HEROICS OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
1874 reunion of abolitionists at the Second Baptist Church helped to set the record straight
Graying alums of America’s antislavery crusade brought a sense of urgency to a belated reunion of “Old Abolitionists” in Chicago.
The event had been postponed to 1874 because of the Great Chicago Fire three years earlier. So those who met at the Second Baptist Church at Morgan and Monroe streetswere painfully aware that time was running out to set the record straight about the Underground Railroad.
Immediately after the Civil War there was cachet in claiming to have been part of the clandestine network of safe houses that helped enslaved Blacks reach freedom in Canada. Some got credit on little or no evidence.
Some parts of the abolitionists’ story were too well-known to be conveniently forgotten. The year before John Brown’s ill-fated 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the militant abolitionist and his guerrillas brought 11 enslaved Blacks, rescued from Missouri, to Chicago and met with prominent members of the city’s anti-slavery movement.
During the Civil War Union soldiers sang: “John Brown’s Body lies a-moldering in the grave/ But his soul goes marching on” to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Illinois’ role in the Underground Railroad was inevitably controversial. In July 1857 the Tribune reported that the Nashville Democrat, a small-town newspaper, had complained:
“For some time past the Negro stealing Abolitionists of this section of Illinois have persisted in their determination to establish this point as a depot on the ‘Underground Railroad.’ ”
The paper said the fugitive enslaved Blacks were headed to “that hot bed of treasonable Abolitionism and corruption, Chicago.”
An estimated 3,000 to 4,500 formerly enslaved Black people passed through Chicago, most finding asylum in Canada, according to the National Park Service.
Fearing that their story might not survive them, the organizers of the Old Abolitionists reunion made a point of inviting young people in the announcement of the event, which was sent to 400 newspapers. Along with others in attendance, the young people sang “The Antislavery Hymn:
While he treads the wheel of slavery Bid his hopeless fears subside
Bear him through oppression’s currents Land him safe on freedom’s side. First-person narratives were told at the reunion. Frances Willard described “The first time she saw free land was from Lake Ontario, where she saw the land of Canada,” the Tribune reported.
A letter from John Cross was read: “I well recollect, a few years later, seeing Elias Robinson, for no crime but wearing the skin his Creator had given him, by the decision of a Chicago magistrate, delivered up, in utter disregard of God’s prohibition, to the biped bloodhounds from Missouri which were howling on his track.”
The reunion’s audience heard the story of Harriet Tubman, the abolitionists’ patron saint. Escaping from slavery in Virginia in 1849, she returned to lead dozens of other enslaved people to freedom, often using the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War she escorted Union soldiers into Confederate territory.
An inspirational lecture on Benjamin Lundy, founder of the Union Humane at Society, a pioneering abolitionist group,
was given by Zebina Eastman, the editor of Chicago magazine.
“But the pledge he made to his soul at Wheeling, to remember the poorest of the poor, to remember those in bonds, to deliver them, held a spell upon him,” Eastman declaimed. “It was a constant question: ‘What shall I do?’ And he concluded he must act.”
Indeed, an easterner complained that the host city was hogging the podium.
“He believed that Chicago had enough speakers to run the Convention to the ground,” the Tribune reported.
Perhaps so, but Chicago had something about which to brag. When a slave owner appeared in Chicago in 1855, the Tribune advised him: “You had better go home and thank God your slaves have escaped, and pray to him to keep you from the sin of owning more.”
Chicago’s abolitionists included John Jones and his wife Mary. A free Black man, he ran a prosperous tailoring business at 119 Dearborn St. Their spacious home was a “station,” as safe-houses on the Underground Railroad were dubbed.
The city’s first Black congregation, Quinn Chapel A.M.E., operated another station in a little church at State and Madison streets. When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Jones presided at a community meeting in Quinn Chapel. It created a Vigilance Committee to watch for bounty hunters trying, under cover of night, to drag Black Chicagoans into servitude.
The most enigmatic of Chicago’s abolitionists was Allan Pinkerton. He founded a detective agency that would become infamous for roughing up union organizers and strikers. But in the 1850s he was on the side of enslaved Blacks.
When John Brown passed through Chicago, he sought out Pinkerton, who fed Brown’s group and brought them to the Jones’ “station.” The escapees were sent on to Detroit, from where they reached Canada.
Another set of Chicago’s “station masters” was Jan and Antje Ton, Dutch immigrants and dedicated abolitionists.
The site of their farm, on what became the city’s Southeast Side, was marked by a plaque this year.
Geography dictated Chicago’s role in the Underground Railroad, and the city’s role can be seen as a predecessor, of sorts, to its current identification as a “sanctuary city” where the police don’t cooperate with federal authorities searching for immigrants in the country illegally.
In the 19th century Illinois was flanked by slave states to the west and south. But enslaved people were essentially freed by setting foot on Illinois soil. In 1853 a judge freed Robert Herman, whose owner had brought him from Arkansas to Illinois.
“He now wishes to say to Richard Thurston of Van Buren, Ark., his ex master, that he thanks him for his freedom; that if he had kept him there with his wife and child he would never have left them, and would therefore have been today a slave,” the Tribune reported.
But as the Fugitive Slave Act took hold, it was perilous for enslaved Blacks to depend upon the goodwill of judges. The Act also imposed a heavy burden on the conductors of intermediate stations on the route to Chicago, as was noted in a letter the Tribune printed on the eve of the Old Abolitionists reunion.
“My father with three brothers who occupied adjoining farms, entertained hundreds of these runaways, taking them 10 or 15 miles on their way — in many instances feeding them in some place of concealment, for days and even weeks,” wrote a resident of Galesburg.
“Not only were these friends and helpers of the fugitive in danger from the ‘owners’, who not infrequently armed with the authority of Law, tracked him across the state, but a price was put upon their heads, and they were beset with spies among their own neighbors, and ostensible friends.”
The Old Abolitionists reunion ended with a salute to newspapers that had supported the abolitionist cause. Among them was the Western Citizen and an eventual successor, the Chicago Tribune.
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