The Underground Railroad

In war-and to put down a slave rebellion was the most glorious call to arms-the patrollers transcended their origins to become a true army. Cora pictured the insurrections as great, bloody battles, unfurling beneath a night sky lit by vast fires. From Martin’s accounts, the actual uprisings were small and chaotic. The slaves walked the roads between towns with their scavenged weapons: hatchets and scythes, knives and bricks. Tipped by colored turncoats, the white enforcers organized elaborate ambushes, decimating the insurgents with gunfire and running them down on horseback, reinforced by the might of the United States Army. At the first alarms, civilian volunteers joined the patrollers to quell the disturbance, invading the quarters and putting freemen’s homes to the torch. Suspects and bystanders crammed the jails. They strung up the guilty and, in the interest of prevention, a robust percentage of the innocent. Once the slain had been avenged-and more important, the insult to white order repaid with interest-the civilians returned to their farms and factories and stores, and the patrollers resumed their rounds.

The revolts were quashed, but the immensity of the colored population remained. The verdict of the census lay in glum columns and rows.

“We know it, but don’t say it,” Cora told Martin.

The crate creaked as Martin shifted.

“And if we say, we don’t say it for anyone to hear,” Cora said. “How big we are.”

On a chilly evening last autumn, the powerful men of North Carolina convened to solve the colored question. Politicians attuned to the shifting complexities of the slavery debate; wealthy farmers who drove the beast of cotton and felt the reins slipping; and the requisite lawyers to fire the soft clay of their schemes into permanence. Jamison was present, Martin told Cora, in his capacities as a senator and local planter. It was a long night.

They assembled in Oney Garrison’s dining room. Oney lived atop Justice Hill, so named because it allowed one to see everything below for miles and miles, placing the world in proportion. After this night their meeting would be known as the Justice Convention. Their host’s father had been a member of the cotton vanguard and a savvy proselytizer of the miracle crop. Oney grew up surrounded by the profits of cotton, and its necessary evil, niggers. The more he thought about it-as he sat there in his dining room, taking in the long, pallid faces of the men who drank his liquor and overstayed their welcome-what he really wanted was simply more of the former and less of the latter. Why were they spending so much time worrying about slave uprisings and northern influence in Congress when the real issue was who was going to pick all this goddamned cotton?

In the coming days the newspapers printed the numbers for all to see, Martin said. There were almost three hundred thousand slaves in North Carolina. Every year that same number of Europeans-Irish and Germans mostly, fleeing famine and political unpleasantness-streamed into the harbors of Boston, New York, Philadelphia. On the floor of the state house, in the editorial pages, the question was put forth: Why cede this supply to the Yankees? Why not alter the course of that human tributary so that it fed southward? Advertisements in overseas papers promoted the benefits of term labor, advance agents expounded in taverns and town meetings and poorhouses, and in due course the charter ships teemed with their willing human cargo, bringing dreamers to the shores of a new country. Then they disembarked to work the fields.

“Never seen a white person pick cotton,” Cora said.

“Before I came back to North Carolina, I’d never seen a mob rip a man limb from limb,” Martin said. “See that, you stop saying what folks will do and what they won’t.”

True, you couldn’t treat an Irishman like an African, white nigger or no. There was the cost of buying slaves and their upkeep on one hand and paying white workers meager but livable wages on the other. The reality of slave violence versus stability in the long term. The Europeans had been farmers before; they would be farmers again. Once the immigrants finished their contracts (having paid back travel, tools, and lodging) and took their place in American society, they would be allies of the southern system that had nurtured them. On Election Day when they took their turn at the ballot box, theirs would be a full vote, not three-fifths. A financial reckoning was inevitable, but come the approaching conflict over the race question, North Carolina would emerge in the most advantageous position of all the slave states.

In effect, they abolished slavery. On the contrary, Oney Garrison said in response. We abolished niggers.

“All the women and children, the men-where did they go?” Cora asked. Someone shouted in the park, and the two in the attic were still for a while.

“You saw,” Martin said.