Additional Material for Teachers
(1) Double Coding
See Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, New York
and Auburn, Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855, page 278. Online version
For more on double coding, see Cruz, Jon, Culture on the Margins:
The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation,
Princeton University Press, 1999
(2) Cole Account
There is at least one slave narrative that contradicts my point. I
hesitate to bring it up, since I find it farfetched. You be the judge!
Thomas Cole was born a slave in Alabama in 1845. In a slave narrative
from the Federal Writers' Project, he told the interviewer about his
"I's hopin' and prayin' all de time I meets up with dat Harriet
Tubman woman. She de cullud women what takes slaves to Canada. She
allus travels de underground railroad, dey calls it, travels at
night and hides out in de day. She sho' sneaks dem out de South and
I thinks she's de brave woman.
At the time of his escape, Tubman was for all intents and purposes
unknown. Historian Kate Larson wrote me:
Cole would have had to meet, specifically, someone from Harriet's
inner circle on the Eastern Shore, and that person would have (to
have) known that Tubman was rescuing people from the Eastern Shore
only - friends and family...If she rescued people from Dorchester
County Maryland, why would she be known anywhere else - and very,
very few people knew her on the Eastern Shore as the person rescuing
people. So Cole's testimony doesn't fit what we know about Tubman...
The slave holders never knew, nor could they have imagined...that
a tiny five foot tall disabled slave woman could have been one of
the UGRR conductors they were so concerned with.
Cole gave the interview somewhere between 1936 and 1938, when he was
in his nineties. By then, Harriet Tubman was a national icon, doubtless
known to Cole. I believe his Tubman remarks were a late-in-life
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mesnquery.html Once there, type
"Thomas Cole" without quotes in the "Search Descriptive Information"
box. Click on item number 1 of the search results. Click on "View page
images." Advance to page 5 of the narrative (page 229 overall.)
(3) Ohio River
Ann Hagedorn, writing about Ripley, Ohio and its riverfront position:
"...Ripley's position along one of the narrowest bends of the
Ohio was soon known among slaves in Kentucky. Many knew that a dry
spell rendered the river so shallow that crossing at such a narrow
stretch was more like wading a stream than navigating a river." (p.
The Ohio of 150 years ago was considerably shallower
(and in some places, narrower) than the river of today. Historically, the Ohio River's
"channel was littered with snags and strewn with boulders, its
flow broken by sand bars, rock ripples, and falls...The natural
river fluctuated wildly from a series of shallow pools during punt
drought flows to a raging torrent rising eighty to a hundred feet in
flood season. (pp. 180 and 181)
"(T)he captain of a boat drawing only fourteen inches reported it
took him thirty-five days to navigate from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati
because he grounded fifty times on shoals where the river was ten
inches deep and 'worked as hard as ever I did in my life' prying his
boat over the shoals." By the Civil War, despite various attempts,
there was still not a uniform three foot channel. (p. 185)
Leland R. Johnson, "Engineering the Ohio" in Always a river: the
Ohio River and the American Experience, Robert L Reid, 1991,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
(4) Underground Road
Gara, The Liberty Line, p. 174.