Escaping to freedom
Tales of the Underground Railroad.
Sometimes the greatest heroes are never widely known. William Still was one of those, known mostly by historians for the records he kept. But his story is one of daring and sacrifice. He risked his life in the cause of freedom.
He was born in New Jersey, the youngest of 18 children. His father, Levin, had earned his freedom by his hard labor. His mother, Sydney, had escaped slavery twice. The first time, she and her four children made it to New Jersey where the family was reunited. But the slave catchers caught up with her and brought her back.
But Sydney craved freedom so desperately that she thwarted her master’s strategy and escaped again. This time, she knew that she would never make it with all four children. The older two were boys and she reasoned that they had a better chance to survive and find their way out of slavery than her younger girls. She left the boys, Levin Jr. and Peter, and fled.
After her escape, Sydney and Levin had 14 more children, of whom William was the youngest.
The family stories of heart-wrenching sacrifice motivated the youngest Still to become a station master on the Underground Railroad. It was neither Railroad, nor underground. It got its name from a slave catcher who when the runaway slave he was chasing disappeared, declared, ‘It’s as though he disappeared on an underground railroad.’ The name and motif stuck.
It was a secret network. Nobody knew much about the other operators. Code names and passwords protected those who risked their lives helping their countrymen to freedom. Letters sent by U.S. mail referred to runaways as “cargo.” William Still operated the busiest station of all in his home in a busy section of Philadelphia.
William Still’s own mother’s yearning for her lost sons showed him that family separations were worse than physical torture, grueling labor or the humiliations of the auction block. He began a secret record, carefully documenting the stories of escapes, name changes, places of origination and destinations.
When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, it became legal for slave catchers to come into free states and capture runaways. They needed no warrant, and if accused, even free blacks had no legal recourse. The punishment for aiding runaways or impeding the efforts of slave catchers was officially imprisonment. But the retaliation inflicted by slave catchers was much more deadly.
Most of the Underground Railroad station masters destroyed their records to protect themselves and those who had passed through. Though the Congress expected the FSA to halt the Underground Railroad, it had the opposite effect. Since free states were no longer safe for fugitives, the lines of the Railroad extended farther north to Canada. One line ran through Niagara Falls and another through Detroit.
Even with the heightened threat, Still kept his records, hiding them each day in an underground crypt. He actively served escapees for about 15 years until the Civil War made the Underground Railroad obsolete.
One day, an older man came into his office. The visitor’s name was Peter. He told Still his story. He had been a young boy enslaved in Maryland. His mother, Sydney, had escaped with her four children and been recaptured. He told of being kidnapped shortly after that and sold to a plantation in Alabama. His father was named Levin. He explained that his older brother, Levin Jr., had been whipped to death.
William cried, “What would you say if I told you that I was your brother?” A little later, Peter was reunited with his mother after being separated for 49 years.
As many as 800 people passed through William Still’s station.
After the Civil War, William Still published his records as “The Underground Rail road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narrative, Letters, narrating the Hardships, Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their efforts of freedom as related by themselves and others or witnessed by the author, together with sketches of some of the largest stockholders and most Liberal aiders and Advisers of the Road, by William Still.”
He died a wealthy man at the age of 81, a true American hero.
Only in America. God bless it.