Making Tracks to Freedom

By Richard Lacayo

The abolitionist John Rankin was that recognizable type, a scalding Old Testament moralist dropped into 19th century America, a place that was already a boiling pot. He was also a Presbyterian preacher, but not the type to turn the other cheek. In 1841, after a pro-slavery raiding party attempted to burn his house, he put forward a summation of his principles: "It is as much a duty to shoot the midnight assassin in his attacks as it is to pray."

John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Rankin--the U.S. produced men like that because slavery, the nation's fatal flaw, was awful enough to breed opponents of equal fury. In Beyond the River (Simon & Schuster; 333 pages), Ann Hagedorn tells Rankin's story as a window onto that era's most audacious utility, the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses, sympathetic whites and free blacks that helped runaway slaves escape to the North. Rankin, his steadfast wife and reliable sons were among its major links--crucial enough that furious slaveholders put a bounty on the minister's head.

On a hill above the Ohio River, the Rankin house--where a defiant lantern hung each night as a beacon--became a fabled destination that fleeing slaves struggled and sometimes died trying to reach. One of them was a woman who dared to cross the melting ice of the Ohio with her 2-year-old after learning that her master planned to sell the child. Rankin's sons helped her along to the next safe town, whence she eventually made her way to Ontario. Though her name remains unknown, the woman's story, by way of Rankin, reached the ears of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who used her as the basis for Eliza, the slave who flees across the ice floes in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Antebellum America was a world of constant low-intensity warfare between abolitionists and slavers in hot pursuit of their "property." The rising tide of escapees led to cross-border raids by Southern slaveholders who were emboldened by federal laws that gave them the right to chase runaways into free states. Hired slave hunters prowled the riverbanks, hoping to catch blacks and drag them south for cash. When no runaways were available, free-black citizens--there were 200,000 in the Northern states by 1860--could be clubbed and hustled across the river into captivity. Pro-slavery Northerners destroyed printing presses and burned the rare biracial schools.

Hagedorn's book could have offered more background on the slave empire and the workings of the Underground Rail-road beyond Ripley, Ohio, Rankin's town. But the ground-level focus gives Hagedorn's story the flavor and fire of an era when even the newspapers had names like the Agitator and the Castigator. And the Rankins turn out to be a redoubtable clan. After a gang of armed men demanded to search her house for a runaway slave, the minister's wife Jean did not bat an eyelash. "If you do not hereafter keep away you will feel the force of powder and lead upon you," she told them. "If no one else would shoot you I would do it myself." Three cheers for muscular Christianity. --By Richard Lacayo