The people of Scotch and Scotch-Irish descent were naturally liberty loving, and seem to have given hearty support to the anti-slavery cause in whatever form it presented itself to them. The small number of Scotch communities in Morgan and Logan counties, Ohio, and in Randolph and Washington counties, Illinois, were centres of underground service.
The secret work of the English, Irish and German settlers cannot be so readily localized. In various places a single German, Irishman, or Englishman is known to have aided escaped slaves in coöperation with a few other persons of different nationality, but so far as known there were no groups made up of representatives of one or another of these races engaged in such enterprises. At Toledo, Ohio, the company of helpers comprised Congressman James M. Ashley, a Pennsylvanian by birth; Richard Mott, a Quaker; James Conlisk, an Irishman; William H. Merritt, a negro; and several others.[271] Lyman Goodnow, an operator of Waukesha, Wisconsin, says he was told that "in cases of emergency the Germans were next best to Quakers for protection."[272] Two German companies from Massachusetts enlisted for the War only when promised that they should not be required to restore runaways to their owners.[273]
Some religious communities and church societies were conservators of abolition ideas. The Quakers deserve, in this work, to be placed before all other denominations because of their general acceptance and advocacy of anti-slavery doctrines when the system of slavery had no other opponents. From the time of George Fox until the last traces of the evil were swept from the English-speaking world many Quakers bore a steadfast testimony against it.[274] Fox reminded slaveholders that if they were in their slaves' places they would consider it "very great bondage and cruelty," and he urged upon the Friends in America to preach the gospel to the enslaved blacks. In 1688 German Friends at Germantown, Pennsylvania, made an official protest "against the traffic in the bodies of men and the treatment of men as cattle." By 1772 New England Friends began to disown (expel) members for failing to manumit their slaves; and four years later both the Philadelphia and the New York yearly meetings made slaveholding a disownable offence. A similar step was taken by the Baltimore Yearly Meeting in 1777; and meetings in Virginia were directed, in 1784, to disown those that refused to emancipate their slaves.[275] Owing to obstacles in the way of setting slaves free in North Carolina, a committee of Quakers of that state was appointed in 1822 to examine the laws of some of the free states respecting the admission of people of color therein. In 1823 the committee reported that there was "nothing in the laws of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to prevent the introduction of people of color into those states, and agents were instructed to remove slaves placed in their care as fast as they were willing to go." These facts show the sentiment that prevailed in the Society of Friends. Many Southern Quakers moved to the North on account of their hatred of slavery, and established such important centres of underground work as Springboro and Salem, Ohio, and Spiceland and New Garden, Indiana. Quakers in New Bedford and Lynn, Massachusetts, and Valley Falls, Rhode Island, engaged in the service. The same class of people in Maryland coöperated with members of their society in the vicinity of Philadelphia. The existence of numerous Underground Railroad centres in southeastern Pennsylvania and in eastern Indiana is explained by the fact that a large number of Quakers dwelt in those regions.
The Methodists began to take action against slavery in 1780. At an informal conference held at Baltimore in that year the subject was presented in the form of a "Question,—Ought not this conference to require those travelling preachers who hold slaves to give promises to set them free?" The answer given was in the affirmative. Concerning the membership the language adopted was as follows: "We pass our disapprobation on all our friends who keep slaves; and advise their freedom." Under the influence of Wesleyan preachers, it is said, not a few cases of emancipation occurred. At a conference in 1785, however, it was decided to "suspend the execution of the minute on slavery till the deliberations of a future conference...." Four years later a clause appeared in the Discipline, by whose authority is not known, prohibiting "The buying or selling the bodies or souls of men, women, or children, with an intention to enslave them." This provision evidently referred to the African slave-trade. In 1816 the General Conference adopted a resolution that "no slaveholder shall be eligible to any official station in our Church hereafter, where the laws of the state in which he lives will admit of emancipation, and permit the liberated slave to enjoy freedom." Later there seems to have been a disposition on the part of the church authorities to suppress the agitation of the slavery question, but it can scarcely be doubted that the well-known views of the Wesleys and of Whitfield remained for some at least the standard of right opinion, and that their declarations formed for these the rule of action. In 1842 a secession from the church took place, chiefly if not altogether on account of the question of slavery, and a number of abolitionist members of the uncompromising type founded a new church organization, which they called the "Wesleyan Methodist Connection of America." Slave-holders were excluded from fellowship in this body. Within two or three years the new organization had drawn away twenty thousand members from the old.[276] In 1844 a much larger secession took place on the same question, the occasion being the institution of proceedings before the General Conference against the Rev. James O. Andrew, D.D., a slave-holding bishop of the South. This so aggravated the Methodist Episcopal societies in the slave states that they withdrew and formed the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Among the members of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection and of the older society of the North there were a number of zealous underground operators. Indeed, it came to be said of the Wesleyans, as of the Quakers, that almost every neighborhood where a few of them lived was likely to be a station of the secret Road to Canada. It is probable that some of the Wesleyans at Wilmington, Ohio, coöperated with Quakers at that point. In Urbana, Ohio, there were Methodists of the two divisions engaged.[277] Service was also performed by Wesleyans at Tippecanoe, Deersville and Rocky Fort in Tuscarawas County,[278] and at Piqua, Miami County, Ohio.[279] In Iowa a number of Methodist ministers were engaged in the work.[280]
The third sect to which a considerable proportion of underground operators belonged was Calvinistic in its creed. All the various wings of Presbyterianism seem to have had representatives in this class of anti-slavery people. The sinfulness of slavery was a proposition that found uncompromising advocates among the Presbyterian ministers of the South in the early part of this century. In 1804 the Rev. James Gilliland removed from South Carolina to Brown County, Ohio, because he had been enjoined by his presbytery and synod "to be silent in the pulpit on the subject of the emancipation of the African."[281] Other ministers of prominence, like Thomas D. Baird, David Nelson and John Rankin, left the South because they were not free to speak against slavery. In 1818 the Presbyterian Church declared the system "inconsistent with the law of God and totally irreconcilable with the gospel of Christ." This teaching was afterwards departed from in 1845 when the Assembly confined its protest to admitting rather mildly that there was "evil connected with slavery," and declining to countenance "the traffic in slaves for the sake of gain; the separation of husbands and wives, parents and children, for the sake of filthy lucre or the convenience of the master; or cruel treatment of slaves in any respect." The dissatisfaction caused by this evident compromise led to the formation of a new church in 1847 by the "New School" Presbytery of Ripley, Ohio, and a part of the "Old School" Presbytery of Mahoning, Pennsylvania. This organization was called the Free Church, and by 1860 had extended as far west as Iowa.[282] It is not strange that the region in Ohio where the Free Presbyterian Church was founded was plentifully dotted with stations of the Underground Railroad, and that the house of the Rev. John Rankin, who was the leader of the movement, was known far and wide as a place of refuge for the fugitive slave.[283] At Savannah, Ashland County, Iberia, Morrow County, and a point near Millersburgh, Holmes County, Ohio, the work is associated with Free Presbyterian societies once existing in those neighborhoods.[284] In the northern part of Adams County, as also in the northern part of Logan County, Ohio, fugitives were received into the homes of Covenanters. Galesburg, Illinois, with its college was founded in 1837 by Presbyterians and Congregationalists, who united to form one religious society under the name of the "Presbyterian Church of Galesburg." Opposition to slavery was one of the conditions of membership in this organization from the beginning. This intense anti-slavery feeling caused the church to withdraw from the presbytery in 1855.[285] From the starting of the colony until the time of the War fugitives from Missouri were conducted thither with the certainty of obtaining protection. Thus Galesburg became, probably, the principal underground station in Illinois.[286] Joseph S. White, of New Castle, in western Pennsylvania, notes the circumstance that all the men with whom he acted in underground enterprises were Presbyterians.[287]
The religious centre in Ohio most renowned for the aid of refugees was the Congregational colony and college at Oberlin. The acquisition of a large anti-slavery contingent from Lane Seminary in 1835 caused the college to be known from that time on as a "hotbed of abolitionism." Fugitives were directed thither from points more or less remote, and during the period from 1835 to 1860 Oberlin was a busy station,[288] receiving passengers from at least five converging lines.[289] So notorious did the place become that a guide-board in the form of a fugitive running in the direction of the town was set up by the authorities on the Middle Ridge road, six miles north of Oberlin, and the sign of a tavern, four miles away, "was ornamented on its Oberlin face with a representation of a fugitive slave pursued by a tiger."[290] On account of the persistent ignoring of the law against harboring slaves by those connected with the institution, the existence of the college was put in jeopardy. Ex-President Fairchild relates that, "A Democratic legislature at different times agitated the question of repealing the college charter. The fourth and last attempt was made in 1843, when the bill for repeal was indefinitely postponed in the House by a vote of thirty-six to twenty-nine."[291] The anti-slavery influence of Oberlin went abroad with its students. Ex-President W. M. Brooks, of Tabor College, Iowa, a graduate of Oberlin, says, "The stations on the Underground Railroad in southwestern Iowa were in the region of Civil Bend, where the colony from Oberlin, Ohio, settled, which afterwards settled Tabor.... From this point (Civil Bend, now Percival) fugitives were brought to Tabor after 1852; here the entire population was in sympathy with the escaped fugitives; ... there was scarcely a man in the community who was not ready to do anything that was needed to help fugitives on their way to Canada."[292] The families that founded Tabor were "almost all of them Congregationalists."[293] Professor L. F. Parker of Grinnell, Iowa, names Oberlin students in connection with Quakers as the chief groups in Iowa whose houses were open to fugitives.[294] Grinnell itself was first settled by people that were mainly Congregationalists.[295] From the time of its foundation (1854) it was an anti-slavery centre, "well known and eagerly sought by the few runaways who came from the meagre settlements southwest ... in Missouri."[296]
There were, of course, members of other denominations that befriended the slave; thus, it is known that the Unitarian Seminary at Meadville, Pennsylvania, was a centre of underground work,[297] but, in general, the lack of information concerning the church connections of many of the company of persons with whom this chapter deals prevents the drawing of any inference as to whether these individuals acted independently or in conjunction with little bands of persons of their own faith.
There seems to have been no open appeal made to church organizations for help in behalf of fugitives except in Massachusetts. In 1851, and again in 1854, the Vigilance Committee of Boston deemed it wise to send out circulars to the clergymen of the commonwealth, requesting that contributions be taken by them to be applied in mitigation of the misery caused by the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law. The boldness and originality of such an appeal, and more especially the evident purpose of its framers to create sentiment by this means among the religious societies, entitle it to consideration. The first circular was sent out soon after the enactment of the odious law, and the second soon after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The results secured by the two circulars will be seen in the following letter from Francis Jackson, of Boston, to his fellow-townsmen and co-worker, the Rev. Theodore Parker.
Boston, Aug. 27, 1854.
Theodore Parker:
Dear Friend,—The contributions of the churches in behalf of the fugitive slaves I think have about all come in. I herewith inclose you a schedule thereof, amounting in all to about $800, being but little more than half as much as they contributed in 1851.
The Mass. Register published in January, 1854, states the number of Religious Societies to be 1,547 (made up of 471 Orthodox, 270 Methodist, and all others 239). We sent circulars to the whole 1,547; only 78 of them have responded—say 1 in 20—from 130 Universalist societies, nothing, from 43 Episcopal $4, and 20 Friends $27—the Baptists—four times as many of these societies have given now as gave in 1851, this may be because Brynes was a Baptist minister.
The average amount contributed by 77 societies (deducting Frothingham of Salem) is $10 each; the 28th Congregationalist Church in this city did not take up a contribution, nevertheless, individual members thereof subscribed upwards of $300; they being infidel have not been reckoned with the churches.
Of the cities and large towns scarce any have contributed. Of the 90 and 9 in Boston all have gone astray but 2—I have not heard of our circular being read in one of them; still it may have been. Those societies who have contributed, I judge were least able to do so.
Francis Jackson.[298]