But it was also about keeping connections alive, of knowing who had come from where or gone in which direction, so that reunions with friends or family might at some point be possible. This was partly an exercise in accounting, of keeping up with expenses and reimbursing those who helped. In his role as the head of the Vigilance Committee, Still kept a detailed diary of who came through his door and how much was spent to send them north. Vigilance brings these two sides of Still together. As Diemer suggests, historians tend to separate the covert Underground Railroad from overt political activism. In the coming years, Still would lead Philadelphia’s local Vigilance Committee, an organization dedicated to stowing away hundreds, if not thousands, of freedom seekers as conductors on the Underground Railroad-the network of loosely aligned agents that illegally aided enslaved people as they escaped to freedom in the years before the Civil War.Īndrew Diemer’s recent biography, Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad (2022), is a much-needed reappraisal of Still’s work leading the Vigilance Committee, alongside his other contributions to the antislavery movement. One of the men who welcomed Brown as he struggled out of the crate was a young Black office clerk named William Still. The half-day voyage turned into a 27-hour journey, but Brown arrived safely, cramped but alive. Against the advice of a white shopkeeper who agreed to help him, Brown decided on a far-fetched plan to pack himself inside a shipping crate and mail himself to the offices of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society at 107 North 5th Street in Philadelphia. After watching slave traders carry away his wife and children, he vowed to escape to the North and raise enough money to buy his family’s freedom.īut how to do it? Escaping slavery was always dangerous, especially when fleeing from a city as far south as Richmond. SOMETIME IN the fall of 1848, Henry Brown, an enslaved person living in Richmond, Virginia, made a decision.

Escape clause book review