There were ardent abolitionists living almost within sight of slave territory that had no scruples about helping slaves across the line and passing them on to freedom. In 1836, Dr. David Nelson, a Virginian, who had freed his slaves and moved to Marion County, Missouri, and had there founded Marion College, was driven into Illinois on account of his anti-slavery views. He settled at Quincy, and soon established the Mission Institute, which was chiefly a school for the education of missionaries. Mr. N. A. Hunt, now eighty-five years old but apparently of clear mind, was a student in Mission Institute in its early years. He relates an incident showing the spirit existing in the school, a spirit that manifested itself a little later in the actions of Messrs Burr, Work and Thompson. His story is that Dr. Nelson came to him one day in the spring of 1839 or 1840, and asked him to go with another student across the Mississippi River and patrol the shore opposite Quincy. The students were to make signals at intervals by tapping stones together, and if their signals were answered they were to help such as needed help by conducting them to a place of safety, a station on the Underground Railroad, sixteen miles east of Quincy. The station could be easily recognized, for it was a red barn. The time chosen for crossing the river was always a Sunday night, a time known to be the best for the persons sometimes found waiting on the other side. This detailing of a watch from the school was regularly done, although with what results is not known.[486]
Among the students attending this Institute in 1841 were James E. Burr and George Thompson. These young men, together with a villager, Alanson Work, arranged with two slaves to convey them from bondage in Missouri. The abductors found themselves surrounded by a crowd of angry Missourians, and were speedily committed to jail in Palmyra. To insure the conviction of the prisoners three indictments were brought against them, one charging them with "stealing slaves, another with attempting to steal them, and the other with intending to make the attempt."[487] Conviction was a foregone conclusion. Work and his companions were pronounced guilty and sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment. These men were not required, however, to serve out their terms. Mr. Work was pardoned after three and a half years on the unjust condition that he return with his wife and children to the State of Connecticut, his former residence. Mr. Burr was released at the end of a little more than four years and six months, and Mr. Thompson after nearly five years' imprisonment. The anti-slavery character of Mission Institute at length brought down upon it the wrath of the Missourians. One winter night a party from Marion County crossed the Mississippi River on the ice, stealthily marched to the Institute, and set it on fire.[488]
In southern Indiana operations similar to those of the students of the Mission Institute were carried on by a supposedly inoffensive pedler of notions, Joseph Sider. With his large convenient wagon Sider traversed some of the border counties of Kentucky, supplying goods to his customers; one of his boxes was reserved for disguises for negroes that wished to cast off the garments of slavery. Sider's method involved the use of his vehicle for long trips to the Ohio River, where the passengers were conveyed by boat to a place of safety, and told to remain concealed until the wagon and team could be transported by ferry the following morning. So simple a plan did not excite suspicion, and served to carry fugitives rapidly forward to some line of underground traffic.[489]
Among those invasions of the South that caused considerable excitement at the time of their occurrence, the cases of Calvin Fairbank, Seth Concklin and John Brown are notable; and accounts of them cannot well be omitted from these pages, even though they may be more or less familiar to the reader. Mr. Calvin Fairbank came of English stock, and was born in Wyoming County, New York, in 1816. His home training as well as his attendance at Oberlin College furnished him with anti-slavery views, but the circumstance to which he traced his hearty hatred of the Southern institution arose by chance, when as a boy he was attending quarterly meeting with his parents. "It happened that my family was assigned," he relates, "to the good, clean home of a pair of escaped slaves. One night after service I sat on the hearthstone before the fire, and listened to the woman's story of sorrow.... My heart wept, my anger was kindled, and antagonism to slavery was fixed upon me."[490] In the spring of 1837 young Fairbank was sent by his father down the Ohio River in charge of a raft of lumber. A little below Wheeling he saw a large, active-looking, black man on the Virginia shore, going to the woods with his axe. He found the woodsman to be a slave, soon gained his confidence, and set him across the river on the raft. A few days later Mr. Fairbank moored his rude craft, and landed on the Kentucky shore opposite the mouth of the Little Miami River. Here he was approached by an old slave-woman, who sought the liberation of her seven children. The matter was easily arranged, and after dark the seven were speedily conveyed across the river.[491]
The rescue of Lewis Hayden and his family was the means of bringing Mr. Fairbank to the penitentiary, while it opened to his friend Hayden an honorable career in New England. Mr. Hayden became a respected citizen of Boston, and helped to organize the Vigilance Committee for the purpose of protecting the refugees that were settling in the city; in course of time he came to serve in the legislature of the State of Massachusetts. His wife, who survived him, made a bequest of an estate of about five thousand dollars to Harvard University to found a scholarship for the benefit of deserving colored students.[492] The story of Hayden's delivery and of his own imprisonment is best told in Mr. Fairbank's words: "Lewis Hayden ... was, when a young man, ... the property of Baxter and Grant, owners of the Brennan House, in Lexington. Hayden's wife, Harriet, and his son, a lad of ten years when I first knew them, were the slaves of Patrick Baine. On a September evening in 1844, accompanied by Miss D. A. Webster, a young Vermont lady, who was associated with me in teaching, I left Lexington with the Haydens, in a hack, crossed the Ohio River on a ferry at nine the next morning, changed horses, and drove to an Underground Railroad depot at Hopkins, Ohio, where we left Hayden and his family.... When Miss Webster and I returned to Lexington, after two days' absence, we were both arrested, charged by their master with helping Hayden's wife and son to escape. We were jointly indicted, but Miss Webster was tried first and sentenced to two years' imprisonment in the penitentiary at Frankfort.... While my case was still pending I learned that the governor was inclined to pardon Miss Webster, but first insisted that I should be tried. When called up for trial in February, 1845, I pleaded guilty, and received a sentence of fifteen years. I served four years and eleven months, and then, August 23, 1849, was released by Governor John J. Crittenden, the able and patriotic man who afterwards saved Kentucky to the Union."[493]
In spite of his incarceration for aiding slaves to escape, and in the face of the heavier penalties laid by the new Fugitive Slave Law, passed shortly after his release from prison, Calvin Fairbank was soon engaged in similar enterprises. He declares, "I resisted its [the law's] execution whenever and wherever possible."[494] A little more than two years after his pardon Mr. Fairbank was again arrested, this time in Indiana, for carrying off Tamar, a young mulatto woman, who was claimed as property by A. L. Shotwell, of Louisville, Kentucky. Without process of law Mr. Fairbank was taken from the State of Indiana to Louisville, where he was tried in February, 1853. He was again sentenced to the state prison for a term of fifteen years, and while there was frequently subjected to the most brutal treatment. Altogether Mr. Fairbank spent seventeen years and four months of his life in prison for abducting slaves; he says that during his second term he received at the hands of prison officials thirty-five thousand stripes.[495] Having served more than twelve years of his second sentence, he was pardoned by acting Governor Richard T. Jacob. It was a singular occurrence that finally enabled Mr. Fairbank to regain his liberty. Among the friends upon whose favor he could rely was the lieutenant-governor of Kentucky, Richard T. Jacob, the son-in-law of Thomas H. Benton, of Missouri. Mr. Jacob was a man of strong anti-slavery tendencies, notwithstanding his political prominence and his private interests as a wealthy planter. The governor, Thomas E. Bramlette, was opposed to extending the executive clemency to so notorious an offender as Mr. Fairbank. Early in 1864 General Speed S. Fry was detailed by President Lincoln to enroll all the negroes of Kentucky, but he came into collision with Governor Bramlette, who sought to prevent General Fry from carrying out his orders. Upon receiving information to this effect the President summoned the executive of Kentucky to Washington to answer to charges; and thereupon Mr. Jacob became acting governor. On his first day in office the new executive of Kentucky was accosted by General Fry with the remark, "Governor, the President thinks it would be well to make this Fairbank's day." On the morning following, the prisoner received a full and free pardon.[496]
Mr. Fairbank gives many interesting devices that he employed in his work to throw off pursuit. "Forty-seven slaves I guided toward the north star, in violation of the state codes of Virginia and Kentucky. I piloted them through the forests, mostly by night; girls, fair and white, dressed as ladies; men and boys, as gentlemen, or servants; men in women's clothes, and women in men's clothes; boys dressed as girls, and girls as boys; on foot or on horseback, in buggies, carriages, common wagons, in and under loads of hay, straw, old furniture, boxes and bags; crossing the Jordan of the slave, swimming or wading chin deep; or in boats, or skiffs; on rafts, and often on a pine log. And I never suffered one to be recaptured."[497]
About 1850, Seth Concklin, a resident of Philadelphia, learned of the remarkable escape of Peter Still from Alabama to the Quaker City. Here the runaway was most happily favored in finding friends. William Still, his brother, from whom he had been separated by kidnappers long years before, was discovered almost immediately in the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society; and Seth Concklin soon proffered himself as an agent to go into the South and bring away Peter Still's family. The fugitive himself first visited Alabama to see what could be done for his wife and children; but failing to accomplish anything he gratefully accepted the offer of the daring Philadelphian. Mr. Concklin expected to assume the character of a slave-owner and bring the Stills away as his servants; he found, however, that the steamboats on the Tennessee River were too irregular to be depended on. He therefore returned north to Indiana, and arranged for the escape of the slave family across that state to Canada. The story of his second attempt at the South has a tragic ending, notwithstanding its favorable beginning. Having made a safe start and a long journey of seven days and nights in a rowboat the whole party was captured in southwestern Indiana. A letter from the Rev. N. R. Johnston to William Still, written soon after the catastrophe, gives the following account of the affair: "On last Tuesday I mailed a letter to you, written by Seth Concklin. I presume you have received that letter. It gave an account of the rescue of the family of your brother. If that is the last news you have had from them I have very painful intelligence for you. They passed on (north) from near Princeton, where I saw them.... I think twenty-three miles above Vincennes, Ind., they were seized by a party of men, and lodged in jail. Telegraphic despatches were sent all through the South. I have since learned that the marshal of Evansville received a despatch from Tuscumbia to look out for them. By some means, he and the master, so says report, went to Vincennes and claimed the fugitives, chained Mr. Concklin, and hurried all off...."[498] In a postscript, the same letter gave the rumor of Seth Concklin's escape from the boat on which he was being carried South; but the newspapers brought reports of a different nature. Their statements represented that the man "Miller"—that is, Concklin—"was found drowned, with his hands and feet in chains and his skull fractured."[499] The version of the tragedy given by the claimant of the fugitives, McKiernon, was as follows: "Some time last march a white man by the name of Miller appeared in the nabourhood and abducted the above negroes, was caught at vincanes, Indi. with said negroes and was thare convicted of steling and remanded back to Ala. to Abide the penalty of the law and on his return met his Just reward by getting drowned at the mouth of cumberland River on the Ohio in attempting to make his escape."[500] Just how Concklin met his death will probably always remain a mystery. McKiernon's letter offered terms for the purchase of the poor slaves, but they were so exorbitant that they could not be accepted. Besides, it was not deemed proper to jeopardize the life of another agent on a mission so dangerous.
It is well known that John Brown aided fugitive slaves whenever the opportunity occurred, as did his Puritan-bred father before him. We have no record, however, of his abducting slaves from the South except in the case of his famous raid into Missouri in 1858. This exploit has a peculiar interest for us, not only as one of the most notable abductions, but as being, in a special way, the prelude of that great plan in behalf of the enslaved that he sought to carry out at Harper's Ferry. After Captain Brown's return from the Eastern states to Kansas in 1858, he and his men encamped for a few days at Bain's Fort. While here, Brown was appealed to by a slave, Jim Daniels, the chattel of one James Lawrence, of Missouri. Daniels had heard of Captain Brown, and, securing a permit to go about and sell brooms, had used it in making his way to Brown's camp.[501] His prayer was "For help to get away," because he was soon to be sold, together with his wife, two children and a negro man.[502] Such a supplication could not be made in vain to John Brown. On the following night (December 20) Brown's raid into Missouri was made. Brown himself gives the account of it:[503] "Two small companies were made up to go to Missouri and forcibly liberate the five slaves, together with other slaves. One of these companies I assumed to direct. We proceeded to the place, surrounded the buildings, liberated the slaves, and also took certain property supposed to belong to the estate.