The earliest organized opposition
to slavery in the American colonies came from the Society of Friends, commonly
called Quakers. Between 1754 and 1776, Friends throughout the colonies
strengthened their commitment to pacifism and began to denounce slavery. John
Woolman, a Quaker minister, traveled throughout New York preaching that slavery
was against the beliefs of the Society of Friends. He was also the first to
argue that the use of goods produced by slaves was as bad as slave holding
itself. The slave population on Long
Island had gown to one slave for every five settlers by 1773. In 1773, the
members of the Flushing Monthly Meeting urged members not to purchase slaves.
Elisa Hicks attended that meeting and reminded members that the Quaker
community would disown anyone who continued to buy or sell slaves.
In 1776, the Long Island Quakers
freed one hundred fifty-four slaves. By 1791, 154 slaves freedom were recorded
in Queens County. The antislavery movement achieved significant momentum in
1831 with the publication of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. The formal founding of the abolitionist movement
came with the inauguration of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia
in 1833.
Newspaper notices for runaways
began to appear as soon as newspapers became regular publications in the early
1700s. From 1750 to 1770, notices for runaways were very common and they were
usually clustered in small paragraphs with a notice for a reward.
One well used route on the
Underground Railroad for New York was the home of George Jackson. Jackson was
born in Bethpage in 1781 and purchased a farm in White Pot (which is now Forest
Hills). Small boats traveled out of Flushing Creek to Westchester County, were
the connections could be made. Another stop was the home of Valentine and
Abigail Hicks in Jericho, which is now the Maine Maid Inn. Between 1815 and
1865, at least five families in Jericho assisted escaped slaves to their
freedom. It was a custom for slaves to come to Long Island, especially
Westbury, because it contained a sizable community of freed Africans.
In 1835, twenty-seven fugitives
were sent to New York from North Carolina. They were brought to Jericho under
the care of Valentine Hicks. There were so many of them that Valentine decided
to separate the family members into different homes until connections were
made. One of these homes was the Thomas Powell farm, now located in the Old
Bethpage Restoration Village. The most detailed accounts of Quaker assistance
to fugitive slaves on Long Island come from the writings about the Mott family.
The Sands-Willet house is reported to be a stop. The Plandome Manor estate had
an ice house and was observed to have a secret escape tunnel. There are also
frequent references to Motts Point as a station.
In 1878, Isaac T. Hopper settled in
Philadelphia and began to develop a program for the systematic assistance of
slaves escaping from the South. The clandestine nature of the Underground
Railroad prevents any accurate estimate of the number of slaves who found their
way to freedom. Estimates fall between 50,000 to 100,000.
Sources:
Driscoll, James. Angels of
Deliverance: The Underground Railroad in Queens, Long Island, and Beyond.
The Queens Historical Society, 1999.
Vahey, Mary Feeney. A Hidden
History: Slavery, Abolition, and the Underground Railroad in Cow Neck and on
Long Island. Cow Neck Peninsula Historical Society, 1998.
Velsor, Kathleen G. The Underground Railroad on Long Island: Friends in Freedom. The History Press, 2013.
