Springfield Union—March 25, 1900

Springfield Union—March 25, 1900 The “Underground Railroad” and those who operated it.–II Western Massachusetts and Vermont, Authentic Traditions of the Trying Times. Written by Aella Greene for the Sunday Republican “Fugitives fleeing from slavery at the South and reaching New York and Westchester county were heartened there to resume their journey toward freedom in Canada and then they fared on through the shore towns to New Haven. From thence two routes of the Underground system extended northward across Connecticut, one of them going through Southington and places north of it, and entering Massachusetts at Southwick and Westfield, the other one extending through North Guilford and Meriden to Hartford and Springfield. The two routes came together at Northampton. And at the corners of the triangular section of the Bay state described by these converging lines of the road were kept three principal stations of the system. The agents at these points were true men and brave, and the conductors making trips to and from those stations had both the wisdom and the intrepidity fitting them for the hazardous business in which they were engaged. Faring through Connecticut by either of the two routes, the fugitives found that which had they dared to sing at all would have caused them to sing, “Jordan am a hard road to trabbel, I beliebe.” In every one of the towns on each route there were people of pronounced pro-slavery ideas, people glad to see the slaves sent back to the servitude from which they were fleeing, and some of whom were not adverse to aid in their rendition,–at least not averse to putting the hunters on their track. Risky business, indeed, was it for the fugitives to traverse Connecticut, and hazardous for the agents of the road to do their work. In one of those Connecticut towns there still lives a matron of pro-slavery notions who was between 30 and 40 years of age when the Underground people were the most active in their work, and she boasts to this day that “she didn’t help the niggers—not she.” Near by the farm on which she then lived and which she still holds as “her own probberty” lived then two men that afterward went to the South and worked plantations with slaves, and “didn’t think niggers wuz fit fur ennythin’ but ter be made ter wuk fer white folks,”—and “she didn’t nuther.” This woman had other neighbors who held similar pro-slavery notions. But let her great age insure her protection from severity of criticism now that slavery is done away; let her and her neighbors and their like be forgiven. Connecticut clock peddlers who went South before the war to vend their wares among the planters, were often so desirous of pleasing those of whom they sought patronage that they did not scan closely the workings of the “peculiar institution.” These peddlers often made a “good spec” at their business and were hospitably entertained by those who bought their time-pieces. So they came back with their original ant-slavery notions modified; or some of these peddlers confessed to a “change of views” on the question. And of these, some were even ready to help catch the runaways. Another element which enters into the computation of the interest which some Connecticut people took in fostering “the institution” is the fact that the cotton gin, which helped to make slavery profitable, was the invention of Eli Whitney, a Connecticut man. Sometimes, too, young men from that state went to the South and found places as slave-drivers, in which business some of them showed great aptness, and received great pay. Other men from Connecticut went to the South to teach families of the planters. Thus it came about that Connecticut Yankees not only sold the slaveholders clocks and cotton machinery, but also taught their children and tasked and flogged their “niggers.” Connecticut Yankees might be said to have had a selfish interest in slavery at the South, and it would be natural for them to look with disfavor on those whose operations endangered the perpetuity of “the institution.” And there were still others in Connecticut who opposed the operators of the Underground road. They disliked, or pretended to dislike, slavery; but they thought that, “seeing there was a law” against helping fugitive slaves on their way, the law should be obeyed. But the opposition in that state to the business of the Underground road sprang also from the inbred hatred of many of the people of the state for the Negro. This hatred “had come down from former generations.” It had been carefully kept through all the stages of its transmission; it had been fostered with the fondness given a favorite child; it had been guarded as a precious treasure: it had been prized a a sacred jewel. It was in this state that the negro prisoner “Cato” was for a long time kept chained to the cold, damp, rock floor of a noisome cell, below ground—kept there until the fastened leg rotted of or wore off. Records do not mention the exact cause of the sundering of the leg, but it was in the ancient prison in the “Copper Hill” neighborhood, near Simsbury. It was in Connecticut, too, that the “nigger haters” made themselves notorious by a great fuss about Prudence Crandall’s colored school On Canterbury Green! To this school Miss Crandall insisted on admitting the children of Negroes to be taught with the children of white people, and those who hated “niggers” subjected her to many indignities and continued their persecutions until they had her apprehended and jailed for some fancied breach of the law. For this insult and injustice the state Legislature, years afterward, made the tardy atonement of a little pension, which was doled from the public treasury to aid in the support of the veteran, then living at the West, during the few years that remained of her old age. Yet let not Massachusetts people taunt those of Connecticut. For in the years of the anti-slavery movement Massachusetts men, working in the interest of pro-slavery greed, enacted in Boston and within the sight of Faneuil hall itself, and even within the very walls of that cradle of liberty scenes for which they and their descendants should forever blush. They mobbed anti-slavery speakers and assaulted, arrested and dragged with ropes around the neck those who from human motives befriended the hapless Negro fugitives from slavery. And from the Bay state those fugitives were sent back to the South to be scourged, and to take on their flayed shoulders the burden of bondage. Even in Western Massachusetts, and within the limits of the valley of the Connecticut, there exist to this day traces of the cruelties endured by Negroes held in slavery. Up in Colrain, the town settled by those Scots, the McClellans, Taggarts and others of Caledonian nativity as well authenticated as theirs, the farms were once worked by slaves. And until recent years there was a tree standing on one of the heights of that town—if it does not there remain to this day—to which these Negro slaves were tied to be whipped into tractability. Nor let the people of the small but smart “state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” too much boast in the presence of Connecticut people. Let them not too much boast in that presence, even when they think of their own Plenty streets, Peace streets and “Christian hill” neighborhoods, and think of the reasons for honest pride, which their political history and their ecclesiastical history give them. Let them not too much boast, for some of the financial foundations of fashionable society in their world-famed Newport rest to this day on fortunes amassed, or, at least begun, in the slave trade. The gatherers of those Newport fortunes, did not, indeed, make their money by working Negroes as slaves in the rice fields and cotton fields of the South, nor by selling slave holders clocks or cotton machinery, or by teaching their children or whipping their slaves. But they were as guilty of the “robbery and ruin” of others as were the planters who grew rich by the compelled and unpaid toil of the blacks. For they bought those blacks and brought them to the marts at the South and sold them to the planters,–bought them of those who had kidnapped them from their native wilds, and, in the noisome holds of slave ships brought them to taste the experiences of lives of bondage—slavery that was to extend to their children and children’s children forever. Nor let New Hampshire people boast too loudly, they too, were responsible in some degree for the sway which the slave power gained in the nation. True, from that state came Horace Greeley with his pen that was so might in the cause of freedom—from that state came that prophet statesman John P. Hale, with the warning cry that was prediction fo the bloody struggle of the civil war, “I tremble for my country, when I remember that God is just.” In New Hampshire there were many in the walks of private life who did much or the anti-slavery cause. Mrs. Charles Horne of Great Falls, a worthy matron with a numerous family of children found time to help the fugitive slaves on their way; and many were the sable pilgrims whose dusky faces lighted up with hope as she fed them at her door or admitted them to the cheer of the hearth of her house.

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