Ohio River Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Free states border=== Because the river is the southern border of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, it was part of the border between [[free states and slave states]] in the years before the [[American Civil War]]. One antebellum [[Slave trade in the United States|slave trader]] reported that they kept slaves chained two-by-two while navigating the Ohio, only when they reached the Mississippi could the slaves be unchained for a time, because "there was slavery on both sides of the boat."<ref>{{cite book |last=Johnson |first=Walter |title=Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=2009 |isbn=9780674039155 |location=Cambridge |pages=61 |language=en-us |oclc=923120203 |author-link=Walter Johnson (historian)}}</ref> The expression "sold down the river" originated as a lament of Upper South slaves, especially from Kentucky, who were shipped via the Ohio and Mississippi to cotton and sugar plantations in the [[Deep South]]. Changes in crops cultivated in the Upper South resulted in slaves available to be sold to the South, where the expansion of cotton plantations was doing very well. Invention of the [[cotton gin]] made cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable throughout the Black Belt of this region.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.ket.org/underground/behind/mendes.htm |work=KET's Underground Railroad: Passage to Freedom, with Kentucky Humanities Association |title=Geography |access-date=December 19, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141020164911/http://www.ket.org/underground/behind/mendes.htm |archive-date=October 20, 2014 |url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Dunaway |first=Wilma A. |chapter=Put in Master's Pocket: Interstate Slave Trading and the Black Appalachian Diaspora |title=Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation |editor-last=Inscoe |editor-first=John C. |publisher=University Press of Kentucky |year=2000 |pages=5β6 |isbn=978-0813121734 |access-date=December 19, 2018 |quote=Bluegrass dealers made a business of buying up Negroes at auction sales and shipping them down to New Orleans to be sold to owners of cotton and sugar cane plantations. . . . This practice gave rise to the expression 'sold down the river. |chapter-url=https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxkdW5hd2F5d2lsbWF8Z3g6MjgyY2NkZDgxYzJlYWNmMw |chapter-format=DOC |archive-date=May 8, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210508104116/https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxkdW5hd2F5d2lsbWF8Z3g6MjgyY2NkZDgxYzJlYWNmMw |url-status=live}}</ref> Before and during the Civil War, the Ohio River was called the "[[River Jordan]]" by slaves crossing it to escape to freedom in the North via the [[Underground Railroad]].<ref>{{cite web |last=Hudson |first=J. Blaine |title=Crossing the "Dark Line": Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Louisville and North Central Kentucky (excerpt) |url=http://www.ket.org/underground/research/crossing.htm |work=KET's Underground Railroad: Passage to Freedom, with Kentucky Humanities Association |access-date=February 25, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130212015127/http://www.ket.org/underground/research/crossing.htm |archive-date=February 12, 2013 |url-status=dead}}</ref> More escaping slaves, estimated in the thousands, made their perilous journey north to freedom across the Ohio River than anywhere else across the north-south frontier. [[Harriet Beecher Stowe]]'s ''[[Uncle Tom's Cabin]]'', the bestselling novel that fueled abolitionist work, was the best known of the anti-slavery novels that portrayed such escapes across the Ohio. The times have been expressed by 20th-century novelists as well, such as the [[Nobel Prize in Literature|Nobel Prize]]-winning [[Toni Morrison]], whose novel ''[[Beloved (novel)|Beloved]]'' was adapted as a film of the same name. She also composed the libretto for the opera ''[[Margaret Garner (opera)|Margaret Garner]]'' (2005), based on the life and trial of an enslaved woman who escaped with her family across the river. Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page