Good afternoon. I can't see the clock from here, but I think it's time. Thank you. I'm sorry to hear that. You know about the the preacher that guest preacher that stopped in the middle of his sermon and he said, I'm sorry, I don't have my watch and I don't see a clock in here. and somebody hollered, there's a calendar behind you. OK, before we start the real lesson today, I talked a week or two ago about J.R.W. Sloan and his sermon at Third RP that was published on the front page of the New York Times. I didn't know that that church building still was there, because it hasn't been an RP church since 1920. But I found on the web, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, that the building is still there at 238 West 23rd Street. On the left, you see what the front of it looks like, and on the right, obviously, you see the interior of it. It was built in 1860. The Arpey's used it until 1920 when they sold it to a Hebrew congregation. And so nowadays, if you can see what you couldn't see in this picture, but there is a Star of David above the door and some other Old Testament things that have been incised into the stonework. I thought it was really fascinating. We don't have good pictures. of very many urban RP churches. They've all disappeared, and apparently nobody thought to take pictures of them. But anyway, I wanted to share that with you before we go on. Today we're talking about Covenanters and the Underground Railroad. Early in 1851, Reverend Nathan R. Johnston of the Covenanter Church in Cincinnati was deeply involved in one of the most infamous incidents in abolitionist history. Seth Conkleton, a white man, very active in smuggling fugitive slaves, was guiding the family of Peter Still to freedom. Now, Peter Still had escaped to the north but then he went back into Alabama to rescue his family, and they were coming north again. And through the Quaker, Levi Coffin, who's the upper picture there, Coffin was a Quaker and one of the main organizers, if organizing is the right word, of the Underground Railroad. As a matter of fact, he was often referred to as the president of the Underground Railroad. So he was involved in this too. Coffin had arranged through Nathan Johnston for a safe stop near Princeton, Indiana. Johnston accompanied them and Peter Still, the lower picture there seems to be a picture of Peter Still. I say seems to be because in The online source where I found it, it was a little unclear whether it was, which of the Still Brothers it was, but I think it was Peter. So they were to go to Princeton, Indiana and have a safe stop. Johnson accompanied them and spent the night at the home of Elders David Stormont near Princeton, Indiana. visiting with Conklin and the Still family. The next day, the fugitives went on to Vincennes, which is about straight west of Bloomington and right on the Wabash River. But the fugitives were arrested north of Vincennes and hurried back to Evansville, which is down on the Ohio River. And that was by a United States marshal The slave owner, a man named McKiernan, had come to get them. They took Conklin along with the refugees on board a riverboat. Stormont and Johnston, hearing of the arrest, rode very quickly to Vincennes but were too late. Johnston then went on to Evansville and on down the river until he learned that Conklin's body had been found in the Ohio River near Paducah, drowned with his hands and feet in chains and his skull fractured. This story is told by Peter Still in his book, which is about so thick, and about the first serious publication about the Underground Railway after the war. The story of the Underground Railway is one of the most dramatic and romanticized in American history. The term refers to a largely informal network of people and houses or other sites which were used to help slaves who escaped from their masters and fled north to freedom. Like Topsy, it just growed, perhaps an early form of crowdsourcing. And if you look at this network, these are roots that the historian Wilbur Siebert found later in the century was able to document that these were ways that slaves were smuggled up to the Canadian border or the nearest body of water to Canada. And it kind of looks like a map of the nervous system, doesn't it? The red lines indicate many of the routes used, and as you can see, The thickest network of escape routes was in Ohio and in western Pennsylvania. More routes in that area than in just about any other part of the map. Now, a constitutional requirement and three federal statutes created the need, created the problem that the Underground Railway was intended to The Federal Constitution, Article 4, Section 4. The Ordinance of 1787, the so-called Northwest Ordinance, establishing and regulating the Northwest Territories, which was basically everything from Ohio west and north. And the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. All of those required the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Under the terms of these, slaves who escaped to non-slave states were subject to recapture and return without jury trial and without a right to testify. In addition, anyone who aided a slave in escaping would be fined $500 and imprisoned for a year, according to the Act of 1793. So the consequences for people in the North who were helping to smuggle fugitives northward could have been severe. They were breaking the law. When free states found a way to circumvent or mitigate the Act of 1793, Congress amended it in 1850, requiring federal marshals and deputy marshals to apprehend fugitive slaves. A marshal or deputy who failed to do so could be fined $1,000, and that fine went to the slave owner. And if the fugitive escaped from the marshal, the marshal or deputy was responsible for the full market value of the slave. So again, it was very risky. could draft any able-bodied male into a posse comitatus, which is a county posse where people are temporarily deputized to act as agents of the law. And if you've watched Old Westerns, you're familiar with how a posse works. And if a man was pressed into service on this passe comitatus, he was required to assist in capturing and transporting fugitives. Anyone who hindered recapture or who rescued or otherwise assisted fugitive slaves was to be fined $1,000 and imprisoned for six months. In other words, the fine itself was doubled. It had been $500 for helping. Now it was made $1,000 for helping. Instead of requiring circuit or district judges to sign certificates to send the accused south, special commissioners were appointed. Commissioners before whom owners or their agents appeared received, if they sent a black person back to or into slavery, they were paid $10. If they freed him, they were paid only $5. So the act stacked the deck against the blacks. If and when the act was enforced, the consequences were dire, both for the fugitive and for anyone who helped him or her, as in the case of Seth Conklin, whacked over the head and tied up in chains and dumped into the Ohio River. Thus, not only the escaping slaves, but also anyone who helped them were exercising nonviolent civil disobedience and were risking their persons, their property, and even their lives in the process. Free blacks were subject to kidnapping and sent to servitude because the only evidence necessary or even permitted was an affidavit or deposition by a white man claiming to be the slave owner. So a free white in Ohio or Pennsylvania or New York could be literally grabbed off the street, and a Southerner could say, he's my slave, and he ran away. And that was it. And he had to go into the South, into slavery. The cards were stacked against blacks and their friends. It's often said that the Northerners who helped free the slaves, flee to safety, were heroes. Yes, they were heroic in risking their fortunes and comforts. But let us not forget that the real heroes in this were the slaves themselves, who risked literally everything on their attempt to find freedom. Frederick Douglass wrote, no man can tell the intense agony which is felt by the slave when wavering on the point of making his escape. The life which he has may be lost, and the liberty which he seeks may not be gained. And so, as far as I'm concerned, the real heroes of the Underground Railway were the slaves who escaped and were doing all of this to get to freedom. Because of the clause in the Constitution requiring that escaping slaves be returned to servitude, That was at least as early as 1793. Efforts were made to help escaping slaves. We spoke earlier in this series about Reverend Alexander Dobbin and his large stone house in Gettysburg, PA, which is probably the best restaurant in Gettysburg. But in that house, we find an early and ingenious way to conceal slaves. As you go up the stairs to the second floor, on your left hand, there is a cupboard mounted on the wall. And it's holding assorted ceramic containers. But part of that cupboard can be opened. And you see that in the right half of this picture. On the left, you see it just looking like a cupboard. On the right, you see that one end of that has opened up and it's a little entrance into the space under the eaves. That space under the eaves turns out to be a fairly large room and Dobbin furnished it with essentials for people staying there. Is there a way to turn out some of these lights here? I think you could see the screen better. if the room were not quite so bright here. I mean, we're all bright. We know that, yes. But thank you. I like that groan. I'm doing something right when people groan. In the north, many people from a wide variety of backgrounds helped in the work of lovingly breaking the fugitive slave law. It's impossible to say when the Underground Railroad was organized because it was never organized. Thank you, Jim. Never organized in the accepted sense. It simply emerged as the slave owners became more aggressive in reclaiming their fleeing property. A lot of non-slave owners especially in the North, seemed frequently to have ignored the Act of 1793. And in the North, at least, many whites were simply apathetic. They would neither give assistance to runaways nor turn them into the authorities. With the passage of the amended Act as part of the Compromise of 1850, slave owners were emboldened to demand the return of runaways, and slave catchers could enter and search private property without a warrant. If they suspected that you were keeping fugitives, they could just barge in at any time of day or night and look through your house. White sentiment in the North was enraged by the new law and saw in it one more overreaching power play by the slave states. The increased abolition activity in the 1850s was in part a backlash against Southern aggressiveness. The most active years of the Underground Railroad were from 1835 until the beginning of the Civil War, so a period of about 15 years. A few of the prominent Americans who gave active aid and comfort to the fleeing slaves would include, first of all, William Still, whom we've mentioned, Frederick Douglass, whom we've talked about before, and Harry Tubman. All of these were Africans who had escaped from the South and then did whatever they could to help other fugitives escape from the South and get on to where they would be safer. But there also were a bunch of other Americans famous, later famous anyway, Americans, prominent at the time, Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sam and P. Chase, who's on the left end of that. He was a senator, and then he was Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, and he was Secretary of State. He was the one who bought Alaska, and that's why they called it Seward's Folly. Anyway, he helped with the of underground railway projects. Thomas Garrett, Thaddeus Stevens, who's the one in the middle there, does not look like a happy man. He was a senator from Pennsylvania who became very prominent during and after the war. He was the one primarily responsible for prosecuting the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. Rutherford B. Hayes, who, I'm sorry, what happened here? There we go, Rutherford B. Hayes, who was from Ohio, and of course later became President of the United States. Joshua Giddings, who is a member of the House of Representatives representing Ohio. He served for 22 years in the House of Representatives. Richard Henry Dana from Massachusetts, who was one of the old aristocracy of Massachusetts. Later he wrote his most famous book, Two Years Before the Mast, which some of you probably have read. And then on the right, of course, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Okay, these two pictures illustrate the fugitive slave law in operation. On the left, you can see a pair of slave catchers is arresting a family of escaping slaves. On the right, runaways have crossed the Ohio River in a rowboat. There were no bridges across the Ohio at that point, not until about 1866 or 67, when Roebling built his suspension bridge at Cincinnati. And that suspension bridge, incidentally, was his kind of mock-up model for the Brooklyn Bridge, which he designed a few years later. So these runaways are crossing the river in a rowboat and being met by armed helpers. Escaping slaves traveled along rivers, canals, railroad tracks, and at times the roads. They would follow the North Star, or when that was hidden, the moss on the trees. If you were ever in Boy Scouts, you learn that the moss grows on the north side of the trees. So if you're lost in the forest, you look for where the moss is, and that will help orient you. Others traveled under a load of hay, or in a peddler's wagon with a false bottom, or the like. Disguises were common. One of the most ingenious methods of escape was achieved by a Virginia slave named Henry Brown. In 1849, when he was 33 years old, he arranged to have himself boxed up in a large wooden crate and shipped by freight to abolitionists in Philadelphia. Once he was delivered there, he was uncrated and became a celebrated abolition speaker. He was thereafter called Box as his middle name, and he adopted that. And so the rest of his life, he was known as Henry Box Brown. He died in 1897. The account of what it was like to be rattled around in a box, a crate that was marked fragile, this end up, and they didn't, I mean, they could have worked for the airlines now. Well, we tend to think of rural congregations as the centers of underground railroad activity. Urban churches were also active because fugitive slaves could easily meld into the population. You see, there were enough free blacks in the North that they could... And who keeps track of everybody in New York City or Philadelphia? Well, N.R. Johnston, who was at that time the stated supply of the Cincinnati congregation, describes one of the more successful incidents of their cooperation with Levi Coffin. This came before the unfortunate incident with Seth Conklin. John L. McFetridge, a covenanter who worked in a lumber yard in Covington, Kentucky, came to Johnston at church one day, telling him of a group of slaves who had arrived in Covington and wanted help to cross the Ohio River and through the state. So Johnston met secretly with one of the slaves, Patterson Randall. Then, as he says, I laid the whole matter before three well-known friends of freedom, Viz Hugh Glasgow, my host, than whom no truer friend of the slave ever walked the streets of Cincinnati, a leading colored businessman, and that noble and well-known friend of human rights, friend Levi Coffin, end quote. These four men arranged and carried out the rescue by boat. They saw them safely through Cincinnati and seven miles beyond the city to the first station. Johnston and Glasgow went out the next day to see if the slaves were safe, and they were taken up a ladder to a secret room above a double corn crib to visit them. And those slaves did make it all the way to Canada. In Philadelphia, too, the covenanters were active. Reverend James M. Wilson, pastor of the First RP Church there from 1834 to 1862, was president of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society. And his church was a station on the Underground Railroad. Members who were children at the time later remembered looking back and up at the balcony during services and seeing a row of black faces peering over the edge of the balcony. So the gallery, like that one, was frequently used as a hiding place for fugitives. In western Pennsylvania, one of the many Covenanter congregations active in the railroad was Brooklyn. a congregation in rural northern Westmoreland County. At one time, the pastor, Reverend Robert Reed, concealed a fugitive from North Carolina in his study for a week. This fugitive was almost white. His father was a planter and a congressman, but he was a slave. He had been sold as a slave and now had escaped. While the fugitive was in the house, two slave hunters carrying whips rode past the house. Mrs. Reed was almost paralyzed with fear. A few nights later, the fugitive was taken by one of the ruling elders, David McElroy, to the home of a Mr. White, who was an elder in the Rehoboth congregation in Jefferson County. And that's the picture you have here. The Rehoboth building is still And I think maybe they have a service once a year or something in there. Robert Reed's wife was Mary Walkinshaw Reed. Mary Walkinshaw, as a girl, saw both colored men and women at her grandfather's house. Her grandfather, that she's talking about, was Robert Sproul, an elder at Brooklyn. Her own home became a station for fugitives on their perilous journey. It was just before the Civil War that Billy Schaefer, foot sore, hungry, and sick, came to her door. He had walked all the way from the home of Dr. Cannon in Greensburg. And he was a minister who was a relative of Jane Grey Cannon in Switzerland. He had walked all the way from there up to Brooklyn in one day. It was quite a hike. She took him in and ministered to him. She held him in her arms when he died. His last words told of his sorrow for the trouble he had caused her and his gratitude for her kindness. The men of Brooklyn buried him in the old cemetery. And even though the church building is not there anymore, the cemetery still is, Brooklyn. He had reached the end of life's journey. Its hardships were over. The land of eternal freedom and rest had been reached. There were other stations in Westmoreland, Allegheny, Beaver, and Washington counties. Well, north of Darlington in Beaver County is a farmhouse which, according to legend, was used as a station. It belonged to a minister of the other Reformed Presbyterian Church, the New Lights. who had split from us in 1833. But Darlington, they didn't split because of a disagreement over slavery. The New Light RPs in Darlington area were very active in the Underground Railroad as well. Slippery Rock, now called Rose Point in Lawrence County, was another place where there were a number of Covenanters involved. Thomas Wilson, who's an ancestor of Bob Wilson at College Hill Church, and his father was an elder at Slippery Rock at Rose Point for a number of years. George McGee, Dr. Cowden, Thomas Spear, William Boyd and others in that congregation all helped. Wilbur H. Siebert, the first professional historian to study the Underground Railroad and published it in 1898, found that the greatest center of Underground Railroad activity was in Ohio, specifically in Logan and Morgan counties. and in Illinois, in Randolph and Washington counties. He wrote, and I quote, it is a fact worthy of record in this connection that the teaching of two sects, the Scots Covenanters and the Wesleyan Methodists, did not exclude the Negro from the bounds of Christian brotherhood. And where churches of either denomination existed, the road was likely to be found in inactive operation. The frequent mention of the Covenanters in Siebert's account is an indication that they were significant in the operation and the success of the Underground Railroad. He points to the particular influence of three colleges which helped foster Underground Railroad activity in the state. Oberlin College, Western Reserve College, of course they're much more well-known than the third, That's Geneva College, which had been founded in Northwood, Ohio, in 1848. Northeast of Columbus, in and around the village of Utica, was one of the oldest Covenanter settlements in the state of Ohio. During the abolition period, one of the roots of the Underground Railroad went through this settlement. And again, a number of local families were involved. A mile south of the town stands a grist mill, which at that time was owned by Thomas MacNaughton, a covenanter. And some of you may remember the MacNaughton name in the Geneva church. Lived in New Brighton, I believe. That's that same family. There was said to be a tunnel from the mill going under the north fork of the Licking River to a cabin in the woods. Now, the engineering needed for a tunnel of that scope I think makes the veracity of the story somewhat questionable, but it persists in local legend. A more credible version of the story says simply that the McNaughtons hid fugitive slaves beneath the floorboards of the mill. And it's a very interesting place to visit, and if you're there of a summer afternoon, it's the best place in the area to get an ice cream cone. McNaughton's don't own it anymore. In Utica, the village itself, the home of Reverend Armour MacFarlane, who was pastor from 1837 to 1853, served as a safe house. The fugitives were concealed in a secret place under the front steps. I assume that that means there was a room there, that it wasn't just hollow steps where you would stack about three people in there, but it must have been a room, a chamber of some kind, that happened to be under the steps. East of the town, on a hill overlooking the entire Licking Valley, stood the James M. Kirkpatrick Farm. Well, north of the town was the Dunlap Farm. Both of these Covenanter families hid fugitives. In 2009, a local man that we met there remembered as a boy playing in a tunnel that reportedly led to the Kirkpatrick farmhouse. It was closed off by the time he was a boy, but apparently that is one tunnel story that really is true. Okay, Reverend John Calvin Boyd was pastor of the Utica RP Church from 1856 to 1882, and again, a fairly long pastorate. He was characterized as, and I quote, a fearless advocate of the cause of the slave, hazarded his interests and even his life for the overthrow of human slavery. And as a young man, he and his six brothers had served as conductors of the Underground Railroad in Coshocton County, Ohio. So he was from his youth actively involved in this. For many years, fugitive slaves found a safe hiding place in a cave on the farm of Isaac Patterson, approximately two miles west of the village of Northwood. Geneva College was established in Northwood in 1848 And the building is not there, but on the right you see the little stone with a plaque, a marker on it, indicating that Geneva College was founded there in 1848. And nobody leaves piles of flowers and teddy bears there, but it's an interesting place to visit. Geneva College, established in 1848, and was immediately a hotbed of abolitionism. Reverend J.R.W. Sloan, who was president of the college for a while and later, of course, a leading abolitionist preacher in New York City, concealed fugitives in the attic of his home, attic of the president's house. His son, William H. Sloan of Columbia University, later wrote, and I quote, the first conscious memory I have is of seeing slaves taken from our garret near midnight and forwarded towards Sandusky. which is a port on Lake Erie. I also remember the formal, but rather friendly, visitation of the house by the sheriff's posse. So the posse was there, but apparently they were not riding around cracking whips at the president of the college. Left that for the faculty. No. Both the faculty and students of Geneva College engaged in the underground work. In 1857, when the Synod was meeting at the college, a wagon load of fugitives was being escorted from Patterson's Cave to the port of Sandusky. The word was whispered around among the members of Synod, who immediately paused their session to offer special prayer for the safety of the fugitives. I might say a word, too, about Isaac Patterson and his farm. The caves have since been filled in. You can't go into them. But Isaac Patterson was one of the ancestors of Rose Weir, whom you know from North Hills Church and the RP Home. So you see, I'm pointing out to you family heritage is a significant thing. Okay. Students and other Covenanters smuggled fugitives from Northwood to Sandusky, which is about 90 miles, and they would often do it by dressing as hunters and concealing the blacks in covered wagons. Now, a wagon could travel 20 miles per day if they rested at night, so this would be nearly five days of travel to get up there. On one occasion, they took 13 fugitives in two wagons. They were ostensibly a hunting party of 10 or 12 armed men. Of course, that was the excuse for carrying weapons. The two covered wagons were a sanctum sanctorum into which no mortal was allowed to peep. The word of command, stand back, was always respected by those who were unduly intent upon seeing the 13 deer brought from the woods of Logan and Hardin Counties and being taken to Sandusky. With such strong abolitionists as the Johnstons, Milligan, J.R.W. Sloan, William Milroy, and J.R. McCartney, who was a professor and was the father later of Clarence Edward McCartney of Geneva College fame, for whom the library is named. Anyway, J.R. McCartney, These were people who were in the leadership of the college and it was practically impossible for pro-slavery sentiments to exist. In fact, there was a southern boy that had been in Geneva for a year or two and went back south to finish his education. Somebody asked him why he had come back to the south. And he said, they're all, you know what, lovers up there. Indeed, Seabrook's list of some 3,000 names of station masters and conductors on the Underground Railroads includes, in every Ohio county that has significant Covenanter population, a number of names of members, many from families not long known in the denomination. In Logan County, for instance, let's see, I don't have... I hope you can read that better than I can. I think that's mostly what I've just been talking about, how they did things in Logan County to get slaves up there. I guess this is why you've got a handout with all of my overheads on it. So if you can't see that, you can at least look at it in your lap. In Logan County, for example, He found Covenanters by the names of Patterson, Johnston, Milligan, Young, Fulton, Trumbull, Jamison, Ritchie, Boyd, Sloan, Day, Forsyth, George, and Elliott, all active in aiding fugitives. Farther south in Muskingum County, which is crossed today by I-70, there was a strong RP congregation in New Concord. There was also a college of the Presbyterian General Assembly, Muskingum College, and it's still there. The two stand in sharp contrast. The RPs were active in the railroad. One example is Robert Speer. a farmer just west of the village and on top of a hill high above the National Road, which is Route 40 there. Reverend W.G. Robb, a grandson of Robert Speer, told some of the tales of the family activities. Slaves were brought in a load of hay from a station 20 miles to the south. They were kept in the hay mow at night The next morning, Mr. Spear would come to the barn and say, well, how many are there for breakfast this morning? Stick your heads out so I can count you. Frightened, dark faces would slowly appear at the hay mow door. Mr. Spear would then call out, nobody gets a bite to eat that isn't counted. Another descendant tells of a time when a slave hunter appeared at the house when the family were finishing breakfast. Speer invited the guests to stay and have breakfast, which in that era naturally required the guests to stay for, to participate in family worship. And after reading a passage of scripture, the passage sang the entire 119th Psalm, giving the fugitives plenty of time to escape. Another granddaughter of Robert Speer inherited a notebook or list in which Speer had written the names of the fugitives he harbored from 1842 to 56. He stopped the list, but not the work, when he learned that some slaves did not give their real names. His tally shows a total of 77 fugitives. Other covenanters in the neighborhood who harbored fugitives included John Jemison and James Boyd, along with a number of seceders, or associate Presbyterians. And even a New School Presbyterian family, that is the mainstream Presbyterian church, which had divided for a while into Old School and New School. And New School was more liberal than Old School. But this New School Presbyterian church in New Concord had a pastor who was pro-slavery. But at least one family from that church helped with the work. In contrast, Muskingum College, which was established in 1837, was governed by the Presbyterian Church, now the Presbyterian USA. The board of trustees included both pro- and anti-slavery advocates. The president of Muskingum from 1838 to 1848 Samuel Wilson was frequently pro-slavery. In 1843, the trustees prohibited the use of the college hall for, quote, all abolitionists, colonizationists, and political discussions. Moreover, George Junkin, the most prominent old school Presbyterian minister in Ohio, was president of Miami University, which is a public university established in 1809. But he was firmly pro-slavery, and so his leadership position in the old school Presbyterian church helped to make old school pro-slavery. Incidentally, in 1853, he became the father-in-law of Thomas J. Jackson, later known as Stonewall Jackson. I mentioned that Miami has always been a public university, but most of its early presidents were ministers of one sort or another. So while New Concord covenanters furnished a ready haven for fugitives, the Presbyterians in New Concord did not on the whole. And New Concord's not a very big town to have that kind of deep division in it. Southern parts of both Indiana and Illinois had been heavily settled by pro-slavery people from the South. It appears that whatever assistance was given to fugitives in both areas depended to a great degree on the Covenanters. In addition to David Stormont, whom we've mentioned before. Another activist at Princeton, Indiana was John Carithers. Again, that's a name which is still in the denomination at Tusca congregation. Reverend David S. Ferris, RP pastor in Bloomington, wrote in his diary for February 19, 1854, At church, Mr. J. Little there, bad news from Princeton. Mr. Carruthers being found concealing a man of color. In Monroe County, the home of the Bethesda congregation near Bloomington, and when you see in the old records references to Bethesda, that's, they renamed it Bloomington when they moved the church from the country into town. the home of the Bethesda Congregation of the Living. It was covenanters who carried on the work of the railroad. Generally speaking, the people of Monroe County were rather lukewarm in regard to escaping slaves. A small group of people that were actively engaged in aiding fugitives came originally from South Carolina. Of course, those were the RPs who had emigrated from South Carolina over the issue of slavery and now settled Southern Indiana and Southern Illinois. These people, of course, were the Reformed Presbyterians. And there's an article in the Indiana Magazine of History from 1917 which says, the main motive actuating the majority of those who aided escaping slaves in this community then was a religious motive. This accounts for the persistency with which they carried on their work and for the risks they ran in performing what they considered their duty. The nearest station south of Bloomington was at Walnut Ridge near Salem. Here the Reverend J.J. McClurkin was active in the cause. Isaiah Reed transported fugitives to Bloomington. North of Bloomington, some Reformed Presbyterians lived near Morgantown. James Kelso and John Cathcart operated a station there. At Bloomington, the most active operators were Thomas Smith, James Clark, Reverend James Ferris, and we've talked about him a number of times because he was the one, when he was a young man in South Carolina who worked to save money to buy a slave so he could set him free. You remember that story? John Blair, Samuel Gordon, Samuel Currie, William Currie, Robert Ewing, John Russell, who was the great-grandfather of Dr. Bill Russell of Geneva College, D.S. Irvin, W.C. Smith, Thomas N. Ferris, Austin Seward, and John Height. In his biography of his father, Reverend James Ferris, DS Ferris wrote, and I quote, our house was a station on the Underground Railroad. Many poor panting fugitives found their way to Canada on that line. James Clark, son-in-law of Dr. Andrew Todd, who lived on the main road, often brought them. His coarse bass voice grew rather familiar. The call, a stranger here made in the dead of the night, was well understood. Safe quarters were found in the house, barn, fields, or woods, according as they supposed there was danger of search. In one case, he says, I never knew where the Negro was secreted, but the hunters rode through the surrounding woods, cracking whips and breaking brush at a fearful rate, and made it a night to be remembered. The man, in spite of them, got safely through. In his diary for January 6, 1818, 54, D.S. Ferris wrote, Father started up to Morgantown with a colored man. On February 15, he noted, a runaway is reported to be near, probably going on tonight. Helping such is our might toward the abolition of slavery. Might, M-I-T-E, as in a little bit. In Illinois, the situation was even more divided than in Indiana. Siebert found relatively few railroad routes in Illinois, but the routes that did operate were focused in Covenanter communities. The Eden, or Bethel, congregation near Sparta. Hill Prairie, also at Sparta. Elkhorn congregation at Oakdale. Church Hill near Coltersville, and societies at Nashville and Centralia. In these communities, covenant families who took part were Hayes, Moore, Milligan, Todd, McClurkin, Hood, Ramsey, Wiley, and Wilson. Reverend Andrew C. Todd Pastor Elkhorn was said to have sheltered as many as 17 fugitives at once. The depth of commitment of these covenanters is reflected in the fact that when President Lincoln issued the first call for volunteers to put down the rebellion in 1861, the men of Elkhorn Congregation with Pastor A.C. Todd in the lead immediately formed a company and enlisted. We'll hear more about that in the last lecture of this series, number six. William Hayes from Bethel congregation had a harrowing experience. He had a neighbor who had slaves. Now this was illegal in Illinois because By the terms of the Northwest Ordinance, no slaves were allowed north of the Ohio River. But this man had moved up from the south, from Kentucky, I think. And the officials in Illinois allowed them to keep their slaves if they had them already when they moved into the state. So there was a woman there that was one of the neighbor's slaves. And he was cruel to her. She had two small children. And he threatened her that if she didn't do something or other, he was going to sell her children downriver. And she was so terrified of that, she took the children and ran away. And she ran to William Hayes' home, the Covenanter family, near them. And he managed to get them sneaked over to the river on the west side of Illinois. Which river is that? Is that the Missouri? It must be the Wabash. Mississippi? Okay, yeah, that's right. It would be Mississippi, upper Mississippi. Get them there and on a boat up to northern Illinois. But somehow the owner and the federal marshal found out where they were and went up and they were able to seize the children They took them away. They couldn't catch the mother, but she never heard any more about her children. She had no idea where they had gone, if they were still alive or not. She just knew that the marshals and the slave owner and the slave hunters had taken them away. Sometimes we ask, why isn't there more to say about RPs in the Underground Railroad? Primarily because this activity was illegal and could result in stiff penalties, so it was dangerous to keep records. The man at New Concord, Mr. Speer, who kept records, that was dangerous to do that. Many of the stories we know of these activities came from the recollections of people who were quite old in the 1940s, telling about their grandparents. The conductors and station masters themselves seldom wrote or talked about what they did. From their perspective, they simply did their duty as Christians, and they didn't want medals for participation. You know, the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University wrote that we've gone from, in the United States, from give me liberty or give me death to give me a participation medal or I'll throw a tantrum. That was not the attitude of the people that worked on the Underground Railroad. Well, next time, which will be October 29, We'll deal with the approaching storm. What did it mean for a reformed Presbyterian to live in a time of great tension and impending doom? Louise and I will be away on a cruise organized by Geneva College next Sabbath, so we won't be with you, but we'll be back on the 29th. Lord willing, we'll have the last two lectures of this series then. Okay, I think it's exactly an hour since we started. So I'll stop. Thank you. They were allowed under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to enter any home to search for slaves. I should tell you a little story, too, about Robert Stormont, the elder at Princeton, Indiana. He built a secret room in his cellar, the cellar of his house, and it was hinged on, well, it was hinged on a pole so they could open the door and get in and out of the room. But you couldn't tell that there was a door there when the door was shut. And they say that several times slave hunters came into Stormont's house because they were just sure he was hiding some fugitives, but they never found them. But yes, it's illegal. It's unconstitutional. But it was the law then, and that's what they did. with the Civil War. Well, the Emancipation Proclamation was 1863, I believe. And so after that, all... Yeah, yeah. So, and at that point, all the laws about slavery became moot. Because there weren't any slaves anymore. Praise the Lord.