Father of the Underground Railroad

You don’t have to read far into William Still’s The Underground Railroad to see exploded the myth that white folks freed the slaves.

Yes, white abolitionists helped the cause enormously after escaped slaves had made the first harrowing step toward freedom. And who else but white abolitionists could have gotten the Empancipation passed.

BUT – and this is a very large BUT – Still’s meticulous narratives that he recorded as escaped slaves passed through his Philadelphia office are a testament to the urgency and agency of enslaved people themselves to gain their freedom and the risks they took to do so.

This man, this William Still, who coined the term Underground Railroad, started as a janitor for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia and eventually became its chief clerk and also chairman of the Vigilant Committee of the Pennsylvania Underground Railroad.

I had no idea that The Underground Railroad Records ran to more than 1,000 pages, but it makes sense as 1,000 narratives and letters are represented in its pages. It can be difficult to read because so many of those escaped had to leave children, spouses, parents, and siblings behind.

William Still’s own birth family is a case in point. His parents were enslaved on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, out of which came also the sainted Harriet Tubman. His father, Levin Steel, was able to buy his freedom and make his way to New Jersey. His mother, Sidney, escaped with the four oldest children, but they were caught and returned to enslavement. She tried again, this time just bring two daughters and leaving her sons behind. Those sons were sold down to Mississippi and eventually to Alabama, where the younger son died in bondage.

William was born free in New Jersey when his father changed their surname to Still. Sidney changed her name to Charity. Years later, when William was working for the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, he interviewed an escaped slave named Peter. Peter was his oldest brother. It took numerous hazardous attempts to escape; he was caught and returned to slavery several times. Even after a successful escape, he returned to Alabama to try to free his wife. That too took several attempts and cost the life of a white man named Seth Concklin who had actually gotten Peter’s wife and children as far as Vincennes, Indiana, before they were all caught. Concklin’s body was found in a river chained and beaten.

The ways in which enslaved people managed to free themselves are as diverse and canny as the people themselves. Many were able to buy passage on a steamboat but were forced to hide in the engine area for days on end. People found themselves wedged into a small, hot, fetid, noisy area and just when they thought they couldn’t endure more, learned that a storm had caused the boat to go off-course and it would take longer than expected.

One of the most famous escapes, about which children’s books have been written, is that of Henry “Box” Brown, who mailed himself to Philadelphia. With the aid of a friend he was packed up in a crate and off he went. He didn’t think he’d survive it, but he did.

And of course there is that woman named Harriet, who returned to Maryland over and over again and brought 60 people out of their captivity. Anyone who went with her had to be unimaginably brave because she made it clear that if someone didn’t want to continue, they would die by her own gun. She couldn’t afford to have anyone caught and tortured into revealing information about her network.

William Still left a remarkable legacy, not only in his narratives, but also through his children with his wife Letitia. Caroline Matilda Still was one of the African-American women doctors I the country. William Wilberforce Still became a prominent lawyer. Robert George Still was a journalist, and Frances Ellen Still was an educator.

William Still lobbied for eight years to successfully desegregate Philadelphia’s public transportation. He organized a YMCA for Black children, participated in the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a founding member of a church, and helped establish a mission school.

When he died in 1902 at the age of 81, The New York Times hailed him as the Father of the Underground Railroad.

William Parker and the Christiana Riot of 1851

It is fascinating to me how the Divine conspires to lead me on a path that takes me to related interests.

I’m taking a course on Movement Theology through the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary. The Kairos Center’s director is the Rev. Liz Theoharis, who is also co-leader with the Rev. William J. Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign. I saw them both in New Hampshire recently at a march and rally.

The course is free and can be taken through Zoom, and it very obviously contains all the themes of the Poor People’s Campaign.

In this week’s reading is part of the Narrative of William Parker. He was an enslaved orphan in Maryland, frustratingly close to free states. He saw friends’ families split up by being sold away and was determined that would not happen to him. At the age of 19 or so (he never knew his exact age), William and his brother made a break for Pennsylvania. Traveling northeast, they spent many nights hiding from patrols. Even after reaching York, they and other fugitives had to beware of slaveowners and bounty hunters who, because of the federal Fugitive Slave Law, could go into a free state with impunity and kidnap back those making their way to freedom. William pushed farther northeast nearer to Philadelphia, where the Underground Railroad flourished.

William had met Frederick Douglass when both were still enslaved and now got to hear and be further inspired by the great man. William Lloyd Garretson was also influential on the young William Parker, and he formed a band of the newly free that did all it could to disrupt the kidnappings and defy the Fugitive Slave Law. They were not afraid to fight back.

He settled in Christiana, about halfway between Philadelphia and Lancaster in an area where there were Quaker allies. Still, Maryland’s nearness to Pennsylvania was always a factor in marauding slaver-takers being in the area.

Parker and his band were involved in many skirmishes to keep refugees, and themselves, from being kidnapped. The most notorious such took place at his home in Christiana, where he had living with him an enslaved man who had worked on the plantation of one Edward Gorsuch in Maryland.

In September 1851, Gorsuch had himself and his sons and friends deputized to be able to arrest the refugee and bring him back. The posse was given information that the man they were looking for was hiding in William’s house and surrounded the house at daybreak. Gorsuch and a ruthless kidnapper named Kline made themselves known to Parker and a parley ensued in which Parker told them that if they entered his house, they would not leave it again.

Within two hours, William’s band of men and other neighbors, including two Quakers, confronted Gorsuch’s posse and a shoot-out occurred that left Gorsuch dead and one of his sons severely wounded. It is said that the Christiana incident put an end to slaveholders trying to enact the Fugitive Slave Law in Pennsylvania.

Nevertheless, William and his wife and children made their ways separately to Toronto and thence to the Buxton Settlement near Chatham, where many other formerly enslaved people had settled.

As for Edward Gorsuch, there is a website called Officer Down Memorial Page. One page honors him for his “sacrifice,” i.e., getting killed while trying to kidnap a black man he had enslaved. From 2010 to 2015, seven memorial statements were left on his entry on the website thanking him for his service. All are anonymous, though one notes it was left by someone who works for the Border Patrol. Since there is no information about why he was considered an officer of the law, for two days, so it would be interesting to know whether the people who made the comments have any idea who he really was.

When I saw the name “Gorsuch,” I immediately thought of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose appointment to SCOTUS came after Mitch McConnell ensured that Merrick Garland’s appointment would never happen.

Neil Gorsuch grew up in Colorado, far from Maryland, and I could find no definitive connection between them. However, Libertarian blogger Will Griff posited in 2017 that the two must be connected because of the unusual name.

And while Gorsuch’s entry on the ODMP page says that his “watch” ended in 1851 (i.e. his death occurred), I think it is much important to note that William Parker’s much longer and heroic watch ended in 1891 at the apparent age of 70 at his home in Canada.

Benjamin Lay: Abolition’s Prophet

When I hear people try to excuse historical acts of racism by saying, “That’s how people were then,” I get apoplectic. I think of people who throughout history have clearly demonstrated they knew right from wrong, no matter what the prevailing society was like.

Now I have another weapon in my arsenal: Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) of Abington Township, PA.

Thanks to Marcus Rediker, the general public can know more about this fierce warrior for emancipation through his book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became First Revolutionary Abolitionist.

In 1738, Benjamin Lay walked 20 miles to attend the annual Quaker’s Philadelphia meeting, according to Mr. Rediker. Keep in mind that it wasn’t until 1758 that the Quakers outlawed slave-holding among the brethren. Lay carried with him a hollowed-out book containing an animal bladder filled with red pokeberry juice. When it came his turn to speak,

“Throwing the overcoat aside, he spoke his prophecy: ‘Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures.’ He raised the book above his head and plunged the sword through it. . . .He then splattered (the red juice) on the heads and bodies of the slave keepers.”

He was expelled from the meeting.

Lay was not a single-issue prophet, though. It wasn’t just his views on emancipation that caused people to disparage him. He truly believed and tried to bring forth a Utopia where everyone was equal and would live simply by growing their own food and making their own clothes and respecting nature. He himself lived in a cave, subsisting only on fruits and vegetables because of his belief in animal rights, and he refused to use anything that existed because of slave labor.

Mr. Rediker posits that Lay isn’t well known today because was not a “gentleman saint” like William Wilberforce, who led the British abolition movement. Lay was “wild and confrontational, militant and uncompromising.” Sounds like a great many prophets.

Being a little person as well as having a hunched back made people think he was “deformed in both body and mind.” It could be that his own “otherness” contributed to his strong feelings about slavery, but it is obvious that his main inspiration is from his understanding of Scripture and what was revealed to him.

According to Joe Lockard of the Antislavery Literature Project at Arizona State University, Lay also was known to perform what might be considered “guerilla” street theater to try to get people to confront the evil of slavery. He even kidnapped a fellow Quaker’s son to show the pain that enslaved families endured when slave-holders broke those families up.

The one book that Lay wrote, which was published by Benjamin Franklin, is available online at:  https://antislavery.eserver.org/religious/allslavekeepersfinal/allslavekeepersfinal The book is titled All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. It looks as if it will take some effort to read, but may be well worth the fortitude to understand Benjamin Lay’s devotion to the cause.

Lay must have felt well vindicated when the Society of Friends in Philadelphia did decide to discipline and/or turn slave-holders out of the community. He died a year later.

Mr. Rediker’s book is available in audible form as well as hard-cover and paperback. He is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Peter Linebaugh), The Slave Ship, and The Amistad Rebellion. He produced the award-winning documentary film “Ghosts of Amistad” (Tony Buba, director), about the popular memory of the Amistad rebellion of 1839 in contemporary Sierra Leone.

An essay from his book appeared in The New York Times last year and the last paragraph is relevant to our times:

“In his time Lay may have been the most radical person on the planet. He helps us to understand what was politically and morally possible in the first half of the 18^th century – and what may be possible now. It is more than we think.”