The Underground Railroad by Charles T. Webber

“The Underground Railroad, also called Fugitives Arriving at Levi Coffin’s Indiana Farm, a Busy Station of the Underground Railroad, is the best known of artist Charles T. Webber‘s paintings. The painting shows a large family of escaped Southern slaves being received in the Northern winter by a group of white abolitionists led by Quaker Levi Coffin.” Wikipedia

Who Was Levi Coffin?

“Known as the “president of the Underground Railroad,” Levi Coffin purportedly became an abolitionist at age 7 when he witnessed a column of chained enslaved people being driven to auction. Getting his start bringing food to fugitives hiding out on his family’s North Carolina farm, he would grow to be a prosperous merchant and prolific “stationmaster,” first in Newport (now Fountain City), Indiana, and then in Cincinnati. All told, he claimed to have assisted about 3,300 enslaved people, saying he and his wife, Catherine, rarely passed a week without hearing a telltale nighttime knock on their side door. Operating openly, Coffin even hosted anti-slavery lectures and abolitionist sewing society meetings, and, like his fellow Quaker Thomas Garrett, remained defiant when dragged into court. “The dictates of humanity came in opposition to the law of the land,” he wrote, “and we ignored the law.” The History Channel https://www.history.com/news/8-key-contributors-to-the-underground-railroad

Fugitive Slaves Fleeing From the Maryland Coast to an Underground Railroad Depot in Delaware,” 1850, Peter Newark/American Pictures/Bridgeman Images