0:02 [SPEAKER_00]: So Levi is confused at his young age because at the age of seven, he's thinking, wait a minute, he's been taken from their families. 0:11 [SPEAKER_00]: All these socks are going through his head and he's wondering, what did these men do that were so bad? 0:16 [SPEAKER_00]: And his fathers, I'm sure, explaining to him, they didn't deserve anything for this. 0:21 [SPEAKER_00]: They're enslaved and legally, they have no choice. 0:24 [SPEAKER_00]: They're never gonna see their families again. 0:26 [SPEAKER_00]: And he says from that age on, I was an abolitionist. 0:28 [SPEAKER_01]: But that's the voice of Joanna Han, Central Regional Director of the Indiana State Museum System. 0:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Joanna also manages the Levi and Catherine coffin state historic site, which is where we are today. 0:41 [SPEAKER_01]: This small brick home has been called the Underground Railroads Grand Central Station over a 20-year span from 1826 to 1847, more than 2000 slaves stopped here on their way north to Canada and freedom. 0:57 [SPEAKER_00]: So just to be clear, underground railroad is a way of describing a system of people that have decided to help slaves escape. 1:07 [SPEAKER_00]: They existed, though, as a way of resisting the fugitive slave laws. 1:11 [SPEAKER_00]: That basically said at that period of time, if you're a slave and you escape, that's an illegal act, so you're considered a fugitive. 1:17 [SPEAKER_00]: And if you help or aid a person in that escape, that is also 1:21 [SPEAKER_00]: So there are people in the United States that don't want to do that, who do not think it is fair that I have to turn this human being in. 1:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Who they don't see as a fugitive, they just see them as a person who wished to live in freedom. 1:34 [SPEAKER_00]: So it was underground because you generally didn't talk about your activities or your support for that. 1:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And then, a rail road was a way of describing really how the system worked. 1:43 [SPEAKER_00]: So you imagine how a rail road works where you have a train that has to get from point A to point B. 1:48 [SPEAKER_00]: And they have to move fast, they have to be in a schedule and the train doesn't stay in the station for very long, right? 1:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Because it's got to get to the next point. 1:54 [SPEAKER_00]: That's really how this how to operate. 1:56 [SPEAKER_00]: The idea is to keep these individuals moving from place to place. 2:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Levi Coffin has often been referred to as the quote, President of the Underground Railroad, but he termed like that can be misleading. 2:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Despite its elaborate synchronization, there was no official leader of the railroad. 2:16 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a leaderless network of abolitionists, consisting of both former slaves and sympathetic whites who opposed the so-called peculiar institution of slavery. 2:31 [SPEAKER_01]: or a long secret of bucket line for human beings, in which each member might only understand their specific part of the journey. 2:39 [SPEAKER_01]: So if you are operating as a member of the Underground Railroad in a place like Indiana or Ohio, you might only know the names of the operators on either side of you that was safer anyway. 2:50 [SPEAKER_01]: as it limited the ability of any one person to betray the railroad in the event that they were exposed. 2:57 [SPEAKER_01]: For many of these abolitionists, like Levi Kauffin, the hatred of slavery was rooted in deeply held religious convictions. 3:04 [SPEAKER_01]: Kauffin was a member of the Quaker Church, a pacifist Christian group that had been protesting slavery in North America since 1688. 3:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Levi's family themselves very early on get involved in efforts that we will see will help influence what becomes maybe the earliest underground railroad efforts in North Carolina. 3:25 [SPEAKER_00]: And this is while Levi's living there and before he comes to Indiana. 3:29 [SPEAKER_00]: So his earliest memory of slavery in North Carolina was at the age of seven. 3:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Now he's being raised a Quaker and at that time, Quakers as a religious body in the United States have decided to denounce slavery. 3:44 [SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, my understanding is you could not be a member of the Society of Friends as they were formally known and own a human being as property. 3:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Now there were exceptions in some places of the country where Quakers were doing that. 3:55 [SPEAKER_00]: But in his community, you think about a child at that age and what your world perspective is, by the age seven, you're starting to understand, oh, there's life outside of the farm I'm growing up. 4:06 [SPEAKER_01]: This is where we open the podcast on young Levi Coffins' first encounter of slavery. 4:12 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked Joanna to describe that scene in greater detail. 4:22 [SPEAKER_00]: So he describes a scene where he's out chopping what I think it was with his father, somewhere on the farm, there's a road nearby. 4:29 [SPEAKER_00]: He sees a cough full of men and slave to men who are chained together, being driven by a white man on a horse and the man on the horse allows his men to rest for a few minutes. 4:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And so Levi, I'm going to say junior, because his father is Levi's senior. 4:45 [SPEAKER_00]: So he turns to his father Levi's senior and says, what's going on here? 4:48 [SPEAKER_00]: So he sees his father walking over and Levi's senior decides to strike up a conversation to say, why are you changed? 4:55 [SPEAKER_00]: What is going on? 4:57 [SPEAKER_00]: And one of the men who are changed, speaks up and says, we've just been sold, we're slaves, we've just been sold. 5:02 [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a fear that we may try to escape to return to our families, so we've been chained. 5:07 [SPEAKER_00]: So that way, if there was an escape, 5:10 [SPEAKER_00]: and they'll be doing so with their chains on. 5:12 [SPEAKER_00]: So Levi is confused at his young age, because at the age of seven, he's thinking, wait a minute, he's meant to have been taken from their families. 5:21 [SPEAKER_00]: All these thoughts are going through his head. 5:23 [SPEAKER_00]: So his first real understanding of slavery is this idea of how slavery greets family separation. 5:29 [SPEAKER_00]: And so in his mind, and he was an only son, he had six sisters, so he's growing up in a family where he's the only son, and I'm sure in his mind, he's thinking what would happen to our family if that had happened to our father. 5:40 [SPEAKER_00]: So he is personalizing as well, the situation that he's just witnessed. 5:44 [SPEAKER_00]: which is pretty big for a seven year old to do. 5:46 [SPEAKER_00]: So that's how he portrays it in the book. 5:48 [SPEAKER_00]: And he says from that age on, I was an abolitionist. 5:50 [SPEAKER_00]: He did not know what that word meant, but he's writing this book about 70 years later. 5:55 [SPEAKER_00]: So he would know that when he was writing it with that meant. 5:58 [SPEAKER_00]: So as he grows older, he starts to witness some of the other things of slavery, the the beatings. 6:05 [SPEAKER_00]: He describes another story where I think they're fishing. 6:10 [SPEAKER_00]: and there's an enslaved man who was fish something that individual did was wrong in the eyes of their enslaved her and he was beaten and Levi's like why? 6:18 [SPEAKER_00]: He didn't do anything wrong. 6:19 [SPEAKER_00]: And so as he gets older and he starts to develop a more full understanding of slavery as well as the laws, Levi will start getting involved in the efforts of helping slaves to potentially escape. 6:35 [SPEAKER_00]: He had a cousin, a vestal coffin, a new garden, and vestal, I think, is a pretty big influence. 6:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Next to his own father, in helping to develop his ideas of, 6:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Really, what are the best ways we can help these individuals? 6:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Because the coffins are known to be sympathetic. 6:53 [SPEAKER_00]: So when I mentioned that the coffins were in a very active anti-slavery-minded community of Quakers, these are individuals that are trying to work within the systems of laws in or currently at that time to help individuals that want to leave slavery. 7:10 [SPEAKER_01]: The work that the Quakers were doing in the fight against slavery was complicated by a legal mandate in North Carolina that required county approval for all menumission, which is the word for the freeing of slaves. 7:22 [SPEAKER_01]: In the event that slaves were freed, they had six months to leave the state. 7:27 [SPEAKER_01]: If they overstayed, they were re-inslaaved. 7:30 [SPEAKER_00]: they did not want those individuals remaining. 7:33 [SPEAKER_00]: And so Quakers could step in and help. 7:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And so some of those individuals would migrate with Quakers out of North Carolina to stay like Ohio and Indiana. 7:40 [SPEAKER_00]: There were, I leave myself as a member, what was called the Manu Mission Society. 7:44 [SPEAKER_00]: So they were trying to raise funds to purchase slaves in the hopes, again, that they can help them leave North Carolina. 7:51 [SPEAKER_00]: And then once they got to Ohio and Indiana, that is when they would actually give them the freedom. 7:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Because they were afraid if they tried to do it in North Carolina, they have that one particular law 7:59 [SPEAKER_00]: and the legal system may try to make it difficult, basically, to ultimately free these individuals. 8:06 [SPEAKER_00]: So if an individual comes to them that is a slave wishing to get out of the situation, Levi and his cousin vessels are thinking we should do everything in our power, even if it meant to break the laws as they existed at that time. 8:19 [SPEAKER_00]: So Levi goes later into stories of how he helped to participate in the physical movement of individuals out of New Garden. 8:27 [SPEAKER_00]: When that includes his uncle Bethuel, he's known his uncle's getting ready to pack the wagon to Indiana. 8:32 [SPEAKER_00]: He also migrated here to Wayne County. 8:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And they have this situation where someone has approached them and they want to get out. 8:40 [SPEAKER_00]: They're ready to leave. 8:41 [SPEAKER_00]: They're done. 8:41 [SPEAKER_00]: And Levi's like, well my uncle's leaving. 8:44 [SPEAKER_00]: We'll just see if he'll let him tag along. 8:47 [SPEAKER_00]: And Bethel said yes. 8:48 [SPEAKER_00]: And Levi came to Indiana a year or so later and had a reunion with a send of visual. 8:52 [SPEAKER_00]: He was living a very, it seemed to be a very good life here in Wayne County. 8:57 [SPEAKER_00]: And he was very happy to see that. 8:58 [SPEAKER_00]: So when he finally makes this decision to leave North Carolina and he comes here to win County, he thinks he's left that all behind in North Carolina. 9:08 [SPEAKER_00]: That's a slave state, Indiana is a free state. 9:10 [SPEAKER_00]: So I think there's this thought in his mind. 9:12 [SPEAKER_00]: My life shouldn't be impacted by slavery, but he's going to find that this region where he has moved to, 9:18 [SPEAKER_00]: seems to be a common area for freedom seekers, especially escaping Kentucky. 9:24 [SPEAKER_00]: And Levi just happens to have settled in that region where some of these people are escaping to. 9:30 [SPEAKER_00]: So, as he describes it in the book, he starts noticing a pattern. 9:36 [SPEAKER_00]: There were free blacks living here amongst the Quakers, as I said, some of them had even migrated at a North Carolina. 9:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Levi was very disappointed at this time. 9:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The Quakers in this area were not very active in helping in this. 9:47 [SPEAKER_00]: He says free blacks were trying to provide what resources they could, but their resources are already greatly limited compared to what a white individual could potentially accomplish. 9:56 [SPEAKER_00]: So he decides I'm going to step in. 9:59 [SPEAKER_00]: He makes it sound like it's almost an instantaneous decision. 10:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Like I just, I got here, I started my store and then almost immediately my wife and I got to work with the Underground Railroad. 10:09 [SPEAKER_00]: But I think the way the Underground Railroad existed in 1826 is not how it existed in 1847 when he leaves. 10:16 [SPEAKER_00]: So if we give Levi and Katherine their credit of just instituting something, getting something started, in hopes that the example they led would encourage others to get involved, which as Levi puts it, seems to be what had happened. 10:29 [SPEAKER_01]: By Levi's own estimate, he and Catherine helped free an average of 100 people a year for 20 years while living in Fountain City. 10:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Some of these people would become important to the abolitionist movement in their own right, as was the case for one woman named Eliza. 10:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Eliza was an enslaved mother in Kentucky and she has learned that her in slavery has decided that he is going to sell Eliza and her child to separate people and his child's very young. 11:04 [SPEAKER_00]: So Eliza decides I can't let that happen. 11:08 [SPEAKER_00]: We're going to escape. 11:09 [SPEAKER_00]: She was enslaved in Kentucky. 11:11 [SPEAKER_00]: And as the story is told by Levi, she escapes in the winter. 11:16 [SPEAKER_00]: She is hotly pursued. 11:18 [SPEAKER_00]: She arrives to a half frozen Ohio river, but she doesn't have a choice. 11:23 [SPEAKER_00]: She has to get across the river on her own with her child in her arms. 11:27 [SPEAKER_00]: So the way he describes it, the river is not completely frozen. 11:29 [SPEAKER_00]: It's half frozen. 11:31 [SPEAKER_00]: It's frozen along the banks probably, but it's brushing in the middle. 11:34 [SPEAKER_00]: And she has to get her child to the other side. 11:37 [SPEAKER_00]: So the way he describes it, 11:41 [SPEAKER_00]: This is Levi's telling and she swims to the child and grabs the child and does that all the way to the other side, just going from ice cake to ice cake. 11:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Levi is met by an individual that he knew on the other side and he realizes this is a woman who's just escaped and he gives her directions of where to go next. 12:01 [SPEAKER_00]: Then a day or two it seems that she is a writer in the coffin house, someone is helped to get here and Levi says that this trauma, this experience of surviving that swim, her child, the escape, the terror of that escape. 12:14 [SPEAKER_00]: She remained in the house a little longer, I think, the normal just because it was winter and it was a chance for her to just settle and take a breath. 12:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Make sure the child is healthy and well, but also to make sure she's ready for the next part of the journey. 12:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Levi says she has helped into Ohio next, taking her to what he called the Greenville settlement, but here locally we call it long town because that the Greenville settlement will get a name called long town later on. 12:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And that was a settlement of free Blacks that lived on the Indiana Ohio State line, just north of here in Randolph County, Indiana. 12:46 [SPEAKER_00]: She was put on what he called the Sandeski route, which means that's the direction she's going to be taken. 12:51 [SPEAKER_00]: People are going to help her get to Sandeski Ohio, and they're she'll get on a boat and someone will 12:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Eliza's departure from the coffin home would not be the end of their story together. 13:01 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1854, after doing this work for the better part of four decades, the coffin decided to make a trip to Canada. 13:09 [SPEAKER_00]: They were interested in really seeing what the conditions in Canada were for these individuals that they've helped over the years, and they were near Chad and Canada, which is what was part of Canada West. 13:20 [SPEAKER_00]: So if you go up to Detroit and cross into Canada, that way that would have been Canada West there. 13:25 [SPEAKER_00]: And so they were at a gathering and this woman comes up and says, Uncle Levi and Katie, which tended to be the names they wanted to be called by these individuals. 13:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And I can imagine it's hard to remember someone's face who you may not have seen for 15 years and you only spent a few days with. 13:41 [SPEAKER_00]: She goes, don't you remember me? 13:42 [SPEAKER_00]: My name is Eliza. 13:43 [SPEAKER_00]: And then she goes on, you gave me my name. 13:46 [SPEAKER_01]: For the safety of their guests, the coffins often gave them temporary names. 13:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Joanna thinks that Eliza kept the name the coffins gave her as a way of starting a new life, choosing a new identity as a free woman, and also of honoring the family who had helped her in her child to freedom. 14:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, one of the reasons why that story is, I think, great to tell is because this is the Eliza Harris, whose actual story inspired Harry Beecherstone to create the character Eliza for the book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. 14:19 [SPEAKER_00]: So when she developed that book and those characters, 14:22 [SPEAKER_00]: and published originally in 1852 1853, she was basing that off of real people that she had learned about. 14:28 [SPEAKER_00]: During especially during the time when she lived in Cincinnati when her father was there, if you read Uncle Tom's cabin and you read Levi's version of it, it's a lot of it is very similar. 14:37 [SPEAKER_00]: So people who come here have read Uncle Tom's cabin and so can make connections that way. 14:43 [SPEAKER_01]: The story of Eliza is just one of the countless examples of the ripple effect of Levi and Catherine's work on the railroad. 14:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Levi's resources especially were a game changer. 14:53 [SPEAKER_01]: As a successful businessman, he was able to house and feed any and all runaway slaves they encountered. 14:59 [SPEAKER_01]: As I mentioned before, many freed blacks were conductors on the railroad as well, had the resources to work as the coffins did on an almost industrial scale, but as it happens, one such story played out right here in Fountain City. 15:16 [SPEAKER_00]: the individual I'm going to has a very similar story in the sense that he's going to arrive here in town and he's going to stay. 15:23 [SPEAKER_00]: But everything I'm going to give you, it's not written history because these are stories that were passed in this individual's family from generation to generation. 15:31 [SPEAKER_00]: So as the stories exist today, there's some time in the 1840s, there was a man named William Bush. 15:38 [SPEAKER_00]: who arrived in town. 15:40 [SPEAKER_00]: He's buried in our town cemetery. 15:41 [SPEAKER_00]: He was a blacksmith for most of those years. 15:44 [SPEAKER_00]: So the thought is, he probably was trained. 15:47 [SPEAKER_00]: You don't just show up in town one day and open a blacksmith shot. 15:49 [SPEAKER_00]: And there's tears of training and apprenticeship to do that. 15:52 [SPEAKER_00]: So he probably was trained as a blacksmith from wherever he escaped from, which would make him a valuable individual to find. 15:58 [SPEAKER_00]: And he was a known operator with the Underground Railroad, especially in the years after I leave I often left in 1847. 16:05 [SPEAKER_00]: But the oral history in the family speaks to that when he arrived in town with his escape, he did so being shipped in a crate. 16:14 [SPEAKER_00]: That was addressed to Levi Coffin. 16:16 [SPEAKER_00]: So Levi never mentions this because as I said, when he's probably trying to protect William. 16:22 [SPEAKER_00]: His great granddaughter, Eileen Baker-Wall, who's one of our volunteers, as a keeper of the stories now. 16:27 [SPEAKER_00]: In the conversations I've had with her, she agrees this must be an attempt to protect him because she said that until the civil rights movement really took off in the 50s and 60s, her family would never talk about this. 16:38 [SPEAKER_00]: It was like the family secret and nobody outside the family could know. 16:41 [SPEAKER_00]: And there were a few objects that William Bush had in his lifetime that were passed down with the stories, which included a pair of what looked like wooden clogs. 16:50 [SPEAKER_00]: They looked like Dutch clogs. 16:51 [SPEAKER_00]: But according to the stories that Eileen has, those were shoes he was wearing at the time of his arrival. 16:59 [SPEAKER_00]: And potentially continue to wear those in the time he had his blacksmith shop here in town, and we have them on display here in the interpretive center. 17:07 [SPEAKER_00]: William stayed and lived out his years. 17:10 [SPEAKER_00]: So we tried to make our visitors aware that there are some people who chose to stay, who felt that this community was safe enough. 17:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The name William Bush is not his given name as a slave. 17:22 [SPEAKER_00]: That was the name he chose for himself, for me, someone may have given him. 17:26 [SPEAKER_00]: I've heard a couple versions, but supposedly this 17:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Eileen says that he was described as being very fair skinned, so he may have been a lot of a lighter skin than some individuals which may have helped him to pass as white to a certain extent. 17:42 [SPEAKER_00]: We don't have any pictures though. 17:43 [SPEAKER_00]: We don't have any any way of knowing really what he looked like. 17:47 [SPEAKER_00]: But as I said, he will get involved in the years after the coffin's leave in underground railroad efforts here. 17:53 [SPEAKER_00]: So there we definitely see where we have white and colored individuals working 18:00 [SPEAKER_01]: After 20 years of living and working in Wayne County, Indiana, Levi Kauffin headed east to Ohio and settled in Cincinnati, he continued his work in the railroad, and William Bush picked up much of Levi's former role here in Fountain City. 18:14 [SPEAKER_01]: You might visit his gravestone if you're ever in town. 18:19 [SPEAKER_00]: So it's behind our town park, because the graveyard, that was a graveyard that was established by the anti-Slavery Quakers. 18:25 [SPEAKER_00]: I hear in town and allowed people to color to be buried there too, which sometimes there were cemeteries. 18:30 [SPEAKER_00]: If you were not white, you cannot be buried there or in town. 18:34 [SPEAKER_00]: If you were not Quaker, you may not be able to be buried in the cemetery that existed at that time, so a new one was created that allowed that to happen. 18:40 [SPEAKER_00]: So it's behind our town park, because the graveyard, 18:43 [SPEAKER_01]: Everything we've just discussed in this episode is the why of the coffin's work on the rare road. 18:49 [SPEAKER_01]: We've talked about their reasons and convictions, and next we'll explore much of the how of the coffin operation. 18:56 [SPEAKER_01]: As in, how does someone manage to outsmart the slave industry and law enforcement more than 2,000 times?
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