The Underground Railroad was not underground nor was it a railroad. It was an informal network of secret hideouts that helped an estimated 100,000 slaves escape from their southern plantation masters. It is a thrilling story of courage and resourcefulness that ended in 1863 when President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation. The following article is by the late Allen Trelease, emeritus professor of history and author of numerous books on southern history, including the definitive work on the Klu Klux Klan.
Slaves en route on the Underground Railroad
Levi Coffin, the Quaker abolitionist, sometimes called President of the Underground Railroad, was born in the New Garden community in Guilford County in 1798. His ancestors had settled the island of Nantucket in the 1640s and came to North Carolina before the Revolution.
As a boy, he was struck by the plight of the slaves around him, who were denied education and basic freedoms and were subject at any time to sale and separation from their families. By age fifteen he was helping his family assist escaping slaves. Later Coffin organized a Sunday school for neighboring slaves (with their owners’ permission) and joined a local manumission (or abolitionist) society.
In the 1820s and later, many North Carolinians left the state for better lands in the West. Some, including Quakers who by now increasingly opposed slavery on moral grounds, headed for the Midwest where the land was particularly fertile and the new states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois forbade slavery. Coffin and his new wife joined this migration in 1826, settling and opening a store at what is now Fountain City, near Richmond in eastern Indiana.
Here they found themselves living along one of the routes that runaway slaves used to travel from the South toward their hoped-for freedom in Canada. The Coffins joined some of their neighbors in helping these refugees, thereby becoming “conductors” in the so-called Underground Railroad. Even in the free states, helping runaway slaves was against Federal law and carried heavy criminal penalties. It had to be done secretly, with great care. The house Coffin built in 1839, like many other “stations” constructed across the North in these years, contained secret hiding places where refugees could evade visiting search parties. Fugitives remained up to several weeks in such houses, regaining strength and waiting for the right moment to start the next leg of their journey. They generally traveled after dark, sometimes on foot, sometimes by wagon. Coffin himself maintained two teams of horses that he used to convey fugitive slaves to other “conductors” farther north. He reportedly helped more than 2,000 slaves to safety over a period of twenty years at Fountain City. His house there is now open to the public.
In 1847 the Coffins moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, just across the river from the slave state of Kentucky. There he opened another store and continued his “railroad” activity, helping another 1,300 persons to reach freedom. One of them was a young woman who had escaped on foot across the frozen Ohio River and provided inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character Eliza in her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Underground Railroad kept no records, but one estimate has it conveying 100,000 slaves out of the South between 1810 and 1850, when a tighter Federal Fugitive Slave law slowed it down.
The Civil War ended slavery and with it the Underground Railroad. But newly freed blacks still needed help overcoming the centuries-long legacy of servitude. During the war and for years afterward, Coffin worked as actively for black education and financial aid as he had earlier for black freedom. These efforts took him as far as England and France. He was also active in the temperance movement.
The Underground Railroad was never a single entity and never under one person’s control. Levi Coffin’s prominence – and his title of “president” – sprang in large part from the autobiography that he wrote late in life. Through his Reminiscences, published in 1876, he provided more information about the workings of the “railroad” than any other participant. Coffin died and was buried at Cincinnati in 1877.