the whites found all this less than convincing: Ibid., pp. 298–300, 404–5; Still, Underground Railroad, pp. 9–12; Stormont, History of Gibson County, pp. 228–30; Joseph P. Elliott, A History of Evansville and Vandenburgh County, Indiana (Evansville, Ind.: Keler Printing Co., 1897), p. 380.
Sometime during the downriver trip: Stormont, History of Gibson County, pp. 230–31; Still, Underground Railroad, pp. 9 ff; Evansville Daily Journal, April 15, 1851.
“There was none of that pretended philanthropy”: “Capture of Fugitive Slaves,” Vincennes Gazette, April 3, 1851.
In a curious way, Concklin’s death: Washington, “Chronicle of an American First Family.”
another brave man was lost to the underground: Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank during Slavery Times, pp. 55–57, 85 ff, 98–103; Runyon, Delia Webster, pp. 122–23, 150–54; Voice of the Fugitive, December 3, 1851, and April 22, 1852.
There was, of course, another difference: Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Anti-Slavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 7, 88–95; Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 2, 281; Keith Melder, “Abby Kelley and the Process of Liberation,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 242–44; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 118ff.
“we were all on a level”: Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, p. 181.
One of the countless women: Lucretia Mott, “Slavery and the Woman Question: Lucretia Mott’s Diary of her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840,” Frederick B. Tolles, ed., Supplement no. 23 to the Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, Friends’ Historical Association, Haverford, PA, 1952, p. 29; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 59, 79–83; Christopher Densmore, curator, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, remarks made at the dedication of the McClintock House national historical site, Waterloo, NY, May 29, 2004.
After the Stantons moved to Seneca Falls: Stanton, Eighty Years and More, pp. 143–50; Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York 1822–1872 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 130–32; Ward and Burns, Not for Ourselves Alone, pp. 39–41, 58–59; Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), pp. 140–41; Nell Irvin Painter, “Difference, Slavery, and Memory: Sojourner Truth in Feminist Abolitionism,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 140–47; Larson, Bound for the Promised Land, pp. 107–9.
Women had always done: Yee, Black Women Abolitionists, pp. 20–21, 29; Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, pp. 179–84.
White women as well as black women: Ward and Burns, Not for Ourselves Alone, pp. 48–49; Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lucy Buffum Lovell, Two Quaker Sisters (New York: Liveright Publishing, 1937), pp. xxv, 110, 128, 134; Diary of Phebe Earle Gibbons, entry for July 17, 1856, Gibbons Family File, Lancaster Historical Society, Lancaster, Pa.; Yee, Black Women Abolitionists, pp. 36, 117; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, p. 150.
Ironically, no one did more: Furnas, Goodbye to Uncle Tom, pp. 5–9, 17, 30–31, 45.
Stowe based her eponymous composite hero partly: Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pp. 19, 26–27; Winks, Blacks in Canada, pp. 185–91.
Stowe learned the story directly: John Rankin Jr., unpublished interviews with Wilbur H. Siebert, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, and Frank Gregg, copy in Union Township Library, Ripley, Ohio.
In Stowe’s rendering, Eliza: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (New York: Signet, 1998), pp. 67–68; Siebert, Mysteries of Ohio’s Underground Railroad, p. 47; Coon, “Southeastern Indiana’s Underground Railroad Routes and Operations,” p. 185.
Virtually every literate American: Furnas, Goodbye to Uncle Tom, pp. 11ff; Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pp. 21–23.
Following her dramatic escape across the ice: Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pp. 147–55, 203–21, 414–19.
Harriet Tubman was unimpressed: Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, p. 22.
CHAPTER 17: LABORATORIES OF FREEDOM
On Christmas Eve, 1854: The escape story of Tubman’s brothers is based on Sarah Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, pp. 57–72; John Creighton, historian, interview with the author, Cambridge, Md., February 12, 2004; Larson, Bound for the Promised Land, pp. 93–94, 105, 110–17; Humez, Harriet Tubman, pp. 23, 351; Still, Underground Railroad, pp. 305, 307.
They were welcomed by Tubman’s friend: St. Catharines Journal, April 22, 1852; Humez, Harriet Tubman, p. 25; Sernett, North Star Country, p. 180; Pease and Pease, Bound with Them in Chains, pp. 133–39; Frederick Douglass, Life and Times, p. 710; Winks, Blacks in Canada, p. 197; Voice of the Fugitive, May 21, 1851; North Star, November 10, 1848.
sometime journalist Benjamin Drew: Drew, Refugee, pp. 57–60.
Some refugees complained: Silverman, Unwelcome Guests, pp. 73, 128–30, 152.
It was not unusual: Frederick Douglass’ Paper, October 2, 1851; Hunter, To Set the Captives Free, pp. 126–27; May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict, pp. 378–79.
In the burgeoning town of Chatham: Farrell, “History of the Negro Community in Chatham, Ontario,” pp. 65, 138; Jonathan W. Walton, “Blacks in Buxton and Chatham, Ontario, 1830–1890: Did the 49th Parallel Make a Difference?” (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1979), pp, 62–67; Lauriston, Romantic Chatham, p. 458; Provincial Freeman, September 9, 1854; Syracuse Daily Standard, May 26, 1856.
Estimates of the total number: Liberator, September 27, 1848; North Star, November 10, 1848; Provincial Freeman, March 25, 1854, and March 26, 1854; Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin pp. 252–53; Silverman, Unwelcome Guests, p. 43; Pease and Pease, Bound with Them in Chains, p. 138; Wayne, “Black Population of Canada West,” pp. 465–85.
the journalist Henry Bibb: Henry Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave,” in I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, vol. 2, Yuval Taylor, ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), pp. 13–92.
Unique within the underground: Detroit Tribune, February 23, 1875, and January 11, 1886; interview with George DeBaptiste, “Underground Railroad,” Detroit Post, May 16, 1870, and February 23, 1875; Lumpkin, “General Plan Was Freedom”; Afua Ave Pamela Cooper, “‘Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause’: Henry Bibb, Abolitionism, Race Uplift, and Black Manhood, 1842–1854” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 2000), pp. 153–59.
Bibb underwent another profound experience: Cooper, “Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause,” pp. 47 ff; Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” pp. 86–87.
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act: Voice of the Fugitive, January 1, 1851, January 29, 1851, February 17, 1851, March 12, 1851, March 26, 1851, May 21, 1851, October 8, 1851, and April 8, 1852; Cooper, “‘Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause,’” pp. 204, 302, 315, 349, 378.
“What is the future of the black race”: Henry Bibb, “An Address to the Colored Inhabitants of North America,” in The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 2: Canada, 1830–1865, C. Peter Ripley, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 170–75.
For Bibb, part of the solution: Voice of the Fugitive, March 26, 1851, and December 16, 1852; Jason H. Silverman, “‘We Shall Be Heard!’: The Development of the Fugitive Slave Press in Canada, Canadian Historical Review 65, no. 1 (March 1984), pp. 54–69; Cooper, “‘Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause,’�
�� pp. 225–27, 241–47.
Among those who attended: Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 10–15, 20–22, 32 ff, 110; Smedley, “History of the Underground Railroad in Chester,” pp. 33, 337.
Initially, the two got along: Winks, Blacks in Canada, pp. 205–8; Silverman, “‘We Shall Be Heard,’” pp. 54–69; Jason H. Silverman, “Mary Ann Shadd and the Search for Equality,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, eds. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, pp. 191–92; Cooper, “‘Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause,’” pp. 264–68, 282; Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, pp. 71 ff.
By 1852 Shadd’s relationship: Mary Ann Shadd, letter to George Whipple, December 28, 1852, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 2, pp. 245–51; Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, p. 66.
Although Bibb’s manifold talents: Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, p. 73; Cooper, “‘Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause,’” pp. 251–64, 275; Provincial Freeman, March 24, 1853, and March 27, 1853, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 2, pp. 265–67, 285–87.
Caught amid the collateral damage: Winks, Blacks in Canada, pp. 195–203; Voice of the Fugitive, May 21, 1851; Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, pp. 105–7.
A sawmill long championed: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life, pp. 137, 164–65, 173–74.
Another problem was more subtle: Ibid., pp. 165–69; Winks, Blacks in Canada, p. 201; Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, pp. 75–81.
Perhaps Dawn’s fatal weakness: Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story, pp. 142, 147, 173–77; North Star, January 12, 1849; Voice of the Fugitive, January 1, 1854; Joshua Leavitt, letter to John Scoble, March 9, 1843, in Anti-Slavery Papers, Dennis Gannon Collection, Welland Museum, St. Catharine’s, Ontario.
For Henry Bibb, the controversy: William Lloyd Garrison, letter to Helen E. Garrison, October 17, 1853, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 4: From Disunionism to the Brink of War 1850–1860, Louis Ruchames, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 272–75; Cooper, “‘Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause,’” p. 286; Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, pp. 74, 81–82.
In 1855, the touring abolitionist: Drew, Refugee, pp. 225 ff.
Shadd too was damaged: Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, pp. 102–8; Silverman, “‘We Shall Be Heard!’”
She even mocked Frederick Douglass: Yee, Black Women Abolitionists, p. 127.
The origins of the Elgin Settlement: Victor Ullman, Look to the North Star: A Life of William King (Toronto: Umbrella Press, 1969), pp. 19, 39–62; Bryan Prince, historian and curator of the Buxton National Historic Site and Museum, North Buxton, Ontario, interview with the author, June 7, 2003.
King, in contrast to Henson: Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, pp. 85–95; Winks, Blacks in Canada, pp. 210–11; Farrell, “History of the Negro Community in Chatham, Ontario,” p. 118; Ullman, Look to the North Star, p. 100; Walton, “Blacks in Buxton and Chatham,” pp. 90–92.
the first of many fugitives: William King, unpublished autobiography, manuscript copy in Raleigh Township Centennial Museum, North Buxton, Ontario; Parker, “Freedman’s Story,” March 1866, p. 291; Ullman, Look to the North Star, p. 108; Walton, “Blacks in Buxton and Chatham,” p. 94.
“When we grew tired”: Ullman, Look to the North Star, p. 106.
King led rather than governed: King, unpublished autobiography; Ullman, Look to the North Star, pp. 141–42; Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, pp. 96–99.
Opposition coalesced around: Black Utopia, pp. 105–6; King, unpublished autobiography; Lauriston, Romantic Chatham, pp. 493–94; Ullman, Look to the North Star, p. 85; Cooper, “‘Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause,’” p. 308; Silverman, Unwelcome Guests, p. 64.
But King had a subtler strategy: King, unpublished autobiography; Ullman, Look to the North Star, pp. 119–23; Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, pp. 100–4; Winks, Blacks in Canada, pp. 210–11; Silverman, Unwelcome Guests, p. 69.
Isaac Riley’s oldest son: Ullman, Look to the North Star, pp. 224–26.
White fears also ebbed: King, unpublished autobiography; Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, pp. 85–95: Farrell, “History of the Negro Community in Chatham, Ontario,” p. 118; Walton, “Blacks in Buxton and Chatham,” pp. 94, 100, 109; Ullman, Look to the North Star, pp. 151–53; Silverman, Unwelcome Guests, p. 69.
Elgin’s crowning moment: King, unpublished autobiography; Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, pp. 96–99; Ullman, Look to the North Star, pp. 90, 151–53.
But there was no second act to Edwin Larwill: Provincial Freeman, May 6, 1854; Walton, “Blacks in Buxton and Chatham,” p. 109.
Gerrit Smith was also dreaming: Harlow, Gerrit Smith, pp. 241–58; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, pp. 99–111; Sernett, North Star Country, pp. 198–202; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, pp. 155–56; Liberator, March 20, 1846; North Star, January 7, 1848, February 18, 1848, February 25, 1848, and December 15, 1848; Press-Republican, June 27, 2002.
“The tide of benefaction”: Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, p. 98.
One of them, William G. Allen: Sernett, North Star Country, p. 68.
Nothing was dearer to Smith’s heart: Ibid., pp. 169–70; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, pp. 115, 120.
The mansion at Peterboro: Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, pp. 140–42; Stanton, Eighty Years and More, pp. 51 ff; Ward and Burns, Not for Ourselves Alone, pp. 11–18; North Star, July 7, 1848.
a rail-thin man with a shock of graying hair: Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 23; Otto Scott, The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement (Murphys, Calif.: Uncommon Books, 1979), p. 19; Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitivie Negro (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1970), p. 42; Caleb Calkins, handwritten deposition, John Brown folder, Gerrit Smith Collection, Bird Library, Syracuse University; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, p. 235.
The stranger’s abolitionist credentials: Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, pp. 8–17, 24.
Brown had taken a personal vow: Ibid., pp. 41–42; Quarles, Allies for Freedom, pp. 18–19; Caccamo, Hudson, Ohio and the Underground Railroad; pamphlet, John Brown Address by Frederick Douglass, speech delivered at the fourteenth anniversary of Storer College in Harpers Ferry, W. Va., 1881, in John Brown Pamphlets, Vol. 5, Boyd B. Stutler Collection, West Virginia State Archives, Charleston, W. Va. 398 “I’ve seen him come in: Merrill D. Peterson, John Brown: The Legend Revisited (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), p. 56.
He had never hesitated: Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, pp. 53, 63; North Star, February 11, 1848.
Only a handful of black families: North Star, March 24, 1848, and March 30, 1849; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, p. 157; Sernett, North Star Country, pp. 201–2; Brendan Mills, National Park Service site manager, interview with the author, John Brown home, North Elba, N. Y., August 11, 2002.
Smith liked Brown’s piety: Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, pp. 149, 169–70; Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, p. 67; Peterson, John Brown, p. 51; John Brown, letter to Gerrit Smith, June 20, 1849, John Brown folder, Gerrit Smith Collection, Bird Library, Syracuse University.
Visitors occasionally stumbled: Scott, Secret Six, p. 19; Quarles, Allies for Freedom, p. 24.
The problems that Loguen had identified: Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, p. 157; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 15, 1853; John Brown Address by Frederick Douglass.
CHAPTER 18: THE LAST TRAIN
One of the saddest incidents: The story of Margaret Garner is based on Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, pp. 558–65; Steven Weisenberger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998), pp. 49, 54–65, 71–75; Julius Yanuck, “The Garner Fugitive Slave Case,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40 (1953): 47–66; Ripley (Ohio) Bee, February 9, 1856, February 23, 1856, and March 8, 1856; Carl Westmoreland, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in
terview with the author, March 1, 1999.
Coffin had moved: Coffin, Reminiscences, pp. 265–74.
By the time the Civil War: Ibid., p. 671.
But Margaret Garner’s terrible odyssey: Coffin, Reminiscences, p. 567; Cincinnati Gazette, March 11, 1856; Weisenberger, Modern Medea, pp. 220–25.
The surviving Garners: Weisenberger, Modern Medea, pp. 277–78.
Now personal liberty laws: McDougall, Fugitive Slaves, p. 67; Campbell, Slave Catchers, pp. 171–79, 184–85; Provincial Freeman, March 24, 1855.
Benoni S. Fuller, for example: Morlock, Was It Yesterday?, p, 125.
In January 1854, another act of Congress: Morison, Oxford History, vol. 2, 1972, pp. 354–60; Louis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 11–12; Ross Drake, “The Law That Ripped America in Two,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 2004, pp. 61–66; Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, pp. 80, 85–86.
“[T]his Nebraska business”: Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 7, 1854.
Free State settlers begged: Gerrit Smith, speech to the Kansas Meeting, Albany, N. Y., April 6, 1854, Gerrit Smith Collection, Bird Library, Syracuse University; Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, pp. 80, 83; National Era, July 10, 1856.
Among the thousands: John Brown Jr., diary, January 1 to March 11, 1856, copy in possession of the WISH Centre, Chatham, Ontario; Martha J. Parker, Angels of italic>Freedom (private printing, Lawrence, Kans., 1999), p. 123; Gunja Sengupta, For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 65; Samuel F. Tappan, letter to Thomas Wentwoth Higginson, January 24, 1858, in Freedom’s Crucible: The Underground Railroad in Lawrence and Douglas County, Kansas, 1854–1865: A Reader, Richard B. Sheridan, ed. (Lawrence: Division of Continuing Education, University of Kansas, 2000), p. 50; Steve Collins, historian, Kansas City Community College, interview with the author, Quindaro, KS, August 13, 2001.
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