Division, crisis, and political violence are hardly new in the history of the United States. It may seem like the current political climate is driving the nation to a breaking point, but history points to examples that can serve as encouragement for those who feel they are powerless to change the political situation.
In the early 19th century, division and violence rose rapidly as the nation faced an impending conflict over slavery. At the time, the eventual triumph over slavery was anything but certain. This ideological battle called for exceptional leadership willing and able to advance the position that enslaved people had long held—that of slavery’s morally corrosive nature. One rural minister out of Ripley, Ohio, the Reverend John Rankin, offered precisely this kind of leadership, leading many of his peers to refer to him as the “father of abolitionism.” His life is a sterling example of how one person’s resistance can help spark a whole movement.
Few today would include Rankin in a list of notable abolitionists. Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison are renowned, and rightly so. But in important ways, Rankin’s work provided a foundation for these titans to build even more support for abolition.
Read More: The Tormented Rise of Abolition in 1830’s America
The first few decades of the 19th century saw a steady rise in anti-slavery thought and activity. In this period, Rankin worked closely with Charles Osborn in east Tennessee following the formation of the Tennessee Manumissions Society in 1815. In other parts of the country, Black leaders like James Forten in Philadelphia opposed colonization efforts and worked to advance the equal standing of Black people in the United States. Abolitionist publications, like Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, were also beginning to sprout.
Rankin gained broader attention through a series of Letters on American Slavery which he addressed to his brother Thomas in 1824 and 1825, following his discovery that Thomas had purchased enslaved people. Rather than writing directly and privately to his brother, however, Rankin published his letters through a new local paper in Ripley at the time—The Castigator.
While this was not an expressly abolitionist paper, the editor, David Ammen, was a friend and neighbor who shared many of Rankin’s anti-slavery views and who was eager to share Rankin’s arguments with his readers. This was the first time Ammen had engaged his paper in the debate over slavery in this fashion.
The influence of slavery in the United States was on the rise as Rankin’s letters circulated throughout the Ohio River Valley. The Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820, ensured that slavery would expand west of the Mississippi. Even in the north, pro-slavery sympathizers scoffed at the idea of limiting the institution any further. Rankin believed that without a widespread moral awakening, the prospect was slim that slavery could be abolished.
His intention wasn’t to publicly shame his brother, but to confront a culture of slavery that was gaining ground even among his own kin. Rankin was deeply disturbed by his brother’s actions. Both were raised in a deeply abolitionist household in the wilderness of eastern Tennessee at the dawn of the 19th century. If his own flesh and blood could abandon their family’s convictions, he wondered, what hope was there to defeat slavery?
Rankin wrote passionately, but he did not rage. He approached his brother with genuine concern for the state of his soul. No matter what possessed Thomas to embrace slavery, Rankin reasoned, malice would not get him to abandon it. He was also aware of the larger audience who would be reading his pleas to Thomas. He intended to leverage his words in The Castigator to drive a local campaign against slaveholding.
Rankin offered rebuttals to every argument in favor of slavery. “The love of gain first introduced slavery into the world and has been its constant support in every age,” he wrote in his first letter. “It gives energy to the tyrant’s sword, drenches the earth with blood, and binds whole nations in chains.”
The Castigator published his letters weekly between Aug. 17, 1824, and Feb. 22, 1825. Without giving his brother the opportunity to respond, Rankin addressed everything from the common belief in Black racial inferiority to biblical positions on slavery and oppression. In doing so, he offered the first comprehensive case for abolition that most readers had ever encountered.
As he closed his final letter, however, Rankin reassured Thomas that he would remain his brother even if he refused to change his ways. He pleaded with him “to ‘do justly, to love mercy,’ ‘and to let the oppressed go free!’” and asked him, “can you refuse?” Thomas didn’t refuse—he set the people he enslaved free in 1827.
Unbeknownst to Rankin as he wrote, he was providing the intellectual bedrock for the broader anti-slavery movement. William Lloyd Garrison became captivated by his arguments, crediting the Letters as “the cause of my entering the antislavery conflict.”
Read More: The Speech That Launched Frederick Douglass’s Life as an Abolitionist
Now fully embracing the cause of “immediate emancipation,” Garrison republished Rankin’s letters in The Liberator starting in 1832, and used them as a textbook on the moral appeal of abolition for budding anti-slavery societies across the country shortly after. Similar to the way the Federalist Papers made the case for the Constitution, Rankin’s Letters on Slavery did the same for abolitionism. As his profile grew, he increasingly found himself on the road as a popular speaker at anti-slavery gatherings across the country.
While many prominent abolitionists lived in New England and New York, geographically removed from the experience of slavery in the south, Rankin was on the front lines. Just up the river from Cincinnati, Ohio, the small community of Ripley was a crucial hub for Underground Railroad activity in the west, with Rankin’s home being the epicenter for Ripley.
“The real fortress and home to the fugitives was the house of Rev. John Rankin,” wrote John Parker, a Black conductor and formerly enslaved man who had settled in Ripley in part due to the abolitionist community that Rankin had cultivated. Rankin, Parker continued to write, was “a man of deeds as well as words,” and the “undoubted leader” of the Underground Railroad in Ripley. Rankin’s house became a beacon of hope for enslaved people who fled.
Rankin moved from Tennessee to Ohio to escape the influence of slavery. He could have kept going north, to the Western Reserve or to New England, where his abolitionist perspective might have been more appreciated. Instead, he only went as far as was necessary to do his work—just to the other side of the Ohio River, the border between slavery and freedom. Between 1829, when he purchased the property, and 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, over 2,000 enslaved people passed through Rankin’s hilltop fortress on their journeys north toward freedom.
Out of all those who sought refuge, none affected him as much as a woman who arrived in his home with her child in the dead of winter in 1838. Rankin and his family sat in astonishment as the woman detailed how she fled her enslaver near Dover, Ky., and crossed the icy river with slave hunters on her heels.
After helping the woman escape to Canada, Rankin would repeat the story to his closest friends, including Professor Calvin Stowe of Lane Seminary and his wife, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe was so moved by what Rankin had described that she used this story as the basis for the character of “Eliza” in her sensational novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Although this was technically a work of fiction, it became a bestseller in part thanks to the real-life stories that she drew from, including the woman whose story she heard from Rankin.
Read More: The Great Black Abolitionist the World Forgot
Yet Rankin’s work on the Underground Railroad made more enemies than allies. Ripley became known by enslavers as the place enslaved people went to disappear. As Rankin’s reputation grew as an abolitionist leader, suspicion grew about his activities in the town. Elevating tensions further, public sentiments toward abolitionists were hostile in the North and South alike. As Rankin helped anti-slavery societies sprout throughout Ohio, anti-abolitionist mobs were never far behind.
Throughout the 1830s, Rankin became closely familiar with the political violence that was all too frequent in the 19th century. Beyond being heckled, cursed at, and pelted with eggs and rocks, he was forced to hide from mobs. Bounties were placed on his head and assassination attempts were made against him and his family in response to his work on the Underground Railroad. Rankin remained committed to finding a peaceful solution to slavery in spite of the growing violence he faced.
While we have yet to arrive today at the level of division and violence faced in the days leading up to the Civil War, we’re closer than we should be. If we hope to overcome our modern political and cultural divide, it would be worthwhile to consider the powerful example left by America’s forgotten father of abolitionism.
Caleb Franz is the author of The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
