America's Prophet

by Bruce Feiler

  Few whites had illusions about the horrors of slavery. Thomas Jefferson called the institution a “hideous evil” and chastised freedom fighters “who can endure toil, famine, stripes [lashes], imprisonment, or death itself” fighting for their own liberty, but who still impose bondage “one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.” Yet Jefferson kept slaves himself, and believed that black Africans were inferior and had a “strong disagreeable odor.” He even fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings.

  Others, though, put their distaste into action. As early as 1641, Massachusetts forbade slavery, except for prisoners of war. By the 1780s, Quakers formed a committee for banning the “execrable traffic” of slaves. Benjamin Franklin, once a buyer and seller of slaves, became an abolitionist. A Vermont judge wrote that he would accept one person’s ownership of another only with a “bill of sale from God Almighty.” By the end of the eighteenth century, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia all banned the importation of African slaves, while most northern states passed laws mandating gradual emancipation. The movement to undermine the institution was beginning to gain momentum.

  I REACH THE base of Rankin Hill, where some teenagers are riding bikes. I can’t believe they are out at this hour. I walk the length of the road and reach a dead end, so I double back, past the dogs and the cat, to the house with the American flag. I spot what appears to be a path and follow it. Suddenly trees envelop me. As I begin making my way up a slope, the sound of grasshoppers fills my ears and I’m moving much more slowly. I come to a patch of dead leaves, and my every step is incredibly loud. A shriek of foliage. “Where are the stairs?” I wonder.

  At the end of a patch of dirt and mulch, I spot the hint of a wooden structure. I’m under a full canopy in complete darkness. This is totally foolish and a tad dicey, I tell myself. Assuming these are the stairs to the Rankin House, I begin to climb, but the treads haven’t been repaired in years and some splinter beneath my shoes. Then suddenly the stairs end, and I’m back in roots and mud. I’m breathing heavily now. If anyone had been anticipating fugitives, this is surely where they would have waited. The only way to proceed is on all fours. My hands are riddled with splinters. Sweat drips into my eyes. Finally I come to a second set of stairs and start to climb, counting one, two, three. These steps are firmer under my feet.

  Ripley, Ohio, is located 250 miles south of the Canadian border in a stretch of hilly woodlands once known as the Imperial Forest. With its plum river location, Ripley emerged as an economic powerhouse in the early 1800s. It became so wealthy that during the panic of 1837, the town sent money to help bail out New York banks. Yet Ripley became best known as ground zero in the antislavery movement, the “hell hole of abolition.”

  For all the hand wringing over slavery, the institution’s pivotal role in the nation’s economy only expanded in the nineteenth century with the growth of cotton as a major cash crop. Importing slaves was banned in 1808, but the existing population ballooned, more than doubling to two million by 1830, then doubling again by the Civil War. Though the Underground Railroad was neither unified nor centralized, it was the most comprehensive attempt to undermine this behemoth and was the greatest movement of civil disobedience since the Revolution. Modern estimates suggest that in the six decades after 1800, between 100,000 and 150,000 slaves received assistance from the network.

  John Rankin was Ripley’s most controversial resident and Ohio’s main conductor. One scholar calls him a “moral entrepreneur,” who brilliantly mined the hearts and minds of southern Ohio and molded them into an underground army. A native of Tennessee, Rankin was raised a strict Calvinist but was transformed by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening that reached across the Appalachians in 1802 and 1803. “A wonderful nervous affection pervaded the meetings,” Rankin wrote. “Some would tremble as if terribly frightened; some would have violent twitching and jerking; some would fall down suddenly as if breathless and lie for hours.”

  The Rankin Family, 1872: the Reverend John Rankin is seated in the center of the bottom row; his son, John, Jr., is standing immediately behind his father’s right shoulder. (Courtesy of The Union Township Public Library, Ripley, Ohio)

  Rankin reacted by reading and rereading the Bible, committing large parts of it to memory. He became a minister but was pushed out of the South for using the Bible to teach “incendiary ideas” about slavery. On New Year’s Eve 1822, Rankin, along with his wife, three sons, and the family’s last remaining fifty dollars, boarded two skiffs and crossed the icy Ohio to Ripley. With a population of 421, Ripley had not yet experienced the prosperity it would soon enjoy, and Rankin remained restless. “Something good would eventually come from Ripley,” his wife assured him. That something came two years later in a letter Rankin received from his brother Thomas, who announced that he had come into money and purchased slaves. Rankin was disgusted and poured out his ire in a series of twenty-one letters over the next thirteen months. The letters were later printed in the Ripley Castigator and made their way to the man who became the country’s leading abolitionist. William Lloyd Garrison credited them with his entry into the movement and reprinted them in the Liberator. Rankin’s letters were eventually published in a book that went through eighteen different editions.

  In his passionate, meticulous diatribes, Rankin attacked every known argument in favor of slavery. His first letter begins, “I consider involuntary slavery a never failing fountain of the grossest immorality, and one of the deepest sources of human misery.” In coming letters, he lambastes the notion that God had designed blacks for servitude. He argues that the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt was state-sponsored service and thus less heinous than owning human chattel. “When the slavery in Egypt is viewed, even in its worst forms, it does not appear to equal in cruelty that which exists among us.” He twice quotes Exodus 11: “He that stealeth a man and selleth him…shall surely be put to death.” And he adds a quotation from Deuteronomy 23: “Thou shall not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped.” In 1827, Thomas Rankin yielded to his brother’s arguments and freed his slaves. Soon afterward, Thomas moved to Ohio and joined the Underground Railroad.

  In 1829, John Rankin bought sixty-five-and-a-half acres of thickly forested land on a hill 540 feet above Ripley. On either side were valleys and behind him the Appalachian foothills. From his front door, Rankin could see nearly five miles of the Ohio River and well into Kentucky. In their modest, one-story house, Rankin and his wife raised at least twenty-two children, including thirteen of their own, plus others from their siblings and friends. To alert slaves that they would be welcomed, the Rankins placed a lantern in the front window every night, making it visible deep into slave territory. One slave referred to it as a “big lighthouse in his yard” and said, “It always meant freedom for a slave if he could get to this light.”

  In the coming decades, Ripley became a hotbed of conflict between abolitionists and slave catchers. “This was a period when men went armed with pistol and knife and used them on the least provocation,” wrote John Parker, a mulatto slave who bought his freedom in 1845 and moved to Ripley in 1848. “When under cover of night the uncertain steps of slaves were heard quietly seeking their friends. When the mornings brought strange rumors of street encounters the night before, but daylight showed no evidence of the fray.” Parker claimed to have aided 315 slaves in their quest for freedom. In his autobiography, he tells of numerous trips across the Ohio to help families cross. He observed a slave leave a skiff so a fellow passenger’s husband could board, only to be captured moments later, “a heroic victim of his own unselfishness.” He ferried women wearing four dresses and three pairs of underwear who almost drowned when they tripped on the lips of their mistresses’ stolen hoop skirts and fell into the water. And he made a daring run into the bedroom of the master of a frantic couple whose baby was being held hostage. “Peeping around the foot of the bed, I saw a bundle lying close to the edge. W
ithout waiting to see what it was, I dragged it toward me, and getting a firm hold pulled it off the bed. As I did there was a creak of the bedsprings and the next moment the room was in darkness. There was no cause for secrecy now, so I jumped to my feet and rushed to the door.”

  Once in Ohio, the slaves were taken to safe houses, then usually sent up the hill to the Rankin house, or similar places, where they were clothed, fed, then taken to subsequent towns, often that same night. “There would be a knock on the door,” explained town historian Betty Campbell, whose great-great-great-grandfather was Ripley’s first resident and whose husband is descended from Senator Alexander Campbell. “The Rankins would take the fugitives in, and their goal was to get them out of there that same night. Often one of the Rankin boys would lead them over the hills. And of course the Rankins had to be back before daylight so nothing would look amiss.” If the runaways arrived too late, the family hid them in the barn, so the Rankins could plausibly deny knowledge of how they got there. Historians have identified one hundred such “stops” on the Underground Railroad in the Buckeye State alone. Ripley was stop number one.

  The most famous person to make the flight across the Ohio to Ripley, and, indirectly, one of the more influential Americans of the nineteenth century, was a slave girl called Eliza who crossed on a brutally cold night in February 1838. “All the boys in town had been down on the slow ice that very afternoon,” John Rankin remembered. “They knew the ice was rotten, with air holes and cracks extending almost across the river.” Eliza was a mulatto with a two-year-old baby who was thought to have been fathered by her overseer. Upon hearing that her master planned to sell her child, Eliza took off north with the baby. An elderly white man who lived along the river advised her against crossing because the ice was too soft. She was ready to turn back when they heard the baying of dogs pursuing her. Relenting, the man gave her a woolen shawl to protect her child and pulled off a wooden rail from his fence for her to support herself should she fall through the ice.

  Eliza hurried down the bank and onto the frozen river just as the dogs burst into the open. With her pursuers watching from Kentucky and bounty hunters eyeing her from Ohio, she placed her foot on a soft spot of ice and plunged into the frigid water, managing barely to heave her baby to safety on some solid ice. The rail worked, caught the ice, and saved her from sinking to the bottom. Grasping desperately in the darkness for her child, who had nearly come unwrapped from the shawl, Eliza rebundled the baby, pulled herself to the surface, took another step, and promptly broke through the ice again, splashing into the water. Once more she tossed the baby to refuge. She scurried to her feet, claimed her baby, then fell yet again into the water. Three times she fell through the ice that night; three times the rail saved her life. Finally she reached the Ohio side, where a bounty hunter, Chancey Shaw, was waiting. He grabbed her by the shoulder. A fugitive like Eliza was worth five hundred dollars, with more for the enslaved infant. But Shaw had been watching the horrifying scene unfold on the river. “Any woman who crossed that river carrying her baby has won her freedom,” he told her. Then he sent her up the stairs to Rankin’s light. “No nigger was ever caught that got to his house,” Shaw said.

  Eliza crossing the Ohio River, from a poster of a staged production of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, created by W. J. Morgan & Co. Lith., Cleveland, Ohio, 1881. (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

  An hour later, warming in front of a fire, Eliza told her story to John Rankin. A year after that, Rankin was visiting one of his brothers in Cincinnati. He called upon an old friend, Calvin Stowe, a professor of biblical studies. One of the people present as Rankin retold the story was Stowe’s wife. “Terrible!” she said upon hearing the tale. “How terrible!” Harriet Beecher Stowe was so moved by Eliza’s story that she retold it as part of her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which became the best-selling book of the nineteenth century and the most influential piece of antislavery literature ever published. Eliza electrified the public and was quickly memorialized in paintings, woodcuts, and stage productions across the country, becoming the public face of the unbreakable humanity of the slaves. As Rankin’s son, John junior, later recalled: “Strange how this unknown fugitive mother figured into the history of this country.”

  AS THE NUMBER of stairs nears one hundred, I break through the overhanging trees and into the open air. The moon makes the sky seem as iridescent as Times Square. My heart is pounding, and I enter an open meadow at the top of the hill. Grass slopes up from the tree line to a destination I can’t quite see. I notice a stone path and some fruit trees that have lost their leaves. And at the top: a small redbrick house with white trim that reminds me of a one-room schoolhouse. It has two chimneys, two windows, two columns, and a white door. A candle is burning in one of the windows. I’ve reached the end of the climb. I’ve made it to the light in the window.

  I settle onto the front stoop and let my body collect itself. A train rumbles by on the Kentucky side, and I can’t believe how loud it is. Sounds carry for several states around here. I see a few cars on the Ohio River Scenic Byway, as well as a bicycle. A barge is moving upriver. From Rankin Hill, the Ohio River valley seems awash in transportation. Maybe that’s why the first slaves who fled north to freedom were described as having disappeared so quickly they must have traveled on an “underground road.” Later, with the arrival of steam locomotives, the phrase was replaced with railroad and the legendary route had its name. It occurred to me that many of the storied paths in American history run from east to west—Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, the Mason-Dixon line, the Oregon Trail, the Transcontinental Railroad. The Underground Railroad was one of the rare paths that ran south-north, as if a counterculture was fighting the natural thrust of American history.

  I sat quietly for a few minutes and let my heart quiet down. I began to hear the sound track of the hill—the grasshoppers, a crow, an animal darting across some dried twigs. For a second I thought I heard someone singing. When the sun comes back, and the first quail calls, / Follow the drinkin’ gourd. I chuckled, but the sound didn’t go away. If anything, the deep, bass voice seemed to be getting closer. It reminded me of “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat.

  For the old man is waiting

  For to carry you to freedom

  If you follow the drinkin’ gourd.

  Maybe someone had left a CD on inside Rankin House.

  Then suddenly a figure emerged from the side of the house and stood in shadow just a few feet in front of me. I scrambled to my feet and nearly tripped. He was bigger than me in every direction and wore a printed African shirt with white cowry shells and black stripes. He had a full white beard. He looked like Joe, who sings “Ol’ Man River,” or at least Jim from Huck Finn, sprung from captivity, with a few decades of home cooking inside him. “Welcome to the Promised Land, son,” he said. I thought I recognized the voice.

  “Jerry Gore!?” I said.

  He let forth a belly laugh that could be heard halfway to Mississippi.

  “Good God, you scared me to death!” I said.

  “Lawd, I hope so,” he said. “White boy like you tryin’ to walk in my shoes.” Then he resumed his song.

  “The riverbank will make a very good road,

  The dead trees show you the way.

  Left food, peg foot travelin’ on,

  Follow the drinkin’ gourd.”

  He gave me a hug. Jerry Gore is something of a self-appointed guardian of the Underground Railroad. A onetime professor at Morehead State in Kentucky and a great-grandson of a fugitive slave, Jerry is a collector of slave artifacts, the administrator of a small museum in nearby Maysville, Kentucky, and a walking encyclopedia of plantation life. But he’s also elusive. For weeks I had been trying to confirm a meeting for the following morning. His answering machine was charming; on it he speaks like a Zulu chieftain, but I had grown tired of hearing it. In my last message I said I was going to make the trek up Rankin Hill around midnight. No one rides these rails today
without a bit of conducting from Jerry Gore.

  We sat on the stoop, and I asked him why every conversation about the Underground Railroad seems to end with somebody singing. He answered with a brief history lesson. The first enslaved Africans who were shipped to America brought with them their own religious traditions. For some it was Islam; for others Christianity. But most brought tribal customs and traditional gods. Once they arrived in America, many slaves were forcefully exposed to the Bible. White owners sometimes justified slavery by telling themselves they were doing the pagan Africans a favor by converting them to Christianity.

  “The key to making a slave is stripping away the enslaved person’s culture,” Jerry said. “Ban their religion. Deny their dress. Take away their names. If you remove the essential parts of a person’s culture, you can make that person do what you want.”

  “So was teaching the slaves Christianity an attempt to control them?”

  “Very much so. The controlling part is that I’m trying to convince you that my God is the real God. In the African perspective, God is to be loved. In the European perspective, God is to be feared. You don’t want to do anything that will incur the wrath of God. So if I’m your slave, and you can teach me to fear your God, then that is a form of control.” In Kentucky, he said, whites built special churches where they took their slaves on Sunday mornings. The slaves were sent up ladders to special balconies—Jerry called them “nigger pews”—then the ladders were removed so they couldn’t escape. “At least it’s the best view!” he joked.