Chesapeake by James A. Michener
Now Rachel and her brother took over. They were a resolute pair, and when the slaves arrived in Philadelphia they quickly dispersed them to various hiding places so that no one could deduce that these were the men who had so humiliated the trackers. Rachel, always anticipating trouble, floated one story that the eight slaves had reached Lancaster and another that they were already in New York, where she had arranged for abolitionists to hold a supposed party at which the eight were to be exhibited.
But she had underestimated the enemy, for as she walked down Market Street after having made arrangements to ship three of the men to Boston, she saw to her horror that Lafe Turlock and Herman Cline were coming toward her, with two policemen in tow. Turning quickly, she pressed herself against a shop window and watched as they passed from sight. That night she read in the paper their advertisement:
RUNAWAY
Eight Prime Slaves Four Marked with Scars Back
and Face One hundred dollars reward for every one
returned to Herman Cline of Little Choptank,
Maryland, who can be reached at Mrs. Demson’s
Boarding House on Arch Street.
Under the law, every citizen of Pennsylvania was obligated to assist Herman Cline in recovering his slaves. Some informant had alerted him to the fact that despite the false leads spread by Rachel, the fugitives had reached Philadelphia and were in hiding there. Federal marshals were already searching rooming houses, and a pro-slavery group of southerners residing in the city had augmented the reward being offered by Cline. It could only be a matter of days before the runaways were apprehended, and men were already speaking of the fact that they must first be returned to northern Maryland for punishment due them for having strung up the trackers.
But the abolitionists were not powerless, especially with Rachel Paxmore goading them on. What they did was to find a Quaker printer not only willing but positively eager to help them. He printed large handbills, four hundred of them, proclaiming the arrival in Philadelphia of the notorious slavers, Lafe Turlock—with a graphic description—and Herman Cline, one of the crudest masters in the state of Maryland. The poster showed woodblock caricatures of the odious pair and ended with this admonition:
Every citizen is warned to be on watch for these monsters, these body-snatchers. Wherever they go on the street, shout warnings of their passage. Wherever they stop to eat, advise everyone within hearing of their identity. Mark where they sleep and let us know. And if they even approach a black citizen, shout and call for help, because these men will snatch freed Negroes if they cannot find their former slaves.
These handbills were distributed to every inn, every dining place, tacked onto poles and pasted on storefronts. Every leader of the abolitionist movement received four copies, which were to be displayed in prominent places.
Rachel and her brother Comly later told their mother what had happened in the ensuing days. “We knew where they slept, at Mrs. Demson’s, so when they appeared on the street, we had packs of young people standing there, who surrounded them, shouting, ‘Slavers! Slavers!’ Wherever they stopped to eat, we stood near their table and stared at them. If they wanted an ale, they could have one only if every person at the inn knew who they were, and many men would spit on the floor and refuse to drink while they were in the place. We made them anathema.”
Lafe Turlock and Herman Cline! They withstood the torments for three days, then quit the city. They thought at first of trying to find their slaves in New York, but one of the abolitionists shouted at them while they were dining, “Don’t think you can escape us! We’ve warned the committees in Lancaster and New York.”
So in the end they had to take passage back to Baltimore. As their boat pulled away from the city, Cline looked at the skyline and almost wept. “Just think, Lafe! I work my heart out in those swamps. I get a decent start in life. And then my property runs away. Nine prime slaves. More than twenty thousand dollars. My goddamn niggers are hidin’ in that city, somewheres.”
Lafe said, “It was them signs. They riled the people against us.”
“A man’s whole savings wiped out. Damn, it seems unfair.”
But the reward for the eight slaves still stood, and Rachel was aware that numerous adventurers lusted for this money. “What can we do?” she asked members of the Philadelphia rescue committee.
“There is only one sure thing,” a wise old Quaker gentleman assured her. “Thee must get them to Canada.”
“But I thought Boston ...”
“They are not safe even there. A black man can find safety nowhere in this country. He must go to Canada.”
So Rachel Paxmore and her brother arranged to spirit the eight slaves out of the country. It took time and money and courage. An improvised path had evolved without conscious direction: “There’s a doctor in Doylestown, and then you go to Scranton, and beyond New York the safe spot is the home of Frederick Douglass in Rochester.”
Rachel stayed with the men all the way to the Canadian border, and only when they were safely across did she permit the tension which had gripped her for three weeks to show itself. She sat on a fallen tree and wept, her shoulders quivering with the anguish that assailed her. “Sister,” said Comly as he sat on the log beside her, “it’s ended. They’re safe.”
But she said, “How despicable. That men in the United States who seek freedom must flee to Canada to find it.”
The flight of nine slaves from Herman Cline’s farm on the Little Choptank so angered the other owners in the region that they convened at Devon Island to consider what steps they might take to prevent similar losses of their capital.
“Cline lost twenty thousand dollars in one night,” a planter from St. Michaels said. “A repetition could wipe us little fellows out.”
“Has any serious thought been given to driving the Paxmores from this territory?” asked a burly man who had been forced to chase two of his slaves all the way to the Pennsylvania border before retrieving them. “Things have been a lot better along the Miles River since David Baker ...” He left it there, not wanting openly to suggest that the Paxmores be gunned down.
“What we might do,” one of the Refuge Steeds suggested, “is use religion. Remind the slaves of their moral obligations to us.”
This proposal met with general approbation, and many of the planters turned to Paul Steed. One asked, “Paul, couldn’t you give a series of sermons? I’d love to have you come to my place and talk to my hands.”
Others seconded this suggestion, but Steed demurred. “I don’t speak well in public. The audience stares at my crooked neck and doesn’t listen to what I say.”
“Some truth to that,” the man from St. Michaels agreed. “But the idea of church services is still good.”
And then someone remembered a tall, thin, fire-eating Methodist-Protestant minister from across the bay; he’d had outstanding success with revivals and delivered what was regarded as “the best nigger sermon in the business.”
“Are you thinking of Reverend Buford?” Paul asked, and when the planters said that was the man, Paul said, “I know him. He stayed with us here at Devon.”
“He’s not Catholic,” a planter said.
“I wanted to argue religion with him. He’s powerful.”
It was agreed that two Choptank men would cross the bay to enlist the aid of Reverend Buford, and when they saw him at the little town of Hopewell on the James River they were reassured that he was the man they wanted. Tall, funereal, with a mop of black hair and a stupendous Adam’s apple that punctuated his simplest remarks, making them seem more vivid than they were, he was, as they had remembered, a fiery man. “What we want,” they told him, “is your best nigger sermon.”
He was reluctant to leave Virginia, where he found much work to do, but when he heard that the invitation came from Paul Steed, he said with some eagerness, “I’ll come. Most intelligent Catholic I ever met.”
“Well, he needs you, and so do we all!”
“Nigger trouble??
“Nine of Herman Cline’s prime hands run off. Eight was traced to Philadelphia.”
“They were recovered?”
“Nope. Abolitionists up there run him and Lafe Turlock out of town. Slaves vanished into thin air. Lost twenty thousand dollars in one night.”
“I’ve heard of Cline,” Buford said. “Some of our people send their slaves to him, and I have no intention of crossing the bay to aid a monster. Probably deserved to lose his slaves, all of them.”
“Reverend, it isn’t Cline we’re worried about. It’s us. Decent men like Paul Steed are in danger of losing their entire investments. We need help. Pacification.”
“We all need it,” Buford said with surprising anxiety. “Who can tell where the passions of this day are going to lead? I pray every night for guidance.”
“And we pray for your guidance,” one of the planters said. “Come over with us and help quieten things.”
“If you thought it would do any good, I’d be willing to give my Theft of Self sermon.”
“That’s the very one we want. I heard you give that at Somers Cove three years ago. Very powerful.”
Reverend Buford started delivering Theft of Self at the smaller plantations east of Patamoke, intending to build expectations as he moved always closer to the main centers of population. The format was invariable. In the late afternoon, when the day’s work was pretty well concluded, all slaves were assembled in some tree-lined open space. Buford insisted that every white person on the plantation be in attendance, seated in the shade and dressed in their Sunday clothes. He started his preaching from a rostrum, but as his enthusiasm grew, he moved about quite freely, using wild gestures and imploring tones.
His message was simple and effective. He did not dodge the issue that had brought him to the Eastern Shore:
“I know and you know that the other week nine slaves ran away from their master, trying to find what they called freedom in the cities of the North. I suppose there could even be some of you standing before me now who have had such thoughts. I confess that even I might have them, were I one of you. But what does God say about such behavior?”
With tremendous force he lined out the teaching of the Bible on slavery. God ordained it; Jesus approved of it; St. Paul said it was one of the gateways to heaven. He was especially strong when he reached the matter of punishment, for some slaves were beginning to ask why it was, if God was all-merciful, that He encouraged beatings? Like all preachers who gave nigger sermons, he lingered over Proverbs 29:19, which stated specifically that a slave “will not be corrected by words, for though he understand he will not answer.”
And he developed the further thesis that when a master struck a slave, he was doing the work of God Himself: “God directs the master to punish you with stripes when you do not obey.” He also spent much time on that curious passage at First Peter 2:18, beloved of southern preachers. This little book was one of the most trivial in the Bible, yet chance passages from it condemned a race.
“What does the Bible tell you? That you must obey your masters, and not only your good masters, but especially your bad ones, because when you submit to their punishment, you build up gold in heaven. And the Bible says, furthermore, that if you are punished unjustly when you have done no wrong, and I know this sometimes happens, causing great animosities, you must submit with a glad heart, because God sees and makes allowances for you in heaven. That is the law of the Bible.”
All their lives the slaves had heard about Proverbs and Peter, and now even though Reverend Buford glossed them with his special rhetoric, they grew restless. Some stared at the violent movement of his Adam’s apple and whispered, “He gonna choke hisse’f!” and others began to fidget. Buford knew how to handle this; he had two additional arrows in his quiver, and when he shot these at the slaves, they listened, for the first contained a definite threat:
“You look at Mr. Sanford sitting there and you think, ‘He has it easy!’ But you don’t know that Mr. Sanford has obligations at the bank, and he must gather up the money, a dollar at a time, working hard to do so, and pay that money to the banker, or he will lose this plantation. The banker will come down here and take it away and sell every one of you to Louisiana or Mississippi.”
He recited other heavy obligations of the white folk sitting in the shade; this one had examinations to pass at Princeton, that one had to care for the sick, and he, Reverend Buford, was obligated to the fine people who ran his church. The world was crammed with duties, and some of the lightest were those borne by slaves.
It was his second arrow that gave Buford his peculiar force in pacifying slaves, and it was from this that his famous sermon took its name:
“At dinner today Mr. Sanford told me that he had never had a finer bunch of slaves than you. ‘They work hard,’ he told me. ‘They mind the crops. They wouldn’t steal a single one of my chickens.’ Yes, that’s what Mr. Sanford told me. He said that you were the most honest slaves in Maryland, but then he added something which shocked me. He said that some of you had been thinking of running away. And what is running away, really? Tell me, what is it? It is theft of self. Yes, you steal yourself and take it away from the rightful owner, and God considers that a sin. In fact, it’s a worse sin than stealing a chicken or a cow or a boat, because the value of what you have stolen is so much greater. Mr. Sanford owns you. You belong to him. You are his property, and if you run away, you are stealing yourself from him. And this is a terrible sin. If you commit this sin, you will roast in hell.”
At this point Reverend Buford liked to spend about fifteen minutes describing hell. It was filled primarily with black folk who had sinned against their masters; there was an occasional white man who had murdered his wife, but never anyone like Herman Cline, who had murdered two of his slaves. It was a horrendous place, much worse than any slave camp, and it could be avoided by one simple tactic: obedience. Then the preacher came to his peroration, and it became evident why he insisted upon the attendance of the white masters:
“Look at your master sitting there, this kind man surrounded by his good family. He spent long years working and saving and in the end he had enough money to buy you. So that you could live here along this beautiful river rather than in a swamp. Look at his beautiful wife, who comes out at night to your cabins to bring you medicine. And those fine children that you helped to bring up, so that you would have good masters in the years to come. These are the good people who own you. Now, do you want to injure them by stealing yourself, and hiding yourself up North where they cannot find you? Do you want to deprive Mr. Sanford of property he bought and paid for? Do you want to go against the word of God, the commands of Jesus Christ, and make those fine people lose their plantation?”
He preferred at this point for the owners to start weeping, for then some of the older slaves would weep, too, and this gave him an opportunity for a ringing conclusion, with the white folk in tears, the slaves shouting, “Amen! Amen!” and all ending in a rededication to duty.
It was a fine thing to hear Reverend Buford speak; he delivered his Theft of Self sermon at eight major plantations, ending at Devon Island, where Paul Steed entertained him in the big house prior to his performance.
“You’ve matured since we last met,” Steed said.
“You’ve become quite a manager,” Buford responded. “Last time it was all books. This time all work.”
“What do you hear in Virginia?” Steed asked.
Buford was no fool. He circulated in the best circles and kept his ears open. “We find ourselves resisting agitators from both ends.”
“What do you mean?”
“The abolitionists pressure us from the North to free our slaves, and the secessionists from South Carolina pressure us to leave the Union.”
“What will you do?”
“Virginia? We’ll make up our own minds.”
“To do what?”
For the first time during his foray to the Eastern Shore, Reverend Buford was at a lo
“Slavery?” Steed broke in.
“In a hundred years it will fall of its own weight.”
“Have you read Hinton Helper?”
“Yes, and I’ve read your retort.”
“Which do you prefer?”
Again the gaunt reverend fell silent, finally mustering courage to say, “Helper. We’ll all be better off when slavery ends.”
“I have close to a million dollars tied up in my slaves.”
“Tied up is the right phrase.”
“Then why do you continue to give your sermons?”
“Because we must all fight for time, Mr. Steed. We must keep things on an even balance, and believe me, having several million former slaves running free across the countryside will not maintain that balance.”
“Answer me directly. Are the Quakers right? Should I free my slaves now.”
“Absolutely not.”
“When?”
“In about forty years. Your son Mark seems a steady young man. He’ll want to free them, of that I’m sure.”
“And my million dollars?”
“Have you ever really had it? I preach often at Janney’s big plantation on the Rappahannock—”
“Some of my forebears were Janneys.”
“I think I heard that. Well, they’re supposed to have a million dollars, too. And they have difficulty finding a few coins to pay me. They’re rich, but they’re poor. And history has a way, from time to time, of shaking the apple tree, and the weak fruit falls off and the owner sees that he never had very many apples to begin with. Not really.”