{"id":3590,"date":"2023-06-27T14:34:57","date_gmt":"2023-06-27T14:34:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/?p=3590"},"modified":"2023-08-05T20:53:55","modified_gmt":"2023-08-05T20:53:55","slug":"dr-darrel-e-bigham-on-jordans-banks-emancipation-and-its-aftermath-in-the-ohio-river-valley-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/dr-darrel-e-bigham-on-jordans-banks-emancipation-and-its-aftermath-in-the-ohio-river-valley-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Darrel E. Bigham – On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (2006)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A

Dr. Darrel E. Bigham, from amUSIngArtifacts.org<\/p><\/div>\n

An enslaved mother made the urgent decision to escape after she learned of her owner\u2019s plans to sell several of her eight children. \u00a0Be<\/span>cause she was trusted to sell vegetables in the local market, she was able to hide her possessions in a wagon underneath a layer of produce.\u00a0 Then, she drove the cart to a spot south of Covington, Kentucky, on the Ohio River.\u00a0 Her husband and children met her there, and began their clandestine operation to cross the river into freedom officially underway.\u00a0 This was a success story: \u201cShe and her family eventually reached Canada,\u201d Darrel E. Bigham writes in his 2006 book <\/span>On Jordan\u2019s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley<\/em>.\u00a0 While his book does not use the term \u2018stampede\u2019, it does include accounts of families, individual freedom seekers, and organized groups of people escaping.\u00a0 In addition, Bigham writes of enslaved people rebelling against slaveholders in a variety of ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bigham writes, \u201c[Slaves] who could not look forward to emancipation expressed opposition in many ways, mostly nonviolent \u2013 ranging from humor and music to work slowdowns or temporarily running away.\u201d1<\/sup>\u00a0 \u00a0Even though many enslaved people knew that they would not be able to escape in the immediate future, they still purposefully rebelled against the slaveholders.\u00a0 One case involved an enslaved man who strangled his overseer “with his own suspenders.\u201d<\/span>2<\/sup>\u00a0 Because the enslavers knew they were outnumbered, they often relied on intimidation to make their enslaved people believe that rebelling was not worth the danger they would be in afterward.\u00a0 \u201c[O]wners took slaves to hangings, hoping to make an impression on them,\u201d<\/span>3<\/sup> Bigham recounts.\u00a0 Clearly, enslaved people\u2019s defiance made an impact.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Enslaved

Enslaved Man Escaping, from NYPL Public Domain Archive.<\/p><\/div>\n

Interestingly, Bigham counters an assertion that this sort of pushback was \u201c[enslaved people\u2019s]\u00a0most successful resistance.\u201d<\/span>4<\/sup>\u00a0 He continues, \u201cThe error is not in celebrating their counterculture, but rather in failing to appreciate that only running away allowed blacks to \u2018outplay whites in the divide-and-conquer\u2019 game.\u201d<\/span>5<\/sup> \u00a0Even better, this form of mobile rebellion did not scare slaveholders in a way which caused them to retaliate violently against the slaves who had stayed.\u00a0 This leads into Bigham\u2019s discussion of escapes. \u00a0He writes that Black people took initiative in organizing their escapes, and emphasizes \u201cthat the Underground Railroad depended heavily on black <\/span>agents\u201d who were sometimes newly-free people who had taken similar routes out of slaveholding territory.<\/span>6<\/sup>\u00a0 Bigham includes several references to individual Black people escaping from their bondage with the help of abolitionists.\u00a0 For example, he relays the story repeated by \u201c[t]he great-niece of a slave named Lewis Barnett\u201d about her great-uncle, who \u201cescaped with twelve others traveling through New Albany\u201d, where they were hidden by a Black family for two days before being unfortunately recaptured.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/p>\n

\"Brick

The Second Baptist Church, New Albany, VA, from Darrel Bigham.<\/p><\/div>\n

Bigham includes a significant amount of geographical and cultural information about the Underground Railroad\u2019s operations, and he makes a point to mention names and provides short accounts of both white and free black people who helped the runaways in their escapes.\u00a0 At the end of his book, Bigham includes pictures of primary sources, some of which are newspapers about anti-Black initiatives, an autographed autobiography of a Black reverend, and two nineteenth-century schools for African Americans.\u00a0\u00a0 Those last photos are from the author\u2019s collection.\u00a0 In fact, Bigham personally provides several pictures of important buildings like schools or churches which used to serve as stops on the Underground Railroad.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1] Darrel Bigham, On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 22.<\/p>\n

[2] Bigham, 22.<\/p>\n

[3] Bigham, 22.<\/p>\n

[4] Bigham, 22.<\/p>\n

[5] Bigham, 22.<\/p>\n

[6] Bigham, 24.<\/p>\n

[7] Bigham, 47.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An enslaved mother made the urgent decision to escape after she learned of her owner\u2019s plans to sell several of her eight children. \u00a0Because she was trusted to sell vegetables in the local market, she was able to hide her possessions in a wagon underneath a layer of produce.\u00a0 Then, she drove the cart to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21280],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scholarship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3590"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3851,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590\/revisions\/3851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}