Through the Great Black Swamp
As Tom and Lizzie approached Toledo by canal boat, the threat of being sold out by crew members loomed large in their minds; however, the options for flight had disappeared. The Miami-Erie Canal strung together a series of small towns and villages in western Ohio whereby the freedom seekers might have evaded pursuit, but in the late stages of the journey, they entered the Great Black Swamp. Nearly impassible before it was drained in the latter half of the twentieth century, the vast wetland stretched from Fort Wayne to Lake Erie, over 100 miles, east to west, and 50 miles to the northbound traveller. To leave the canal boat would be to slog for weeks through trackless wilderness that would only grant pursuers more time to lay their traps in the unavoidable port of Detroit.
As the canal boat began to make its final approach to Toledo on the Maumee River, the uncertainty of what awaited upon their disembarkation would have grown to an immense burden, and the rigors of the region’s landscape would have reinforced the inevitability of their pathway. Although the canal boat efficiently spirited the party northward, its infrastructure, including the telegraph that ran alongside was enfranchised in the systematic traffic of goods through the Midwest, which by way of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers was coextensive with the infrastructure of slavery. By contrast the Great Black Swamp was virtually untenable and, apart from the canal, would have brought the Canadian-bound seeker to a dead halt.
For the contemporary reader who has grown up enjoying the expediency of transit through the Great Lakes region, the constrained travel of Tom and Lizzie’s party may come as a surprise. Whereas a roadway detour today may mean a ten-minute delay, a detour through the Great Black Swamp might have led to weeks of delay, and during the cold of Autumn might have proven fatal. Whereas enclaves of the self-emancipated had formed in central Indiana, western Ohio, and southern Michigan, few accounts mention Black residents of the Great Black Swamp region. In part, the nearby “city of refuge,” as Canada was called at times, shapes this historical gap. Many freedom seekers would ask, why not complete the full measure and cross the border, which was but a few hours’ trip from Toledo by boat? However, the dearth of records also suggests that those who sought out the swamp favored its privacy; it forcefully resisted the Midwest’s socialization, and so it lacked many of the expedients that abetted bounty hunters elsewhere in the region. Because the swamp underscored the limits of technical mastery, it established a refuge for the fugitive, if only in his or her mind.