Sydney Howard Gay's "Record of Fugitives"

Sydney Howard Gay

In 1855 and 1856, Sydney Howard Gay, the editor of the weekly abolitionist publication, the National Anti-Slavery Standard and a key operative in the underground railroad in New York City, decided for unknown reasons to meticulously record the arrival of fugitive slaves at his office. The resulting two volumes, which he called The Record of Fugitives, sits in the Gay Papers at the Rare Books and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, where it has remained, until recently, virtually untouched. Gay interviewed the fugitives, who numbered well over two hundred men, women, and children and recorded their stories. More than half of them arrived by train via Philadelphia, and also appear in a similar set of records maintained there by the black abolitionist William Still, enabling the historian to check the consistency of the runaways' stories, and to combine the contents of the two...