PURVIS, Robert,
president of the “Underground Railway,” was born in Charleston, S. C, Aug. 4,
1810. His father was an Englishman and his mother a native of Charleston,
though her mother, Dido Badaracka, was a Moor, born in Morocco about 1754. When
Dido was twelve years old she and an Arab girl having been decoyed by a native
to see a captured deer were seized, put on the hacks of camels and carried over
the country to a slave mart. From this place they were shipped with a cargo of
kidnapped Africans to Charleston. Being a comely girl, bright and interesting,
she was purchased by a wealthy maiden lady at whose death she was emancipated
and granted an annuity of $60. William Purvis, father of Robert, prospered as a
cotton-broker in Charleston, from which business he retired in 1819 with a
competency. He was an abolitionist even at that early day. The following year
he sent his wife and their three sons to Philadelphia with the design of going
thence to England to reside permanently. The execution of this plan was
prevented by his untimely death. But this did not occur until he had
established a school for colored children in Philadelphia and paid the teacher
himself for one year. Robert obtained a liberal education. When twenty years of
age he became deeply interested in the slavery question through meeting
Benjamin Lundy, founder of the antislavery movement in America. He learned to
hate slavery as intensely as he loved liberty. In 1831 he read the first copies
of the “Liberator,” founded by William Lloyd Garrison, and from that time to
the emancipation proclamation no American labored for those in bondage with
more self-sacrificing devotion. Mr. Purvis was one of the sixty persons who met
in Philadelphia Dec. 4, 1833, and founded the “American Anti-Slavery Society,”
which accepted without reservation a declaration of principles formulated by
Garrison, viz.: slavery under all circumstances a sin; emancipation a
fundamental right and duty; colonization a delusion; church apologies for
slavery in the Bible evidence of guilt; statesmanship that sought to suppress
agitation a fraud; liberty and slavery incompatible under one government. This
society was the nucleus of an intense and powerful moral agitation, the
uncompromising spirit and indomitable course of its members making the
abolition of slavery feasible and necessary. State societies were formed and
Mr. Purvis was president of the Pennsylvania society for many years. When the “Underground
Railroad,” an organization to assist fugitive slaves to their liberty, came
into existence in Pennsylvania, in 1838, he was made its president and is now
(1892) the only surviving member. His most efficient helpers were two market
women in Baltimore — one white and the other colored — who obtained genuine
passports which they gave to slaves who wished to escape. These passports were
returned to them and used again by other fugitives. A son of a slaveholder in
Newbern, N. C, engaged in the lumber trade, sent many fugitives to
Philadelphia. The homes of Thomas Garrett and Samuel D. Burris, of Delaware,
were also important stations from which many were aided in their flight north
of Mason and Dixon's line. Many of the fugitives reported at Mr. Purvis' home
in Philadelphia where he had a compartment constructed which could only be
entered through a trap door underneath one of the rooms. This was deemed
perfectly safe should any search be made by authorized officials. In the
division among the abolitionists in 1840 he stood with Garrison in favor of
recognizing the equal rights of women as members of the anti-slavery societies,
and in stern opposition to the organization of abolitionists into a political
party. His fidelity to the cause he avowed endeared him to all his associates,
as he never surrendered a principle or consented to a compromise. In 1861, when
it became necessary to adopt heroic measures, he labored to induce the
government to place the civil war openly and avowedly on an anti-slavery basis
and to bend every effort to the establishment of a new Union from which slavery
should be forever excluded. The poet Whittier and Robert Purvis were the
survivors of the sixty members who formed the American Anti-Slavery Society in
1833. In an article published in the “Atlantic Monthly” Mr. Whittier says, “When
Robert Purvis rose to speak in the convention, his appearance at once attracted
my attention. I think I never have seen a finer face and figure, and his
manner, words and bearing were in keeping.” At the semi-centennial anniversary
of the society held in Philadelphia, in 1883, Mr. Purvis presided.
SOURCE: James T. White & Co., Publisher, The National Cyclopaedia of American
Biography, Volume 1, p. 413
