave say, “Bless our dear masters and brothers, who come here to read the Bible to us, and pay so much attention to us.”

  In the spring of 1828 the Hensons’ security was suddenly shaken. An agent arrived from Maryland with directions from Isaac Riley to liquidate the slaves that Henson had brought out three years earlier. Only Henson’s own family was to be spared, a striking measure of the close ties between master and slave. Henson was ordered to return to Rockville to manage what remained of Isaac Riley’s estate, leaving his wife and family behind in Kentucky. In modern terms, Henson was retraumatized by the impending sale: intense emotional flashbacks reawakened the grief that as a child he had seen in his mother’s eyes when she was separated from h
er children, opening him up, in turn, to the enormity of what he had done to these same slaves when he had forced the yawl away from the docks at Cincinnati. As he listened now to their “groans and cries” he was overwhelmed by guilt, finally realizing how he had been responsible for keeping in slavery men and women who might otherwise have gone free, and for now bringing about the same rending of husband from wife and mother from child that had wrecked his own family thirty years before. “And now,” he admitted, “through me, were they doomed to wear out life miserably in the hot and pestilential climate of the far south.” Henson seems for the first time to have fully grasped that loyalty, no matter how profound, could never guarantee security for any slave. With something akin to panic, he longed “to get away with my wife and children, to some spot where I could feel that they were indeed mine.” He began to think seriously about obtaining his own freedom.

  Sometime before his departure for the East, in September 1828, Henson met “a most excellent white man” who, “in a confidential manner,” told him that he had “too much capacity to be confined to the limited life of a slave,” and that he deserved to be free. If Henson had ever had such a conversation before, it left no impression on him. But now he listened intently. Although Henson never revealed the man’s identity, he was probably an itinerant preacher. While the leadership of the evangelical churches had by the 1820s shifted decisively toward tolerance for slavery, if not outright support, many individual preachers, Presbyterian and Baptist as well as Methodist, continued to espouse an antislavery message, especially in the western states where political attitudes about slavery had not yet hardened. The Methodists’ Tennessee Conference, which also oversaw preachers active in Kentucky, in particular stood out for its continuing hostility to slavery, still refusing to ordain unrepentant slaveholders as late as 1820, while a Presbyterian clergyman, John Finley Crowe, published the weekly Abolition Intelligencer and Missionary Magazine in Shelbyville, barely a day’s journey from Amos Riley’s plantation. Henson’s new friend, whoever he was, did not urge him to flee outright or, at least at this stage, say much if anything about an underground network, but he did promise to help him earn the money to buy his freedom, by putting him in contact with a “brother preacher” in Cincinnati.

  The Cincinnati that Josiah Henson found en route back to Maryland was “a bright, beautiful and flourishing little city” whose feverish bustle epitomized a region that was inventing and reinventing itself almost literally from day to day. Steamboats swarmed along the riverfront, hooting their arrivals and departures, columns of smoke churning in white clouds from their lofty flutes. Pillared Greek Revival homes graced the finer blocks. Business houses and banks, hotels, churches, even a university, a museum, a theater, and a hospital proclaimed the city’s aspirations to culture. Local newspapers advertised the latest fashions from London and New York, furs from the Pacific, and oysters from Philadelphia. Since 1810 its population had quadrupled to more than sixteen thousand, four thousand of whom had arrived in the last two years alone. Almost three thousand city residents were black, many of them fugitives who had rowed or swum across the Ohio, walked across its frozen surface in the winter, or simply jumped off riverboats moored at the docks. Virtually the only jobs open to them were as laborers, barbers, and menials, and competition with immigrants, mostly Irish, for even those jobs would soon erupt into ugly riots, leaving many blacks dead, and hundreds more homeless. Lamented John Malvin, a black visitor to Cincinnati, in 1827, “I found every door was closed against the colored man in a free state, excepting the jails and penitentiaries.”

  With the introduction that Henson received from “the excellent white man,” he was able to meet a number of “invaluable friends who entered heart and soul” into his plans. They arranged for him to preach in several of the city’s churches, probably to both white and black congregations, where he appealed directly for donations to purchase his freedom. In a few days he had earned 160 dollars, a substantial sum. He continued eastward, traveling from town to town, preaching as he went. He was deeply moved by the courtesy that he encountered, probably never before having addressed all-white audiences, much less ones that listened to him with the pious respect that they would grant to a white man. By the time he left Ohio, he had 275 dollars, plus new clothes and a horse, very likely the first valuable personal property that he had ever owned.

  Isaac Riley was delighted to see Henson after his long absence in Kentucky. However, he took away the pass that for a few weeks had given Henson the fleeting illusion that he could travel as freely as a white man. Henson was also sent to sleep in the slave quarters over the kitchen, a rude shock after what must have been fairly comfortable accommodations that he had enjoyed in Ohio. All night he lay awake, physically sick from the stench of the place, feeling humiliated and bitter, and more determined than ever to obtain his freedom. Riley seemed amenable to his proposition, agreeing to allow Henson to purchase himself for 350 dollars in cash, plus a promissory note for 100 dollars more. This was an increasingly common practice in Maryland, where slave owners resorted to such negotiations in an effort to stem the flight of their chattels across the state line to Pennsylvania, or into the free black neighborhoods of Baltimore. Henson was ecstatic. His savings and his horse enabled him to pay the cash portion on the spot. In March 1829 he received his manumission papers. He was now, he believed, a free man. This, he was soon to find out, was only an illusion.

  Riley agreed to allow Henson to return to Kentucky, but insisted on putting Henson’s manumission papers under a personal seal for his brother Amos to open, and told Henson to travel with his slave pass instead. This made a kind of sense. Paradoxically, it was much safer to travel as a slave than as a free black. Henson knew that free blacks were often kidnapped and sold into slavery, with no hope of redress from the law. Kidnapping a slave, however, was outright theft, and whites were sometimes executed for it; molesting a free black man was no crime at all.

  Back in Kentucky, Henson found that news of his negotiations and his fund raising had traveled ahead of him. His wife, Charlotte—here he betrays a rare insight into what may have been a less than perfect marriage—revealed that she suspected that he had earned the money not by preaching, which her plantation-bound experience apparently could not grasp, but by stealing it. “But how are you going to raise the rest of the thousand dollars?” she asked Josiah, shocking him. He believed, of course, that he had already paid everything except the one-hundred-dollar promissory note. Pressed to explain what she meant, Charlotte explained that Amos Riley had said that Henson had put 350 dollars down, and that when he had paid the remaining 650 dollars he would have his freedom—and his papers, which he had so trustingly delivered to Amos under his brother’s seal.

  Henson realized that a cruel trick had been played on him, and fell into “a frenzy of grief.” To whom could he appeal? Who would believe that he had been cheated? Not a magistrate, certainly. No black man’s word was admissible in a Kentucky court against a white man, certainly not against his own master. Amos Riley told Henson, with cruel sarcasm, “Want to be free, eh! I think your master treats you pretty hard, though. Six hundred and fifty dollars don’t come so easy in old Kentuck. How does he ever expect you to raise all that? It’s too much, boy, it’s too much.”

  (Isaac Riley’s widow, Matilda, who lived until 1890, told a different story of these events. In an 1883 interview in the Rockville Sentinel, she claimed that she was still holding a promissory note for five hundred dollars that Henson had negotiated, which she asserted Henson had never paid. “Uncle Si,” she said, using the family’s nickname for Henson, had negotiated with Riley for the purchase of his whole family, promising to return together with them to Maryland, and to remain there until he had paid off the note. Armed with a document from Isaac Riley ordering his brother Amos to “let Si Have his wife and children,” Matilda said, “‘Uncle Si’ returned to Kentucky, obtained possession of his family, and when he reached Cincinnati made for Canada.” Denying that
Riley had been duplicitous, the article portrayed Henson as an ungrateful “pet servant,” who craftily took advantage of his indulgent master, whose confidence in Henson’s honesty “remained unshaken until he had deceived him in obtaining the order for his family.”)

  So long the model slave, Henson had now branded himself as unreliable. Not long after his return from Maryland, Amos Riley ordered him to accompany his twenty-one-year-old son, also named Amos, to New Orleans with a flatboat loaded with produce. As the miles grew between Henson and his family back in Kentucky, he fell into a deep depression, sensing that the Rileys had decided to sell him along with the rest of the cargo. Sure that he could survive no more than a few years in the cotton fields of the Deep South, he thought first of suicide. Then he seriously considered murdering young Amos and the three crewmen while they slept, taking what money he could find, and trying to make his way north. Only his religious scruples held him back. “I was about to lose the fruit of all my efforts at self-improvement, the character I had acquired, and the peace of mind that had never deserted me.” Afterward, alone on the deck in the night, with the dark landscape of the Mississippi slipping by in the wet blackness, he was filled with shame and remorse. “Nothing brought composure to my mind but the solemn resolution I then made, to resign myself to the will of God, and take with thankfulness, if I could, but with submission, at all events, whatever he might decide should be my lot.”