Bound for Canaan (30 page)

The Rankins' operation was no secret—every Kentuckian in the neighborhood seemed to suspect them, and their house was often the first searched when a slave was missed. Fugitives could not be kept long in Ripley, where there were plenty of roughnecks, proslavery Democrats, and footloose Kentuckians in town always ready to hunt fugitive slaves if the pay was good. (Within hours, a master in pursuit of his runaway property could easily command a posse with the promise of whiskey and a dollar a day, at a time when a good farm hand could at best earn only three bits for a long day's work.) The Rankins tried to ensure that as few people as possible knew when a fugitive was passing through. “It was the custom with us not to talk among ourselves about the fugitives lest inadvertently a clue should be obtained of our
modus operandi
,” Lowry Rankin wrote. “‘Another runaway went through at night' was all that would be said.” While John Rankin must have had a wide knowledge of the larger network, he kept it to himself. His sons, who left much more detailed memoirs than his, rarely mention any stations except those in Red Oak and Sardinia, the two to which they most often conveyed fugitives. Judicious ignorance guaranteed safety: a man could not inadvertently give away knowledge that he did not have.

The success of the arrangement depended on an equilibrium of boldness and discretion. Courageous as their nightly trips were, the Rankins refused to cross the river into Kentucky, where the penalty for such activity was up to twenty-one years in the penitentiary. The Rankins also disliked freelancers from out of town who threatened to upset that equilibrium. When, for instance, a Canadian stranger showed up unexpectedly at the Rankins' home with a former fugitive and claimed that he intended to go into Kentucky to rescue the man's enslaved wife and four children, they urged him to give up the attempt and go home. Ignoring their advice, the stranger obtained work in Kentucky as a woodcutter and set about making contact with the fugitive's family. Over the next few weeks, he succeeded in bringing out not just the family but no fewer than twenty other slaves in the course of several trips back across the river, before he was arrested on suspicion of slave stealing. Fortunately, he managed to break jail and make his way back to Ohio. The Rankins sent the fugitives north on the Underground Railroad, but they were glad to see the last of the Canadian. Wrote Lowry Rankin, a little sourly, “His experience in jail on bread and water had satisfied his ambition and he went back to Canada
with his last load and we were thankful he did for we were afraid he would make us trouble.”

 

W
hen Calvin Fairbank landed in Ripley, hoping to secure a route by which he could escort a family of fugitives from Lexington, Kentucky, he expected the local underground to readily tender the help he needed. He didn't know what he was in for. The Rankins were so standoffish, he decided their house was not really an Underground Railroad station at all. He met an equally chilly reaction from the other abolitionists in Ripley, who even accused him of being a spy or a slave hunter in disguise. “It was altogether an unpleasant experience,” Fairbank wrote. He left Ripley frustrated but undissuaded. He too had been raised on the stubborn verities of evangelical antislavery, in western New York, and he was as single-mindedly committed to battling sin in his way as the Rankins were in theirs. The object of his efforts was a slightly built waiter named Lewis Hayden, who worked at Lexington's fashionable Phoenix Hotel. Hayden had once been the property, oddly enough, of a distant relative of John Rankin, also a Presbyterian minister, who had declaimed from his pulpit that there was no more harm in separating a family of slaves than a litter of pigs, and swapped him for a pair of carriage horses. In 1825, when Hayden was fourteen, the Marquis de Lafayette on his last visit to the United States happened to glance directly at him and, apparently, bow to him during the welcoming parade in Lexington. For Hayden, it was a transformative and liberating moment. “You can imagine how I felt, a slave boy to be favored with [Lafayette's] recognition,” Hayden wrote. “I date my hatred of slavery to that day.”

Fairbank's collaborator was a transplanted Yankee schoolmistress named Delia Webster. An adventurous Vermonter with elfin eyes and high, handsome cheekbones, she had been raised in the town of Vergennes, not far from the home of the stalwart abolitionist Rowland T. Robinson, whose sheep farm served as a terminus of the Underground Railroad. She had become acquainted with Hayden and his hope of escaping to the free states, and was his link to Fairbank. In the guise of a Methodist itinerant, Fairbank preached several times in Lexington and the surrounding area while exploring routes of escape. Since Hayden lived with his own family and apart from his masters, who leased him to the hotel, it was not difficult
for them to leave the city in Fairbank's rented carriage without attracting attention. Webster fancied herself in the role of a secret agent and willingly agreed to go along, knowing that the presence of a white woman would do much to allay suspicion. Unfortunately, Fairbank and Webster complicated things by adopting several contradictory cover stories. Fairbank hinted to the man from whom he rented the carriage that he was taking his fiancée to Maysville, on the Ohio River, to get married. Webster told people at the rooming house where she lived that they were traveling into the countryside on church business. Once under way, with the Haydens' skin daubed with flour to make them look white, and their son Jo hidden under the seat, they told people they encountered that they were helping a pair of friends to elope to Ohio.

The party headed north along the Maysville turnpike, modern Route 68. Fairbank had chosen their path carefully. The turnpike was the first stone-paved road west of the Alleghenies, enabling a well-handled coach to maintain a steady speed of eight miles an hour. They made good time through Paris, but then at Millersburg things began to go wrong. One of the horses fell ill and had to be exchanged, causing a dangerous delay. While there, Fairbank and Webster were recognized by two slaves from Lexington, who on their return unwittingly divulged information that helped connect the disappearance of the Haydens with the rented coach. The rest of the journey was uneventful, and at nine o'clock the next morning the party crossed the Ohio at Maysville, Kentucky, where the river sweeps northward between low bluffs in a great westward arcing bend. They passed through Ripley, where Fairbank temporarily left Webster, while he went on to Red Oak, having managed to win the confidence of an underground man there named Hopkins. Unfortunately, Webster insisted on driving back to Lexington, where she intended to resume her teaching the following day. By the time the two abolitionists reached Washington, Kentucky, four miles south of the river, they already started seeing handbills announcing the disappearance of the Haydens. On the outskirts of Lexington, the owner of the carriage met them on the road, seized the vehicle, and drove it to the seedy Megowan Hotel, which served variously as slave jail and public prison. A mob almost instantly surrounded the two Yankees, and Fairbank was tied and dragged into the barroom. Webster was allowed to return to her boardinghouse. However, in her absence, her
landlady had rifled through her trunk and found a fatally incriminating letter from Fairbank, offering to help in running off slaves.

Fairbank was tried and convicted of slave stealing, and wound up serving four and a half years in the Kentucky State Penitentiary. Webster was pardoned after serving five months, and returned home to Vermont. During her imprisonment, her modesty and grace won her the sympathy of many Kentuckians, who were embarrassed at the presence of such an obviously fine-toned woman in their penitentiary. After her release, to the dismay of Fairbank's supporters, however, she wrote a book exculpating herself, and suggesting that she had renounced abolitionism forever. Yet she remains an enigmatic figure. Despite her published apologia, she would later return to the Ohio Valley with an even bolder scheme to run off slaves. Nor had the underground heard its last from Calvin Fairbank.

Having been deposited with the abolitionist in Red Oak, Ohio, Lewis Hayden and his family were carried northward without further incident to Sandusky, and thence to Canada. They eventually settled in Boston, where Hayden would help found that city's Vigilance Committee, and become a leading figure in the Underground Railroad. In Hayden, the Rankin family had missed meeting one of the most remarkable African Americans of the era. Further, had they lent Calvin Fairbank the experience that they had gleaned from years of eluding Kentucky slave catchers, they might have saved him and Delia Webster from capture. But caution was the adhesive that held the Ripley network together. This close to the Ohio River, any misstep might easily lead to arrest, mob violence, or death. In 1839 Sally Hudson, a black woman who went to the aid of a fugitive who had been recaptured in the Gist settlement, was shot in the back and killed by a slave catcher. Although there were many witnesses, the murderer was never convicted. One of the Rankins' white collaborators, Reverend Dyer Burgess, a member of the Chillicothe Presbytery, was nearly lynched while traveling on an Ohio River steamboat, being saved only by the timely intervention of friends. John B. Mahan, a Methodist minister, was arrested at his home in Sardinia and carried back to Kentucky, where after sixteen months in jail and a prolonged trial, he was subjected to a ruinous fine that impoverished his family and contributed to his premature death. Then in the summer of 1841 the Rankins' own hilltop stronghold was the target of an armed assault.

One Sunday evening, Calvin Rankin was seeing a young lady home, and noticed several suspicious-looking men in town whom he took to be Kentuckians. There was nothing unusual about this, and the Rankins took no special precautions. However, Calvin and a teenage nephew named John P. Rankin, who was living with them, lay awake listening for sounds in the night. At about two-thirty in the morning, they heard a low whistle. Taking pistols, they immediately slipped downstairs and out the back door, waking Lowry Rankin in the process. Once outside, Calvin edged toward the northern end of the house, and John toward the south. Both boys were barefoot, and moved silently across the grass. At the front corner of the house, Calvin came suddenly face to face with a strange man, who stared back at him in astonishment. When Calvin demanded to know what he wanted, the man abruptly raised a pistol and fired point-blank. The shot passed over Calvin's shoulder, though so close that it set his shirt on fire. Another intruder posted at the south end of the house fired at John as soon as he came around the corner, but he also missed, and began to run. John fired his own pistol at the disappearing figure, and then heard “an unearthly scream,” but the man disappeared into the darkness. Several more men now appeared coming up the hill from the direction of the town, firing as they approached.

Inside the house, a wild scene was taking place. After the first two shots, Lowry jumped out of bed, pulled on his clothes, and started for the door. But his wife flung her arms around his neck “like a vise,” begging him not to go out. At the same time, their mother, Jean Rankin, ran in her nightclothes to the door, which the boys had left open, and locked it. With a decisiveness that suggests a well-practiced routine, she also seized the keys from the other doors, and was standing with her back against the front door when Lowry reached it, and refused to let him out. Lowry and the other brothers pleaded with her to clear the way, but she asserted with grim self-possession that Calvin and John must already have been killed, and that the murderers would be watching the doors, waiting to shoot whoever appeared in them. She would have no more killed, she declared. The boys' father agreed. “She added that we could do the dead no good, and our duty was now to preserve our own lives,” Lowry recalled. Lowry, however, slipped to the back of the house and forced open a window that had been nailed down. He jumped out the window followed by his brother
Samuel, when firing began again in the orchard a little distance to the east. Lowry was relieved to hear the voices of Calvin and John demanding the intruders' surrender. He and Samuel went to assist them when they discovered that a fire had been set against the barn. Picking up a pail at the cistern, Lowry ran to the barn and threw water on the blaze, and stamped out what remained of it. Had he been only a few minutes later, the fire would have reached the unthreshed crops in the barn. The family would have lost its entire store of wheat, oats, and hay, and the fire might well have spread, as probably it was intended, to the Rankin house itself.

Realizing that Lowry and Samuel had managed to get outside, Reverend Rankin now ordered the other boys out as well. A running battle was meanwhile taking place in the orchard, where Calvin and his cousin were in pursuit of the intruders. Barefooted, however, they made slow progress across the stubbly ground, and their quarry eluded them. By now, people in the town below had heard the shooting, and hundreds of them swarmed up the hill to the Rankins' aid. The Kentuckians managed to reach their boats and escape, taking their wounded with them. The man that John shot, a cobbler named Smith, later died, the only known white fatality in the Rankins' long war with slavery.

That week, Reverend Rankin published a warning in the
Ripley Bee.
Until now, he had prohibited his family from attacking any strangers seen on their property, unless they were seen actually committing a crime. In the course of that violent night, however, something had changed crucially. It represented an abrupt moral shift that foreshadowed the coming evolution of the entire abolitionist movement away from pacifism toward a willingness to fight, a course that would inexorably lead toward open warfare in Kansas in the next decade, and to the apotheosis of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. Rankin stated in his blunt Presbyterian way that although he was a man of peace he felt it was as much a duty to shoot down the midnight assassin as to pray. Strangers thereafter on his property after bedtime came at their own risk, for they certainly would be shot. Never was a man seen prowling about the Rankin land after that.