Bound for Canaan (29 page)

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In many of the river communities, underground work was carried out almost entirely by African Americans. One of the most effective networks of all was based in the port of Madison, Indiana, about eighty miles downriver from Cincinnati. With a few exceptions, it is difficult to form a sharp picture of the men who formed this cell. None of them left memoirs or diaries. Their activities remain visible at all only as they have been refracted through the anecdotes of white abolitionists, often long after the fact, and in a handful of nineteenth-century newspaper articles that omit more than they reveal. It is clear that the man at the cell's center in the early 1840s was the freeborn Virginian George DeBaptiste, whose picaresque career suggests that he had much more than the average share of charm and nerve. A natural mole, he would not have been out of place in the shadowy world of twentieth-century espionage. The only picture of him, an engraving made later in his life when he had become a successful businessman in Detroit, is unrevealing: it shows a rather heavy-featured man, with beetling brows and deep-set, grave eyes, and a short, dense beard that enfolds his square jaw like a baseball glove. Born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1814, he was trained as a barber, and by the age of eighteen became the body servant of a professional gambler, with whom he traveled widely around the country, including the Deep South. In 1838 DeBaptiste had settled in Madison, and his barbershop at the corner of Second and Walnut soon became the underground's local headquarters.

As late as 1840, Madison was the second largest city in the state, with almost ten thousand inhabitants, two hundred of them African American. Like Ripley, Madison owed its prosperity to the confluence of the Ohio River with the staple commodity of the mid-century western diet: pork. More than a dozen firms dealt in pork-related products: lard, bristle, hides, barrels, as well as meat. Their brick warehouses lined the mile-and-a-half-long riverfront, where flatboats, keelboats, steamboats, and fishing boats jostled for space along the wharfs amid floating clouds of flimsy skiffs. Little more than a couple of planks hammered crudely together, these had so little value that they were left lying everywhere along the river's shores, where they were pressed into service as many a fugitive's express to freedom. Poised here in a political no man's land between slavery and freedom,
the lives of Madison's blacks—sailors, stevedores, waiters, and casual laborers, for the most part—were intertwined with those of proslavery and antislavery whites in an unstable equilibrium that both favored the clandestine work of the underground and accentuated its danger.

DeBaptiste and most of his collaborators were part of Madison's tiny black middle class, self-employed businessmen or artisans who possessed economic independence, freedom of action, and the kind of organizational sense that was essential to make the mechanisms of the Underground Railroad work. They were well-known to everyone in town, and thus always exposed to the scrutiny of whites, few of whom they could trust with their secret. In essence, they hid their underground work in plain sight. Less than a block from DeBaptiste's barbershop, where he trimmed the hair of abolitionists and slave owners alike, stood the businesses of his fellow African Americans: John Carter's stall in the public farmers' market, Stepney Stafford's laundry, and Elijah Anderson's blacksmith shop, at Third and Walnut. Slaves who brought produce in from Kentucky farms passed on to Carter information about fugitives who were waiting to cross the river. Stafford's employees served as the cell's eyes and ears as they made their daily rounds to homes that included those of proslavery families, who might let slip information about the movements of local slave catchers. Anderson, one of several conductors, personally took fugitives as far north as Levi Coffin's home in Newport. At least two white men were also part of DeBaptiste's circle: John Todd, who lived just west of Madison, and his brother who lived in Kentucky, who would beat on an old brass pot and then wave lanterns when it was safe for a fugitive to cross the river. For blacks, who were vulnerable in ways that whites were not, secrecy was potentially a matter of life and death. Although he was widely suspected of helping to run off slaves, DeBaptiste succeeded for years in brushing off suspicion with disarming innocence. He always declared, with what one imagines must have been a carefully calibrated chuckle and a servile smile, that he only wished that he was “smart enough to steal the niggers, and he would steal all there was in Old Kentuck.”

DeBaptiste estimated that in the course of eight years in Madison, he personally assisted 108 fugitives to freedom, and several times that number indirectly. He sometimes crossed into Kentucky himself to make arrangements for their escape. When a fugitive was ready to cross the river, a message of this sort might be sent to DeBaptiste: “There is a
chance to purchase a horse that will suit your purpose. He is a mahogany bay, young, well broken, large, and is just the thing for a minister. You can see him on Tuesday afternoon. Price $100.” DeBaptiste would understand from this that a large mulatto, a church member, needed his help; that he would be in, say, Louisville on Tuesday night, and that he had one hundred dollars to pay his expenses. If the message had described a “light brown filly,” he would have known that the fugitive was a light-skinned girl. If it was said that the price would be cheap, he would know that the fugitive had no money, and had to be provided for. If it stated that the animals would be sent across the river, on the night mentioned, DeBaptiste and one or two friends, would go down to an agreed-upon point on the river after dark and lie at the water's edge, sometimes for half the night, listening for the sound of muffled oars. Most often, DeBaptiste, Anderson, or one of the others took fugitives to Lancaster, twelve miles north of Madison, a town inhabited by fiercely abolitionist immigrants from Vermont and Maine, who in 1839 had formed the first antislavery society in southern Indiana.

With good reason, DeBaptiste was wary of traps. One of the leaders of the Lancaster cell, Daniel Nelson, a veteran of the War of 1812, was twice arrested and jailed for aiding fugitives. When a fellow barber first approached DeBaptiste in 1844 or 1845, asking for help in escaping from his Kentucky master, DeBaptiste correctly suspected that he had been recruited to entrap him. DeBaptiste initially denied knowledge of any illicit activity. Not long afterward, however, DeBaptiste met the same man on the street in Cincinnati. The conversation that ensued suggests the kind of reasoning that DeBaptiste and other black agents in the border country may have used to penetrate the servile resignation of slaves they hoped to entice out of bondage. After castigating the barber for having been willing to betray “a man of his own race,” DeBaptiste repeatedly challenged him where it must have hurt the most, in his manhood: “Why, aren't you ashamed—you, a man able to make money, and take care of yourself, with a good trade, young, strong, and a man all over, if you were only a mind to be—to be calling another man your master, like a dog, paying over to him your wages, which you earn here on the north side of the river? Don't you feel low-down to be setting such an example to the colored people? You will marry, and raise children to be sold down South as slaves. Aren't you ashamed?” According to DeBaptiste, the barber replied, “Now, George,
I've been thinking of that, too; and I don't mean it. I will be a man. I'll leave massa right off, if I can only get away.” And with the help of DeBaptiste's friends in the underground, he did just that.

There was a dramatic postscript to the barber's story, however. A reward of three hundred dollars was soon posted for the runaway, whose name unfortunately has gone unrecorded. Slave hunters traced him to White Pigeon, Michigan, an abolitionist stronghold more than two hundred miles north of Madison, where they found him working in a barber shop. Cornered, the barber fought his way out with an axe, nearly cutting off the hand of one of his assailants. White citizens of the town held back the pursuers until the barber could be gotten out of town, and placed once more on the Underground Railroad, which speedily forwarded him to Detroit, and on to the more certain safety of Canada.

In 1846 Kentucky slave owners and their local allies launched an effort to destroy the underground in Madison. White mobs invaded the homes of blacks and nearly beat to death those who dared to resist. One of DeBaptiste's conductors, Griffin Booth, was almost drowned by proslavery men in the Ohio River. Elijah Anderson abruptly moved upriver to Lawrenceburg before something similar happened to him. DeBaptiste himself fled to Detroit, fearing exposure and arrest. Outside Madison, gangs of proslavery hoodlums terrorized white abolitionists. The stress on underground families was extreme. The son of Lyman Hoyt, a white farmer, remembered how he had slept on a trundle bed in his parents' room and was frequently wakened at night by his mother sobbing and his father stealthily slipping out of the room: “My curiosity, then awakened, was not wholly satisfied for a year or more, during which time the, to me, mysterious events recurred. My parents were devout Baptists, members of the church nearby, and I attended regularly the meetings and Sunday school. I heard much of wicked men, thieves, robbers, and murderers, and began to fear that my father must be engaged in some such wicked work, and I used to cry to myself when I heard poor mother crying and because, I thought, she was grieving over my father's wickedness.” Finally, one morning, after a year of this, the boy discovered that his father was hiding fugitives in the hayloft, where he found three men, a woman, and a baby hidden concealed in the hay. “Father then explained the whole history, cautioning secrecy. Thus warning that some of the pro-slavery men might kill him, or burn his barn and other outbuildings.”

The system that DeBaptiste and his collaborators built continued to flourish, despite attacks by white vigilantes and the flight of several key leaders. New men continued to step forward to fill the breach. The kind of repression that a generation earlier would have been sufficient to destroy the underground had little lasting effect. If anything, it stiffened resistance to intimidation. The Yankee farmers in Lancaster made it known to all that if they were attacked by proslavery forces they would fight back, even on Sunday. Remembrance Williams, a member of the Baptist congregation to which nearly all of them belonged, recalled, “Firearms were carried into the church, revolvers sometimes falling from the coat pockets as Deacons rose from prayer.”

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By the late 1830s, the Rankins could count on the support of between 150 and 200 abolitionists in Ripley. Many were people of some social standing, like Thomas McCague, a wealthy Ripley pork packer who was probably the primary financier of the local underground. As the white abolitionists increased in number, they provided an ever firmer cushion of security for those, like the Rankins, who undertook the most dangerous work. Only a small group including the Rankins and members of the Campbell, Collins, and McCoy families, and a few others worked directly or regularly with fugitives. These relationships have been explored in detail by Ann Hagedorn in
Beyond the River,
a history of the Underground Railroad in and around Ripley. The larger antislavery community provided money when it was needed, intelligence about the activities of slave hunters, and armed protection when the core activists were under attack.

The underground network, in Ripley and elsewhere, was built on a cellular structure consisting mainly of discrete, family-based units that were linked to one another only at their outer edges, and whose members typically did not know the names of fellow members who lived more than two or three towns away. For families who occupied a particularly critical location, like the Rankins, clandestine work was a full-time vocation. Jean Rankin, the reverend's wife, was responsible for seeing that a fire was always burning and food was on the table for unexpected visitors who came
in the night, and for providing dry clothes and a place for them to rest. By the 1840s, at least, John Rankin focused his efforts primarily on political debate and antislavery work within the Presbyterian church. He did little if any conducting of fugitives himself. That was the responsibility of his sons, most of whom were now in their teens and twenties: slim Samuel, the handsomest of them, with his father's piercing eyes and high, chiseled cheekbones; Calvin, with his mother's broad face and high-domed forehead; John Jr., a copy of Calvin, but shorter and wirier; sad-eyed, weak-chinned Adam Lowry (who was known always by his middle name), the eldest, with his flyaway hair. All would follow their father into the ministry, though Lowry only reluctantly, even grudgingly, for he had dreamed of becoming a draftsman and escaping the relentless single-mindedness of the Rankin home, but he too had finally surrendered to the reverend's wishes when he saw a slave girl sold away in front of him one day in the bowels of a steamship at the Ripley wharf.

At least one of the Rankin boys was expected to be on call at any given moment to saddle up and hasten his charges to the next friendly home. “The mode of travel was sometimes afoot, sometimes on horses, sometimes in wagons and the route chosen was governed by the circumstances of each case as was thought would be most safe and the guide preferred,” the underground veteran Isaac Beck recalled. Whenever possible, a runner was sent on ahead to alert the next station to be ready for an arrival. Stations were commonly between fifteen and twenty miles apart, the maximum distance for mounted riders or a wagon to travel at night and return before dawn. The Rankins' main route initially ran a long twenty-one miles north through rolling, lightly forested hills to Sardinia. Later, when volunteers became more abundant, the legs were shortened considerably and linked up with alternative routes to other nearby towns. By the late 1830s the Rankins most often carried fugitives four and a half miles to the village of Red Oak. There the route split, with one branch continuing north via Russellville to Sardinia, and the other via Decatur to West Union, in Adams County. At a Quaker settlement near Clinton, the Sardinia line joined a different route that originated at the river port of Moscow, west of Ripley, and passed northward through Felicity, Bethel, and Williamsburg. In times of unusual danger, none of these routes might be used, and fugitives might be sent west toward Cincinnati, and from there into Indiana.