“Who are those children all dressed in blue? . . . Must be the ones that made it through.” The song Wade in the Waterwas a Negro spiritual originally sung on the Underground Railroad — the conduit by which southern slaves escaped to freedom in the north. The lyrics have clear biblical references, but also had practical purpose. They were sung to encourage escaping blacks to walk through water, so that chasing bloodhounds would lose their scent.
That image of desperate slaves, baying hounds and ruthless bounty hunters dominates perception of the Underground Railroad. That’s certainly the story suggested by the title of Eric Foner’s book. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of America’s Fugitive Slaves implies a book about how courage and imagination were combined to achieve escape. In fact, this book is about something important but less dramatic. It’s concerned with the bureaucracy behind the Underground Railroad rather than with individual stories of exodus.
Granted, there are a few good tales in this book. The best is that of Henry “Box” Brown, a Virginia slave who effectively mailed himself to Philadelphia in a box “too small for a coffin”. The 250-mile trip by rail and steamboat took 24 hours. On two occasions during the journey, Brown’s box was stowed with his head facing down. On reaching his destination, he sprang from his parcel, “[his] face radiant with joy”. He then launched into a hymn.
A few more stories like this would have been welcome. Foner instead focuses on the machinations behind the establishment of the Underground Railway in New York, a state with an ambivalent attitude toward slavery. Granted, plenty of moralists were determined to eradicate the evil institution. But slaves were, above all, seen as property and there are few places more respectful of property rights than New York. Friendly relations between Wall Street investors and southern cotton producers ensured that New Yorkers often sided with slave owners when it came to the question of fugitive slaves.
Foner details the disagreements among New York abolitionists over how best to undermine slavery. Well-meaning organisations argued incessantly over whether limited funds should be used to help individual slaves to escape or should instead be invested in a propaganda campaign against the institution itself. As Foner concludes: “The heated exchanges among people deeply committed to the same goal of ending slavery and improving the condition of free blacks exemplify what Sigmund Freud later called ‘the narcissism of small differences’.” In other words, men of noble ends can still have small minds.
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The problem with bureaucracy is that it’s inherently dull. The blurb promises a story about three New York abolitionists: Sydney Howard Gay, a newspaper editor; Louis Napoleon, a black furniture polisher; and Charles B Ray, a black minister. Between 1830 and 1860, they helped more than 3,000 fugitives to liberty. In fact, those three do not figure as prominently as is promised and their exploits are related in rather banal fashion. This is a serious, well-researched book, but not a gripping one. I kept waiting for it to get interesting.
This book nevertheless provides a useful counterpoint to the current tendency to whitewash America’s slave-owning past. Today’s revisionists emphasise the supposed humanity of slaveowners, while ignoring the inherent evil of owning another human being. A sense of racial superiority will excuse a lot of sins. Before the Civil War, slave owners convinced themselves that they were doing their chattels a favour by providing food and shelter. The slave’s desire to escape therefore confounded them. They even invented an illness called “drapetomania” (a “disease causing Negroes to run away”) to explain the inexplicable. Journalists in the south also blamed northern businessmen for luring innocent blacks from the idyll of the plantation to the inferno of the factory.
It all comes down to that issue of ownership, which runs like a river through this book. Even the most ardent abolitionists sometimes stumbled over the fact that slaves were property. They worried that assisting escape might be interpreted as colluding in robbery. Thus, American respect for the constitution impeded the recognition of injustice. “There is a higher law than the constitution,” the abolitionist William Seward shouted in 1850. That’s remarkably similar to what Martin Luther King had to shout 100 years later. Sometimes we just have to accept that the law is an ass.
Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of America’s Fugitive Slaves by Eric Foner, OUP, 320pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £17.09, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134