Escape from Kentucky
In the spring of 1848, two brothers made preparations in the basement of Zion Baptist Church of Cincinnati. Only 25 miles from their former enslavers in Pendleton County, Kentucky, the pair knew that utmost discretion was necessary. However, whereas James prepared to hurry north to a safer Quaker settlement, Tom made a bold plan that was almost certain to end in disaster. Before he could set off northward towards Canada, he had to return south to rescue his wife Lizzie, who was still trapped in bondage. A journey by river, road, canal, and lake would begin by returning to the service of his enslaver, but he calculated that the slim hope was worth the risk. As he would tell Lizzie, “I ain’t got whole freedom without you” (113).
Northward by Night
Tom had returned to enslavement in Pendleton County and spent the summer convincing his master that he was “sick of freedom,” that abolitionists were the “greates’ rascals I ever seen,” and that irreconcilable differences had arisen between him and his wife (112, 113). On her separate plantation, Lizzie played her own long game, eventually persuading her master to call off the hound set to guard against the return of her husband. After months of secret coordination through the grapevine telegraph, Tom and Lizzie put their plan in motion on the night of an Autumn holiday. Meeting around midnight at the Licking River, the pair secured a skiff and made all speed along the river’s northward winding.
Like many waterways of the mid-nineteenth century, the Licking River was the best among a very few bad means of transportation. The rolling hills of the region would have been virtually impassable, save for the plantations cut into its forest. By contrast the north-bound highway (now KY 27) cut a direct twenty-five mile route to the Ohio River, but it also passed through half a dozen towns, which were patrolled by slave hunters and militias. The river’s pathway nearly doubled that distance and left the pair visible from both banks. Nevertheless, two nights of paddling with quiet rag-wrapped oars brought Tom and Lizzie southward to the Ohio River. Yet, just as the larger river’s quarter-mile span came into sight at dawn, the pair encountered the peril of daylight travel. Two men “halllooed” from the bank near Covington and interrogated the freedom seekers (116). No evidence of wrongdoing was necessary for these amateur patrollers, and a desperate boat chase ensued. Only when Tom and Lizzie reached mid-river and their pursuers gave up did they fall into a fit of shaking and laughter, as fear of capture gave way to joy of escape.
This first leg of Tom and Lizzie’s journey reflected the calculation thrust upon every freedom seeker: how does one balance efficient, visible and laborious, discrete travel? Choosing neither the vulnerability of the open road nor the slog of the Kentucky wilderness, the pair persevered, but barely. Of course, this calculation was on the minds of the enslavers too, who leveraged the bottlenecks of American transit. Where northward pathways converged, there the bounty hunters waited. Whatever means Tom and Lizzie would choose to cross the 400 remaining miles to Canada, they must expect danger in proportion to speed.