University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XI

EFFECT OF THE UNDERGROUND BAILROAD

The effect of Underground Railroad operations in steadily
withdrawing from the South some of its property and thus
causing constant irritation to slave-owners and slave-traders
has already been commented upon. The persons losing
slaves of course regarded their losses as a personal and undeserved
misfortune. Yet, considering the question broadly
from the standpoint of their own interests, the work of the
underground system was a relief to the masters and to the
South. The possibility of a servile insurrection was a dreadful
thing for Southern minds to contemplate; but they could,
not easily dismiss the terrible scenes enacted in San Domingo
during the years 1791 to 1793 and the three famous uprisings
of 1800,1820 and 1831, in South Carolina and Virginia. The
Underground Railroad had among its passengers such persons
as Josiah Henson, J. W. Loguen, Frederick Douglass,
Harriet Tubman, William Wells Brown and Henry Bibb; it
therefore furnished the means of escape for persons well qualified
for leadership among the slaves, and thereby lessened the
danger of an uprising of the blacks against their masters. The
negro historian, Williams, has said of the Underground Road
that it served as a "safety-valve to the institution of slavery.
As soon as leaders arose among the slaves, who refused to
endure the yoke, they would go North. Had they remained,
there must have been enacted at the South the direful scenes
of San Domingo."[1]

It is difficult to arrive at any satisfactory idea of the actual
loss sustained by slave-owners through underground channels.
The charges of bad faith against the free states made in
Congress by Southern members were sometimes accompanied

by estimates of the amount of human property lost on account
of the indisposition of those living north of Mason and
Dixon's line to meet the requirements of the fugitive slave
legislation. Thus as early as 1822, Moore, of Virginia, speaking
in the House in favor of a new fugitive recovery law,
said that the district he represented lost four or five thousand
dollars worth of runaway slaves annually.[2] In August, 1850,
Atchison, of Missouri, informed the Senate that "depredations
to the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars are
committed upon the property of the people of the border
slave states of this Union annually."[3] Pratt, of Maryland,
said that not less than $80,000 worth of slaves was lost every
year by citizens of his state.[4] Mason, of Virginia, declared
that the losses of his state were already too heavy to be
borne, that they were increasing from year to year, and were
then in excess of $100,000 per year.[5] Butler, of South
Carolina, reckoned the annual loss of the Southern section at
$200,000.[6] Clingman, of North Carolina, said that the thirty
thousand fugitives then reported to be living in the North
were worth at current prices little less than $15,000,000.[7]
Claiborne, the biographer of General John A. Quitman,
who was at one time governor of Louisiana, indicated as
one of the defects of the second Fugitive Slave Law its
failure to make "provision for the restitution to the South of
the $30,000,000, of which she had been plundered through
the 100,000 slaves abducted from her in the course of the
last forty years" (1810–1850);[8] and the same writer stated
that slavery was rapidly disappearing from the District of
Columbia at the time of the enactment of the new law, the
number of slaves "having been reduced since 1840 from
4,694 to 650, by 'underground railroads' and felonious abductions."[9]

The wide divergences among the estimates here given, as
well as the obvious difficulty of getting reliable information in
regard to the number of runaway slaves, renders these figures
of little use in determining the loss of human property by the
slaveholding states. Nevertheless, the estimates are valuable
in illustrating the character of the complaints that were
made in Congress, and in enabling one to realize that the
tenure of slave property in the border states was rendered
precarious by the operations of the Underground Railroad.
Can it be thought strange that the disappearance week by
week and month by month of valuable slaves over the unknown
routes of the underground system should have produced
wrath, suspicion and hostility in the minds of people
who could justly claim to have a constitutional guarantee,
the laws of Congress, and the decisions of the highest courts
on their side?

In the compendiums of the United States Census for 1850
and 1860 are some statistics on fugitive slaves, which fall
far short of the most moderate estimates of the Southerners,
and flatly disagree with the testimony gathered from all
other quarters. The official reports appear to show that the
number of slaves escaping from their masters was small and
inconsiderable, that it rapidly decreased, and that it was independent
of proximity to a free population. But the censuses
are not only opposed to the evidence, they are on their
face inadequate.

If, as those tables indicate, only 1,011 slaves escaped from
their masters in 1850, and only 803 in 1860, and in the latter
year only 500 escaped from the border slave states, then it
becomes impossible to understand the emphasis laid by
Southern men upon the value of their runaway slaves, the
steady pressure made by the border states for a more stringent
law that resulted in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and
the allegation of bad faith on the part of the North put

forth by the Southern states as a reason for secession.[10] In
considering the weight to be ascribed to the figures on fugitive
slaves supplied by the census compendiunis, it is proper
to set over against them the showing afforded by the same
compendiums relative to the decline of the slave population
in the border slave states during the decade 1850–1860; for
it is to be noted that the compendiums show a marked decline
in these states, that they show a greater percentage of decline
in the northernmost counties of these states than in the
states as a whole, and, what is even more remarkable, that
the loss appears to have been still greater during this time
in the four "pan-handle" counties of Virginia than in any of
the other states referred to, or in the border counties of any
one of them.[11] It can scarcely be suggested that the relatively
rapid decline of the slave population in the border counties
was due to larger shipments of slaves to the far South from
these marginal regions without at the same time suggesting
that the explanation for such shipments lay in the proximity
of a free population and the numerous lines of Underground
Railroad maintained by it. The concurrence of evidence
from sources other than the census reports, and the agreement
therewith of part of the evidence gathered from these
reports themselves, constrains one to say that those who compiled
the statistics on fugitive slaves did not secure the facts
in full; and that the complaints of large losses sustained by
slave-owners through the befriending of fugitive slaves by
Northern people, frequently made by Southern representatives
in Congress and by the South generally, were not without
sufficient foundation.

It is natural that there should be great variation among the
guesses made as to the total number of those indebted for
liberty to the Underground Road. Very few of the persons
that harbored runaways were so indiscreet as to keep a
register of their hunted visitors. Their hospitality was equal
to all possible demands, but was kept strictly secret. Under
these circumstances one should handle all numerical generalizations
with caution.

Record of Fugitives aided during Five Months.

Kept by Daniel Osborn, of Alum Creek Settlement, Ohio.

By rare good fortune the writer has found a single leaf of
a diary kept by Daniel Osborn, a Friend or Quaker, of
Alum Creek Settlement, Delaware County, Ohio, which
gives a record of the blacks passing through that neighborhood
during an interval of five months, from April 14 to
September 10, 1844. The accompanying facsimiles, which
reproduce the two sides of the leaf, show that the number is
forty-seven. The year in which this memorandum was made
may be fairly taken as an average year, and the line on which
this Quaker settlement was a station as a representative
underground route in Ohio. Now, along Ohio's southern
boundary there were the initial stations of at least twelve
important lines of travel, some of which were certainly in.
operation before 1830. Let us consider, as we may properly,
that the period of operation continued from 1830 to 1860.
Taking these as the elements for a computation, one may
reckon that Ohio may have aided not less than 40,000
fugitives in the thirty years included in our reckoning.[12]
That the number of refugees after 1844 did not decrease is
indicated by the statement that during one month in the
year of 1854–1855 sixty were harbored by one member of the
Alum Creek Settlement. It is to be remembered that several
families of the settlement were engaged in this work.[13]

An illustration of underground activity in the East may be
ventured. Mr. Robert Purvis, of Philadelphia, states that he
kept a record of the fugitives that passed through the hands
of the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia 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. His record
book showed, he says, an average of one a day sent northward.
In other words, between 1830 and 1860 over 9,000
runaways were aided in Philadelphia. But we know that the
Vigilance Committee did not begin this sort of work in the
Quaker City, and that underground activities there date back
at least to the time of Isaac T. Hopper's earliest efforts, that

is, 1800 and before. We also know that there were many
centres round about Philadelphia, some of whose work was
certainly done independently of that place.

That the resources of some of the operators in centres in
the West were being drained almost to exhaustion by the
demands of the heavy traffic towards the close of the underground
period, distinctly appears in the following letter
from Col. J. Bowles, of Lawrence, Kansas, to Mr. F. B.
Sanborn:—

The success of the Underground Road in transporting
negroes beyond the limits of the Southern states was long
ago commented upon as standing in marked contrast with
that of the American Colonization Society. This association
was organized in 1816, and soon had auxiliary societies in
most of the states. Its object was to remove the free blacks
and such as might be made free from the South, and colonize
them on the coast of Africa. By 1857, after an existence of
forty years, the Colonization Society had sent to Africa 9,502
emigrants, of whom 3,676 were free-born, 326 self-purchased,
and 5,500 emancipated on condition of being transported.
That the informal method of the abolitionists was many times
as efficient as that adopted by the organization mentioned,

with its treasury and its board of officers, cannot be
denied.[14]

By actual count it is found that the number of persons
within the limits of Ohio named as underground workers in
the collections upon which this book is based, is about 1,540;
in all other states taken together the number found is
1,670. It is proper to observe that these figures are minimum
figures. Death and infirmity, as well as removal, have
carried many unknown operators beyond the chance of discovery.

It is not surprising that the secret enterprises of this determined
class of people—so effectual as to make rare the pursuit
of a fugitive during the last years of the decade preceding
the War[15] —should have become the ground of an important
charge against the North in the crisis of 1860. The violation
of the Fugitive Slave Law was an accusation upon which Southern
members of Congress rang all the changes in the course
of the violent debates of the sessions of 1860–1861. Thus
Jones, of Georgia, said in the House in April, 1860: "It is
a notorious fact that in a good many of the non-slaveholding
states the Republican party have regularly organized societies
—underground railroads—for the avowed purpose of stealing
the slaves from the border States, and carrying them off
to a free State or to Canada. These predatory bands are
kept up by private and public subscriptions among the
Abolitionists; and in many of the States, I am sorry to say,
they receive the sanction and protection of the law. The
border States lose annually thousands and millions of dollars'
worth of property by this system of larceny that has been
carried on for years." Polk, of Missouri, whose state had
suffered not a little through the flight and abduction of
slaves, made the same complaint in the Senate in January,
1861: "Underground railroads are established," said he,
"stretching from the remotest slaveholding States clear up

to Canada. Secret agencies are put to work in the very
midst of our slaveholding communities to steal away slaves.
The constitutional obligation for the rendition of the fugitive
from service is violated. The laws of Congress enacted to
carry this provision of the Constitution into effect are not
executed. Their execution is prevented. Prevented, first,
by hostile and unconstitutional state legislation. Secondly,
by a vitiated public sentiment. Thirdly, by the concealing
of the slave, so that the United States law cannot be made
to reach him. And when the runaway is arrested under the
fugitive slave law—which, however, is seldom the case—
he is very often rescued. . . . This lawlessness is felt with
special seriousness in the border slave States. The underground
railroads start mostly from these States. Hundreds
of thousands of dollars are lost annually. And no State
loses more heavily than my own. Kentucky, it is estimated,
loses annually as much as $200,000. The other border States
no doubt lose in the same ratio, Missouri much more. But
all these losses and outrages, all this disregard of constitutional
obligation and social duty, are as nothing in their
bearing upon the Union in comparison with the animus, the
intent and purpose of which they are at once the fruit and the
evidence. . . ."[16] Of this animus the election of Lincoln was
regarded as the crowning proof; and it became, as is well
known, the signal for secession.

In December, 1860, the very month in which South Carolina
chose to withdraw from the Union, the arrest of a
runaway negro in Canada gave rise to an extradition case
that became an additional cause of excitement. The negro
was William Anderson, who in 1853 had been caught without
a pass in Missouri, and had killed the man that tried to
capture him. In 1860 he was recognized in Canada by a
slave-catcher from Missouri, was arrested on the charge of
murder, and thrown into jail at Toronto. As the Ashburton
treaty contained an article providing for the extradition of
slaves guilty of crimes committed in the United States, the
American government sought to secure the surrender of

Anderson for punishment. Lord Elgin, Governor-General
of Canada at the time, was appealed to in the fugitive's behalf
by Mrs. Laura S. Haviland. He made a spirited reply
to the effect that "in case of a demand for William Anderson,
he should require the case to be tried in their British
court; and if twelve freeholders should testify that he had
been a man of integrity since his arrival in their dominion, it
should clear him." Nevertheless, the case was twice decided
against the defendant, first by the common magistrate's
court, then by the Court of Error and Appeal, to which it
had been carried on a writ of habeas corpus. But this did
not end the matter. Through the efforts of the fugitive's
friends application was made for a writ of habeas corpus to
the English Court of the Queen's Bench, and the writ was
granted. Anderson was defended by Gerrit Smith, whose
eloquent speech produced a profound impression in Canada,
and did not fail to attract considerable notice in all parts of
the United States.[17]

During the month of December, in which the Anderson
case came into prominence, the example of secession set by
South Carolina was followed by five other cotton states.
Meantime Congress was giving unmistakable evidence of the
importance attaching to the fugitive slave question. In his
message of December 4, President Buchanan gave serious
consideration to this question, although he insisted that the
Fugitive Slave Law had been duly enforced in every contested
case during his administration.[18] He recommended an "explanatory
amendment" to the Constitution affording "recognition
of the right of the master to have his slave who has
escaped from one state to another restored and 'delivered
up' to him, and of the validity of the Fugitive Slave Law
enacted for this purpose, together with a declaration that all
State laws impairing or defeating this right, are violations of

the Constitution, and are consequently null and void."[19] On
December 12 not less than eleven resolutions were introduced
into the House on this subject, and on December 13,
18 and 24 other resolutions followed. Resolutions of a
similar nature continued to be presented in both Houses
during January and February of the succeeding year, ceasing
only with the end of the session.[20]

These efforts on the part of the national legislature to
appease the spirit of secession in the South were paralleled
by efforts equally futile on the part of various Northern state
legislatures during the same period. It was reported that
towards the close of the year 1860 a caucus of governors of
seven Republican states was held in New York City, and
decided to recommend to their legislatures "the unconditional
and early repeal of the personal liberty bills passed by their
respective states." As a matter of fact this recommendation
was made by the Republican governors of four states, Maine,
Massachusetts, New York and Illinois, and the Democratic
governors of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Rhode Island
repealed her personal liberty law in January, 1861; Massachusetts
modified hers in March; and was followed by Vermont,
which took similar action in April. Ohio had repealed
her act in 1858, but her legislature seized this opportunity to
urge her sister states to cancel any of their statutes "conflicting
with or rendering less efficient the Constitution or the
laws."[21] The conciliation of the South was clearly the purpose
of these measures, but action came too late, for confidence
between the sections had already been destroyed.

The fact that the border slave states, with the exception of
Virginia, remained in the Union, must not be interpreted as
indicating small losses of human property by these states.
The strong ties existing between the states lying on either
side of the sectional line, the presence of a rigorous Union
sentiment in Kentucky, western Virginia and the slaveholding
regions lying east and west of these, together with the hope

of a new compromise entertained by these states, tended to
keep them in their places in the Union. The prospect of a
stampede of slaves, in case they should join the secession
movement, was a consideration that may be supposed to have
had some weight in fixing the decision of the border slave
states. Certainly it was one to which Northern men attached
considerable importance at the time in explaining the steadfast
position of these states; and the impossibility of recovering
even a single fugitive from the free states in case of a
disruption of the Union along Mason and Dixon's line was a
thing of which Southern members of the national House were
duly reminded by their Northern colleagues.

The retention of the loyalty of the border slave states was
a matter of grave concern to President Lincoln, who sought
first of all the preservation of the Union. In his inaugural
address Lincoln had declared his purpose to see to it that the
Fugitive Slave Law was executed, and when a few months
later an opportunity presented itself he kept his promise.
Congress also realized the need of caution on account of the
border states, and moved slowly in framing general enactments.
The changed conditions surrounding the slaves, due
to the marshalling of forces for the War and the advance of
Northern troops into the enemy's country, multiplied the
chances for escape throughout the South, and removed the
necessity for a long and perilous journey by the slaves to find
friends. Negroes from the plantations of both loyal and disloyal
masters flocked to the camps of Union soldiers, and
could not be separated. Under such circumstances the need
of uniformity of method in dealing with cases early became
apparent. The War had scarcely more than commenced when
protests began to be made against the employment of Northern
troops as slave-catchers. A letter read in the Senate by Mr.
Sumner, in December, 1861, made inquiry, "Shall our sons,
who are offering their lives for the preservation of our institutions,
be degraded to slave-catchers for any persons, loyal
or disloyal? If such is the policy of the government, I shall
urge my son to shed no more blood for its preservation."[22]
Two German companies in one of the Massachusetts regiments

also entered protest, making it a condition of their
enlistment that they should not be required to perform such
discreditable service. "They complained, and with them
the German population generally throughout the country."[23]
The inexpediency of the return of fugitives by the army was
recognized by Congress in the early part of 1862, and a bill
forbidding officers from restoring them under any consideration
was signed by the President on May 14, 1862.[24]

The various acts of Congress and the President relative
to fugitive slaves down to the Proclamation of Emancipation,
practically circumscribed the legal effect of the Fugitive Slave
laws to the border states, for in the free states the laws had
not been observed for a long time. It was not until June,
1864, that these measures were swept from the statute-book
of the nation, notwithstanding the insistence of Kentucky
and the other loyal states of the South that a constitutional
obligation rested upon the government to retain them. The
repeal act did not remove this obligation. Such a result
could come only with the extinction of slavery, and the last
vestige of slavery did not disappear until the adoption of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. The
Amendment provides: "Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

The general significance of the long controversy in regard
to fugitive slaves can best be understood by tracing the development
as a sectional issue of the question at the bottom of
it, namely, the obligation to restore fugitives to their masters.
The creation of a line dividing the free North from the slaveholding
South in the early years of our national history, and
the enactment of the first Fugitive Slave Law, by which the
general government assumed a certain responsibility for runaways,
led to the opening of the question. From that time

on, the steadily increasing number of escapes, together with
the spread of the underground system, which made these
escapes almost uniformly successful, kept the question open.
Operations along the secret lines constantly caused aggravation
in the South; and the pursuit of passengers, mobs and
violence were results widely witnessed in the North. The
other questions between the sections were subject to compromise,
but party action could not control the workings of
the Underground Railroad. The stirring sights and affecting
stories with which the North became acquainted through the
stealthy migration of slaves were well adapted to make
abolitionists rapidly, and the consequence was more aggravation
on both sides. The practice of midnight emancipation
in Northern states during the early years was accompanied,
not unnaturally, with the formulation and statement of the
principle of immediatism in neighborhoods where underground
methods were familiar. Thus the way was prepared
for Garrison and his talented coworkers, whose eloquent
tongues and pens could no more be controlled by pro-slavery
forces than could the Underground Railroad itself. Agitation
reacted upon the Road and increased its activity; this caused
counter agitation by Southerners in and out of Congress
until a more rigorous Fugitive Slave Law was secured.

The Compromise of 1850 failed to reconcile the sections:
Northern men despised the Fugitive Slave Law, and displayed
greater zeal than ever before in aiding runaway slaves. Thus,
in the later stages of the controversy, as from its beginning, the
fugitive was a successful missionary in the cause of freedom.
Personal liberty laws were passed by the free states to
defend him; Uncle Tom's Cabin was written to portray
to the world his aspirations for liberty and his endeavors to
secure it; John Brown devised a "subterranean pass way" to
assist him, as a part of the great scheme of liberation that
failed at Harper's Ferry. One of the chief reasons for withdrawing
from the Union assigned by the seceding states was
the bad faith of the North in refusing to surrender fugitives.
At the outbreak of the Civil War large numbers of slaves
sought refuge with the Union forces, the government soon
found it impracticable to restore them, and disavowed all responsibility

for them in 1862. By the Proclamation of Emancipation
slavery was abolished within the area of the disloyal
states, and the controversy became merely formal, the loyal
slave states striving to maintain an abstract right based by
them upon the Constitution. In 1864, however, they were
forced to yield, and the fugitive slave legislation was repealed.
The year following witnessed the cancellation of the fugitive
slave clause in the Constitution by the amendment of that
instrument. In view of all this it is safe to say that the
Underground Railroad was one of the greatest forces which
brought on the Civil War, and thus destroyed slavery.