FROM, HON.  S.P.  CHASE, LATE CHIEF JUSTICE U.S.  SUPREME COURT.

Your book will certainly be an interesting one.  No one probably has had equal opportunities with yourself of listening to the narratives of fugitive slaves.  No one will repeat them more truthfully, and no stories can be more fraught with interest than theirs.  Let us rejoice, that, in our country, such narratives can never be heard again.

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FROM WM. LLOYD GARRISON.

I congratulate you that, after much patient research, careful preparation, and untiring labor, you have completed your voluminous work on “THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.”  I am sure your work will be found to be one of absorbing interest, worthy of the widest patronage, and historically valuable as pertaining to the tremendous struggle for the abolition of chattel slavery in our land.  No phase of that struggle was so crowded wifh thrilling incidents, heroic adventures, and self-sacrificing efforts as the one you have undertaken to portray, and with which you were so closely connected, to wit: “THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.”  While it will be contemplated with shame, sadness, and astonishment, by posterity, it will serve vividly to illustrate the perils which everywhere confronted the fugitives from the Southern “house of bondage,” and to which those who dared to give them food and shelter were also subjected.

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FROM GEN.  O.O.  HOWARD.

You could not prepare a work that would afford more instruction and interest to me than a detailed history of the operations of the so-called “UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.” I am delighted at the casual examination I have been permitted to give it.  Thousands will rise up to call you blessed for your faithful record of our “legalized crime,” and its graphic terrible consequences set forth by you in such true pictures and plain words.

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HON.  CARL SCHURZ, SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR.

I have no doubt you can make the narrative a very interesting contribution to the history of an important period of our national development.  It will be calculated to strengthen in the whole American people a just sense of the beneficent results of the great social revolution we have achieved, and to inspire the people of your own race with a high appreciation of the blessings of liberty they now enjoy.

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FROM HON.  W.D.  KELLEY, CONGRESSMAN FROM PA.

The stories you tell with admirable simplicity and directness of the suffering heroically endured by such numbers of poor fugitives, will instruct and inspire many who have regarded the American slave as a member of an inferior race.