Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses that facilitated the escape of enslaved African Americans seeking freedom in the 19th century, primarily between 1800 and 1865. It operated clandestinely, with various individuals, including free blacks, sympathetic whites, and abolitionist groups, providing assistance to fugitives. While many escaped northward, some sought refuge in Mexico or among Native American tribes. Routes were often dangerous, with fugitives relying on the goodwill of strangers for food, shelter, and guidance, as they typically had little knowledge of geography and limited resources. Notable figures, such as Harriet Tubman, emerged as courageous conductors, helping many escapees on their journeys while evading capture themselves. The system became more organized in response to increasing threats from laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, prompting greater collaboration among abolitionists. Despite the risks, the Underground Railroad played a crucial role in the lives of thousands of fleeing slaves, with many of their stories remaining undocumented and unrecognized. The legacy of the Underground Railroad underscores the collective efforts and moral convictions of those who opposed slavery, highlighting a significant chapter in American history.
Underground Railroad
Significance: The Underground Railroad was a loose network of secret routes by which fugitive slaves made their way from the southern slave states north to freedom, often as far as Canada. Parts of the Underground Railroad may have been in place as early as 1786.
By 1850, southern slave owners were claiming enormous loss of slave property to the Underground Railroad, although many believe these claims were exaggerated. It is impossible to know how many slaves made their way to freedom—estimates range from sixty thousand to a hundred thousand between 1800 and 1865.
Many slaves reached freedom without the aid of the Underground Railroad, and many, especially those in the Deep South, did not flee north but went instead to Mexico or found refuge with the Seminole, Cherokee, or other American Indian tribes. However, the majority of fugitive slaves escaped from the border states and fled north. Usually, the most dangerous leg of their journey was reaching a station on the underground line; once there, conductors would pass them from site to site toward safety.
It was almost impossible for a runaway slave to reach freedom successfully without assistance. Most slaves had little or no knowledge of geography and fled with only vague notions of where they were headed; most left with no money and few provisions and had to risk asking strangers along the way for food, shelter, and protection from pursuers. For the most part, persons helping runaways performed impulsive acts of compassion and did not consider themselves to be part of a resistance group. In parts of the country, however, the numbers of fugitives coming through were so great that predetermined escape routes, safe houses, and plans of action were organized. In time, some Underground Railroad lines were highly organized, and at least some routes existed in most of the states between the South and Canada.
The two most frequent escape corridors were from Kentucky and Virginia into Ohio and from there north, and up the Eastern Seaboard through New England. Ohio especially was crisscrossed with routes of escape, as were western Pennsylvania and New York, eastern Indiana, and northwestern Illinois. The Middle Atlantic states and New England also had many well-established routes; lines existed west of Ohio and even, to some degree, in the South. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, organized aid to runaways grew, as the threats to free African Americans as well as fugitive slaves increased and more antislavery sympathizers felt the moral obligation to risk civil disobedience.
Organization
No one knows when or how the name Underground Railroad began, although legend has it that it was coined after a frustrated slavecatcher swore that the fugitives he was pursuing had disappeared as thoroughly and suddenly as if they had found an underground road. As knowledge of the existence of escape routes spread, so did the railroad terminology, with words such as “conductors,” “stations,” “stationkeepers,” and “lines.”
Conductors often used inventive means to transport fugitives safely from station to station. Many were hidden under goods or in secret compartments in wagons. A few, such as Henry “Box” Brown, were actually boxed and shipped by train or boat. At least once, slaves were hidden in carriages forming a fake funeral procession. There were so many routing options along some lines that tracing was difficult. Barns, thickets, attics, spare rooms, woodsheds, smokehouses, and cellars were used as stations. Fugitives often were disguised: A hoe could make a runaway look like a hired-out day laborer; fine clothes could disguise a runaway field hand as a servant of gentlefolk; cross-dressing could keep fugitives from matching descriptions on handbills. Perhaps the most famous escape effected through disguise was that of husband and wife William and Ellen Craft, who, with Ellen disguised as a white Southern gentleman and William as her valet, made it from Georgia to Philadelphia, where the Underground Railroad then transported them to safety. Once at a station, fugitives were given shelter, food, clothing, and sometimes money, as well as help in reaching the next stop.
Quakers—mostly of the Hicksite sect—played a large and early role in maintaining the Underground Railroad; in 1797, George Washington complained of Quakers helping one of his slaves escape. Other sects, such as Covenanters and Wesleyan Methodists, also contributed a number of agents. Particular locations, such as Oberlin College in Ohio, became important centers of activity. Women as well as men played active roles, especially in providing food and clothing to fugitives, and women often organized auxiliaries to support the more visible vigilance and abolitionist committees.
The role played by white antislavery sympathizers, although important, has tended to be overemphasized. In southern states, fellow slaves usually were the source of food and a hiding place for escapees. In border states, free blacks provided the most important help to fugitives, both in all-black settlements and in cities where black abolitionists worked alongside their white counterparts. Many African American churches and vigilance committees extended protection, support, and help in relocation to fugitives who reached the free states.
Whites rarely took the initiative to go south and effect escapes, but a number of former slaves returned to help friends and family flee. The most famous conductor to recruit escapees was the remarkable Harriet Tubman. Having herself escaped from slavery, she made some nineteen daring and successful trips into southern states to bring out groups of slaves, despite the forty-thousand-dollar bounty on her head. She is credited with personally leading more than three hundred slaves to safety, never losing anyone in her charge, and earned the title “the Moses of her people.”
The period of greatest activity for the Underground Railroad was from 1850 to 1860. Among the most active white stationkeepers was Levi Coffin. In thirty-five years of activism in Indiana and Ohio, Coffin helped three thousand fugitive slaves on their way north. Quaker Thomas Garrett of Wilmington, Delaware, aided several thousand fugitives over a forty-year period; he lost all of his property to court fines as a result but refused to cease his work.
Important black members of the Underground Railroad included the Reverend William H. Mitchell of Ohio, who in twelve years provided temporary shelter for thirteen hundred fleeing slaves; Robert Purvis of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; William Whipper of Columbia, Pennsylvania; Henry Highland Garnet of New York; Lewis Hayden of Boston, Massachusetts; Frederick Douglass of Rochester, New York; and William Wells Brown of Buffalo, New York.
However, most of those who hid, fed, transported, and otherwise aided fugitive slaves have remained anonymous. Likewise, records about the fugitives themselves are scarce. Following the Civil War, several prominent activists published memoirs about their Underground Railroad activities that included accounts of some of the slaves they aided. Black stationkeeper William Still of Philadelphia kept notes on almost seven hundred fugitives he helped, providing valuable statistics. His records indicate that 80 percent of runaways were male and that significant numbers of house servants as well as field hands fled. However, the names and profiles of the vast majority of the thousands of men, women, and children who braved the hazards of flight in desperate bids for freedom remain unknown.
Bibliography
Blackett, R. J. M. Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2013. Print.
Buckmaster, Henrietta. Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement. Boston: Beacon, 1941. Print.
Coffin, Levi. Reminiscences of Levi Coffin. New York: Arno, 1968. Print.
Foner, Eric. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. New York: Norton, 2015. Print.
Gara, Larry. The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1961. Print.
Siebert, Wilbur H. The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom. 1898. Mineola: Dover, 2006. Print.
Still, William. The Underground Railroad. 1872. Chicago: Johnson, 1972. Print.