The term which had been given to poor Jim, in confidence, as the means by which he was to make his escape from bondage, and extorted from him by torture, having thus been given to the world from the city of Washington, became henceforth the universal appelation for a _corporation_ which, for more than twenty years thereafter, extended its great trunk lines across all the northern states from Mason and Dixon’s line and the Ohio River to the Queen’s Dominion, and its ramifications far into the southern states. It was most efficiently officered, and had its side tracks, connections and switches; its stations and eating houses all thoroughly well recognized by the initiated; its station agents and conductors, men undaunted in danger and unswerving in their adherence to principle; its system of cypher dispatches, tokens and nomenclature which no attaché ever revealed except to those having a right to receive them, and its detective force characterized by a shrewdness in expedients and a versatility of strategy which attached to any mere money making enterprise would have put “millions in it.” It received the support of men and women from every class, sect, and party, though from some more than from others; its character was engraven, as by a pen of fire, in the hearts and consciences of men, burning deeper and deeper, until finally abrogated in that grand emancipation proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, when it was found that its stock, always unwatered but by tears, had yielded an incomputable percentage in the freedom secured to over thirty-six thousand fugitives from human bondage, and embodied in houses, lands, schools, churches and social and domestic happiness.
Now that the track is all pulled up; that the rolling stock has disappeared; that most of the operators and passengers have gone down into silence or are dwelling in forgetfulness of accumulating years, and that only a few of the old stations remain as they were, a new generation pertinently inquires, “What called such a road into existence and how were its gigantic operations so successfully and yet so secretly carried on?”
To the first of these questions it may be replied that the history of American slavery is older than the story of Plymouth Rock. In the year 1619 a cargo of Africans, kidnapped on the coast of the “Dark Continent,” was sold from the deck of a Dutch man-of-war at Jamestown, Va., to be used in the cultivation of tobacco along the river.