Amid all the varieties of anti-slavery men, from the Garrisonian abolitionist to faint-hearted slaveholders like James G. Birney, it is interesting to see how many had a share in the Underground Railroad; and how many earned a reputation as heroes. Professor Siebert has gathered the names of about 3,200 persons known to have been engaged in this work--a roll of honor for many American families. Everybody knew that the fugitives were aided by Fred Douglass, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings, John Brown, Levi Coffin, Thomas Garrett and Theodore Parker; but this book gives us some account of the interest of men like Thaddeus Stevens, not commonly counted among the sons of the prophets; and performs a special service to the student of history and the lover of heroic deeds, by the brief account of the services of obscure persons who deserve a place in the hearts of their countrymen. Men like Rev. George Bourne, Rev. James Duncan and Rev. John Rankin, years before Garrison's propaganda, had begun to speak and publish against slavery, and to prepare men's minds for a righteous disregard of Fugitive Slave Acts. Joseph Sider, with his carefully subdivided peddler's wagon, deserves a place alongside the better known Henry Box Brown. The thirty-five thousand stripes of Calvin Fairbank, seventeen years a convict in the Kentucky penitentiary, range him with Lovejoy as an anti-slavery martyr. Rev. Charles Torrey had in the work of rousing slaves to escape, the same devotion to a fatal duty as that which animated John Brown. And no one who has ever heard Harriet Tubman describe her part as "Moses" of the fugitives can ever forget that African prophetess, whose intense vigor is relieved by a shrewd and kindly humanity. The quiet recital of the facts has all the charm of romance to the passengers on the Underground Railroad: whether travelling by night in a procession of covered wagons, or boldly by day in disguises; whether boxed up as so much freight, or riding on passes unhesitatingly given by abolitionist directors of railroads; the fugitives in these pages rejoice in their prospect of liberty. The road sign near Oberlin, of a tiger chasing a negro, was a white man's joke; but it was a negro who said, apropos of his master's discouraging account of Canada: "They put some extract onto it to keep us from comin'"; and neither Whittier in his poems, nor Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novels, imagined a more picturesque incident than the crossing of the Detroit River by Fairfield's "gang" of twenty-eight rescued souls singing, "I'm on my way to Canada, where colored men are free," to the joyful accompaniment of their firearms. To the settlements of fugitives in Canada Professor Siebert has given more labor than appears in his book; for his own visits supplement the accounts of earlier investigators; and we have here the first complete account of the reception of the negroes in Canada and their progress in civilization.