On an August night in 1842, Dr. Richard Eells, an active Quincy abolitionist in the 1830-40's, was transporting a runaway slave named Charley to a safer location when his carriage was stopped near this spot by a posse searching for Charley. Charley fled and hid in a nearby cemetery, Madison Park today, but was found, captured, and returned to slavery in Missouri. Dr. Eells' house at 415 Jersey was considered station number one on the Underground Railroad from Quincy to freedom in Canada, and Dr. David Nelson's Mission Institute, an abolitionist training school located just northeast at 25th and Maine, was also on the Underground Railroad and was the likely destination for Charley and Dr. Eells that night. Dr. Richard Eells was convicted of aiding a fugitive slave and was fined $400 by local judge Stephen Douglas. Although he died before his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, his attorneys, including William Seward and Salmon Chase, later members of President Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, carried the case through to the end. Because of the notoriety of the case, Eells became president of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Party in 1843 and was a Liberty Party candidate for president in 1844 and for governor in 1846. In Quincy's early years, slavery was a major religious and social issue, and the city's location across the Mississippi River from Missouri made it a hotbed of political controversy; sixty-five community leaders chartered the Adams County Anti-Slavery Society, the first in Illinois.

Photo: William Fischer, Jr.

Quincy, Illinois · USA