The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A comprehensive history

by Wilbur Henry Siebert

Mitchell's small volume of 172 pages was published in England in 1860. Its author was a free negro, who served as a slave-driver in the South for several years, then became a preacher in Ohio, and for twelve years engaged in underground work; finally, about 1855, he went to Toronto, Canada, to minister to colored refugees as a missionary in the service of the American Free Baptist Mission Society.[4] It was while soliciting money in England for the purpose of building a chapel and schoolhouse for his people in Toronto that he was induced to write his book. The range of experience of the author enabled him to relate at first hand many incidents illustrative of the various phases of underground procedure, and to give an account of the condition of the fugitive slaves in Canada.[5]

Still's Underground Railroad Records, a large volume of 780 pages, appeared in 1872, and a second edition in 1883. For some years before the War Mr. Still was a clerk in the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia; and from 1852 to 1860 he served as chairman of the Acting Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia, a body whose special business it was to harbor fugitives and help them towards Canada. About 1850 Mr. Still began to keep records of the stories he heard from runaways, and his book is mainly a compilation of these stories, together with some Underground Railroad correspondence. At the end there are some biographical sketches of persons more or less prominent in the anti-slavery cause. The book is a mine of material relating to the work of the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia.

Operations carried on in an extended field of six or seven counties in southeastern Pennsylvania, over routes many of which led to the Quaker City, are recounted in Smedley's volume of 395 pages, published in 1883. The abundant reminiscences and short biographies were patiently gathered by the author from many aged participants in underground enterprises.

In his Reminiscences, a book of 732 pages, Levi Coffin, the reputed president of the Underground Railroad, relates his experiences from the time when he began, as a youth in North Carolina, to direct slaves northward on the path to liberty, till the time when, after twenty years of service in eastern Indiana and fifteen in Cincinnati, Ohio, he and his coworkers were relieved by the admission of slaves within the lines of the Union forces in the South. Mr. Coffin was a Quaker of the gentle but firm type depicted by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the character Simeon Halliday, of which he may have been the original. It need scarcely be said, therefore, that his autobiography is characterized by simplicity and candor, and supplies a fund of information in regard to those branches of the Road with which its author was connected.

Pettit's Sketches comprise a series of articles printed in the Fredonia (New York) Censor, during the fall of 1868, and collected in 1879 into a book of 174 pages. The author was for many years a "conductor" in southwestern New York, and most of the adventures narrated occurred within his personal knowledge.

Johnson's From Dixie to Canada is a little volume of 194 pages, in which are reprinted some of the many stories first published by him in the Lake Shore Home Magazine during the years 1883 to 1889 under the heading, "Romances and Realities of the Underground Railroad." The data that most of these tales embody were accumulated by research, and while the names of operators, towns and so forth are authentic, the writer allows himself the license of the story-teller instead of restricting himself to the simple recording of the information secured. His investigations have given him an acquaintance with the routes of northeastern Ohio and the adjacent portions of Pennsylvania and New York.

Hope's volume, published in 1894, does not increase the number of our sources of information, inasmuch as its materials are derived from Still's Underground Railroad Records and Coffin's Reminiscences. It was written by an Englishman apparently as a popular exposition of the hidden methods of the abolitionists.

To these books should be added a pamphlet of thirty pages, entitled The Underground Railroad, by James H. Fairchild, D.D., ex-President of Oberlin College, published in 1895 by the Western Reserve Historical Society.[6] The author had personal knowledge of many of the events he narrates and recounts several underground cases of notoriety; he thus affords a clear insight into the conditions under which secret aid came to be rendered to runaways.