Of Slavery,
and Moral Conviction…
In our own common lives we rarely
may be called on to make very hard choices or statements with our lives.
The underground railroad with its network
of conductors and station masters helping the fugitive traveler to safety and
freedom is a unique story of many common people doing uncommon things with
their lives.
It is a great story of
courage in conviction.
These people as our forbearers had the vision of moral
courage to stand in front of something and stop it. They knew slavery and saw the effect of
slavery first hand. They saw it as a
wrong. They saw it and knew it as a
social, economic, spiritual, political, religious moral wrong.
In early America the ideal of "All men are created
equal" was the young idea and an experiment, these people lived then with
the contradiction of slavery and they knew the contradiction. They chose not to just stand passively out;
but by conscience they stood convinced, they stood in front of it.
In their times what they did was uncommon. They agitated. They aggravated. They confronted. They confounded. They were not popular. They were reviled by their neighbors and
shunned by friends. Their work was
criminal. It was illegal in their day.
However their vision did grow in
With Due and Great Respect, -Doug Hamilton
Accessing the story:
The story of Quakers in
In early