©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

Three-quarters of an hour southwest of Peebles, in Adams County, Ohio, which is the place of my birth, the great Ohio River flows briefly northward and narrows to little more than one thousand feet wide. In times of summer drought a nearly dry footpath, and of winter freezes a solid bridge of ice, this taper in the waterway hosted animal and human traffic trekking shore to shore since antiquity, in pre-colonial times including but not limited to the river’s northern-based Miami and Shawnee Indians slinking across it, looting their southern neighbors, and hightailing it home with their angry victims in close pursuit. Once back on the north side of the river, it was easy to take cover in the great and dense “Imperial Forest,” as dubbed by frontiersmen. Caves, hollows, and thickets of bushes and of grapevines that wove impenetrable screens among the giant trees, some of them sycamores so large in circumference that two horsemen riding side by side could pass through their tunneled trunks, provided strategic hideaways. Over time, as the red faces changed to white, the river was a primary transportation route during the westward expansion of the United States of America, and the magnificent trees shading its waters began to be put to man’s ax to build their residential and commercial enterprises.  

            In the spring of 1804, one year almost to the day following Ohio’s designation as the 17^th state of the Union, at the bend of the river where it meets Red Oak Creek on its northern shore, Colonel James Poage, a Virginian, along with his wife and ten children and their possessions, as well as his twenty slaves, disembarked two enormous flatboats on a wild and pristine thousand-acre plot, land granted to him for his twenty years of service to the government as a surveyor. Poage was attracted to the location not only because of its abundant natural resources, which he foresaw lining his pockets with riches, but also because it was a slave-free region. While a member of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War, the practice of enslaving human beings exercised his conscience, and he wanted out of it. Shortly after his arrival at his new home, he freed all of his slaves, dismantled his flatboats, and with the recycled lumber and trees from the forest, built a settlement. Soon a town took root that through a few evolutions finally was named Ripley. The riches never materialized for Poage, but his reputation for his “robust and cheerful piety” and as a welcoming and gracious host to new arrivals and guests in his Ripley, Ohio home grew far and wide.

            Weary black slaves on plantations in America’s Deep South lulled their children to sleep at night with stories of the great river up north with its narrow place that would someday be their pathway to freedom. They called it the “River Jordan” after Jesus’ baptismal waterway in the Bible. “And on the other side of the river, in a place called Ohio, people don’t keep other people as slaves. All people are free, even people with black skins like you and me,” slave mothers told their wide-eyed children. “That river is the line between being a slave and being free.”           

In the years leading to the American Civil War, slaves bolting to freedom on dangerous journeys across the north-south frontier via the Underground Railroad found more escape routes for the largest number of themselves on the Ohio River than anywhere else in the country. According to Ohio State University history professor Wilbur Siebert, Ohio’s Underground Railroad network comprised an estimated 3,000 miles of routes featuring more than twenty points of entry on the Ohio River, and as many as ten exit points by ferry across Lake Erie into Canada. The Ohio River is the generally accepted line to this day in the United States that separates the Midwestern Great Lakes states from the Southern border-states. Remnants of martyrs to the cause of freeing slaves, black and white and all shades in between, pepper the shores of the river. If you silence your mind and put your heart to the task, you might hear their anguished cries above the angry shouts, the snarls of the dogs, the blasts of the guns of their trackers.                                                                                                                                   

Perched atop the high embankment of the narrow bend in the Ohio River, the townspeople of Ripley were major witnesses to and actors in the firestorm of comings and goings of runaway slaves and their pursuers across the river. Among the population at that point were prominent as well as less-known abolitionists drawn to the area by a burning desire to devote themselves to the illegal act of freeing slaves. They set up housekeeping, established secret safe houses, cut backwoods paths, and worked diligently at helping slaves to escape bondage, at risk to their own and their family’s lives. Owing to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that granted slave-owners the right to regain their “property” even within the borders of free-states, slave-hunters, both owners and bounty-hunters, prowled the shores of the river, breached its northern shore, and chased down their human prey in free territory with impunity. It is doubtful that the Underground Railroad would have succeeded as it did absent the presence and support of free people of color fighting against such forces. They were people who had made it to freedom and had deliberately settled along stations of the Underground Railroad in Ohio beginning at the river, and stretching north to Columbus and on to Toledo and Cleveland and other towns around Lake Erie. Their express purpose was aiding runaways seeking safe harbor. During my growing-up years of the 1940s and 1950s in Columbus, I was unaware of the vital role my city, and even my state, played in fighting against one of the most oppressive human rights violations ever to occur. I was proud to learn in my research for this essay that Columbus alone has 22 documented Underground Railroad sites. 

Much is owed in the effort to end slavery in America to the more than 3,200 individuals known to have worked on the Underground Railroad. Many others will remain forever anonymous. But as I submit earlier in my dissertation, listening hearts might hear them.

          

**Author’s Note…I read a fabulous novel on the subject of a fleeing slave recently titled “The Day I Saw the Hummingbird,” by American author Paulette Mahurin. It is available in soft cover and eBook on Amazon.com.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available on Amazon.com.

Image…Ripley, Ohio from the southern shore of the Ohio River…1847 Woodcut