William Still
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"Father of the Underground Railroad"
1821-1902
Abolitionist, writer, and businessman. Still was born near Medford, in Burlington County, N.J. His father, Levin Steel, was a former slave who had purchased his own freedom and changed his name to Still to protect his wife Sidney, who had escaped from slavery in Maryland. After her first escape attempt had failed she ran to her husband with two of their four children and changed her name to Charity. Their son William was the youngest of eighteen children. From early boyhood he worked on his father's farm and as a woodcutter. He had little formal schooling, but read what was available and studied grammar on his own. He left home when he was twenty, finding employment with neighboring farmers. In 1844 he went to Philadelphia, where he worked at various jobs, including handyman in several households.
In 1847 he married Letitia George, who became the mother of his four children. The year of his marriage, Still found employment in the office of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. His duties were janitorial and clerical, but he soon became involved with aiding fugitives from slavery. He was in a unique position to provide board and room for many of the fugitives who rested in Philadelphia before resuming their journey to Canada. One of those former slaves
turned out to he his own brother, Peter Still, left in bondage by his mother when she had escaped forty years earlier. William Still later reported that finding his brother led him to preserve the careful records concerning former slaves which provided valuable source material for his book The Underground Railroad (1872)(View Excerpts).
When Philadelphia abolitionists organized a vigilance committee to assist the large numbers of fugitives going through the city after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, they named William Still chairman. John Brown's wife stayed with the Still family for a time following the Harpers Ferry raid, and several of Brown's accomplices received aid from Still. Although he concluded his work in the antislavery office in 1861, Still continued his association with the society, serving for eight years as vice-president and president from 1896 to 1901.
While working for the abolition society Still began purchasing real estate. During the Civil War he opened a store handling new and used stoves, and later established a very successful coal business. In 1864 he came to Camp William Penn, where Negro soldiers were stationed.
William Still's book on the Underground Railroad was an important addition to the literature of the antislavery movement. One of the small number of postwar accounts written or compiled by Negro authors, it provided a much-needed corrective to the memoirs of white abolitionists. Still recognized the many contributions of white abolitionists, but he also pictured the fugitives themselves as courageous individuals, struggling for their own freedom, rather than as helpless or passive passengers on a white Underground Railroad. His journals were the only day-to-day record of vigilance committee
activity covering a prolonged period. In addition to the accounts of the fugitives, he included excerpts from newspapers. legal documents, letters from abolitionists and former slaves, and biographical sketches.
Although the executive committee of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery had asked Still to write his book, the work and its publication and distribution were a product of his own effort. His stated purpose was to "encourage the race in efforts of self elevation" He believed that the most eloquent advocates of Negroes were Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and other self- emancipated champions. It was his mission as a Negro to record their heroic deeds and he hoped the book would serve as additional testimony to the intellectual capacity of his race. "We very much need works on various topics from the pens of colored men to represent the race intellectually.' He told one of his sales agents.
Still's book went into three editions and became the most widely circulated work on the Underground Railroad. He proudly exhibited it at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, a powerful reminder of the condition of Negroes slavery.
Still worked in other ways to improve the status of Negroes. In 1855
he traveled to Canada to visit communities where refugees from United
States slavery settled. His positive reports counteracted some of the
criticism of Negroes in Canada then in circulation. Five years later
he cited the examples of successful Negroes in Canada to argue for
the emancipation of all slaves. In 1859, he started a campaign to end
racial discrimination on Philadelphia railroad cars by exposing the
injustice in a letter to the press. Eight years later the campaign
ended successfully when the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law
forbidding such discrimination. In 1861 Still helped organize and
finance a social, civil, and statistical association to collect data
about Negroes. When some Philadelphia colored citizens opposed
Still's crusade for equal service on the streetcars, he wrote A Brief
Narrative of the Struggle for the Rights of the Colored People of
Philadelphia in the City Railway Cars (1867).
In 1874 Still was again involved in the controversy when he openly
supported a reform candidate for the mayor of Philadelphia. To
explain his repudiation of the Republican candidate, Still spoke to a
public meeting and later published a pamphlet entitled An Address on
Voting and Laboring(1874). As an active member of the Presbyterian
church he helped found a Mission School in North Philadelphia. He
also organized in 1880 one of the early YMCAs for Negro youth, served
in the Freedmen's Aid Commission, and was a member of the
Philadelphia Board of Trade. He helped manage homes for aged Negroes
and destitute Negro children, as well as an orphan asylum for the for
the children of soldiers and sailors.
He died of heart trouble caused by Bright's disease, and was survived
by his widow, two daughters, and a son.
