Bound for Canaan (28 page)

Although John Rankin would later join the Liberty Party, he voted as a staunch Whig that year. He had met Harrison personally, “and admired the manly stand he had publicly taken in favor of the use of the Bible in the public schools.” (In contrast to many abolitionists, who advocated emancipation without condition, Rankin believed that the only peaceful way to free the slaves was through their outright purchase and emancipation by the national government; he estimated the total cost at one billion dollars.) Gerrit Smith, even more of an absolutist than Rankin, took his defection at the polls as a personal affront. In an open letter in the
Philanthropist
he called Rankin's support for Harrison “wicked presumption” and a “tempting of God”: “What—that dear old pioneer of the Anti-Slavery cause, contribute to make those rulers of the nation, who are in favor of protracting the bondage of the slave? Impossible! I repeat, Impossible!” Rankin replied graciously, “I offer no excuses. If I am in error, it is [a] matter of deep regret, and I hope you will not cease your efforts to lead me into truth.”

2

Disillusionment with the national parties fostered the growth of the Underground Railroad as more and more Americans became willing to break laws that they believed to be sinful but impossible to change by political means. As Gerrit Smith put it in an article in the
Friend of Man
, the organ of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, “If there be human enactments against our entertaining the stricken stranger—against our opening our door to our poor, guiltless, and unaccused colored brother pursued by bloodthirsty kidnappers—we must, nevertheless, say with the apostle: ‘We must obey God rather than man.'”

The underground was expanding nowhere more rapidly than in the Ohio River valley. Once across the river, fugitives who managed to make contact with the underground could, with some confidence, hope to be passed in safety from town to town and from farm to farm all the way to the Great Lakes. Although their total can never be known, probably more northbound fugitives crossed the region that extended from eastern Ohio to central Indiana than any other part of the free states. In contrast to Pennsylvania, whose steeply corrugated and thinly populated landscape of southwest-to-northeast ridges funneled most fugitives into the narrow Philadelphia–to–New York corridor, Ohio and Indiana formed a wide, comparatively flat expanse that was webbed with roads leading north to Lake Erie, and peopled with the two kinds of communities that were most valuable for underground transit: free black settlements and well-organized white abolitionists. The geographical distance from the slave states to Canada was also short. No place in the Ohio River valley between Marietta, Ohio, and Cincinnati was more than two hundred miles from
Lake Erie, and from Wellsville, Ohio, across the river from the northern-most point in Virginia, the distance was only ninety miles. The speed of travel along the underground lines varied considerably. “Our aim was safety not speed, for it made little difference to the fugitive whether he was a week or a month in getting to Canada, so that he got there safely and was fed on the way,” Isaac Beck, a longtime conductor in Sardinia, Ohio, near Ripley, told a newspaper reporter later in his life.

In all the Southern border states, blacks both slave and free lent assistance to the underground by directing fugitives to the best places to cross the river, and where to go once they had gotten to the northern bank. In some places, black agents worked directly with contacts in the Free States, at extreme risk to their own safety. According to John Rankin, several slaves belonging to a Kentucky patroller named Peter Driscol surreptitiously assisted fugitives for several years, even as Driscol boasted to whoever would listen that “no abolitionists, not even ‘Uncle Johnny' [Rankin] whom all niggers like, could persuade my niggers to leave me.” (Flee they did, however, having heard a rumor that they were to be sold southward; Driscol pursued his slaves as far as Cleveland, where, so it was said, he arrived at the wharf just in time to see his former property climbing the sides of a schooner bound for Canada.) An elderly female slave living in Virginia opposite Gallipolis, Ohio was known to have ferried many runaways across the river there, and in Worthington, Ohio, white abolitionists periodically collected money for “Old Man Clark” to travel into Kentucky to lead out fugitives. George DeBaptiste and his underground cell in Madison, Indiana had contacts as deep into Kentucky as Frankfort and Lexington. Occasionally, daring rescuers ventured across the river to bring out slaves, as Calvin Fairbank proposed to do when he landed in Ripley on that August day in 1844.

But it was for the most part in the river towns of Ohio, Indiana, and to a much lesser extent Illinois, where the Underground Railroad's main western lines began. Although fugitives might land in Ohio at almost any point, there were about fifteen key crossings where the narrowness of the river, the convergence of roads, and the presence of strong abolitionist cells combined to attract them in significant numbers. Some distance north of the main crossings, the underground routes generally converged into “trunk lines,” which, although they might zigzag to the east or west, tended always northward, with lines from Ripley and other points in west
ern and central Ohio terminating at Toledo or Sandusky, and those farther east at Lorain, Cleveland, or Ashtabula. Some routes in far eastern Ohio had links in western Pennsylvania, and fugitives traveling in that region were as likely to find themselves carried to Erie, Pennsylvania, or Fredonia or Buffalo, New York, as they were to an Ohio port. Fugitives crossing into Indiana most often were forwarded to Detroit.

John Rankin was not the first abolitionist in Ripley, or the first to offer help to a fugitive slave. Rather, he was a kind of moral entrepreneur who brilliantly mined the hearts and minds that were at hand, and molded them into an underground army. The underground had three interlocking elements in the area around Ripley. The first consisted of antislavery Presbyterian ministers, many of them former Southerners who, like Rankin, had come north to escape the claustrophobic climate of slavery. United through the administrative body known as the Chillicothe Presbytery, they formed a ready-made web of relationships that linked Ripley with Red Oak, Sardinia, Russellville, and a galaxy of other towns in southern Ohio. According to Isaac Beck, one of Rankin's collaborators in Sardinia, when William Lloyd Garrison founded the
Liberator,
these like-minded men collectively embraced the abolitionist cause “with increased zeal,” and “every Presbyterian church became a center of Abolitionism, increased by the intelligent and pious of the churches and [by] non-church members. Here was where the U.G.R.R. workers originated.”

The second component included politicized white abolitionists. In 1835 Rankin personally reorganized Ripley's antislavery society and linked it with the statewide body. The following year he undertook a hair-raising but ultimately successful organizing campaign through the southwestern counties as a traveling agent of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. In the course of six months, he was attacked no fewer than twenty times. At Putnam, he wrote, “We were surrounded by a large mob which threw stones at the building,” and as they left the hall, Rankin and a companion were pelted with goose eggs, and “the small gravel of the street fell around us like hail.” On his way home, in Chillicothe, Rankin “preached morning and night for the colored people,” while “a few fellows of the baser sort” threw stones into the church, injuring members of the audience. At Felicity, where one of Rankin's brothers was the pastor, he enrolled sixty members in an antislavery society. A classmate from Samuel Doak's school in Tennessee helped him to form another large antislavery society at
Goshen. Although the pastor at Williamsburg warned him that his activities would lead to bloodshed and war, Rankin ignored him and called a meeting anyway, and soon, Rankin wrote, “Abolitionism was so deeply implanted in Williamsburg, that it could not be uprooted.” At Winchester, a mob assembled and beat drums so that nothing could be heard, nevertheless, sixteen new names were added to the rolls of the local antislavery group. At Batavia, despite another egging, he enrolled, among others, Henry Ward Beecher's son and county prosecutor John Jolliffe, who would for decades lend his legal skills to the defense of fugitive slaves. Arriving at the church in Williamstown where he was to speak, Rankin found waiting for him only a crowd of wild-looking young men. “I fixed my eyes upon the rudest looking fellows to awe them down, just as I would a biting dog, and so long as I could look them in the eyes they were quiet but they turned their backs to me and began to behave badly; but I talked to them and stilled them down until I got through. When I closed they rose up and used the most filthy and indecent language of which they were capable, and when we left they gathered up the fire brands and followed us, throwing at us. They first hit the man with whom we lodged, next they hit me on the shoulder but I was so far off it did no injury.” The experience left the usually imperturbable Rankin momentarily rattled: “After all the argument I had just used to prove that all men should be free, it did seem as if some men were not fit for freedom.” He went on to lecture at Sardinia, New Gilead, Beach Grove, Bethel, Monroe, Springdale, and Grassyrun, leaving newly formed or expanded societies behind him in each place. “In Clermont County,” Rankin wrote in a letter to the
Ripley Bee
, “the cause is going on delightfully. I formed the last three societies in three days.”

Along with the Presbyterians and members of antislavery societies, African Americans formed the third pillar of the underground. Blacks were statistically negligible in all the Free States that bordered the Ohio River. They numbered just over half of one percent of the population in Illinois, by far the least welcoming of the three, slightly more than one percent in Indiana, and about one and a quarter percent in Ohio. In Ohio and Indiana, much of the black population was distributed in the river counties, which positioned them well to offer assistance to fugitives crossing from Kentucky precisely where their role was absolutely critical. Blacks worked as underground conductors and agents, and black hamlets scattered through the region served as key holding areas, or way stations,
where fugitives could rest and recuperate before being moved farther north. In the Sardinia area, north of Ripley, reputedly the most reliable conductor for many years was a freed slave named John D. Hudson, “a man of good intellect and powerful physique and when enraged of no more fear than a mad bull,” as Beck described him.

African American hamlets such as the Gist settlement near Sardinia, however, offered little security to fugitives, who often sought them out in hope of linking up or settling in with relatives or friends. But prejudice and the unreliability of law and order made them very unsafe, since they were a favorite hunting ground for slave catchers, who were also far more apt to use violence against blacks than against whites. These communities often owed their existence to the charitable impulses, or the guilt, of reformed Southern slave owners who emancipated their slaves and resettled them in free territory. The Gist settlement was just such an example. In 1819 several hundred slaves belonging to a wealthy Virginia merchant named Samuel Gist were settled by the executors of his will on two parcels of land north of Ripley. Whites more crudely referred to these as the “Nigger Camps,” and regarded them as sumps of vice and intemperance. “We feel no prejudice against the black man on account of color, or for mere degradation; but at the same time, we are unwilling that we should be morally infected by contact with an inferior race, the result of which contact is in no way beneficial to the black, and highly injurious to the white,” the
Xenia News
sneeringly editorialized.

Isolated and largely unprotected, blacks defended themselves against slave catchers in whatever ways they could. Where they were numerous enough, they might resort to physical violence as they did in Detroit, in July 1833, when they rioted against the recapture of a fugitive couple from Kentucky, Ruth and Thornton Blackburn, by slave hunters. Blacks armed with clubs, stones, and pistols surrounded the jail where the Blackburns were being held, and refused to obey the local authorities' order to disband. Mrs. Blackburn was liberated through a ruse and quickly spirited to Canada, which lay barely ten minutes' sailing time away across the Detroit River. The following day, armed protesters seized the cart that was carrying Thornton Blackburn to the waterfront, where he was to be placed on a steamboat in the custody of his captors. In the fracas, the Detroit sheriff was fatally injured, and Thornton was hurried across the river to Canada, where he rejoined his wife.

But in vulnerable black settlements close to the Ohio River, such defiance was rarely possible. Instead, when they could, blacks often improvised a kind of inspired street theater. Isaac Beck recounted the story of a slave named Ike who escaped from Mason County, Kentucky and by some means reached the Gist settlement. There someone informed on him in hope of claiming a reward for his capture. A message was sent to Ike's master, a man named Taylor, who arrived in the settlement and seized the fugitive. That evening, Taylor, Ike, and his captors were sitting on the unnamed informer's porch while a number of “camp negroes,” as Beck recounted it, were “loafing” nearby. Among them was the underground operative John D. Hudson. When Taylor and his men went in to supper, Ike went in with them, acting as if he expected to be welcomed inside as well, but Taylor ordered him out again. According to Beck, Ike obeyed and left the room “but forgot to stop on the porch.” He ran for the woods where, apparently by arrangement, he was taken in hand by a guide and disappeared. When Taylor realized what had happened he and his posse set off in pursuit, tailed by several of the other “loafers” including Hudson, who was carrying a conch shell that he continued to blow throughout the pursuit. Ike's guide led him to a certain cabin, where he hid him in the loft. When Taylor and his men in time came to the same cabin, two men idling nearby suddenly “commenced a game of fisticuffs,” and were soon locked in a clinch and rolling down a hill, surrounded by a crowd of shouting neighbors. The fugitive's pursuers became so engrossed in the excitement that they followed the mayhem away from the cabin. Ike, meanwile, escaped from the loft and ran out the back door. There another guide stood waiting, and led him to another cabin in a dense wood two miles away, owned by a white abolitionist named Pettijohn, who cared for him until the danger eased, then sent him on his way via the Underground Railroad. When Hudson was later asked if he was not afraid to follow the hunters blowing his conch shell he replied, “No, the knots on the shell would hurt a fellow's head very bad.”