For the decade or so leading up to 1850, the Quakers of Cass County, Michigan had lived in quietly gleeful defiance of the United States federal government – and of the slaveholding interests which imposed themselves upon that government's will. They prided themselves on their cheap land, lax laws, and refusal to ask any questions about a newcomer's past. The word got out soon enough. Blacks who had claimed their freedom through one means or another began arriving in a trickle, but under the pressure of urgent hope soon grew into a flood. They settled down on their own little homesteads, hoping to avoid too much notice as they forged their new lives.
When a man who simply called himself John Johnson appeared with his dark-eyed little daughter under his arm in the spring of 1846, no one asked about his past.
He soon attracted comment, though, for how conspicuously he kept himself apart from both the white and black communities of Penn Township. He had not arrived on the Underground Railroad, and his face said nothing about his birth. He was clearly wealthy – though no one knew how – and he kept to himself on his large plot of land. With the help of a few freedmen, he cleared a small patch of field out of the trees, which he thereafter tended alone. Busybodies could sometimes catch him and his burly ox tending to his wheat, accompanied only by the little girl riding their mule behind them.
He attracted much comment when he gifted a Christmas hog to each of the free families whose land bordered on his.
The only way the town saw him was through his diligent attendance of the Society of Friends' weekly meeting. When John Johnson first arrived with his daughter at the meetinghouse, the elders braced themselves to teach the fresh faces the ways of their society, but they took quite naturally to the meeting's long silences. No one ever managed to determine if they had past experience with the friends, or if they were blessed with a clear inner light, for the father was never moved to speak in the meetings, and his oddly still little daughter followed his lead. Even when prompted after the meetings, he would not talk of his past, nor of his politics, nor of his plans for the future.
Shrouded in secrecy as the two were, it was difficult for the Quakers not to wonder if the darker hue of John Johnson's skin came purely from his long hours in the sun, or if his daughter's curls betrayed anything about the family's origins. However, curiosity eventually subsided as the town became accustomed to their aggressively unobtrusive presence. The town, after all, had other new citizens to worry about, and few of them could provide for themselves with a mysterious fortune.
Cass County continued to grow, and like John Johnson, its success could not avoid comment.
The first raid came up from Kentucky in 1847.
News of the coming angry Southern planters in pursuit of lost property reached town just before they did, and the people of Penn Township were ready with their torches and sharper farming implements. Outnumbering the planters, they refused to let them down the path to where the first family of black farmers waited. John Johnson had heard the commotion and made his way to the edge of the scene. Someone handed him a pitchfork, but he held it like a farmer and not a rioter, with its long teeth to the ground. When the raiders returned in 1849, he was not there to oppose them, nor did he attend the community-wide celebration to recognize the slavers' second defeat.
Penn Township, unfortunately, did not have long to celebrate. Their efforts had been too successful, and attracted the attention of a divided Congress. The good Quakers of Cass County were cited in the Southern argument as to why the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 needed to be rewritten, and reinforced.
The news of the new Act's passage reached Michigan with cries of dismay. Penn Township swore to protect all its citizens, but even the most devoted knew that the Kentucky planters would soon be back with guns in one fist and the law in the other, with federal troops close behind them. There was only so much that prayers and pitchforks could do.
The county's black population evaporated within a matter of weeks, knowing that they would be the particular targets of now-legal attacks. Some vanished into the woods, others north to Canada. Rumors of resistance in Vermont drove at least one family east.
John Johnson both settled and sparked rumors about his past when he disappeared in the exodus. The last anyone saw of him, he was tying his ox to the post outside of the meetinghouse, a brief note of thanks looped about its burly neck. The woman sweeping the meetinghouse by candlelight went to the window to see what he needed, but when she lifted her candle, he hid his face under his broad hat, an unspoken request for privacy. She said nothing as he mounted his mule behind his daughter, then rode off into the deep and colorless night.
The context if this were to be expanded into a larger AU:
-Jean Valjean (John Johnson) is a poor farmer of uncertain family origins from rural Pennsylvania. As is par for the course, he's on the run after breaking parole.
-Fantine (Fanny) is a free, mixed-race maid in Baltimore. Pity she believes that Felix Thompson will take care of her and her daughter. She travels North after being abandoned, hoping to make a better life for the next generation. Things end about as well as you'd expect.
-After John Johnson rescues Cosette (Cora), he has no idea what her actual legal status is so is constantly running to try to keep her safe (and himself out of prison). The changing fugitive slave laws are therefore a Problem.
-I guess the Amis have to be abolitionists. Maybe some of them start off in Quaker circles because haha "Friends."
-Whoops I've ignored Javert again.