Underground Railroad – President's Street Tours

EARLY ABOLITIONISTS WHO HAD A PROFOUND EFFECT ON BALTIMORE

ANTHONY BENEZET, A FRENCH HUGUENOT

Anthony Benezet, a French Huguenot, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1733. At the age of eighteen, Benezet joined Quaker John Woolman from nearby Mount Holly, New Jersey to oppose the British slave trade and taxes for the Seven Years French and Indian War. Woolman would later influence Benjamin Franklin’s and Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, which denounced the slave trade.

Benezet began the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully held in Bondage and began the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. In 1772, he published the first Public Pamphlet in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania denouncing slavery that inspired William Wilberforce in the British House of Commons, and Thomas Clarkson who lobbied Parliament for abolition, and John Wesley in England who in 1774 wrote “Thoughts on Slavery”.

JOHN WOOLMAN, AN AMERICAN QUAKER

Despite the crucial role many Quakers played in the early abolition movement, both in Britain and in America not all of them initially opposed slavery. Slavery was common, longstanding, and present on every continent but Antarctica in the early 18th century, including among Quakers. Africans were enslaving fellow Africans and selling their slaves to the highest bidders. So were certain tribes of Native Americans. Slavery was profitable and ubiquitous.

Abolitionist Quaker John Woolman changed the way people saw slavery and laid the foundation for the anti-slavery movement. Born to a Quaker family in 1720 in Rancocas, New Jersey, he was working as a clerk in a local small business at the age of twenty-three when his employer requested that he prepare a bill of sale for a slave.

A pang of conscience prompted Woolman to object. Slavery was inconsistent with the principles of Christianity, he insisted, but he nonetheless did as he was asked. That was the moment that set the course for his lifelong personal engagement in the business of opposing slavery began.

Three years later, a friend asked Woolman to write his will for him, including a provision for the transmission of ownership of a slave. Woolman not only refused, but he also convinced his friend on the spot to free the slave. Holding people in bondage, he argued, profoundly offended the ethics of Christianity, and imperiled the very soul of the slave owner.

That same year (1746), Woolman undertook a three-month, 1,500-mile ministerial journey during which he preached sermons about Christianity and anti-slavery to Quaker audiences from New England to North Carolina.

THOMAS CLARKSON AND WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, BRITISH INFLUENCERS

William Wilberforce, a member of the House of Commons in London, introduced a bill to end the slave trade every year for 18 years before it finally passed in 1807. Clarkson and his single-issue think tank, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, had recruited Wilberforce and mounted a successful campaign to promote the cause. They based their work on John Woolman, who died in England in 1772 at the age of fifty-one, that had planted so many abolitionist seeds on both sides of the Atlantic that within a decade, Quakers became the first Christian sect to crusade for abolition.

Quakers were the earliest allies of Clarkson and Wilberforce, and the people whom both abolitionists regarded as indispensable friends of the cause. When Clarkson and eleven Quakers sat down at a print-shop table to create the Society in 1787, they thanked the earlier John Woolman (1720-1772) for their inspiration.

JOHN WESLEY, ENGLISH METHODIST CLERIC

Later in his ministry, John Wesley was a keen abolitionist speaking out and writing against the slave trade. Wesley denounced slavery as “the sum of all villainies,” and detailed its abuses. He addressed the slave trade in a polemical tract, titled Thoughts Upon Slavery, in 1774. He wrote, “Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air; and no human law can deprive him of that right which he derives from the law of nature”. Wesley influenced George Whitefield to journey to the colonies, spurring the transatlantic debate on slavery. [Wesley was a mentor to William Wilberforce, who was also influential in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

BALTIMORE’S ABOLITIONISTS

ELISHA TYSON – LIBERATOR

Elisha Tyson established one of the first underground railroad networks with Quaker Minister Jacob Lindley of Chester County, PA. From there, Lindley would forward the runaways to Phillip Brice in East Bradford and finally on to Abram Bonsall’s Home at Valley Creek Bridge, PA.

In 1824 in Elisha Tyson’s final days, he helped free Africans from high seas illegal human trafficking through the court system, 17 years before the famous Amistad rescue case. In his lifetime, he is credited with freeing as many 10,000 African Americans, including the many he rescued from re-enslavement by kidnappers

When he died, 3,000 African Americans joined his half-mile funeral procession from Sharp Street to the former Society of Friends Burial Ground at Asquith Street Friends Meeting House in Old Town (Jonestown) in Baltimore.

MOSES SHEPPARD – GUARD

Like many Quakers of the time, Moses Sheppard (1771-1857) was active in the abolition movement and an active supporter of the Protective Society of Maryland to Protect Free Negroes, the American Antislavery Society, and the Society of Friends Indian Affairs Committee.

He was on the Board of Managers for the Maryland Colonization Society and help found the Maryland in Liberia Colony. His Quaker faith supported the colonization doctrine believing that Black people could only truly be free in a free country. In 1820, Daniel Coker, also of Sharp Street, took his family to Sierra Leone to become the first Methodist Missionary there.

Though Colonization was intended by Sheppard as a humanitarian movement to support freedom, Maryland slave owner Robert G. Harper, who proposed the new settlement of Liberia, had a different intent, and wrote in 1824:

The “horror” felt by whites at the “idea of an intimate union with the free blacks,” despairingly, “precludes the possibility of such a state of equality, between them and us, as alone could make us one people.”

Sheppard, a cousin of Elisha Tyson, respected his elder kin. He followed him from Pennsylvania to Baltimore. Like Tyson, he became wealthy as a grain miller and merchant, and invested in other business enterprises in Maryland. He built his house next to the Sharp Street Church to protect free Blacks from kidnappers.

WILLIAM J. WATKINS -TEACHER

William J. Watkins was a teacher at Sharp Street School’s Academy for Negro Youth. A staunch Abolitionist, he authored articles for Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, Frederick Douglass’ North Star, and William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator newspapers.

Watkins opposed Colonization and said it was an attempt to remove free Black people from America. He is credited with causing Garrison, who was apprenticing at Lundy’s Paper in Baltimore, to stop supporting Colonization and to embrace the cause of Emancipation instead.

Watkins and his three sons participated in the Underground entrepot rescue operations at the nearby Port of Baltimore.

After the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed, in 1852, Watkins moved to Toronto, Canada. He said he wanted to be buried in a free country. The B&O Railroad razed his former home to make way for the completion of Camden Station in 1857.

FRANCIS ELLEN WATKINS HARPER- ABOLITIONIST AND SUFFRAGIST

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911) was an abolitionist, suffragist, poet, teacher, public speaker, and writer. She attended the Sharp Street School Academy for Negro Youth and was raised by her Uncle William J. Watkins in Baltimore for 13 years. His family’s abolition activities and legacy influenced his niece.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON – PUBLISHER

William Watkins radically changed William Lloyd Garrison’s views on Colonization during his work here in Baltimore, after which he became a proponent of Emancipation. Garrison and fellow abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy, were both jailed for 49 days on a slander charge brought against them by a slave ship in Fell’s Point. Following Garrison’s release, he left for Boston and began publishing his abolition newspaper, The Liberator.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS – ABOLITIONIST

Frederick Douglass’ influences in Baltimore – and later, the world – came from two publications he always carried in his coat pockets: The Columbian Orator and The Genius of Universal Emancipation.

The Columbian Orator, written by Caleb Bingham and published in 1797, was a collection of real and imagined writings by notable figures such as George Washington, which celebrated patriotism and questioned the ethics of slavery. It is believed Douglass bought this book when he was a boy of 12, with money earned shining shoes.

The Genius of Universal Emancipation was Benjamin Lundy’s newspaper.

DAVID EINHORN – RABBI

The Jewish community in Baltimore and elsewhere was split on the issue of slavery, with some supporting it with biblical justifications, and others, strongly opposing it.

Rabbi Einhorn’s public opposition to slavery began in 1856. He launched an attack against the pro-slavery views of other prominent Rabbis in his monthly publication, Sinai.

Einhorn was incensed at the strong pro-slavery positions taken, stating, “if a Christian had said Judaism was pro-slavery, all Jews, from the most extreme orthodox wing to the most radical reformers, would have called the wrath of heaven and earth upon such falsehoods.”

Rabbi Einhorn aligned himself with the anti-slavery views of Michael Helprin and Rabbi Gustav Gottheil, all of whom “perceived a fundamental relationship between the rights of the Jew and the rights of the Negro.”

Rabbi Einhorn “saw no possibility of freedom for minorities in an atmosphere which condoned the enslavement of any people.” To set people outside the door of opportunity and equality was unacceptable to him.

His open advocacy and especially his public disagreement with other prominent Rabbis’ pro-slavery stance brought threats against Einhorn in Baltimore. There was a movement afoot to tar and feather him. So intense was the pro- slavery and abolitionist controversy that “Baltimore Jews who belonged to other congregations were forced to state in the public press that they did not accept his leadership.”

Riots broke out in Baltimore over the Einhorn controversy. Several people were killed and printing presses, including those which printed his newspaper, Sinai, were destroyed. On April 19, 1861, the fourth day of the rioting, Rabbi Einhorn, fearing that his family would be harmed, fled Baltimore, never to return. But he had left his mark.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD: Why Baltimore?

People Get Ready. . . There’s a Train A-Comin’ (Curtis Mayfield)

The Underground Railroad existed long before there was a railroad. But, the railroad, a new technology, changed the way both free and enslaved Americans sought movement and freedom in a very tangible way. A lot of this activity was centered in Baltimore.

For many freedom seekers, the use of words like railroad, conductor, and station were euphemisms to describe the network of allies, rest stops, and modes of travel used on the Underground Railroad. Scholars agree that the Underground Railroad stretched from Georgia and North Carolina in the South, up through Virginia to Washington, DC, and into Baltimore before continuing north through Central Maryland to Pennsylvania and beyond.

BALTIMORE: A CITY SOUTH OF NORTH AND NORTH OF SOUTH

Due to its central geographic location, which placed Baltimore directly in the middle of the South and the North, the city became an important station on the Underground Railroad. But Baltimore’s placement on the map was not the only reason it came to be used as a major stop along the way for many freedom seekers.

The city of Baltimore during the early to mid-1800s was a particularly fertile landscape, both for the creation and nurturing of the fledgling commercial rail industry and for the escape of many men and women from the shackles of slavery.
The city’s population, which alternated between the second and third largest city in the country at the time, was growing rapidly. By 1860, Baltimore was home to an estimated 200,000 African Americans, including both free African Americans and those still enslaved.

Due to the changing nature of agriculture, which had shifted from a tobacco-based economy capable of supporting an enslaved workforce year-round, to wheat and other crops that made such practices impractical, and the increasing industrialization of the city, Baltimore was swiftly becoming home to a growing community of both free and bound men and women.

The mixing of these two populations was inevitable as the city grew. according to historian William J. Switala, “The fact that slaves were now placed in an environment where they had close contact with free blacks had a tremendous impact on their rate of escape.” Given the opportunities for support from Black churches such as Sharp Street, Bethel AME, and Orchard Street (founded in 1825 by Truman Le Pratt, a West Indian former slave of Governor John Eager Howard), and many free Black landlords, urban freedom seekers looking for a way out had a uniquely favorable opportunity, one not available to more isolated enslaved people on rural estates.

On the crowded streets of Baltimore, it was hard to tell the status of an African American from sight alone, and it was possible for a freedom seeker to disappear in plain sight. Many did. Runaways escaping slavery would enter the city, change their names and identities, and blend in openly.

IN PLAIN SIGHT: ISAAC WRIGHT, AKA DANIEL COKER

Two notable examples of this are Isaac Wright, alias Daniel Coker, and Frederick Hall, alias William Williams.

Isaac Wright, alias Daniel Coker escaped from Maryland to New York in the 1790s. Francis Asbury ordained him a Deacon of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania. He returned to Baltimore and passed as his half-white brother until he could purchase his freedom.

In 1816 Daniel Coker and Richard Allen founded the mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia. Coker represented the Bethel AME Church in Baltimore until 1820 when he left to be the first Methodist Missionary in Sierra Leone.

IN PLAIN SITE: FREDERICK HALL, AKA WILLIAM WILLIAMS

Another runaway, Frederick Hall, from Bellefield Plantation in Croom, Maryland came to Baltimore and changed his name to William Williams. He became an enlisted Private, 38th U.S. Infantry. He was wounded during the British bombardment of Fort McHenry on September 13, 1814. He died a hero two months later of a leg wound received from British naval cannon fire.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD: WHY THE BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD

As the first commercial common carrier in the nation, the B&O was a major investment in the growing city of Baltimore. It had significant financial backing from the state government during its establishment in 1827 and its early construction. The goal was to enable Baltimore to compete with other coastal cities that were investing in canals to reach markets in the west of the nation.

Starting in the 1830s, tracks were rolled out across the city and around the harbor, linking the West Pratt Street Station (later called Mount Clare Station) with facilities on the east end, near President Street. The traffic along this route through the city was the cause of much interest and sometimes concern, particularly after the advent of American steam locomotion with the success of the B&O’s “Tom Thumb” in 1830. It was easy to see that it would replace the original horse-drawn cars in most other places.

This led to the passage of local laws and city ordinances that required a complicated dance where train cars were broken up at one end of the city, pulled through the streets by horsepower, and reassembled at the other end of the city.
Mount Clare Station became the changeover point between steam and horse, which means that it was a bottleneck for all rail traffic in and out of the city from points west and south.

The B&O was trying to move passengers and freight through the city at the same time the company was focusing on construction and expansion of their lines beyond the city and state. Preoccupied with operating and expanding, B&O’s directors had little interest in policing their cars for would-be escapees, despite an act passed by the Maryland General Assembly on April 4, 1839. This Act outlawed the transportation of Black Marylanders by railroad or ship, making those found in violation of the law subject to a $500 penalty.

The B&O Railroad historically had abolitionists among their founders and the highest levels of management. While some founders were known enslavers, others were Baltimore Quakers and Methodists who believed that all people were created equal in the eyes of God, which led to their stance against the ownership of slaves, and their ideas may have translated into real world impact for those seeking freedom on the railroad.

The B&O’s first president, Phillip E. Thomas, barred the use of slave labor in both the construction and operation of the B&O.
According to historian Whitman, “Both Methodists and Quakers may have slowed the growth of slavery in Baltimore… some noteworthy examples of the exclusion of slave labor can be attributed to such influences, as in the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.”

This is supported by a letter from Thomas to Samuel Janney on March 22, 1866, which states: “The domestic traffic now increasingly carried on in the persons of the people of color must, and no doubt does, inflict a great mass of individual distress and misery… I cannot but dread that a time of terrible retribution must come upon our country for so long tolerating and even sanctioning its revolting barbarities.”

Thomas’ assessment of slavery shows a strong aversion to its use in any capacity and his views, as well as those of other B&O founders, likely trickled down in the early administration of the railroad.
Even if the B&O did not help freedom seekers, they did not go far out of their way to discourage them, and perhaps at least some were happy to give to freedom seekers the opportunity to escape on the railroad, legal or not.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS FOOTSTEPS - ABOLITION - UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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