University of Virginia Library

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."[1] This clause received at a later time strict
interpretation at the bar of the state supreme court, and
slavery was held to have ceased with the year 1780.

There is little to be said about the remaining group of
states with which we are here concerned. Their territorial
organizations were effected under the provisions of the Ordinance
of 1787. One of the most important of these provisions
is as follows: "There shall be neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude in the said Territory, otherwise than
in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have
been duly convicted."[2] 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."[3] The five states, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan
and Wisconsin were therefore admitted to the Union as free
states. West of the Mississippi River there is one state, at
least, that must be added to the group just indicated, namely,
Iowa. Slaveholding was prevented within its domain by
the Act of Congress of 1820, prohibiting slavery in the
territory acquired under the Louisiana purchase north of
latitude 36° 30′, and several years before this law was
abrogated Iowa had entered statehood with a constitution
that fixed her place among the free commonwealths. The
enfranchisement of this extended region was thus accomplished
by state and national action. The ominous result
was the establishment of a sweeping line of frontier between
the slaveholding South and the non-slaveholding North, and
thereby the propounding to the nation of a new question,

that of the status of fugitives in free regions. The elements
were in the proper condition for the crystallization of this
question.

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

conditions. The temper of the Dutch when calling for their
servants in 1659 was not conciliatory, for they threatened, if
their demand should be refused, "to publish free liberty,
access and recess to all planters, servants, negroes, fugitives,
and runaways which may go into New Netherland." The
escape of fugitives from the Eastern colonies northward to
Canada was also a constant source of trouble between the
French and the Dutch, and between the French and English.[4]

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."[5]

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."[6] Neither of these clauses appears to
have been subjected to much debate, and they were adopted
by votes that testify to their acceptableness; the former received
the support of all members present but one, the latter
passed unanimously.

In the sentiment of the time there seems to have been no

sense of humiliation on the part of the North over the conclusions
reached concerning the rendition of escaped slaves.
It had been seen by Northern men that the subject was one
requiring conciliatory treatment, if it were not to become a
block in the way of certain Southern states entering the
Union; and, besides, the opinion generally prevailed that
slavery would gradually disappear from all the states, and
the riddle would thus solve itself.[7] 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.[8] In
abstract law the rights of the slave-owner had in truth been
well provided for. Especially deserving of note is the fact
that a constitutional basis had been furnished for claims
which, in case slavery did not disappear from the country—
a contingency not anticipated by the fathers—might be insisted
upon as having the fundamental and positive sanction
of the government. But what would be the fate of the running
slave was a matter with which, after all, private principles
and sympathies, and not merely constitutional provisions,
would have a good deal to do in each case.

For several years the stipulations for the rendition of fugitive
slaves remained inoperative. At length, in 1791, a case
of kidnapping occurred at Washington, Pennsylvania, and
this served to bring the subject once more to the public
mind. Early in 1793 Congress passed the first Fugitive Slave
Law.[9] This law provided for the reclamation of fugitives
from justice and fugitives from labor. We are concerned, of
course, with the latter class only. The sections of the act
dealing with this division are too long to be here quoted:

they empowered the owner, his agent or attorney, to seize the
fugitive and take him before a United States circuit or district
judge within the state where the arrest was made, or
before any local magistrate within the county in which the
seizure occurred. The oral testimony of the claimant, or an
affidavit from a magistrate in the state from which he came,
must certify that the fugitive owed service as claimed. Upon
such showing the claimant secured his warrant for removing
the runaway to the state or territory from which he had fled.
Five hundred dollars fine constituted the penalty for hindering
arrest, or for rescuing or harboring the fugitive after
notice that he or she was a fugitive from labor.

All the evidence goes to show that this law was ineffectual;
Mrs. McDougall points out that two cases of resistance
to the principle of the act occurred before the close of 1793.[10]
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.[11] By
1850 the Northern states were traversed by numerous lines
of Underground Railroad, and the South was declaring its
losses of slave property to be enormous.

The result of the frequent transgressions of the Fugitive
Slave Law on the one hand and of the clamorous demand for
a measure adequate to the needs of the South on the other,
was the passage of a new Fugitive Recovery Bill in 1850.[12] 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.[13]

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,"[14] 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.[15]
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.' "[16]

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."[17] 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.[18] Scraps of information
about Canada and the Northern states were gleaned
and treasured by minds recognizing their own degradation,
but scarcely knowing how to take the first step towards the
betterment of their condition.

There can be no doubt that the form in which slavery existed
in the South during the opening decade of the present
century was comparatively mild; but it is quite clear that it
soon exchanged this character for one from which the amenities

of the patriarchal type had practically disappeared.
With the rapid expansion of the industries peculiar to the
South after the opening up of the Louisiana purchase, the
invention of the cotton gin, and the removal of the Indians
from the Gulf states, came the era of the slave's dismay. The
auction block and the brutal overseer became his dread while
awake, his nightmare when asleep. That his fears were not
ill founded is proved by the activity of the slave-marts of
Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans and Washington from
the time of the migrations to the Mississippi territory until
the War. Alabama is said to have bought millions of dollars
worth of slaves from the border states up to 1849. Dew estimated
that six thousand slaves were carried from Virginia,
though not all of these were sold to other states.[19]

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;[20] 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."[21] Then, too, the negro's attachment

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

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.[22] 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.[23] 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.[24]
William Edwards, of Amherstburg, Ontario, left his master
on account of a severe flogging.[25] 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.[26]

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.[27] 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.[28]

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."[29]
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.[30]

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.[31] 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.[32]

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."[33] 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.[34]
The labors of Mr. Ross several years later gave color to the
same notion. These facts help to explain the insistence of
the lower Southern states on the passage and strict enforcement
of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.

With the growth of a thing so unfavored as was the Underground
Road, local conditions must have a great deal to
do. The characteristics of small and scattered localities,
and even of isolated families, are of the first importance in
the consideration of a movement such as this. These little
communities were in general the elements out of which the
underground system built itself up. The sources of the convictions
and confidences that knitted these communities
together in defiance of what they considered unjust law can
only be learned by the study of local conditions. The incorporation
in the Constitution of the compromises concerning
slavery doubtless quieted the consciences of many of the
early friends of universal liberty. It was only natural, however,
that there should be some that would hold such concessions
to be sinful, and in violation of the principles asserted
in the Declaration of Independence and in the very Preamble
of the Constitution itself. These persons would cling tenaciously

to their views, and would aid a fugitive slave whenever
one would ask protection and help. It is not strange
that representatives of this class should be found more frequently
among the Quakers than any other sect. In southeastern
Pennsylvania and in New Jersey the work of helping
slaves to escape was, for the most part, in the hands of
Quakers from the beginning. This was true also of Wilmington,
Delaware, New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Valley
Falls, Rhode Island, as of a number of important centres in
western Pennsylvania, and eastern, central and southwestern
Ohio, in eastern Indiana, in southern Michigan and in eastern
Iowa.

Anti-slavery views prevailed against the first attempts at
enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 in Massachusetts,
and spread to other localities in the New England
states. When the tide of emigration to the Western states
set in, settlers from New England were given more frequent
occasions to put their principles into practice in their new
homes than they had known in the seaboard region. The
western portions of New York and Pennsylvania, as well as
the neighboring section of Ohio, called the Western Reserve,
are dotted over with communities where negroes learned the
meaning of Yankee hospitality. Like Joshua R. Giddings,
the people of these communities claimed to have borrowed
their abolition sentiments from the writings of Jefferson,
whose "abolition tract," Giddings said, "was called the Declaration
of Independence."[35] In northern Illinois there were
many centres of the New England type, though, of course,
not all the underground stations in that region were kept by
New Englanders.

In a few neighborhoods settlers from the Southern states
were helpers. These persons had left the South on account
of slavery; they preferred to raise their families away from
influences they felt to be harmful; and they pitied the slave.
It was easy for them to give shelter to the self-freed negro.
In south central Ohio, in a district of four or five counties
locally known as the old Chillicothe Presbytery, a number of
the early preachers were anti-slavery men from the Southern

states. Among the number were John Rankin, of Ripley,
James Gilliland, of Red Oak, Jesse Lockhart, of Russellville,
Robert B. Dobbins, of Sardinia, Samuel Crothers, of Greenfield,
Hugh S. Fullerton, of Chillicothe, and William Dickey,
of Ross or Fayette County. The Presbyterian churches
over which these men presided became centres of opposition
to slavery, and fugitives finding their way into the vicinity
of any one of them were likely to receive the needed help.[36]
The stations in Bond, Putnam and Bureau counties, Illinois,
were kept in part by anti-slavery settlers from the South.

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

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

The principles and experience gained by a number of students

while attending college in Oberlin did not come amiss
later when these young men established themselves in Iowa.
Professor L. F. Parker, after describing what was probably
the longest line of travel through Iowa for escaped slaves,
says: "Along this line Quakers and Oberlin students were
the chief namable groups whose houses were open to such
travellers more certainly than to white men,"[37] 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."[38]

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."[39] 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."[40] 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.[41] 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.[42] 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.[43] 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.[44] 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.[45]
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, New
York City became more active than ever in receiving and
forwarding refugees.[46] 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.[47] 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;[48] 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.[49]

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."[50] In New Hampshire
there was a station at Canaan after 1830, and probably
before that time.[51] 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."[52]
This thing once begun in New Hampshire seems to have continued
steadily during the decades until the War of the Rebellion.[53]
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.[54] In.
Massachusetts the town of Fall River became an important
station in 1839.[55] 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.[56] 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.[57] 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.[58]

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.[59] 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.[60] 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 Kil-bourne,
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.[61] 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.[62] 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.[63] 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."[64] 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.[65] 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."[66] 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."[67]
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."[68]
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."[69] 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.[70] The foregoing items have been
brought together to show that there was no break in the business
of the Road from the beginning to the end. The death or
the change of residence of abolitionists may have interrupted
travel on one or another route, and may even have broken a
line permanently, but the history of the Underground Railroad
system in Ohio is continuous.

In North Carolina underground methods are known to
have been employed by white persons of respectability as
early as 1819. We are informed that "Vestal Coffin organized
the Underground Railroad near the present Guilford
College in 1819. Addison Coffin, his son, entered its service
as a conductor in early youth and still survives in hale old
age. . . . Vestal's cousin, Levi Coffin, became an antislavery
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."[71] 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."[72] 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."[73] It is scarcely necessary
to make a showing of testimony to prove that an expansion
of routes like that taking place in Ohio and states farther
east occurred also in Indiana.

It is doubtful at what time stations first came to exist in
Illinois. Mr. H. B. Leeper, an old resident of that state,
assigns their origin to the years 1819 and 1820, at which
time a small colony of anti-slavery people from Brown
County, Ohio, settled in Bond County, southern Illinois.

Emigrations from this locality to Putnam County, about
1830, led, he thinks, to the establishment there of a new
centre for this work. These settlers were persons that had
left South Carolina on account of slavery, and during their
residence in Brown County, Ohio, had accepted the abolitionist
views of the Rev. James Gilliland, a Presbyterian
preacher of Red Oak; and in Illinois they did not shrink
from putting their principles into practice. This account is
plausible, and as it is substantiated in certain parts by facts
from the history of Brown County, Ohio, it may be considered
probable in those parts that are and must remain
without corroboration. Concerning his father Mr. Leeper
writes: "John Leeper moved from Marshall County, Tennessee,
to Bond County, Illinois, in 1816. Was a hater of
slavery. . . . Remained in Bond County until 1823, then
moved to Jacksonville, Morgan County, and in 1831 to Putnam
County, and in 1833 to Bureau County, Illinois. . . .
My father's house was always a hiding-place for the fugitive

from slavery."[74] On the basis of this testimony, and the
probability in the case, we may believe that the underground
movement in Illinois dates back, at least, to the time of the
admission of Illinois into the Union, that is, to 1818. Soon
after 1835, the movement seems to have become well established,
and to have increased in importance with considerable
rapidity till the War.

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

The abolitionist enterprises of the more western states,
Iowa and Kansas, came too late to be in any way connected
with the proposal of these bills. The settlement of these
territories was, of course, considerably behind that of Ohio,
Indiana and Illinois, but the nearness of the new regions to
a slaveholding section insured the opportunity for Underground
Railroad work as soon as settlement should begin.
Professor L. F. Parker, of Tabor College, Iowa, has sketched
briefly the successive steps in the opening of his state to
occupancy. "The Black-Hawk Purchase opened the eastern
edge of Iowa to the depth of 40 or 50 miles to the whites
in 1833. The strip . . . west of that which included what
is now Grinnell was not opened to white occupancy till 1843,
and it was ten years later before the white residents in this
county numbered 500. Grinnell was settled in 1854, when
central and western Iowa was merely dotted by a few hamlets
of white men, and seamed by winding paths along prairie
ridges and through bridgeless streams."[75] 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.[76] Professor Parker states that Grinnell was a stopping-place
for the hunted slave from the time of its founding in
1854.

We may summarize our findings in regard to the expansion
of the Underground Railroad, then, by saying that it had
grown into a wide-spread "institution" before the year 1840,
and in several states it had existed in previous decades. This
statement coincides with the findings of Dr. Samuel G. Howe
in Canada, while on a tour of investigation in 1863. He reports
that the arrivals of runaway slaves in the provinces,
at first rare, increased early in the century; that some of the
fugitives, rejoicing in the personal freedom they had gained
and banishing all fear of the perils they must endure, went
stealthily back to their former homes and brought away their
wives and children. The Underground Road was of great
assistance to these and other escaping slaves, and "hundreds,"

says Dr. Howe, "trod this path every year, but they did not
attract much public attention."[77] 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."[78] 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.[79]

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."[80] As this work reached considerable development
in the district indicated during the first decade
of this century the account quoted is seen to contain an
anachronism. Railroads were not known either in England
or the United States until about 1830, so that the word
"railroad" could scarcely have received its figurative application
as early as Mr. Smedley implies.

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

"When he was running away, his master, a Kentuckian, was
in close pursuit and pressing him so hard that when the Ohio
River was reached he had no alternative but to jump in and
swim across. It took his master some time to secure a skiff,
in which he and his aid followed the swimming fugitive,
keeping him in sight until he had landed. Once on shore,
however, the master could not find him. No one had seen
him; and after a long . . . search the disappointed slave-master
went into Ripley, and when inquired of as to what had become
of his slave, said . . . he thought' the nigger must have
gone off on an underground road.' The story was repeated
with a good deal of amusement, and this incident gave the
name to the line. First the 'Underground Road,' afterwards
'Underground Railroad.' "[81] 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.[82] 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.

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.)