Levi and Catharine Coffin
Levi Coffin was a Quaker born on Oct. 28, 1798 on a farm in New Garden, N.C., the only son of seven children born to Levi Coffin and Prudence Williams “The Coffin’s.” Levi mutually shared his hatred for slavery with both his parents and grandparents they all were opposed to slavery, Coffin noted in his memoirs published in 1876, “and none of either of the families ever owned slaves; and all were friends of the oppressed, so I claim that I inherited my anti-slavery principles.”
As a teenager, Levi first opportunity to help free slaves came when a man by the name Stephen Holland brought a group of slaves to the corn husking. While the whites at the party were feasting, Levi stayed behind so that he could talk with the slaves, while talking to one of the slaves he learned that, one was a freeborn and was an indentured servant to Edward Lloyd, a Philadelphia Quaker before earning his freedom, but was kidnapped and sold back into slavery. After Levi heard the story he was very angry so the young Levi decided to get another slave whom I knew well, to take the former indentured servant of Edward Lloyd to his father’s house the next night. After Levi’s father had learned the details of how the slave was sold back into slavery, the elder Coffin wrote
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Others in the community would questioned him about why he helped slaves when he knew what the consequences were, Levi would tell them that he "read in the Bible when I was a boy that it was right to take in the stranger and administer to those in distress, and that I thought it was always safe to do right. The Bible, in bidding us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, said nothing about color, and I should try to follow out the teachings of that good