Between the time of his marriage, when he began to keep a depot on the Underground Rail Road, and the year 1824, he passed more than one hundred slaves through to Canada, and between the latter time and his death, eight hundred more, making, in all nine hundred aided by him.  He was ever willing to sacrifice his own personal comfort and convenience, in order to assist fugitives.  In 1833, when on his way to the West, in a carriage, with his friend, Thomas Peart, also a most faithful friend of the colored man and interested in Underground Rail Road affairs, he found a fugitive slave, a woman, in Adams county, who was in immediate danger.  He stopped his journey, and sent his horse and wagon back to his own home with the woman, that being the only safe way of getting her off.  This was but a sample of his self-denial, in the cause of human freedom.

His want of ability to guide in person runaway slaves, or to travel with them, prevented him from taking active part in the wonderful adventures and hair-breadth escapes which his brain and tact rendered possible and successful.  It is believed that no slave was ever recaptured that followed his directions.  Sometimes the abolitionists were much annoyed by impostors, who pretended to be runaways, in order to discover their plans, and betray them to the slave-holders.  Daniel Gibbons was possessed of much acuteness in detecting these people, but having detected them, he never treated them harshly or unkindly.

Almost from infancy, he was distinguished for the gravity of his deportment, and his utter heedlessness of small things.  The writer has heard men preach the doctrine of the trifling value of the things of a present time, and of the tremendous importance of those of a never-ending eternity, but Daniel Gibbons is the only person she ever knew, who lived that doctrine.  He believed in plainness of apparel as taught by Friends, not as a form or a rule of society, but as a principle; often quoting from some one who said that “the adornment of a vain and foolish world, would feed a starving one.”  He opposed extravagant fashions and all luxury of habit and life, as calculated to produce effeminacy and degrading sensuality, and as a bestowal of idolatrous attention upon that body which he would often say “was here but for a short time.”

Looking only upon that as religion, which made men love each other and do good to each other in this world, he was little of a stickler for points of belief, and even when he did look into theological matters or denounce a man’s religious opinions, it was generally because they were calculated to darken the mind and be entertained as a substitute for good works.  Pursuing the even tenor of his way, he could as easily lead the flying fugitive slave by night out of the way of his powerful master, as one differently constituted could bestow his wealth upon the most popular charity in the land.