The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom. Wilbur Henry Siebert
there in legitimate occupations used their opportunities to pass the helpful word or to afford more substantial aid. The Rev. Calvin Fairbank, the Rev. Charles T. Torrey and Dr. Alexander M. Ross may be cited as notable examples of this class. The latter, a citizen of Canada, made extensive tours through various slave states for the express purpose of spreading information about Canada and the routes by which that country could be reached. He made trips into Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee, and did not think it too great a risk to make excursions into the more southern states. He went to New Orleans, and from that point set out on a journey, in the course of which he visited Vicksburg, Selma and Columbus, Mississippi, Augusta, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina.[60]
Considering the comparative freedom of movement between the slave and the free states along the border, it is easy to understand how slaves in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri might pick up information about the "Land of Promise" to the northward. Isaac White, a slave of Kanawha County, Virginia, was shown a map and instructed how to get to Canada by a man from Cleveland, Ohio. Allen Sidney, a negro who ran a steamboat on the Tennessee River for his master, first learned of Canada from an abolitionist at Florence, Alabama.[61] Until the contest over the peculiar institution had become heated, it was not an uncommon thing for slaves to be sent on errands, or even hired out to residents of the border counties of the free states. Notwithstanding Ohio's political antagonism to slavery from the beginning, there was a "tacit tolerance" of slavery by the people of the state down to about 1835; and "numbers of slaves, as many as two thousand it was sometimes supposed, were hired … from Virginia and Kentucky, chiefly by farmers." Doubtless such persons heard more or less about Canada, and when the agitation against slavery became vehement, they were approached by friends, and many were induced to accept transportation to the Queen's dominions.[62]
Depredations of this sort caused alarm among slaveholders. They sought to deter their chattels from flight by talking freely before them about the rigors of the climate and the poverty of the soil of Canada. Such talk was wasted on the slaves, who were shrewd enough to discern the real meaning of their masters. They were alert to gather all that was said, and interpret it in the light of rumors from other sources. Thus, masters themselves became disseminators of information they meant to withhold. In this and other ways the slaves of the border states heard of Canada. The sale of some of these slaves to the South helps to explain the knowledge of Canada possessed by many blacks in those distant parts. When Mr. Ross visited Vicksburg, Mississippi, he found that "many of these negroes had heard of Canada from the negroes brought from Virginia and the border slave states; but the impression they had was that, Canada being so far away, it would be useless to try to reach it."[63] Notwithstanding the distance, the number of successful escapes from the interior as well as from the border slave states seems to have been sufficient to arouse the suspicion in the minds of Southerners that a secret organization of abolitionists had agents at work in the South running off slaves. This suspicion was brought to light during the trial of Richard Dillingham in Tennessee in 1849.[64] The labors of Mr. Ross several years later gave color to the same notion. These facts help to explain the insistence of the lower Southern states on the passage and strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.
With the growth of a thing so unfavored as was the Underground Road, local conditions must have a great deal to do. The characteristics of small and scattered localities, and even of isolated families, are of the first importance in the consideration of a movement such as this. These little communities were in general the elements out of which the underground system built itself up. The sources of the convictions and confidences that knitted these communities together in defiance of what they considered unjust law can only be learned by the study of local conditions. The incorporation in the Constitution of the compromises concerning slavery doubtless quieted the consciences of many of the early friends of universal liberty. It was only natural, however, that there should be some that would hold such concessions to be sinful, and in violation of the principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence and in the very Preamble of the Constitution itself. These persons would cling tenaciously to their views, and would aid a fugitive slave whenever one would ask protection and help. It is not strange that representatives of this class should be found more frequently among the Quakers than any other sect. In southeastern Pennsylvania and in New Jersey the work of helping slaves to escape was, for the most part, in the hands of Quakers from the beginning. This was true also of Wilmington, Delaware, New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Valley Falls, Rhode Island, as of a number of important centres in western Pennsylvania, and eastern, central and southwestern Ohio, in eastern Indiana, in southern Michigan and in eastern Iowa.
Anti-slavery views prevailed against the first attempts at enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 in Massachusetts, and spread to other localities in the New England states. When the tide of emigration to the Western states set in, settlers from New England were given more frequent occasions to put their principles into practice in their new homes than they had known in the seaboard region. The western portions of New York and Pennsylvania, as well as the neighboring section of Ohio, called the Western Reserve, are dotted over with communities where negroes learned the meaning of Yankee hospitality. Like Joshua R. Giddings, the people of these communities claimed to have borrowed their abolition sentiments from the writings of Jefferson, whose "abolition tract," Giddings said, "was called the Declaration of Independence."[65] In northern Illinois there were many centres of the New England type, though, of course, not all the underground stations in that region were kept by New Englanders.
In a few neighborhoods settlers from the Southern states were helpers. These persons had left the South on account of slavery; they preferred to raise their families away from influences they felt to be harmful; and they pitied the slave. It was easy for them to give shelter to the self-freed negro. In south central Ohio, in a district of four or five counties locally known as the old Chillicothe Presbytery, a number of the early preachers were anti-slavery men from the Southern states. Among the number were John Rankin, of Ripley, James Gilliland, of Red Oak, Jesse Lockhart, of Russellville, Robert B. Dobbins, of Sardinia, Samuel Crothers, of Greenfield, Hugh S. Fullerton, of Chillicothe, and William Dickey, of Ross or Fayette County. The Presbyterian churches over which these men presided became centres of opposition to slavery, and fugitives finding their way into the vicinity of any one of them were likely to receive the needed help.[66] The stations in Bond, Putnam and Bureau counties, Illinois, were kept in part by anti-slavery settlers from the South.
It is a fact worthy of record in this connection that the teachings of the two sects, the Scotch Covenanters and the Wesleyan Methodists, did not exclude the negro from the bonds of Christian brotherhood, and where churches of either denomination existed the Road was likely to be found in active operation. Within the borders of Logan County, Ohio, there were a number of Covenanter homes that received fugitives; and in southern Illinois, between the towns of Chester and Centralia, there was a series of such hospitable places. There were several Wesleyan Methodist stations in Harrison County, Ohio, and with these were intermixed a few of the Covenanter denomination.
It was natural that negro settlements in the free states should be resorted to by fugitive slaves. The colored people of Greenwich, New Jersey, the Stewart Settlement of Jackson County, Ohio, the Upper and Lower Camps, Brown County, Ohio, and the Colored Settlement, Hamilton County, Indiana, were active. The list of towns and cities in which negroes became coworkers with white persons in harboring and concealing runaways is a long one. Oberlin, Portsmouth and Cincinnati, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Boston, Massachusetts, will suffice as examples.
The principles and experience gained by a number of students while attending college in Oberlin did not come amiss later when these young men established themselves in Iowa. Professor L. F. Parker, after describing what was probably the longest line of travel through Iowa for escaped slaves, says: "Along this line Quakers and Oberlin students were the chief namable groups whose houses were open to such travellers more certainly than to white men,"[67] and the Rev. William M. Brooks, a graduate of Oberlin, until recently President of Tabor College, writes: "The stations … in southwestern Iowa were in the region of Civil Bend, where the colony from Oberlin, Ohio, settled which afterwards settled Tabor."[68]
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.