Growing up in a Quaker family in the South in 1830, Levi Coffin did not support slavery, but he was exposed to its atrocities. Convinced that every person deserved to be free, Levi began helping slaves escape to the North along the Underground Railroad, and during the following 40 years he was able to help over 3,000 people find freedom.

'Levi Coffin and the Underground Railroad' recreates the human drama, pathos, excitement, and danger surrounding the attempts of American blacks in the 1800s to find release from oppression in the South. With cruelty to slaves indelibly impressed on his mind as a child, young Levi Coffin, a Quaker, was determined to spend his life improving their lot. In spite of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, he took seriously the admonition of Deuteronomy 23:15: Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee. Levi appealed to the consciences of fellow Quakers. He and his wife, Catherine, provided refuge, food, and moral support in their home during several decades for a stream of some 3,000 runaways headed for Canada. One of the slaves the Coffins assisted, Eliza Harris, became the leading character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential novel, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. Frustrated by Coffin's successful efforts to help fugitives elude recapture, slave-hunters nicknamed him President of the Underground Railroad. The network of cooperative homes became known as stations or depots, the wagons as trains, the drivers as brakemen or firemen, and the hosts along the way as stationmasters or conductors. This book presents Levi Coffin's experiences in a way that will capture the interest and admiration of young and old alike.

Here are firsthand descriptions of the experiences of escaped slaves making their way to freedom in the North and in Canada in the years before the Civil War.

A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York—Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring—full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage—and significant—the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.

Uses letters, newspaper articles, biographies, and autobiographies to tell the Underground Railroad's stories of pain and courage.

During the fourteen years Sydney Howard Gay edited the American Anti-Slavery Society's National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City, he worked with some of the most important Underground agents in the eastern United States, including Thomas Garrett, William Still and James Miller McKim. Gay's closest associate was Louis Napoleon, a free black man who played a major role in the James Kirk and Lemmon cases. For more than two years, Gay kept a record of the fugitives he and Napoleon aided. These never before published records are annotated in this book. Revealing how Gay was drawn into the bitter division between Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, the work exposes the private opinions that divided abolitionists. It describes the network of black and white men and women who were vital links in the extensive Underground Railroad, conclusively confirming a daily reality.

First published in 1898, this comprehensive history was the first documented survey of a system that helped fugitive slaves escape from areas in the antebellum South to regions as far north as Canada. Comprising fifty years of research, the text includes interviews and excerpts from diaries, letters, biographies, memoirs, speeches, and a large number of other firsthand accounts. Together, they shed much light on the origins of a system that provided aid to runaway slaves, including the degree of formal organization within the movement, methods of procedure, geographical range, leadership roles, the effectiveness of Canadian settlements, and the attitudes of courts and communities toward former slaves.

" The underground railroad—with its mysterious signals, secret depots, abolitionist heroes, and slave-hunting villains—has become part of American mythology. But legend has distorted much of this history. Larry Gara shows how pre-Civil War partisan propanda, postwar remininscences by fame-hungry abolitionists, and oral tradition helped foster the popular belief that a powerful secret organization spirited floods of slaves away from the South. In contrast to much popular belief, however, the slaves themselves had active roles in their own escape. They carried out their runs, receiving aid only after they had reached territory where they still faced return. The Liberty Line puts slaves in their rightful position: the center of their struggle for freedom.