Established in the early 1800s, the Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses for those escaping slavery. The success of the Underground Railroad rested on the cooperation of former runaway slaves, free-born blacks, Native Americans, and white and black abolitionists who helped guide fugitive slaves. The southern Ohio town of Marietta is supposedly one of the Underground Railroad’s outposts, situated where the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers meet.
Evaluating history means dealing with a curious hybrid of exciting untruths/clever humbug. Which is to say, the story of the Underground Railroad is not quite wrong, but simplified; not quite a myth, but mythologized, cloaking white midwestern communities in a gauzy innocence. It took courage almost everywhere in antebellum America to actively oppose slavery, but the idea that Ohio welcomed fugitives with open arms is a fairytale—Ohio was split on the issue of slavery. It was against not only state law, but also federal law to help an escaping slave. Indeed fugitives were only marginally better off in the ostensibly free state of Ohio than across the border in Kentucky. The frontier was not a place of heroism and sweetness and light. It was a place of violence, injustice and devastation for many escapees.
Ohio has a complex historical relationship to slavery and racial capitalism. During the nineteenth century, the economy of Cincinnati—the capital of Southwest Ohio and bordering Kentucky—stood in stark contrast to Northeast Ohio’s. Its wealth was indelibly linked to slavery. Slavecatchers abounded as far north as Dayton, where they made a living catching African Americans seeking freedom and selling them back into bondage across the river. Abolitionists were not welcome in antebellum Cincinnati.
Fugitive slaves were largely on their own until they crossed the Ohio River. And those that did were mostly rescued by free blacks, not benevolent white abolitionists. Most runaways did not head north, and most slaves who sought their liberty did not run away. Only after the Civil War—when it no longer required vision or courage or personal sacrifice—did large numbers of white Americans grow interested in being part of the liberation story. You might call it an early example of retroactive reputation laundering.
That is not to say that there weren’t great men like the famous stationmaster John Rankin in Ripley, Ohio, who used the secret “sign” of a lantern in a window to signal that it was safe to cross the Ohio River to his home. However, this was not a common signal. If it had been, the slave catchers would have quickly learned of it, and used it to identify safe houses.
In the entire history of slavery, the Railroad offers one of the few narratives in which white Americans can plausibly appear as heroes. It is also one of the few slavery narratives that feature black Americans as heroes—which is to say, one of the few that emphasize the courage, intelligence, and humanity of enslaved African Americans rather than their subjugation and misery.
The UR reached its height between 1850 and 1860: slavery lasted for two and half centuries. Estimates are that about 40,000 slaves escaped to freedom on the network, but of them, for every one that made it, between five and 10 were caught, often brutally punished, and returned south to slavery.
Whispers of tunnels, secret rooms and runaway slaves have swirled around the Anchorage, Marietta, Ohio’s mysterious mansion on the hillside built in the 1850’s and completed in 1859, for more than a century. I guess if you look for “evidence” of the Anchorage’s Underground Railroad involvement you will “find” a network of large tunnels in the basement leading into the surrounding hillsides. Geologists, engineers and construction experts believe the tunnels were designed for drainage. I try to be a precise and compassionate observer of America, and this toes the feather line between fantasy and reality.
Inflated tales of emergency hiding places for fugitive slaves may temporarily distract us from tragedy with thrilling adventures, but when the history of slavery gets mixed up with folklore, the severity of the atrocities that took place become minimized. Likewise ghost stories construct a more genteel vision of the past: but they also deflect from the very real pain of racism and the suffering caused by the barbaric institution of chattel slavery. In the words of James Baldwin: “A complex thing can't be made simple. You simply have to try to deal with it in all its complexity and hope to get that complexity across.”
A note on language. By changing from the use of a name—slaves—to an adjective—enslaved—we grant these individuals an identity as people and use a term to describe their position in society rather than reducing them to that position. In a small but important way, we carry them forward as people, not the property that they were in that time. This is not a minor thing, this change of language.