This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Train conductors were once the most visible of all railroad employees, with their fancy uniforms and their ominous cries of "All aboard." Only on the underground railroad were the conductors silent and secretive. These were the men and women who hid escaping slaves in their homes and saw them on to the next stop. These "conductors" as they were called feared the slave hunters who tracked slaves down for the reward and were not above violence. And so, they conducted quietly.
Except for a few like Owen Lovejoy of Princeton, Illinois. Owen had watched his brother martyred by an angry pro-slavery mob in Alton in 1836, and it sent him a message loud and clear: a man who spends his life for a noble and just cause gets his money's worth.
Owen Lovejoy had worked for his brother on Elijah's abolitionist newspapers in St. Louis and Alton, but his brother's death was the real turning point in his life. He dedicated himself completely to the anti-slavery cause. He edited a biography of his brother for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Then he moved to Princeton, Illinois, to become a Congregational minister, and to serve as a conductor on the branch of the underground railroad running through Princeton. What he saw firsthand as escaped slaves came to his door for food and shelter left him unable to be a silent conductor.
He issued a proclamation to the bounty hunters. "Let it echo through all the arches of heaven, and reverberate and bellow along all the deep gorges of hell where slave catchers will be very likely to hear it: Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, three-quarters of a mile east of the village, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it."
Owen Lovejoy could not stop speaking. He was elected to the House of Representatives where he spread the anti-slavery cause by stirring speeches such as "Human Beings, Not Property," calling a nation back to the Declaration of Independence.
In the fall of 1860, Lovejoy became a conductor on the Lincoln campaign train, where, in a voice loud enough to speak for himself and his martyred brother, he could cry "All Aboard" for the emancipation proclamation.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
