“Eliza” Reappears
1841
John Rankin and his wife, Jean, couldn’t have been more surprised while tending their garden in July of 1841. Two figures emerged from a nearby wooded lot, climbed over a fence, and strode through waist-high corn coming toward them. The white man was a stranger, maybe Canadian by his dress. But the black woman looked vaguely familiar. She was five feet, four inches tall and heavyset, not quite middle-aged, and dressed as a man in trousers and a waistcoat. Now Rankin recognized her. It was none other than the brave slave woman who had crossed the icy floes of the Ohio River in February of 1838 with her baby. He had never expected to see her again.
John Rankin’s hilltop house above the Ohio River was a known refuge for runaway slaves, a fact that had antagonized slave catchers from Kentucky for years. He had been mobbed more than twenty times, and there was a bounty for his abduction or assassination.
The woman had come back from Canada for her grown daughter and grandchildren, as she had promised herself when she escaped. They were all slaves on Thomas Davis’s farm in Dover, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from the Rankins’ house. The French-Canadian man whom she had met in Cleveland along the Underground Railroad route to Canada had agreed to help her, so she hired him to rescue her family. The woman’s plan was for the two of them to secretly alert her daughter to be ready and find a boat to take them across the Ohio River. They needed the Rankins’ network of connections in order to make their way along the Underground Railroad and back to Canada.
Reverend Rankin found the woman’s rescue plan too risky, and strongly advised against it. Her daughter had four sons and three daughters, including a sixteen-month-old, whose cries could betray them. It was a large number to rescue at one time unnoticed. Seeing her determination, however, he eventually agreed to assist her on his side of the river, but she would have to get them first. It would take the cooperation of many agents for the undertaking to be successful.
Work was found for the woman in Red Oak at the Archibald Hopkins farm, just four miles to the north, so she could earn her keep while their plan was set into action. Meanwhile, her accomplice rowed across the Ohio River and found his way to the woman’s enslaved family.
The Canadian had no accent, having lived in many places, and blended in well in Dover. Mrs. Rankin had found him clothes suitable to a common laborer. He found a job chopping wood on the Davis farm, where the woman’s family lived. He wisely frequented the local taverns and spent time on the riverfront to learn the schedule of the patrollers. Typically they went off duty by 4:00 a.m. and were usually inebriated at that point. He also scouted the shoreline to find a safe departure point that did not have barking dogs that might awaken neighbors.
By the first week of August, all was ready. Late on a Friday night, Rankin’s sons, aged eighteen and fifteen, rode horses to the Hopkins farm to pick up the woman. When they returned, the Canadian man was waiting on the riverbank along Front Street. The boys noiselessly rowed the woman and the Canadian across the Ohio River and dropped them off on the Kentucky shore. The escape was to take place the following night.
The woman’s daughter took six of her children, leaving behind the eldest daughter, a house servant, to whom they could not get word of the escape plan. Managing the removal of all these people, as well as the couple hundred pounds of belongings her daughter insisted she needed, retarded their progress along the three and a half miles through wooded hills to the river. Despite their best efforts, they could not make it across the river before daylight. The fugitives were forced to hide out on the Kentucky shore on Sunday, hoping to attempt their escape the following night. They took refuge among the thickly timbered land of a farmer named Mike Sullivan.
Sunday morning Davis awoke to find his slaves missing. He organized a posse of a dozen men. The Canadian had stolen Sullivan’s skiff before the sun rose and rowed it across to the Ohio side, leaving it prominently displayed to throw off the hunt. The posse crossed the river and spent the entire day searching through the town of Ripley, looking for fugitives they assumed had escaped on Sullivan’s skiff, but ironically hadn’t even left Kentucky yet.
A $400 reward was immediately offered for information on the whereabouts of Davis’s slaves, but the machinery of the Underground Railroad had already begun to turn. The taverns in Ripley, for instance, sold the bounty hunters ale at low prices, hoping to incapacitate them. The Rankin family went to church, knowing that their house would be searched while they were gone.
Around 3:00 a.m. on Monday, the Canadian borrowed an abolitionist’s boat and rowed from Ohio back to Kentucky, gathering the fugitives and some of their possessions. After dropping his passengers off in Ripley at 5:00 a.m., the Canadian collected his pay and left. His work was done, and he did not want to be implicated in the escape. Two underground agents brought the fugitives up the shore to the home of Thomas and Kitty McCague, wealthy, well-connected Ripley residents. Since the McCagues had slave-owning friends and family in Kentucky, nobody suspected them of being in collusion with the Underground Railroad.
After the search died down, the fugitives were escorted one at a time to the Rankins’ house. Once again the unnamed woman sat in the Rankins’ kitchen, just as she had done three years earlier, half frozen from her icy crossing. This time she was surrounded by most of her family, and it was a warm summer evening. However, there was no time to grow comfortable.
From the Rankins’ house the former slaves traveled to the Hopkins’s farm four miles down the road. Next they were all concealed in a peddler’s wagon and were escorted to Hillsboro, Ohio, thirty-five miles to the north. From there they went on to Cleveland, then to Lake Erie, and finally to Canada.
John and Jean Rankin neither saw nor heard from the determined woman and her family again, but were informed of their safe arrival in Canada—adding to the growing number of fugitive slaves who had successfully passed through the Rankins’ house on their way to freedom.