I'm Goin' Home

Announcer: Funding for this program was provided by the Ringen Fund, Incorporated.

Singing: I'm goin' home Singing: Oh, yes I'm goin' home Oh, yes I'm goin' home, Lord, Lord I'm goin' home I'm goin' home, Lord, Lord I'm goin' home Singing: My baby's blue... Narrator: In the 1840s, home for these men and women was Lexington, Kentucky, far away from the African homeland of their ancestors, who were captured, stripped of their freedom, and sent across an ocean to a life of slavery.

This is the story of one such slave who fled bondage from Ashland, the estate of Senator Henry Clay, in Lexington, Kentucky.

Escaping the clutches of slavery was a terrifying and grueling ordeal, every step tracked by slave catchers who were employed to pursue and return escaped slaves to their enslavers.

This is also the story of the brave men and women in small towns that dotted the map between slavery and Canada, who risked imprisonment and fines to make the trek possible.

Unfortunately, as with most slaves of the period, we don't even know his name.

But we do know one place he stayed along the Underground Railroad on his way home-- not to Africa, but to a life of freedom in Canada.

Singing: I'm goin' home Singing: I'm goin' home Narrator: Fleeing slavery wasn't simply about having the freedom to make choices.

It was about escaping brutality and violence and the dehumanization of being bought and sold, making family separation a constant threat.

Vanessa Holden: Enslavers regarded them as if they were livestock... animals... to be trained up and used and disposed of.

And violence is one way-- whether it's physical violence, emotional violence, all sorts of other types of manipulation-- to try and force this relationship.

Eric Brooks: They also lived-- the females, women and girls-- under the constant threat of sexual exploitation.

That never went away.

They could be sexually exploited at any time by any number of people.

They lived under constant threat of separation from family members.

We know about the vicious beatings.

We know about the sexual assaults.

But I do think the more insidious ways of dehumanizing the enslaved are the things that are sometimes embedded.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that the reason that Africans look the way they do-- and he describes the-- the darkening of the skin and the prognathism, meaning that the jaw juts out and the flat, broad noses-- I mean, essentially, a face like mine-- that we look this way because African women chose to mate with orangutans rather than African men.

And yet he's writing this knowing the kind of racial fiction that that was.

Narrator: In the 1740s, slavery existed in every North American colony.

But by 1804, after the 13 colonies had become states and four more were added, nine of them in the North had abolished the institution.

The South, however, relied heavily on slavery as a labor force that could produce large cash crops, like cotton, tobacco, and rice.

In addition, slavery was deeply embedded in the social structure of the South.

Holden: The South becomes a slave society.

The North, originally, is a society with slaves.

And so, it eventually kind of dies out, largely because it's not necessarily the most economically-viable labor system.

The entire U.S.

economic system was completely dependent upon the plantation system of the Deep South.

Northern financiers, merchants, bankers, etc., etc., factory owners were dependent on the cotton plantations.

We are really talking about a system that is globally profitable.

Cotton, rice, sugar, tobacco-- these were crops raised in plantations to be sold in the world market.

Southern-grown, slave-grown cotton was fueling industrial revolution in Britain, the textile industries in Manchester and Lancaster.

Their main supply was slave-grown cotton from the South, and this cotton was the largest item of export from the United States, and its value exceeded all other items of export, until the Civil War.

So, we are seeing a very profitable system that was fueling not only Southern economic growth but also national economic growth.

You had cotton textile mills in New England, Northern agricultural and manufacturing concerns that supplied the South.

So, the traditional view that somehow the South and North clashed over deferring economic systems is simply incorrect.

It was a very complementary relationship.

It fueled shipping, insurance, industry... including Wall Street.

Auctioneer: ...voice echoes... Holden: Slavery was big business.

At the height of the slave trade in the 1840s and 1850s, middlemen-- so, brokers and, so, slavers-- could expect to get incredible sums, when it comes to profit, on the open market.

So, we have to understand that, crass as it is to think in these really stark financial terms, enslavers, even small-scale ones, saw enslaved people as financial products akin to parents who buy their children a car when they graduate high school or help them with a down payment on a house.

Again, it's deeply dehumanizing and crass to think of it in these terms, but that's really how stark it is.

Auctioneer: Sold to the gentleman in the black hat.

Holden: There's hundreds of middlemen-- whether you are the steamboat owner who's pulling a cargo of hemp and enslaved people down the river, you're a blacksmith who makes shackles, you're someone with a basement who can use it as a temporary holding pen for enslaved coffles waiting to either walk down through Tennessee into Alabama country or make their way to the river and go all the way to New Orleans, an innkeeper here in Lexington who makes plenty of money every time that there's a court date or a market date housing slave traders... There's all kinds of money to be made on slavery, even indirectly.

And so, I think it's important to recognize that it's not just enslavers who own land and are farming hemp or tobacco or corn-- it's all these other auxiliary industries that are making money hand over fist on slavery.

Narrator: It was an institution for which they were willing to fight-- and would, in the Civil War.

[Gunfire crackling] In the 1800s, the South was unlike the increasingly industrialized North.

The climate was much more conducive to agriculture.

In the states of the Deep South, large fields of cotton blooms stretched as far as the eye could see, while tobacco was the cash crop of the Mid-South.

Other crops added to the economic success.

However, that success was dependent on the plantation system, enslaving people to do the work.

According to historic estimates, there were more than 46,000 plantations in the South in the 1800s.

According to the census of 1860, there were nearly 4 million slaves.

In Lexington, Kentucky, statesman Henry Clay owned slaves and the 600-acre Ashland estate where they worked.

Henry Clay's estate comprised about 660 acres of land, approximately one square mile.

This farm became one of the most famous and visited farms anywhere in the United States in its time.

[Cows mooing] He bred the finest livestock.

He had thoroughbred horses.

He was also a plantation owner.

This was a plantation.

It met the definition of that type of farm in that it had a singular cash crop, and that cash crop was hemp.

Narrator: Eric Brooks, the chief curator of Henry Clay's Ashland estate, is as knowledgeable as anyone concerning the treatment of the slaves there.

Brooks: Life for the people enslaved here was often very, very hard.

Most of the people Henry Clay enslaved, he enslaved to work the hemp fields.

Holden: Most enslaved people worked from what they used to call "can't to can't"-- from when you can't see in the morning to when you can't see again at night.

Brooks: Clay once wrote a chapter in an agricultural textbook that was published in 1837, and he describes his hemp operation at Ashland in great detail.

And he says at the end of the chapter that, "The reason I am successful, the reason that Kentucky is successful, is that there is a ready supply of enslaved labor."

So, he makes no bones about that fact.

Narrator: Clay was somewhat of an enigma-- a Speaker of the House, a Senator, Secretary of State, and three-time presidential candidate who had personal and political views about slavery that were conflicting.

He called slavery "unjust," "a great evil," and said it was "undoubtedly a manifest violation of a man's rights."

However, during the course of his life, Clay owned about 140 slaves.

Brooks: He was essentially born a slaveholder.

I mean, he was born into the slave-owning aristocracy and never varied from that the rest of his life.

There was never a time when he did not own slaves.

So, he had no bones about the fact that he was wealthy because he enslaved people.

He knew that was how things worked, and he was comfortable with that.

Further, he enslaved about 140 people.

Right now, today, we have records of emancipation of a grand total of six of those people.

That's powerful math, and I think it says a great deal about how Clay felt about slavery.

Now, he also had to deal with it as a political issue, and that's a different matter.

He sees clearly from the beginning of his career that it divides the nation.

It always had.

There was no question of that.

It never stopped being an issue.

It only became more of an issue as time passed and the nation expanded.

He wanted to find ways to deal with that, to ensure that it did not break the nation apart, that it did not threaten the continued development and growth of the nation.

So, he espoused ideas of finding a compromise that everyone could live with so that the country could continue to grow and develop.

Narrator: Clay's complex struggle with the issue of slavery was evident in legislation where he played a key role.

The Missouri Compromise in 1820 allowed Maine to be admitted as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.

The Compromise of 1850 included a series of laws allowing California to be admitted as a free state and banning the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

It also included a new Fugitive Slave Law, requiring free states to return runaway slaves to their owners and establishing harsher penalties for those who helped the slaves.

Despite those efforts, the tension between slaveholders and those against slavery continued to grow, and Clay's compromises would only delay the inevitable-- a war between the states.

The movement to abolish slavery actually had its roots long before the antebellum years of the 1830s, '40s, and '50s.

Sinha: The first wave of abolition-- organized abolition-- arose in the Revolutionary Era, when the Northern states abolished slavery, and the African slave trade was abolished.

And the second wave, which really begins in the 1830s-- 1820s, 1830s but reaches a peak in the 1840s and '50s, just before the Civil War-- the second wave of abolition is considered to be more radical, mainly because so many African Americans became part of organized abolition.

Narrator: Sinha is an award-winning author who penned "The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition."

She points out that, for the most part, the abolitionist movement was made up of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Sinha: Abolitionists were not powerful people.

They tended not to be very rich.

They tended to be, you know, men and women of modest means.

Their petitions were gagged in Congress.

Many times, they were met with racist mobs who attacked their meetings for being "promiscuous."

By that, they meant Blacks and whites, men and women, mingling together in a radical space.

So, whatever they lacked in political power, abolitionists made up in just outproducing their opponents.

Narrator: Some of the elements of the abolitionist movement were well planned, and some were not.

In his book, "The Most Absolute Abolition," which was a finalist for the prestigious Harriet Tubman Prize in 2023, Jesse Olsavsky, an assistant professor of history at Duke's Kunshan University in China, describes the abolitionist vigilance committees.

Vigilance committees were mainly urban antislavery organizations, and their objective was to assist runaways, enslaved people who were running away from the South, to get wherever they wanted to go.

It also protected fugitives from slave hunters and slave catchers who were sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States under the Fugitive Slave Clause to be able to go after runaway slaves and render them back to slavery.

And what's unique about the vigilance committees is they brought together the most diverse array of abolitionists that sometimes in other spaces had worked separately.

They were led by African Americans, but they were inherently interracial.

And so, they had a lot of serious and committed white allies.

Narrator: On the Eastern Seaboard, the work of the vigilance committees was more public and open than in the states to the west, because there was a much different climate concerning runaway slaves.

Olsavsky: The eastern coast vigilance committees were very closely connected to the abolitionist presses, and so, their ideas and their activities were constantly before the public.

But in the case of the Midwest, the vigilance committees operated like secret societies.

For example, in Ohio, there was extreme anti-Black racism, and so, one had to be careful.

Narrator: Despite the dangers of operating the Underground Railroad, the movement to end slavery grew, and so did the number of abolitionist newspapers and books providing fuel to the abolitionist movement.

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who founded "The North Star."

He became one of the greatest orators of his day and a leading abolitionist and writer.

Douglass was a radical outsider, always outside of power, knocking on the doors, always demanding the country live up to its creeds, and a ferocious, radical critic.

[Chuckles] That's what abolitionists were.

And then he reaps victory in the middle of life-- he's only in his 40s-- and his cause won.

How many radicals actually win?

Narrator: Blight's book, "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom," a definitive biography about one of the most important African Americans of the 19th century, won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2019.

Blight: Douglass was such a writer.

He wrote millions of words, 1,200 pages of autobiography, hundreds and hundreds of the short-form political editorials in his newspaper, and then thousands of speeches, almost all of which we have a text for.

Quite likely, more Americans heard Frederick Douglass speak than any other American of the 19th century.

Narrator: In addition to the autobiographies written by Douglass in the 1840s, Solomon Northup dictated "Twelve Years a Slave" to a white lawyer for publication, and Harriet Beecher Stowe penned "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

It became one of the most widely-read abolitionist books of the times.

So powerful was her writing, it is said that, upon meeting her, President Abraham Lincoln said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."

Whether that statement was actually made or not, there is no denying the impact of the book.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her abolitionist writing, helped change, you know, the face of American popular culture.

What she's able to do is create conversation.

She's able to go on speaking tours.

It was about, how can you, as an artist, you know, lend your political voice and your advocacy work to a cause?

Narrator: An author and popular public speaker, Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens has written about another powerful voice of the antebellum years-- runaway slave Harriet Tubman.

Cooper Owens: To think about a person born into slavery who remained illiterate for all of her 91 years, and yet this woman was so smart.

By the time she attempts to run away with her two brothers, that attempt was, unfortunately, unsuccessful, but she now realizes, "You know what, I think I can do this."

And she runs a second time, and it's successful.

And what is amazing is, over a course of about 12 years, she goes back and forth to that slave farm, and she gets all of her friends, all of her family.

Her last trip is to get both her parents and move them to-- eventually, to Canada.

She saw liberation as a collective thing.

And so, everywhere she went, she founded institutions.

Her service work, her civic duties were known.

She was, in fact, the most written-about woman in the 19th century.

Narrator: It's estimated that there were as many as 40 abolitionist newspapers during that time.

Sinha: Abolitionist print culture, which is basically newspapers, pamphlets, petitions, and later on slave narratives that abolitionists endorse, is really important in the growth of the movement.

This is how abolitionists spread their message across the country.

Olsavsky: They understood that transforming public opinion was very important to the movement, and so, they wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, and, you know, most were not professional writers, but it was-- if you were an abolitionist, you had to write something, and you had to say something, no matter who you were.

Narrator: The first documented use of the phrase "Underground Railroad" was published in one of those abolitionist newspapers, the "Tocsin of Liberty."

It came in the August 10th, 1842, edition written by Thomas Smallwood under the pseudonym Sam Weller.

Smallwood was born into slavery, bought his freedom, and then helped 400 others escape to freedom.

Roaming the countryside would be slave catchers, employed by slave owners, in some cases, or working for rewards, in others.

It was at the height of this bitter national debate over slavery that one of the slaves of Ashland ran away.

The year was 1844.

Henry Clay was making a third run to be the President of the United States, ultimately losing to James K. Polk, who, ironically, was also a slaveholder.

By that time, the Underground Railroad had become a viable yet dangerous passage of escape for thousands of slaves.

Holden: What the Underground Railroad represents is a level of organization and a level of understanding how many people need help to flee, and the introduction of white abolitionists into the movement-- folks willing to take the risk of either turning a blind eye to who happened to be sleeping in their barn that night, to physically constructing, you know, places in their homes to hide people, to being a ready way station-- they were risking quite a bit themselves to participate.

Knowing that there was an increasingly active network of folks outside of those local networks who were willing to help really bolstered a sense that maybe the tide could be turning here.

Maybe enough people would think slavery was wrong and do something about it.

Narrator: Professor Holden, who also serves as the director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative, is the author of "Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community."

Turner, a slave in Virginia, was put to death after leading his slave rebellion in 1831.

Holden: There's a massive revolt that leads to the death of almost 60 white men, women, and children.

And the lesson for many was that, while the militia may ultimately prevail, while many systems of the slavocracy may ultimately put the rebellion down, that doesn't guarantee that you won't be murdered before that system locks into place.

One thing that the rebellion does signal is that getting rid of slavery might not have a political answer.

Narrator: Ultimately, the solution would be a war.

But until that point, the debate raged and grew into defiant action.

Families in towns and villages used their homes and barns as stations on the Underground Railroad.

Others, called "conductors," would guide the runaway slaves from one station to another.

The trepidation was palpable for both the freedom seekers and those who helped them.

It's a constant state of fear that you will be found out, that you might be considered a race traitor, that you could be taken away from your family and imprisoned, or have your business burnt down, or to be socially ostracized.

Narrator: The Underground Railroad connected many people in a common cause and helped tens of thousands of runaway slaves to freedom.

One of Henry Clay's slaves made a journey to freedom that was well-documented.

It was the story of Lewis Richardson, who was also a slave at Ashland in the 1840s.

He escaped in 1846 and went through the western part of Ohio.

After arriving in Amherstburg, across from Detroit, in Canada, Richardson gave a speech about slavery and his experience at Ashland that was so impressive, a transcript of the speech appeared in newspapers throughout the North and even in Europe.

Actor playing Richardson: I am truly happy to meet with you on British soil, where I am not known by the color of my skin, but where the government knows me as a man.

But I am free from American slavery after wearing the galling chains on my limbs 53 years, nine of which it has been my unhappy lot to be the slave of Henry Clay.

It has been said by some that Clay's slaves had rather live with him than be free, but I had rather this day have a millstone tied to my neck and be sunk to the bottom of Detroit River than to go back to Ashland and be his slave for life.

As late as December 1845, H. Clay had me stripped and tied up and 150 lashes given me on my naked back.

Brooks: Lewis Richardson made a decision to escape on the Underground Railroad, leaving behind a wife and also a child, knowing that he might never see them again and that either of them could be punished for his action.

So, he makes a really profound decision with incredible consequence.

That says something about what he was facing.

Narrator: Another of Henry Clay's slaves tried to gain her freedom through the court system.

Charlotte Dupuy was a cook and housekeeper, while her husband, Aaron, was a coach driver and personal valet for Clay.

While serving as Secretary of State, Clay spent a great deal of time in Washington, D.C.

Traveling there with him, Charlotte, Aaron, and their two children stayed in the Decatur House.

Charlotte had filed a lawsuit against Clay for her freedom and that of her children.

Brooks: She does that in 1829, because she knows that Clay's term as Secretary of State is up, and he's not staying around for the presidency of his enemy, Andrew Jackson.

She also knows that once she files the suit, the legal question of the ownership of the property of the person of Charlotte Dupuy becomes a legal matter, and the courts will not allow her to be removed from Washington until it is resolved.

Narrator: The suit actually went to trial, but she lost and then refused to go back to Ashland.

Charlotte was jailed and then sent by Clay to labor in New Orleans, spending three years away from her family.

The stories of the DuPuys, Richardson, escaped slaves Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and others, were drawing national and international attention and continued to fuel the tensions that led to the Civil War.

However, the fame of Richardson and the others was the exception rather than the rule.

In the case of the slave who stayed in the Church family home, we have very little information and don't even know his name.

However, it is Austin Church's documentation of the family role in helping this slave to freedom that makes this story so compelling.

Austin wrote... Actor playing Austin: At one time, a man was brought here in the night and left in Father's and Mother's charge the next day, until the next night.

And Father found out during the day that he was a slave of Henry Clay of Kentucky.

So, a day or two after he had gone, Father wrote Mr.

Clay, telling him his slave was now in Canada, that he stayed at my house one day and told him who he was, and he, Father, forgot to take steps to return him to Kentucky.

Narrator: It's not known if Senator Clay responded to the letter.

However, the story does provide documentation of one stop on the slave's journey to freedom.

It's estimated that approximately 100,000 enslaved Americans escaped to freedom from the states that allowed slavery.

As many as 50,000 of them came through Ohio.

The routes to freedom on the Underground Railroad were almost as numerous.

Combining that with the secrecy of the times and the lack of identification for runaway slaves makes telling the story of one person's journey nearly impossible.

However, the writings of Austin Church tell us of a town, family, a house, and even words from a letter as a starting point.

We also know that a slave of Henry Clay's stayed in Columbiana, Ohio, and we have a well-documented story of a Henry Clay slave moving through Southern Ohio.

Of course, we know the starting point-- the Ashland estate of Henry Clay in Lexington, Kentucky.

There was fear on every step of the journey, but the prize of freedom was worth it.

Narrator: The Ashland estate of Henry Clay is where the journey began for the slave who was written about by Austin Church.

Brooks: People who were enslaved to process hemp had a life expectancy of about 30 to 35 years.

They often suffered a condition called hemp pneumonia, which results from the inhaling of hemp fibers when it is broken.

And they worked that until they were either dead or physically incapable of doing so.

Narrator: The decision to trade the hemp fields for freedom was most likely made in 1844, two years after Clay left the Senate.

The first 70 miles of the journey were made through the backwoods of northern Kentucky.

However, another formidable obstacle lay ahead-- the Ohio River.

[Dogs barking] Holden: We can't overstate how dangerous that journey was.

We can't overstate that, in most slave states, if someone was killed while trying to flee, no one would be held accountable for that murder, that you could end up in a jail held by a sheriff, where either you'd be claimed again by your enslaver, or the sheriff could put you up for auction, and you end up even further south.

The risks were overwhelming, and it really took a lot of brave people to help folks make it to freedom.

Narrator: The 17-mile shoreline between Maysville, Kentucky, and Ripley, Ohio, provided popular places to cross.

One reason was the support of abolitionists.

The other reason was the river's width and depth.

A boat wasn't always necessary.

At times during the year, one could wade across.

During the winter, the river froze, and it was walkable.

One documented story tells of Eliza Harris' Ohio River crossing to the home of Presbyterian minister John Rankin, carrying her two-year-old infant across the frozen waters toward freedom.

[Dogs barking] Betty Campbell: There are bounty hunters following her, she realizes.

And so, she steps out onto the ice on the Kentucky side of the river and takes a few steps with her baby, and she falls through into the river, and she throws her baby up on another big cake of ice, and she climbs up on it and continues her trek across the Ohio River to Ohio, to Ripley, and she falls in another time but eventually is able to make it to the shore, and she climbs up the steep hill to the Rankin house, and so, her needs are taken care of, then she's moved on north.

We know she eventually makes it to Canada.

Narrator: Historians say that when Harriet Beecher Stowe heard the story, Harris became the model for Eliza in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Reverend Rankin, his wife, and their 13 children performed remarkably for decades in helping runaway slaves to freedom.

Campbell: We have a lot of information written by Reverend Rankin, and in that, he tells us that over about a 40-year period of living here in Ripley, he and his family aided roughly 2,000 fugitive slaves escaping through their farm home.

And he also wrote, "I never lost a passenger."

Narrator: Rankin was so successful that embittered Kentuckians placed a $3,000 bounty on his head, and he was wanted dead or alive.

There was even a gun battle on his property.

Campbell: The Rankin sons are in a gunfight battle with Kentucky slave owners and bounty hunters.

And when it's all over, several of the bounty hunters are seriously injured, and none of the Rankin men are, with the exception of one of John Rankin's sons, and a bullet has grazed his shoulder.

Narrator: However, the Rankins persisted, putting a light in the window as a shining beacon for runaway slaves on the Kentucky side of the river.

Campbell: They learned that if, in their attempt to escape, they could make it to the Ohio River around Ripley, they were told to look for the house on the hill and the light in the window.

That was a safe house, and that was the home of the Rankins.

They would take care of their needs and then move them on to the next station north.

Narrator: Runaway slaves would move through the property quickly, often north by wagon to Redoak, just five miles away.

While some runaways left Redoak on an eastern route through Decatur or to the west, many would continue north through Russellville and on to Sardinia.

Thanks to the writings of Dr.

Isaac M. Beck, a staunch abolitionist living in Sardinia, we know that a slave of Henry Clay's stayed there.

He wrote... Actor playing Beck: When Henry Clay was a candidate for president in 1844, a young mulatto man, a slave of Clay's, was taken through Adams County on a line east of this.

Narrator: A key phrase in Beck's letter provides information about the direction taken by Henry Clay's slave.

Beck says the slave "was taken through Adams County on a line east of this."

Passing through Adams County would have put Clay's slave 30 miles to the east of Sardinia, making it very unlikely that his direction would have been reversed to head toward Cincinnati.

Documented stations continuing east are much more plausible.

Small towns like Youngsville, Sinking Spring, and Bainbridge eventually led to Chillicothe.

The trail was dangerous and exhausting.

They traveled mostly by night, always in fear of the slave catchers who earned their money by capturing and returning slaves to their owners.

Sleep came only when there was time and a safe place.

There were some cases when travel took place during the day, hiding in hay wagons and hoping not to be stopped.

Isaac Hamilton, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, wrote that a Henry Clay slave stayed in Columbiana, Ohio.

But the journey there from Chillicothe was nearly 250 miles.

Narrator: With every step, runaway slaves were placing their lives in the hands of people they didn't even know, who led them from one town to the next, and who would give them food and a place to rest.

While the trail was not underground nor a railroad, there was a shared terminology.

The "passengers" were the runaway slaves.

"Agents" would provide help to the passengers along the way.

"Conductors" were people who guided the slaves from one location to the next.

The locations were called "stations," and the owners of the homes, barns, and root cellars that provided shelter for the runaway slaves were called "station masters."

Typically, the distance between stations was between 10 and 20 miles.

In reaching Chillicothe, the journey was far from complete.

Runaway slaves would continue heading toward Canada by making stops in towns to the east and north at well-documented stations.

Upon reaching Columbiana, a slave of Henry Clay's spent a night, and the event was remembered by Isaac Hambleton, one of four Quaker brothers, who bought land and a small mill there, the remnants of which still stands.

Quaker settlements, known as the Society of Friends, played an important role in the success of the Underground Railroad throughout Ohio, and it was the Quakers who first settled Columbiana County.

Even before the rise of the 19th-century abolition movement, you had a lot of mainly Protestant dissenters in British North America who were anti-slavery.

The Quakers are really the ones who are most responsible for organized abolition in both parts of the Atlantic-- against the African slave trade in Britain and here against slavery in the Northern states.

It's not just their ideology and their religious beliefs but their organizational skills that really jumpstarts the first wave of abolition in the United States.

If a law is immoral, it is your duty not to obey that law.

This is at the heart of Quaker doctrine.

But there were, in fact, a lot of Quakers who thought, as long as you're not involved in slavery, you don't need to engage in active disobedience to the powers of slavery.

But there were many groups of Quakers who basically take Quaker doctrine to their conclusion.

They're sometimes called Progressive Quakers or Hicksite Quakers.

And they were serious about this-- is that any unjust law has to be disobeyed, and you have to be open about it.

You have to be as defiant as you can be.

Narrator: T.C.

Mendenhall, a member of the Quaker community in Columbiana whose father was an operator on the Underground Railroad, wrote about his youth.

Actor playing Mendenhall: I remember many dusky passengers who spent a night at our house and were helped on their way.

Many slaves were piloted through Columbiana County.

Narrator: The reason so many slaves came through the area was that the abolitionist movement was so strong there.

Columbiana County even published "The Anti-Slavery Bugle" every week, and it was mailed to other states throughout the North.

The newspaper's motto was, "No Union with Slaveholders."

From Columbiana County, slaves could take one of several paths, including one to Limaville, then to Ravenna, next to Garrettsville, and from there to Chagrin Falls.

Chagrin Falls was not unlike many other towns in Ohio and elsewhere that were part of the Underground Railroad.

Ruth Zeager: Chagrin was really-- I mean, it was a mill town, so, the power of the water really drew people to the town to build their businesses, and it really became the center of the Chagrin Valley and the hub of activity for everyone around here.

Everyone came to Chagrin to go shopping, to work.

It was really a hub of activity.

John Bourisseau: It was really a very burgeoning, industrial village.

A lot of people don't realize that.

So, they were creating these dams along the river for power and creating these different industries to support this new village.

So, it was a very active community, growing very quickly.

Narrator: Despite the growth, Chagrin Falls was still a small village.

However, it had a passion to help end slavery.

Records show the names of residents who donated to the abolitionist movement and attended meetings.

Bourisseau: You can see from the newspapers of the time, not from Chagrin, but from the abolitionist newspapers, that there were many meetings scheduled to talk about the slave trade and trying to abolish the slave trade.

Narrator: "Old Auntie" was a symbol of the community support.

Dorcus Ann Elizabeth Williams was a runaway slave from Virginia who came to Chagrin in the 1850s and stayed until she passed away in the 1870s.

Many in the town pitched in to help Old Auntie in her old age.

However, the support of the abolitionist movement was not unanimous.

Scott Hageman: It definitely wasn't 100%.

The Methodist Church actually split, because half of them were against slavery, and half of them weren't.

And when they split, the bigger group was the ones that weren't against slavery.

Zeager: I think it would be scary, because you didn't know if you were ever gonna get caught or what would happen to your family if they got caught.

Hageman: The whole point of the Underground Railroad is to be secretive.

If you told people where the stops were and who the people were, you're putting everybody at risk.

Bourisseau: It seems that the people that were active were also many of the leaders in the community.

And, you know, certainly there was a risk, but they didn't seem to be that concerned, because there was such support.

Hageman: Henry Church Sr.

was very active.

Dr.

Vincent, he has a great, big, white house.

He was also very active.

We have documentation that he helped slaves escape too, kept them in his house.

Another person we know about is Isaac Rarick.

Mr.

Rarick was very-- almost John Brown anti-slavery.

Very active, very vocal.

He was a conductor.

He would go and get slaves and bring them to his barn and hide them in the barn, and then he would take them from the barn to Painesville or wherever.

Other station masters that we had was J.W.

Williams, and the wooden house is where he actually had the Underground Railroad going through that.

The other house that we have that we know of is Albion Gardner.

He was very active also, and that house is still there.

And the other ones that we know about were Dr.

Harvey Curtis-- He was very active.

He organized meetings.

He organized speeches.

And the other one I can think of is Deacon Thomas West.

Narrator: Austin's extensive writings about that time provide information about the probable path to Chagrin Falls for the slave of Henry Clay.

He identifies the usual conductor who brought runaways to their house as a man who lived in Bainbridge, a town in between Garrettsville and Chagrin.

Actor playing Austin: Porter McConaughey has brought these runaway slaves to our house in the nighttime a great many times.

Father and Mother always got them something to eat, then fixed a bed on the floor and put them to rest for the balance of the night.

During the next day, often the neighbors would come in and have a talk with them.

Narrator: This was the Church family home that was McConaughey's destination.

Hageman: Mr.

McConaughey was one of the first, if not the first resident of Bainbridge, Ohio.

He was active as a conductor and a station master.

If you're the conductor, you're constantly looking for what's safe.

So, you have multiple destinations that you can go to.

You have multiple stations within that destination that you can go to.

I don't know how they scouted it, but I'm sure they would scout out where they're gonna go the next night.

And then, based on what they thought was the safest route, they would go that route and take the slaves and drop them off there.

Narrator: A photo taken shortly after the Civil War shows Austin, his parents, Henry Sr.

and Clarissa, his siblings, Jerusha, Jane, Henry Jr., Royal, and Cal.

The Church family came here in 1834, and what you really needed to start building a town was blacksmiths, because they did everything, they made everything.

Bourisseau: They were very active in the community, both in terms of creating industry and creating wealth, but also playing roles in-- for example, Henry Church, Sr.

was a justice of the peace for a period of time, and his son Austin later became involved with the school board and different community activities.

So, they were involved in the fabric of the community, but also in creating the wealth for the community.

And I think that their positions in the community and their support of the abolitionist movement made it something that other people in the community were willing to support also.

Narrator: The family being part of the Underground Railroad had a lifelong impact on Austin.

Actor playing Austin: Once, a slave and his wife were brought to the house, and I remember seeing my mother cry when the woman told of some of her experiences in slavery.

Narrator: Austin estimated that runaway slaves would stay with them three, four, or five times a year and did so for many years.

The families who chose to do this work faced the possibility of fines and imprisonment.

The Church family, like others, helped runaway slaves despite a Fugitive Slave Act that had been in existence since 1793.

The law authorized local governments to seize and return fugitive slaves to their owners.

Penalties could be imposed on anyone who helped the runaway slaves.

Harsher penalties, including fines and jail time, were part of a much stronger Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the responsibility shifted from local governments, that were often more lenient, to the federal government.

Leaving Chagrin Falls, Henry Clay's slave was only a few stops and a handful of miles from Lake Erie, where a ship would take him on the last stage of his journey to Canada and freedom.

Narrator: Information from the Wilbur H. Siebert Underground Railroad Collection leads us to believe that Henry Clay's slave went from Chagrin Falls to Painesville.

Lisa Lewins: What we know from that time is that the people were very strong abolitionists, starting with the Mormons who settled in Kirtland, Ohio-- they were very strongly in favor of freeing the slaves and making sure that slavery did not exist anywhere in the United States.

What we also saw were particular groups of people who were really prominent.

So, people who owned the newspapers, the judges, the lawyers, the prominent business people were very supportive of anti-slavery and were also very interested in helping slaves to reach freedom.

Narrator: Siebert spent much of his life collecting correspondence, notes, manuscripts, papers, maps, and photographs related to the Underground Railroad.

He also conducted interviews with former fugitive slaves and Underground Railroad agents.

Sinha: Wilbur Siebert is interesting, because he was not an Americanist.

He was actually a European historian, but he was teaching in Ohio.

And he came across these stories, these compelling stories of the Underground Railroad, and then he started writing books on them and constructing these elaborate maps where he literally was mapping routes of the Underground Railroad.

Lewins: We found that routes coming up from Chagrin, from Warren, from Akron, from Ravenna, all over this Northeast Ohio quadrant were coming right into Concord and Painesville and consolidating the slaves into safe houses.

Their barns, their houses, their taverns, their businesses were all being used to help house people.

So, they could come here, they could be fed, they could be sheltered, they could receive clothing and other goods they would need.

And then there was a whole set of people who were right along the lakefront who were ready to move them into a small boat, then onto a steamer and right into Canada.

Narrator: In Siebert's work "Mysteries of Ohio's Underground Railroad," he wrote... Actor playing Siebert: In 1835, Seth Marshall settled in Painesville and opened a hardware store on Main Street near the river.

Thereafter, for a score or more of years, Mr.

Marshall managed the local Underground traffic.

Loads of passengers were brought over the stage road from Chagrin Falls and lodged in the big Marshall barn.

Mr.

Marshall kept these passengers moving to Fairport and embarking to Canada.

He was instrumental in every step of helping these people to escape.

And so, everything from the housing, putting them on the small boats, getting them out to the harbor safely, he was definitely a part of that, and for many years, from what we could see.

Narrator: Marshall lived on Bank Street in Painesville, overlooking the Grand River.

The barn on Marshall's property provided the perfect launching point to the next stop.

It is said that he would hide slaves among the cargo on small boats that went up the river to Fairport Harbor.

Part of what made the system work so well was the friendship between Marshall and Uri Seeley.

Seeley was the county sheriff and also a staunch abolitionist.

He was responsible for upholding the Fugitive Slave Act, which would have made Marshall a criminal and would have forced him to return the fugitive slaves that Marshall was aiding.

By way of the Grand River, the next stop was less than 10 miles away, the Fairport Harbor Lighthouse.

Built in 1825 and standing 30 fe the lighthous was on the banks of both the Grand River and Lake Erie.

making it an easy jump-off spot for runaway slaves as they awaited a ship to freedom.

Dan Maxson: They selected Samuel Butler to be the lighthouse keeper, which was a very lucrative job, because it's a government job.

He served two tours of duty here.

He was the first keeper here, and then he was back in the 1840s-- 1841-- for a second term.

And he was a noted abolitionist.

You had great anti-slavery, you know, sentiment here, but he owned Eagle Tavern down the street.

He had a partner named Phineas Root who had a hotel at the base of the hill here.

And they were kind of like early proponents of helping the slaves.

Narrator: Dan Maxson is the curator of the Fairport Harbor Lighthouse Museum and knows how busy and important the lighthouse was to the area.

Maxson: In its heyday in the 1840s, we're talking 3,000 ships, a million dollars of commerce.

Narrator: In the mid-1800s, shipping and passenger travel on Lake Erie was heading into its heyday.

Schooners dominated the Great Lakes and the ports along the shore.

However, luxury ships with their steam-powered paddles were becoming a favorite form of travel for passengers.

Ports throughout the Great Lakes, including Fairport Harbor, were bustling.

The ports were also bustling with runaway slaves heading to Canada and freedom.

Maxson: Fairport Harbor is one of the main routes that slaves are looking for as they're coming up.

So, some of them were ferried on, you know, flat-bottomed boats or little scows and would have come through Painesville and wound up in Fairport.

Narrator: The final challenge was to determine which ships would take the runaway slaves to freedom in Canada.

The lighthouse keeper was in a perfect position to do just that.

Maxson: Butler was the lighthouse keeper.

And besides being the keeper, you were also part of the revenue cutter service.

So, you were collecting taxes.

So, he had intimate knowledge of all the captains coming into the port for paying taxes, for, you know, checking their manifest for cargo.

So, I mean, it would be quite easy for him to know which captains are staunch anti-slavery.

So, it's easy for him to say, "Hey, can we add to the manifest the grain, the lumber...?"

Whatever they're hauling as cargo.

Narrator: The ships from Fairport Harbor that carried the runaway slaves would typically head directly north to Port Stanley, Canada, a new home, and freedom.

Singing: I'm goin' home Singing: Oh, yes I'm goin' home Oh, yes I'm goin' home, Lord Lord, I'm goin' home I'm goin' home, Lord Lord, I'm goin' home... Narrator: This is the plausible journey for the slave who escaped Senator Henry Clay's Ashland estate in Lexington, Kentucky.

It was a trip of more than 400 miles filled with fear and danger and putting trust and hope in dozens of strangers who were working together for a common cause.

Cooper Owens: You have Black and white people trying to build coalitions around the idea of a shared humanity, and at the same time, you have the entrenchment of really oppressive forces, and all of these things are happening at the same time.

So, I think of that moment as-- it's a moment of great oppression, but it is also one of great possibility, because of the kind of ingenuity of the people who are committed to humanity.

Singing: I'm goin' home, Lord, Lord I'm goin' home Singing: I'm goin' home Singing: Oh, yes I'm goin' home I'm goin' home Oh, yes I'm goin' home, Lord, Lord I'm goin' home I'm goin' home, Lord, Lord I'm goin' home My old father's cryin' My old father's cryin' Come on home, Lord, Lord Come on home Come on home, Lord, Lord Come on home Singing: I'm goin' home Singing: Oh, yes I'm goin' home Oh, yes I'm goin' home, Lord, Lord I'm goin' home I'm goin' home, Lord, Lord I'm goin' home