Detroit · 1836–1861
The Roots of Abolition
In the 1830s, a fugitive slave running north from Kentucky had one last river to cross. The Detroit River ran a mile wide between Michigan and Windsor, Ontario, and beyond it was British soil, where the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act made every escaped slave a free man by the moment his foot touched the far shore. Detroit was the station house where that crossing was made. The abolitionists who ran it called their city, in coded correspondence, Midnight.
The station's headquarters was Second Baptist Church, founded in 1836 by thirteen freed African-Americans who had walked out of the First Baptist Church of Detroit over its refusal to admit Black members. Second Baptist met first in a rented room; by 1857 it had built a brick sanctuary on Monroe Street in Greektown that still stands today. The church's Croghan Street Station hid fugitives in a subterranean space under the sanctuary. Between 1836 and 1865, an estimated 5,000 human beings passed through that basement on their way to freedom.
The abolitionist network that made the station work was led by two men: William Lambert, a Black abolitionist and tailor who founded Detroit's Colored Vigilant Committee in 1842, and George DeBaptiste, a former valet to President William Henry Harrison who operated the steamboat T. Whitney across the Detroit River. Lambert coordinated with white abolitionist ministers — Rev. Charles Duffield of St. Matthew's, Rev. Marcus Swift of the Wesleyan Methodists — to shelter fugitives in safe houses across the city. DeBaptiste, unable to pilot the steamboat himself due to legal barriers, hired a white captain and ran the crossing under his own management.
What the Detroit Vigilance Committee refused, and what makes them the ideological parents of modern abolition, was gradualism. The dominant 19th-century argument against slavery in the northern states was that it would fade on its own — that free labor would outcompete slave labor, that the peculiar institution would die of economic causes, that abolitionists ought not agitate the South and risk civil war. William Lloyd Garrison famously answered that argument in the first issue of The Liberator: “I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Lambert, DeBaptiste, and their allies stood in that same tradition.
The abolitionists did not petition Congress for a slower Fugitive Slave Act, or for exceptions from slavery for elderly slaves, or for a phase-out beginning in 1900. They insisted that slavery was man-stealing, that the enslaved was a person whose right to liberty came from God and could not be qualified by human statute, and that any law which said otherwise was void. That argument was called radical and impractical in its own day. It was, in the end, the argument that won.
Abolish Abortion Michigan stands in the same tradition, on the same argument, applied to the same class of person under a different name. The preborn are image-bearers of God whose right to live comes not from statute but from creation. The laws which say otherwise — Michigan's 2022 Reproductive Freedom for All amendment among them — are void by the same standard the Vigilance Committee applied to the Fugitive Slave Act.
The gradualist argument on abortion is the exact 1830s argument on slavery. Wait for public opinion to shift. Don't rock the boat. Accept restrictions and exceptions and phase-outs. Focus on the achievable. It is the mainstream “pro-life” strategy of the last forty years, and it is the argument the Detroit abolitionists refused. What William Lambert and George DeBaptiste insisted on, and what we insist on today, is that a person is a person under the law from the moment they exist — no exceptions, no phase-in, no compromise with the institution that says otherwise.
The Second Baptist Church sanctuary at 441 Monroe Street in Greektown is still an active congregation and welcomes visitors. The Detroit Historical Society preserves the story of the Croghan Street Station and Detroit's role as the terminus. The International Underground Railroad Memorial on the Detroit Riverwalk (near Hart Plaza) marks the crossing point itself, with a matching monument on the Windsor side. For a full self-guided tour of Detroit's Underground Railroad sites, the Society's walking guide is the best starting point.
Sources: A History of Second Baptist Church of Detroit(Rev. Nathaniel Leach, 1988); “The Underground Railroad in Michigan” (Michigan History Center, MI DNR); Passages to Freedom(Detroit Historical Society); University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library archives on William Lambert and George DeBaptiste.
