The Coffyns or Coffins are a Devonshire family, said to have been founded by one of the followers of the Conqueror. In 1642 Tristram Coffyn, a son of this old house, sailed from Plymouth for New England, taking with him his wife and five children, his mother and two sisters. He settled at Salisbury, in the colony of Massachusetts, and his descendants are now to be found in many of the States. Several of them have won themselves a name of note in the service of their country; but none has a higher claim to the remembrance, not only of their fellow-citizens but of all who honour worth wherever it is to be found, than Levi Coffin, whose memoirs lie before us under the title of Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad, being a brief History of the Labours of a Lifetime on behalf of the Slave (London: Sampson Low, 1876). His tale, told in plain homely language, is a stirring one, and shews us a phase of American life which is happily a thing of the past; for now that slavery is abolished there is no longer any need for the devoted labours of the true-hearted men who by means of the once famous ‘Underground Railroad’ helped the fugitive slave on his way to the land of freedom—over the Canadian border and into British territory, where, and where only, he was safe from kidnappers and hunters.

Levi Coffin was born in 1798. His father was a member of a colony of the Society of Friends, settled at New Garden in North Carolina; and he himself has always belonged to that religious profession. One day when he was about seven years old he was standing beside his father, who was chopping up some wood at a little distance from the house. Along the road came a coffle or gang of slaves, chained in couples on each side of a long chain which extended between them. At some distance behind came the slave-dealer with a wagon-load of supplies. Levi’s father spoke pleasantly to the slaves. ‘Well boys,’ he said, ‘why do they chain you?’ One of them replied for the rest: ‘They have taken us away from our wives and children, and they chain us lest we should make our escape and go back to them.’ The gang tramped off along the dusty road; and in answer to the child’s eager questions, his father told him what slavery was; and little Levi endeavoured to realise the troubles of the poor men he had just seen, by thinking—‘How terribly we should feel if father were taken away from us!’

This was the first outbreak of a feeling which influenced his whole life. He began his work early. At fifteen years of age he was the means of enabling a slave—who had been kidnapped near Baltimore and brought into North Carolina—to escape from the slave-dealer’s gang. He was also often of service to runaway slaves, who used to conceal themselves in the daytime in the woods and thickets near his father’s house at New Garden, by going out to them with a small store of provisions, which he distributed to those he found there.

In 1826 Levi Coffin removed to Newport, Indiana, where he took a shop and began business. He was soon a prosperous man; and ten years after he was able to set up a large oil-factory. His place in Newport soon became one of the ‘stations’ of the Underground Railroad. This was a secret organisation for facilitating the escape of slaves from the Southern States to Canada. It was neither planned nor organised by any one man; it had grown up gradually, to supply a want felt by the Abolitionist party. A slave escaped from a plantation would without it have no means of travelling rapidly, of obtaining relief, or of finding friends to conceal him, and his hope of safety would depend only upon a series of lucky chances and accidents. Gradually, however, along the routes by which the slaves usually escaped certain houses came to be known as those to which the fugitives could safely apply for assistance. These routes were in the secret language of the U. G. R. R. (Underground Railroad) known as lines, and the houses were called ‘stations.’ In course of time the lines were so well organised that in every town along the route there was a director who had at his command a number of hiding-places for slaves, funds collected for their relief, wagons for passing them on by night to the next station, and means of acquiring information as to any pursuit that might be attempted.

‘I kept,’ says Levi Coffin, ‘a team and wagon always at command, to convey the fugitive slaves on their journey. These journeys had to be made at night, often through deep and bad roads, and along by-ways that were seldom travelled. Every precaution to evade pursuit had to be used, as the hunters were often on the track, and sometimes ahead of the slaves. We had different routes for sending the slaves to depÔts ten, fifteen, or twenty miles distant; and when we heard of slave-hunters having passed on one road, we forwarded our passengers by another. Sometimes we learned that the pursuers were ahead of them; and we sent a messenger and had the fugitives brought back to my house, to lie in concealment till they had lost the trail.... Three principal lines from the south converged at my house—one from Cincinnati, one from Madison, and one from Jeffersonville, Indiana. There was no lack of passengers. Seldom a week passed without our receiving them. We knew not what night or what hour of the night we would be roused from slumber by a gentle rap at the door; that was the signal announcing the arrival of a train of the U. G. R. R. I have often been awaked by this signal, and sprung out of bed in the dark and opened the door. Outside in the cold or rain there would be a two-horse wagon loaded with fugitives, perhaps the greater part of them women and children. When they were all safely inside and the door fastened, I would cover the windows, strike a light, and build a good fire. By this time my wife would be up and preparing victuals for them; and in a short time the cold and hungry fugitives would be made comfortable. I would accompany the conductor of the train’ [that is, the driver of the wagon; in America the guard of a railway train is always called the conductor] ‘to the stable, and care for the horses, that had perhaps been driven twenty-five or thirty miles that night through the cold and rain. The fugitives would rest on pallets before the fire the rest of the night. The companies varied in number from two or three to seventeen fugitives.’

Such was the work which for twenty years this good man carried on in Newport. He had often to set his wits hard at work to foil the slave-hunters, and more than once ran serious personal risk. The whole undertaking must have cost him a heavy expenditure of time, labour, and money. But he was not content with this. He organised in Newport a store where cotton goods were sold that had been manufactured entirely by free labour; and for this purpose took a journey to the South to establish relations with planters who employed only freemen. He and his friends then formed a league, each member of which bound himself to purchase no goods on the production of which slaves had been employed.

In 1847 he removed to Cincinnati, and took charge of one of the most important points in the system of the U. G. R. R. Cincinnati is built on the northern bank of the Ohio River, and thus stood on the very frontier of the slave-land, the opposite shore belonging to the slave state of Kentucky. Here his work went on for about fifteen years, till the war put an end to slavery in the United States. He tells in his Reminiscences many a stirring story of the escape of fugitives that he passed on to Canada. For these we must refer our readers to the book itself. He was so active, enterprising, and successful that he received the name of ‘President of the Underground Railroad.’ Everywhere he had the fullest confidence reposed in him by the coloured people; and often those who had escaped to Canada would send him their savings, to be employed in buying their relatives and friends out of captivity in the South by a fair bargain with the planters. It may be safely said that his whole life was passed in the cause of promoting the freedom of the slave; and he always found willing helpers and allies, mostly men of his own religious persuasion. He always confined his operations to concealing the slaves that came or were brought to him, and helping them upon their way to Canada or to some free state. He would never actually lure a slave from a plantation; and he condemned any active or forcible resistance to the law, even when it was exercised upon the side of slavery.

A man of quite a different stamp was John Fairfield, another agent of the Underground Railroad, but whom Levi Coffin with his Quaker peace principles could never forgive for making the revolver an auxiliary in his work. ‘With all his faults,’ he says, ‘and misguided impulses and wicked ways, Fairfield was a brave man; he never betrayed a trust that was reposed in him, and he was a true friend to the oppressed and suffering slave.’ Fairfield was a Virginian; and his earliest exploit had been to run away to Canada from his uncle’s plantation taking one of the slaves with him. From that time till he died he passed an adventurous life, visiting once or twice in the year Virginia or Kentucky, establishing relations with the slaves upon a plantation, and then leading them to Canada. He was soon known to many of the refugees settled there, and they would ask him to bring them their relatives from the Southern plantations, sometimes offering him money they had saved as payment for his exertions.

‘Fairfield,’ says Levi Coffin, ‘was a young man without family, and was fond of adventure and excitement. He wanted employment, and agreed to take the money offered by the fugitives and engage in the undertaking. He obtained the names of masters and slaves, and an exact knowledge of the different localities to be visited, then acted as his shrewd judgment dictated under different circumstances. He would go South, into the neighbourhood where the slaves were whom he intended to conduct away, and under an assumed name and a false pretence of business, would board perhaps at the house of the master whose stock of valuable property he intended to decrease. He would proclaim himself to be a Virginian, and profess to be strongly pro-slavery in his sentiments, thus lulling the suspicions of the slaveholders, while he established a secret understanding with the slaves, gaining their confidence, and making arrangements for their escape. Then he would suddenly disappear from the neighbourhood, and several slaves would be missing at the same time. Fairfield was always ready to take money for his services from the slaves if they had it to offer; but if they had not he helped them all the same. He was equally ready to spend it in the same cause, and if necessary would part with his last dollar to effect his object.’

Often he would bring a negro or two with him, who would act as his slaves, and whom he would pretend to treat very roughly. These would act as his intermediaries with the men he hoped to rescue. On one occasion he rescued a large number of men from the salt-works on the Kanawha River in Virginia. He assumed the character of a salt-dealer, and had two large boats built on the river for his business. When the boats were finished, a crowd of negroes escaped in them down the river towards the Ohio. As soon as the alarm was given, he pretended to be very anxious to aid in recapturing his boats and the escaped slaves. He rode off at the head of the pursuers, directed the chase, and when they found the abandoned boats on the river-bank, he suggested that they should scatter in various directions, and meet in a few hours to report if they had got any traces of the fugitives. He never appeared at the rendezvous; he had joined the slaves at a previously appointed spot, and was conducting them to one of the stations on the Underground Railroad en route for Canada. He generally marched at night, and rested in concealment in the daytime.

Often on these journeys he had to fight his way through patrols of slave-hunters. One moonlight night he had a narrow escape. The patrollers had found his track, and gathered a body of armed men, and lay in ambush waiting for him at both ends of a bridge which his party of fugitives had to cross. Fairfield always armed his men with revolvers, and told them that he would shoot down any one who would not fight for his freedom. On this occasion he was taken by surprise. As the party gained the centre of the bridge they were fired upon from both ends of it. ‘They thought, no doubt,’ said Fairfield, ‘that this sudden attack would intimidate us, and that we would surrender; but in this they were mistaken. I ordered my men to charge to the front, and they did charge. We fired as we went, and the men in ambush scattered and ran like scared sheep.’ Fairfield’s clothes were torn by balls, and he and one of his party were slightly wounded. Levi reproved him for trying to kill any one, and told him that we should love our enemies. Fairfield’s reply was characteristic. ‘Love our enemies, indeed! I do not intend to hurt people if they keep out of the way; but if they step in between me and liberty they must take the consequences.’ Levi naÏvely adds: ‘I saw it was useless to preach peace principles to Fairfield.’ Such a man could only have one end. There is reason to believe that shortly before the outbreak of the war in 1861 he was detected arming the negroes in Tennessee, and was lynched by a Southern mob. He had been twelve years engaged in his daring work among the plantations.

The abolition of slavery by the war did not put an end to Levi Coffin’s labours for the negroes; it only gave them another form. It became necessary to provide for the thousands to whom a sweeping measure of emancipation had given their freedom and nothing more, in many cases casting them adrift upon the world without any resource, for at the end of the war trade was bad and employment scarce. Relief societies for the freedmen were formed throughout the States. Levi Coffin took a leading part in this work; and when it was decided to send a delegate to ask for aid from England, he was chosen for this important post. In the summer of 1864 he arrived in London with credentials and introductions to various public men. At his first meeting held in London for the freedmen he was supported by Messrs John Bright, W. E. Forster, Samuel Gurney, and other members of parliament. A second meeting followed at Mr Gurney’s house. Levi Coffin notes with satisfaction that ‘it was quite aristocratic in character, being largely composed of lords, dukes, bishops, and members of parliament.’ A London Freedmen’s Aid Society was organised with several prominent men upon its committee. Branches were established and meetings held throughout England and Ireland. Levi Coffin spoke at all these meetings. Perhaps many of our readers will remember having heard him.

Having finished his work in England, he went over to France and continued it there; and when, after having been more than twelve months in Europe, he returned to Cincinnati in 1865, he had the satisfaction of knowing that his journey had borne rich fruit for the freedmen. He paid another visit to Europe in 1867 as a delegate to an Anti-slavery Congress in Paris. With the account of this journey his book of interesting Reminiscences concludes. We heartily recommend it to our readers. If nothing else, it shews how much one earnest man can accomplish in a lifetime for a cause that he has thoroughly at heart.