It has been well documented that prior to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, there was a high level of Underground Railroad activity in Cass County, Michigan. With the migration of Quaker families directly from Wayne County, Indiana, an earlier hotbed of anti-slavery activism, a refuge for fugitives was created in Southwest Michigan.
Freedom-seeking African Americans came to Cass County from all over the South and especially from the border state of Kentucky. In Cass, they found a temporary haven among the Quakers of Young's Prairie. This community included Charles Osborn, a disciple of anti-slavery activist John Woolman. Other notable figures included Stephen and Hannah Bogue, Zachariah Shugart, Ishmael Lee, Josiah Osborn and Jefferson Osborn (sons of Charles), William "Nigger Bill" Jones, and Henry Shepard, himself a fugitive. Many of these Quakers were transplants from Wayne.
The radical Quakers of Young's Prairie--in particular, the Bogues, Lees, and Josiah Osborn--were disowned by the Birch Lake Meeting in 1843 due to their
active opposition to slavery and, more specifically, for joining the Anti-Slavery Friends Meeting. Their committed stance against slavery became the backdrop for their Underground Railroad activities, which culminated in the
Kentucky Raid of 1847. Between 1842 and 1847, there developed in the county quite a colony of fugitives, who apparently resided in small cabins on scattered Quaker-owned land in Penn and Calvin townships. The historical record suggests that some of the freedom-seekers intended to make Cass County home while many others considered the county as one of several stops on the road to Canada.
A little known fact is that most African Americans who did in fact settle in the county arrived
not via the Railroad but following Quakers, who had in some cases once owned them and who freed them either before or after their migrations. Other black families of Cass were free long before migration to the North and have documented their history! Early free black families of the county include the Andersons, Wilsons, Stewarts, and Allens, who initially settled right around Young's Prairie. Though there is little evidence to prove it, anti-slavery activism also among these free black residents, themselves founders of an anti-slavery society, implies a role for them as well in the Network to Freedom.
Several projects are currently under way to tell the story of these various actors and actresses in history, successes and failures of their concerted efforts to assist those who made bold moves to achieve freedom. How might these important stories, our stories, best be told?
By all accounts, the history of Quakers and African Americans in Cass County is phenomenal and inspiring. One commenter wrote, “No serious discussion of the Negro in Michigan would be complete without some mention of Cass County."* The history of the Underground Railroad in the County deserves more than mention; it deserves continual study. Would you not agree?
*Norma McRae, Negroes in Michigan During the Civil War, Michigan Civil War Centennial Observance Commission, Lansing MI, 1966, 10.
The Bonine House, built by James E. Bonine, husband of Sarah Bogue (daughter of known Underground Railroad operatives Stephen and Hannah Bogue), is located at the northeast corner of M60 and Penn Rd. in Cass County, Michigan.
