REMINISCENCES OF LEVI COFFIN.*
WE hope the publication of these two books in England may bo taken as a sign that the spirit which inspired the Anti-slavery Society, and led our fathers and mothers—many of them, at least —to make splendid efforts and sacrifices has not died out. W by they, should have appeared almost contemporaneously from the offices * Reminiscences of Led Coffin. London: Sampson Low, Marston, and Co. 1876 Reminiscences of an Abolitionist. Dyer Brothers.
of two different publishers is not apparent. It seems, however, that " the President of the Underground Railway " died, as might have been expected, a poor man, and that his widow, who shared his dangers and labours for more than forty years, is to some extent dependent on the sale of these volumes. The larger one, to which our references are made, and which we have ourselves read with deep interest, is probably too minute in detail and too voluminous to obtain a large circulation here ; but the smaller volume, which is in the orthodox railway-bookstall form, and may be had for ls. 6d., ought to prove a formid- able rival to the most popular sensational novel. For it is full of stories of more hair-breadth escapes, more exciting adventures than ever came into the brain of a novelist, and which have the advantage of coming to us in the simple language of an old Quaker free from every trace of exaggeration or embellishment. So we can cordially recommend them to all young people, at a loss for a couple of hours' reading on a railway journey, or on a wet morning, and can assure them that while catering for their own casual amusement they will be gaining profitable insight into a very notable chapter of recent history.
Whether Levi Coffin was or was not descended (as he seems to believe) from the Sir Richard Coffin who accompanied William the Conqueror to England, or from the Sir William Coffin one of
Henry knights at the field of the Cloth of Gold, we may safely say that in sagacity and courage he was worthy of ancestors of the heroic type. He was born in 1798, of Quaker parents, in North Carolina, in a small settlement of free men, in the midst of a slave-owning people. As a child he saw the coffies of manacled slaves passing to the South, and heard his father protest aganist the cruelties of their drivers. Before he was fif- teen he was a staunch Abolitionist, and at that age performed his first exploit in that character. A planter named Osborne came to his father's house in pursuit of a negro servant, who was hiding in the neighbourhood on his way North. The slave was within a few hundred yards of the house, where Levi had just been feeding him. Osborne was raising a posse to help him in his hunt, and young Levi was pressed into the service, with the result that the slave escaped, while his master came back foiled, but swearing "that there was not a man in that neighbourhood worth a d— to help him hunt his nigger, except young Levi Coffin." This was his first and last hunt. In 1822 Levi turned schoolmaster, and in the evenings and on Sundays opened classes for the negroes, which were at first tolerated, but then suppressed by the masters. In 1824 he was married, and in 1826 migrated to Indiana, where he established himself as a bacon-curer and dry-goods merchant at Newport, not far from the border. The place was full of Friends from Southern States, who had found Quakerism and slavery incompatible, but many of whom were opposed to Levi's thorough-going and compro- mising activity in helping fugitive slaves. They argued and remonstrated. He replied that if, by endeavouring to fulfil the
injunctions of the Bible, he should lose his business, his busi- ness must go. But he had no fear of danger to his life or business, as long as he was faithful to his duty and honest and industrious. So he went on his way, had a waggon and horses ready at all hours to forward fugitives, a safe hiding-place for them, and prompt aid in the Courts wherever legal intervention was possible, as it often was, for the slave-owners generally came in pursuit without the necessary documents, and as sure as they did, found themselves arrested at the suit of that man of peace, Levi Coffin, " the notorious nigger-thief of Newport," as the Kentuckians called him. Soon the stream of fugitives set steadily towards his house. Not a week passed that he and his wife were not roused in the night to receive some hunted hunger-stricken slave, and never in vain. Nearly 4,000 passed through his hands, of whom he never would'seem to have lost one. It was this rare peaceful courage and sagacity which gained him the title by which, we trust, he is immortalised. Three parties of Kentuckians were hunting the neighbourhood for seventeen
slaves, who had reached Levi's house in a body the day before their pursuers. After a week's futile search, they turned south,
declaring that they could never get the slightest news of a slave after he had reached that house, and that there must be an Underground Railway, of which Levi Coffin was President. (p.190.)
",This was the first time I ever heard of the Underground Rail-
way," he writes ; but his friends fixed the name on him, and he accepted it and joked about the line, and made calls on its stock from all his friends, sometimes for waggons, sometimes for dollars, sometimes for house-room, till the President's proclamation in 1863, when " the business was spoiled, the stock went down in the market, and the line was of no further use." Shortly after
this Kentucky raid, to which we have referred above, he was summoned before the grand jury of the county to answer for his doings, and asked by the chairman if he understood the law as to harbouring fugitive slaves. " I told him I had read it, but didn't know whether I understood it or not. I suggested that he turn to and read it, which he did. I told him that I knew of no violation of the statute in that neighbourhood. Persons often travelled our way and stopped at our house, who said they were slaves ; but I knew nothing about it, as our law did not presume that such persons could tell the truth." (p. 192.) In 1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed, principally by the exer- tions of Arnold Buffum, a Quaker friend of Levi's, and by 1840 the Abolition feeling had grown so strong in Indiana that he could now " often keep fugitives at his house openly, while preparing them for their journey.North." So sped the good cause, but not without sore trials for Levi and his fellow-workers. In 1843 the Society of Friends in America was rent asunder by the slavery question, the majority being in favour of gradual emancipation and colonisation, as against immediate and unconditional emancipation, for which Levi and the minority were testifying daily, at the risk of their goods and their lives. They claimed only to be allowed to live up to that part of the Friends' discipline which bore testimony against slavery, but in vain. (p. 231, &c.) One of the most interesting episodes in the book to English readers will be the account of the endeavour of the London yearly meeting to heal this breach by the despatch of a deputation, headed by William Forster (the father of the Member for Bradford) to the Friends in the States. It is a touching and instructive piece of ecclesiastical history, to which, however, we can only thus refer. (p. 239, &c.) Though himself as true as steel to his Quaker principles, Levi often had to work with Abolitionists of a very different creed. Foremost amongst these was one John Fairfield, a born fighter, who spent his life in running off slaves from all parts of the South and appearing with them suddenly at the Newport deptit. " Was any one hurt ?" Levi asked on one of these cccasions. " You see," replied Fairfield, " we were at close quarters, but my men were plucky; we shot to kill, and made the devils run." " I reproved him for trying to kill any one, and told him we should love our enemies." "Love the devil!" he exclaimed ; "slave- holders are devils, and it is no harm to kill the devil. I don't intend to hurt people, but if they stand between me and liberty, they must take the consequences." (p. 444.) Levi found it use- less to preach peace principles to John Fairfield, and mourned over his backslidings. Nevertheless he continued to help him, and when telegraphed from Philadelphia, " Fairfield wants money ; shall we give it him?" replied, " if John Fairfield wants money, give it him." And when Fairfield died, rifle in hand, in his vocation in distant Tennessee, Coffin wrote, " With all his faults, misguided impulses, and wicked ways, he was a brave man, who never betrayed a trust that was imposed on him, and was a true friend to the oppressed and suffering slave." (p. 446.) In 1844 the Abolitionist conscience was deeply moved on the subject of using the products of slave-labour, and Levi Coffin was selected as the manager of a central store at Cincinnati, where free-grown cotton, sugar, and other untainted goods could be procured. He moved to that city, and established himself in a large house, which became the great d6pOt of the Under- ground Railway in the West, and to which slave-owners, touched in conscience, came from all parts of the South, to add heavily to his labours by leaving favourite slaves (generally their own children) under his care, to be edu- cated and settled in the Free States. Here he lived through all the excitement of the fugitive-slave law and the consequent riots, bearing all things, enduring all things, and hoping all things, until the war broke out. When the rebels threatened Cincinnati and the citizens were flying, he was urged to escape, as his house would be the first to be destroyed. "I laughed at
their fears, and told them I felt no alarm, and had never run from danger, and that if our friends and neighbours were to suffer, I would stay and suffer with them." (p. 603.) And when in a few weeks the city was safe, and the war rolled back to the South, he followed the army, and took a leading part in organising the freedmen's aid movement. In this work he came to England twice, once during and once after the war, and we are glad to say, was welcomed as he deserved, and went back strengthened in all ways, to end his life as he had begun it, in the faithful service of Him who said, " Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." It will be a bad day for our race when the scenes of that great struggle, which was begun in England eighty years ago, and ended with the sur-
render of Lee at Apottomax Court-house in 1865, cease to exercise a fascination over men with English blood in their veins ; and let us hope that the longer the grand old story is told to our boys and girls, the more brightly will the names of such soldiers in the good cause as John Brown, Lloyd Garrison, and Levi Coffin shine out amongst the roll of statesmen and orators and poets and generals who officered the host, and came in for the lion's share of contemporary honour.
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