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New book focuses on Underground Railroad

Posted February 01, 2008 10:00 pm

A new book about the Underground Railroad highlights a long-overlooked aspect of anti-slavery activity in Illinois, according to the author, Owen Muelder.

"For a long time, scholarship on the Underground Railroad in the Midwest focused mainly on Michigan, Indiana and Ohio," Muelder said. "The region that in the first half of the 1800s was called 'the West' - Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nebraska - was neglected."

Muelder is director of the Underground Railroad Freedom Center at Knox College.

His new book, "The Underground Railroad in Western Illinois," includes a study of activities in Adams, Hancock, McDonough, Fulton, Peoria, Knox, Stark and Bureau counties through the 1850s.

While the vast majority of underground traffic was by foot or boat, Muelder says starting in the mid-1850s, some slaves used the new rail lines to Chicago.

He details the routes - from Quincy to Princeton - used by fugitive slaves. They were assisted at several locations by white and black anti-slavery activists but also pursued by slave hunters and shunned by many white communities.

Muelder's book emphasizes the central role of the founders of Galesburg and Knox College as "conductors" on the Underground Railroad in the region.

"The activism of people like George Washington Gale and the college's first two presidents, Hiram Kellogg and Jonathan Blanchard, shows how strongly they believed that, even though slavery was legal, it was a sin and violated a higher moral law."

Muelder only had to walk across the Knox campus to work with one of the most important sources - the unpublished diary of local clergyman and Knox trustee Samuel G. Wright, preserved in the Archives and Special Collections in Knox's Seymour Library.

"Wright's diary tells when and how many escaped slaves he sheltered on his farm in Stark County during the 1840s and '50s. It is one of the most extensive written records from the Underground Railroad in the region, and one of the few that has contemporary numbers," Muelder said.

Muelder cites one historian's estimate that about 2,000 slaves a year may have escaped from the South - a number consistent with Underground Railroad records from Illinois.

The book cover features a modern photograph of the Phelps Barn near Elmwood in Peoria County, taken by Galesburg photographer and Knox College faculty member Michael Godsil, and an 1857 engraving that shows two fugitive slaves and three Underground Railroad operators held in a jail cell in Missouri, after having been arrested for attempting to help slaves escape to Illinois.

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