Underground Railway - American History, 1493-1945

Letter from Henry Bibb to John Calkins about how his money was used for fugitive enslaved people

19 June 1852

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Dated 19 June 1852, this document is a letter of correspondence between Henry Walton Bibb (1815-1854) and a John Calkins of Wilbraham, Massachusetts. Bibb writes to Calkins to tell him how his money was spent in aiding runaway enslaved people who had traveled on the Underground Railroad to Canada.

The Underground Railroad was a network of abolitionists and freed people who provided shelter, places to hide and financial support for fugitive enslaved people fleeing the South prior to the abolition of slavery in the United States. An informal and secret network, it was active in several U.S. states – particularly Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Maryland – and aimed to transport enslaved people to northern U.S. States or Canada where slavery was illegal. It is unclear when the Underground Railroad began, but it was certainly active during the first half of the nineteenth-century – a period when anti-slavery movements and activities proved to be the most active.

A former “Railroader” himself, Henry Walton Bibb was a self-educated enslaved person who eventually fled to Canada and became a noted abolitionist. He was born on a plantation in Shelby County, Kentucky, in 1815 to an enslaved woman named Mildred Jackson. His father was a White politician and landowner named James Bibb. Bibb grew up in slavery and married a fellow enslaved woman named Melinda in 1833. He made his first escape for freedom in 1837, settling for a short period in Perrysberg, Ohio, before returning to Kentucky to free his wife and child. Bibb was captured and was taken, together with his family, to a plantation in New Orleans. After another failed attempt to escape, Bibb was eventually separated from his family and sold to Indians. He successfully fled in 1842 and traveled on the Underground Railroad to Detroit.

A staunch abolitionist, Bibb delivered his first anti-slavery speech in May 1844 and toured the north-east of America for a number of years to give pro-abolition lectures. In 1849 he published Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, which details his personal experiences of slavery. Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act by the United States Congress in 1850 – which required the return of runaway enslaved people – Bibb fled to Ontario, Canada, where he founded and edited an abolitionist newspaper called The Voice of the Fugitive. A bi-weekly newspaper, The Voice attacked racial bigotry, called for a universal end to slavery and the integration of Black refugees into Canadian society through agriculture, education and temperance. In fact, he both organized and worked with the Refugee Home Society (established 1851), which helped runaway enslaved people to settle and purchase farms in Canada. Bibb died in 1854 at the age of 39.

Henry Bibb was one of many former enslaved people turned abolitionists. Other prominent figures included Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818-1895), author of several pro-abolitionist texts such as My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797-1883), an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist.

The Underground Railway