These incidents show the origin of the system. The first case of
assistance rendered a negro was not in itself illegal, but was
intended merely to prevent the crime of kidnapping. The second
was illegal in form, but the aid was given to one who, having
been set free by will, was being reenslaved, it was believed, by
an unjust decision of a court. The third was a case of outrageous
abuse on the part of the owner. The negro Sam had himself gone to
a trader begging that he would buy him and preferring to take his
chances on a Mississippi plantation rather than return to his
master. The trader offered the customary price and was met with
the reply that he could have the rascal if he would wait until
after the enraged owner had taken his revenge, otherwise the
price would be twice the amount offered. A large proportion of
the fugitives belonged to this maltreated class. Others were
goaded to escape by the prospect of deportation to the Gulf
States. The fugitives generally followed the beaten line of
travel to the North and West.

In 1826 Levi Coffin became a merchant in Newport, Indiana, a town
near the Ohio line not far from Richmond. In the town and in its
neighborhood lived a large number of free negroes who were the
descendants of former slaves whom North Carolina Quakers had set
free and had colonized in the new country. Coffin found that
these blacks were accustomed to assist fugitives on their way to
Canada. When he also learnt that some had been captured and
returned to bondage merely through lack of skill on the part of
the negroes, he assumed active operations as a conductor on the
Underground Railroad.

Coffin used the Underground Railroad as a means of making