Dear Grinnell:—Uncle Tom says if the roads are not too bad you can look for those fleeces of wool by to-morrow. Send them on to test the market and price, no back charges.

Yours,
Hub.[136]

There were many persons engaged in underground work that did not always take the precaution to veil their communications. Judge Thomas Lee, of the Western Reserve, was one of this class, as the following letter to Mr. Putnam, of Point Harmar, will show:—

Cadiz, Ohio, March 17th, 1847.

Mr. David Putnam,

Dear Sir:—I understand you are a friend to the poor and are willing to obey the heavenly mandate, "Hide the outcasts, betray not him that wandereth." Believing this, and at the request of Stephen Fairfax (who has been permitted in divine providence to enjoy for a few days the kind of liberty which Ohio gives to the man of colour), I would be glad if you could find out and let me know by letter what are the prospects if any and the probable time when, the balance of the family will make the same effort to obtain their inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Their friends who have gone north are very anxious to have them follow, as they think it much better to work for eight or ten dollars per month than to work for nothing.

Yours in behalf of the millions of poor, opprest and downtrodden in our land.

Thomas Lee.

In the conveyance of fugitives from station to station there existed all the variety of method one would expect to find. In the early days of the Underground Road the fugitives were generally men. It was scarcely thought necessary to send a guide with them unless some special reason for so doing existed. They were, therefore, commonly given such directions as they needed and left to their own devices. As the number of refugees increased, and women and children were more frequently seen upon the Road, and pursuit was more common, the practice of transporting fugitives on horseback, or by vehicle, was introduced. The steam railroad was a new means furnished to abolitionists by the progress of the times, and used by them with greater or less frequency as circumstances required, and when the safety of passengers would not be sacrificed.

When fugitive travellers afoot or on horseback found themselves pursued, safety lay in flight, unless indeed the company was large enough, courageous enough, and sufficiently well armed to give battle. The safety of fugitives while travelling by conveyance lay mainly in their concealment, and many were the stratagems employed. Characteristic of the service of the Underground Railroad were the covered wagons, closed carriages and deep-bedded farm-wagons that hid the passengers. There are those living who remember special day-coaches of more peculiar construction. Abram Allen, a Quaker of Oakland, Clinton County, Ohio, had a large three-seated wagon, made for the purpose of carrying fugitives. He called it the Liberator. It was curtained all around, would hold eight or ten persons, and had a mechanism with a bell, invented by Mr. Allen, to record the number of miles travelled.[137] A citizen of Troy, Ohio, a bookbinder by trade, had a large wagon, built about with drawers in such a way as to leave a large hiding-place in the centre of the wagon-bed. As the bookbinder drove through the country he found opportunity to help many a fugitive on his way to Canada.[138] Horace Holt, of Rutland, Meigs County, Ohio, sold reeds to his neighbors in southern Ohio. He had a box-bed wagon with a lid that fastened with a padlock. In this he hauled his supply of reeds; it was well understood by a few that he also hauled fugitive slaves.[139] Joseph Sider, of southern Indiana, found his pedler wagon well adapted to the transportation of slaves from Kentucky plantations.[140] William Still gives instances of negroes being placed in boxes, and shipped as freight by boat, and also by rail, to friends in the North. William Box Peel Jones was boxed in Baltimore and sent to Philadelphia by way of the Ericsson line of steamers, being seventeen hours on the way.[141] Henry Box Brown had the same thrilling and perilous experience. His trip consumed twenty-four hours, during which time he was in the care of the Adams Express Company in transit from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia.[142]

Abolitionists that drove wagons or carriages containing refugees, "conductors" as they came to be called in the terminology of the Railroad service, generally took the precaution to have ostensible reasons for their journeys. They sought to divest their excursions of the air of mystery by seeming to be about legitimate business. Hannah Marsh, of Chester County, Pennsylvania, was in the habit of taking garden produce to the Philadelphia markets to sell; when, therefore, she sometimes used her covered market-wagon, even in daytime, to convey fugitives, she attracted no attention, and made her trips without molestation.[143] Calvin Fairbank abducted the Stanton family, father, mother and six children, from the neighborhood of Covington, Kentucky, by packing them in a load of straw.[144] James W. Torrence, of Northwood, Ohio, together with some of his neighbors exported grain, and sometimes feathers, to Sandusky. These products were generally shipped when there were fugitives to go with the load. As the distance to Sandusky was a hundred and twenty miles, refugees who happened to profit by this arrangement were saved much time and no small amount of risk in getting to their destination.[145] Mr. William I. Bowditch, of Boston, used a two-horse carryall on one occasion to take a single fugitive to Concord.[146] Mr. John Weldon and other abolitionists, of Dwight, Illinois, took negroes to Chicago concealed in wagons loaded with sacks of bran.[147] Levi Coffin, of Cincinnati, Ohio, frequently received large companies for which safe transportation had to be supplied. On one occasion a party of twenty-eight negroes arrived, towards daylight, in the suburbs of Cincinnati, from Boone County, Kentucky, and it was necessary to send them on at once. Accordingly at Friend Coffin's suggestion a number of carriages were procured, formed into a long funeral-like procession and started solemnly on the road to Cumminsville.[148] An almost endless array of incidents similar to these can be given, but enough have been recited to illustrate the caution that prevailed in the transportation of fugitive slaves toward Canada.

The routes were very far from being straight. They are perhaps best described by the word zigzag. The exigencies that determined in what direction an escaping slave should go during any particular part of his journey were, in the nature of the case, always local. The ultimate goal was Canada, but a safe passage was of greater importance than a quick one. When speed would contribute safety the guide would make a long trip with his charge, or perhaps resort to the steam railroad; but under ordinary circumstances, in those regions where the Underground Railroad was most patronized, a guide had almost always a choice between two or more routes; he could, as seemed best at the time, take the right-hand road to one station, or the left-hand road to another. In truth, the underground paths in these regions formed a great and intricate network, and it was in no small measure because the lines forming the meshes of this great system converged and branched again at so many stations that it was almost an impossibility for slave-hunters to trace their negroes through even a single county without finding themselves on the wrong trail. It was a common stratagem in times of special emergency to switch off travellers from one course to another, or to take them back on their track and then, after a few days of waiting, send them forward again. It is, then, proper to say that zigzag was one of the regular devices to blind and throw off pursuit. It served moreover to avoid unfriendly localities. It seems probable that the circuitous land route from Toledo to Detroit was an expedient of this sort, for slave-owners and their agents were often known to be on the lookout along the direct thoroughfare between the places named. The two routes between Millersburgh and Lodi in northern Ohio are explained by the statement that the most direct route, the western one, fell under suspicion for a while, and in the meantime a more circuitous path was followed through Holmesville and Seville.[149]

During the long process by which the slave with the help of friends was being transmuted into the freeman he spent much of his time in concealment. His progress was made in the night-time. When a station was reached he was provided with a hiding-place, and he scarcely left it until his host decided it would be safe for him to continue his journey. The hiding-places the fugitive entered first and last were as dissimilar as can well be imagined. Slaves that crossed the Ohio River at Ripley, and fell into the hands of the Rev. John Rankin, were often concealed in his barn, which is said to have been provided with a secret cellar for use by the slaves when pursuers approached. The barn of Deacon Jirch Platt at Mendon, Illinois, was a haven into which many slaves from Missouri were piloted by way of Quincy. A hazel thicket in Mr. Platt's pasture-lot was sometimes resorted to,[150] as was one of his hayricks that was hollow and had a blind entrance.[151] Joshua R. Giddings, the sturdy anti-slavery Congressman from the Western Reserve, had an out-of-the-way bedroom in one wing of his house at Jefferson, Ohio, that was kept in readiness for fugitive slaves.[152] The attic over the Liberator office in Boston is said to have been a rendezvous for such persons.[153] A station-keeper at Plainfield, Illinois, had a woodpile with a room in the centre for a hiding-place.[154] The Rev. J. Porter, pastor of a Congregational church at Green Bay, Wisconsin, was asked to furnish a place of hiding for a family of fugitives, and at his wife's suggestion he put them in the belfry of his church, where they remained three days before a vessel came by which they could be safely transported to Canada.[155] Mr. James M. Westwater and other citizens of Columbus, Ohio, fitted up an old smoke-house standing on Chestnut Street near Fourth Street as a station of the Underground Railroad.[156] A fugitive reaching Canton, Washington County, Indiana, was secreted for a while in a low place in a thick, dark woods; and afterwards in a rail pen covered with straw.[157] Eli F. Brown, of Amesville, Athens County, Ohio, writes: "I built an addition to my house in which I had a room with its partition in pannels. One pannel could be raised about a half inch and then slid back, so as to permit a man to enter the room. When the pannel was in place it appeared like its fellows.... In the abutment of Zanesville bridge on the Putnam side there was a place of concealment prepared."[158] "Conductors" Levi Coffin, Edward Harwood, and W. H. Brisbane, of Cincinnati, Ohio, had a number of hiding-places for slaves. "One was in the dark cellar of Coffin's store; another was at Mr. Coffin's out-of-the-way residence between Avondale and Walnut Hills; another was a dark sub-cellar under the rear part of Dr. Bailey's residence, corner of Sixth and College Streets."[159] The gallery of the old First Church at Galesburg, Illinois, was utilized as a place of concealment for refugees by certain members of that church.[160] Gabe N. Johnson, a colored man of Ironton, on the Ohio River, sometimes hid fugitives in a coal-bank back of his house.[161] This list of illustrations could be almost indefinitely continued. A sufficient number has been given to show the ingenuity necessarily used to secure safety.

In the transit from station to station some simple disguise was often assumed. Thomas Garrett, a Quaker of Wilmington, Delaware, kept a quantity of garden tools on hand for this purpose. He sometimes gave a man a scythe, rake, or some other implement to carry through town. Having reached a certain bridge on the way to the next station, the pretending laborer concealed his tool under it, as he had been directed, and journeyed on. Later the tool was taken back to Mr. Garrett's to be used for a similar purpose.[162] Valentine Nicholson, a station-keeper at Harveysburg, Warren County, Ohio, concealed the identity of a fugitive, a mulatto, who was known to be pursued, by blacking his face and hands with burnt cork.[163] Slight disguises like these were probably not used as often as more elaborate ones. The Rev. Calvin Fairbank, and John Fairfield, the Virginian, who abducted many slaves from the South, resorted frequently to this means of securing the safety of their followers. Mr. Fairbank tells us that he piloted slave-girls attired in the finery of ladies, men and boys tricked out as gentlemen and the servants of gentlemen; and that sometimes he found it necessary to require his followers to don the garments of the opposite sex.[164] In May, 1843, Mr. Fairbank went to Arkansas for the purpose of rescuing William Minnis from bondage. He found that the slave was a young man of light complexion and prepossessing appearance, and that he closely resembled a gentleman living in the vicinity of Little Rock. Minnis was, therefore, fitted out with the necessary wig, beard and moustache, and clothes like those of his model; he was quickly drilled in the deportment of his assumed rank, and, as the test proved, he sustained himself well in his part. On boarding the boat that was to carry him to freedom he discovered his owner, Mr. Brennan, but so effectual was the slave's make-up that the master failed to penetrate the disguise.[165]