"Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free! They touch our country and their shackles fall."
Most persons that engaged in the underground service were opposed either to enticing or to abducting slaves from the South. This was no less true along the southern border of the free states than in their interior. The principle generally acted upon by the friends of fugitives was that which they held to be voiced in the Scriptural injunction to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. The quaking negro at the door in the dead of night seeking relief from a condition, the miseries of which he found intolerable and for which he was in no proper sense responsible, was a figure to be pitied, and to be helped without delay. Under such circumstances there was no room for casuistry in the mind of the abolitionist. The response of his warm nature was as decisive as his favorite passage of Scripture was imperative. The fugitive was fed, clothed if necessary, and guided to another friend farther on. But abolitionists were unwilling, for the most part, to involve themselves more deeply in danger by abducting slaves from thraldom. The Rev. John B. Mahan, one of the early anti-slavery men of southern Ohio, expressed this fact when he said, "I am confident that few, if any, for various reasons, would invade the jurisdiction of another state to give aid and encouragement to slaves to escape from their owners...."[469] And in northern Ohio, in so radical a town as Oberlin, a famous station of the Underground Road, we are told that there was no sentiment in favor of enticing slaves away, and that this was never done except in one case--by Calvin Fairbank, a student.[470]
[469] _History of Brown County, Ohio_, p. 315.
[470] Conversation with ex-President James H. Fairchild, Oberlin, O., Aug. 3, 1892.
The general disinclination to induce escapes of slaves, either by secret invitation or by persons serving as guides, renders the few cases conspicuous, and gives them considerable interest. When instances of this kind became known to the slave-owners, as for example, by the arrest and imprisonment of some over-venturesome offender, the irritation resulting on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line was apt to be disproportionate to the magnitude of the cause. Nevertheless the aggravation of sectional feeling thus produced was real, and was valued by some Northern agitators as a means to a better understanding of the system of slavery.[471]