Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad - Hardcover

Diemer, Andrew K.

 
9780593534380: Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593534387 ISBN 13: 9780593534380
Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The remarkable and inspiring story of William Still, an unknown abolitionist who dedicated his life to managing a critical section of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia—the free state directly north of the Mason-Dixon Line—helping hundreds of people escape from slavery.

Born free in 1821 to two parents who had been enslaved, William Still was drawn to antislavery work from a young age. Hired as a clerk at the Anti-Slavery office in Philadelphia after teaching himself to read and write, he began directly assisting enslaved people who were crossing over from the South into freedom. Andrew Diemer captures the full range and accomplishments of Still’s life, from his resistance to Fugitive Slave Laws and his relationship with John Brown before the war, to his long career fighting for citizenship rights and desegregation until the early twentieth century.
 
Despite Still’s disappearance from history books, during his lifetime he was known as “the Father of the Underground Railroad.” Working alongside Harriet Tubman and others at the center of the struggle for Black freedom, Still helped to lay the groundwork for long-lasting activism in the Black community, insisting that the success of their efforts lay not in the work of a few charismatic leaders, but in the cultivation of extensive grassroots networks.  Through meticulous research and engaging writing, Vigilance establishes William Still in his rightful place in American history as a major figure of the abolitionist movement.
 

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ANDREW DIEMER is an associate professor at Towson University. He earned his PhD from Temple University and is author of The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016. He lives in Philadelphia.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

A Boy in the Pines

William Still was born October 7, 1821, in a remote corner of the southern New Jersey pinelands, the youngest of eighteen children of Levin and Charity Steel. Their home was, as William’s older brother recalled, “a log house, with one door and no glass windows in it,” on the southern edge of Burlington County in what is now Shamong Township, but which was then part of Washington Township, a few miles east of the small town of Medford. The soil was sandy, and the Stills’ property was one of the small farms that had been carved out of the pine forest that to this day stretches over the gently undulating ground of southern New Jersey. Black residents, the vast majority of them free, made up less than 5 percent of the population in Burlington County, and while robust Black communities could be found in parts of the county, the Stills settled in an area where they were one of few Black families.

What had brought the Still family to this place? Neither Levin nor Charity had been born in New Jersey. Both had been born into slavery, a hundred miles to the south on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in Caroline County. In contrast to Dorchester County, to its immediate south, bordering the Chesapeake, Caroline County, inland and abutting the state of Delaware along its eastern border, contained somewhat fewer slaves, about 20 percent of the population in 1800. As young children, both had been enslaved to one William Banning, but when Banning died in 1780, Levin, who was then about ten, became the property of his widow, Margaret, while Charity, then about eight and known as Sidney, passed to Banning’s daughter, Lydia Morton, who later sold her to Alexander Griffith (a man William Still would later remember as Saunders Griffin). Margaret Banning died soon after her husband, and Levin became the property of her grandson, William Wood, who was about the same age as Levin.

Slavery had been the foundation of the economy in this part of Maryland for more than a century, but that economy was changing. The turbulence of the American Revolution helped catalyze a significant shift. Planters who had once almost exclusively focused on a single crop, tobacco, now increasingly grew grains, fruits, and vegetables, and raised livestock. Wheat in particular found a ready market across the Atlantic as the French Revolution and its aftermath disrupted agriculture across Europe. With this diversified agricultural economy came a corresponding demand for different kinds of labor and a transformation in the seasonal rhythms of production. Wheat, for example, required two intense periods of labor during its cultivation: planting and harvest. At these times, farmers sought all the work they could get. The rest of the year, however, there was far less to be done in order to tend to the crop. This posed a problem for planters, who saw that their enslaved labor force continued to grow over these years. Ever creative in their exploitation of slave labor, masters turned this problem into an opportunity. In the decades which followed the American Revolution, slave laborers were put to work grinding grain, tending livestock, and transporting crops to market. They worked as coopers, smiths, millers, and tanners.

While slave masters did their best to get the most value out of their enslaved property, there was a growing sense among the planters of the Chesapeake region that they had more slave labor than they needed. Some responded by selling slaves south and west to the burgeoning cotton frontier where the lust for slave labor was almost insatiable. The division of enslaved families became the hallmark of this “generation” of Chesapeake slavery. Other masters hired out underused slaves for a period of time. Many of these hired-out slaves were put to work in towns, large and small, across the region. There was also the escalating fear among masters that their property in slaves was endangered by the possibility of flight. Slaves had always run away, of course, but the gradual abolition of slavery in the states just north of Maryland, along with the growth of free Black populations closer to home, especially in Baltimore, where fugitives might find refuge, meant that fugitives were ever more likely to be successful in evading recapture.

Enslaved Marylanders were quick to take advantage of these conditions. Masters were desperate to find some way to control enslaved property that seemed increasingly beyond their control, and as a result more and more were willing to negotiate with their slaves in order to secure them as long as possible; for some this would provide a path to freedom. Levin Steel was one of these who made his desires clear. “I’d sooner die than stay a slave,” he told his master. Rather than risk losing his slave for nothing, Levin Steel’s young master agreed to allow him to purchase his own freedom. They settled on a price and then it fell to Levin to find ways to meet that price. The complex economy of the Chesapeake presented opportunities for a man like Levin to make extra money, but this was, of course, for work done above what was already demanded of him by his master. He would have had to work late into the night, and on the Sundays that slaves were typically given off. Often enslaved families pooled their labor to pay for the manumission of a single member; perhaps this was the case for the Steel family. Levin was resolute, and on November 22, 1798, his efforts were rewarded: his master, William Wood, signed his manumission. Levin was twenty-four years old, and it had taken him years, and sacrifices at which we can only guess, to buy his own freedom.

Levin had a problem, however. His wife, Sidney, was still enslaved, as were their four children, two boys and two girls. They had a different owner, so perhaps Sidney’s owner was unwilling to negotiate with her as Levin’s master had with him. Even if their master was willing to sell, perhaps the prospect of paying the price for five manumissions was not feasible. Levin and Sidney knew that every year it took to pay the price of manumission increased the risk that a master would sell his property to the highest bidder, potentially separating the family forever. Whatever the case, Levin decided to leave his family behind, heading north to New Jersey. It is possible that Levin hoped he would be able to make more money in this new home and that he planned to return to purchase his wife and children. Perhaps he and Sidney had planned for her to run away when the opportunity arose. In any case, likely sometime in 1807, Sidney and the four children fled from their master and joined Levin in New Jersey.

The family was reunited in the small town of Greenwich, New Jersey, located along the water where the Delaware River broadens into the Delaware Bay. They likely made their home in the Black community known as Springtown, in the northeastern portion of town. Across southern New Jersey, such Black settlements provided community and protection to Black residents. Communities like Springtown also relied on close relationships with sympathetic white Quakers who were prominent in the region; Friends had been among the earliest settlers of Greenwich. Fugitives from slavery like Sidney were particularly aware of their vulnerability. New Jersey had passed a gradual abolition law in 1804, stipulating that all enslaved people born after July 4, 1804, would become free, upon their twenty-first birthday for women, and upon their twenty-fifth birthday for men, but that meant that there were thousands of people still legally enslaved in the state. Even more pressing, the fugitive slave law of 1793 permitted slave catchers to travel into the state in search of those who, like Sidney and her family, had fled from bondage in another state. The family changed their last name from Steel to...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593534387
ISBN 13 
9780593534380
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

Weberstr. 67
Osnabrück
49084
Deutschland