Underground Railroad in Ohio, The

INTRODUCTION

The Underground Railroad has enriched our history with marvelous stories. We have inherited tales of well-planned routes that extended as far south as Alabama and Georgia and envision these trails dotted with homes of heroic White station operators. We hear that runaway slaves made their way from one safe spot to the next through dark tunnels or under the stars, humming a drinking gourd song that kept them pointed north. In the daytime, it is said, they occasionally spotted quilts hung on clotheslines, with helpful images sewn in that functioned as Underground Railroad code. When not on the move, they cowered silently in one secret room or another. Good stories all, but the problem is that almost none are true.

The Underground Railroad existed only in northern free states. There, help was available for freedom seekers from at least 1800, although no one called it the Underground Railroad then—no one knew what a railroad was much before the 1830s.¹ Few White people participated in the effort until that decade; for years, the Underground Railroad was primarily a system of Blacks helping Blacks. It existed to support the travel of fugitives to the guaranteed freedom of Canada, something even the free U.S. states denied them. Enslaved people in the border states of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky heard tell of the Underground Railroad but understood that travel to it was risky; they were entirely on their own until they crossed into a northern state. This made the Underground Railroad a practical option only for those living within a walkable distance of it, most often just two or three days. There were a few exceptions, such as river and sea ports enabling connection by boat, but generally the Underground Railroad was unknown in the Deep South.

The state most heavily traveled by people fleeing slavery—for reasons of geography, history and attitude—was Ohio. A map of Underground Railroad travel patterns, as best as can be constructed years after the fact, shows a few specific thoroughfares in eastern states but an intricate spider web of routes blanketing Ohio. Hundreds of fleeing people passed through on each of these Ohio lines. Even the well-meaning and organized opponents of slavery in Philadelphia marveled at the volume of fugitive traffic moving through Cincinnati; other Ohio towns barely heard of back east, places like Ripley and Salem, hosted nearly as much. Numbers are hard to pin down, but more enslaved people seem to have escaped through Ohio than through all other states combined.

I lived most of my life in Ohio, first on a major route in eastern Ohio and then on a confluence of routes north of Cincinnati. In both places, the Underground Railroad was all around yet barely talked about. Perhaps as midwesterners, we just didn’t talk about ourselves much. But more importantly, whiffs of Jim Crow, maybe more accurately described as a choking fog, had settled in by my childhood in the 1950s. A northern brand of racism kept Whites silent about what should have been a major point of pride. Although Black people were well in evidence, the people in my social circle were White. Among them, I sensed confusion about the matter. The Underground Railroad era was far distant in time, driven by priorities now absent. Should this antebellum legacy be celebrated or ignored?

In recent years, there has thankfully been renewed interest in the Underground Railroad, although I have sometimes been frustrated with the fictional accounts. In trying to recover the nearly lost history of this era, creators are adding all sorts of colorful embellishments. Besides the inaccurate notions about quilts and songs, they insert magical realism. The whole Underground Railroad effort seems mysterious and otherworldly to us now, so why not tell it magically? The creative license in this genre that bothers me most is the choice of setting. Stories are told of the Underground Railroad in southern slave states, which is very misleading to today’s readers. Second to that is a focus on the East Coast, with its powerful media market dating back to the nineteenth century. Yes, Philadelphia has a wonderful antislavery heritage preserved by the likes of Underground Railroad operative and writer William Still, a free Black man. Meanwhile, stories based on the Underground Railroad’s major location—the whole state of Ohio—are not being told.

The true stories, to the extent that they can be recovered, are as fascinating as anything fiction writers can imagine. They include elements that might surprise those who have heard only distorted lore. While there are indeed many White people to celebrate, African Americans are the leading characters and heroes of the stories, whether they were free or fleeing slavery. This group did a lot less slinking around and a lot more hiding in plain sight than we have been led to believe. And to add to the confusion about whether real railroads were involved, well, they were. Plenty of well-dressed fugitives posing as free citizens held tickets on trains—or on canalboats—wending their way northward through Ohio ever closer to Canada.

This book will explain why Ohio was so prominent in this noble effort, bracketed in between stories of two of Ohio’s heroes. Throughout, you will encounter very few secret rooms, tunnels or coded quilts, but you may not miss these legends or even notice their absence because they are supplanted with better qualities: courage and cunning. The valiant strength of the real people who worked to overcome the wickedness of slavery needs no embellishment.

Chapter 1

ADDISON WHITE, UDNEY HYDE AND THE THREE AMANDAS

Addison White knew all about salt. He knew how to harvest brine from a Kentucky salt lick, digging deep holes where a salty liquid would seep in. He knew the weight of the buckets as he drew the brine out and the labor of cutting wood for fires to heat it. He knew to maintain those fires at a steady temperature under the salt pans. Just below boiling was best for fine table salt, but a lower temperature would work for the coarse salt needed for meatpacking.² The pork processors in Cincinnati, on the north side of the big river not far away, ordered tons and tons of the stuff. Addison knew to be patient while the crystals formed, unlike the meatpackers always clamoring for more. And Addison White knew another thing about salt that the customers didn’t: he knew what it felt like on the ripped flesh of his back after a whipping. Addison White was enslaved.³

Salt-making interested Addison. He liked watching the mounds of crystals form, a latent little surprise each time. He had both the mind and body for the work, as he was inquisitive and strong. But no matter—he got whipped some days regardless. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for the whippings, possibly why it played on his mind so badly. His owner, Daniel Garrard White, had grown up in a family who believed in whipping their slaves. Daniel’s father, Hugh Lowery White, was feared by the slaves around Clay County, where the White family had settled after the Revolution to become prominent salt merchants. One later recounted, Hugh White wuz so mean to his slaves I know of two gals that kilt themselves. One nigger gal Sudie wuz found across the bed with a pen knife in her hand. He whipped another nigger gal most to death for fergitting to put onions in the stew. The next day she went down to the river…and her body finally washed upon the shore.⁴ While many slaves of the upper South were spared the very worst beatings of slavery, those owned by the Whites were not.

Even so, Addison had not thought much about running away. The saltworks Daniel White was attempting to develop were in Fleming County; it has never been determined if Addison was born nearby or had been brought out of Clay farther down in the heart of the state. Either way, he was well aware that he could easily walk to the Ohio River in one night, and he had heard about something called the Underground Railroad on the other side. But Addison had a wife and young children. He knew what life was like where he was, and he was not so sure what Ohio—or Canada—offered. Could he support himself there? Those Cincinnati pork-packers ordered their salt from Kentucky—were there no saltworks up north?

One summer day in 1856, the decision to run was made for him. Due to yet another inscrutable infraction, he was to be whipped again. This time, word was that a nigger breaker was being brought in to deal with him. Rather than be whipped in an impromptu manner at the saltworks as before, Addison would be taken to a public whipping post. Tied there, he would probably pass out during the slashing strokes. Then more salt. The prospect caused Addison to snap and attack his overseer. About thirty-five years old and much bigger than most men, he easily pushed the overseer to the ground. Addison immediately realized that if he did not run, he was as good as dead.

Exactly how Addison managed to escape is lost within that ugly era, but he did get away. Instead of heading directly north to Maysville and the river, he seems to have taken a circuitous route. Perhaps this was cunning; perhaps it was to see and seek aid from loved ones before he went north. He passed through the town of Cynthiana to the west, where he encountered a pretty young Black girl named Amanda Barrow sitting on a porch snapping beans—a common activity in late summer Kentucky. From there he followed a road ending at river’s edge across from Ripley, Ohio. With some scavenged wood, Addison floated partway out before swimming the final distance. He knew to look for a set of steep stairs cut into the hill just west of town, which he could just make out in the moonlight. At the top was a small house with a lantern burning in a window—this was Reverend Rankin’s house, where they said you could get help.

Common practice in the Rankin home was for Jean Rankin to feed escaping slaves whatever she had and to make sure they were appropriately clothed and well shod. After sizing up new arrivals, she would dig into her boxes of goods, the result of her husband’s constant speeches and fundraising, to find what she thought they needed. This was done hastily because you did not tarry long at the Rankins’—everyone on both sides of the river knew that it was an obvious place to look for fugitives. Even before her ministrations had concluded, one of the Rankins’ teenage sons would be saddling up and preparing for a night ride into the wooded hills to the north. He took the road and asked his passengers to walk off to the side within earshot—the journey was safer that way. Before dawn, the small procession arrived at a station where the fugitives could rest and eat before the process was repeated with a new conductor. By then, the sleepy Rankin boy had returned home. It kept getting a bit easier and safer as the freedom seekers got farther from the river, away from the gaggle of slave catchers and rascals it harbored.

Lore among Addison White’s descendants suggests that he reached central Ohio’s Champaign County just three days after leaving the Rankins. If true, that one-hundred-mile achievement is surprising but not impossible. An Underground Railroad journey usually took longer; indeed, in safe regions there was no pressing reason for hurry. It is also said that he navigated part of it completely alone, without the aid of anyone else, a circumstance not unheard of. The main takeaway from these accounts—this part undoubtedly true—is that Addison arrived in Champaign County without having developed a clear sense of Ohio, its laws or his own status. Some Black people were free here. Was he free too? The strangeness of the land further unsettled him. The county’s name, borrowed from the French, meant open, flat country. Having spent his whole life in Kentucky, Addison had never seen such land. He could now see a patchwork of pastures, cornfields and woodlands stretching on for miles—odd but pleasant, except that it made him feel exposed to everyone else who could see across these gently sloped plains.

Addison’s confusion about his freedom, or lack of it, may seem naïve but was not unwarranted. The nation’s 1850 Fugitive Slave Law stated that his enslaved status was to be maintained everywhere in the United States; however, thought in Ohio differed. On his journey, Addison had already heard contradictory information. For undeniable, irreversible freedom in 1856, he was supposed to continue on to Canada. But he was also told that Ohioans, like the majority of northerners, hated some slave law that had gone into effect back in 1850. In fact, so many hated it so much that they were happy to disregard and disobey it; they would not send him back to Kentucky, as the law specifically required them to do. Abhorrence of the awful 1850 law, particularly the part that turned them all into slave catchers, may explain his fast trip up from Ripley. So many Ohioans were opposed to slavery by 1856 that the Underground Railroad was not really so underground anymore. Transporting fugitives now happened openly and in broad daylight in much of Ohio.

It was in this milieu that Addison White found his way to the home of Udney Hyde in the Champaign County village of Mechanicsburg. Udney Hyde was one of the more colorful characters of the Underground Railroad. Simply stated, he was a badass. While Addison had probably heard a prayer from the devout Reverend Rankin, a Presbyterian, and had been addressed in the thees and thous of Quakerdom as he passed through the town of Wilmington, Udney Hyde did not give two hoots about anything related to the church. He swore like a sailor, and his only noticeable devotion was his hatred of slavery.

If asked why he detested slavery so much, Udney might share his observation that little black lambs cried every bit as much as white lambs when separated from their mothers, proving to