An Escaped Slave Returned To Cincinnati In Disguise & Fooled Even Levi Coffin
The Dumas Hotel is now long gone, replaced by modern office buildings in the downtown block bounded by Fourth, Fifth, Broadway and Lawrence. If the ghost of the Dumas Hotel could speak, it would have some amazing stories to tell. This is just one of them.
The name of Levi Coffin is widely known as an abolitionist and as the "President" of the Underground Railroad that rescued thousands of African Americans from slavery. Coffin's house in Fountain City, Indiana, is now a national historic landmark. The Coffin farm is pretty far from the river and the Underground Railroad required a number of "stations" along the way to get runaway slaves to Levi Coffin's house.
The Dumas Hotel was sometimes called "Station No. 1" on the Underground Railroad. As Gina Ruffin Moore explains in her 2007 book on Cincinnati Black History, the Dumas was a rare hotel owned by African Americans and open to African Americans as customers. Slave owners in Cincinnati on business housed their concubines and children there. It was a nexus of news and information for the African American community.
One day, as Levi Coffin relates in his "Reminiscences," an elegant Southern lady appeared at the Dumas with a woman slave. They had arrived in Cincinnati by steamboat and the lady sent her maidservant out with a request that Levi Coffin and John Hatfield, another major "conductor" on the Underground Railroad. According to Coffin:
"The landlord conducted us up-stairs to the ladies' parlor, and introduced us to the lady from Alabama. She was a fine-looking, well-dressed Creole, with straight black hair and olive complexion, presenting the appearance of the ladies one sees in New Orleans and other Southern cities. She was polite and ladylike in her manner, and informed us that she had sent for us, though she was a stranger to us both, that she might consult us on a matter of business. She went on to say that she had a servant with her whose liberty she wished to secure, and she had been referred to us for advice."
Coffin asked if it was a man or a woman she wished to procure freedom for and the lady called her maidservant into the room and directed her to go into the other room and "get out that bundle."
When the door reopened, it was not a maidservant but a man, a man well known to Coffin and Hatfield, a man known only as Jackson who had worked as a barber in Cincinnati before he was captured as a runaway slave and carried off to Alabama.
Jackson related his story to Coffin and Hatfield.
He had been a slave owned by William Rufus DeVane King who, as Vice President to Franklin Pierce in 1853, served the remarkably brief term of six weeks before dying of tuberculosis while in office. During King's stint in Washington, Jackson ran away and came to Cincinnati.
Jackson opened a barber shop in Cincinnati and prospered for some years without discovery. Somehow his dead master's heirs learned of his whereabouts, and sent an agent to bring him back to Alabama. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave great latitude to these "agents" and they grabbed Jackson in broad daylight at the corner of Fifth and Walnut and hauled him to the Ohio River, where they transported him to Kentucky, a slave state.
In Kentucky, Jackson was bound and taken to Alabama, where he endured several additional years of slavery. While re-enslaved, he married a free Creole of Mobile, who owned some property. According to Coffin:
"When dressed up, she presented the appearance of an elegant Southern lady. A plan was soon formed to gain Jackson's liberty. His wife was to act the part of a lady traveling to Baltimore on business, and Jackson, who was small in stature, was to be disguised as a woman and accompany her as her servant. When all the preparations were made, they sent their trunks on board the regular vessel for New Orleans, and took passage for that city, in their newly assumed characters."
Traveling up the Mississippi and Ohio to Cincinnati, they were pressured on all sides. Slave-owning women advised Jackson's wife to avoid Cincinnati, but to leave her "maidservant" in Covington while conducting business on the Ohio side. Passengers with abolitionist sympathies pulled the "maidservant" aside and counseled her to make a run for it in Ohio. Jackson professed his fidelity to his lady and refused to agree to an escape.
And so, they arrived at the Dumas Hotel and the meeting with Coffin and Hatfield.
"It was decided that it would be unsafe for Jackson to remain in Cincinnati; he was too well known here. He concluded that he would go to Cleveland, where he was not known, and where he could be on the lake shore, so that, if danger appeared, he could step on board a steamer and cross to Canada."
And that is what happened. Jackson took the first available train to Cleveland. He opened a barber shop and wrote for his wife.
"She joined him immediately, and when we last heard from them they were living comfortably and happily at Cleveland. Jackson had a good business in his barber shop, and was troubled with no fear of molestation."
Just one tale from long-gone Dumas Hotel.
