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The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom. Wilbur Henry Siebert
Underground managers who were so indiscreet as to keep a diary or letters for a season, were induced to part with such condemning evidence under the stress of a special danger. Mr. Robert Purvis, of Philadelphia, states that he kept a record of the fugitives that passed through his hands and those of his coworkers in the Quaker City for a long period, till the trepidation of his family after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850 caused him to destroy it.[21] Daniel Gibbons, a Friend, who lived near Columbia in southeastern Pennsylvania, began in 1824 to keep a record of the number of fugitives he aided. He was in the habit of entering in his book the name of the master of each fugitive, the fugitive's own name and his age, and the new name given him. The data thus gathered came in time to form a large volume, but after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law Mr. Gibbons burned this book.[22] William Parker, the colored leader in the famous Christiana case, was found by a friend to have a large number of letters from escaped slaves hidden about his house at the time of the Christiana affair, September 11, 1851, and these fateful documents were quickly destroyed. Had they been discovered by the officers that visited Parker's house, they might have brought disaster upon many persons.[23] Thus, the need of secrecy constantly served to prevent the making of records, or to bring about their early destruction. The written and printed records do give a multitude of unquestioned facts about the Underground Railroad; but when wishing to find out the details of rational management, the methods of business, and the total amount of traffic, we are thrown back on the recollections of living abolitionists as the main source of information; from them the gaps in the real history of the Underground Railroad must be filled, if filled at all.
It is with the aid of such memorials that the present volume has been written. Reminiscences have been gathered by correspondence and by travel from many surviving abolitionists or their families; and recollections of fugitive slave days have been culled from books, newspapers, letters and diaries. During three years of the five years of preparation the author's residence in Ohio afforded him opportunity to visit many places in that state where former employees of the Underground Railroad could be found, and to extend these explorations to southern Michigan, and among the surviving fugitives along the Detroit River in the Province of Ontario. Residence in Massachusetts during the years 1895–1897 has enabled him to secure some interesting information in regard to underground lines in New England. The materials thus collected relate to the following states: Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont, besides a few items concerning North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.
Underground operations practically ceased with the beginning of the Civil War. In view of the lapse of time, the reasons for trusting the credibility of the evidence upon which our knowledge of the Underground Road rests should be stated. Some of the testimony dealt with in this chapter was put in writing during the period of the Road's operation, or at the close of its activity, and, therefore, cannot be easily questioned. But it may be said that a large part of the materials for this history were drawn from written and oral accounts obtained at a much later date; and that these materials, even though the honesty and fidelity of the narrators be granted, are worthy of little credit for historical purposes. Such a criticism would doubtless be just as applied to reminiscences purporting to represent particular events with great detail of narration, but clearly it would lose much of its force when directed against recollections of occurrences that came within the range of the narrator's experience, not once nor twice, but many times with little variation in their main features. It would be difficult to imagine an "old-time" abolitionist, whose faculties are in a fair state of preservation, forgetting that he received fugitives from a certain neighbor or community a few miles away, that he usually stowed them in his garret or his haymow, and that he was in the habit of taking them at night in all kinds of weather to one of several different stations, the managers of which he knew intimately and trusted implicitly. Not only did repetition serve to deepen the general recollections of the average operator, but the strange and romantic character of his unlawful business helped to fix them in his mind. Some special occurrences he is apt to remember with vividness, because they were in some way extraordinary. If it be argued that the surviving abolitionists are now old persons, it should not be forgotten that it is a fact of common observation that old persons ordinarily remember the occurrences of their youth and prime better than events of recent date. The abolitionists, as a class, were people whose remembrances of the ante-bellum days were deepened by the clear definition of their governing principles, the abiding sense of their religious convictions, and the extraordinary conditions, legal and social, under which their acts were performed. The risks these persons ran, the few and scattered friends they had, the concentration of their interests into small compass, because of the disdain of the communities where they lived, have secured to us a source of knowledge, the value of which cannot be lightly questioned. If there be doubt on this point, it must give way before the manner in which statements gathered from different localities during the last five years articulate together, the testimony of different and sometimes widely separated witnesses combining to support one another.[24]
The elucidation by new light of some obscure matter already reported, the verification by a fresh witness of some fact already discovered, gives at once the rule and test of an investigation such as this. Out of many illustrations that might be given, the following are offered. Mr. J. M. Forsyth, of Northwood, Logan County, Ohio, writes under date September 22, 1894: "In Northwood there is a denomination known as Covenanters; among them the runaways were safe. Isaac Patterson has a cave on his place where the fugitives were secreted and fed two or three weeks at a time until the hunt for them was over. Then friends, as hunters, in covered wagons would take them to Sandusky. The highest number taken at one time was seven. The conductors were mostly students from Northwood. All I did was to help get up the team. … "
The Rev. J. S. T. Milligan, of Esther, Pennsylvania, December 5, 1896, writes entirely independently: "In 1849 my brother … and I went … to Logan Co., Ohio, to conduct a grammar school … at a place called Northwood. The school developed into a college under the title of Geneva Hall. J. R. W. Sloane[25] … was elected President and moved to Northwood in 1851. … The region was settled by Covenanters and Seceders, and every house was a home for the wanderers. But there was a cave on the farm of a man by the name of Patterson, absolutely safe and fairly comfortable for fugitives. In one instance thirteen fugitives, after resting in the cave for some days, were taken by the students in two covered wagons to Sandusky, some 90 miles, where I had gone to engage passage for them on the Bay City steamboat across the lake to Malden—where I saw them safely landed on free soil, to their unspeakable joy. Indeed, I thought one old man would have died from the gladness of his heart in being safe in freedom. I went from Belle Centre [near Northwood] by rail, and did not go with the land escort—but from what they told me of their experience, it was often amusing and sometimes thrilling. They were ostensibly a hunting party of 10 or 12 armed men. … The two covered wagons were a 'sanctum sanctorum' into which no mortal was allowed to peep. … The word of command, 'Stand back,' was always respected by those who were unduly intent upon seeing the thirteen deer … brought from the woods of Logan and Hardin counties and being taken to Sandusky."
In the same letter Mr. Milligan corroborates some information secured from the Rev. R. G. Ramsey, of Cadiz, Ohio, August 18, 1892, in regard to an underground route in southern Illinois. Mr. Ramsey related that his father, Robert Ramsey, first engaged in Underground Railroad work at Eden, Randolph County, Illinois, in 1844, and that he carried it on at intervals until the War. "The fugitives," he said, "came up the river to Chester, Illinois, and there they started northeast on the state road, which followed an old Indian trail. The stations were each in a community of Covenanters, … " and existed, according to his account, at Chester, Eden, Oakdale, Nashville and Centralia. "Besides my father," said Mr. Ramsey, "John Hood and two brothers, James B. and Thomas McClurkin, lived in Oakdale, where my father lived during the last thirty-five years of his life. He lived in Eden before this time. … "[26] The Rev. Mr. Milligan writes as follows: "My father removed to Randolph Co., Ill., in 1847, and with Rev. Wm. Sloane … and the Covenanter congregations under their ministry kept a very large depot wide open for slaves escaping from Missouri. Scores at a time came to Sparta [the post-office of the Eden settlement mentioned above]—my father's region, were harbored there, … and finally escorted to Elkhorn [about two miles from Oakdale], the region of Father Sloane, where