Blood and Daring Read Online Free PDF Page A

Anderson surrounded. He pulled the long knife from his waistband and escaped, but almost immediately ran into Digges. Digges raised a tree branch, but before he could swing it the two men fell together. Anderson’s knife plunged into Digges’s chest. Two more thrusts to the back dropped Digges, and Anderson fled. Eight-year-old Ben Digges, who had been there throughout the violent encounter, was left staring at his wounded and bleeding father while the slaves gave chase.
    With Digges dying of his wounds, local newspapers reported this latest attack on a law-abiding white man by a rampaging slave. At a hastily called meeting, Howard County residents expressed shock and anger. A vigilante committee was formed and a number of men eager to collect a reward headed out. Twice Anderson was nearly caught, but he managed to slip away before he was seen.
    Dirty, exhausted, starving, and wearing shredded clothing, Anderson slowly struggled northward. He happened upon a white man whose reaction to seeing him was such that Anderson decided to risk trusting him. The gentleman offered a meal and bed for the night. He told Andersonof the quickest way to Chicago and of certain individuals he should find there who would help get him to Canada. With suspicion in his heart, but anguished desperation in his mind, he left the next morning, his pockets bulging with apples and bread. After weeks on his own, Anderson had boarded the Underground Railroad.
    The Underground Railroad was at the time and would forever be shrouded in mystery and myth. Most slaves were on their own when running, but many were helped by sympathetic white people who offered them food, homes, wagons and courage. 4 Helping a slave to escape was akin to abetting theft and punishable with fines and imprisonment that became increasingly severe. Brave whites nonetheless persisted and their numbers increased. The Underground Railroad’s name came from code words; safe houses were called stations and those offering help were dubbed conductors. In the harsh cruelty of all that slavery entailed, the Underground Railroad offered a spark of decency. Influential abolitionist Levi Coffin, a North Carolina Quaker, said with a sentiment that reflected the beliefs of all conductors, “The dictates of humanity came in opposition to the law and we ignored the law.” 5
    After a few more days of hardship and terror, Anderson arrived in Chicago and he quickly found the people who had been recommended to him. They bought him clothes, found him lodging and gave him food. For three weeks, he lay hidden in a small room above a barbershop. Finally, train tickets were provided for him to travel to Detroit. Within days he was over the Detroit River and in Windsor. It was late November 1853, and John Anderson had made it to Canada. He was free.
CANADA
    Following directions given to him by his Detroit contacts, Anderson found a safe house in Windsor owned by Henry Bibb, an escaped slave who dedicated himself to helping other fugitive slaves and the Canadian abolitionist movement. His efforts included the creation of an institute designed to help recent arrivals learn to read and master the vocational skills needed to begin their new lives. Bibb enrolled Anderson, who workedhard and did well. Soon, Anderson had a job working as a labourer with the Great Western Railway. He saved his money, and devoted his days off to doing maintenance work and his free time to learning to read, write and do sums.
    The Canada in which Anderson found himself was idyllic compared to Missouri, but it still struggled with racism and segregation. Canada was not a stranger to slavery. Early French settlers had enslaved Aboriginal people, and then, in the late seventeenth century, African slaves arrived in Quebec. The capitulation agreement that ceded Quebec to Britain after the 1759 conquest guaranteed the continuation of slavery. In 1763, Quebec governor James Murray had sent an urgent request to New York for a shipment of