Record of Fugitives aided during Five Months.
Kept by Daniel Osborn, of Alum Creek Settlement, Ohio.
By rare good fortune the writer has found a single leaf of a diary kept by Daniel Osborn, a Friend or Quaker, of Alum Creek Settlement, Delaware County, Ohio, which gives a record of the blacks passing through that neighborhood during an interval of five months, from April 14 to September 10, 1844. The accompanying facsimiles, which reproduce the two sides of the leaf, show that the number is forty-seven. The year in which this memorandum was made may be fairly taken as an average year, and the line on which this Quaker settlement was a station as a representative underground route in Ohio. Now, along Ohio's southern boundary there were the initial stations of at least twelve important lines of travel, some of which were certainly in operation before 1830. Let us consider, as we may properly, that the period of operation continued from 1830 to 1860. Taking these as the elements for a computation, one may reckon that Ohio may have aided not less than 40,000 fugitives in the thirty years included in our reckoning.[976] That the number of refugees after 1844 did not decrease is indicated by the statement that during one month in the year of 1854-1855 sixty were harbored by one member of the Alum Creek Settlement. It is to be remembered that several families of the settlement were engaged in this work.[977]
An illustration of underground activity in the East may be ventured. Mr. Robert Purvis, of Philadelphia, states that he kept a record of the fugitives that passed through the hands of the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia for a long period, till the trepidation of his family after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850 caused him to destroy it. His record book showed, he says, an average of one a day sent northward. In other words, between 1830 and 1860 over 9,000 runaways were aided in Philadelphia. But we know that the Vigilance Committee did not begin this sort of work in the Quaker City, and that underground activities there date back at least to the time of Isaac T. Hopper's earliest efforts, that is, 1800 and before. We also know that there were many centres round about Philadelphia, some of whose work was certainly done independently of that place.
That the resources of some of the operators in centres in the West were being drained almost to exhaustion by the demands of the heavy traffic towards the close of the underground period, distinctly appears in the following letter from Col. J. Bowles, of Lawrence, Kansas, to Mr. F. B. Sanborn:—