University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XI
FUGITIVE SLAVES

In the latter part of the year 1852 was organised
or rather re-organised, in the rooms of
the Anti-slavery Society, at 107 North Fifth
Street, Philadelphia, what was known as the "Vigilance
Committee." The chairman of this committee
was a coloured man, Robert Purvis. He
was descended from a free coloured woman of
Charleston, whose mother was said to have been
a Moor. His father, Robert Purvis, was an Englishman.
He was brought to Pennsylvania by his
parents in 1819; was a member of the Anti-slavery
Convention in 1833, and was one of the signers of
its declaration of sentiments. When the fiftieth
anniversary of the Anti-slavery Society was held
in Philadelphia, December 4, 1883, he was one
of the three original signers who were present.
The other two were John G. Whittier, the poet,
and Elizur Wright, the anti-slavery editor. The
Secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee
was William Still.

This Vigilance Committee, which was the successor
of an earlier organisation of the same name

that dates at least as far back as 1838, soon became
the principal directing body for all the numerous
lines of the Underground Railroad which centred
in Philadelphia at that time. As secretary of
this organisation, William Still kept a record of
all the fugitive slaves who passed through the hands
of this committee from the time of its organisation
until the breaking out of the Civil War. During
the period of the Civil War he kept this record
hidden, but in 1872 it was published in the form
of a book called "The Underground Railroad."

This book is one of the most remarkable records
in existence, concerning the history of slavery. It
is made up in large part of the letters that were
written by the different agents of the Underground
Railroad to the secretary of the Vigilance Committee,
and of letters written by fugitive slaves,
sometimes while they were en route to Canada,
and sometimes after they had reached their destination.
They tell, in words of the fugitives
themselves, of the difficulties, sufferings, fears
of runaway slaves, and of all the various devices
which they used to escape from bondage to freedom.

Of his own motives for keeping this record, Mr.
Still says:

Sometimes these fugitives reached free soil packed
in boxes, shipped as merchandise by rail or by
steamship, from some of the nearby Southern
ports. This was the case of Henry Box Brown,
who was shipped from Richmond, Va., by James
A. Smith, a shoe dealer, to William H. Johnson,
Arch Street, Philadelphia. He was twenty-six
hours on the road from Richmond to Philadelphia.
Though the box was marked "This side up," in
the course of his journey, Mr. Brown was compelled
to ride many miles standing on his head. When
the box arrived at the anti-slavery office, there
was the greatest apprehension lest, in the course
of the journey, the fugitive had perished and the
society would find itself with a corpse upon its
hands. Mr. Still described, in the following words,
the scene when this box was opened in the presence
of a number of prominent members of the
Anti-slavery Society:

The witnesses will never forget that moment. Saw and hatchet
quickly had the five hickory hoops cut and the lid off, and the
marvellous resurrection of Brown ensued. Rising up in his box,

he reached out his hand, saying, "How do you do, gentlemen?"
The little assemblage hardly knew what to think or do at the
moment. He was about as wet as if he had come up out of the
Delaware. Very soon he remarked that, before leaving Richmond,
he had selected for his arrival-hymn (if he lived) the psalm beginning
with these words: "I waited patiently for the Lord, and He
heard my prayer." And most touchingly did he sing the psalm,
much to his own relief, as well as to the delight of his small audience.
He was then christened Henry Box Brown, and soon afterward
was sent to the hospitable residence of James Mott and E. M.
Davis, on Ninth Street, where, it is needless to say, he met a cordial
reception from Mrs. Lucretia Mott and her household.[2]

Other attempts were made after that time to
ship fugitive slaves out of the South as express
packages. In 1857, a young woman was shipped
from Baltimore to Philadelphia in a box of freight.
After reaching Philadelphia, this box with its living
freight, after having been turned upside down
several times, was left standing nearly all of one
night at the freight shed, and it was not secured
by the persons to whom it was consigned until
ten o'clock the next day. When the box was
opened the young woman inside was unconscious
and could not speak for some time. She recovered,
however, and eventually escaped to Canada.

Samuel A. Smith, who shipped Henry Box
Brown from Richmond to Philadelphia, attempted,
shortly after this successful venture, to send
two other slaves by express to the anti-slavery
office. The deceit, however, was discovered and

Smith was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to
eight years in prison, and served out his time in
the penitentiary.

Frequently fugitives were secreted upon steamships
and sailing vessels. There was usually a
coloured steward on these vessels who was willing
to run the risk of assisting a fugitive to escape.
Men dressed themselves as women, and women
dressed themselves as men in order to escape
from slavery. Sometimes fugitives travelled hundreds
of miles in skiffs in order to reach free soil.

William Still, the author of the book on "The
Underground Railroad," had a singular experience.
One summer day in 1850, as he was engaged in
mailing the weekly issue of the Pennsylvania
Freeman, two coloured men entered the office.
One of these was a stranger, a man who had purchased
his freedom and gone to Philadelphia in
the hope of finding his relatives.

"I am from Alabama," he said, speaking slowly
and deliberately. "I have come in search of my
people. My little brother and I were kidnapped
about forty years ago, and I thought by coming
to Philadelphia and having notices published and
read old people would remember about it, and I
could find my mother and people."

"Where were you kidnapped from?" asked
Mr. Still.

"I don't know," was the reply.

"Don't you know the name of the place?"

"No."

"Don't you know the name of any town, river,
neighbourhood or state?"

"No."

"What was your name?"

"Peter."

"What was your brother's name?"

"Levin."

"What were the names of your father and mother?"

"Levin and Sidney."

By the time the dialogue had reached this point
William Still was so fully convinced that the stranger
was one of his long-lost brothers that he scarcely
knew what to do.

"I allowed a full hour to pass," he says, in relating
the circumstance, "meanwhile plying him with
questions before intimating to my brother the
discovery I had made. Then seating myself by
his side, I said, 'I think I can tell you about all
your kinsfolk—mother, father, and all,' and then
I went on to say, 'You are an own brother of mine.'"

Such proved to be the case. It seems that Peter
Still had been stolen from his parents when they
were living on a farm in New Jersey, in an obscure
little settlement of Free Negroes and fugitive slaves
called "Springtown," in Cumberland County.[3]

The father of William Still and his brother, Peter,
had purchased his own freedom from his master,
about 1800. The mother was a fugitive slave.
Peter had been carried from his mother when he
was six years old and taken to Alabama. After
he had grown to be a young man he made up his
mind to save money by performing extra labour,
to buy his freedom. Fearing that his master
would be unwilling to sell him his freedom, he
secured the friendly offices of a Jew named Friedman
who made the purchase and set him free.

After reaching Philadelphia and finding his
brother William, as has been described, Peter
Still made several attempts to secure the freedom
of his wife and children, whom he left in slavery
in Alabama. It was in an attempt to secure the
freedom of Peter Still's wife and children that
Seth Concklin, the Shaker Abolitionist, lost his
life. Seth Concklin was one of the few white
men who, in their efforts to rescue the slaves, penetrated
the slave country. He succeeded in bringing
the fugitives by boat down the Tennessee and
up the Mississippi and the Wabash rivers, as far
as Vincennes, when he and they were captured
and taken back. Concklin was killed in an attempt
to escape.[4]

One of the most singular and interesting figures
among the people who were engaged in the work
of the "Underground Railroad" was Harriet
Tubman. She escaped from slavery some time
about 1849, when she was between twenty and
twenty-five years of age. It was the fear that she
and her brothers were to be "sold South" that
finally led her to make the attempt to escape. She
started, with her brothers, from her home in Maryland,
guided, as she said, only by the North Star.
But after the fugitives had made some distance,
the brothers, who feared that they would not succeed,
turned back and Harriet went on alone.
After making her own escape, she went back
repeatedly to different parts of the South and aided
in the escape of other fugitives. Many of the
slaves who had escaped to Canada, and who had
learned to have complete faith in "Moses," as
they called her, employed her to secure the freedom
of their friends. The fugitives in Canada believed
that she had a charmed life. As a matter of fact,
Harriet Tubman succeeded, in the course of nineteen
different trips into the South, in bringing more
than three hundred slaves from the South into the

Northern states and Canada, and in no case was a
fugitive under her care ever captured. During the
Civil War, she was employed in the secret service of
the Federal Army, and, in the last year of the
war, carried papers which admitted her through
the lines of the Union Army in any part of the
country, wherever she cared to go. She was still
living, in 1908, in retirement at Auburn, New York.

The most distinguished fugitive who escaped
from slavery was Frederick Douglass, who secured
a "sailor's protection," which certified that he
was a free American sailor. Armed with this on
Monday, September 3, 1838, he boarded the train
at Baltimore and rode directly to New York City.
From there he went into New Bedford, where he
found refuge in the home of a coloured man by
the name of Nathan Johnson. After Frederick
Douglass went to live in Rochester, New York,
his home there became one of the principal stations
of the "Underground Railroad," which ran from
New York City through Albany to the Great Lakes
and Canada.

He has told, in his autobiography, the manner
in which fugitives were brought to his home, concealed
there, and then hurried on to the little town
of Charlotte, seven miles from Rochester, and
there placed on board a little lake steamer en route
for Canada.

"On one occasion," he said, "I had eleven

fugitives at the same time under my roof. And
it was necessary for them to remain with me until
I could collect sufficient money to get them on to
Canada.

"But," he added, "it is due to the truth to state
that we seldom called in vain upon a Whig or a
Democrat for help. Men were better than their
theology and truer to humanity than to their politics
or their offices."

He refers here to the fact that at one time,
when a master was in the office of a United States
Commissioner, getting the papers necessary for
the arrest of three young men who had escaped
from slavery in Maryland, the law-partner of the
commissioner, a distinguished Democrat, sought
him out, told him what was going on in his office,
and urged him by all means to get these young
men out of the way of pursuit.

In Syracuse, New York, there was another
station of the "Underground Railroad," conducted
by another fugitive slave. This was the Rev. J. W.
Loguen, afterward a bishop of the A. M. E. Zion
Church. "Jarm" Loguen, as he was called, was
born a slave in Kentucky. His mother came of
free parents in Ohio, but was kidnapped and sold
in Kentucky when she was a child. She seems to
have been a woman of great sense and character,
and after her son grew up he inherited from her,
apparently, a determination to be free.

He and another young man made their escape
on horseback. They reached the Ohio River,
crossed the ice, and finally, after a long series of
adventures, during which they spent some time with
the Indians, and passed several weeks in a settlement
of fugitive slaves in Indiana, crossed the river at
Detroit into Canada. They remained for some time
on British soil, but Loguen finally returned to the
United States and settled in Northern New York.

Although he had no education when he left
Kentucky, young Loguen was industrious, thrifty,
and succeeded in making money. He used the
first money he accumulated to secure for himself an
education at the Oneida Institute, Whitesboro, New
York, a school started for coloured children by
the noted Abolitionist, Beriah Green. Afterward,
he went to Syracuse to live and interested himself,
as a minister and anti-slavery leader, in the welfare
of the coloured people of that city. It was while
he was there that the famous "Jerry Rescue"
took place, in which some of the citizens stormed
the United States Commissioner's Office and forcibly
carried off a fugitive named Jerry, who had been
arrested under the recently enacted Fugitive Slave
Law. At this time, Syracuse was the home of
Samuel J. May and Gerrit Smith, and this first
case under the Fugitive Slave Law was at once a
defiance and a test of the abolitionist temper of
the people of that city.

Though thousands of fugitive slaves succeeded
in making their escape by routes that led from the
South through Pennsylvania and New York, and
also through New England, by far the larger number
of the fugitives passed through the State of Ohio.
In all the little coloured settlements in Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois, and in the larger cities like Cincinnati,
there were men who were known to be fugitive
slaves. Some of these men were slowly paying
for their freedom from their earnings in the free
states. In his life of Salmon P. Chase, Prof.
Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard University,
refers to a theological student who was known to
have provided for his education "from the instalments
thus paid by a man for his own flesh, and
to have charged the poor Negro twelve per cent.
on deferred payment." As further illustration of
the number and variety of these cases, he mentions
a Negro child in a charitable school who excused
her absence with the explanation, "I am staying
at home to help buy father."

After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, September
26,1850, large numbers of these fugitive slaves
living in Ohio became frightened for fear that they
were to be sent back into slavery and fled into Canada.
At that time, J. C. Brown, a free man who had paid
11,800 for his freedom, organised a colonisation
society for the purpose of inducing coloured people to
leave the State of Ohio and settle in Canada.

"At this time," says Mr. Brown, "Cincinnati
was full of women, without husbands, and their
children. These were sent by planters from Louisiana,
Mississippi, and some from Tennessee, who
had got fortunes and had found that white women
could live in those states, and in consequence, they
had sent their slave wives and children to Cincinnati
and set them free."

These people were now, of course, in a state of
terror and their former masters were of course
anxious to get them upon free soil where there
would be no doubt of their security. It was at
this time that a number of refugees in different
parts of Canada, sprang up. Under Mr. Brown's
direction, four hundred and sixty people were
settled in the township of Biddulph, near Little
York. These were joined afterward by fifteen families
from Boston, Mass. They purchased twelve
hundred and twenty acres which were divided
into tracts of from twenty-five to fifty acres to a
family.

One of the most romantic of the fugitive slave
stories is that of William and Ellen Craft. William
Craft was a slave on a plantation near Macon,
Georgia. He had learned the trade of cabinetmaker
and had become so proficient in that craft
that, in addition to his daily work for his master,
he had been able to earn a considerable sum of
money for himself by work performed in his leisure

moments. William Craft was a black man, but
on this same plantation there was another slave,
a young woman, who was almost white. They
became acquainted with each other and after a
time they were married. They had not lived
together very long before the fear that they might
at some time be sold and thus parted from one
another, made them think about the possibilities
of escape from slavery. After studying over the
matter for some time, William Craft hit upon a
plan.

There were always white people in the slavery
times who were willing for the sake of a little money
to carry on a secret traffic with the slaves. From
one of these white men he secured a suit of men's
clothing that would fit his wife. He had the suit
made in the latest fashion in order to make the disguise
as complete as possible. He secured shoes,
hat, neckties, all the other pieces of wearing apparel
necessary to complete the wardrobe of a wealthy
young planter. In this disguise, Ellen Craft, having
secured a permit from her mistress for a visit of
a few days to a neighbouring plantation, took the
train at Macon for Savannah. The husband,
William, having secured a similar permit for himself,
boarded the same train and, passing himself
off as the Negro servant of his wife, they made the
journey out of slavery into freedom together.

At Savannah they took the boat for Charleston.

From Charleston they went to Wilmington, North
Carolina, and from there took the train to Philadelphia.
They had a great many curious and
exciting adventures on the way. The young
"planter" who, in order to more fully disguise
herself, had tied a bandage around her head, as
if she had a toothache, seemed to arouse the interest
and sympathy of a number of people, who gave
her advice how to keep her Negro servant from
running away from her when she reached free
soil. Both at Savannah, when they were boarding
the boat, and at Wilmington, when they were
taking the train to the North, they found it was
the rule to require passengers to register their names.
As neither of them could read and write, Ellen
Craft had put her right hand in a poultice and
supported it with a sling about her neck, pretending
that she was suffering from rheumatism. Even
then, it was with the greatest difficulty that she
was able to persuade the agents of the steamship
and railway companies to sign her name for her.
At length, however, they reached Philadelphia in
safety and for several days found refuge in the
home of philanthropic Quakers in that city. From
there, they went to Boston, where William Craft
secured employment at his trade as cabinet-maker.

They had left their home in Macon in 1848.
Two years later the Fugitive Slave Law was passed
and a determined effort was made by many Southern

slave-holders to get possession of their runaway
slaves, who were living in freedom in many parts
of the North. It was not long before such an
effort was made to get possession of the two fugitives
from Macon. For some months they lived in daily
apprehension of being seized and carried away.
Finally, upon learning that a warrant had been
issued for their arrest, some of their anti-slavery
friends smuggled them aboard one of the ships
leaving Boston for England. Arriving in Liverpool
they went directly to friends in London. Shortly
after their arrival there they went to live in the
town of Hammersmith, not far from London, which
was their home for a number of years. William
Craft secured employment in the African trade,
and took several ship-loads of merchandise out
to Africa where he was able to dispose of them
with special advantage because he was of the same
colour and race as the people with whom he sought
to trade.

After emancipation and the Civil War had made
it possible for them to return to the country of
their birth, William and Ellen Craft came back
to Boston and lived for several years in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where their children were educated.
While they were in England several children were
born to them, one of them, William, is still living
there. Another has since become the wife of Dr.
W. D. Crum, who was collector of customs at

Charleston, South Carolina, under President Roosevelt.
A grandson of William and Ellen Craft,
Henry K. Craft, who was graduated from Harvard
University in 1908, is, at the time this is written, in
charge of the electrical plant and the teaching of
Electrical Engineering at Tuskegee Institute.
William and Ellen Craft finally returned to Georgia
and passed their last days in a comfortable home
not far from Savannah.

Directly and indirectly, the fugitive slaves probably
did more to bring about the abolition of slavery
than any other one agency. The Northern people
learned from the lips of these fugitives—from the
strange, romantic, pathetic, and tragic stories they
told—that the slaves, no matter how ignorant
or how different in colour or condition they might
seem, were very much the same kind of human
beings as themselves. They learned from the
sufferings of these fugitives, from the desperate
efforts which they made to escape, that no matter
what might be said to the contrary the slaves wanted
to be free.

At the same time, the fugitive slaves learned in
the United States, in their very efforts to be free,
something about the nature of freedom that they
could not have learned in Africa. Slavery, however
hard or cruel it might be, appeared to the native
African, as it did to the Greek and Roman, to be
the natural condition of the majority of men. It

was only after the African slaves learned the language
of their masters and possessed themselves to some
extent of their masters' ideas that they began to
conceive that the natural condition of man was
not slavery but freedom.

When the fugitive slaves came in contact with
the anti-slavery people of the North they made
the acquaintance for the first time of a people who
hated slavery in a way and with an intensity which
few of them had ever felt or known. They
learned from these anti-slavery people to believe
in freedom for its own sake, not only for themselves
but for every one. They were transformed in this
way from fugitive slaves to abolitionists. They
became, as a result, the most determined of antislavery
people, and many of them devoted their
lives most unselfishly to securing the freedom of
other members of their race.

In 1860 it was estimated that the number of
Negroes that journeyed annually from Canada
to the slave states to rescue their fellows from
bondage was about five hundred. These persons
carried the Underground Railroad and the Underground
Telegraph into nearly every Southern state.[5]