COFFIN, LEVI: 1789-1877.
Although his published works were limited to his Reminiscences, which came out the year before his death, and to the probable authorship of some ephemeral and necessarily anonymous anti-slavery pamphlets, Levi Coffin was a figure of sufficient importance in the pre-Civil War scene in the middle west to warrant an exhaustive sketch here.
The Dictionary of American Biography says of him, in part:
"Levi was born on a farm at New Garden, N.C., the youngest of the seven children of Levi and Prudence (Williams) Coffin. His mother's family was of Welsh descent. Both of his parents were Quakers. The boy, who was the only son, could not be spared from necessary work on the farm except for short intervals at the district school. He was mainly taught by his father at home. When he was twenty-one, he left for a session at a distant school … then taught for a winter, attended school the following year, and taught at intervals for several years thereafter. In 1821, together with his cousin Vestal Coffin, he organized at New Garden a Sunday-school for negroes. This succeeded for a time but eventually the masters, becoming alarmed at Coffin's methods, kept their slaves at home, and the school was closed. On Oct. 28, 1824, Coffin was married to Catharine White, a Quaker. Two years later, he moved to Newport (now Fountain City), Wayne County, Ind.–a village of about twenty families-where he was to live for more than twenty years. Here Coffin opened a store. Very soon after he came to Newport , he found that he was on a line of the Underground Railroad through which slaves often passed. Coffin let it be known that his house would be a depot and immediately fugitives began to arrive … The Railroad was attended with heavy expenses. These Coffin could not have borne had he not been prosperous. Journeys had to be made at night, often through deep mud and bad roads and along seldom-traveled by-ways. A week seldom passed without his receiving passengers … Coffin was also at this time a member of a Committee on Concerns of People of Color to look after their educational interests, treasurer of a fund raised to sustain schools and aid the poor and destitute, and an active participant in the temperance movement. Almost twenty years after he had gone to Newport to live, he became interested in the free labor question. In 1847, he agreed to go experimentally to Cincinnati for five years and open a wholesale free-labor goods store. A Quaker Convention at Salem, Ind., had voted in 1846 to raise $3,000 to begin such a project. A year after the outbreak of the Civil War, Coffin began his work for the freedmen and devoted his entire time to this for the rest of his life. In May, 1864, he went to England for this purpose, and an English Freedmen's Aid Society was formed … In 1867, Coffin was appointed delegate to the International Anti-Slavery Conference in Paris … The last ten years of his life were passed in retirement …"
Condensed from M. A. K., Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. IV.
- Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the
Underground Railroad; Being a Brief History of the Labors of a Lifetime in
Behalf of the Slave, with the Stories of Numerous Fugitives.
Cincinnati, n.d. [1876].
