Reverend Charles Torrey was a graduate of Yale and an ordained Congregational minister. He disagreed with William Lloyd Garrison about the direction of the anti-slavery movement. Joining the Liberty Party, he traveled into the South. Torrey’s first arrest came in 1842 for trying to report for Liberty Party newspapers on a convention of slaveholders in Annapolis, MD. Then he started answering pleas from runaway slaves to help their families, still enslaved, join them in the North.

Torrey moved to Baltimore, a good location from which to help slaves escaping from Virginia. Some say he helped more than 400 break free. But in 1845, Torrey was arrested, tried, and convicted of helping runaways. He served a year or so on a six-year sentence of hard labor before dying from tuberculosis in the Maryland Penitentiary. Torrey was only 33 years old.