to Friends, five to a member who had ordered that they be taken West at
his expense. Six of these slaves belonged to Samuel Lawrence, a Negro
slaveholder, who had purchased himself and family. White pathetically
reports the case of four of the women who had married slave husbands and
had twenty children for the possession of whom the Friends had to stand a
lawsuit in the courts. The women had decided to leave their husbands
behind but the thought of separation so tormented them that they made an
effort to secure their liberty. Upon appealing to their masters for terms
the owners, somewhat moved by compassion, sold them for one half of their
value. White then went West and left four in Chillicothe, twenty-three in
Leesburg and twenty-six in Wayne County, Indiana, without encountering any
material difficulty.[12]

Others had thought of this plan but the Quakers actually carried it out on
a small scale. Here we see again not only their desire to have the Negroes
emancipated but the vital interest of the Quakers in success of the
blacks, for members of this sect not only liberated their slaves but sold
out their own holdings in the South and moved with these freedmen into the
North. Quakers who then lived in free States offered fugitives material
assistance by open and clandestine methods.[13] The most prominent leader
developed by the movement was Levi Coffin, whose daring deeds in behalf of
the fugitives made him the reputed President of the Underground Railroad.
Most of the Quaker settlements of Negroes with which he was connected were
made in what is now Hamilton, Howard, Wayne, Randolph, Vigo, Gibson,
Grant, Rush, and Tipton Counties, Indiana, and Darke County, Ohio.

The promotion of this movement by the Quakers was well on its way by 1815
and was not materially checked until the fifties when the operations of
the drastic fugitive slave law interfered, and even then the movement had
gained such momentum and the execution of that mischievous measure had