58 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
upon the sympathies of a strongly pro-slavery man by showing him a 
scarred and wounded fugitive that he could not help contributing to 
his relief. Coffin promptly rejoined: “ Thou hast laid thyself lable 
not only to a heavy fine, but to imprisonment, under the Fugitive 
Slave Law. Thou gave a fugitive slave a dollar to help him to Can- 
ada; I saw thee do it!” 
Sometimes he induced free negroes to act the part of supposed 
runaways. They would be hurriedly driven off with ostentatious pre- 
cautions, to cover the fact that the real fugitives had quietly escaped. 
Coffin’s good wife so far compromised with her conscience as to lay 
aside her Quaker garb and dress up as a fashionable lady, with a negro 
fugitive slave carrying a rag baby behind her. Coffin knew every 
quirk of the law and was remarkably. shrewd in taking advantage of 
any flaw in its process to extricate the fugitives from its grasp. 
At the close of the War, after the emancipation of the slaves in 
the United States, Coffin declared: “The stock of the Underground 
Railroad had gone down in the market, the business is spoiled, the 
road is now of no further use.” The work of the Underground Rail- 
road was done. 
It was through Coffin that this mysterious railway received its 
designation. “Certain baffled slave-hunters,” says “Ascot Hope,” 
“are said to have declared that there must be an underground railroad 
to Canada, with Levi Coffin for president, as they never could get the 
slightest trace of a fugitive after reaching his house, so shrewdly 
and slyly did the Quaker manage their flight.” Analogous to this 
was the “grape-vine telegraph” by which intelligence was secretly 
conveyed with strange rapidity along the Underground Railway lines. 
A friend, and in a way a colleague of Coffin’s, was John Fairfield, 
a man of dauntless spirit and reckless audacity. He was the son of 
a Virginia planter, and became a fierce antagonist of the slave system 
amid which he was brought up. He was arrested again and again, 
but always managed to break gaol. He used. to hector and bully the 
very men whom he was helping to escape in a way that convinced 
their owners that he had little sympathy with abolitionists. Bringing 
off a number of mulattoes and quadroons, he provided himself at 
Philadelphia with $80.00 worth of wigs and powder for their disguise. 
In 1853 he brought off twenty-eight slaves at the same time. At 
Detroit, writes Mr. Fitch Reed, “two hundred and fifty abolitionists 
took breakfast with them just before daylight. We procured boats 
enough for Fairfield and his crew. As they pushed off from shore, 
they all commenced singing the song: ‘I am on my way to Canada, 
where coloured men are free,’ and continued firing off their arms till 
out of hearing.” 
