Participants In The Underground Railroad Operations Write About Their Experiences Part 1
Posted on April 28, 2008 - Filed Under Arts and Entertainment
The Underground Railroad was secretly engaged in helping fugitive slaves to reach places of security in the Free states and in Canada for approximately fifty years. In general, the participants in the underground operation were quiet persons, little known outside of the localities where they lived, and were members of a class of people that historians found it difficult to know much about. They were people who lived simple, strenuous lives and who with sincerity recorded what they knew and experienced during the years the Underground Railroad was in operation. They had the characteristics of a deep-seated, moral movement and an undeniable value for historical purposes as was demonstrated in their individual volumes of publications about their experiences with the Underground Railroad.
Throughout this series of articles I will give a brief description of these courageous people and some of their memories of the Underground Railroad Operations. Unfortunate is that full names of these authors were not consistently available in the resource I found, nonetheless, I am certain if you are interested, you can research to find information on each author’s work in more detail.
Also, please visit my web site link in the resource box of each of these articles to read more about the Underground Railroad Operations specific to Baltimore and other various aspects of Baltimore’s history.
Part 1
The author of a volume of 172 pages published in England in 1860 was a Free Negro, who served as a slave-driver in the South for several years, then became a preacher in Ohio, and for twelve years engaged in underground work. After this time he went to Toronto, Canada to minister to colored refugees as a missionary in the service of the American Free Baptist Mission Society. While in England he solicited for money to build a chapel and schoolhouse for his people in Toronto, and was induced to write his book. His range of experience with the underground procedure enabled him to relate at first hand many incidents illustrative of the various phases of its operations, and to give an account of the condition of the fugitive slaves in Canada.
Still’s Underground Railroad Records was a large volume of 780 pages that appeared in 1872. A second edition appeared in 1883. Before the War, Mr. Still was a clerk in the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia. From 1852 to 1860 he served as chairman of the Acting Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia, a body whose special business was to harbor fugitives and help them move towards Canada. Around 1850, Mr. Still began to keep records of the stories he heard from runaways. His book is mainly a compilation of these stories along with some Underground Railroad correspondence.
The Underground Railroad operations carried on in a field of six or seven counties in southeastern Pennsylvania, over routes of which many led to the Quaker City as was recounted in Smedley’s volume of 395 pages published in 1883. The memories and short biographies were gathered by this author from many of the aged participants in the Underground Railroad operations.
Levi Coffin, the reputed president of the Underground Railroad relates his experiences in a book of 732 pages from the time when he began as a youth in North Carolina to direct slaves northward on the path to liberty until the time when after twenty years of service in eastern Indiana and fifteen in Cincinnati, Ohio, he and his coworkers were relieved by the admission of slaves within the lines of the Union forces in the South.
Mr. Coffin was a Quaker of the gentle but firm type depicted by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the character Simeon Halliday, of which he may have been the original. His autobiography is characterized by simplicity and candor and supplied a wealth of information in regards to those branches of the Road with which he was connected.
Pettit’s Sketches was a series of articles printed in the Fredonia (New York) Censor, during the fall of 1868. The articles were collected in 1879 in a book of 174 pages. This author was for many years a “conductor” in southwestern New York. Most of the adventures narrated occurred within his personal knowledge.
John’s From Dixie to Canada is a little volume of 194 pages. Some of his stories were published by him in the Lake Shore Home Magazine during the years of 1883 to 1889 under the heading, “Romances and Realities of the Underground Railroad.” Most of these takes were accumulated by research. The names of operators, towns and so forth are authentic; the writer allowed himself the license of the storyteller instead of restricting himself to the simple recording of the information collected. His investigations gave an acquaintance with the routes of Northeastern Ohio and the adjacent portions of Pennsylvania and New York.
Continued in Part 2
Source: The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom by Wilbur H. Siebert, Associate Professor of European History in Ohio State University, Copyright 1898 by the MacMillan Company
This article is FREE to publish with the resource box.
© 2007 Connie Limon all rights reserved
By: Connie Limon. Visit http://www.charmcitybaltimore.info for more information about the history of Baltimore, Maryland as well as living, working and vacationing in the Charm City.
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