The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father
By Caleb Franz.
Post Hill Press, 2024.
Paperback, 336 pages, $18.99.
Reviewed by Peter Biles.
The past is like a waterfall, and history is like the glass of water we pull from it. We often wonder what, or who, we’re missing in the grand story.
The Conductor, by emerging author Caleb Franz, adds a vital drop of water to the chalice of history with its revelatory account of the life of Reverend John Rankin, the Presbyterian minister who played a major role in the 19th-century abolition movement and the famous Underground Railroad. Franz opens up the book with a description of George Washington walking through the heat of a battle in the French and Indian War with bullets flying through his coat and hat, leaving him unharmed. Such images form the foundations of the American psyche, speaking to the nation’s resolve, defiance against tyranny, and willingness to lay it all on the line for freedom. George Washington is considered a hero—one that every American knows. But there are other men and women who have labored in different and yet no less heroic ways and have consequently been lost to time’s passage.
John Rankin is one of those men. While George Washington represents America’s ideals of liberty and justice for all, Rankin was a man who dedicated his life to ensuring the nation lived up to its promise. For Rankin, slavery was the deepest affront against God and the human person, and he would refuse to rest until such a demonic institution was forever abolished from the so-called “land of the free.”
Rankin was born in Tennessee in 1793 and became an ordained Presbyterian minister as a young man. He eventually moved with his wife, Jean, to Ripley, Ohio, a small town on the banks of the Ohio River. Ohio was a free state, but Ripley itself was a vicious mess, filled with immorality, vice, and plenty of anti-black fervor to fuel protestation against Rankin and his preaching. Franz elaborately describes how, from the start of their time in Ripley, Rankin and his family were heckled and verbally abused for speaking up against slavery. Franz particularly emphasizes Rankin’s perseverance in the face of constant pushback. And in time, he would have more than mere hecklers to worry about.
Franz’s comprehensive knowledge of American history from the Revolution to the American Civil War makes The Conductor an informative and entertaining read. Not only does it offer a compelling portrait of a man lost to history, but it also serves as a wonderful introduction to the first 100 years of this country’s tumultuous beginnings, in which slavery played a controversial role not only in the mid-1800s but from the moment Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson himself, although a slave owner, was opposed to the institution and didn’t want to see it spread westward. The spread of slavery in the ever-expanding United States would become a hotbed of tension and conflict. Through it all, Rankin stood tall as a major influence in the abolition movement, inspiring many of its key figures in the years leading up to the Civil War.
William Lloyd Garrison is a household name among abolitionists. Initially, Garrison was a proponent of colonization and gradual emancipation. The former entailed resettling freed slaves in Africa. Gradual emancipation would incrementally free slaves to hypothetically ensure that slave states could adjust. It was only after reading John Rankin’s Letters on Slavery, which were originally written to Rankin’s brother Thomas and later published and widely disseminated, that Garrison abandoned these approaches and decided that abolition must be total and immediate.
Rankin was also acquainted with Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the United States in its first year and topped a million copies sold in the United Kingdom. Abraham Lincoln credited Stowe with starting the Civil War, so brutally awakening was her narrative of slavery in America. Franz notes in the book how Stowe actually drew upon the real-life story of a woman crossing the Ohio River in the dead of winter with her infant in her arms to reach “Liberty Hill,” Rankin’s homestead that stood atop a knoll behind the town of Ripley. Rankin and his family were astonished at this woman’s commitment to freedom. Slave hunters were close on her heels, and it was a miracle that she was able to cross the river, since the ice was beginning to thaw and break off into chunks. Liberty Hill became a shining beacon of hope for fugitive slaves travelling the Underground Railroad en route to Canada. It was a metaphorical “city on a hill,” promising salvation to desperate souls.
Abolitionism wasn’t just a political campaign. It was also a theological issue that divided many churches of the time. While many pastors and churches supported slavery during Rankin’s lifetime, the Bible informed every square inch of John Rankin’s worldview. From the beginning of his training as a minister, his opposition to slavery was firmly rooted in his conviction that this heinous institution made a mockery of human beings made in the image of God. No person, Rankin argued, was created by God for servitude. Rankin devoted a lot of his preaching to debunking the notions that the Bible taught slavery and that God created certain groups of humans for unpaid servitude. “Instances of slavery in the Bible are incomparable to the modern example of modern slavery, he argued,” writes Franz. “Slavery in the Bible was limited in duration and often used as a means to pay off debt or punishment of crimes. This is in stark contrast to American slaves, who were kidnapped from Africa and sold into bondage.”
Rankin also emphasized how slavery always lays the groundwork for tyranny, which supposedly was what the United States despised the most. Rankin believed that “mankind was created with a yearning for freedom.” Everyone in the world has a right to this basic freedom and needs to access the Word of God for the words of eternal life. Since slaves were not allowed to read, Rankin argued, they couldn’t be adequately given access to belief in Christ. Rankin’s words remind me of a book I’m currently going through by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity. Ratzinger posits that Christianity is a “philosophy of freedom,” and that God created beings outside of himself who are endowed with some sense of self-determination. Slavery destroys the humanity of its victims and strips them of their basic right to choose. It also corrupts the souls of the slaveholder and fills the oppressor with false feelings of superiority and entitlement.
There are many reasons to read The Conductor by Caleb Franz. Read it for the historical overview of a nation still trying to figure out what it stands for. Read it for the political drama of Whigs, Democrats, and the budding Republican movement. But ultimately, read it for the moral vision pulsing at the core of John Rankin’s heart. Read it to feed off of his righteous cause for freedom. Read it to consider what moral blind spots we have in the West today, and how, buttressed by God’s Word and a true patriotism founded on principles of liberty and justice, we can follow in the good minister’s example.
Peter Biles is a contributor for Young Voices and the author of two novels and a short story collection. His upcoming collection of stories, Last November, will be published later this Spring.
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