An important book of epic scope on America’s first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for change

The civil war brought to a climax the country’s bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery’s denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and white, slave and free, who joined forces to create what would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that occupies as romantic a place in the nation’s imagination as the Lewis and Clark expedition. The true story of the Underground Railroad is much more morally complex and politically divisive than even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the country’s westward expansion arose a fierce clash of values that was nothing less than a war for the country’s soul. Not since the American Revolution had the country engaged in an act of such vast and profound civil disobedience that not only challenged prevailing mores but also subverted federal law.

Bound for Canaan tells the stories of men and women like David Ruggles, who invented the black underground in New York City; bold Quakers like Isaac Hopper and Levi Coffin, who risked their lives to build the Underground Railroad; and the inimitable Harriet Tubman. Interweaving thrilling personal stories with the politics of slavery and abolition, Bound for Canaan shows how the Underground Railroad gave birth to this country’s first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for social change.

Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of several books, including Bound for Canaan, Killing the White Man’s Indian, and My Mother’s Ghost, a memoir. The son of a national civil rights leader for Native Americans, he was introduced early in life to racial politics. As a journalist, he has written widely on political and cultural subjects in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, American Heritage, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He was born in New York City, and now lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley with his wife and daughter.

Bound for Canaan

The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights MovementBy Fergus Bordewich

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Fergus Bordewich
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060524316

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 …

Continues…
Excerpted from Bound for Canaanby Fergus Bordewich Copyright © 2006 by Fergus Bordewich. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.