Sojourner Truth's America

14. “God, You Drive”: The Sojourner in Ohio

221 I am pleading for my people— A poor, down-trodden race, Who dwell in freedom’s boasted land, With no abiding place. — sojourner’s hymn chapter 14 “God, You Drive” the sojourner in ohio I “I got to Buffalo on the evening of the same day I left you,” Sojourner Truth informed Amy Post by letter in early June. She had “a beautiful passage up the lake” (Lake Erie) that night, and arrived in Cleveland the next morning. Cleveland, like Rochester, began as an insignificant little village. In 1796, a black New York pilot and Iroquois interpreter (“Black Joe of Buffalo”) guided Moses Cleveland (Olive Gilbert’s great-uncle) to the site that bears his name. By 1850, thanks to the Erie and Ohio canals, Cleveland was the most important city in northern Ohio, called the Western Reserve.1 From early statehood, Ohio denied civil and educational rights to blacks, forbade settlement without freedom papers, and required a $500 bond and a white patron. Harboring a self-emancipated person carried a $500 fine. In 1850, northern Ohio’s reported black population was small and scattered: 224 in Cleveland and 350 in all of Cuyahoga County; 264 in Lorain County, home of Oberlin College; 202 in Erie; and 212 in Summit County. Other Reserve counties reported fewer than one hundred African Americans. These figures exclude hosts of self-emancipated people, the “illegal aliens” of the time, mostly living 222 sojourner truth and the antislavery apostles in agricultural communities. Southern Ohio’s much larger black population faced intense white hostility. Bloody attacks on Cincinnati blacks in 1829 and 1836 spurred a mass exodus to Canada. But oppression inspired activism. In 1834, Chillicothe blacks founded the Colored Anti-Slavery Society, and Cincinnati whites edited a colonizationist-antislavery newspaper. Moreover, in 1841, Cincinnati blacks counterattacked with a vengeance when whites invaded their community.2 In Cleveland, Sojourner “stopped among the colored friends and was treated with great kindness.” One young black activist, William Howard Day, was a longtime acquaintance from New York. Day’s activist mother Eliza had helped found Zion Church and had been targeted by the 1834 mob. Like Sojourner Truth, William Day settled in Northampton in 1844; he studied under the guardianship of her friend the Abolitionist editor John P. Williston before going to Oberlin. Day now worked for True Democrat, a Free Soil newspaper in Cleveland. Sojourner must have also met Day’s fiancée, Lucie Stanton, reportedly the first black female college graduate. Stanton’s wealthy stepfather financed the Underground Railroad , posting bail and paying legal fees for conductors and apprehended blacks. Fifty-six-year-old John Malvin was another black leader Sojourner probably met. A self-educated, self-emancipated Virginia carpenter, he was black Cleveland’s “leading spirit” and most significant underground station keeper.3 In Cleveland, Sojourner did not witness the nurturing spirituality among African Americans that bridged socioeconomic barriers. Instead, most of Cleveland ’s small black middle class integrated into white churches. The lone black church, St. John’s A.M.E., had been established in 1830 and purchased its own building in 1848. Since three of St. John’s five trustees could not write, the little church was said to lack an “elevated” membership; it serviced the uneducated, poor, and self-emancipated blacks living in and around the river-front shanties and in settlements outside the city. Black churches were conservative about female preachers, in any case. Nonetheless, Sojourner Truth spoke at an antislavery meeting held during her four-day stay; before leaving, she sold $3 worth of books among her people.4 She moved on to Akron and the Woman’s Convention. After arriving at the hotel where the participants were staying, she paced up and down the lobby, no doubt seeking friendly or familiar faces. Two Ohio women, Frances Dana Gage and Hannah Tracy Cutler saw the “tall colored woman” carrying a basket on her arm, “in which she carried some little books.” As Lucius Hine, a convention vice president, joined the two white women entering the parlor, he joked about Sojourner Truth: “This I suppose is one of the delegates to your convention.” Both women “disclaimed any knowledge of this particular delegate.” Cutler, the convention’s secretary, was a widowed schoolteacher; Gage, the presiding officer, was a homemaker who also wrote poetry, short stories, and a column called “Aunt The Sojourner in Ohio 223 Fanny” for Jane Swisshelm’s...