900 UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, BOONE, CARROLL, AND GALLATIN COUNTIES —Some evidence suggests that Elijah Anderson, a strong leader within the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church, and De Baptiste, an equally strong leader of the Black Baptist denomination, used the emerging slave churches in Carroll, Henry, and Shelby counties, Ky., and the separate African American churches at Frankfort, Ky., as major communications conduits in establishing UGRR links. De Baptiste, in par ticu lar, was known to favor the use of Prince Hall Masonic lodges as sites to establish trustworthy UGRR cells. During the 1840s the American Anti-Slavery Society placed two white abolitionists, William Phelps and George Whitfield from Wheeling, Va. (today W.Va.), in Madison, Ind., to develop organized assistance and to encourage escaping slaves. They reportedly spent most of their time organizing UGRR cells south of the Ohio River. The effects of such organization showed up in the increased traffic of runaway slaves passing through the Madison UGRR during the 1850s. The abolitionist leadership at Carrollton in Carroll Co., Ky., was apparently so feeble that after 1846, when Elijah Anderson moved his base of operations from Madison to Lawrenceburg, Ind., Alex Fuller was moved to Carrollton from Warsaw, Ky., where he had apparently been active in the UGRR operations. Fuller is a shadowy figure, likely one of the 100 field agents placed along the Ohio River by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Many of these agents were disguised as peddlers, fishermen, ferrymen, and boatmen, both black and white. Gallatin Co. What is known about aid to fugitive slaves in Gallatin Co. comes mainly from records of UGRR activities in Indiana or from family histories there. The public records in Gallatin Co. include one grand jury indictment in 1838 against Lewis Hamilton, a free black living near Sparta, Ky.; other criminal records or accusations have been either destroyed or quashed. Many of the Union sympathizers in Gallatin Co., who may have been involved with helping fugitive slaves, moved to Missouri, Kansas, and other western states after the Civil War, therefore causing the record of any such aid to be lost. Warsaw in Gallatin Co. developed as a small Ohio River port in spite of large sandbars impeding all but the keelboat and packet steamboat traffic. Across the river, the hamlets of Florence, Lamb, Markland, Patriot, and Vevay, Ind., hosted a number of antislavery activists. By 1850 Switzerland Co. on the Indiana side and Warsaw on the Kentucky side had a substantial number of settlers— chiefly merchants, manufacturers, and craftsmen— who came from New York, New England, and Pennsylvania; these families tended to be proUnion, and some of them were quite actively opposed to slavery. Pockets of settlers from New England and New York began giving aid to runaway slaves on an ad hoc basis. But there were also transplanted Kentuckians living in Indiana who favored slavery and had relatives in both Gallatin and Carroll counties.
In 1821 the first newspaper notice of a runaway slave from Gallatin Co. appeared in the Lawrenceburg, Ind., Oracle. Benjamin Waller offered a $200 reward for the recovery of Peter Shelley, a 44-yearold slave, who escaped by using a pass that was 10 years out of date. The earliest recorded antislavery activist in Gallatin Co. was Rev. John Pavy, a Regular Baptist minister, who was chased out of Fredericksburg (Warsaw) in 1823 for preaching against slavery. Pavy moved across the Ohio River and established a farm on the Mount Sterling Rd. above Vevay, Ind. The move was timely, since in 1824 Vevay hosted visits from both Judge Stephen C. Stevens, a Presbyterian and a radical abolitionist at Vevay and Madison, Ind., and also Rev. James Duncan, a Presbyterian minister who authored A Treatise on Slavery: In Which Is Shewn Forth the Evil of Slave Holding both from the Light of Nature and Divine Revelation. In 1840 Stevens and Duncan were associated with the formation of the antislavery Liberty Party in Indiana. Stevens, in 1848, was a convener of the Free Soil antislavery party in Buffalo, N.Y. For more than 20 years, John Pavy, his seven sons, and his son-in-law Stephen R. Gerard ran a major route of the UGRR at Vevay and later in Craig Township, Switzerland Co., Ind. At first such aid to runaway slaves was sporadic. During the late 1840s and early 1850s, a more organized approach to helping fugitive slaves developed, including signaling systems to reach activists in Ripley and Decatur counties farther north in Indiana. The Pavy family history claims that four sons became Baptist ministers and that one of them, Absalom, went west to serve as a missionary to American Indians. After Samuel H. Pavy established his farm in Craig Township, slaves were said to swim across the Ohio River there and hide in Pavy’s barn, later being transported away in Gerard’s flax wagon. The Gerards, the Lambs, and the Pavys had intermarried, reinforcing the oral tradition that George Ash, the ferryman from Carrollton, Ky., to Lamb, Ind., aided runaway slaves. In March 1838 David Lilliard brought charges in the Gallatin Circuit Court against Lewis Hamilton, a free person of color, for enticing Lilliard’s slave Billy to escape to Ohio. Because of the interstate aspects, the Kentucky commonwealth attorney brought the case to the March court term of 1838. The charges apparently were not sustained, because Lewis Hamilton was later listed in the Gallatin Co. 1850 census as a free black, a blacksmith, living near Sparta, Ky., with $400 property and a family of seven. In October 1841 Rev. Alexander Sebastian, a Separate Baptist minister, was chased from Warsaw for his radical preaching against slavery and apparently for preaching against the Regular Baptists’ dogma. He had been called to an antislavery Free Will Baptist congregation at Bryant Creek near Florence, Ind., and purchased a farm northwest of Patriot, Ind. Kentuckians were said to have crossed the Ohio River in order to heckle his preaching. For a short time, Sebastian was ordained in the Free Will Baptist denomination, but
his teachings were too radical, and he was soon denounced at the Free Will Baptist Quarterly Meeting. He then went to an area near East Enterprise and Quercus Grove in Indiana to found Separate Baptist churches there and at Cross Plains, Ind., both of which had members active in the UGRR of Indiana’s Switzerland and Ripley counties. The Sebastian congregation merged with the Liberty Free Will Baptist congregation, forming the New Liberty congregation, which continues today and prides itself on its abolitionist roots. In 1847 a debate was held in Warsaw between Rev. J. L. Waller of the Baptist Church and Rev. E. M. Pingree of the Universalist Church. The Universalist Church, founded in the Boston, Mass., and the Concord, N.H., area, had developed a strong antislavery plank, and many of the nation’s leading antislavery activists were members. Two of the most active Universalist congregations were at Patriot (1840) and Vevay (1852), Ind. The Silas and Jonathan Howe families, very strong Unionists, lived on both sides of the Ohio River, at Patriot and in the Sugar Creek area near Warsaw, Ky. Silas Howe became a captain in the 18th Kentucky Infantry and later a major in the 55th Kentucky Infantry, and his father, Jonathan Howe, was a captain in the Gallatin Co. Home Guards, a group of about 20 Union supporters. Before the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, nearly all Universalist preachers and lay leaders supported the abolition of institutional slavery by any means. Afterward, a few Universalist preachers claimed that the law of the land superseded acts that would entice slaves to run away or prevent authorities from reclaiming fugitive slaves. By 1840 Alexander and Duncan Fuller were living in Warsaw. Sarah Fuller, a daughter of Alexander, writing shortly after the Civil War, claimed that Alexander was active in the UGGR and had moved from Warsaw to Carrollton, Ky., before 1860. There were several Fullers active in the UGRR in southeastern Indiana and southern Ohio. Boone Co. With 40 miles of shoreline, myriad creeks and forests, and several large plantations dotting the Ohio River, Boone Co. proved nearly impossible to patrol against runaway slaves. In Indiana, across from Boone Co., there were no free black agricultural communities and no sizable “Yankee” settlements close to the Ohio River. The UGRR operations in nearby Dearborn Co., Ind., came about almost entirely through organization of antislavery societies and through efforts of antislavery congregations among the Free Will Baptists, the Methodist Protestants (MPs), and the Universalists. The most celebrated runaway slave from Boone Co. was Margaret Garner. Yet her tragic slaveescape story is not a story of the UGRR. Garner and her family escaped independently from Richwood, Ky., and took refuge with family members at Cincinnati. Apparently the escaping Garners attempted to reach activists in the local UGRR only after a posse from Kentucky had found them, and by then it was far too late for rescue.