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William Still
https://www.thoughtco.com/william-still-father-of-underground-railroad-45193
Early Life
Still was born a free Black man near the town of Medford in Burlington County, New Jersey, the youngest of 18 children born to Levin and Sidney Steel. Although he gave his official birthdate as October 7, 1821, Still provided the date of November 1819 on the 1900 census. Still was the son of people who had been enslaved laborers on a potato and corn farm on the eastern shore of Maryland owned by Saunders Griffin.
William Still's father, Levin Steel, was able to purchase his own freedom, but his wife Sidney had to escape enslavement twice. The first time she escaped she brought along her four oldest children. However, she and her children were recaptured and returned to enslavement. The second time Sidney Steel escaped, she brought two daughters, but her sons were sold to enslavers in Mississippi. Once the family was settled in New Jersey, Levin changed the spelling of their name to Still and Sidney took a new name, Charity.
Throughout William Still's childhood, he worked with his family on their farm and also found work as a woodcutter. Although Still received very little formal education, he did learn to read and write, teaching himself by extensive reading. Still's literary skills would help him become a prominent abolitionist and advocate for formerly enslaved people.
Marriage and Family
In 1844, at the age of 23, Still relocated to Philadelphia, where he worked first as a janitor and then as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Soon he became an active member of the organization, and by 1850 he served as the chairman of the committee established to help freedom seekers.
While he was in Philadelphia, Still met and married Letitia George. Following their marriage in 1847, the couple had four children: Caroline Matilda Still, one of the first African American women doctors in the United States; William Wilberforce Still, a prominent African American lawyer in Philadelphia; Robert George Still, a journalist and print shop owner; and Frances Ellen Still, an educator who was named after the poet Frances Watkins Harper.
The Underground Railroad
Between 1844 and 1865, Still helped at least 60 enslaved Black people escape bondage. Still interviewed many of the enslaved Black people seeking freedom, men, women, and families, documenting where they came from, the difficulties they met and help they found along the way, their final destination, and the pseudonyms they used to relocate.
During one of his interviews, Still realized that he was questioning his older brother Peter, who had been sold to another enslaver when their mother escaped. During his time with the Anti-Slavery Society, Still put together records of more than 1,000 former enslaved people, keeping the information hidden until slavery was abolished in 1865.
With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Still was elected chairman of the Vigilance Committee organized to find a way to circumvent the legislation.
African American Civic Leader
Since his work with the Underground Railroad had to be kept secret, Still kept a fairly low public profile until enslaved people were freed. Nonetheless, he was a fairly prominent leader of the Black community. In 1855, he traveled to Canada to observe enclaves of formerly enslaved people.
By 1859, Still began the fight to desegregate Philadelphia's public transportation system by publishing a letter in a local newspaper. Although Still was supported by many in this endeavor, some members of the Black community were less interested in gaining civil rights. As a result, Still published a pamphlet entitled, "A Brief Narrative of the Struggle for the Rights of the Colored People of Philadelphia in the City Railway Cars" in 1867. After eight years of lobbying, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law ending segregation of public transportation.
Still was also an organizer of a YMCA for Black youngsters; an active participant in the Freedmen's Aid Commission; and a founding member of the Berean Presbyterian Church. He also helped establish a Mission School in North Philadelphia.
After 1865
In 1872, seven years after the abolition of slavery, Still published his collected interviews in a book entitled, "The Underground Rail Road." The book included more than 1,000 interviews and was 800 pages long; the tales are heroic and harrowing, and they illustrate how people suffered deeply and sacrificed much to escape enslavement. Notably, the text underscored the fact that the abolitionist movement in Philadelphia was primarily organized and maintained by African Americans.
As a result, Still became known as the "Father of the Underground Railroad." Of his book, Still said, "We very much need works on various topics from the pens of colored men to represent the race intellectually." The publication of "The Underground Rail Road" was important to the body of literature published by African Americans documenting their history as abolitionists and formerly enslaved people.
Still's book was published in three editions and went on to become the most circulated text on the Underground Railroad. In 1876, Still placed the book on exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition to remind visitors of the legacy of enslavement in the United States. By the late 1870s, he had sold an estimated 5,000-10,000 copies. In 1883, he issued the third expanded edition that included an autobiographical sketch.
Businessman
During his career as an abolitionist and civil rights activist, Still acquired considerable personal wealth. He began purchasing real estate throughout Philadelphia as a young man. Later, he ran a coal business and established a store selling new and used stoves. He also received proceeds from the sales of his book.
To publicize his book, Still built a network of efficient, entrepreneurial, college-educated sales agents to sell what he described as a collection of "quiet examples of what fortitude can achieve where freedom is the goal."
Death
Still died in 1902 of heart trouble. In Still's obituary, The New York Times wrote that he was "one of the best-educated members of his race, who was known throughout the country as the 'Father of the Underground Railroad.'"
William Lloyd Garrison: The Liberator
The link on the left takes you to the complete online archive of full issues of William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator (1831-1865), the most prominent periodical of radical Abolitionism in the United States of America. You can find scanned PDF documents of full issues of The Liberator, as well as many individual articles, columns, and departments from the magazine that have been transcribed in HTML for ease of reading, searching, and linking. This archive is a project in progress, with the ultimate aim being to make all 35 years of The Liberator available in full on the web.
Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman.
Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." The quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has been argued that "The long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change."
The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of stereotypes about black people. These include the affectionate, dark-skinned "mammy"; the "pickaninny" stereotype of black children; and the "Uncle Tom", or dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his white master or mistress. In recent years, the negative associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a "vital antislavery tool."
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