The
Underground Railroad
from Slavery to Freedom

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD:
LEVI COFFIN RECEIVING A COMPANY OF FUGITIVES IN THE OUTSKIRTS OF CINCINNATI, OHIO.
(From a painting by C. T. Webber, Cincinnati, Ohio.)

The
Underground Railroad
from Slavery to Freedom
A Comprehensive History

Wilbur H. Siebert

With an Introduction by
Albert Bushnell Hart

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Mineola, New York

[Bibliographical Note]

This Dover edition, first published in 2006, is an unabridged republication of The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, originally published by The Macmillan Company, New York and London, in 1898. The original fold-out map facing page 113 has now been set into the book on three separate pages in the same location.

International Standard Book Number: 0-486-45039-2

Manufactured in the United States of America
Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N. Y. 11501

[To My Wife]

[INTRODUCTION]

BY ALBERT BUSHNELL HART

Of all the questions which have interested and divided the people of the United States, none since the foundation of the Federal Union has been so important, so far-reaching, and so long contested as slavery. During the first half of the nineteenth century the other great national questions were nearly all economic—taxation, currency, banks, transportation, lands,—and they had a strong material basis, a flavor of self-interest; but though slavery had also an economic side, the reasons for the onslaught upon it were chiefly moral. The first objection brought by the slave-power against the anti-slavery propaganda was the cry of the sacredness of vested and property rights against attack by sentimentalists; but what dignified the whole contest was the very fact that the sentiment for human rights was at the bottom of it, and that the abolitionists felt a moral responsibility even though property owners suffered. The slavery question, which in origin was sectional, became national as the moral issues grew clearer; and finally loomed up as the dominant question through the determination of both sides to use the power and prestige of the national government. From the moral agitation came also the personal element in the struggle, the development of strong characters, like Calhoun, Toombs, Stephens and Jefferson Davis on one side; like Lundy, Lovejoy, Garrison, Giddings, Sumner, Chase, John Brown and Lincoln on the other.

Among the many weak spots in the system of slavery none gave such opportunities to Northern abolitionists as the locomotive powers of the slaves; a "thing" which could hear its owner talking about freedom, a "thing" which could steer itself Northward and avoid the "patterollers," was a thing of impaired value as a machine, however intelligent as a human being. From earliest colonial times fugitive slaves helped to make slavery inconvenient and expensive. So long as slavery was general, every slaveholder in every colony was a member of an automatic association for stopping and returning fugitives; but, from the Revolution on, the fugitives performed the important function of keeping continually before the people of the states in which slavery had ceased, the fact that it continued in other parts of the Union. Nevertheless, though between 1777 and 1804 all the states north of Maryland threw off slavery, the free states covenanted in the Federal Constitution of 1787 to interpose no obstacle to the recapture of fugitives who might come across their borders; and thus continued to be partners in the system of slavery. From the first there was reluctance and positive opposition to this obligation; and every successful capture was an object lesson to communities out of hearing of the whipping-post and out of sight of the auction-block.

In aiding fugitive slaves the abolitionist was making the most effective protest against the continuance of slavery; but he was also doing something more tangible; he was helping the oppressed, he was eluding the oppressor; and at the same time he was enjoying the most romantic and exciting amusement open to men who had high moral standards. He was taking risks, defying the laws, and making himself liable to punishment, and yet could glow with the healthful pleasure of duty done.

To this element of the personal and romantic side of the slavery contest Professor Siebert has devoted himself in this book. The Underground Railroad was simply a form of combined defiance of national laws, on the ground that those laws were unjust and oppressive. It was the unconstitutional but logical refusal of several thousand people to acknowledge that they owed any regard to slavery or were bound to look on fleeing bondmen as the property of the slaveholders, no matter how the laws read. It was also a practical means of bringing anti-slavery principles to the attention of the lukewarm or pro-slavery people in free states; and of convincing the South that the abolitionist movement was sincere and effective. Above all, the Underground Railroad was the opportunity for the bold and adventurous; it had the excitement of piracy, the secrecy of burglary, the daring of insurrection; to the pleasure of relieving the poor negro's sufferings it added the triumph of snapping one's fingers at the slave-catcher; it developed coolness, indifference to danger, and quickness of resource.

The first task of the historian of the Underground Railroad is to gather his material, and the characteristic of this book is to consider the whole question on a basis of established facts. The effort is timely; for there are still living, or were living when the work began, many hundreds of persons who knew the intimate history of parts of the former secret system of transportation; the book is most timely, for these invaluable details are now fast disappearing with the death of the actors in the drama. Professor Siebert has rescued and put on record events which in a few years will have ceased to be in the memory of living men. He has done for the history of slavery what the students of ballad and folk-lore have done for literature; he has collected perishing materials.

Reminiscence is of course, standing alone, an insufficient basis for historical generalization. On that point Professor Siebert has been careful to explain his principle: he does not attempt to generalize from single memories not otherwise substantiated, but to use reminiscences which confirm each other, to search out telling illustrations, and to discover what the tendencies were from numerous contrasted testimonies. Actual contemporary records are scanty; a few are here preserved, such as David Putnam's memorandum, and Campbell's letter; and the crispness which they give to the narrative makes us wish for more. The few available biographies, autobiographies, and contemporary memoirs have been diligently sought out and used; and no variety of sources has been ignored which seemed likely to throw light on the subject. The ground has been carefully traversed; and it is not likely that much will ever be added to the body of information collected by Professor Siebert. His list of sources, described in the introductory chapter and enumerated in the Appendices, is really a carefully winnowed bibliography of the contemporary materials on slavery.

The book is practically divided into four parts: the Railroad itself (Chapters ii, v); the railroad hands (Chapters iii, iv, vi); the freight (Chapters vii, viii); and political relations and effects (Chapters ix, x, xi). Perhaps one of the most interesting contributions to our knowledge of the subject is the account of the beginnings of the system of secret and systematic aid to fugitives. The evidence goes to show that there was organization in Pennsylvania before 1800; and in Ohio soon after 1815. The book thus becomes a much-needed guide to information about the obscure anti-slavery movement which preceded William Lloyd Garrison, and to some degree prepared the way for him; and it will prove a source for the historian of the influence of the West in national development. As yet we know too little of the anti-slavery movement which so profoundly stirred the Western states, including Kentucky and Missouri, and which came closely into contact with the actual conditions of slavery. As Professor Siebert points out, most of the early abolitionists in the West were former slaveholders or sons of slaveholders.

Professor Siebert has applied to the whole subject a graphic form of illustration which is at the same time a test of his conclusions. How can the scattered reminiscences and records of escapes in widely separated states be shown to refer to the results of one organized method? Plainly by applying them to the actual face of the country, so as to see whether the alleged centres of activity have a geographical connection. The painstaking map of the lines of the Underground Railroad "system" is an historical contribution of a novel kind; and it is impossible to gainsay its evidence, which is expounded in detail in one of the chapters of the book. The result is a gratifying proof of the usefulness of scientific methods in historical investigation; one who lived in an anti-slavery community before the Civil War is fascinated by tracing the hitherto unknown stretches north and south from the centre which he knew. The map bears testimony not only to the wide-spread practice of aiding fugitives, but to the devotion of the conductors on the Underground Railroad. How useful a section of Mr. Siebert's map would have been to the slave-catcher in the 50's, when so many strange negroes were appearing and disappearing in the free states! The facts presented in the brief compass of the map would have been of immense value also to the leaders of the Southern Confederacy in 1861, as a confirmation of their argument that the North would not perform its constitutional duty of returning the fugitives; yet there is no record in this book of the betraying of the secrets of the U. G. R. R. by any person in the service. The moral bond of opposition to the whole slave power kept men at work forwarding fugitives by a road of which they themselves knew but a small portion. The political philosophers who think that the Civil War might have been averted by timely concessions would do well to study this picture of the wide distribution of persons who saw no peace in slavery.

Amid all the varieties of anti-slavery men, from the Garrisonian abolitionist to faint-hearted slaveholders like James G. Birney, it is interesting to see how many had a share in the Underground Railroad; and how many earned a reputation as heroes. Professor Siebert has gathered the names of about 3,200 persons known to have been engaged in this work—a roll of honor for many American families. Everybody knew that the fugitives were aided by Fred Douglass, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings, John Brown, Levi Coffin, Thomas Garrett and Theodore Parker; but this book gives us some account of the interest of men like Thaddeus Stevens, not commonly counted among the sons of the prophets; and performs a special service to the student of history and the lover of heroic deeds, by the brief account of the services of obscure persons who deserve a place in the hearts of their countrymen. Men like Rev. George Bourne, Rev. James Duncan and Rev. John Rankin, years before Garrison's propaganda, had begun to speak and publish against slavery, and to prepare men's minds for a righteous disregard of Fugitive Slave Acts. Joseph Sider, with his carefully subdivided peddler's wagon, deserves a place alongside the better known Henry Box Brown. The thirty-five thousand stripes of Calvin Fairbank, seventeen years a convict in the Kentucky penitentiary, range him with Lovejoy as an anti-slavery martyr. Rev. Charles Torrey had in the work of rousing slaves to escape, the same devotion to a fatal duty as that which animated John Brown. And no one who has ever heard Harriet Tubman describe her part as "Moses" of the fugitives can ever forget that African prophetess, whose intense vigor is relieved by a shrewd and kindly humanity.

The quiet recital of the facts has all the charm of romance to the passengers on the Underground Railroad: whether travelling by night in a procession of covered wagons, or boldly by day in disguises; whether boxed up as so much freight, or riding on passes unhesitatingly given by abolitionist directors of railroads; the fugitives in these pages rejoice in their prospect of liberty. The road sign near Oberlin, of a tiger chasing a negro, was a white man's joke; but it was a negro who said, apropos of his master's discouraging account of Canada: "They put some extract onto it to keep us from comin'"; and neither Whittier in his poems, nor Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novels, imagined a more picturesque incident than the crossing of the Detroit River by Fairfield's "gang" of twenty-eight rescued souls singing, "I'm on my way to Canada, where colored men are free," to the joyful accompaniment of their firearms.

To the settlements of fugitives in Canada Professor Siebert has given more labor than appears in his book; for his own visits supplement the accounts of earlier investigators; and we have here the first complete account of the reception of the negroes in Canada and their progress in civilization.

Upon the general question of the political effects of the Underground Railroad, the book adds much to our information, by its discussion of the probable numbers of fugitives, and of the alarm caused in the slave states by their departure. The census figures of 1850 and 1860 are shown to be wilfully false; and the escape of thousands of persons seems established beyond cavil. Into the constitutional question of the right to take fugitives, the book goes with less minuteness, since it is intended to be a contribution to knowledge, and not an addition to the abundant literature on the legal side of slavery.

It has been the effort of Professor Siebert to furnish the means for settling the following questions: the origin of the system of aid to the fugitives, popularly called the Underground Railroad; the degree of formal organization; methods of procedure; geographical extent and relations; the leaders and heroes of the movement; the behavior of the fugitives on their way; the effectiveness of the settlement in Canada; the numbers of fugitives; and the attitude of courts and communities. On all these questions he furnishes new light; and he appears to prove his concluding statement that "the Underground Railroad was one of the greatest forces which brought on the Civil War and thus destroyed slavery."

[CONTENTS]

[ILLUSTRATIONS, PORTRAITS, FACSIMILES AND MAPS]

[PREFACE]

This volume is the outgrowth of an investigation begun in 1892-1893, when the writer was giving a portion of his time to the teaching of United States history in the Ohio State University. The search for materials was carried on at intervals during several years until the mass of information, written and printed, was deemed sufficient to be subjected to the processes of analysis and generalization.

Patience and care have been required to overcome the difficulties attaching to a subject that was in an extraordinary sense a hidden one; and the author has constantly tried to observe those well-known dicta of the historian; namely, to be content with the materials discovered without making additions of his own, and to let his conclusions be defined by the facts, rather than seek to cast these "in the mould of his hypothesis."

Starting without preconceptions, the writer has been constrained to the views set forth in Chapters X and XI in regard to the real meaning and importance of the underground movement. And if it be found by the reader that these views are in any measure novel, it is hoped that the pages of this book contain evidence sufficient for their justification. There is something mysterious and inexplicable about the whole anti-slavery movement in the United States, as its history is generally recounted. According to the accepted view the anti-slavery movement of the thirties and the later decades has been considered as altogether distinct from the earlier abolition period in our history, both in principle and external features, and as separated from it by a considerable interval of time. The earlier movement is supposed to have died a natural death, and the later to have sprung into full life and vigor with the appearance of Garrison and the Liberator. Issue is made with this view in the following pages, where Macaulay's rational account of revolutions in general may, perhaps, be thought to find illustration. Macaulay says in one of his essays: "As the history of states is generally written, the greatest and most momentous revolutions seem to come upon them like supernatural inflictions, without warning or cause. But the fact is, that such revolutions are almost always the consequences of moral changes, which have gradually passed on the mass of the community, and which ordinarily proceed far before their progress is indicated by any public measure. An intimate knowledge of the domestic history of nations is therefore absolutely necessary to the prognosis of political events." Or, the essayist might have added, to a subsequent understanding of them.

It is impossible for the author to make acknowledgments to all who have contributed, directly and indirectly, to the promotion of his research. A liberal use of foot-notes suffices to reduce his obligations in part only. But, although the great balance of his indebtedness must stand against him, his special acknowledgments are due in certain quarters. The writer has to thank Professor J. Franklin Jameson of Brown University for calling his attention to a rare and important little book, which otherwise would almost certainly have escaped his notice. To Professor Eugene Wambaugh of the Harvard Law School he is indebted for the critical perusal of Chapter IX, on the Prosecutions of Underground Railroad Men,—a chapter based largely on reports of cases, and involving legal points about which the layman may easily go astray. The frequent citations of the monograph on Fugitive Slaves by Mrs. Marion G. McDougall attest the general usefulness of that book in the preparation of the present work. For personal encouragement in the undertaking after the collection of materials had begun, and for assistance while the study was being put in manuscript, the author is most deeply indebted to Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, and the Seminary of American History in Harvard University, over which he and his colleague, Professor Edward Channing, preside. The proof-sheets of this book have been read by Mr. F. B. Sanborn, of Concord, Massachusetts, and, it is hardly necessary to add, have profited thereby in a way that would have been impossible had they passed under the eye of one less widely acquainted with anti-slavery times and anti-slavery people. More than to all others the author's gratitude is due to the members of his own household, without whose abiding interest and ready assistance in many ways this work could not have been carried to completion. It should be said that no responsibility for the use made of data or the conclusions drawn from them can justly be imposed upon those whose generous offices have kept these pages freer from discrepancies than they could have been otherwise.

It is a fortunate circumstance that, by the kindness of the artist, Mr. C. T. Webber, the reproduction of his painting entitled "The Underground Railroad" can appear as the frontispiece of this book. Mr. Webber was fitted by his intimate acquaintance with the Coffin family of Cincinnati, Ohio, and their remarkable record in the work of secret emancipation, to give a sympathetic delineation of the Underground Railroad in operation.

Ohio State University,
October, 1898.

THE
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
FROM
SLAVERY TO FREEDOM

[CHAPTER I]

SOURCES OF THE HISTORY OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Historians who deal with the rise and culmination of the anti-slavery movement in the United States have comparatively little to say of one phase of it that cannot be neglected if the movement is to be fully understood. This is the so-called Underground Railroad, which, during fifty years or more, was secretly engaged in helping fugitive slaves to reach places of security in the free states and in Canada. Henry Wilson speaks of the romantic interest attaching to the subject, and illustrates the coöperative efforts made by abolitionists in behalf of colored refugees in two short chapters of the second volume of his Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America.[1] Von Holst makes several references to the work of the Road in his well-known History of the United States, and predicts that "The time will yet come, even in the South, when due recognition will be given to the touching unselfishness, simple magnanimity and glowing love of freedom of these law-breakers on principle, who were for the most part people without name, money, or higher education."[2] Rhodes in his great work, the History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, mentions the system, but considers it only as a manifestation of popular sentiment.[3] Other writers give less space to an account of this enterprise, although it was one that extended throughout many Northern states, and in itself supplied the reason for the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, one of the most remarkable measures issuing from Congress during the whole anti-slavery struggle.

The explanation of the failure to give to this "institution" the prominence which it deserves, is to be found in the secrecy in which it was enshrouded. Continuous through a period of two generations, the Road spread to be a great system by being kept in an oblivion that its operators aptly designated by the figurative use of the word "underground." Then, too, it was a movement in which but few of those persons were involved whose names have been most closely associated in history with the public agitation of the question of slavery, or with those political developments that resulted in the destruction of slavery. In general the participants in underground operations were quiet persons, little known outside of the localities where they lived, and were therefore members of a class that historians find it exceedingly difficult to bring within their field of view.

Before attempting to prepare a new account of the Underground Railroad, from new materials, something should be said of previous works upon it, and especially of the seven books which deal specifically with the subject: The Underground Railroad, by the Rev. W. M. Mitchell; Underground Railroad Records, by William Still; The Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, by R. C. Smedley; The Reminiscences of Levi Coffin; Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad, by Eber M. Pettit; From Dixie to Canada, by H. U. Johnson; and Heroes in Homespun, by Ascott R. Hope (a nom de plume for Robert Hope Moncrieff).

While several of these volumes are sources of original material, their value is chiefly that of collections of incidents, affording one an insight into the workings of the Underground Railroad in certain localities, and presenting types of character among the helpers and the helped. In composition they are what one would expect of persons who lived simple, strenuous lives, who with sincerity record what they knew and experienced. They have not only the characteristics of a deep-seated, moral movement, they have also an undeniable value for historical purposes.

Mitchell's small volume of 172 pages was published in England in 1860. Its author was a free negro, who served as a slave-driver in the South for several years, then became a preacher in Ohio, and for twelve years engaged in underground work; finally, about 1855, he went to Toronto, Canada, to minister to colored refugees as a missionary in the service of the American Free Baptist Mission Society.[4] It was while soliciting money in England for the purpose of building a chapel and schoolhouse for his people in Toronto that he was induced to write his book. The range of experience of the author enabled him to relate at first hand many incidents illustrative of the various phases of underground procedure, and to give an account of the condition of the fugitive slaves in Canada.[5]

Still's Underground Railroad Records, a large volume of 780 pages, appeared in 1872, and a second edition in 1883. For some years before the War Mr. Still was a clerk in the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia; and from 1852 to 1860 he served as chairman of the Acting Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia, a body whose special business it was to harbor fugitives and help them towards Canada. About 1850 Mr. Still began to keep records of the stories he heard from runaways, and his book is mainly a compilation of these stories, together with some Underground Railroad correspondence. At the end there are some biographical sketches of persons more or less prominent in the anti-slavery cause. The book is a mine of material relating to the work of the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia.

Operations carried on in an extended field of six or seven counties in southeastern Pennsylvania, over routes many of which led to the Quaker City, are recounted in Smedley's volume of 395 pages, published in 1883. The abundant reminiscences and short biographies were patiently gathered by the author from many aged participants in underground enterprises.

In his Reminiscences, a book of 732 pages, Levi Coffin, the reputed president of the Underground Railroad, relates his experiences from the time when he began, as a youth in North Carolina, to direct slaves northward on the path to liberty, till the time when, after twenty years of service in eastern Indiana and fifteen in Cincinnati, Ohio, he and his coworkers were relieved by the admission of slaves within the lines of the Union forces in the South. Mr. Coffin was a Quaker of the gentle but firm type depicted by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the character Simeon Halliday, of which he may have been the original. It need scarcely be said, therefore, that his autobiography is characterized by simplicity and candor, and supplies a fund of information in regard to those branches of the Road with which its author was connected.

Pettit's Sketches comprise a series of articles printed in the Fredonia (New York) Censor, during the fall of 1868, and collected in 1879 into a book of 174 pages. The author was for many years a "conductor" in southwestern New York, and most of the adventures narrated occurred within his personal knowledge.

Johnson's From Dixie to Canada is a little volume of 194 pages, in which are reprinted some of the many stories first published by him in the Lake Shore Home Magazine during the years 1883 to 1889 under the heading, "Romances and Realities of the Underground Railroad." The data that most of these tales embody were accumulated by research, and while the names of operators, towns and so forth are authentic, the writer allows himself the license of the story-teller instead of restricting himself to the simple recording of the information secured. His investigations have given him an acquaintance with the routes of northeastern Ohio and the adjacent portions of Pennsylvania and New York.

Hope's volume, published in 1894, does not increase the number of our sources of information, inasmuch as its materials are derived from Still's Underground Railroad Records and Coffin's Reminiscences. It was written by an Englishman apparently as a popular exposition of the hidden methods of the abolitionists.

To these books should be added a pamphlet of thirty pages, entitled The Underground Railroad, by James H. Fairchild, D.D., ex-President of Oberlin College, published in 1895 by the Western Reserve Historical Society.[6] The author had personal knowledge of many of the events he narrates and recounts several underground cases of notoriety; he thus affords a clear insight into the conditions under which secret aid came to be rendered to runaways.

It is surprising that a subject, the mysterious and romantic character of which might be supposed to appeal to a wide circle of readers, has not been duly treated in any of the modern popular magazines. During the last ten years a few articles about the Underground Railroad have appeared in The Magazine of Western History,[7] The Firelands Pioneer,[8] The Midland Monthly,[9] The Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art and Literature[10] and The American Historical Review.[11] Three of these publications, the first two and the last, are of a special character; the other two, although they appeal to the general reader, cannot be said to have attempted more than the presentation of a few incidents out of the experience of certain underground helpers. From time to time the New England Magazine has given its readers glimpses of the Underground Road by its articles dealing with several well-known fugitive slave cases, and a biographical sketch of the abductor Harriet Tubman.[12] But it would be quite impossible for any one to gain an adequate idea of the movement from the meagre accounts that have appeared in any of these magazines.

In contrast with the magazines, the newspapers have frequently published some of the stirring recollections of surviving abolitionists, but the result for the reader is usually that he learns only some anecdotes concerning a small section of the Road, without securing an insight into the real significance of the underground movement. Without undertaking here to print a full list of articles on the subject, it is worth while to notice a few newspapers in which series of sketches have appeared of more or less value in extending our geographical knowledge of the system, or in illustrating some important phase of its working. The New Lexington (Ohio) Tribune, from October, 1885, to February, 1886, contains a series of reminiscences, written by Mr. Thomas L. Gray, that supply interesting information about the work in southeastern Ohio. The Pontiac (Illinois) Sentinel, in 1890 and 1891, published fifteen chapters of "A History of Anti-Slavery Days" contributed by Mr. W. B. Fyffe, recording some episodes in the development of this Road in northeastern Illinois. The Sentinel, of Mt. Gilead, Ohio, in a series of articles, one of which appeared every week from July 13 to August 17, 1893, under the name of Aaron Benedict, affords a knowledge of the way in which the secret work was carried on in a typical Quaker community. In The Republican Leader, of Salem, Indiana, at various dates from Nov. 17, 1893, to April, 1894, E. Hicks Trueblood printed the results of some investigations begun at the instance of the author, which disclose the principal routes of south central Indiana. An account of the peculiar methods of the pedler Joseph Sider, an abductor of slaves, is also given by Mr. Trueblood. The Rev. John Todd has preserved in the columns of the Tabor (Iowa) Beacon, in 1890 and 1891, some valuable reminiscences, running through more than twenty numbers of the paper, under the title, "The Early Settlement and Growth of Western Iowa"; several of these are devoted to fugitive slave cases.[13]

It is not surprising, in view of the unlawful nature of Underground Railroad service, that extremely little in the way of contemporaneous documents has descended to us even across the short span of a generation or two, and that there are few written data for the history of a movement that gave liberty to thousands of slaves. The legal restraints upon the rendering of aid to slaves bent on flight to Canada were, of course, ever present in the minds of those that pitied the bondman, whether a well-informed lawyer, like Joshua R. Giddings, or an illiterate negro, who, notwithstanding his fellow-feeling, was yet sufficiently sagacious to avoid the open violation of what others might call the law of the land. Therefore, written evidence of complicity was for the most part carefully avoided; and little information concerning any part of the work of the Underground Road was allowed to get into print. It is known that records and diaries were kept by certain helpers; and a few of the letters and messages that passed between station-keepers have been preserved. These sources of information are as valuable as they are rare: they would doubtless be more plentiful if the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 had not created such consternation as to lead to the destruction of most of the telltale documents.

The great collection of contemporaneous material is that of William Still, relating mainly to the work of the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia. The motives and the methods of Mr. Still in keeping his register are given in the following words: "Thousands of escapes, harrowing separations, dreadful longings, dark gropings after lost parents, brothers, sisters, and identities, seemed ever to be pressing on my mind. While I knew the danger of keeping strict records, and while I did not then dream that in my day slavery would be blotted out, or that the time would come when I could publish these records, it used to afford me great satisfaction to take them down fresh from the lips of fugitives on the way to freedom, and to preserve them as they had given them...."[14] When in 1852 Mr. Still became the chairman of the Acting Committee of Vigilance his opportunities were doubtless increased for obtaining histories of cases; and he was then directed as head of the committee "to keep a record of all their doings, ... especially of the money received and expended on behalf of every case claiming their interposition."[15] During the period of the War, Chairman Still concealed the records and documents he had collected in the loft of Lebanon Cemetery building, and although their publication became practicable when the Proclamation of Emancipation was issued, the Underground Railroad Records did not appear until 1872.[16]

Theodore Parker, the distinguished Unitarian clergyman of Boston, and one of the most active members of the Vigilance Committee of that city, kept memoranda of occurrences growing out of the attempted enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law in his neighborhood. He was outspoken in his opposition to the law, and was not less bold in gathering into a journal, along with newspaper clippings and handbills referring to the troubles of the time, manuscripts of his own bearing on the unlawful procedure of the Committee. This journal or scrap-book, given to the Boston Public Library in 1874 by Mrs. Parker,[17] was compiled day by day from March 15, 1851, to February 19, 1856, and throws much light on the rendition of the fugitives Burns and Sims.

John Brown, of Osawattomie, left a few notes of his memorable journey through Kansas and Iowa, on his way to Canada in the winter of 1858 and 1859, with a company of slaves rescued by him from bondage in western Missouri. On the back of the original draft of a letter written by Brown for the New York Tribune soon after the slaves had been taken from their masters, appear the names of station-keepers of the Underground Railroad in eastern Kansas, and a record of certain expenditures forming, doubtless, a part of the cost of his trip.[18] When the fearless abductor arrived at Springdale, Iowa, late in February, he wrote to a friend in Tabor a statement concerning the "Reception of Brown and Party at Grinnell, Iowa, compared with Proceedings at Tabor," in which he set down in the form of items the substantial attentions he had received at the hands of citizens of Grinnell.[19] These meagre records, together with the letter written to the Tribune mentioned above, are all that Brown wrote, so far as known, giving explicit information in regard to an exploit that created a stir throughout the country.

Mr. Jirch Platt, of the vicinity of Mendon, Illinois, recorded his experiences as a station-keeper in a "sort of diary and farm record," and in a "blue-book," and appears to have been the only one of the underground helpers of Illinois that ventured to chronicle matters of this kind. The diary is still extant, and shows entries covering a period of more than ten years, closing with October, 1859; the following items will illustrate sufficiently the character of the record:—

"May 19, 1848. Hannah Coger arrived on the U. G. Railroad, the last $100.00 for freedom she was to pay to Thomas Anderson, Palmyra, Mo. The track is kept bright, it being the 3rd time occupied since the first of April...."

"Nov. 9, '54. Negro hoax stories have been very high in the market for a week past."

"Oct. 1859. U. G. R. R. Conductor reported the passage of five, who were considered very valuable pieces of Ebony, all designated by names, such as John Brooks, Daniel Brooks, Mason Bushrod, Sylvester Lucket and Hanson Gause. Have understood also that three others were ticketed about midsummer."

In Ohio, Daniel Osborn, of the Alum Creek Quaker Settlement, in the central part of the state, kept a diary, of which to-day only a leaf remains. This bit of paper gives a record of the number of negroes passing through the Alum Creek neighborhood during an interval of five months, from April 14 to September 10, 1844, and is of considerable importance, because it supplies data that furnish, when taken in connection with other terms, the elements for an interesting computation of the number of slaves that escaped into Ohio.[20] In the correspondence of Mr. David Putnam, of Point Hamar, near Marietta, Ohio, there were found a few letters relating to the journeys of fugitives. That even these few letters remain is doubtless due to neglect or oversight on the part of the recipient. It is noticeable that some of them bear unmistakable signs of intended secrecy, the proper names having been blotted out, or covered with bits of paper.

Underground managers who were so indiscreet as to keep a diary or letters for a season, were induced to part with such condemning evidence under the stress of a special danger. Mr. Robert Purvis, of Philadelphia, states that he kept a record of the fugitives that passed through his hands and those of his coworkers in the Quaker City for a long period, till the trepidation of his family after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850 caused him to destroy it.[21] Daniel Gibbons, a Friend, who lived near Columbia in southeastern Pennsylvania, began in 1824 to keep a record of the number of fugitives he aided. He was in the habit of entering in his book the name of the master of each fugitive, the fugitive's own name and his age, and the new name given him. The data thus gathered came in time to form a large volume, but after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law Mr. Gibbons burned this book.[22] William Parker, the colored leader in the famous Christiana case, was found by a friend to have a large number of letters from escaped slaves hidden about his house at the time of the Christiana affair, September 11, 1851, and these fateful documents were quickly destroyed. Had they been discovered by the officers that visited Parker's house, they might have brought disaster upon many persons.[23] Thus, the need of secrecy constantly served to prevent the making of records, or to bring about their early destruction. The written and printed records do give a multitude of unquestioned facts about the Underground Railroad; but when wishing to find out the details of rational management, the methods of business, and the total amount of traffic, we are thrown back on the recollections of living abolitionists as the main source of information; from them the gaps in the real history of the Underground Railroad must be filled, if filled at all.

It is with the aid of such memorials that the present volume has been written. Reminiscences have been gathered by correspondence and by travel from many surviving abolitionists or their families; and recollections of fugitive slave days have been culled from books, newspapers, letters and diaries. During three years of the five years of preparation the author's residence in Ohio afforded him opportunity to visit many places in that state where former employees of the Underground Railroad could be found, and to extend these explorations to southern Michigan, and among the surviving fugitives along the Detroit River in the Province of Ontario. Residence in Massachusetts during the years 1895-1897 has enabled him to secure some interesting information in regard to underground lines in New England. The materials thus collected relate to the following states: Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont, besides a few items concerning North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.

Underground operations practically ceased with the beginning of the Civil War. In view of the lapse of time, the reasons for trusting the credibility of the evidence upon which our knowledge of the Underground Road rests should be stated. Some of the testimony dealt with in this chapter was put in writing during the period of the Road's operation, or at the close of its activity, and, therefore, cannot be easily questioned. But it may be said that a large part of the materials for this history were drawn from written and oral accounts obtained at a much later date; and that these materials, even though the honesty and fidelity of the narrators be granted, are worthy of little credit for historical purposes. Such a criticism would doubtless be just as applied to reminiscences purporting to represent particular events with great detail of narration, but clearly it would lose much of its force when directed against recollections of occurrences that came within the range of the narrator's experience, not once nor twice, but many times with little variation in their main features. It would be difficult to imagine an "old-time" abolitionist, whose faculties are in a fair state of preservation, forgetting that he received fugitives from a certain neighbor or community a few miles away, that he usually stowed them in his garret or his haymow, and that he was in the habit of taking them at night in all kinds of weather to one of several different stations, the managers of which he knew intimately and trusted implicitly. Not only did repetition serve to deepen the general recollections of the average operator, but the strange and romantic character of his unlawful business helped to fix them in his mind. Some special occurrences he is apt to remember with vividness, because they were in some way extraordinary. If it be argued that the surviving abolitionists are now old persons, it should not be forgotten that it is a fact of common observation that old persons ordinarily remember the occurrences of their youth and prime better than events of recent date. The abolitionists, as a class, were people whose remembrances of the ante-bellum days were deepened by the clear definition of their governing principles, the abiding sense of their religious convictions, and the extraordinary conditions, legal and social, under which their acts were performed. The risks these persons ran, the few and scattered friends they had, the concentration of their interests into small compass, because of the disdain of the communities where they lived, have secured to us a source of knowledge, the value of which cannot be lightly questioned. If there be doubt on this point, it must give way before the manner in which statements gathered from different localities during the last five years articulate together, the testimony of different and sometimes widely separated witnesses combining to support one another.[24]

The elucidation by new light of some obscure matter already reported, the verification by a fresh witness of some fact already discovered, gives at once the rule and test of an investigation such as this. Out of many illustrations that might be given, the following are offered. Mr. J. M. Forsyth, of Northwood, Logan County, Ohio, writes under date September 22, 1894: "In Northwood there is a denomination known as Covenanters; among them the runaways were safe. Isaac Patterson has a cave on his place where the fugitives were secreted and fed two or three weeks at a time until the hunt for them was over. Then friends, as hunters, in covered wagons would take them to Sandusky. The highest number taken at one time was seven. The conductors were mostly students from Northwood. All I did was to help get up the team...."

The Rev. J. S. T. Milligan, of Esther, Pennsylvania, December 5, 1896, writes entirely independently: "In 1849 my brother ... and I went ... to Logan Co., Ohio, to conduct a grammar school ... at a place called Northwood. The school developed into a college under the title of Geneva Hall. J. R. W. Sloane[25] ... was elected President and moved to Northwood in 1851.... The region was settled by Covenanters and Seceders, and every house was a home for the wanderers. But there was a cave on the farm of a man by the name of Patterson, absolutely safe and fairly comfortable for fugitives. In one instance thirteen fugitives, after resting in the cave for some days, were taken by the students in two covered wagons to Sandusky, some 90 miles, where I had gone to engage passage for them on the Bay City steamboat across the lake to Malden—where I saw them safely landed on free soil, to their unspeakable joy. Indeed, I thought one old man would have died from the gladness of his heart in being safe in freedom. I went from Belle Centre [near Northwood] by rail, and did not go with the land escort—but from what they told me of their experience, it was often amusing and sometimes thrilling. They were ostensibly a hunting party of 10 or 12 armed men.... The two covered wagons were a 'sanctum sanctorum' into which no mortal was allowed to peep.... The word of command, 'Stand back,' was always respected by those who were unduly intent upon seeing the thirteen deer ... brought from the woods of Logan and Hardin counties and being taken to Sandusky."

In the same letter Mr. Milligan corroborates some information secured from the Rev. R. G. Ramsey, of Cadiz, Ohio, August 18, 1892, in regard to an underground route in southern Illinois. Mr. Ramsey related that his father, Robert Ramsey, first engaged in Underground Railroad work at Eden, Randolph County, Illinois, in 1844, and that he carried it on at intervals until the War. "The fugitives," he said, "came up the river to Chester, Illinois, and there they started northeast on the state road, which followed an old Indian trail. The stations were each in a community of Covenanters, ..." and existed, according to his account, at Chester, Eden, Oakdale, Nashville and Centralia. "Besides my father," said Mr. Ramsey, "John Hood and two brothers, James B. and Thomas McClurkin, lived in Oakdale, where my father lived during the last thirty-five years of his life. He lived in Eden before this time...."[26] The Rev. Mr. Milligan writes as follows: "My father removed to Randolph Co., Ill., in 1847, and with Rev. Wm. Sloane ... and the Covenanter congregations under their ministry kept a very large depot wide open for slaves escaping from Missouri. Scores at a time came to Sparta [the post-office of the Eden settlement mentioned above]—my father's region, were harbored there, ... and finally escorted to Elkhorn [about two miles from Oakdale], the region of Father Sloane, where they were sheltered and escorted ... to some friends in the region of Nashville, Ill., and thence north on the regular trail which I am not able further to locate. At Sparta, Coultersville and Elkhorn there was an almost constant supply of fugitives.... But ... few were ever gotten from the ægis of the Hayes and Moores and Todds and McLurkins and Hoods and Sloanes and Milligans of that region."

The evidence above quoted has the well-known value of two witnesses, examined apart, who corroborate each other; and it also illustrates the way in which the pieces of underground routes may be joined together. These letters, together with some additional testimony, enable us to trace on the map a section of a secret line of travel in southern Illinois.

Another example throws light on a channel of escape in northeastern Indiana. While Levi Coffin lived at Newport (now Fountain City), Indiana, he sometimes sent slaves northward by way of what he called "the Mississinewa route,"[27] from the Mississinewa River, near which undoubtedly it ran for a considerable distance. This road seems to have been called also the Grant County route. In the most general way only do these descriptions tell anything about the route. However, correspondence with several people of Indiana has brought it to light. One letter[28] informs us in regard to fugitives departing from Newport: "If they came to Economy they were sent to Grant Co...." Now, so far as known, Jonesboro' was the next locality to which they were usually forwarded, and the line from this point northward is given us by the Hon. John Ratliff, of Marion, Indiana, who had been over it with passengers. He says that the first station north of Jonesboro' was North Manchester, where "Morris" Place was agent; the next station, Goshen, where Dr. Matchett harbored fugitives; and thence the line ran to Young's Prairie,[29] which is in Cass County, Michigan. The same section of Road, but with a few additional stations, is marked out by William Hayward. The additional stations may not have existed at the time when Mr. Ratliff served as a guide, or he may have forgotten to mention them. Mr. Hayward writes: "My cousin, Maurice Place, often brought carriage loads of colored people from North Manchester, Wabash Co., to my father's house, six miles west of Manchester on the Rochester road.... We would keep them ... until sometime in the night; then my father would go with them to Avery Brace's ... three miles ... north, through the woods. He took them ... seven miles farther ... to Chauncey Hurlburt's in Kosciusko Co.... They (the Hurlburts) took them twelve miles farther ... to Warsaw, to a man by the name of Gordon, and he took them to Dr. Matchett's in Elkhart Co., not far from Goshen. There were friends there to help them to Michigan."[30]

In weighing the testimony amassed, the author has had the advantage of personal acquaintance with many of those furnishing information; and the internal evidence of letters has been considered in estimating the worth of written testimony. Doubtless the work could have been more thoroughly executed, if the collection of materials had been systematically undertaken by some one a decade or two earlier. It is certain that it could not have been postponed to a later period. Since the inception of this research the ravages of time have greatly thinned the company of witnesses, who count it among their chiefest joys that they were permitted to live to see their country rid of slavery, and the negro race a free people.

ONE OF THE PIONEERS IN THE UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT IN PHILADELPHIA AND NEW YORK.
Mr. Hopper is supposed to have resorted to underground methods as early as 1787.

[CHAPTER II]

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE UNDERGROUND ROAD

The Underground Road developed in a section of country rid of slavery, and situated between two regions, from one of which slaves were continually escaping with the prospect of becoming indisputably free on crossing the borders of the other. Not a few persons living within the intervening territory were deeply opposed to slavery, and although they were bound by law to discountenance slaves seeking freedom, they felt themselves to be more strongly bound by conscience to give them help. Thus it happened that in the course of the sixty years before the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion the Northern states became traversed by numerous secret pathways leading from Southern bondage to Canadian liberty.

Slavery was put in process of extinction at an early period in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and the New England states. From the five and a fraction states created out of the Northwestern Territory slavery was excluded by the Ordinance of 1787. It is interesting to note how rapid was the progress of emancipation in the Northeastern states, where the conditions of climate, industry and public opinion were unfavorable to the continuance of slavery. In 1777 emancipation was begun by the action of Vermont, which upon its separation from New York adopted a constitution in which slavery was prohibited. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts took action three years later. Pennsylvania provided by statute for gradual abolition, and its example was followed by Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784, by New York in 1799, and by New Jersey in 1804. Massachusetts was less direct, but not less effective, in securing the extinction of slavery; happily it had inserted in the declaration of rights prefixed to its constitution: "All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and inalienable rights."[31] This clause received at a later time strict interpretation at the bar of the state supreme court, and slavery was held to have ceased with the year 1780.

There is little to be said about the remaining group of states with which we are here concerned. Their territorial organizations were effected under the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787. One of the most important of these provisions is as follows: "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."[32] It was this feature, introduced into the great Ordinance by New England men, that rendered futile the many attempts subsequently made by Indiana Territory to have slavery admitted within its own boundaries by congressional enactment. "It is probable," says Rhodes, "that had it not been for the prohibitory clause, slavery would have gained such a foothold in Indiana and Illinois that the two would have been organized as slaveholding states."[33] The five states, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin were therefore admitted to the Union as free states. West of the Mississippi River there is one state, at least, that must be added to the group just indicated, namely, Iowa. Slaveholding was prevented within its domain by the Act of Congress of 1820, prohibiting slavery in the territory acquired under the Louisiana purchase north of latitude 36° 30', and several years before this law was abrogated Iowa had entered statehood with a constitution that fixed her place among the free commonwealths. The enfranchisement of this extended region was thus accomplished by state and national action. The ominous result was the establishment of a sweeping line of frontier between the slaveholding South and the non-slaveholding North, and thereby the propounding to the nation of a new question, that of the status of fugitives in free regions. The elements were in the proper condition for the crystallization of this question.

The colonies generally had found it necessary to provide regulations in regard to fugitives and the restoration of them to their masters. Such provisions, it is probable, were reasonably well observed as long as runaways did not escape beyond the borders of the colonies to which their owners belonged; but escapes from the territory of one colony into that of another were at first left to be settled as the state of feeling existing between the two peoples concerned should dictate. In 1643 the New England Confederation of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven, unwilling to leave the subject of the delivery of fugitives longer to intercolonial comity, incorporated a clause in their Articles of Confederation providing: "If any servant runn away from his master into any other of these confederated Jurisdiccons, That in such case vpon the Certyficate of one Majistrate in the Jurisdiccon out of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proofs, the said servant shall be deliuered either to his Master or any other that pursues and brings such Certificate or proofe." About the same time an agreement was entered into between the Dutch at New Netherlands and the English at New Haven for the mutual surrender of fugitives, a step that was preceded by a complaint from the commissioners of the United Colonies to Governor Stuyvesant of New Netherlands, to the effect that the Dutch agent at Hartford was harboring one of their Indian slaves, and by the refusal to return some of Stuyvesant's runaway servants from New Haven until the redress of the grievance. It was only when some of the fugitives had been restored to New Netherlands, and a proclamation, issued in a spirit of retaliation by the Lords of the West India Company, forbidding the rendition of fugitive slaves to New Haven, had been annulled, that the agreement for the mutual surrender of runaways was made by the two parties. Negotiations in regard to fugitives early took place between Maryland and New Netherlands; at one time on account of the flight of some slaves from the Southern colony into the Northern colony, and later on account of the reversal of the conditions. The temper of the Dutch when calling for their servants in 1659 was not conciliatory, for they threatened, if their demand should be refused, "to publish free liberty, access and recess to all planters, servants, negroes, fugitives, and runaways which may go into New Netherland." The escape of fugitives from the Eastern colonies northward to Canada was also a constant source of trouble between the French and the Dutch, and between the French and English.[34]

When, therefore, emancipation acts were passed by Vermont and four other states the new question came into existence. It presented itself also in the Western territories. The framers of the Northwest Ordinance found themselves confronted by the question, and they dealt with it in the spirit of compromise. They enacted a stipulation for the territory, "that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original states, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service aforesaid."[35]

Meanwhile the Federal Convention in Philadelphia had the same question to consider. The result of its deliberations on the point was not different from that of Congress expressed in the Ordinance. Among the concessions to slavery that the Federal Convention felt constrained to make, this provision found place in the Constitution: "No person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."[36] Neither of these clauses appears to have been subjected to much debate, and they were adopted by votes that testify to their acceptableness; the former received the support of all members present but one, the latter passed unanimously.

In the sentiment of the time there seems to have been no sense of humiliation on the part of the North over the conclusions reached concerning the rendition of escaped slaves. It had been seen by Northern men that the subject was one requiring conciliatory treatment, if it were not to become a block in the way of certain Southern states entering the Union; and, besides, the opinion generally prevailed that slavery would gradually disappear from all the states, and the riddle would thus solve itself.[37] The South was pleased, but apparently not exultant, over the supposed security gained for its slave property. General C. C. Pinckney, of South Carolina, probably expressed the view of most Southerners when he said that the terms for the security of slave property gained by his section were not bad, although they were not the best from the slaveholders' standpoint, and that they permitted the recapture of runaways in any part of America—a right the South had never before enjoyed.[38] In abstract law the rights of the slave-owner had in truth been well provided for. Especially deserving of note is the fact that a constitutional basis had been furnished for claims which, in case slavery did not disappear from the country—a contingency not anticipated by the fathers—might be insisted upon as having the fundamental and positive sanction of the government. But what would be the fate of the running slave was a matter with which, after all, private principles and sympathies, and not merely constitutional provisions, would have a good deal to do in each case.

For several years the stipulations for the rendition of fugitive slaves remained inoperative. At length, in 1791, a case of kidnapping occurred at Washington, Pennsylvania, and this served to bring the subject once more to the public mind. Early in 1793 Congress passed the first Fugitive Slave Law.[39] This law provided for the reclamation of fugitives from justice and fugitives from labor. We are concerned, of course, with the latter class only. The sections of the act dealing with this division are too long to be here quoted: they empowered the owner, his agent or attorney, to seize the fugitive and take him before a United States circuit or district judge within the state where the arrest was made, or before any local magistrate within the county in which the seizure occurred. The oral testimony of the claimant, or an affidavit from a magistrate in the state from which he came, must certify that the fugitive owed service as claimed. Upon such showing the claimant secured his warrant for removing the runaway to the state or territory from which he had fled. Five hundred dollars fine constituted the penalty for hindering arrest, or for rescuing or harboring the fugitive after notice that he or she was a fugitive from labor.

All the evidence goes to show that this law was ineffectual; Mrs. McDougall points out that two cases of resistance to the principle of the act occurred before the close of 1793.[40] Attempts at amendment were made in Congress as early as the winter of 1796, and were repeated at irregular intervals down to 1850. Secret or "underground" methods of rescue were already well understood in and around Philadelphia by 1804. Ohio and Pennsylvania, and perhaps other states, heeded the complaints of neighboring slave states, and gave what force they might to the law of 1793 by enacting laws for the recovery of fugitives within their borders. The law of Pennsylvania for this purpose was passed the same year in which Mr. Clay, then Secretary of State, began negotiations with England looking toward the extradition of slaves from Canada (1826); but it was quashed by the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Prigg case in 1842.[41] By 1850 the Northern states were traversed by numerous lines of Underground Railroad, and the South was declaring its losses of slave property to be enormous.

The result of the frequent transgressions of the Fugitive Slave Law on the one hand and of the clamorous demand for a measure adequate to the needs of the South on the other, was the passage of a new Fugitive Recovery Bill in 1850.[42] The increased rigor of the provisions of this act was ill adapted to generate the respect that a good law secures, and, indeed, must have in order to be enforced. The law contained features sufficiently objectionable to make many converts to the cause of the abolitionists; and a systematic evasion of the law was regarded as an imperative duty by thousands. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was based on the earlier law, but was fitted out with a number of clauses, dictated by a self-interest on the part of the South that ignored the rights of every party save those of the master. Under the regulations of the act the certificate authorizing the arrest and removal of a fugitive slave was to be granted to the claimant by the United States commissioner, the courts, or the judge of the proper circuit, district, or county. If the arrest were made without process, the claimant was to take the fugitive forthwith before the commissioner or other official, and there the case was to be determined in a summary manner. The refusal of a United States marshal or his deputies to execute a commissioner's certificate, properly directed, involved a fine of one thousand dollars; and failure to prevent the escape of the negro after arrest, made the marshal liable, on his official bond, for the value of the slave. When necessary to insure a faithful observance of the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution, the commissioners, or persons appointed by them, had the authority to summon the posse comitatus of the county, and "all good citizens" were "commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution" of the law. The testimony of the alleged fugitive could not be received in evidence. Ownership was determined by the simple affidavit of the person claiming the slave; and when determined it was shielded by the certificate of the commissioner from "all molestation ... by any process issued by any court, judge, magistrate, or other person whomsoever." Any act meant to obstruct the claimant in his arrest of the fugitive, or any attempt to rescue, harbor, or conceal the fugitive, laid the person interfering liable "to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months," also liable for "civil damages to the party injured in the sum of one thousand dollars for each fugitive so lost." In all cases where the proceedings took place before a commissioner he was "entitled to a fee of ten dollars in full for his services," provided that a warrant for the fugitive's arrest was issued; if, however, the fugitive was discharged, the commissioner was entitled to five dollars only.[43]

By the abolitionists, at whom it was directed, this law was detested. A government, whose first national manifesto contained the exalted principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, stooping to the task of slave-catching, violated all their ideas of national dignity, decency and consistency. Many persons, indeed, justified their opposition to the law in the familiar words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The scriptural injunction "not to deliver unto his master the servant that hath escaped,"[44] was also frequently quoted by men whose religious convictions admitted of no compromise. They pointed out that the law virtually made all Northern citizens accomplices in what they denominated the crime of slave-catching; that it denied the right of trial by jury, resting the question of lifelong liberty on ex-parte evidence; made ineffective the writ of habeas corpus; and offered a bribe to the commissioner for a decision against the negro.[45] The penalties of fine and imprisonment for offenders against the law were severe, but they had no deterrent effect upon those engaged in helping slaves to Canada. On the contrary, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 stimulated the work of secret emancipation. "The passage of the new law," says a recent investigator, "probably increased the number of anti-slavery people more than anything else that had occurred during the whole agitation. Many of those formerly indifferent were roused to active opposition by a sense of the injustice of the Fugitive Slave Act as they saw it executed in Boston and elsewhere.... As Mr. James Freeman Clarke has said, 'It was impossible to convince the people that it was right to send back to slavery men who were so desirous of freedom as to run such risks. All education from boyhood up to manhood had taught us to believe that it was the duty of all men to struggle for freedom.'"[46]

The desire for freedom was in the mind of nearly every enslaved negro. Liberty was the subject of the dreams and visions of slave preachers and sibyls; it was the object of their prayers. The plaintive songs of the enslaved race were full of the thought of freedom. It has been well said that "one of the finest touches in Uncle Tom's Cabin is the joyful expression of Uncle Tom when told by his good and indulgent master that he should be set free and sent back to his old home in Kentucky. In attributing the common desire of humanity to the negro the author was as true as she was effective."[47] To slaves living in the vicinity, Mexico and Florida early afforded a welcome refuge. Forests, islands and swamps within the Southern states were favorite places of resort for runaways. The Great Dismal Swamp became the abode of a large colony of these refugees, whose lives were spent in its dark recesses, and whose families were reared and buried there. Even in this retreat, however, the negroes were not beyond molestation, for they were systematically hunted by men with dogs and guns.[48] Scraps of information about Canada and the Northern states were gleaned and treasured by minds recognizing their own degradation, but scarcely knowing how to take the first step towards the betterment of their condition.

There can be no doubt that the form in which slavery existed in the South during the opening decade of the present century was comparatively mild; but it is quite clear that it soon exchanged this character for one from which the amenities of the patriarchal type had practically disappeared. With the rapid expansion of the industries peculiar to the South after the opening up of the Louisiana purchase, the invention of the cotton gin, and the removal of the Indians from the Gulf states, came the era of the slave's dismay. The auction block and the brutal overseer became his dread while awake, his nightmare when asleep. That his fears were not ill founded is proved by the activity of the slave-marts of Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans and Washington from the time of the migrations to the Mississippi territory until the War. Alabama is said to have bought millions of dollars worth of slaves from the border states up to 1849. Dew estimated that six thousand slaves were carried from Virginia, though not all of these were sold to other states.[49]

The fear of sale to the far South must have stimulated slaves to flight. That the number of escapes did increase is deduced from the consensus of abolitionist testimony. Our sole reliance is upon this testimony until the appearance of the United States census reports for 1850 and 1860;[50] and the exhibits on fugitive slaves in these compendiums we are constrained by various considerations to regard as inadequate. However, the flight of slaves from the South was not what the new conditions would readily account for. We must conclude, therefore, that the deterring effect of ignorance and the sense of the difficulties in the way were reënforced after 1840 by increased vigilance on the part of the slave-owning class, owing to the rise in value of slave property. "Since 1840," says a careful observer, "the high price of slaves may be supposed ... to have increased the vigilance and energy with which the recapture of fugitives is followed up, and to have augmented the number of free negroes reduced to slavery by kidnappers. Indeed it has led to a proposition being quite seriously entertained in Virginia, of enslaving the whole body of the free negroes in that state by legislative enactment."[51] Then, too, the negro's attachment to the land of his birth, and to his kindred, when these were not torn from him, must be allowed to have hindered flight in many instances; when, however, the appearance of the dreaded slave-dealer, or the brutality of the overseer or the master, spread dismay among the hands of a plantation, flights were likely to follow. This was sometimes the case, too, when by the death of a planter the division of his property among his heirs was made necessary. William Johnson, of Windsor, Ontario, ran away from his Kentucky master because he was threatened with being sent South to the cotton and rice fields.[52] Horace Washington, of Windsor, after working nearly two years for a man that had a claim on him for one hundred and twenty-five dollars, reminded his employer that the original agreement required but one year's labor, and asked for release. Getting no satisfaction, and fearing sale, he fled to Canada.[53] Lewis Richardson, one of the slaves of Henry Clay, sought relief in flight after receiving a hundred and fifty stripes from Mr. Clay's overseer.[54] William Edwards, of Amherstburg, Ontario, left his master on account of a severe flogging.[55] One of the station-keepers of an underground line in Morgan County, Ohio, recalls an instance of a family of seven fugitives giving as the cause of their flight the death of their master, and the expected scattering of their number when the division of the estate should occur.[56]

This picture of a poor fugitive is from one of the stereotype cuts manufactured in this city for the southern market, and used on handbills offering rewards for runaway slaves.

THE RUNAWAY

(Slightly enlarged from The Anti-Slavery Record, published in New York City by the American
Anti-Slavery Society.)

It has already been remarked that slaves began to find their way to Canada before the opening of the present century, but information in regard to that country as a place of refuge can scarcely be said to have come into circulation before the War of 1812. The hostile relations existing between the two nations at that time caused negroes of sagacious minds to seek their liberty among the enemies of the United States.[57] Then, too, soldiers returning from the War to their homes in Kentucky and Virginia brought the news of the disposition of the Canadian government to defend the rights of the self-emancipated slaves under its jurisdiction. Rumors of this sort gave hope and courage to the blacks that heard it, and, doubtless, the welcome reports were spread by these among trusted companions and friends. By 1815 fugitives were crossing the Western Reserve in Ohio, and regular stations of the Underground Railroad were lending them assistance in that and other portions of the state.[58]

After the discovery of Canada by colored refugees from the Southern states, it was, presumably, not long before some of them, returning for their families and friends, gave circulation in a limited way to reports more substantial than the vague rumors hitherto afloat. Among the escaped slaves that carried the promise of Canadian liberty across Mason and Dixon's line were such successful abductors as Josiah Henson and Harriet Tubman. In 1860 it was estimated that the number of negroes that journeyed annually from Canada to the slave states to rescue their fellows was about five hundred. It was said that these persons "carried the Underground Railroad and the Underground Telegraph into nearly every Southern state."[59] The work done by these fugitives was supplemented by the cautious dissemination of news by white persons that went into the South to abduct slaves or encourage them to escape, or while engaged there in legitimate occupations used their opportunities to pass the helpful word or to afford more substantial aid. The Rev. Calvin Fairbank, the Rev. Charles T. Torrey and Dr. Alexander M. Ross may be cited as notable examples of this class. The latter, a citizen of Canada, made extensive tours through various slave states for the express purpose of spreading information about Canada and the routes by which that country could be reached. He made trips into Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee, and did not think it too great a risk to make excursions into the more southern states. He went to New Orleans, and from that point set out on a journey, in the course of which he visited Vicksburg, Selma and Columbus, Mississippi, Augusta, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina.[60]

Considering the comparative freedom of movement between the slave and the free states along the border, it is easy to understand how slaves in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri might pick up information about the "Land of Promise" to the northward. Isaac White, a slave of Kanawha County, Virginia, was shown a map and instructed how to get to Canada by a man from Cleveland, Ohio. Allen Sidney, a negro who ran a steamboat on the Tennessee River for his master, first learned of Canada from an abolitionist at Florence, Alabama.[61] Until the contest over the peculiar institution had become heated, it was not an uncommon thing for slaves to be sent on errands, or even hired out to residents of the border counties of the free states. Notwithstanding Ohio's political antagonism to slavery from the beginning, there was a "tacit tolerance" of slavery by the people of the state down to about 1835; and "numbers of slaves, as many as two thousand it was sometimes supposed, were hired ... from Virginia and Kentucky, chiefly by farmers." Doubtless such persons heard more or less about Canada, and when the agitation against slavery became vehement, they were approached by friends, and many were induced to accept transportation to the Queen's dominions.[62]

Depredations of this sort caused alarm among slaveholders. They sought to deter their chattels from flight by talking freely before them about the rigors of the climate and the poverty of the soil of Canada. Such talk was wasted on the slaves, who were shrewd enough to discern the real meaning of their masters. They were alert to gather all that was said, and interpret it in the light of rumors from other sources. Thus, masters themselves became disseminators of information they meant to withhold. In this and other ways the slaves of the border states heard of Canada. The sale of some of these slaves to the South helps to explain the knowledge of Canada possessed by many blacks in those distant parts. When Mr. Ross visited Vicksburg, Mississippi, he found that "many of these negroes had heard of Canada from the negroes brought from Virginia and the border slave states; but the impression they had was that, Canada being so far away, it would be useless to try to reach it."[63] Notwithstanding the distance, the number of successful escapes from the interior as well as from the border slave states seems to have been sufficient to arouse the suspicion in the minds of Southerners that a secret organization of abolitionists had agents at work in the South running off slaves. This suspicion was brought to light during the trial of Richard Dillingham in Tennessee in 1849.[64] The labors of Mr. Ross several years later gave color to the same notion. These facts help to explain the insistence of the lower Southern states on the passage and strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.

With the growth of a thing so unfavored as was the Underground Road, local conditions must have a great deal to do. The characteristics of small and scattered localities, and even of isolated families, are of the first importance in the consideration of a movement such as this. These little communities were in general the elements out of which the underground system built itself up. The sources of the convictions and confidences that knitted these communities together in defiance of what they considered unjust law can only be learned by the study of local conditions. The incorporation in the Constitution of the compromises concerning slavery doubtless quieted the consciences of many of the early friends of universal liberty. It was only natural, however, that there should be some that would hold such concessions to be sinful, and in violation of the principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence and in the very Preamble of the Constitution itself. These persons would cling tenaciously to their views, and would aid a fugitive slave whenever one would ask protection and help. It is not strange that representatives of this class should be found more frequently among the Quakers than any other sect. In southeastern Pennsylvania and in New Jersey the work of helping slaves to escape was, for the most part, in the hands of Quakers from the beginning. This was true also of Wilmington, Delaware, New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Valley Falls, Rhode Island, as of a number of important centres in western Pennsylvania, and eastern, central and southwestern Ohio, in eastern Indiana, in southern Michigan and in eastern Iowa.

Anti-slavery views prevailed against the first attempts at enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 in Massachusetts, and spread to other localities in the New England states. When the tide of emigration to the Western states set in, settlers from New England were given more frequent occasions to put their principles into practice in their new homes than they had known in the seaboard region. The western portions of New York and Pennsylvania, as well as the neighboring section of Ohio, called the Western Reserve, are dotted over with communities where negroes learned the meaning of Yankee hospitality. Like Joshua R. Giddings, the people of these communities claimed to have borrowed their abolition sentiments from the writings of Jefferson, whose "abolition tract," Giddings said, "was called the Declaration of Independence."[65] In northern Illinois there were many centres of the New England type, though, of course, not all the underground stations in that region were kept by New Englanders.

In a few neighborhoods settlers from the Southern states were helpers. These persons had left the South on account of slavery; they preferred to raise their families away from influences they felt to be harmful; and they pitied the slave. It was easy for them to give shelter to the self-freed negro. In south central Ohio, in a district of four or five counties locally known as the old Chillicothe Presbytery, a number of the early preachers were anti-slavery men from the Southern states. Among the number were John Rankin, of Ripley, James Gilliland, of Red Oak, Jesse Lockhart, of Russellville, Robert B. Dobbins, of Sardinia, Samuel Crothers, of Greenfield, Hugh S. Fullerton, of Chillicothe, and William Dickey, of Ross or Fayette County. The Presbyterian churches over which these men presided became centres of opposition to slavery, and fugitives finding their way into the vicinity of any one of them were likely to receive the needed help.[66] The stations in Bond, Putnam and Bureau counties, Illinois, were kept in part by anti-slavery settlers from the South.

It is a fact worthy of record in this connection that the teachings of the two sects, the Scotch Covenanters and the Wesleyan Methodists, did not exclude the negro from the bonds of Christian brotherhood, and where churches of either denomination existed the Road was likely to be found in active operation. Within the borders of Logan County, Ohio, there were a number of Covenanter homes that received fugitives; and in southern Illinois, between the towns of Chester and Centralia, there was a series of such hospitable places. There were several Wesleyan Methodist stations in Harrison County, Ohio, and with these were intermixed a few of the Covenanter denomination.

It was natural that negro settlements in the free states should be resorted to by fugitive slaves. The colored people of Greenwich, New Jersey, the Stewart Settlement of Jackson County, Ohio, the Upper and Lower Camps, Brown County, Ohio, and the Colored Settlement, Hamilton County, Indiana, were active. The list of towns and cities in which negroes became coworkers with white persons in harboring and concealing runaways is a long one. Oberlin, Portsmouth and Cincinnati, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Boston, Massachusetts, will suffice as examples.

The principles and experience gained by a number of students while attending college in Oberlin did not come amiss later when these young men established themselves in Iowa. Professor L. F. Parker, after describing what was probably the longest line of travel through Iowa for escaped slaves, says: "Along this line Quakers and Oberlin students were the chief namable groups whose houses were open to such travellers more certainly than to white men,"[67] and the Rev. William M. Brooks, a graduate of Oberlin, until recently President of Tabor College, writes: "The stations ... in southwestern Iowa were in the region of Civil Bend, where the colony from Oberlin, Ohio, settled which afterwards settled Tabor."[68]

The origin of the Underground Road dates farther back than is generally known; though, to be sure, the different divisions of the Road were not contemporary in development. Two letters of George Washington, written in 1786, give the first reports, as yet known, of systematic efforts for the aid and protection of fugitive slaves. One of these letters bears the date May 12, and the other, November 20. In the former, Washington speaks of the slave of a certain Mr. Dalby residing at Alexandria, who has escaped to Philadelphia, and "whom a society of Quakers in the city, formed for such purposes, have attempted to liberate."[69] In the latter he writes of a slave whom he sent "under the care of a trusty overseer" to the Hon. William Drayton, but who afterwards escaped. He says: "The gentleman to whose care I sent him has promised every endeavor to apprehend him, but it is not easy to do this, when there are numbers who would rather facilitate the escape of slaves than apprehend them when runaways."[70] The difficulties attending the pursuit of the Drayton slave, like those in the other case mentioned, seem to have been associated in Washington's mind with the procedure of certain citizens of Pennsylvania; it is quite possible that he was again referring to the Quaker society in Philadelphia. However that may be, it appears probable that the record of Philadelphia as a centre of active sympathy with the fugitive slave was continuous from the time of Washington's letters. In 1787 Isaac T. Hopper, who soon became known as a friend of slaves, settled in Philadelphia, and, although only sixteen or seventeen years old, had already taken a resolution to befriend the oppressed Africans.[71] Some cases of kidnapping that occurred in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1804, stirred the citizens of that town to intervention in the runaways' behalf; and the movement seems to have spread rapidly among the Quakers of Chester, Lancaster, York, Montgomery, Berks and Bucks counties.[72] New Jersey was probably not behind southeastern Pennsylvania in point of time in Underground Railroad work. This is to be inferred from the fact that the adjacent parts of the two states were largely settled by people of a sect distinctly opposed to slavery, and were knitted together by those ties of blood that are known to have been favorable in other quarters to the development of underground routes. That protection was given to fugitives early in the present century by the Quakers of southwestern New Jersey can scarcely be doubted; and we are told that negroes were being transported through New Jersey before 1818.[73] New York was closely allied with the New Jersey and Philadelphia centres as far back as our meagre records will permit us to go. Isaac T. Hopper, who had grown familiar with underground methods of procedure in Philadelphia, moved to New York in 1829. No doubt his philanthropic arts were soon made use of there, for in 1835 we find him accused, though falsely this time, of harboring a runaway at his store in Pearl Street.[74] Frederick Douglass mentions the assistance rendered by Mr. Hopper to fugitives in New York; and says that he himself received aid from David Ruggles, a colored man and coworker with the venerable Quaker.[75] After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, New York City became more active than ever in receiving and forwarding refugees.[76] This city at the mouth of the Hudson was the entrepôt for a line of travel by way of Albany, Syracuse and Rochester to Canada, and for another line diverging at Albany, and extending by the way of Troy to the New England states and Canada; and these routes appear to have been used at an early date. The Elmira route, which connected Philadelphia with Niagara Falls by way of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was made use of from about 1850 to 1860. Its comparatively late development is explained by the fact that one of its principal agents was a fugitive slave, John W. Jones, who did not settle in Elmira until 1844, and that the line of the Northern Central Railroad was not completed until about 1850.[77] In western New York fugitives began to arrive from the neighboring parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio between 1835 and 1840, if not earlier. Professor Edward Orton recalls that in 1838, soon after his father moved to Buffalo, two sleigh-loads of negroes from the Western Reserve were brought to the house in the night-time;[78] and Mr. Frederick Nicholson, of Warsaw, New York, states that the underground work in his vicinity began in 1840. From this time on there was apparently no cessation of migrations of fugitives into Canada at Black Rock, Buffalo and other points.[79]

The remoteness of New England from the slave states did not prevent its sharing in the business of helping blacks to Canada. In Vermont, which seems to have received fugitives from the Troy line of eastern New York, the period of activity began "in the latter part of the twenties of this century, and lasted till the time of the Rebellion."[80] In New Hampshire there was a station at Canaan after 1830, and probably before that time.[81] The Hon. Mellen Chamberlain, of Chelsea, Massachusetts, personally conducted a fugitive on two occasions from Concord, New Hampshire, to his uncle's at Canterbury, in the same state "most probably in 1838 or 1839."[82] This thing once begun in New Hampshire seems to have continued steadily during the decades until the War of the Rebellion.[83] As regards Connecticut the Rev. Samuel J. May states that as long ago as 1834 slaves were addressed to his care while he was living in the eastern part of the state.[84] In Massachusetts the town of Fall River became an important station in 1839.[85] New Bedford, Boston, Marblehead, Concord, Springfield, Florence and other places in Massachusetts are known to have given shelter to fugitives as they travelled northward. Mr. Simeon Dodge, of Marblehead, who had personal knowledge of what was going on, recollects that the Underground Road was active between 1840 and 1860, and his testimony is substantiated by that of a number of other persons.[86] Doubtless there was underground work going on in Massachusetts before this period, but it was probably of a less systematic character. In Maine fugitives frequently obtained help in the early forties. The Rev. O. B. Cheney, later President of Bates College, was concerned in a branch of the Road running from Portland to Effingham, New Hampshire, and northward, during the years 1843 to 1845.[87] That later conditions probably increased the labors of the Maine abolitionists appears from the statement of Mr. Brown Thurston, of Portland, that he had at one time after the passage of the second Fugitive Slave Law the care of thirty fugitives.[88]

Considering the geographical situation of Ohio and western Pennsylvania, the period of their settlement, and the character of many of their pioneers, it is not strange that this work should have become established in this region earlier than in the other free states along the Ohio River. The years 1815 to 1817 witnessed, so far as we now know, the origin of underground lines in both the eastern and western parts of this section. Henry Wilson explains this by saying that soldiers from Virginia and Kentucky, returning home after the War of 1812, carried back the news that there was a land of freedom beyond the lakes. John Sloane, of Ravenna, David Hudson, the founder of the town of Hudson, and Owen Brown, the father of John Brown of Osawattomie, were among the first of those known to have harbored slaves in the eastern part.[89] Edward Howard, the father of Colonel D. W. H. Howard, of Wauseon, and the Ottawa Indians of the village of Chief Kinjeino were among the earliest friends of fugitives in the western part.[90] At least one case of underground procedure is reported to have occurred in central Ohio as early as 1812. The report is but one remove from its original source, and was given to Mr. Robert McCrory, of Marysville, Ohio, by Richard Dixon, an eye-witness. The alleged runaway, seized at Delaware, was unceremoniously taken from the custody of his mounted captor when the two reached Worthington, and was brought before Colonel James Kilbourne, who served as an official of all work in the village he had founded but a few years before. By Mr. Kilbourne's decision, the negro was released, and was then sent north aboard one of the government wagons engaged at the time in carrying military supplies to Sandusky.[91] That such action was not inconsistent with the character of Colonel Kilbourne and his New England associates is evidenced by the fact that as an agent for "The Scioto Company," formed in Granby, Connecticut, in the winter of 1801-1802, he had delayed the purchase of a township in Ohio for settlement until a state constitution forbidding slavery should be adopted.[92] If now the testimony of the oldest surviving abolitionists from the different regions of the state be compared, some interesting results may be found. Job Mullin, a Quaker of Warren County, in his eighty-ninth year when his statement was given, says: "The most active time to my knowledge was from 1816 to 1830...." In 1829 Mr. Mullin moved off the line with which he had been connected and took no further part in the work.[93] Mr. Eliakim H. Moore, for a number of years the treasurer of Ohio University at Athens, says that the work began near Athens during 1823 and 1824. "In those years not so many attempted to escape as later, from 1845 to 1860."[94] Dr. Thomas Cowgill, an aged Quaker of Kennard, Champaign County, recollects that the work of the Underground Railroad began in his neighborhood about 1824. The time between 1840 and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law he regards as the period of greatest activity within his experience. Joseph Skillgess, a colored citizen of Urbana, now seventy-six years old, says that it is among his earliest recollections that runaways were entertained at Dry Run Church, in Ross County.[95] William A. Johnston, an old resident of Coshocton, testifies: "We had such a road here as early as the twenties, I know from tradition and personal observation."[96] Mahlon Pickrell, a prominent Quaker of Logan County, writes: "There was some travel on the Underground Railroad as early as 1820, but the period of greatest activity in this vicinity was between 1840 and 1850."[97] Finally, Mr. R. C. Corwin, of Lebanon, writes: "My first recollection of the business dates back to about 1820, when I remember seeing fugitives at my father's house, though I dare say it had been going on long before that time. From that time until 1840 there was a gradual increase of business. From 1840 to 1860 might be called the period of greatest activity."[98] Among these aged witnesses, those have been quoted whose experience, character and clearness of mind gave weight to their words. Mr. Rush R. Sloane, of Sandusky, who made some local investigations in northwestern Ohio and published the results in 1888, produces some evidence that agrees with the testimony just given. He found that, "The first runaway slave known as such at Sandusky was there in the fall of the year 1820.... Judge Jabez Wright, one of the three associate judges who held the first term of court in Huron County in 1815, was among the first white men upon the Firelands to aid fugitive slaves; he never failed when opportunity offered to lend a helping hand to the fugitives, secreting them when necessary, feeding them when they were hungry, clothing and employing them."[99] After reciting a number of instances of rescues occurring between 1820 and 1850, Mr. Sloane remarks that one of the immediate results of the passage of the second Fugitive Slave Law was the increased travel of fugitives through the State of Ohio.[100] The foregoing items have been brought together to show that there was no break in the business of the Road from the beginning to the end. The death or the change of residence of abolitionists may have interrupted travel on one or another route, and may even have broken a line permanently, but the history of the Underground Railroad system in Ohio is continuous.

In North Carolina underground methods are known to have been employed by white persons of respectability as early as 1819. We are informed that "Vestal Coffin organized the Underground Railroad near the present Guilford College in 1819. Addison Coffin, his son, entered its service as a conductor in early youth and still survives in hale old age.... Vestal's cousin, Levi Coffin, became an anti-slavery apostle in early youth and continued unflinching to the end. His early years were spent in North Carolina, whence he helped many slaves to reach the West."[101] Levi Coffin removed to Indiana in 1826. Of his own and his cousin's activities in behalf of slaves while still a resident of North Carolina, Mr. Coffin writes: "Runaway slaves used frequently to conceal themselves in the woods and thickets of New Garden, waiting opportunities to make their escape to the North, and I generally learned their places of concealment and rendered them all the service in my power.... These outlying slaves knew where I lived, and, when reduced to extremity of want or danger, often came to my room, in the silence and darkness of the night, to obtain food or assistance. In my efforts to aid these fugitives I had a zealous coworker in my friend and cousin Vestal Coffin, who was then, and continued to the time of his death—a few years later—a staunch friend to the slave."[102] When Levi Coffin emigrated in 1826 to southeastern Indiana, he did not give up his active interest in the fleeing slave, and his house at Newport (now Fountain City) became a centre at which three distinct lines of Underground Road converged. It is probable, however, that wayfarers from bondage found aid from pioneer settlers in Indiana before Friend Coffin's arrival. John F. Williams, of Economy, Indiana, says that fugitives "commenced coming in 1820," and he denominated himself "an agent since 1820," although he "never kept a depot till 1852."[103] It is scarcely necessary to make a showing of testimony to prove that an expansion of routes like that taking place in Ohio and states farther east occurred also in Indiana.

It is doubtful at what time stations first came to exist in Illinois. Mr. H. B. Leeper, an old resident of that state, assigns their origin to the years 1819 and 1820, at which time a small colony of anti-slavery people from Brown County, Ohio, settled in Bond County, southern Illinois. Emigrations from this locality to Putnam County, about 1830, led, he thinks, to the establishment there of a new centre for this work. These settlers were persons that had left South Carolina on account of slavery, and during their residence in Brown County, Ohio, had accepted the abolitionist views of the Rev. James Gilliland, a Presbyterian preacher of Red Oak; and in Illinois they did not shrink from putting their principles into practice. This account is plausible, and as it is substantiated in certain parts by facts from the history of Brown County, Ohio, it may be considered probable in those parts that are and must remain without corroboration. Concerning his father Mr. Leeper writes: "John Leeper moved from Marshall County, Tennessee, to Bond County, Illinois, in 1816. Was a hater of slavery.... Remained in Bond County until 1823, then moved to Jacksonville, Morgan County, and in 1831 to Putnam County, and in 1833 to Bureau County, Illinois.... My father's house was always a hiding-place for the fugitive from slavery."[104] On the basis of this testimony, and the probability in the case, we may believe that the underground movement in Illinois dates back, at least, to the time of the admission of Illinois into the Union, that is, to 1818. Soon after 1835, the movement seems to have become well established, and to have increased in importance with considerable rapidity till the War.

It is a fact worthy of note that the years that witnessed the beginnings in Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina and Illinois of this curious method of assailing the slave power, precede but slightly those that witnessed the formulation of three several bills in Congress designed to strengthen the first Fugitive Slave Law. The three measures were drafted during the interval from 1818 to 1822.

The abolitionist enterprises of the more western states, Iowa and Kansas, came too late to be in any way connected with the proposal of these bills. The settlement of these territories was, of course, considerably behind that of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, but the nearness of the new regions to a slaveholding section insured the opportunity for Underground Railroad work as soon as settlement should begin. Professor L. F. Parker, of Tabor College, Iowa, has sketched briefly the successive steps in the opening of his state to occupancy. "The Black-Hawk Purchase opened the eastern edge of Iowa to the depth of 40 or 50 miles to the whites in 1833. The strip ... west of that which included what is now Grinnell was not opened to white occupancy till 1843, and it was ten years later before the white residents in this county numbered 500. Grinnell was settled in 1854, when central and western Iowa was merely dotted by a few hamlets of white men, and seamed by winding paths along prairie ridges and through bridgeless streams."[105] One of the early settlers in southeastern Iowa was J. H. B. Armstrong, who had been familiar with the midnight appeals of escaping slaves in Fayette County, Ohio. Mr. Armstrong removed to the West in 1839, and settled in Lee County, Iowa. His proximity to the northeastern boundary of Missouri seems to have involved him in Underground Railroad work from the start, on the route running to Salem and Denmark. When in 1852 Mr. Armstrong moved to Appanoose County, and located within four miles of the Missouri line, among a number of abolitionists, he found himself even more concerned with secret projects to help slaves to Canada. The lines of travel of fugitive slaves that extended east throughout the entire length of Iowa were more or less associated with Kansas men and Kansas movements, and their development is, therefore, to be assigned to the time of the outbreak of the struggle over Kansas (1854). Residents of Tabor in southwestern Iowa, and of Grinnell in central Iowa, agree in designating 1854 as the year in which their Underground Railroad labors began. The Rev. John Todd, one of the founders of the college colony of Tabor, is authority for the statement that the first fugitives arrived in the summer of 1854.[106] Professor Parker states that Grinnell was a stopping-place for the hunted slave from the time of its founding in 1854.

We may summarize our findings in regard to the expansion of the Underground Railroad, then, by saying that it had grown into a wide-spread "institution" before the year 1840, and in several states it had existed in previous decades. This statement coincides with the findings of Dr. Samuel G. Howe in Canada, while on a tour of investigation in 1863. He reports that the arrivals of runaway slaves in the provinces, at first rare, increased early in the century; that some of the fugitives, rejoicing in the personal freedom they had gained and banishing all fear of the perils they must endure, went stealthily back to their former homes and brought away their wives and children. The Underground Road was of great assistance to these and other escaping slaves, and "hundreds," says Dr. Howe, "trod this path every year, but they did not attract much public attention."[107] It does not escape Dr. Howe's consideration, however, that the fugitive slaves in Canada were soon brought to public notice by the diplomatic negotiations between England and the United States during the years 1826-1828, the object being, as Mr. Clay, the Secretary of State, himself declared, "to provide for a growing evil." The evidence gathered from surviving abolitionists in the states adjacent to the lakes shows an increased activity of the Underground Road during the period 1830-1840. The reason for flight given by the slave was, in the great majority of cases, the same, namely, fear of being sold to the far South. It is certainly significant in this connection that the decade above mentioned witnessed the removal of the Indians from the Gulf states, and, in the words of another contemporary observer and reporter, "the consequent opening of new and vast cotton fields."[108] The swelling emphasis laid upon the value of their escaped slaves by the Southern representatives in Congress, and by the South generally, resounded with terrific force at length in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. That act did not, as it appears, check or diminish in any way the number of underground rescues. In spite of the exhibit on fugitive slaves made in the United States census report of 1860, which purports to show that the number of escapes was about a thousand a year, it is difficult to doubt the consensus of testimony of many underground agents, to the effect that the decade from 1850 to 1860 was the period of the Road's greatest activity in all sections of the North.[109]

It is not known when the name "Underground Railroad" came to be applied to these secret trails, nor where it was first applied to them. According to Mr. Smedley the designation came into use among slave-hunters in the neighborhood of Columbia soon after the Quakers in southeastern Pennsylvania began their concerted action in harboring and forwarding fugitives. The pursuers seem to have had little difficulty in tracking slaves as far as Columbia, but beyond that point all trace of them was generally lost. All the various methods of detection customary in such cases were resorted to, but failed to bring the runaways to view. The mystery enshrouding these disappearances completely bewildered and baffled the slave-owners and their agents, who are said to have declared, "there must be an Underground Railroad somewhere."[110] As this work reached considerable development in the district indicated during the first decade of this century the account quoted is seen to contain an anachronism. Railroads were not known either in England or the United States until about 1830, so that the word "railroad" could scarcely have received its figurative application as early as Mr. Smedley implies.

The Hon. Rush R. Sloane, of Sandusky, Ohio, gives the following account of the naming of the Road: "In the year 1831, a fugitive named Tice Davids came over the line and lived just back of Sandusky. He had come direct from Ripley, Ohio, where he crossed the Ohio River....

"When he was running away, his master, a Kentuckian, was in close pursuit and pressing him so hard that when the Ohio River was reached he had no alternative but to jump in and swim across. It took his master some time to secure a skiff, in which he and his aid followed the swimming fugitive, keeping him in sight until he had landed. Once on shore, however, the master could not find him. No one had seen him; and after a long ... search the disappointed slave-master went into Ripley, and when inquired of as to what had become of his slave, said ... he thought 'the nigger must have gone off on an underground road.' The story was repeated with a good deal of amusement, and this incident gave the name to the line. First the 'Underground Road,' afterwards 'Underground Railroad.'"[111] A colored man, the Rev. W. M. Mitchell, who was for several years a resident of southern Ohio, and a friend of fugitives, gives what appears to be a version of Mr. Sloane's story.[112] These anecdotes are hardly more than traditions, affording a fair general explanation of the way in which the Underground Railroad got its name; but they cannot be trusted in the details of time, place and occasion. Whatever the manner and date of its suggestion, the designation was generally accepted as an apt title for a mysterious means of transporting fugitive slaves to Canada.

A CROSSING PLACE FOR FUGITIVE SLAVES ON THE OHIO RIVER, AT STEUBENVILLE, OHIO.
(From a recent photograph.)

HOUSE OF THE REV. JOHN RANKIN, RIPLEY, OHIO.
Situated on the top of a high hill, this initial station was readily found by runaways from the Kentucky shore opposite.
(From a recent photograph.)

[CHAPTER III]

THE METHODS OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

By the enactment of the first Fugitive Slave Law, February 12, 1793, the aiding of fugitive slaves became a penal offence. This measure laid a fine of five hundred dollars upon any one harboring escaped slaves, or preventing their arrest. The provisions of the law were of a character to stimulate resistance to its enforcement. The master or his agent was authorized to arrest the runaway, wherever found; to bring him before a judge of the circuit or the district court of the United States, or before a local magistrate where the capture was made; and to receive, on the display of satisfactory proof, a certificate operating as a full warrant for taking the prisoner back to the state from which he had fled. This summary method of disposing of cases involving the high question of human liberty was regarded by many persons as unjust; they freely denounced it, and, despite the penalty attached, many violated the law. Secrecy was the only safeguard of these persons, as it was of those they were attempting to succor; hence arose the numerous artifices employed.

The uniform success of the attempts to evade this first Fugitive Slave Law, and doubtless, also, the general indisposition of Northern people to take part in the return of refugees to their Southern owners, led, as early as in 1823, to negotiations between Kentucky and the three adjoining states across the Ohio. It is unnecessary to trace the history of these negotiations, or to point out the statutes in which the legislative results are recorded. It is notable that sixteen years elapsed before the legislature of Ohio passed a law to secure the recovery of slave property, and that the new enactment remained on the statute books only four years. The penalties imposed by this law for advising or for enticing a slave to leave his master, or for harboring a fugitive, were a fine, not to exceed five hundred dollars, and, at the discretion of the court, imprisonment not to exceed sixty days. In addition, the offender was to be liable in an action at the suit of the party injured.[113] It can scarcely be supposed that a state Fugitive Slave Law like this would otherwise affect persons that were already engaged in aiding runaways than to make them more certain than ever that their cause was just.

The loss of slave property sustained by Southern planters was not diminished, and the outcry of the South for a more rigorous national law on the subject was by no means hushed. In 1850 Congress met the case by substituting for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 the measure called the second Fugitive Slave Law. The penalties provided by this law were, of course, more severe than those of the act of 1793. Any person hindering the claimant from arresting the fugitive, or attempting the rescue or concealment of the fugitive, became "subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or imprisonment not exceeding six months," and was liable for "civil damages to the party injured by such illegal conduct in the sum of one thousand dollars for each fugitive so lost." These provisions of the new law only added fresh fuel to the fire. The determination to prevent the recovery of escaped slaves by their owners spread rapidly among the inhabitants of the free states. Many of these persons, who had hitherto refrained from acting for or against the fugitive, were provoked into helping defeat the action of a law commanding them "to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution" of a measure that would have set them at the miserable business of slave-catching. Clay only expressed a wish instead of a fact, when he maintained in 1851 that the law was being executed in Indiana, Ohio and other states. Another Southern senator was much nearer the truth when he complained of the small number of recaptures under the recent act.

The risk of suffering severe penalties by violating the Fugitive Slave laws was less wearing, probably, on abolitionists than was the social disdain they brought upon themselves by acknowledging their principles. During a generation or more they were in a minority in many communities, and were forced to submit to the taunts and insults of persons that did not distinguish between abolition of slavery and fusion of the white and the black races. "Black abolitionist," "niggerite," "amalgamationist" and "nigger thief" were convenient epithets in the mouths of pro-slavery champions in many Northern neighborhoods. The statement was not uncommonly made about those suspected of harboring slaves, that they did so from motives of thrift and gain. It was said that some underground helpers made use of the labor of runaways, especially in harvest-time, as long as it suited their convenience, then on the pretext of danger hurried the negroes off without pay. Unreasoning malice alone could concoct so absurd an explanation of a philanthropy involving so much cost and risk.[114] Abolitionists were often made uncomfortable in their church relations by the uncomplimentary attentions they received, or by the discovery that they were regarded as unwelcome disturbers of the household of faith.[115] Even the Society of Friends is not above the charge of having lost sight, in some quarters, of the precepts of Anthony Benezet and John Woolman. Uxbridge monthly meeting is known to have disowned Abby Kelly because she gave anti-slavery lectures.[116] The church certificate given to Mrs. Elizabeth Buffum Chace when she transferred her membership from Swanzey monthly meeting to Providence (Rhode Island) monthly meeting was without the acknowledgment usually contained in such certificates that the bearer "was of orderly life and conversation."[117] A popular Hicksite minister of New York City, in commending the fugitive Thomas Hughes for consenting to return South with his master, said, "I had a thousand times rather be a slave, and spend my days with slaveholders, than to dwell in companionship with abolitionists."[118] In the Methodist Church there came to be such stress of feeling between the abolitionists and the other members, that in many places the former withdrew and organized little congregations apart, under the denominational name, Wesleyan Methodist. The truth is, the mass of the people of the free states were by no means abolitionists; they cherished an intense prejudice against the negro, and permitted it to extend to all anti-slavery advocates. They were willing to let slavery alone, and desired that others should let it alone. In the Western states the character of public sentiment is evidenced by the fact that generally the political party considered to be most favorable to slavery could command a majority, and "black laws" were framed at the behest of Southern politicians for the purpose of making residence in the Northern states a disagreeable thing for the negro.[119]

Abolitionists were frequently subjected to espionage; the arrival of a party of colored people at a house after daybreak would arouse suspicion and cause the place to be closely watched; a chance meeting with a neighbor in the highway would perhaps be the means by which some abolitionists' secrets would become known. In such cases it did not always follow that the discovery brought ruin upon the head of the offender, even when the discoverer was a person of pro-slavery views. Nevertheless, accidents of the kind described served to fasten the suspicions of a locality upon the offender. Gravner and Hannah Marsh, Quakers, living near Downington, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, became known to their pro-slavery neighbors as agents on the Underground Road. These neighbors were not disposed to inform against them, although one woman, intent on finding out how many slaves they aided in a year, with much watching counted sixty.[120] The Rev. John Cross, a Presbyterian minister living in Elba Township, Knox County, Illinois, about the year 1840, had neighbors that insisted on his answering to the law for the help he gave to some fugitives. Mr. Cross made no secret of his principles and accordingly became game for his enemies. One of these was Jacob Kightlinger, who observed a wagon-load of negroes being taken in the direction of Mr. Cross's house. Investigation by Mr. Kightlinger and several of his friends proved their suspicions to be true, and by their action Mr. Cross was indicted for harboring fugitive slaves.[121]

Parties in pursuit of fugitives were compelled to make careful and often long-continued search to find traces of their wayfaring chattels. During such missions they were, of course, inquisitive and vigilant, and when circumstances seemed to warrant it, they set men to watch the premises of the persons most suspicioned, and to report any mysterious actions occurring within the district patrolled. The houses of many noted abolitionists along the Ohio River were frequently under the surveillance of slave-hunters. It was not a rare thing that towns and villages in regions adjacent to the Southern states were terrorized by crowds of roughs eager to find the hiding-places of slaves, recently missed by masters bent on their recovery. The following extracts from a letter written by Mr. William Steel to Mr. David Putnam, Jr., of Point Harmar, Ohio, will show the methods practised by slave-hunters when in eager pursuit of fugitives:—

Woodsfield, Monroe Co., O.
Sept. 5, 1843.

Mr. David Putnam, Jr.:

Dear Sir,—I received yours of the 26th ult, and was very glad to hear from it that Stephen Quixot had such good luck in getting his family from Virginia, but we began to be very uneasy about them as we did not hear from them again until last Saturday, ... we then heard they were on the route leading through Summerfield, but that the route from there to Somerton was so closely watched both day and night for some time past on account of the human cattle that have lately escaped from Virginia, that they could not proceed farther on that route. So we made an arrangement with the Summerfield friends to meet them on Sunday evening about ten miles west of this and bring them on to this route ... the abolitionists of the west part of this county have had very difficult work in getting them all off without being caught, as the whole of that part of the country has been filled with Southern blood hounds upon their track, and some of the abolitionists' houses have been watched day and night for several days in succession. This evening a company of eight Virginia hounds passed through this place north on the hunt of some of their two-legged chattels.... Since writing the above I have understood that something near twenty Virginians including the eight above mentioned have just passed through town on their way to the Somerton neighborhood, but I do not think they will get much information about their lost chattels there....

Yours for the Slave,
William Steel.[122]

A case that well illustrates the method of search employed by pursuing parties is that of the escape of the Nuckolls slaves through Iowa, the incidents of which are still vivid in the memories of some that witnessed them. Mr. Nuckolls, of Nebraska City, Nebraska, lost two slave-girls in December, 1858. He instituted search for them in Tabor, an abolitionist centre, and did not neglect to guard the crossings of two streams in the vicinity, Silver Creek and the Nishnabotna River. As the slaves had been promptly despatched to Chicago, this search availed him nothing. A second and more thorough hunt was decided on, and the aid of a score or more fellows was secured. These men made entrance into houses by force and violence, when bravado failed to gain them admission.[123] At one house where the remonstrance against intrusion was unusually strong the person remonstrating was struck over the head and injured for life. The outcome of the whole affair was that Mr. Nuckolls had some ten thousand dollars to pay in damages and costs, and, after all, failed to recover his slaves.[124]

Many were the inducements to practise espionage on abolitionists. Large sums were offered for the capture of fugitives, and rewards were offered also for the arrest and delivery south of Mason and Dixon's line of certain abolitionists, who were well-enough known to have the hatred of many Southerners. "At an anti-slavery meeting of the citizens of Sardinia and vicinity, held on November 21, 1838, a committee of respectable citizens presented a report, accompanied with affidavits in support of its declarations, stating that for more than a year past there had been an unusual degree of hatred manifested by the slave-hunters and slaveholders towards the abolitionists of Brown County, and that rewards varying from $500 to $2,500 had been repeatedly offered by different persons for the abduction or assassination of the Rev. John B. Mahan; and rewards had also been offered for Amos Pettijohn, William A. Frazier and Dr. Isaac M. Beck, of Sardinia, the Rev. John Rankin and Dr. Alexander Campbell, of Ripley, William McCoy, of Russellville, and citizens of Adams County."[125] A resolution was offered in the Maryland Legislature, in January, 1860, proposing a reward for the arrest of Thomas Garrett, of Wilmington, for "stealing" slaves.[126] It is perhaps an evidence of the extraordinary caution and shrewdness employed by managers of the Road generally that so many of them escaped without suffering the penalties of the law or the inflictions of private vengeance.

Slave-owners occasionally tried to find out the secrets of an underground station or of a route by visiting various localities in disguise. A Kentucky slaveholder clad in the Friends' peculiar garb went to the house of John Charles, a Quaker of Richmond, Indiana, and meeting a son of Mr. Charles, accosted him with the words, "Well, sir, my little mannie, hasn't thee father gone to Canada with some niggers?" Young Charles quickly perceived the disguise, and pointing his finger at the man declared him to be a "wolf in sheep's clothing."[127] About the year 1840 there came into Cass County, Indiana, a man from Kentucky by the name of Carpenter, who professed to be an anti-slavery lecturer and an agent for certain anti-slavery papers. He visited the abolitionists and seemed zealous in the cause. In this way he learned the whereabouts of seven fugitives that had arrived in the neighborhood from Kentucky a few weeks before. He sent word to their masters, and in due time they were all seized, but had not been taken far before the neighborhood was aroused, masters and victims were overtaken and carried to the county-seat, a trial was procured, and the slaves were again set free.

Thus the penalties of the law, the contempt of neighbors, and the espionage of persons interested in returning fugitives to bondage made secrecy necessary in the service of the Underground Railroad.

Night was the only time, of course, in which the fugitive and his helpers could feel themselves even partially secure. Probably most slaves that started for Canada had learned to know the north star, and to many of these superstitious persons its light seemed the enduring witness of the divine interest in their deliverance. When clouds obscured the stars they had recourse, perhaps, to such bits of homely knowledge as, that in forests the trunks of trees are commonly moss-grown on their north sides. In Kentucky and western Virginia many fugitives were guided to free soil by the tributaries of the Ohio; while in central and eastern Virginia the ranges of the Appalachian chain marked the direction to be taken. After reaching the initial station of some line of Underground Road the fugitive found himself provided with such accommodations for rest and refreshment as circumstances would allow; and after an interval of a day or more he was conveyed, usually in the night, to the house of the next friend. Sometimes, however, when a guide was thought to be unnecessary the fugitive was sent on foot to the next station, full and minute instructions for finding it having been given him. The faltering step, and the light, uncertain rapping of the fugitive at the door, was quickly recognized by the family within, and the stranger was admitted with a welcome at once sincere and subdued. There was a suppressed stir in the house while the fire was building and food preparing; and after the hunger and chill of the wayfarer had been dispelled, he was provided with a bed in some out-of-the-way part of the house, or under the hay in the barn loft, according to the degree of danger. Often a household was awakened to find a company of five or more negroes at the door. The arrival of such a company was sometimes announced beforehand by special messenger.

That the amount of time taken from the hours of sleep by underground service was no small item may be seen from the following record covering the last half of August, 1843. The record or memorandum is that of Mr. David Putnam, Jr., of Point Harmar, Ohio, and is given with all the abbreviations:

This is plainly a schedule of arriving and departing "trains" on the Underground Road. It is noticeable that the schedule contains no description, numerical or otherwise, of the parties coming and going; nor does it indicate, except by initial, to what places or persons the parties were despatched; further, it does not indicate whether Mr. Putnam accompanied them or not. It does, however, give us a clue to the amount of night service that was done at a station of average activity on the Ohio River as early as the year 1843. The demands upon operators increased, we know, from this time on till 1860. The memorandum also shows the variation in the length of time during which different companies of fugitives were detained at a station; thus, the first fugitive, or company of fugitives, as the case may have been, departed on the evening of the day of arrival; the second party was kept in concealment from Wednesday morning until the Sunday night next following before it was sent on its way; the third party seems to have been divided, one section being forwarded the night of the day of arrival, the other the next night following; in the case of the last company there seems to have existed some especial reason for haste, and we find it hurried away at two o'clock in the morning, after only an hour's intermission for rest and refreshment. The memorandum of night service at the Putnam station may be regarded as fairly representative of the night service at many other posts or stations throughout Ohio and the adjoining states.

Much of the communication relating to fugitive slaves was had in guarded language. Special signals, whispered conversations, passwords, messages couched in figurative phrases, were the common modes of conveying information about underground passengers, or about parties in pursuit of fugitives. These modes of communication constituted what abolitionists knew as the "grape-vine telegraph."[129] The signals employed were of various kinds, and were local in usage. Fugitives crossing the Ohio River in the vicinity of Parkersburg, in western Virginia, were sometimes announced at stations near the river by their guides by a shrill tremolo-call like that of the owl. Colonel John Stone and Mr. David Putnam, Jr., of Marietta, Ohio, made frequent use of this signal.[130] Different neighborhoods had their peculiar combinations of knocks or raps to be made upon the door or window of a station when fugitives were awaiting admission. In Harrison County, Ohio, around Cadiz, one of the recognized signals was three distinct but subdued knocks. To the inquiry, "Who's there?" the reply was, "A friend with friends."[131] Passwords were used on some sections of the Road. The agents at York in southeastern Pennsylvania made use of them, and William Yokum, a constable of the town, who was kindly disposed towards runaways, was able to be most helpful in times of emergency by his knowledge of the watchwords, one of which was "William Penn."[132] Messages couched in figurative language were often sent. The following note, written by Mr. John Stone, of Belpre, Ohio, in August, 1843, is a good example:—

Belpre Friday Morning

David Putnam

Business is aranged for Saturday night be on the lookout and if practicable let a cariage come & meet the carawan

J S[133]

Mr. I. Newton Peirce forwarded a number of fugitives from Alliance, Ohio, to Cleveland, over the Cleveland and Western Railroad. He sent with each company a note to a Cleveland merchant, Mr. Joseph Garretson, saying: "Please forward immediately the U. G. baggage this day sent to you. Yours truly, I. N. P."[134] Mr. G. W. Weston, of Low Moor, Iowa, was the author of similar communications addressed to a friend, Mr. C. B. Campbell, of Clinton.

Low Moor, May 6, 1859.

Mr. C. B. C.,

Dear Sir:—By to-morrow evening's mail, you will receive two volumes of the "Irrepressible Conflict" bound in black. After perusal, please forward, and oblige,

Yours truly,
G. W. W.[135]

The Hon. Thomas Mitchell, founder of Mitchellville, near Des Moines, Iowa, forwarded fugitives to Mr. J. B. Grinnell, after whom the town of Grinnell was named. The latter gives the following note as a sample of the messages that passed between them:—

Dear Grinnell:—Uncle Tom says if the roads are not too bad you can look for those fleeces of wool by to-morrow. Send them on to test the market and price, no back charges.

Yours,
Hub.[136]

There were many persons engaged in underground work that did not always take the precaution to veil their communications. Judge Thomas Lee, of the Western Reserve, was one of this class, as the following letter to Mr. Putnam, of Point Harmar, will show:—

Cadiz, Ohio, March 17th, 1847.

Mr. David Putnam,

Dear Sir:—I understand you are a friend to the poor and are willing to obey the heavenly mandate, "Hide the outcasts, betray not him that wandereth." Believing this, and at the request of Stephen Fairfax (who has been permitted in divine providence to enjoy for a few days the kind of liberty which Ohio gives to the man of colour), I would be glad if you could find out and let me know by letter what are the prospects if any and the probable time when, the balance of the family will make the same effort to obtain their inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Their friends who have gone north are very anxious to have them follow, as they think it much better to work for eight or ten dollars per month than to work for nothing.

Yours in behalf of the millions of poor, opprest and downtrodden in our land.

Thomas Lee.

In the conveyance of fugitives from station to station there existed all the variety of method one would expect to find. In the early days of the Underground Road the fugitives were generally men. It was scarcely thought necessary to send a guide with them unless some special reason for so doing existed. They were, therefore, commonly given such directions as they needed and left to their own devices. As the number of refugees increased, and women and children were more frequently seen upon the Road, and pursuit was more common, the practice of transporting fugitives on horseback, or by vehicle, was introduced. The steam railroad was a new means furnished to abolitionists by the progress of the times, and used by them with greater or less frequency as circumstances required, and when the safety of passengers would not be sacrificed.

When fugitive travellers afoot or on horseback found themselves pursued, safety lay in flight, unless indeed the company was large enough, courageous enough, and sufficiently well armed to give battle. The safety of fugitives while travelling by conveyance lay mainly in their concealment, and many were the stratagems employed. Characteristic of the service of the Underground Railroad were the covered wagons, closed carriages and deep-bedded farm-wagons that hid the passengers. There are those living who remember special day-coaches of more peculiar construction. Abram Allen, a Quaker of Oakland, Clinton County, Ohio, had a large three-seated wagon, made for the purpose of carrying fugitives. He called it the Liberator. It was curtained all around, would hold eight or ten persons, and had a mechanism with a bell, invented by Mr. Allen, to record the number of miles travelled.[137] A citizen of Troy, Ohio, a bookbinder by trade, had a large wagon, built about with drawers in such a way as to leave a large hiding-place in the centre of the wagon-bed. As the bookbinder drove through the country he found opportunity to help many a fugitive on his way to Canada.[138] Horace Holt, of Rutland, Meigs County, Ohio, sold reeds to his neighbors in southern Ohio. He had a box-bed wagon with a lid that fastened with a padlock. In this he hauled his supply of reeds; it was well understood by a few that he also hauled fugitive slaves.[139] Joseph Sider, of southern Indiana, found his pedler wagon well adapted to the transportation of slaves from Kentucky plantations.[140] William Still gives instances of negroes being placed in boxes, and shipped as freight by boat, and also by rail, to friends in the North. William Box Peel Jones was boxed in Baltimore and sent to Philadelphia by way of the Ericsson line of steamers, being seventeen hours on the way.[141] Henry Box Brown had the same thrilling and perilous experience. His trip consumed twenty-four hours, during which time he was in the care of the Adams Express Company in transit from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia.[142]

Abolitionists that drove wagons or carriages containing refugees, "conductors" as they came to be called in the terminology of the Railroad service, generally took the precaution to have ostensible reasons for their journeys. They sought to divest their excursions of the air of mystery by seeming to be about legitimate business. Hannah Marsh, of Chester County, Pennsylvania, was in the habit of taking garden produce to the Philadelphia markets to sell; when, therefore, she sometimes used her covered market-wagon, even in daytime, to convey fugitives, she attracted no attention, and made her trips without molestation.[143] Calvin Fairbank abducted the Stanton family, father, mother and six children, from the neighborhood of Covington, Kentucky, by packing them in a load of straw.[144] James W. Torrence, of Northwood, Ohio, together with some of his neighbors exported grain, and sometimes feathers, to Sandusky. These products were generally shipped when there were fugitives to go with the load. As the distance to Sandusky was a hundred and twenty miles, refugees who happened to profit by this arrangement were saved much time and no small amount of risk in getting to their destination.[145] Mr. William I. Bowditch, of Boston, used a two-horse carryall on one occasion to take a single fugitive to Concord.[146] Mr. John Weldon and other abolitionists, of Dwight, Illinois, took negroes to Chicago concealed in wagons loaded with sacks of bran.[147] Levi Coffin, of Cincinnati, Ohio, frequently received large companies for which safe transportation had to be supplied. On one occasion a party of twenty-eight negroes arrived, towards daylight, in the suburbs of Cincinnati, from Boone County, Kentucky, and it was necessary to send them on at once. Accordingly at Friend Coffin's suggestion a number of carriages were procured, formed into a long funeral-like procession and started solemnly on the road to Cumminsville.[148] An almost endless array of incidents similar to these can be given, but enough have been recited to illustrate the caution that prevailed in the transportation of fugitive slaves toward Canada.

The routes were very far from being straight. They are perhaps best described by the word zigzag. The exigencies that determined in what direction an escaping slave should go during any particular part of his journey were, in the nature of the case, always local. The ultimate goal was Canada, but a safe passage was of greater importance than a quick one. When speed would contribute safety the guide would make a long trip with his charge, or perhaps resort to the steam railroad; but under ordinary circumstances, in those regions where the Underground Railroad was most patronized, a guide had almost always a choice between two or more routes; he could, as seemed best at the time, take the right-hand road to one station, or the left-hand road to another. In truth, the underground paths in these regions formed a great and intricate network, and it was in no small measure because the lines forming the meshes of this great system converged and branched again at so many stations that it was almost an impossibility for slave-hunters to trace their negroes through even a single county without finding themselves on the wrong trail. It was a common stratagem in times of special emergency to switch off travellers from one course to another, or to take them back on their track and then, after a few days of waiting, send them forward again. It is, then, proper to say that zigzag was one of the regular devices to blind and throw off pursuit. It served moreover to avoid unfriendly localities. It seems probable that the circuitous land route from Toledo to Detroit was an expedient of this sort, for slave-owners and their agents were often known to be on the lookout along the direct thoroughfare between the places named. The two routes between Millersburgh and Lodi in northern Ohio are explained by the statement that the most direct route, the western one, fell under suspicion for a while, and in the meantime a more circuitous path was followed through Holmesville and Seville.[149]

During the long process by which the slave with the help of friends was being transmuted into the freeman he spent much of his time in concealment. His progress was made in the night-time. When a station was reached he was provided with a hiding-place, and he scarcely left it until his host decided it would be safe for him to continue his journey. The hiding-places the fugitive entered first and last were as dissimilar as can well be imagined. Slaves that crossed the Ohio River at Ripley, and fell into the hands of the Rev. John Rankin, were often concealed in his barn, which is said to have been provided with a secret cellar for use by the slaves when pursuers approached. The barn of Deacon Jirch Platt at Mendon, Illinois, was a haven into which many slaves from Missouri were piloted by way of Quincy. A hazel thicket in Mr. Platt's pasture-lot was sometimes resorted to,[150] as was one of his hayricks that was hollow and had a blind entrance.[151] Joshua R. Giddings, the sturdy anti-slavery Congressman from the Western Reserve, had an out-of-the-way bedroom in one wing of his house at Jefferson, Ohio, that was kept in readiness for fugitive slaves.[152] The attic over the Liberator office in Boston is said to have been a rendezvous for such persons.[153] A station-keeper at Plainfield, Illinois, had a woodpile with a room in the centre for a hiding-place.[154] The Rev. J. Porter, pastor of a Congregational church at Green Bay, Wisconsin, was asked to furnish a place of hiding for a family of fugitives, and at his wife's suggestion he put them in the belfry of his church, where they remained three days before a vessel came by which they could be safely transported to Canada.[155] Mr. James M. Westwater and other citizens of Columbus, Ohio, fitted up an old smoke-house standing on Chestnut Street near Fourth Street as a station of the Underground Railroad.[156] A fugitive reaching Canton, Washington County, Indiana, was secreted for a while in a low place in a thick, dark woods; and afterwards in a rail pen covered with straw.[157] Eli F. Brown, of Amesville, Athens County, Ohio, writes: "I built an addition to my house in which I had a room with its partition in pannels. One pannel could be raised about a half inch and then slid back, so as to permit a man to enter the room. When the pannel was in place it appeared like its fellows.... In the abutment of Zanesville bridge on the Putnam side there was a place of concealment prepared."[158] "Conductors" Levi Coffin, Edward Harwood, and W. H. Brisbane, of Cincinnati, Ohio, had a number of hiding-places for slaves. "One was in the dark cellar of Coffin's store; another was at Mr. Coffin's out-of-the-way residence between Avondale and Walnut Hills; another was a dark sub-cellar under the rear part of Dr. Bailey's residence, corner of Sixth and College Streets."[159] The gallery of the old First Church at Galesburg, Illinois, was utilized as a place of concealment for refugees by certain members of that church.[160] Gabe N. Johnson, a colored man of Ironton, on the Ohio River, sometimes hid fugitives in a coal-bank back of his house.[161] This list of illustrations could be almost indefinitely continued. A sufficient number has been given to show the ingenuity necessarily used to secure safety.

In the transit from station to station some simple disguise was often assumed. Thomas Garrett, a Quaker of Wilmington, Delaware, kept a quantity of garden tools on hand for this purpose. He sometimes gave a man a scythe, rake, or some other implement to carry through town. Having reached a certain bridge on the way to the next station, the pretending laborer concealed his tool under it, as he had been directed, and journeyed on. Later the tool was taken back to Mr. Garrett's to be used for a similar purpose.[162] Valentine Nicholson, a station-keeper at Harveysburg, Warren County, Ohio, concealed the identity of a fugitive, a mulatto, who was known to be pursued, by blacking his face and hands with burnt cork.[163] Slight disguises like these were probably not used as often as more elaborate ones. The Rev. Calvin Fairbank, and John Fairfield, the Virginian, who abducted many slaves from the South, resorted frequently to this means of securing the safety of their followers. Mr. Fairbank tells us that he piloted slave-girls attired in the finery of ladies, men and boys tricked out as gentlemen and the servants of gentlemen; and that sometimes he found it necessary to require his followers to don the garments of the opposite sex.[164] In May, 1843, Mr. Fairbank went to Arkansas for the purpose of rescuing William Minnis from bondage. He found that the slave was a young man of light complexion and prepossessing appearance, and that he closely resembled a gentleman living in the vicinity of Little Rock. Minnis was, therefore, fitted out with the necessary wig, beard and moustache, and clothes like those of his model; he was quickly drilled in the deportment of his assumed rank, and, as the test proved, he sustained himself well in his part. On boarding the boat that was to carry him to freedom he discovered his owner, Mr. Brennan, but so effectual was the slave's make-up that the master failed to penetrate the disguise.[165]

BARN OF SEYMOUR FINNEY, ESQ., DETROIT, MICHIGAN.
A shelter for fugitives in Detroit, formerly standing where the Chamber of Commerce Building now stands.

THE OLD FIRST CHURCH, GALESBURG, ILLINOIS.
Fugitive slaves were sometimes concealed in the gallery of this church.

A similar story is told by Mr. Sidney Speed, of Crawfordsville, Indiana, when recalling the work of his father, John Speed, and that of Fisher Doherty. "In 1858 or 1859, a mulatto girl about eighteen or twenty years old, very good-looking and with some education, ... reached our home. The nigger-catchers became so watchful that she could not be moved for several days. In fact, some of them were nearly always at the house either on some pretended business or making social visits. I do not think that the house was searched, or they would surely have found her, as during all this time she remained in the garret over the old log kitchen, where the fugitives were usually kept when there was danger. Her owner, a man from New Orleans, had just bought her in Louisville, and he had traced her surely to this place; she had not struck the Underground before, but had made her way alone this far, and as they got no trace of her beyond here they returned and doubled the watches on Doherty and my father. But at length a day came, or a night rather, when she was led safely out through the gardens to the house of a colored man named Patterson. There she was rigged out in as fine a costume of silk and ribbons as it was possible to procure at that time, and was furnished with a white baby borrowed for the occasion, and accompanied by one of the Patterson girls as servant and nurse." Thus disguised, the lady boarded the train at the station. But what must have been her feelings to find her master already in the same car; he was setting out to watch for her at the end of the line. She kept her courage, and when they reached Detroit she went aboard the ferry-boat for Canada; her pretended nurse returned to shore with the borrowed baby; and as the gang-plank was being raised, the young slave-woman on the boat removed her veil that she might bid her owner good-by. The master's display of anger as he gazed at the departing boat was as real as the situation was gratifying to his former slave and amusing to the bystanders.[166]

John Fairfield, the Virginian, depended largely on disguises in several of his abducting exploits. At one time he was asked by a number of Canadian refugees to help some of their relatives to the North, and when he found that many of them had very light complexions, he decided to send them to Canada disguised as white persons. Having secured for them the requisite wigs and powder, he was gratified with the transformation in appearance they were able to effect. He therefore secured tickets for his party, and placed them aboard a night train for Harrisburg, where they were met by a person who accompanied them to Cleveland and saw them take boat for Detroit. Later Fairfield succeeded in aiding other companies of slaves to escape from Washington and Harper's Ferry by resorting to similar means.[167] Among the Quakers the woman's costume was a favorite disguise for fugitives. No one attired in it was likely to be in the least degree suspicioned of being anything else than what the garb proclaimed. The veiled bonnet also was peculiarly adapted to conceal the features of the person disguised.[168] One incident will suffice to show the utility of the Quaker costume. One evening Joseph G. Walker, a Quaker of Wilmington, Delaware, was appealed to by a slave-woman, who was closely pursued. She was permitted to enter Mr. Walker's house, and a few minutes later, in the gown and bonnet of Mrs. Walker, she passed out of the front door leaning upon the arm of the shrewd Quaker.[169]

It is quite apparent that the Underground Railroad was not a formal organization with officers of different ranks, a regular membership, and a treasury from which to meet expenses. A terminology, it is true, sprang up in connection with the work of the Road, and one hears of station-keepers, agents, conductors, and even presidents of the Underground Railroad; but these titles were figurative terms, borrowed with other expressions from the convenient vocabulary of steam railways; and while they were useful among abolitionists to save circumlocution, they commended themselves to the friends of the slave by helping to mystify the minds of the public. The need of organization was not felt except in a few localities. It was only in towns and cities that the distinctions of "managers," "contributing members," and "agents" began to develop in any significant way, and even in the case of these places the distinctions must not be pushed far, for they indicate merely that certain men by their sagacious activity came to be called "managers," while others less bold, the contributing members, were willing to give money towards defraying the expenses of some trusty person, the agent, who would run the risk of piloting fugitives.

The first reference to an organization devoted to the business of aiding fugitive slaves occurs in a letter of George Washington, bearing date May 12, 1786. Washington speaks of a "society of Quakers in the city [Philadelphia], formed for such purposes...."[170] We have no means of knowing how this body conducted its work, nor how long it continued to exist. It is sometimes stated that the formal organization of the Underground Road took place in 1838, but this is not an accurate statement. An organized society of the Underground Railroad was formed in Philadelphia about the year 1838. Mr. Robert Purvis, who was the president, has called this body the first of its kind, but this may be doubted in view of the quotation from Washington's letter above cited. The character of the organization appears from the following account of its methods given by Mr. Purvis:[171] "The funds for carrying on this enterprise were raised from our anti-slavery friends, as the cases came up,"[172] and their needs demanded it; for many of the fugitives required no other help than advice and direction how to proceed. To the late Daniel Neall, the society was greatly indebted for his generous gifts, as well as for his encouraging words and fearless independence.... The most efficient helpers or agents we had, were two market-women, who lived in Baltimore....

"Another most effective worker was a son of a slaveholder, who lived at Newberne, S.C. Through his agency, the slaves were forwarded by placing them on vessels.... Having the address of the active members of the committee, they were enabled to find us, when not accompanied by our agents.... The fugitives were distributed among the members of the society, but most of them were received at my house in Philadelphia, where ... I caused a place to be constructed underneath a room, which could only be entered by a trap-door in the floor...."

This account shows clearly that the organization of 1838 was limited; and while it was officered with a president, secretary and committee, and had helpers at a distance called agents, it can scarcely be said that the plan of action of the society was different in essential points from that which developed without the formality of election of officers in many underground centres throughout the Northern states. Levi Coffin, by his devotion to the cause of the fugitive from boyhood to old age, gained the title of President of the Underground Railroad,[173] but he was not at the head of a formal organization. In northeastern Illinois, Peter Stewart, a prosperous citizen of Wilmington, who was a very active worker in the cause, was sometimes called President of the Underground Railroad,[174] but here again the distinction seems to have been complimentary and figurative. In truth the work was everywhere spontaneous, and its character was such that organization could have added little or no efficiency. Unfaltering confidence among members of neighboring stations served better than a code of rules; special messengers sent on the spur of the moment took the place of conferences held at stated seasons; supplies gathered privately as they were needed sufficed instead of regular dues; and, in general, the decision and sagacity of the individual was required rather than the less rapid efforts of an organization.

In a few centres where the amount of secret service to be done was large, a slight specialization of work is to be noticed. This division of labor consisted in the employment of a regular conductor or agent at these points to manage the work of transportation of passengers to points farther north; while the station-keepers attended more closely to the work of receiving and caring for the new arrivals. The special conductors chosen were men thoroughly acquainted with the different routes of their respective neighborhoods. At Mechanicsburg, Champaign County, Ohio, Udney Hyde, a fearless and well-known citizen, acted as agent between the local stations of J. R. Ware and Levi Rathbun, and stations to the northeast as far as the Alum Creek Quaker Settlement, a distance of forty miles.[175] The stations at Mechanicsburg were among the most widely known in central and southern Ohio. They received fugitives from at least three regular routes, and doubtless had "switch connections" with other lines. Passengers were taken northward over one of the three, perhaps four roads, and as one or two of these lay through pro-slavery neighborhoods a brave and experienced agent was almost indispensable. George W. S. Lucas, a colored man of Salem, Columbiana County, Ohio, made frequent trips with the closed carriage of Philip Evans, between Barnesville, New Philadelphia and Cadiz, and two stations, Ashtabula and Painesville, on the shore of Lake Erie. Occasionally Mr. Lucas conducted parties to Cleveland and Sandusky and Toledo, but in such cases he went on foot or by stage.[176] His trips were sometimes a hundred miles and more in length. George L. Burroughes, a colored man of Cairo, Illinois, became an agent for the Underground Road in 1857, while acting as porter of a sleeping-car running on the Illinois Central Railroad between Cairo and Chicago.[177] At Albany, New York, Stephen Meyers, a negro, was an agent of the Underground Road for a wide extent of territory.[178] At Detroit there were several colored agents; among them George De Baptiste and George Dolarson.[179]

The slight approach to organization manifest in some centres in the division of labor between station-keepers and special agents or conductors was caused by the large number of fugitives arriving at these points, and the extreme caution necessary. When, at length, indignation was aroused in the minds of Northern abolitionists by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, September 18, 1850, the determination to resist this measure displayed itself in certain localities in the formation of vigilance committees. Theodore Parker explains that it was in consequence of the enactment of this measure that "people held indignant meetings, and organized committees of vigilance whose duty was to prevent a fugitive from being arrested, if possible, or to furnish legal aid, and raise every obstacle to his rendition. The vigilance committees," he says, "were also the employees of the U. G. R. R. and effectively disposed of many a casus belli by transferring the disputed chattel to Canada. Money, time, wariness, devotedness for months and years, that cannot be computed, and will never be recorded, except, perhaps, in connection with cases whose details had peculiar interest, was nobly rendered by the true anti-slavery men."[180] Such committees of vigilance were organized in Syracuse, New York, Boston, Springfield and some of the smaller towns of Massachusetts, in Philadelphia and other places. New York City, like Philadelphia, had a Vigilance Committee as early as 1838. About this association of the metropolis there is scarcely any information.[181] We must be content then to confine our attention to the committees called into existence by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

Eight days after the enactment of this law citizens of Syracuse, New York, issued a call through the newspapers for a public meeting, and on October 4 members of all parties crowded the city-hall to express their censure of the law. The meeting recommended "the appointment of a Vigilance Commitee of thirteen citizens, whose duty it shall be to see that no person is deprived of his liberty without 'due process of law.' And all good citizens are earnestly requested to aid and sustain them in all needed efforts for the security of every person claiming the protection of our laws." This committee was appointed and an address and resolutions adopted.[182] At an adjourned meeting held on October 12 the assemblage voted to form an association, "pledged to stand by its members in opposing this law, and to share with any of them the pecuniary losses they may incur under the operation of this law." The determination shown in the organization of these two bodies was well sustained a year later when the attempt was made by officers of the law to seize Jerry McHenry as a fugitive slave. The Vigilance Committee decided to storm the court-house, where the colored man was confined under guard, and rescue the prisoner. This daring piece of work was successfully accomplished, and the government never again attempted to recover any slaves in central New York.[183]

The organization of the Vigilance Committee of Syracuse was closely followed by the organization of a similar committee in Boston. At a meeting in Faneuil Hall, October 14, 1850, resolutions were adopted expressing the conviction that no citizen would take part in reënslaving a fugitive, and pledging protection to the colored residents of the city. To make good this pledge a Vigilance Committee of fifty was appointed.[184] This body organized by choosing a president, treasurer, and secretary, a committee of finance, an executive committee, a legal committee and a committee of special vigilance and alarm. An appeal was then issued to the citizens of Boston calling their attention to the arrival of many destitute fugitives in Boston, and to the establishment of an agency for the purpose of securing employment for fugitive applicants. Gifts of money and clothing were asked for. In response to a circular sent out by the finance committee to all the churches in 1851, a sum of about sixteen hundred dollars was raised. That there might be coöperation throughout the state notices were sent to all the towns in Massachusetts urging the formation of local vigilance committees; and as a result such committees were organized in some towns.[185]

The meeting-place of the Boston Committee was Meionaon Hall in Tremont Temple. Members were notified of an intended meeting personally, if possible, by the doorkeeper of the committee, Captain Austin Bearse.[186] The proceedings of the committee were secret, and comparatively little is now known about their work. It is, however, known that for ten years the organization was active, and that although it was not successful in rescuing Sims and Burns from a hard fate, it nevertheless secured the liberty of more than a hundred others.[187]

Soon after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed John Brown visited Springfield, Massachusetts, where he had formerly lived. The valley of the Connecticut had long been a line of underground travel, and citizens of Springfield, colored and white, had become identified with operations on this line. Brown at once decided that the new law made organization necessary, and he formed, therefore, the League of Gileadites to resist systematically the enforcement of the law. The name of this order was significant in that it contained a warning to those of its members that should show themselves cowards. "Whosoever is fearful or afraid let him return and depart early from Mount Gilead."[188] In the "Agreement and Rules" that Brown drafted for the order, adopted January 15, 1851, the following directions for action were laid down: "Should one of your number be arrested, you must collect together as quickly as possible, so as to outnumber your adversaries.... Let no able-bodied man appear on the ground unequipped, or with his weapons exposed to view.... Your plans must be known only to yourselves and with the understanding that all traitors must die, wherever caught and proven to be guilty.... Let the first blow be the signal for all to engage, ... make clean work with your enemies, and be sure you meddle not with any others.... After effecting a rescue, if you are assailed, go into the houses of your most prominent and influential white friends with your wives, and that will effectually fasten upon them the suspicion of being connected with you, and will compel them to make a common cause with you.... You may make a tumult in the court-room where a trial is going on by burning gunpowder freely in paper packages.... But in such case the prisoner will need to take the hint at once and bestir himself; and so should his friends improve the opportunity for a general rush.... Stand by one another, and by your friends, while a drop of blood remains; and be hanged, if you must, but tell no tales out of school. Make no confession." By adopting the Agreement and Rules forty-four colored persons constituted themselves "a branch of the United States League of Gileadites," and agreed "to have no officers except a treasurer and secretary pro tem., until after some trial of courage," when they could choose officers on the basis of "courage, efficiency, and general good conduct."[189] Doubtless the Gileadites of Springfield did efficient service, for it appears that the importance of the town as a way-station on the Underground Road increased after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill.[190]

WILLIAM STILL,
Chairman of the Acting Vigilance Committee in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1852-1860.

We have already learned that Philadelphia had a Vigilance Committee before 1840. In a speech made before the meeting that organized the new committee, December 2, 1852, Mr. J. Miller McKim, the secretary of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, gave the reasons for establishing a new committee. He said that the old committee "had become disorganized and scattered, and that for the last two or three years the duties of this department had been performed by individuals on their own responsibility, and sometimes in a very irregular manner." It was accordingly decided to form a new committee, called the General Vigilance Committee, with a chairman and treasurer; and within this body an Acting Committee of four persons, "who should have the responsibility of attending to every case that might require their aid, as well as the exclusive authority to raise the funds necessary for their purpose." The General Committee comprised nineteen members, and had as its head Mr. Robert Purvis, one of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the first president of the old committee. The Acting Committee had as its chairman William Still, a colored clerk in the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and a most energetic underground helper. The Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, thus constituted, continued intact until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.[191] Some insight into the work accomplished by the Acting Committee can be obtained by an examination of the book compiled by William Still under the title Underground Railroad Records. The Acting Committee was required to keep a record of all its doings. Mr. Still's volume was evidently amassed by the transcription of many of the incidents that found their way under this order into the archives of the committee. The work was limited to the assistance of such needy fugitives as came to Philadelphia; and was not extended, except in rare cases, to inciting slaves to run away from their masters, or to aiding them in so doing.[192]

The relief of the destitution existing among the wayworn travellers was a matter requiring considerable outlay of time and money on the part of abolitionists. There was occasionally a fugitive or family of fugitives, that, having better opportunity or possessing greater foresight than others, made provision for the journey and escaped to Canada with little or no dependence on the aid of underground operators. Asbury Parker, of Ironton, Ohio, fled from Greenup County, Kentucky, in 1857, clad in a suit of broadcloth, alone befitting, as he thought, the dignity of a free man.[193] The brother of Anthony Bingey, of Windsor, Ontario, came unexpectedly into the possession of five hundred dollars. With this money he instructed a friend in Cincinnati to procure a team and wagon to convey the family of Bingey to Canada. The company arrived at Sandusky after being only three days on the road.[194]

But the mass of fugitives were thinly clad, and had only such food as they could forage until they reached the Underground Railroad. The arrival of a company at a station would be at once followed by the preparation, often at midnight, of a meal for the pilgrims and their guides. It was a common thing for a station to entertain a company of five or six; and companies of twenty-eight or thirty are not unheard of. Levi Coffin says, "The largest company of slaves ever seated at our table, at one time, numbered seventeen."[195] During one month in the year 1854 or 1855 there were sixty runaways at the house of Aaron L. Benedict, a station in the Alum Creek Quaker Settlement in central Ohio. On one occasion twenty sat down to dinner in Mr. Benedict's house.[196] It will thus be seen that the supply of provisions alone was for the average station-keeper no inconsiderable item of expense, and that it was one involving much labor.

The arrangements for furnishing fugitives with clothing, like much of the underground work done at the stations, came within the province of the women of the stations. While the noted fugitive, William Wells Brown, lay sick at the house of his benefactor, Mr. Wells Brown, in southwestern Ohio, the family made him some clothing, and Mr. Brown purchased him a pair of boots.[197] Women's anti-slavery societies in many places conducted sewing-circles, as a branch of their work, for the purpose of supplying clothes and other necessities to fugitives. The Woman's Anti-Slavery Society of Ellington, Chautauqua County, New York, sent a letter to William Still, November 21, 1859, saying: "Every year we have sent a box of clothing, bedding, etc., to the aid of the fugitive, and wishing to send it where it would be of the most service, we have it suggested to us, to send to you the box we have at present. You would confer a favor ... by writing us, ... whether or not it would be more advantageous to you than some nearer station...."[198]

The Women's Anti-Slavery Sewing Society of Cincinnati maintained an active interest in underground work going on in their city by supplying clothing to needy travellers.[199] The Female Anti-Slavery Association of Henry County, Indiana, organized a Committee of Vigilance in 1841 "to seek out such colored females as are not suitably provided for, who may now be, or who shall hereafter come, within our limits, and assist them in any way they may deem expedient, either by advice or pecuniary means...."[200]

In some of the large centres, money as well as clothing and food was constantly needed for the proper performance of the underground work. Thus, for example, at Cincinnati, Ohio, it was frequently necessary to hire carriages in which to convey fugitives out of the city to some neighboring station. From time to time as the occasion arose Levi Coffin collected the funds needed for such purposes from business acquaintances. He called these contributors "stock-holders" in the Underground Railroad.[201] After steam railroads became incorporated in the underground system money was required at different points to purchase tickets for fugitives. The Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia defrayed the travelling expenses of many refugees in sending some to New York City, some to Elmira and a few to Canada.[202] Frederick Douglass, who kept a station at Rochester, New York, received contributions of money to pay the railroad fares of the fugitives he forwarded to Canada and to give them a little more for pressing necessities.[203]

The use of steam railroads as a means of transportation of this class of passengers began with the completion of lines of road to the lakes. This did not take place till about 1850. It was, therefore, during the last decade of the history of the Underground Road that surface lines, as they were sometimes called by abolitionists, became a part of the secret system. There were probably more surface lines in Ohio than in any other state. The old Mad River Railroad, or Sandusky, Dayton and Cincinnati Railroad, of western Ohio, (now a part of the "Big Four" system), began to be used at least as early as 1852 by instructed fugitives.[204] The Sandusky, Mansfield and Newark Railroad (now the Baltimore and Ohio) from Utica, Licking County, Ohio, to Sandusky, was sometimes used by the same class of persons.[205] After the construction of the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad[206] as far as Greenwich in northern Ohio, fugitives often came to that point concealed in freight-cars. In eastern Ohio there were two additional routes by rail sometimes employed in underground traffic: one of these appears to have been the Cleveland and Canton from Zanesville north,[207] and the other was the Cleveland and Western between Alliance and Cleveland.[208] In Indiana the Louisville, New Albany and Chicago Railroad from Crawfordsville northward was patronized by underground travellers until the activity of slave-hunters caused it to be abandoned.[209] Fugitives were sometimes transported across the State of Michigan by the Michigan Central Railroad. In Illinois there seems to have been not less than three railroads that carried fugitives: these were the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy,[210] the Chicago and Rock Island[211] and the Illinois Central.[212] When John Brown made his famous journey through Iowa in the winter of 1858-1859 he shipped his company of twelve fugitives in a stock car from West Liberty, Iowa, to Chicago, by way of the Chicago and Rock Island route.[213] In Pennsylvania and New York there were several lines over which runaways were sent when circumstances permitted. At Harrisburg, Reading and other points along the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, fugitives were put aboard the cars for Philadelphia.[214] From Pennsylvania they were forwarded by the Vigilance Committee over different lines, sometimes by way of the Pennsylvania Railroad to New York City; sometimes by way of the Philadelphia and Reading and the Northern Central to Elmira, New York, whence they were sent on by the same line to Niagara Falls. Fugitives put aboard the cars at Elmira were furnished with money from a fund provided by the anti-slavery society. As a matter of precaution they were sent out of town at four o'clock in the morning, and were always placed by the train officials, who knew their destination, in the baggage-car.[215] The New York Central Railroad from Rochester west was an outlet made use of by Frederick Douglass in passing slaves to Canada. At Syracuse, during several years before the beginning of the War, one of the directors of this road, Mr. Horace White, the father of Dr. Andrew D. White, distributed passes to fugitives. This fact did not come to the knowledge of Dr. White until after his father's demise. He relates: "Some years after ... I met an old 'abolitionist' of Syracuse, who said to me that he had often come to my father's house, rattled at the windows, informed my father of the passes he needed for fugitive slaves, received them through the window, and then departed, nobody else being the wiser. On my asking my mother, who survived my father several years, about it, she said: 'Yes, such things frequently occurred, and your father, if he was satisfied of the genuineness of the request, always wrote off the passes and handed them out, asking no questions."[216]

In the New England states fugitives travelled, under the instruction of friends, by way of the Providence and Worcester Railroad from Valley Falls, Rhode Island, to Worcester, Massachusetts, where by arrangement they were transferred to the Vermont Road.[217] The Boston and Worcester Railroad between Newton and Worcester, Massachusetts, as also between Boston and Worcester, seems to have been used to some extent in this way.[218] The Grand Trunk, extending from Portland, Maine, through the northern parts of New Hampshire and Vermont into Canada, occasionally gave passes to fugitives, and would always take reduced fares for this class of passengers.[219]

The advantages of escape by boat were early discerned by slaves living near the coast or along inland rivers. Vessels engaged in our coastwise trade became more or less involved in transporting fugitives from Southern ports to Northern soil. Small trading vessels, returning from their voyages to Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, landed slaves on the New England coast.[220] In July, 1853, the brig Florence (Captain Amos Hopkins, of Hallowell, Maine) from Wilmington, North Carolina, was required, while lying in Boston harbor, to surrender a fugitive found on board. In September, 1854, the schooner Sally Ann (of Belfast, Maine), from the same Southern port, was induced to give up a slave known to be on board. In October of the same year the brig Cameo (of Augusta, Maine) brought a stowaway from Jacksonville, Florida, into Boston harbor, and, as in the two preceding cases, the slave was rescued from the danger of return to the South through the activity and shrewdness of Captain Austin Bearse, the agent of the Vigilance Committee of Boston.[221] The son of a slaveholder living at Newberne, North Carolina, forwarded slaves from that point to the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia on vessels engaged in the lumber trade.[222] In November, 1855, Captain Fountain brought twenty-one fugitives concealed on his vessel in a cargo of grain from Norfolk, Virginia, to Philadelphia.[223]

The tributaries flowing into the Ohio River from Virginia and Kentucky furnished convenient channels of escape for many slaves. The concurrent testimony of abolitionists living along the Ohio is to the effect that streams like the Kanawha River bore many a boat-load of fugitives to the southern boundary of the free states. It is not a mere coincidence that a large number of the most important centres of activity lie along the southern line of the Western free states at points near or opposite the mouths of rivers and creeks. On the Mississippi, Ohio and Illinois rivers north-bound steamboats not infrequently provided the means of escape. Jefferson Davis declared in the Senate that many slaves escaped from his state into Ohio by taking passage on the boats of the Mississippi.[224]

Abolitionists found it desirable to have waterway extensions of their secret lines. Boats, the captains of which were favorable, were therefore drafted into the service when running on convenient routes. Boats plying between Portland, Maine, and St. John, New Brunswick, or other Canadian ports, often took these passengers free of charge.[225] Thomas Garrett, of Wilmington, Delaware, sometimes sent negroes by steamboat to Philadelphia to be cared for by the Vigilance Committee.[226] It happened on several occasions that fugitives at Portland and Boston were put aboard ocean steamers bound for England.[227] William and Ellen Craft were sent to England after having narrowly escaped capture in Boston.[228]

On the great lakes the boat service was extensive. The boats of General Reed touching at Racine, Wisconsin, received fugitives without fare. Among these were the Sultana (Captain Appleby), the Madison, the Missouri, the Niagara and the Keystone State. Captain Steele of the propeller Galena was a friend of fugitives, as was also Captain Kelsey of the Chesapeake. Mr. A. P. Dutton was familiar with these vessels and their officers, and for twenty years or more shipped runaway slaves as well as cargoes of grain from his dock in Racine.[229] The Illinois (Captain Blake), running between Chicago and Detroit, was a safe boat on which to place passengers whose destination was Canada.[230] John G. Weiblen navigated the lakes in 1855 and 1856, and took many refugees from Chicago to Collingwood, Ontario.[231] The Arrow,[232] the United States,[233] the Bay City and the Mayflower plying between Sandusky and Detroit, were boats the officers of which were always willing to help negroes reach Canadian ports. The Forest Queen, the Morning Star and the May Queen, running between Cleveland and Detroit, the Phœbus, a little boat plying between Toledo and Detroit, and, finally, some scows and sail-boats, are among the old craft of the great lakes that carried many slaves to their land of promise.[234] A clue to the number of refugees thus transported to Canada is perhaps given by the record of the boat upon which the fugitive, William Wells Brown, found employment. This boat ran from Cleveland to Buffalo and to Detroit. It quickly became known at Cleveland that Mr. Brown would take escaped slaves under his protection without charge, hence he rarely failed to find a little company ready to sail when he started out from Cleveland. "In the year 1842," he says, "I conveyed, from the first of May to the first of December, sixty-nine fugitives over Lake Erie to Canada."[235]

The account of the method of the Underground Railroad could scarcely be called complete without some notice of the rescue of fugitives under arrest. The first rescue occurred at the intended trial of the first fugitive slave case in Boston in 1793. Mr. Josiah Quincy, counsel for the fugitive, "heard a noise, and, turning around, saw the constables lying sprawling on the floor, and a passage opening through the crowd, through which the fugitive was taking his departure without stopping to hear the opinion of the court."[236]

The prototype of deliverances thus established was, it is true, more or less deviated from in later instances, but the general characteristics of these cases are such that they naturally fall into one class. They are cases in which the execution of the law was interfered with by friends of the prisoner, who was spirited away as quickly as possible. The deliverance in 1812 of a supposed runaway from the hands of his captor by the New England settlers of Worthington, Ohio, has already been referred to in general terms.[237] But some details of the incident are necessary to bring out more clearly the propriety of its being included in the category of instances of violation of the constitutional provision for the rendition of escaped slaves. It appears that word was brought to the village of Worthington of the capture of the fugitive at a neighboring town, and that the villagers under the direction of Colonel James Kilbourne took immediate steps to release the negro, who, it was said, was tied with ropes, and being afoot, was compelled to keep up as best he could with his master's horse. On the arrival of the slave-owner and his chattel, the latter was freed from his bonds by the use of a butcher-knife in the hands of an active villager, and the forms of a legal dismissal were gone through before a court and an audience whose convictions were ruinous to any representations the claimant was able to make. The dispossessed master was permitted to continue his journey southward, while the negro was directed to get aboard a government wagon on its way northward to Sandusky. The return of the slave-hunter a day or two later with a process obtained in Franklinton, authorizing the retaking of his property, secured him a second hearing, but did not change the result. A fugitive, Basil Dorsey, from Liberty, Frederick County, Maryland, was seized in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1836, and carried away. Overtaken by Mr. Robert Purvis at Doylestown, he was brought into court, and the hearing of the case was postponed for two weeks. When the day of trial came the counsel for the slave succeeded in getting the case dismissed on the ground of certain objections. Thereupon the claimants of the slave hastened to a magistrate for a new warrant, but just as they were returning to rearrest the fugitive, he was hustled into the buggy of Mr. Purvis and driven rapidly out of the reach of the pursuers.[238] In October, 1853, the case of Louis, a fugitive from Kentucky on trial in Cincinnati, was brought to a conclusion in an unexpected way. The United States commissioner was about to pronounce judgment when the prisoner, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity, slipped from his chair, had a good hat placed upon his head by some friend, passed out of the court-room among a crowd of colored visitors and made his way cautiously to Avondale. A few minutes after the disappearance of the fugitive his absence was discovered by the marshal that had him in charge; and although careful search was made for him, he escaped to Canada by means of the Underground Railroad.[239] In April, 1859, Charles Nalle, a slave from Culpeper County, Virginia, was discovered in Troy, New York, and taken before the United States commissioner, who remanded him back to slavery. As the news of this decision spread, a crowd gathered about the commissioner's office. In the meantime, a writ of habeas corpus was served upon the marshal that had arrested Nalle, commanding that officer to bring the prisoner before a judge of the Supreme Court. When the marshal and his deputies appeared with the slave, the crowd made a charge upon them, and a hand-to-hand melée resulted. Inch by inch the progress of the officers was resisted until they were worn out, and the slave escaped. In haste the fugitive was ferried across the river to West Troy, only to fall into the hands of a constable and be again taken into custody. The mob had followed, however, and now stormed the door behind which the prisoner rested under guard. In the attack the door was forced open, and over the body of a negro assailant, struck down in the fray, the slave was torn from his guards, and sent on his way to Canada.[240] Well-known cases of rescue, such as the Shadrach case, which occurred in Boston in January, 1851, and the Jerry rescue, which occurred in Syracuse nine months later, may be omitted here. They, like many others that have been less often chronicled, show clearly the temper of resolute men in the communities where they occurred. It was felt by these persons that the slave, who had already paid too high a penalty for his color, could not expect justice at the hands of the law, that his liberty must be preserved to him, and a base statute be thwarted at any cost.

THE REPUTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.
Mr. Coffin and his wife aided more than 3000 slaves in their flight.

[CHAPTER IV]

UNDERGROUND AGENTS, STATION-KEEPERS, OR CONDUCTORS

Persons opposed to slavery were, naturally, the friends of the fugitive slave, and were ever ready to respond to his appeals for help. Shelter and food were readily supplied him, and he was directed or conveyed, generally in the night, to sympathizing neighbors, until finally, without any forethought or management on his own part, he found himself in Canada a free man. These helpers, in the course of time, came to be called agents, station-keepers, or conductors on the Underground Railroad. Of the names of those that belonged to this class of practical emancipationists, 3,211 have been catalogued;[241] change of residence and death have made it impossible to obtain the names of many more. Considering the kind of labor performed and the danger involved, one is impressed with the unselfish devotion to principle of these emancipators. There was for them, of course, no outward honor, no material recompense, but instead such contumely and seeming disgrace as can now be scarcely comprehended.

Nevertheless, they were rich in courage, and their hospitality was equal to all emergencies. They gladly gave aid and comfort to every negro seeking freedom; and the numbers befriended by many helpers despite penalties and abuse show with what moral determination the work was carried on. It has been said that the Hopkins, Salsbury, Snediger, Dickey and Kirkpatrick families, of southern Ohio, forwarded more than 1,000 fugitives to Canada before the year 1817.[242] Daniel Gibbons, of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was engaged in helping fugitive slaves during a period of fifty-six years. "He did not keep a record of the number he passed until 1824. But prior to that time, it was supposed to have been over 200, and up to the time of his death (in 1853) he had aided about 1,000."[243] It has been estimated that Dr. Nathan M. Thomas, of Schoolcraft, Michigan, forwarded between 1,000 and 1,500 fugitives.[244] John Fairfield, the abductor, "piloted not only hundreds, but thousands."[245] The Rev. Charles T. Torrey went to Maryland and "from there sent—as he wrote previous to 1844—some 400 slaves over different routes to Canada."[246] Philo Carpenter, of Chicago, is reported to have escorted 200 fugitives to vessels bound for Canada.[247] In a letter to William Still, in November, 1857, Elijah F. Pennypacker, of Chester County, Pennsylvania, writes, "we have within the past two months passed forty-three through our hands."[248] H. B. Leeper, of Princeton, Illinois, says that the most successful business he ever accomplished in this line was the helping on of thirty-one men and women in six weeks' time.[249] Leverett B. Hill, of Wakeman, Ohio, assisted 103 on their way to Canada during the year 1852.[250] Mr. Van Dorn, of Quincy, in a service of twenty-five years, assisted "some two or three hundred fugitives."[251] W. D. Schooley, of Richmond, Indiana, writes, "I think I must have assisted over 100 on their way to liberty."[252] Jonathan H. Gray, Milton Hill and John H. Frazee were conductors at Carthage, Indiana, and are said to have helped over 150 fugitives.[253] "Thousands of fugitives found rest" at Ripley, Brown County, Ohio.[254] During the lifetime of General McIntire, a Virginian, who settled in Adams County, Ohio, "more than 100 slaves found a safe retreat under his roof." Other helpers in the same state rendered service deserving of mention. Ozem Gardner, of Sharon Township, Franklin County, "assisted more than 200 fugitives on their way in all weathers and at all times of the day and night."[255] It is estimated by a friend of Dr. J. A. Bingham and George J. Payne, two operators of Gallia County, that the line of escape with which these men were connected was travelled by about 200 slaves every year from 1845 to 1856.[256] From 1844 to 1860 John H. Stewart, a colored station-keeper of the same county, kept about 100 fugitives at his house.[257] Five hundred are said to have passed through the hands of Thomas L. Gray, of Deavertown, in Morgan County.[258] Ex-President Fairchild speaks of the "multitudes" of fugitives that came to Oberlin, and says that "not one was ever finally taken back to bondage."[259] Many other stations and station-agents that were instrumental in helping large numbers of slaves from bondage to freedom cannot be mentioned here.

Reticent as most underground operators were at the time in regard to their unlawful acts, they did not attempt to conceal their principles. On the contrary, they were zealous in their endeavors to make converts to a doctrine that seemed to them to have the combined warrant of Scripture and of their own conscience, and that agreed with the convictions of the fathers of the Republic. The Golden Rule and the preamble of the Declaration of Independence they often recited in support of their position. When they had transgressed the Fugitive Slave Law of Congress they were wont to find their justification in what ex-President Fairchild of Oberlin has aptly called the Fugitive Slave Law of the Mosaic institutions:[260] "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which hath escaped unto thee; he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates where it liketh him best; thou shalt not oppress him."[261] They refused to observe a law that made it a felony in their opinion to give a cup of cold water to famishing men and women fleeing from servitude. Their faith and determination is clearly expressed in one of the old anti-slavery songs:—

"'Tis the law of God in the human soul,
'Tis the law in the Word Divine;
It shall live while the earth in its course shall roll,
It shall live in this soul of mine.
Let the law of the land forge its bonds of wrong,
I shall help when the self-freed crave;
For the law in my soul, bright, beaming, and strong,
Bids me succor the fleeing slave."

Theodore Parker was but the mouthpiece of many abolitionists throughout the Northern states when he said, at the conclusion of a sermon in 1850: "It is known to you that the Fugitive Slave Bill has become a law.... To law framed of such iniquity I owe no allegiance. Humanity, Christianity, manhood revolts against it.... For myself I say it solemnly, I will shelter, I will help, and I will defend the fugitive with all my humble means and power. I will act with any body of decent and serious men, as the head, or the foot, or the hand, in any mode not involving the use of deadly weapons, to nullify and defeat the operation of this law...."[262]

Sentiments of this kind were cherished in almost every Northern community by a few persons at least. There were some New England colonies in the West where anti-slavery sentiments predominated. These, like some of the religious communities, as those of the Quakers and Covenanters, became well-known centres of underground activity. In general it is safe to say that the majority of helpers in the North were of Anglo-American stock, descendants of the Puritan and Quaker settlers of the Eastern states, or of Southerners that had moved to the Northern states to be rid of slavery. The many stations in the eastern and northern parts of Ohio and the northern part of Illinois may be safely attributed to the large proportion of New England settlers in those districts. Localities where the work of befriending slaves was largely in the hands of Quakers will be mentioned in another connection. Southern settlers in Brown County and adjoining districts in Ohio are said to have been regularly forwarding escaped slaves to Canada before 1817.[263] The emigration of a number of these settlers to Bond County, Illinois, about 1820, and the removal of a few families from that region to Putnam County in the same state about a decade later, helps to explain the early development of secret routes in the southern and north central parts of Illinois.[264]

In the South much secret aid was rendered fugitives, no doubt, by persons of their own race. Two colored market-women in Baltimore were efficient agents for the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia.[265] Frederick Douglass's connection with the Underground Railroad began long before he left the South.[266] In the North, people of the African race were to be found in most communities, and in many places they became energetic workers. Negro settlements in the interior of the free states, as well as along their southern frontier, soon came to form important links in the chain of stations leading from the Southern states to Canada.

In the early days running slaves sometimes sought and received aid from Indians. This fact is evidenced by the introduction of fugitive recovery clauses into a number of the treaties made between the colonies and Indian tribes. Seven out of the eight treaties made between 1784 and 1786 contained clauses for the return of black prisoners, or of "negroes and other property."[267] A few of the colonies offered rewards to induce Indians to apprehend and restore runaways. In 1669 Maryland "ordered that any Indian who shall apprehend a fugitive may have a 'match coate' or its value. Virginia would give '20 armes length of Roanake,' or its value, while in Connecticut 'two yards of cloth' was considered sufficient inducement."[268] The inhabitants of the Ottawa village of Chief Kinjeino in northwestern Ohio were kindly disposed towards the fugitive;[269] and the people of Chief Brant, who held an estate on the Grand River in Ontario west of Niagara Falls, were in the habit of receiving colored refugees.[270]

The people of Scotch and Scotch-Irish descent were naturally liberty loving, and seem to have given hearty support to the anti-slavery cause in whatever form it presented itself to them. The small number of Scotch communities in Morgan and Logan counties, Ohio, and in Randolph and Washington counties, Illinois, were centres of underground service.

The secret work of the English, Irish and German settlers cannot be so readily localized. In various places a single German, Irishman, or Englishman is known to have aided escaped slaves in coöperation with a few other persons of different nationality, but so far as known there were no groups made up of representatives of one or another of these races engaged in such enterprises. At Toledo, Ohio, the company of helpers comprised Congressman James M. Ashley, a Pennsylvanian by birth; Richard Mott, a Quaker; James Conlisk, an Irishman; William H. Merritt, a negro; and several others.[271] Lyman Goodnow, an operator of Waukesha, Wisconsin, says he was told that "in cases of emergency the Germans were next best to Quakers for protection."[272] Two German companies from Massachusetts enlisted for the War only when promised that they should not be required to restore runaways to their owners.[273]

Some religious communities and church societies were conservators of abolition ideas. The Quakers deserve, in this work, to be placed before all other denominations because of their general acceptance and advocacy of anti-slavery doctrines when the system of slavery had no other opponents. From the time of George Fox until the last traces of the evil were swept from the English-speaking world many Quakers bore a steadfast testimony against it.[274] Fox reminded slaveholders that if they were in their slaves' places they would consider it "very great bondage and cruelty," and he urged upon the Friends in America to preach the gospel to the enslaved blacks. In 1688 German Friends at Germantown, Pennsylvania, made an official protest "against the traffic in the bodies of men and the treatment of men as cattle." By 1772 New England Friends began to disown (expel) members for failing to manumit their slaves; and four years later both the Philadelphia and the New York yearly meetings made slaveholding a disownable offence. A similar step was taken by the Baltimore Yearly Meeting in 1777; and meetings in Virginia were directed, in 1784, to disown those that refused to emancipate their slaves.[275] Owing to obstacles in the way of setting slaves free in North Carolina, a committee of Quakers of that state was appointed in 1822 to examine the laws of some of the free states respecting the admission of people of color therein. In 1823 the committee reported that there was "nothing in the laws of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to prevent the introduction of people of color into those states, and agents were instructed to remove slaves placed in their care as fast as they were willing to go." These facts show the sentiment that prevailed in the Society of Friends. Many Southern Quakers moved to the North on account of their hatred of slavery, and established such important centres of underground work as Springboro and Salem, Ohio, and Spiceland and New Garden, Indiana. Quakers in New Bedford and Lynn, Massachusetts, and Valley Falls, Rhode Island, engaged in the service. The same class of people in Maryland coöperated with members of their society in the vicinity of Philadelphia. The existence of numerous Underground Railroad centres in southeastern Pennsylvania and in eastern Indiana is explained by the fact that a large number of Quakers dwelt in those regions.

The Methodists began to take action against slavery in 1780. At an informal conference held at Baltimore in that year the subject was presented in the form of a "Question,—Ought not this conference to require those travelling preachers who hold slaves to give promises to set them free?" The answer given was in the affirmative. Concerning the membership the language adopted was as follows: "We pass our disapprobation on all our friends who keep slaves; and advise their freedom." Under the influence of Wesleyan preachers, it is said, not a few cases of emancipation occurred. At a conference in 1785, however, it was decided to "suspend the execution of the minute on slavery till the deliberations of a future conference...." Four years later a clause appeared in the Discipline, by whose authority is not known, prohibiting "The buying or selling the bodies or souls of men, women, or children, with an intention to enslave them." This provision evidently referred to the African slave-trade. In 1816 the General Conference adopted a resolution that "no slaveholder shall be eligible to any official station in our Church hereafter, where the laws of the state in which he lives will admit of emancipation, and permit the liberated slave to enjoy freedom." Later there seems to have been a disposition on the part of the church authorities to suppress the agitation of the slavery question, but it can scarcely be doubted that the well-known views of the Wesleys and of Whitfield remained for some at least the standard of right opinion, and that their declarations formed for these the rule of action. In 1842 a secession from the church took place, chiefly if not altogether on account of the question of slavery, and a number of abolitionist members of the uncompromising type founded a new church organization, which they called the "Wesleyan Methodist Connection of America." Slave-holders were excluded from fellowship in this body. Within two or three years the new organization had drawn away twenty thousand members from the old.[276] In 1844 a much larger secession took place on the same question, the occasion being the institution of proceedings before the General Conference against the Rev. James O. Andrew, D.D., a slave-holding bishop of the South. This so aggravated the Methodist Episcopal societies in the slave states that they withdrew and formed the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Among the members of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection and of the older society of the North there were a number of zealous underground operators. Indeed, it came to be said of the Wesleyans, as of the Quakers, that almost every neighborhood where a few of them lived was likely to be a station of the secret Road to Canada. It is probable that some of the Wesleyans at Wilmington, Ohio, coöperated with Quakers at that point. In Urbana, Ohio, there were Methodists of the two divisions engaged.[277] Service was also performed by Wesleyans at Tippecanoe, Deersville and Rocky Fort in Tuscarawas County,[278] and at Piqua, Miami County, Ohio.[279] In Iowa a number of Methodist ministers were engaged in the work.[280]

The third sect to which a considerable proportion of underground operators belonged was Calvinistic in its creed. All the various wings of Presbyterianism seem to have had representatives in this class of anti-slavery people. The sinfulness of slavery was a proposition that found uncompromising advocates among the Presbyterian ministers of the South in the early part of this century. In 1804 the Rev. James Gilliland removed from South Carolina to Brown County, Ohio, because he had been enjoined by his presbytery and synod "to be silent in the pulpit on the subject of the emancipation of the African."[281] Other ministers of prominence, like Thomas D. Baird, David Nelson and John Rankin, left the South because they were not free to speak against slavery. In 1818 the Presbyterian Church declared the system "inconsistent with the law of God and totally irreconcilable with the gospel of Christ." This teaching was afterwards departed from in 1845 when the Assembly confined its protest to admitting rather mildly that there was "evil connected with slavery," and declining to countenance "the traffic in slaves for the sake of gain; the separation of husbands and wives, parents and children, for the sake of filthy lucre or the convenience of the master; or cruel treatment of slaves in any respect." The dissatisfaction caused by this evident compromise led to the formation of a new church in 1847 by the "New School" Presbytery of Ripley, Ohio, and a part of the "Old School" Presbytery of Mahoning, Pennsylvania. This organization was called the Free Church, and by 1860 had extended as far west as Iowa.[282] It is not strange that the region in Ohio where the Free Presbyterian Church was founded was plentifully dotted with stations of the Underground Railroad, and that the house of the Rev. John Rankin, who was the leader of the movement, was known far and wide as a place of refuge for the fugitive slave.[283] At Savannah, Ashland County, Iberia, Morrow County, and a point near Millersburgh, Holmes County, Ohio, the work is associated with Free Presbyterian societies once existing in those neighborhoods.[284] In the northern part of Adams County, as also in the northern part of Logan County, Ohio, fugitives were received into the homes of Covenanters. Galesburg, Illinois, with its college was founded in 1837 by Presbyterians and Congregationalists, who united to form one religious society under the name of the "Presbyterian Church of Galesburg." Opposition to slavery was one of the conditions of membership in this organization from the beginning. This intense anti-slavery feeling caused the church to withdraw from the presbytery in 1855.[285] From the starting of the colony until the time of the War fugitives from Missouri were conducted thither with the certainty of obtaining protection. Thus Galesburg became, probably, the principal underground station in Illinois.[286] Joseph S. White, of New Castle, in western Pennsylvania, notes the circumstance that all the men with whom he acted in underground enterprises were Presbyterians.[287]

The religious centre in Ohio most renowned for the aid of refugees was the Congregational colony and college at Oberlin. The acquisition of a large anti-slavery contingent from Lane Seminary in 1835 caused the college to be known from that time on as a "hotbed of abolitionism." Fugitives were directed thither from points more or less remote, and during the period from 1835 to 1860 Oberlin was a busy station,[288] receiving passengers from at least five converging lines.[289] So notorious did the place become that a guide-board in the form of a fugitive running in the direction of the town was set up by the authorities on the Middle Ridge road, six miles north of Oberlin, and the sign of a tavern, four miles away, "was ornamented on its Oberlin face with a representation of a fugitive slave pursued by a tiger."[290] On account of the persistent ignoring of the law against harboring slaves by those connected with the institution, the existence of the college was put in jeopardy. Ex-President Fairchild relates that, "A Democratic legislature at different times agitated the question of repealing the college charter. The fourth and last attempt was made in 1843, when the bill for repeal was indefinitely postponed in the House by a vote of thirty-six to twenty-nine."[291] The anti-slavery influence of Oberlin went abroad with its students. Ex-President W. M. Brooks, of Tabor College, Iowa, a graduate of Oberlin, says, "The stations on the Underground Railroad in southwestern Iowa were in the region of Civil Bend, where the colony from Oberlin, Ohio, settled, which afterwards settled Tabor.... From this point (Civil Bend, now Percival) fugitives were brought to Tabor after 1852; here the entire population was in sympathy with the escaped fugitives; ... there was scarcely a man in the community who was not ready to do anything that was needed to help fugitives on their way to Canada."[292] The families that founded Tabor were "almost all of them Congregationalists."[293] Professor L. F. Parker of Grinnell, Iowa, names Oberlin students in connection with Quakers as the chief groups in Iowa whose houses were open to fugitives.[294] Grinnell itself was first settled by people that were mainly Congregationalists.[295] From the time of its foundation (1854) it was an anti-slavery centre, "well known and eagerly sought by the few runaways who came from the meagre settlements southwest ... in Missouri."[296]

There were, of course, members of other denominations that befriended the slave; thus, it is known that the Unitarian Seminary at Meadville, Pennsylvania, was a centre of underground work,[297] but, in general, the lack of information concerning the church connections of many of the company of persons with whom this chapter deals prevents the drawing of any inference as to whether these individuals acted independently or in conjunction with little bands of persons of their own faith.

There seems to have been no open appeal made to church organizations for help in behalf of fugitives except in Massachusetts. In 1851, and again in 1854, the Vigilance Committee of Boston deemed it wise to send out circulars to the clergymen of the commonwealth, requesting that contributions be taken by them to be applied in mitigation of the misery caused by the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law. The boldness and originality of such an appeal, and more especially the evident purpose of its framers to create sentiment by this means among the religious societies, entitle it to consideration. The first circular was sent out soon after the enactment of the odious law, and the second soon after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The results secured by the two circulars will be seen in the following letter from Francis Jackson, of Boston, to his fellow-townsmen and co-worker, the Rev. Theodore Parker.

Boston, Aug. 27, 1854.

Theodore Parker:

Dear Friend,—The contributions of the churches in behalf of the fugitive slaves I think have about all come in. I herewith inclose you a schedule thereof, amounting in all to about $800, being but little more than half as much as they contributed in 1851.

The Mass. Register published in January, 1854, states the number of Religious Societies to be 1,547 (made up of 471 Orthodox, 270 Methodist, and all others 239). We sent circulars to the whole 1,547; only 78 of them have responded—say 1 in 20—from 130 Universalist societies, nothing, from 43 Episcopal $4, and 20 Friends $27—the Baptists—four times as many of these societies have given now as gave in 1851, this may be because Brynes was a Baptist minister.

---

The average amount contributed by 77 societies (deducting Frothingham of Salem) is $10 each; the 28th Congregationalist Church in this city did not take up a contribution, nevertheless, individual members thereof subscribed upwards of $300; they being infidel have not been reckoned with the churches.

Of the cities and large towns scarce any have contributed. Of the 90 and 9 in Boston all have gone astray but 2—I have not heard of our circular being read in one of them; still it may have been. Those societies who have contributed, I judge were least able to do so.

Francis Jackson.[298]

The political affiliations of underground helpers before 1840 were, necessarily, with one or the other of the old parties—the Whig or the Democratic. As the Whig party was predominantly Northern, and as its sentiments were more distinctly anti-slavery than those of its rival, it is fair to suppose that the small band of early abolitionists were, most of them, allied with that party.[299] The Missouri Compromise in 1820, one may surmise, enabled those that were wavering in their position to ally themselves with the party that was less likely to make demands in the interests of the slave power. In 1840 opportunity was given abolitionists to take independent political action by the nomination of a national Liberty ticket. At that time, and again in 1844, many underground operators voted for the candidates of the Liberty party, and subsequently for the Free Soil nominees.[300]

But it is not to be supposed that all friends of the fugitive joined the political movement against slavery. Many there were that regarded party action with disfavor, preferring the method of moral suasion. These persons belonged to the Quakers, or to the Garrisonian abolitionists. The Friends or Quakers refused as far as possible to countenance slavery, and when the political development of the abolition cause came they regretted it, and their yearly meetings withheld their official sanction, so far as known, from every political organization. Nevertheless, there were some members of the Society of Friends that were swept into the current, and became active supporters of the Liberty party.[301] The most noted and influential of these was the anti-slavery poet, Whittier.[302] When, in 1860, the Republican party nominated Lincoln, "a large majority of the Friends, at least in the North and West, voted for him."[303]

The followers of Garrison that remained steadfast to the teachings and the example of their leader shunned all connection with the political abolitionist movement. Garrison never voted but once,[304] and by 1854 had gone so far in his denunciation of slavery that he burned the Constitution of the United States at an open-air celebration of the abolitionists at Framingham, Massachusetts.[305] To his dying day he seems to have believed "that the cause would have triumphed sooner, in a political sense, if the abolitionists had continued to act as one body, never yielding to the temptation of forming a political party, but pressing forward in the use of the same instrumentalities which were so potent from 1831 to 1840."[306]

The abolitionists were ill-judged by their contemporaries, and were frequently subjected to harsh language and occasionally to violent treatment by persons of supposed respectability. The weight of opprobrium they were called upon to bear tested their great strength of character. If the probity, integrity and moral courage of this abused class had been made the criteria of their standing they would have been held from the outset in high esteem by their neighbors. However, they lived to see the days of their disgrace turned into days of triumph. "The muse of history," says Rhodes, "has done full justice to the abolitionists. Among them were literary men, who have known how to present their cause with power, and the noble spirit of truthfulness pervades the abolition literature. One may search in vain for intentional misrepresentation. Abuse of opponents and criticism of motives are common enough, but the historians of the abolition movement have endeavored to relate a plain, honest tale; and the country has accepted them and their work at their true value. Moreover, a cause and its promoters that have been celebrated in the vigorous lines of Lowell and sung in the impassioned verse of Whittier will always be of perennial memory."[307]

Contempt was not the only hardship that the abolitionist had to face when he admitted the fleeing black man within his door, but he braved also the existing laws, and was sometimes compelled to suffer the consequences for disregarding the slaveholder's claim of ownership. In 1842 the prosecution of John Van Zandt, of Hamilton County, Ohio, was begun for attempting to aid nine slaves to escape. The case was tried first in the Circuit Court of the United States, and then taken by appeal to the Supreme Court. The suits were not concluded when the defendant died in May, 1847. The death of the plaintiff soon after left the case to be settled by administrators, who agreed that the costs, amounting to one thousand dollars, should be paid from the possessions of the defendant.[308] The judgments against Van Zandt under the Fugitive Slave Law amounted to seventeen hundred dollars.[309] In 1847 several members of a crowd that was instrumental in preventing the seizure of a colored family by the name of Crosswhite, at Marshall, Michigan, were indicted under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. Two trials followed, and at the second trial three persons were convicted, the verdict against them amounting, with expenses and costs, to six thousand dollars.[310] In 1848 Daniel Kauffman, of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, sheltered a family of thirteen slaves in his barn, and gave them transportation northward. He was tried, and sentenced to pay two thousand dollars in fine and costs. Although this decision was reversed by the United States Supreme Court, a new suit was instituted in the Circuit Court of the United States and a judgment was rendered against Kauffman amounting with costs to more than four thousand dollars. This sum was paid, in large part if not altogether, by contributions.[311] In 1854 Rush R. Sloane, a lawyer of Sandusky, Ohio, was tried for enabling seven fugitives to escape after arrest by their pursuers. The two claimants of the slaves instituted suit, but one only obtained a judgment, which amounted to three thousand dollars and costs.[312] The arrest of the fugitive, Anthony Burns, in Boston, in the same year, was the occasion for indignation meetings at Faneuil and Meionaon Halls, which terminated in an attempt to rescue the unfortunate negro. Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips and T. W. Higginson took a conspicuous part in these proceedings, and were indicted with others for riot. When the first case was taken up the counsel for the defence made a motion that the indictment be quashed. This was sustained by the court, and the affair ended by all the cases being dismissed.[313]

These and other similar cases arising from the attempted enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act in various parts of the country led to the proposal of a Defensive League of Freedom. A pamphlet, issued soon after the rendition of Burns, by Ellis Gray Loring, Samuel Cabot, Jr., Henry J. Prentiss, John A. Andrew and Samuel G. Howe, of Boston, and James Freeman Clarke, of Roxbury, Massachusetts, stated the object of the proposed league to be "to secure all persons claimed as fugitives from slavery, and to all persons accused of violating the Fugitive Slave Bill the fullest legal protection; and also indemnify all such persons against costs, fines, and expenses, whenever they shall seem to deserve such indemnification." The league was to act as a "society of mutual protection and every member was to assume his portion of such penalties as would otherwise fall with crushing weight on a few individuals." Subscriptions were to be made by the members of the organization, and five per cent of these subscriptions was to be called for any year when it was needed.[314] How much service this association actually performed, or whether, indeed, it got beyond the stage of being merely proposed is not known; in any event, the fact is worth noting that men of marked ability, distinction and social connection were forming societies, like the Defensive League of Freedom, and the various vigilance committees, for the purpose of defeating the Fugitive Slave Act.

Among the underground helpers there are a number of notable persons that have admitted with seeming satisfaction their complicity in disregarding the Fugitive Slave Law. A letter from Frederick Douglass, the famous Maryland bondman and anti-slavery orator, says: "My connection with the Underground Railroad began long before I left the South, and was continued as long as slavery continued, whether I lived in New Bedford, Lynn [both in Massachusetts], or Rochester, N.Y. In the latter place I had as many as eleven fugitives under my roof at one time."[315] In his autobiography Mr. Douglass declares concerning his work in this connection: "My agency was all the more exciting and interesting because not altogether free from danger. I could take not a step in it without exposing myself to fine and imprisonment, ... but in face of this fact, I can say, I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating, and satisfactory work."[316] Dr. Alexander M. Ross, a Canadian physician and naturalist, who has received the decorations of knighthood from several of the monarchs of Europe in recognition of his scientific discoveries, spent a considerable part of his time from 1856 to 1862 in spreading a knowledge of the routes leading to Canada among the slaves of the South.[317] Dr. Norton S. Townshend, one of the organizers of the Ohio State University and for years professor of agriculture in that institution, acted as a conductor on the Underground Railroad while he was a student of medicine in Cincinnati, Ohio.[318] Dr. Jared P. Kirtland, a distinguished physician and scientist of Ohio, kept a station in Poland, Mahoning County, where he resided from 1823 to 1837.[319]

Harriet Beecher Stowe gained the intimate knowledge of the methods of the friends of the slave she displays in Uncle Tom's Cabin through her association with some of the most zealous abolitionists of southern Ohio. Her own house on Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, was a refuge whence persons whose types are portrayed in George and Eliza, the boy Jim and his mother, were guided by her husband and brother a portion of the way towards Canada.[320] Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the essayist and author, while stationed as the pastor of a free church in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1852 to 1858, often had fugitives directed to his care. In a recent letter he writes of having received on one occasion a "consignment of a young white slave woman with two white children" from the Rev. Samuel J. May, who had put her "into the hands, for escort, of one of the most pro-slavery men in Worcester." The pro-slavery man, of course, did not have a suspicion that he was acting as conductor on the Underground Railroad.[321]

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

Joshua R. Giddings, for twenty years in Congress an ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery, kept a particular chamber in his house at Jefferson, Ohio, for the use of refugees.[322] Sometimes when passing through Alliance, Ohio, Mr. Giddings found opportunity to call upon his friend, I. Newton Peirce, to whom he contributed money for the transportation of runaway slaves by rail from that point to Cleveland.[323] What his views were of the irritating law of 1850, he declared on the floor of the House of Representatives, February 11, 1852, in the following words: "... Let me say to Southern men; It is your privilege to catch your own slaves, if any one catches them.... When you ask us to pay the expenses of arresting your slaves, or to give the President authority to appoint officers to do that dirty work, give them power to compel our people to give chase to the panting bondman, you overstep the bounds of the Constitution, and there we meet you, and there we stand and there we shall remain. We shall protest against such indignity; we shall proclaim our abhorrence of such a law. Nor can you seal or silence our voices."[324]

Thaddeus Stevens, a leading lawyer of Pennsylvania, who rendered the cause of abolition distinguished service in Congress, where he gained the title of the "great commoner," entered upon the practice of his profession at Gettysburg in 1816, and soon became known as a friend of escaping slaves. His removal to Lancaster in 1842 did not take him off the line of flight, and he continued to act as a helper. The woman that "kept house for him for more than twenty years, and nursed him at the close of his life, was one of the slaves he helped to freedom."[325]

James M. Ashley, member of Congress from Ohio for over nine years, and his successor in the House, Richard Mott, a Quaker, were confederates in their violation of the Slave Act at Toledo, Ohio. Mr. Ashley began his service in behalf of the blacks early in life. As a youth of seventeen in Kentucky, he helped two companies across the Ohio River, one company of seven persons, and the other of five.[326] Sidney Edgerton, who was elected to Congress from Ohio on the Free Soil ticket in 1858, and four years after was appointed governor of Montana Territory by President Lincoln, assisted his father in the befriending of slaves at Tallmadge, Summit County, Ohio.[327] Jacob M. Howard, afterwards United States senator from Michigan, was one of the principal operators at Detroit.[328] General Samuel Fessenden, of Maine, who received the nomination of the Liberty party for the governorship of his state, and later for Congress, and was during forty years the leading member of the bar in Maine, gave escaped bondmen reaching Portland a hearty welcome to his house on India Street.[329] In Vermont there were a number of men prominent in public affairs that were actively engaged in underground enterprises. Colonel Jonathan P. Miller, of Montpelier, who went to Greece, and assisted that country in its uprising in the twenties, served as a member of the Vermont legislature in 1833, and took part in the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, was among the early helpers in New England. Lawrence Brainerd, for several years candidate for governor of Vermont, and later chosen to the United States Senate as a Free Soiler, gave shelter to the wanderers at St. Albans, where they were almost within sight of "the Promised Land."[330] Others were the Rev. Alvah Sabin, elected to Congress in 1853, who kept a station at the town of Georgia, the Hon. Joseph Poland of Montpelier, the Hon. William Sowles of Swanton, the Hon. John West of Morristown and the Hon. A. J. Russell of Troy.[331]

Gerrit Smith, the famous philanthropist, kept open house for fugitives in a fine old mansion at Peterboro, New York. He was one of the prime movers in the organization of the Liberty party at Arcade, New York, in 1840, and was its candidate for the presidency in 1848 and in 1852. He was elected to Congress in 1853 and served one term. It is said that during the decade 1850 to 1860 he "aided habitually in the escape of fugitive slaves and paid the legal expenses of persons accused of infractions of the Fugitive Slave Law."[332] The Rev. Owen Lovejoy, brother of the martyr Elijah P. Lovejoy, served four terms in the national House of Representatives. On one occasion he was taunted by some pro-slavery members of the House with being a "nigger-stealer." In a speech made February 21, 1859, Mr. Lovejoy, referring to these accusations, said: "Is it desired to call attention to this fact—of my assisting fugitive slaves?... Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, three-quarters of a mile east of the village, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it. Thou invisible demon of slavery, dost thou think to cross my humble threshold, and forbid me to give bread to the hungry and shelter to the houseless! I bid you defiance in the name of my God!"[333] Josiah B. Grinnell, who represented a central Iowa district in the Thirty-eighth and the Thirty-ninth congresses, had a chamber in his house at Grinnell that came to be called the "liberty room." John Brown, while on his way to Canada with a band of Missouri slaves, in the winter of 1858-1859, stacked his arms in this room, and his company of fugitives slept there.[334] Mr. Grinnell relates of the members of this party, "They came at night, and were the darkest, saddest specimens of humanity I have ever seen, glad to camp on the floor, while the veteran was a night guard, with his dog and a miniature arsenal ready for use on alarm...."[335]

Thurlow Weed, the distinguished journalist and political manager, even in his busiest hours had time to afford relief to the underground applicant. One who knew Mr. Weed intimately relates the following incident: "On one occasion when several eminent gentlemen were waiting [to see the journalist] they were surprised and at first much vexed, by seeing a negro promptly admitted. The negro soon reappeared, and hastily left the house, when it was learned that he was a runaway slave, and had been aided in his flight for liberty by the man who was too busy to attend to Cabinet officers, but had time to say words of encouragement and present means of support to a flying fugitive."[336] Sydney Howard Gay, for several years managing editor of the New York Tribune, and subsequently on the editorial staff of the New York Post and the Chicago Tribune, was an efficient agent of the Underground Railroad while in charge of the Anti-Slavery Standard, which he conducted in New York City from 1844 to 1857.[337]

Among the clergymen that made it a part of their religious duty to minister to the needs of the exiles from the South, were John Rankin, Samuel J. May and Theodore Parker. Mr. Rankin, a native of Tennessee, early developed his anti-slavery views in Kentucky, where from 1817 to 1821 he served as pastor of two Presbyterian churches at the town of Carlisle. During the next forty-four years he resided at Ripley, Ohio, in a neighborhood frequented by runaways.[338] Doubtless he became a patron of these midnight visitors at the time of his location in Ripley. In 1828 he established himself in a house situated upon the crest of a hill just back of the town and overlooking the Ohio River. For many years the lights beaming through the windows of this parsonage were hailed by slaves fleeing from the soil of Kentucky as beacons to guide them to a haven of safety.[339]

Samuel J. May, for many years a prominent minister in the Unitarian Church, writes: "So long ago as 1834, when I was living in the eastern part of Connecticut, I had fugitives addressed to my care.... Even after I came to reside in Syracuse [New York] I had much to do as a station-keeper or conductor on the Underground Railroad, until slavery was abolished by the proclamation of President Lincoln.... Fugitives came to me from Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana. They came, too, at all hours of day and night, sometimes comfortably, yes, and even handsomely clad, but generally in clothes every way unfit to be worn, and in some instances too unclean and loathsome to be admitted into my house."[340]

Theodore Parker, the learned theologian and iconoclast of Boston, often deserted his study that he might work in the cause of humanity. In his Journal, under the date October 23, 1850, Mr. Parker wrote: "... The first business of the anti-slavery men is to help the fugitives; we, like Christ, are to seek and save that which is lost."[341] In an unsigned note written in 1851 to his friend Dr. Francis, Mr. Parker says:—

... I have got some nice books (old ones) coming across the water. But, alas me! such is the state of the poor fugitive slaves, that I must attend to living men, and not to dead books, and all this winter my time has been occupied with these poor souls. The Vigilance Committee appointed me spiritual counsellor of all fugitive slaves in Massachusetts while in peril.... The Fugitive Slave Law has cost me some months of time already. I have refused about sixty invitations to lecture and delayed the printing of my book—for that! Truly the land of the pilgrims is in great disgrace!

Yours truly.[342]

Among the underground workers there were two whose principal object in life seems to have been to assist fugitive slaves. These two organizers of underground travel were Levi Coffin, of Cincinnati, Ohio, and Thomas Garrett, of Wilmington, Delaware, both lifelong members of the Society of Friends, both capable business men, both able to number the unfortunates they had succored in terms of thousands.

Thomas Garrett was born in Pennsylvania in 1789, and espoused the cause of emancipation at the age of eighteen, when a colored woman in the employ of his father's family was kidnapped. He succeeded in rescuing the woman from the hands of her abductors, and from that time on made it his special mission to aid negroes in their attempts to gain freedom. In 1822 he removed to Wilmington, Delaware, and during the next forty years his efforts in behalf of fugitives were unremitting. He was not so fortunate as Levi Coffin in escaping the penalties of the Fugitive Slave Law; an open violation of the law got him into difficulty in 1848. He was tried on four counts before Judge Taney, and his entire property was swallowed up in fines amounting to eight thousand dollars. There is a tradition that the presiding judge admonished Garrett to take his loss as a lesson and in the future to desist from breaking the laws; whereupon the aged Quaker stoutly replied: "Judge, thou hast not left me a dollar, but I wish to say to thee, and to all in this court-room, that if any one knows of a fugitive who wants a shelter and a friend, send him to Thomas Garrett and he will befriend him."[343] Although sixty years of age when misfortune befel him, Mr. Garrett was successful in again acquiring a competence through the kindness of fellow-townsmen in advancing him capital with which to make a fresh start. Though satisfied, he was wont to think that his real work in life was never finished. "The war came a little too soon for my business. I wanted to help off three thousand slaves. I had only got up to twenty-seven hundred!"

Mr. Coffin was a native of North Carolina. Born in 1798, he was while still a boy moved to assist in the escape of slaves by witnessing the cruel treatment the negroes were compelled to endure. In 1826 he settled in Wayne County, Indiana, on the line of the Underground Road, and such was his activity that his house at New Garden (now Fountain City) soon became the converging point of three principal routes from Kentucky. In 1847 Mr. Coffin removed to Cincinnati for the purpose of opening a store where goods produced by free labor only should be sold. His relations with the humane work were maintained, and the genial but fearless Quaker came to be known generally by the fictitious but happy title, President of the Underground Railroad. It has been said of Mr. Coffin that "for thirty-three years he received into his house more than one hundred slaves every year."[344] In 1863 the Quaker philanthropist assisted in the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau. In the following year and again in 1867, he visited Europe as agent for the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission. When the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution was celebrated in Cincinnati by colored citizens and their friends, Mr. Coffin was one of those called upon by the chairman to address the great meeting. In response, the veteran station-keeper explained how he had obtained the title of President of the Underground Road. He said, "The title was given to me by slave-hunters, who could not find their fugitive slaves after they got into my hands. I accepted the office thus conferred upon me, and ... endeavored to perform my duty faithfully. Government has now taken the work out of our hands. The stock of the Underground Railroad has gone down in the market, the business is spoiled, the road is now of no further use."[345] He then amid much applause resigned his office, and declared the operations of the Underground Railroad at an end.

MAP
showing the lines of the
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
IN
Chester and the Neighboring
Counties of Pennsylvania
Based on R. C. Smedley's History of the Road in these Counties.

"UNDERGROUND"
ROUTES TO CANADA
SHOWING THE LINES OF TRAVEL
OF FUGITIVE SLAVES

W.H. Siebert, 189_

[CHAPTER V]

STUDY OF THE MAP OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD SYSTEM

There are many features of the Underground Railroad that can best be understood by means of a geographical representation of the system. Such a representation it has been possible to make by piecing together the scraps of information in regard to various routes and parts of routes gathered from the reminiscences of a large number of abolitionists. The more or less limited area in which each agent operated was the field within which he was not only willing, but was usually anxious, to confine his knowledge of underground activities. Ignorance of one's accomplices beyond a few adjoining stations was naturally felt to be a safeguard. The local character of the information resulting from such precautions places the investigator under the necessity of patiently studying his materials for what may be called the cumulative evidence in regard to the geography of the system. It is because the evidence gathered has been cumulative and corroborative that a general map can be prepared. But a map thus constructed cannot, of course, be considered complete, for it cannot be supposed that after the lapse of a generation representatives of all the important lines and branches could be discovered. Nevertheless, however much the map may fall short of showing the system in its completeness, it will be found to help the reader materially in his attempt to realize the extent and importance of this movement.

The underground system, in accordance with the statement of James Freeman Clarke, is commonly understood to have extended from Kentucky and Virginia across Ohio, and from Maryland through Pennsylvania, New York and New England to Canada.[346] But this description is inadequate, for it fails to include the states west of Ohio. Henry Wilson extends the field westward by asserting that the "territory embraced by the Middle States and all the Western States east of the Mississippi ... was dotted over with 'stations,'" and "covered with a network of imaginary routes, not found ... in the railway guides or on the railway maps;"[347] and in another place he quotes the Rev. Asa Turner, a home missionary, who went to Illinois in 1830, who says: "Lines were formed through Iowa and Illinois, and passengers were carried from station to station ... till they reached the Canada line."[348] The association of Kansas with the two states just named as a channel for the escape of runaways from the southwestern slave section, is made by Mr. Richard J. Hinton.[349] The addition of one other state, New Jersey, is necessary to complete the list of Northern states involved in the Underground Railroad system.[350] This region, which forms nearly one quarter of the present area of the Union, constituted the irregular zone of free soil intervening between Southern slavery and Canadian liberty.

The conditions that determined the number and distribution of stations throughout this region are clearly discernible even in the incomplete data with which we are forced to be content. It is safe to assert that in Ohio the conditions favorable to the development of a large number of stations, and the dissemination of these throughout the state, existed in a measure and combination not reproduced in the case of any other state. Ohio's geographical boundary gave it a long line of contact with slave territory. It bordered Kentucky with about one hundred and sixty miles of river frontage; and Virginia with perhaps two hundred and twenty-five miles or more, and crossings were made at almost any point. The character of the early settlements of Ohio is a factor that must not be overlooked. The northern and eastern parts of the state were dotted over with many little communities where New England ideas prevailed; the southern and southwestern parts came in time to be well sprinkled with the homes of Quakers, Covenanters and anti-slavery Southerners and some negroes; the central and southeastern portions contained a number of Quaker settlements. The remote position and sparse settlement of the northwestern section of the state probably explain the failure to find many traces of routes in that region. Family ties, church fellowship, an aggressive anti-slavery leadership,—journalistic and political,—the leavening influence of institutions like Oberlin College, Western Reserve College and Geneva College, all contributed to propagate a sentiment that was ready to support the fleeing slave; and thus Ohio became netted over with a large number of interlacing lines of escape for fugitive slaves. The western portions of Pennsylvania and New York, and the eastern portion of Indiana shared with Ohio these favorable conditions, and one is not surprised to find many stations in these regions. The same is true of northern and west-central Illinois, where many persons of New England descent settled. The few lines known in southwestern Illinois were developed by a few Covenanter communities. The geographical position of the most southern portions of Illinois and Indiana determined the character of the population settling there, and thus rendered underground enterprises in those regions more than ordinarily dangerous. There may have been stations scattered through those parts, but if so, one can scarcely hope now to discover them. The great number of routes in southeastern Pennsylvania, and the stream of slave emigration flowing through New Jersey to New York are to be attributed largely to the untiring activity of a host of Quakers, assisted by some negroes. The coöperation of some zealous station-keepers in the neighboring slave territory seems to account partly for the multitude of stations that appear upon the map between the lower Susquehanna and Delaware rivers. Whether there was any underground work done in the central and northern parts of Pennsylvania is not known; the indications are that there was not much; the stations said to have existed at Milroy, Altoona, Work's Place and Smicksburg probably connected with lines running in a northwesterly direction to Lake Erie. This is known to have been true of the stations at Greensburg, Indiana, Clearfield and intermediate points, which were linked in with stations leading to Meadville and Erie. The remoteness of New York and of the New England states from the slaveholding section explains the comparatively small number of stations found in those states. Iowa, which bordered on slave territory, had only a small number of stations, for it was a new region, not long open to occupation; and only the southern part of the state was in the direct line of travel, which here was mostly eastward. There were a few places of deportation in southeastern Wisconsin for fugitives that had avoided Chicago, and followed the lakeshore or the Illinois River farther northward. A rather narrow strip of Michigan, adjoining Indiana and Ohio, was dotted with stations.

There were friends of the discontented slave in the South as well as in the North, although it cannot be said, upon the basis of the small amount of evidence at hand, that these were sufficient in number or so situated as to maintain regular lines of escape northward. Doubtless many acts of kindness to slaves were performed by individual Southerners, but those were not, in most of the cases, known as the acts of persons coöperating to help the slave from point to point until freedom and safety should be reached. That there were regular helpers in the South engaged in concerted action, Samuel J. May, a station-keeper of wide information concerning the Road, freely asserts. In 1869 he wrote, "There have always been scattered throughout the slaveholding states individuals who have abhorred slavery, and have pitied the victims of our American despotism. These persons have known, or have taken pains to find out, others at convenient distances northward from their abodes who sympathized with them in commiserating the slaves. These sympathizers have known or heard of others of like mind still farther north, who again have had acquaintances in the free states that they knew would help the fugitive on his way to liberty. Thus lines of friends at longer or shorter distances were formed from many parts of the South to the very borders of Canada...."[351] It is not easy to substantiate this statement; and all that will be attempted here is the presentation of such examples as have been found of underground work on the part of persons living south of Mason and Dixon's line. Mr. Stephen B. Weeks is authority for the statement that "Vestal Coffin organized the Underground Railroad near the present Guilford College in 1819," and that "Addison Coffin, his son, entered its service as a conductor in early youth...."[352] Levi Coffin, Vestal's cousin, helped many slaves from this region to reach the North before he moved to Indiana in 1826.[353] In Delaware there seems to have been a well-defined route upon which the houses of John Hunn, of Middletown,[354] Ezekiel Hunn, of Camden, and Thomas Garrett, of Wilmington,[355] were important stations. John Hunn speaks of himself as having been "superintendent of the Underground Railroad from Wilmington down the Peninsula."[356] Maryland also had its line—perhaps its lines—of Road. One route ran overland from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia. Mr. W. B. Williams, of Charlotte, Michigan, throws some light on this route. He says, "My uncle, Jacob Bigelow, was for several years previous to the war a resident of Washington, D.C. He was an abolitionist, and general manager of the Underground Railway from Washington to Philadelphia...."[357] Mr. Robert Purvis tells of two market-women that were agents of the Underground Road in Baltimore, forwarding fugitives to the Vigilance Committee with which he was connected in Philadelphia.[358] The Quaker City was also a central station for points still farther south. Vessels engaged in the lumber trade plying between Newberne, North Carolina, and Philadelphia, were often supplied with slave passengers by the son of a slaveholder living at Newberne.[359] A slave at Petersburg, Virginia, was agent for that section of country, directing fugitives to William Still in Philadelphia.[360] Eliza Bains, a slave-woman of Portsmouth, Virginia, sent numbers of her people to Boston and New Bedford by boat.[361] Frederick Douglass declared that his connection with the Underground Railroad began long before he left the South.[362] Harriet Tubman, the abductor, made use of stations at Camden, Dover, Blackbird, Middleton and New Castle in the State of Delaware on her way to Wilmington and Philadelphia.[363] The testimony of these various witnesses seems to show that underground routes existed in the South, but it is not sufficient in amount to enable one to trace extended courses of travel through the slaveholding states.

It is apparent from the map that the numerous tributaries of the Ohio and the great valleys of the Appalachian range afforded many tempting paths of escape. These natural routes from slavery have been recognized and defined by a recent writer.[364] "One," he says, "was that of the coast south of the Potomac, whose almost continuous line of swamps from the vicinity of Norfolk, Va., to the northern border of Florida afforded a refuge for many who could not escape and became 'marooned' in their depths, while giving facility to the more enduring to work their way out to the north star land. The great Appalachian range and its abutting mountains were long a rugged, lonely, but comparatively safe route to freedom. It was used, too, for many years. Doubtless a knowledge of that fact, for John Brown was always an active railroad man, had very much to do, strategically considered, with the Captain's decision to begin operations therein. Harriet Tubman ... was a constant user of the Appalachian route in her efforts to aid escaping slaves.[365] ... Underground Railroad operations culminating chiefly at Cleveland, Sandusky, and Detroit, led by broad and defined routes through Ohio to the border of Kentucky. Through that State, into the heart of the Cumberland Mountains, northern Georgia, east Tennessee, and northern Alabama, the limestone caves of the region served a useful purpose.... The Ohio-Kentucky routes probably served more fugitives than others in the North. The valley of the Mississippi was the most westerly channel, until Kansas opened a bolder way of escape from the southwest slave section." These were the main channels of flight from the slave states; but it must be remembered that escapes were continually taking place along the entire frontier between the two sections of the Union, the drift of travel being constantly towards those points where the homes of abolitionists or where negro settlements indicated initial stations on lines running north to freedom. The border counties of the slave states were thus subject to a steady loss of their dissatisfied bondmen. This condition is well represented in the case of several counties of Maryland, concerning which Mr. Smedley obtained information. He says, "The counties of Frederick, Carroll, Washington, Hartford and Baltimore, Md., emptied their fugitives into York and Adams counties across the line in Pennsylvania. The latter two counties had settlements of Friends and abolitionists. The slaves learned who their friends were in that part of the Free State; and it was as natural for those aspiring to liberty to move in that direction as for the waters of brooks to move toward larger streams."[366]

Along the southern margin of the free states began those well-defined trails or channels that have lent themselves to representation upon the large map given herewith. In dealing with the tracings shown upon this map it will be best to consider the territory as divided into three regions, the first comprising the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York; the second, the New England states; and the third, the five states created out of the Northwest Territory. This arrangement will, perhaps, admit of the introduction of some system into the discussion of what might otherwise prove a complicated subject.

In point of time underground work seems to have developed first in eastern Pennsylvania.[367] Regular routes of travel began to be formed in the vicinity of Philadelphia about the middle of the first decade of the present century. It is said that "some cases of kidnapping and shooting of fugitives who attempted to escape occurred in Columbia, Pa., in 1804. This incited the people of that town, who were chiefly Friends or their descendants, to throw around the colored people the arm of protection, and even to assist those who were endeavoring to escape from slavery.... This gave origin to that organized system of rendering aid to fugitives which was afterward known as the 'Underground Railroad.'" Thus begun, the service rapidly extended, being greatly favored by the character of the population in southeastern Pennsylvania, which was largely Quaker, with here and there some important settlements of manumitted slaves. It was on account of the large number of runaways early resorting to Columbia that it became necessary to have an understanding with regard to places of entertainment for them along lines leading to the Eastern states and to Canada, whither most of the fugitives were bound.[368] There seems to have been scarcely any limitation upon the number of persons in Lancaster, Chester and Delaware counties willing to assume agencies for the forwarding of slaves; hence this region became the field through which more routes were developed in proportion to its extent than any other area in the Northern states. It will be necessary to make use of a special map of the region in order to follow out the principal channels of escape and to discover the centres from which the Canada routes sprung.[369] West of the Susquehanna River Gettysburg and York were the stations chiefly sought by slaves escaping from the border counties of Maryland. Along the western shore of the Chesapeake runaways passed northward to Havre de Grace, where they usually crossed the Susquehanna, and with others from the Eastern Shore found their way to established stations in the southern part of Lancaster and Chester counties in Pennsylvania. From the territory adjacent to the Delaware the movement was to Wilmington, and thence north through Chester and Delaware counties. The routes developed in the three regions just indicated formed three systems of underground travel, the first of which may be called the western, the second, the middle, and the third, the eastern system. These systems comprised, besides the main roads indicated in heavy lines upon the map, numerous side-tracks and branches shown by the light lines. Their common goal was Phœnixville, the home of Elijah F. Pennypacker, and from here fugitives were sent to Philadelphia, Norristown, Quakertown, Reading and other stations as occasion required. While Phœnixville may be regarded as the central station for the three systems mentioned, it did not receive all the negroes escaping through this section, and Smedley says that "Hundreds were sent to the many branch stations along interlacing routes, and hundreds of others were sent from Wilmington, Columbia, and stations westward direct to the New England States and Canada. Many of these passed through the hands of the Vigilance Committee connected with the anti-slavery office in Philadelphia."[370] From this point one outlet led overland across New Jersey to Jersey City and New York; another outlet from Philadelphia, was the Reading Railroad, which also carried refugees from various stations along its course. How many steam railway extensions may have been connected with the underground tracks of southeastern Pennsylvania cannot be discovered. One such extension was the Northern Central Railroad from Harrisburg across the state to Elmira, New York.[371] Another trans-state route in eastern Pennsylvania appears to have had its origin at or near Sadsbury, Chester County, and to have run overland to Binghamton, New York.[372] The intermediate stations along this pathway are not known, although some disconnected places of resort in northeastern Pennsylvania[373] may have constituted a section of it. Lines of northern travel for fugitives also passed through Bucks County, but Dr. Edward H. Magill, formerly President of Swarthmore College, thinks these were "less clearly marked" than those running through Chester and Lancaster counties. He finds that friends of the slave in the middle section of Bucks County generally forwarded the negroes to Quakertown or even as far north, by stage or private conveyance, as Stroudsburg. From this point they sometimes went to Montrose or Friendsville, in Susquehanna County, near the southern boundary of the State of New York,[374] whence, together with fugitives from Wilkesbarre, and, perhaps, the Lehigh Valley, they were sent on to Gerrit Smith, at Peterboro in central New York, and thence to Canada.[375]

At the other end of Pennsylvania several routes and sections of routes have been discovered. The most important of these seem to have been the roads resulting from the convergence of at least three well-defined lines of escape at Uniontown in southwestern Pennsylvania from the neighboring counties of Virginia and Maryland. A map drawn by Mr. Amos M. Jolliffe, of Uniontown, shows that there were two courses leading northward from his neighborhood, both of which terminated at Pittsburgh.[376] From this point fugitives seem to have been sent to Cleveland by rail, or to have been directed to follow the Alleghany or the Ohio and its tributaries north. Investigation proves that friends were not lacking at convenient points to help them along to the main terminals for this region, namely, Erie and Buffalo, or across the border of the state to the much-used routes of the Western Reserve.[377] East of the Alleghany River significant traces of underground work are found running in a northeasterly direction from Greensburg through Indiana County to Clearfield,[378] a distance of seventy-five miles, and from Cumberland, Maryland, through Bedford and Pleasantville to Altoona,[379] about the same distance. These fragmentary routes may have had connections with some of the fragmentary lines of western New York. From Clearfield an important branch is known to have run northwest to Shippenville and Franklin, and so to Erie, a place of deportation on the lake of the same name.[380]

New Jersey was intimately associated with Philadelphia and the adjoining section in the underground system, and afforded at least three important outlets for runaways from the territory west of the Delaware River. Our knowledge of these outlets is derived solely from the testimony of the Rev. Thomas Clement Oliver, who, like his father, travelled the New Jersey routes many times as a guide or conductor.[381] Probably the most important of these routes was that leading from Philadelphia to Jersey City and New York. From Philadelphia the runaways were taken across the Delaware River to Camden, where Mr. Oliver lived, thence they were conveyed northeast following the course of the river to Burlington, and thence in the same direction to Bordentown. In Burlington, sometimes called Station A, a short stop was made for the purpose of changing horses after the rapid drive of twenty miles from Philadelphia. The Bordentown station was denominated Station B east. Here the road took a more northerly direction to Princeton, where horses were again changed and the journey continued to New Brunswick. Just east of New Brunswick the conductors sometimes met with opposition in attempting to cross the Raritan River on their way to Jersey City. To avoid such interruption the conductors arranged with Cornelius Cornell, who lived on the outskirts of New Brunswick, and, presumably, near the river, to notify them when there were slave-catchers or spies at the regular crossing. On receiving such information they took a by-road leading to Perth Amboy, whence their protégés could be safely forwarded to New York City. When the way was clear at the Raritan the company pursued its course to Rahway; here another relay of horses was obtained and the journey continued to Jersey City, where, under the care of John Everett, a Quaker, or his servants, they were taken to the Forty-second Street railroad station, now known as the Grand Central, provided with tickets, and placed on a through train for Syracuse, New York. The second route had its origin on the Delaware River forty miles below Philadelphia, at or near Salem. This line, like the others to be mentioned later, seems to have been tributary to the Philadelphia route traced above. Nevertheless, it had an independent course for sixty miles before it connected with the more northern route at Bordentown. This distance of sixty miles was ordinarily travelled in three stages, the first ending at Woodbury, twenty-five miles north of Salem, although the trip by wagon is said to have added ten miles to the estimated distance between the two places; the second stage ended at Evesham Mount; and the third, at Bordentown. The third route was called, from its initial station, the Greenwich line. This station is vividly described as having been made up of a circle of Quaker residences enclosing a swampy place that swarmed with blacks. One may surmise that it made a model station. Slaves were transported at night across the Delaware River from the vicinity of Dover, in boats marked by a yellow light hung below a blue one, and were met some distance out from the Jersey shore by boats showing the same lights. Landed at Greenwich, the fugitives were conducted north twenty-five miles to Swedesboro, and thence about the same distance to Evesham Mount. From this point they were taken to Mount Holly, and so into the northern or Philadelphia route. Still another branch of this Philadelphia line is known. It constitutes the fourth road, and is described by Mr. Robert Purvis[382] as an extension of a route through Bucks County, Pennsylvania, that entered Trenton, New Jersey, from Newtown, and ran directly to New Brunswick and so on to New York.

Mr. Eber M. Pettit, for many years a conductor of the Underground Railroad in western New York,[383] asserts that the Road had four main lines across his state, and scores of laterals,[384] but he nowhere attempts to identify these lines for the benefit of those less well informed than himself. Concerning what may be supposed to have been one of the lines, he speaks as follows: "The first well-established line of the U. G. R. R. had its southern terminus in Washington, D.C., and extended in a pretty direct route to Albany, N.Y., thence radiating in all directions to all the New England states, and to many parts of this state.... The General Superintendent resided in Albany.... He was once an active member of one of the churches in Fredonia. Mr. T., his agent in Washington City, was a very active and efficient man; the Superintendent at Albany was in daily communication by mail with him and other subordinate agents at all points along the line."[385] Frederick Douglass, who was familiar with this Albany route during the period of his residence in Rochester, describes it as running through Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Rochester, and thence to Canada; and he gives the name of the person at each station that was most closely associated in his mind with the work of the station. Thus, he says that the "fugitives were received in Philadelphia by William Still, by him sent to New York, where they were cared for by Mr. David Ruggles, and afterwards by Mr. Gibbs, ... thence to Stephen Myers at Albany; thence to J. W. Loguen, Syracuse; thence to Frederick Douglass, Rochester; and thence to Hiram Wilson, St. Catherines, Canada West."[386] Not all the negroes travelling by this route went as far as Rochester; some were turned north at Syracuse to the port of Oswego, where they took boat for Canada.[387] The Rev. Charles B. Ray, a member of the Vigilance Committee of New York City, and editor of The Colored American, has left some testimony which corroborates that just given. He knew of a regular route stretching from Washington, by way of Baltimore and Philadelphia, to New York, thence following the Hudson to Albany and Troy, whence a branch ran westward to Utica, Syracuse and Oswego, with an extension from Syracuse to Niagara Falls. New York was a kind of receiving point from which fugitives were assisted to Albany and Troy, or, as sometimes happened, to Boston and New Bedford, or, when considerations of safety warranted it, were permitted to pass to Long Island.[388] The lines that are said to have radiated from Albany are mentioned neither by Mr. Douglass nor by Mr. Ray, but we know from other witnesses that some of the fugitives sent to Troy found their way to places of refuge north and east. Mr. Martin I. Townsend, of Troy, writes that fugitives arriving at that city were supplied with money and forwarded either to Suspension Bridge, on the Niagara River, or by way of Vermont and Lake Champlain to Rouses Point.[389] It seems probable that another branch of the secret thoroughfare followed the valley of the Hudson from Troy to the farm of John Brown, near North Elba among the Adirondacks. Mr. Richard H. Dana visited this frontier home of Brown one summer, and was informed by his guide that the country about there belonged to Gerrit Smith; that it was settled for the most part by families of fugitive slaves, who were engaged in farming; and that Brown held the position of a sort of ruler among them. The view was therefore credited that this neighborhood was one of the termini of the Underground Railroad."[390]

Gerrit Smith, the friend and counsellor of Brown, lived at Peterboro, in central New York, where his house was an important station for runaway slaves. His open invitation to fugitives to come to Peterboro gave the post he maintained great publicity, and many negroes resorted thither. From Peterboro they were sent in Mr. Smith's wagon to Oswego.[391] A little to the east and north of this place of deportation there were what may perhaps be called emergency stations at or near Mexico, New Haven, Port Ontario[392] and Cape Vincent.[393] From the place last named, and perhaps also from Port Ontario, fugitives took boat for Kingston.[394] A route that came into operation much later than that with which the Peterboro station was connected was the Elmira route. In 1844, John W. Jones, an escaped slave from Virginia, settled in Elmira, and began, together with Mr. Jervis Langdon, a prominent citizen of the town, to receive fugitives. A few years later the Northern Central Railroad was constructed, and supplied a means of travel through western New York to Niagara Falls. Underground passengers forwarded by rail from Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Williamsport were sent on via the Northern Central to Canada.[395] In the counties of New York west and south of the Elmira route the map shows some disconnected stations and sections of Road. Not enough is known about these to suggest with certainty their connections. It is, however, evident that their trend is toward the short arm of the Province of Ontario, which is separated from the United States only by the Niagara River, with crossings favorable for fugitives at Buffalo, Black Rock, Suspension Bridge and Lewiston. In the angle of southwestern New York there were two routes, the objective point of which was Buffalo. One of these, by way of Westfield and Fredonia, hugged closely the shore of Lake Erie;[396] the other, issuing by way of the Alleghany River from Franklin, Pennsylvania, ran through Jamestown and Ellington to Leon, where it branched, one division going to Fredonia and so on northward, whilst the other seems to have followed a more direct course to Buffalo.[397]

Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller, the daughter of Gerrit Smith, says that in October, 1839, the "White Slave, Harriet," was taken by Mr. Federal Dana from her father's house directly to Cape Vincent, and that Mr. Dana wrote from that point: "I saw her pass the ferry this morning into Canada." Letter received from Mrs. Miller, Peterboro, N.Y., Sept. 21, 1896.

Notwithstanding the unfavorable position for this work of the New England states, a considerable number of fugitive slaves found their way through these states to Canada. A part of them came through Pennsylvania and New York. Smedley states, as already noted, that hundreds were sent from Wilmington, Columbia, and other points to the New England states and Canada.[398] Another part came by boat from Southern ports to the shores of New England, landing at various places, chief among which seem to have been New Haven, New Bedford, Boston and Portland. Such was the number of arrivals and consequent demand for transportation to a place of safety, that these four places became the beginnings of routes, which it has been possible to trace on the map with more or less completeness.

The first of these may be called the Connecticut valley route. President E. B. Andrews, of Brown University, whose father was an active friend of slaves at Montague in western Massachusetts, describes this route as running from New York, New Haven, or New London up the Connecticut River valley to Canada.[399] This is corroborated by some writer in the History of Springfield, Massachusetts, where it is noted that there was a steady movement of parties of runaways up the valley on their way to the adjacent provinces.[400] Mr. Erastus F. Gunn, of Montague, Massachusetts, writes that the travel along this route was largely confined to the west side of the river, and was through Springfield, Northampton and Greenfield into the State of Vermont.[401] Fugitives disembarking at New Haven[402] went north through Kensington, New Britain and Farmington, and probably by way of Bloomfield or Hartford to Springfield. Sometimes they came up the river by steamboat to Hartford, the head of navigation, and continued their journey overland.[403] A trail probably much less used than the routes just mentioned, seems to have connected the southwestern part of Connecticut with the valley route.[404] In Massachusetts there were ramifications from the valley route,[405] which may have terminated among the hills in the western part of the state, for all that one can now discover.

A line of Road originating at New Bedford in southeastern Massachusetts is mentioned in connection with the line up the Connecticut valley by the Hon. M. M. Fisher, of Medway, Massachusetts, as one of the more common routes.[406] Mrs. Elizabeth Buffum Chace says that slaves landing on Cape Cod went to New Bedford, whence under the guidance of some abolitionist they were conveyed to the home of Nathaniel P. Borden at Fall River. Between this station and the one kept by Mr. and Mrs. Chace at Valley Falls, Robert Adams acted as conductor; and from Valley Falls Mr. Chace was in the habit of accompanying passengers a short distance over the Providence and Worcester Railroad until he had placed them in the care of some trusted employee of that road to be transferred at Worcester to the Vermont Railroad.[407] The Rev. Joshua Young was receiving agent at Burlington, Vermont, and testifies that during his residence there he and his friend and parishioner, L. H. Bigelow, did "considerable business."[408] South of Burlington there was a series of stations not connected with the Vermont Central Railroad extension of the New Bedford route. The names of these stations have been obtained from Mr. Rowland E. Robinson, whose father's house was a refuge for fugitives at Ferrisburg, Vermont, and from the Hon. Joseph Poland, the editor of the first anti-slavery newspaper in his state, who was himself an agent of the Underground Road at Montpelier. The names are those of nine towns, which form a line roughly parallel to the west boundary of the state, namely, North Ferrisburg, Ferrisburg, Vergennes, Middlebury, Brandon, Rutland, Wallingford, Manchester and Bennington.[409] They constituted what may be called the west Vermont route, Bennington being at the southern extremity, where escaped slaves were received from Troy, New York.[410] The terminal at the northern end of this route was St. Albans, whence runaways could be hastened across the Canadian frontier. The valley of the lower Connecticut seems to have yielded a sufficient supply of fugitive slaves to sustain a vigorous line of Road in eastern Vermont. It was over this line the travellers came that were placed in hiding in the office of Editor Poland at Montpelier, having made their way northward with the aid of friends at Brattleboro, Chester, Woodstock, Randolph and intermediate points. At Montpelier the single path divided into three branches, one extending westward and uniting with the west Vermont route at Burlington, another running northward into the Queen's dominions by way of Morristown and other stations, and the third zigzagging to New Port, where a pass through the mountains admitted the zealous pilgrims to the coveted possession of their own liberty.[411]

CAVES IN SALEM TOWNSHIP, WASHINGTON COUNTY, OHIO.
The cave on the left was a rendezvous for fugitives.

HOUSE OF MRS. ELIZABETH BUFFUM CHACE,
A STATION OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, VALLEY FALLS, RHODE ISLAND.

Having thus sketched in the Vermont lines of Underground Railroad, it is necessary for us to return to the consideration of the New Bedford route, which had some accessory lines near its source. One of these had stations at Newport and Providence, managed by Quakers—Jethro and Anne Mitchell with others in the former, and Daniel Mitchell in the latter.[412] Another was a short line through Windham County, in the northeastern part of Connecticut, to Uxbridge, where it joined the main line.[413] The Rev. Samuel J. May, who was a resident of Brooklyn, Connecticut, in the early thirties, had fugitives addressed to his care at that time, and he helped them on to Effingham L. Capron while he lived in Uxbridge, and afterwards when he settled in Worcester.[414] From Boston[415] westward there were at least two paths to reach the New Bedford road, one of these was by way of Newton to Worcester, and the other through Concord to Leominster. Mr. William I. Bowditch generally passed on the fugitives received at his house to Mr. William Jackson, of Newton, thence they were sent by rail to Worcester.[416] Colonel T. W. Higginson writes that fugitives were sometimes sent from Boston to Worcester,[417] while he lived in the latter place, and that he has himself driven them at midnight to the farm of the veteran abolitionists, Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, in the suburbs of the city.[418] All along the short route, from Boston to Leominster and Fitchburg, stations were systematically arranged, according to the statement of Mrs. Mary E. Crocker,[419] who was one of the helpers at Leominster.[420] This was the route taken by Shadrach, after his rescue in Boston.[421]

Boston was the starting-point of longer lines running north along the coast; one, so far as can now be made out, turning and passing obliquely across New Hampshire; the other following the shore into Maine. Mr. Simeon Dodge, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, who had intimate knowledge of the first of these courses, gives, in an illustrative case, the names of Marblehead, Salem and Georgetown as stations;[422] and Mr. G. W. Putnam, of Lynn, gives the names of persons harboring slaves at two of these places.[423] A report of the Danvers Historical Society is authority for the statement that Mr. Dodge, together with some of the abolitionists of Salem, maintained a secret thoroughfare to Canada,[424] which passed through Danvers, and on through Concord, New Hampshire.[425] From Concord fugitives were sent north to Canterbury and Meredith Ridge[426] in two known instances, and more frequently, it appears, to Canaan and Lyme. James Furber, who lived in Canaan for several years, is said to have made trips to Lyme about once a fortnight with refugees received by him.[427] From Lyme they may have gone north by way of the Connecticut valley. At Salem the coast route parted company with the New Hampshire route, and ran on through Ipswich, Newburyport and Exeter[428] to Eliot, Maine, and perhaps farther.

Slaves sometimes reached Portland, Maine, travelling as stowaways on vessels from Southern ports. Consequently Portland became the centre of several hidden routes to Canada. Mr. S. T. Pickard, who lived in the family of Mrs. Oliver Dennett in Portland, says that Mrs. Dennett harbored runaway slaves, as did also Nathan Winslow and General Samuel Fessenden. The fugitives that came to Portland, he says, were on their way to New Brunswick and Lower Canada, and some were shipped directly to England.[429] Mr. Brown Thurston, the veteran abolitionist of Portland, is authority for the statement that routes extended from Portland to the provinces, by water to St. John, New Brunswick, and by rail to Montreal,[430] the road used being the Grand Trunk.[431] An important overland route also had its origin at Portland. Its two branches encircled Sebago Lake, united at Bridgton, and formed a single pathway to the northwest, and did not separate again until the eastern border of Vermont was reached. There, at Lunenburg, one branch took its course up the Connecticut valley to Stratford, and thence, probably, ran to Stanstead, Quebec; while the other, passing more to the westward, joined the easternmost of the branches from Montpelier, Vermont, at Barton, and so entered Canada.[432] Besides, there were at least two subsidiary routes, which were probably feeders of the "through line" just described. One of them ran to South Paris and Lovell;[433] the other, according to ex-President O. B. Cheney, of Bates College, who was privy to its operations, ran to Effingham, North Parsonsfield and Porter.[434] Both Lovell and Porter are within a few miles of several of the stations that form a part of the Maine section of this line, and could witnesses be found it is likely that their testimony would sustain the view that external evidence suggests.

In the free states included between the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers the number of underground trails was much greater than in the states farther east. Bordering on the slave states, Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia, with a length of frontier greatly increased by the sinuosities of the rivers, the states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were the most favorably situated of all the Northern states to receive fugitive slaves. Not only the bounding rivers themselves, but also their numerous tributaries, became channels of escape into free territory, and connected directly with many lines of Underground Railroad. These lines of Road are shown on the map as starting from the Ohio or the Mississippi, but they cannot be supposed to have abruptly originated there, for in some instances there were points south of these streams that formed an essential part of the system. It is impossible to bring together here the numerous bits of testimony through the correlation of which the multitude of lines within the old Northwest Territory has been traced. Only a general survey, therefore, of the Underground Railroad system in the Western states will be undertaken, while several smaller maps of limited areas will give the details of the multiple and complex routes found therein.

Concerning the number of paths there were in Ohio it is almost impossible to obtain a definite and correct idea. The location of the state was favorable to the development of new lines with the steady increase in the number of slaves fleeing across its southern borders; and, in the process of development, it was natural that the various branches should intertwine and form a great network. To disentangle the strands of this web and say how many there were is a thing not easy to accomplish, although an anonymous writer in 1842 seems to have found little or no difficulty in arriving at a definite conclusion. His estimate appeared in the Experiment of December 7, and is as follows: "It is evident from the statements of the abolitionists themselves, that there exist some eighteen or nineteen thoroughly organized thoroughfares through the State of Ohio for the transportation of runaway and stolen slaves, one of which passes through Fitchville, and which to my certain knowledge has done a 'land office business.'"[435] If the number of important initial stations fringing the southern and eastern boundaries of Ohio be counted as the points of origin of separate routes, it would be correct to say that there were not less than twenty-two or twenty-three routes in Ohio, but in a count thus made one would fail to note the instances in which, as in the case of Cincinnati, several lines sprang from one locality.

In the remaining portion of the Northwest Territory, the number of lines was relatively not so great; and extended areas, as in the western and northern parts of Indiana or the southeastern part of Illinois, contained few or no lines so far as can now be discovered. In western and northern Illinois the conditions were more favorable, and the multiplicity of routes is such that on account of the fusion, division and subdivision of roads it is impossible to say how many lines crossed the state. In Michigan the case is not so complicated, and one can trace with some clearness six or seven paths leading to Detroit. Iowa, not a part, however, of the old Northwest Territory, was traversed by lines terminating in Illinois, and therefore deserves consideration here. In the southeastern part of the state there were several short routes with initial stations at Croton, Bloomfield, Lancaster and Cincinnati, all of which had terminals no doubt along the Mississippi, though it has been possible to complete but two of the routes. In southwestern Iowa, Percival and the three roads branching from it are said to have supplied means of egress for slaves from Missouri and Nebraska through three tiers of counties ranging across the state in lines parallel with the north boundary of Missouri. John Brown took the northernmost of these parallel roads in the winter of 1858 and 1859, when he led a company of twelve fugitives from Missouri through Kansas to Percival on their way to Chicago and Detroit.