Abolitionists and The Civil War
In 1857, Susan B. Anthony and William Lloyd Garrison spoke at an abolition meeting. In 1847 Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became an abolitionist leader, commenced publishing a newspaper "The North Star" in Rochester. Douglass delivered his fiery speech "The Meaning of July Fourth to the Negro" before the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Association at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, on July 5, 1852.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, numerous locations in the Rochester area were used as safe-houses to shelter fugitive slaves before they were placed on board boats (often on the Genesee River) for transport to Canada. The route was part of the famous Underground Railroad. The most common route used the 'lines' that led from Henrietta through Monroe County and into Rochester. Some of the better known 'stations' included: the Henry Quinby farm by Mendon Ponds Park, which today is by the Fieldstone Smokehouse; the David H. Richardson farm on East Henrietta Road near Castle Road; the Warrant farm in Brighton, 1956 West Henrietta Road; the old Frederick Douglass home on South Avenue near the current Highland Park; a cluster of houses along Exchange Street where numerous Quakers lived, and now where the Blue Cross Arena sits, and the home of Harvey Humphrey on Genesee Street. One contemporary described the Frederick Douglass homes as "a labyrinth of secret panels and closets, where he secreted the poor human wretches from the man hunters and the blood-hounds, who were usually not far behind.”,
Other 'stations' were located in the areas surrounding Rochester, including Brighton, Pittsford, Mendon and Webster. A station in North Chili, just west of Rochester, run by abolitionist Methodists was an important site in the formation of the Free Methodist Church, which was formed in 1860. The denomination's first college, Roberts Wesleyan College, was built on the site.
Read more about this topic: History Of Rochester, New York
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil and/or war:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)