The Story of Levi Coffin: Father of the Underground Railroad

"There's an underground railroad around

here, and Levi Coffin is its president," said a slave-

catcher, as he passed the plain home of Levi and

Catharine Coffin in Newport, Indiana. The man had

been searching for weeks for seventeen escaped slaves

who had fled in a body from Kentucky. He and his

companions had traced the fugitives across the Ohio

River and for fifty or sixty miles through Indiana to

Newport. The fugitives had not been actually seen to

enter the Coffin home; therefore, the pursuers could

get no search warrant to go through the house. But

it was known that any slave who came to Newport

might be sheltered by Levi Coffin. The slave-catchers

watched the house for weeks, while at the same time

searching all over the countryside.

But it was no use. The hot trail which many slaves had followed, ended right there, and the men

finally went home in disgust, but leaving behind them

the name that clung to this friend of Negroes for

the rest of his life. It was so often repeated, in fact,

that letters sometimes came to him addressed to

"President of the Underground Railroad."

Levi Coffin's home was the converging point of

several lines of the Railroad. Fugitive slaves came to him from everywhere, and were likewise sent on to several different stations, ten, sometimes twenty miles away.

Mr. and Mrs. Coffin never knew when passengers

might arrive by the “mysterious” Road. But there was

rarely a week that none did, and so they found it necessary to always be prepared to feed and care for twenty+ people. There would be a gentle

knock at the door, and Levi Coffin would spring from

his bed to find a ragged, footsore man who had struggled northward alone for weeks. Quietly they would be led in, the door fastened, and the windows

covered so that no light could be seen from without.

Then the Coffins would build a fire, prepare food,

and lay one of the many small mattresses, they had, before the fire for the Slaves to rest on the remainder of the night.

Once, Levi was told that twenty-eight fugitives were hiding outside Newport. The next day Levi Coffin gathered together a number of carriages, loaded all of them in, and sent them on in a funeral-like procession on the road to Cumminsville.

Levi Coffin was born in North Carolina in 1798. Coffin began early to do what he could to help along with the unfortunate

victims. Gangs of slaves, driven by their white “leaders”, were often driven through

North Carolina on their way to the cotton and rice plantations further south. Levi Coffin and his cousin, Vestal Coffin, would talk to these slaves as they rested at night. One Negro who had been kidnaped from Philadelphia and sold in New Orleans was finally restored to his friends through information given by Vestal Coffin.

During the twenty years they lived in Indiana, they

helped in freeing 3,300 slaves. An average of 106

fugitives a year slept under their roof.

There is a direct link in "Uncle Tom's Cabin", if you recall, the elderly

Quaker, Simeon Halliday, (and his kindness to flee-

ing slaves) was inspired by, Levi Coffin and his wife

Simeon and Rachel Halliday. Eliza, who crossed the Ohio River on blocks of

floating ice, was also a real person who was sheltered

in the Coffin home on her way to Canada.

In 1847, Levi Coffin started another form of service to the cause of free will. He moved to the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, and opened a “Free Produce Store”; (a store in which nothing was sold that had been produced by slave labor).

Coffin's work was to continue even during and

after the Civil War, Levi Coffin traveled over the country collecting

funds and finally spent a year in England for the

same purpose. Clothes, blankets, and $100,000 in

money were given him by many who believed in his cause.

Until he was nearly eighty years old, he worked

constantly for the slaves, and when he died

they came in weeping crowds to say farewell. He had

always lived according to his belief:

"I read in the Bible that it was right to take in the

stranger and administer to those in distress, and I

thought it was always safe to do right. The Bible, in

bidding us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked,

said nothing about color, and I should try to follow

out the teachings of the good book." 1876

During and after the Civil War, Coffin worked feverishly to eliminate slavery at home and abroad. He was a notable in the Western Freedmen’s Aid Society, and in one year, he raised $100,000 for the Society. He later traveled in 1867 to Paris as a delegate to the International Anti-Slavery Conference.

On September 16, 1877, he died in Cincinnati and was buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery