Levi Coffin in Cincinnati

Levi Coffin had already spent twenty years helping freedom seekers reach safety before he moved to Cincinnati. His house in Newport, Indiana, now Fountain City, had become so central to escape routes from three different directions that people called it the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad. Coffin himself was sometimes called the President of the Underground Railroad, a title he found embarrassing but did not exactly refuse.

In eighteen forty-seven, Coffin and his wife Catherine moved to Cincinnati to run a wholesale warehouse that sold goods made exclusively by free labor, as a commercial alternative to slave-produced cotton and sugar. The business was part of the Free Produce movement, which tried to undercut slavery economically by building a market for goods untouched by enslaved labor. It was a principled project and a commercial struggle; most consumers were not willing to pay more for the principle.

The Coffins' Cincinnati home became another stop on the network. Historians estimate that approximately thirteen hundred freedom seekers passed through their Cincinnati household during the eighteen years they lived there. Combined with the approximately two thousand people they helped during the Indiana years, the Coffins are estimated to have assisted more freedom seekers than almost anyone in the movement's history.

Coffin was a Quaker, which placed him in a religious tradition that had opposed slavery since the late seventeenth century. He petitioned Congress to help create the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction and lived to see the Thirteenth Amendment ratified, which abolished slavery in eighteen sixty-five. He died in eighteen seventy-seven.

His Indiana house is preserved as a National Historic Landmark. His Cincinnati home is gone. The work he did in both places is documented in his memoirs, published in eighteen seventy-six, one of the most complete firsthand accounts of Underground Railroad operations ever written.