William Still

The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia

William C. Kashatus

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780268105549, 9780268103576
• eBook ISBN: 9780268200381
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The first full-length biography of William Still, one of the most important leaders of the Underground Railroad.

William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia is the first major biography of the free Black abolitionist William Still, who coordinated the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad and was a pillar of the Railroad as a whole. Based in Philadelphia, Still built a reputation as a courageous leader, writer, philanthropist, and guide for fugitive enslaved people. This monumental work details Still's life story beginning with his parents' escape from bondage in the early nineteenth century and continuing through his youth and adulthood as one of the nation's most important Underground Railroad agents and, later, as an early civil rights pioneer. Still worked personally with Harriet Tubman, assisted the family of John Brown, helped Brown's associates escape from Harper's Ferry after their famous raid, and was a rival to Frederick Douglass among nationally prominent African American abolitionists. Still's life story is told in the broader context of the anti-slavery movement, Philadelphia Quaker and free black history, and the generational conflict that occurred between Still and a younger group of free black activists led by Octavius Catto.

Unique to this book is an accessible and detailed database of the 995 fugitives Still helped escape from the South to the North and Canada between 1853 and 1861. The database contains twenty different fields—including name, age, gender, skin color, date of escape, place of origin, mode of transportation, and literacy—and serves as a valuable aid for scholars by offering the opportunity to find new information, and therefore a new perspective, on runaway enslaved people who escaped on the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad. Based on Still's own writings and a multivariate statistical analysis of the database of the runaways he assisted on their escape to freedom, the book challenges previously accepted interpretations of the Underground Railroad. The audience for William Still is a diverse one, including scholars and general readers interested in the history of the anti-slavery movement and the operation of the Underground Railroad, as well as genealogists tracing African American ancestors.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. William Still, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, Etc. (1872; repr., Chicago: Johnson, 1970), 1–2, 18–19. The complete story of Peter Freedman Still was first published in Kate E. R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife “Vina,” after Forty Years of Slavery (Syracuse, NY: William T. Hamilton, 1856). Peter took the surname “Freedman” after Joseph Freedman, a Jewish friend who was entrusted with his earnings until he raised the $500 needed to purchase his freedom.

2. William Still to J. Miller McKim, Pennsylvanian Freeman, August 8, 1850.

3. Pickard, Kidnapped and the Ransomed, v; Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: Amistad, 2005), 357.

4. Benjamin Quarles, “Foreword to the 1970 Edition,” in W. Still, Underground Railroad (1872/1970), vi.

5. According to Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, children of slaves born after November 1780 were to be freed upon their twenty-eighth birthday. Although these children were held in bondage for twenty-eight years, they were considered “servants.” See “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” transcription, CCA; and Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 119.

6. Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (1968; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970). For text of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, see “The Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850: An Act Respecting Fugitives from Justice, and Persons Escaping from the Service of Their Masters,” in W. Still, Underground Railroad (1872/1970), 355–60.

7. John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011), 199–203. Agent was a more generic term, referring to anyone who worked on the Underground Railroad.

8. Quarles, “Foreword to the 1970 Edition,” vi–vii.

9. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 154–55; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 265–67. The predecessor of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society’s General Vigilance Committee was the Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia, founded by the Vigilant Association of Philadelphia in 1837. Though it was interracial in membership, only two of the thirteen members of the standing committee were African American: Robert Purvis, the president; and Jacob C. White. After 1839, the white members stopped attending the monthly meetings of the committee and it became an exclusively black operation. Between 1839 and 1844, when the organization disbanded, the Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia assisted some three hundred fugitives each year. See Joseph A. Boromé, “The Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92 (July 1968): 320–51.

10. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 230.

11. Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 156.

12. “William Still Dead,” New York Times, July 15, 1902.

13. See Eber Pettit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad (1867; repr., Westfield, NY: Chautauqua Regional Press, 1999); Levi Coffin, Reminiscences (Cincinnati, OH: Western Tract Society, 1876); R. C. Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and Neighboring Counties (1883; repr., Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2005); Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 2006); and William Cockrum, History of the Underground Railroad as It Was Conducted by the Anti-Slavery League (Oakland City, IN: J. W. Cockrum Printing, 1915). Two other books, published in the twentieth century, propagated the mythology of these earlier accounts: Henrietta Buckmaster, Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941); and William A. Breyfogle, Make Free: The Story of the Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1958). Despite the historical inaccuracy of these works, some historians consider them useful. David Brion Davis, for example, argues that the “romanticizing” of the Underground Railroad recognizes the “humanity of the slaves and the dehumanizing effects permanently confining people in times and spaces chosen by white masters.” See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 232. Similarly, David Blight insists on the need to respect local lore and mythology as a way of understanding the “extraordinary hold of the Underground Railroad on Americans’ historical imagination.” See David Blight, “Why the Underground Railroad, and Why Now? A Long View,” in Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, ed. David W. Blight (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 217.

14. Some folklorists believe that quilt codes, done in geometric patterns and distinctive stitches, were used to aid slaves in memorizing certain directives before their escape. Specific names, which functioned as metaphors in the code, were assigned to various quilt patterns. If a “Monkey Wrench” quilt pattern was being displayed, for example, slaves knew that they were to gather all the “tools” they would need on an impending escape to the North. A “Wagon Wheel” pattern signified the method of transportation they would take. If a “Tumbling Bear” pattern appeared, slaves knew that the moment of escape had arrived. See Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (New York: Anchor, 2000), 69–71. For other works on quilt codes, see Roland L. Freeman, A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers and Their Stories (Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill, 1996); and Glady-Marie Fry, Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South (New York: Dutton, 1990).

15. For works on escape songs and spirituals, see Harold Courlander, Negro Folk Music, U.S.A. (1963; repr., New York: Dover, 1992); Miles M. Fisher, Negro Slave Songs in the United States (New York: Citadel, 1968); and Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

16...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One The Price of Freedom
• Two Quaker Philadelphia
• Three The Underground Railroad
• Four The Fugitive Slave Act
• Five Vigilance
• Six The Bondswoman’s Escape
• Seven “Dear Friends”
• Eight Canada West
• Nine Kidnapped and Ransomed
• Ten The Memorable 28
• Eleven Fighting for Freedom
• Twelve The Streetcar Protest
• Thirteen The Politics of Reform
• Fourteen Legacy
• Appendix: Database of Runaway Slaves Interviewed by William Still, 1853–61
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index