The Underground Railroad In The Queen City
The Underground Railroad was a system of routes and places of support that helped African American slaves escape to the North and to Canada during the decades before the Civil War. The Underground Railroad worked most effectively in the border states because escape routes were shorter and clearer than in the Deep South. Located on the Ohio River across from Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio proved to be an important route of escape on the Underground Railroad. Richard Cooper and Dr Eric Jackson have written this new book "Cincinnati's Underground Railroad" (2014) which tells the story of the Queen City and its role in helping slaves find freedom. Cooper is manager of content development and interpretation at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a museum founded in Cincinnati in 2004 to teach about the Underground Railroad. Jackson is associate professor of history and director of the black studies program at Northern Kentucky University.
The book presents the story largely through photographs, engravings and drawings from the era accompanied by text and annotations. It begins with a brief section offering an overview of slavery in the United States beginning with the Northwest Ordinance and continuing through the Constitution and the compromise of 1850. The Northwest Ordinance had banned slavery in the area that became Cincinnati. The authors further describe the rise of the Abolition movement beginning in the early 1830's to provide further background.
The history of Cincinnati and the Underground Railroad melds with the romance of the Ohio River. Photos of river scenes, steamboats and skiffs, stevedores, and the attendant river industries enhance the story. The reader gets a view of the Cincinnatti of the era, a sense of the topography of the area, and a feel for the possibilities for the movement of slaves seeking to attain freedom across the river. In 1850, the Queen City or "Porkopolis" was the sixth largest city in the United States with a large population of free blacks. Abolitionist sentiment was strong, but it was balanced by a great deal of pro-slavery, anti-black feeling.
Many people, African American and white, including ministers, businessmen, publishers, and teachers, took part in the Underground Railroad in Cincinnati. Some wrote about their experiences including Harriet Beecher Stowe who lived in Cincinnati for many years before leaving and writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin".
I enjoyed seeing the depictions of the Queen City during the early to mid-19th Century including the many old churches and schools, neighborhoods, old homes, and businesses, cemeteries and waterfront and in seeing how this broader local history tied in with the history of the Underground Railroad.
The textual portions of the book tell the story simply and clearly. More detail about the precise dates and locations of the photographs would have been welcome. The short concluding bibliography will help readers wishing to learn about the Underground Railroad in more detail.
"Cincinnati's Underground Railroad" is part of the "Images of America" series of local photographic histories published by Arcadia Publishing. I visited Cincinnati for the first time shortly before reading this book. I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about the city I saw all-too-briefly and its connection to the Underground Railroad.
