Q i Q i Q O "0 t^ "fr ^ •ff" Please handle this volume with care. The University of Connecticut Libraries, Storrs hbl, stx E 450.S93 C.2 Underground railroad in Connecticu -t=- VJ1O 3 ^153 DD7Dlfih3 5 02 VO U> o PPcDApa j 8 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from LYRASIS members and Sloan Foundation http://archive.org/details/undergroundrailr1962stro THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN CONNECTICUT 2SB5HSH5E5^SZSHSH5SSiSESE5a5SSHSHSE5aSE5HSE5^EHS^5Z5HSZn5iLb1E£ The Underground Railroad in Connecticut By HORATIO T. STROTHER Wesleyan University Press: middletown, Connecticut 5Z5Z5Z£TE5E5H5H5E5Z5E5E5Z5Z5Z525mZ5H555H5B5E5H5H5ZSHSE5ZSE5Z5I S<?3 c. & Copyright © 1962 by Wesleyan University LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 62—15122 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FIRST PRINTING OCTOBER 1962, SECOND PRINTING OCTOBER 1969 TO THE MEMORY OF David Louis MY SON a5E5ZSZ5ZnSEnSZn5ZnFaSH5HSHHH5SSZEanSHSHSZffSSa5Z515HSEffaS CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction 3 1. Blazing the Trail 10 2. Thorny Is the Pathway 25 3. Fugitives in Flight 43 4. The Captives of the Amistad 65 5. A House Divided 82 6. "This Pretended Law We Cannot Obey" 93 7. New Haven, Gateway from the Sea 107 8. West Connecticut Trunk Lines 119 9. East Connecticut Locals 128 10. Valley Line to Hartford 137 11. Middletown, a Way Station 150 12. Farmington, the Grand Central Station 163 13. The Road in Full Swing 175 A ppendices 1. Narrative of Mr. Nehemiah Caulkins of Waterford, Connecticut 191 2. Underground Railroad Agents in Connecticut 210 3. Slaves and Free Negroes in Connecticut, 1639-1860 212 4. Antislavery Societies in Connecticut, 1837 213 5. Slaves in Connecticut, 1830 216 Notes 219 Bibliography 239 Index 253 ILLUSTRATIONS facing page Four Antislavery Leaders 70 Cinque. The portrait by Nathaniel Jocelyn 71 Four Underground Agents 86 Two Underground Stations 87 Principal Underground Routes in the Northeast 118 Underground Railroad Routes in Connecticut 119 The Reverend James W. C. Pennington 134 The home of Francis Gillette in Bloomfield 135 iSHSinSZFii5H5H5ZSH5aSHSrE5a5asaSfaSH5Z5HSH5H5aSBS'HS252Sa5aEasaE PREFACE It has been said that we shall never know the events of the past as they actually occurred. And it is true that the historian, writing from a position more or less distant in time and viewpoint from the happenings that concern him, can hardly know his materials as his more or less dis- tant forebears knew them. Nonetheless he must do his best, bearing in mind a maxim of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense." Such is the task of the historian in resurrecting and presenting the missing links of the Underground Railroad. Even at the height of its operations, the work of this "railroad" in Connecticut was shrouded in obscurity ; and so it has remained. Detailed contemporary records have not survived ; indeed they can hardly have existed, for the entire movement arose, nourished, and came to its end as an extralegal and even a downright illegal enterprise. A few of its passengers and operators wrote some of what they remembered, then or later, in the form of memoirs, diaries, or letters that are still in existence. Contemporary newspapers and periodicals supply some data, often less explicit than one could wish. Family and local legend, passed verbally down through the generations since the era before the Civil War, add a modicum of information and an understanding of contemporary viewpoints. For leads of these sorts, for many facts and recollec- tions, the writer is indebted to a great number of kind peo- PREFACE pie, who labored conscientiously to help him gather infor- mation. It would be impossible to name them all here. But a special word of thanks must be tendered to Wilbur H. Sie- bert, of Ohio State University ; the material he furnished has given this book its heart. To Cedric L. Robinson, Rod- erick B. Jones, Mrs. Mabel A. Newell, Mrs. Stowell Rounds, Beaufort R. L. Newsom, Mrs. Alfred H. Terry, Mrs. Charles Perkins, Mrs. Harold S. Burr, Mrs. Warren N. Drum, Miss Felicie Terry, Mrs. Lillian L. Clarke, Mrs. Alice Weaver, Henry Sill Baldwin, Benjamin L. Doug- las, Mrs. Louise Kingsley, Miss Fedora Ferraresso, Mrs. Madeline Edgerton, and Miss Virginia Skinner, who helped the writer gather the fruits of research, goes his deepest gratitude. He is indebted, too, to many hard workers at the Yale University Library, the Connecticut State Library, the Springfield City Library, and the Schomburg Library in New York City—and especially to Miss Gertrude M. Mc- Kenna of the Olin Library, Wesleyan University. Their generous cooperation has made his researches much easier and more profitable. The staff of Wesleyan University Press, by their encouragement and detailed cooperation, did much to bring this work to its final shape. The Con- necticut Historical Society was a fruitful source of illus- trations. For their wise encouragement and valued suggestions, the writer is most thankful to Peter Schroeder and to Al- bert E. Van Dusen, of the University of Connecticut. And finally, to his wife Joanne, without whose constant support this work could not have been completed, goes his highest regard. —Horatio T. Strother Higganum, Connecticut January 196% THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN CONNECTICUT a5asH5E5E5E5aszsHSHSH5aKHs esesEsasas SzshshsiFS arcs'.msiasHf INTRODUCTION News traveled slowly in 1831, but few newspapers in the United States failed to report with all possible speed that a bloody slave insurrection, led by Nat Turner, had broken out in Southampton County, Virginia. This dramatic attack against the South's "peculiar institution" proved in the end to be fruitless. The uprising was put down by armed force, Turner was captured and executed, and scores of Negroes—many of whom had taken no part in the revolt—were murdered in savage retaliation. But "nearly sixty whites" had died in the initial outbreak, and a wave of terror swept through every slave-holding state. Months earlier, in Boston, the first appearance of William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery newspaper The Liberator had made the South—and the nation—aware that the en- tire institution of slavery was coming under unremitting attack from zealous abolitionists in the North, although how effective that attack would be was as yet unclear. Tur- ner's rebellion was an attack of a different and more terri- fying kind. It was too close to home, too immediate a threat to the prosperity of King Cotton and Prince Sugar, too dangerous to life itself, to be forgotten when it was over. The Southern master knew that he could not rest con- tent with the capture of Turner and his accomplices, and that merely "a harsher and more vigilant discipline" over INTRODUCTION the slaves could not assure the continued acceptance of slavery as an institution. Something more was needed, some moral principle that would justify slavery forever, in the eyes of all men. That something Professor Thomas Dew attempted to supply in a declaration before the Virginia legislature in that same crucial year : slavery was "not only God's commanded order, not only the most humane order, but also the most natural order." This idea, it has been said, "proceeded to envisage the South as on its way to be- coming a rigid caste society." x Whether slavery was a civilizing influence or a cause of degradation to masters and chattels alike is not a question today. But in the middle decades of the nineteenth century there were violent partisans on both sides, and no meeting of minds was possible between them. It would have been sheer folly for extreme abolitionists like Garrison or Wen- dell Phillips to argue the point with such convinced advo- cates of slavery as John C. Calhoun or Robert B. Rhett. It is safe to say, at the outset, that men like these embittered the sectional conflict that culminated in the Civil War. For by 1831 the ideological struggle over slavery was well under way ; and at the same time, in all the states from the Midwest to New England, abolitionists and humanitar- ians were developing a chain of escape routes and hiding places for runaway slaves fleeing the South. Only a few or- dinary citizens had even a glimpse of this activity ; those engaged in it, in the main, knew little more than the sta- tions and byways in their own vicinity ; even the fugitives who escaped through these clandestine channels became fa- miliar with only the pathways and the resting places through which they themselves moved. Yet most people, North and South, were aware that, despite the heavy legal and social penalties for assisting runaway slaves, there ex- isted a widespread, loosely knit network of hideouts and se- INTRODUCTION cret routes of escape; and that these were known collec- tively as the Underground Railroad. 2 That name, it is said, was first applied to the system in 1831, the year of Turner's death and The Liberator's birth. A slave named Tice Davids escaped from his owner in Ripley, Ohio, and immediately disappeared. The master searched the vicinity as thoroughly as he could but found no trace of his runaway bondsman. At length he concluded ruefully, "He must have gotten away by an underground road." From "road" to "railroad" was a simple transition, especially in that time when the newly established steam railroads were a nine days' wonder. Besides, the terminol- ogy of railroading afforded easy names with which to mask a range of activities that lay outside the law. So the Underground Railroad—more the "name of a mode of operation than the name of a corporation"—had its "con- ductors" and "passengers," its "stations" and "station- keepers"; but they, like its "tracks" and "trains," were concealed from public view. They had to be; it was the only way to be safe.