‘I kept,’ says Levi Coffin, ‘a team and wagon always at command, to convey the fugitive slaves on their journey. These journeys had to be made at night, often through deep and bad roads, and along by-ways that were seldom travelled. Every precaution to evade pursuit had to be used, as the hunters were often on the track, and sometimes ahead of the slaves. We had different routes for sending the slaves to depôts ten, fifteen, or twenty miles distant; and when we heard of slave-hunters having passed on one road, we forwarded our passengers by another. Sometimes we learned that the pursuers were ahead of them; and we sent a messenger and had the fugitives brought back to my house, to lie in concealment till they had lost the trail.... Three principal lines from the south converged at my house—one from Cincinnati, one from Madison, and one from Jeffersonville, Indiana. There was no lack of passengers. Seldom a week passed without our receiving them. We knew not what night or what hour of the night we would be roused from slumber by a gentle rap at the door; that was the signal announcing the arrival of a train of the U. G. R. R. I have often been awaked by this signal, and sprung out of bed in the dark and opened the door. Outside in the cold or rain there would be a two-horse wagon loaded with fugitives, perhaps the greater part of them women and children. When they were all safely inside and the door fastened, I would cover the windows, strike a light, and build a good fire. By this time my wife would be up and preparing victuals for them; and in a short time the cold and hungry fugitives would be made comfortable. I would accompany the conductor of the train’ [that is, the driver of the wagon; in America the guard of a railway train is always called the conductor] ‘to the stable, and care for the horses, that had perhaps been driven twenty-five or thirty miles that night through the cold and rain. The fugitives would rest on pallets before the fire the rest of the night. The companies varied in number from two or three to seventeen fugitives.’ Such was the work which for twenty years this good man carried on in Newport. He had often to set his wits hard at work to foil the slave-hunters, and more than once ran serious personal risk. The whole undertaking must have cost him a heavy expenditure of time, labour, and money. But he was not content with this. He organised in Newport a store where cotton goods were sold that had been manufactured entirely by free labour; and for this purpose took a journey to the South to establish relations with planters who employed only freemen. He and his friends then formed a league, each member of which bound himself to purchase no goods on the production of which slaves had been employed.