Gen[eral] Thomas W. Higginson

My Dear Gen[eral],

I am happy to inform you that a certain Rail Road has been and is in full blast. Several persons have taken full advantage of it to visit their friends. Only one or two accidents have happened. Our funds in these hard times have nearly run out, and we need some help, for the present is attended with considerable expense. If you know of any one desirous of helping the cause, just mention our case to him, and ask him to communicate with Walter Oakley at Topeka, James Blood and myself at Lawrence, or Sam C. Smith at Quindaro.

Our friend A. A. Jamison is now in this city in attendance upon the Territorial Legislature, of which he is a member: he wishes to be remembered to you.

Did Parker Pillsbury ever publish his Lecture on the French Revolution. If so, I wish you would send me a copy.

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About Samuel F. Tappan and Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

Samuel F. Tappan, who was a native of Massachusetts, was one of a party of thirty settlers who came to Kansas in 1854. Locating in Lawrence, he became the correspondent of the New York Tribune and the Boston Atlas, telling of the difficulties with the border ruffians. He was clerk of the Topeka Constitutional Convention and assistant clerk of the House of Representatives in 1856. In July of that year he went east and brought back by way of Iowa and Nebraska a quantity of arms and ammunition. He was secretary of the Leavenworth Constitutional Convention in 1858 and clerk of the Wyandotte Convention in 1859.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), author and soldier, was born of Puritan stock in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Graduating from Harvard in 1841, he was a schoolmaster for two years, and a student of theology at the Harvard Divinity School. He had a stormy career as a Unitarian minister and was said to have been one of the angriest and most outspoken abolitionists in New England. He helped runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. In the summer and fall of 1856 he visited Lawrence, Kansas. In the Civil War he was colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, one of the early regiments recruited from former slaves who served under white officers for the federal service. He described his experiences in Army Life in a Black Regiment. After the Civil War he spent his life chiefly in literary work. He advocated equality of opportunity and equality of rights for the two sexes.

This letter is significant because it suggests an organized, intentional, and not casual or accidental network of underground railroad stations in eastern Kansas of which Quindaro was clearly apart. The date of the letter also dismisses the notion that Quindaro residents were only active in occasionally helping 'contrabands' released from plantations in Missouri and other locales by Union troops during the Civil War years; it suggests the operation of underground railroad stations at Quindaro from its very beginning in 1857, reinforcing Clarina Nichols account of the underground in her 1882 letter to the Wyandott Gazett.

Sheridan, Richard. Editor and Compiler. Freedom's Crucible: The Underground Railroad in Lawrence and Douglas County Kansas, 1854-1865: A Reader. (Lawrence: Division of Continuing Education, University of Kansas, 1998): 49-50.