Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (33 page)

JOHN JAY II
, grandson of the first chief justice of the United States and one of the few New York City lawyers willing to defend accused fugitive slaves in court.
(Portraits of American Abolitionists, Massachusetts Historical Society)

JAMES S. GIBBONS, ABIGAIL HOPPER GIBBONS, AND FAMILY
. This photograph from 1854 depicts a Quaker abolitionist couple active in the underground railroad in New York City, and their children.
(Courtesy of Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College)

THE PHILADELPHIA VIGILANCE COMMITTEE
. Produced sometime in the 1850s, this collection of photographs includes seven underground railroad activists in Philadelphia, plus Thomas Garrett (middle row, left), who forwarded fugitive slaves to that city from Wilmington, Delaware. Among those depicted are James Miller McKim (top left); William Still (bottom right); Passmore Williamson (bottom center); and Robert Purvis (middle right). Many of the fugitives who reached New York in the 1850s had passed through Philadelphia.
(Courtesy of Boston Public Library Print Department)

THE RESURRECTION OF HENRY BOX BROWN AT PHILADELPHIA
. In one of the most celebrated escapes of the antebellum years, Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, had himself concealed in a crate and shipped to the antislavery office in Philadelphia. This lithograph from 1851 shows James Miller McKim, with a hatchet, and William Still, holding the top of the crate, as Brown emerged. The man on the left may be the printer, Thomas Sinclair, and on the right, the abolitionist Charles D. Cleveland, who operated a school for girls.
(Library Company of Philadelphia)

GRACEANNA LEWIS
, a member of one of the rural Quaker families that assisted fugitives who passed through southeastern Pennsylvania.
(Chester County Historical Society)

WILLIAM WHIPPER
, a prominent black businessman and abolitionist in Columbia, Pennsylvania, who dispatched many fugitives to Philadelphia and upstate New York.
(I. Garland Penn,
The Afro-American Press and Its Editors
)

THE FOLLIES OF THE AGE, VIVE LA HUMBUG!!
This popular print from 1855 depicts in the lower right corner the abolitionist Passmore Williamson urging Jane Johnson to escape from slavery. Johnson and her two children had been brought to Philadelphia by their owner, John Hill Wheeler, on their way to New York to board a ship for Nicaragua, where Wheeler was to take up a position as American ambassador. Williamson, along with William Still and several other black men, approached Johnson on a ferry as the party was about to depart. She and her children did become free. As the title suggests, the print is unsympathetic—other “follies” include a train wreck, a free lover, a carnival huckster, and a shop selling patent medicines. But it illustrates how widely known the Johnson case had become.
(Library Company of Philadelphia)

MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN
, the fashionable organizer of the annual Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar that raised money for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
(Portraits of American Abolitionists, Massachusetts Historical Society)

A broadside advertising the annual bazaar for 1856, emphasizing the “elegant” imported goods on sale.
(Library of Congress)

A broadside published by Boston abolitionists condemning a Whig member of Congress who voted for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as well as President Millard Fillmore, who signed the measure, and the local Whig press, which supported it. It includes excerpts from the law and some of the reasons that it outraged many northerners.
(Gilder-Lehrman Collection)

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW . . . HAMLET IN CHAINS
. An engraving from the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
, October 17, 1850, depicts James Hamlet, the first person returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, in front of city hall in New York. Flags fly from the building, emblazoned with popular American maxims violated by Hamlet’s rendition. By the time this appeared in print, New Yorkers had raised the money to purchase Hamlet’s freedom and he was back in the city.
(Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University)