The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT The Underground Railroad By William E. Bohn Along time ago, I filled this space by relating a yarn with which my father used to entertain his admiring family. Once, some years...
...All of this came back to me the other day when I happened to get hold of a book, Mysteries of Ohio's Underground Railroads, by one of my old history teachers, Wilbert Henry Siebert...
...It was some eight or ten miles to the Cleveland dock where so many thousands of fugitives had ended their perilous journey across Ohio by way of the Underground Railroad and, finally, crossed the gangplank of a boat bound for Canada and freedom...
...It seemed as if they had a sense of the importance of their efforts...
...Only a century ago, these people were fleeing in terror across the land...
...And Professor Siebert's diagrams show that one branch of the "railroad" went past father's farm on its way to Cleveland...
...Father, it seemed, looked forward to the encounter with great pleasure...
...From this point on, the odyssey as my father gave it to us was a paean in praise of his noble horses...
...Father told the man to jump on the seat beside him and hold on tight...
...They were only a pair of farm horses attached to a farm wagon, but how they did go...
...Practicallv none of them could read or write...
...The law was against them...
...The Southerner, of course, had been deprived of a valuable piece of property—perhaps worth a thousand dollars...
...He regaled us with the exact words uttered by each of the prospective combatants—and they were good, lusty, spirited words...
...Every item is carefully authenticated...
...It puts the history of Negro progress in perspective...
...The Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850, made it a crime to assist a slave in making his escape...
...Now the descendants of these helpless, tormented slaves are taking an important part in the industrial, political and cultural life of this country...
...In connection with the present conflict over integration, it seems to me that this book has importance...
...No matter what anyone says or does, these offspring of slaves cannot be kept down...
...But I am skeptical about this part of the narrative...
...Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati, where thousands of these escapees crossed the Ohio...
...At last, after spreading terror and confusion along the city streets, the two vehicles dashed onto the steamer's wharf just as the whistle was blowing for departure...
...Soon his pleasant meditations were broken by the sight of a Negro hurrying along on foot and obviously in deep trouble...
...All that the frustrated Southerner could do was to depart sadly for home...
...And, indeed, the pursuers could be seen coming along at great speed in a buggy drawn by a spirited horse...
...At Montgomery, Alabama, they have organized a highly effective Gandhian strike...
...A slave woman, actually named Eliza, crossed the river, not on blocks of ice but on ice which was thawing and therefore was covered with icy water...
...At a number of points, especially along the lake, there were tunnels through which they could escape to highways or wharfs...
...But this was a case in which the sense of human need superseded respect for the law...
...But Bill and Jen, with the wagon jouncing over stones and ruts, always managed to keep just out of reach...
...At that port at that time, this sort of thing was not unusual...
...The slave-owner with his deputy sheriff was close behind shouting threats...
...It is white men opposed to them who are breaking the law...
...Once, some years before the Civil War, he was driving his favorite pair of horses from his farm in Orange, Ohio to Cleveland...
...I well recall their names, Bill and Jen...
...He had the law on his side, his temper was at the boiling point, and he was all set to take it out of my father's hide...
...They were concealed in hidden rooms, in caves, in deep hollows in the woods...
...Most of this careful research work was done 50 or 60 years ago, while many of those who remembered about these things were still alive and able to tell their stories...
...In an instant, the man was across the gangplank and beyond the authority of his former master...
...father was a man of vivid imagination, and much telling had given him an opportunity to touch up the high points...
...During his vacations while teaching at Ohio State University, Professor Siebert has spent his time traveling up and down and across the state of Ohio ferreting out every available bit of information about how the Abolitionists helped the slaves travel from the Ohio River to Lake Erie on their way to liberation...
...Their sons and daughters are in many of the universities of the South...
...All I am sure of is that there was a fine exhibition of the resources of the English tongue but, in the end, no fight...
...He explained that his master and an officer of the law were following him...
...They have decisions of the Supreme Court on their side...
...The captain and his men understood at once what all the excitement was about...
...They traveled secretly at night...
...The onlookers were on the side of father and the escaped black man...
...For 18 years, she harbored many of them in her own house and heard their tales...
Vol. 39 • November 1956 • No. 51
