One day in June 1841, Reverend John Rankin was picking raspberries in the garden behind his hilltop home at Ripley, Ohio when he looked up to see standing before him a white stranger dressed in a homespun jacket buttoned to the top of his pants, an outfit common enough in parts of Canada, but outlandish in the Ohio Valley. Even more startling to Rankin was the stranger’s companion, the squat black woman “Eliza,” who had fled across the ice-bound Ohio three years earlier, and whom Rankin hadn’t expected to see again.
“Oh, master Rankin, I want my daughter,” she said.
The man with her was a French Canadian. The two had walked to Ripley from Cleveland, almost three hundred miles away. They intended to cross the river and bring away Eliza’s grown daughter and her four children. She explained that the Canadian, whose name has gone unrecorded, was a rugged fellow who had worked as sailor, fisherman, and farmer, and understood the risks if he was caught. She had promised to pay him well. How she acquired the money Rankin does not say, but it is possible that she raised it by recounting the story of her escape to white church congregations and asking for donations, a common practice.
Without a country, without rights, without scope for their ambitions, without respect, without security, family was all that most slaves had, and its very precariousness made its bonds all the more precious. Eliza’s own freedom was the only real capital she possessed, and she had decided to invest it in the salvation of her family. Since communication between slaves and relatives in the North, especially those in Canada, was all but impossible, Eliza’s daughter of course knew nothing of this plan.
“Nonsense!” Rankin exclaimed when he had heard them out. He was consistently opposed to gambling the life of a free person who was safe on the uncertain chance of liberating any number of enslaved ones, even family. He looked the Canadian up and down, and then said to Eliza, “As sure as you and that man go over there, they will catch you and sell you down the river, and they will hang him. Now do not try it.”
Eliza made it clear that they would go ahead with or without his help. Resigning himself, Rankin found Eliza temporary work with an abolitionist family near Ripley, and togged out the Canadian in a suit of less conspicuous clothes.
The Canadian found work chopping wood for steamboats and clearing land at the Thomas Davis farm, in Kentucky, where Eliza’s daughter was enslaved, two and a half miles from the river. He found accommodations in the river port of Dover, opposite Ripley, which allowed him to observe the habits of the local slave patrols, which, he carefully noted, retired for the night between three-thirty and four A.M. Certain that he could bring off the rescue, he returned to Ripley for a final conference with Rankin, and to pick up Eliza, who was essential to the plan, since the daughter might not agree to leave without the assurances of her mother.
Rankin arranged to have Eliza and the Canadian rowed across the Ohio on Friday evening, and to have them brought back again with the daughter and her children the following night. He also arranged for a wagon to be ready in Ripley to take the whole party north into Highland County as soon as they landed. Eliza was disguised—rather comically, to the younger Rankins—in a man’s brown shad-bellied coat and wide-brimmed hat, with her voluminous skirts stuffed inside in a way that made her look even more rotund than usual. Lowry and Samuel Rankin went across the river with them in a skiff belonging to the Rankins’ close collaborator, John Collins, whose house faced the river in Ripley. When the boys shoved off to return to Ripley, Eliza and the Canadian were left alone and as vulnerable as any human beings on earth could be.
Saturday night passed with no trace of Eliza’s family. The wagon that was supposed to carry them north departed without them. At last, on Sunday, the Canadian returned alone, and holed up at the Collins house. Collins sent a report up the hill to Rankin with a small boy who had not yet learned to read, and thus could never accidentally betray the contents. In substance, the Rankins were informed Eliza and the Canadian had reached the Davis farm before dawn on Saturday, and hid behind a haystack until Eliza’s daughter appeared, on her way to milk the cows. When Eliza rose up before her, the shocked daughter “began to squall and hollow,” until the Canadian “caught her by the neck and said that if she didn’t stop he would choke her to death.” When she had calmed down, Eliza returned with her to her cabin, and settled herself beneath the cabin’s floor while the daughter explained the situation to her children. The Canadian remained out of sight in the woods.
After nightfall, the Canadian slipped into the cabin, as planned. He discovered that Eliza’s daughter now had six children in all, two more having been born since Eliza’s escape. Also, the daughter was pregnant. Moreover, she had collected “two or three hundred pounds of stuff in bundles, piled up,” and flatly refused to leave without every piece of it. He and Eliza finally agreed to carry the bundles in relays, hiding them in the woods, then going back for another load. The children toted what they could, the older ones moving faster, the smaller ones straggling behind with an armful of clothing, a pot, or some other trifle. The details hint at a trauma that eluded the white abolitionists: a home suddenly disrupted, the wrenching disorientation of leaving fathers and husbands behind (they weren’t even mentioned in the Rankins’ accounts), perhaps even ambivalence about flight itself on the part of a young woman who had been abruptly torn from her home by a fiercely strong-willed mother who, it must have seemed, had suddenly risen from the dead.
By the time they reached the river, it was too late to cross before daylight. The Canadian settled Eliza’s family in a cornfield and then left them, promising to return on Sunday, after the patrols had bedded down for the night. Eliza was charged with keeping the children quiet until he returned. The Canadian had stolen a skiff to cross back to Ripley. Probably on Rankin’s advice, he pulled it up onto the Ohio bank, where it could plainly be seen by anyone looking across from Kentucky. When the Davises awoke on Sunday morning, they soon discovered that seven of their slaves had disappeared. Thomas Davis hurried into Dover to alert the patrol and set to scouring the riverbank to see if any skiffs were gone. Mike Sullivan, a flatboat builder, recognized his skiff on the shore at Ripley. As John P. Rankin recorded the story, Sullivan told the slave owner and his party, “Them niggers are right over in that town, they sure are up there in some of them holes that old John Rankin has to hide niggers in.” In fact, Eliza’s family was at that very moment lying just a short distance away in Sullivan’s own cornfield.
Davis and a posse of Kentuckians took the Dover ferry across to Ripley, where he spent the rest of the morning stalking around town, offering a reward of four hundred dollars to any man “that would only point his finger at the house they were in.” From their perch above the town, the Rankins could see both the tumult in town, as the Kentuckians hurried through the streets, searching for the fugitives, and the cornfield across the river where they were actually hidden. Knowing that their home would be searched, they made an ostentatious show of descending the hundred stone steps down the hill to town to attend church, leaving the door to their house open behind them.
That night, after the patrols had retired, the Canadian rowed silently back across the river to Kentucky in Collins’s skiff. He beached it under a clump of trees just below the fence that was the Mason and Bracken county line. Eliza herself had kept watch all day and night, never having shut her eyes. Just before dawn on Monday morning, they shook awake Eliza’s daughter and her children, and hurried them to the river so quickly that—by the Canadian’s design, surely—almost all the luggage they had packed the day before was left behind before the daughter realized what was happening. There on the riverbank, Eliza handed a wallet of gold to the Canadian. He took it without looking inside, and pulled for Ohio.
They were met on the Ohio shore by Collins and “Jolly Bob” Patton, a deacon of the Reform Church, who had arranged with one of the elders, Thomas McCague, one of the wealthiest men on the river, for the fugitives to be hidden in McCague’s sedate brick home. McCague’s slaught
erhouse at that time was killing more hogs than all Cincinnati, and he was never suspected as a member of the underground. His house was used only in an emergency like this, when slave hunters were expected to be in close pursuit. The gate had been left unlatched. As they entered, the Canadian took his adieu, and headed back to Canada on foot. He was never seen in Ripley again.
The fugitives were taken upstairs to a large room on the third floor. Now the problem was to get them up to the Rankin house somehow without being seen. Six black children with a pregnant woman, accompanied by known abolitionists, climbing the steps to the Rankin farm, could hardly be missed. They would obviously have to be split up. The smallest children were carried unsuspected up the hill in the McCagues’ elegant carriage. Others were led by different guides by roundabout routes, avoiding freshly tilled fields where they would leave tracks. Once the party was reassembled in the Rankins’ kitchen, they were placed in a wagon belonging to a cooperative traveling salesman. With John P. Rankin and the sons of two other underground men as guards, the triumphant Eliza and her family, utterly numb by now with exhaustion and fear, set off for Hillsboro, thirty-five miles north on the road to Columbus, and thus passed out of recorded history, although she would live on for generations to come as a fictional construct born from the imagination of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
John P. Rankin and his friends returned to Ripley just before dawn. “In the morning mother had us up to regular breakfast, and soon it was school time,” he recalled. “We hustled ourselves down and were at school just as gay and lively as any other boys there, and never whispered a word to each other.”
3
In March 1841 the Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Standard of Newport, Indiana, reported to its readers, “We have no means of ascertaining the exact number of fugitives who have passed over Lake Erie this season, but we are confident it is greater than it was the last, when eight hundred was the estimated number. They have gone singly and in pairs; in tens and twenties, and even in larger companies.” The Advocate was talking, as it made clear, only about refugees who had crossed Lake Erie, and only those who were known to the organized underground. Unknown numbers also crossed the St. Lawrence from northern New York and Vermont, and coasted the rocky shores of New England from Boston to Nova Scotia. But the underground lines funneled the largest proportion of Canada-bound fugitives into the lake ports between Oswego, New York and Detroit, and from there by water directly to Canada. (In winter, underground men from Buffalo, New York, drove fugitives in their farm wagons to Canada across the frozen Niagara River, and Sandusky, Ohio, conductors carried them in speeding sleighs across the ice on Lake Erie.)
Conductors who were in a hurry, or desperate, sometimes literally flung fugitives onto a passing ship, and hoped for the best. In one such instance, a steamboat captain named Chapman, en route from Cleveland to Buffalo, was hailed about three miles offshore by four men in a small boat, two of them merchants with whom he had done business the day before, and the others black strangers. One of the whites threw on board a purse containing fifteen dollars in silver, and asked Chapman to land the black men in Canada, telling him to take his pay out of it, and to give the passengers what was left. The sight of the new passengers didn’t please the captain, who, imbued with the racial prejudices of his time and place, found them “very black, coarse in feature and build, stupid in expression, and apparently incapable of any mental excitement except fear.” Fortunately, however, Chapman was a man with a heart, and he ran in near the Canadian shore, and landed the men on a beach, where they were met by the agents of the underground, “though,” Chapman recalled years later, “at the time I had never heard of that institution, and my vessel was pressed into service, and constituted an ‘extension of the track’ without my knowing it.” Chapman handed the men the entire fifteen dollars, and told them they were free. What he then witnessed startled the captain. “They seemed to be transformed; a new light shone in their eyes, their tongues were loosed, they laughed and cried, prayed and sang praises, fell upon the ground and kissed it over and over. I thought to myself, ‘My God! Is it possible that human beings are kept in such a condition that they are made perfectly happy by being landed and left alone in a strange land with no human beings or habitations in sight, with the prospect of never seeing a friend or relative?’ Before I stepped upon my deck I had determined to never again be identified with any party that sustained the system of slavery.”
For the most part, however, the underground relied on trusted captains and crews. In the 1840s the Mayflower transported fugitives from Sandusky, Ohio, to Amherstburg, in Canada, with such regularity that it became known as the “abolition boat.” (The Mayflower was the venue of a memorable incident in August 1854, when, as it was nearing the dock at Buffalo, the ship’s barber, a fugitive slave named Hoover, recognized his former master in the company of several police officers; Hoover ran to the bow of the Mayflower, and leaped from it onto the stern of the nearest ship—named the Plymouth Rock, no less—and then climbed up from it onto the ferry bound across the Niagara River to Canada, thus making his escape.) Samuel B. Cuyler of Pultneyville, New York boldly led fugitives to the town landing in broad daylight to meet the Ontarian, whose captain was a cousin by marriage, and paid their fares with funds donated by local abolitionists. Horace Ford delivered fugitives to a black barber named John Bell, in Cleveland, who in the evening would put them aboard a certain Canadian passenger boat captained by an Englishman, “who would wink at our enterprise and say nothing about it though he must have understood the situation.” Captains bound for Detroit often put fugitives in small boats as they passed beneath the British guns of Fort Malden, and had crewmen row them ashore.
For many fugitives, the lake crossing must have had a weirdly theatrical quality, after weeks or months of furtive flight. Few had ever seen such a vast expanse of water as the Great Lakes, or traveled on anything as grand as a mid-century steamboat. Shallow and turbulent Lake Erie was the center of steamship activity on the lakes, and giant craft like the twenty-two-hundred-ton City of Buffalo with their deep hulls and low superstructure rivaled in size and elegance anything on the Atlantic at that time. Fugitives, naturally, were much more likely to travel on deck, or with the cargo, but they could not help being dazzled by these floating palaces, which were luxurious beyond the experience even of the common white man, opulent with gilded fretwork, dazzlingly illuminated crystal chandeliers, ornamental paintings, acres of luxurious red plush, and furniture of mahogany or rosewood. They were also harrowingly dangerous. Nearly 30 percent of all the steamboats built before 1849 were lost to accidents. Boilers exploded, scalding passengers to death by the score. Boats were blown apart by storms, collided with other boats, and caught fire and burned like tinder. (On steamboats that plied the rivers of the South, the owners typically preferred Irishmen to slaves as firemen, because if the boiler exploded and killed them their deaths would bring no financial loss to the management.)
Of all the underground gateways to Canada, the busiest was Detroit. By 1837 forty-two regularly scheduled steamers touched at its port. (Many fugitives, of course, also arrived in Detroit by overland routes from Indiana and Illinois.) The opening of the Erie Canal, in 1825, helped make Detroit a natural hub for westbound emigrants, and the fastest growing city in the region. Between 1830 and 1840 its population tripled from three thousand to more than nine thousand, and it would more than double again by 1850, to twenty-one thousand. Arriving fugitives found a city that was inventing itself literally day by day. Against a backdrop of church steeples framed against the majestic western sky, enormous steamers, sidewheelers, brigs, sloops, small three-sailed chaloupes, ten-oared bateaux laden with cargoes for the frontier hinterland, and flitting canoes crowded the noisy waterfront. Everywhere, new streets were being laid out, big new brick houses were under construction, and the plank sidewalks were crowded with emigrants from the East and Europe pouring through on their way to the frontier. Fugitives also found one of the best organi
zed underground operations in the country.
By the 1840s most fugitives were forwarded across the Detroit River by the city’s Vigilance Committee, founded by the redoubtable black abolitionist William Lambert, a Quaker-educated tailor from New Jersey, who had come to Detroit to seek his fortune in 1838. Lambert was also a superb businessman, and would amass a fortune before his death in 1891. In 1840 he had addressed the Michigan State Legislature, calling forcefully but unsuccessfully for the franchise to be extended to blacks. Three years later, he organized and chaired the state’s first convention of black citizens, whose final statement, a radical one by the standards of the era, boldly declared that the people “have the right at all times, to alter or reform [their government], and to abolish one form of government and establish another, whenever the public good requires it.” It was, in essence, an open call for slave rebellion. Lambert’s closest collaborator in clandestine work was William C. Munroe, minister at Detroit’s first black religious institution, the Second Baptist Church, whose handsome new neo-gothic building on Beaubien Street was an ornament of Detroit’s increasingly sophisticated cityscape. Messages from conductors in his congregation often had a quaintly biblical flavor. “Pastor, tomorrow night at our 8:00 meeting, let’s read Exodus 10:8,” one might read, meaning that a conductor would be arriving at 8 P.M. with ten fugitives, eight men and two women. From the church, it was but a five-minute walk to the waterfront, and then a ten-minute ferry ride across the mile of water that separated the United States and Canada.
Bound for Canaan Page 32