In Bond, Putnam, and Bureau Counties,
Illinois.[48] The Underground Railroad was thus enabled to extend into
the heart of the South by way of the Cumberland Mountains. Over this Ohio
and Kentucky route, culminating chiefly in Cleveland, Sandusky, and
Detroit, more fugitives found their way to freedom than through any other
avenue.[49] The limestone caves were of much assistance to them. The
operation of the system extended through Tennessee into northern Georgia
and Alabama, following the Appalachian highland as it juts like a
peninsula into the South. Dillingham, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman used
these routes.

Let us consider, then, the attitude of these mountaineers toward slaves.
All of them were not abolitionists. Some slavery existed among them. The
attack on the institution, then, in these parts was not altogether
opposition to an institution foreign to the mountaineers. The frontiersmen
hated slavery, hated the slave as such, but, as we have observed above,
hated the eastern planter worse than they hated the slave. As there was a
scarcity of slaves in that country they generally dwelt at home with their
masters. Slavery among these liberal people, therefore, continued
patriarchal and so desirous were they that the institution should remain
such that they favored the admission of the State of Missouri as a slave
State,[50] not to promote slavery but to expand it that each master, having
a smaller number of Negroes, might keep them in close and helpful contact.
Consistently with this policy many of the frontier Baptists, Scotch-Irish
and Methodists continued to emphasize the education of the blacks as the
correlative of emancipation. They urged the masters to give their servants
all proper advantages for acquiring knowledge of their duty both to man and
to God. In large towns slaves were permitted to acquire the rudiments of
education and in some of them free persons of color had well-regulated
schools.[51]

Two noteworthy efforts to educate Negroes were put forth in these parts. A
number of persons united in 1825 to found an institution for the education
of eight or ten Negro slaves with their families, to be operated under the
direction of the "Emancipating Labor Society of the State of Kentucky."
About the same time Frances Wright was endeavoring to establish an
institution on the same order to improve the free blacks and mulattoes
in West Tennessee. It seems that this movement had the support of a goodly
nu