Word: slave
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...Atlantic were writing about the horrors of slavery. "The Wretches they to Christian climes bring o'er, / To serve worse heathens than they did before," wrote Daniel Defoe of trans-Atlantic slavetraders in 1702. In 1695 "Oroonoko", a popular London play, depicted plantation life and a bloody slave insurrection with striking sympathy: "If you saw the bloody Cruelties, / They execute on every slight offence . . . / Your heart wou'd bleed for 'em." In 1703 the Boston Puritan Samuel Sewall wrote against slavery in "The Selling of Joseph", and as early as 1667 his predecessor, Michael Wigglesworth, had contended that...
...Twenty of the poets are black, including relatively familiar figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Jupiter Hammon. Others are more surprising: Francis Williams, a free black from Jamaica who studied at Cambridge University in the early 1700s; George White, a former slave from Virginia who only learned to read at age 42 yet became a preacher and published author; and the anonymous "Sable Bard" of 1797 who tells his story in verse, from enslavement as a child in Africa, transport to America, and service in the Revolutionary War, to manumission and the struggle to survive as a freeman...
...hill above the Ohio River, the Rankin house--where a defiant lantern hung each night as a beacon--became a fabled destination that fleeing slaves struggled and sometimes died trying to reach. One of them was a woman who dared to cross the melting ice of the Ohio with her 2-year-old after learning that her master planned to sell the child. Rankin's sons helped her along to the next safe town, whence she eventually made her way to Ontario. Though her name remains unknown, the woman's story, by way of Rankin, reached the ears of Harriet...
...world of constant low-intensity warfare between abolitionists and slavers in hot pursuit of their "property." The rising tide of escapees led to cross-border raids by Southern slaveholders who were emboldened by federal laws that gave them the right to chase runaways into free states. Hired slave hunters prowled the riverbanks, hoping to catch blacks and drag them south for cash. When no runaways were available, free-black citizens--there were 200,000 in the Northern states by 1860--could be clubbed and hustled across the river into captivity. Pro-slavery Northerners destroyed printing presses and burned the rare...
Hagedorn's book could have offered more background on the slave empire and the workings of the Underground Rail-road beyond Ripley, Ohio, Rankin's town. But the ground-level focus gives Hagedorn's story the flavor and fire of an era when even the newspapers had names like the Agitator and the Castigator. And the Rankins turn out to be a redoubtable clan. After a gang of armed men demanded to search her house for a runaway slave, the minister's wife Jean did not bat an eyelash. "If you do not hereafter keep away you will feel...