Fergus standing with His Excellency at Washington’s Crossing.

Thanks to the folks at Washington Crossing Historic Park in PA, Washington Crossing Park Assoc in NJ, Labyrinth Books of Princeton, Farley’s Bookshop of New Hope, and Frank and Patty Lyons of Yardley, PA’s Continental Tavern for hosting me and sharing these photos. The event was a great success and we had a fine dinner at the Continental Tavern.

Fergus discussing The First Congress.

Fergus speaking about The First Congress at Washington's Crossing.

Fine owed by George Washington for overdue library books now $300,000
 
Founder of a nation, trouncer of the English, God-fearing family man: all in all, George Washington has enjoyed a pretty decent reputation. Until now, that is.
 
The hero who crossed the Delaware river may not have been quite so squeaky clean when it came to borrowing library books.

 
Continue reading at The Guardian.
 

Calling the House to Order | By Mark Spencer
 
‘We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us,” James Madison said of the harrowing task facing the First Congress assembled at Federal Hall, its temporary home in New York City. While historians write much about the ideological origins of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the drafting of the Constitution (1787), the First Federal Congress (1789-91) gets short shrift. That is unfortunate. While the Revolution launched America’s political experiment and the Constitution provided a theory and a mode of government, the First Congress defined how American government would work in practice. Many of the questions it faced, Fergus M. Bordewich notes, were vast in scope: “Was the president to have independent power? Or was he to be a figurehead, an agent of Congress? Where did the power of government lie? Was the Senate an executive body or a legislative one? How were the powers of the two branches to be reconciled?” Nobody knew. Mr. Bordewich guides us through the answers in “The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government.”
 
Center stage in this story are Congress’s 95 members. They included Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, the “American Demosthenes;” Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, “one of the House of Representatives’ most respected members;” Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, “a hardheaded businessman and no sentimentalist;” and Virginia’s Madison, about whom Mr. Bordewich writes, “no man contributed more to the achievements of the First Congress.” Others also played prominent roles in the creation of a practical government: President George Washington; Vice President John Adams; various cabinet ministers, particularly Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson; and miscellaneous lesser figures such as Alexander McGillivray, “the remarkable” Creek chief who was “the son of a Scottish trader and a mixed French-Indian mother.” An unlikely hero, of sorts, was the “rigid, thick-skinned, and socially maladroit” Sen. William Maclay of Pennsylvania, who kept a diary of the Congress’s daily proceedings. For many debates, his cranky voice is the only record.

 
Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.
 

Read the full article titled “City History, and Vantages, Often Overlooked” by Sam Roberts here. The First Congress will be out tomorrow as well and you can find it here.

“America begins in New York,” Kenneth T. Jackson, the Columbia University professor and editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City, likes to say. Now comes the journalist and author Fergus M. Bordewich to engagingly revive the forgotten story of the nearly 18 months that New York was the nation’s first capital in “The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government” (Simon & Schuster, $30).

As the author instructively recalls, that first Congress fleshed out the bare bones of the recently ratified Constitution in two sessions that were probably the most productive in its history — a claim vindicated through prodigious research by the First Federal Congress Project at George Washington University.

Congressmen, representing only 11 states, convened at Peter Charles L’Enfant’s renovated Federal Hall downtown. These learned men loftily managed to compromise on most issues (though closing their eyes to others, like the slave market practically across the street) while enduring the clatter of horse-drawn traffic outside their windows and the noise of insatiable spectators cracking nuts in the public gallery of the House of Representatives.

For a roadmap through the legislative combat zone that almost surely lies in store, today’s senators and congressmen might look for inspiration to the supremely pragmatic lawmakers who piloted Congress through the longest, and arguably the bitterest, debate in American history to pull the nation back from the brink of war and craft the Compromise of 1850.

Congress had already struggled unsuccessfully for two years to decide whether to extend slavery into or ban it from the vast new territories the United States had conquered in the Mexican War. The crisis came to a head in 1849 when Gold Rush settlers in California petitioned for admission as a free state, upsetting the precarious balance of fifteen free states and fifteen slave states in the U.S. Senate. Threats of southern secession were rampant. Congress was so badly deadlocked that many Americans expected civil war to break out within weeks. “We are on the very eve of bloodshed in the capital,” warned the New York Herald. “There is no telling when its crimson streaks may deluge the halls of Congress.”
The ten-month-long debate that extended until September of 1850 was not a pretty spectacle. Before it was over, mortal threats would be made, punches thrown, and guns drawn on the floor of Congress.

Henry Clay of Kentucky–respected for fathering national compromises in 1820 and 1833–proposed an omnibus bill webbed with new compromises which he argued would end the nation’s entire controversy over slavery: California would be admitted as a free state; territorial governments would be formed in the rest of the Mexican Cession with no mention of slavery; Texas would abandon its claims to New Mexico, and in return the U.S. government would pay off that state’s yawning debts; the slave trade in Washington, DC would be ended, but the legality of slavery itself there would be reaffirmed; finally, a new fugitive slave law would impose harsh punishment on anyone who aided runaways.

Clay’s allies transcended party allegiances. They included the aged Massachusetts Whig Daniel Webster, pro-slavery Mississippi Unionist Henry Foote, and the populist Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, at thirty-seven the youngest member of the Senate. Failure to compromise, Clay warned, would mean the nation’s disintegration into confederacies of the South, New England, the Mississippi Valley, the Great Lakes region, and the Far West.

The opposition to compromise was formidable. It included both hardcore defenders of slavery led by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, who believed that slavery had been “established by Almighty God,” northern abolitionists who believed that there was a higher law than the Constitution which commanded Christians to oppose any appeasement of the Slave Power, and other politicians who objected to one or another of Clay’s proposals.

Clay had hoped to win over the ideological extremists by means of moral persuasion. He failed. Instead, the enemies of the omnibus united against it.

Douglas, whose ferocious energy caused him to be dubbed “a steam engine in britches,” then stepped into the vacuum left by the exhausted Clay. After studying the voting patterns that had killed the omnibus, the squat, hard-drinking Douglas deduced that enough different combinations of votes existed to pass the measures piecemeal, anchored on a core group of dependable “moderates.” He surmised correctly, for instance, that he could get enough anti-slavery men to vote for California statehood and the abolition of the slave trade in Washington, and enough southern firebrands to vote for the fugitive slave bill, which he could pass separately. It was a strategy that depended less on patriotic appeals and soaring oratory than on tireless negotiations, which were carried out as often as not over jugs of wine in the snack bar just off the Senate floor, where one senator after another might find himself in Douglas’s bearlike embrace.

Within a few weeks, Douglas had passed every piece of Clay’s compromise, although only a few senators voted for every part of it. The House of Representatives soon followed suit. It was a triumph for aggressive pragmatism. “No man and no party has acquired a triumph, except the party friendly to the Union,” Douglas declared.

At one point in the debate, Daniel Webster fixed his famously intimidating gaze on the arch-sectionalist John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and caustically declared: “In all such disputes, there will sometimes be found men with whom everything is absolute; absolutely right, or absolutely wrong. They are apt, too, to think that nothing is good but what is perfect, and that there are no compromises or modifications to be made in consideration of difference of opinion or in deference to other men’s judgment. If their perspicacious judgment enables them to detect a spot on face of the sun, they think that a good reason why the sun should be struck from heaven.”

Clay, Douglas and Webster were all derided as hypocrites by many in their own day. But they were not afraid to sacrifice popularity to cut a deal that saved the United States from collapse. The compromise may have been what the historian Sean Wilentz has called an “evasive truce” that delayed but could not prevent, a final reckoning over slavery. But failure would likely have meant war, one which in 1850 the North might well have lost.

Compromise is the oil of American democracy. It is what our politicians are, in part, elected to do. If they insist on ideological purity they will always fail us, or doom themselves to rancorous irrelevance. As they gird themselves for the truculent battles to come this year, they would do well to remember Webster’s words.

Many of you may already know that my latest book, America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union, was released on April 17th. With several other new publications in the offing, it seemed like the right moment to inaugurate this long-promised blog as a channel to communicate to you about my work, American history, and (occasionally) myself.

I’ll be delivering news about my current and upcoming writing projects, talking about history—mostly between the nation’s founding and post-Civil War Reconstruction—and ways in which the past continues to interpenetrate and shape the present.

When it seems apt, I’ll tie history to present-day events. I won’t shy away from controversy. But I promise not to rant, nor will I denigrate or insult anyone, present or past.

You’ll be hearing soon about my next work of history, American Dawn, a history of the First Congress, of 1789-1791, which I’ll be working on for the next couple of years, and which will be published by Simon & Schuster. The First Congress has often been overlooked in treatments of the Early Republic, but its importance was immense. It literally invented the United States government from the paper blueprint of the Constitution. What happened there, when it met in New York City still recovering from the ravages of the Revolutionary War, is a dramatic political tale in which we see the Founding Fathers as hard-headed but immensely creative politicians who took the fragile idea of nationhood and made it real. Their success was by no means a forgone conclusion.

You’ll also find, as time goes on, personal reflections, short essays, book reviews, and occasional travel writing about, perhaps, Harriet Tubman country on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, or the abolitionist heartland of upstate New York, or the astonishing Fort Jefferson (“Shark Island”) in the Dry Tortugas, off the Florida Keys.

I MAY ALSO take a literary detour from time to time…

…perhaps with something about China, where I lived and worked in the early 1980s, and still write about from time to time. My review of Paul French’s terrific noirish true-crime thriller Midnight in Peking, set in Beijing in the eve of World War II, will soon be on my website.

…or perhaps about American Indian issues. Much of my childhood was spent around native American communities, and my book Killing the White Man’s Indian was a combination of reportage and history that explored the incredibly complicated relationship of Indians in the present-day U.S.

Before too long, I also hope to give you an early preview of the novel I’ve been writing about the consequences of the Civil War. It’s titled Confederates, and it’s set in the late 20th century…

I hope to be informative, entertaining, and at least sometimes surprising. As a “long” writer by both habit and temperament, the compacted form of blogging doesn’t come to me naturally. But I expect to eventually get the hang of it. I’ll strive to keep the tone informal, in the spirit of a friendly conversation, and to avoid the heavy notes of the lecture hall. New posts will appear regularly at least several times a month.

In my next post, I’ll be talking about my soon-to-be-released e-book, The Looming Conflict: Radicals, Rebels, and the Road to Civil War.

What was John Brown’s Subterranean Pass-Way? As Brown envisioned it, it would be an underground highway that would reach 2,000 miles all the way down through the Appalachian Mountains through Virginia and Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and into the Deep South, as far as Georgia. It was the vision that Brown had in mind when he marched into Harper’s Ferry in 1859. This was the UGRR on an epic scale. Had it succeeded, today we’d all be talking about how the entire underground as we know it was just the lead-up to John Brown’s monumental plan.

What did Brown really have in mind? How would the Subterranean Pass-Way have worked? Was it was just a pipe dream, or something that could really have happened?

FIRST, LET’S PUT the Underground Railroad in perspective. Apart from sporadic slave rebellions, and individual acts of defiance, only the Underground Railroad physically resisted slavery. It was the nation’s first interracial political movement. From its beginnings, it was a collaborative movement involving free blacks, anti-slavery whites, and even slaves.

It was also the nation’s first great movement of mass civil disobedience since the American Revolution. It engaged thousands of citizens in the active subversion of federal law. And it was the first American mass movement that asserted the principle of personal, active responsibility for others’ human rights.

The Underground Railroad and the broader abolition movement were also the seedbed of American feminism—all the women who helped organize the first women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 came out of the Underground Railroad. In the underground, women were for the first time participants in a political movement on an equal plane with men, sheltering and clothing fugitive slaves, serving as guides, risking reprisals against their families, and publicly insisting that their voices be heard.

The UGRR began in Philadelphia in the 1790s into a national network spanning the northern states. Why then? Why there? Philadelphia was the first place in America that offered the human synergy that made the UGRR work: large populations of emancipated blacks and anti-slavery whites (Quakers in this case). There could be no UGRR until there were havens to which fugitives could be safely delivered. There were none until the 1790s—the region around Philadelphia was the first safe haven in the US.

THERE WAS of course never any president of the underground, no board of directors. It was a diverse, flexible, efficient system with no central control. It was a model of democracy in action, operating with the maximum of grassroots involvement. As a station master in Ohio, put it, “There was no regular organization, no constitution, no officers, no laws or agreement or rule except the ‘Golden Rule,’ and every man did what seemed right in his own eyes.”

By the 1850s, in much of the North the Underground Railroad was operating with remarkable openness. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, for example, regularly published detailed reports on underground activity in articles that were signed by agents themselves. In Syracuse, Jermain Loguen advertised his underground work, and his address in local papers, and identified himself on his business cards as “Underground Railroad Agent.”

To give you some context for the extent of John Brown’s ambitions—he expected to free hundreds of thousands of slaves—I’ll give you some figures for the kind of numbers that the UGRR actually handled at this time. Thomas Garrett, the station master at Wilmington, Delaware, one of the few to keep a tally of his passengers over a long span of time claimed to have helped a total of 2,750 over about forty years, an average of two hundred twenty-five per year. From mid-1854 to early 1855, the all-black (and predominantly female) Committee of Nine, which oversaw underground work in Cleveland, Ohio, forwarded two hundred and seventy five fugitives to Canada, an average of one per day. The Detroit Vigilance Committee, possibly the busiest in the United States, reported 1,043 fugitives crossing to Canada from May 1855 to January 1856, an average of one hundred thirty per month.

In 1858, Brown wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Boston abolitionist: “Rail Road business on a somewhat extended scale is the identical object for which I am trying to get means. I have been connected with that business as commonly conducted from my boyhood…”

Brown’s family had engaged in underground work out of their home in Hudson, Ohio—a rabid abolitionist town—since the early years of the 19th century. Fugitives were hidden in the Browns’ barn. And as a young man, Brown himself traveled around northeastern Ohio guiding fugitives. At the age of thirty-seven, he had taken a personal vow before God to consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery. Not long before the Harper’s Ferry raid, he told Harriet Tubman that the Day of Judgement was at hand, that it was time for “God’s wrath to descend,” and that he was the divine instrument ordained to deliver it.

Brown may have begun thinking about a Subterranean Pass-Way as early as the 1840s, when he worked for a time as a surveyor in the mountains of western Virginia. He probably began to think of that rugged, underpopulated region as an area through which large numbers of fugitives might be moved safely.

In 1847, when Frederick Douglass met Brown for the first time, in Springfield, MA, Brown spread out a map of the United States. Pointing at the Appalachians, he told Douglass that the mountains “were placed here to aid in the emancipation of your race; they are full of natural forts, where one man for defense would be equal to a hundred for attack; they are also full of good hiding places, where a large number of men could be concealed and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time. I know these mountains well and could take a body of men into them and keep them there in spite of all the efforts of Virginia to dislodge me, and drive me out.”

THE PLAN was to start out with twenty-five picked men—almost exactly the number he had at Harper’s Ferry twelve years later—who would be stationed in small cells. They would come down from the mountains to raid plantations, bring away slaves, arm them, and retreat to the mountains. Some would be guided north through the mountains to the free states—this was the literal meaning of the Subterranean Pass-Way. Others would remain with Brown. They would eventually become a bastion of armed freemen who would govern themselves in the mountains like a sovereign state.

As Brown envisioned it, the plan would ultimately bring slavery to its knees. Brown was nothing if not an apocalyptic thinker—and this was an apocalyptic scheme. The South would hemorrhage slaves. Slaveholders would be impoverished, and crippled by terror. Arming blacks would generate self-respect, independence, and courage. Slavery was already a state of war, he told Douglass. Slaves had every right to fight by any means at hand to achieve their own freedom.

Douglass was taken with Brown, if not quite swayed by his plan. He thought it was impractical. Brown, he wrote, however “though a white gentleman, is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”

With the privilege of hindsight, Brown’s plan looks foolhardy and impossible. Was it?

He had done a lot of homework. Brown had studied slave insurrections like Nat Turner’s. Turner had terrified the entire state of Virginia in 1831. He’d studied European guerrilla, particularly how Portuguese mountain fighters had held off the French army at the beginning of the 19th century. He’d studied the Seminole resistance to the U.S. in the swamps of Florida, in the 1830s and 1840s. He knew about the multitude of virtually independent maroon communities that runaway slaves had established in the mountains of Jamaica. And he was of course familiar with the Haitians’ successful—bloody—war to overthrow French rule. He also probably knew that since 1820 North Carolina Quakers had successfully been sending fugitives almost 1,000 miles along an underground route that ran from the Quaker enclave around Greensboro all the way to Indiana.

Brown’s plan was not unique, by the way. An almost identical plan was advanced by a man who is almost totally forgotten today—Lysander Spooner. Spooner was a lawyer and anarchist who was well known in the 1840s for arguing that slaves had a right to wage war against their oppressors. In 1858, Spooner independently published a pamphlet urging whites to invade the South, arm slaves, and help them fight a war of liberation. He also spoke of building forts in the forest, amassing arms, and waging “a just war for liberty.” (He was also the first, I think, to assert that blacks deserved reparations for their years of enslavement.)

Many abolitionists—Arthur Tappan, even Wendell Phillips—shunned Spooner’s proposals as far too dangerous, and violent. Other abolitionists’ criticism reflected the widespread racist assumption that blacks had been so beaten down by slavery that they simply would not fight. Brown was of course right. Hundreds of thousands of black troops would fight valiantly in the Civil War.

When Spooner met Brown and learned about his plan, he opposed it, asserting that neither blacks nor whites in the South were ready for the kind of action that Brown intended. He thought Brown was foolhardy…that without both groups having been trained in advance and aware of the general strategy the plan was doomed to failure. (Spooner of course was right.)

BROWN WAS LIVING at this time in North Elba, New York, not far from Lake Placid. Brown had bought two hundred and forty four acres of land there, on credit from the wealthy abolitionist (and underground activist) Gerrit Smith, who hoped to establish a colony of free backs there. Brown was undeterred by the rugged boulder-strewn landscape, thickly forested with maple, oak, and spruce. They settled into a four-room farmhouse that looked out over valleys shimmering with golden rod and 4,000-foot high Whiteface Mountain. The Adirondacks, like the hands of omnipotent God, Brown believed would lift up the suffering black poor, and himself. Brown lived his beliefs. His goal was to transform the rag-tag settlement of African Americans into a self-sufficient community. He hired black workers, sowed crops, helped rationalize confused boundaries, and prepared to take the community’s affairs in hand. The writer Richard Henry Dana, who encountered him there, was fascinated by this “tall, sinewy, hard-favored, clear-headed, honest-minded man,”and his teeming mob of children. Most of all, Dana was astonished to find the Browns, including even their daughters, dining with their black neighbors, addressing them as “ Mr. Jefferson” and “ Mrs. Wait,” and so on.

The Harper’s Ferry raid was also the culmination of an increasingly violent decade. More and more abolitionists were beginning to think that only direct, violent action could bring the evil of slavery to an end.

After the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the pacifist, Quaker style of the underground was increasingly overshadowed by men more willing to confront slavery aggressively, and to answer the violence of slavery—and federal repression—with violence. Militant abolitionist crowds physically wrenched recaptured fugitive slaves from the hands of federal officers in Boston and Syracuse. And in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania underground men—all African Americans, by the way—lured a slave master and a posse of police officers into a trap, confronted them, and shot several of them, leaving the slave master dead. West of the Appalachians, underground men in some places actually sent mounted posses of armed men across the Ohio River into Kentucky to bring out fugitive slaves who were waiting there.

In January 1854, another act of Congress pushed still more Northerners beyond their limits of tolerance. Under pressure from the South and its allies, Congress had opened the western Territories to slavery, leaving the legality of slavery up to voters in each territory. Even many deeply racist Yankees were converted into an army of voters committed to the principle of keeping the soil of Kansas and Nebraska free for white immigrants. “[T]his Nebraska business is the great smasher in Syracuse, as elsewhere,” the Syracuse underground leader Jermain Loguen (a fugitive slave), wrote to Frederick Douglass. “It is smashing up platforms and scattering partizans at a fine rate…The people are becoming ashamed to have any connection with the ungodly course that many of their Congressmen…The time is coming when blood is to flow in this cause; and let it come I say.”

When Free State settlers in Kansas begged eastern abolitionists for guns to defend themselves, Brown’s wealthy supporter Gerrit Smith promised immediate help: “Will we do for them what we can? We will!” Smith’s friend, U.S. Senator William H. Seward, declared, “We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers as it is in right.”

It was in Kansas that John Brown learned to fight. He arrived in Kansas in October 1855, driving a wagon loaded with rifles and swords, determined “to help defeat Satan and his legions.” Kansas transformed him from a failed businessman into a prophet whose private apocalypse would become a battle plan for guerrilla warfare.

In Kansas, John Brown finally found reality violent enough to fit the cosmic battle between Good and Evil he had always carried in his head. His first taste of warfare came in December 1855, when a proslavery force of two thousand men menaced the Free State bastion of Lawrence, fifty miles north of the Browns’ cabins at Osawatomie. The Browns and their neighbors raced to Lawrence’s defense, arriving there in a wagon that bristled like a lethal porcupine with rifles, pikes, and bayonets. Brown was commissioned a captain on the spot, and appointed to command a company of twenty men, his first military commission. From the first moment, he savored the power that weapons and leadership conferred. Although the anticipated attack never materialized, Brown had discovered that men would follow him, and fight for him.

STILL, UNTIL the spring of 1856, John Brown was not much different from many other scripture-quoting abolitionists in Kansas. Despite the incendiary rhetoric in the air, only six Free Staters had so far been killed. Then, in May, proslavery raiders sacked Lawrence in an orgy of burning and looting. Almost simultaneously, Kansans learned that Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the most outspoken abolitionist in the United States Senate, had been beaten senseless on the floor of the chamber by a cane-wielding Congressman from South Carolina, in a shocking tableau that left men like Brown feeling ashamed of the North’s seeming helplessness in the face of Southern power. “Something must be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights,” Brown declared. Advised to act with caution, he retorted, “Caution, caution, sir. I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.”

On the night of May 23rd, a party of men led by Brown, and including four of his sons, swept through an isolated settlement on Pottawatomie Creek, thirty miles from Osawatomie. They dragged five men out of their cabins, and hacked them to death with cutlasses embossed with the American eagle. The victims were all notorious proslavery men, and had advocated attacks against the Free Staters, but none was guilty of killing anyone. Two of Brown’s sons who had not participated in the raid were so distraught that they suffered nervous breakdowns. But Brown was unrepentant.

The murders ignited a reign of terror. Proslavery “border ruffians” raided Free Staters’ homesteads. Abolitionists fought back. Federal troops scoured the prairie in search of Brown and his band. Hamlets were left desolate, farms abandoned. Osawatomie was burned to the ground. Brown’s son Frederick, who had participated in the massacre, was shot dead by a proslavery man. Brown himself was almost caught in September, when a troop of dragoons rode up to the cabin where he was hiding, and stayed for refreshment. He lay hidden in the loft, with a revolver in each hand, watching through cracks in the floorboards as his host fed melons to the soldiers. Although he survived many brushes with the enemy, Brown seemed to sense his own fate. He told his son Jason, the quietest of all the Browns, a farmer who dreamed more of raising fruit trees than of vengeance, “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause.”

Brown’s experience in Kansas gave new life to his plan for the Subterranean Pass-Way. Having eluded his enemies for months on the open prairies of Kansas, he believed that it would be to even easier to defy them in the fastnesses of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only “a few resolute men” would be needed at first. Once they had established a chain of defensible positions, recruits could be sent down as they were needed.

In January 1858, Brown left Kansas to find backers for his plan. His itinerary was a Cook’s Tour of the leading underground figures in the East. He spent three weeks with Frederick Douglass, in Rochester, where he wrote a forty-eight article constitution for a “Provisional Government,” including a unicameral legislature, president and vice-president, supreme court, a commander-in-chief, all to serve without pay. He told Douglass that his first objective was the capture of the Virginia town of Harper’s Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, with its federal armory and rifle works, which would provide weapons for the thousands of slaves he expected to flock to his cause.

Not long afterward, he met Harriet Tubman for the first time. Tubman was a celebrity by now within the underground. She had made eight trips to the South, and brought out some fifty fugitives. Brown recognized in her a kindred spirit, whose physical courage, boldness, and skill at traveling unnoticed through the South would be invaluable. He took to referring to her as “General Tubman,” and Tubman, for her part, embraced Brown as one of the few whites she had ever met who understood, as blacks always had, that anti-slavery work was not just moral uplift but part of a war in which combatants had to be prepared to die.

FROM ROCHESTER, Brown moved on to Gerrit Smith’s mansion at Peterboro, where he was introduced to the well-connected abolitionist and educator Franklin Sanborn, for whom Brown enthusiastically sketched plans for his mountain redoubts on a scrap of paper. (Sanborn cautiously labeled the designs “woolen machinery.”) Sanborn and Brown then traveled to Boston, where Brown won the support of four more prominent radical abolitionists who had already lent their support to the Free State cause in Kansas, and now agreed to organize financing for Brown’s southern strategy.

On May 8th, at a secret convention in Chatham, Brown proclaimed the establishment of his Provisional Government. Of the forty-six men present, the only whites were thirteen of Brown’s followers from Kansas. Brown left Chatham with the hope that hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadian blacks would eventually join his expedition. Only one did, Osborne P. Anderson, a printer who was elected a member of Brown’s provisional Congress.

To draw attention away from his real intentions, he returned to Kansas, where he lay low for the next six months. When he left Kansas in December 1858, his departure was spectacular. A Missouri slave named Jim Daniels had contacted him, and asked for help in liberating the members of his family, who were about to be sold. It was an opportunity to carry out precisely the kind of raid into slave territory that Brown had in mind, on a vaster scale, for Virginia. Brown led a detachment of men ten miles into Missouri to the plantation where Daniels lived. They collected the five members of Daniels’s family, and five more slaves from another plantation nearby. A second detachment freed a slave at a third farm, and killed her owner. For the next month, the fugitives were hidden in a cabin across the state line in Kansas. In late January 1859, Brown and the twelve fugitives (a baby having been born in the interim, and christened “John Brown”), set off northward toward Nebraska with the fugitives in an ox-drawn wagon and an armed guard of fifteen abolitionists, dodging proslavery guerrillas, marshals’ posses, and at one point fighting and defeating a sixty-man force of United States troops. Near Nebraska City, when thawing ice halted their flight at the Missouri River, Brown’s men cut down trees and flung logs from the shore to firmer ice, and dragged their wagons across by hand, just hours ahead of their pursuers. They traveled east along an established underground route through Iowa, via Tabor and Grinnell, where they were welcomed by Josiah Grinnell, the founder of the college that bears his name. Grinnell personally reserved a boxcar for Brown’s party at the nearest railhead, to carry them directly to Chicago, which they reached on March 10th. Two days later they arrived in Detroit where, presumably with the assistance of the local underground, they were taken to the wharf and ferried across the Detroit River to Windsor. As he watched them embark, Brown recalled a passage of Scripture: “Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen thy salvation.” They had covered almost fifteen hundred miles in eighty-two days, proof to scoffers, Brown felt sure, that he was capable of making the Subterranean Pass-Way a reality.

AROUND TEN THIRTY on the dank night of Sunday, September 17th 1859, seventeen shadowy figures led by the man some now called Old Osawatomie slipped down from the brooding bluffs of Maryland overlooking the Potomac River, and with the brisk steps of men who knew that whatever the outcome they were about to make history, they entered the black tunnel of the covered railroad bridge that spanned the river to Harper’s Ferry. Each carried a Sharpes rifle, a brace of pistols, and a knife sheathed at his waist. Twelve of the men were white, five black. Almost all were in the twenties. Some were naive idealists, others veterans of the guerrilla war in Kansas. Among them were Brown’s youngest sons Watson and Oliver, two neighbors from North Elba, New York, a Canadian spiritualist, a black graduate of Oberlin College, a pair of Quakers who had abandoned their pacifist beliefs to follow Brown from Iowa, a freed slave hoping to liberate his wife and children, and boys from Maine, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.

We all know the rest of the story. Measured against Brown’s hopes, the raid was a spectacular failure.

Brown failed to take account of the real nature of the South in the 1850s. There was little organized underground activity south of the border states. (The main exception had been the Quaker counties of North Carolina, but underground work there apparently ceased to function after about 1853, when the last known underground men were forced to flee.)

Brown did no investigation whatever of the realities that his plan would have to deal with in the South. So strongly did he feel that he was guided by God, and so intensely did he identify with enslaved African-Americans that he failed to take WHITE Southerners into account. Of course, in the mid-19th century no one did focus groups, or market research, so to speak. Brown lived in an age that believed that faith and destiny could trump reality.

The South was, in effect, what we call today a totalitarian society. I’m using that word deliberately. Yes, it’s an anachronism, a 20th century term. But it accurately describes what the South was like for African-Americans both enslaved and free—and for whites who dared to publicly challenge the institution of slavery. For them, the Bill of Rights simply did not apply: there was no right of free speech, free press, or free assembly. Whites who dared were smeared, attacked, ostracized, driven from their homes, and sometimes killed. This had been going on for decades. By the 1850s the kind of whites whom Brown counted on to help him in the Deep South had fled the region. Nearly all the antislavery Quakers in North Carolina had migrated north, or fallen silent. Those who remained were silent and cowed.

But as a spark that lit a feverish passion for freedom in the hearts of both white and black abolitionists, the raid was a spectacular success. Less than two years after Brown’s execution in Charlestown, Virginia, war came. As Union armies marched southward, John Brown’s failed dream of a Subterranean Pass-Way became a great highway. Wherever the armies marched, slaves poured off the plantations, to the Union lines, and to freedom.

We know that large numbers of fugitives were sent from Philadelphia to New York City, and up through the valley to Albany and Troy. Between 1842 and 1843—fugitives—virtually all, probably, from New York City. Most of them were sent onward to Central New York, Vermont, or Massachusetts.

But there is almost no record of how they traveled. Compared to other areas—for example, Central New York State, southern Pennsylvania, the Ohio River Valley, Detroit—the absence of records is deeply puzzling.

How did they travel? What routes did they follow? And who helped them?

Profile of the valley and slavery

Before we get to the answer, I want to go back in time somewhat. New York was once home to the largest number of slaves of any state in the North—more than Georgia, until the late 18th century. The heaviest concentration of them was on plantations in the Hudson Valley, many owned by the prominent Livingston family. At times, slaves had made up as much as 10% of the population. Slavery was cruel here as it was anywhere in the South. Slaves were branded with irons, and notched in the ears, like cattle. Sometimes they were punished with castration.

In the early 19th century, there were about 2,000 slaves in Dutchess County—in some areas of the county, one-third of the population was enslaved.

Support for slavery—or at least tolerance for it—persisted in the valley’s staunch antebellum Democratic Party politics. Especially in the plantation country along the east shore of the river, the atmosphere was, frankly, intensely hostile to abolitionism.

In 1833 and 1834, agents for the newly-formed American Anti-Slavery Society swarmed through the state, setting up hundreds of local branches, and recruiting many thousands of members. They were less successful in the Hudson Valley than in any other part of the state. Apart from the Quaker strongholds of Poughkeepsie and Hudson, they recruited almost no one. In 1839, an agent assigned to the mid-Hudson was mobbed and driven out of Newburgh. The same year, a Liberty Party ticket received only 29 votes in Dutchess County—compared to 438 votes in Madison County, near Syracuse, which was a hotbed of abolitionist activity.

And in 1840, Samuel Ringgold Ward of Poughkeepsie—the state abolition society’s first black lecturer—was prevented from speaking anywhere. No churches or public buildings were opened to him. And the wheels were even stolen from his wagon.

In 1846, in a referendum on black suffrage, the vote in the valley against allowing blacks to vote was overwhelming: 92% in Columbia County, 96% in Westchester and Ulster, and almost 98% in Putnam.

The land route

So let’s come back to the question I began with. We know fugitives traveled through the valley in big numbers. But how did they do it?

In the early decades of the century, fugitives were assisted by the tacit alliance that formed the nucleus of the underground in many parts of the county: Quakers and free blacks.

But: Bear in mind that in this early period many of the fugitives handled by the underground were not coming from the South, but fleeing from slavery right here in New York State, or from New Jersey, or Connecticut.

The main route—as best as I have been able to determine it—ran more or less due north through a chain of Quaker communities that extended from New York City to Vermont. Families and meetings were intertwined. Quakers could travel from New York to Burlington without ever sleeping beneath a non-Quaker’s roof. So could fugitives.

In the 1830s, fugitives were dispatched northward by underground men like David Ruggles and Isaac T. Hopper. Ruggles—who had connections in Poughkeepsie—was the founder of the New York City Vigilance Committee, the first black-operated underground unit in the country. Hopper was, in a sense, the “father of the Underground Railroad.” He began doing underground work in Philadelphia as early as the 1790s.

Fugitives dispatched from the city found protection at three Quaker-owned mills, and possibly at the Colored Peoples Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, in New Rochelle, and among Quakers in Mamaroneck and Scarsdale.

The route continued north to the homes of Joseph Pierce at Pleasantville, and John Jay Jr. at Bedford, in northern Westchester. The Jay family included some of the most important, if underappreciated heroes of the abolitionist movement. His grandfather, also named John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was a founder of the New York Manumission Society (though a slave owner himself). His father, Judge William Jay, was one of the most prolific pamphleteers of the abolitionist movement. His son, William Jay Jr., reportedly forwarded fugitives out of New York City while he was a student at Columbia University. (I’ll come back to the Jays later.)

Fugitives probably also found refuge, or at least assistance, in an African-American settlement known as “The Hills,” near the town of Harrison.

From northern Westchester, fugitives continued on through Brewster, in Putnam County, and into Dutchess County to the Quaker stronghold known as Quaker Hill, near Pawling. Many, if not most, found shelter at the home of a Quaker farmer named David Irish.

Dutchess County had the largest concentration of Quakers outside Philadelphia. The eastern portion of the county was densely settled with Quakers. The Oblong Meeting of Quaker Hill was was the first in the country—in 1769—to free slaves as an official action of the body.

North of Quaker Hill, fugitives could count on protection from Quakers belonging to the Oswego Meeting, to the northwest. Some were sheltered at Susan Moore’s Floral Hill boarding house, a few miles from the Meeting, at Moore’s Mills.

About twenty miles north of Quaker Hill stood the most important single abolitionist institution in the valley—and one of the most important in the country: the Nine Partners School, just east of present-day Millbrook.

This Quaker school may, in fact, have served as a sort of command center for the underground in the entire region. As early as the 1810’s, students were required to memorize a lengthy anti-slavery catechism that described slavery as a “dreadful evil.” Ending slavery, it went on, was “a great revolution,” a “noble purpose” for which men and women had been created by their Heavenly Father.

The school had a profound influence on students who went on to shape the entire abolitionist movement—and other great reform movements. They included abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucretia Coffin and her future husband James Mott, also a prominent abolitionist. And Daniel Anthony, later a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, and the father of Susan B. Anthony.

The school’s headmaster Jacob Willetts—he was author of the most popular textbooks of the day—personally sheltered fugitives at his home just down the road from the school. So did several of his Quaker neighbors.

Some fugitives may have been sent west to Poughkeepsie, where there was a strong abolitionist community. Underground activity in the city has not yet been documented. But fugitives may very well have been assisted by members of the Congregational church, which sponsored a first-rate school for African-Americans as early as the mid-1830s. (David Ruggles probably taught there, along with Samuel Ringgold Ward.)

But the main land route continued due north. The best evidence I’ve seen for what route they may have followed is in a letter written by Roland Robinson, the owner of Rokeby, the wonderful museum and underground site just south of Burlington, Vermont. Robinson was a close friend of Isaac T. Hopper and other hard-core Quaker abolitionists. His home was, in effect, a northern terminus of the Underground Railroad. Robinson was describing the route he followed in Columbia and Dutchess counties in the course of a trip to New York City. His stops included meetings at Nine Partners, Pleasant Valley, Poughkeepsie, and Crum Elbow, near Hyde Park, all in Dutchess County; and Claverack, Hudson, Ghent, and Chatham, in Columbia County; and then Troy. I think this is certainly the route by which fugitives were sent.

Incidentally, there is a remarkable archaeological project underway near the old Crum Elbow meeting, in Hyde Park, at the site of a black hamlet known in the nineteenth century as the Guinea Settlement. (It was abandoned in the 1870s, and the site lost until recently.) The settlement was populated mainly by former slaves who had worked on the great river plantations. But archaeologists and researchers—Chris Lindner of Bard College, and Susan Hinkle—have identified by name three fugitive slaves who lived there. The community was more or less under the protection of the Quaker Crum Elbow meeting, some of whose members lived there. It’s the best example I know of the intimate interaction between Quakers and blacks in the valley, and the best proof so far that communities like this were integral parts of the Underground Railroad.

The most important underground center in Columbia County was Hudson. In the early nineteenth century, two-thirds of the families in the city were Quakers—and the rest were said to be “half-Quakers.” A contemporary described it as “a city of bustling warehouses, wharves, and docks, ropewalks, and industry,” with a population of about 5,000. The meeting house is still there…

Until his death in 1843, the pivotal underground figure in Hudson was a man named Charles Marriott. He was an English-born Quaker and gentleman farmer. Marriott is another one of the great forgotten figures of the underground. His home is still standing, after a fashion…

Marriott was a key link in the whole web of underground activity in eastern New York. He was in constant touch with fellow antislavery Quakers in Vermont, Rhode Island, Rochester, and New York City. He was an intimate collaborator with Isaac Hopper, in New York City, and with Roland Robinson, the proprietor of Rokeby, near Burlington, Vermont. (He also kept a home in New York City, on Mott St., in present-day Chinatown: the site now houses a Chinese hair salon, and herbal medicine store.)

In his letters, Marriott eloquently expressed the moral radicalism of the underground. He wrote, for example, in 1835, “Friends [i.e. fellow Quakers] generally seem to deplore the present excitement. For my share, I hope it will never subside until slavery be abolished.” He was also one of the few underground men who left documentary proof of what they were doing. In a letter at Rokeby, he wrote matter-of-factly, in 1838, “Many fugitives from the South effect their escape. 3 passed through my hands last week.”

So far, I’ve been talking about the Quaker route up the eastern edge of the valley. There is also evidence that a west-to-east land route also crossed the valley from Port Jervis, on the Delaware River, to Newburgh, on the Hudson. This was, apparently, one of several alternate routes available to the Philadelphia underground. The best source for this route is Roger King’s small book “The Silent Rebellion: The UGRR in Orange County”. King ferretted out old news stories and memoirs chronicling the passage of fugitives through the towns of Chester and Goshen to Newburgh. In Newburgh, they were often received by an African-American family named the Alsdorfs. King also suggests the existence some kind of route up the western shore of the river from New Jersey.

There is also some evidence that fugitives were sometimes rowed across the Hudson from Newburgh to the vicinity of Beacon, and led from there across Dutchess County to the Quaker enclave at Quaker Hill. Some fugitives may also have found refuge in the African-American hamlet of Baxtertown, near Beacon. Baxtertown’s site has been lost. But, like the Guinea Settlement, it is only waiting to be rediscovered.

River travel

After the 1830s, something odd happens. There is almost no mention of fugitives at all in the valley. What’s going on?

The answer, I think, has to do with something that happened in the valley in the year 1807, that had nothing whatever to do with slavery…the first successful steamboat, Robert Fulton’s “Clermont.”

After that, the Hudson rapidly became the great Interstate Highway of its day. Between 1826 and the Civil War, travel time between New York City and Albany dropped from 15 hours to just 7 hours. Sending fugitives by river was both cheap and fast. Traveling from New York to Albany by land might take ten days or two weeks, and require a massive commitment of escorts, wagons, shelter—and money.

Rev. Charles B. Ray, a central figure in the New York City underground explained how they did it: “New York was a kind of receiving depot, whence we forwarded to Albany, Troy, sometimes to New Bedford and Boston, and occasionally we dropped a few on Long Island. When we had parties to forward from here, we would alternate in sending between Albany and Troy, and when we had a large party, we would divide between the two cities.”

On one occasion, Ray had a party of twenty-eight people on his hands, ranging from a grandmother to a child of five years. Ray recalled, “I secured passage for them in a barge, and Mr. Wright and myself spent the day in providing food, and personally saw them on the barge. I then took the regular passenger boat [at the] foot of Cortlandt St., and started. Arriving in the morning, I reported to the committee at Albany and then returned to Troy, and gave Brother Garnet notice, and he and I spent the day in visiting friends of the cause there, to raise money to help the party through to Toronto.”

With luck, a fugitive could expect to be in Canada less than a week after stepping on board a steamboat in Manhattan.

Charles Ray makes it clear that it was commonplace to put fugitives on barges. Travelers also had a choice of about 20 regularly scheduled steamboats, not to mention hundreds of cargo sloops and steamers, scows, and canal boats that were towed in long chains from the city up to the Erie Canal. In mid-century, on any given day, as many as 500 ships were traveling on the river, many of them crewed or captained by African Americans.

Some fugitives may have traveled on so-called “Abolition boats” such as the People’s Line owned by committed abolitionists, who carried fugitives on regular trips. Among these may well have been the family of Samuel Schuyler, a former Albany slave who had bought his freedom, and founded a prosperous tow-boat business that was carried on throughout the antebellum period by his sons.

Black stewards also served on the steamships that plied the Hudson between NYC and Albany. One of them was Steven Myers, a leader of the Albany underground. Myers worked as a steward on the Armenia, which sailed between Albany and New York. Considering that he was the head of the underground in Albany, it’s almost inconceivable that he didn’t escort fugitives as a regular thing. (Steamboats were incredibly dangerous: they blew up, burned, and hit snags and sank all the time. In July 1852, the Armenia was beaten by the Henry Clay in the most famous race ever on the river—famous because, near Yonkers, the Henry Clay caught fire and became a floating inferno, killing eighty on board, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister.) Fortunately Myers lived on to serve the underground until the Civil War.

The image of fugitive slaves sneaking northward in the dead of night has a terrific iconic power. But in much of the North this was a myth. By the 1850s—and in spite of the Fugitive Slave Law—more and more of the underground’s work took place completely in the open. In June 1852, the warden of Sing Sing penitentiary, in Westchester, released one day early a prisoner, a fugitive who had served two years for the theft of a boat—to keep him from falling into the hands of the U.S. Commissioner, who intended to hand him over to his former master. And when local Democrats complained to one Northern sheriff about the number of fugitive slaves who were passing openly through the county, he replied: “Let ‘ em!”

The underground always embraced new technology. Just as steamboats replaced the old land route, the underground literally took to the rails wherever it could. The opening of the railroad up the eastern shore of the river in 1851 cut travel time in half. In the 1850s, the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery office gave fugitives train fare for travel from New York City north. In January 1855, Harriet Tubman simply took three of her brothers, and several other companions she had led all the way from Maryland, to Grand Central Station and bought them tickets for Albany.

Conclusion

Although the land route was largely superseded, it apparently was never abandoned. Earlier I mentioned the Jay family.

William Jay Jr., the great-grandson of John Jay was deeply active in the underground. He was also a close friend of Stephen Myers, the head of the underground here in Albany. He was apparently also one of the underground’s main financial supports.

The curator of the Jay home recently shared with me a remarkable letter.

In August 1860, Stephen Myers’s Harriet wrote to William Jay Jr. from Albany (Stephen was working at the time as a butler at Lake George): “The two fugitives arrived here that you sent, and I sent them immediately on their route for Canada… I have to attend to the fugitives myself. I was very thankful that you gave some aid, for it was on Saturday they came, and it would have been difficult to get money to send them on that day.” She went on to thank him profusely “for all the favors you have done for the downtrodden that come to this office.”

The relationship was so close that the Myerses named one of their grandchildren after him: William John Jay Myers. It is a signpost to the kind of remarkable relationships that the Underground Railroad inspired across racial and class lines. It was of course, just one of many—and an indication of the social and moral radicalism that the underground embodied.

It’s a fitting place for me to end.