WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Caleb Franz: The Conductor

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Caleb Franz has built a career as a writer, podcaster, and nonprofit professional. He often provides commentary on public affairs and writes on American history. His work has appeared in outlets such as The Independent, Washington Examiner, RealClearHistory, and more. His new book is The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism's Essential Founding Father.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Scott Bertrand. Now, here's Sky Graham. We have with us here, Caleb Franz, who is the author of The Conductor about John Rankin. And could you just give a brief overview of who John Rankin was and what your inspiration is for writing a book about him? Sure, yeah. Well, thank you for having me. John Rankin is, I kind of bill him in.

the book as this figure who is the essential founding father of abolitionism. He was commonly known in his day as the father of abolitionism, especially in the western states like Ohio and Kentucky. And he's a largely forgotten figure. Everyone has largely heard of, at least those who look at the history of slavery and abolition in this country, names like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, all of these names are very familiar to us. But John Rankin really laid the foundation for those individuals to build their movement and to be able to build upon the work that he laid down. John Rankin is someone that I also kind of have a personal connection to in one way because

he died in the town that I grew up in. So I had known of him for some time, but it really wasn't until I started working on this book project that I really, really understood his gravity and his significance in American history. And it was something that I was shocked, quite frankly, that hasn't been told more and hasn't been discovered by more people. So that was what was one of the motivations for writing this book was to make sure his story gets out there. Yeah, absolutely. So obviously you do talk in the introduction about how he's not as commonly referenced or known. Why exactly do you think that is? Why do you think these other figures are so much more prolific and talked about, whereas John Rankin isn't as commonly cited?

Yeah, that was certainly a question that I had throughout the writing process as I went through this book. And it's a question that is still kind of being answered, but I kind of came to largely three conclusions that kind of hits at that. The first is a matter of location. John Rankin never lived in Boston or New York or Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., the way that so many of these other well-known and very influential abolitionists did. of course in New England was kind of one of the more popular hubs of anti-slavery activity. So it obviously got more of the attention. All of the places that John Rankin lived, they were small towns in his day and they're small towns still today.

Places like Dandridge, Tennessee, Carly, Kentucky, Ripley, Ohio, Ironton, Ohio, various places like that. So I think location certainly plays a role into it. Another is his own nature. He was a very humble person. And this is a time when every movement tends to gravitate around personalities. It doesn't matter, you know, how well-meaning and well-intention the movement is. There's always going to be some personalities that kind of gravitate towards the top. And Rankin's nature was the exact opposite of that.

He never really wanted to be the face of anything. He largely just wanted to be a small town preacher. And you can kind of see that after the Civil War, once slavery has ended, that's largely what he returns to. And throughout his autobiography, you kind of noticed this where he, things that would be major story beats of any other person. he just kind of maybe provides a sentence or a paragraph, and then he moves on to the next thing. He predominantly focuses on his faith in that. And then the third thing that I think is important to note is that the nature of slavery itself and the nature of the Underground Railroad, I think the history is really one of the final casualties of slavery itself.

And what I mean by that is after the few years, Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a lot of abolitionists, it became much more dangerous for anyone operating on the Underground Railroad to help people escape slavery into Canada. So a lot of the records that were kept, perhaps this was stories, locations, whatever it may be, names, a lot of those records were destroyed or burned. And in fact, John Rankin himself instructed a lot of his fellow Ripley conductors in Ripley, Ohio, to burn any records as to not expose the line that they were working on in on the Underground Railroad. So a combination of those factors, kind of, it starts to paint a picture about why Rankin

may be less of a familiar figure to us today. And something that you touched on that I think is really interesting about this entire story is that he started as a pastor, as a preacher, and kind of made his way into this abolitionist anti-slavery movement. So how does someone go from being this small town preacher to anti-slavery activism? How does that? How did that work? Yeah, that was one of the more important elements that I really wanted this story to touch on because his faith was really the most important. thing to him in his life. And it sort of informed every action that he took and everything that he did. And every, you know, if he were alive today, he would tell you that much of, much of his

activities were not his own doing, but rather he was just, just following what, what he was, what he was instructed to do by, by the Almighty. And you see that throughout, he, he was, he started out as a, he started out as a small preacher in eastern Tennessee. He started preaching against oppression. He didn't even really mention slavery whenever he started this, but a lot of the congregation, and especially the elders, knew exactly what he was talking about. And he was kind of faced with a choice that he could either continue to preach to them

or he could preach against slavery and oppression, but he couldn't do both. So he decided to move north and take a bit of a leap of faith and move north to Ohio. And in Ohio, you see plenty of instances where he's just doing what he thought was the right thing to do. And it wasn't necessarily under the intention of building a movement. But through those actions, a movement certainly came nonetheless. Yeah, for sure. And when you talked about him building this movement, one of the things you touched on was the letters that he wrote against slavery after he found out that his brother had purchased a slave. So could you just go into some of those letters and how they influenced public opinion and how they shifted what people thought about slavery and how they helped build that movement?

Yeah. So John Rankin's letters on American slavery is, I think probably the most significant written contribution that he had made. And largely, as you mentioned, his brother had written to him kind of just catching up informing him about life recently. And he ends on the note that he had purchased slaves. and John Rankin is distraught upon this discovery. So rather than respond to him directly, he takes his time, and then whenever he does respond, he responds in the local paper through a public letter campaign,

and he sends his brother the papers rather than individual letters. Ironically, it was also cheaper, so it was more economical to send him the paper than a letter. but this was he tried to put together every possible argument that he could he could muster and he could consider and offer a rebuttal because in his mind if his own flesh and blood he grew up in an anti-slavery household if his own flesh and blood could could fall prey to these arguments so much that he could engage in the slave trade then everyone needs to hear these arguments because not everyone, especially in his day, grew up in the same kind of household that he

did. So he wanted to make sure that his message was spread as far and as wide as possible, and it kind of took off around the Ohio River Valley. And it went dormant for a little bit after an act of arson burned several copies of these letters. But then they resurfaced toward the end of the decade into the 1830s, and they fell into the hands of a young William Lloyd Garrison. And Garrison credits these letters as the point of entry for him and the anti-slavery conflict. Now, a lot of things was going on in Garrison's life, so it all kind of like worked together at that time, right place, right time kind of situation. But he specifically writes about these letters about how they were the cause of him entering the

anti-slavery conflict. He points at John Rankin as his anti-slavery father, and he calls himself a disciple of Rankin's. And as the Liberator, Garrison's paper is up and running, he republishes them for a more national audience in the Liberator. And then once the Anti-Slavery Society, the American Anti-Slavery Society is founded, the society uses Rankin's letters as a type textbook to go out and basically instruct people on the moral argument for abolition and against slavery. Yeah, for sure. And something that I also wanted to touch on was the opposition to Rankin's work that he faced. Could you just go into a little bit of what type of opposition he faced, what kind of pressure he was under from outside forces? Obviously, he faced mob violence. So could you

just kind of go into what that was and what the response to his work was from some of his critics? Yeah, it was a very dangerous time for anyone in the abolitionist movement. This was an era of violence that was kind of defined by violence. You see acts and even in the halls of Congress where you have duels happening and people being beaten in the case of Charles Sumner, which happened. a little bit later, but beaten by Kane. And Rankin is very much affected by this violence. And the underlying threat of this violence is slavery itself. So you have, as you mentioned, mobs that would circulate around him after he starts speaking,

riding the circuit, so to speak, in Ohio. He has to eventually start parking his force on the other side of town, so mobs don't shave it. in Bobbitt's tail. He is pelted with eggs and rocks. And honestly, some of those instances are some of the more tame instances that he faced. He was under the constant threat of bounty hunters showing up at his house, trying to find any fugitive slaves that they may be harboring, which led to at least one instance whenever he wasn't home of a standoff with his wife. And, and that's the bounty hunters. And then probably most significantly, he had bounties put on his head, and assassins would creep around his house. And in one, the instance, there was, in fact,

a battle that took place at his house in 1841, a siege, so to speak. So the threat of violence was all around him. This was not an easy or comfortable or convenient decision to make, especially with where he stayed in Ripley, Ohio, which was on the front lines, looking right over into slavery in Kentucky. And I think that speaks quite a bit about who Rankin was and his character, because he could have moved further north. He could have moved to the Western Reserve. He could have moved to New England, where most of his fellow abolitionists would have resided. But he didn't. he just stayed right on the Ohio River.

He only escaped the South as far as he needed to to escape the influence of slavery, even though that influence still lingered in Ripley as well and in Southern Ohio as well. And I think that demonstrates not just his commitment to the freedom of his fellow man, but also the love of community that he was able to develop in Ripley. Yeah, absolutely. And another thing that I found really interesting. So you're discussing all of these letters that he was writing throughout the time. How prolific would you say those letters were?

I know that you obviously talked about his influence on William Lloyd Garrison. However, how prolific would you say those letters were around, you know, the common people? Were other people reading them? Were people picking up on them? were people learning from them? What was that? What was the environment around that? Yeah.

I would say that they had a significant effect. Certainly the drama around, you know, the nature of this feud, so to speak, between brothers sort of drew people in. But once they picked up the paper or picked up his letters and started reading through them, Rankin understood that that was his opportunity to say exactly what he needed to say. So he tried to find everything from, he addressed everything from like the love of gain to the supposed inferiority of the black race to the biblical justifications that were made at the time very prominently in southern Christian communities for the institution of slavery.

and he wanted to be able to offer a counter-argument. And I think it is very appropriate to say that these letters, especially in that Ohio River Valley, provided a strong foundation. Of course, the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society a decade later becomes one of the most prominent anti-slavery societies, and that's in no small part due to Rankin's contributions and these letters that he wrote,

providing that intellectual framework. Another way to look at this is that, you know, for what the Federalist papers did for the Constitution, Rankin's letters on American slavery did something very similar for the abolitionist movement and the way that we understand abolition today. Yeah, for sure. And then moving off of his letters in particular and more to his anti-slavery activism in other areas, obviously he went around the country. He went on speaking tours and things like that. like a lot of members of anti-slavery societies, but he also helped with the Underground Railroad, and that was a main point of this book. So could you talk a little bit about Rankin's work on the Underground Railroad, what he did within his own home, having slaves come into his own home? Could you just talk a little bit about that and what his work was there? Yeah, this is, I think that this really contributes to the level of respect that so many

people in the abolitionist movement had for Rankin because it did kind of start to divide into you know factions and and division about the the appropriate way to approach slavery and and Rankin was that that glue that holds the abolition movement together and he's this this center of gravity so to speak and I think a lot of that comes down to his example that he demonstrated on the Underground railroad and the leadership that he demonstrated there. Over 2,000 people escaped slavery and went into Canada through his home specifically throughout his entire life. So this is from the 1820s to the 16th, all the way basically up until the 13th Amendment. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, he's still helping people escape into freedom up to Canada, since Kentucky obviously was not

affected by the Emancipation Proclamation. Most notably, I would say the most significant point of that is most popular here in the way that he influenced culture through the underground railroad activities that he had was whenever one night in February of 1838, a slave woman that passed through the Ohio River when it was frozen and she was killed. carrying her child in her arms, and she made it to Rankin's house. And this story sort of so affected Rankin, the courage and the conviction and the bravery that this woman communicated was so, was so strong to Rankin, that he communicated this story to his friends in Cincinnati, the Stowe's, Calvin Stowe and Harriet Beecher Stowe. And Harriet Beecherstow was so affected by this story that she adopted it and adapted it for one of the threads in Uncle Tom's cabin, where the character of Elisa is doing something very similar, where she's crossing the river. There's a few of the details that she changed.

Obviously, as I mentioned, for safety purposes, she had to be a little bit more discreet. but this is a very real way, I think, that that demonstrates Rankin's impact and influence through his actions as well as his words there on the Underground Railroad. Yeah, absolutely. And I just have one more really quick question for you. Why, if you could just give a quick summary, why do you think that this story should be told? Obviously, we talked a little bit about this at the beginning, but if you could just give your brief rundown on why should this story be told and why is it important for people to go out and read this story? Yeah, well, two things really come to mind, I think. The first is that I think Brankin is one of the most significant figures in American history that has, for large, you know, parts been lost to history. And I think that is a shame

that we need to really understand his story and his contributions that he made if we want to understand how abolition was effective and how it eventually did, in fact, defeat the institution of slavery. So if we want to understand the history of slavery, we should not overlook Rankin's role that he played in that. Additionally, I also think that Rankin is very important for a day and age in an age that is marked by sort of political violence, rising tensions and division. Rankin provides moral clarity and moral leadership to be able to navigate through all of those issues without losing himself and without losing the movement that he holds so dear. And I think that there are a lot of lessons.

This is very much a biography and very much a history straightforward in that sense. But if you're looking for lessons to apply to it today, I think that would be it. Thank you so much. And again, this is Caleb Franz, author of The Conductor Biography about John Rankin. Thank you so much for coming on, and I really appreciate hearing everything you have to say. Thank you so much. This was a pleasure. That's Caleb Franz with Sky Graham. More of our interviews and conversations on our website, Radiofreehillsdale.com. Click on Student Chosen Features. And I'm Scott Bertram on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.

Thank you.