There are many causes worth fighting for, and some so noble they are worth dying for. That was a truth American Patriot Elijah Anderson knew well, as he risked and ultimately lost his life helping his fellow black Americans reach freedom on the Underground Railroad.
Even in the darkest and ugliest chapters of U.S. history, we find heroes to inspire us. Leftists love to use February as “Black History Month” to deepen racial divides and tout woke favorites, but most black patriots are just as ignored or vilified as white patriots. Elijah Anderson never let racism, especially Democrat racism (some parties never change), stop him from achieving great deeds in the tradition of the Founders and Revolutionaries.
“The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land,” Henry David Thoreau described the network of white and black Americans who risked violence, imprisonment, and even death to bring slaves from the slave-owning states to the free states. “General Superintendent” Elijah Anderson, a blacksmith, husband, and father, was one particularly daring member of this network. From Madison to Lawrenceburg (Ind.), despite violent mobs and racist law enforcement, Anderson worked on. He rescued an estimated 1,000 slaves over the years, helping them experience the God-given liberty America’s founding documents promised.
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Anderson was born free, and he dedicated his life to helping those who weren’t. From History.com:
The Ohio River, which marked the border between slave and free states, was known in abolitionist circles as the River Jordan. For enslaved people on the lam, Madison, Indiana, served as one particularly attractive crossing point, thanks to an Underground Railroad cell set up there by blacksmith Elijah Anderson and several other members of the town’s Black middle class. Light skinned enough to pass for a white slave owner, Anderson took numerous trips into Kentucky, where he purportedly rounded up 20 to 30 enslaved people at a time and whisked them to freedom, sometimes escorting them as far as the Coffins’ home in Newport. The work was exceedingly dangerous.
A mob of pro-slavery whites ransacked Madison in 1846 and nearly drowned an Underground Railroad operative, after which Anderson fled upriver to Lawrenceburg, Indiana. Continuing his activities, he assisted roughly 800 additional fugitives prior to being jailed in Kentucky for “enticing slaves to run away.” On what some sources report to be the very day of his release in 1861, Anderson was suspiciously found dead in his cell.
Tragically, Anderson’s suspicious death occurred the very year the Civil War began, not many years before Abraham Lincoln and his fellow Republicans would legally end slavery once and for all. But just like the other civil rights champions and Union soldiers who died over the years, Anderson’s legacy lives on.
My drawing of Underground Railroad hero Elijah Anderson pic.twitter.com/BJDqN4z43v
— Catherine Salgado (@CatSalgado32) February 28, 2024
Today let us remember the man who died in prison that other men could live in freedom, American hero Elijah Anderson.