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 e
ntire 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.
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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 return 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 rectangle 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.
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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.
CHAPTER 11
THE CAR OF FREEDOM
Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS
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“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.”
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