It is with feelings of much gratification that he is able
to present to the readers the portraits of many of the
leading men and women who were actively engaged in
the "Underground Railroad," who dared to open their
houses to the fugitive slave, and to do unto him as they
would be done by. With the exception of a few cuts,
furnished through the kindness of William Still, all
have been engraved expressly for this work from the
best likenesses in the possession of the families.

When we consider that from the beginning of the
anti-slavery conflict until after the breaking out of the
Rebellion, the whole North was, by a vast majority, pro-
slavery; when abolitionists were individually reviled
and persecuted, even by churches of all denominations;
when their country meetings were frequently broken up
by ruffians, and their city conventions dispersed by mobs;
when Faneuil Hall, the "Cradle of American Liberty,"
was refused by the Board of Aldermen to abolitionists
for holding a convention, and afterwards used for pro-
slavery purposes; when but three ministers in all Boston
could be found who would read to their congregations
a notice of an anti-slavery meeting; when Miss Prudence
Crandall, of Canterbury, Conn., who opened a school
for colored persons, was refused all supplies and accom-

modations in the town, was arrested and imprisoned
according to a law passed by the Legislature of that
State, after the commencement of her school, expressly
for the purpose of suppressing the education of the colored
people, and that, too, in intelligent New England, where
a system of public school education received its earliest
support; when a convention for the purpose of forming
a State Anti-slavery Society in Utica, N. Y., was broken
up and dispersed by a mob, headed by a former Judge
of the county; when newspapers refused to publish anti-
slavery speeches, but poured forth such denunciations
as: "The people will hereafter consider abolitionists as
out of the pale of legal and conventional protection
which society affords to its honest and well-meaning
members," that "they will be treated as robbers and
pirates, and as the enemies of the human kind;" when
the offices of anti-slavery papers were broken into and
the presses and the type destroyed; when William Lloyd
Garrison, then editor of The Liberator, was seized and
dragged bareheaded through the streets of Boston by a
mob, many of whom sought to kill him; when Elijah P.
Lovejoy, for the same offence of editing an anti-slavery
paper, was mobbed and shot to death in his office in
Alton, Ill.; when Northern merchants extensively en-

gaged in Southern trade, told abolitionists that as their
pecuniary interests were largely connected with those of
the South, they could not afford to allow them to suc-
ceed in their efforts to overthrow slavery, that millions
upon millions of dollars were due them from Southern
merchants, the payment of which would be jeopardized
by any rupture between the North and South, and that
they would put them down by fair means if they could,
but by foul means if they must; with all this violent.
pro-slavery spirit existing throughout the North, and
the Fugitive Slave Law, like a sword of power in the
hands of slave-holders, ready to be wielded by them
against any one assisting a slave to freedom, we must
concede that it required the manhood of a man, and the
unflinching fortitude of a woman, upheld by a full and
firm Christian faith, to be an abolitionist in those days,
and especially an Underground Railroad agent.

It need scarcely be reiterated that this malevolent
spirit was wrought up to white heat in the South. An
abolitionist could not travel there without persecution
and threats of death; from five to twenty thousand
dollars reward was offered at different times by Southern
gentlemen for the arrest and delivery into their hands of
William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur Tappan and others.

Yet slave-holders could travel through the North without
any fear of personal or physical violence from abolition-
ists. Their principles and their teachings were against
using brute force or encouraging a feeling of hatred for
their adversaries.

Aside from the direct antagonists to anti-slavery,
there were apathetic people who heard recitals of tales
of torture inflicted upon slaves, of the labors of abolition-
ists to educate people against the tyranny of the system,
and the persecutions inflicted upon them for so doing,
without giving a thought or manifesting a feeling upon
either side. William Lloyd Garrison became quite
warm in conversation one time when alluding to these
two classes and the sin of slavery. His friend, Samuel
J. May, said to him: "Do try to keep cool, my friend;
why, you are all on fire." Laying his hand upon May's
shoulder with a kind and sympathetic pressure, he said
slowly, and with a deep emotion: "Brother May, I
have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice
about me to melt."

Thanks to an over-ruling Providence, those mountains
have melted, and their clear waters have descended to
Southern fields of recent carnage, and washed away the
crimson stains of a fratricidal war growing out of the

institution of slavery—a rebellion against the Government which had recognized and protected the system, and still offered protection to it that the Union might be preserved. By the Proclamation of Lincoln, as a means to acquire victory, to hasten the termination of war and to establish a peace, the fetters of four millions of human beings were struck off and they were declared henceforth and forever free.

The stars and stripes of American liberty are now no longer fanned by the mingled breath of master and slave, and the American eagle looks down exultantly from his majestic soarings upon a broad, free country, of which he is the proud and honored National emblem.

The one great cause of sectional animosity being now removed, let us devoutly hope that all will be united in one common brotherhood, actuated by one common purpose the prosperity, welfare and happiness of the whole people living under the protection and regulation of a wise, well-administered, general Government.

Trusting that this volume may fulfill the limited mission for which it is designed, it is humbly submitted to the public as a brief record of a few incidents in the lives of those who, although environed by constant danger in the days of slavery, successfully managed the