©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 17th
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
Great post. And thank you for the mention of my book, The Day I Saw the Hummingbird. Love, Paulette
ReplyDeleteExcellent post. My compliments!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your nice comment, Pamela.
Delete