American Historical Ephemera & Photography, including African Americana

The Liberator. Vol. VII, No. 18. Boston, MA: 28 April 1837. 4 pp., folio, 18 x 25 1/2 in. Early anti-slavery newspaper identified in the upper margin in brown iron gall ink to "J. Gibbons," attributing the paper to the Gibbons family, prominent Quakers in Lancaster, PA, active in the Underground Railroad. AN IMPORTANT ASSOCIATION COPY. 

Masthead with a woodcut engraving showing an enslaved person whipped by a slaveholder and a family being split apart and sold. The issue is filled with anti-slavery news and rhetoric with a front-page headline, "Slavery," with a detailed letter 4 columns in length written and signed in type by President John Quincy Adams. Dated 20 March 1837, the letter discusses Adams' opposition to slavery in the United States. 

During the first half of the 19th century, fugitives from south of the Mason-Dixon Line regularly arrived at the Gibbons family’s Underground Railroad station along mud-bottomed Mill Creek in Upper Leacock Township, Lancaster County. The Gibbons asked the fugitives to provide their names and ages, the names of the men who had enslaved them, and what part of the South they had left behind. They recorded these facts in a blank book. Then they gave the fugitives new identities and sent them on their way toward freedom. Three generations of Gibbons family members — James (1735–1810), Daniel (1775–1853) and Joseph (1818–1883) — participated in this dangerous enterprise by operating one of Lancaster County’s primary Underground Railroad stations.

Daniel apparently was an expert at plotting the movement of fugitives over long distances. Many African Americans escaping from Maryland came up the Susquehanna River to Columbia in western Lancaster County and crossed through or near Lancaster city to the Gibbons farm. Gibbons sent fugitives from Bird-in-Hand in several directions, sometimes to Reading or northern Chester County. More often he directed them to Underground Railroad operators in southern Lancaster County, including Dr. J. K. Eshleman, Thomas Whitson, Lindley Coates, and Joshua Brinton; from there fugitives traveled to Christiana on the Lancaster–Chester County border and, ultimately, to Philadelphia or Canada. No slave escaping to freedom who followed Daniel’s directions was ever recaptured. Only one (and possibly a second) fugitive was ever seized from the Gibbons' property. Daniel also drove fugitives in his carriage to stations farther east. On one occasion, he encountered an imperiled fugitive in Adams County and sent her back to his farm with his own horse and wagon. 

Daniel died three years later in 1853, and his son Joseph took over as station manager. Joseph was 35 years old and had been assisting his parents for many years. While conducting a party of fugitives on a midnight run to escape a slave master when he was 16 years old, Joseph developed a permanent tenderness in his feet; so he represented the second generation of station operators with poor locomotion. 

This is an outstanding “association item” of an anti-slavery newspaper delivered to and owned by a family prominent in the Underground Railroad during the pre-Civil War era in Southern Pennsylvania.