The Black abolitionists who formed vigilance committees believed that mainstream antislavery societies, which were focused on speeches, lectures, and petitions (“moral suasion”), had not been sufficiently concerned with the increasing number of runways coming to northern cities. After the first committee formed in New York in 1835, the organizational form spread to other cities along the Underground Railroad’s water and land routes to Canada. Their membership was interracial, though the organizations were Black-led and organized. Committees were divided between an elected leadership, chosen by a small group of trusted dues-paying members, and an informal membership consisting of dozens of people, often recruited from local African American communities, who used their special skills on a part-time basis. For instance, market women in Baltimore helped fugitives acquire passports; sailors helped hide them on northbound ships. Servants in hotels kept a lookout for visiting slave catchers. Apart from such vital workers, wayward intellectuals, reprobate ministers, housewives, and even some ship captains all worked for the committees.
In addition to cultivating radical ideas, vigilance committees offered a space where new antislavery strategies could be learned, experimented with, and further developed. For instance, the committees had long worked informally with sailors who stowed away fugitives in ship holds, sometimes without knowledge of their proslavery captains. Sailors risked at best getting fired and at worst imprisonment for disobeying their captains. Aware of these risks, the Philadelphia committee made the decision to cooperate as much as possible with avowedly antislavery ship captains, conducting trade between northern and southern ports. Those captains hired crew members sympathetic to the cause. This made escaping by sea much more effective and moved some of the risk from precariously employed sailors onto middle-class captains.
The pedagogy began as soon as fugitives arrived at the vigilance committee offices. Black sailors and hotel workers were quite skilled at spotting runaways and gaining their trust before sending them to committee offices. In order to uncover spies, help others, and learn with scientific precision what the slave economy was like and how it could be resisted, vigilance activists routinely interviewed newly arrived fugitives, in many cases transcribing detailed conversations. Nearly 2,000 such interviews survive to this day. It was through these interviews that abolitionists and fugitives came into dialogue for the first time and fugitives became a part of abolitionism. They were rarely systematic interrogations, but rather, as in the case of Arianna Sparrow’s mother, fugitives were encouraged to tell their stories in whatever way they found suitable. And because Black abolitionists usually conducted the interviews, runaways were often remarkably candid, revealing both their ideals and practical resistance strategies in ways very different from the formerly enslaved Black people who talked to white interviewers decades after the Civil War.