Thoreau found fellowship with others after the cooling of his relationship with Emerson. Ellery Channing — who accompanied him on walks around Concord — was chief among them. With the publication of his Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist in 1873, Channing later became the first biographer of Thoreau. In 1848, Harrison Gray Otis Blake of Worcester, Massachusetts, began a correspondence with Thoreau. Thoreau sometimes visited Blake in Worcester, and the two hiked in Concord and elsewhere. Blake inherited Thoreau's manuscripts (except for his surveys, which went to the Concord Free Public Library) from Sophia Thoreau, who died in 1876. He subsequently edited journal material for the volumes Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888), and Autumn (1892). Theophilus Brown was another Worcester friend. Thoreau visited Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford, and corresponded with Calvin Greene of Rochester, Michigan. He met Englishman Thomas Cholmondeley in Concord in 1854. On his return to England, Cholmondeley corresponded with Thoreau and sent him a rich and much appreciated collection of Oriental books.
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Thoreau and certain other residents of Concord took an active part in the Underground Railroad. In the 1850s, Thoreau's mother concealed slaves on their way to freedom in her home. Thoreau escorted fugitives to the West Fitchburg railroad station, where they made connections for Canada. The prominent fugitive slave cases of Shadrach Minkins (who spent one night in February of 1851 at the house of the Mr. and Mrs. Francis Bigelow), Thomas Sims (1851), and Anthony Burns (1854) angered Thoreau. His speech "Slavery in Massachusetts," delivered at an abolition meeting in Framingham, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1854, was prepared in reaction to the return of the fugitive slave Burns to his Virginian master.
Thoreau admired radical abolitionist John Brown, in 1855 captain of a Kansas militia company determined to keep Kansas a free state, in 1859 leader of a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Frank Sanborn of Concord was one of Brown's key supporters. In 1857, Brown visited Concord, lunched at Mrs. Thoreau's, and spoke publicly later in the day. He returned to Concord and spoke again in 1859. Following the raid at Harper's Ferry, Thoreau delivered "A Plea for Captain John Brown" in Concord, Boston, and Worcester. After Brown's execution, his "The Last Days of John Brown" was read at Brown's memorial service on July 4, 1860, in North Elba, New York. Thoreau also helped Francis Jackson Merriam, one of Brown's raiders at Harper's Ferry, escape to Canada.
