Front Line of Freedom

African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley

Keith P. Griffler

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813182841
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The Underground Railroad, an often misunderstood antebellum institution, has been viewed as a simple combination of mainly white "conductors" and black "passengers." Keith P. Griffler takes a new, battlefield-level view of the war against American slavery as he reevaluates one of its front lines: the Ohio River, the longest commercial dividing line between slavery and freedom. In shifting the focus from the much discussed white-led "stations" to the primarily black-led frontline struggle along the Ohio, Griffler reveals for the first time the crucial importance of the freedom movement in the river's port cities and towns. Front Line of Freedom fully examines America's first successful interracial freedom movement, which proved to be as much a struggle to transform the states north of the Ohio as those to its south. In a climate of racial proscription, mob violence, and white hostility, the efforts of Ohio Valley African Americans to establish and maintain communities became inextricably linked to the steady stream of fugitives crossing the region. As Griffler traces the efforts of African Americans to free themselves, Griffler provides a window into the process by which this clandestine network took shape and grew into a powerful force in antebellum America.

1

River of Slavery
River of Freedom

Wade in the water,

Wade in the water, children,

Wade in the water,

God’s gonna trouble the water.

African American spiritual

The waters of the Ohio River reflected an accurate though troubling image of the young American nation for nearly a century after its founding. The last barrier across which thousands of fugitives from enslavement made good their escape, the river embodied the ideal proclaimed by the Revolutionary generation on the world stage: the young Republic as a beacon of liberty. Yet the Ohio also served as a means of transport for the internal trade in enslaved children, women, and men—tens of thousands of African Americans were shipped downriver to the Cotton Belt markets for human chattel. At once a river of freedom and of slavery, the Ohio embodied the stark contradictions of the existence of slavery in a free Republic.

The river both divided and connected a nation. With slavery legally confined to its southern bank, African Americans were on one side free and on the other in a condition of legal enslavement. The Ohio River was, however, at the same time more than the boundary between enslavement and free soil: it was the link between them, the tangible expression of their economic interdependence. The river constituted the longest commercial border along the Mason-Dixon Line in the antebellum period, a thriving trade route by which the farmers of the North provisioned the plantations of the South. The close interconnection of the commercial interests of Ohio’s booming river ports and the South’s “peculiar institution” created a region economically dependent on enslavement and the slave trade.¹

The paradox that played out along the Ohio River presented a complex set of issues through which the United States would wade during the first century of its existence. A nation claiming to carry the torch of liberty in the world retained slavery in the decades following its abolition in the dominions of the motherland that seemed so tyrannical to a generation of revolutionaries. Founded in freedom, the United States had become the world’s largest slave republic. A steady flow of escapees from slavery across the banks of the Ohio served as a constant reminder to North and South of the main issue—at once moral, political, and economic—that divided them and proved a harbinger of a full-blown civil war.

True to the words of the African American spiritual, the Ohio River was troubled water in the antebellum period. It was the site of a protracted, often violent, struggle between the forces of freedom and those of slavery that would continue to plague the nation until its system of bondage was permanently abolished. Whether the Ohio River carried African Americans on the Underground Railroad to the North’s free soil or took them via the trade in human flesh to the living hell of the South’s plantation slavery, it was always against stiff resistance. The strip of land along the northern bank of the Ohio River stretching from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles west became the front line of African Americans’ struggle to become free, remain free, and help others attain their freedom. For decades leading up to the Civil War a conflict raged over this terrain—one that came to be best known by the unlikely name of the Underground Railroad.

Wilbur Siebert, who did more than any other person to shape the nation’s historical memory of the Underground Railroad, confessed what had originally set him on the subject. A professor of history at the Ohio State University in the early 1890s, he looked at the bored faces of his students in his American history survey sections and decided, as many instructors of history do, to enliven his class with some interesting anecdotes. He hit upon the idea of “a mysterious and romantic subject . . . rich in adventure”—the Underground Railroad. Discovering that it was a topic about which his students knew, or professed to know, much, he set about tracing the stories they related to him. As so often happens, he found exactly what he was looking for. He uncovered what he later gave the fitting title The Mysteries of Ohio’s Underground Railroads—a book-length explication of the romance he had used to coax his students to pay attention in class.²

It was clear to Siebert who had played the roles of the heroes of this romance: the parents and grandparents of his white students, members of the “antislavery denominations, Quakers, Scotch Covenanters and Wesleyan Methodists.” In the words of the historian who penned the introduction to Siebert’s first and purportedly authoritative opus on the subject, “In aiding fugitive slaves the abolitionist was making the most effective protest against the continuance of slavery; but he was also doing something more tangible; he was helping the oppressed, he was eluding the oppressor; and at the same time he was enjoying the most romantic and exciting amusement open to men who had high moral standards. He was taking risks, defying the laws, and making himself liable to punishment, and yet could glow with the healthful pleasure of duty done.” Like many other war stories, this one had been converted into a romance.³

To be sure, it is unlikely that the African American participants, especially the fugitives from enslavement, would have regarded the story in a similar manner. A story focusing not on the heroic smuggler but on the illicit cargo would necessarily tell a far different tale. Runaways knew all too well what fate awaited them if their bold strike for freedom should fail. Told from their perspective, the inevitable unsuccessful attempts, while still providing the stuff of adventure stories, could not be passed over nearly so lightly.⁴

But then, to Siebert’s mind, the African American fugitives who were whisked away to freedom with all the efficiency of the Protestant work ethic were no more than minor characters, providing merely the pretext for the heroic and wonderfully intricate operation on their behalf. Siebert even evinced a willingness to make light of the terror they commonly experienced in their flight. His preface to Mysteries dismisses their role with what purports to be a humorous anecdote—one in the racist tradition of Vaudeville (the Hollywood of its day) with its stock African American characters. Siebert relates a story of fugitive Asbury Parker, who on reaching the southern terminus of the Underground Railroad is provided with a new suit of clothing. The conductor taking him on to the next station tells him they can make the journey by day if the runaway plays the dignified part of a free person. En route, however, Parker happens to fall over a downed telegraph poll. Siebert quotes him as remarking, “Now what have I done! Dat wire will tell de white folks da’s a nigger loose in the woods.”⁵

For Siebert, the incident speaks for itself and requires no further commentary. In addition to signaling that, like any good adventure story, this one has its lighter side, he leaves his (white) reader of the Jim Crow era with the rather clear implication that this fugitive, at least, could not have made the journey on his own without the help of the organization known as the Underground Railroad. It is, in a sense, eminently fitting that Siebert, who first came to the subject in an attempt to entertain a white audience, reveals his underlying assumptions when he entices readers by highlighting his work’s potential to amuse and divert.

The Underground Railroad, however, was no mere romance or adventure story. It was an epic, at once tragic and noble—tragic because a nation priding itself on liberty needed it at all; noble in that it represented the best in the human spirit of opposition to oppression. To those most directly concerned, those who are sometimes portrayed as playing a subordinate role in a drama ultimately revolving around their strike for freedom, the story of the Underground Railroad was a war experienced in the trenches.

The origins of the name “Underground Railroad” remain obscure. Starting a discussion of the subject by declaring that it was neither a railroad nor underground has even become something of a cliche, yet the traditional, almost legendary, name is perhaps more apt than any other potential substitute. The phrase captures the essential element of the Underground Railroad’s modus operandi—one that has gained recognition over the century and a half subsequent to the close of its operations.⁶

Posterity has nevertheless had the unfortunate tendency to focus, as it were, on the wrong part of the name. The mythology of the Underground Railroad has laid emphasis on the second part of its sobriquet. The imagery with which it is associated is all derived from the terminology of the railroad—stations and station keepers, conductors, lines, and passengers. It has even been endowed with some of the clocklike efficiency with which railroads are supposed to operate. So much is that true that this myth, and the early historians who worked under its influence, virtually outfitted the historical personages they describe in the regulation uniforms for which railroads are known. The railroad metaphor has taken hold to such an extent that a great deal of attention is spent today reconstructing routes, documenting stations, and charting maps. It seems to be all but forgotten that even the notion of such an artifact as a map would have been alien to the participants in the clandestine movement—an important fact to bear in mind in the study of their history. Underground Railroad stalwart J.H. Tibbetts of Madison, Indiana, recalled, “[I]t was not safe at that time to put such thing[s] on paper for we did not know how soon our enemies would mob us and burn our houses, of course any such paper would be a good witness and caus[e] us to be perhaps put to death or whiped & driven from our” state.⁷

Aside from the persistent, popular myths of tunnels, the second part of the name is all but ignored. And yet it is solely this part that remains true to the nature of the institution described, perhaps the closest to an underground resistance movement that ever took root in American soil. While the metaphor of a railroad is singularly inapt to describe the methods of work, the mission, and the results of the Underground Railroad, the images of an underground movement do much to capture its drama, danger, and essential context.⁸

At first sight, such a characterization seems odd, even quixotic. We associate such “undergrounds” with resistance movements in occupied nations—those of World War II France and Poland, for instance. Those liberatory movements united large segments of the population in a life-and-death struggle for the right to walk freely and openly in the light of day, to enjoy the rights cherished by citizens of nations founded on liberty. Since its inception, the United States has never endured such a foreign occupation. And yet, for decades it nurtured in its heartland just such an underground—freedom fighters engaged in the desperate struggle to end the yoke of tyrannical oppression in the land of their birth.⁹

“The eyes of the world are upon you,” the Executive Committee of the New York Anti-Slavery Society wrote to their counterparts of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in Cincinnati in 1836: “The fate of this nation—the destiny of posterity—the freedom of unborn millions—the fair flame of America—the hopes of a suffering world—are committed to your trust. The soil you occupy seems marked out by the God of the oppressed, as the last, final Thermopylae of holy freedom upon the earth. The glorious Emancipator of his church and of the world, has seen fit to place you in the fore front of the battle.”¹⁰

The Ohio River was known to enslaved African Americans as the River Jordan—across which lay the Promised Land. African Americans in the antebellum period often saw in their own struggle the reenactment of the Biblical story of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Yet, as American liberty remained an unfulfilled promise, the American River Jordan constituted a conduit only to a contested freedom. Most African American fugitives who passed through this terrain did so en route to points farther north. For the thousands who remained, the territory immediately north of the Ohio was no Promised Land.¹¹

The African American experience thus modified the Biblical story of the Exodus from slavery that led to the crossing of the River Jordan into the Promised Land. It was, rather, the saga of a determined struggle to create a Promised Land that would convert a river of slavery into a river of freedom. The constant stream of fugitives from the South was the prelude to the exodus that finally came only with the abolition of slavery.

The forces of slavery had great reason to loathe the presence of African Americans on free soil. The Underground Railroad relied on the ambiguity attached to any African American north of the Mason-Dixon Line. To be sure, an African American in the North might be a fugitive from legal bondage, or she might be a free person resident in the North. Far more often than African Americans were stowed in the false bottoms of wagons, they were given tickets on northbound trains and boats, where they openly “passed” for Northerners—not all of whom were white. This apparently small detail, all the more ignored since the false bottoms and secret hiding places fit the mood of the romance, actually conveys a tale far more worthy of telling, because it gets at the significance of the Underground Railroad that the adventure story ignores. For African Americans in the South to melt into the Northern black population, there had to be one. And that was not something to take for granted in the antebellum North, particularly in its western states.

From the first, the free African American population of the North suffered incessant persecution designed to disrupt and ultimately dislodge. The vast majority of the inhabitants on both sides of the river were staunchly proslavery—and willing to do virtually anything to prove it. If every “fugitive from service” (as the judicial system termed them) could be mistaken for a “legal” resident of the North, so could every Northern African American be taken for a runaway. African Americans were menaced by slaveholders and their paid agents on the southern shore of the Ohio, and by kidnappers, legal proscription, and systematic discrimination on the opposite bank. The region was converted into an armed camp. The port cities of the Ohio River’s northern bank where free African Americans concentrated became flashpoints, the proslavery fervor periodically boiling over in particularly brutal fashion: mob violence unleashed on African Americans and white abolitionists.¹²

The Underground Railroad was significant not only for the individuals it helped to freedom, but perhaps even more for the struggle it represented against the complicity of free states in the trade in human flesh. It was at once an attack on the “Black Laws” that denied African Americans citizenship rights, the “Fugitive Slave” laws that menaced their liberty, and the spirit of slavery that sought their expulsion when not in Southern bondage. The results were measured most accurately not by the number of fugitives who arrived safely in Canada but in the populations remaining defiantly in states north of the Ohio, particularly those who settled along its banks. Not only the continuation of the enterprise known as the Underground Railroad, but the survival of the dream of freedom rested on the maintenance of the condition of African American freedom north of the Ohio River. In that simple condition—without which no clandestine network of conductors could have survived any protracted length of time—a complex history takes root to which attaches the significance that appears to be lacking in the romantic adventure of the Underground Railroad.

The history of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley centers as much,...