“one-horse tumbrils”: R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1840, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951), p. 27.
coffles of slaves shuffling westward: Cohn, Life and Times of King Cotton, pp. 105–6; Dangerfield, Awakening of American Nationalism, pp. 105–6.
“droves of a dozen”: Merton L. Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), p. 6.
the shore of a free state: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, pp. 51–53.
“Town booming”: Buley, Old Northwest, vol. 1, pp. 26–28, 36, 171–72.
few African Americans in Indiana: Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 20–21; Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery, p. 232.
Equality among whites: Buley, Old Northwest vol. 1, pp. 30–31; vol. 2, p. 51.
Coffin spent several weeks: Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, pp. 81–84.
de facto slavery continued: Buley, Old Northwest, vol. 2, pp. 53–54.
Whipping was permitted: Carol Pirtle, Escape Betwixt Two Suns: A True Tale of the Underground Railroad in Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 8–10, 101; Dillon, Abolitionists, pp. 23–24; Glennette Tilley Turner, The Underground Railroad in Illinois (Glen Ellyn, Ill.: Newman Educational Publishing, 2001), p. 108.
Illinois was still raw wilderness: Buley, Old Northwest, vol. 2, pp. 53–54; Buley, Old Northwest, vol. 1, p. 48.
“Starvation seemed to stare”: Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, p. 92.
Hiatt’s relatives “asked me”: Ibid., p. 95.
married Benjamin White’s sister: Ibid., p. 103.
settled in Newport: Ibid., p. 106.
runaway slaves often passed: Ibid., pp. 107–8.
“I told them”: Ibid., pp. 109–10; Daniel N. Huff, “The Unnamed Anti-Slavery Heroes of Old Newport” (paper presented to the Wayne County, Indiana, Historical Society, September 23, 1905, Friends Collection, Earlham College).
Karl Anton Postl: Quoted in Harry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1963), pp. 17–18.
Henson’s life in Kentucky: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, pp. 55–57.
Nehemiah Adams: Nehemiah Adams, A South-Side View of Slavery (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1974), pp. 43–45.
the Hensons’ security: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, pp. 58–60.
“a most excellent white man”: Ibid., p. 62.
continued to espouse an antislavery message: Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, pp. 46–53.
The Cincinnati that Josiah Henson found: Buley, Old Northwest, vol. 2, p. 47; Charles F. Goss, Cincinnati: The Queen City 1788–1912, vol. 1 (Cincinnati: S. J. Clarke, 1912), pp. 126, 135–36.
the only jobs: Lyle Kohler, “Cincinnati’s Black Peoples: A Chronology and Bibliography, 1787–1982” (unpublished paper prepared for the Cincinnati Arts Consortium, 1986, Cincinnati Public Library), p. 9.
“I found every door”: Ibid., p. 8.
“invaluable friends”: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, p. 64.
By the time he left: Ibid., p. 66.
an increasingly common practice: T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 161.
Riley agreed: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, p. 72.
Back in Kentucky: Ibid., pp. 74 ff.
Isaac Riley’s widow: Interview with Matilda Riley, Rockville (MD) Sentinel, June 8, 1883.
to New Orleans: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, pp. 79 ff.
“Nothing was left”: Ibid., p. 93.
CHAPTER 6: FREE AS SURE AS THE DEVIL
a charismatic Virginia slave: Nat Turner, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” in The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory, by Scot French (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), pp. 289 ff.
“’[T] was my object”: Ibid., p. 295.
Between one hundred: Yuval Taylor, ed., I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, vol. 1 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), p. 236; Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), pp. 2, 35–36, 84–85; Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 64; Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and their Allies 1619–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 157–58.
Fulfilling the worst fears: Russel Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy 1830–1860 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1949), pp. 122 ff.
In Raleigh: Louis P. Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), pp. 38–39.
Virginians debated: Ibid., pp. 57, 62.
“We have, as far”: Nye, Fettered Freedom, p. 71.
“I will be as harsh as truth”: Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 112; Masur, 1831, pp. 23–25.
Tens of thousands: Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, p. 282.
Jarm Logue: Jermain Loguen, The Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Freeman (Syracuse, N. Y.: J. G. K. Truair & Co., 1859), p. 124.
Moses Roper: Roper, “Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper,” p. 499.
William Wells Brown: Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” p. 701.
Slaves ran because: Stampp, Peculiar Institution, pp. 110–14; Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 17 ff, 50–51.
Occasionally whites enticed: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Bantam, 1981), p. 144; Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, p. 30.
most “lurked”: Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 115; Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 58, 67–68, 100–101, 109.
The Tennessee slave: Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen, pp. 241, 245.
a Mississippi planter: Burton, Rise and Fall of King Cotton, pp. 159–60.
a system of police control: Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 120; Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, p. 118.
South Carolina community, Georgetown: Hadden, Slave Patrols, p. 63.
“It was part of my business”: Ibid., 83.
Patrollers typically had: Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 154–55.
“If a slave”: Lewis Clarke, in John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), p. 157.
Patrollers gathered in a tavern: John Kendrick, Horrors of Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1817), p. 53.
“As I was goin”: Hadden, Slave Patrols, p. 119.
tended to run in any direction: Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 100–1, 161; Cecelski, Waterman’s Song, pp. 128–31; Fergus M. Bordewich, Killing the White Man’s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York: Anchor, 1996), pp. 74–75.
refuge with Native Americans: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 98–101; Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 87–88.
One youngster: Julie Winch, “Philadelphia and the Other Underground Railroad,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 111, no. 1 (January 1987): 13.
When the Choctaw: Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, p. 87.
The Cherokee, in particular: Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 121, 127; Bordewich, Killing the White Man’s Indian, pp. 40–41; Hadden, Slave Patrols, pp. 14–15; William Loren Katz, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (New York: Atheneum, 1986), pp. 54–55.
“I do think”: Grimes, “Life of William Grimes,” pp. 231–32.
Fugitives could count on: Miller, Wolf by the Ears, p. 129; Kashatus, Just over the Line, p. 28
; Siebert, Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, p. 297; Dangerfield, Awakening of American Nationalism, p. 130; Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 159–60; John Rankin, Life of Rev. John Rankin, Written by Himself in His Eightieth Year (ca. 1872), text from a manuscript in the collection of Lobena and Charles Frost, reproduced and copyrighted in 1998 by Arthur W. McGraw.
“The real distance was great”: Frederick Douglass, “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” in Douglass: Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), pp. 609–10.
Canada in the 1830s: Winks, Blacks in Canada, p. 234; Daniel G. Hill, The Freedom-Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 1992), pp. 13–15; Siebert, Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, pp. 191–92.
Word slowly spread: Winks, Blacks in Canada, pp. 142 ff; Siebert, Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, p. 192.
Lundy described: Dillon, Benjamin Lundy, pp. 171–73; Winks, Blacks in Canada, p. 158.
No one really knows: Michael Wayne, “The Black Population of Canada West on the Eve of the American Civil War: A Reassessment Based on the Manuscript Census of 1861,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 56, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 284–93; Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 115; Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, p. 26; Ball, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures,” pp. 438 ff. 115 A large majority of fugitives: Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 111; Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 64, 229; Kashatus, Just over the Line, p. 15.
The plan terrified Charlotte: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, pp. 104–9.
very lightly populated: Diane Perrine Coon, interview with the author, October 10, 2002.
they continued eastward: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, pp. 110–12.
local constables, slave catchers, informers: Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 119, 157–58, 178; Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 115; Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” p. 704; statement of Alexander Hemsley, in Benjamin Drew, The Refugee: A Northside View of Slavery (Reading, Pa.: Addison-Wesley, 1969), pp. 32–25; statement of William A. Hall, in Drew, pp. 220–24.
There was no single prototype: James W. C. Pennington, “The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington,” in I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, vol. 2, Yuval Taylor, ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), p. 120; Hall, in Drew, Refugee, pp. 220–24; statement of A. T. Jones, in Drew, The Refugee, pp. 106–7.
most fugitives relied on pluck: Franklin and Schweniger, Runaway Slaves, pp. 109–20; Ball, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures,” pp. 438–56.
Jim Pembroke, who: Pennington, “The Fugitive Blacksmith,” pp. 115–38.
Since Henson’s last visit: Kohler, “Cincinnati’s Black Peoples,” p. 9; Thomas E. Wagner, “Cincinnati and Southwestern Ohio: An Abolitionist Training Ground”(thesis, Miami University, 1967), pp. 1–8; Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 302–4; Winks, Blacks in Canada, p. 155.
On their own once again: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, pp. 115 ff.
vast hardwood forests: R. Carlyle Buley, Old Northwest, vol. 1, p. 51; vol. 2, p. 149.
Benjamin Lundy walked: Dillon, Benjamin Lundy, pp. 174–75.
the Hensons set off: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, pp. 119 ff.
“I threw myself”: Ibid., p. 126.
CHAPTER 7: FANATICS, DISORGANIZERS, AND DISTURBERS OF THE PEACE
the damage it suffered: Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen, p. 124.
Born around 1813: Carol M. Hunter, To Set the Captives Free: Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen and the Struggle for Freedom in Central New York 1835–1872 (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 33; C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers: The United States, 1847–1858, vol. 4 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 87, note 4.
three slave-owning Logue brothers: Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen, p. 14.
treated him as a “pet”: Ibid., p. 23.
Jarm merely fantasized: Ibid., pp. 227–28.
Ross procured for them: Ibid., pp. 253, 261.
On Christmas Eve: Logue’s flight to Canada described, Ibid., pp. 275–337.
“a true hearted colored man”: Hunter, To Set the Captives Free, p. 42; Diane Perrine Coon, interview with the author, November 11, 2002; Maxine F. Brown, The Role of Free Blacks in Indiana’s Underground Railroad: The Case of Floyd, Harrison, and Washington Counties (Indianapolis: Indiana Department of Natural Resources, 2001), pp. 2–7.
By 1834, however: Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (De Kalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1974), pp. 62–64.
Many fugitives still: statement by William H. Hall in Drew, Refugee, pp. 220–24; Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” pp. 712–13, 715.
“There was no Anti-Slavery Society”: Pennington, “The Fugitive Blacksmith,” p. 140.
only in southeastern Pennsylvania: Child, Isaac T. Hopper, pp. 192, 206.
one of his last cases: Ibid., pp. 189–91.
the deepening rift: Barbour et al., “Orthodox-Hicksite Separation,” pp. 100–30.
“Friends generally seem”: Charles Marriott, letter to Rowland T. Robinson, October 22, 1835, Rokeby Museum, Ferrisburgh, Vt.
his tailoring business suffered: Child, Isaac T. Hopper, p. 295.
vibrant middle class: Nash, Forging Freedom, pp. 130–33, 247–52, 272–73; Julie Winch, “Philadelphia and the Other Underground Railroad,” pp. 8–9; Mayer, All on Fire, p. 173.
waves of immigrants: Nash, Forging Freedom, p. 251. 135 New measures had been proposed: Winch, “Philadelphia and the Other Underground Railroad,” pp. 8–9.
Hopper was considered remarkable: Child, Isaac T. Hopper, p. 151.
a white mob gathered: Nash, Forging Freedom, p. 254.
full-scale race riot: Ibid., p. 275.
Richard Allen, had been seized: Ibid., 242.
a kidnapping ring: Winch, “Philadelphia and the Other Underground Railroad,” p. 22.
Jarm Logue’s mother: Loguen, Rev. J. W. Loguen, pp. 12–14.
repugnance at the kidnapping: Nash, Forging Freedom, p. 243; Winch, “Philadelphia and the Other Underground Railroad,” pp. 8–9.
In March 1820: William R. Leslie, “The Pennsylvania Fugitive Slave Act of 1826,” Journal of Southern History 13 (1952): 433–35, 445.
In 1826, under pressure: Ibid., p. 443.
A particularly strong node of activism: Franklin Ellis and Samuel Evans, History of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Everts and Peck, 1883), pp. 73–74; Smedley, “History of the Underground Railroad in Chester,” pp. 28 ff.
“We might as well”: Smedley, “History of the Underground Railroad in Chester,” p. 148.
African-American abolitionists played: Smedley, “History of the Underground Railroad in Chester,” pp. 27–29, 53–57, 99–100, 143–50, 245–46; Adams, Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery in America, pp. 23–24; Siebert, Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, pp. 120–21.
the tanner Owen Brown: James F. Caccamo, Hudson, Ohio and the Underground Railroad (Hudson, Ohio: Friends of Hudson Library, 1992), pp. 21–22.
James Adams, the mulatto son: statement by James Adams in Drew, Refugee, pp. 12–19.
whaling port of Nantucket: Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), pp. 95–96; Siebert, Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, p. 258.
Some, like David Hudson: Caccamo, Hudson, Ohio and the Underground Railroad, p. 21.
William Jay: Dillon, Abolitionists, pp. 53–54.
“Those who do remain”: quoted in Wright, “North Carolina Quakers and Slavery,” pp. 17–18.
underground conductor Calvin Fairbank: Calvin Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank during Slavery Times (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), p. 7.
roving journalist Benjamin Lundy: D
illon, Benjamin Lundy, p. 47.
“immediate and total abolition”: George Bourne, Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (Detroit: Negro History Press, 1972), p. 156; Siebert, Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, pp. 304–6.
John Rankin of Ohio wrote: Riley, Ohio Castigator, July 24, 1824, and August 31, 1824; Ann Hagedorn, Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 47–50; William Lloyd Garrison, letter to Henry E. Benson, December 10, 1835, Walter M. Merrill, ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: I Will Be Heard!, vol. 1: 1822–1835 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 574–75.
Adam Lowry Rankin: Adam Lowry Rankin, “The Autobiography of Adam Lowry Rankin” (unpublished manuscript, Union Township Library, Ripley, Ohio), pp. 41–45.
The conference was William Lloyd Garrison’s idea: Mayer, All on Fire, pp. 170–71; Carleton Mabee, Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970), p. 20.
“we learnt that a goodly number”: Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969, p. 82).
The delegates were mostly young: Mayer, All on Fire, pp. 172–74; May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict, pp. 82–96; Dillon, Slavery Attacked, pp. 172–73; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (New York: Atheneum, 1971), pp. 107–8.
“our Coryphaeus”: May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict, p. 86.
a ringing proclamation: William Lloyd Garrison, “Declaration of the National Antislavery Convention,” in Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, Mason Lowance, ed. (New York: Penguin, 2000), pp. 119–22.
“a holy enthusiasm”: May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict, p. 96.
CHAPTER 8: THE GRANDEST REVOLUTION THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN
That evening, he intended: Octavius B. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878), pp. 165–66.
Though only thirty-eight years old: John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 75–77.
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