University of Virginia Library

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 Hoist makes several references to
the work of the Road in his well-known History of the United
States, and predicts that "The time will yet come, even in
the South, when due recognition will be given to the touching
unselfishness, simple magnanimity and glowing love of
freedom of these law-breakers on principle, who were for the
most part people without name, money, or higher education."[2]
Rhodes in his great work, the History of the United

States from the Compromise of 1850, mentions the system, but
considers it only as a manifestation of popular sentiment.[3]
Other writers give less space to an account of this enterprise,
although it was one that extended throughout many Northern
states, and in itself supplied the reason for the enactment of
the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, one of the most remarkable
measures issuing from Congress during the whole anti-slavery
struggle.

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

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

While several of these volumes are sources of original
material, their value is chiefly that of collections of incidents,
affording one an insight into the workings of the Underground

Railroad in certain localities, and presenting types of
character among the helpers and the helped. In composition
they are what one would expect of persons who lived
simple, strenuous lives, who with sincerity record what they
knew and experienced. They have not only the characteristics
of a deep-seated, moral movement, they have also an
undeniable value for historical purposes.

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

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

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

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

Pettit's Sketches comprise a series of articles printed in the
Fredonia (New York) Censor, during the fall of 1808, 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 storyteller
instead of restricting himself to the simple recording
of the information secured. His investigations have given
him an acquaintance with the routes of northeastern Ohio
and the adjacent portions of Pennsylvania and New York.

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

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

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

sketch of the abductor Harriet Tubman.[12] But it
would be quite impossible for any one to gain an adequate
idea of the movement from the meagre accounts that have
appeared in any of these magazines.

In contrast with the magazines, the newspapers have frequently
published some of the stirring recollections of surviving
abolitionists, but the result for the reader is usually
that he learns only some anecdotes concerning a small section
of the Road, without securing an insight into the real significance
of the underground movement. Without undertaking
here to print a full list of articles on the subject, it is worth
while to notice a few newspapers in which series of sketches
have appeared of more or less value in extending our geographical
knowledge of the system, or in illustrating some
important phase of its working. The New Lexington (Ohio)
Tribune, from October, 1885, to February, 1886, contains a
series of reminiscences, written by Mr. Thomas L. Gray, that
supply interesting information about the work in southeastern
Ohio. The Pontiac (Illinois) Sentinel, in 1890 and 1891,
published fifteen chapters of "A History of Anti-Slavery
Days" contributed by Mr. W. B. Fyffe, recording some episodes
in the development of this Road in northeastern Illinois.
The Sentinel, of Mt. Gilead, Ohio, in a series of articles, one
of which appeared every week from July 13 to August 17,
1898, under the name of Aaron Benedict, affords a knowledge
of the way in which the secret work was carried on in a typical
Quaker community. In The Republican Leader, of Salem,
Indiana, at various dates from Nov. 17, 1893, to April, 1894,
E. Hicks Trueblood printed the results of some investigations
begun at the instance of the author, which disclose
the principal routes of south central Indiana. An account
of the peculiar methods of the pedler Joseph Sider, an abductor
of slaves, is also given by Mr. Trueblood. The Rev.

John Todd has preserved in the columns of the Tabor (Iowa)
Beacon, in 1890 and 1891, some valuable reminiscences,
running through more than twenty numbers of the paper,
under the title, "The Early Settlement and Growth of Western
Iowa"; several of these are devoted to fugitive slave
cases.[13]

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

The great collection of contemporaneous material is that
of William Still, relating mainly to the work of the Vigilance
Committee of Philadelphia. The motives and the methods
of Mr. Still in keeping his register are given in the following
words: "Thousands of escapes, harrowing separations, dreadful
longings, dark gropings after lost parents, brothers, sisters,
and identities, seemed ever to be pressing on my mind. While
I knew the danger of keeping strict records, and while I did
not then dream that in my day slavery would be blotted out,

or that the time would come when I could publish these records,
it used to afford me great satisfaction to take them down
fresh from the lips of fugitives on the way to freedom, and
to preserve them as they had given them. . . ."[14] When in
1852 Mr. Still became the chairman of the Acting Committee
of Vigilance his opportunities were doubtless increased for
obtaining histories of cases; and he was then directed as head
of the committee" to keep a record of all their doings, . . .
especially of the money received and expended on behalf of
every case claiming their interposition."[15] During the period
of the War, Chairman Still concealed the records and documents
he had collected in the loft of Lebanon Cemetery
building, and although their publication became practicable
when the Proclamation of Emancipation was issued, the
Underground Railroad Records did not appear until 1872.[16]

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

John Brown, of Osawattomie, left a few notes of his memorable
journey through Kansas and Iowa, on his way to Canada
in the winter of 1858 and 1859, with a company of slaves rescued
by him from bondage in western Missouri. On the back
of the original draft of a letter written by Brown for the New
York Tribune soon after the slaves had been taken from their

masters appear the names of station-keepers of the Underground
Railroad in eastern Kansas, and a record of certain
expenditures forming, doubtless, a part of the cost of his trip.[18]
When the fearless abductor arrived at Springdale, Iowa, late
in February, he wrote to a friend in Tabor a statement concerning
the "Reception of Brown and Party at Grinnell, Iowa,
compared with Proceedings at Tabor, "in which he set down
in the form of items the substantial attentions he had received
at the hands of citizens of Grinnel.[19] These meagre records,
together with the letter written to the Tribune mentioned
above, are all that Brown wrote, so far as known giving explicit
information in regard to an exploit that created a stir
throughout the country.

Mr. Jireh 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 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
the 3rd time occupied since thw first of April." . . .
"Nov. 9, '54. Negro hoax stories have been very high in
the market for a week past."

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

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

In Ohio, Daniel Osborn, of the Alum Creek Quaker
Settlement, in the central part of the state, kept a diary, of

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

Underground managers who were so indiscreet as to keep
a diary or letters for a season, were induced to part with such
condemning evidence under the stress of a special danger.
Mr. Robert Purvis, of Philadelphia, states that he kept a
record of the fugitives that passed through his hands and
those of his coworkers in the Quaker City for a long period,
till the trepidation of his family after the passage of the Fugitive
Slave Bill in 1850 caused him to destroy it.[21] Daniel
Gibbons, a Friend, who lived near Columbia in southeastern
Pennsylvania, began in 1824 to keep a record of the number
of fugitives he aided. He was in the habit of entering in his
book the name of the master of each fugitive, the fugitive's
own name and his age, and the new name given him. The
data thus gathered came in time to form a large volume,
but after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law Mr. Gibbons
burned this book.[22] William Parker, the colored leader in
the famous Christiana case, was found by a friend to have a
large number of letters from escaped slaves hidden about his
house at the time of the Christiana affair, September 11, 1851,
and these fateful documents were quickly destroyed. Had
they been discovered by the officers that visited Parker's

house, they might have brought disaster upon many persons.[23]
Thus, the need of secrecy constantly served to prevent the
making of records, or to bring about their early destruction.
The written and printed records do give a multitude of
unquestioned facts about the Underground Railroad; but
when wishing to find out the details of rational management,
the methods of business, and the total amount of traffic, we
are thrown back on the recollections of living abolitionists as
the main source of information; from them the gaps in the
real history of the Underground Railroad must be filled, if
filled at all.

It is with the aid of such memorials that the present volume
has been written. Reminiscences have been gathered
by correspondence and by travel from many surviving abolitionists
or their families; and recollections of fugitive slave
days have been culled from books, newspapers, letters and
diaries. During three years of the five years of preparation
the author's residence in Ohio afforded him opportunity to
visit many places in that state where former employees of
the Underground Railroad could be found, and to extend
these explorations to southern Michigan, and among the surviving
fugitives along the Detroit River in the Province of
Ontario. Residence in Massachusetts during the years 18951897
has enabled him to secure some interesting information
in regard to underground lines in New England. The materials
thus collected relate to the following states: Iowa, Wisconsin,
Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode
Island, Massachusetts and Vermont, besides a few items concerning
North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.

Underground operations practically ceased with the beginning
of the Civil War. In view of the lapse of time, the
reasons for trusting the credibility of the evidence upon
which our knowledge of the Underground Road rests should
be stated. Some of the testimony dealt with in this chapter
was put in writing during the period of the Road's operation,
or at the close of its activity, and, therefore, cannot be easily
questioned. But it may be said that a large part of the

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

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

The Rev. J. S. T. Milligan, of Esther, Pennsylvania, December
5, 1896, writes entirely independently: "In 1849 my
brother . . . and I went . . . to Logan Co., Ohio, to conduct
a grammar school . . . at a place called Northwood. The
school developed into a college under the title of Geneva
Hall. J. R. W. Sloane[25] . . . was elected President and
moved to Northwood in 1851. . . . The region was settled
by Covenanters and Seceders, and every house was a home
for the wanderers. But there was a cave on the farm of a
man by the name of Patterson, absolutely safe and fairly

comfortable for fugitives. In one instance thirteen fugitives,
after resting in the cave for some days, were taken by the
students in two covered wagons to Sandusky, some 90 miles,
where I had gone to engage passage for them on the Bay
City steamboat across the lake to Maiden—where I saw them
safely landed on free soil, to their unspeakable joy. Indeed,
I thought one old man would have died from the gladness
of his heart in being safe in freedom. I went from Belle
Centre [near Northwood] by rail, and did not go with the
land escort—but from what they told me of their experience,
it was often amusing and sometimes thrilling. They
were ostensibly a hunting party of 10 or 12 armed men. . . .
The two covered wagons were a 'sanctum sanctorum' into
which no mortal was allowed to peep. . . . The word of
command, 'Stand back,' was always respected by those who
were unduly intent upon seeing the thirteen deer . . .
brought from the woods of Logan and Hardin counties and
being taken to Sandusky."

In the same letter Mr. Milligan corroborates some information
secured from the Rev. R. G. Ramsey, of Cadiz, Ohio,
August 18, 1892, in regard to an underground route in
southern Illinois. Mr. Ramsey related that his father, Robert
Ramsey, first engaged in Underground Railroad work at
Eden, Randolph County, Illinois, in 1844, and that he carried
it on at intervals until the War. "The fugitives," he said,
"came up the river to Chester, Illinois, and there they
started northeast on the state road, which followed an old
Indian trail. The stations were each in a community of
Covenanters, . . ." and existed, according to his account,
at Chester, Eden, Oakdale, Nashville and Centralia. "Besides
my father," said Mr. Ramsey, "John Hood and two
brothers, James B. and Thomas McClurkin, lived in Oakdale,
where my father lived during the last thirty-five years of his
life. He lived in Eden before this time. . . . "[26] The Rev.
Mr. Milligan writes as follows: "My father removed to
Randolph Co., Ill., in 1847, and with Rev. Wm. Sloane . . .
and the Covenanter congregations under their ministry kept
a very large depot wide open for slaves escaping from Missouri.

Scores at a time came to Sparta [the post-office of
the Eden settlement mentioned above]—my father's region,
were harbored there, . . . and finally escorted to Elkhorn
[about two miles from Oakdale], the region of Father Sloane,
where they were sheltered and escorted . . . to some friends
in the region of Nashville, Ill., and thence north on the regular
trail which I am not able further to locate. At Sparta,
Coultersville and Elkhorn there was an almost constant
supply of fugitives. . . . But . . . few were ever gotten
from the ægis of the Hayes and Moores and Todds and
McLurkins and Hoods and Sloanes and Milligans of that
region."

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

Another example throws light on a channel of escape in
northeastern Indiana. While Levi Coffin lived at Newport
(now Fountain City), Indiana, he sometimes sent slaves northward
by way of what he called "the Mississinewa route,"[27] from
the Mississinewa River, near which undoubtedly it ran for a
considerable distance. This road seems to have been called
also the Grant County route. In the most general way only
do these descriptions tell anything about the route. However,
correspondence with several people of Indiana has brought it
to light. One letter[28] informs us in regard to fugitives departing
from Newport: "If they came to Economy they were
sent to Grant Co. . . ." Now, so far as known, Jonesboro'
was the next locality to which they were usually forwarded,
and the line from this point northward is given us by the
Hon. John Ratliff, of Marion, Indiana, who had been over it
with passengers. He says that the first station north of
Jonesboro' was North Manchester, where "Morris" Place

was agent; the next station, Goshen where Dr. Matchett
harbored fugitives; and thence the line ran to Younge's
Prairie,[29] which is in Cass County, Michigan. The same section
of Road, hut with a few additional stations, is marked out
bv 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 Chamicey Hurlburt's
in Kosciusko Co. . . . They (the Hurlburts) took them
twelve miles farther . . . to Warsaw, to a man by the name
of Gordon, and he took them to Dr. Matchett's in Elkhart
Co., not far from Goshen. There were friends there to help
them to Michigan."[30]

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