Underground Warfare: A New Museum Sheds Light on the History of the Underground Railroad

By Fergus M. Bordewich. This article originally appeared as “Free at Last” in Smithsonian Magazine, December 2004.

 

ON A DANK MORNING in 1999, Carl Westmoreland’s phone rang, in his office overlooking the gray ribbon of the Ohio River and downtown Cincinnati. Westmoreland, a descendant of slaves, was an advisor to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the country’s first major institution dedicated to the clandestine pre-Civil War network that assisted tens of thousands of fugitive slaves to freedom. The center, which opens this August, was then still mostly a dream in the mind’s eye of Westmoreland and his colleagues. He listened skeptically as he gazed out his window at the dismal soup of snow and rain.

The gruff voice at the other end of the line was telling him about a supposed “slave jail” somewhere in northern Kentucky, and insisting that he come out to look at it. Westmoreland received a lot of calls like this one. There were callers who claimed to have houses with secret hiding places in the walls, or mysterious tunnels on their property. He had checked out countless such sites. Almost none of them had anything to do with the Underground Railroad.

“I’ll call you back tomorrow,” Westmoreland said, dismissively.

The next day, his phone rang again. It was the same caller. “So when are you coming out,” the voice demanded.

 

THE CALLER’S commanding tone reminded him of his father. Westmoreland gazed at the lowering sky. “I’m on my way,” he sighed.

An hour later, Westmoreland, a lean, wiry man of sixty-two, was slogging across a sodden alfalfa pasture in Mason County, Kentucky, eight miles south of the Ohio River, with a retired businessman named Raymond Evers. He led Westmoreland to a rickety tobacco barn that stood atop a low hill.

“Where is it?” Westmoreland growled.

“Just open the door!” Evers told him.

Inside, in the dimness,  Westmoreland saw a smaller structure made of rough-hewn logs, with barred windows, enclosed within the larger, later one. Attached to a joist were the rings to which manacled slaves had once been chained. “I felt the way I did when I went to Auschwitz,” says Westmoreland. “I felt the power of the place—it was dark, ominous. When I saw the rings, I thought, It’s like a slave ship turned upside down.”

At first, no one in the area admitted to knowing anything about the jail, which had been used for decades to store corn and farm machinery. But eventually Westmoreland met a local man who had heard from his father, who had in turn been told by his grandfather, what the jail was used for. “They chained ‘em up over there, and sold ‘em off like cattle,” he told Westmoreland.

 

AT WESTMORELAND’S URGING, the Freedom Center bought the thirty-two by twenty-seven foot square structure, dismantled it, and brought it to Cincinnati for restoration. The slaves who once languished in it could never have imagined that it would one day become the centerpiece of a museum dedicated to slavery’s overthrow. When the Freedom Center opens its doors this August, it will be the first thing that visitors see in its lofty atrium facing the Ohio River, a stark symbol of antebellum bondage, and of the brutality from which the passengers on the Underground Railroad sought to escape. Says Westmoreland, a former community organizer and a specialist in historical restoration, “This institution represents the first time that there has been an honest effort to honor and preserve our collective memory, not in a basement or a slum somewhere, but at the front door of a major metropolitan community.

The 158,000-square-foot Freedom Center, a striking building with built of rough-hewn stone and roofed with copper, is the first major institution to attempt to encompass the story of one of the most provocative political movements ever to arise in the United States. By its own definition a “museum of conscience,” the Freedom Center hopes to engage visitors in a visceral way. “This is not a slavery museum,” says the Freedom Center’s executive director Spencer Crew, who came to Cincinnati from Washington D.C., where he was director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. “Rather, it is a way to engage people on the subject of slavery and race without finger-pointing. Yes, it shows that slavery was terrible. But it also shows that there were people who stood up against it. Even in the dark era of slavery there was a possibility of hope, that there were people who said to themselves, ‘This is not right, and I have got to do something about it.’ The Underground Railroad gave life to the principles that the nation was founded upon: liberty, equality, and freedom. We want to shake people up—we want to make them think about their role in a free society.”

 

VISITORS TO THE Freedom Center will see, apart from the slave jail, such artifacts as manumission papers, abolitionists’ diaries, wanted posters, ads for runaways, and newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison’s militant Liberator, the first newspaper in the U.S. to call for immediate abolition. And, of course, shackles. “Shackles have an almost mystical fascination,” says Rita C. Organ, the Freedom Center’s Director of Collections. “There were even small-sized shackles for children. By looking at them, you get a feeling of what our ancestors must have felt—suddenly you begin to imagine what it was like being huddled in a ‘coffle’ of chained slaves on the march.”

Other galleries present the stories of underground conductors and station masters, black and white, men and women, as well as fugitives themselves, who after all were the central figures in the national drama of the Underground Railroad. Some, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, are justly famous. Many others, like John J. Parker, a former slave who became a key player in the Ohio underground, and his close collaborator, the abolitionist John Rankin, were virtually lost in a traditional version of history that tended to emphasize stories of exotic hiding places, and to omit both African-Americans, except as helpless fugitives, and white participants whose racial radicalism made later generations uncomfortable.

A portion of the Freedom Center is also devoted to exploring the lasting meaning of the Underground Railroad, by highlighting present-day Americans who have challenged injustice at the risk of their own safety, such as a young black West Virginia woman who walked into the middle of a Klu Klux Klan rally and shamed the crowd into dispersing, and a Middle Eastern gas station owner in New York City who prevented members of a radical Islamic group from setting fire to a neighborhood synagogue. Says Crew, “Ideally, we would like to create modern day Underground Railroad conductors, who have the internal fortitude to buck society’s norms, and to stand up for the things they really believe in.”

 

THE CREATION of the Freedom Center was a considerable achievement in an era of tight corporate budgets and shrinking public largesse. Since its inception from an idea proposed a meeting of the Cincinnati chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, in 1994, at a time when Cincinnati was reeling from confrontations between the police and the black community, and widely publicized racial slurs by former Reds owner Marge Schott. Since then, the Freedom Center has raised an impressive $60 million from private donations (including $7 million from Cincinnati-based Proctor and Gamble, and more than $4 million from the company’s executives) plus another $50 million from public sources, including the Department of the Interior. Its fundraising success has caused grumbling on the part of some smaller museums and  Underground Railroad interest groups have complained that the Freedom Center has soaked up money that ought to have been spread more widely. In the long run, however, the success of the Freedom Center is likely to draw new interest to the whole subject of the Underground Railroad, an to bring more attention to related sites throughout the country.

“The Freedom Center will provide the nation with a more realistic picture of its history, both by showing how slaves were always resisting their enslavement, and by making it clear that there were times when black and white Americans of different economic and social classes worked together,” says James O. Horton, who teaches at George Washington University, and has written widely on African-American history. “It will also demonstrate that those who have been truest to the American ideal were those who were most willing to put themselves in harm’s way, in order to bring freedom to the greatest number of people.”

 

“USING THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD as a kind of fulcrum is an inspired and inspiring idea,” adds Ira Berlin, a historian based at the University of Maryland, and the author of “Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.” “The Freedom Center asks us to understand the Underground Railroad in its broadest context—the larger struggle of slaves to regain their freedom. The Underground Railroad was the one institution that stood up against the injustice of slavery. Politically, it played a critical role, by making the nature of slavery clear to Northerners who had been indifferent to it, by showing that slaves who were running away were neither happy nor well-treated, as apologists for slavery claimed. And morally, it demonstrated the enormous resiliency of the human spirit in the collaboration of blacks and whites to help people gain their freedom. The Underground Railroad hosed down Americans with their own principles, by making them face up to the nation’s founding precept that all men were created equal.”

As many as one hundred thousand slaves may have found their way to safe havens in the North and Canada with its help. “We just don’t know the total number, and we will probably never know,” says Horton. “Part of the reason for that is that the underground was so successful. It kept its secrets well.” However, its impact was far greater than mere numbers. The nation’s first great movement of civil disobedience since the American Revolution, it engaged thousands of citizens in the active subversion of federal law. By provoking fear and anger in the South, and prompting the enactment of draconian legislation that eroded the rights of white Americans, the Underground Railroad was a direct contributing cause of the Civil War. It also gave many African Americans their first experience in politics and organizational management. And in an era when proslavery ideologues stridently asserted that blacks were better off in slavery because they lacked the basic intelligence, and even the biological ability, to take care of themselves, the Underground Railroad offered proof of their courage and initiative.

“The Underground Railroad symbolized the intensifying struggle over slavery,” says Berlin.  “It was the result of the ratcheting up of the more conservative anti-slavery movement which in the years after the American Revolution had begun calling for compensated emancipation and gradualist solutions to slavery.” The Underground Railroad put slave holders on the defensive. Southerners typically credited the underground with a reach that it did not really have, and tended to blame the disappearance of any slave on Yankee enticement. In the North, it brought African-Americans, often for the first time, into white communities where fugitives could be seen as real people, with real families, and real feelings, enabling whites to put themselves in the slave’s situation, at least in their imagination. Says Berlin, “The Underground Railroad ultimately forced whites to confront the reality of race in American society, the hypocrisy of their own national creed, and to begin to wrestle with the reality in which black people lived all the time. It was a transforming experience.”

 

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD was the country’s first racially integrated civil rights movement, in which whites and blacks worked together for decades before the Civil War, taking great risks together, saving tens of thousands of lives together, and ultimately succeeding together in one of the most ambitious political undertakings in American history. Underground work involved a degree of personal risk that few Americans have ever endured, except soldiers in times of war. In border areas, underground agents faced the constant danger of punitive litigation, personal violence, and possible death. In an era when emancipation seemed subversive and outlandish to most Americans, the men and women of the underground defied society’s standards on a daily basis, inspired by a sense of spiritual imperative, and a passion for freedom. “White participants in the underground found in themselves a depth of humanity that they hadn’t realized they had,” says Horton. “And for many of them, humanity won out over legality.” As the New York philanthropist Gerrit Smith, one of the most important financiers of the Underground Railroad put it, “If there be human enactments against our entertaining the stricken stranger—against our opening our door to our poor, guiltless, and unaccused colored brother pursued by bloodthirsty kidnapers--we must, nevertheless, say with the apostle: ‘We must obey God rather than man.’” 

From the earliest years of American slavery—the first African slaves were sold to colonists at Jamestown, in 1619—there were slaves who ran away. But until British Canada and the Northern states began abolishing slavery at the end of the eighteenth century, there were no permanent havens for fugitives to flee to, although some did find a precarious home in swamps and forests, in Spanish Florida, and among Native Americans. The first visible stirrings of coordinated Underground Railroad activity can be traced to the early years of the nineteenth century, when free blacks and white Quakers began providing refuge for runaways in Philadelphia, and the surrounding countryside. The process accelerated in the 1830s with the establishment of local and state anti-slavery societies across the North, which brought together isolated abolitionists in organized webs with long-distance connections, and forced the issue of slavery onto the national agenda. “The whole country was like a huge pot in a furious state of boiling over,” recalled Addison Coffin, who served as an underground conductor in North Carolina, and later Indiana. “It was almost universal for ministers of the gospel to run into the subject in all their sermons; neighbors would stop and argue pro and con across the fence; people traveling along the road would stop and argue the point.” Although abolitionists were initially treated with contempt by a society that largely took the existence of slavery for granted, the underground would eventually count among its members and close collaborators future president Rutherford B. Hayes, who as a young lawyer lent his services to the defense of fugitive slaves; the future governor of New York and Secretary of State William Seward; the founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, James Pinkerton; and the family of Henry Ford. By the 1850s, the underground had developed into a diverse and flexible system with thousands of activists reaching from the upper edge of the South to Canada.

Although important corridors of underground transit existed as far east as Delaware, and eventually as far west as Kansas, the Underground Railroad was nowhere more extensive than it was in the Ohio River Valley, where scores of river crossings served as gateways from the slave states to the free, and where synergy between communities of free blacks and anti-slavery whites provided an extended network of support for fugitives as far north as the Great Lakes. Once across the river, fugitives who managed to make contact with the underground could, with some confidence, hope to be passed in safety from farm to farm all the way to the Great Lakes in a matter of days, and even faster once iron railroads came into widespread use. (The term “Underground Railroad” is often said to have derived from the perhaps apocryphal story of a frustrated slave hunter who, when he failed to find a runaway in the lanes of the abolitionist stronghold of Ripley, Ohio, supposedly exclaimed, “He must have gone off on an underground road!” In an age when smoke-belching locomotives and shining steel rails were new and exciting, underground men from New York to Illinois who had never even seen an actual railroad readily adopted its lingo, describing guides as “conductors,” safe houses as “stations,” their wagons as “trains” or “cars,” and of the fugitives they carried as “passengers.”)

 

IN PRACTICE, the underground was a model of democracy in action, in most areas doing its work with a minimum of central direction and a maximum of grassroots involvement, often centered on linked circles of family members and church congregations. “The method of operating was not uniform but adapted to the requirements of each case,” as Isaac Beck, a veteran underground station master in southern Ohio, put it. “There was no regular organization, no constitution, no officers, no laws or agreement or rule except the ‘Golden Rule,’ and every man did what seemed right in his own eyes.” Travel was sometimes on foot, sometimes on horses, sometimes in wagons, and the choice of route was usually governed by the circumstances of each case, depending on safety and the available guides. One of the most famous station masters, the Quaker Levi Coffin, kept a team harnessed and a wagon ready at all times at his home in Newport (now Fountain City), Indiana. When additional teams were needed, “The people at the livery stable seemed to understand what the teams were wanted for, and they asked no questions,” Coffin wrote in his “Reminiscences.” On occasion, fugitives might be carried in a hearse, or a false-bottomed wagon fitted with a shallow compartment that could hold four or five people. In emergencies, blacks were sometimes powdered white, men disguised as women, and women as men. The volume of underground traffic varied very widely from place to place. Coffin estimated that in the course of almost forty years he helped a total of 3,300 fugitives, an average about 100 per year. By comparison, the Miller family of Medina County, Ohio, who lived on a more lightly traveled route, assisted an average of thirty-three per year, while others, such as like Milton Kennedy, who worked on an steamboat based at Portsmouth, Ohio, encountered only a handful of fugitives in the course of several years.

One of the most active underground centers on the river—and one of the most dangerous—was the town of Ripley, Ohio, about fifty miles east of Cincinnati. Today, Ripley is a sleepy grid of two- and three-story nineteenth century structures nestled at the foot of low bluffs, facing south toward the river and the cornfields of Kentucky beyond. But in the decades before the Civil War, it was one of the busiest ports between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, with an economy fueled by river traffic, ship-building, and pork-butchering. To angry slave owners, it was known as “a black, dirty abolition hole”—and with good reason. Since the 1820s, radical white Presbyterians led by Rev. John Rankin, a flinty Tennessean who had moved north to escape the climate of slavery, had collaborated closely with local blacks in one of the most successful and long-lasting underground operations in the country. “Let us be willing to go down and do the lowest service in Christ’s kingdom, and labor to elevate the lowest of our race, that they may become the sons and daughters of the Almighty,” Rankin thundered to his congregation. To him, as to the many evangelical Christians active in the underground, the loss of a fugitive to slave catchers was not just a tactical defeat but a spiritual catastrophe.

The Rankins’ simple brick farmhouse still stands in bold isolation on a hilltop on the edge of Ripley, a beacon of freedom that in antebellum times was visible for miles along the river and a considerable distance into Kentucky. The African-American conductor Arnold Gragston, who as a slave in Kentucky ferried scores of fugitives across the river remembered it, burnished by memory no doubt, as “a lighthouse, thirty feet tall.”

One day, Betty Campbell, a local preservationist who speaks with the soft Southern-inflected cadence of the river counties, led me through the Rankin house, which is a museum open to the public. She pointed out the austere drawing room where the Rankins greeted hundreds of fugitives, the fireplace where frozen feet were thawed on winter nights, the upstairs crawlspace beneath the eaves where, on occasion, fugitives were hidden. For the most part, however, since they lived so close to the river and within easy reach of slave hunters, The Rankins generally kept fugitives only briefly before speeding them on their way, along the overgrown streambed behind the house, and through the forest to the next station, a few miles north.

“The river divided the two worlds by law, the north and the south, but the cultures were porous,” Campbell said, as we stood in front of the house, gazing down the hundred steps up which fugitives once climbed to safety, and across the gray trough of the Ohio River, toward the forested bluffs of Kentucky, whose appearance has not changed a great deal since the mid-nineteenth century. “There were anti-slavery men in Kentucky, and also proslavery men here in Ohio, where a lot of people had Southern, origins and took slavery for granted. Every day, trusted slaves were sent from Kentucky to Ripley, to market, and at any time of the day Ripley abolitionists could see slaves at work in the fields across the river.”

 

FOR FAMILIES WHO occupied a particularly critical location, like the Rankins, clandestine work was a full-time vocation. Jean Rankin, the reverend’s wife, was responsible for seeing that a fire was always burning and food on the table, for unexpected visitors who came in the night, while at least one of Rankin sons was expected to be on call at any given moment to saddle up and hasten his charges to the next friendly home. They tried to ensure that as few people as possible knew when a fugitive was passing through. “It was the custom with us not to talk among ourselves about the fugitives lest inadvertently a clue should be obtained of our modus operandi,’” the Rankins’ eldest son, and a longtime underground conductor, Adam Lowry Rankin wrote. “‘Another runaway went through at night’ was all that would be said.” Any misstep could mean disaster. One of the Rankins’ collaborators, John B. Mahan, a Methodist minister, was arrested at his home and carried back to Kentucky, where after sixteen months in jail he was subjected to a ruinous fine that impoverished his family, and contributed to his premature death. In the summer of 1841, the Rankins’ own hilltop stronghold was the target of an assault by Kentucky slave hunters, who were beaten off only after a gun-battle, which left one of the attackers dead. African-Americans were even more vulnerable. In 1839, Sally Hudson, a black woman who went to the aid of a fugitive was shot in the back and killed by a slave catcher. Although there were many witnesses, the murderer was never convicted.

Courageous as their activities were, the Rankins declined to cross the river into Kentucky, where the penalty for “slave stealing” was up to twenty-one years in the penitentiary. One who did, however, was John P. Parker, a former slave who had bought his freedom in Louisiana, and in the 1850s moved to Ripley where, by day, he operated an iron foundry. By night, he ran off slaves from Kentucky plantations, and ferried them across the river to Ohio. No photograph of Parker survives, but his heroic story was preserved in a series of interviews that he gave to a journalist, Frank Gregg, in the 1880s.

On one occasion, Parker learned that a party of fugitives was hiding about twenty miles south of the river, without a guide, their leader having been captured. “Being new and zealous in this work, I volunteered to go to the rescue,” Parker recalled. Armed with a pair of pistols and a knife, and guided by a slave associate, Parker reached the party about dawn, hidden in deep woods and paralyzed with fear, “so badly demoralized that some of them wanted to give themselves up rather than face the unknown.” Avoiding roads, Parker led the ten men and women for miles through dense thickets, warning them constantly to try not to leave a trail of broken branches and trampled brush behind them.

In spite of his efforts, slave hunters were in close pursuit. Tragedy for one of his passengers was salvation for the rest. One of the men insisted on setting off in search of water. He had been gone only a short while when he came hurtling back through the brush with two white men so hot on his heels that they failed to notice the rest of the concealed party. Parker turned furiously to the rest. “Drawing my pistol,” he recalled, “I quietly told them that I would shoot the first one that dared make a noise, which had a quieting effect.” Peering through the bushes, they soon saw their captured companion being led away with his arms tied behind his back. With no time to lose now, Parker pressed on toward the Ohio River with all possible speed. They reached the river without further incident, but as luck would have it, on the shore they were spotted by a patroller, a look-out hired to keep watch for fugitive slaves. Although the man backed off when he saw the size of Parker’s party, Parker knew that he would soon alert the countryside.

The lights of Ripley were clearly visible across the water but, as Parker put it, “they might as well have been [on] the moon so far as being a relief to me.” With the baying of hounds ringing in their ears, Parker and his people frantically scoured the shore for a beached rowboat. One was found quickly enough, but in it there was only room enough for eight. Two fugitives would have to be left behind, or they would all be caught. One was the husband of a woman already in the boat. She began to wail. “Then I witnessed an example of heroism that made me proud of my race,” Parker told his interviewer in old age. One of the single men in the boat climbed out and waded back to shore to make room for the husband. As Parker rowed away toward the free state of Ohio, he watched the lights of slave hunters converge on the spot where he had left the two men behind.

Parker, like the Rankins, was notorious among Kentucky slave owners, who placed a price of one thousand dollars on his head, and several times used decoys to attempt to lure him into their hands. More than once, armed whites searched his home, and assaulted him in the streets of Ripley. Amazingly, he survived. And triumphed: he estimated that in his years of underground work, he helped a total of four hundred and forty fugitives to freedom. (Thanks to years of work by a local citizens’ group headed by Betty Campbell, Parker’s house on the Ripley waterfront was recently restored, and is now open to visitors.)

John P. Parker is one of many activists whose work in the Underground Railroad is now memorialized in the Freedom Center, in Parker’s case, in the form of an original film made on site in and around Ripley. Says Rita C. Organ, “We don’t have much that belonged to the people who were running away. Most of them had few if any possessions, and most of what they did have they left behind when they ran away. We don’t often have their shoes, so to speak. But we do have their stories.” And the stories that they had to tell form a collective chronicle of Homeric dimensions, the narrative of an age of heroes for whom a commitment to freedom, for themselves and their fellow human beings, was a matter of life an death. Visitors to the Freedom Center will also encounter, in addition to Levi Coffin and John Rankin, the fearless Quaker conductor Laura Haviland, who also founded a school for fugitives, in Michigan; and African-Americans such as George DeBaptiste and William Lambert, who organized and led the underground in Detroit, one of the country’s busiest central depots; Jermain Loguen, who boldly advertised his home in Syracuse, New York, as the local headquarters of the Underground Railroad; and, of course, the inimitable Harriet Tubman. Tubman, one of the few female conductors on record, led north a total of about seventy fugitives in the course of some thirteen trips deep into slave-holding territory.

In the decades after the Civil War, the heroes of the Underground Railroad were largely forgotten, or romanticized, as the nation abandoned its commitment to the rights of African-Americans. The Freedom Center aims to set the record straight, and to make it clear that the men and women of the underground were not just radicals on the margin of society, but for the most part ordinary men and women who were engaged in the quest to achieve the real American dream. “The nation’s founding documents tell us that America was committed to equality and freedom,” says James O. Horton. “Well, that’s what the Underground Railroad was all about. It was an effort to make America fulfil its promise to humanity. And unless we continue to have people like that, we have no hope as a nation.”

 

ON A SPARKLING spring day, Carl Westmoreland accompanied me to the Kentucky farm where the slave jail once stood. The jail, Westmoreland said, had been built in the 1830s by a prosperous slave trader named John Anderson, whose rise to social prominence belied the folklore image of slave traders as sleazy, tobacco-juice-spewing lowlife. Anderson was a prominent member of the local elite, a member of the prestigious Jockey Club, and the owner (thanks to his profits from slave-trading) of forty-two thoroughbred race horses. He used the jail as a holding pen while he bought up slaves for transport by flatboat to the huge slave market at Natchez, Mississippi, several times a year. Anderson’s house is gone now, as are the cabins of the slaves who served him, who tended his land, and who probably even operated the jail itself. In their place, red-throated blackbirds and woodcocks chirped and warbled, as the ripe smell of alfalfa wafted over the green hills.

“The jail is a perfect symbol of forgetting,” Westmoreland said as we walked. “For their own reasons, whites and blacks both tried to forget about that jail, just as the rest of America tried to forget about slavery. But that building has already begun to teach, by causing people to go back and look at the local historical record. It’s doing its job.”

Westmoreland led me to the slave trader’s overgrown grave, in a copse of hickory and locust trees. Anderson died in 1834, at the age of forty-two. “They say that he tripped over a grapevine, and fell onto the sharp stump of a cornstalk, which penetrated his eye and entered his brain,” Westmoreland said, his gravelly voice thick with irony. “He was chasing a runaway slave.”  —Fergus M. Bordewich