By: Eric Foner
Editor’s note: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and scholar Eric Foner has just published Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.With new research and documentation, Foner explores the courageous lives of those who helped slaves escape to freedom on the Eastern corridor of the U.S. and describes how their actions affected the Civil War. Here’s an excerpt.
In popular memory, the individual most closely associated with the underground railroad is Harriet Tubman. Born a slave in Maryland in 1822, this remarkable woman escaped in 1849 and during the following decade made at least thirteen forays to her native state, leading some seventy men, women, and children, including a number of her relatives, out of bondage.
Tubman’s first rescue took place in 1850, when she received word that a niece, Kessiah Bowley, and her two children were about to be sold. Bowley’s free husband purchased the family at auction, even though he lacked the money to pay the seller. He then spirited them by boat to Baltimore, where Tubman met the family and brought them to Philadelphia and then to Canada. On a later trip, in 1857, Tubman rescued her elderly parents, who had become free but were in danger of being arrested for their own efforts to help slaves escape. Her exploits were not confined to the South. In 1860, she led a crowd that rescued Charles Nalle, a fugitive slave from Virginia who had been seized by a slave catcher in Troy, New York.
Tubman’s fame spread quickly in abolitionist circles. She made the acquaintance of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, and Lewis Tappan. By the late 1850s, she had become known as the slaves’ “Moses.” After the Civil War, Douglass would write of Tubman, “Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people.” Nonetheless, Tubman struggled to raise money for her undertakings. She worked in Philadelphia, New York, and Canada as a laundress, housekeeper, and cook, and solicited funds from abolitionists. On one occasion, she camped out in the antislavery office in New York City, asking visitors for donations.
Tubman exhibited extraordinary courage. She “seemed wholly devoid of personal fear,” wrote William Still. When Tappan asked how she would feel if she were captured and condemned to “perpetual slavery,” Tubman replied, “I shall have the consolation to know that I had done some good to my people.” But Tubman did not act entirely on her own. Her rescues relied on connections with slaves and free blacks in Maryland and with underground railroad networks in the mid-Atlantic states. Thomas Garrett offered assistance to Tubman as she passed through Wilmington on what he called “her very perilous adventures.” He described her accomplishments at length to correspondents in Britain and passed along money they forwarded for her use.
Twice in 1856, Tubman brought fugitive slaves through Sydney Howard Gay’s office in New York City. In May, Gay recorded, “Captain Harriet Tubman” arrived with four fugitive slaves—Ben Jackson, James Coleman, William Connoway, and Henry Hopkins—from Dorchester County on Maryland’s eastern shore, the center of slavery in the state. As young men in their twenties, the four had an “aggregate market value,” Gay estimated, of $6,000. Gay took the opportunity to interview Tubman about her past deeds and the details of this escape.
The group started out on foot from Maryland on May 3, 1856. When they reached New Castle, Delaware, having learned that the owners had raised a “hue and cry” and posted a substantial reward for their capture, the fugitives hid for a week in a “potato hole” (presumably a kind of root cellar) at the home of a black woman. At great risk, Tubman traveled back and forth to Wilmington by train seeking assistance; eventually she persuaded “a friend” to bring the slaves to Garrett’s house in that city, where they arrived on May 11. They appeared at William Still’s office in Philadelphia two days later and and then continued on by rail, reaching Gay’s on May 14. Gay dispatched them all to Syracuse, from where they headed to Canada. Three of the four men appear in the Canadian census of 1861, living in or near Toronto.
In November 1856, Tubman returned to Maryland, hoping to bring out her sister Rachel. Rachel, however, was not ready to leave, so instead Tubman led William Bailey, his brother Josiah, and another slave, Peter Pennington, out of Talbot County, on the eastern shore. The Bailey brothers worked in the timber business of William Hughlett, who owned thousands of acres of land and forty slaves, among them Josiah Bailey. Hughlett rented other slaves, including William Bailey, from nearby owners. He treated all of them with great cruelty.
“He left his master on account of ill-treatment,” Gay wrote of William Bailey, “of which lately he has received more than he could or would bear.” Three weeks before the escape, Josiah Bailey had been “stripped naked” and “flogged severely” because he engaged in a dispute with another slave. Both brothers were married; they left behind their wives and a total of seven children. Tubman and the slaves embarked for the North on November 15, 1856. With the owners in hot pursuit, Tubman led them on a circuitous journey by foot to Wilmington, ninety miles to the north.
Along the way they were joined by another slave, Eliza Manokey, a forty-two-year-old woman who had escaped the previous January and hidden in the woods and then in the homes of free black families. Like the Baileys, she had experienced some of the worst horrors of slavery. “Often suffered for want of food and clothing, and often flogged,” Gay recorded. Her owner had presented Manokey’s four-year-old son as a gift to a nephew, who then departed for Missouri with the child; “the boy clung frantically to his mother … but in vain.” Manokey left behind a husband, their seventeen-year-old daughter, and four grandchildren.
By the time the group reached Wilmington, the owners had preceded them, posting placards offering unusually generous rewards for their return—$1,500 for Josiah Bailey, $800 for Pennington, and $300 for William Bailey. Even though local blacks tore down the notices, many persons, including the Wilmington police, were on the lookout for the fugitives. Thomas Garrett, however, managed to get black bricklayers to convey them, concealed in a wagon, to William Still’s office in Philadelphia on the night of November 24. Still immediately sent them, separately, to New York, where they arrived on November 26 and 27. Gay then dispatched them to Troy and Syracuse.
In Syracuse they encountered an unexpected obstacle. William E. Abbott, treasurer of the local Fugitive Aid Society, who was well acquainted with Tubman, normally forwarded runaway slaves directly to Canada via the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge. But now, he wrote, “our funds fail us and we are obligated to send them forward to the different half way houses that are on the route.” Nonetheless, Tubman got the group to Canada.
