[wiTHROWw] THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY 61 
he at length escaped to Canada. lager to lead others into liberty, 
he travelled on foot 400 miles into Kentucky, and brought off safely 
a party of thirty fugitives. Time after time he repeated his adven- 
turous journey and rescued in all 118 slaves from bondage. Of one 
of these journeys he writes: “ Words cannot describe the feelings 
experienced by my companions as they neared the shore; their bosoms 
were swelling with inexpressible joy as they mounted the seats of 
the boat, ready eagerly to spring forward that they might touch the 
soil of the freeman, and when they reached the shore they danced and 
wept for joy, and kissed the earth on which they first stepped, no 
longer the Slave, but the Free.” 
John Mason, another fugitive slave from Kentucky, aided the 
escape in nineteen months of two hundred and sixty-five fugitives, 
and in all assisted not less than 1,300 to escape to Canada. He was 
finally captured by the aid of bloodhounds. He resisted till both 
arms were broken. He was sold south to New Orleans, but escaped 
to the city of Hamilton, in Canada. “Let a man walk abroad on 
Freedom’s Sunny Plains,” he writes, “and having once drunk of its 
celestial “stream whereof maketh glad the city of our God,’ afterward 
reduce this man to slavery, it is next to an impossibility to retain him 
in slavery.” 
A. brave woman named Armstrong, disguised as a man, returned 
to the Kentucky plantation, where she had been a slave, hid near a 
spring where her children came for water, and brought off five of 
them to Canada. 
Surpassed by none in high courage and consecrated zeal in these 
efforts to emancipate the slave was the humble heroine Harriet 
Tubman. Of this simple black woman Governor William H. Seward, 
of New York, wrote: “I have known Harriet long, and a nobler, 
higher spirit or a truer, seldom dwells in human form.” John Brown 
described her as “one of the bravest persons on this continent — 
General Tubman, as we call her.” “She saw in the oppression of 
her race,” says Siebert, “the sufferings of the enslaved Israelites, and 
was not slow to demand that the Pharaoh of the South should let her 
people go.” She, therefore, received the name of Moses — from 
the great Hebrew liberator who led to freedom a nation of slaves. 
Herself born a slave, she first tasted the sweets of liberty in 1849. 
She subsequently made nineteen excursions south and brought off 
over three hundred fugitives from bondage. All her own earnings 
were devoted to this mission together with generous sums given her. 
Her method was, having secured her convoy of slaves, to start north 
on Saturday night so as to allow a good start before they could be 
advertised, and to pay negroes to tear down the advertisements of 
