Goof Morning POU!
Today we look feature another conductor of The Underground Railroad.
As an 8-year-old slave, John P. Parker was taken from his mother and chained to an elderly African-American man.
The man and the boy were forced to walk about 100 miles in 1835 from Norfolk, Va., to Richmond, where their new owners lived. Not long after that, Parker learned that the old man, who had comforted him on their journey, was whipped so severely that he died.
Parker soon was sold to a slave trader, chained to 400 other slaves and forced to walk more than 800 miles in the summer heat from Richmond to Mobile, Ala.
These and other horrific experiences filled the boy with a contempt for slavery that hardened his determination to escape some day for a life of freedom.
“How I hated slavery as it fettered me, and beat me and baffled me in my desires,” he says in his eloquent and harrowing autobiography, “His Promised Land” (W.W. Norton & Company; $20), which wasn’t published until 1996, nearly a century after Parker’s death.
Parker wound up freeing not only himself from slavery, but hundreds of others. The Ripley, Ohio, resident became a major figure in Ohio’s Underground Railroad.
Risking his life and his successful iron foundry business, he helped more than 600 slaves escape to freedom from 1845 to 1865. His house in Ripley near the Ohio River is a National Historic Landmark and operates as a museum dedicated to the celebration of his life.
“This is a true American hero,” said Betty Campbell, a member of the John P. Parker Historical Society Inc. in Ripley. “The terrible injustices he saw as a slave just roiled within him. Once he bought his freedom, he knew he couldn’t just stand by and not help others.”
Still a child when he arrived in Mobile after his torturously long journey with the large group of slaves, Parker was sold to a doctor. This turned out to be the first big break of his life.
The doctor used him as a house slave, which was much easier than working in the cotton or sugar fields. The doctor’s two boys befriended Parker and taught him how to read and write. They slipped him books from their father’s library.
“I read the Bible, Shakespeare and the English poets in the hayloft at odd times, when I was not driving the doctor to see his patients,” Parker says in his autobiography, which is based on the transcription of journalist Frank M. Gregg’s night-long interview of Parker in the late 1880s. The book was edited by Stuart Seely Sprague.
At the doctor’s encouragement, Parker eventually went to work at a foundry to learn a trade.
But Parker got into a fight at one foundry and then was fired at another because the white foreman resented a black man who was more proficient than he was at his job.
The doctor, believing Parker’s combative temperament made him no longer suitable as a house slave, planned to sell him to a sugar plantation. But Parker convinced a widowed patient of the doctor’s to buy him for $1,800 with the understanding that he would pay her back with interest and be set free.
By working in a foundry and doing other jobs, he earned enough in 18 months to buy his freedom. He was 18 years old.
Parker lived briefly in New Albany, Ind., spent a short time in Cincinnati and then moved to Ripley, where he bought an iron foundry. In recognition to his rise from the ashes of slavery, Parker named his business the Phoenix Foundry.
In 1848, he married Miranda Boulden, a Cincinnati native. They raised six children:
- Hale Giddings Parker, b. 1851, graduated from Oberlin College‘s classical program and became the principal of a black school in St. Louis; later he studied law and in 1894 moved to Chicago to become an attorney
- Cassius Clay Parker, b. 1853 (the first two sons were named after prominent abolitionists); he studied at Oberlin College and became a teacher in Indiana.
- Horatio W. Parker, b. 1856, became a principal of a school in Illinois; he later taught in St. Louis.
- Hortense Parker, b. 1859; she and her two sisters all studied music; Hortense was among the first African-American graduates ofMount Holyoke College; after marriage in 1913, she moved to St. Louis and continued to teach music. Her husband was a college graduate who served as principal of a school.
- Portia, b. 1865, became a music teacher
- Bianca, b. 1871, became a music teacher
The parents ensured that all their children were educated. A generation from slavery, all six went to college and entered the middle class.
Parker obtained patents for the many mechanical devices he invented. They included a soil pulverizer, a tobacco press and a sugar mill. He became one of the wealthiest men in Ripley, which was a growing, prosperous river town in the mid-19th century.
But his most important legacy is his work as a conductor of the Underground Railroad. Ripley was a hotbed of abolitionists, led by the Rev. John Rankin.
Rankin’s house at the top of a hill overlooking the Ohio River sheltered more than 2,000 runaway slaves. He placed candles in the front windows of his house to guide the slaves from the Kentucky side of the river. Like the Parker House, the Rankin House also is a National Historic Landmark and a museum.
Parker was one of the most daring slave rescuers. Carrying two pistols and a knife, he frequently went into Kentucky to guide the fugitive slaves to the river and then row them across in his skiff before their pursuers could catch them.
Parker’s wits and guile helped him as much his toughness in his rescue missions.
There was a Kentucky slave owner who made two of his slaves give him their baby at night to discourage them from trying to escape. While the slave couple waited in a cornfield, Parker snuck into the slave owner’s bedroom and took the sleeping baby from the foot of the slave owner’s bed.
With bullets whizzing past them, Parker, carrying the baby, and the two slaves ran to Parker’s boat and made it across the Ohio River.
Even in Ripley, Parker was in danger. Some Ripley residents were slave-catchers who could expect a lucrative reward for each slave caught and returned to his or her owner. Kentucky slave-owners also would come to Ripley hunting for their runaway slaves. They were prepared to shoot anyone who had aided them.
“Every time he walked out his front door, his wife had to wonder, ‘Is he coming back?’” said Greg Haitz, president of the John P. Parker Historical Society.
During his slave-rescue years, Parker never left his house without a pistol, a knife and a blackjack. He also developed the habit of walking in the middle of Ripley’s streets.
“Day or night, I dare not walk on the sidewalks for fear someone might leap out of a narrow alley at me,” he says.
No photographs of Parker exist. He refused to let his photograph be taken because didn’t want his face on the Wanted posters that offered $1,000 for his capture, dead or alive.
Parker once jumped off a steamer into the Ohio River to escape men who wanted to kill him for the $1,000 bounty. Another time, he and two runaway slaves hid in empty coffins in a workshop to avoid their pursuers.
If Parker had been caught aiding runaway slaves, he could have been imprisoned for up to 20 years and would have had his home and his foundry confiscated by the government.
“This guy was the sixth-wealthiest man in Ripley, and he’s risking it all rowing a boat across the river to help someone less fortunate than him,” said Carl Westmoreland, senior adviser for historic preservation at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.
With the help of grants, the John P. Parker Historical Society, which formed in 1996, bought the Parker house and restored it as a museum.
In his autobiography, Parker refers to his slave-rescue work as “my own little personal war on slavery.”
This self-educated man who was born into slavery fought his “little war” with the courage and efficiency of a full-scale army.
When Parker died at the age of 73 in 1900, The Cincinnati Commercial Appeal daily newspaper declared that “a more fearless creature never lived. He gloried in danger.”
In 2007 the Cincinnati Opera commissioned a family opera based on the life of John P. Parker.