The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad

2. Slavery and Freedom

Chapter Two SLAVERY AND FREEDOM THE LEGENDARY underground railroad carried its passengers "from Slavery to Freedom." The phrase, quoted from the title of Professor Siebert's history of the underground railroad, implies a simple and dramatic contrast. According to this pattern of thinking, the slaves were all straining under their bonds, yearning to be free; their inherent love of freedom inspired their escapes. Yet seldom did the bondsmen act from such clearcut motives. The desirability of freedom for its own sake was apparently not nearly so obvious to those born in slavery as to Professor Siebert. In actual fact, many additional considerations, far more prosaic than a search for freedom, influenced those slaves who made a break from slavery. Motives for running away, whether instinctive or practical , were usually more than balanced for the slave by a variety of circumstances which made it far easier not to do so. Furthermore , there were other ways to leave bondage; not all slaves who entered the ranks of the freedmen did so by running away, nor did they all prefer life in the North to life in the South. After all, the slaves were people and every individual was unique. Each viewed life somewhat differently from his companions , and each had his own ideas about slavery. Even the conditions of servitude varied considerably according to the time, the location, and the immediate circumstances. But to the great majority, slavery meant hard work and severe restrictions on one's personal mobility. A Maryland slaveholder who voluntarily freed his slaves found that when they were free, they 20 The Liberty Line remained around his home but refused to work or even to make a gesture at paying rent. And when freedom finally came to all the southern slaves, many of them celebrated their emancipation by refraining from all work and by moving about, some- J times at random. An aged former slave recalled that only one family remained on the plantation where he had lived; "the rest was just like birds, they just flew."l Other freed slaves remained where they had been and continued to labor for their former masters. Many years later, some of the former bondsmen expressed their reaction to freedom when it had first come upon them. One said, "We knowed freedom was on us, but we didn't know what was to come with it. We thought we was going to get rich like the white folks. . . . But it didn't turn out that way." Another explained that when his master told him and his fellow slaves that they were free, "We didn't hardly know what he means, ... didn't many of us go, 'cause we didn't know where to of went." A Texas slave who also continued to work for his former master said, "Freedom wasn't no difference I knows of." Some even missed the security which the more paternalistic slaveholders had provided. An Alabama Negro reported that he had had "a harder time" since emancipation. Another from the same state recalled the "happy days" of the past, when the Negroes lacked the advantages they have enjoyed since the Civil War, but when they had someone to go to when they were in trouble and a security that they never again regained.2 To some few slaves at least, that security, which provided a modicum of food and shelter, was more meaningful than an abstract freedom. Others disagreed. One former slave admitted that he had had less security and more "worriment" since emancipation, but still he preferred freedom. Another woman who had lived 1 J. T. Mason to Gerrit Smith, January 21, 1850, abstracted in Calendar of the Gerrit Smith Papers in the Syracuse University Library (General Correspondence, vol. 2, Albany, N.Y., 1942), 357; Henderson H. Donald, The Negro Freedman (New York. 1952) • 1-3; B. A. Botkin. Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago, 1945) , 229. 2 Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, 93, 152. 223. 238; Charles S. Johnson, In the Shadow 0/ the Plantation (Chicago, 19!14) , 19. Slavery and Freedom 21 through both slavery and freedom admonished her interviewer not to believe anyone who said he would rather be a slave. "We all had freedom in our bones," said still another, who had been very young at the time of the Civil War.s A reported interview with a fugitive in an abolitionist newspaper indicates that there...