The years intervening since the abolition of American slavery leave a majority of our people ignorant of its workings, and of matters connected with it, except as they are gleaned from the pages of history, or from the lips of those now grown old.
It is not the purpose of this little volume to discuss the history of the “peculiar institution” in detail, but simply to give so much of it as will make appreciable the cause for another one equally “peculiar,” known for the last twenty years of its existence as the Underground Railroad,—a name for a mode of operation, and not of a corporation or material object.
During the years of its operation, secrecy was a cardinal, an imperative principle of its management, as the following pages will make apparent. On the breaking out of the War of the Rebellion, thus putting an end to its operations, every other subject was swallowed up in the excitement of the great struggle, and subsequently in that of Reconstruction. Thus the Road dropped measurably out of sight, leaving but meager reports and archives to tell the story of its working.
The promptings of a desire to leave to posterity some realistic record of this, one of the most wonderful and thrilling features of our national history, vino parallel to which is afforded in the annals of time, must be the excuse for these pages. During the eighties, the writer, who had lived amid its excitements for years, and was more or less familiar with the writings of Coffin, Pettit, the Clarkes and others, undertook a systematic research into the matter, the result of which was the accumulation of a large fund of incident and information pertaining to the Road, much of which was published in the Home Magazine between the years 1883 and 1889, inclusive. Those articles, in part, carefully revised, are now placed before the reader in this more permanent form, with the hope that they may receive the generous approval of an appreciative public.
The Author