Abel Brown: Forgotten Hero of the Underground Railroad
(Author’s note: An article with this title originally written by me was plagiarized from the now defunct site, Suite 101, and is published without my byline or permission on the site, worldhistory.us. The article below focuses on my rediscovery of this tragic hero of the Underground Railroad).
I’ve been researching the Underground Railroad for more than 30 years. Probably my most important discovery, at least to those who are hardcore UGRR researchers was my accidental rediscovery of Rev. Abel Brown.
You could say I discovered him like Columbus discovered America — there had been many voyages from Europe to America long before he made his “discovery.” It’s also possible another historian had “rediscovered” him about the same time, Stanley Harrold, whose work I highly esteem.
What makes it memorable for me is that I wasn’t looking for him.
In fact, Abel Brown was a well-known radical abolitionist during his time who not only contributed letters and articles to The Liberator and other abolitionist publications but published his own newspaper, the Toscin of Liberty, later the Albany Patriot, in association with another radical abolitionist of his time, Charles T. Torrey.
The Discoveries
