Lindsey Payne’s Longest Run
1838
Lindsey Payne’s life savings of $3.50 jingled in his pocket as he took off on a limping run for the James Smith plantation. If he didn’t make it in time, his two friends, Zip and Lorenzo, would leave without him. News that Zip had been purchased by a Georgia trader had necessitated an immediate escape. Eighteen-year-old Lindsey had little time to pack a bundle of clothes, some corn cakes, and bacon to sustain him on their journey on that May morning in 1838.
Lindsey’s lame leg had kept him from laboring in the cotton fields, but now it was an enormous disadvantage. A childhood injury crippled him when a wood pile shifted and crushed his leg. Despite his mother’s pleading, Mistress Sarah Langston had refused to seek proper medical attention. Now that he needed to cover the two-mile distance in record time, he was especially embittered. He would force his leg to carry him to the agreed-upon rendezvous point. Lindsey Payne had had enough of cruel masters and mistresses.
Lindsey reached Zip and Lorenzo just in time. He was glad to be leaving Heathsville, Virginia, where he was hired out as a shoemaker. But he was also leaving behind eleven siblings in Northumberland County. Realistically he held little hope of ever seeing them again, but that was the price of freedom.
The fugitives headed north in a boat they had confiscated along the Cone River and then continued on foot, covering some 250 miles. When it became apparent that the slower-paced Lindsey could not keep up with his two companions, they decided to split up. The two able-bodied men needed to strike out on their own to prevent all three from being captured.
A despondent Lindsey understood, but wept to himself at being left behind. Lurching on alone, Lindsey fought against despair until a terrifying experience changed his outlook.
At 3:00 a.m. on May 8, the ground shook under Lindsey and a strange thunder rumbled in the distance. He could see nothing in the dark. The horrific noise was coming around the bend. An iron monster reared its ugly head, spouting fire and smoke, screaming furiously on its quick approach. Lindsey had never seen a train before. He scrambled up a steep bank, thinking, “The Devil is about to burn me up. Farewell! Farewell!” With that, he passed out.
When he awoke, he was alone in the quiet dark. His imagination began to run away with him. He was sure that he heard the hoofbeats of “paddy-rollers” (patrollers, or night watchmen) coming after him. But no, it was only his own heart racing wildly. Lindsey resumed his journey.
Around noon he heard the Devil returning, caught on its set of metal tracks, wheels turning and steam pouring forth, choking and wailing. Behind it was a series of wagon-like roofed boxes the Devil carried with rows of white faces in the windows. “Wagons that he carries the souls to hell with,” Lindsey thought. Still terrified, he was relieved to see that the Devil was not after black people, and grateful not to have been taken.
Continuing on, Lindsey eventually arrived at New Castle, Delaware, where he was somehow reunited with Lorenzo and Zip. The three fugitives planned to take a steamer up the Delaware River to Philadelphia, since traveling on foot was not expeditious. In New Castle, however, blacks came under scrutiny. The law forbade passage on steamboats without proof of free status—and securing free papers would be impossible. So the three runaways mustered the confident air of free black men. They looked straight ahead and walked up the steamship’s gangplank clear to the ticket counter and purchased three tickets to Philadelphia. Miraculously, no one stopped to question them.
They arrived in Philadelphia on Thursday afternoon. Lindsey decided to stay in the United States, while Zip and Lorenzo boarded a ship to Europe to try their luck abroad.
In Philadelphia Lindsey was directed to a black shoemaker named Simpson to inquire about work. After a long conversation, Lindsey admitted he was a runaway. By luck, Simpson was an agent on the Underground Railroad. Simpson took him home, where he was welcomed by the shoemaker’s family, fed well, and hidden overnight. The next day Simpson set Lindsey up with other contacts.
Friday morning, his sixth day on the run, Lindsey was put aboard a steamer to New York City with a letter of introduction to David Ruggles, a black printer and the secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee, part of an Anti-slavery Society organization that assisted fugitive slaves. Departing from New York three days later, Lindsey took with him two more letters of introduction, one to Mr. Foster in Hartford, Connecticut, and the other to the Reverend Dr. Samuel Osgood, in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Again, Lindsey was warmly welcomed upon his arrival in Hartford by Mr. Foster, who took up a collection on his behalf. He then boarded a steamboat for Springfield, Massachusetts, taking with him his next letter of recommendation. He also took a new formal name, James Lindsey Smith, but he continued to go by Lindsey. (James Smith was the name of the plantation owner from whom Zip had run away.)
In Massachusetts Reverend Osgood helped Lindsey find employment as a shoemaker. Lindsey said, “It was the first work that I had ever done in the like of a freeman, which gave me the strength to think I was a man with others.” Reverend Osgood also made it possible for Lindsey to attain an education in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, enabling him to run his own business, become a public speaker on the antislavery lecture circuit, and earn a degree as a Methodist minister.
Lindsey married Emeline Minerva Platt in 1842 and settled in Norwich, Connecticut. He eventually bought a home, owned a shoe shop, and educated his four children. In 1845, seven years after settling in Norwich, James Lindsey Smith mistakenly thought he saw an old master in town. He said, “I had determined never to be taken back alive. Death was preferable to slavery, now that I had tasted the sweets of liberty.”
In 1867, two years after the Civil War ended slavery, Lindsey returned to Heathsville, Virginia, for a visit. His boat landed at Cone Wharf, the exact spot where he had begun his escape nearly thirty years earlier. He was reunited with friends, two of his sisters, and a brother.
Many of the wealthy slave owners he had known in Virginia were now poor and hungry. Some of the great plantations had been divided and sold to those who were once enslaved. Lindsey accepted an invitation to dine with his former mistress, a twice-widowed woman whom he knew as Mrs. Sarah Langston. It was she who had done nothing, all those years before, to see that his injured leg received proper attention. She was most interested in the tale of his escape and his new life. In appreciation of her acceptance of him as a free man, Lindsey presented her with a pair of shoes. There had been a time when his former mistress would not walk outside without a slave to hold an umbrella to shade her, but now she was being forced to grow her own subsistence garden under the beating sun.
James Lindsey Smith spent nearly a month visiting the places where he had spent his youth, drinking from springs where his now dispersed family had once gathered. Over the years he would make repeated visits to Heathsville, often arriving with charitable boxes of clothing and necessities donated by the townspeople of Norwich, Connecticut, where he made his home with his wife and children—having never forgotten what it was like to be without.