Slave Life in Georgia - African American History

Slave Life in Georgia 112
24.03.2006
themselves to help forward fugitive slaves to Canada, it would be the means of
preventing numerous run-aways from being recaptured and carried back into
Slavery. Having determined upon the general outline of the plan, he was no
sooner released than he commenced operations for carrying it out in all its
details. In
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this he was so successful, that before many weeks the underground line was
completed from Mason and Dixon's boundary to Canada, a distance varying
from two hundred to above five hundred miles, with all its complicated
machinery of vigilance committees, spies, pilots, conveyances, and signals. It
had not yet received a name, but the number of slaves who effected their escape
increased so enormously, in consequence of the facilities "the line" afforded
them, that the slaveholders took the alarm. In vain, however, they redoubled
their vigilance, and multiplied their precautions and their measures. Though
they even succeeded in tracking the fugitives to the Ohio, all traces of them
disappeared there. They were all amazement; and at length, as a solution of the
mystery that attended the disappearance of their property at this point, they
jumped to the conclusion that the Abolitionists had prepared a subterranean
railroad, by means of which they ran off fugitive slaves. The term was a happy
one, and "the Underground Railroad to Freedom" was at once adopted by the
Abolitionists as the most appropriate name for so extraordinary an enterprise.
From first to last, that is, in about two years, Mr. Torrey was individually
instrumental in running
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off nearly four hundred slaves, the greater part of whom would probably, "but
for his exertions," he writes, "have died in slavery."
On the 25th of June, 1844, Mr. Torrey was arrested at Baltimore, (Maryland,) at
the instance of one Bushrod Taylor, of Winchester, (Virginia,) who swore that
Mr. Torrey had helped sundry slaves of his (the complainant's) to escape.
Governor M'Donnell, without further inquiry, at once issued an order for
Torrey's arrest and incarceration. Immediately upon this, a second complaint
was lodged against him by a man of most infamous character, named Heckrotte,
for having aided two of his victims to escape. The chief evidence to sustain the
second charge was that of two professional slave-catchers, men of notoriously
bad repute, and whose entire testimony, in so far as it implicated Mr. Torrey,