UGRR Leader Elijah Anderson: Martyred by Kentucky Enslavers?

'Superintendent' of Underground Railroad found dead in his cell on the day he was to be released from Kentucky State Penitentiary

This color lithograph, First Kentucky Penitentiary-Completed 1799, was published in Sneed's History of the Kentucky Penitentiary, Frankfort, 1860. It would have been the building that housed Elijah Anderson during his imprisonment in the late 1850s, as well as "The Petticoat Abolitionist" Delia Webster in the 1840s.

Born a free man in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1808, young Elijah Anderson worked on the steamships that sailed the Ohio River as a blacksmith, working on steam fittings and maintaining the engines that propelled the boats up and down the river.

The opportunity to travel the river likely gave Anderson access to conductors and others who participated in the operations of the Underground Railroad, which was extremely active in Jefferson County, Indiana, particularly in the county seat, Madison. The largest city in the Indiana Territory and later the state, Madison was a bustling Ohio River port, receiving steamboats that delivered goods and mail, and that also transported pork and other products produced by the numerous industries there. 

No doubt his experiences on steamboats gave him a front-row seat to the operations of the Underground Railroad, which often used riverboats to help move freedom-seekers along the Ohio River to various “stations,” then aiding them north through Indiana to freedom in Michigan and across the Detroit River in Canada.

Anderson eventually became acquainted with George DeBaptiste, who worked there as a barber and also ran a riverboat transportation business between Madison and Cincinnati. For about 10 years, DeBaptiste aided freedom-seekers in Jefferson County, escorting them to farms 10 or 12 miles north of the city—particularly in Lancaster, home of the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Society.

Anderson arrived in Madison sometime in the 1830s and eventually became proprietor of his own blacksmith shop on the southeast corner of Third and Walnut streets. In his dissertation, Eleutherian College: Rosetta Stone of the Jefferson County, Indiana, Anti-Slavery Environ, historian Mark Furnish, Ph.D., said accounts show that Anderson worked with UGRR agents John Carr, James Baxter, Jesse and Jacob Wagner, Chapman Harris, Col. John and Samuel Ledgerwood, Charles Almond, James Stewart, and Jared G. Ryker. He was considered a close friend in writings by another conductor, John H. Tibbets, and likely also worked with DeBaptiste and John Lott. Anderson married Lott's daughter, Lucinda, on January 2, 1834.

As one of the most competent and successful conductors, Anderson earned the title of “general superintendent” of the UGRR from Rush R. Sloane, an abolitionist in Northwest Ohio. But, he also was an activist: He and others legally challenged an Indiana law that required Blacks living in the state on or before September 1, 1831, to pay a $500 bond. The bond was required to ensure that Blacks wouldn't become "wards of the state," depending on public funds to survive. Judge Miles C. Eggleston, who was pro-slavery, ruled the law constitutional; a Madison newspaper reported that Anderson was forced to pay the bond or be expelled by the overseers of the poor,

Anderson had a reputation for being an aggressive conductor, traveling frequently into the slave state of Kentucky to assist those wanting to flee bondage in their plight. He claimed to have aided 800 freedom-seekers during his tenure as a superintendent in Madison. Historians estimate, however, that Anderson may have aided more than one thousand freedom-seekers during his tenure.

In 1847, however, he was sued along with his friend and UGRR co-worker, the Rev. Chapman Harris, and others for the rousting of John Simmons, another free Black man severely beaten by thhose suspeting Simmons of betraying his race by deceiving freedom-seekers and turning them in to slave-catchers like Jefferson County Sheriff (and slave-catcher) Robert Right Rea in exchange for money.

In the end, the defendants lost the suit; Anderson was forced to sell his property to cover the judgment and years' worth of legal expenses. By 1853, however, Anderson recovered economically, and was living on Walnut Street in a brick townhouse valued at $900, according to tax records. Not long after, however, Anderson and his second wife, Charlotte, moved their family to McLean County, Illinois, probably because Madison was becoming a dangerous place for anyone associated with UGRR activity. Furnish states that it is possible they later moved from Illinois to Cleveland, Ohio. There are accounts that he continued his UGRR work in the 1850s, delivering freedom-seekers across Lake Erie and into Canada.

Elijah Anderson would have been held in the Trimble County jail (first opened in 1800) in Bedford, Kentucky, after his 1856 arrest and during his trial for aiding an enslaved man named George escape his slave owner in Henry County. And, again, two years earlier, Delia Webster also was imprisoned in this same jail.

In 1856, during a trip to the Cincinnati area, Anderson was captured and arrested, tried and convicted in Trimble County, Kentucky, for enticing a young enslaved man named George away from his slave owner, a John Scott of Henry County. He was sentenced to eight years in the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Frankfort.

Of Anderson’s arrest, Furnish writes: 

There are versions of this almost mythical account of why Anderson was arrested.  One account has the bold and courageous Elijah attempting to rescue a freedom-seeker who had been apprehended and was being paraded through the streets of Madison on his way back to slavery in the South.

Another account has Anderson betrayed. He was engaged in his work with the Underground Railroad, escorting a group of fugitive slaves to Cincinnati and passing them off to another conductor.  On his way down the Ohio aboard a mail boat he was grabbed by a slave-catcher named Bly. Bly had been tipped off that Anderson would be on the boat.

Another account has Elijah Anderson arrested by Louisville police officers. The police were tipped off by an African-American man who wanted the reward money Kentucky slave owners were offering for Elijah. … It is said that Chapman Harris attempted to rescue Elijah from prison.

According to an article published years later in the Madison Daily Courier, he was received at the penitentiary on June 18, 1857, with his original release date set in February 1866. The article quoted court or prison documents that described Anderson thusly: “intemperate, 49 years old, education poor, from Virginia, blacksmith, married.” The document described him as just over 5 feet, 9 inches tall, weighing 139 pounds, with a black complexion, black eyes, “kinky” hair, and sporting a scar on the nose, between his eyes, two or three more scars on his right wrist, another on the inside of his right knee, and another on the outside of his right foot.

Anderson was found dead in his cell on March 4, 1861, which coincidentally was the day he was to be released as well as the day Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as the fourteenth president of the United States. 

The article mentioned early states that Elijah’s daughter, Mattie Anderson, who taught school in Frankfort, Ky., and had arrived the day he died to bring him back home, later petitioned the court that the label “intemperate” be removed from her father’s description, testifying that both he and her mother were involved in the Temperance movement. 

Mattie Anderson, with the help of a freedman named Peter Smith, had her father’s remains disinterred from the cemetery at the penitentiary and transported a cemetery located about 14 miles from Gallipolis, Ohio, to be reinterred.

Anderson's cause of death was never concluded. There is no proof that he was martyred for his work, but the timing seems as though it might be more than just coincidence.