“Midnight” was the code name of Detroit, the last U.S. stop on the Underground Railroad. From Detroit, escaped slaves who had made their way up from the South were ferried across the Detroit River or Lake Erie into Canada and freedom.
A half-dozen African-American towns, including one named Dawn, sprang up to provide homes for the contraband, as the Southern planters called their missing slaves. These towns flourished between 1850 and the start of the Civil War but are largely forgotten today.
Jacqueline L. Tobin, a Denver writer and the author of the controversial “Hidden In Plain View,” a nonfiction account of the use of quilts in the Underground Railroad, re-creates these towns and the people who lived there.
Many of the residents of Dawn, Chatham, Buxton Mission and other towns were not just brutalized illiterates released from bondage but black men and women of intellect and courage. Henry Bibb, for instance, escaped slavery to become a prominent abolitionist and publisher. He returned to the South more than once to rescue his family, but failed. When he discovered his wife had become the mistress of her owner, Bibb wrote, “I could no longer regard her as my wife.” He married another woman.
So it’s hardly surprising that many black women, such as Mary Ann Shadd, another Canadian writer and intellectual, joined the women’s rights movement after the Civil War ended.
If Canada were the promised land for slaves, it was hardly a place of contentment. Black abolitionists quarreled about how much white support they wanted for their communities – the so-called “begging question.” Some believed blacks should refuse white assistance so that they could learn self-reliance. Without it, they’d never be independent, the separatists argued. They encouraged African-Americans to attend all-black churches and schools too.
Others felt they couldn’t survive without money from the outside world and eagerly solicited contributions. After all, they said, the two races had to learn to coexist.
“I see no more use in having a colored church exclusively, than having a colored heaven and a colored God. I regard prejudice to be just as wicked in a colored person as in a white one,” Henry Bibb wrote.
Other issues intruded. A few communities gave land to men born into bondage but not to free-born African-Americans, offending blacks who’d never endured slavery but nonetheless were dedicated abolitionists and “conductors” on the Underground Railroad. Many leaders supported violence, including John Brown’s attack at Harper’s Ferry. Brown attended a secret meeting in one of the Canadian black communities just prior to the raid. (Tobin includes excerpts from an obscure account of the raid by a black participant who survived the fighting.)
In “From Midnight to Dawn,” Tobin focuses attention on a little-known aspect of the Underground Railroad. But the book has a couple of serious flaws. The writing is pedestrian, which is a shame because the subject is a dramatic one. More important, Tobin fails to document her information. That’s surprising in light of the controversy over her first book, “Hidden in Plain View,” which has been dismissed by most quilt historians as fanciful legend. (Black historians are not as critical.)
While “Midnight to Dawn” is not likely to draw the same criticism, the author, nonetheless, would have boosted the book’s credibility if she had included footnotes.
Tobin is best with period anecdotes. After the 15th Amendment was ratified, a black man hung a sign on his building, which was once used in the Underground Railroad: “This office is permanently closed. Hereafter Stockholders will receive dividends according to their desserts.”
The sign sums up the euphoria among African-Americans some 135 years ago that equality was theirs for the taking. Little did they know the long and painful struggle ahead of them.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist.
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From Midnight to Dawn
The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad
By Jacqueline L. Tobin with Hettie Jones
Doubleday, 288 pages, $24.95
