Outwitting the Pursuit
“But William began to fear all was not right, and regretted having told this man of his condition, and made an errand on deck, as he saw me sitting alone. He told me all he had said to the steersman.”
–Laura Haviland, A Woman’s Life Work
If the wetlands of the Great Black Swamp represents the sheer scale of impassable terrain that defined the American Midwest, Toledo’s small dockyards represent the constraints of passage. A bounty hunter would know precisely where to wait, and only through cunning and luck would Tom and Lizzie sneak through. As Tom and Lizzie approached Toledo by canal boat, the threat of being sold out by crew members loomed large in their minds. A young member of the party, William, had already shared incriminating evidence of his northward flight, which imperiled all self-emancipated members of the party, and crew members had begun to lure the boy with promises of “good wages” in Toledo.
When at last the boat docked in Toledo, Haviland left William and another young man on board, where they pretended to have taken up the boat crew’s dubious offer of employment. Yet, before the crew could apprehend the boys and deliver them to slave catchers, Haviland guided them covertly to a safehouse (119). By morning, she had paid their fares and “with hardly five minutes to spare,” the whole party reached the vessel that would bear the “living freight” to Detroit (119).
Whereas contemporary American transit geography offers innumerable routes by which a traveler might head north from Ohio to Detroit, travel remained severely constrained through the 1840s. Even when rail overtook the canal in the 1850s, pricey fares often led freedom seekers to select from a predictably narrow set of options. As a result, period biographies often recount chance encounters between self-emancipated travelers and the agents of enslavers. For instance, in his autobiography, Israel Campbell describes a “very pleasant trip” up the Miami Canal, only to spot a Tennessean merchant in Toledo who had arrested a fugitive in the past (197). What would be a wildly improbable meeting for a contemporary traveler in this case appears to have been determined by a regional bottleneck. Rail, road, canal, and telegraph all converged upon Toledo, and alternate routes through Indiana and western Ohio would have forced Campbell onto the crude roadways of southern Michigan.