Bound for Canaan (27 page)

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In August 1844 Calvin Fairbank, a young seminarian from Oberlin College, was scouting out a route by which he might guide a family of fugitives from Lexington, Kentucky into Ohio. Fairbank had been bringing slaves across the Ohio River since he was twenty-one. He had rescued a total of forty-three over the last seven years, working independently or with one or two partners, often on his summer vacations from college. He had just completed an exploratory trip to Lexington, and was now crossing the river on the ferry to the Ohio town of Ripley, where he had been told that “friends of the fugitives” could be found. He intended to make contact with them, and he wanted their help when he brought his runaways north.

From the ferry Fairbank noticed a man crossing in a skiff. He hailed him.

“Mister, are you a Kentuckian?”

The man replied that he was.

Indicating Ripley, Fairbank asked, “Well, what kind of place is this?”

“It is a black, dirty, Abolition hole, sir.”

Inquiring further, Fairbank got the man to point out the homes of several well-known abolitionists. “And Dr. Rankin occupies the one on the hill,” the man concluded, indicating a red brick farmhouse that stood by itself on a steep bluff overlooking the town.

John Rankin was arguably the most formidable antislavery man on this stretch of the river. Fairbank probably had read the immensely influential public letters attacking slavery that Rankin had written to his brother in 1824 and 1825, which were widely reprinted in the
Liberator
and the publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Rankin had recruited hundreds of Ohioans to the abolitionist cause, and thanks to his indefatigable efforts the Underground Railroad was as firmly rooted in Ripley as the mighty oak trees that lent their deep and concealing shade to the precincts of his farm, across which as many as two thousand fugitives eventually would pass. In spite of his notoriety, Rankin and his brood of stalwart children—there were nine sons and four daughters—continued to dwell on their exposed hilltop, their home a beckoning symbol of freedom that could be seen for many miles along the river.

Pictures of John Rankin show a rather flinty-looking man: high white forehead towering over a long nose, uncompromising eyes, and thin, compressed lips, a face of sharp delineations, without softening half-tones. It is not a misleading image. Rankin's life was exclusively organized around a fierce, outspoken, and evangelical opposition to slavery. He was born in Jefferson County, Tennessee, in 1793, into a family of Scotch Presbyterians who had come to America from the North of Ireland. His father, a Revolutionary War veteran who had personally witnessed the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, “was remarkable for the purity of his morals,” Rankin wrote, taking his offspring to revival meetings whenever he could, and drilling them in the writings of obscure Scottish clerics. His mother, a gentler figure, had pronounced antislavery views, which impressed themselves on him at an early age.

As a child, he was tortured by spiritual anxieties. After church on
Sundays, while other young people skylarked, he felt obsessed with death, judgment, and eternity. The doctrine of election and foreordination in particular filled him with “anguish of spirit.” He tried to explain them away, “but it was a vain effort.” He also brooded over slavery, which he saw as a living sin oozing through the deep valleys of Tennessee. He was fortunate to attend Washington College in Jonesboro, which was run by an eminent Princeton University graduate, Dr. Samuel Doak. Himself a slaveholder, Doak taught his students that slavery was morally wrong, although like most Southern Christians he justified it with the argument that the danger of servile revolution was too great to risk actually setting slaves free. For Rankin there would be no such compromise.

Once ordained as a minister, Rankin ran into trouble immediately. He resigned from his first congregation because it would not tolerate his antislavery views. He then settled in eastern Kentucky, where antislavery men lived interspersed with slave owners, and he believed that he would be permitted to preach to the local slaves. Since it was a criminal offense to teach slaves to read, Rankin started a Sunday school in which only oral instruction was given, and only slaves who had written permission from their masters were accepted. One day, however, a mob of whites armed with clubs drove the slaves off. Rankin then gathered them in a friend's kitchen, but the slaves were ambushed and beaten on the way home. Disgusted by the behavior of his fellow whites, Rankin sold his property at a sacrifice, and on New Year's Day 1822 moved his family across the Ohio River to Ripley, Ohio, where the local Presbyterian church had invited him to serve as its pastor, at a salary of five hundred dollars per year.

Ripley was then in its commercial heyday, a bustling town of about three thousand, its economy fueled by river traffic and the businesses that sustained it, including a small ship-building industry. It was also one of the most important pork-butchering and packing towns in the West. Rankin's son John Jr. estimated that, as a boy, he had “fired the kettles that had scalded sixty thousand hogs one year and sixty-two thousand another year.” Steamboats linked Ripley with ports from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, and in the spring flatboats came down the creeks and rivers by the hundreds with cargoes of corn, tobacco, beef, whiskey, lumber, lime, and poultry destined for markets as far away as New Orleans. Rankin initially found Ripley an “exceedingly immoral” place “badly infested with infidelity, Universalism and whiskey,” where the Presbyterians were heavily
outnumbered by “infidels,” and swearing, frolicking, and dancing were openly tolerated. He went to work with Old Testament ferocity, forming Bible classes and Sunday schools, organizing satellite churches in the surrounding towns, denouncing saloons, and fulminating against farmers who celebrated their harvest with whiskey. He apparently had an impact, for in 1837 a traveler from New York declared Ripley to be “very pleasantly situated and the most moral place I was ever in.”

In his preaching, Rankin tirelessly reiterated three basic principles: that all men were created equal, that God had “made of one blood all nations of men,” and that every man ought either to do his own work or pay the man who does it for him. He thundered with his East Tennessee twang, “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.” For Rankin, each suffering slave embodied a mortal vision of the sacred. The loss of a fugitive to slave catchers was thus not just a tactical defeat but a spiritual catastrophe. When Rankin learned that a fugitive who had been safe in the North had returned to Kentucky to rescue his family and had, along with them, been captured and reenslaved, he “was seized with such anguish of spirit that it seemed as if there were nothing in creation that could cheer me.”

Rankin can be seen as an emblematic figure among white radicals in much the way that David Ruggles can among blacks—a bridge from the pacifist style of the early nineteenth century to the confrontational activism of mid-century. Both men's writings and public utterances ran equally hot with moral outrage, but their styles differed considerably. Where Ruggles was impetuous to the point of rashness, Rankin avoided unnecessary risks. And while Ruggles pursued his work in often painful, underfinanced isolation, Rankin could rely on a disciplined phalanx of collaborators. He had another advantage that Ruggles could never have: he was a white man in a society that with rare exceptions treated even a brilliant black man like Ruggles with barely concealed contempt. Ruggles had burned himself out in less than five years. Rankin would serve their cause in Ripley without interruption for more than thirty.

The Northwest had changed since Josiah Henson and Jarm Logue had made their way north through the wilderness. Where Indians had roamed, new fields were everywhere being cleared, new houses built, barns erected, orchards planted, and roads pushed through the forest (al
though in much of the region they were still so poorly maintained that people referred to them as “mud roads” even when the dust was thickest). In the north, livestock was plentiful, and in the southwest, including the area around Ripley, hogs were raised in such profusion that several towns that lived on the slaughtering trade proudly claimed the sobriquet “Porkopolis.” But it was still a rough land, full of proud, self-confident men who were in a hurry to acquire land and get rich fast, men who wore their clothes caked with mud, their hair long, and spoke a language that blended the idioms of the Carolinas and Kentucky, New York and New England. As the 1840s dawned they were increasingly “tetchous” over the issue of slavery, “contrarious” if challenged, and ready to engage in violent “ructions” if pressed too hard.

Throughout the region, color prejudice against blacks was entangled with the pragmatic bigotry of businessmen and farmers whose economic interests were interwoven with those of the South. In 1832, a committee of the Ohio House of Representatives had menacingly reported that free blacks represented “a serious political and moral evil” that threatened white citizens of the state. Five years later Caleb Atwater, an influential Cincinnatian, declared, “As a state it is [in] our interest…to have slavery continued in the slave holding states, for a century yet, otherwise our growth will be checked.” In September 1841 organized mobs had once again attacked blacks in Cincinnati, dragging barbers and waiters out of their places of employment, threatening the homes of abolitionists, and at one point even turning a cannon on a black neighborhood near Sixth Street and Broadway. Large majorities continued to support laws that barred blacks from testifying against whites in court and from service on juries, as well as from the public schools, asylums, and poorhouses, even as abolitionist agitation reached fever pitch. “The whole country was like a huge pot in a furious state of boiling over,” recalled Levi Coffin's nephew Addison Coffin, who followed his uncle to Indiana in 1842. The twenty-year-old North Carolinian was overwhelmed by “the contending, declaiming, denouncing, vilifying, swearing and vulgarity” that filled the community. “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; at mills, stores, shops, everywhere it was abolition, pro-slavery, niggers, amalgamation, nigger wives, and all other such.”

The new decade was a time of transformation for abolitionism. The American Anti-Slavery Society was, in a sense, a victim of its success. It had grown with astonishing speed since its founding in Philadelphia barely a decade before. But serious cracks soon began to show. By the end of the 1830s, William Lloyd Garrison had adopted a cluster of radical positions that were unacceptable to more conventional abolitionists. He rejected the Constitution because it incorporated tolerance of slavery, and advocated the secession of the North in order to separate it from the sins of the South. He declared in the
Liberator
, “
My hope for the millennium begins where Dr. Beecher's expires—viz
., AT THE OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION.” He scandalized evangelicals—who made up almost the entire rank and file of the movement—by suggesting that not everything in the Bible was divinely inspired, and by disparaging clergymen as “blind leaders of the blind, dumb dogs that cannot bark, spiritual popes—that…love the fleece better than the flock.” Garrison's opponents feared, with some cause, that antislavery would be submerged in Garrison's wider reformist agenda. Lewis Tappan, for instance, regarded the Protestant churches as the most effective agencies for advancing the abolitionist cause, and felt deep suspicion of anyone who was not a professed evangelical. “I sometimes fear we have greatly erred in associating with ungodly men in the Anti S. Enterprise,” he wrote to Gerrit Smith, who tried his best to remain on good terms with both factions. The last straw, at least for Tappan and the powerful circle of evangelicals based in New York, was Garrison's embrace of women's rights, including the participation of women in antislavery organizations on an equal basis with men. In 1839 Tappan's supporters, who represented the great majority of the movement's membership, as it proved, walked out of the American Anti-Slavery Society, leaving its rump to Garrison. They then met to form an entirely new organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, singing at the top of their lungs, “
Lo! What an entertaining sight/Are brethren who agree
.”

Many white abolitionists had also given up hope that gentle admonition would convince slaveholders to relinquish their human property. Despite decades of appeals to Christian morality, the number of slaves in the United States had steadily increased to just under two and a half million by 1840, more than double the figure at the beginning of the century. The political landscape offered only unpalatable alternatives. Neither of the
major parties showed the least sign of being willing to challenge slavery's overwhelming power in Washington. Abolitionists had only contempt for President Martin Van Buren. As Andrew Jackson's vice president, Van Buren had provided the tie-breaking vote in the Senate that prohibited postmasters from delivering any abolitionist literature where it was prohibited by state law, and in his own 1837 inaugural address he had blamed mob violence on abolitionists' “reckless disregard for the consequences of their actions.” Van Buren's Whig opponent in 1840, William Henry Harrison, as a member of Congress had voted to introduce slavery into Illinois, and he had publicly asserted that in his opinion the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and the press did not apply to abolitionists. Into this vacuum Gerrit Smith and his upstate New York supporters that year launched the Liberty Party, the first political party in American history to advocate the immediate abolition of slavery, its only platform. Its nominee for president was James G. Birney, a former Kentucky slave owner who had become converted to abolitionism. As befitted its origins in the Burned Over District of central New York, the party spoke with a distinctly evangelical voice, calling upon all abolitionists to “Vote as you pray, and pray as you vote.” Although the Liberty Party won only about 7 percent of the vote that year, and would never win much more than that, it would serve as the main national channel of political action for abolitionists throughout the 1840s. It also represented the first crucial step in forcing slavery onto the nation's agenda, a process that would finally be complete with the founding of the Republican Party in 1856. Those who dared to vote for Birney did so at their peril. In Cincinnati, for example, one Samuel Ogden cast his vote at the Cheviot Hotel, and was instantly attacked by proslavery men who beat him senseless and trampled him in the mud.