Shipped South

The Stills’ enslaver, Mr. McKiernan came in person to retrieve the family from the Vincennes jail, and he took every precaution to constrain its mobility as it traveled south by stage coach and by ship. At night, they family was locked in rooms that they could not escape except by leaping from high windows and being “dashed to pieces” (304). On the Ohio River, the family was “deemed safe,” because the same river that had borne the family toward freedom now imprisoned them under threat of drowning (304). When controlled by an enslaver, family homes and mundane transportation were transformed into technologies of constraint. 

While the physical barriers of architecture, of stage coach, and of river boat limited the Stills’ opportunities for escape, they were further encumbered as an indivisible family unit. Pickard dramatizes the Still boys’ internal struggle:

How the sinews of, Levin and Peter ached for a race! If their mother and sister had been safe, would they have walked quietly down to the river, on whose bosom they were to be borne back to slavery? No, no–they would at least have made one, desperate effort to escape. But they could not desert those who were so dear to them; and so they meekly followed their old master, while they knew his footsteps led to the scene of cruel torture–perhaps even to death. (304)

The physical enclosures worked in tandem with the tie of family and friendship, which presented the Still boys with the impossible choice between abandonment and submission. Whereas the automobile and airplane have come to symbolize individual autonomy in the modern American ethos, the freedom seeker recognized the very opposite ethos in antebellum transit. The enclosures of coach and riverboat caused the Stills to internalize familial love as a physical constraint. In effect, the enslavers used family bonds as manacles.