Slaveholders, Sheriffs, and Saviors on the Indiana-Kentucky border copertina

Slaveholders, Sheriffs, and Saviors on the Indiana-Kentucky border

Slaveholders, Sheriffs, and Saviors on the Indiana-Kentucky border

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It’s been a few months since I gave you an update on this project. Bottom line: I’ve been writing the book that this newsletter has helped me research. I spent much of July drafting chapters for Along The Ohio: Stories the River Still Carries, and then a week at the Appalachian Writers Workshop studying with Charles Dodd White.From there, I spent nearly a week in Indiana and Illinois. Boy, did I learn a lot.When Madison was platted in 1809-1810 it filled the gap between two already-mature ports: Cincinnati upstream about 70 miles, and Louisville about 46 downstream. It became Indiana’s third-largest city and a major hog-processing/steamboat hub within a few decades.Indiana is, of course a Midwestern state, and as part of the Northwest Territory, slavery was not permitted there. However, an old Ordinance signed and stored back east was secondary to the labor needs settlers faced on the frontier. Not only that, people were too busy scratching out a living than to fund territory-wide enforcement. These two factors combined to give Indiana’s southern counties a unique culture born of cross-river proximity to Kentucky, a slave state until 1865.Today’s visitors see Madison’s charms through Victorian architecture, a vibrant riverfront, and a range of cute shops and upscale eateries, but the town embraces its divided Antebellum heritage too.While our Hollywood-induced cultural memory is that planters lived on their plantations, that wasn’t the case here. Many of them lived in Madison — a proper river port with services and society — while holding the people they enslaved across the water in Kentucky. So “free Indiana” butting up against “slave Kentucky” wasn’t a clean line; slaveholders were commuting from Indiana to their own enslaved workforce every day, sometimes bringing workers along to help in the house and gardens in Madison, but sending them back across the river to prove that they weren’t practicing slavery in a free state.White family lines crossed that same slave-free boundary just as messily. Take Robert Right Rea, a slave catcher who was also, simultaneously, the sitting Jefferson County sheriff. He was the “major obstacle” faced by Underground Railroad conductor Robert Elliott, a teamster living about ten miles north of Madison. The twist: Rea and Elliott were cousins by marriage — Rea was a cousin of Elliott’s own wife. So the two Jefferson County men working on opposite sides of the slavery laws that permitted enslavers to capture “fugitive slaves” even in free states were literally family. I can only imagine the frosty interactions around the extended family’s holiday dinner tables.Reminds me of those Looney Tunes characters Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf.Sheriff Rea's double-identity as a slave catcher brought him into contact with a prominent abolitionist in Jefferson County, John H. Tibbets, who wrote in his own memoir that Rae (which he spelled Ray) "was known all over Kentucky and was always applied to when a slave got away." Later in Tibbets’ account he tells of an enslaved man in Kentucky who was trusted by his owner to conduct business on the Ohio side of the river. He never tried to escape. Unbeknownst to the enslaver, the worker was also helping fugitives make river crossings at night.One evening, the sheriff caught the worker in the act and induced him to try running away with the group of fugitives so that Rae could “catch” all of them and collect a reward. This backfired when the old man’s enslaver said Rae had tricked his worker and therefore refused to pay the bounty.A few years later, Rae turned up drowned in the Ohio River below Madison. The river that carried so many people to freedom on his watch, in the end, carried him too.Information about abolitionists’ activities before the Civil War is particularly difficult to substantiate unless something they did involved legal procedures. UGRR conductors weren’t prone to keeping statistics and diaries of their work.One reason people moved through this stretch of the Ohio traces back to the Revolutionary War. In 1781, Virginia (before Kentucky was a state)rewarded George Rogers Clark and the soldiers of his Illinois campaign with 150,000 acres directly across the river from Louisville — land that became Clark’s Grant, the first American settlement northwest of the Ohio. Privates got 108 acres each; officers, more. It put hundreds of Virginia veterans, and often the people they enslaved, within an easy ride of Indiana soil that Virginia’s own Northwest Ordinance had declared free.By 1820, Madison had a large free Black community in its Georgetown neighborhood. Some were brought to free soil from slave states — often by Quakers, sometimes by their enslaver-veterans — and manumitted.The story that interests me from among the many UGRR conductors in Madison is of Chapman Harris. Enslaved status passed through the mother under the law of the time, so being born to a free ...
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