Love and Danger on the Underground Railroad: George and Edy Duncan’s Journey to Freedom, 1820

Abstract

Love and Danger on the Underground RailroadGeorge and Edy Duncan’s Journey to Freedom, 1820 Roy E. Finkenbine (bio) In 1820 fugitives from slavery in the American South began showing up for the first time at harbors such as Sandusky, Cleveland, Fairport, and Ashtabula on the southern shore of Lake Erie. Scores of antiquarian sources from these lake ports provide evidence. Cleveland witnessed its first court case involving runaway slaves in May after the citizens of Hudson forcibly freed two Virginia slaves who had nearly reached the lake and were being returned to bondage. Local people later assisted the runaways in gaining passage to Upper Canada (contemporary Ontario). Trailblazing Underground Railroad historian Wilbur Siebert scoured through local records and memories from these lake ports and found that “runaway slaves were arriving at Painesville in 1820 and embarking from Fairport” and “pioneer settlers of Ashtabula and Ashtabula Harbor were promoting the escape of slaves to Canada by 1820.” Attorney Rush Sloane, who aided many in reaching freedom, noted that “the first runaway slave known as such at Sandusky was there in the fall of the year 1820.” The Kentucky fugitive crossed Ohio on foot, with his master in hot pursuit. Unable to locate his bondsman in Sandusky, the master boarded the steamboat Walk-in-the Water bound for Detroit. Capt. P. Shepard then secretly sailed the slave in another vessel to Fort Malden and liberty on the Canadian side. Ohio’s Lake Erie ports soon [End Page 7] joined the Detroit River and Niagara River frontiers as major crossing points for freedom seekers going to Canada.1 A number of factors made this pioneering exodus possible. Among these, two deserve mention here. First, the advent of steamboats on the lake, beginning with the launch of the Walk-in-the-Water in 1818, made passenger travel between Ohio lake ports and Detroit, Erie, and Black Rock, New York, relatively routine. By the 1820s, sympathetic steamboat captains and crews were helping runaway slaves across Lake Erie. After reaching either Detroit or Black Rock (now part of Buffalo), fugitives crossed easily into Upper Canada. Second, slaves in the Ohio River valley were increasingly aware that they could find freedom in Canada. The 1793 Antislavery Act in Upper Canada placed the province on the road to emancipation. After the War of 1812, veterans returning to their homes in western Virginia and Kentucky brought news about the land of freedom to the north. This circulated quickly through slave communities in the Upper South. John P. Parker, an Underground Railroad worker in Ripley, claimed that “after the War of 1812 every slave knew the north star led to freedom and Canada.” Abolitionist politician Henry Wilson observed that “many of the slaves, catching at these vague items of information, made them the basis of plans of escape …, in entire ignorance of the distance and dangers of the way.” This generalized awareness of Canadian freedom assumed more concrete form after 1819, when John Beverly Robinson, Upper Canada’s attorney general, made it clear to American officials that colonial authorities in the province would oppose any efforts to extradite runaway slaves. “Whatever may have been the condition of the Negroes in the [United States],” he announced, “here they are free—For the enjoyment of all civil rights … and among them the right to personal freedom.” The volume of runaway slaves headed toward Canada expanded exponentially in 1820.2 [End Page 8] Among the first runaway slaves to make the Lake Erie crossing in 1820 were George and Edy Duncan, the property of Samuel Sprigg, common-wealth attorney for western Virginia and a prominent resident of Wheeling. Only seventeen and fourteen years of age, respectively, at the time of their flight, this obscure slave couple displayed the curious mixture of naïveté, courage, and desire that is found most often in the young. Absconding separately from bondage, and reuniting near the end of their journey, they fled Wheeling, crossed the Ohio River, moved through a series of Quaker settlements in east-central Ohio, then two Yankee farmsteads in the Western Reserve, ultimately crossing Lake Erie from Fairport. Most of what can be known about George and Edy’s journey to...