Wilbur Henry Siebert

“ Now melting to tears, and now inspiring to rage, her work everywhere touches the conscience, and makes the slave-hunter more hateful." [942] He saw the import of the appeal of fugitive slaves to Northern communities for protection and liberty. "For them every sentiment of humanity is aroused. Rude and ignorant they may be, but in their very efforts for freedom they claim kindred with all that is noble in the past. Romance has no stories of more thrilling interest; classical antiquity has preserved no examples of adventure and trial more worthy of renown. They are among the heroes of our age. ”

“ The result is a gratifying proof of the usefulness of scientific methods in historical investigation; one who lived in an anti-slavery community before the Civil War is fascinated by tracing the hitherto unknown stretches north and south from the centre which he knew. The map bears testimony not only to the wide-spread practice of aiding fugitives, but to the devotion of the conductors on the Underground Railroad. How useful a section of Mr. Siebert's map would have been to the slave-catcher in the 50's, when so many strange negroes were appearing and disappearing in the free states! ”

“ These Boston boys, born beneath the shadow of Faneuil Hall, the sons of a free citizen of Boston, and educated in the Boston free schools, were, by the compromises of the Constitution, admitted to be slaves, the property of a South Carolinian planter. The Boston father had no right to his own sons. The law, however, had long been considered a dead letter. The Christian mother, as she morning and evening bowed with her children in prayer, felt that they were safe from the slave-hunter, surrounded as they were by the churches, the schools, and the free institutions of Massachusetts. ”

“ Among the concessions to slavery that the Federal Convention felt constrained to make, this provision found place in the Constitution: "No person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." ”

“ The first objection brought by the slave-power against the anti-slavery propaganda was the cry of the sacredness of vested and property rights against attack by sentimentalists; but what dignified the whole contest was the very fact that the sentiment for human rights was at the bottom of it, and that the abolitionists felt a moral responsibility even though property owners suffered. ”

“ Persons living along the border of the slave states, whose sympathies were stirred to action by their personal knowledge [301] of the hardships of slavery, became the promoters of lines of Underground Railroad, sending or taking fugitives northward to friends they could trust. It was not an infrequent occurrence that intimate neighbors were called in to hear the thrilling tales of escape related in the picturesque and fervid language of negroes that valued liberty more than life. ”

“ By the abolitionists, at whom it was directed, this law was detested. A government, whose first national manifesto contained the exalted principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, stooping to the task of slave-catching, violated all their ideas of national dignity, decency and consistency. Many persons, indeed, justified their opposition to the law in the familiar words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." ”

“ Of all the questions which have interested and divided the people of the United States, none since the foundation of the Federal Union has been so important, so far-reaching, and so long contested as slavery. During the first half of the nineteenth century the other great national questions were nearly all economic—taxation, currency, banks, transportation, lands,—and they had a strong material basis, a flavor of self-interest ”

“ Indeed, so marked an impression had been made upon the minds and sympathies of anti-slavery men by the brave and successful flight of slaves, that a Liberty convention at Peterboro, New York, in January, 1842, issued an address to slaves, declaring that slavery was to be "tortured even unto death," advising them to seek liberty by flight, and assuring them that the abolitionist knew no more grateful employment than that of helping escaping slaves to Canada. ”

“ Probably most slaves that started for Canada had learned to know the north star, and to many of these superstitious persons its light seemed the enduring witness of the divine interest in their deliverance. When clouds obscured the stars they had recourse, perhaps, to such bits of homely knowledge as, that in forests the trunks of trees are commonly moss-grown on their north sides. In Kentucky and western Virginia many fugitives were guided to free soil by the tributaries of the Ohio; while in central and eastern Virginia the ranges of the Appalachian chain marked the direction to be taken. ”

“ In one instance thirteen fugitives, after resting in the cave for some days, were taken by the students in two covered wagons to Sandusky, some 90 miles, where I had gone to engage passage for them on the Bay City steamboat across the lake to Malden—where I saw them safely landed on free soil, to their unspeakable joy. Indeed, I thought one old man would have died from the gladness of his heart in being safe in freedom. ”

“ The state of ignorance in which the slave population of the South was largely kept must be regarded as the admission by the master class that their slaves were likely to seize the boon of freedom, unless denied the encouragement towards self-emancipation that knowledge would surely afford. The fables about Canada brought to the North by runaways well illustrate both the ignorance of the slave and the apprehensions of his owner. ”

“ The action of public sentiment in the Northern states, which, he said, palsied the Fugitive Slave Law, was accompanied, during the decade from 1850 to 1860, by tokens of open violation of the law, defiant resolutions adopted by mass-meetings, and obstructional legislation passed by various free states; the spirit of nullification was thus aroused in many localities north of Mason and Dixon's line. The demands of character and humanity had long been obeyed by many men and women for whom any compromise involving the continuance in slavery of their fellow-men was a dreadful crime. ”

“ Well-known cases of rescue, such as the Shadrach case, which occurred in Boston in January, 1851, and the Jerry rescue, which occurred in Syracuse nine months later, may be omitted here. They, like many others that have been less often chronicled, show clearly the temper of resolute men in the communities where they occurred. It was felt by these persons that the slave, who had already paid too high a penalty for his color, could not expect justice at the hands of the law, that his liberty must be preserved to him, and a base statute be thwarted at any cost. ”

“ Slave-owners and their agents entered vigorously upon the chase, and a larger number of communities in the free states than ever before were invaded by men engaged in the disgusting business of capturing blacks, intelligent and ambitious enough to seek their own liberty. Villages, towns and cities from Iowa to Maine, but especially in the middle states, witnessed scenes calculated to awaken the popular detestation of slavery as it had never been awakened before. Pitiable distress fell upon the fugitive settlers in the North and did much to quicken consciences everywhere. ”

“ Like him, she saw in the oppression of her race the sufferings of the enslaved Israelites, and was not slow to demand that the Pharaoh of the South should let her people go. She was known to many of the anti-slavery leaders of her generation; her personality and her power were such that none of them ever forgot the high virtues of this simple black woman. Governor William H. Seward, of New York, wrote of her: "I have known Harriet long, and a nobler, higher spirit or a truer, seldom dwells in human form." ”

“ Yet this side must be understood if the Underground Railroad is to appear in its true character as something more than a mere manifestation of the moral sentiment existing in the North and in some localities of the South. The romantic episodes in the fugitive slave controversy have been frequently described; but it has altogether escaped the eye of the general historian that the underground movement was one that grew from small beginnings into a great system; that it must be reckoned with as a distinct causal factor in tracing the growth of anti-slavery opinion ”

“ From earliest colonial times fugitive slaves helped to make slavery inconvenient and expensive. So long as slavery was general, every slaveholder in every colony was a member of an automatic association for stopping and returning fugitives; but, from the Revolution on, the fugitives performed the important function of keeping continually before the people of the states in which slavery had ceased, the fact that it continued in other parts of the Union. ”

“ Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court of the United States went back of the law of Congress to the Constitution in seeking the source of the master's right of recaption, and laid down the principle that "under and in virtue of the Constitution, the owner of a slave is clothed with entire authority, in every state in the Union, to seize and recapture his slave, whenever he can do it without any breach of the peace, or any illegal violence. ”

“ The truth is, the mass of the people of the free states were by no means abolitionists; they cherished an intense prejudice against the negro, and permitted it to extend to all anti-slavery advocates. They were willing to let slavery alone, and desired that others should let it alone. ”

“ The moral bond of opposition to the whole slave power kept men at work forwarding fugitives by a road of which they themselves knew but a small portion. The political philosophers who think that the Civil War might have been averted by timely concessions would do well to study this picture of the wide distribution of persons who saw no peace in slavery.
Amid all the varieties of anti-slavery men, from the Garrisonian abolitionist to faint-hearted slaveholders like James G. Birney, it is interesting to see how many had a share in the Underground Railroad ”

“ One will seek in vain in the secondary works for an adequate account of the Underground Railroad, or a proper estimate of its importance, whether one looks in the general histories of the United States, such as the works of Von Holst, Schouler, and Rhodes, the more condensed books of which we have an example in Prof. J. W. Burgess's The Middle Period, or the histories of slavery, like Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Greeley's American Conflict, Williams' History of the Negro Race, and Willey's History of the Anti-Slavery Cause in State and Nation. ”

“ The fact that there were large tracts of good land in the portion of Canada accessible to the fugitive was a fortunate circumstance, for the desire to possess and cultivate their own land was wide-spread among the escaped slaves. This eagerness drew many of them into the Canadian wilderness, there to cut out little farms for themselves, and live the life of pioneers. The extensive tract known as the Queen's Bush, lying southwest of Toronto and stretching away to Lake Huron, was early penetrated by refugees. ”

“ If he had questioned them all about their desire for liberty he would have found habitual runaways agreeing with their fellows that they were content with their present lot. The average slave was shrewd enough under ordinary circumstances to tell what he thought least likely to arouse suspicion. That such discretion did not signify lack of desire for freedom is shown not only by the numerous escapes, but by the narratives of fugitives. ”

“ William King, had been at one time a slave-owner, and the fourth, the Rev. Hiram Wilson, was a missionary among the refugees for many years. These men were persons of wide observation and experience among fugitive slaves. It is safe to say that there were no men in Canada that knew better the disadvantages under which the average fugitive, just arrived from the South, was called upon to begin the struggle for a livelihood. And it will be admitted that there were none in or out of Canada more zealous and self-sacrificing in promoting the refugee's interests. ”

“ Doubtless many acts of kindness to slaves were performed by individual Southerners, but those were not, in most of the cases, known as the acts of persons coöperating to help the slave from point to point until freedom and safety should be reached. That there were regular helpers in the South engaged in concerted action, Samuel J. May, a station-keeper of wide information concerning the Road, freely asserts. In 1869 he wrote, "There have always been scattered throughout the slaveholding states individuals who have abhorred slavery, and have pitied the victims of our American despotism. ”

“ Nova Scotia, to which probably more than to any other of these, refugees from Southern bondage fled, had by reason of natural causes, lost nearly, if not quite all traces of slavery by the beginning of our century. The experience of the eighteenth century had been sufficient to reform public opinion in Canada on the question of slavery, and to show that the climate of the provinces was a permanent barrier to the profitable employment of slave labor. ”

“ Fugitive slave cases were stubbornly contested in the courts on the ground that the law of 1850 was unconstitutional. The series of cases in which the law was subjected to the penetrating criticism of some of the ablest lawyers in the country is a long and interesting one; nothing in the history of the times more clearly shows the effect of the Underground Railroad in rousing ever-widening indignation at the hunt for fugitives. ”

“ Can it be thought strange that the disappearance week by week and month by month of valuable slaves over the unknown routes of the underground system should have produced wrath, suspicion and hostility in the minds of people who could justly claim to have a constitutional guarantee, the laws of Congress, and the decisions of the highest courts on their side? ”

“ Persons of this type contented themselves generally, no doubt, with acting as spies and informers, and rarely engaged in the excitement of a slave-hunt except as the aids of Southern planters or their agents. If it is true that there was a sentiment averse to slavery prevailing through many years in the North, it is also true that the residents of the free states for the most part conceded the right of Southerners to pursue and recover their fugitives without hindrance from their Northern neighbors. ”