#Escape the underground asriel ending free#

For enslaved people on the lam, Madison, Indiana, served as one particularly attractive crossing point, thanks to an Underground Railroad cell set up there by blacksmith Elijah Anderson and several other members of the town’s Black middle class.

#Escape the underground asriel ending free#

The Ohio River, which marked the border between slave and free states, was known in abolitionist circles as the River Jordan. “The dictates of humanity came in opposition to the law of the land,” he wrote, “and we ignored the law.” Operating openly, Coffin even hosted anti-slavery lectures and abolitionist sewing society meetings, and, like his fellow Quaker Thomas Garrett, remained defiant when dragged into court. All told, he claimed to have assisted about 3,300 enslaved people, saying he and his wife, Catherine, rarely passed a week without hearing a telltale nighttime knock on their side door. Getting his start bringing food to fugitives hiding out on his family’s North Carolina farm, he would grow to be a prosperous merchant and prolific “stationmaster,” first in Newport (now Fountain City), Indiana, and then in Cincinnati. Known as the “president of the Underground Railroad,” Levi Coffin purportedly became an abolitionist at age 7 when he witnessed a column of chained enslaved people being driven to auction. Webber, shows Levi Coffin, his wife Catherine, and Hannah Haydock assisting a group of fugitive slaves. The Underground Railroad, painted by Charles T. There, he continued helping escaped slaves, at one point fending off an anti-abolitionist mob that had gathered outside his Quaker bookstore.

A friend of Joseph Bonaparte, the exiled brother of the former French emperor, Hopper moved to New York City in 1829. Though a tailor by trade, he also excelled at exploiting legal loopholes to win enslaved people's freedom in court. Anti-slavery sentiment was particularly prominent in Philadelphia, where Isaac Hopper, a convert to Quakerism, established what one author called “the first operating cell of the abolitionist underground.” In addition to hiding runaways in his own home, Hopper organized a network of safe havens and cultivated a web of informants so as to learn the plans of fugitive slave hunters.

Quakers played a huge role in the formation of the Underground Railroad, with George Washington complaining as early as 1786 that a “society of Quakers, formed for such purposes, have attempted to liberate” a neighbor’s slave.