The Ohio River: Free People of Color, J.P. Ball's Anti-Slavery Panorama, and Zones of Fugitivity

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

This panel considers Free People of Color who crossed the Ohio River and settled throughout southern Ohio. The Fugitive Slave Act amplified the immense and intense activity along the Ohio River within the state of Ohio. The panel considers the experience of moving from one side of the river to the other. What were zones of fugitivity along the waterway? The photographer J.P. Ball was a free artist of color in Cincinnati who designed a gigantic painting panorama situated on the Ohio, Mississippi, and Susquehanna Rivers as a critique of the Fugitive Slave Law. Considerations are offered for what was at stake in the acts of migration and resettlement.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Andrea Frohne, Ohio University

Individual Presentations

• J.P. Ball’s Splendid, Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States: The World’s Only African American, Abolitionist Panorama (1855) - Theresa Leininger-Miller, University of Cincinnati

• Historically Free People of Color Moving In and Out of Payne's Crossing, Ohio - Andrea Frohne, Ohio University

• A River Runs through It: Black Appalachia as Zone of Fugitivity - Kenton Butcher, Bucknell University