Excerpt: The Abolitionist

Katy limped as fast as she could—not fast enough. Amos swept his daughter up and ran for the other side of the street.
And then he fell, and Katy, shaken by the fall, pulled herself up and looked at her father and looked at the blood and the screaming crowd didn’t matter and the flying bullets and flashing knives didn’t matter, nothing mattered but the blood slowly staining her father’s back crimson red.
She might have knelt there forever, staring and staring and staring, if someone hadn’t stumbled by and grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet and down the alley and behind a pile of trash, where a slave woman knelt with her child, wide-eyed and shivering.
Katy doubled over and cried. Until a bullet cracked into the bricks above their heads, raining dust and spinters down and making the baby scream. Then she remembered, and she stood up and looked around.
Northside Church couldn’t be far. If it was, they were dead. Beckoning, she limped down the alley, and the others followed. They caught up quickly, and the young man who had pulled her away from her father pulled her along again until the stone church towered above them.
There was a little wooden door in the back—unlocked. They hurried into the hallway beyond, and Katy rapped on the wall panels until they swung aside and the priest peered out. “Katy! Where’s your father? What’s—come in.”
There were already four people in the room—a family. The parents watched the newcomers with apprehensive eyes; the children slept, blissfully unaware.
“What’s happening out there?” the priest asked.
“Slave rebellion.”
“And your father?”
Katy’s face went blank. “Dead.” She slid down the wall to the floor and stayed there.

from The Reminiscences of Levi Coffin:

L---- B---- then asked me if I understood the statute in regard to harboring fugitive slaves. I told him that I had read it, but did not know whether I understood it or not. I suggested that he turn to it and read it, which he did. I told him that I knew of no violation of that statute in our neighborhood. Persons often traveled our way and stopped at our house who said they were slaves, but I knew nothing about it from their statements, for our law did not presume that such people could tell the truth. This made a laugh among the jury, with the exception of L---- B----. I went on to say that a few weeks before a company of seventeen fugitives had stopped at my house, hungry and destitute, two of them suffering from wounds inflicted by pursuers who claimed them as slaves, but I had no legal evidence that they were slaves; nothing but their own statements, and the law of our State did not admit colored evidence. I had read in the Bible when I was a boy that it was right to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and to minister to those who had fallen among thieves and were wounded, but that no distinction in regard to color was mentioned in the good Book, so in accordance with its teachings I had received these fugitives and cared for them. I then asked:

"Was I right, Friend B----, in doing so?"

He hesitated and seemed at a loss how to reply. I continued: "How does thy Bible read? Was it not as I have said?"

"Yes," he answered, "it reads somehow so."

--Levi Coffin