Ohio History Journal

LOUIS WEEKS

 

John P. Parker:

Black Abolitionist Entrepreneur,

1827-1900

 

 

 

 

 

As historians attempt to set the record straight--to recite for Americans the involve-

ment of black people in all aspects of our national life--they will, since the recovery

of his "Autobiography," now be able to include more on the contributions of yet

another outstanding Negro, John P. Parker of Ripley, Ohio.1

To be sure, a few students of American history have already mentioned Parker.

Henry E. Baker of the United States Patent Office included him in the study, "The

Negro in the Field of Invention," which appeared in the Journal of Negro History

in 1917. According to Baker, several inventions by Parker resulted in the establish-

ment of the Ripley Foundry and Machinery Company, a prosperous business:

 

He [Parker] obtained several patents on his inventions, one being a "screw for Tobacco

Presses," patented in September, 1884, and another for a similar device patented in May,

1885. Mr. Parker set up shop in Ripley for the manufacture of his presses, and the business

proved successful from the first. The small shop grew into a large foundry where upwards

of 25 men were constantly employed. It was owned and managed by Mr. Parker till his

death. The factory is still being operated, and on the business lines originated by the founder,

but the ownership has passed from the Parker family.2

Parker numbered among the few Negroes who obtained patents in America

before 1900. Only fifty-five black inventors held more than one patent in the year

1901, according to W. E. B. DuBois. Moreover, Parker had obtained at least three,

perhaps more, of the seventy-seven patents issued to Negroes before 1886. Despite

immense opposition, he proved himself capable of inventing new machinery, carry-

ing through the patenting process, and then capitalizing upon his ideas.3

While working in southern Ohio, John Parker also found time to be an impor-

tant conductor on the Underground Railroad. A specialized study, The Mysteries of

 

1. See Randolph C. Downes, "On Negro History," Ohio History, LXXVIII (1969), 213-214, for one

call to recite participation by blacks in the making of the state; "Autobiography by a slave, John Parker,

Brown County, Ohio, circa, 1880," Duke University Library.

2. Henry E. Baker; "The Negro in the Field of Invention," Journal of Negro History, II (1917),

29-31. In 1871 the establishment was known as the Phoenix Foundry with Parker and William Hood,

proprietors. Carl N. Thompson, comp., Historical Collections of Brown County, Ohio (n.p., 1969), 162,

165, 167, 190.

Mr. Weeks is assistant professor of Christian Thought and History at the Louisville Presbyterian

Theological Seminary.

• 1
 

156                                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

Ohio's Underground Railroads, published in 1951, refers to Parker. The author,

Wilbur H. Siebert, however, carefully separates Parker from the cluster of white

abolitionists who were operating in the area of Ripley and Red Oaks under the

leadership of Rev. John Rankin, the Presbyterian clergyman who founded the Free

Presbyterian Church. Parker's reason for not working within Rankin's group, accord-

ing to Siebert, was not that the Negro felt animosity toward the white workers,

but that he simply did not "think it proper to ask white men how to abduct slaves

from Kentucky." Even though Parker

Knew the dangers and difficulties in liberating slaves,... he had no hesitation about abduct-

ing them. He was in secret communication with intending runaways, sending his associates

to meet them at night and conduct them to rowboats which would carry them across. He

also provided guides to escort them to havens up the road. Ripley abolitionists followed John

Parker's leadership not infrequently in their hazardous enterprises.

By way of summary, Siebert stated that Parker "was a large and shrewd man of

impressive appearance." True to his usual penchant for statistics, the historian

added that according to W. [B.] Campbell, a veteran of the Underground Railroad

in Ripley, the Negro abolitionist was 'the direct means of plucking over 1,000 slaves

from bondage.'⁴

As a young professor at Ohio State University, Siebert had visited Ripley in

1892. He later claimed that all his statements concerning the community could be

verified by Captain Richard C. Rankin, son of Rev. John Rankin his "best inform-

ant."⁵ Henry Howe, a contemporary but much older historian, also used Rankin as

an informant and quoted in the 1900 edition of Historical Collections in Ohio,

Rankin's independent testimony to the effectiveness of Parker's militant abolition-

ism. Not giving a specific date, Rankin remembered being sent by his father to

interfere with the designs of three slave hunters. In the attempt, Rankin recognized

one of the three men as 'a desperate character, who had killed one man at Hamilton,

Ohio, and had waylaid and shot another near his home in Kentucky.' Even so, the

youth drew and held a revolver 'within three inches of his eyes,' but another Ken-

tuckian likewise aimed his six-shooter at Rankin. It was Parker who resolved this

dramatic standoff. According to Rankin,

In this position we were found by John P. Parker, a colored citizen of Ripley, who came

in soon after with a double-barrelled shot gun. In a short time a crowd gathered, and the

 

3. W. E. B. DuBois, ed., "The Negro Artisan," Report of a Social Study Made Under the Direction

of Atlanta University; Together with the Proceedings of the Seventh Conference for the Study of Negro

Problems, held in Atlanta University, on May 27, 1902 (Atlanta, 1902), 187-188. According to several

reports from Ripley, Parker also produced a "Parker Pulverizer," a type of harrow for which he held

at least one patent. Confirmation of this statement is hard to obtain since the United States Patent

Office states that patents granted in the nineteenth century are almost impossible to determine by name.

Baker in "The Negro in the Field of Invention" names several of the difficulties which confronted

slaves and freemen in their attempts to secure patents during the 1900's.

4. Wilbur H. Siebert, The Mysteries of Ohio's Underground Railroads (Columbus, 1951), 77-78. The

Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, February 18, 1900, published a special feature on the Underground

Railroad in southern Ohio honoring prominent conductors, and John Parker's recent death is especially

noted. The facts related by Siebert about Parker seem to have been obtained from this article and were

given by W. B. (Barney) Campbell, not W. R. Campbell, as stated in the text. (W. N. Campbell was

Senator Alexander Campbell's son.) The discrepancies between Siebert's account and Parker's "Auto-

biography" lead to the conclusion that Siebert did not interview John Parker on April 5, 1892, as he

claims in his book. Basic discrepancies include the state where he was a slave and the amount of

money necessary for purchase of his freedom.

5. Siebert, Mysteries, 68.

• 2
 

John P. Parker                                                                     157

 

"hunters" were taken before the mayor and fined sixty dollars and costs.6

Yet another work, a local history, makes more than a passing reference to Parker.

Ripley, Ohio: Its History and Families, compiled by the Sesquicentennial Committee

of that community in 1965, recites with some perception Parker's place among abo-

litionists and entrepreneurs. Besides including a brief sketch of the man's life, this

study declares that no one in Ripley's antebellum days "was more prominently

identified with the prosperity of the town than John Parker."7

General histories, whether of American Negroes, inventors, or even of the Under-

ground Railroad, however, have usually omitted references to Parker, despite the

fact that knowledge of his contributions could readily have been obtained. Fortu-

nately, the work of the redoubtable Carter G. Woodson proves an exception to the

general rule. Woodson drew heavily upon specialized materials, particular fields,

locations, and professions. He cited Parker's inventions among the "Achievements

in Freedom" that have proved important in history in his classic, The Negro In Our

History.8

On the other hand, Wilbur Siebert, who asserted that his visit to Ripley took

place in 1892, did not even mention Parker when he published his first general

work, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, in 1898, only six years

later. Parker is excluded from discussion in the text as well as from the Appendix,

which professed to list all the operators known in Brown County. Also, since he

later, in 1951, termed Parker "Ripley's Chief Negro Operator," one would expect

the names of other black men in Siebert's directory of participants in that area.

Instead, no Negroes are identified among the operators in Brown County, while

John Rankin and his sons along with sixty-eight other whites are named.9

The early neglect of Parker by Siebert is serious from a historical point of view,

as his study glorifies white participation in the Underground Railroad to the exclu-

sion of blacks, even though some of them were still living when he wrote and could

have been interviewed. Moreover, it seems surprising that such valuable works on

Negro history as Black Odyssey by Roi Ottley, Their Own Words by Milton Meltzer,

Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States by Herbert Aptheker,

The Lonesome Road by Saunders Redding, and Charles H. Wesley's studies in

black history--all appear uniformly to ignore Parker's life and his work.10

 

 

6. Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1900), I, 339.

7. Sesquicentennial Committee, comp., Ripley, Ohio; Its History and Families (n.p., 1965), 26, 28,

36, 37, 67, 69, 92.

8. Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History (Washington, 1947), 464. Perhaps a typographical

error, "T." instead of "P." appears as Parker's middle initial.

9. Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1898), 417;

Siebert, Mysteries, 77-78. W. B. Campbell, Siebert's apparent source, was a veteran of the Underground

Railroad who had worked with John Rankin and Parker. His description of Parker's relationship to

the other conductors was: "He [Parker] was often a leader of the whites in perilous rescue work, and

was always carrying on an independent campaign for his race.... A more fearless creature never

lived . . . I doubt whether any one negro ever deserved more gratitude from his race." (Italics added.)

Commercial Tribune, February 18, 1900.

10. Roi Ottley, Black Odyssey (New York, 1948), Milton Meltzer, ed., Their Own Words (New

York, 1964), Herbert Aptheker, Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New

York, 1951), Saunders Redding, The Lonesome Road (Garden City, 1958), Charles H. Wesley, In Free-

dom's Footsteps and The Quest for Equality (New York, 1968). The three volume work, The Negro in

American History (New York, 1969) and two recent accounts of the Underground Railroad, William

Breyfogle, Make Free: The Story of the Underground Railroad (Philadelphia, 1958) and Henrietta Buck-

master, Flight to Freedom (New York, 1958), make extensive reference to John Rankin and his sons

but ignore John Parker altogether.

• 3
 

158                                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

Most of the claims made on Parker's behalf that are published in the various

works already referred to are corroborated in the aforementioned recently uncov-

ered manuscript. The "Autobiography by a slave, John Parker, Brown County,

Ohio, circa 1880," is a typescript of approximately ninety pages, in the Flowers

Collection of Southern Americana at the Duke University Library. It holds interest

for a wide range of persons who study Ohio history, the Underground Railroad,

and the nascent black capitalism of nineteenth-century America, not to mention

those whose interests encompass all of black history as well as American slave nar-

ratives. John Parker lived his first eighteen years as a slave, and his story recounts

these years in a manner similar to that found in published narratives between 1840

and 1860.11

In brief, Parker's life was a full one.12 Born in 1827 in Norfolk, Virginia, Parker

was the child of a slave mother and a white father. At age eight, his master, who

may have been his father, sold him to an agent, who removed the boy to Richmond

for resale. When he was sold the second time, Parker joined a large slave caravan

heading for Alabama. After traveling all the way to Mobile, destination of the cara-

van, Parker was purchased by a doctor for use in his personal household. Members

of his owner's family taught Parker to read and to write, and by age sixteen the

youth was ordered to accompany two young men of the family northward in order

to serve them while they attended college. Parker was soon returned to Mobile,

however, for his owner feared the slave would escape to the North.

The Mobile doctor then apprenticed Parker to a succession of craftsmen. The

plasterer to whom he was first obligated "began abusing" the young man from

the very first. "Being apt and observing, I soon could do rough jobs," Parker re-

counted; but the white master assigned his apprentice a task beyond his training.

The plasterer, seeing Parker's amateur work, "flew into a rage" and beat the young

man "with a lathe with a nail in it." Hospitalized by his wounds, Parker then defied

a white attendant and fled Mobile.

The escaping slave made his way to New Orleans aboard a steamer, managed

to elude authorities in that city, and stowed away in the empty hold of a north-

bound riverboat. When he ventured above deck in search of food, Parker was dis-

covered and captured. After a series of misadventures, during which he fell into the

hands of several persons on the Mississippi, he was finally returned to New Orleans

for resale. The Mobile doctor then succeeded in regaining his elusive slave and

took him back to Alabama.

Once again in Mobile, Parker was apprenticed, this time to a molder at a local

foundry. "It was a natural bent, so I went at it with a will, so that I was soon a

full-fledged molder," Parker recalled, adding:

Being of an inventive turn of mind . . . I soon rigged up my bench so I could do more

 

11. Investigation revealed that the Parker manuscript was purchased at the same time as a longer

"Autobiography of John Rankin," and acquisition of the materials was noted in June 1939. "Auto-

biography of a slave, John Parker, Brown County, Ohio, circa 1880," the catalog entry for the Parker

story, was made in 1945, too late for inclusion in the Guide to the Manuscript Collections in the Duke

University Library, prepared by N. M. Tilley and N. L. Goodwin (Durham, 1947).

See Charles H. Nichols, Many Thousand Gone (Leiden, 1963) for one clear description of the genre.

Cf. Margaret Young Jackson, "An Investigation of Biographies and Autobiographies of American

Slaves Published Between 1840 and 1860, Based upon the Cornell Special Slavery Collection" (unpub-

lished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1954). Although the recollections of Parker do not fall

totally within the scope of slave narratives, many of the devices and illustrations are similar.

12. The following data, and the quotations as well, are taken directly from the Duke manuscript,

which follows the life of John Parker until the outbreak of the Civil War.

• 4
 

John P. Parker                                                              159

 

and better work than any man in the shop. This fact naturally caused some ill-feeling

among the other workmen toward me. My master gave me what I made, so I very fool-

ishly spent my money on myself. I remember I paid twenty dollars for a hat.

Parker's extravagance contributed to his mounting problems-- a fight with his

foreman and the promise of more trouble if he stayed in Mobile. The doctor then

sent his slave to work in a foundry in New Orleans, but there he shamed the other

workmen by his prodigious efforts, and soon their hostility brought about his dis-

missal. Faced with the prospect of being sold as a field hand, he became desperate.

The young man asked one of his master's patients, a Mrs. Ryder, to assume

ownership and to allow him to purchase his freedom. After some time and at the

last moment, she agreed to buy Parker and to let him earn his freedom by paying

$1800 from the pay he could receive as a molder. Motivated by the hope of free-

dom, he went to work in a different foundry in Mobile and loaded boats in his

spare time, fulfilling his obligation to Mrs. Ryder in less than two years' time.

Having heard of foundries at Jeffersonville and New Albany, Parker asked for

a pass to Indiana. But, as he remembered, "Cincinnati lured me away to other

adventures." It was in Cincinnati that the newcomer received his first invitation to

assist escaping slaves:

 

My first real experience with the runaways was in a manner unsought by me, in fact I was

unwillingly forced into it. I had met a free man, who was a barber, in the house where I

was living. He told me that he had lived in Maysville, Kentucky, and was under suspicion

of having helped runaways. He was given one night to be gone, so he took the first packet

to Cincinnati, leaving his wife to pack up their belongings. The man confided in me that

several nights before he was forced to get out of town [he] met two girls in the act of run-

ning away. Knowing they had a good home and a kindly mistress, besides being young,

he persuaded the girls to go back home and stay there. Now that he had been treated so

brutally [in Maysville], he had made up his mind to run the girls away and proposed I

accompany him back to Maysville to aid in the enterprise.

 

The persistence of the barber finally persuaded Parker to assist in the endeavor,

and Parker's vocation in assisting escapees followed from this occasion. Soon he

moved to Ripley, and, according to the introduction to his story, "entered into one

of the most adventurous careers of any slaverunner along the entire border." The

introduction continues:

He devoted his life to forays in Kentucky, to scouting on both sides of the Ohio River, to

taking care of the helpless slaves who had found their way to the Ohio and could not get

across, to actual fighting for them and against their pursuing masters. Owing to the stringent

antislavery laws and the fugitive slave law, Parker never was able to tell of his adventures.

He had built up a profitable iron foundry business. He had patented a clod-smashing ma-

chine which came into use. All of his property would have been confiscated and he would

have been jailed, had the slave owners been able to catch him.13

 

This introduction, and the entire "Autobiography" of Parker, also, resulted from

 

 

13. The reference to a "clod-smashing machine," repeated in the course of the story, was to a

harrow which Parker first invented while yet in Mobile. A detailed description of Parker's invention

is not provided; but if it improved on the spike-toothed harrow, in general use until after 1865, then

it was indeed an important contribution. Gage's disk harrow was not patented until 1847. See History

of American Technology (New York, 1956) and Waldemar Kaempffert, A Popular History of American

Invention (New York, 1924), Vol. II.

• 5
 

160                                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

the work of Frank M. Gregg, an Ohio newspaperman and businessman who lived

his early life in Ripley.14 As a boy, Gregg had known Parker as the "man who was

afraid to walk on the sidewalks." Gregg had also known the reason for Parker's

preference for streets to sidewalks: "Ripley was an old town with many narrow

alleys, out of which enemies could leap at him unawares," and Parker had

established his habits "when there was a reward on his head dead or alive." The

newspaperman was careful to assert that courage, not fear, marked his subject's

personality. "A courageous man, even in his old age he was quick with his fists,

a knife, or a pistol."

At the outset, Gregg set forth his relationship to the story of John Parker, and

did not claim to have functioned merely as an amanuensis. He admits the story is

based on the notes he compiled through an all-night talk session with Parker and

is not a strictly verbatim account. In explanation of why he decided to write the

story, Gregg says of Parker:

He was a man who rarely talked, never bragged. Having made some reputation as a news-

paperman, I returned to my old hometown, just to talk to John Parker. I knew he had had

a life of adventure, but I never imagined such an interesting one as he unfolded to me and

my banker friend, Frank A. Stivers, an old friend of Parker's and the leading banker of

Ripley.

The good will and essential faithfulness of Gregg to his notes cannot seriously

be doubted. In the course of his newspaper career, he would write other works.

His two volume history of The Founding of a Nation, while participating in several

of the misconceptions in his day concerning the Puritans and the Pilgrims, never-

theless evidences a competence in discerning fact from fiction. Again, his brief study

of Andrews Raiders or the Last Scenes and the Final Chapter of the Daring Incur-

sion into the Heart of the Confederacy exhibits no genius for insight, but contains

an adequate grasp of event and detail. The style of both these works, as the writing

in his other publication, The Voice of the Nation, and Other Verse, however, differs

radically from the narrative of Parker's story, possibly indicating Gregg's heavy

reliance on Parker's own words and style, and one wonders if this might not be the

reason why the manuscript has never been published.15 More important than any

inductive arguments concerning Gregg's fidelity to Parker's "Autobiography" or

lack of a publisher are the corroborating testimonies of the truthfulness of the facts

from independent sources. Both Henry Howe and W. B. Campbell confirm signifi-

cant details of Parker's personality and work.

As for the general content of Gregg's manuscript, unlike Solomon Northup's

Twelve Years A Slave, the account does not contain reams of historical data.¹⁶ Its

 

 

 

14. Frank M.Gregg (1864-1937), according to the New York Herald Tribune, January 7, 1937, was

"a student of American History of the Colonial period and the Civil War." Furthermore, Gregg "pur-

chased the original site of the Common House of Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and on it con-

structed a reproduction of the original building." He also "erected a monument at Ripley in honor of

the Abolitionists of the Virginia Military District from Ohio." Another Gregg manuscript, graciously

provided for my reading by Mrs. Eliese Bambach Stivers and Miss Florence Baird, was the chief source

for Ripley, Ohio (chairman of the Sesquicentennial Committee was Mrs. Stivers), and for the items

concerning Parker in that work.

15. Frank M. Gregg, The Founding of a Nation, 2 vols. (Cleveland, 1915); Gregg, Andrews Raiders,

or the Last Scenes and the Final Chapter of the Daring Incursion into the Heart of the Confederacy

(Chattanooga, 1891); Gregg, The Voice of the Nation, and Other Verse (New York, 1918).

16. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years A Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup (Baton Rouge, 1968).

• 6
 

John P. Parker                                                              161

 

purpose was not to validate claims of kidnapping and rescue, as Northup succeeded

in doing. Rather, Gregg allows Parker simply to remember, albeit in colorful lan-

guage, his own youth and manhood. The black man's concern, looking back over

his early life and recalling events of fifty years past, was more with meaning than

with petty detail. The first half is concerned with slavery, the last half with attempts

to free slaves, his wife and family life are only mentioned in passing, and the later

years in Ripley are included in another manuscript by Gregg.

Significantly, the figure of John Parker emerges from the pages of the manu-

script as a distinctly personal, fully believable character. The mind at work appears

to be that of a proud black man. He tricks the whites; finds black comrades; re-

members personal incidents; respects, but maintains distance from, the white forces

of abolition in Ohio. At the same time, Parker learns, sees, smells, feels, desires,

gets tricked, shows courage, and laughs. His vocabulary is limited, but is full of

vital expression. In sum, the "Autobiography" seems to reflect Parker directly with

a minimum of editorial interference.

For his part, John Parker was no Frederick Douglass, intending by the writing

of his memoirs "to vindicate a just and beneficent principle . . . to enlighten the

public mind, by revealing the true nature, character, tendency of the slave system."

Neither was Parker writing for some evangelical reason, or to obtain funds for

the emancipation of his family.¹⁷ Instead, he was telling his story because someone

asked him to, or because he loved to reminisce to listening and appreciative ears,

or perhaps as a gesture of friendship to his fellow townsmen.

If Parker was no Douglass, recounting his story that others might be freed, he

was even less a Scott Bond, telling the history of his modest success as though all

men should imitate him.18 Bond sponsored the publication of his biography to

serve as a model for the social betterment and capitalistic involvement of other

Negroes. Parker, on the other hand, passed along remarks of his creativity and

his financial prowess as occasional asides, as anecdotes in the course of his narra-

tive of more exciting dimensions. The "Autobiography" does recount lessons Parker

received along the way; but more than that, it reveals his own self-image.

Whatever Parker was not, however, pales in comparison to what he was. He

was a slave who overcame the institution of chattel slavery. He was likewise an

important, yet unheralded, participant in the Underground Railroad. He was,

against all odds, a successful inventor and businessman in the southernmost regions

of Ohio. He functioned for many years as an independent, militant black man

in an essentially white power structure of trade and finance.

To Parker, the facts of accomplishment are secondary to his emotional experi-

ences and pride in himself and his work. He tells what it meant to him to be a

slave. The implications of defying the caste system, he described also. Even with

the twentieth-century emphasis on writing history from the workers' point of view,

even with the immense records compiled by the interviewers of former slaves, all

too little is known of their attitudes and actions. Parker's recollections provide a

 

 

17. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855), vi-vii. Cf. narratives by

James W. Pennington, William W. Brown and Jacob Stroyer, who wrote to evangelize, and by Luns-

ford Lane and Moses Grandy, who wrote for money for freedom. Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium

(New York, 1968), recounts the essence of each narrative except Lane's, which first appeared as Narra-

tive of the Early Life, Redemption from Slavery and Banishment, by Lunsford Lane (Boston, 1842).

18. Dan A. Rudd and Theophilus Bond, From Slavery to Wealth, The Life of Scott Bond, The

Rewards of Honesty, Industry, Economy and Perseverance (Madison, Ark., 1917).

• 7
 

162                                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

necessary corrective to all who claim the near-total submission of slaves to the

institution.19

In defiance of the slave codes, Parker received a rudimentary education and

had access to numerous works of literature and history. Thus, while he was still

subjected to the inhumanity of slavery in the United States, he could compare

the life he endured with the lives of other persons in other cultures. In addition,

he was able to articulate his memories and hopes in a manner seldom possible

for the normally illiterate slaves, and as a skilled laborer he enjoyed a mobility

within the system not usually afforded slaves--even those in the cities of the ante-

bellum South.20 Significantly, Parker bought his own freedom. This possibility for

freedom which he exploited, as did thousands of others, has not received adequate

attention by researchers. And as soon as he was freed, he assisted in the actual

liberation of other slaves. His unrecognized work on the Underground Railroad

bears out the current thesis that white participation in the movement has been

exaggerated while black involvement has been generally overlooked.21 Parker's

willingness to risk his life and property in freeing his brothers and sisters in bond-

age appears terribly courageous, almost foolhardy, in light of his own vocation

and interests; but he does not wish to appear as doing anything different from

the vast majority of ex-slaves on the borderlands who cooperated in the enterprise.

In the face of massive inequities of Ohio's legal and social regulations, John

Parker managed to establish himself as a reputable businessman and prominent

citizen of Ripley.²² It is hoped that the "Autobiography" will be used to help set

the record straight regarding the role of blacks in the abolition movement in

southern Ohio as well as give credit where credit is due for Parker's role in the

economic life of Ripley, Ohio.

 

19. An example is B. A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down (Chicago, 1945), Introduction. More

recently the same sentiments have appeared in the course of the discussion concerning Nat Turner's

revolt.

20. Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities; The South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964) does assert

the mobility of urban slaves.

21. Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington, 1961), has

expanded on the general impressions given by an earlier work of Benjamin Drew, The Refugee; A

Northside View of Slavery (Boston, 1856), among others.

22. See Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961)

for one account of their treatment.

• 8