On the Borders of Slavery and Race: Charles T. Torrey and the Underground Railroad

Abstract

Boundaries are physical, political, legal, cultural, and psychological limits on individuals and nations. They indicate points beyond which prudent persons must not venture because the risks are too great. Yet by crossing into a different country, a different cultural framework, individuals change themselves and-if they risk enough-their times as well. The more formidable the barrier, the more profound the potential change. Recent studies of the borderlands of the southwestern United States, where American and Mexican cultures overlap, affirm that it is at geographical boundaries that such differences are most striking. It is in borderlands where cultures collide and tensions are highest as they physically challenge one another in a struggle for dominance. But, as studies of the Southwest also show, it is in such volatile areas where cultures interact that change may come quickly.1 During the decades prior to the Civil War this was the case in the Chesapeake and other borderlands between the North and the South. Traditional southern economies and values interacted with modernizing influences from the North. There was tension between free and slave labor, between industry and agriculture, between conflicting moralities, and between hope and despair among black families as economic chance led on the one hand to manumission and on the other to sale south.2 These borderlands were also where the more adventuresome of northern white abolitionists came face to face with slaveholders, desperate slave families, and free black southerners who were the slaves' keenest allies. Charles T. Torrey is now generally forgotten by historians of antebellum America. But Torrey was among the more prominent northern white abolitionists when in December 1841 he crossed the Mason-Dixon Line for his first time and proceeded south to Baltimore and Washington. Like many others who had traveled from the North into this region, Torrey became acutely aware that he had crossed a cultural border. He remarked economic decline, physical desolation, and moral depravity in contrast to what he perceived to be northern vitality, wealth, and piety. But what struck him most deeply was the suffering of enslaved African Americans.3 His visceral reaction to what appeared to him to be barbaric cruelty and his empathy for those subjected to it led Torrey to cross a more strictly drawn boundary than that between the free and slave states-the boundary of race. He exemplified in his subsequent conduct the potential in northern abolitionism for organized interracial cooperation against slavery in the border South. Just as significant, he initiated a tradition of such cooperation that persisted in the Chesapeake into the Civil War years. Torrey's activities in this region led to his arrest on charges of helping slaves escape, his imprisonment in the Maryland Penitentiary, and his death there in 1846. He became an antislavery martyr, revered especially among African Americans for having initiated an underground railroad. Yet there has been no detailed investigation of his activities in the border South that led to his legendary status and no attempt to link those activities to larger issues associated with the character of the underground railroad in particular and the antislavery movement in general. Most significant among these larger issues is the crucial role of racial and cultural turmoil in the Chesapeake borderlands themselves in metamorphosing Torrey and those who followed his example from peaceable advocates of emancipation into revolutionaries. It was this confrontational context that shaped the aggressive northern abolitionism of the 1840s and 1850s and, correspondingly, a growing apprehension among slavery's defenders.4 Torrey's career as a practical abolitionist in the border South also provides insights into long-standing disputes among historians. These include disagreements concerning involvement of white abolitionists in the underground railroad, the extension of its activities into the South, and the relationship of the antislavery movement to the sectional conflict. …