A TREASURE TROVE, BRINGING UGRR
HISTORY ALIVE
"Secret Lives of the Underground
Railroad in New York City"
Don Papson and Tom Calarco have opened for us a treasure
trove, a first-hand, first-person, first-rate exploration of the Underground
Railroad in operation.
"Secret Lives of
the Underground Railroad in New York City" brings us deep into the inner
workings of this grassroots resistance movement devoted to helping blacks free
themselves from slavery . And it isn't
just a New York City story, because the authors track the freedom routes up the
Champlain Line toward Montreal, out along the Erie Canal and Mohawk River
toward Niagara, and more.
Papson, founding president and curator for the North Star
Underground Railroad Museum, in Ausable Chasm, N.Y., trained his research south toward New York
City when he learned about the never-before-published Record of Fugitives, unknown to the public for more than 150 years. His
decision paid off. He and two volunteers
transliterated the handwritten journals covering the years 1855 and 1856, and
the book draws heavily on scraps of escape profiles like this one:
"April 30. John Williams, and Mary, his wife, from Haven
Manor, 13 miles from Elkton, Md. master's name John Peach. Ran away last fall, but were caught between
Newcastle & Wilmington, taken back, & whipped. Peach said if they ran away again, "he would
have 'em if he had to go to hell for 'em." He will only, however, have to
go (to) Canada. It is not to be-sure so
far, but the difficulties would hardly be greater, as in the other place, a
slave catcher would be sure of aid & sympathy.
"They left on the
night of the 10th & reached Wilmington before morning, & were received
by Thos. Garrett. Forwarded to Still,
who sent them here. Sent on to
Syracuse. $8.50"
Louis Napoleon, an illiterate black man, born into slavery
in NYC, and Sydney Howard Gay, editor of The
Standard, a major abolitionist newspaper and later of the New York Tribune,
worked as a team to find escapees a safe haven in New York City, and then send
them on to Underground Railroad agents in Albany, Troy, Syracuse and
Rochester. For two years, these
operations were all recorded in careful detail by Gay, including the names of
the agents, the route people traveled, and the amount of money spent on the
escape. (Garrett and Still mentioned in
the excerpt above were leading station master agents.)
"Our primary mission has been to recognize the work of
Sydney Howard Gay and Louis Napoleon, to reveal how the Underground Railroad
operated in New York City, and to conclusively demonstrate that the Underground
Railroad was neither a legend nor a myth, but a daily reality," the
authors write in their introduction.
That daily reality could be harrowing, with slave catchers,
bounty hunters, roaming the streets of the city, where big business and many
citizens were pro-slavery, and whose mayor and police were not sympathetic to
the freedom campaign. The Underground
Railroad operatives and leading abolitionists were harassed, threatened and
driven from meeting halls. Some of their
houses were burned.
Many escapees came to New York City by boat from Maryland,
Virginia and further south, hiding aboard with and without sympathetic captains
to help them. Some came as slaves and
jumped ship to gain their freedom in New York.
Louis Napoleon, who has been rescued from total obscurity by this book,
famously went to court to free some of these individuals, and then hired
coaches to drive them north.
Gay complained to some of his partners in the Underground
Railroad network that the Philadelphia
station's practice of sending people to NYC in the early morning hours meant
that Napoleon was constantly getting out of bed
to meet 3 a.m. ferry boats crossing the Hudson from New Jersey.
Providing valuable context for these dramatic personal
tales, Papson and Calarco also track the equally dramatic ups and downs of the
leading abolitionist organizations of the time, and the power struggles between
William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, Frederick Douglass in Rochester, Lewis Tappan
in New York City, and others. They
fought over money, over whether to campaign for women's suffrage, whether to
participate in politics, and over strategic direction. They all agreed, however, that the fight for
freedom was a moral imperative.
Given the chronic financial troubles of the anti-slavery
societies and their newspapers, it is amazing they were able to help the
freedom-seekers at all. They were
constantly appealing for funds, and sponsored fund-raising fairs, ran pleading
ads in newspapers, and cut their staffs and salaries to the edge of
supportability. Still, Gay and Napoleon
kept up their station agent work into the Civil War, as fugitives kept on
coming.
Gay left the Standard
in 1858, unable to support his family and worn out by the constant
struggle. Later that year, he joined
Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, an anti-slavery paper, and by 1862 was
managing editor. "Secret
Lives" recounts the harrowing story of the New York City draft riots in
1863, when angry mobs murdered hundreds of blacks -- men, woman and children --
and torched many buildings.
The Tribune building
was a target, because of its pro-war stance, and Gay found himself not only
writing editorials supporting Lincoln and the draft, but also rushed to "the Brooklyn Navy Yard and came back
with bombshells and hand grenades...A howitzer was positioned at one of the
upstairs windows, and there were huge piles of hand grenades stacked at other
windows. Henry Ward Beecher sent over
his Sharps revolving rifle, and a long trough was put in place so bombshells
could be slid into the middle of the street away from the building. Gay later told his wife and children 'if we
had used them, the mob and the office and everybody in it would have been blown
to Hell'. "
Papson and Calarco, who has written several other books on
the Underground Railroad, including "The Underground Railroad in the
Adirondack Region," and "People and Places of the Underground
Railroad," together have a vast store of knowledge about this chapter of
our history. "Secret Lives"
invites the reader to experience and appreciate this tragic and inspiring
American story in a unique way.
Review by Peter
Slocum, a volunteer at the North Star Underground Railroad Museum.
Published by
McFarland & Company, Inc.,
Jefferson, N.C. www.mcfarlandpub.com. 800-253-2187.
