With a historian's grasp of events and a novelist's instinct for story, Bordewich focuses on the 60 years leading up to the Civil War. Its beginnings can be traced to a band of abolitionists who created what became known as the Underground Railroad.

Acknowledgments

xi

Preface

xiv

Maps

xviii

Introduction

1

(10)

PART ONE BEGINNINGS: 1800 TO 1830

1. An Evil Without Remedy

11

(18)

2. The Fate of Millions Unborn

29

(17)

3. A Gadfly in Philadelphia

46

(18)

4. The Hand of God in North Carolina

64

(20)

5. The Spreading Stain

84

(21)

PART TWO CONNECTIONS: THE 1830's

6. Free as Sure as the Devil

105

(21)

7. Fanatics, Disorganizers, and Disturbers of the Peace

126

(21)

8. The Grandest Revolution the World Has Ever Seen

147

(19)

9. A Whole-Souled Man

166

PART THREE CONFRONTATION: THE 1840's

10. Across the Ohio

189

(28)

11. The Car of Freedom

217

(24)

12. Our Watchword Is ONWARD

241

(27)

13. The Saltwater Underground

268

(27)

PART FOUR VICTORY: THE 1850's

14. A Disease of the Body Politic

295

(25)

15. Do We Call This the Land of the Free?

320

(24)

16. General Tubman

344

(30)

17. Laboratories of Freedom

374

(27)

18. The Last Train

401

(32)

Epilogue

433

(7)

Notes

440

(61)

Selected Bibliography

501

(20)

Index

521

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Bound for Canaan
The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement

Chapter One

An Evil Without Remedy

The Negro Business is a great object with us. It is to the
Trade of the Country as the Soul to the Body.
-- Joseph Clay, slave owner

Josiah Henson's earliest memory was of the day that his father came home with his ear cut off. He, like his parents, had been born into slavery, and knew no other world beyond the small tract of tidewater Maryland wherehe was raised. He was five or six years old when the horrifying thing happened, probably sometime in 1795. "Father appeared one day covered inblood and in a state of great excitement," Henson would recall many yearslater. His head was bloody and his back lacerated, and "he was beside himselfwith mingled rage and suffering."

Henson was born on June 15, 1789, on the eastern shore of ChesapeakeBay, on a farm belonging to Francis Newman, about a mile fromPort Tobacco. His mother was the property of a neighbor, Dr. JosiahMcPherson, an amiable alcoholic who treated the infant Henson as somethingof a pet, bestowing upon him his own Christian name. In accordance with common practice, McPherson had hired out Henson's motherto Newman, to whom Henson's father belonged. Newman's overseer, a"rough, coarse man," had brutally assaulted Henson's mother. Whetherthis was an actual or attempted rape, or the more mundane brutality ofdaily life, Henson does not make clear. Perhaps he didn't know. Whateverthe cause, Henson's father, normally a good-humored man, attacked theoverseer with ferocity and would have killed him, had not Henson'smother intervened. For a slave to lift his hand "against the sacred templeof a white man's body," even in self-defense, was an act of rebellion. Slaveswere sometimes executed, and occasionally even castrated, for such an act.Knowing that retribution would be swift, Henson's father fled. Like mostrunaways, however, he didn't go far, but hid in the surrounding woods,venturing at night to beg food at nearby cabins. Eventually, hunger compelledhim to surrender. Slaves from surrounding plantations were orderedto witness his punishment for their "moral improvement." Onehundred lashes were laid on by a local blacksmith, fifty lashes at a time.Bleeding and faint, the victim was then held up against the whipping postand his right ear fastened to it with a "tack." The blacksmith then slicedthe ear off with a knife, to the sound of cheers from the crowd.

What the real sentiments of the slaves watching this punishmentmight have been no one can say. Perhaps they cheered in a desperate effortto reassure their masters that they, unlike Henson's father, were docileand trustworthy, and harbored no thoughts of rebellion. Or perhaps withrelief, seeing a "troublemaker," whose deed had caused their masters tobecome more vigilant and harsh in an effort to forestall further rebellion,now getting his just deserts. Or perhaps, to people so brutalized by theirown degradation, the cruelty may even have seemed a form of gruesomeentertainment. Afterward, Henson's father became a different man, broodingand morose -- "intractable," as slave owners typically described humanproperty that no longer responded compliantly to command. Nothingcould be done with him. "So off he was sent to Alabama. What was his afterfate neither my mother nor I ever learned."

Following his father's disappearance, Henson and his mother returnedto the McPherson estate. Even after years of freedom, Hensonwould remember the doctor as a "liberal, jovial" man of kind impulses,and he might well have lived out his life in passive oblivion as a slave hadnot it been for another stroke of fate that abruptly changed his life yet again. One morning, when Henson was still a small child, McPherson wasfound drowned in a stream, having apparently fallen from his horse thenight before in a drunken stupor. McPherson's property was to be sold off,and the proceeds divided among his heirs. The slaves were frantic at theprospect of being sold away from Maryland to the Deep South, where itwas well known that overwork, the grueling climate, and disease shortenedlives. Even sparing that, an estate sale commonly meant that parentswould be divided from children, and husbands from wives, lifelong friendsseparated from one another, a relatively benign master suddenly exchangedfor a cruel one. For female slaves, the future might mean rapeand permanent sexual exploitation. The only thing that those about to besold did know was that the future was completely uncertain, and that theyhad not the slightest power to affect their fate.

In due course, all the remaining Hensons -- Josiah's three sisters, twobrothers, his mother, and himself -- were put up at auction. The memoryof this event remained engraved in Josiah's memory until the end of hislife: the huddled group of anxious slaves, the crowd of bidders, the clinicalexamining of muscles and teeth, his mother's raw fear. His brothers andsisters were bid off one by one, while his mother, holding his hand, lookedon in "an agony of grief," whose meaning only slowly dawned on the littleboy as the sale proceeded. When his mother's turn came, she wasbought by a farmer named Isaac Riley, of Montgomery County, just outsidethe site of the new national capital at Washington. Then youngHenson himself was finally offered up for sale. In the midst of the bidding,as Josiah remembered it, his mother pushed through the crowd, flung herselfat Riley's feet, and begged him to buy the boy as well. Instead, heshoved her away in disgust ...

Bound for Canaan
The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement. Copyright © by Fergus Bordewich. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Excerpted from Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement by Fergus M. Bordewich
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