HENRY BIBB, A COLONIZER

The underground railroad has been characterized by one historian of the Negro race as a "safety valve to the institution of slavery" since it tended to remove from the slave States those Negroes whose special abilities and leadership might have involved them in insurrections.1 Their abilities frequently found an outlet in another land, under different conditions and in an entirely orderly way. Negroes who fled to Canada were given considerable material aid by the government of Canada and treated with sympathy by its people. Their own leaders, however, played no small part in the progress that they made in the British provinces and the names of Josiah Henson, Martin R. Delany and Henry Bibb stand for intelligence, energy and high qualities of service on behalf of the race in Canada.

Henry Bibb, born in slavery and without more than the barest rudiments of education, became prominent in the anti-slavery crusade, was actively associated with the Liberty Party in the State of Michigan during the forties and when the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850 drove thousands of his people out of the North and into Canada he set himself vigorously to the task of settling them on the land, providing schools and churches, and through his paper, The Voice of the Fugitive, exercised a good influence upon them at a time when their minds might be expected to be unsettled. Garrison and others who were active in the anti-slavery movement paid tribute to his services in that cause.

Bibb's career in slavery is told in his narrative published in New York in 1849.2 He was born in Shelby

1 Williams, G. W., History of the Negro Race in America, N. Y., 1883, Vol. II, p. 58.

2 See The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, written by himself, with an introduction by Lucius Matlack, New York, 1849. I am indebted to the Brooklyn Public Library for the loan of this book.

county, Kentucky, in May, 1815, the son of a slave mother and a white father, and his childhood he sums up by saying that he was "educated in the school of adversity, whips and chains." Of his early life he writes:

"I was a wretched slave, compelled to work under the lash without wages and often without clothes enough to hide my nakedness. I have often worked without half enough to eat, both late and early, by day and by night. I have often laid my wearied limbs down at night to rest upon a dirt floor, or a bench without any covering at all, because I had nowhere else to rest my wearied body, after having worked hard all the day. I have been compelled in early life to go at the bidding of a tyrant through all kinds of weather, hot and cold, wet or dry, and without shoes frequently until the month of December, with my bare feet on the cold frosty ground, cracked open and bleeding as I walked."

From the slaveholder's standpoint he was a most unsatisfactory servant, being an incorrigible runaway, a blemish on his moral character which probably accounted for the frequency with which he changed owners, six separate sales being recorded at prices ranging from $850 to $1200. The plantation punishments had no effect upon him save to increase his desire for freedom.

As with many another slave the very evils of the system served a purpose in Bibb's life. Denied education of a normal kind he became observant and his mind was enlightened by what he saw and heard. "Among other good trades," he says, "I learned the art of running away to perfection. I made a regular business of it and never gave it up until I had broken the bonds of slavery and landed myself in Canada where I was regarded as a man and not a thing."

Ill treatment was the incentive to the first attempt of Bibb to secure his freedom. This was in 1835 and the next few years were occupied with repeated unsuccessful efforts to get away and to take his wife and child with him. He

had heard of Canada and his thoughts ever turned in that direction. On several occasions his flights led him as far as the Ohio River, the boundary of freedom, but some force seemed always at hand to drag him back. At the end of 1837 he managed to reach Cincinnati and spent that winter at Perrysburg with a community of Negroes settled there. The next summer he risked his freedom in attempting to bring his wife North, was captured, lodged in jail at Louisville, and managed to escape within a few hours after being locked up. A year later he renewed the attempt, was again captured, and this time was sold, together with his wife, to a trader who dealt in the New Orleans market. It was in the fall of 1839 that the man and wife were exposed for sale in a slave yard on St. Joseph Street and in the narrative there is an interesting account of the trade in this southern city. Newly arrived blacks were taken before a city official who inspected their backs to see if they were scarred and also examined their limbs to see if they were sound. To determine their age the teeth were examined and the skin pinched on the back of the hand. In the case of old slaves the pucker would remain for some seconds. There was also rigorous examination as to mental capacity. Slaves who displayed unusual intelligence, who could read or write or who had been to Canada were not wanted. Bibb notes that practically every buyer asked him if he could read or write and if he had ever run away. Of the slave yard itself he .writes:

"All classes of slaves were kept there for sale, to be sold in private or public-young or old, males or females, children or parents, husbands or wives. Every day, at ten o'clock, they were exposed for sale. They had to be in trim for showing themselves to the public for sale. Everyone's head had to be combed and their faces washed, and those who were inclined to look dark and rough were compelled to wash in greasy dish water in order to make them look slick and lively. When spectators would come in the yard the slaves were ordered out to form a line. They were made to

stand up straight and look as sprightly as they
could; and when they were asked a question they
had to answer it as promptly as they could, and
try to induce the spectator to buy them. If they
failed to do this they were severely paddled after
the spectators were gone. The object for using
the paddle in the place of a lash was to conceal the
marks which would be made by a flogging. And the
object for flogging under such circumstances is to
make the slave anxious to be sold."

The Bibbs were eventually sold to a Red River planter with whom they had a most miserable existence. For attending without leave a religious meeting on a neighboring plantation Bibb was ordered to receive five hundred lashes. To avoid this he took his wife and child and they hid in a swamp. Dogs tracked them down and every slave on the plantation witnessed the punishment that was given. Shortly afterwards the planter sold Bibb to a party of southern sportsmen but refused to sell the wife whom Bibb never saw again. The new owners quickly resold him to an Indian from whom he managed to escape and successfully made his way through the Indian Territory, Missouri and Ohio to Michigan and Detroit. He was never in the South again.

Bibb's arrival in Detroit came at what proved for him a most opportune time, since it gave scope for his abilities to be utilized in the anti-slavery cause, particularly in the State of Michigan. The Detroit Anti-Slavery Society had been formed in 1837 and by the end of 1840 there were similar societies all over the State. Michigan, at this time, was probably better organized and more united in sentiment

8 Compare with this description of a New Orleans slave pen the descriptions of Richmond auctions by W. H. Russell, My Diary North and South, N. Y., 1863, page 68, and William Chambers, Things as they are in America, London, 1854, pages 273-286.

4 He says that his object in going to Detroit was to get some schooling. He was unable to meet the expense, however, and as he puts it: "I graduated in three weeks and this was all the schooling I ever had in my life." His teacher for this brief period was W. C. Monroe who afterwards presided at John Brown's Chatham Convention in May, 1858.

than any other of the Northwestern States. It was the era of the Liberty Party whose platform "asserted the overmastering importance of the one question of the existence of slavery, and the necessity of bringing about a separation of the national government from all connection with the institution." This third party was facing in 1844 a crisis over the question of the annexation of Texas for which the South was a unit and on which the political organizations of the North were divided. Bibb had attended a convention of free colored people held in Detroit in 1843 and the next year he began to give addresses throughout the State in the interests of Liberty Party candidates, a full ticket for both Congress and the State legislature having been nominated. It was a bitter contest in which he engaged. The Whigs pointed out that they were standing out against the annexation of Texas, a slave empire in itself, and that votes for a third party would but pave the way for a Democratic victory. This is exactly what happened. In Michigan the Liberty Party polled six and a half per cent of the votes, but even this added to the Whig vote would not have brought victory." Bibb continued to work for the Liberty Party during 1844 and 1845, going also into Ohio with Samuel Brooks and Amos Dresser. They were more than once mobbed and their meetings broken up by rowdies. Of their work Bibb writes:

"Our meetings were generally appointed in small log cabins, schoolhouses, among the farmers, which were sometimes crowded full; and where they had no horse teams it was often the case that there would be four or five ox teams come, loaded down with men, women and children to attend our meetings. The people were generally poor and in many places not able to give us a decent night's lodgings. We generally carried with us a few pounds of candles to light up the houses wherein we held our meetings after night; for in many places they had neither candles nor candlesticks.

See Smith, Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest, New York,