This is a book of true stories from the 1850s that include some incidents in which the author personally participated as a young man. The book describes the work of people in the Anti-Slavery League who operated south of the Indiana border to contact slaves on plantations and effect their initial escapes, connecting them to other members of the organization who would pass them along the underground railroad to Canada. The book also describes the activities of slave hunters in Indiana who, greatly encouraged by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, hunted both escaped slaves and free African Americans, returning both to the slave south. The Anti-Slavery League operated against these gangs.