The New York Vigilance Committee, which “did not scruple to help fugitive slaves to places of safety,” was a linchpin in the maintenance of  the Underground Railway. Central to the facts presented in GATEWAY TO FREEDOM by Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner (THE FIERY TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery) is a new disclosure of papers by Sydney Howard Gay, a New York abolitionist who painstakingly recorded hundreds of escape accounts.

The idea of an “underground railroad” came from the imagination of a slave who hoped to escape along it, in 1839. The term quickly caught on, so much so that when the real railroads were in financial crisis, newspapers enjoyed noting that the underground variety was the only one not suffering the losses.

"Foner’s detailed histories --- of the slaves who left the South seeking freedom, and those on the Northern side who determinedly assisted them --- bring the courage, charity and vision of both groups to light and life."

The Vigilance Committee was formed in 1835. In 1850, the (second) Fugitive Slave Act made it incumbent on all US citizens to aid in the return of escaped “property.” This in turn made Gay’s journals treasonable, so by one of those flukes that make scholarly research both daunting and rewarding, it was only recently that Foner gained access to them, after earlier investigators had concluded that these remarkable accounts, like similar materials, had been burned. Some of Gay’s better-known subjects were Harriet Jacobs (who later wrote her own memoir, INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL), and Henry “Box” Brown, who himself had been crated and sent from Richmond to Philadelphia in a container only three feet long, nearly suffocating twice when his head was set downwards.

But equally moving are the tales collected by Gay and others of the throngs of anonymous men, women and children who walked hundreds of miles by night, in dark and dangerous forests, with no idea of geography, hunted by patrols; or traveled as stowaways in a ship’s hold, reliant on the good will of the captain from whom they bought their passage --- always facing the possibility of capture and a return to far worse conditions than those they fled. One woman with a young daughter, hoping to join her escaped husband, hid in an excavated dugout under a house “with no means of light or ventilation,” Gay recorded, for five months.

Though many abolitionists were Quakers (underground lore taught the escapees to recognize them by their square collars and “thees” and “thous”) who eschewed violence, others boldly urged newly freed slaves to use firearms in defense of their liberty. In all cases, these idealistic citizens were acting in defiance of federal law but in concord with many state laws, and in accordance with their personal morality. Meanwhile, President Lincoln could not suggest that the slave owners did not have a legal right to reclaim their property as stated in the Act, but deeply felt the plight of captives longing for release; he once wrote, “I bite my lip and keep quiet.”

Foner’s detailed histories --- of the slaves who left the South seeking freedom, and those on the Northern side who determinedly assisted them --- brings the courage, charity and vision of both groups to light and life.