What Humans Are Capable Of

I finished Bound for Canaan this week, and I can't tell you how enlightening the book was! There was so much information, so much of which I didn't know, that I was dazzled!  I now know how very, very complex the whole issue of slavery was for many more years than I realized, and I have a great deal of admiration for all the people involved in making slavery the major moral issue it became.  I now look at the black people who live around me with new eyes, wondering if they are descended from slaves who benefited from or who were involved in making possible the Underground Railroad.

I really believe everyone should read this book because it will fill in all the blanks in your education about the Underground Railroad.  Most people are content to think the whole thing consisted of a bunch of brave white people who helped hide runaway slaves in their attics or cellars.  With the exception of naming Harriet Tubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, most people probably couldn't bring to mind a single abolitionist or Underground Railroad conductor.  I was like that.  But there were hundreds upon hundreds of people needed to make it work over those decades, people who stepped up, making large and small contributions, doing it mostly for no monetary gain--courageous people who risked their lives and often their livelihoods to keep the enslavement of fellow humans from being comfortably practiced in this nation, and finally, though it took a great war, to end it.

I learned about the many cities, such as Detroit, that served as centers of underground activity from very early on.  I knew about Cincinnati and Philadelphia, but I didn't know about the many other places where slave holders and their hired kidnappers (looking for escaped slaves) were afraid to go because they would not be able to recover their "property" without a fight.  I didn't know how widespread the Underground Railroad eventually became, to where protecting fugitives was openly acknowledged and encouraged by whole towns, counties, and even states.  I didn't know that there were thousands of American black people who had to escape this country all together, settling in Canada where they lived as citizens and where they were beyond the reach of slave catchers who would kidnap them and drag them back to bondage.

But I also didn't know that slaves in the deep south had very little hope of escape, so tightly controlled was the entire region's plantation system, the slave economy and its structure so deeply entrenched in the state and local governments, and indeed the culture of the region, that anyone who wanted to help slaves or who believed slavery was wrong had no way of acting on those beliefs without taking a terrible risk.  There were few slaves, apparently, from Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia or South Carolina who escaped to freedom in those decades before the civil war. North Carolina for a while had a colony of Quakers who were active in helping the enslaved, but eventually, when the laws got more and more stringent and heavily biased toward slave holders, the North Carolina abolitionists had to escape themselves or risk death.

I have never have had much sympathy with the southern cause, but I came away from this book with tremendous anger toward the stubbornness of those slave holders and really the entire system, clinging desperately to what they must have known was an evil, evil system, and all for the sake of money, really, when it comes down to it. They wanted cheap labor, and as my mother points out astutely, they didn't want to have to work.  They fancied themselves aristocrats, I guess, like the 18th century lords and ladies of England and France, lounging about in their castles or mansions while the lowly did all the work.

Of course, the whole country benefited from the slave economy that made the production of cotton and other staple crops so cheap that we could lead the world in the manufacture of fabric and other goods. No part of our nation is exempt from blame.  Think of all the mills and factories that existed because of cotton, tobacco, sugar cane and rice, all the goods produced and sold to people who could afford to buy them because they were making money on the backs of their fellow humans.  Think of all those nice young New England girls who worked in the cotton mills, able to buy trinkets or send home money to farm families because of people who had been kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, raped, beaten, starved and, if not killed, in every way possible demeaned and destroyed their entire lives.  If they had known, would those young women have thought it a fair exchange?  I wonder.

But what's perhaps most amazing about this book is the hope that springs from every page.  Despite all the conditions that made it next to impossible to fight against this evil institution, people still did.  They risked everything to eradicate what they saw as a stain on our democracy, and they won! Eventually, they won. In this book, human deeds are shown to be both horrifying and awe-inspiring.  People are capable of both great evil and great good.  And we should never forget that.  Despite the fact that we are still fighting the battle that began when the first kidnapped Africans landed in this part of the world, we are capable of triumphing some day.

I've always believed in humans' ability to triumph, and Bound for Canaan, despite the horrors it brings to light, has only reinforced that belief.

Next time I'll talk about something more mundane--a new mystery by Nevada Barr.  See you then!

Underground Revelations

I've made good progress in Bound for Canaan this week. It's very well written, and full of interesting information about the Underground Railroad.  The first part of the book deals with the beginnings of the network, which was, apparently, never formally constituted.  It simply evolved, over the decades, from its beginnings as isolated pockets of people (principally in the North) who believed slavery was evil and should be resisted, into something widespread, well known and well organized.

The anti-slavery underground was more than just networks of people who helped the enslaved to escape to freedom.  People also helped the fugitives find jobs and establish lives in communities (mostly in the Northern states).  They helped with the cause of abolition, too, politically and socially.  Many of the people involved were members of religious groups who came to believe slavery was a grievous sin that must be eradicated immediately.  The Quakers were the most prominent of such groups, but the Methodists were also early advocates of resistance. Ministers would urge their congregations to join with them in helping slaves in any way they could and to convert others to the cause.

One major thing I learned from this book is that the Underground Railroad was not just a group of sympathetic northern wealthy whites. The author makes the point repeatedly that the Underground Railroad involved people of all ethnicities and socioeconomic groups who came from both the north and the south.  Many black people, both free and enslaved, helped fugitives escape and establish new lives.  Some helped through the courts, others through the media, through their churches or their businesses.

As with every history book I've read, what struck me with Bound for Canaan is the immense complexity of this period in our history.  There was an awful lot going on with this issue in the late 18th century into the 19th century.  After reading this book, there is no way anyone can say that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War.  Everyone was talking about it; everyone had an opinion about the rightness of slavery, how the enslaved should be dealt with, what to do with freed blacks, how to help the newly freed people.  Many people were frightened by the possibility of the violence that this problem and its solution seemed to bring with it.

The author also mentions the cotton gin, and how that transformed the more diverse southern economy into the cotton monoculture economy it became, and how it changed the fate of the enslaved and the formerly enslaved.  The increased value of cotton and the outlawing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808 made slaves more valuable than ever.  Owners were very reluctant to let them go, and the Fugitive Slave Act had already made it possible for slaves to be hunted throughout the United States.  For that reason alone, many slaves traveled all the way to Canada so that they could not be caught and returned. But even freed slaves or those who had been born free were not safe from slave catchers, who stood to gain from selling any dark-skinned person they could kidnap.  And of course those kidnapped people had to be rescued, too, adding to the numbers of those in need of help and the difficulty of helping them.

One important Underground Railroad conductor and abolitionist was the Reverend Rankin, whose house high on a hill overlooking the town of Ripley, Ohio and the Ohio River gave hope to slaves coming through Kentucky on their way north. His house still sits there.  You can visit it and imagine how he lived and carried out his crucial mission for over thirty years.  He was only one of many, though.  Some of the people involved in this crusade helped hundreds, even thousands of slaves escape bondage over the decades.

But I guess I've said enough for now.  And I'm not even half way through! There's much more to come next time, so stay tuned!

Sticks and Stones and Devilish Neighbors

This week I finished reading the book about witches, The Devil of Great Island. Though it was short, only 207 pages, it was pretty slow going, probably due to the fact that the book seems to be truly scholarly, which means that it's well documented but not particularly compelling as a story.  But I did learn some interesting things.

One of the things I learned is that early colonial New England was a very complex and contentious place--lots of arguing and fighting among the inhabitants, whether English, French, or Indian. For the most part, the fighting seemed to be between religious factions, yet the causes stemmed more from property disputes and politics than religious practices or freedoms.  One interesting fact is that the squabbling among colonists got so bad at one point that the English government had to step in and tell the Massachusetts Bay folks that they had to be more tolerant of other religions!

But the Crown's meddling in colonial affairs did little to improve matters. In fact, their untidy method of granting land parcels was what caused some of the problems in the first place. Other problems arose from the diverse group of colonists, some of whom had widely divergent ideas about how to establish a village or a colony. Their conflicts with the natives who were displaced by their increasingly large settlements also factored into the tense atmosphere.

One result of all this fighting, the author Emerson Baker argues, was an increase in accusations of witchcraft.  According to the author, accusing neighbors of witchcraft was a way to get them out of the way and then grab their land or property.  But there was another side to the witchcraft controversy: the people who were accused probably were guilty of harming people, Baker believes, just not as witches.  The episodes of stone throwing, for instance, were probably secret attacks by very mortal neighbors who were unhappy with the victims' behavior and saw no other way of persuading them to stop.  Unfortunately, with one particularly exasperating fellow, George Walton, even repeated stonings failed to curb his bad behavior. His next door neighbor, Thomas Walford, was one of his victims. Since Mr. Walford was also my ninth great grandfather, I found the book's chapter on the Walfords very interesting, as you can imagine.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the period it covers, the late 17th century in New England, but be aware that it is a history book, not a narrative. 

For my next book, I'm going to stick with history and plunge into a book on the Underground Railroad that I've been meaning to read, Bound for Canaan.  I'll let you know how that goes next time!