[wirarow] THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY 57 
of escaped. slaves. “My heart wept,’ he writes, “my anger was 
kindled, an antagonism to slavery was fixed upon me.” He devoted 
himself with enthusiasm to the work of succouring the slave and soon 
was placed behind prison bars. He was arrested again and again 
and spent seventeen years and four months of his life in prison for 
abducting slaves, and has placed on record the statement that he 
received at the hands of prison officials 35,000 stripes on his naked 
body. His ample reward was that he had guided forty-seven slaves 
toward the north star. “I piloted them,” he writes, “through the 
forests, mostly by night; girls, fair and white, dressed as ladies; men 
and boys, as gentlemen or servants; men in women’s clothes, and 
women in men’s clothes; boys dressed as girls, and girls as boys; on 
foot or on horseback, in buggies, carriages, common wagons, in and 
under loads of hay, straw, old furniture, boxes and bags; crossing the 
‘ Jordan of the slave, swimming or wading chin deep; or in boats, or 
skiffs; on rafts,and often on a pine log. And I never suffered one 
to be recaptured.” 
Two of the most noted leaders of the Underground Railway 
movement were those sturdy Quakers, Thomas Garrett of Delaware, 
and Levi Coffin of Ohio. In his sixtieth year Garrett, when mulcted 
in a fine of $8,000 for the crime of helping his brother man, replied: 
“ Judge, thou hast not left me a dollar, but I wish to say to thee, 
and to all in this court-room, that if any one knows of a fugitive who 
wants shelter and a friend, send him to Thomas Garrett and he will 
befriend him.” Long afterwards he said: “The war came a little 
too soon for my business. I wanted to help off three thousand slaves. 
I had only got up to twenty-seven hundred.” 
Levi Coffin, the Quaker Greatheart of Mrs. Stowe’s “ Uncle 
Tom’s Cabin,’ was born in a slave state, North Carolina, in 1798. 
The scenes he witnessed as a boy entered his soul. In 1847 he settled 
in Cincinnati for the purpose of dealing only in the product of free 
labour. It is said that “for thirty-three years he received into his 
house more than one hundred slaves every year.” Under Levi Coffin’s 
Quaker drab and broad-brimmed hat there lurked a vein of quaint 
humour combined with a shrewd business method. Summoned before 
the Grand Jury, he was asked if he knew of any violation of the fugi- 
tive slave law in his own neighbourhood. He replied that persons 
often stopped at his house who said they were slaves, but he knew 
nothing about it from their statements for the law did not consider 
them capable of giving evidence. He collected money for a poor 
family in need, and three swaggering Kentucky slave holders sub- 
scribed their dollar each and were greatly disgusted to find they had 
helped fugitive slaves along the Underground Railway. He so worked 
