Authors: Fergus Bordewich
In October Hughes was indicted for grand larceny. Corse, Ruggles, Hopper, and Gibbons were charged with harboring Hughes and helping him avoid prosecution. Antiabolitionist newspapers reacted with their customary venom, accusing the Quakers and Ruggles of “abducting” Hughes, and abetting the theft itself. During the trials that ensued, the authorities resorted to gross intimidation in an attempt to make their case. Corse was warned that if he did not cooperate, “it will create a riot, and your house may be pulled down.” The police also tried, unsuccessfully, to force Clark's wife (Clark, the waiter, had himself fled the city), to manipulate Hopper into confessing that he had been a partner to the theft. The district attorney openly urged the jury to “appease the South” by convicting Corse, and in the jury room, one of the jurors freely admitted that he would never acquit an abolitionist. On the stand, Hopper declared that he never intended to yield up Hughes to his master, but that he had never taken any measures to keep Hughes from his master either. Ruggles de
fiantly stated that if it was true that Hughes was a slave to Darg, and the advertisement was true, it only meant that the slave had manumitted himself, and collected what was due him in the process.
In the end, Hughes's deal with the prosecutors fell through, and he was sentenced to two years in prison. His testimony was so transparently unreliable that the case against Hopper and Gibbons was soon abandoned, as eventually was the one against Corse. Although the threat of legal action hung over Ruggles for more than a year, no evidence against him was ever produced, and the charges against him were finally dropped in November 1839. But by then Ruggles was seriously ill. He had always been a high-strung, emotionally vulnerable man who concealed his sensitivity beneath fierce self-control, a man who deliberately sought out confrontation but suffered inwardly from its emotional impact. It required superhuman self-control of a black man to live as risky a public life as Ruggles had chosen. “At all times,” he wrote, “it behooves us to place the most careful watch over our own demeanor, living down, by consistent and virtuous conduct, every charge which may be brought against us.” But the years of worry, fatigue, and stress were finally exacting their toll.
Unfortunately, Ruggles had also managed to irritate Lewis Tappan, the most influential, and the wealthiest, antislavery man in the city. “Like most every colored man I have ever known, he was untrustworthy about money matters,” snapped Tappan, who in spite of his abolitionist principles declined to employ black clerks in his store. “I do not accuse him or others as deficient in integrity, but no regular account appears to be kept of money received or paid.” As if this were not enough, Ruggles had become enmeshed in a debilitating libel suit with his former friend Reverend Samuel E. Cornish, one of the founders of the Vigilance Committee, who now attacked him mercilessly in the pages of the
Colored American
. The conservative Cornish may already have resented Ruggles's impulsive and confrontational style. But the feud turned vicious when Cornish blamed Ruggles for a costly libel suit that was lodged against the newspaper by an alleged kidnapper, whose name Ruggles had mentioned in a published report of the Vigilance Committee. “Great in promises and in performances nothing,” one of Cornish's broadsides cruelly snarled. Another charged him with being “reckless of principle,” his brain “distempered,” his imagination “heated.” The internecine strife saddened Ruggles deeply. His sense of personal defeat was palpable. “There is too much personal quar
reling among us,” he wrote. “But for the sake of the cause, I bleed in silence.” The black abolitionist William Whipper, a key underground figure in Pennsylvania, begged publicly for a cessation of the attacks. He wrote in his own newspaper, the
National Reformer
, “Let not a faithful public servant that has lost his eyesight in the cause of liberty, suffer a worse infliction by having his character assailed because he is now too poor to defend it.”
Ruggles's reputation was tottering, and his sight was indeed rapidly failing. He was also broke. After years of working without salary, he was compelled to plead for back pay from the Vigilance Committee, and was awarded four hundred dollars. Ruggles had already sold the “last scrap” of his property to raise funds “to seek treatment for the opacity which affects our eyes.” But he now had to spend virtually every penny of it on his defense in the Darg case. For a man as proud as Ruggles, it must have felt deeply humiliating when he even had to beg friends and distant acquaintances for money. Gerrit Smith gave twenty dollars, the largest single donation.
In January 1839 Ruggles resigned as secretary of the Vigilance Committee. Destitute and almost blind now, he fell back on the charity of friends in New Rochelle. For the next several years, he was “repeatedly bled, leeched, cupped, plastered, blistered, salivated, dosed with arsenic, nux-vomica, iodine, strychnine and other poisonous drugs” which caused an “enlargement of his liver, the worst kind of dyspepsia, irritation of the lungs, chronic inflammation of the bowels, piles, nervous and mental debility” and a numb “state of the skin.” Astonishingly enough, he survived all this. He would live on until 1849, and would even manage to reinvent himself as the proprietor of a health spa in New England. But at the age of twenty-eight, his most important antislavery work was effectively over. Under his leadership, the Vigilance Committee helped or rescued something in excess of one thousand men and women. After his departure, the committee went into decline, but other less flamboyant men would eventually pick up the work that he had left off. Frederick Douglass never forgot what Ruggles had done for him. “He was a whole-souled man,” he wrote of his benefactor, “fully imbued with the love of his afflicted and hunted people, and took pleasure in being to me, as was his wont, âEyes to the blind, and legs to the lame.'”
A good man lives in that house, go to it and go in, and you will be safe.
âA
NONYMOUS
K
ENTUCKIAN,
TO A FUGITIVE SLAVE
1
In August 1844 Calvin Fairbank, a young seminarian from Oberlin College, was scouting out a route by which he might guide a family of fugitives from Lexington, Kentucky into Ohio. Fairbank had been bringing slaves across the Ohio River since he was twenty-one. He had rescued a total of forty-three over the last seven years, working independently or with one or two partners, often on his summer vacations from college. He had just completed an exploratory trip to Lexington, and was now crossing the river on the ferry to the Ohio town of Ripley, where he had been told that “friends of the fugitives” could be found. He intended to make contact with them, and he wanted their help when he brought his runaways north.
From the ferry Fairbank noticed a man crossing in a skiff. He hailed him.
“Mister, are you a Kentuckian?”
The man replied that he was.
Indicating Ripley, Fairbank asked, “Well, what kind of place is this?”
“It is a black, dirty, Abolition hole, sir.”
Inquiring further, Fairbank got the man to point out the homes of several well-known abolitionists. “And Dr. Rankin occupies the one on the hill,” the man concluded, indicating a red brick farmhouse that stood by itself on a steep bluff overlooking the town.
John Rankin was arguably the most formidable antislavery man on this stretch of the river. Fairbank probably had read the immensely influential public letters attacking slavery that Rankin had written to his brother in 1824 and 1825, which were widely reprinted in the
Liberator
and the publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Rankin had recruited hundreds of Ohioans to the abolitionist cause, and thanks to his indefatigable efforts the Underground Railroad was as firmly rooted in Ripley as the mighty oak trees that lent their deep and concealing shade to the precincts of his farm, across which as many as two thousand fugitives eventually would pass. In spite of his notoriety, Rankin and his brood of stalwart childrenâthere were nine sons and four daughtersâcontinued to dwell on their exposed hilltop, their home a beckoning symbol of freedom that could be seen for many miles along the river.
Pictures of John Rankin show a rather flinty-looking man: high white forehead towering over a long nose, uncompromising eyes, and thin, compressed lips, a face of sharp delineations, without softening half-tones. It is not a misleading image. Rankin's life was exclusively organized around a fierce, outspoken, and evangelical opposition to slavery. He was born in Jefferson County, Tennessee, in 1793, into a family of Scotch Presbyterians who had come to America from the North of Ireland. His father, a Revolutionary War veteran who had personally witnessed the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, “was remarkable for the purity of his morals,” Rankin wrote, taking his offspring to revival meetings whenever he could, and drilling them in the writings of obscure Scottish clerics. His mother, a gentler figure, had pronounced antislavery views, which impressed themselves on him at an early age.
As a child, he was tortured by spiritual anxieties. After church on
Sundays, while other young people skylarked, he felt obsessed with death, judgment, and eternity. The doctrine of election and foreordination in particular filled him with “anguish of spirit.” He tried to explain them away, “but it was a vain effort.” He also brooded over slavery, which he saw as a living sin oozing through the deep valleys of Tennessee. He was fortunate to attend Washington College in Jonesboro, which was run by an eminent Princeton University graduate, Dr. Samuel Doak. Himself a slaveholder, Doak taught his students that slavery was morally wrong, although like most Southern Christians he justified it with the argument that the danger of servile revolution was too great to risk actually setting slaves free. For Rankin there would be no such compromise.
Once ordained as a minister, Rankin ran into trouble immediately. He resigned from his first congregation because it would not tolerate his antislavery views. He then settled in eastern Kentucky, where antislavery men lived interspersed with slave owners, and he believed that he would be permitted to preach to the local slaves. Since it was a criminal offense to teach slaves to read, Rankin started a Sunday school in which only oral instruction was given, and only slaves who had written permission from their masters were accepted. One day, however, a mob of whites armed with clubs drove the slaves off. Rankin then gathered them in a friend's kitchen, but the slaves were ambushed and beaten on the way home. Disgusted by the behavior of his fellow whites, Rankin sold his property at a sacrifice, and on New Year's Day 1822 moved his family across the Ohio River to Ripley, Ohio, where the local Presbyterian church had invited him to serve as its pastor, at a salary of five hundred dollars per year.
Ripley was then in its commercial heyday, a bustling town of about three thousand, its economy fueled by river traffic and the businesses that sustained it, including a small ship-building industry. It was also one of the most important pork-butchering and packing towns in the West. Rankin's son John Jr. estimated that, as a boy, he had “fired the kettles that had scalded sixty thousand hogs one year and sixty-two thousand another year.” Steamboats linked Ripley with ports from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, and in the spring flatboats came down the creeks and rivers by the hundreds with cargoes of corn, tobacco, beef, whiskey, lumber, lime, and poultry destined for markets as far away as New Orleans. Rankin initially found Ripley an “exceedingly immoral” place “badly infested with infidelity, Universalism and whiskey,” where the Presbyterians were heavily
outnumbered by “infidels,” and swearing, frolicking, and dancing were openly tolerated. He went to work with Old Testament ferocity, forming Bible classes and Sunday schools, organizing satellite churches in the surrounding towns, denouncing saloons, and fulminating against farmers who celebrated their harvest with whiskey. He apparently had an impact, for in 1837 a traveler from New York declared Ripley to be “very pleasantly situated and the most moral place I was ever in.”
In his preaching, Rankin tirelessly reiterated three basic principles: that all men were created equal, that God had “made of one blood all nations of men,” and that every man ought either to do his own work or pay the man who does it for him. He thundered with his East Tennessee twang, “Let us be willing to go down and do the lowest service in Christ's kingdom, and labor to elevate the lowest of our race, that they may become the sons and daughters of the Almighty.” For Rankin, each suffering slave embodied a mortal vision of the sacred. The loss of a fugitive to slave catchers was thus not just a tactical defeat but a spiritual catastrophe. When Rankin learned that a fugitive who had been safe in the North had returned to Kentucky to rescue his family and had, along with them, been captured and reenslaved, he “was seized with such anguish of spirit that it seemed as if there were nothing in creation that could cheer me.”
Rankin can be seen as an emblematic figure among white radicals in much the way that David Ruggles can among blacksâa bridge from the pacifist style of the early nineteenth century to the confrontational activism of mid-century. Both men's writings and public utterances ran equally hot with moral outrage, but their styles differed considerably. Where Ruggles was impetuous to the point of rashness, Rankin avoided unnecessary risks. And while Ruggles pursued his work in often painful, underfinanced isolation, Rankin could rely on a disciplined phalanx of collaborators. He had another advantage that Ruggles could never have: he was a white man in a society that with rare exceptions treated even a brilliant black man like Ruggles with barely concealed contempt. Ruggles had burned himself out in less than five years. Rankin would serve their cause in Ripley without interruption for more than thirty.
The Northwest had changed since Josiah Henson and Jarm Logue had made their way north through the wilderness. Where Indians had roamed, new fields were everywhere being cleared, new houses built, barns erected, orchards planted, and roads pushed through the forest (al
though in much of the region they were still so poorly maintained that people referred to them as “mud roads” even when the dust was thickest). In the north, livestock was plentiful, and in the southwest, including the area around Ripley, hogs were raised in such profusion that several towns that lived on the slaughtering trade proudly claimed the sobriquet “Porkopolis.” But it was still a rough land, full of proud, self-confident men who were in a hurry to acquire land and get rich fast, men who wore their clothes caked with mud, their hair long, and spoke a language that blended the idioms of the Carolinas and Kentucky, New York and New England. As the 1840s dawned they were increasingly “tetchous” over the issue of slavery, “contrarious” if challenged, and ready to engage in violent “ructions” if pressed too hard.
Throughout the region, color prejudice against blacks was entangled with the pragmatic bigotry of businessmen and farmers whose economic interests were interwoven with those of the South. In 1832, a committee of the Ohio House of Representatives had menacingly reported that free blacks represented “a serious political and moral evil” that threatened white citizens of the state. Five years later Caleb Atwater, an influential Cincinnatian, declared, “As a state it is [in] our interestâ¦to have slavery continued in the slave holding states, for a century yet, otherwise our growth will be checked.” In September 1841 organized mobs had once again attacked blacks in Cincinnati, dragging barbers and waiters out of their places of employment, threatening the homes of abolitionists, and at one point even turning a cannon on a black neighborhood near Sixth Street and Broadway. Large majorities continued to support laws that barred blacks from testifying against whites in court and from service on juries, as well as from the public schools, asylums, and poorhouses, even as abolitionist agitation reached fever pitch. “The whole country was like a huge pot in a furious state of boiling over,” recalled Levi Coffin's nephew Addison Coffin, who followed his uncle to Indiana in 1842. The twenty-year-old North Carolinian was overwhelmed by “the contending, declaiming, denouncing, vilifying, swearing and vulgarity” that filled the community. “It was almost universal for ministers of the gospel to run into the subject in all their sermons; neighbors would stop and argue pro and con across the fence; people traveling along the road would stop and argue the point; at mills, stores, shops, everywhere it was abolition, pro-slavery, niggers, amalgamation, nigger wives, and all other such.”
The new decade was a time of transformation for abolitionism. The American Anti-Slavery Society was, in a sense, a victim of its success. It had grown with astonishing speed since its founding in Philadelphia barely a decade before. But serious cracks soon began to show. By the end of the 1830s, William Lloyd Garrison had adopted a cluster of radical positions that were unacceptable to more conventional abolitionists. He rejected the Constitution because it incorporated tolerance of slavery, and advocated the secession of the North in order to separate it from the sins of the South. He declared in the
Liberator
, “
My hope for the millennium begins where Dr. Beecher's expiresâviz
., AT THE OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION.” He scandalized evangelicalsâwho made up almost the entire rank and file of the movementâby suggesting that not everything in the Bible was divinely inspired, and by disparaging clergymen as “blind leaders of the blind, dumb dogs that cannot bark, spiritual popesâthatâ¦love the fleece better than the flock.” Garrison's opponents feared, with some cause, that antislavery would be submerged in Garrison's wider reformist agenda. Lewis Tappan, for instance, regarded the Protestant churches as the most effective agencies for advancing the abolitionist cause, and felt deep suspicion of anyone who was not a professed evangelical. “I sometimes fear we have greatly erred in associating with ungodly men in the Anti S. Enterprise,” he wrote to Gerrit Smith, who tried his best to remain on good terms with both factions. The last straw, at least for Tappan and the powerful circle of evangelicals based in New York, was Garrison's embrace of women's rights, including the participation of women in antislavery organizations on an equal basis with men. In 1839 Tappan's supporters, who represented the great majority of the movement's membership, as it proved, walked out of the American Anti-Slavery Society, leaving its rump to Garrison. They then met to form an entirely new organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, singing at the top of their lungs, “
Lo! What an entertaining sight/Are brethren who agree
.”
Many white abolitionists had also given up hope that gentle admonition would convince slaveholders to relinquish their human property. Despite decades of appeals to Christian morality, the number of slaves in the United States had steadily increased to just under two and a half million by 1840, more than double the figure at the beginning of the century. The political landscape offered only unpalatable alternatives. Neither of the
major parties showed the least sign of being willing to challenge slavery's overwhelming power in Washington. Abolitionists had only contempt for President Martin Van Buren. As Andrew Jackson's vice president, Van Buren had provided the tie-breaking vote in the Senate that prohibited postmasters from delivering any abolitionist literature where it was prohibited by state law, and in his own 1837 inaugural address he had blamed mob violence on abolitionists' “reckless disregard for the consequences of their actions.” Van Buren's Whig opponent in 1840, William Henry Harrison, as a member of Congress had voted to introduce slavery into Illinois, and he had publicly asserted that in his opinion the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and the press did not apply to abolitionists. Into this vacuum Gerrit Smith and his upstate New York supporters that year launched the Liberty Party, the first political party in American history to advocate the immediate abolition of slavery, its only platform. Its nominee for president was James G. Birney, a former Kentucky slave owner who had become converted to abolitionism. As befitted its origins in the Burned Over District of central New York, the party spoke with a distinctly evangelical voice, calling upon all abolitionists to “Vote as you pray, and pray as you vote.” Although the Liberty Party won only about 7 percent of the vote that year, and would never win much more than that, it would serve as the main national channel of political action for abolitionists throughout the 1840s. It also represented the first crucial step in forcing slavery onto the nation's agenda, a process that would finally be complete with the founding of the Republican Party in 1856. Those who dared to vote for Birney did so at their peril. In Cincinnati, for example, one Samuel Ogden cast his vote at the Cheviot Hotel, and was instantly attacked by proslavery men who beat him senseless and trampled him in the mud.