The Underground Railroad was the effort by enslaved African Americans to gain freedom by escaping bondage, and although most began and completed their journeys unassisted, each decade in which slavery remained legal in the United States saw increased efforts to help them escape. In Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln's neighbor Jameson Jenkins played an important role in the hopes of freedom seekers passing through from the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri. Born in North Carolina around 1810, Jenkins was documented as a free man by 1846, and within about ten years he had left his home state, traveled through slave states to the free state of Indiana, married Elizabeth Pelham, and after the birth of their daughter Nancy in 1844 the family moved on to Illinois. Soon after arriving in Springfield, he filed his Certificate of Freedom papers with the Sangamon County Recorder of Deeds on March 28, 1846. On January 17, 1850, Jenkins took part in an incident reported locally as a "slave stampede," helping a group of runaway slaves escape slave catchers and taking them north to Bloomington, Illinois. Newspapers then carried contradictory reports, including claims that the runaways had been captured and that Jenkins had betrayed them, but later accounts revealed that he had in fact assisted them and that the conflicting stories had been spread so the railroad car he used to travel to Bloomington would not be discovered. In doing so, Jenkins risked his home, his livelihood, and his life to deliver freedom to people who had once been enslaved. On February 18, 1848, Jenkins and his family bought a small two-story home on the northwest corner of this lot, and as an enterprising and comparatively successful drayman, or teamster, he held an occupation well suited to a conductor on the Underground Railroad. The Jenkins family contributed to a middle-class neighborhood that also represented Lincoln's dream of rising by one's own ability, free from the shackles of slavery that deprived people of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
