14. Contemporaneous and Modern Books on Slavery
Under this heading are brought for convenience several different classes of books on slavery. The first of these classes comprises the three small volumes, published during the interval from 1816 to 1826, in which immediate emancipation was advocated by the Rev. George Bourne, the Rev. James Duncan, and the Rev. John Rankin. Our interest here in the teaching of these men arises primarily from the circumstance that two of them, at least, are known to have done what they could to advance the work of the Underground Railroad, while all of them lived, at the time of the appearance of their books, on or near the border line over which came the trembling fugitive in search of freedom.
Another class is made up of volumes descriptive of slavery. Such are Mrs. Frances A. Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1836-1839, Frederick Law Olmsted's Cotton Kingdom, G. M. Weston's Progress of Slavery in the United States, and a book that has but recently come from the press, Edward Ingle's Southern Sidelights.
In a third class must be grouped such recent monographs as Mrs. Marion G. McDougall's Fugitive Slaves, and Miss Mary Tremaine's Slavery in the District of Columbia. The former has been found to be especially serviceable, not only because of its subject matter, but also because of its numerous and accurate references and its long list of notable fugitive slave cases.
15. Secondary Works
One will seek in vain in the secondary works for an adequate account of the Underground Railroad, or a proper estimate of its importance, whether one looks in the general histories of the United States, such as the works of Von Holst, Schouler, and Rhodes, the more condensed books of which we have an example in Prof. J. W. Burgess's The Middle Period, or the histories of slavery, like Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Greeley's American Conflict, Williams' History of the Negro Race, and Willey's History of the Anti-Slavery Cause in State and Nation. These works are important for their discussions from different points of view of the political forces and constitutional questions involved in the struggle for emancipation, and in general they present descriptions of the famous contested fugitive slave cases and cases of rescue, but they have failed, on account of the small amount of evidence hitherto available, to arrive at a proper view of the political significance of the underground system.
16. Libraries
While the great mass of evidence that has made this volume possible was collected by field work, the author did not neglect to search libraries, both public and private, in the prosecution of his undertaking. He was able to make use of the public libraries of Cincinnati, besides the private library of Major E. C. Dawes of that city, the state library, and the library of Ohio State University at Columbus, the library of C. M. Burton, Esq., of Detroit, Michigan, and during two years' residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was able to avail himself of the splendid collections of anti-slavery books and pamphlets to be found in the Boston Public Library and the library of Harvard University. The materials for the chapter on "Prosecutions of Underground Railroad Men" were gathered in the Harvard Law Library.