rtise their
status, but rather to conceal it, so that most estimates were more
likely to be under than over the truth. Henry Wilson places the number
in the free States at twenty thousand. There were in Boston in 1850,
according to a public statement of Theodore Parker, from four to six
hundred; and in other New England towns, notably New Bedford, the
number was large. Other estimates place the figures much higher. Mr.
Siebert, in his _Underground Railroad_, after a careful calculation
from the best obtainable data, puts the number of fugitives aided in
Ohio alone at forty thousand in the thirty years preceding 1860, and
in the same period nine thousand in the city of Philadelphia alone,
which was one of the principal stations of the underground railroad
and the home of William Still, whose elaborate work on the
_Underground Railroad_ gives the details of many thrilling escapes.

In the work of assisting runaway slaves Douglass found congenial
employment. It was exciting and dangerous, but inspiring and
soul-satisfying. He kept a room in his house always ready for
fugitives, having with him as many as eleven at a time. He would keep
them over night, pay their fare on the train for Canada, and give them
half a dollar extra. And Canada, to her eternal honor be it said,
received these assisted emigrants, with their fifty cents apiece, of
alien race, debauched by slavery, gave them welcome and protection,
refused to enter into diplomatic relations for their rendition to
bondage, and spoke well of them as men and citizens when Henry Clay
and the other slave [pro-slavery] leaders denounced them as the most
worthless of their class. The example of Canada may be commended to
those persons in the United States, of little faith, who, because in
thirty years the emancipated race have not equalled the white man in
achievement, are fearful lest nothing good can be expected of them.

In the stirring years of the early fifties Douglass led a busy life.
He had each week to fill the columns of his paper and raise the money
to pay its expenses. Add to this his platform work and the underground
railroad work, which consisted not only in personal aid to the
fugitives, but in raising money to pay their expenses, and his time
was very adequately employed. In every anti-slavery meeting his face
was welcome, and his position as a representative of his own peculiar
people was daily strengthened.

When Uncle Tom's Cabin, in 1852, set the worl