The Ohio as the Line

Stand at the edge of the Ohio River in downtown Cincinnati and look south. The state line runs through the middle of the water. Kentucky begins on the far bank. The distance is less than a quarter mile. For nearly six decades before the Civil War, that quarter mile was the difference between slavery and freedom in the western interior of the United States.

Ohio was admitted to the Union in eighteen three as a free state. Its constitution prohibited slavery. Kentucky had been a slave state since statehood in seventeen ninety-two. The Ohio River between them was not a philosophical boundary. It was a legal one, enforced by the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty, which required Northern citizens to assist in the capture of freedom seekers and return them south. Cincinnati was legally a free city whose laws required it to participate in capturing free people and returning them to bondage.

This produced a city of contradictions. Black residents could not always testify in court. They faced Black Codes requiring financial bonds for residency. They were attacked by mobs in eighteen twenty-nine, eighteen thirty-six, and eighteen forty-one. And at the same time, Cincinnati was the crossing point for thousands of people making the most consequential journey of their lives. The Freedom Center estimates that the Ohio River crossing at Cincinnati and the surrounding area was one of the most active corridors of the Underground Railroad in the entire country.

The river looks peaceful from here. It runs roughly a quarter mile wide and an average of about fifteen feet deep, with a current that runs faster in the center than it appears from the bank. The people who crossed it by night in winter, in leaking rowboats, on breaking ice, knew it in a different register entirely.