JOHN P. PARKER was born into slavery in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1827, the son of a black woman and a white man.1 At the age of eight, Parker was bound to another slave and forced to walk from Norfolk to Richmond, where he was then sold and marched in chains to Mobile, Alabama. In his oral history, Parker recounts his memories of this brutal journey to Mobile: his hatred of captivity, and the solace he found in helping another slave weaker than him. His rage and resourcefulness served him again and again when he later became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping hundreds of slaves escape to freedom.2
It took Parker eighteen years to acquire his own freedom. He was owned for many years by a Mobile doctor.3 Parker remembers that the boys in the family smuggled books to him, and that the doctor encouraged him to learn the trade of iron moulding. After Parker attempted to escape, though, the doctor decided to sell him as a field hand. Saving himself from hard labor on a sugar plantation, Parker persuaded a widowed patient of the doctor’s to purchase him for $1,800. Parker’s reputation for stubborness was perhaps why the price of his freedom was set unusually high. He paid the widow back over the course of a year and a half, using his skills in the foundry to earn money. In 1845, Parker became a free man.
Moving first to New Albany, Indiana, and then to Cincinnati, Ohio, Parker began boarding with a barber who hoped to rescue his own family from slavery. Parker was initially reluctant to join the man in his endeavor, but eventually, although the barber himself gave up in despair, Parker managed to rescue the family—the first in a long string of successes. In 1848, Parker started his own family, marrying Miranda Boulden, a Cincinnati native, and establishing a small general store at Beechwood Factory, Ohio.
The next year, Parker and his wife moved to Ripley, Ohio, then a bustling river town with a thriving abolitionist community (the Ripley Abolition Society had a membership of over 300). In Ripley, Parker could work at his profession in ironworks and continue to help slaves escape. Many anti-slavery southerners, particularly a number of ministers, had chosen or been forced to leave the South and had relocated to this area along the Ohio River. Ripley was home to two “Negro settlements,” which had been created thirty years before Parker’s arrival as places for the emancipated slaves of planter Samuel Gist.4 Ohio’s first abolitionist, U.S. Senator Alexander Campbell, also lived in Ripley, as did the Reverend John Rankin, whose hilltop home served as a beacon to escaping slaves. Rankin’s house allegedly sheltered the woman who inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Eliza,” whose harrowing night passage across the thawing Ohio River, leaping from one ice patch to the next with her baby in her arms, is vividly described in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
To reach Ripley, fugitives often followed the Maysville road, which connected the slave-rich bluegrass region centered in Lexington, Kentucky with the Ohio River. Maysville, the largest town in northeastern Kentucky, had an early anti-slavery society. On the other side of the river, a few miles north of Ripley, lay the town of Red Oak, where the Reverend James Gilliland and his congregation formed the core of the largest concentration of Underground Railroad conductors in Ohio.5 These borderlands in Ohio sustained the busiest terminals on the entire Underground Railroad, possibly even providing the railroad with its name. According to W. M. Mitchell’s 1860 The Underground Railroad, the term originated in 1831 when Tice Davis swam across the Ohio, barely eluding his former master. Furious, the slaveowner is said to have exclaimed, “The damned abolitionists must have a railroad by which they run off” slaves.
For nearly fifteen years, John P. Parker rescued fugitive slaves, leading the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune to write, shortly after Parker’s death, “a more fearless creature never lived. He gloried in danger…. He would go boldly over into the enemy’s camp and filch the fugitives to freedom.” The inherent danger of aiding slaves was much greater for an African-American who, if caught, would receive a lengthy jail term, providing he survived pursuit without being shot dead. When the Civil War broke out, he smuggled a few hundred slaves into the service of the Union Army, a record admired in the 1883 History of Brown County, Ohio: “It is but a word of justice to say of Mr. Parker’s service during the late war, that the half could not be told.”
Parker led a dual life—by night ferrying fugitives across the Ohio River, by day working as an iron moulder. In his oral autobiography, Parker concentrates on stories of the Underground Railroad. His work in the foundry and machine shop was also notable as was the series of inventions he patented.
In December 1865, John P. Parker and his partner William Hood purchased a foundry and blacksmith shop including its contents for $6,000. By mid-March of 1868, Parker’s business and property were estimated to be worth between $8,000 and $10,000. He sought out African-American buyers and appealed to racial pride. An article entitled “Mechanic” written from Ripley, Ohio, appeared in the Little Rock Arkansas Freeman of October 5, 1869. In it Parker declared that “a plow made by a black man, tells for us more than a hundred first class speeches.” Parker proposed sending “an Agent among the Southern people—the said Agent to be a colored man. He will ask the trade of our people in particular.” Of his products he declared, “we manufacture engines, varying in sizes from ten to twenty-five horsepower; Dorsey’s patent reaper and mower; and a sugar mill, which thus far has given universal satisfaction. Besides we expect this fall and winter, to get up an assortment of steel plows.”
Many African-American businesspeople failed during the Panic of 1873, because of undercapitalization, hard times, and prejudice, but Parker survived. He brought in a partner to manufacture threshers as Belchamber & Parker in 1876. The firm dissolved two years later. Parker’s net worth peaked at between $15,000 and $20,000 during 1882, but diminished during the economic downturn in 1883.
Parker’s work diversified. By now he had developed a black-smith shop and a machine shop, as well as a coal yard associated with his foundry. But becoming partners with a hard-working, practical miller as the firm of J. P. Parker & Kirkpatrick brought him grief. They shared an investment in the Model Mill, which was bought by Kirkpatrick in August 1883.
This range of activities stretched Parker’s resources to the breaking point, and, by mid-June of 1885, he was in a difficult financial situation. His expertise in the foundry business was of no use to him in milling. Investment in milling brought Parker to the brink of bankruptcy, which was compounded by a May 1, 1886 fire that totally consumed the four-story brick building which housed the mill. The structure was insured for $6,500 and valued at $15,000.6
Three years later, in August of 1889, another fire that would affect Parker broke out. It started in the boiler room of the Ripley Mill & Lumber Company on Front Street near Parker’s home and business. The town’s steam fire engine was insufficient, and the fire spread to nearly the entire block. Parker’s residence was completely destroyed and his old foundry damaged, but the fire department was able to save Parker’s machine shop—a stroke of good luck since his principal business at the time was manufacturing tobacco screws for his patented tobacco presses. Parker proved resilient; by September of 1890, he had built a new foundry and woodworking shop a block and a half from his old one. The Phoenix Foundry was the largest such enterprise located between Portsmouth and Cincinnati, Ohio. Parker’s son, Hale, served as the western agent for the John P. Parker tobacco press and pulverizer.7
This series of disasters probably explains the stipulation in Parker’s will forbidding his six offspring from carrying on the family business. Far better, he thought, to have them go to college and become involved in the learned professions. In 1892, Parker told Wilbur H. Siebert, the leading Underground Railroad historian, that he expected his children to fill respected places in communities removed from the Ohio River.8
John P. Parker, an extensive reader, shared his love of learning with his children and must have been proud of their achievements. Two of his sons, Hale Giddings (born 1851) and Cassius Clay (1854), both named after prominent abolitionists, went through the preparatory school at Oberlin College. Hale Parker graduated from Oberlin’s classical program in 1873. In 1878, Hale and his wife moved to St. Louis, where he became principal of a school for black children and went on to study law. He moved with his family to Chicago after becoming involved with the “Negro Department” of the Chicago World’s Fair; his two daughters and his son all graduated from college.
Cassius Parker became a school teacher in Indiana. The youngest son, Horatio W. Parker (1856), was a principal at a school in Illinois, later moving to St. Louis, where he taught and became a clerk in the post office. Parker had three daughters, Bianca (1871), Portia (1865), and Hortense (1859), all of whom studied music.9 In 1883, Hortense Parker was one of the first African-American graduates of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Like two of her brothers, she, too, moved to St. Louis where she married and taught music.
In just two generations, the Parker family moved from slavery to the college-educated black middle class. John Parker’s drive and spirit brought him out of servitude and gained him a position as a businessman in his community. His courage and generosity made him one of the small group of Americans, and even smaller group of African-Americans, who helped pull other people out of slavery, even at the risk of their lives. At his death in 1900, he left a valuable legacy for both his family and his country.
WE WOULD NEVER have had John Parker’s autobiography without Frank Moody Gregg’s intense interest in the story of “Eliza’s” flight across the thawing Ohio River in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s novel, published in 1852, stirred up a great deal of controversy. From the time of its publication until the end of the nineteenth century, many people devoted vast amounts of time to validating or discrediting real-life incidents upon which Stowe might have based parts of her novel. The stories about Eliza often mentioned that she found shelter at the Reverend John Rankin’s house in Ripley. Frank Moody Gregg, a native of Ripley and a reporter for the Chattanooga News, set out to uncover the true story.10
Gregg began by interviewing Rankin’s son, John Rankin Jr., in Indiana and then four “corroborating witnesses,” not including Parker, from Ripley. Since a fragment of the Parker autobiography discusses Eliza, it seems likely that Gregg’s original purpose in visiting Parker was to continue his Eliza search, since he knew that Parker sometimes worked with the Rankins.
It appears that Parker’s own story proved more engaging than whatever light he could shed on Eliza’s. In Parker, Gregg found an articulate interview subject, willing to talk about a necessarily hidden subject, the secret and dangerous lives of Underground Railroad conductors. To stay out of jail and avoid retribution, white Underground Railroad conductors kept few records; there is even less documentation of the participation of African-American conductors on the Underground Railroad.11 Gregg recognized the rare opportunity to document an African-American man’s work on the Underground Railroad.
Today historians are rightly wary of accounts of black experience based on interviews given to whites. “A View from the Bottom Rail,” in James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle’s After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection examines two interviews given by an ex-slave, Susan Hamlin.12 The interview by an African-American and the interview by a Caucasian give remarkably different versions of the severity of slavery and the relationship between master and slave. This example of the discrepancy between narratives raises two questions about the Parker interview: Was Parker straightforward with Gregg? Did Gregg misreport what Parker said?
Parker may have slanted his account to his white audience. At the very beginning of the narrative, he states that his intelligence came from his white father. He also does not reproach his Mobile owners for their conduct. It is possible that this clemency toward white people covered an animosity rendered inexpressible by the politics of the colored line. Yet this seems less likely given the candor of the tone throughout the narrative. Parker had known both people present at the interview—Gregg and a banker friend of Parker’s, Frank A. Stivers—for many years. It would have been hard for Parker to maintain a front during the many hours of this lengthy interview in front of two old acquaintances.
The question of whether Gregg misreported Parker’s words is perhaps best answered by considering the manuscript’s voice. Interviewers have often changed a narrator’s voice to make it more consistent with written English and with the interviewer’s style. Fortunately, we have another work of Gregg’s to use as a standard for comparison. In early 1908, Gregg completed a typescript of his work, “The Borderland,” which was a rewritten book based on Gregg’s interview with Parker. The difference between the voice in the “The Borderland,” and the voice in Parker’s memoir becomes evident upon comparison of similar passages. Parker’s language is more specific, detailed, and vivid—it has the slight rough edge associated with oral history. Consider the following two pairs of examples:
GREGG
Though the best blood of that state was in my veins, still at the age of 14, I found myself locked to a chain with others of my race, trudging along dusty highways southward.
PARKER
It was in June that I began my chainbound journey to Alabama, where I eventually reached. Our journey was long and tiresome. Imagine yourself chained to a long chain to which men, women and children were also attached. The roads were dusty or muddy.
GREGG
We were going through the mountains of Virginia. The azaleas and laurel were in full bloom, not only filled the wood with fragrance, but ran down like a flood of odor into the borders of the road. Seizing a stick, I struck at each flowering bud and sent its petals flying in every direction.
PARKER
I was trudging along a trail called a road through the mountains of Virginia. It was June. Every flower was in bloom, the wilderness was all about us, green and living. Azaleas and mountain laurels were in full bloom. Every thing seemed to be gay except myself. Picking up a stick, I struck each flowering shrub, taking delight in smashing down particularly those in bloom.
Gregg tried to remold the narrative in “The Borderland” to the genteel standards of the day. In doing so, he lost the tiny, telling details of Parker’s memories, along with the emotion that Parker’s account evokes. While there may have been some slight retouching by Gregg, the roughness of the presented memoir shows very little reworking. I believe that in the interview, we are close to Parker’s voice, while in “The Borderland,” Gregg has imposed his own. The beauty of Parker’s imagery and the precision of his language is rightly attributed to Parker’s own stylistic mastery and to the incredible life he lived.
JOHN P. PARKER’S memoir has not previously been published. In the 1880s, when Gregg originally interviewed Parker, the prevalence of racism made it difficult to publish the work. It was placed in the Duke University Archive as part of the Rankin-Parker collection—the Parker memoir, the Rankin memoir, and Gregg’s “Eliza”—and accessioned on June 30, 1939.13
John P. Parker’s lack of celebrity status and the illegibility of the manuscript may have contributed to its long delay in publication. Robert Newman and I have combined our lengthy readings and rereadings of it to present the most accurate rendition we could. Many words were deciphered from context (this is how we discovered that “mng” indicates “morning”). We have used points of ellipsis for absolutely illegible words.
Pages are missing from the original, most of them from the tenth chapter. Many of these pages can be reconstructed by substituting the corresponding passages from Gregg’s “The Borderland.” Asterisks have been used to indicate where this substitution begins and ends. There are two other cases of possibly missing work. The first is in a passage describing the old town of Ripley. There the pagination implies missing pages, but the narrative does not falter, which may indicate that there is a mispagination rather than that paragraphs are missing. The second possible gap involves the “Eliza” incident, and is indicated by a footnote.
All editing has been done for the sole purpose of making the work more accessible to the reader. Since the memoir was orally presented, punctuation has been somewhat changed, paragraphing has been added, capitalization has been altered for consistency, and spelling mistakes have been corrected. Where words have been added for clarification they are enclosed in brackets. We have attempted above all to preserve the spirit of the original.
—Stuart Seely Sprague