Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

Among those awaiting trial for aiding in Mary Ellen’s rescue and escape were the pastor of the leading Presbyterian church in the town, the superintendent of a Methodist Sunday School, a professor from Oberlin College who had happened to be in the place on that day, a merchant, two lawyers and a physician, together with some clerks, laboring men, a farmer and several free negroes. The day following the conclusion of Rhoda’s trial was Sunday, and the Presbyterian minister preached from the jail yard to a large concourse of people who stood for two hours in a biting wind, for it was now well on in the winter, listening with the closest attention. The sermon, which was mainly an anti-slavery address, added fuel to the already flaming excitement.

Meetings were held and bands of men began to organize and arm themselves. Militia guarded the jail night and day. The pro-slavery sympathizers, though in the minority in this region, yet made up a considerable share of the populace, and, angered and uneasy, they also began to prepare for whatever might happen. To hints that the Fugitive Slave law prisoners might yet be delivered from jail they retaliated with threats that those of their own party who were under durance for infraction of state laws should no longer suffer imprisonment.

So acute did the situation become that Governor Chase hurried to Washington to consult with President Buchanan, assuring him that while he intended to support the federal government, as long as its authority was exercised legitimately, nevertheless he felt it his duty to protect the state officials and the state courts and that this should be done, though it took every man in the state to do it.

Finally, a compromise was arranged by which the federal government dropped the remaining prosecutions for the escape of Mary Ellen and released the prisoners, while the state authorities dismissed the suits against the slave trader’s agent and his companion and the members of the marshal’s posse.

The episode was amicably settled, but the flames of contention had been so fed by it that they mounted higher and higher. Meetings continued to be held all over those portions of the state where anti-slavery sentiment was strong. They culminated, soon after Rhoda’s release, in an immense mass-convention at Cleveland attended by many thousand people and addressed by public men of distinction, where, amid the greatest enthusiasm, resolutions were passed denouncing the Dred Scott decision and declaring the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional and therefore void.

In the pocket of the dress she had worn on the day of her arrest Rhoda chanced to find, soon after this convention, Charlotte’s note telling of her engagement. She smiled soberly as she thought of all the consequences that had resulted from this manifestation of her sister’s puckish spirit.

“If she hadn’t misled me this way,” Rhoda’s thoughts ran, “I wouldn’t have forgotten about everything else the way I did for a few minutes, and I would have kept watch of Mary Ellen and made her keep her veil down, and then that man wouldn’t have recognized her, and we’d have gone right on and nothing would have happened!”

Rhoda’s trial aroused the keenest interest all over the North. But it was an interest that cared only for principles. The personalities of those engaged in the matter were of the slightest consequence. Everywhere, in newspapers and in conversation, there was discussion of the affair, and of the consequences to which it might lead. But the people concerned in it were only so many cogs in a mighty Wheel of Fate, turning resistlessly, and ever about to bring into the present, out of the unknown future, no man could tell what.

To the South and its northern sympathizers the whole affair was irritating and alarming in high degree. Democratic newspapers and their readers declared the attitude of “Chase and his abolition crew” to be equivalent to a declaration of war against the United States and welcomed the prospect, while the compromise by which the difficulty was finally settled they described with bitterness as “another triumph” for the creed of the “traitorous higher law with its open sanction of treason and rebellion.”

But there was one element in the North to whom Rhoda Ware’s share in these events was not a matter of indifference. In the eyes of the abolitionists she was a martyr to the cause to which they were zealously devoted and during the month in which she served out her sentence letters poured in upon her containing money for the payment of her fine and warm words of praise. The Female Anti-Slavery Society of Hillside sent her the whole of their small store, saying, “we shall be proud to share even so little in the martyrdom of our beloved president.” Rhoda wept over it, knowing well at what cost of personal sacrifice the little hoard had been gathered. But she knew, too, that to beg them to take back their offering would be to stab their very hearts. Other anti-slavery societies in Ohio and elsewhere sent contributions. There were checks from rich men in New York, New England and Pennsylvania, whose purses were always open for the anti-slavery cause and whose custom it was to give brotherly encouragement to Underground operators who fell into the toils of the Fugitive Slave Act by helping to pay their fines. The amount in which Rhoda had been mulcted was entirely paid, as was the assessment in many another case, by these enthusiastic co-workers.