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Volume collects lost stories of underground railroad
Andrea
Lynn, Humanities Editor
217-333-2177; andreal@illinois.edu
2/13/04
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
Long-lost stories about one of the most complex, secretive, dangerous
and successful collaborations among black freemen, slaves and white
abolitionists are told in a new book, “Fleeing for Freedom: Stories
of the Underground Railroad” (Ivan R. Dee).
The editors of the book, George and Willene Hendrick, say they drew
from the best accounts ever written by abolitionist “conductors”
who helped fugitive slave “passengers” escape to freedom
on the Underground Railroad in the 30 years before the Civil War.
The book brings together for the first time under one cover stories
from the voluminous writings of the two major chroniclers of the Underground
Railroad: Levi Coffin, a Quaker abolitionist who worked in the Midwest,
and William Still, a free black man – and a son of slaves, one
of 18 children – who served as secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance
Committee.
Known by many names, including the “Liberty Line,” the Underground
Railroad never literally operated underground, nor was it a railroad.
Yet over three decades, and against all odds, the abolitionists’
ingenious transportation network of conductors, stations and depots,
ticket agents and station masters managed to bring tens of thousands
of
slaves – its desperate passengers – to freedom in the North
and in Canada.
To keep the constantly changing network running, abolitionists recruited
hundreds of helpers – guides and entire families who would hide
fugitives under their roofs. Abolitionists designed untold numbers of
escape routes by means of roads, rails and rivers, often having to change
those routes at a moment’s notice. And they employed various modes
of transportation to move fugitives to freedom, including horses, buggies
and farm wagons, train baggage cars, riverboats and domestic ocean-going
vessels.
To be sure, fugitives also walked great distances following the North
Star, and then once in the North, from one safe house to another. With
authorities on their heels, they sometimes had to be hidden between
mattresses or sacks of grain or in false wells.
Throughout the time that abolitionists – including their wives
and often children – engaged in Underground Railroad activities,
slavery was legal in the United States, and they and other abolitionists,
as well as the runaway slaves, were in violation of state and federal
laws.
The plight of escaped slaves worsened with the passage of the Fugitive
Slave Act of 1850, the Hendricks wrote. This act placed fugitives in
free states in imminent danger, and made it easier for the master to
regain his fugitive “property.” If a judge so ordered, the
captured fugitive was returned to slavery in the South.
“U.S. marshals and deputies were charged to execute that return
or face a fine of $1,000,” the Hendricks wrote. “The 1850
law also specified that ‘all good citizens’ could be ‘commanded
to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution’ of the
act.”
It is not surprising, therefore, that most abolitionist “conductors”
refused to reveal their routes, their safe-houses, their methods of
operation or their journal notes on the grounds that doing so was far
too risky for both themselves and the fugitives.
Coffin and Still, on the other hand, kept extensive notes on their activities
for the underground network, and chronicled them in two 700-page memoirs.
The memoirs were published in the 1870s, but were largely forgotten
“in part because of their daunting length,” said George
Hendrick, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Illinois. The Hendricks searched for the authors’
manuscripts and notebooks, but never found them.
The Coffin and Still selections in “Fleeing for Freedom”
are rich not only because they include narrative histories of slaves
and first-hand accounts of the strategies, tactics, heartbreak and dangers
of the Underground Railroad, but also because they include remarkable
documents of the era, including court proceedings, letters of gratitude
from freed slaves and newspaper articles and advertisements.
The advertisements largely consisted of slave owners’ notices
– descriptions of their runaway slaves and the rewards for their
capture. One notice, dated Oct. 25, 1857, and posted by the Rev. Levi
Traverse in the Cambridge Democrat, read:
“$300 REWARD. – Ran away from the subscriber, from the neighborhood
of Town Point, on Saturday night, the 24th inst., my negro man, AARON
CORNISH, about 35 years old. He is about five feet ten inches high,
black, good-looking, rather pleasant countenance, and carries himself
with a confident manner. He went off with his wife, DAFFNEY, a negro
woman belonging to Reuben E. Phillips. I will give the above reward
if taken out of the country, and $200 if taken in the country; in either
case to be lodged in Cambridge Jail.”
Although it was forbidden to teach slaves to read and write, those restrictions
were sometimes circumvented, allowing some slaves to become literate.
One particularly poignant letter William Still received from a freed
slave, written on June 9, 1858, in Syracuse, N.Y., read, in part: “Dear
Sir: – One of your Underground R.R. Passengers Drop you these
few Lines to let you see that he have not forgoten you one who have
Done so much for him well sir I am still in Syracuse, well in regard
to what I am Doing for a Living I no you would like to hear, I am in
the Painting Business, and have as much at that as I can do…
“I have an idea sir, next winter iff I can this summer make Enough
to Pay Expenses, to goo to that school at McGrowville & spend my
winter their. I am going sir to try to Prepair myself for a Lectuer,
I am going sir By the Help of god to try and Do something for the Caus
to help my Poor Breathern that are suffering under the yoke.
“Do give my Respect to Mrs Stills & Perticular to Miss Julia
Kelly…. I am in great hast you must excuse my short letter. I
hope these few Lines may fine you as they Leave me quite well. It will
afford me much Pleasure to hear from you. Yours Truly, WILLIAM COOPER.”
In their introduction to the book, the Hendricks trace the growth of
the Underground Railroad movement in the United States, offer a biographical
account of Coffin and Still and include an annotated bibliography of
some of the most useful accounts of the Underground Railroad.
Among the larger-than-life stories they included are those of:
• Fugitive Lear Green, 18, from Baltimore, who had herself shipped to
Philadelphia in a steamer trunk; she spent more than 18 hours in the
trunk on the deck of an Erricson Line steamer, “hungering and
thirsting for liberty”;
• Fugitives William and Ellen Craft. Ellen, of fair skin and dressed as
a sickly young white planter, and her husband, William, masquerading
as her servant, staged a daring escape in 1848 from Georgia, dodging
a string of close calls en route to freedom, first in Boston, and later
in England, where they engaged in abolitionist activities;
• Fugitive Henry “Box” Brown, a skilled worker and inventive
mind who, after his wife and children were sold away, contrived to escape
by having himself sent overland in a small sealed wooden box. He endured
much of his journey from Richmond, Va., to Philadelphia upside down
in his box and resting on his head; his ordeal lasted 26 hours. Brown
later became something of an entrepreneur and showman in England, touring
with a panorama called “The Mirror of Slavery”;
• Fugitive Eliza Harris, a slave from Kentucky, whose harrowing escape
to freedom by foot over, and sometimes in, the frozen Ohio River –
with her child, a 2-year old, in her arms – was immortalized by
Harriet Beecher Stowe in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
• White Southern abolitionist John Fairfield, whose daring, heroic and
often controversial deeds brought hundreds of Virginia slaves to freedom
in Canada. Fairfield’s specialty was to unite husbands and wives,
parents and children, who had been separated.
Coffin, a devout Quaker, was highly critical of Fairfield’s ways,
which sometimes included violence, and occasionally murder, but the
chronicler’s last words on Fairfield read: “With all his
faults and misguided impulses, and wicked ways, he was a brave man;
he never betrayed a trust that was reposed in him, and he was a true
friend to the oppressed and suffering slave.”
Previous books by the Hendricks include “The Creole Mutiny: A
Tale of Revolt Aboard a Slave Ship,” “Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl and A True Tale of Slavery” and “Two Slave
Rebellions at Sea.” They also have published “Selected Poems
of Carl Sandburg,” Sandburg’s “Poems for the People”
and “Billy Sunday and Other Poems,” plus books on Katherine
Anne Porter, Hiram Rutherford, Henry Salt and Ham Jones.
The Hendricks are now working on a book about civil disobedience and
African Americans, which begins with black sit-ins in the 1840s in the
northern United States, then moves to civil disobedience and Thoreau,
Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
