Still, William, Underground Rail Road:
A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, Etc.

Porter & Coales, Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, 1872
Call Number: 1400, MSA L1117

MSA L1117, Image No: 778   Enlarge and print image (49K)

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Still, William, Underground Rail Road:
A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, Etc.

Porter & Coales, Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, 1872
Call Number: 1400, MSA L1117

MSA L1117, Image No: 778   Enlarge and print image (49K)

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MARIANA, GRACE ANNA, AND ELIZABETH E. LEWIS. Near Kimberton, in Chester county, Pa., was the birth-plane, and, till within a few years, the home of three sisters, Mariann, Grace Anua and Elizabeth R. Lewis, who were among the most faithful, devoted, and quietly efficient workers in the Anti-slavery cause, including that department of it which is the subject of this volume. Birth-right members of the Society of Friends, they were born into more than the traditional Anti-slavery faith and feeling1 of that Society. A deep abhorrence of slavery, and an earnest will to put that feeling into act, as opportunity should serve, were in the very life-blood which they drew from father and mother both. Left fatherless at an early age, they were taught by their mother to remember that their father, on his visits to their maternal grandfather, living then in Maryland, was wont, as ho expressed it, to feel the black shadow of slavery over his spirit, from the time he entered, till he left, the State; and that, on his death-bed, he bad regretted having let ill-health prevent his meeting with, and joining one of the Anti-slavery Societies of that day. Of the mother's share in the transmission of their hereditary feeling, it is enough, to all acquainted with the history of Anti-slavery work in Pennsylvania, to say that she was sister, not by blood alone, but in heart and soul, to that early, active, untiring abolitionist, Dr. Bartholomew Fussell. It is easy to see that the children of such parents, growing up under the influence of such a mother, needed no conversion, no sacrifices of prejudice or hostile opinions, to make them Anti-slavery; but were ready, simply as a matter of course, to work for the good cause whenever any way appeared in which their work could serve it. What was called " modern abolitionism," as distinguished from the less aggressive form of opposition to slavery, •which preceded the movement pioneered by Garrison, they at once accepted, as soon as it was set before them, through the agents of the American Anti-SlaverySociety, in the campaign in Pennsylvania, begun in 1838. Regarding it liut as the next step forward in the way they had already entered, they instinctively fell into line with the new movement, assisted in forming a society auxiliary to it, in their own neighborhood, and were constant to the end in working for its advancement. Auxiliary to the influences already mentioned, was a very early recollection of seeing a colored man, Henry, bound with ropes and carried off to slavery. Grace Anna, not more than four or five years old at the time, declared that the man's face of agony is Iwfore her now; nor is it likely that her sisters were impressed less deeply. Of natures keenly sensitive, they hated slavery, from that hour, as only children of such natures can ; and—as yet too young and immature for that charity to have been developed in them, which can