[219] Letter of Brown Thurston, Portland, Me., Oct. 21, 1895.
The advantages of escape by boat were early discerned by slaves living near the coast or along inland rivers. Vessels engaged in our coastwise trade became more or less involved in transporting fugitives from Southern ports to Northern soil. Small trading vessels, returning from their voyages to Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, landed slaves on the New England coast.[220] In July, 1853, the brig _Florence_ (Captain Amos Hopkins, of Hallowell, Maine) from Wilmington, North Carolina, was required, while lying in Boston harbor, to surrender a fugitive found on board. In September, 1854, the schooner _Sally Ann_ (of Belfast, Maine), from the same Southern port, was induced to give up a slave known to be on board. In October of the same year the brig _Cameo_ (of Augusta, Maine) brought a stowaway from Jacksonville, Florida, into Boston harbor, and, as in the two preceding cases, the slave was rescued from the danger of return to the South through the activity and shrewdness of Captain Austin Bearse, the agent of the Vigilance Committee of Boston.[221] The son of a slaveholder living at Newberne, North Carolina, forwarded slaves from that point to the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia on vessels engaged in the lumber trade.[222] In November, 1855, Captain Fountain brought twenty-one fugitives concealed on his vessel in a cargo of grain from Norfolk, Virginia, to Philadelphia.[223]
[220] Mrs. Elizabeth Buffum Chace, _Anti-Slavery Reminiscences_, pp. 27, 30.
[221] Austin Bearse, _Reminiscences of Fugitive-Slave Law Days in Boston_, 1880, pp. 34-39.
[222] Smedley, _Underground Railroad_, letter of Robert Purvis, of Philadelphia, p. 335.
[223] Still, _Underground Railroad Records_, pp. 165-172. For other cases, see pp. 211, 379-381, 437, 558, 559-565.
The tributaries flowing into the Ohio River from Virginia and Kentucky furnished convenient channels of escape for many slaves. The concurrent testimony of abolitionists living along the Ohio is to the effect that streams like the Kanawha River bore many a boat-load of fugitives to the southern boundary of the free states. It is not a mere coincidence that a large number of the most important centres of activity lie along the southern line of the Western free states at points near or opposite the mouths of rivers and creeks. On the Mississippi, Ohio and Illinois rivers north-bound steamboats not infrequently provided the means of escape. Jefferson Davis declared in the Senate that many slaves escaped from his state into Ohio by taking passage on the boats of the Mississippi.[224]