- William Still, a free black man who helped fugitive slaves in Pennsylvania
- Levi Coffin, a Quaker who helped fugitive slaves in Ohio
- Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who became a prominent abolitionist and orator
- John Brown, a white abolitionist who led an armed raid on a federal armory in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in an effort to spark a slave rebellion
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel that helped to turn public opinion against slavery
- Sojourner Truth, an escaped slave who became a prominent abolitionist and women's rights activist
- Henry Box Brown, an escaped slave who mailed himself from Richmond to Philadelphia in a wooden crate