Encountering the Telegraph
As Laura Haviland’s party traveled northward on the Miami-Erie Canal, it encountered a wire strung between tall wooden poles. Hardly a year earlier, in September 1847, the telegraph had reached Dayton, Ohio, where it turned south to Cincinnati. The party likely first spotted this new technology in Franklin, where the wire ran alongside the canal. Many Americans would have observed the telegraph with awe during these years, but Haviland’s party knew that this nearly instantaneous form of communication was already being used by enslavers and slave catchers.
Whereas this new technology would have been met with curiosity by the whole party, Lizzie “dodged back and for a moment seemed as badly frightened as though her master had been in sight” (118). Curiously, the telegraph wire transmitted no information but gripped Lizzie’s imagination, even seeming to distort time and space through its mere presence. Something about this wire cast its subject back into her time as an enslaved person, while mysteriously propagating the enslavers’ power far beyond its regional jurisdiction. She mistook the electrical conduit for a recording device that might transmit her location to pursuing slave patrols and only after careful consideration realized that “it was the operators at each end of the wires that gave information” (118). Yet, this realization could not wholly ease Lizzie’s fear; she knew well that the wire had reordered and indeed expedited the work of the bounty hunter.
Lizzie’s fear came from long experiences of observation and measurement that had characterized her life as an enslaved person. She was intimately familiar with the tracking and recording protocols that governed the lives of the enslaved. Labor quotas, auction advertisements, and travel passes governed plantation life, and the self-emancipated were the subjects of fugitive posters and newspaper bounties. In this new world of instant communication, tracking the enslaved and self-emancipated took on a scale that matched the sprawl of American geography. Safety never again would be assured by merely crossing a border. By transmitting information instantly in any direction, the telegraph could summon slave patrols even ahead of the freedom seeker. As slave catchers increasingly used the telegraph as a source of information for apprehending freedom seekers, they transformed it into the world’s first electronic surveillance network.