William Still’s role as the committee’s record-keeper made him, over time, one of the most important historians of the Underground Railroad. His decisions about what to document, how to organize it, and when to eventually publish it were consequential for everything that came after. His account of Brown’s arrival — who was present, what Brown said, what the room looked like — is one of the primary sources historians draw on. It was eyewitness testimony, written down and preserved at personal risk, because the same legal environment that made Brown’s escape necessary also made documenting and assisting freedom seekers a prosecutable offense.
Still was motivated by more than political principle, though that was real. His mother, Charity, had herself escaped from Maryland, leaving behind two daughters and a husband. She had made her way north, built a new life, eventually been reunited with her husband. The two daughters she had left behind were not recovered. Still grew up knowing he had sisters he had never met. He found one of them eventually — through his Underground Railroad work, as an adult, in a meeting that has been documented in accounts of his life and preserved in the historical literature. The personal history gave his commitment to documentation a specific weight: these were not abstractions but people, and they deserved to have their existence recorded.
Passmore Williamson was a different kind of figure. A Quaker merchant of some means, his involvement in antislavery work had a specifically Quaker character — a sense of religious obligation to act against injustice that was part of the tradition of Quaker antislavery going back to the previous century. His address as the destination for Brown’s box was not a casual choice; it was a statement that he was willing to put his person and property at the center of the operation.