1. Information about Parker is scant. For example, we are forced to fall back on the Gregg manuscript to determine which parent was African-American and which Caucasian and for his activities prior to moving to Ripley. Where they exist, corroborating sources, including censuses and city directories, have been used. No clearly identifiable photograph of John P. Parker is known to exist. Thanks to Alison J. Gibson of Ripley’s Union Township Public Library and Michel S. Perdreau of Athens, Ohio who graciously shared sources, and to Jerry Gore of Maysville who first alerted me to the Parker manuscript.
2. There is little in print about John P. Parker. A brief biographical sketch appears in the 1883 History of Brown County. Henry E. Baker included Parker in his 1917 Journal of Negro History article “The Negro in the Field of Invention,” and Frank R. Levstik wrote the Parker entry in Logan and Winston’s Dictionary of Negro Biography.
Only in recent years have historians paid attention to Parker. The first substantial article came out in Ohio History (1971) with Louis Weeks’s “John P. Parker: Black Abolitionist Entrepreneur, 1827–1900.” That article includes liberal excerpts from the memoir. Paul Young has published two articles in Ohio Southland, “John Parker: Ripley’s Black Abolitionist” (Winter 1990) and “The Underground Railroad” (Issue #1, 1991). Edith M. Gaines’s Freedom Light: Underground Railroad Stories from Ripley, Ohio (1991) spotlights Parker as well as Rankin. Parker was also featured in John Cooper’s “Restoring History,” River Hills (Summer 1994).
3. By going through the annual Catalog of Officers and Students at Yale University for the years in which the doctor’s sons headed north to study, I hoped to identify the doctor since students’ hometowns were listed. I compared the Yale surnames with the Mobile city directory to identify the doctor, but found no appropriate match. It is possible the two sons failed entrance exams or decided they did not like Connecticut and returned.
4. Gist’s slaves arrived in June 1818 and set up two “camps,” known as the upper and lower camp. Because of the poor quality of the land and the better opportunities available working on steamboats, the two African-American settlements never prospered. In 1837 a school was set up, but the schoolhouse was burned down. An article in the Cincinnati Whig written in 1836 exemplifies the racism of the time: “Farms given to them 15 years ago instead of being well improved, and timber preserved for farming have been sadly managed…. They are so excessively lazy and stupid that the people of Georgetown (near their camps) and neighboring farmers will not employ them.” The Gist slaves were not the only ones who were emancipated and settled in Brown County. The Rev. Samuel Doak also freed his slaves in 1818, and eleven came to Brown County.
5. Many of the slaves John Parker rowed across the Ohio River were forwarded on to Red Oak, where a large number of families willingly took in fugitives.
6. Information regarding Parker’s businesses is from the R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, Baker Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Business, Ohio volume 17, pp. 240, 344, 424, 442. The credit-rating agency depended upon responsible community leaders to evaluate the creditworthiness and character of individual businessmen and their firms. Those who provided the confidential information are identified by number, not by name.
Of Alfred Belchamber, with whom Parker was involved in the threshing-machine-making business, an informative letter from Eb McKinley to Isaac Addison McKinley dated Ripley, April 30, 1859, declares that “he is a very clever, industrious merchant of good moral habits. He builds threshing machines of his own getting up; a combination of several of the best machines in use. He is now gone on a tour of Kentucky, to put up a new hemp break that he has just finished and will be absent a few days.” Cincinnati Historical Society, CM. Carson Collection.
7. St. Paul, Minnesota Appeal, February 14, 1891.
8. By the 1920s, Parker’s Phoenix Foundry became the Ripley Foundry and Machine Company. Wilbur H. Siebert in Ripley (Ohio) Bee, June 17, 1948, copy in the Wilbur H. Siebert Collection, Box 115, Ohio Miscellaneous, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio. Siebert was interested primarily in agents of the Underground Railroad who forwarded fugitives toward Canada, which may explain why there is no surviving contemporary evidence of the interview. There are notes regarding the three other Ripley, Ohio, interviews of that day.
9. The dates of birth for Portia and Bianca are derived from their ages given in censuses of Brown County, Ohio.
10. Gregg (1864–1937) was the son of Samuel Gregg, a dry goods merchant and Martha (McCracken) Gregg. After graduating from high school in Ripley, he headed out to Colorado, where he became a section hand on the Union Pacific Railroad. From there he went to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he worked for three years in a candy factory. Then he became a reporter with the Chattanooga News. It may have been during his years with the News that he returned to Ripley to interview Parker. Circumstantial evidence supporting this view includes references to Parker as “an old man,” to Gregg’s reputation as a journalist, and to Parker’s residence, which was destroyed by fire in 1889 but is mentioned as being intact in the manuscript. 1886–1889 is the most likely time frame for the interview.
Gregg left the News for the Cleveland (Ohio) Press, where he worked for five years. He married and became an active member of Cleveland’s business community. He organized the Cleveland Street Lighting Company, purchased in 1906 the Cleveland Macaroni Company, and became president of the Cleveland Worm and Gear Company.
His affection for Ripley combined with his wealth led him to organize the 1912 Centennial Celebration of Ripley; he purchased bronze plaques to be installed in front of historic houses and bought the “Liberty Monument,” which was unveiled as part of the centennial. I suspect he was also responsible for the May 1910 photographing of Parker’s house, of the African-American church, and of other African-American places. Gregg was an amateur historian, publishing Andrews’ Raiders (1891), The Founding of a Nation (1915), and Voice of the Nation and Other Verses (1918). His “Anti-Slavery Notes,” a transcription of historical source works, can be dated from his home address to 1907 while “The Borderland” is dated 1908. Both are at the Ohio Historical Society.
In a fragment of Gregg’s never published “The Imperial Forest,” he wrote of Parker, “I remember going through his library in after years and was astounded at its quality of philosophy, history, poetry and drama, but there was no fiction. He had become a highly educated man through his books.”
11. Following the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law a number of Indiana slave-nappers who had helped slaves escape from Kentucky were arrested and taken back to Kentucky. For such crimes, prison sentences of 5–20 years were common.
12. James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: the Art of Historical Detection 3rd edition (New York, 1992), “The View From the Bottom Rail,” 148–177.
13. Three manuscripts, John Rankin’s Autobiography, which may have been used in a disjointed 26 part serial that the Emporia, Kansas News ran during 1874–75, the Parker Memoir, and the “Eliza” manuscript comprise Duke University’s Rankin-Parker Collection. No source is given for the donor and there is no record of whether the manuscripts were given in 1939 or merely catalogued then. Gregg died in 1937.
1. According to the prejudice of the time, white people were considered superior in intelligence to black people.
2. Frank Alexander Stivers (1865–1938) was the son of Andrew Jackson Stivers (1818–94) and Katherine (Maddox) Stivers. Both father and son were in the banking business. Stivers was approximately the same age as Gregg.
3. The age Gregg gives for Parker is not consistent with Chapter 6 of the memoir, in which Parker says that six months after the contract was made he was eighteen. The widow, Elizabeth Ryder, is listed in the 1838 and 1844 Mobile city directories.
4. The mathematics of the deal are never made entirely clear. In Chapter 6 of the memoir, Parker mentions “payment of $1,800, with interest, to be paid at the rate of $10 per week,” but he makes irregular payments and earns his freedom in eighteen months. Possibly the $10 per week was the interest and Parker was to pay off the principal at any rate he could.
5. New Albany, located nearly opposite Louisville, Kentucky, saw its population practically quadruple from 2,079 to 8,181 between 1830 and 1850 as the steamboat and the Portland Canal at Louisville dramatically increased river traffic.
6. Alexander Campbell (1779–1857) was born in Virginia and moved to Kentucky. A doctor, in 1803 he was elected to the state legislature. After moving to Ohio he was elected to the Ohio legislature and served from 1807 to 1809. From 1809 to 1813 he served in the United States Senate, and in 1815 he moved to Ripley to practice medicine. He became vice-president of the first general antislavery society in 1835 and was Ripley’s mayor from 1838 to 1840.
7. It was an article of faith among the sons of John Rankin that their father’s Letters to a Slave Holder was instrumental in lighting a fire under William Lloyd Garrison.
1. It is interesting that Parker attributes both positive and negative traits to his white father. It is impossible to know if Parker spoke in these terms because of his white audience.
2. The shift of the African-American population from the upper to the lower south was caused not only by the sale of African-American slaves but also by the migration of slave-owning families to the cotton-rich lands of the lower south. By comparison, the loss due to runaways was minor–amounting to perhaps one thousand a year for the nation as a whole and one hundred a year for Kentucky.
3. Slave owners feared that literacy might provoke unrest and even rebellion among slaves.
4. A careful study of Yale catalogs of the period reveals no year when those enrolled included two brothers from Mobile, nor do surnames of any of the Mobile students, of whom there were a number, match up with surnames of members of the local medical association for 1844. On the other hand, such students would have to pass an examination to get in once they reached New Haven.
5. Natchez had a notorious reputation nationwide.
6. For Mike Fink see Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine, eds., Half Horse Half Alligator: The Growth of the Mike Fink Legend (Chicago, 1956). Mike Fink lived from 1770 to 1823, and his notorious actions became the basis of legends. It would not have been unusual for Parker to hear stories of Mike Fink while he was on the Mississippi.
7. No such steamboat is listed in Merchant Steam Vessels of the United States–1868: The Lytle-Holdcamper List as existing at this time, but the list is incomplete.
8. Of all religious groups, Quakers were most likely to aid fugitives.
9. If he learned a trade, a slave might be able to hire himself out for a greater amount than he paid his master for the privilege. In a number of cases such slaves were in time able to purchase their freedom or, if married, first their wife’s freedom and later their own. (The offspring of a wife who was free were also free. If the male bought his own freedom first, he would then have to purchase not only his wife’s freedom, but also the freedom of all of his children.) The practice is seen as an urban phenomenon but occurred in rural areas as well. Some slaves were rented out to the iron industry at a distance. It was also a method that gave an owner with a surplus of slaves an alternative to selling them. The practice was the norm when children of slave owners became orphans, for the guardian needed cash each year until the children reached their majority.
10. The Magnolia, built in 1845, ran the New Orleans-Vicksburg trade and to St. Louis and Louisville offseason, as noted in Frederick Way, Jr., Way’s Packet Directory, 1848’1983 (Athens, Ohio, 1983). An 1846 advertisement for the steamer appears in Leonard V. Huber, compiler, Advertisements of Lower Mississippi River Steamboats 1812–1920 (West Barrington, R.I.: Steamship Historical Society of America, 1959), p. 44.
11. This is an extreme case of contestation of rights. That is, Parker realized that he had no value dead and therefore the white man would not shoot.
12. Parker’s experience with and his trust of fellow African-Americans were not unique.
13. Slaves were frequently used in the iron industry in the South. See, for example, Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: Norton, 1994); Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford, 1970); and Charles B. Dew, Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (New Haven: Yale, 1966).
14. I could find no listing for Jennings as a foundryman in the 1844 New Orleans city directory.
15. Three gilded balls are the symbol of a pawnshop, used from a time when a large proportion of those who pawned items were illiterate.
16. Parker turned 18 in 1843 and began his work assisting runaway slaves approximately a year later.
17. A steamboat owner was held liable if an escaped slave took passage on his vessel. Consequently passports or free papers were required.
18. Particularly in Kentucky, where masters served in the 1813 campaigns leading to the battles of the Thames and Lake Erie, slaves gained an awareness of Canada.
19. In antebellum times the Ohio River was free-running and its depth and width depended on rainfall and ice gorges. Especially since the 1960s the river has been transformed into a series of lengthy artificial pools. Because the border between Ohio and Kentucky is the historic shoreline of Ohio, we know that at Ripley land extended an additional half block beyond today’s boundary. A nineteenth-century atlas shows a similar situation at Maysville, Kentucky.
20. Ripley’s Liberty Monument (1912) listed John T. Rankin, James Gilliland, Jesse Lockhart, John B. Mahan, Alfred Beasley, Greenleaf G. Norton, Alexander Campbell, Theodore and Thomas Collins, Samuel Kirkpatrick, Thomas McCague, John Parker, and Col. James Poage as “The Men Who Fought for Liberty.”
21. Gregg placed a tablet on the McCague house which, he said, “perhaps delineates the character of Aunt Kitty. This tablet marks the home of Thomas McCague, an ardent antislavery advocate. On one occasion John Parker, an Underground Railroad conductor being pursued, brought a party of slaves to his house at break of day. McCague said, ‘It’s daylight, don’t stop.’ His wife, Aunt Kitty, said: ‘Daylight or no daylight, Parker, bring them in.’” Eliese Bambach Stivers, Ripley, Ohio: Its History and Families (n.p., 1965), p. 25.
22. It is actually a two-story house.
23. Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio (Cincinnati: 1902), vol. 2, P. 339 tell a story in which Parker saved the day by aiming his double-barreled shotgun at the intruders, who were about to blow Rankin away.
24. See W. M. Mitchell, The Underground Railroad by Rev. W. M. Mitchell of Toronto Canada West (London, 1860), p. 4, as well as Stivers, Ripley, p. 25.
25. The Rev. James Gilliland, a 1792 graduate of Dickinson College, preached in South Carolina until dismissed for his antislavery proclivities. He arrived at Red Oak in 1805 and died February 1, 1845. He is buried in the Red Oak Cemetery. Red Oak became a key station on the Underground Railroad.
26. The Rev. Jesse H. Lockhart came from Tennessee. John Rankin set him up at Russellville, Ohio.
27. A number of masters freed slaves, often by means of a will. In some cases such slaves were the offspring of the master’s family. Governments feared that such individuals might end up as wards of the state and consequently required bonds. Such a liability could be avoided if the slave was sent to Ohio.
28. Levi Coffin, Reminiscences (Cincinnati: 1876), pp. 304, 307–9, mentions a company of 28 and Coffin’s ruse of a funeral procession.
29. Samuel Hemphill (1814–79) was born in Pennsylvania. His father died in the War of 1812. His mother brought him to Ohio about 1824, and some eight years later he moved to Ripley, where he became a merchant, married, and had three children.
30. Archibald Leggett was born in Pennsylvania about 1797. A wealthy man, by 1860 he was worth $50,000.
31. Thomas McCague (1793–1864) was an important pork merchant in Ripley.
32. At least thirteen steamboats, all side-wheelers, were built at Ripley. All but the Caledonia (1833), whose home port was Pittsburgh, had Cincinnati as a home port.
33. The reference is to an earlier fashion which was now out of style. Andrew Jackson was President 1829–37.
34. Stivers, Ripley, 83, quotes from Gregg’s unpublished “The Imperial Forest” that “both Thomas McCague and Archibald Leggett were rich enough to send their personal funds to aid New York bankers during the Panic of 1837.”
35. At this point, pages 50–53 of the manuscript are missing, but because there is no break in the narrative, this may be mere mispagination.
36. Sixty years is a miscalculation, since the interview’s most likely date is before the end of 1889 (see note 10 in the Preface). It is impossible to know if Parker misspoke, or if Gregg copied the date wrong or adjusted it for coherence at some later date.
37. The Fugitive Slave Act permitted slave owners to go into the free states and recover their runaway slaves and made it illegal to assist runaways. (In the manuscript the date is incorrectly given as 1852.) The impact among fugitives living in the north was immediate, as hundreds fled from Ohio, New York, Michigan, and elsewhere to Canada. There was a backflow from Canada to the United States once it became apparent that the law could rarely be successfully enforced.
38. This incident was mentioned earlier in the narrative.
39. Jim Srofe, Sroafe, or Shrofe was the molder, according to Stivers, Ripley, p. 26. The 1850 census for Mason County, Kentucky, lists a family named Sroafe.
40. The attorney was probably Archibald Leggett.
41. John Brown led a force against the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later West Virginia), on October 16, 1859. He was captured, tried, and hanged, and considered a martyr by many pro-abolitionist northerners.
42. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had an enormous impact on the country. It became a best-seller, and its depiction of slavery seared the national consciousness. She was bitterly assailed in the south while she won the plaudits of abolitionists and other northerners.
43. John Rankin, Jr., the principal source of Gregg’s “Eliza of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” manuscript, declared that the fall following Eliza’s crossing, when he was a student at Lane Seminary, his father told Harriet Beecher Stowe of the incident, and she commented, “Terrible, how terrible.” Another son, Richard C. Rankin, in his April 8, 1892, interview with Wilbur H. Siebert, said that the telling occurred at Ripley when the Cincinnati Synod met there soon after the incident.
44. Richard C. Rankin declared that Eliza was from Fleming County; the Rankin manuscript VFM 2137 declared that Eliza’s daughter was owned by Thomas Davis “21/2 miles back of Dover near German-town,” which would place her in Bracken County or Mason County.
45. Eliza’s child is sometimes said to be two years old, though popularly referred to as a baby, not a toddler.
46. Rev. John Rankin in the Emporia (Kansas) News, January 29, 1875, identifies the man as “an Englishman” while his autobiography (typescript) calls him “an old Scotchman.” Richard C. Rankin identifies the locale as at Stony Creek near Asa Anderson’s farm opposite Red Oak Creek.
47. The winter of 1838 is the best fit for the incident, as the river was thoroughly iced over.
48. John Rankin, Jr., spoke of a “woolen shawl,” and this was corroborated by the first witness he interviewed, Mrs. Chambers Baird; however, Richard C. Rankin speaks of the article as a “little red flannel petticoat” that the ferryman John Crosby found the next day and that indicated to those seeking Eliza that they had made it across. Mrs. Charles Campbell spoke of a “flannel skirt” when asked by Gregg.
49. Chance Shaw, the Ohio patrolman near the mouth of Red Oak Creek, was the man with the outstretched hand, according to John Rankin, Jr. His version is perhaps more poetic than the one in the autobiography: “A rough hand suddenly came out of the black night like a hungry devil and seized her. There was no voice, no presence, just a giant hand laid its weight upon her and held her. It was so sudden and unexpected. The fugitive sank helplessly to the ground with a groan.” At that Shaw declared, “Woman, you have won your freedom.”
50. The original pages 71–72 of the Parker autobiography manuscript are missing.
51. The quote from Harriet Beecher Stowe is derived directly from Gregg’s “Eliza of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and the Parker manuscript is but a vehicle for using this information. Parker had not been in Ohio during the 1830s. All he could know was what he had heard secondhand. One is led to conclude that Gregg was trying to prove the veracity of the Eliza story even while including his own knowledge in the Parker manuscript.
52. Rankin might well have been worried since Kentucky’s legal system was harsher than the federal Fugitive Slave Law (1850) in which six months in prison and a fine of $1,000 were imposed. Kentucky’s Register of Prisoners from 1855–1861 lists people who helped slaves escape receiving terms from 5–20 years.
53. Others believe the crossing took place at Cincinnati. See Russel B. Nye, “Eliza Crossing the Ice: A Reappraisal of Sources,” Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio Bulletin 7 (1950), 105–12; and Felix J. Koch, “Where Did Eliza Cross the Ohio?” Ohio Archaeological, Historical and Philosophical Society Quarterly 25 (1915), 588–90. Nye does not deny Rankin’s role, but he looks to the late 1840s, not the 1830s, for the incident.
54. According to Gregg’s “Imperial Forest,” Parker aided 900 fugitives, including those whom he aided during the war through the recruitment of Union soldiers. The Parker manuscript gives two other figures–315 before he tossed out his memorandum book and 440 when he ended his work.
55. I have been unable to find reference to this reward in the Mason County Circuit Court Order Books. The reward may have been agreed upon by a group of slaveowners.
56. Charleston Bottom Road appears on modern Mason County maps and is about four miles west of Maysville.
57. Parker had little choice in leaving the obese woman behind. Either he endangered the original party and himself, or he attempted the escape including the extra woman, most likely causing all to be captured.
58. One William Robinson, a mulatto born in Tennessee, is listed as a deckhand in the 1860 census of Ripley.
59. Only one Irishman named Tim appears in the naturalization records of Brown County, Ohio. Timothy O’Carrol was naturalized in 1864.