Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (5 page)

Stripped of previous distortions, the story of the underground railroad remains one with an extraordinary cast of characters and remarkable tales of heroism, courage, and sheer luck. Decades after his own escape from slavery, recalling his long career as one of the country’s foremost advocates of abolition and racial justice, Frederick Douglass reflected, “I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating, and satisfactory work” than in assisting runaway slaves.
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As for the fugitives, those who encountered them could not but be moved by their stories, which, as one abolitionist put it, far exceeded “the fictitious sufferings and adventures of imaginary characters” conjured up by novelists. Fugitive slaves, wrote James Miller McKim, represented “some of the finest specimens of native talent the country provides,” and their actions offered “ample proof” of everything abolitionists maintained about “the capacity of the colored man.” In 1855, as the
National
Anti
-
Slavery
Standard
’s Philadelphia correspondent, McKim penned a dispatch expressing the hope that when slavery had met its “just doom,” the story of fugitive slaves and those who aided them would inspire pride among all Americans:

These wonderful events . . . now being enacted before the American people, will, one day, be justly appreciated. Now, deemed unworthy of the notice of any, save fanatical abolitionists, these acts of sublime heroism, of lofty self-sacrifice, of patient martyrdom, these beautiful Providences, these hair-breadth escapes and terrible dangers, will yet become the themes of the popular literature of this nation, and will excite the admiration, the reverence and the indignation of the generations yet to come.
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SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN NEW YORK

T
he history of slavery, and of fugitive slaves, in New York City begins in the earliest days of colonial settlement. Under Dutch rule, from 1624 to 1664, the town of New Amsterdam was a tiny outpost of a seaborne empire that stretched across the globe. The Dutch dominated the Atlantic slave trade in the early seventeenth century, and they introduced slaves into their North American colony, New Netherland, as a matter of course. The numbers remained small, but in 1650 New Netherland’s 500 slaves outnumbered those in Virginia and Maryland. The Dutch West India Company, which governed the colony, used slave labor to build fortifications and other buildings, and settlers employed them on family farms and for household and craft labor. Slavery was only loosely codified. Slaves sued and were sued in local courts, drilled in the militia, fought in Indian wars, and married in the Dutch Reformed Church. When the British seized the colony in 1664, New Amsterdam had a population of around 1,500, including 375 slaves.
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Under British rule, the city, now called New York, became an important trading center in a slave-based New World empire. In the eighteenth century, the British replaced the Dutch as the world’s leading slave traders, and the city’s unfree population steadily expanded. New York merchants became actively involved in the transatlantic slave trade as well as commerce with the plantations of the Caribbean. Slave auctions took place regularly at a market on Wall Street. Between 1700 and 1774, over 7,000 slaves were imported into New York, most of them destined for sale to surrounding rural areas. This figure was dwarfed by the more than 200,000 brought into the southern colonies in these years. But in 1734, New York’s colonial governor lamented that the “too great importation of . . . Negroes and convicts” had discouraged the immigration of “honest, useful and laborious white people,” who preferred to settle in neighboring colonies like Pennsylvania. By mid-century, slaves represented over one-fifth of the city’s population of around 12,000. Ownership of slaves was widespread. Most worked as domestic laborers, on the docks, in artisan shops, or on small farms in the city’s rural hinterland. In modern-day Brooklyn, then a collection of farms and small villages, one-third of the population in 1771 consisted of slaves.
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New Yorkers later prided themselves on the notion that in contrast to southern slavery, theirs had been a mild and relatively benevolent institution. But New York slavery could be no less brutal than in colonies to the south. “Hard usage” motivated two dozen slaves to stage an uprising in 1712 in which they set fires on the outskirts of the city and murdered the first whites to respond. There followed a series of sadistic public executions, with some conspirators burned to death or broken on the wheel. The colonial Assembly quickly enacted a draconian series of laws governing slavery. These measures established separate courts for slaves and restricted private manumissions by requiring masters to post substantial bonds to cover the cost of public assistance in the event that a freed slave required it. The discovery of a “Great Negro Plot” in 1741, whose contours remain a matter of dispute among historians, led to more executions and further tightening of the laws governing slavery. As a result, few black New Yorkers achieved freedom through legal means before the era of the Revolution. Most censuses in colonial New York did not even count free blacks separately from slaves. On the eve of the War of Independence, the city’s population of 19,000 included nearly 3,000 slaves, and some 20,000 slaves lived within fifty miles of Manhattan island, the largest concentration of unfree laborers north of the Mason-Dixon Line. One visitor to the city noted, “It rather hurts a European eye to see so many Negro slaves upon the streets.”
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As long as slavery has existed, slaves have escaped to freedom. During the colonial era, long before any abolitionist networks offered assistance, New York City became both a site from which fugitives fled bondage and a destination for runaways from the surrounding countryside and other colonies. Black farmsteads on the northern edge of New Amsterdam were notorious for sheltering fugitives. Offering refuge to the slaves of one’s rivals became a common practice in imperial relations, facilitating runaways’ quest for freedom. Connecticut and Maryland, the British colonies nearest to New Netherland, encouraged Dutch slaves to escape and refused to return them. In 1650, Governor Petrus Stuyvesant threatened to offer freedom to Maryland slaves unless that colony stopped sheltering runaways from the Dutch outpost.
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As the slave population increased under British rule, so did the number of escapes from the city. Since nearby colonies, controlled by the British, no longer offered safe refuge, slaves often escaped to upstate Indian nations or French Canada. As early as 1679, New York’s colonial Assembly imposed a fine of twenty-five pounds—a considerable sum at the time—for harboring fugitives. In 1702, taking note of the alarming practice of slaves “confederating together in running away,” it banned gatherings of more than three slaves. Three years later the lawmakers mandated the death penalty for any slave found without permission more than forty miles north of Albany. Another law, seeking to reduce fugitives’ mobility, made it illegal for a slave to gallop on horseback. Meanwhile, even as some slaves attempted to escape from New York City, others fled there on foot or arrived hidden on ships. Many found employment on the docks or on the innumerable vessels that entered and left the port. The city’s newspapers carried frequent notices warning captains not to hire runaways. Especially during the eighteenth century’s imperial wars, however, such admonitions were routinely ignored, due to the pressing need for sailors on naval vessels and privateers.
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New York City’s colonial newspapers published advertisements for runaways of various kinds—not only slaves, but also indentured servants, apprentices, soldiers, and criminals—and the number increased steadily over the course of the eighteenth century. One study of several hundred fugitive-slave notices in the city’s press found that 255 of the runaways originated in New York City, 259 in nearby New Jersey, 159 in rural New York, and 25 as far away as Virginia and the West Indies. These advertisements conveyed considerable information about the fugitives to assist in their apprehension. One, for example, from the
New
-
York
Gazette
in 1761 offered a reward of five pounds for the return of the slave Mark Edward:

A well set fellow, near six feet high, talks good English, plays well on a fiddle, calls himself a free fellow, goes commonly with his head shaved, hath two crowns on the top of his head, small black specks or moles in his eyes. . . . Had on when he went away, a good pair of leather breeches, a blue broadcloth jacket, a red jacket under it without sleeves, a good beaver hat.

The vast majority of colonial runaways were young adult men. Because of the small size of slaveholdings, numerous married slaves lived apart from one another, and many fugitives were said to have absconded to join family members. Individuals, white and black, on occasion assisted fugitives, but no organizations existed to do so and most runaways appear to have eventually been recaptured.
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Although justices of the peace and other officials sometimes pursued runaway slaves, no law in colonial New York dealt explicitly with their recapture—this generally relied on action by the owner himself, through newspaper ads, letters, and the physical seizure of the fugitive. Such owners were exercising the common-law right of “recaption,” which authorized the reappropriation of stolen property, or lost property capable of locomotion—a stray horse, for example, or a fugitive slave—without any legal process, so long as it was done in an orderly manner and without injury to third parties. (The right also extended to the recapture of runaway indentured servants, apprentices, children, and wives, but, given the subordinate position of women under the common law, not to an aggrieved wife hunting down an absconding husband.) Since the law presumed blacks to be slaves, accused fugitives had a difficult task proving that they were free.
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Throughout the colonies, the American Revolution disrupted the system of slavery and seemed to place its future in jeopardy. Nowhere was this more true than in New York City. Before the imperial crisis that led to American independence, chattel slavery had not been a matter of public debate, although colonists spoke frequently of the danger of being reduced to metaphorical slavery because of British taxation. By the early 1770s, however, a number of Methodist and Quaker congregations in the city encouraged members to manumit their slaves. Quakers were particularly prominent in antislavery activity in the late colonial period. Their belief that all human beings, regardless of race, possessed an “inward light,” allowing God to speak personally to each individual, led increasing numbers of Quakers to condemn slavery as an affront to God’s will. Most Quakers, however, disliked political agitation and saw abolition as a process that should take place gradually, with as little social disruption as possible.
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During the American Revolution, slavery in New York City experienced profound shocks, from very different directions. One was the rise of a revolutionary ideology centered on individual liberty, which convinced a number of patriot leaders of slavery’s incompatibility with the ideals of the nation they were struggling to create. After an initial reluctance to enlist slaves as soldiers, moreover, New York’s legislature allowed owners to send slaves as replacements for military service, with the reward of freedom. In 1777, the Continental Congress opened the ranks of the revolutionary army to black men, promising freedom to slaves who enrolled. By the end of the war, an estimated 6,000 black men had served in state militias and the Continental Army and Navy. Most were slaves who gained their freedom in this manner, including an unknown number from New York City.
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Of more import to New York’s slaves, however, were the actions of British officials who offered freedom to the slaves of patriots in order to weaken the revolutionary cause. The first emancipation proclamation in American history preceded Abraham Lincoln’s by nearly ninety years. Its author was the Earl of Dunmore, the royal governor of colonial Virginia, who in November 1775 promised freedom to “all indentured servants, negroes, or others” belonging to rebels if they enlisted in his army. Several hundred Virginia slaves joined Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, their uniforms, according to legend, emblazoned with the words “Liberty to Slaves.” Unfortunately for their compatriots in bondage, American forces soon drove the governor out of the colony. With the remnants of his army, including its black unit, Dunmore arrived at Staten Island in August 1776. A month later, George Washington’s forces retreated from Manhattan. As British forces occupied New York, many of the inhabitants fled, and a fire destroyed a considerable part of the city.
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The British did not leave New York City until the War of Independence had ended. During the occupation the city became “an island of freedom in a sea of slavery,” a haven for fugitive slaves from rural New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, as well as for hundreds of black refugees who had fled to British lines in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The influx reached the point that, for a time, city officials directed Hudson River ferryboats to stop transporting runaway slaves to the city. The fugitives, along with New York slaves who remained when their owners departed, found employment reconstructing the damaged parts of the city and working for the British army as servants, cooks, and laundresses and in other capacities. For the first time in their lives, they received wages and were effectively treated as free, although their ultimate fate remained uncertain. When the British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778, more black refugees arrived, and still more followed in 1781 and 1782 after the British defeat at Yorktown.
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Of course, some black New Yorkers identified with the cause of independence. Black men had taken part in the crowd actions of the 1760s and 1770s that protested British measures such as the Stamp Act, including the group that tore down of a statue of George III in 1775. But once the British occupied the city, New York’s slaves and black refugees from other colonies concluded that their freedom depended on Britain winning the war. This belief was reinforced in June 1779 when Sir Henry Clinton, the commander of British forces in North America, issued the Philipsburg Proclamation, which greatly extended Dunmore’s original order by promising freedom to all slaves, except those owned by loyalists, who fled to British lines and embraced the royal cause. “Whoever sells them,” he added, “shall be prosecuted with the utmost severity.” According to the Pennsylvania cleric Henry Mühlenberg, the idea that “slaves will gain their freedom” in the event of a British victory quickly became “universal amongst all the Negroes in America.”
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