on their way to the land of liberty by a philanthropic organization known as the Underground Railway. Of this organization, of its methods, its results, and some of its principal agents, we purpose in this paper to give some account.

From the nature of the case the operations of the Underground Railway had to be conducted in secret. Few details of its work were placed on record. Its agents for very practical reasons did good by stealth and blushed to find it fame." They lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and espionage. When discovered they were marked men, exposed to punishment by the law, and were subject to extrajudicial disabilities, annoyance, and persecution; and they were sometimes done to death as martyrs of liberty. The literature of the subject is therefore meagre. It is scattered through reports of legal trials, paper and magazine articles, and a number of books and sketches, reminiscence and biography. A few Underground Railway agents were indiscreet enough to commit to writing the record of their operations, some of which, for a time preserved, it was found necessary to destroy. Nevertheless, a number of works have been compiled on this subject.

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The most considerable of these is Still's "Underground Railway Records," a large volume of 780 pages, which appeared in 1872 and a second edition in 1883. Levi Coffin, an apostle of abolition, a distinguished member of an uncompromising anti-slavery family, has written a large volume of reminiscences of the stirring events in which he was so prominent. Theodore Parker, of Boston, an active abolitionist, made. a large collection of manuscript and printed documents on this subject, which is now in possession of the Boston Public Library.

That philanthropic Canadian, Dr.

Alexander M. Ross, who bore a brave part in aiding the escape of fugitives, has in his "Recollection and Experiences of an Abolitionist," recorded many stirring incidents of the anti-slavery campaign. The biographies of Fred Douglass, Josiah Henson, Austin Steward, and other escaped slaves, also describe many personal incidents and adventures. Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" gives a graphic account of Underground Railway methods, and the Key to that work furnishes corroborative statements vindicating the general truthfulness of her novel. The latest, best-digested, and most comprehensive book on this subject is "The Underground Railway from Slavery to Freedom," by Wilbur H. Siebert, Professor of European History in Ohio State University.*

It is somewhat remarkable that such law-abiding and peace-loving people as the Friends or Quakers should be active agents in the violation of law and defiance of authority involved in the abduction, concealment and forwarding to their destination of the hunted slaves. The zealous abolitionist and Underground Railway agent, to use the words of Professor Hart, of Harvard University, argued thus:

'In aiding fugitive slaves he is making the most effective protest against the continuance of slavery; but he was also doing something more tangible; he was helping the oppressed, he was eluding the oppressor; and at the same time he was enjoying the most romantic and exciting amusement open to men who had high moral standards. Above all, the Underground Railway was the opportunity for the bold and the adventurous ; it had the excitement of piracy, the secrecy of burglary, the daring of insurrection; to the pleasure of relieving the poor negro's sufferings it added the triumph of snapping one's fingers at the slave-catcher; it developed coolness, indifference to danger, and quickness of

Professor Siebert has recorded the names of over three thousand persons who were engaged in this heroic work, a roll of honour in which its members might well be proud to be inscribed. While the rank and file were men of humble birth and unknown to fame, yet some of them were persons of high position, literary culture, or heroic daring-men who won "glorious infamy" by their sufferings for the slave. The futile effort of Brown, of Osawatomie, to emancipate the slaves in Virginia, led to his execution on the scaffold; but on many a weary march and by many a lonely campfire, the armies of freedom chanted the Marseillaise of the Civil War: <6 John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul is marching on." Its refrain, too, furnished the motive for the noble battle hymn of the Republic.

"In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.

While God is marching on."

The historic record of the Quakers as unfaltering friends of liberty and uncompromising foes of oppression and wrong, as heroic confessors unto blood and martyrs unto death for righteousness and truth, finds further illustration in their connection with the Underground Railway.

From very early times in the history of slavery the bondman had a habit of seeking his liberty when he found an opportunity. It is a way that slaves always and everywhere have had. So great a loss thus accrued to the slave-holders of the

American Republic that as early as 1793, in an unconscious irony on its own recent struggle for Independence, Congress passed its first Fugitive Slave Law.

From that time down to the close of the Secession War may be considered the period of the secret modes of rescuing the slave, culminating in the well-organized Underground Railway, with its many routes and branches. The fugitive slave laws were from time to time made more severe in their penalties, involving not only heavy fines, but long imprisonment. These laws became more and more obnoxious to the abolitionists as violations of primal human rights, and of the instincts of liberty. The benign provisions of the ancient Hebrew law of divine origin, "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee," were cited as good reasons for violating the manmade law which virtually made all northern citizens accomplices in the crime of slave-catching.

A considerable number of slaves in the far south escaped to Mexico or to the deep recesses of the Dismal Swamp, and some to Great Britain; but to most of them the true land of liberty was Canada. The increased scope and value given to slave labour by the Louisiana Purchase and the invention of the cotton-gin and consequent vast extension of cotton culture made the task of the slave more bitter, and increased his passion for liberty. Virginia, the mother of presidents, became also the mother of slaves. The southern tier of slave states became a great mill, in which were ground out the lives of bondmen; and new grist must be supplied, after the foreign slave trade had been abolished, by slave-breeding in the northern tier of slave states. The dread of being "sold south," with the utter and irrevocable severance of the dearest and

tenderest ties of kinship and love, hung like a nightmare over the souls of myriads of our fellow-beings. The value of slaves became greatly enhanced, and led to the systematic pursuit of fugitives, and sometimes to the kidnapping of free negroes in the north.

Yet in many parts of the far south the very existence of such a place as Canada, and the succour which it offered for the fugitive were unknown. The war of 1812-15, and the return of the southern soldiers to their homes, made that place of refuge known and predisposed the negroes to seek liberty among the enemies of their masters. It was not long before tidings from the fugitives in Canada found their way back to their old homes. Before the Secession War it is estimated that five hundred negroes annually travelled between the land of freedom and the land of slavery to rescue their kinsmen.

There were those also of an alien race, whose only kinship with the oppressed was that of the soul, who took part in this crusade. Notable among these was Dr. Alexander M. Ross, a native of Ontario, a citizen of Toronto, a man of culture, and of distinguished scientific attainments, who devoted his energies with impassioned zeal to the succour of the slave. Mrs. Stowe's tear-compelling story of "Uncle Tom's Cabin " was to him a revelation and a command. Upon reading it his resolution was taken, he says, to devote all his energies to let the oppressed go free. Dr. Ross had won name and fame in the Old World and the New for his scientific studies, and had received decorations from several European sovereigns. He visited the cotton States in pursuit of his studies in ornithology, visited many plantations, conversed with the more intelligent slaves, and induced nurnbers to escape. He would give them money, food, a pocket compass, and

a knife or pistol, and send them on to the land of liberty. A reward of $12,000 was offered for his arrest. While aiding the escape of a slave he evaded capture only by shooting the horse of his pursuer. He was a tried and trusted friend of John Brown, whom he entertained at his home in Toronto.

Dr. Ross was in Richmond at the time of Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry. He was arrested and handcuffed, but escaped for lack of incriminating evidence. John Brown on the day before his death wrote to Dr. Ross exhorting him not to give up his labours for "the poor that cry and are in bonds." During the Civil War he served in the Federal Army, and subsequently in the army of Mexico. He won the commendation of Mr. Gladstone for his zeal, forethought, and tenacity, and for the signal courage and disinterestedness in humanity which formed the basis of his character.*

William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most famous of the abolitionists, was born at Newburyport, Mass., of New Brunswick parentage. In Baltimore and Washington he came in contact with slavery, and wrote so vehemently against it that he was tried, imprisoned, and amerced in a fine of $1,000. In 1831 he issued the first number of The Liberator, in which, for five-andthirty years, he continued to plead

* Whittier made Dr. Ross the subject of the following memorial verses, which are printed in fac-simile in The Canadian Magazine, Vol. V., p. 16:

For his steadfast strength and courage
In a dark and evil time,
When the Golden Rule was treason,
And to feed the hungry crime.

For the poor slave's hope and refuge

When the hounds were on his track, And saint and sinner, State and Church, Joined hands to send him back.

Blessings upon him! What he did
For each sad, suffering one,
Chained, hunted, scourged, and bleeding,
Unto our Lord was done!

the cause of the slave. He adopted as his motto, "My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind," and stoutly affirmed, "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." These prophetic These prophetic words are engraved upon his monument in the city of Boston, through whose streets he was dragged by a mob and committed to prison to save his life. When he visited England Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton was amazed to find him a white man, having taken it for granted that no one could plead so eloquently against slavery unless he himself had been a slave. He procured the aid of George Thompson, the eloquent English abolitionist, who earnestly pleaded the cause of the oppressed in the chief cities of the Northern States and Canada.*

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A noble band of women became leaders in the anti-slavery reform at a time when public opinion forbade public speaking to their sex. Mrs. Chapman, Mrs. Child, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley, and others bravely bore this reproach and addressed public audiences when stones and brickbats crashed through the windows. For admitting coloured girls to her school at Canterbury, Conn., Mis Prudence Crandall, a Quaker lady, was treated with contumely and malice. She was boycotted, to use the phrase of a later day, even by the doctor who refused. to visit the sick in her school, and lived as in a besieged garrison. She was thrown into a prison cell from which a murderer had just been taken for execution. Her school was fired and well-nigh wrecked, and was finally closed by violence.

Wendell Phillips, a man of the

*After thirty-five years' ceaseless effort the work to which The Liberator was devoted was accomplished, and Garrison, an invited guest, saw the flag of the emanci pated Union raised upon the battlements of Fort Sumter.

bluest blood of Boston, a member of its Brahmin caste, son of the first mayor of that city, espoused the cause of the hatred abolitionists. He shared their persecutions and witnessed their triumphs. Channing, Quincey, and other heroes of reform soon joined the ranks.

Intense opposition was offered the new propaganda. Anti-abolitionist riots took place in several northern cities. In New York the house of Mr. Louis Tappan was sacked and the furniture burned. In Philadelphia the anti-slavery hall was burned, as was also an asylum for coloured children. The Hon. J. C. Burney, solicitor for Alabama, released his slaves, for which his name was stricken off the roll of the bar, and the press he established at Cincinnati was destroyed.

Many ministers of religion obeyed the precepts and imitated the example of Him who came to "preach to the captives and to set at liberty them that are bruised."

The Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, a Presbyterian pastor from Maine, for denouncing a cruel lynching in St. Louis, was driven from that city. The same fate followed him to Alton, Ill., where his house was attacked, and he was himself shot to death by a mob. He was the first but not the last abolition martyr. His fate sounded the death-knell of slavery. Soon more than a hundre l anti-slavery societies sprang up throughout the north.

The Rev. Owen Lovejoy, whose brother, as we have seen, was murdered for the cause of liberty, was taunted as "nigger stealer." He replied, "Thou invisible demon of slavery, dost thou think to cross my humble threshold, and forbid me to give bread to the hungry and shelter to the houseless! I bid you defiance in the name of my God!"

For many years the lights in the windows of Thomas Rankin, a Presbyterian pastor on the Ohio River,

"were hailed by slaves fleeing from the soil of Kentucky as beacons to guide them to a haven of safety."

Theodore Parker, the accomplished scholar and orator and enthusiastic abolitionist of Boston, writes: "I must attend to living men, and not to dead books, and all this winter my time has been occupied with these poor souls."

The Rev. Charles Torrey, in 1838, resigned the pastorate of a Congregational church, in Providence, Rhode Island, and relinquished quiet and comfort that he might devote himself to the work of freeing the slaves. He was thrust into prison, attempted to escape, was sentenced to penitentiary for six years, and in prison he died. In 1844 he wrote: "If I am a guilty man, I am a very guilty one; for I have aided nearly four hundred slaves to escape to freedom, the greater part of whom would probably, but for my exertions, have died in slavery." Of him Whittier wrote: "In the wild woods of Canada, around many a happy fireside and holy family altar, his name is on the lips of God's poor. He put his soul in their soul's stead; he gave his life for those who had no claim on his love save that of human brotherhood."

Calvin Fairbank, a student of Oberlin College, read at his father's fireside, a station of the Underground Railway, the story of sorrow of escaped slaves. "My heart wept," he writes, "my anger was kindled, an antagonism to slavery was fixed upon me." He devoted himself with enthusiasm to the work of succouring the slave, and soon was placed behind prison bars. He was arrested again and again, and spent seventeen years and four months of his life in prison for abducting slaves, and has placed on record the statement that he received at the hands of prison officials thirty-five thousand stripes on his naked body. His ample reward was that he had guided forty-seven slaves toward the north star. writes:

He

"I piloted them through the forests, mostly by night; girls, fair and white, dressed as ladies; men and boys, as gentlemen or servants; men in women's clothes, and women in men's clothes, boys dressed as girls, and girls as boys; on foot or on horseback, in buggies, carriages, common waggons, in and under loads of hay, straw, old furniture, boxes and bags; crossing the Jordan of the slave, swimming or wading chin deep; or in boats, or skiffs; on rafts, and often on a pine log. And I never suffered one to be recaptured."