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Footnotes to "Impetus for Freedom"

1 A Negro spiritual.

2 Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800-1865 (Boston, 1938), 13.

3 Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956), 101, 108, 111, 116, 127; Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 149-51.

Ibid., 188. As late as 1838, slaveholders still branded slaves; see A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color (New York, 1980), 27-28, 33-35.

5 Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself, in Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puffin' On Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup (New York, 1969), 65; John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, 1977), 275-76. Escaped slaves often returned to the South for their loved ones. Henry Bibb, for example, returned twice to get his wife and baby daughter. See also William Still, Diary of the Underground Railroad (Philadelphia, 1872), 164, 386, copy in possession of the Indiana Historical Society Library.

6 Quoted in Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 112.

De Bow's Review, XI (1851), 331-33, as cited ibid., 109. See also Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property (New York, 1977), 84.

8 Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1967). See also John D. Hicks, The Federal Union (Boston, 1957), 452-54; James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States (New York, 1906), 4:556-58; and Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929).

9 Quoted in Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (1969; reprint, New York, 1975), 143.

10 Lew Wallace to Susan Wallace, December 22, 1861, in Lew Wallace Collection, Indiana Historical Society Library. Compare Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; reprint, New York, 1962).

11 Frederick Law Olmsted, Journey in the Back Country (New York, 1860), 476; Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 86, 111.

12 Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 110; Ben Broadside, Indiana Division, Indiana State Library; Negro registers for Ohio County and Jefferson County, for example, are included in the exhibit.

13 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 273.

14 Josiah Henson, Truth is Stranger than Fiction: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (Boston, 1879), 103. It was not unusual for whole families to escape together. See Still, Diary of the Underground Railroad, 70, 75, 97, 124,136, 137-42.

15 Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, in Osofsky, ed., Puttin' On Ole Massa, 175-223, especially 202-22; Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington, Ky., 1961 ), 45.

16 Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, in Osofsky, ed., Puttin' On Ole Massa, 205.

17 Henson, Truth is Stranger than Fiction, 103.

18 Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures, in Osofsky, ed., Puttin' On Ole Massa, 113; Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, ibid., 206; Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 111.

19 Mrs. Mayme Austin Mitcham, "Early Events in the Life of Mrs. Josephine Taylor Austin, as Related by Her One Month Before Her Passing on November 20, 1939 at the Age of 90 Years 1 Month and 10 Days by Her Daughter" (ca. 1939), in possession of Alfred Mitcham; "The Underground Railroad in Vigo County," Terre Haute Tribune Star, July 16, 1961; Shirley McCord, comp., Travel Accounts of Indiana (Indianapolis, 1970), passim, for conditions of travel in the state; Still, Diary of the Underground Railroad, 67-68.

20 Henson, Truth is Stranger than Fiction, 102-3; Benjamin Drew, A North-side View of SlaveryThe Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (1856; reprint, New York, 1968), 150.

21 Ibid., 188; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures, in Osofsky, ed., Puttin' on Ole Massa, 156.

22 Peter Still was the brother of William Still; he had been kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child. He bought his own freedom at forty-five and had returned to the East to earn the money to purchase his family. The Liberator, 25:3 (January 19, 1855); Evansville Journal, April 5, 1851. See also Still, Diary of the Underground Railroad, for Seth Conklin's story.

23 Levi Coffin, Reminiscences (Cincinnati, 1876), 206-16; Ebenezer Tucker, History of Randolph County, Indiana (Chicago, 1882), 196-97; John L. Smith and Lee L. Driver, Past and Present of Randolph County (Indianapolis, 1914); Julia S. Conklin, "The Underground Railroad in Indiana," Indiana Magazine of History, 6 (June, 1910), 70; Dr. O. N. Huff, "Unnamed Anti-Slavery Heroes of Old Newport," ibid., 3 (September, 1907), 136-37; W. D. Waldrip, "A Station of the Underground Railroad," ibid., 7 (June, 1911), 76.

24 Riker and Thornbrough, eds., Messages and Papers of James Brown Ray, 111-12.

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