From the Editor's Desk
Full Article:
"The dictates of humanity came in
opposition to the law of the land, and we ignored the law."
- Levi Coffin, Quaker abolitionist, from Bound
for Canaan
In Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement, Fergus Bordewich vividly brings to life Levi Coffin, scores of black and white abolitionists, and astonishing tales of the ingenuity and courage exhibited by fugitives and their helpers. What came to be called the Underground Railroad, a movement largely led by activists in African-American free communities and supported by white abolitionists, helped approximately 100,000 fugitives reach freedom. The strength of the book lies in the tales Bordewich relates.
Levi Coffin, born in North Carolina, became inalterably opposed to enslavement after witnessing a slave coffle being led further south in 1805, when he was seven years old. His father inquired, and was told by one of the chained African-American men that they had been torn from their families and were chained to keep them from running back home. After Levi's father explained slavery, Levi wondered, "How terribly we should feel if father were taken away from us." Building on the foundations of this flash of empathy, Levi Coffin helped establish one of the first organized long-distance routes of escape, from North Carolina to Quaker communities in southern Indiana. After moving to Indiana, he was dubbed the "President of the Underground Railroad" by a slaveowner. He and Catherine Coffin helped 3000 people escape from slavery.
One of Coffin's counterparts in the East was William Still, whose mother Charity had escaped enslavement, though she had been unable to rescue two of her sons. As the clerk of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, and chair of the local African-American vigilance committee, in the 1850s, Still was assisting 60 fugitives a month. His detailed records and oral histories are, according to Bordewich, "the best record of daily underground operations anywhere in the country."
In the spring of 1850, Peter Friedman, a freed man formerly enslaved in Alabama, entered Still's office seeking information about his parents. Still asked about his life story, discovering Friedman's parents had left Maryland forty years earlier. Still responded, "Suppose I should tell you that I am your brother?" Charity, then aged 80, was still alive, and was reunited with the son stolen from her by slavery.
But Friedman's family, Vina, Levin, Peter, and Catherine, were still enslaved in Alabama. Peter Friedman traveled back to Alabama in an attempt to negotiate their release, but to no avail. He then met a white abolitionist adventurer named Seth Concklin, who offered to help them escape. Concklin stopped at the Coffins' house to make contacts, bought a rowboat, transported it to Alabama, and helped the Friedman family to row it more than 400 miles down the Tennessee and up the Ohio rivers to Indiana. There, between stations of the "railroad," they were caught. While the Friedmans and Concklin were being shipped back to Alabama in chains, Concklin was murdered, one of the Underground's martyrs. The publicity that the Concklin case generated enabled Peter Friedman to raise $5000 from sympathetic abolitionists to ransom his family away from the slaveholder, and the family was finally reunited.
Through Bordewich's accumulation of stories, the cruelty of enslavement is manifest, but also the power of anti-racist solidarity, and the rallying cry of abolition. That cry for freedom rings acrosss the world and throughout this issue, as authors imagine more cooperative futures, and call for the abolition of modern slavery, bigotry, empire, nuclear weapons, and war. They urge us to action, to solidarity, to resistance, ignoring the law when necessary. The dictates of humanity require no less.
- Sam Diener, Co-Editor
