Jack Kelly writer
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THE FREEDOM ROAD
(Dutchess Magazine, Spring 2005)
“Josiah Henson’s earliest memory was of the day that his
father came home with his ear cut off.” This startling
sentence opens a brilliant new history of the Underground
Railroad by Red Hook author Fergus Bordewich. It lets us
know from the outset that Bound for Caanan: The
Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of
America (HarperCollins, $27.95), which is scheduled to hit
the stores next month, is going to be a wrenching, highly
personal account of this great American exercise in civil
disobedience.
Soon after 1800, in spite of federal laws proscribing aid to
runaway slaves, abolitionists began to help escaped
blacks reach freedom. By the 1820s an organized
movement to accomplish this work had begun to emerge.
In succeeding decades this network conducted thousands
of men, women and children to Canada, which had
outlawed slavery in 1791. Bound for Canaan turns this
familiar story into a moving human drama.
The author quickly brushes aside the old lie that slaves
were well-treated and content with their lot. He graphically
delineates the horrors that prompted them to risk all to
gain freedom. For example, Moses Roper’s owner
punished him for an escape attempt by “pouring tar on his
head, rubbing it over his face, and setting it on fire.”
Rape, whippings, brutality, and the forcible tearing apart of
families were the daily facts of slave life.
The name most famously linked to the Underground
Railroad is that of Harriet Tubman, a visionary woman who
escaped slavery and devoted herself to helping others
during the underground’s most active period. Her story
points up the fact that the underground was not only a
benevolent project of white abolitionists, but was in many
cases inspired and energized by free blacks and former
slaves, who were all too familiar with the plight of their
compatriots in the South.
In addition to Tubman, the author introduces us to many
other heroic figures in the movement. He weaves through
the narrative the story of Josiah Henson, the slave boy
who figures in the opening sentence. Henson’s talent and
intelligence had won him the favor of his master, yet the
slave “would finally risk everything -- high status, his family’
s safety, not to mention his life -- to flee north.”
For any slave, running away was a life-changing event. As
Bordewich astutely observes, “Flight was a psychological
as well as a geographical odyssey, a journey of self-
discovery and self-realization.” This was true for Henson,
who crossed the Ohio River with his wife and four sons
and made his way through hostile territory to Canada.
Arrival on northern shore induced a true ecstacy in the
former slave. “I threw myself on the ground,” he said,
“rolled in the sand, seized handfuls of it and kissed them.”
Henson went on to become a successful farmer in Canada
and to apply his energy and charisma to “the rescue and
elevation of those who were suffering the same evils I had
endured.” He set up a community to help some of the
12,000 slaves who eventually reached freedom in the
north.
Bound for Canaan turns history into an adventure story.
With the baying dogs of slave hunters at her heels, a
woman with an infant in her arms sets off across the frozen
Ohio River. Crashing through the ice to her armpits, she
heaves the baby ahead of her. She manages to scramble
onto the floes, reaches a safe house and is rescued. Her
adventure will inspire the melodrama of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. Remarkably, this unidentified heroine later returns
to the South to lead her daughter and grandchildren to
freedom.
The book is packed with stories like this. Calvin Fairbanks
was a Methodist minister who had served four years in
prison for helping slaves escape from Kentucky. After his
release he offered his aid to a 27-year-old slave woman
named Tamar. A harrowing chase ensued, but Fairbanks
managed to hand Tamar on to the next underground
station on her way to freedom. He himself was arrested,
returned to Kentucky, and sentenced to fifteen years in
the state penitentiary.
Freedom, to those of us who have enjoyed it all our lives,
often takes on the abstract quality of political rhetoric.
Bound for Canaan awakens the reader to what freedom
meant to a people who had to struggle to attain it. Their
understanding of the practical reality of liberty illuminates
for us the precious asset we possess.
The system established to help runaways at first had no
name. But as the country became enthralled by new-
fangled locomotives and rail lines, the anti-slavery network
adopted the modern terminology, referring to stations,
conductors, and trunk lines. One of the principal routes
ran through the Hudson Valley and the issue became a
contentious one locally. In 1837 a timid Poughkeepsie
Journal editorialized, “The abolitionists are wrong in forcing
upon the world measures so decidedly in the face of public
opinion.”
Bordewich’s book not only documents a vital passage of
American history, it also provides essential reading for
anyone surveying the moral landscape of present-day
America. While secular thinkers like Thomas Jefferson
recognized the evil of slavery, Bound for Canaan reminds
today’s liberals that the Underground Railroad was
overwhelmingly a “faith-based initiative.” Many of its
organizers were fervent Quakers who viewed slavery as
sin. “In Christian warfare there must be no reservation,”
one tract declared.
But lest believers grow smug, the book also points out that
many churches condoned slavery and that the majority of
slave owners saw themselves as pious followers of Jesus.
In this Christian land, those who helped slaves to freedom
were “ridiculed, persecuted, and sometimes murdered for
their efforts.”
Moral choices were starkly outlined by the Underground
Railroad movement. “We may perform acts of
benevolence and kindness,” one participant wrote, “which
require but little self-denial.” But, he went on, unpopular
and risky acts require “more devotion to principle and
more firmness than many possess.” The anti-slavery
movement was peopled by individuals who were willing to
make hard choices every day.
The book ends with the Civil War. In a sense, that awful
conflict looms over the entire story. For thirty years, the
Underground Railroad was the arena where two
incompatible views of the nation’s destiny ground
inexorably together. The sense of moral righteousness on
each side steered the country toward a conflict more
catastrophic than anyone could imagine.
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