one universal procedure. Indeed there were places and times when the Underground Railroad was quite literally a railroad. Many a fugitive was simply put aboard the steam cars, with money to pay the fare, where under the eye of a sympathetic trainman he might travel for many miles by the most rapid means then available. Many others made at least part of their journey by water, on ocean-going vessels, river steamers, or humble canal boats. Any form of transport that went north and was reasonably safe could be used; and all were used, here or there, as circumstances made possible or expedient.
The men and women who engaged in this demanding and hazardous work came from all walks of life—farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, teachers, physicians and lawyers, businessmen of every sort. Many were ministers; many more were escaped slaves who had found precarious refuge in the North. Some, perhaps a majority, were convinced and active abolitionists; others seem to have been impelled to the cause in the first instance by more purely religious or humanitarian motives. Their total number, in any given year or over a span of decades, remains unknown, but they were certainly to be counted in the thousands. Few of them had any knowledge of the system beyond their own circumscribed orbits, but here and there a man or woman emerged whose activities spanned the country.
Such a one was Levi Coffin of Ohio, who was reputed to have helped more than three thousand fugitives and who in time came to be known as “president of the Underground Railroad.” Another was the Reverend Samuel J. May, whose range of activity at different times included eastern Connecticut, Boston, and Central New York. Two others of national prominence, both in the Underground Railroad and in the abolitionist cause, were the escaped slaves Frederick Douglass and the famous Harriet Tubman.
But these were the exceptions. The average Under-grounder performed his unpaid and demanding task in secrecy, in danger, and—except for the handful of neighboring co-workers with whom he was in contact—in solitude.
The system these dedicated people constructed was a slow growth, but by the 1850’s it had reached virtually nation-wide proportions. Its stations and routes extended through all the free states from the cornfields of Kansas to the rocky harbors of New England, with tenuous fingers stretching into the stronghold of slavery itself—the South. Its terminals lay scattered along the line of the Great Lakes and the country’s northern border, beyond which lay the one real refuge, the one region that put an end to all fear of re-enslavement—Canada.
For runaways who sought permanent freedom, it had always been Canada. As early as 1705, when the French flag flew beyond the St. Lawrence, escaped slaves had fled there from Albany. Under English law, which came to Canada in 1763, slavery was permitted. But the American Revolution soon followed; in Canadian eyes the United States became an enemy country, and enemy property would not readily be returned. Within twenty years thereafter slavery was ended in Canada by a series of court decisions, holding that the air of this British land was “too pure for a slave to breathe.”5
This made Canada more than ever the refugees’ goal, and before the War of 1812 reached its inconclusive end, the words “Canada” and “freedom” were used interchangeably by slaves in all the shanties and quarters in the South. Men who knew what it was to be flogged by merciless masters, women who lived in fear of having their chastity stolen by lecherous overseers, mothers and fathers who dreaded the day when they would be torn from their families and “sold down the river” to the rich new cotton lands of the Mississippi Delta and East Texas, came to know that the way north was the way to freedom. Follow the Drinking Gourd, they said, follow the North Star; up there were people who would see you got safely across the border. Every month the number who made a break for freedom grew larger, until by the time of the Civil War it has been estimated that anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 fugitive slaves had escaped from bondage.6 The whole story of those who safely crossed the Mason-Dixon line will not be told here—perhaps it will never be fully known—but in this study it is proposed to examine in detail what happened in a single Northeastern state.
CHAPTER 1
BLAZING THE TRAIL
THERE had always been runaway bondsmen in Connecticut. In 1643, just four years after the first slave set foot on the colony’s soil, the Articles of Confederation between the United Colonies of New England—Massachusetts, New Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven—provided that “if any servant run away from his master into any of these confederated jurisdictions, that, in such case, upon certificate of one magistrate in the jurisdiction of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proof, the said servant shall be delivered, either to his master or any other, that pursues and brings such certificate of proof.”1 Such was Connecticut’s first fugitive slave law—although the runaways to whom it referred were likely to be white indentured servants or apprentices rather than Negro slaves, who in 1643 were a mere handful.
In 1680 the number of slaves was still only thirty. And in the very next year, one of these became Connecticut’s first known runaway Negro. This was a certain Jack, property of Sam Wolcott of Wethersfield. He was said to be a shiftless slave, his master a merciless man. One day in June, 1681, this unpleasant relationship ended; Jack ran off and set out on a journey northward. Along the way he managed to steal a gun, but it had no flint and he abandoned it in a woodland. Eventually he reached Springfield, Massachusetts, where his journey ended on the first of July:
Anthony Dorcester saith that today about noone this Negroe came to his house & after asking for a pipe of Tobacco, I told him there was some on the table, he tooke my knife & cut some & then put it in his pocket & after he tooke down a cutlass & offered to draw it but it coming out I closed in upon him & so Bound him with the help of my wife & daughter when he scrambling in his Pocket I suspected he might have a knife & searching found my knife naked in his Pocket which he would faine have got out but I prevented him & tooke it away… . I committed the Negroe to Prison there to remain & be safely secured till discharged by Authority.2
Jack apparently set an example that others were ready to follow, for a law of 1690 provided that no Negro servant was to be ferried across any stream unless he had a certificate.3 It is obvious that even at this early date fugitives were becoming a problem; and at least some of them were finding friends among Connecticut’s respectable citizens. In 1702 a mulatto slave named Abda fled from his owner, Captain Thomas Richards of Hartford, and was secreted by Captain Joseph Wadsworth of the same place. Some time later, when the town constable approached him with a writ to reclaim the fugitive, Wadsworth resisted, and the case was brought before the governor and council for decision. As a man of partly Caucasian descent, Abda filed a countersuit against Captain Richards, asking damages of twenty pounds sterling “for his unjust holding and detaining the said Abda in his service as his bondman.” But Governor Saltonstall made short work of Abda’s case and of similar cases that might arise later. In one breath, he consigned “all persons born of Negro bondwomen” to slavery. Abda was returned to his owner.4
Others who went farther were likely to fare better, for Massachusetts soon proved to be a fairly safe refuge for Connecticut runaways. In Pittsfield, it was reported, many became house servants for respectable families. Springfield, where “sympathy for the slave, fleeing from bondage, was often manifested … years before the odious fugitive slave law,” was a special magnet.5
It must not be supposed, however, that the runaway was automatically safe as soon as he reached Massachusetts. Harboring a fugitive slave, even at that period, could be a dangerous business. In the town of Wilbraham, for example, an elderly and honored magistrate of Hampden County “suffered a serious injury in his own house, in an ineffectual attempt to protect a colored man in his employ from being seized and dragged back to slavery in Connecticut.”6 The state legislature, too, evinced little friendship for Negroes in general and
