The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A comprehensive history
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Title: The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A comprehensive history
Author: Wilbur Henry Siebert
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THE
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM
[Illustration: 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
CHAPTER I
SOURCES OF THE HISTORY OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
PAGE
The Underground Road as a subject for research 1
Obscurity of the subject 2
Books dealing with the subject 2
Magazine articles on the Underground Railroad 5
Newspaper articles on the subject 6
Scarcity of contemporaneous documents 7
Reminiscences the chief source 11
The value of reminiscences illustrated 12
CHAPTER II
ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE UNDERGROUND ROAD
Conditions under which the Underground Road originated 17
The disappearance of slavery from the Northern states 17
Early provisions for the return of fugitive slaves 19
The fugitive slave clause in the Ordinance of 1787 20
The fugitive slave clause in the United States Constitution 20
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 21
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 22
Desire for freedom among the slaves 25
Knowledge of Canada among the slaves 27
Some local factors in the origin of the underground movement 30
The development of the movement in eastern Pennsylvania, in
New Jersey, and in New York 33
The development of the movement in the New England states 36
The development of the movement in the West 37
The naming of the Road 44
CHAPTER III
THE METHODS OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
Penalties for aiding fugitive slaves 47
Social contempt suffered by abolitionists 48
Espionage practised upon abolitionists 50
Rewards for the capture of fugitives and the kidnapping of
abolitionists 52
Devices to secure secrecy 54
Service at night 54
Methods of communication 56
Methods of conveyance 59
Zigzag and variable routes 61
Places of concealment 62
Disguises 64
Informality of management 67
Colored and white agents 69
City vigilance committees 70
Supplies for fugitives 76
Transportation of fugitives by rail 78
Transportation of fugitives by water 81
Rescue of fugitives under arrest 83
CHAPTER IV
UNDERGROUND AGENTS, STATION-KEEPERS, OR CONDUCTORS
Underground agents, station-keepers, or conductors 87
Their hospitality 87
Their principles 89
Their nationality 90
Their church connections 93
Their party affinities 99
Their local standing 101
Prosecutions of underground operators 101
Defensive League of Freedom proposed 103
Persons of prominence among underground helpers 104
CHAPTER V
STUDY OF THE MAP OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD SYSTEM
Geographical extent of underground lines 113
Location and distribution of stations 114
Southern routes 116
Lines of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York 120
Routes of the New England states 128
Lines within the old Northwest Territory 134
Noteworthy features of the general map 139
Complex routes 141
Broken lines and isolated place names 141
River routes 142
Routes by rail 142
Routes by sea 144
Terminal stations 145
Lines of lake travel 147
Canadian ports 148
CHAPTER VI
ABDUCTION OF SLAVES FROM THE SOUTH
Aversion among underground helpers to abduction of slaves 150
Abductions by negroes living along the northern border of the
slave states 151
Abductions by Canadian refugees 152
Abductions by white persons in the South 153
Abductions by white persons of the North 154
The Missouri raid of John Brown 162
John Brown's great plan 166
Abductions attempted in response to appeals 168
Devotees of abduction 178
CHAPTER VII
LIFE OF THE COLORED REFUGEES IN CANADA
Slavery question in Canada 190
Flight of slaves to Canada 192
Refugees representative of the slave class 195
Misinformation about Canada among slaves 197
Hardships borne by Canadian refugees 198
Efforts toward immediate relief for fugitives 199
Attitude of the Canadian government 201
Conditions favorable to their settlement in Canada 203
Sparseness of population 203
Uncleared lands 204
Encouragement of agricultural colonies among refugees 205
Dawn Settlement 205
Elgin Settlement 207
Refugees' Home Settlement 209
Alleged disadvantages of the colonies 211
Their advantages 212
Refugee settlers in Canadian towns 217
Census of Canadian refugees 220
Occupations of Canadian refugees 223
Progress made by Canadian refugees 224
Domestic life of the refugees 227
School privileges 228
Organizations for self-improvement 230
Churches 231
Rescue of friends from slavery 231
Ownership of property 232
Rights of citizenship 233
Character as citizens 233
CHAPTER VIII
FUGITIVE SETTLERS IN THE NORTHERN STATES
Number of fugitive settlers in the North 235
The Northern states an unsafe refuge for runaway slaves 237
Reclamation of fugitives in the free states 239
Protection of fugitives in the free states 242
Object of the personal liberty laws 245
Effect of the law of 1850 on fugitive settlers 246
Underground operators among fugitives of the free states 251
CHAPTER IX
PROSECUTIONS OF UNDERGROUND RAILROAD MEN
Enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 254
Grounds on which the constitutionality of the measure was
questioned 254
Denial of trial by jury to the fugitive slave 255
Summary mode of arrest 257
The question of concurrent jurisdiction between the federal
and state governments in fugitive slave cases 259
The law of 1793 versus the Ordinance of 1787 261
Power of Congress to legislate concerning the extradition of
fugitive slaves denied 263
State officers relieved of the execution of the law by the
Prigg decision, 1842 264
Amendment of the law of 1793 by the law of 1850 265
Constitutionality of the law of 1850 questioned 267
First case under the law of 1850 268
Authority of a United States commissioner 269
Penalties imposed for aiding and abetting the escape of
fugitives 273
Trial on the charge of treason in the Christiana case, 1854 279
Counsel for fugitive slaves 281
Last case under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 285
Attempted revision of the law 285
Destructive attacks upon the measure in Congress 286
Lincoln's Proclamation of Emancipation 287
Repeal of the Fugitive Slave Acts 288
CHAPTER X
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN POLITICS
Valuation of the Underground Railroad in its political aspect 290
The question of the extradition of fugitive slaves in colonial
times 290
Importance of the question in the constitutional conventions 293
Failure of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 294
Agitation for a more efficient measure 295
Diplomatic negotiations for the extradition of colored
refugees from Canada, 1826-1828 299
The fugitive slave a missionary in the cause of freedom 300
Slave-hunting in the free states 302
Preparation for the abolition movement of 1830 303
The Underground Railroad and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 308
The law in Congress 310
The enforcement of the law of 1850 316
The Underground Road and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ 321
Political importance of the novel 323
Sumner on the influence of escaped slaves in the North 324
The spirit of nullification in the North 327
The Glover rescue, Wisconsin, 1854 327
The rendition of Burns, Boston, 1854 331
The rescue of Addison White, Mechanicsburg, Ohio, 1857 334
The Oberlin-Wellington rescue, 1858 335
Obstruction of the Fugitive Slave Law by means of the personal
liberty acts 337
John Brown's attempt Lo free the slaves 338
CHAPTER XI
EFFECT OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
The Underground Road the means of relieving the South of many
despairing slaves 340
Loss sustained by slave-owners through underground channels 340
The United States census reports on fugitive slaves 342
Estimate of the number of slaves escaping into Ohio, 1830-1860 346
Similar estimate for Philadelphia, 1830-1860 346
Drain on the resources of the depot at Lawrence, Kansas,
described in a letter of Col. J. Bowles, April 4, 1859 347
Work of the Underground Railroad as compared with that of the
American Colonization Society 350
The violation of the Fugitive Slave Law a chief complaint of
Southern states at the beginning of the Civil War 351
Refusal of the Canadian government to yield up the fugitive
Anderson, 1860 352
Secession of the Southern states begun 353
Conclusion of the fugitive slave controversy 355
General effect and significance of the controversy 356
ILLUSTRATIONS, PORTRAITS, FACSIMILES AND MAPS
The Underground Railroad: Levi Coffin receiving a company of
fugitives in the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Isaac T. Hopper 17
The Runaway: a stereotype cut used on handbills advertising
escaped slaves 27
Crossing-place on the Ohio River at Steubenville, Ohio 47
The Rankin House, Ripley, Ohio 47
Facsimile of an Underground Message _On page_ 57
Barn of Seymour Finney, Detroit, Michigan 65
The Old First Church, Galesburg, Illinois 65
William Still 75
Levi Coffin 87
Frederick Douglass 104
Caves in Salem Township, Washington County, Ohio 130
House of Mrs. Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Valley Falls, Rhode
Island 130
The Detroit River at Detroit, Michigan 147
Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio 147
Ellen Craft as she escaped from Slavery 163
Samuel Harper and Wife 163
Dr. Alexander M. Ross 180
Harriet Tubman 180
Group of Refugee Settlers at Windsor, Ontario, C.W. 190
Theodore Parker 205
Thomas Wentworth Higginson 205
Dr. Samuel G. Howe 205
Benjamin Drew 205
Church of the Fugitive Slaves, Boston, Massachusetts 235
Salmon P. Chase 254
Thomas Garrett 254
Rush R. Sloane 282
Thaddeus Stevens 282
J. R. Ware 282
Rutherford B. Hayes 282
Gerrit Smith 290
Joshua R. Giddings 290
Charles Sumner 290
Richard H. Dana 290
Bust of Rev. John Rankin 307
Harriet Beecher Stowe 321
Captain John Brown 338
Facsimile of a Leaf from the Diary of Daniel Osborn
_On pages_ 344, 345
MAPS
Map of the Underground Railroad System _Facing page_ 113
Map of Underground Lines in Southeastern Pennsylvania " 113
Map of Underground Lines in Morgan County, Ohio _On page_ 136
Lewis Falley's Map of the Underground Routes of Indiana and
Michigan _On page_ 138
Map of an Underground Line through Livingston and La Salle
Counties, Illinois _On page_ 139
Map of Underground Lines through Greene, Warren and Clinton
Counties, Ohio _On page_ 140
APPENDICES
PAGES
APPENDIX A: Constitutional Provisions and National Acts
relative to Fugitive Slaves, 1787-1850 359-366
APPENDIX B: List of Important Fugitive Slave Cases 367-377
APPENDIX C: Figures from the United States Census Reports
relating to Fugitive Slaves 378, 379
APPENDIX D: Bibliography 380-402
APPENDIX E: Directory of the names of Underground Railroad
Operators and Members of Vigilance Committees 403-439
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.
[1] Chapters VI and VII, pp. 61-86.
[2] Vol. III, p. 552, foot-note.
[3] _History of the United States_, Vol. II, pp. 74-77, 361, 362.
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]
[4] Mitchell, _Underground Railroad_, Preface, p. vi; p. 17.
[5] Mr. Mitchell divides his little book into two chapters, one
on the "Underground Railroad," occupying 124 pages, the other on
the "Condition of Fugitive Slaves in Canada," occupying 48 pages.
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.
[6] _Tract No. 87_, in Vol. IV, pp. 91-121, of the publications
of the Society.
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.
[7] March, 1887, pp. 672-682.
[8] July, 1888, pp. 19-88. This periodical is issued by
the Firelands Historical Society of Ohio. The bulk of the
number mentioned is made up of contributions in regard to the
Underground Road in northwestern Ohio.
[9] February, 1895, pp. 173-180.
[10] May, 1895, pp. 9-16.
[11] April, 1896, pp. 455-463. This article is a preliminary
study prepared by the author.
[12] Lillie B. C. Wyman: "Black and White," in _New England
Magazine_, N.S., Vol. V, pp. 476-481; "Harriet Tubman," _ibid._,
March, 1896, pp. 110-118. Nina M. Tiffany: "The Escape of William
and Ellen Craft," _ibid._, January, 1890, p. 524 _et seq._;
"Shadrach," _ibid._, May, 1890, pp. 280-283; "Sims," _ibid._,
June, 1890, pp. 385-388; "Anthony Burns," _ibid._, July, 1890,
pp. 569-576. A. H. Grimké: "Anti-Slavery Boston," _ibid._,
December, 1890, pp. 441-459.
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]
[13] Other newspapers in which materials have been found are
mentioned in the Appendix, pp. 395-398.
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]
[14] _Underground Railroad Records_, pp. xxxiii, xxxiv.
[15] _Ibid._, p. 611, where is printed an article from the
_Pennsylvania Freeman_, December 9, 1852, giving an account of
the formation of the Committee.
[16] See pp. xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvi.
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.
[17] The title Mr. Parker gave to this scrap-book is as follows:
"Memoranda of the Troubles in Boston occasioned by the infamous
Fugitive Slave Law."
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.
[18] Sanborn, _Life and Letters of John Brown_, p. 482.
[19] _Ibid._, pp. 488, 489.
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.
[20] See Chap. XI, p. 346.
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.
[21] Conversation with Robert Purvis, Philadelphia, Pa., December
24, 1895.
[22] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, pp. 56, 57.
[23] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, pp. 120, 121.
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]
[24] The value of reminiscences and memoirs is considered in
an article on "Recollections as a Source of History," by the
Hon. Edward L. Pierce, in the _Proceedings of the Massachusetts
Historical Society_, March and April, 1896, pp. 473-490. This,
with the remarks of Professor H. Morse Stephens in his article
entitled "Recent Memoirs of the French Directory," _American
Historical Review_, April, 1896, pp. 475, 476, 489, should
be read as a corrective by the student that finds himself
constrained to have recourse to recollections for information.
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."
[25] The Rev. J. R. W. Sloane, D.D., was the father of Professor
William M. Sloane, of Columbia University, New York City.
Professor Sloane, in a letter recently received, says: "The first
clear, conscious memory I have is of seeing slaves taken from
our garret near midnight, and forwarded towards Sandusky. I also
remember the formal, but rather friendly, visitation of the house
by the sheriff's posse." Date of letter, Paris, November 19, 1896.
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."
[26] Conversation with the Rev. R. G. Ramsey, Cadiz, Ohio, August
18, 1892.
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]
[27] _Reminiscences_, p. 184.
[28] Letter of John Charles, Economy, Wayne County, Indiana,
January 9, 1896. Mr. Charles is a Quaker, and took part in the
underground work at Economy.
[29] Letter from Charles W. Osborn, Economy, Indiana, March 4,
1896. Mr. Osborn obtained the names of stations in conversation
with Mr. Ratliff.
[30] Letter of William Hayward.
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.
[Illustration: 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.
[31] Constitution of Massachusetts, Part I, Art. 1; quoted by Du
Bois, _Suppression of the Slave Trade_, p. 225.
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.
[32] See Appendix A, p. 359.
[33] _History of the United States_, Vol. I, p. 16.
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]
[34] M. G. McDougall, _Fugitive Slaves_, pp. 2-11.
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]
[35] _Journals of Congress_, XII, 84, 92.
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.
[36] Constitution of the United States, Art. IV, § 2. See
_Revised Statutes of the United States_, I, 18. See also Appendix
A, p. 359.
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.
[37] Elliot's _Debates_. See also George Livermore's _Historical
Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic
on Negroes, as Citizens and as Soldiers_, 1862, p. 51 _et seq._
[38] Elliot's _Debates_, III, 277.
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.
[39] Appendix A, pp. 359-361.
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.
[40] _Fugitive Slaves_, p. 19.
[41] See Chap. IX, pp. 259-267; also Stroud, _Sketch of the Laws
Relating to Slavery in the Several States_, 2d ed., pp. 220-222.
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]
[42] Appendix A, pp. 361-366.
[43] _Statutes at Large_, IX, 462-465.
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]
[44] _Deut._ xxiii, 15, 16.
[45] See _Some Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict_, by S.
J. May, p. 345 _et seq._; Stroud's _Sketch of the Laws Relating
to Slavery in the Several States_, 2d ed., 1856, pp. 271-280;
Wilson, _History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power_, Vol.
II, pp. 304-322.
[46] M. G. McDougall, _Fugitive Slaves_, p. 43; J. F. Clarke,
_Anti-Slavery Days_, p. 92.
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.
[47] Rhodes, _History of the United States_, Vol. I, p. 377.
[48] F. L. Olmsted, _Journey in the Back Country_, p. 155; Rev.
W. M. Mitchell, _The Underground Railroad_, pp. 72, 73; M. G.
McDougall, _Fugitive Slaves_, p. 57.
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]
[49] Edward Ingle, _Southern Side-Lights_, p. 293.
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]
[50] These reports will be dealt with in another connection. See
Chap. XI, pp. 342, 343.
[51] G. M. Weston, _Progress of Slavery in the United States_,
Washington, D.C., 1858, pp. 22, 23.
[52] Conversation with William Johnson, Windsor, Ontario, July,
1895.
[53] Conversation with Horace Washington, Windsor, Ontario, Aug.
2, 1895.
[54] _The Liberator_, April 10, 1846.
[55] Conversation with William Edwards, Amherstburg, Ontario,
Aug. 3, 1895.
[56] Letter of H. C. Harvey, Manchester, Kan., Jan. 16, 1893.
[Illustration: 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]
[57] S. G. Howe, _The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West_, pp.
11, 12.
[58] Wilson, _History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power_,
Vol. II, p. 63.
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]
[59] Redpath, _The Public Life of Captain John Brown_, p. 229.
[60] Dr. A. M. Ross, _Recollections and Experiences of an
Abolitionist_, 2d ed., 1876, pp. 10, 11, 15, 39.
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]
[61] Conversation with White and Sidney in Canada West, August,
1895.
[62] Rufus King, _Ohio_, in _American Commonwealths_, pp. 364,
365, relates that some of these slaves were discharged from
servitude "by writs of habeas corpus procured in their names,"
and that "numbers were abducted from the slave states and
concealed, or smuggled by the 'Underground Railroad' into Canada."
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.
[63] Dr. A. M. Ross, _The Recollections and Experiences of an
Abolitionist_, p. 38.
[64] A. L. Benedict, _Memoir of Richard Dillingham_, p. 17.
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.
[65] George W. Julian, _Life of Joshua R. Giddings_, p. 157.
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.
[66] _History of Brown County, Ohio_, p. 313 _et seq._ Also
letter of Dr. Isaac M. Beck, Sardinia, O., Dec. 26, 1892. Mr.
Beck was born in 1807, and knew personally the clergymen named.
He joined the abolition movement in 1835. His excellent letter is
verified in various points by other correspondents.
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]
[67] Letter from Professor L. F. Parker, Grinnell, Iowa, Aug. 30,
1894.
[68] Letter from President W. M. Brooks, Tabor, Iowa, Oct. 11,
1894.
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]
[69] Sparks's _Washington_, IX, 158, quoted in _Quakers of
Pennsylvania_, by Dr. A. C. Applegarth, Johns Hopkins Studies, X,
p. 463.
[70] Lunt, _Origin of the Late War_, Vol. I, p. 20.
[71] L. Maria Child, _Life of Isaac T. Hopper_, 1854, p. 35.
[72] _History of Chester County, Pennsylvania_, R. C. Smedley's
article on the "Underground Railroad," p. 426; also Smedley,
_Underground Railroad_, p. 26.
[73] The Rev. Thomas C. Oliver, born and raised in Salem, N.J.,
says that the work of the Underground Railroad was going on
before he was born, (1818) and continued until the time of the
War. Mr. Oliver was raised in the family of Thomas Clement, a
member of the Society of Friends. He graduated from the Princeton
Theological Seminary in 1856. As a youth he began to take part
in rescues. Although seventy-five years old when visited by the
author, he was vigorous in body and mind, and seemed to have a
remarkably clear memory.
[74] L. Maria Child, _Life of Isaac T. Hopper_, p. 316.
[75] _History of Florence, Mass._, p. 131, Charles A. Sheffeld,
Editor.
[76] The Underground Road was active in New York City at a much
earlier date certainly than Lossing gives. He says, "After the
Fugitive Slave Law, the Underground Railroad was established, and
the city of New York became one of the most important stations on
the road." _History of New York_, Vol. II, p. 655.
[77] Letter of Mrs. Susan L. Crane, Elmira, Sept. 14, 1896. Mrs.
Crane's father, Mr. Jervis Langdon, was active in underground
work at Elmira, and had a trusted co-laborer in John W. Jones,
who still lives in Elmira.
[78] Conversation with Professor Orton, Ohio State University,
Columbus, O., 1893.
[79] For cases of arrivals of escaped slaves over some of the
western New York branches, see _Sketches in the History of the
Underground Railroad_, by Eber M. Pettit, 1879. These sketches
were first published in the _Fredonia Censor_, the series closing
Nov. 18, 1868.
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]
[80] Letter of Mr. Aldis O. Brainerd, St. Albans, Vt., Oct. 21,
1895.
[81] Letter of Mr. Charles E. Lord, Franklin, Pa., July 6, 1896:
"My maternal grandfather, James Furber, lived for several years
in Canaan, N.H., where his house was one of the stations of the
Underground Railway. His father-in-law, James Harris, who lived
in the same house, had been engaged in helping fugitive negroes
on toward Canada ever since 1830, and probably before that time."
[82] Letter of Judge Mellen Chamberlain, Chelsea, Mass., Feb. 1,
1896.
[83] Letter of Mr. Thomas P. Cheney, Ashland, N.H., March 30,
1896.
[84] _Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict_, p. 297.
[85] Elizabeth Buffum Chace, _Anti-Slavery Reminiscences_, p.
27. Mrs. Chace says: "From the time of the arrival of James
Curry at Fall River, and his departure for Canada, in 1839, that
town became an important station on the so-called Underground
Railroad." The residence of Mrs. Chace was a place of refuge from
the year named.
[86] Concerning Springfield, Mass, see Mason A. Green's _History
of Springfield_, pp. 470, 471. For the sentiment of New Bedford,
see Ellis's _History of New Bedford_, pp. 306, 307.
[87] Letter of the Rev. O. B. Cheney, Pawtuxet, R.I., Apr. 8,
1896.
[88] Letter of Mr. Brown Thurston, Portland, Me., Oct. 21, 1895.
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.
[89] Wilson, _Rise and Fall of the Slave Power_, Vol. II, p.
63; Alexander Black, _The Story of Ohio_, see account of the
Underground Railroad.
[90] Letter of Col. D. W. H. Howard, Wauseon, O., Aug. 22, 1894.
[91] Conversation with Robert McCrory, Marysville, O., Sept. 30,
1898. Mr. McCrory was educated at Oberlin College, and has an
excellent memory.
[92] Howe's _Historical Collections of Ohio_, Vol. I, p. 614.
[93] Letter from Job Mullin, dictated to his son-in-law, W. H.
Newport, at Springboro, O., Sept. 9, 1895.
[94] Conversation with Mr. Eliakim H. Moore, Athens, O.
[95] Conversation with Joseph Skillgess, Urbana, O., Aug. 14,
1894.
[96] Letter of Wm. A. Johnston, Coshocton, O., Aug. 23, 1894.
[97] Letter of Hannah W. Blackburn, for her father, Mahlon
Pickrell, Zanesfield, O., March 25, 1893.
[98] Letter of R. C. Corwin, Lebanon, O., Sept. 11, 1895.
[99] _The Firelands Pioneer_, July, 1888, p. 34.
[100] The _Firelands Pioneer_, July, 1888, p. 34 _et seq._
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.
[101] Stephen B. Weeks, _Southern Quakers and Slavery_, p. 242.
[102] _Reminiscences of Levi Coffin_, 2d ed., pp. 20, 21.
[103] Letter from John F. Williams, Economy, Ind., March 21,
1893. When this letter was written, Mr. Williams was eighty-one
years old. He was, he says, born in 1812. In 1820 he would have
been eight years old. Children were sometimes sent to carry food
to refugees in hiding, or to do other little services with which
they could be safely trusted. Such experiences were apt to make
deep impressions on their young memories.
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.
[104] Letter from H. B. Leeper, Princeton, Ill., received Dec.
19, 1895. Mr. Leeper is seventy-five years of age. His letter
shows a knowledge of the localities of which he writes, Bond
County in southwestern Illinois, and Bureau and Putnam Counties
in the central part of the state.
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.
[105] Letter from Professor L. F. Parker, Grinnell, Iowa, Aug.
30, 1894.
[106] Letter from Professor James E. Todd, Vermillion, South
Dakota, Nov. 6, 1894. Professor Todd is the son of the Rev. John
Todd.
The _Tabor Beacon_, 1890, 1891, contains a series of
reminiscences from the pen of the Rev. John Todd. The first of
these recounts the first arrival of fugitives in July, 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]
[107] S. G. Howe, _The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West_,
1864, pages 11, 12.
[108] G. M. Weston, _Progress of Slavery in the United States_,
Washington, D.C., 1858, p. 22.
[109] Some conclusions presented in the _American Historical
Review_, April, 1896, pp. 460-462, are here repeated.
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.
[110] R. C. Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, pp. 34, 35.
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.
[111] The _Firelands Pioneer_, July, 1888, p. 35.
[112] The _Underground Railroad_, pp. 4, 5.
[Illustration: A CROSSING PLACE FOR FUGITIVE SLAVES ON THE OHIO
RIVER, AT STEUBENVILLE, OHIO.
(From a recent photograph.)]
[Illustration: 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.
[113] The date of the act is February 26, 1839.
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]
[114] See an article entitled "An Underground Railway," by Robert
W. Carroll, of Cincinnati, O., in the _Cincinnati Times-Star_,
Aug. 19, 1890; also Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, p. 182; and
J. B. Robinson, _Pictures of Slavery and Anti-Slavery_, pp. 293,
294.
[115] _History of Henry County, Indiana_, p. 126 _et seq._
[116] Elizabeth Buffum Chace, _Anti-Slavery Reminiscences_, p. 19.
[117] _Ibid._, p. 18.
[118] Lydia Maria Child, _Life of Isaac T. Hopper_, pp. 388, 389.
[119] See President Fairchild's pamphlet, _The Underground
Railroad_.
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]
[120] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, p. 139.
[121] _History of Knox County, Ill._, pp. 213, 214. Mr.
Kightlinger's account of this affair is published under his own
name.
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]
[122] The original letter is in the possession of the author of
this book.
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]
[123] The _Tabor Beacon_, 1890, 1891, Chapter XXI of a series
of articles by the Rev. John Todd, on "The Early Settlement
and Growth of Western Iowa." Mr. Todd was one of the early
settlers of western Iowa. The letters were received from his
son, Professor James E. Todd, of the University of South Dakota,
Vermillion, S. Dak.
[124] Letter of Mr. Sturgis Williams, Percival, Ia., 1894. Mr.
Williams was also one of the pioneers of western Iowa.
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.
[125] _History of Brown County, Ohio_, p. 314.
[126] _The New Reign of Terror in the Slaveholding States_, for
1859-1860 (_Anti-Slavery Tracts_, No. 4, New Series), pp. 49, 50.
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.
[127] Letter of Mrs. Mary C. Thorne, Selma, Clark Co., O., March
3, 1892. John Charles was an uncle of Mrs. Thorne.
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:
Aug. 13/43 Sunday Morn. 2 o'clock arrived
Sunday Eve. 8-1/2 " departed for B.
16 Wednesday Morn. 2 " arrived
20 Sunday eve. 10 " departed for N.
Wife & children 21 Monday morn. 2 " arrived from B.
Monday eve. 10 " left for Mr. H.
22 Tuesday eve. 11 " left for W.
A. L. & S. J. 28 Monday morn. 1 " arrived left
2 o'clock.[128]
[128] The original memorandum is written in pencil on a letter
received by Mr. Putnam from Mr. John Stone, of Belpre, O., in
Aug., 1843. The contents of this letter, or message, is given on
page 57. The original is in possession of the author.
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 cara_wan_
J S[133]
[129] The _Firelands Pioneer_, July, 1888, p. 20; also letter of
S. J. Wright, Rushville, O., Aug. 29, 1894, and letter of Ira
Thomas, Springboro, O., Oct. 29, 1895.
[130] This owl signal was mentioned in conversation with several
residents of Marietta. Miss Martha Putnam says she has heard her
father make the "hoot-owl" call hundreds of times. General R.
R. Dawes designates this call the "river signal." "When I was a
boy of eight," he says, "I was visiting my grandfather, Judge
Ephraim Cutler. The place was called Constitution. Somehow, in
the night I was wakened up, and a wagon came down over the hill
to the river. Then a call was given, a hoot-owl call, and this
was answered by a similar one from the other side; then a boat
went out and brought over the crowd. My mother got out of bed and
kneeled down and prayed for them, and had me kneel with her."
Conversation with General Dawes, Marietta, O., Aug. 21, 1892.
[131] Letter of the Rev. J. B. Lee, Franklinville, N.Y., Oct. 21,
1895.
[132] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, p. 46.
[133] See the facsimile.
[Illustration: hand written note]
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.
[134] Letter of I. Newton Peirce, Folcroft, Sharon Hill P.O.,
Delaware Co., Pa., Feb. 1, 1893.
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]
[135] _History of Clinton County, Iowa_, article on the
"Underground Railroad," pp. 413-416.
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]
[136] J. B. Grinnell, _Men and Events of Forty Years_, p. 217.
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]
[137] Judge R. B. Harlan and others, _History of Clinton County,
Ohio_, pp. 380-383; letter of Seth Linton, Oakland, Clinton
County, O., Sept. 4, 1892; Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, p.
187.
[138] The _Miami Union_, April 10, 1895, article entitled "A
Reminiscence of Slave Times."
[139] Letter of Mrs. C. Grant, Pomeroy, Meigs Co., O.
[140] The _Republican Leader_, March 16, 1894, article,
"Reminiscence of the Underground Railroad," by E. H. Trueblood.
[141] See _Underground Railroad Records_, pp. 46, 47.
[142] _Ibid._, pp. 81-84; see also _Narrative of Henry Box Brown,
who escaped from slavery enclosed in a box 3 feet long and 2
wide, written from a statement of facts made by himself_, 1849,
by Charles Stearns.
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.
[143] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, pp. 138, 139.
[144] _The Rev. Calvin Fairbank During Slavery Times_, pp. 24,
25; see also the _Chicago Tribune_, Jan. 29, 1893, p. 33.
[145] Conversation with James W. Torrence, Northwood, Logan Co.,
O., Sept. 22, 1894.
[146] Letter of William I. Bowditch, Boston, Mass., April 5, 1893.
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]
[147] Letter of John Weldon, Dwight, Ill., Nov. 7, 1895.
[148] _History of Darke County, Ohio_, p. 332 _et seq._
[149] Letter of Thomas L. Smith, Fredericksburg, Wayne Co., O.,
Oct. 6, 1894.
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.
[150] Letter of J. E. Platt, Guthrie, Ok., March 28, 1896. Mr.
Platt is a son of Deacon Jirch Platt.
[151] Letter of William H. Collins, Quincy, Ill., Jan. 13, 1896.
[152] Conversation with J. Addison Giddings, Jefferson, O.
[153] Letter of Lewis Ford, Boston, Mass. See also _Reminiscences
of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston_, by Austin Bearse, 1880, p.
12.
[154] Letter of John Weldon, Dwight, Ill., Jan. 10, 1896.
[155] Letter of the Rev. J. E. Roy, Chicago, Ill., April 9, 1896.
[156] W. G. Deshler and others, _Memorial on the Death of James
M. Westwater_, pp. 14, 15.
[157] Letter of E. H. Trueblood, Hitchcock, Ind.
[158] Letter of E. F. Brown, Amesville, O.
[159] _Cincinnati Commercial Gazette_, Feb. 11, 1894, article by
W. Eldebe.
[160] Letter of Professor George Churchill, Galesburg, Jan. 29,
1896.
[161] Conversation with Gabe N. Johnson, Ironton, O., Sept. 30,
1894.
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]
[162] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, p. 242.
[163] Letter of Valentine Nicholson, Indianapolis, Ind., Sept.
10, 1892.
[164] _The Rev. Calvin Fairbank During Slavery Times_, p. 10.
[165] _Ibid._, p 34. _et seq._
[Illustration: BARN OF SEYMOUR FINNEY, ESQ., DETROIT, MICHIGAN.
A shelter for fugitives in Detroit, formerly standing where the
Chamber of Commerce Building now stands.]
[Illustration: 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]
[166] Letter from Mr. Sidney Speed, Crawfordsville, Ind., March
6, 1896.
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]
[167] _Reminiscences of Levi Coffin_, pp. 439-442.
[168] M. G. McDougall, _Fugitive Slaves_, p. 61.
[169] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, p. 244.
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....
[170] Spark's _Washington_, IX, 158, quoted in _Quakers of
Pennsylvania_, by Dr. A. C. Applegarth, _Johns Hopkins Studies_,
X, 463.
[171] The letter from which this quotation is made will be found
in _Underground Railroad_, by R. C. Smedley, pp. 355, 356.
[172] The italics are my own.
"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.
[173] Howe, _Historical Collections of Ohio_, Vol. II, pp. 103,
104; see also the _Reminiscences of Levi Coffin_.
[174] George H. Woodruff, _History of Will County, Illinois_, p.
268.
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]
[175] Conversation with J. R. Ware, and with the daughter of Mr.
Hyde, Mrs. Amanda Shepherd, Mechanicsburg, O., Sept. 7, 1895;
conversation with Major Joseph C. Brand, Urbana, O., Aug. 13,
1894.
[176] Conversation with George W. S. Lucas, Salem, Columbiana
Co., Aug. 14, 1892, when he was fifty-nine years old. He was
remarkably clear and convincing in his statements, many of which
have since been corroborated. Citizens of Salem referred to him
as a reliable source of information.
[177] Letter from George L. Burroughes, Cairo, Ill., Jan. 6,
1896. Mr. Burroughes said that Mr. Robert Delany, a friend from
Canada, proposed to him that they both take an agency for the
Underground Railroad. Delany took the Rock Island route and
Burroughes the Cairo route.
[178] Letter of Martin I. Townsend, Troy, N.Y., Sept. 4, 1896.
Mr. Townsend was counsel for the fugitive, Charles Nalle, in
the Nalle or Troy Rescue case. See the little book entitled,
_Harriet, the Moses of Her People_, 2d ed., p. 146; see also
_History of the County of Albany, New York, from 1609-1886_, p.
725.
[179] Conversation with Judge J. W. Finney, Detroit, Mich., July
27, 1897.
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.
[180] Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker_, Vol.
II, pp. 92, 93.
[181] Frederick Douglass relates that when he escaped from
Maryland to New York, in 1838, he was befriended by David
Ruggles, the secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee; _Life
of Frederick Douglass_, 1881, p. 205.
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 fugiti
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