56

208 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Saco, Me. He had these carefully preserved and bound in one cover and sent
to me in Washington. He was one of the most systematically careful men of
all my anti-slavery friends, for I doubt if another entire volume of the paper
exists.

One important branch of my anti-slavery work in Rochester, in addition
to that of speaking and writing against slavery, must not be forgotten or omitted.
My position gave me the chance of hitting that old enemy some telling
blows, in another direction than these. I was on the southern border of Lake
Ontario, and the Queen's Dominions were right over the way — and my prominence
as an abolitionist, and as the editor of an anti-slavery paper, naturally
made me the station master and conductor of the underground railroad passing
through this goodly city. Secrecy and concealment were necessary conditions
to the successful operation of this railroad, and hence its prefix "underground."
My agency was all the more exciting and interesting, because not altogether
free from danger. I could take no step in it without exposing myself to fine and
imprisonment, for these were the penalties imposed by the fugitive slave law,
for feeding, harboring, or otherwise assisting a slave to escape from his master;
but in face of this fact, can say. I never did more congenial, attractive,
fascinating, and satisfactory work. True, as a means of destroying slavery, it
was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but the thought that
there was one less slave, and one more freeman, — having myself been a slave,
and a fugitive slave — brought to my heart unspeakable joy. On one occasion
I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary
for them to remain with me, until I could collect sufficient money to get them
on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had
some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter, but as may well
be imagined, they were not very fastidious in either direction, and were well
content with very plain food, and a strip of carpet on the floor for a bed, or a
place on the straw in the barn loft.

The underground railroad had many branches: but that one with which I
was connected had its main stations in Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia,
New York, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and St. Catharines (Canada). It is
not necessary to tell who were the principal agents in Baltimore; Thomas
Garrett was the agent in Wilmington; Melloe McKim , William Still, Robert
Purvis, Edward M. Davis, and others did the work in Philadelphia; David
Ruggles, Isaac T. Hopper, Napoleon, and others, in New York city; the
Misses Mott and Stephen Myers, were forwarders from Albany: Revs.
Samuel J. May and J. W. Loguen, were the agents in Syracuse: and J. P.
Morris and myself received and dispatched passengers from Rochester to