Slaveholders grew more enraged and paranoid with each passing year. The exact number who fled will never be known. Written accounts have survived that document the escapes of about 100 slaves from Portsmouth and Norfolk, but no one connected to the railroad was foolish enough to keep a complete log. Along Crawford and Water streets in Portsmouth, prostitutes peered out of saloons with names like “The Globe.” Traders haggled with merchants.Īround the turn of the 19th century, the system of routes and safe houses known today as the Underground Railroad began to take shape. With that port came a collection of sailors – rogues, world travelers and pirates. Together, the communities had the largest port in Virginia, bringing in goods from Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York while exporting cotton, wheat and tobacco. Congested downtown streets eventually widened and gave way to farmland. It was framed on the west by Smith’s Creek, near what is now the Hague, and to the east by the marshy Newtons Creek a few blocks past Church Street. Norfolk was crowded around the wharf on an anvil-shaped peninsula on the opposite side of the Elizabeth River. A train ran down High Street to the docks. Portsmouth sat on just over a half-square-mile, from North Street and what is now Olde Towne to the Gosport Navy Yard, and from the wharf back about eight blocks.
ESCAPE THE UNDERGROUND JAIL FREE
In Norfolk, nearly a third of the city’s 14,000 residents were slaves, with a small population of free blacks. In 1854, Portsmouth was a town of about 8,500 people, nearly a quarter of them enslaved. Those men would spend the rest of their lives reflecting on what they gained and what was lost. The harbor here was a beacon for men like Robert. Few details of that world remain – the railroad’s survival depended on secrecy and subterfuge – but the path to freedom cut right through Hampton Roads. He could wait to be sold and torn from his family, or tear himself from them.Įscape meant entering a world of spies and slave hunters, missionaries and mercenaries.
Robert faced a terrible choice and didn’t have much time. They had three sons, many friends, a respected place in their community. They weren’t allowed to live together, but Robert stayed a few blocks away at the naval hospital where he worked. Nine years earlier, the general had married them in his front parlor. She was pretty despite the large scars on her head, reminders of some brutality. Robert had loved Julia since he was a teenager. Julia Irving lived in a stately white house at the corner of North and Middle streets, the favorite of the elderly general and his wife who owned her. John Hodges, owned this house on North Street in Portsmouth.
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