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Can anybody point me to any writings about Anabaptists helping with the underground railroad, writings or discussions by Anabaptists about whether Christians should help slaves escape, etc.?

Ernie wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 8:05 pm Can anybody point me to any writings about Anabaptists helping with the underground railroad, writings or discussions by Anabaptists about whether Christians should help slaves escape, etc.?

I haven’t found much. Nearly all Anabaptists left slave states (including my Quaker ancestors who along with their Mennonite neighbours left NC in the 1800s). Anabaptists were pretty small populations in the 1860s.

There is a lot of local lore about the underground railroad in Central PA in the Mifflin County (Belleville) area. My mother grew up with it.

The underground railroad was not simply about helping escaped slaves reach the Mason-Dixon line. It was also about hiding escaped slaves from organized bands of vigilante slave catchers who roamed through northern states catching escaped slaves for bounty. That was what the Fugitive Slave Law was about. So a big part of the underground railroad in the north was simply hiding escaped slaves from slave posses even in places that were hundreds of miles from the border.

How much Mennonites or Anabaptists were involved in any of it I have no idea. But my mother who grew up in Belleville definitely grew up with the local lore that that area farms were involved in the underground railroad.

Here's a historical marker from West Milton, Ohio.





John Mast of N. Carolina was a brother of Jacob Mast, the first Amish bishop ordained in America. John had 12 children, and after his death 10 of them moved to this area of western Ohio. John Mast Jr. is of course his son, and Davenport and Hoover are sons-in-law. The plaque calls them Quakers; they may have been, it's not entirely clear. If not Quakers themselves, they were of one mind with them in participating in abolitionist activities.

One of the 12 stayed in N. Carolina and became a slave owner.