| 5/23/2005 3:00:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article |
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| Paul Venard, and his wife Pam were hosts at their Preston Plantation
in Trimble County. |
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| Johnny Jackson, a Madison blues musician, explains the hidden meaning in the
lyrics of spirituals and work songs that slaves sang. (Staff photo by Peggy Vlerebome) |
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The Road to Freedom
Group follows trail of Underground Railroad
Peggy Vlerebome
Courier Staff Writer
The journey from a Kentucky plantation to an Indiana college that hid freedom seekers before the Civil War could have taken months for a runaway slave, but for a group of people interested in the Underground Railroad, the journey took just a day.
And the modern-day travelers Saturday had comforts and conveniences that runaway slaves and the conductors who guided their passage on the figurative railroad never could have imagined: Moving without the fear that a slave catcher was right behind, crossing the Ohio River on a barge pushed by a tugboat with two locomotive engines, walking in broad daylight, having cold bottled water at every turn.
But despite the modern touches, participants learned about real freedom seekers, real conductors, real events and people that a textbook can give only partial justice to in describing the phenomenon that was the Underground Railroad.
The Rivers Institute at Hanover College and English professor Ted Farrell organized the daylong excursion to see if such a trip would be feasible to offer to the public from nearby as well as to tourists. The 28 people on the venture included students from Cincinnati-area high schools who are docents at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and representatives from some of the organizations that were partners in the tour.
At the end of the day, Farrell solicited reaction from the group, and the participants were asked to later send a critique to the Rivers Institute. One of the early reactions was that the tour needs to be condensed, he said. It took eight hours.
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The first stop after leaving Madison was Preston Plantation on the Ohio River in Trimble County, Ky., a half-hour bus trip.
At one time the Preston Plantation was a 12,000-acre plantation and had 70 slaves at any one time, including Humes and O’Banion family members whose descendants have long lived in Madison, Farrell said.
The plantation later was divided up, and Paul and Pam Venard own a piece of it. The plantation house is not on their property, but they have found where the slave quarters were located near their house.
While the tour participants sat on logs under a tree, Johnny Jackson, a Madison musician who usually performs blues in a club or on the sidewalk, sang and led singing of spirituals, some of which had a dual purpose as both religious songs and lyrics with hidden meanings, and he explained what the codes meant.
There were three kinds of spirituals, he said. One group of spirituals expressed “anguish, sorrow and longing for change” and could “ease the pain of slavery if only by giving voice to slaves’ despair,” Jackson told the group seated on logs. “When you sing, when you put something on paper, when you express it, it makes you feel better.” He sang one verse of “Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child” as an example.
Coded spirituals were another type. Often, the songs “helped slaves escape to the North,” he said.” The lyrics told them “where to go, how to get there.” Examples of those spirituals included “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” The words “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home” was a plea for the Underground Railroad to come into the slave-holding states, Jackson said. The Ohio or Mississippi river was what was meant by the words “I looked over Jordan and what did I see.” The song’s reference to angels meant the workers on the Underground Railroad, he said.
The repetition of the words “wade in the water” in the song by that title was meant to imprint advice that slaves would hopefully remember if they were being chased by slave hunters with dogs, because the water would make the dogs lose their scent, Jackson said.
A woman in the group pointed out that the song also is sung at baptisms with no hidden meaning. “That is one thing that is great about spirituals,” Jackson said. “They have meaning on many levels.”
The third kind of spiritual was written during or shortly after the Civil War, some by black troops, such as “O Freedom,” Jackson said. These spirituals were “a lot more bold in their cry for freedom. They said ‘I’m going to be free. I am free.’” The lyrics in “O Freedom” include the refrain, “Before I be a slave I be buried in my grave.”
Slaves also sang work songs. “Slaveholders realized slaves would work and could work harder, longer if they sang,” Jackson said. The overseers didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics, he said.
These songs had a hard rhythm and often had a call and response format, he said, in which the caller would comment on social and community issues. An example was “Hoe, Emma, Hoe.”
One of the Cincinnati teens said he could relate to that because music makes cleaning his room go faster.
Slaves did not sing out of happiness, Farrell said, although that idea was widely spread in the North to make it seem that slaves didn’t want to leave the plantations. But not all slaves wanted to seek freedom, Farrell said later in the tour, because the risk was so high – only a small percentage succeeded – and the punishment for getting caught was so terrible.
The choice was “being thought of as an animal like a sheep or a horse or a cow,” Farrell said, or going North and facing racism. “It was harder to run than stay put. ...Your family, everyone you know, everything you know was right here.
“Even if they didn’t escape, black Americans struggled,” Farrell said. “They knew in their hearts they deserved to be free.”
For those who chose to leave, escape meant crossing the Mississippi River or the Ohio River. The Ohio River was narrower and shallower then, so in places it could be crossed on foot. Other places, a rowboat or a conductor in a rowboat waited at the water’s edge for nighttime, and then the boat was rowed quietly, the oars silently slicing the water so as not to attract attention.
There is only one report of a slave escaping from Preston Plantation, Farrell said, even though it was right on the water. “They didn’t stay because they wanted,” Farrell said of the majority of slaves in the South.
The visitors left the plantation from its riverbank, but there was nothing stealth about it.
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American Commercial Barge Co. outfitted one of its barges with railings, wooden benches and indoor-outdoor carpeting to take the visitors across the river, pushed by the tugboat James E. Nivin. The barge company donated the cost of the barge conversion to the program.
Any sense of old-timeyness the visitors might have felt as they emerged at the river from a trail at the Preston Plantation were dispelled with a very modern reality: Everyone had to show a picture identification in order to board the barge, a homeland-security requirement. Everyone also had don a bulky life jacket.
Unlike a trip across the river for a boat full of freedom seekers, this crossing couldn’t help but attract attention because the barge was accompanied by a U.S. Coast Guard boat and a U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary boat. The visitors got to see the Coast Guard in action when a pleasure boat came down the river straight ahead of the barge. The Coast Guard boat, with emergency lights flashing and siren screaming, roared at it to ward it off. The move was precautionary because the barge was an open pleasure boat, a tugboat crew member said.
It took the flotilla one hour and 40 minutes to travel upriver and across it to the riverbank south of Hanover College. During the ride, Farrell and Michelle Purvis, program director at the Rivers Institute, told stories of real slaves and real conductors on the Underground Railroad.
In another mixing of historic and modern, the tugboat crew gave tours of the tugboat, explaining the workings and relaying fascinating facts, such as a full tow of 15 barges transports as much as nearly 1,000 semi tractor trailer trucks.
Years ago, an old barge was sunk into the riverbank east of Hanover Beach, making a handy place for boats to drop off and pick up passengers, and for the barge Saturday to pull up to.
Escaping slaves might not have landed at that spot, but the idea was that this is where freedom began, when the feet first stepped on Indiana land. Total freedom at that moment was more likely than it had ever been, but wasn’t a certainty, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it legal for slave catchers to cross the river into Indiana.
A skit on the riverbank featured Helen Ochs of Hanover College portraying a newly arrive freedom seeker, Jackson portraying Freeman Anderson, a real figure in the Underground Railroad, and Farrell portraying John H. Tibbets, a conductor on the Underground Railroad from Lancaster County.
From there, the entourage went to Hanover College for lunch, either by scrambling up a steep slope made slippery by recent rain, or hiking through a lush woods, up a less severe incline for a half-mile to a waiting van.
As the group left the riverbank to walk through the woods, Jackson and others sang “Go In the Wilderness.”
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Sue Livers of Madison provided the recipes for foods authentic to the Underground Railroad days for the college food staff to prepare for a buffet lunch in the dining room at Donner Hall, a dormitory.
The menu was fried chicken, cooked mixed greens, mashed potatoes and cornbread.
While the group ate, Katie Johnson, a student at Hanover, told about the college’s role during the slavery days. Not everyone who was against slavery agreed on what should be done, and that division between aiding escape or favoring the sending of slaves to form colonies in Africa was very real among the campus leaders of the day.
She told about a black man, Moses Royals, who applied for admission to Hanover in 1856, but was not accepted. Johnson said she isn’t proud of that part of Hanover’s history, in which blacks were not admitted until well into the 20th century.
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After lunch, there was a short ride to St. Stephen’s A.M.E. Church in Hanover.
There, Livers, a member of the church, told the history of St. Stephen’s and about two of its deacons who were conductors on the Underground Railroad. Dessert of sweet potato pie, blackberry cobbler and peach cobbler followed in the church community hall.
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Eleutherian College is 13 miles north of Hanover, and Farrell directed the bus driver on a route on old county roads instead of north on State Road 7 to State Road 250.
Jae Breitweiser, president of Historic Eleutherian College, was dressed in a period dress and portrayed Lucy Nelson, a real figure on the Underground Railroad in Lancaster.
Breitweiser, as Nelson, assured Ochs that Tibbets had never been caught taking a freedom seeker to the next stop.
The main room on the first floor of the three-story classroom building that remains at Eleutherian also was the chapel.
Inside the classroom/sanctuary, Farrell told the travelers that freedom seekers had physical, emotional and spiritual experiences, and the tour enabled the participants to have the physical experience of climbing the hill, the emotional experience of the music and with the upcoming sermon, they would have the spiritual sense of the times. The sermon, he said, was “the kind of preaching that could have taken place here...and that would have to do with why freedom was so very important.”
The Rev. Mattie Sullivan, pastor of Eagle’s Crest Christian Fellowship and a teacher at Arlington High School, both in Indianapolis, preached a sermon whose theme was, “You are more than when you come,” based on the biblical book of Exodus.
Slavery succeeded because slave owners were able to “control and constrain” the mind and the might of the slaves, she said.
“If I can control your mind, I’ve got you,” she said. “Tell me a lie and make me believe it. That’s mind control.”
She said the same mentality that enabled slaveholders to turn people into slaves is still in society. “They tell you you cannot do things (such as get an education) because they need CNAs (certified nursing assistants),” she said. “You don’t need a license to empty bedpans. You are more than you have become.”
After the sermon, Purvis said, “The lie that was slaveholding was broken by the people who escaped on the Underground Railroad. They knew they were more than when they came. We know for sure they were in this building. This is a spiritual place because of that.”
Ochs, director of the Haq Center for Cross-Cultural Education at Hanover College, said that as an African, what she learned on the tour helps her understand what happened on this end of the slavery route. “We don’t know the history, so it’s kind of shared experience,” she said.
The partners in the tour, in addition to the Rivers Institute, Haq Center, Eleutherian College, Preston Plantation, St. Stephen’s, the barge company, the Freedom Center and the Coast Guard were state partners: Conner Prairie, Freetown Village, Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana, the Indiana Department of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, Indiana Freedom Trails Program and the Southern Indiana Minority Enterprise Initiative.
Local partners were Historic Madison Inc., Jefferson County Historical Society and the Madison Area Convention and Visitors Bureau.
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Reader Comments
Posted: Sunday, October 22, 2006
Article comment by:
Jada Green
I really loved your site. It was amazing. I never seen nothing like this before. I can't imagin what it was like for slaves. i feel sorry for them. Great web site!
Posted: Thursday, July 13, 2006
Article comment by:
Carla Ewald Pedersen
Great article!Could you list all of the stops on the Underground Railroad in Indiana, please? Thanks.
Posted: Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Article comment by:
Jeannette Jones Sleet
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/features/freedom/series/index.html
My husband is a descendent of Boone County slaves. I am descendent of the Humes, Daugherty and Jones Families who were from Preston,TrimbleCounty, Tandy and Payne farms. They settled in Hanover, Saluda,Madison.
We participated in The Tracks to Freedom. See above Link
Is the Hanover event done yearly?
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