A Gentle Rap at the Door

The signal, Levi Coffin wrote, was a gentle rap at the door.¹

“We knew not what night or what hour of the night we would be roused from slumber by a gentle rap at the door,” he wrote in his Reminiscences, published in Cincinnati in 1876. “That was the signal announcing the arrival of a train of the Underground Railroad, for the locomotive did not whistle, nor make any unnecessary noise.”¹

He would get out of bed in the dark and open the door. Outside in the cold or rain there might be a two-horse wagon full of people, many of them women and children. He would invite them in, in a low voice, and they would follow him into the dark house without a word, “for we knew not who might be watching and listening.” When the door was fastened, he covered the windows, struck a light and built up the fire.¹

“By this time my wife would be up and preparing victuals for them,” he wrote, “and in a short time the cold and hungry fugitives would be made comfortable.”¹

His wife was Catharine White Coffin. “It was never too cold or stormy, or the hour of night too late, for my wife to rise from sleep, and provide food and comfortable lodging for the fugitives,” he wrote. “Her sympathy for those in distress never tired, and her efforts in their behalf never abated.”¹

This went on, he wrote, the whole time they lived in Newport, in Wayne County, Indiana: “a period of more than twenty years. The number of fugitives varied considerably in different years, but the annual average was more than one hundred.”¹

A gang on the Salisbury road

Levi Coffin was born in North Carolina; the National Park Service gives the date as October 28, 1798, and the place as Guilford County.⁹ His family were Quakers. “Both my parents and grandparents were opposed to slavery, and none of either of the families ever owned slaves,” he wrote.¹

He dated what he called his “conversion to Abolitionism” from something he saw when he was about seven years old. He was by the roadside where his father was chopping wood, when a gang of enslaved men came along the new Salisbury road, chained in couples on each side of a long chain, with the driver some distance behind.¹

His father spoke to them and asked, “Well, boys, why do they chain you?” One of the men answered: “They have taken us away from our wives and children, and they chain us lest we should make our escape and go back to them.”¹

When they had passed, the boy asked his father question after question, and his father explained what slavery was. “As I listened, the thought arose in my mind,” Coffin wrote: “How terribly we should feel if father were taken away from us.”¹

On the 28th day of the tenth month, 1824, he married Catherine White, as he spelled her name, the daughter of Stanton and Sarah White, at Hopewell Meeting-House, after the manner of Friends. They had known each other since childhood. It was his twenty-sixth birthday; she had turned twenty-one the month before. He described her as “an amiable and attractive young woman of lively, buoyant spirits,” and wrote that she had been “an able and efficient helper to me in all my efforts on behalf of the fugitive slaves, and a cheerful sharer in all the toils, privations and dangers which we have, in consequence, been called upon to endure.”¹

Newport

In the ninth month of 1826 they left North Carolina for good, with their son Jesse, about a year old. They made the trip in light wagons in four weeks. “We located at Newport, Wayne County, Indiana, where we lived for more than twenty years,” he wrote. The village was in the middle of a large settlement of Friends.¹

He opened a store, which did well. He began cutting pork, and in 1836 built a mill to make linseed oil.¹ And he found, soon after they arrived, that Newport was on a line of the Underground Railroad.¹

People escaping slavery who came through Newport usually stopped with the free Black families in the neighborhood, many of them, he wrote, descendants of people freed by Friends in North Carolina years before. They were often pursued and caught. He asked some of the Friends in the village why they did not take the fugitives in, and found that they were afraid of the penalty of the law.¹

“I told them that I read in the Bible when I was a boy that it was right to take in the stranger and administer to those in distress, and that I thought it was always safe to do right,” he wrote. “The Bible, in bidding us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, said nothing about color.”¹ He knew, he wrote, “that my wife’s feelings and sympathies regarding this matter were the same as mine, and that she was willing to do her part.”¹

In the winter of 1826 to 1827, people began to come to their house.¹

Neighbors warned him that he would ruin his business, and that his life was in danger from slave hunters and their friends. An old Friend came to argue that the fugitives might have killed their masters. Coffin asked him whether the Good Samaritan had stopped to ask whether the man who fell among thieves was guilty of any crime before he helped him.¹ Some of his customers who supported slavery stopped trading with him for a while. New customers came, he wrote, and his trade grew.¹

The work cost money. He kept a team and a wagon always ready, and sometimes needed two or three more. The trips were made at night, through deep mud and on back roads. When they learned that slave hunters had gone down one road, they sent their passengers by another.¹ “Three principal lines from the South converged at my house,” he wrote: “one from Cincinnati, one from Madison, and one from Jeffersonville, Indiana.”¹

The people who came were often barefoot and in rags. The young women of the neighborhood organized a sewing society and met at the Coffins’ house to make clothes for them.¹ Some had been out for months, traveling at night and hiding by day, “afraid of every white person they saw, even after they came into a free State.” The Coffins kept such people until they were strong enough to travel on.¹

Eliza Harris

One of the people who came to the Coffins’ house in Newport was a young woman with a child.¹

She told them, he wrote, that she had been enslaved in Kentucky, a few miles back from the Ohio River below Ripley, Ohio, and had learned that she and her only child, a little over two years old, were to be separated. She had already buried two children. That night she took the child and walked to the river, expecting to cross on the ice, and found at daylight that it had broken up and was drifting in large cakes.¹

The next evening, with her pursuers in sight, she ran for the river. “Clasping her babe to her bosom with her left arm, she sprang on to the first cake of ice, then from that to another and another,” Coffin wrote. When a cake sank under her, she slid the child onto the next one and pulled herself after it. She reached the Ohio shore near Ripley wet to the waist, her hands numb with cold. A man who had watched from the bank helped her up it.¹

She was passed from station to station to the Coffins’ house, where she stayed several days, and was then sent on with others by way of Sandusky to Canada.¹

Harriet Beecher Stowe told a version of this crossing in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Because the woman had been sheltered at their house, Coffin wrote, “it was generally believed among those acquainted with the circumstances that I and my wife were the veritable Simeon and Rachel Halliday, the Quaker couple alluded to in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”¹

In the summer of 1854 the Coffins visited Canada. After a meeting at a Black church, he wrote, a woman came up to his wife, seized her hand, and said: “How are you, Aunt Katie? God bless you!” Catharine did not recognize her at first. The woman reminded her of the days of her distress, and of the name Catharine had given her then: Eliza Harris. The Coffins visited her at her home in Chatham and found her “comfortable and contented.”¹

The same thing happened, he wrote, in nearly every neighborhood they visited in Canada. “Hundreds who had been sheltered under our roof and fed at our table, when fleeing from the land of whips and chains, introduced themselves to us.”¹

Cincinnati

In 1847 Coffin agreed to move to Cincinnati to run a wholesale store selling only goods made by free labor. He sold his business in Newport, rented out his house, and moved on April 22, 1847, expecting to come back in five years.¹

“When we moved to Cincinnati in the spring of 1847, my wife and I thought that perhaps our work in Underground Railroad matters was done, as we had been in active service more than twenty years,” he wrote. “But we soon found that we would have more to do than ever.”¹ He ran the free-labor store for ten years, then sold it and, he wrote, “retired from mercantile life with very limited means.”¹

After the war he gave his time to aid and education for the freed people, and reported on that work to the Freedmen’s Aid Society at Birmingham, England.¹ A friend wrote after his death that he had twice crossed the Atlantic to plead for funds for the Freedmen’s Aid Commission.²

The resignation

Coffin explained in his book where his title had come from. When Black citizens of Cincinnati celebrated the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, he wrote, “I thought that it was a fitting time to resign my office as President of the Underground Railroad.”¹

Near the close of the meeting he was introduced. “I said that I had held the position of President of the Underground Railroad for more than thirty years. The title was given to me by slave-hunters who could not find their fugitive slaves after they got into my hands,” he wrote. “Government had now taken the work of providing for the slaves out of our hands. The stock of the Underground Railroad had gone down in the market, the business was spoiled, the road was of no further use.”¹

“Amid much applause, I resigned my office and declared the operations of the Underground Railroad at an end.”¹ Those are the last words of the book.

September 1877

Levi Coffin died at his home in Avondale, outside Cincinnati, on September 16, 1877.^2,3

The next evening, the Cincinnati Daily Star reported, a meeting of Black citizens of the city was held at the study of the pastor of the Union Baptist Church “to take action in relation to the death of the late Levi Coffin.” They appointed a delegation of about two dozen men to attend the funeral, and asked the Black women of the city to contribute a floral offering in the shape of an anchor to be placed on the casket.⁶ On the day of the funeral, the paper reported, the city’s Board of Public Works transacted no business; its members had adjourned to attend the funeral of Levi Coffin.⁷

The funeral, as the Cincinnati Daily Gazette described it in an account reprinted in the 1880 edition of the Reminiscences, filled the Friends Meeting House at Eighth and Mound streets to overflowing. Catharine Coffin sat near the platform with their sons Henry and Jesse. Among the eight pallbearers were two Friends, two old co-workers, and four Black men: George Peterson, Robert Scott, Peter H. Clark and T. Colston.²

One speaker, the Rev. Dr. Rust, said that when Coffin walked the streets he had been “hooted at and threatened by mobs,” and that “it would take less bravery to go up to the cannon’s mouth than to do the work he did.”² At the grave, Peter H. Clark spoke, and the pastor of the Avondale Baptist Church, a Black congregation, told how Coffin had, unasked, helped relieve the church of an oppressive debt.²

Catharine Coffin died less than four years later. The Chicago Daily Tribune printed a dispatch from Cincinnati dated May 23, 1881: “Mrs. Catharine Coffin, widow of the late Levi Coffin, died yesterday at her residence at Avondale. She, with her husband, was widely known during the slavery times as among the most active helpers of fugitives on their way to Canada.”⁸

In 1902, according to the Cincinnati Friends Meeting, a six-foot granite marker was unveiled over them at Spring Grove Cemetery. It reads, in part: “Noble benefactors aiding thousands to gain freedom. A tribute from the colored people of Cincinnati.”¹⁰

How they died

Levi Coffin died at his residence in Avondale, near Cincinnati, on the afternoon of September 16, 1877. The 1880 edition of his Reminiscences gives the time as 2:30 p.m. and says he died “in the seventy-ninth year of his age”; a Cincinnati dispatch in the Memphis Daily Appeal also gave half-past two, and one in the Chicago Daily Tribune gave 3:30.^2,3,4 The 1880 account says he “had not been in his usual health for more than a year,” though at times during that summer he seemed to recover a little, and his death was “unexpected.”² The New-York Tribune reported that his death “was quick and painless”: he was sitting at his dinner table when his head suddenly fell forward, and he died before he could be lifted from his chair.⁵ None of the sources read names an illness or a cause of death.

Catharine Coffin died at her residence in Avondale on May 22, 1881.^8,10 The newspaper reports read for this story do not state the cause of her death.