Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner

Author:Eric Foner
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: United States, Slavery, Social Science, 19th Century, History
ISBN: 9780393244380
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

II

As the networks assisting fugitives consolidated to the city’s south, the underground railroad in New York, in the words of the Tribune, did “a safe and increasing business.” What Lewis Tappan called the “friendly rivalry” between the New York State Vigilance Committee and the group operating out of Sydney Howard Gay’s office heightened activity in the city. Both national abolitionist organizations, the Times noted, “own stock in the underground railroad, and make no bones of drumming up passengers for it.” On a single day in 1852, the Tribune reported, there passed through the city “no fewer than forty-one human chattels . . . all safely landed in Canada.”26

A third organization assisting fugitive slaves, the Committee of Thirteen, also operated in New York in the early 1850s. It had been established in the wake of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. This group of black abolitionists from New York City and Brooklyn included Dr. James McCune Smith, the publisher Philip A. Bell, and, before his departure from the city, William P. Powell, owner of the Colored Seamen’s Boarding House. (After Powell sailed for England, Albro Lyons and his wife Mary operated the establishment and continued to provide a hiding place for fugitive slaves.) Two “offshoots” quickly followed, committees of nine in Brooklyn, and five in the village of Williamsburg. All these groups offered legal assistance to fugitives and protection against slave catchers. Junius C. Morel, a member of the Committee of Thirteen, was a resident of the Brooklyn village of Weeksville (located in present-day Crown Heights), whose population of 366 in 1850 made it one of the country’s largest free African American settlements. Weeksville offered a modicum of safety from kidnappers and slave catchers, and the committee used it as a place to hide fugitives.27

The Committee of Thirteen seems to have survived for only a few years. While it lasted, like other groups involved with the underground railroad, it operated both openly and in secret. In December 1851, it presented a memorial to the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth, who had arrived in New York after the failed revolution of 1848. The committee identified the Hungarian uprising with “the struggles now going on in our own country” against slavery. When Governor Washington Hunt called on the New York legislature to appropriate funds for black colonization, the Committee of Thirteen organized rallies to expose the “ignorance and weakness” of Hunt’s message. In April 1852, the committee held a public gathering at which it urged runaway slaves to leave the city, unless they were prepared to “send to perdition” owners intent on their recapture. Charles B. Ray, who had succeeded Gerrit Smith as head of the New York State Vigilance Committee, spoke at a number of these meetings. But the Committee of Thirteen established a greater reputation for discretion than Ray’s own organization. Early in 1852, the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee forwarded to New York “for safe-keeping and disposal” one of the “Christiana patriots” (evidently a man who had escaped from jail after being arrested for participation in that affray).

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