The Underground Railroad

by Abbie Bakan

February is Black History month. This makes it an appropriate time to dispel some of the myths about Canadian history. Slavery was a terrible crime in the United States. But slavery is also a part of Canada's past.

But along with slavery there was always resistance. Part of that resistance was The Underground Railroad -- a network of supporters illegally organized to promote and cover for the escape of slaves from the US South to other areas where they could live in freedom. Here, ABBIE BAKAN tells the story of the anti-slavery resistance of which this railroad was a part.

THE SCOURGE OF SLAVERY

In 1770, pre-Revolutionary colonial United States, black slaves produced three-quarters of the exports, but comprised only 18 per cent of the total population. But in the southern colonies slaves comprised 40 per cent of the population.

In 1776 the American Revolution succeeded in breaking the colonial rule of Britain in the thirteen colonies that became the United States of America.

This new country, proclaiming democracy and freedom, allowed for the maintenance of a vicious system of slavery.

By 1810 there were 1,164,000 slaves in the US. Only with the end of the US Civil War, when North and South clashed between 1861 and 1865, was slavery in US finally abolished.

In the meantime, slaves rebelled in any way they could. One of those means was escape. The Underground Railroad was one of the main escape routes. Sometimes, the last stop was one of the "free states" of New England.

But Canada was widely considered to be the last stop on the line. The North Star was the main reference point on the unwritten maps that were followed.

Extreme and violent repression was met by anyone, slave or free, who was identified with the Railroad.

'UNDERGROUND, ALL THE WAY TO BOSTON'

The origin of the term, "Underground Railroad" is hard to trace. There are at least four writers who have given different versions to the origin. One is from Eber C. Pettit who recalled reading a piece in a Washington, D.C. newspaper in about 1839 which involved a captured fugitive slave. After having been tortured for the crime of escape from slavery, the slave confessed that he was to have been sent on a trip north and that "the railroad went underground all the way to Boston." Pettit comments:

"[T]hus it will be seen that this famous thoroughfare was first called the 'Underground Railroad' in the city of Washington ... It had, like all other railroads, its officers and stations, engineers and conductors, ticket agents and train dispatchers, hotels and eating houses."

ESCAPING THE 'BURNING OF HELL'

Over the various places where Underground Railroad stations existed, there were places and times when an impressive level of organization was in place. At other times, slaves simply ran away to escape from horrific conditions of abuse, not knowing where their next stop would be or where they were going.

At some point along the journey, sometimes after the most difficult part of the escape was behind them and they had no one to rely on but themselves, abolitionists, Quakers, or militant free blacks -- including those such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman in the US, and Mary Ann Shadd in Canada -- would aid fugitive slaves through a complex network of survival posts.

It was not only American white abolitionists who helped slaves to escape. Ottawa Indians in western Ohio led by Chief Kinjeino are among the first reported to help fugitive black slaves. And according to one report: "Portuguese fisherman are said to have conspired with members of the Shinnecock tribe to transport fugitive slaves from the north shore of Long Island into ports of freedom in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island."

Estimates of those who fled go as high as 100,000, mainly between the years 1830 and the outbreak of the US Civil War in 1860.

Canada was the often the main destination of escape. But not all those who escaped and tried to get to Canada were able to survive the passage. Estimates of the number of fugitives living in Canada from the US are around 40,000 to 60,000 in total in Ontario alone, which was where the majority arrived.

Most of the fugitive slave routes went through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan, and the nearest British territory was Ontario. Other routes ended in New Brunswick, Montreal, and from California to Vancouver Island.

What were the slaves escaping from?

Slaves were the property of the slave owners, in law no different than animals purchased for use like cattle on a farm. It was therefore fully legal to inflict the cruelest and most barbaric punishment on this human chattel for even the most minimal form of disobedience.

In the South, planters instructed their "overseers" -- those put in charge of disciplining the slaves -- to give 20 lashes for "ordinary offenses" and 39 for "more serious ones", but often more were inflicted.

The most serious crime was escape. And "[m]ore important than the number was the vigor with which the lashes were laid down." Solomon Northrop wrote of his first beating at the hands of a slave trader who used first a paddle with holes in it and then a rope-whip. In Northrop's words:

"I struggled with all my power, but it was in vain. I prayed for mercy, but my prayers were only answered with imprecations and stripes. I thought I must die beneath the lashes of the accursed brute. Even now my flesh crawls upon my bones, as I recall the scene. I was all on fire. I can compare to nothing else than the burning of hell!"

The conditions of slavery involved more than just physical abuse. Some fled to be rejoined with loved ones who had been sold, often as a form of punishment. Some had heard stories of a Promised Land where a vision of freedom inspired their escape.

All faced incredible risks, and had no guarantee of living to see their freedom.

Most slaves only knew their immediate vicinity. The fear of the unknown was deepened by the badge of slavery they wore on their skin, as blacks in a brutally racist society, making them open targets for re-capture and punishment. Solomon Northrop describes the conditions of hostile vigilantism that escaped slaves encountered:

"No man who has never been placed in such a situation can comprehend the thousand obstacles thrown in the way of the flying slave. Every white man's hand is raised against him -- the patrollers are watching for him -- the hounds are ready to follow on his track, and the nature of the country is such as renders it impossible to pass through it with any safety."

The hounds were vicious. The dogs were trained to bite, tear, and mutilate their catch. One black woman who was nursing several children sired by her master had a breast chewed off. Sometimes slaves prone to escape were considered worthless, and dogs were set upon them after they were returned to their masters.

THE 'CRIME' OF SOLIDARITY

White conductors of the Underground Railroad, while able to live freely in society and therefore not subject to conditions of re-capture, were nonetheless considered traitors of the most vile kind. Tarring and feathering was one form of punishment for whites accused of supporting the black slaves against their white masters.

"Heated pine tar was applied from scalp to sole, shriveling and blistering the skin. While the tar was still soft, goose feathers were sprinkled over the body and occasionally lighted. Sometimes the burning feathers ignited the tar ... Cleaning up was even worse; as clinging tar was peeled from the body, so was skin and flesh. Infection was a near certainty."

While white solidarity was crucial to many successful escapes, at the centre of the Underground Railroad were the slaves themselves.

Henry "Box" Brown, for example, had himself nailed into a wooden box by some carpenters known to the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. He traveled upside down most of his journey, but escaped safely to the north. The white Virginian who helped him was sentenced to prison for a subsequent attempt to send slaves as freight to their freedom.

Runaway slaves would escape on their own, but an elaborate system of lanterns and markers could sometimes identify a station. The escaping slaves traveled mostly at night, with some seeking secret codes like a "P" for Pennsylvania marked on a rock.

In Hudson Ohio, a white federal judge's wife kept a scarf on a statue of a black slave on her lawn as a symbol to fugitives. If the hitching post had a flag, the runaway slaves were welcome for refuge. If there was no flag, the judge was home and the shelter had to be passed by -- the Underground Railroad station was closed.

Sometimes slaves would travel during the day with a conductor who would accompany them on to the next station. If a conductor was white, they might pose as a master, or fake a funeral procession. Sometimes, white infants were given to black women to carry so the fleeing slaves could pose as nannies.

Special passages in houses were in some cases maintained for hiding slaves, or special compartments were built in covered wagons for transportation. Black conductors, such as Harriet Tubman, would usually act as night-time guides in order to avoid detection. One slave song of the period indicates the thirst for freedom:

"Farewell, old master, don't come after me. I'm on my way to Canada, where colored men are free."

CANADA: NO PROMISED LAND

What did this land called Canada really have to offer the escaping slaves?

Canada, or the Canadas before Confederation, was not based on the development of plantation slave colonies. But this only because it was not profitable to do so with the cold winter climate. It was not out of altruism but pragmatism that the profits that went to the Canadian ruling class were gleaned by different means than plantation slavery.

Canada was framed as a confederation in 1867, in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

The loyalties of the "founding fathers" were not with the North during the Civil War, nor with the abolition to slavery. They were part of a class as virulently racist as their American counterparts.

Slavery did exist in Canada. Canada was not the Promised Land the slaves sang about and risked their lives to reach.

Estimates are that in 1759, there were more than 1,000 slaves in what is now Quebec. As early as 1749, there were slaves in Halifax. In 1783, Loyalist settlers fleeing the rebellious colonies that would become the United States of America brought about 2,000 slaves to Canada. With a population of only about 120,000 in the region that would become Canada this was a significant percentage.

Slavery was abolished in Canada only when it was abolished throughout the British empire in 1834.

The Loyalists who settled in Canada with their slaves fled the United States because they remained loyal to the part of the British North American colonial empire that gave its support to the repression of rebellion in any form, slave resistance or US independence. After the founding of Halifax, for example, in 1749, the trade in slaves was aggressively pursued for the next fifty years.

Canada's ruling class included some of the most prominent interests that defended and supported slavery. But at the same time, there was a split in the world's ruling classes over the issue of slave versus free wage labour as capitalism began to spread across North America.

This was a division at the core of the Civil War in the US. And it was also reflected in the apparently ambivalent legal status of slaves in Canada.

But recognizing slavery as a legitimate institution for Canada's ruling class was one thing. Supporting the return of escaped slave property to the US ruling class south of the border was another. Against the background of US independence in 1776, with its mix of slave and non-slave colonies, the first session of the first Parliament of Upper Canada, (what is now basically Ontario), in 1793 enacted a measure preventing the entry of slaves into the province.

But the law did not threaten the control of the white landowners by making the practice of slavery illegal.

Any slave entering the province, who came in on his or her own accord, was to be considered immediately free. But their children, born after 1793, would not be free until age 25. And slaves already living in Upper Canada remained slaves for life.

JOHN A. MACDONALD -- THE SLAVERS' FRIEND

Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was an ardent defender of the South in the US Civil War.

He cut his political baby teeth training in alliance with the Confederate Army counter-revolutionaries when they were attempting to destabilize the American Union states during and after the American Civil War.

The Copperhead Conspirators, as they were called, deposited huge sums of money with the Bank of Montreal, through which they financed activities against the North. One of the Copperheads, a man named Headley, was one of the raiders on New York City who set fire to a dozen large hotels in November of 1864. Headley returned to his headquarters in no place other than Toronto, to prepare for anticipated prosecutions. In these memoirs, Headley writes:

"At the suggestion of Colonel Thompson (the chief Confederate Commissioner) it was deemed advisable that we retain Hon. John Macdonald as counsel in the event of a requisition, as he is friendly to our cause and was regarded as a very eminent lawyer. One evening after supper ... we rode in a sleigh to the residence of Mr. Macdonald in the suburbs of Toronto. He greeted us cordially and we discussed our case fully until a late hour. The arrangement was made and a retainer fee was paid the following day. But it happened that the time never arrived when his services were required."

Pre-Confederation Canada, loyal to the British empire, followed Britain in supporting of the Confederate South in the US Civil War. John A. Macdonald was the Attorney General of Canada West prior to Confederation. When speaking at a banquet a few months prior to this appointment he praised "the gallant defense that is being made by the Southern Republic."

MARY ANN SHADD -- FREEDOM FIGHTER

Mary Ann Shadd was one of the main advocates for slave "emigration" from the US to Canada. Shadd was the first black woman on the North American continent to found and edit a weekly newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, in the cities of Windsor, Chatham and Toronto during the 1850s.

Though there were numerous debates among them, Shadd worked from Canada with abolitionists in the US, including the Frederick Douglass, in the struggle against slavery.

The rebellion of John Brown was one of the results of this solidarity.

John Brown was the white son of an Underground Railroad station master, and a railroad conductor himself. Brown led an armed insurrection to preserve Kansas from slavery in May of 1856. During the events, Brown's forces killed five men in revenge of an earlier attack by pro-slavery forces. In December 1858, he set out with a group of 11 slave men, women and children, on a three week journey of a thousand miles from Missouri to Windsor, Canada, in the middle of winter.

In 1859, Brown and his guerrilla army of about twenty followers seized a government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hopes of provoking a slave rebellion. Brown was taken prisoner, tried for treason, and hanged. To this day, Brown remains a martyred symbol of the heroic fight against slavery in the US.

Mary Ann Shadd was among the trusted conspirators who met with John Brown in Windsor. There Brown, Shadd, Shadd's husband, her brother, and a young family friend named Osborne P. Anderson, and others discussed and refined plans for the Harpers Ferry rebellion.

THE LEGACY OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Karl Marx stated in Capital that "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin, while in the black it is branded." In his writings on the American Civil War, Marx and Engels clearly saw that a victory for the North would be in the interests of the working class of the US, North and South, and internationally. As early as November of 1861, Marx predicted that the clash of the northern industrial ruling class with the old landed plantocracy of the South would drive the North to promote the decisive slogan "the emancipation of the slaves."

As socialists, we stand firmly on the side to the slaves in the struggle against the racist system that marked the birth of capitalism on this continent. The Underground Railroad was one central part of that resistance.