Cincinnati by Water
In 1848, Cincinnati was known by many as a hub of the Underground Railroad, one populated by energetic abolitionists such as Levi and Catherine Coffin, Reverend Jonathan Cable, and James Bradley. Today its streets are dotted by the sites and scenes of covert escapes. In large part, this legacy emerged as a result of the city’s strategic geography. In 1850, more than 12,000 people were enslaved in northern Kentucky, which lay within sight across the Ohio River. That river could speed travelers from anywhere between the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania to the watershed of the Mississippi. But for the freedom seeker, it was the Miami-Erie Canal, completed in 1845, that made Cincinnati the ideal launch point for northward travel. Just as this waterway promised to connect Ohio farmers and manufacturers with the commercial network of the Great Lakes and Atlantic seaboard, it also offered brisk travel for the self-emancipated en route to Canada.
It was in Cincinnati that Tom and Lizzie joined abolitionist Laura Haviland, as she prepared to return to her home in southeastern Michigan. Soon Haviland’s vigilance committee had paid fares for a party of five additional freedom seekers who would travel by canal boat. While the captain was “friendly” to the abolitionists, he employed drivers and steersman whose loyalty was unknown, and soon the travelers had cause for worry (117). In Haviland’s account, the boat’s crew took a strong interest in William, a boy in their party who was enamored of the boatmen’s labor and began to share his past. Although Tom and Lizzie had hoped their chief dangers lay behind them, their growing company had introduced new threats of discovery and capture.
Tom’s and Lizzie’s danger was not merely the risk that their Kentucky past would reach out to grasp them. Rather, they had become human cargo within a vast network of commodities in motion. The boat’s crew had harvested William’s backstory, and all seven freedom seekers soon wondered whether a buyer would be found. If bounty hunters descended on the party, William would not be the only one carried away. By riding the canal, the party had not merely benefited from a groundbreaking transit technology, but had enmeshed itself in a national economy–one continuous with the southern slave trade. Ohioans demanding access to national markets had provoked the expedient of the canal, and when a passenger revealed his commercial value, this transit system threatened to swallow him up as just another commodity.