Considering the comparative freedom of movement between the slave and the free states along the border, it is easy to understand how slaves in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri might pick up information about the "Land of Promise" to the northward. Isaac White, a slave of Kanawha County, Virginia, was shown a map and instructed how to get to Canada by a man from Cleveland, Ohio. Allen Sidney, a negro who ran a steamboat on the Tennessee River for his master, first learned of Canada from an abolitionist at Florence, Alabama.[61] Until the contest over the peculiar institution had become heated, it was not an uncommon thing for slaves to be sent on errands, or even hired out to residents of the border counties of the free states. Notwithstanding Ohio's political antagonism to slavery from the beginning, there was a "tacit tolerance" of slavery by the people of the state down to about 1835; and "numbers of slaves, as many as two thousand it was sometimes supposed, were hired ... from Virginia and Kentucky, chiefly by farmers." Doubtless such persons heard more or less about Canada, and when the agitation against slavery became vehement, they were approached by friends, and many were induced to accept transportation to the Queen's dominions.[62] [61] Conversation with White and Sidney in Canada West, August, 1895. [62] Rufus King, _Ohio_, in _American Commonwealths_, pp. 364, 365, relates that some of these slaves were discharged from servitude "by writs of habeas corpus procured in their names," and that "numbers were abducted from the slave states and concealed, or smuggled by the 'Underground Railroad' into Canada."