The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A comprehensive historySiebert, Wilbur Henry
History
The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A comprehensive history
Siebert, Wilbur Henry
Fugitive slaves -- United States; Underground Railroad
It will be remembered that the occasion, if not the cause, of
John Brown's raid into Missouri was the solicitation of aid by a
slave for himself and companions. Such prayers for succor were not
infrequently addressed to abolitionists by those in bonds or by
their refugee friends. In the anti-slavery host there were many
whose principles wavered not under any test applied to them, and
whose impulses urged them upon humanitarian missions, however hemmed
in by difficulties and dangers. Among those who heard and answered
the cry of the slave were the Rev. Charles T. Torrey, Captain
Jonathan Walker, Mrs. Laura S. Haviland, Captain Daniel Drayton,
Richard Dillingham, William L. Chaplin and Josiah Henson.
The variety of persons represented in this short, incomplete list
is interesting: Mr. Torrey was a Congregational clergyman of New
England stock, and had been educated at Yale College; Messrs. Walker
and Drayton were masters of sailing vessels, and came from the
states of Massachusetts and New Jersey respectively; Mrs. Haviland
was a Wesleyan Methodist, who founded a school or institute in
southeastern Michigan for both white and colored persons; Richard
Dillingham was a Quaker school-teacher in Cincinnati, Ohio; William
L. Chaplin began his professional life as a lawyer in eastern
Massachusetts, but soon became the editor of an anti-slavery
newspaper; and Josiah Henson was a fugitive slave, one of the
founders of the Dawn Institute in Canada West. With the exception of
the last named they were white persons, whose sense of the injustice
of slavery caused them to take a stand that shut them out of that
conventionally respectable society to which their birth, education
and talents would have admitted them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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