A
light seemed to be shed on the horrors of slavery as if the voice of
his childhood's friend were calling from the grave in impassioned
tones, to aid the cause for which he had given his life.

Martin Conwell, progressive, aggressive, was not a man to let his
deeds lag behind his words. Such help as he could, he lent the
cause of the oppressed. He made his home one of the stations of the
"Underground Railway," as the road to freedom for escaping slaves was
called. Many a time in the dead of night, awakened by the noise of a
wagon, Russell would steal to the little attic window, to see in the
light of the lantern, a trembling black man, looking fearfully this
way and that for pursuers, being hurried into the barn. Back to bed
went Russell, where his imagination pictured all manner of horrible
cruelties the slaves were suffering until the childish heart was near
to bursting with sympathy for them and with fiery indignation at the
injustice that brought them to this pitiful state. Not often did he
see them, but sometimes childish curiosity was too strong and he
searched out the cowering fugitive in the barn, and if the runaway
happened to be communicative, he heard exaggerated tales of cruelty
that set even his young blood to tingling with a mighty desire to
right their wrongs. Then the next night, the wagon wheels were heard
again and the slave was hurried away to the house of a cousin of
William Cullen Bryant, at Cummington. As the wheels died in the
distance up the mountain road, the boyish imagination pictured the
flight, on, on, into the far north till the Canada border was reached
and the slave free. Little wonder that when the war broke out, this
boy, older grown, spoke as with a tongue of fire and swept men up by
the hundreds with his impassioned eloquence, to sign the muster roll.

One of these slaves thus helped to freedom is now Rev. J.G. Ramage, of
Atlanta, Ga. In 1905, he applied to Temple College for the degree of
LL.D. Noticing on the letter sent in reply to his request, the name
of Russell Conwell, President of the College, he wrote Dr. Conwell,
telling him that in 1856 when a runaway slave he had stopped at a
farmhouse at South Worthington, Mass., and remembered the name of
Conwell. Undoubtedly Martin Conwell was one of the men who had helped
him to freedom.

John Brown brought Fred Douglas, the colored orator, with him on one
of his visits. When Russell was told by his father that this was "a
celebra