business was transacted with more perfect fidelity, more profound secrecy, more harmony in the working of its complicated machinery and yet with such tremendous results.
It had, like all other rail roads, its offices and stations, engineers and conductors, ticket agents and train dispatchers, hotels and eating houses. The fugitive slave law passed by Congress in 1850, imposed a penalty of $1,000 fine and imprisonment for selling or giving a meal of victuals to one of the passengers on this road, or for helping them on their way. Disregarding these penalties, the eating houses were open day and night, and well supplied with the best food the country afforded.
The business was conducted in silence and harmony, consequently but few of the employees suffered the aforesaid penalties; yet some of the noblest and purest men that ever suffered as martyrs were victims of that horrid fugitive slave law. Rev. John Rankin, of Ohio, was fined $1,000 and imprisonment. Wm. L. Chaplin, Esq., of Mass., was imprisoned in Virginia, released on nineteen thousand dollars bail, which was paid by his friends to save his life, and Rev. C.T.Torry died in a Virginia prison.
The managers availed themselves of all manner of facilities for traveling; rail roads and steam boats, canal boats and ferry boats, stage coaches, gentlemen’s carriages and lumber wagons were pressed into active duty when needed. The large rivers were the chief obstacles in their way when not bridged with ice. In 1858
