In 1835, Cross Street was the scene of an anti-Black, anti-abolitionist riot. Middletown was home to abolitionists, both Black and white, as well as to pro-slavery factions, and to those who believed that Black emigration to Africa held the answer to ending racial strife. Cross Street Church was very likely a way station on the railroad. Along with prominent white citizens Jesse Baldwin and Benjamin Douglas, Jehiel Beman and his second wife, Nancy, served as underground railroad conductors after they returned to Middletown in 1854, and perhaps before. With the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the need for the underground railroad increased. Served as underground railroad conductors, sheltering slaves who were fleeing the South in search of freedom in Canada or elsewhere. Several Middletown citizens, both white and Black, Harriet Tubman, famous conductor on the Underground RailroadĪ more hidden aspect of the abolitionist movement was the underground railroad. Cross Street Church was so closely allied with the anti-slavery movement that it was known as “Freedom Church” in this period. This group was one of the earliest women’s abolitionist societies in the United States. Clarissa Beman, Leverett’s wife, was one of the founders of Middletown’s Colored Female Anti-Slavery Society in the same year. Both of his sons, Amos and Leverett, were also active in the cause. A founding member of the Middletown Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, he became one of its five managers. Jehiel Beman was tireless in his fight against slavery. Within just five years, there were twenty-nine anti-slavery societies in Connecticut alone. The New England Anti-Slavery Society (later known as the American Anti-Slavery Society) was founded in Boston in 1832, and the cause spread throughout the North in response to Garrison’s call. Cross Street Church, brought his family to Middletown and Wesleyan University was founded, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his anti-slavery paper, The Liberator. In 1831, the same year that Jehiel Beman, first regular pastor at the A.M.E. Slavery was a burning issue in New England in the 1830s. Although there were no more slaves in Middletown by 1830, slavery was not fully abolished in the state until 1848. Education and voting rights were hard to come by in Connecticut in the early 19th century. Freedom, however, did not automatically bring basic rights. Of these residents, 209 were people of color, all of them free. According to the 1830 census, Middletown’s population was 6,892. In 1820, 97 slaves and 7,844 free people of color lived in Connecticut. Churches and religious denominations played key roles, especially the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Congregationalists, Wesleyans, and Reformed Presbyterians as well as breakaway sects of mainstream denominations such as branches of the Methodist church and American Baptists. The diverse "conductors" on the railroad included free-born Blacks, white abolitionists, former slaves (either escaped or manumitted), and Native Americans. Escaped slaves would pass from one way station to the next, steadily making their way north. These individuals were organized into small, independent groups who, for the purpose of maintaining secrecy, knew of connecting "stations" along the route but few details of their immediate area. The Underground Railroad consisted of clandestine routes, transportation, meeting points, safe houses and other havens, and assistance maintained by abolitionist sympathizers. The escape network was "underground" in the sense of underground resistance but was seldom literally subterranean. At its height between 18, an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people escaped enslavement via the Underground Railroad, though Census figures only account for 6,000. The Underground Railroad was a network of routes by which African slaves in the 19th century United States attempted to escape to free states, or as far north as Canada, with the aid of abolitionists. Map of General Routes on the Underground Railroad
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