The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A comprehensive history

by Wilbur Henry Siebert

The influence of the Underground Road in spreading abroad an abiding anti-slavery sentiment was, of course, greatly restricted by the caution its operators had to observe to keep themselves and their protégés out of trouble. The deviating secret routes of the great system were developed in response to the need of passengers that were in constant danger of pursuit. It is this fact of the pursuit of runaways into various communities where they were supposed to be in hiding, together with the harsh scenes enacted by hireling slave-catchers in raiding some station of the Underground Road, that gave to the operations of the Road that publicity necessary to make converts to the anti-slavery cause. During the earlier years of the Road's development the pursuit of runaways was not so common as it came to be after 1840, and later, after the passage of the second Fugitive Slave Law in 1850; but cases are recorded, as already noted, in 1793 in Boston, 1804 in eastern Pennsylvania, 1818 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. These are but illustrations of a class of early cases that brought the question of slavery home to many Northern communities with such force as could not have been done in any other way. These cases, like the numerous cases of kidnapping that occurred during the same period, contributed not a little to keep alive a sentiment that was steadily opposed to slavery, and that expressed and strengthened itself in the practice of harboring and protecting fugitives. The great effect upon public opinion of these cases, and such as these, appears from the sad affair of Margaret Garner, a slave-woman who escaped from Boone County, Kentucky, late in January, 1856, and found shelter with her four children in the house of a colored man near Cincinnati, Ohio. Rather than see her offspring doomed to the fate from which she had hoped to save them, she nerved herself to accomplish their death. While her master, successful in his pursuit, was preparing to take them back across the river, she began the work of butchery by killing her favorite child. Before she could finish her awful task she was interrupted and put in prison. The efforts to prevent her return to Southern bondage proved unavailing, and she was at length delivered to her master, together with the children she had meant to kill. President R. B. Hayes, who was practising law in Cincinnati at the time, and lived on a pro-slavery street, told Professor James Monroe, of Oberlin College, that the tragedy converted "the whole street," and that the day after the murder "a leader among his pro-slavery neighbors" called at his house, and declared with great fervor, "Mr. Hayes, hereafter I am with you. From this time forward, I will not only be a black Republican, but I will be a damned abolitionist!"[886]

That the doctrine of immediate abolition should find expression during the years in which the underground movement was in its initial stage of development, is a fact the importance of which should be given due recognition in tracing the growth of anti-slavery sentiment to 1830, and in showing thus what was the preparation of the North for the advent of Garrison and his followers, and for the party movements in opposition to slavery. It is surely worthy of remark in this connection that, of the three men that promulgated the idea of immediate abolition before 1830, one published a book, containing, besides other things, an argument in support of the assistance rendered to fugitive slaves, while another was known both in Ohio and in the Southern states as an intrepid underground operator.

Of the trio the first in point of time as also in pungency of statement was the Rev. George Bourne, who went to live in Virginia about 1809 after several years residence in Maryland. Mr. Bourne's acquaintance with slavery impressed him deeply with the evils of the system, and he accordingly felt constrained to preach and also to publish some vehement protests against it. For this he was persecuted and driven from Virginia, and, like a hunted slave, he found his way in the night into Pennsylvania, where he settled with his family. Among his writings is a small volume entitled The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, published in 1816 and addressed to all that professed to be members of Christian churches. In it the author vigorously and repeatedly urged the "immediate and total abolition" of slavery, and warned his contemporaries of the consequences of continuing the system until by its growth it should endanger the Union. He could discover no palliative suitable to the evil. "The system is so entirely corrupt," he said, "that it admits of no cure but by a total and immediate abolition. For a gradual emancipation is a virtual recognition of the right, and establishes the rectitude of the practice. If it be just for one moment, it is hallowed forever; and if it be inequitable, not a day should it be tolerated."[887]

Eight years after the appearance of the book containing these uncompromising views, a treatise was published at the town of Vevay on the Ohio River in southeastern Indiana by the Rev. James Duncan. This small work was entitled A Treatise on Slavery, in which is shown forth the Evil of Slaveholding, both from the Light of Nature and Divine Revelation. The purpose of the work as set forth by the author was to persuade all slaveholders that they were "guilty of a crime, not only of the highest aggravation, but one that, if persisted in," would "inevitably lead them to perdition."[888] He therefore assailed the principle of slavery, denying the argument admitted by some of the apologists for slavery among his contemporaries, namely, "that the emancipation of slaves need not be sudden, but gradual, lest the possessors of them should be too much impoverished, and lest the free inhabitants might be exposed to danger, if the blacks were all liberated at once." This doctrine of the inexpediency of immediate abolition Mr. Duncan denied, taking the position that such excuses would "go to justify the practice of slaveholding, because the only motive that men can have to practise slavery is that it may be a means of preventing poverty and other penal evils. If the fear of poverty or any penal sufferings will exculpate the possessors of slaves from blame for a few months or years, it will do it for life; and if some may be lawfully held to labor without wages, all may be held the same way; and if the principle of slavery is morally wrong, it ought not to be practised to avoid any penal evil, but if just, even the cruel treatment of slaves would not condemn the practice."[889] He maintained that, although the different sections of the country were not equally guilty of the sins of slaveholding, yet the nation as a whole was responsible for the evil,—on account of the number in the free states that were friendly to slavery, on account also of the advocacy by Northern representatives of the policy of slavery extension, and, finally, on account of the slack zeal of some of those inimical to the institution.[890] He proposed that Christians should have no church fellowship with slaveholders; he urged political action against slavery; and he supplemented the assertion that it was the duty of slaves to escape if they could, by the statement that it was impossible for any one to hinder or prevent their escape without flying in the face of the moral law.[891] As regards gradualism, which was practised in some states, he said: "If it is lawful to hold a man in bondage until he is twenty-eight years of age, it must be equally lawful to hold him to the day of his death; and if it is sinful to hold him to the day of his death, it must partake of the same species of crime to hold him until he is twenty-eight."[892] The arguments in support of his position he based largely upon the Decalogue, the Golden Rule and other scriptural injunctions, as well as upon the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.[893] Underground operators always justified themselves on these grounds; and their motives in joining the Liberty and Free Soil parties later—as many of them did—appear not to have been other than the motives of Bourne and Duncan in advocating political action against slavery.

The last member of the trio who complained of delay in granting freedom to the enslaved was the Rev. John Rankin, the pastor of a Presbyterian church in the town of Ripley on the Ohio River in southwestern Ohio. Long residence in Tennessee and Kentucky had filled him with hatred of slavery, and for this hatred he gave his reasons in a series of thirteen vigorous letters addressed to his brother Thomas, a merchant at Middlebrook, Augusta County, Virginia, who had recently become a slave-owner. The letters were written in 1824, and were collected in a little volume in 1826. In the preface, Mr. Rankin said that the safety of the government and the happiness of its subjects depended upon the extermination of slavery,[894] and in the letters themselves he attacked the system of American slavery in unmistakable language. In principle he stood clearly with Bourne and Duncan, as he afterwards came to the support of Garrison, although he did not use the words "immediate abolition." He held that "Avarice tends to enslave, but justice requires emancipation."[895] He heard with impatience the excuse for continued slaveholding that freedom would ruin the blacks because they were not capable of doing for themselves, and must, therefore, either all starve or steal. With sarcasm he exclaimed, "Immaculate tenderness! Astonishing sympathy! But what is to be dreaded more than such tenderness and sympathy? Who would wish to have them exercised upon himself?... And have not many of those [slaves] who have been emancipated in America become wealthy and good citizens?... We are commanded to 'do justly and love mercy,' and this we ought to do without delay, and leave the consequences attending it to the control of Him who gave the command."[896] It has been noted in another place that Mr. Rankin was for years an active agent of the Underground Railroad, in association with a number of abolitionists of his neighborhood, among whom he was a recognized leader.[897]

REV. JOHN RANKIN.
(From a bust by Ellen Rankin Copp, of Chicago, Illinois.)

The idea has somehow gained credence in the general accounts of the anti-slavery movement that the Garrisonian movement was one that could scarcely be said to have had precursors in the earlier agitation; and the pre-Garrison abolitionists have been thought of, apparently, as marked by mild philanthropy, adherence to law and tolerance. It has been supposed that an interval of inactivity followed upon the earlier movements, and that the later movement was thus a thing apart, radically different in its character from anything that had gone before. In view of the evidence brought together in this volume it is perhaps not too much to say that a real continuity of development is traceable through the period with which we have had to do, and that many little communities throughout the country, under the influences always at work, had germinated the idea of immediate abolition, in support of which texts were easily found in the Bible; and that thus the way had been prepared for the anti-slavery ideas and activities of 1830 and the subsequent years. Mr. Garrison himself "confessed his indebtedness for his views" of slavery to Bourne's The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable, next after the Bible itself,[898] and in Number 17 of the first volume of the Liberator appears an extract quoted from Bourne's work.[899] It is certain that Garrison was familiar with the work as early as September 13, 1830,[900] and he may have been so earlier. He arrived at the doctrine during the summer of 1829, before his association with Lundy at Baltimore.[901] It cannot be determined when Garrison first became acquainted with the Letters on Slavery of the Rev. John Rankin, but they seem to have had a wide circulation, for about the year 1825 they had fallen into the hands of the Rev. Samuel J. May, living at the time in Brooklyn, Connecticut, and he had read them with interest.[902] In the second volume of the Liberator Garrison republished these letters, and in after years, on more than one occasion, he acknowledged himself the "disciple" of their author.[903]

The outspoken courage characteristic of the new phase into which the anti-slavery cause passed in 1830 helped to increase the resistance made in the North to the law for the rendition of fugitive slaves. The sympathy with the slave now became vocal in various centres, and made itself heard among the blacks of the South through the passionate and unguarded utterances of their masters. The evidence gathered from surviving abolitionists in the states adjacent to the lakes shows an increased activity of the Underground Road during the decade 1830-1840. The removal of the Indians from the Gulf states and the consequent opening of vast cotton-fields during the period named led many slaves to flee from the danger of transportation to the far South.[904] Under these circumstances pursuits of runaways became more frequent, and were often marked by a display of anger on the part of the pursuing party easily accounted for by the anti-slavery agitation in the free states. Open interference and rescues in which both negroes and whites took part became more common.[905] Many persons of respectability, more courageous than the great majority of their class at that time, not only enrolled themselves in the new anti-slavery societies, but made it a part of their duty to engage in the defence of fugitive slaves. Salmon P. Chase often served as counsel for the captured runaway during this period, and soon gained for himself the unenvied title of "attorney-general for fugitive slaves."[906] Other men of talents, position and education were not behind the rising Ohioan in their protection of the refugee. A formal organization of Underground Railroad workers, with Robert Purvis as president, was effected at Philadelphia in 1838. It is evident that the Underground Railroad was now developing with rapidity. The conditions prevailing in the North and South during the decade 1840-1850 were not less favorable to the escape of slaves, and, in one particular, were more favorable; the decision in the Prigg case in 1842 took away much of the effectiveness of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, and thus made pursuit little less than useless.