Authors: Fergus Bordewich
5
Still the fugitives came, night after night, having seen the Rankins' ever-glowing light from the Kentucky bluffs. Sometimes they swam. More often they rowed across the river in skiffs “borrowed” from the Kentucky shore. Sometimes, in the hottest weather, when the Ohio was so dry that steamboats were stranded, they could walk most of the way across. (The river was narrower then, about 150 yards across at Ripley; today, after much dredging and banking, it is about 600 yards wide.) But escapes were most common in winter, when the dense vegetation on the Kentucky side was easier to move through, the snakes that infested the hills were dormant, and the ice on the river froze as much as eighteen inches thick.
Unfortunately, John Rankin never wrote about these people until he reached old age, and in the brief account of his life that he did record, they are rarely more than tantalizing shadows. One young woman is “beautiful and accomplished in her manners and but slightly colored,” a seamstress who “had intercourse with the highest class of ladies, from whom she gained much knowledge and learned politeness.” Another, a pious Presbyterian nurse, was fifty years old, and about to be sold away from her home in Kentucky when she was brought across the river by “a free colored girl of Ohio.” Another was a young man who “said that in Kentucky there were twenty men after him in a wheat field and they were so near him he thought they would hear his heart beat.” These heroic men and women remain elusive in the first hours of their freedom, seen only for a moment in the Rankins' accounts as if in the sudden glare of a flash in a darkened room, only to mutely recede again into the darkness of the past as abruptly as they appeared.
The most famous single fugitive to pass through the Rankin home was also the most enigmatic of all. On a bitter night in the winter of 1838, a heavy-set black woman picked her way furtively down Tuckahoe Ridge toward the frozen river. She followed the familiar track from the plantation where she was enslaved, careful to keep herself out of sight when she reached the snow-covered floodplain, moving close to the ground. In her arms, she carried an infant whom she had wrapped in a shawl against the cold air. She was leaving her other children and a husband behind, hoping that if she was not caught, and if she did not die, she might be able to re
turn for them someday. She had fled abruptly for the same reason as so many other fugitives: a day or two earlier a slave trader had appeared at her master's estate to negotiate her price or that of her child. She knew that she might die crossing the river, but if she did nothing she would die a different kind of death, to be sold away south, and away from her family forever.
In some accounts, the woman begged help from an elderly Scotsman or Englishman who lived near the shore, and who sheltered her until she heard the baying of dogs on her trail. As she ran from his house she grabbed hold of a plank and raced to the river's edge. When the ice was solid, teams of horses could cross it. But there had been a thaw and the ice was rotten, full of air holes and cracks, and the water was running over it, and it was ready to break up. No one had ventured onto it for the past two days, but she had no choice. Her first step broke through. For a moment she stood paralyzed in freezing water. Then she plunged forward, carrying her baby in one hand and the plank in the other. The ice seemed firmer as she ran toward the Ohio shore, but then without warning she broke through again, this time up to her armpits. She pushed the baby ahead of her onto the ice, then levered herself up with the aid of the plank. Laying the plank across the broken ice, she crept along it until she fell through once more. Again she managed to throw the infant ahead of her before she sank. Crawling back onto the ice, she continued her progress in this fashion until the ice disintegrated beneath her again. This time she sank in only to her knees, and she knew that she was close to the Ohio shore. When she finally touched solid land she collapsed, physically spent.
She was safe for the moment, she thought. But she was not alone. A white man had come up out of the darkness and loomed over her. Had she known who he was she would have recognized him as her worst nightmare. He was a Ripley man named Chancey Shaw, a sometime slave catcher who often prowled the northern bank of the river on the lookout for fugitives. He had watched attentively as the woman made her way across the ice, and he was preparing to seize her when, he later admitted to a local abolitionist, he heard her baby whimper and something unexpectedly moved inside him. Surprising himself, he heard himself tell her, “Woman, you have won your freedom.” Instead of arresting her, he led her, soaked and freezing, to the edge of the village. There he pointed to a long flight of steps that ascended a bare hill, at the top of which the rec
tangle of a farmhouse and a light were visible. He told her to make for the light, saying, “No nigger has ever been got back from that house.”
The first that the Rankins knew of the fugitive woman's presence was when Jean Rankin heard her poking at the fire. (The door to the Rankin home was always unlocked in anticipation of fugitives.) Immediately falling to the indispensable work that was everywhere performed by the women of the Underground Railroad, she soon had the mother and her baby fed and out of their wet clothes. Upstairs twelve-year-old John Rankin Jr. was awakened by the voice of his father. “I had answered that night call too many times not to know what it meant,” John Jr. recalled many years later. “Fugitive slaves were downstairs. Ahead of us was a long walk across the hills in the dead of night under a cold winter sky. Then the long cold walk back home, which must be made before daybreak.”
Still sleepy, John Jr. came downstairs with his brother Calvin to see a short, stout mulatto woman dressed in one of their mother's old linsey-woolsey dresses and a pair of their father's socks, seated before the fire with her baby in her arms and a pile of clothes drying before the fire. The Rankins massed around her as she told them her story. “She seemed so simple as she looked up in our faces,” John Jr. recalled. “How little did we know that this courageous mother, who was though now unknown, was to stir the heart of a great nation.” More than a decade later, she would be transformed in the imagination of the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe into the fictional slave “Eliza,” and her perilous crossing of the frozen Ohio River would achieve the dimensions of myth as the most famous rendering of a fugitive's escape ever written. But in the shivering figure before their fire, the Rankins simply saw a fugitive slave who had to be moved on quickly and safely to the home of another friend who would house and feed her, and then guide her on her lonely way to freedom.
Three horses were brought around to the back door, and using an old chair as an “upping block,” the fugitive hoisted herself up onto Jean Rankin's horse. Calvin was assigned to carry the baby, and John Jr. fell in behind him, as the boys wound down the thickly wooded bank of Red Oak Creek. At Red Oak, they handed off the woman and her child to James Gilliland, the local Presbyterian minister, who would in turn see that they were forwarded to the next station north. “So far as we were concerned, it was only another incident of many of similar character,” John Jr. told an interviewer long afterward. The Rankins never even knew her real name.
Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
âF
REDERICK
D
OUGLASS
1
“Eliza” and her child spent the winter with abolitionists in Greenfield, Ohio. In the spring, to put slave hunters off their trail, they were sent west to one of the most secure underground bastions west of the Appalachians, the home of Levi and Catherine Coffin, in Newport, Indiana. She would soon make another entrance onto the stage of history almost as dramatic as her first, but for the Coffins, as for the Rankins, “Eliza” was now but a fleeting presence. She remained with them for several days, told them her remarkable story, one of the multitude they heard every year, and then made way for other fugitives, who were appearing at the Coffin home in a steady stream. Rarely did a week pass when the Coffins were not awakened in the night at least once by a tap at the side door of their house. “Outside in the cold or the rain, there would be a two-horse wagon loaded with fugitives,” Levi wrote in his autobiography. “I would invite them, in
a low tone, to come in, and they would follow me into the darkened house without a word, for we knew not who might be watching and listening. When we were all inside, I would cover the windows, strike a light and build a good fire. By this time, my wife would be up and preparing victuals for them.”
The sensitive, lantern-jawed farmboy who had wept at the sight of a flogged slave, and who had ridden over the mountains of western Virginia to foil the pursuit of a fugitive, was now well-advanced into middle age and, to all appearances, a respectable burgher, a pillar of the local establishment, an impression that was accentuated by the solemnity of his customary conservative costume of black broadcloth coat, immaculate white neckcloth, and high-crowned Quaker hat. Age had deepened the furrows in his gaunt cheeks, thinned his hair, and infused his hazel-colored eyes with a tired gravity. In spite of the recent national depression, his businesses had grown along with Newport. In addition to his thriving dry goods store, he had “commenced cutting pork,” two hundred thousand pounds of it in 1841. He also owned a mill that manufactured linseed oil. Robert Burrel, a fugitive slave, operated it around the clock when there was water, and at night neighbors fell asleep listening to the fall of the weight on the wedge that pressed out the oil. Recently Coffin had built a fine new two-story red brick home, one of the best in Newport, on what everyone now called the “Coffin corner,” near Pleasant Unthank's boardinghouse, Charles Comfort's shoe store, and a blacksmith shop belonging to a man named Sigafoos, who kept as a pet a large timber wolf that bared its teeth to anyone who stopped to look at it. Appearances aside, Coffin presided over what may well have been the busiest center of illegal activity in the state of Indiana.
Outside of certain river towns like Madison and the Quaker counties in the eastern part of the state, the underground was less ubiquitous in Indiana than it was in Ohio. (It was weaker yet in Illinois, which was still thinly populated, and whose southern tier was inhabited mainly by intensely proslavery immigrants from the South; the most significant underground routes in Illinois ran from west to east, from the Missouri state line to Chicago.) As it was elsewhere, the underground in Indiana was a fluid web whose component strands were never static or unchangeable. Broadly speaking, however, three main routes traversed the state from south to north. The first ran from Cincinnati and Lawrenceburg, via
Newport and Wayne County, through Fort Wayne, and into Michigan. The second originated from separate branches that crossed the Ohio River at Madison, New Albany, and Leavenworth. The first two of these joined at Salem, merged with a third near Columbus, and continued northward through Indianapolis and South Bend. The westernmost route began at Evansville and followed the Wabash River north through Terre Haute and Lafayette to South Bend, where it joined the middle route from Indianapolis. The Coffins received fugitives from at least three directionsâfrom Cincinnati, Madison, and Jeffersonville, and sometimes Indianapolisâand usually forwarded them northward either toward the lake port of Sandusky, Ohio, or toward Battle Creek, Michigan, where the line from eastern Indiana linked up with routes from Illinois, and from central and western Indiana, and continued on across southern Michigan to Detroit.
Like George DeBaptiste in Madison, Coffin represented a new, pivotal kind of figure in the clandestine network, sometimes called a “general manager,” who exerted a combination of managerial efficiency and moral suasion to rationalize the operation of what had formerly been a fairly haphazard system. These men, and there would be more and more of them as the system continued to grow, were products of it's growing maturity and reach. As the underground spread, it required more sophisticated coordination. Someone had to be able, often on very short notice, to muster and allocate resources, and to deal simultaneously with traumatized and suspicious refugees, law enforcement officials, slave hunters, and willing but not always effective abolitionists. Money had to be raised to buy shoes and cloth to make clothing for fugitives who arrived destitute, and often barefooted, in rags, and footsore. Food had to be collected and kept ready. Wagons had to be hired, horses procured, feed purchased, drivers paid, messengers dispatched, guards arranged for, medical care provided.
Coffin was one of those men, unusual in any age, with the strength of character and knowledge of his own heart to know what his role on earth truly was. This produced a self-confidence that enabled him to withstand both physical danger and extraordinary social pressure during his early years in Newport. He also owed his effectiveness, in part, to his prominence in the community. In addition to running his own enterprises, he was a director of the Richmond branch of the state bank. When anyone
wished to do business with the bank, as Coffin put it, “much depended on the director from the district where the applicant lived,” a fact that restrained many of the proslavery men of the area, who declined to challenge his clandestine activity as they might otherwise have done. He did not hide his beliefs. “I expressed my anti-slavery sentiments with boldness on every occasion,” he wrote. “I told the sympathizers with slave-hunters that I intended to shelter as many runaway slaves as came to my house, and aid them on their way; and advised them to be careful how they interfered with my work.”
Coffin's personal feelings about color were ambiguous. He frequently cited the danger of racial miscegenation as an argument on behalf of abolition and
against
slavery, because, as he often pointed out, bondage led to the sexual exploitation of black slaves by their white masters. Only free blacks, in other words, could be kept out of white people's bedrooms. However, his misgivings about racial mixing were mitigated by a deep and undoubtedly genuine sense of charity. “We were not in favor of amalgamation and did not encourage the intermarriage or mixing of the races, but we were in favor of justice and right-dealing with all colors,” Coffin wrote of his antislavery friends in Newport.
However, his commitment to emancipation was unalloyed. Slave hunters often passed through Newport, and Coffin made it bluntly clear to them that he had the local authorities on his side. How effectively Coffin's power could be deployed when he wished is shown by the experience of two slave-owning brothers from Maryland, named Dawes, who bought a tanyard at Winchester, in neighboring Randolph County. They had a pair of enslaved girls with them when they arrived, whom they decided to sell before permanently settling in Indiana. The brothers had originally intended to continue on to Missouri. Although Indiana law permitted the passage of slaves through the state, it did not allow the importation of slaves by state residents. When the Daweses purchased the tanyard, they fell under the provisions of the state's personal liberty law. En route to Kentucky, where they planned to sell the girls and buy a stock of hides with the proceeds, the brothers passed through Newport. An abolitionist from Winchester, realizing that the girls were being taken south, galloped ahead to Newport in an attempt to have the Daweses arrested as kidnappers. Levi Coffin recalled, “We at once called a meeting in our schoolhouse, and by ringing the bell and sending out runners, we soon
had most of the citizens convened.” Knowing that the masters would soon be out of the state, they had no time for delay. Coffin filed an affidavit with the town magistrate, Jonathan Unthank, an active member of the underground, who presided over the meeting. Unthank, in turn, issued a writ and gave it to the town constable, John Hunt, who, significantly, was also in attendance. Hunt collected a ten-man posse, and with Coffin they set off through a torrential rain in pursuit of the Daweses. They found the brothers two hours' ride south, sheltering in a farmhouse. Hunt arrested them on the spot. Coffin informed the two girls that under Indiana law they were now free. Hunt then ordered the brothers to return with him to Newport, and told them that they would be charged with kidnapping, and that the penalty was five hundred dollars' fine and two years' imprisonment. A trial was organized within days. An hour before it was to begin, the brothers panicked and offered to abandon their claim to the girls if Coffin would not testify against them. Coffin agreed only on condition that they make out papers of emancipation for the girls on the spot. The papers were written, and signed by Coffin's attorney and the Newport magistrate. The girls were then turned over to Coffin and sent north via the underground lines. The Daweses later attempted to sue Coffin for his part in the affair, but they were unable to find a lawyer anywhere in the area who was willing to take their case.
On another occasion, when Coffin was summoned to appear before a grand jury at the county seat for harboring fugitive slaves, he found that he was personally acquainted with a majority of the jurors, and knew several of them to be active abolitionists. Asked if he knew that harboring fugitives was against Indiana law, Coffin replied opaquely, “Persons often travel out our way and stop at our house who
say
they are slaves, but I know nothing about it from their statements, for our law does not presume that such people can tell the truth, since the laws of our state do not admit colored evidence.” Coffin's close collaborator Dr. Henry H. Way was then called to the stand. He was asked if he knew where in Newport a certain band of fugitives had stopped. “At Levi Coffin's,” Way replied blandly, adding that he had helped to dress the wounds of some of them. Asked if he knew that they were fugitives, Way replied, “They said they were slaves from Kentucky, but their evidence is worthless in this state.” Several other witnesses testified in much the same fashion, all agreeing that the fugitives had been lodged at Coffin's house, and that anyone who
wished to meet them had been allowed to do so. In the end, the jury declined to indict either Coffin or Way for any crime.
Almost everyone in Newport seemed to be involved in the underground in one way or another. Their boldness is sometimes astonishing. Once when a slave owner pursuing a fugitive with a warrant demanded to investigate the home of the Coffins' friend Daniel Hough, Hough led him through the house with a lantern and then, opening the attic door, bluntly told him, “Here is where we keep our runaway darkies, but there are none in there tonight.” As time went on, the Coffins openly kept fugitives at their house with little fear of being molested. Many years later, a Newport man named Jesse Way would remember how one day in his youth he had been passing the Coffin home and noticed a crowd of people standing in the street around the door. “What is the matter?” he asked his uncle Henry, who was coming out of the house. “Is somebody dead?” His uncle replied matter-of-factly, “Only a fresh load of negroes come to town.” Newport's abolitionist sewing society met regularly at the Coffin house to make clothes for the fugitives. And the Coffins' door was always open to visiting antislavery lecturers, including, in 1843, Frederick Douglass, who was just beginning to make a name for himself as a newly minted abolitionist orator, on his first western tour as a speaker for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
2
Once Frederick and Anna Douglass were certain that they were safe in New Bedford, they settled into a domestic life that was unremarkable for free people, but must have seemed wondrous and exotic for a man who had been enslaved all his life, until only a few months before. Douglass put on the “habiliments of a common laborer,” as he expressed it, and set off in search of work. He sawed wood, dug cellars, shoveled coal, swept chimneys, loaded and unloaded sailing vessels, and stoked furnaces. Once in a while he managed to work at what he had been trained to do, caulking ships, when white caulkers did not warn him off, for even in the “Gibraltar of the fugitive,” as abolitionists called it, there was discrimination. Nevertheless, blacks, who numbered 10 percent of the population, were better
off in New Bedford than anywhere else in the North. Protected by white abolitionists and a legal system that would defend them, they were safe from slave catchers, and they worked at a wide variety of professions. Some were even wealthy. But their position was only relative. Douglass was furious when he discovered that the Methodist church that he had joined, and most of the other white churches in New Bedford, did not permit black congregants to take the sacrament of bread and wine until the whites had been served first. Prejudice against color, he would write, “hangs around my neck like a heavy weight. It presses me out from among my fellow men.” His face glares out from daguerreotypes taken around this time with the intensity of a Byzantine saint. It is a faceâthe chiseled planes of his cheeks, the firm chin, the brow curled into that fierce wrinkle above the bridge of his aquiline nose, and more than anything else that unnervingly, unforgivingly direct gazeâthat perhaps more than any other of his era radiates a jarring fusion of intellectual brilliance and rage. He eventually joined an all-black congregation, where he began to talk about his life in slavery, in the process gradually discovering the first stirrings of the mesmerizing voice that would become one of the most famous of the nineteenth century.