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.