The Underground Railroad

Chapter 7 Summary

This chapter introduces us to the character of Arnold Ridgeway, who is infamous for catching fugitive enslaved people. Ridgeway is the son of a blacksmith. From a young age, Ridgeway viewed his father’s work, with its transfixing molten iron, as “a window into the primitive energies of the world” (75). Ridgeway had a drinking partner named Tom Bird, who was Indigenous. When encouraged by inebriation, Tom would often speak of the Great Spirit that dwelled in all living things. These ideas reminded Ridgeway of his feelings about iron—the “liquid fire” of the earth that could be shaped and wrought into all manner of useful objects: “nails, horseshoes, plows, knives, guns. Chains” (75). While a young Ridgeway watched his father expertly manipulate the molten iron, his father assured him that he, too, would one day find his spirit.

At 14, and with a strapping body that betrayed none of the confusion within it, Ridgeway took up with the patrollers. At the time, the cotton trade was inflating the number of enslaved people in the country, while the enslaved people revolting in the West Indies were worrying local planters. The number of patrollers, therefore, was also rising—and Ridgeway quickly found his place among their ranks.

Patrolling was not difficult. The patrollers stopped enslaved people and freemen alike—not only for amusement, but to remind them of their place. Word of runaways cheerfully animated them. They would interrogate frightened enslaved people and terrorize freemen, who would hide their valuables and pray that the violence would be limited to objects. Through patrolling, white men could indulge in the thrill of violence and domination—and they also gained insider insight about the best places to indulge themselves with enslaved women.

During those days, Ridgeway was more staid than his compatriots—boys and men of ill repute considered criminals in other countries. While others would eagerly dispatch flashy guns to fell those who flee, Ridgeway followed Chandler’s example and favored lurking in the dark to nab African wenches furtively running through the woods to see their wives. Ridgeway would run them down like animals and then beat them with an impassioned taste for their punishment—although, paradoxically, his pursuit of them was the only thing that cured his own restlessness.

Ridgeway’s father regarded patrolling as second-rate work, but when Ridgeway came into manhood at 18, he reminded his father that both of them worked for Mr. Eli Whitney at the end of the day: “The two men were parts of the same system, serving a nation rising to its destiny” (79).

Ridgeway became a full enslaved person catcher upon his first visit to New Jersey. His pursuit of an enslaved women named Betsy took him there. Ridgeway had never traveled so far before and found each of the country’s various states “more lunatic and complicated than the last” (79). The deputy at the Trenton jail that held Betsy treated Ridgeway with respect, as this was not a simple case of chasing down a boy or disrupting a festival for idle pleasure. Betsy offered to trade sex for her freedom, and Ridgeway had his first sexual experience with her while making no promises about her freedom. When he turned her over to her enslaver, she spat in his face, and the men laughed. Ridgeway used the $20 he earned from the endeavor to buy new boots and a coat.

He soon began frequently working in New York, where the “gargantuan metropolis, the liberty movement, and the ingenuity of the colored community all converged to portray the true scale of the hunt” (80). Ridgeway learned the ins and outs of the city quickly. When sympathizers would smuggle runaways into the city ports, stevedores, dockhands, and clerks would pass information to Ridgeway, which he would use to snatch fugitives away from freedom. Freemen would inform on runaways as well.

Soon, Ridgeway began to run with a “circle of slave catchers, gorillas stuffed into black suits with ridiculous derbies” (80). Together, they tracked their quarry for days on end. Ridgeway scorned the blackbirders and the Five Points gangs of patrollers who “hog-tied freemen and dragged them south for auction” (81), viewing their work as vulgar and beneath him.

Ridgeway also contended with the abolitionist movement in New York. There, the courts were required to sign off before Ridgeway could transport his charges, while abolitionist lawyers were prone to erect elaborate legal schemes to prevent his work. These lawyers argued that any slave who crossed the New York border, a Free State, should become free. They would latch on to any detail in a bulletin to cast doubt on the identity of captured enslaved people. And so, “it became a game, prying [them] from jail before the lawyers unveiled their latest gambit” (81). Ridgeway also astutely used bribery to bypass legal procedures.

Ridgeway would wait on the docks for smugglers and watch the grand ships from Europe unload their wares and passengers. He would watch hapless and disoriented newcomers stagger across the dock and feel certain that “they’d leave their mark on this new land, as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable racial logic” (82). He began to see the American imperative—“if you can keep it, it’s yours” (82)—as the true Great Spirit.

Ridgeway built a name for himself. His unique approach was to concentrate on the idea that the enslaved person was running from him, rather than on trying to predict their next destination. It served him well. When his father died, Ridgeway returned to the South with a posse. There were too many fugitives (with higher bounties than in the North) for him to handle alone. In the South, there were no legal stratagems to waylay him. The Underground Railroad, which he viewed as “a criminal conspiracy devoted to theft of property” (83), ran no stops.

A Delaware abolitionist named August Carter particularly bothered Ridgeway. Carter used his ideal white features to ingratiate others to his cause. It was well-known that Carter’s home, only a hundred yards from the river, was an Underground Railroad stop—even though all the raids would always come up empty. Abolitionist Methodists distributed abolitionist pamphlets from his printing press, and London newspapers printed his arguments without rebuttal. He also had friends among judges who forced Ridgeway to surrender enslaved people on three separate occasions: “Passing Ridgeway outside the jail, he’d tip his hat” (83).

Ridgeway found it necessary to put Carter in his place. Ridgeway, along with his posse, came to Carter’s home and beat his face in so savagely that Ridgeway’s hands were swollen for two days afterward. His posse raped Mrs. Carter violently. Then, they set the house on fire. Mr. Carter then relocated to Worcester with a new profession as cobbler.

Ridgeway’s name soon became notorious, but every now and then, enslaved people evaded him. He was itching for a challenging hunt when he was summoned to Randall. He had failed in hunting Mabel, which ignited his desire to capture Cora. He also resolved to find and snuff out the Underground Railroad presence in Georgia.