slaves travel the underground railroad

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

The underground railroad.

During the era of slavery, the Underground Railroad was a network of routes, places, and people that helped enslaved people in the American South escape to the North.

Social Studies, U.S. History

Home of Levi Coffin

Historic image of the home of American Quaker and abolitionist Levi Coffin located in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a group of African Americans out front.

Photography by Cincinnati Museum Center

During the era of slavery , the Underground Railroad was a network of routes, places, and people that helped enslaved people in the American South escape to the North. The name “ Underground Railroad ” was used metaphorically, not literally. It was not an actual railroad, but it served the same purpose—it transported people long distances. It also did not run underground, but through homes, barns, churches, and businesses. The people who worked for the Underground Railroad had a passion for justice and drive to end the practice of slavery —a drive so strong that they risked their lives and jeopardized their own freedom to help enslaved people escape from bondage and keep them safe along the route.

According to some estimates, between 1810 and 1850, the Underground Railroad helped to guide one hundred thousand enslaved people to freedom. As the network grew, the railroad metaphor stuck. “Conductors” guided runaway enslaved people from place to place along the routes. The places that sheltered the runaways were referred to as “stations,” and the people who hid the enslaved people were called “station masters.” The fugitives traveling along the routes were called “passengers,” and those who had arrived at the safe houses were called “cargo.”

Contemporary scholarship has shown that most of those who participated in the Underground Railroad largely worked alone, rather than as part of an organized group. There were people from many occupations and income levels, including former enslaved persons . According to historical accounts of the Railroad, conductors often posed as enslaved people and snuck the runaways out of plantations. Due to the danger associated with capture, they conducted much of their activity at night. The conductors and passengers traveled from safe-house to safe-house, often with 16-19 kilometers (10–20 miles) between each stop. Lanterns in the windows welcomed them and promised safety. Patrols seeking to catch enslaved people were frequently hot on their heels.

These images of the Underground Railroad stuck in the minds of the nation, and they captured the hearts of writers, who told suspenseful stories of dark, dangerous passages and dramatic enslaved person   escapes . However, historians who study the Railroad struggle to separate truth from myth . A number of prominent historians who have devoted their life’s work to uncover the truths of the Underground Railroad claim that much of the activity was not in fact hidden, but rather, conducted openly and in broad daylight. Eric Foner is one of these historians. He dug deep into the history of the Railroad and found that though a large network did exist that kept its activities secret, the network became so powerful that it extended the limits of its myth . Even so, the Underground Railroad was at the heart of the abolitionist movement. The Railroad heightened divisions between the North and South, which set the stage for the Civil War .

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History | July/August 2022

South to the Promised Land

Before the Civil War, numerous enslaved people made the treacherous journey to Mexico in a bold quest for freedom that historians are now unearthing

A trail wends through the notoriously inhospitable brush country along the U.S.-Mexico border known as the Nueces Strip.

By Richard Grant

Photographs by Scott Dalton

Diana Cardenas, a high school English teacher from Pharr, Texas, stands in her small family cemetery between the Rio Grande and the new border wall. Stylishly dressed and coiffed, wilting slightly in the heat and humidity, she holds up a photograph of her grandmother. “Her name was Adela Jackson, and we were close,” she says. “She loved to come here, and tell me stories about our family history, and all the runaway slaves we helped and took across the river into Mexico.”

Until recently, the southbound Underground Railroad, as some scholars call it, has been largely overlooked, mainly because it left so few traces in surviving records. No one who escaped slavery by going to Mexico wrote a firsthand account of the experience, as Frederick Douglass and others did about escaping north. Nor were they interviewed by researchers, or recruited by antislavery organizations. And though the journeys of enslaved people to Mexico are of the utmost importance, the scale of the southern migration was more modest, numbering between 3,000 and 10,000 people, compared with an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 who fled north of the Mason-Dixon line.

But in recent years scholars have begun to uncover a wealth of information about the southbound freedom-seekers. For example, they’ve learned that while there was no organized network of assistance, no celebrated “conductors” like Harriet Tubman guiding them to the next safe haven, slaves escaping to Mexico did sometimes receive help along the way.

Diana Cardenas’ great-great-great-grandfather, who died in obscurity, was among the staunchest allies of slaves escaping south. “He was a white man from Alabama named Nathaniel Jackson,” says Cardenas. “He married a slave that he freed, Matilda Hicks, and they came out here in covered wagons in 1857. She already had three children by another man, and she had seven more with Nathaniel.”

Cardenas produces a faded, blurry, copied photograph, a family heirloom, showing a woman she believes is Matilda Hicks, her great-great-great-grandmother, tall and thin and wearing a white dress.

“Nathaniel bought 5,535 acres of land right here by the river and established the Jackson Ranch,” says Cardenas. “There were Black, white and mixed-race people all living together, raising cattle in a place that was very remote, where they could be left alone. The runaways knew they could get help here—food, clothing and work if they wanted it. Nathaniel was a nice, generous, courageous man, a humanitarian. He would cross them into Mexico in boats.”

The history of southbound runaways, preserved in scattered fragments, presents scholars with enormous challenges of research and interpretation. Perhaps no one has done more to advance our understanding than a historian named Alice Baumgartner. In 2012, as a Rhodes scholar studying violence on the U.S.-Mexico border in the early and mid-19th century, she was hunting through state and municipal archives in northern Mexico. She found plenty of documents about cattle rustling and Lipan Apache raids, but she also came across records of a completely unexpected kind of violence—between American slave catchers crossing the Rio Grande and Mexicans who fought against them.

“It really caught my attention, because I didn’t know that enslaved people were escaping into Mexico, and I never would have suspected that Mexican citizens and officials were protecting them,” says Baumgartner, now an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California .

She was particularly struck by the story of Manuel Luis del Fierro of Reynosa, in the state of Tamaulipas, who was startled awake by screaming on the night of August 20, 1850. He threw off the covers, grabbed his rifle and confronted two men in his living room. One was waving a pistol at his wife’s maid, a young Black woman named Mathilde Hennes, who had escaped slavery in Louisiana, made the long, dangerous journey to Mexico, and become a valued member of Del Fierro’s household.

Pointing his rifle at the kidnappers, Del Fierro ordered them to surrender. One got away, but the other—William Cheney of Cheneyville, Louisiana, who claimed Hennes as his property under U.S. law—was arrested by the Reynosa police, imprisoned for nearly a month, and sent home empty-handed.

The incident was not unusual, Baumgartner discovered. She read the correspondence of four councilmen from the Mexican border town of Guerrero, who pursued, shot and killed a slaveholder who had kidnapped a runaway. In 1851, the residents of another village in the state of Coahuila took up arms to stop a slave catcher named Warren Adams from abducting a Black family. Months later, the Mexican Army posted a sizable force and two artillery pieces on the Rio Grande to prevent a group of 200 Texans from crossing the border to seize runaway slaves.

Baumgartner kept uncovering information that surprised and fascinated her. After independence from Spain, in 1821, “Mexico passed these really radical antislavery laws, and Mexicans at all levels of society were serious about enforcing them,” she told me recently. “This was well known by enslaved people on the U.S. side of the border.” Indeed, more than three-quarters of the fugitive slaves caught in Texas between 1837 and 1861, she learned from a database of runaway slave notices, were heading to Mexico.

Baumgartner went on to search 28 archives in three countries—Mexico, the United States and Britain—and wrote the first full-length book about the subject, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War . The book, published in 2020, was lauded for its groundbreaking historical insights and panoramic sweep. “Masterfully researched,” wrote a reviewer for the New York Times . Publishers Weekly called it “an eye-opening and immersive account.” “Black Perspectives,” the digital publication of the African American Intellectual History Society, argued that it made “a convincing case that Mexico shaped the freedom dreams of enslaved people in states like Texas and Louisiana.”

At the heart of Baumgartner’s study were a few simple questions: “Why were enslaved people escaping to Mexico?” she says. “What did they find there? Why were Mexicans helping them?”

Felix Haywood of San Antonio, a former slave interviewed in 1937 for the Federal Writers’ Project, didn't himself try to escape south, but he heard stories about those who did, and he visited Mexico after the Civil War before returning to Texas. “There wasn’t no reason to run up North,” he told the interviewer. “All we had to do was walk, but walk South, and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande. In Mexico you could be free. They didn’t care what color you was—black, white, yellow or blue.”

The earliest examples of slaves escaping south are from the late 17th century. In the Carolinas, enslaved men and women ran away from the rice plantations to Spanish Florida, where they were able to arm themselves against their former enslavers. In 1693 King Charles II of Spain decreed that all fugitive slaves would be free in Florida. In 1733 a caveat was added: To gain their freedom, fugitives had to convert to Catholicism and declare loyalty to the Spanish crown. In 1750 the same promise was extended to the entire Viceroyalty of New Spain, which included all of present-day Mexico and nearly all of the American West, plus Florida.

After the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, the de facto border between the United States and New Spain was the Sabine River, in present-day East Texas. (This border was formalized in 1819.) It’s impossible to say how many enslaved people made it across the Sabine, but we know that slaveholders in Louisiana complained about escapes to New Spain. Thomas Mareite, a French historian at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, has found evidence that 30 slaves from plantations on the Cane River near Natchitoches left for New Spain in October 1804. Nine crossed the Sabine River, and a string of similar escape attempts followed.

In January 1808 a Black man recorded as “Rechar,” presumably Richard, arrived at Trinidad de Salcedo, a small Spanish outpost near present-day Madisonville, Texas. He told his story to the authorities. His family had been split up by enslavers and scattered all over southern Louisiana. Having made his own escape from a plantation in Opelousas, he managed to find and rescue his wife and three of their seven children. He tried, and failed, to rescue the other four, then led his reduced family across more than 100 miles of swampy wilderness and crossed the Sabine River into freedom. (Their fate in Spanish territory is unknown.)

Even though slavery existed in New Spain, American runaways were usually granted asylum by the Spanish authorities, because the American form of slavery was regarded as far more brutal and dehumanizing. In New Spain, for example, slaves were subjects of the Spanish crown, not property, and it was illegal to separate husbands and wives or to impose excessive punishments. Rechar declared that “the harshness of American laws” as well as keeping his family together were the reasons for his escape.

In 1821, after Mexico won its independence, it opened the northern frontier state of Tejas (as Texas was then called) to Anglo American settlers. Many of those settlers brought Black slaves and established American-style cotton plantations in present-day East Texas. This set up a conflict with the Mexican government, which banned the importation of enslaved people in 1824, on the principle of liberty for all.

The Anglo colonists ignored the law or imposed lifetime contracts of indentured servitude on their Black workers. The state of Coahuila y Tejas responded by limiting indenture contracts to ten years, and guaranteeing liberty to the children of slaves, in a so-called “free womb” law. In 1835, the Anglo settlers, bristling at these and other laws they regarded as oppressive, rose up in revolt. “It’s controversial, especially in Texas, but the historical profession is coming to a consensus that slavery was an important part of the Texas Revolution,” says Baumgartner.

In 1836, Texas won independence from Mexico and, now an autonomous republic, enshrined slavery in its constitution. Mexico fully abolished slavery the following year. In 1845, Texas joined the United States as a slave state. Then came the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Defeat forced Mexico to relinquish all or parts of the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

“This was the first time in its history that the U.S. acquired territory where slavery was [previously] abolished by law,” says Baumgartner.

At the same time, Southern politicians attempted to expand slavery by annexing Cuba, where it was firmly entrenched, and by working to overturn the Missouri Compromise, which had prohibited slavery in much of the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. When these and other efforts failed, secession and Civil War followed.

The idea that Mexico’s antislavery laws not only encouraged African American slaves to cross the southern border but also ignited the Texas Revolution and inflamed the conflict between North and South that led to the American Civil War is the essence of Baumgartner’s groundbreaking argument. “It reorders the way we should think and teach about the slavery expansion crisis,” David Blight, the Yale historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 2018’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom , says. “Indeed, it reorders how to think about the huge question of the coming of the American Civil War.”

In 1849, Mexico’s congress decreed that foreign slaves would become free “by the act of stepping on the national territory.” This soon became common knowledge among enslaved people in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and what would later become Oklahoma. They envisioned what historian Mekala Audain calls a “Mexican Canaan” across the Rio Grande—a promised land where they could be free. They made the arduous journey through Texas. They stowed away on boats leaving from Galveston and New Orleans for Tampico and Veracruz. In the 1850s a dozen slaves were reaching Matamoros, Mexico, every month. Two-hundred-seventy arrived in Laredo, in Tamaulipas (now called Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo, Texas) in a single year. American diplomats kept pressuring their Mexican counterparts to sign extradition treaties, which would return runaway slaves to their owners, but Mexico flatly refused—in 1850, 1851, 1853 and 1857.

Audain, an associate professor at the College of New Jersey, is currently finishing a book about the experiences of enslaved African Americans in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. “One distinct aspect of escapes in Texas was navigating the terrain,” she says. “Depending on where they began their escapes, there could be limited shade and water, especially as they traveled south of San Antonio. A lack of trees also limited their abilities to camouflage themselves.”

There were several different routes to Mexico. Slaves escaping from Louisiana tended to go via Nacogdoches to Houston and cross the border to Matamoros. Another route went from the vicinity of Austin to San Antonio and then to Laredo in Tamaulipas or Piedras Negras in Coahuila. Using established roads, or keeping them in sight, made it easier to navigate, but increased the likelihood of confrontation and capture.

Most northbound runaways were on foot and unarmed, but many southbound freedom-seekers, especially from Texas, rode horses and carried guns. “It was a reflection of the culture and the most effective strategy,” says Audain. “They could travel faster, defend themselves and hunt for food.” Escaping on horseback probably also helped to neutralize the much-feared bloodhounds and other slave-hunting dogs; the dogs had no clear human scent to follow and likely couldn’t keep up with horses over long distances.

Kyle Ainsworth, a historian and special collections librarian who runs the Texas Runaway Slave Project at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, has calculated from runaway slave notices that 91 percent of Texas escapees were male, with an average age of 28. “Many women were responsible for raising their children,” says Ainsworth. “It was very difficult for enslaved people to run away with young children, although there are definitely a few examples where they tried.”

Baumgartner has noted the ingenuity many escaping slaves showed. “They forged passes to give the impression they were traveling with the permission of their masters. They disguised themselves as white men, fashioning wigs from horsehair and pitch. They stole horses, firearms, skiffs, dirk knives, fur hats, and in one instance, 12 gold watches and a diamond breast pin.”

Some fugitives were helped by other slaves, free Black people, Mexicans, Germans and other sympathetic white people, but these allies operated independently of one another and risked being tarred, feathered, hanged or shot for helping slaves escape. One former slave who made it to Chihuahua, Mexico, and was later captured, said mail carriers helped him escape, but this appears to be an isolated example.

For the great majority, the journey south was an improvisation, a wayfinding through an unknown and hostile geography. They lived by their wits on a constant knife-edge of danger; for those on foot, the journey could take months. Often pursued by their enslavers, or hunted by slave patrols, with a bounty on their heads that any citizen might attempt to collect, they had to find food and water and contend with the Texas climate—well over 100 degrees in summer and subject to sudden, freezing “blue norther” storms in winter. Native Americans were another threat.

The most dangerous part of the journey was the Nueces Strip—a 100- to 150-mile expanse of remote, thorny, rattlesnake-infested brush country between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. It contained few roads or settlements, which made it hard to navigate and find food, and very little water. There was no slavery this far south in Texas, because the risk of slaves escaping to Mexico was too great. Black people were highly conspicuous and immediately suspected of being fugitives. “The Nueces Strip was also where runaway slaves were most likely to encounter slave catchers, military patrols, Texas Rangers and Indians—all of whom would capture them or worse,” says Ainsworth.

If they reached the Rio Grande near present-day Pharr, Texas, runaways could expect help and kindness from Nathaniel Jackson and his neighbors, but the river ran for more than 1,000 miles along the international border, and most runaways reached it elsewhere. For Audain, the most affecting stories are those that end with drownings in the Rio Grande. “I think of all the effort they put into planning their escapes, walking hundreds of miles across Texas, and managing to avoid kidnappers and patrols,” she says. “They somehow survived these challenges, only for their journeys to end not with freedom, but with death.”

Mareite, the French historian, uses the phrase “conditional freedom” to describe what runaway slaves found in Mexico. Alice Baumgartner compares it to the abridged freedom that runaways found north of the Mason-Dixon line, where the U.S. Constitution, through the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, provided for their capture and return to slavery. In Mexico, federal law guaranteed freedom to runaways, but they were always at risk from North American slave hunters who crossed the border illegally and broke Mexican antislavery laws.

Most runaways arrived in Mexico with little or no Spanish. A few were able to establish themselves as merchants, carpenters and bricklayers in Matamoros and other cities. For the great majority, however, there were two options. They could find work as servants or day laborers on ranches and haciendas. Or they could risk their lives once again by joining military colonies.

These were fortified outposts established by the Mexican government to defend its northeast borderlands from devastating raids for livestock, captives and plunder by Comanches and Lipan Apaches. In return for such military service, according to a law passed by Mexico’s congress in 1846, foreigners, including runaway slaves, would receive land and full citizenship. Historians know little about the experiences of African Americans in these military colonies, with one significant exception.

At a colony in Coahuila were Black Seminoles, descended from free Black people and slaves who had run away from Georgia and the Carolinas and allied themselves with the Seminole Indians in Florida. They had fought with the tribe in the three Seminole Wars against the U.S. Army. When they were finally defeated, the Seminoles and Black Seminoles were forced onto the Creek reservation in Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma, with most arriving by 1842. The Creeks denied the newcomers land and started capturing Black Seminoles and selling them into slavery in Arkansas and Louisiana. By 1849, says Baumgartner, “the Seminoles and their Black allies had had enough.”

The Seminole leader Wild Cat, with the assistance of John Horse, leader of the Black Seminoles, led more than 300 men, women and children, including 84 Black Seminoles, from Indian Territory south to Mexico. In northern Coahuila, the Mexican government granted them a 70,000-acre military colony with work animals, agricultural equipment and financial subsidies. Within months of arriving, Wild Cat went back to Indian Territory and returned with about 40 more Seminole families and most of the remaining Black Seminoles.

Runaway slaves started arriving before the colonists had finished clearing fields and building their wood-frame houses. One man named David Thomas had escaped with his daughter and three grandchildren. In 1850, a group of 17 arrived, asking to join the Black Seminoles. By 1851, there were 356 Black people living at the colony, and three-quarters of them were runaway slaves. At a moment’s notice, all the adult males had to be ready to fight against the Comanches or Apaches, arguably the most formidable Native American warriors on the continent.

In her book, Baumgartner describes an early morning scene at the outset of a military campaign: “bright-kerchiefed heads appeared in the low doorways of the houses; women unhobbled the horses, slipping bits into their mouths. Then the men emerged, a powder horn and a bullet pouch slung across a shoulder, a machete or a horse pistol in hand.”

The Black Seminoles, known as Mascogos in Mexico, had a well-earned reputation as superb trackers and fighters. On foot or on horseback, according to the historian Kenneth Porter, who gathered their oral histories in the 1940s, the stronger men would use muskets as clubs. “They beat down buffalo-hide shields, splintered lance shafts, and rammed the iron-shod stocks into their enemies’ astonished faces.” Others used machetes to hack off spear and lance points, and then decapitate their foes. In a battle known in the oral history as “the big fight,” 30 or 40 Black Seminoles defeated a much larger force of Comanches and Apaches, and much of the fighting was hand-to-hand combat.

Descendants of the Black Seminoles and the runaways who joined them are still living in the town of El Nacimiento de los Negros (literally The Birth of the Blacks) in northeast Coahuila. Every year on June 19 they stage a celebration with dancing and barbecues. The women dress up in long, polka-dot pioneer dresses. The children sing songs in an old African American dialect of English that can be found in Negro spirituals. Only recently, according to Baumgartner, did the villagers learn their tradition is connected to Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. “In Nacimiento, it’s called Día de los Negros or Day of the Blacks,” she says.

In Porter’s unpublished oral histories, which Baumgartner was thrilled to find in an archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, people in El Nacimiento describe cultural traditions that date back to slavery. “Even though they’re in a Catholic country, with a priest posted in their community to make sure they’re good Catholics, they’re still celebrating the marriage ceremony by jumping over the broomstick,” says Baumgartner.

Thanks to Porter, Baumgartner was able to conjure the lives of the Black Seminoles and the runaways in their colony. But she found no detailed source material about other African Americans in Mexico, and has failed to find any other descendants. “Many of them took Spanish names and married into Mexican families,” she says. “And the Mexican government stopped keeping track of anyone’s race in 1821 with official documentation.”

With enslavers, Texas Rangers, bounty hunters and slave catchers all crossing the border to kidnap runaways in Mexico, the last thing Black refugees wanted to do was advertise their presence. They lived as discreetly as possible. “They evaded their enslavers for the same reason they’re evading historians,” says Baumgartner. “It’s hard to get too mad about that.”

A mockingbird calls from a mesquite tree in the graveyard as the sun sets over the Rio Grande. The manicured hand of Diana Cardenas goes back into her folder of photographs and produces a portrait of a handsome, broad-faced Black man in work clothes and a well-worn hat.

Cardenas stares at the photograph, wishing she knew more about this man, who escaped bondage by fleeing south through Texas yet did not take the final step of crossing the river. “I don’t have his name, but my grandmother told me this man stayed here and married into one of the local Hispanic families,” she says. “He took a Hispanic last name and his children grew up speaking Spanish.”

She doesn’t know how many runaway slaves passed through the Jackson Ranch on their way to Mexico, but from her grandmother’s stories she estimates several dozen at least and perhaps a hundred. “Dozens more stayed and married into local families,” she says. “Not everyone wants to admit it, but there’s a lot of African blood around here, and most of it came from the runaway slaves who stayed.”

A few miles downriver, in another small family cemetery, two women tell the story of a white man named John Webber. “He came to Mexican Texas as a single man and settled near Austin in Webber’s Prairie, which later became Webberville,” says Roseann Bacha-Garza, a historian. “He fell in love with his neighbor’s slave, Silvia Hector, and had children with her. He emancipated her in 1834, married her, and purchased the freedom of their children.”

After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passed, Webber moved his family to the lower Rio Grande Valley, and bought 8,856 acres of land in 1853. “Like the Jackson Ranch, it became a stopping place for runaway slaves going to Mexico,” says Sofia Bravo, a direct descendant of Webber and Hector’s. Bacha-Garza adds, “John and Silvia built a ferry landing and licensed a ferry that went across to the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. It was useful for his business—he was a trader—and also for ferrying runaways.”

“I’m very proud of my great-great-grandfather,” says Bravo. “It took guts to marry a Black woman and bring her here. He provided for her and her children, and he didn’t care what race you are.” Glancing around the muddy cemetery at the graves of her ancestors, who include Caucasian Spaniards, African Americans and Indigenous Mexicans, she adds, “I’m the same way. We all fit in the same-size hole when we’re dead.”

*Editor's Note, 7/14/2022: An earlier version of this story identified a photograph held by Diana Cardenas as Matilda Hicks, her great-great-great-grandmother. Other family members believe the photo does not show Hicks. The text and caption have been updated.

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Richard Grant | | READ MORE

Richard Grant is an author and journalist based in Tucson, Arizona. His most recent book is The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi .

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Photographer Scott Dalton, a Texas native, works primarily along the U.S.-Mexico border.

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Notes from the Underground Railroad: How Slaves Found Freedom

Passengers on this “railroad” never forgot their life-or-death journey from bondage.

Arnold Gragston struggled against the current of the Ohio River and his own terror the first night he helped a slave escape to freedom. With a frightened young girl as his passenger, he rowed his boat toward a lighted house on the north side of the river. Gragston, a slave himself in Kentucky, understood all too well the risks he was running. “I didn’t have no idea of ever gettin’ mixed up in any sort of business like that until one special night,” he remembered years later. “I hadn’t even thought about rowing across the river myself.”

Slaves had been making their way north to freedom since the late 18th century. But as the division between slave and free states hardened in the first half of the 19th century, abolitionists and their sympathizers developed a more methodical approach to assisting runaways. By the early 1840s, this network of safe houses, escape routes and “conductors” became known as the “Underground Railroad.” Consequently, a cottage industry of bounty hunters chasing escaped slaves sprang to life as lines of the railroad operated across the North—from the big cities of the East to the little farming towns of the Midwest. Above all else, the system depended on the courage and resourcefulness of African Americans who knew better than anyone the pain of slavery and the dangers involved in trying to escape.

In a 1937 interview with the Federal Writers’ Project, Gragston recalled that his introduction to the Underground Railroad had occurred only a day before his hazardous trek, when he was visiting a nearby house. The elderly woman who lived there approached him with an extraordinary request: “She had a real pretty girl there who wanted to go across the river, and would I take her?”

The dangers, as Gragston well knew, were great. His master, a local Know-Nothing politician named Jack Tabb, alternated between benevolence and brutality in the treatment of his slaves. Gragston remembered that Tabb designated one slave to teach others how to read, write and do basic math. “But sometimes when he would send for us and [if] we would be a long time comin’, he would ask us where we had been. If we told him we had been learnin’ to read, he would near beat the daylights out of us—after getting somebody to teach us.”

Gragston suspected such arbitrary displays of cruelty were meant to impress his master’s white neighbors and considered Tabb “a pretty good man. He used to beat us, sure; but not nearly so much as others did, some of his own kin people, even.”

Tabb seemed especially fond of Gragston and “let me go all about,” but Gragston realized what would happen if he were caught helping a slave escape to freedom—Tabb would probably shoot him or whip him with a rawhide strap. “But then I saw the girl, and she was such a pretty little thing, brown-skinned and kinda rosy, and lookin’ as scared as I was feelin’,” he said. Her plaintive countenance won out, and “it wasn’t long before I was listenin’ to the old woman tell me when to take her and where to leave her on the other side.”

While agreeing to make the perilous journey, Gragston insisted on delaying until the next night. The following day, images of what Tabb might do wrestled in Gragston’s mind with the memory of the sad-looking fugitive. But when the time came, Gragston resolved to proceed. “Me and Mr. Tabb lost, and as soon as [dusk] settled that night, I was at the old lady’s house.

“I don’t know how I ever rowed the boat across the river,” Gragston remembered. “The current was strong and I was trembling. I couldn’t see a thing there in the dark, but I felt that girl’s eyes.”

Gragston was certain the effort would end badly. He assumed his destination would be like his home in Kentucky, filled “with slaves and masters, overseers and rawhides.” Even so, he continued to row toward the “tall light” the old woman had told him to look for. “I don’t know whether it seemed like a long time or a short time,” he recalled. “I know it was a long time, rowing there in the cold and worryin’.” When he reached the other side, two men suddenly appeared and grabbed Gragston’s passenger—and his sense of dread escalated into horror. “I started tremblin’ all over again, and prayin’,” he said. “Then one of the men took my arm and I just felt down inside of me that the Lord had got ready for me.” To Gragston’s astonishment and relief, however, the man simply asked Gragston if he was hungry. “If he hadn’t been holding me, I think I would have fell backward into the river.”

Gragston had arrived at the Underground Railroad station in Brown County, Ohio, operated by abolitionist John Rankin. A Presbyterian minister, Rankin published an anti-slavery tract in 1826 and later founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Rankin and his neighbors in Ripley provided shelter and safety for slaves fleeing bondage. Over the years, they helped thousands of slaves find their way to freedom—and Gragston, by his own estimate, assisted “way more than a hundred” and possibly as many as 300.

He eventually made three to four river crossings a month, sometimes “with two or three people, sometimes a whole boatload.” Gragston remembered the journeys more vividly than the men and women he took to freedom. “What did my passengers look like? I can’t tell you any more about it than you can, and you weren’t there,” he told his interviewer. “After that first girl—no, I never did see her again—I never saw my passengers.” Gragston said he would meet runaways in the moonless night or in a darkened house. “The only way I knew who they were was to ask them, ‘what you say?’ And they would answer, ‘ Menare .’” Gragston believed the word came from the Bible but was unsure of its origin or meaning. Never­theless, it served its purpose. “I only know that it was the password I used, and all of them that I took over told it to me before I took them.”

The dangers increased as Gragston continued his work. After returning to Kentucky one night from a river crossing with 12 fugitives, he realized he had been discovered. The time had come for Gragston and his wife to make the journey themsleves. “It looked like we had to go almost to China to get across that river,” he remembered. “But finally, I pulled up by the lighthouse, and went on to my freedom—just a few months before all of the slaves got theirs.”

The work of the Underground Railroad involved a network of white abolitionists, dedicated slaves like Gragston and free African Americans such as William Still of Philadelphia. The youngest of 18 children, Still was born in 1821, moved to Philadelphia in the mid-1840s and went to work for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society as a mail clerk and janitor. He rose to prominence in the city’s burgeoning abolitionist movement and served as chairman of the General Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia. Still was closely involved in the planning, coordinating and communicating required to keep the Underground Railroad active in the mid-Atlantic region. He became one of the most prominent African Americans involved in the long campaign to shelter and protect runaways.

In The Underground Rail Road , a remarkable book published in 1872, Still recounted the stories of escaped slaves whose experiences were characterized by courage, resourcefulness, pain at forced partings from family members and, above all, a desperate longing for freedom. For Still, aiding runaway slaves—and helping to keep families intact—was a deeply personal calling. Decades earlier, his parents had escaped slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. William’s father, Levin, managed to buy his freedom after declaring as a young man that “I will die before I submit to the yoke.”

William’s mother, Sydney, remained in bondage, but she fled with her four children to Greenwich, N.J., only to be seized by slave-hunters. Sydney and her family were returned to Maryland, but she escaped a second time to New Jersey. She changed her name to Charity to avoid detection and rejoined her husband, but their reunion was tarnished by the knowledge that she was forced to leave two boys behind. Her angry former owner promptly sold them to an Alabama slaveholder. William Still would eventually be united with one of his enslaved brothers, Peter, who escaped to freedom in the North—a miraculous event that after the war inspired William to compile his history, hoping it would promote similar reunions.

The work of the Underground Railroad became the focal point of pro- and anti-slavery agitation after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Part of that year’s grand legislative compromise aimed at halting the slide toward civil war, the law required federal marshals to capture escaped slaves in Northern free states and denied jury trials to anyone imprisoned under the act. Abolitionists and supporters of slavery—each for their own reasons—tended to exaggerate the extent of the railroad’s operations, historian James McPherson observes, but there was no denying its effectiveness. As the decade progressed, the Fugitive Slave Act gave the work of the Underground Railroad new urgency.

Perhaps no one embodied the hunger for freedom more completely than John Henry Hill. A father and “young man of steady habits,” the 6-foot, 25-year-old carpenter was, in Still’s words, “an ardent lover of Liberty” who dramatically demonstrated his passion on January 1, 1853. After recovering from the shock of being told by his owner that he was to be sold at auction in Richmond, Hill arrived at the site of the public sale, where he mounted a desperate struggle to escape. Employing fists, feet and a knife, he turned away four or five would-be captors and bolted from the auction house. He hid from his baffled pursuers in the kitchen of a nearby merchant until he decided he wanted to go to Petersburg, Va., where his free wife and two children lived.

He stayed in Petersburg as long as he dared, leaving only when informed of a plot to capture him. Hill returned to his kitchen hideout in Richmond before learning that Still’s Vigilance Committee had arranged—at the considerable cost of $125—for him to have a private room on a steamship leaving Norfolk for Philadelphia. Four days after departing Richmond on foot, he arrived in Norfolk and boarded ship—more than nine months after escaping from the auction. “My Conductor was very much Excited,” Hill later wrote, “but I felt as Composed as I do at this moment, for I had started…that morning for Liberty or for Death providing myself with a Brace of Pistels.”

On October 4, Hill wrote Still to inform him that he had arrived safely in Toronto and found work. But other matters preoccupied him. “Mr. Still, I have been looking and looking for my friends for several days, but have not seen nor heard of them. I hope and trust in the Lord Almighty that all things are well with them. My dear sir I could feel so much better sattisfied if I could hear from my wife.”

But the Christmas season of 1853 brought good news. “It affords me a good deel of Pleasure to say that my wife and the Children have arrived safe in this City,” Hill wrote on December 29. Although she lost all her money in transit—$35—the family reunion proved deeply moving. “We saw each other once again after so long, an Abstance, you may know what sort of metting it was, joyful times of corst.”

During the next six years, Hill frequently wrote Still, reflecting on his experiences in Canada, the situation in the United States—and sometimes passing on sad family news. On September 14, 1854, Hill wrote of the death of his young son, Louis Henry, and his wife’s heartache at the boy’s passing. In another letter, Hill fretted about the fate of his uncle, Hezekiah, who went into hiding after his escape and ultimately fled to freedom after 13 months. Hill’s letters are replete with concern for escaped slaves and the volunteer “captains” of the Underground Railroad who risked imprisonment or death to assist runaways. Still acknowledged Hill’s spelling lapses but praised his correspondence as exemplifying the “strong love and attachment” freed slaves felt for relatives still in bondage.

Despite enormous difficulties, some families managed to escape to freedom intact.

Ann Maria Jackson, trapped in slavery in Delaware, made up her mind to flee north with her seven children when she learned alarming news of her owner’s plans. “This Fall he said he was going to take four of my oldest children and two other servants to Vicksburg,” she confided to Still. “I just happened to hear of this news in time. My master was wanting to keep me in the dark about taking them, for fear that something might happen.”

Those fears were well-founded. Upon learning of his planned departure for Mississippi, quick-thinking Jackson gathered her children and headed for Pennsylvania. The presence of slave-hunting spies along the state line complicated the family’s escape, but on November 21 a volunteer reported to Still that Jackson and her children, ranging in age from 3 to 16, were spotted across the state line in Chester County. From Pennsylvania, the family continued north into Canada. The 40 or so years Jackson had spent in slavery were at an end.

“I am happy to inform you that Mrs. Jackson and her interesting family of seven children arrived safe and in good health and spirits at my house in St. Catharines, on Saturday evening last,” Hiram Wilson wrote to Still from Canada on November 30. “With sincere pleasure I provided for them comfortable quarters till this morning, when they left for Toronto.”

Caroline Hammond’s family faced different challenges. Born in 1844, Hammond lived on the Anne Arundel County, Md., plantation of Thomas Davidson. Hammond’s mother was a house slave and her father, George Berry, “a free colored man of Annapolis.”

Davidson, she remembered, entertained on a lavish scale, and her mother was in charge of the meals. “Mrs. Davidson’s dishes were considered the finest, and to receive an invitation from the Davidsons meant that you would enjoy Maryland’s finest terrapin and chicken besides the best wine and champagne on the market.” Thomas Davidson, Hammond recalled, treated his slaves “with every consideration he could, with the exception of freeing them.”

Mrs. Davidson, however, was a different story. She “was hard on all the slaves, whenever she had the opportunity, driving them at full speed when working, giving different food of a coarser grade and not much of it.” Her hostility would soon evolve into something more sinister.

Hammond’s father had arranged with Thomas Davidson to buy his family’s freedom for $700 over the course of three years. Working as a carpenter, Berry made periodic partial payments to Thomas Davidson and was within $40 of completing the transaction when the slaveowner died in a hunting accident. Mrs. Davidson assumed control of the farm and the slaves, Hammond remembered—and refused to complete the transaction Berry had arranged with her late husband. As a result, “mother and I were to remain in slavery.”

The resourceful Berry, however, was undeterred. Hammond recalled that her father bribed the Anne Arundel sheriff for permits allowing him to travel to Baltimore with his wife and child. “On arriving in Baltimore, mother, father and I went to a white family on Ross Street—now Druid Hill Avenue, where we were sheltered by the occupants, who were ardent supporters of the Underground Railroad.”

The family’s escape had not gone unnoticed. Hammond remembered that $50 rewards were offered for their capture—one by Mrs. Davidson and one by the Anne Arundel sheriff, perhaps to protect himself from criticism for the role he played in aiding their escape in the first place. To flee Maryland, Hammond and her family clambered into “a large covered wagon” operated by a Mr. Coleman, who delivered merchandise to the towns between Baltimore and Hanover, Pa.

“Mother and father and I were concealed in a large wagon drawn by six horses,” Hammond recalled. “On our way to Pennsylvania we never alighted on the ground in any community or close to any settlement, fearful of being apprehended by people who were always looking for rewards.”

Once they were in Pennsylvania, life for Caroline and her family got much easier. Her mother and father settled in Scranton, worked for the same household and earned $27.50 a month. Hammond attended school at a Quaker mission.

When the war ended, her family returned to Baltimore. Hammond completed the seventh grade and, just like her mother, became a cook.

As she recounted her experiences as a slave in a 1938 interview with the Federal Writers’ Project, Hammond looked back on a life of 94 years with justified pride and satisfaction.

“I can see well, have an excellent appetite, but my grandchildren will let me eat only certain things that they say the doctor ordered that I should eat. On Christmas Day 49 children and grandchildren and some great-grandchildren gave me a Christmas dinner and $100 for Christmas,” she declared. “I am happy with all the comforts of a poor person not dependent on anyone else for tomorrow.”

Not surprisingly, freedom produced the same bliss and relief for a number of Underground Railroad passengers.

Hill’s correspondence with Still is suffused with the escaped slave’s profound joy in his new life. Even as he mourned the loss of his son, Hill reflected on his contentment. “It is true that I have to work very hard for comfort,” he acknowledged in a letter to Still in 1854, but freedom more than compensated for his grief and hardship.

“I am Happy, Happy.”

Robert B. Mitchell is the author of Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver .  

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The underground railroad.

• Diane Miller Diane Miller National Park Service Northeast Region, National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.974
• Published online: 19 October 2022

Africans and their descendants enslaved in the western hemisphere resisted their status in several ways. One of the most consequential methods was self-liberation. While many date the Underground Railroad as starting in the 1830s, when railroad terminology became common, enslaved people began escaping from the earliest colonial period. Allies assisted in journeys to freedom, but the Underground Railroad is centered around the enslaved people who resisted their status and asserted their humanity. Fugitives exhibited creativity, determination, courage, and fortitude in their bids for freedom. Together with their allies—white, Black, and Native American—they represented a grassroots resistance movement in which people united across racial, gender, religious, and class lines in hopes of promoting social change. While some participation was serendipitous and fleeting, the Underground Railroad operated through local and regional networks built on trusted circles of extended families and faith communities. These networks ebbed and flowed over time and space. At its root, the Underground Railroad was both a migration story and a resistance movement. African Americans were key participants in this work as self-liberators and as operators helping others to freedom. Their quest for freedom extended to all parts of what became the United States and internationally to Canada, Mexico, Caribbean nations, and beyond.

• Underground Railroad
• African American
• self-liberation
• Native American

Freedom Seeking in the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

All of the European colonies established in North America allowed slavery, though the racialized system of African slavery took almost a century to evolve. To thrive in the Americas, colonizing powers needed to secure a labor force. Indentured servants and enslaved indigenous peoples proved to be a short-term solution. Increasingly Africans, both free and enslaved, became integral to the development of the colonies. Colonial powers all adopted slave codes, as early as the 16th and 17th centuries , to control the Black population and ensure a reliable labor force. A 1662 Virginia law, for example, declared that children born to Black women “shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” 1 These laws limited Black rights and the paths to freedom. While a free Black population existed since the colonial era, by the 18th century most Africans and their descendants in what is now the United States were subject to hereditary enslavement as chattel. Slavery and the legal infrastructure that supported it were designed to dehumanize the enslaved. Through their resilience, enslaved Africans resisted this status from the beginning.

In 1526 , Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón brought several hundred Spanish and a large number of enslaved Africans from Hispaniola to settle near Sapelo Sound in Georgia. Disease and dissent doomed the effort. Emboldened by a mutiny among the Spanish, the enslaved Africans burned the compound while the indigenous Guale attacked the colony. Indeed, the first group of enslaved Africans brought to North America became the first to self-liberate. Settling among the Guale they became an early maroon community, forecasting a pattern of Native and African cooperation. 2 Future Spanish settlement in Florida, however, successfully established slavery. Spanish slave codes allowed for legal protections, church membership, and manumission. The Catholic Church provided sacraments of marriage and baptism; concerned for the souls of their enslaved members, the church discouraged breaking up enslaved families.

British slave codes, however, reduced the enslaved to chattel—movable personal property—and regulated them with harsh codes. Manumission was discouraged. As British planters developed rice cultivation in the Carolinas they imported skilled Africans, who soon learned the differences between the British and Spanish systems. Africans enslaved on the sea islands of the Carolina coast escaped south into Spanish Florida. As early as 1688 , the governor of South Carolina sent an envoy to St. Augustine to negotiate the return of fugitives. 3 In 1738 , Governor Don Manuel de Montiano enforced royal edicts of 1693 and 1733 that granted unconditional freedom to enslaved people escaping from the British southeast. In 1738 , a group of formerly enslaved and free people of color established the legally sanctioned town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose or Fort Mose, two miles north of St. Augustine. 4

Tobacco, the staple crop in the Chesapeake region, also required intensive labor performed by Africans, motivating resistance and escapes. Frustrated governors of Virginia and Maryland sought to negotiate with the Shawnees to return the runaways. Virginia governor Spotswood offered bounties of guns and blankets. Maryland’s governor sent delegations to the Shawnees to negotiate the return of fugitive slaves, offering silk stockings and woolen coats. 5 In October 1722 , the Maryland General Assembly discussed the matter of Indians being allowed to harbor runaway slaves, “as the Shuannoes at this Time do and protect them under the pretence of their having set such Slaves free. This Gentlemen we look upon as a Matter of Great Importance.” 6 At the confluence of the north and south branches of the Potomac River, near what is now Cumberland, Maryland, by the 1690s a band of Shawnees established a village, said to be led by King Opessa. The village was deserted before 1738 , when it was already shown on maps as “Shawno Ind. Fields deserted.” Through at least the 1720s, Shawnees living at King Opessa’s Town and neighboring sites offered refuge to fugitive slaves who had fled from their Virginia and Maryland masters. Repeated attempts failed to return any runaways.

In the vast territory that was added to the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, a power struggle among European nations led to control changing from France ( 1682 ) to Spain ( 1762 ), and back to France ( 1800 ) again before being sold in 1803 . Enslaved Africans played an important role in European efforts to establish a productive colony and control the region. The brutal and precarious conditions on the frontier gave rise to a fluid environment in which the enslaved population navigated. Plantations carved out of the wilderness were surrounded by swamps and waterways, proximately located to Indian settlements. Africans resisted their status by running away, often with assistance from nearby Native Americans. The cypress swamps provided a refuge for permanent maroon settlements comprised of escaped Africans. Extensive networks of secret passageways linked these maroon communities with plantations, and the free and enslaved populations regularly communicated with each other. At various times, this fluidity facilitated conspiracies and revolts. 7

The number of slaves who found refuge with Native American tribes during the colonial period must have been substantial, given the number of treaties that included clauses for their return. 8 In seven of eight treaties negotiated with Native American tribes from 1784 to 1786 , clauses were introduced for the return of “negroes and other property.” 9 By the time of the American Revolution, enslaved Africans had been self-liberating for 250 years. The Enlightenment ideals of freedom and liberty percolated in the colonies, giving rise to revolutionary fervor and the Declaration of Independence. This irony was understood by enslaved people, some of whom made their own break for freedom.

Societal disruption and the presence of competing loyalist and patriot factions opened opportunities for self-emancipation; some enslaved people exploited these opportunities to self-liberate. Military service was one of the means by which enslaved people attained freedom. Significantly, both the British and continental armies offered emancipation in return for service. Unable to field a sufficient number of white soldiers, for example, the Rhode Island Assembly in 1778 voted that every enslaved man who enlisted would be immediately discharged from service and absolutely free. 10 Eventually, every state except South Carolina and Georgia enlisted Blacks. In 1775 , Lord Dunsmore, Royal Governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation offering freedom to any enslaved person who fought on the side of the British. Not only did this bring hundreds of soldiers to the British army, it also deprived the patriots of their labor. When the British army withdrew in 1783 , thousands of Black loyalists went with them. The British evacuated about three thousand to Nova Scotia, recording their names and descriptions in the Book of Negroes . Ultimately, most Black loyalists went to Britain, and some settled in the Caribbean.

The Freedom Seeker’s Journey

Of all the horrors of slavery, the cruelest was its effect on the spirit of the enslaved. Frederick Douglass, who escaped in 1838 and became a leading antislavery orator, described a period of his enslavement when he became a field hand hired to a notorious “slave breaker.” In his account, Douglass acknowledged that, after a few months, “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished . . . the dark night of slavery closed in upon me.” 11 In a letter to Douglass published as a preface to the autobiography, abolitionist Wendell Phillips lauded him for describing the wretchedness of slavery by the “cruel and blighting death which gathers over his soul” rather than by the hunger, toil, and punishment he endured. 12 Freedom seekers had to overcome the soul-destroying nature of enslavement to self-liberate; they often also had to leave behind family and everyone they knew and loved. While a number of factors could precipitate self-liberation, it was the compelling need for freedom and self-determination that sustained freedom seekers. When asked by Underground Railroad activist Calvin Fairbank why he wanted his freedom, for example, Lewis Hayden replied “Because I’m a man.” 13

While most freedom seekers were young, single men, women and groups also made the journey. For women, the decision was complicated when they had young children. Harriet Tubman tried several times to rescue her sister, Rachel, who would not leave without her children. To her lasting regret, Tubman was never able to liberate Rachel, who died while enslaved. Another enslaved mother, Margaret Garner, attempted to flee with her husband and four of their children after two had been sold away. They made it across the Ohio River from Kentucky but were soon tracked down. Rather than see her children returned to a life of slavery, Margaret used a butcher knife to kill her two-year-old daughter. She tried to kill the other children but did not succeed. The Garners were returned to their enslaver, disquieting Ohio abolitionists, who did not want the precedent set allowing Kentucky enslavers to reclaim freedom seekers. Margaret’s desperate act illuminated the inhumanity of slavery.

Yet another mother, Ann Maria Jackson, succeeded in escaping from Delaware with seven of her children after another two were sold away. The grief of losing two of his children caused their father, a free Black man named John Jackson, to lose his sanity. Ann Maria, driven by a need to have autonomy to raise her children without fear of separation, decided that escaping was her best option. Bringing children on such a journey could easily compromise the safety of the group if they cried out or could not keep up. Jackson succeeded in escaping to Philadelphia as illustrated in Figure 1 . The consequences of being caught included being tortured, killed, maimed, or sold away.

Figure 1. Ann Maria Jackson arrives with her children at the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee.

On their journeys, freedom seekers had to be courageous, creative, adaptable, and resourceful. Most had to navigate their way to an indeterminate destination. Lucy Delaney recalled her mother using the North Star to guide her escape from Missouri. 14 John Brown used his knowledge of science to navigate using the moss found growing on trees. Concluding that the sun had dried the moss on the south side of the trees, he went in the direction “towards which the long, green moss pointed.” 15 Josiah Henson, shown in Figure 2 , described escaping slavery in 1830 with his wife and children. Thinking that they could find food from people along the way, Henson did not bring a supply. They found the Scioto trail but did not realize it cut through wilderness. Henson’s wife fainted from hunger but revived from the little morsel of food he had remaining. Their second day in the wilderness, the family came upon some Native Americans, who provided bountiful food and a comfortable place to sleep. 16 Knowing who to trust was one of the most important skills for freedom seekers on their journeys.

Figure 2. Josiah Henson, formerly enslaved author, abolitionist, and minister.

Free Black Communities and Vigilance Committees

The revolutionary fervor that compelled the United States to independence did not extend to the enslaved. While northern states enacted laws in the revolutionary period allowing for emancipation, in most states it took decades for slavery to actually end. Vermont abolished slavery by a constitutional amendment in 1777 , while slavery was ended in Massachusetts as a result of a legal decision. In New York and New Jersey, the largest slaveholding states in the north, however, slavery persisted until the mid- 19th century . 17 Nevertheless, a free Black population developed in the north, particularly in cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. These communities became key to the success of the Underground Railroad in the east. Freedom seekers could find refuge and employment amongst these populations, which were also a source of shelter, food, clothing, medical attention, legal aid, money, and transportation.

Vigilance committees formed among free Black communities and their white allies played a critical role in protecting freedom seekers. Beyond providing material and financial assistance, vigilance committees took direct action to rescue captured fugitives and kidnapped free Blacks who had been caught by slave catchers, empowered by the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1793 and 1850 . David Ruggles established the New York Vigilant Committee in 1835 . Initially focused on protecting free Blacks, particularly children, from kidnapping, the Committee evolved to provide assistance to fugitives. In 1838 , Ruggles notably sheltered Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Bailey) when he arrived in New York alone and without a plan. Ruggles summoned his fiancée, Anna Murray, to New York, where she married Douglass in Ruggles’s parlor. Ruggles gave them five dollars and sent them to another Black abolitionist in New Bedford. 18

Figure 3. Portrait of William Still

Inspired by Ruggles’s example, Robert Purvis convinced his associates to follow suit in 1837 when they formed the Vigilant Association of Philadelphia. It reorganized several times, with its last iteration formed in 1852 in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 . William Still (Figure 3 ) was appointed chair of the acting committee, which would assist individual cases, raise funds, and record their activities. 19 Still became the leader of the Underground Railroad network in Philadelphia. In 1872 , Still published The Underground Rail Road (Figure 4 ) based on the records of his work with the Vigilance Committee. Still’s work documents the stories of hundreds of freedom seekers, including Harriet Tubman and his long-lost brother, Peter Still. Further, he provided sketches of the network of white and Black abolitionists with whom he worked: Quakers Thomas Garrett and John Hunn; abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, J. Miller McKim, and Lewis Tappan; and African American activists William Whipper, Samuel Burris, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Harriet Tubman. In Boston, African American activist William Cooper Nell declared that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and that they who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.” 20 The Boston Vigilance Committee posted broadsides (Figure 5 ) warning the community to remain alert to slave catchers. Lewis Hayden, who had previously escaped slavery in Kentucky and was one of the most active members of the Vigilance Committee, demonstrated this sentiment in October 1850 in one of the first tests of the new Fugitive Slave Law. William and Ellen Craft had escaped enslavement in Georgia using an elaborate disguise, with Ellen posing as a white male slaveholder traveling by train and ship with her enslaved servant, William. The ruse succeeded, and they made their way to Boston, where Hayden provided shelter. Slave catchers tracked the couple to Hayden’s house seeking their return. William Craft described the scene: “Lewis Hayden and I had a keg of gunpowder under his house in Phillips Street, with a fuse attached ready to light it should any attempt be made to capture us.” 21 After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 , the Crafts emigrated to England to ensure their freedom

Figure 4. The Underground Railroad.

Figure 5. Fugitive Slave Law Warning Poster, 1851, Boston African American Historic Site.

Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

As the number of slave escapes escalated over the 1830s and 1840s, sectional tensions heightened. Southern slaveholding states pushed for enforcement of fugitive slave laws, while free states passed personal liberty laws to protect freedom seekers who had reached their borders. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 provided a mechanism to enforce the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution and return fugitives to their enslavers, though they may have been caught in free states. The law denied alleged slaves access to fair trials, due process of law, or the right to prove their freedom in court, in violation of several articles of the Bill of Rights. It also subverted the Constitution’s protection of the right to habeas corpus, which ensures that people arrested will be brought to court for a fair trial. In 1842 , the Supreme Court ruled in Prigg v Pennsylvania that states could refuse to allow their officials to enforce the fugitive slave law. A number of northern states based their refusal to assist in rendition of freedom seekers on this ruling. Used as a tool in the antislavery arsenal, Prigg v Pennsylvania led to calls for a new fugitive slave law. 22

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 supplemented the 1793 act by a series of amendments. Federal officials were appointed in each county to enforce the law by issuing arrest warrants and appointing deputies and posse comitatus for capturing fugitives. It required law enforcement officers to assist recapturing freedom seekers and punished anyone found assisting escapes. It also denied appeals once a certificate to remove a fugitive from a free state had been issued. Not even the Supreme Court could issue a writ of habeas corpus once a justice of the peace had issued a certificate of removal after an informal hearing. 23 Alleged fugitives were prohibited from testifying on their own behalf, and jury trials were forbidden. Additionally, if the magistrate ruled in favor of the enslaver, they received a ten-dollar fee, rather than the five-dollar fee they received if they decided for the freedom seeker. Anyone interfering in a rendition faced a thousand-dollar fine, as did federal marshals who failed to safeguard a fugitive. 24 This law inspired a spate of personal liberty laws in northern states designed to protect their Black populations from kidnapping and freedom seekers from rendition back to slavery. Many freedom seekers who had settled in the north made a subsequent journey to Canada, because they were no longer safe in the United States.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 set the stage for a series of dramatic cases and confrontations. On February 15, 1851 , Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped to Boston from Norfolk, was arrested by a federal marshal and taken to the courthouse. He became the first freedom seeker in New England captured under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 . 25 A group of Black men led by Lewis Hayden (Figure 6 ) rushed the courtroom and seized Minkins, shepherding him to safety. The authorities failed to pursue the rescue party. Minkins was hidden in the attic of a widow in the African American community of Beacon Hill, before Hayden got him out of town, and Minkins was able to make his way to safety in Quebec. In September 1851 , Maryland enslaver Edward Gorsuch attempted to seize a group of freedom seekers near Christiana, Pennsylvania. A predawn raiding party at the home of freedom seeker William Parker resulted in Gorsuch’s death and a severe wound to his son. Consequently, the federal government indicted forty-one men, including thirty-six Blacks and five whites, for treason. The trial took place at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, with Supreme Court Justice Robert Grier presiding and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens leading the defense. Castner Hanway, who refused to join the posse or to prevent the attack on the slave catchers, was the first tried. Justice Grier charged the jury that refusing to aid in a rendition did not constitute treason. The jury found Hanway not guilty, and the other indictments were eventually dropped. The Christiana Rebellion was not the most violent episode related to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 , but it garnered national attention due to the high-profile participants. 26

Figure 6. Lewis Hayden (1811–1889).

Another early attempt to enforce the 1850 law occurred in Syracuse in October 1851 , when a fugitive known as Jerry was arrested and placed in custody of US Deputy Marshal Henry Allen. A large crowd gathered at the courthouse attempting to rescue Jerry, who escaped to the streets but was recaptured. Organized by Gerrit Smith, Rev. Samuel J. May, and two Black ministers, Rev. Jermain Loguen and Rev. Samuel Ringgold Ward, a crowd attacked the jail where Jerry was held and succeeded in rescuing him and taking him to Canada. To further embarrass federal officials, deputy marshal Allen was indicted and tried for kidnapping. While he was not convicted, the trial provided a forum for abolitionists to attack slavery and the 1850 law. 27

Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law continued to stoke sectional tensions. One of the most famous and dramatic renditions occurred in 1854 when Anthony Burns was caught in Boston. This time, despite mass meetings and a failed rescue attempt where abolitionists broke down the courthouse door, the federal government returned to Burns slavery. Federal troops were deployed to guard the courthouse and prevent another rescue. They escorted Burns to Long Wharf while fifty thousand people lined the streets and abolitionists strung a coffin over the street with the word “Liberty” inscribed on it. The spectacle of federal troops escorting a freedom seeker back to slavery inspired many citizens to become abolitionists. 28 Massachusetts subsequently passed some of the strongest personal liberty laws in the country. Boston abolitionists ultimately raised funds to purchase Burns’s freedom.

Free states chafed at the federal enforcement of the fugitive slave law. The 1859 capture of Joshua Glover in Wisconsin led to a jurisdictional confrontation between state and federal authority. Glover had escaped slavery in Missouri and settled near Racine. His enslaver obtained a warrant under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Glover was jailed in Milwaukee due to concerns about a potential rescue in Racine. As might be expected, a large crowd gathered in protest, and a hundred men were sent to Milwaukee. They succeeded in rescuing Glover from jail, and he made it safely to Canada, where he died in 1888 . Sherman Booth, a newspaper editor who helped organize the protest, was arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act for aiding and abetting an escape. Federal prosecution of Booth led to defiance by Wisconsin courts over the issue of state habeas corpus jurisdiction versus federal judicial authority. The Wisconsin Supreme Court even defied the US Supreme Court by asking their clerk to make no return to a writ issued by the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger Taney issued a unanimous opinion in the companion cases Abelman v Booth and United States v Booth that a state could not issue a writ of habeas corpus to remove a person from federal custody, establishing the supremacy of federal jurisdiction. 29 The assertion of federal over states’ rights incensed Wisconsin legislators and citizens, leading to discussion about secession from the union over federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law.

Geography of the Underground Railroad

Stereotypically, fugitives on the Underground Railroad sought freedom in Canada. While that is certainly true for many, the Underground Railroad was much more dynamic and complex. Self-liberators went in any direction where they could achieve freedom. Before the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 increased the risk of re-enslavement, many freedom seekers settled in states such as Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts, where slavery had been abolished during the late 1700s or early 1800s. When the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 proclaimed the territory north and west of the Ohio River to be free from slavery, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin became destinations for freedom seekers from the trans-Appalachian south.

Despite the prohibition of slavery, however, Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance provided that any fugitive escaping to the territory may be lawfully reclaimed and returned to their enslaver. 30 Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois shared boundaries with slave states, and many settlers in the southern parts of these states had migrated from the Upper South. Significantly, restrictive Black Codes discouraged settlement of African Americans in these states. In Ohio, for example, an 1804 law required free Blacks to obtain a certificate of freedom from the court for a fee. An 1807 law further stipulated that free Blacks had to find two people who would guarantee a surety of five hundred dollars for their good behavior.

Nevertheless, the Ohio River became one of the most important borders between slavery and freedom. People enslaved in Kentucky began making their way to freedom across the river. Ohio became a busy thoroughfare, with Lake Erie and Detroit offering quick routes to Canada, a common destination after slavery was abolished there in 1833 . Blacks established communities in remote areas throughout the state and supported their enslaved brethren in their bids for freedom. These small communities became critical centers of Underground Railroad activities: “Such localities were fearless in the defense of their visitors and sometimes induced fugitives to settle among them.” 31 Along with white and Native American allies, they formed an interracial freedom movement, risking their lives in defense of freedom seekers. 32

Black communities scattered across the Midwest, settling on marginal land, near waterways and natural features that afforded shelter. Often these communities were located in proximity to Quaker and other abolitionist strongholds. Extended families and church communities formed the cornerstone of these communities, which offered safe havens for fugitives and sometimes a place to settle. 33 Congregations of Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and African Methodist Episcopalians helped organize these efforts. In the sometimes deadly and often contested flights to freedom, safety could be found by support from a group of people working in concert. Blacks worked with each other and some trusted white abolitionists. Whites who had left the South over disagreements about slavery such as Presbyterian Reverend John Rankin and Quaker Levi Coffin became engaged in the work of actively assisting freedom seekers. In Ripley, on the Ohio River, for example, Rankin, who built his home on the hill overlooking the town and the river (Figure 7 ), worked with formerly enslaved John Parker, whose forays into Kentucky to liberate slaves and assist with river crossings earned a price on his head. Anti-slavery sentiment ran high in Ohio where Oberlin College, founded in 1833 to train teachers and Christian leaders for the western territories, became an incubator for Underground Railroad activists. Oberlin had a reputation for progressive causes and social justice, admitting women since its beginning and African Americans since 1835 . It became an active force in the Underground Railroad in Ohio and a number of the Underground Railroad activists in Iowa and Kansas shared a connection to Oberlin. In April 1835 , abolitionist leaders in Ohio such as Asa Mahan, John Rankin, Theodore Dwight Weld, and Charles Finney, many associated with Oberlin College, established the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in Zanesville. The Ohio association based their organization on the model of the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 . By 1836 , the Ohio society had 120 chapters in every part of the state and numbered about 10,000 members. A spider web of Underground Railroad routes crossed the state leading to Cleveland, Sandusky and other towns along Lake Erie where freedom seekers departed to Canada. Despite this rapid growth, however, the Ohio abolitionists and Underground Railroad activists faced opposition from those who did not share their goals of immediate emancipation and civil rights for African Americans. Mob violence was directed against sympathetic newspaper publisher James Birney, Reverend John Rankin, and the Anti-Slavery society’s meetings.

Figure 7. The John Rankin House on Liberty Hill in Ripley, Ohio.

Further downriver in the river town of Madison, Indiana, the African American neighborhood known as Georgetown developed as early as 1820 . Before the modern lock system was created on the Ohio River, it was shallow and narrow at this point, with several creeks draining into the river from the east end of town. These features made Madison a prime location for river crossings. Georgetown, where activists George DeBaptiste, William Anderson, and Elijah Anderson lived, became a central site for the Underground Railroad, helping hundreds of enslaved African Americans to freedom. In nearby Eagle Hollow a mile from town, African American Chapman Harris’s home on high ground above the Ohio River was another crossing point. Harris was instrumental in forming a communication network to abolitionists in the Lancaster area, near Madison. In 1848 , activists from the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Society established Eleutherian College to educate students regardless of race or gender. The leaders of this group of Baptists, Lyman Hoyt, Samuel Tibbets, and James Nelson, were active with the Underground Railroad, providing safe houses and couriers. George DeBaptiste referred to this group as the “New England Settlement.”

Further north, Quaker Levi Coffin, known by some as the “president” of the Underground Railroad, received freedom seekers at his home in Newport (now Fountain City). The Quaker community worked together to provide assistance, with Levi’s wife Catherine providing food and lodging for fugitives and hosting women from the community to sew clothing to supply them. The Coffins arrived from North Carolina in 1826 and discovered that an established line of the Underground Railroad ran through the area, passing through the Greenville settlement of wealthy African American farmers such as James Clemens and Thornton Alexander. The African American farmers and Quakers including Levi Coffin established the Union Literary Institute to provide education for Black and white children. The Greenville community and Union Literary Institute were deeply involved with the Underground Railroad. By 1847 , Levi Coffin moved to Cincinnati to open a wholesale free produce store that only sold goods not grown by enslaved labor. The Coffins continued their Underground Railroad work in Ohio.

The Underground Railroad landscape in Indiana witnessed additional adjustments during the 1840s. Southeast Indiana proved to be contested territory, as were all borderlands between slave and free territories. Slave catchers such as Wright Ray operated in the Madison-Lancaster area. He was the sheriff of Jefferson County for many years and “was known all over Kentucky and was always applied to when a slave got away and by this means he obtained (many) rewards.” 34 In the 1840s there were several attacks on free Blacks in Madison. Around 1849 , responding to the loss of enslaved laborers, white Kentuckians attacked Georgetown, driving several Underground Railroad and community leaders to move away. George DeBaptiste relocated to Detroit, where he continued his Underground Railroad activities. Elijah Anderson moved to Lawrenceburg on the Ohio River west of Cincinnati. He continued his repeated trips to Kentucky and accompanied hundreds of freedom seekers to Canada. In December 1856 , he was captured on a steamboat, found guilty of violating Kentucky law, and sentenced to eight years in prison. The day that he was to be released, March 4, 1861 , he was found dead in his cell.

The Underground Railroad Moves West

As the nation moved westward, the question of slavery became more divisive. The Missouri Compromise ostensibly settled the question by admitting Missouri as a slave state but prohibiting slavery north of latitude 36° 30´. Even before the Kansas-Nebraska Act created new territories allowing the status of slavery to be determined by popular sovereignty, Indian agents and missionaries were introducing slavery to the Ohio tribes that had been removed there, in violation of the Missouri Compromise. The hallmarks of the Underground Railroad and Bleeding Kansas that marked the region following the Kansas-Nebraska Act had their origins while it was still known as Indian Territory.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 set the stage for the violent confrontation over the expansion of slavery in the territory known as Bleeding Kansas, as whites poured into the newly opened Indian Territory. The Kansas-Nebraska Act ended the Missouri Compromise and formally opened Kansas to the possibility of slavery. Under the doctrine of popular sovereignty, local laws would either establish slavery or prohibit it. Waves of emigrants flowed into Kansas from the East, claiming land and supporting the free state cause. From Boston came ardent abolitionists of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, who founded Lawrence, the most active Underground Railroad community in the territory. American Missionary Association emigrants from New York founded Osawatomie, another active abolitionist and Underground Railroad stronghold. 35

Proslavery advocates poured across the border from Missouri, if not always to settle, then at least to take part in the electoral process. Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina sponsored southern emigrants. Alabama appropriated $25,000 to help its emigrants, though mostly they did not enjoy the same level of support as their northern counterparts. 36 Many southerners came to Kansas without slaves or means, looking for the opportunity to make their fortune. Some of these settlers found slave catching and kidnapping to be lucrative pursuits. The largest number of proslavery settlers came in the first two years and brought their slaves, intending to found new homes. In the territorial census of 1855 , although southerners were in the majority, enslaved laborers made up only 2.2 percent of the population (186 of 8,525 people). The average slaveholding was small—2.3, compared to 6.1 in Missouri’s Little Dixie or 7.7 in the Upper South. 37 Some estimates show that the slave population more than doubled by 1857 , and the average size of slaveholdings likely increased. 38

The Underground Railroad in Kansas threatened the ability of slave owners in the region to control their property, however, and contributed to the ultimate success of the Free State cause. Indeed, abolitionists caused such disruption that slaveholders hesitated to bring their property to Kansas or even western Missouri. When the partisan strife broke around them, many removed their slaves to a safe distance or sold them, lest they lose them to the Underground Railroad. 39 Underground Railroad activity in the Kansas-Missouri border region was both more deliberate and more violent than found in more established areas. Activists, even Quakers, made trips into Missouri to bring slaves off plantations. Abolitionists adopted an established route, the Lane Trail, to send fugitives on the way to Canada.

In the turmoil of Bleeding Kansas, antislavery advocates reconsidered the nonviolent ideals of Garrisonian abolitionists. Northern women, some of them Quaker pacifists, picked up Sharpe’s rifles and threatened men at gunpoint. Northern men, often noted as law-abiding and industrious, justified betraying territorial laws and exchanging gunfire with proslavery men in response to perceived southern excesses. 40 Against this backdrop, Kansas settlers struggled over the enslaved status of African Americans in their midst. Slaveholders concentrated along the Missouri River, though they brought few enslaved people to Kansas. Most Missouri slaves lived in the “Little Dixie” region of western Missouri, where hemp production occupied the slave labor force. Among the antislavery settlers, some came to Kansas from Underground Railroad communities to the east. Others came with abstract convictions about slavery that were tested once they reached the front lines in Kansas. Congregationalist minister Richard Cordley grew up near Ann Arbor, Michigan. He recalled his indignation when the Fugitive Slave Law passed in 1850 while he was a student at Andover Theological Seminary. At the time, Cordley declared his intention to shelter a fugitive if ever confronted with the opportunity. Once in Kansas, Cordley observed, “It is easy to be brave a thousand miles away. But now I must face the question at short range. . . . But I felt there was only one thing to do.” 41 Cordley told his friend Monteith that he would help shelter Lizzie, a young woman who was seeking her escape to Canada. Lizzie stayed with Reverend Cordley’s family for several months before Monteith made plans for the next part of her journey.

The Lane Trail, a route established for Free State emigrants to Kansas, became the primary Underground Railroad route out of Kansas. Proslavery forces controlled the Missouri River west of St. Louis and had virtually closed the river route to Free State passengers and freight by 1856 . Missourians turned back the Star of the West and the Sultan in June, forcing northerners to seek an overland route through free territory. 42 Running west from Chicago, the Lane Trail crossed Iowa, the southeast corner of Nebraska, and south to Topeka, thereby skirting Missouri. Lane marked the route with stone cairns, “Lane Chimneys,” built on elevations such that they could be seen across the plains. Dr. Ira Blanchard, who operated an Underground Railroad station in Civil Bend, Iowa, proposed to John Brown that the Lane Trail was the most practical route for transporting fugitives in Kansas to freedom in Canada. Brown brought Blanchard to Topeka in 1856 to arrange the network of supporters at the trailhead.

In response to the threat of slave catchers, abolitionists in Kansas sheltered fugitives in their homes until arrangements could be made to take a group north with an armed escort. Underground Railroad conductors required money, food, arms, transportation, and clothing to assist freedom seekers to safety. As in the borderlands further east where communities of supporters were essential to the success of the Underground Railroad, in Kansas the networks of collaboration were also crucial. John Armstrong, John Ritchie, Jacob Willits, Daniel Sheridan, and others pledged that they would safely conduct all fugitives arriving in Topeka to Blanchard’s stop in Civil Bend, Iowa. 43 From there, the Lane Trail crossed the free state of Iowa headed toward Chicago. Freedom seekers often continued to Detroit and across into Windsor, Canada.

The Topeka men inaugurated the route in February 1857 when activist John Armstrong helped Ann Clarke, a woman enslaved by government officials who lived near Lecompton, to escape. John Brown forwarded another three slaves to Armstrong, in the charge of a man named Mills. Mills and Armstrong took the fugitives in a covered wagon north on the Lane Trail. The group passed through Kansas without incident, but border ruffians stopped the wagon outside Nebraska City. Escaping detection as they hid in the false bottom of the wagon, the group pushed on. John Kagi, one of Brown’s inner circle, had gone ahead of this first group and met them at Nebraska City, where his father and sister lived. Kagi helped Armstrong at the river crossing, where they persuaded the ferryman at gunpoint to risk the ice laden river. After the ice pushed them half a mile downriver, the group made the far shore and continued without incident to Civil Bend. The first trip thus successfully completed, Brown considered the Underground Railroad through Kansas firmly established. 44

This trip demonstrated a tactic further developed by Kansas Underground Railroad conductors. As fugitives found their way to Lawrence or Topeka, abolitionists sheltered them until an armed escort could convey them to Iowa. Groups of a dozen or more freedom seekers with several armed protectors comprised such convoys. Dr. John Doy, John Brown, Reverend John Stewart, Charles Leonhardt, and even the Quaker “Iowa boys” who settled in Pardee organized trips of this type. In January 1859 , Doy wrote to Massachusetts abolitionist Samuel May, requesting financial assistance and describing the Kansas operation. Doy waited with seventeen fugitives for an armed escort to Iowa. In a previous trip, he had appointed conductors every fifteen miles to secure a protected route and a well-organized society with officers. 45

From the diatribes of proslavery leaders, the enslaved population of Missouri knew that Lawrence was a place to trust, and therefore it became a destination. Slave hunters also knew Lawrence as a place to find fugitives, or failing that, to kidnap free Blacks. Abolitionist James Abbott observed that kidnapping free Blacks was more lucrative to slave catchers, because the proceeds from selling them were generally more than the reward for returning a fugitive. 46 After several episodes with kidnappers, the African Americans of Lawrence appealed to the white citizens for protection. Together they made a plan for the Blacks to emigrate to Iowa, where they could live without fear. Dr. Doy agreed to escort a group of thirteen people to Holton, Kansas. 47

While African Americans in Lawrence made preparations to avoid kidnapping into slavery, John Brown was busy liberating a group of a dozen enslaved Missourians. With a party of about a dozen, Brown went into Missouri on the night of December 20, 1858 . A second party of about eight, led by Aaron D. Stevens, also conducted a raid that night. Brown liberated an enslaved family, taking personal property belonging to the estate to help finance the long journey ahead. Brown reasoned that the property, having been bought with enslaved labor, rightly belonged to them. The party led by Stevens succeeded in getting an enslaved woman whom they had sought but, in so doing, killed her owner Mr. Cruise. 48 Several safe houses in the Osawatomie area offered shelter to the fugitives for about a month once they had safely arrived in Kansas. Brown was anxious to depart, because he had heard rumors of threats to either kill him or hand him over to the Missourians. With his party of twelve fugitives, Brown and his men proceeded to Lawrence, where he arranged finances and provisions before proceeding to Topeka.

Plans originally called for Doy’s party of Lawrence refugees to travel with John Brown’s group of Missourians. An armed guard of ten men was to accompany both groups and was deemed sufficient to secure their safety. Circumstances prevented the groups from traveling together, and Brown overruled Doy, taking the entire escort. Brown argued that his group of fugitives, having been taken from Missouri in open defiance, faced a greater risk than Doy’s group of free Blacks. Determined to proceed, Doy risked the twenty-mile trip from Lawrence to Oskaloosa unprotected. 49 About twelve miles out from Lawrence, a party of twenty armed and mounted border ruffians ambushed Doy’s party, taking them to Weston, Missouri. Slave traders sold the thirteen African Americans in the party into slavery, wives and children being separated from their husbands and fathers. The Missouri court found Dr. Doy guilty and sentenced him to five years of hard labor in the state penitentiary. While awaiting an appeal to the state Supreme Court, Doy’s Kansas allies launched a daring rescue in July 1859 . The “Immortal Ten” bluffed their way into the jail at St. Joseph, to which the court had transferred Doy. They walked out with him, making their escape across the Missouri River in boats they had hidden on the banks for that purpose. 50

As Doy languished in jail, Brown’s group made their way up the Lane Trail. Stopped by proslavery forces, the group had to send to Topeka for assistance. The Topeka men traveled with the party to Tabor, Iowa, for additional protection. Indeed, arriving in Civil Bend, Iowa, Brown learned that a posse had preceded him and searched the place thoroughly. Brown and his party with twelve fugitives continued through Detroit to Canada, from where he continued his preparations for the raid at Harpers Ferry.

Border regions between slave and free territories presented opportunities for the enslaved and challenges for their enslavers. James Abbott, who led the Doy rescue party, observed that slaves learned where to find freedom from the slaveholders themselves. The masters came to understand the danger of holding people as property so close to a free state and began to move the slaves farther south. Facing the threat of sale, many slaves in the region took action to free themselves. 51 In strategic terms, if Kansas became a free state, slavery in Missouri was seriously threatened. Bordered on three sides by free states (Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois), Missouri would be isolated, and runaway slaves would be more likely. By the time that Kansas was opened to settlement by US citizens, the nationwide debate over slavery had grown acrimonious. Moreover, Underground Railroad activity in Kanas was marked by more violence than its eastern counterparts.

The Southern Underground Railroad

For Africans and their descendants enslaved in the Carolinas, Georgia, and along the Gulf Coast, the path to freedom often went south to Florida. While some allied with the Spanish in St. Augustine, many others escaped to the wilderness. Most of these fugitives were Gullah people who escaped from the rice growing sea islands along the coast; they retained much of their African language and culture and developed rice growing settlements in Florida. Native tribes also being pushed into Florida at the time allied with these maroon communities. They formed a multiethnic, biracial alliance. In return for paying tribute to the Seminoles, the Black communities gained sanctuary among the Indians and were able to live relatively independently. Most importantly, the groups were military allies. The Black Seminoles functioned as warriors, spies, interpreters, and intermediaries. As proslavery factions gained control in Florida, Seminoles and the Black allies headed further down the Florida peninsula. From Cape Florida on the southern tip of Key Biscayne, Black Seminoles made their way to the British Bahamas. Influenced by their African members, the Seminoles resisted removal and fought the US army in two wars that lasted until 1842 . They felt that their freedom and families were jeopardized if they acquiesced to removal. 52 To bring the war to a speedier conclusion, General Thomas Jesup began offering freedom to Blacks if they would surrender and agree to removal. 53 When they arrived in Indian Territory, confusion about the status of the Black Seminoles complicated intertribal relations for years.

Though they had been part of the Creek Confederation, in Oklahoma the Seminole feared that they would lose their independence to the larger tribe should they move into the area of the Creek nation. The fate of the Black Seminoles was a key issue, as by this time the Creek had adopted a more stringent form of slavery. The Blacks would not be free, as many claimed to be according to General Jesup’s agreement. And, if enslaved, Black Seminoles would not be able to live separately in their own communities. To exacerbate the situation, some Creeks claimed ownership of almost all of the Black Seminoles, since they had been required to pay for them when they joined the tribe as runaways from Georgia and South Carolina. 54 Led by John Horse, the Black Seminoles struggled to maintain their independence. In 1848 Attorney General John Mason ruled that General Jesup had no authority to free the Black Seminoles, and that they would have to revert to slaves under the Creek system as chattel. 55 After ten years of freedom, the prospect was untenable. Allied with Wild Cat, a Seminole leader and friend, John Horse and many of the Black Seminoles left Indian Territory for Mexico, where they established Nacimiento de los Negros near Coahuila.

In the fluid frontier of western Louisiana and eastern Texas, enslaved people sought refuge in bayous. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 , Spanish-controlled Texas became a destination and portions of El Camino Real de las Tejas a route to freedom. Rather than a single road, the “King’s Highway” was a series of paths that intercepted at various points along a main thoroughfare that extended from Nachitoches, Louisiana, to Monclova, Mexico, over 2,400 miles. 56 In 1711 Nachitoches, Louisiana, was founded to serve the French military as a trading post and block Spanish settlement. It played a significant trading role during the French and American periods. El Camino Real, leading from Nachitoches westward, was a primary route used for trade—legal and illegal. Enslaved people escaped to freedom through this pathway. An initial destination was the Spanish fort Los Adaes that was constructed to prevent French expansion. Some fugitives stayed at the fort and worked for government officials. Others continued westward for the Spanish interior regions such as San Antonio and northern Mexico. Las Adaes continued as a place of safety until it closed in 1774 . 57

In 1804 a group of people enslaved on several plantations in Nachitoches parish escaped westward. Within several weeks, the group was caught and returned to Nachitoches. Two white Spanish men were apprehended with eight fugitives. The entire territory of Louisiana was in alarm as the Haitian revolution had occurred shortly before this escape. Not only did they have to contend with potential slave insurrections, they were also alarmed about Spanish complicity. While Fort Adaes had closed, freedom seekers looked to Nagadoches, Texas, where Spanish policy prohibited the return of fugitives. 58

As the cotton south pushed westward into Texas, Mexico became a destination for fugitives. Slavery was completely outlawed in Mexico in 1837 . Knowing this, some enslaved people made the arduous journey south. Without the abolitionist networks that existed in the east, freedom seekers from Louisiana and Texas received little assistance. Court records and runaway ads from Texas newspapers attest to the determination of more than 2,500 fugitives to gain their freedom. 59

Despite entering the United States as a free state through the Compromise of 1850 , enslaved laborers were brought to California. This was especially noticeable in the gold fields. The legal status of the enslaved was arbitrated through court cases, freedom claims, imprisonment, and rescues. California was a destination for some freedom seekers, particularly those who came there on whaling ships from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Though African Americans were ostensibly free, they struggled to achieve equal rights. A fugitive slave law was passed in 1852 protecting the right of slaveholders to bring enslaved laborers to work in California. In 1855 African Americans held the First Colored Convention, mainly concerned with the right to testify in court in cases where white men were involved, an important issue with fugitive slave cases. The 1857 Archy Lee case tested whether Lee, who escaped when his enslaver returned to Mississippi, was free because California was a free state. Maintaining that Lee’s enslaver was not a resident of California, the State Supreme Court maintained Lee’s enslaved status. The US District Court overturned this ruling, but the state legislature passed new restrictive laws in response.

Civil War and Contraband

The Underground Railroad continued through the Civil War. When the war began, Lincoln resisted freeing fugitives for fear of antagonizing border states that had remained in the Union though they still allowed slavery. Abolitionist army officers in the field, however, made contradictory orders, such as General Frémont, whose proclamation effectively freed people enslaved in Missouri, and General Hunter, who likewise issued a similar order covering Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. In May 1861 General Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe, Hampton Roads, Virginia devised a more acceptable plan. Refusing to return three freedom seekers, Butler declared that they were being used to wage war against the Union. Following this logic, Congress issued Confiscation Acts in 1861 and 1862 , stating that if slaves are property and are owned by a person in active rebellion to the United States, the military had the right to seize them. They were described as “contraband of war.”

The Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863 , only freed people enslaved in areas that had seceded from the union. As the Union army gained control of Confederate territory, enslaved people escaped to their lines in droves. Contraband camps sprung up across the south with several hundred thousand refuges. Many of the men joined the Union Army. All told, about two hundred thousand men—contraband, free Blacks, and former freedom seekers, some returned from Canada—fought with the Union army for the freedom of their people. The Thirteenth Amendment, which passed Congress on January 31, 1865 , was ratified on December 6, 1865 , abolishing slavery in the United States and formally ending the necessity for the Underground Railroad.

Discussion of the Literature

Traditionally, the Underground Railroad has been understood as an organized effort by white religious groups, often Quakers, to aid helpless, enslaved African Americans. Historians typically date its beginning to the 1830s. Northern abolitionists were the heroes of the story—benevolent protectors of the African American slave—while southerners were vilified. Following the Civil War, it became fashionable for abolitionists to publish reminiscences about their Underground Railroad exploits. 60 Notable publications in this period included The Reminiscences of Levi Coffin and The Underground Rail Road by William Still. Both Coffin and Still portrayed the Underground Railroad based on their personal involvement, and their publications reflected their realities. Coffin, a white Quaker from Indiana and Ohio nicknamed “President of the Underground Railroad,” focused on his assistance to freedom seekers. 61 Coffin placed the white abolitionists squarely in the center of the Underground Railroad and signified a structured, organized operation.

William Still, in contrast, placed the fugitive slave at the center of the story in The Underground Rail Road . Still was working at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia when he heard his long-lost brother seeking information about his parents. He resolved to record the details of the fugitive slaves that he interviewed through his work as secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee to help reunite other families. Still hid his diaries rather than destroy them after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 . In 1872 , at the request of the Society, he published his book based on these notes.

The first scholarly effort to examine the Underground Railroad was undertaken by Wilbur Siebert, an Ohio State University professor working with his students. Beginning in the 1890s, Siebert and his students collected a vast array of correspondence, interviews, manuscripts, student papers, maps, photographs, and other materials related to the Underground Railroad, drawn from informants who had participated in or witnessed the events. From this material, Siebert created detailed maps of Underground Railroad routes and lists of participants. He published two books, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom and Mysteries of Ohio’s Underground Railroads . 62 His collection of research materials is at the Ohio Historical Society and available online. While Siebert’s work is not definitive, it remains one of the most systematic and largest studies of the Underground Railroad ever conducted. Siebert’s informants were mainly white, leading to significant gaps in his understanding and portrayal of the Underground Railroad.

By the mid- 20th century , scholars began dismissing accounts of Underground Railroad activities as largely myth and hyperbole. Since much of what had been written relied on the testimony of participants and their descendants, critics characterized it as self-aggrandizing or the product of faulty memories. The Underground Railroad, common wisdom held, was illegal and secret and so therefore could not be known. However, court cases related to enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act contain information, sometimes with detailed accounts. Civil claims for losses of enslaved property are another source. Government actions such as treaties and legislative reports contain information. Pension records of men who served in the US Colored Troops often contain accounts of their escapes from slavery. Many Underground Railroad incidents were covered in local newspapers. Some participants operated within a network of extended family and church connections—the people they knew best and could trust the most. Letters and diaries still exist and are often in the possession of descendants. For this reason, family history and genealogy are often the most useful tools for exploring Underground Railroad activities.

Larry Gara, in his seminal 1961 work The Liberty Line , argued that much of the depiction of the Underground Railroad should be classified as folklore, rather than history. Gara astutely credited fugitive slaves themselves with agency in effecting their escapes. He also emphasized the role of the African American community, both slave and free, in supporting fugitives. Gara took issue, however, with portrayals of the Underground Railroad as organized. He concluded that there was not much support for the existence of a well-developed network, as the abolition movement was too fractured for such organization. Most abolitionists preferred to focus on legal means of securing freedom for the enslaved or buying freedom for fugitives. 63

Gara’s work seemed to close the discussion on this topic. Few scholars addressed their attention to the Underground Railroad in the decades following The Liberty Line . Among descendants and in the communities where this history occurred, however, the memory of the Underground Railroad endured. Charles Blockson, whose great-grandfather James escaped from Seaford, Delaware, recalled listening to his grandfather tell the story of his father’s escape from slavery. 64 Discovering a copy of William Still’s book, Blockson found the story of his great grandfather, who had recounted his journey to Still. Thus inspired, Blockson devoted years to studying the Underground Railroad and visiting historic sites around the country. National Geographic commissioned him to write an article on the topic, and the resulting 1984 cover story reintroduced the public to the inspirational story of the Underground Railroad. Undue focus on assistance provided by white abolitionists, Blockson observed, “tended to make the people whom the Railroad was designed to aid—the fugitive slaves—seem either invisible or passive and helpless without aid from others.” 65

This broader understanding of the Underground Railroad has informed the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom (NTF), a program established by Congress following a study conducted under the guidance of a federal Advisory Committee chaired by Charles Blockson. As communities have documented their sites, stories, and heroes through this program, the database of verified Underground Railroad sites across the country is growing and expanding the map of the Underground Railroad (Figure 8 ). These documented stories reveal local and regional networks operating within trusted circles of extended families and faith communities. These networks ebbed and flowed over time and space. With the passage of the Network to Freedom Act and the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, renewed interest in the Underground Railroad resulted in a resurgence of scholarly and popular interest. In 2004 David Blight edited Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory , in association with the Freedom Center, which particularly explored public memory of the Underground Railroad. 66 New studies of the Underground Railroad tend to be regionally, biographically, or thematically focused. The Ohio-Kentucky borderland has received much scholarly attention. Keith Griffler’s Front Lines of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley and Cheryl LaRoche’s Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance both focus on the important role of the African American community in the north to the freedom movement. 67 James Blaine Hudson examined freedom seekers escaping from Kentucky in Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in the Kentucky Borderland . 68

Figure 8. Routes of the Underground Railroad.

Harriet Tubman has been the subject of several biographies including by Kate Larson, Bound for the Promised Land ; Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom ; Jean Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and Stories ; and Lois Horton, Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom: A Brief History with Documents . 69 Nikki Taylor explored the burden of slavery on women in Driven toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio . 70 Frederick Douglass was the subject of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography by David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom . 71

Several studies have explored maroonage, where enslaved people self-liberated and lived outside the control of enslavers and plantations. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, in Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation , emphasize the importance of temporary escapes within the south but also explore settlements of freedom seekers. 72 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall examined maroonage and cultural creation in Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century , demonstrating that this form of resistance develops under a variety of slavery regimes. 73 Sylviane Diouf delivers a comprehensive examination of how freedom seekers survived in maroon communities found throughout the South in Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroon . 74

Primary Sources

While the Underground Railroad is a story of international scope and significance, it was a grassroots movement comprised of thousands of individual stories. There were organized networks of operatives but no centralized control. These networks can be studied through records of vigilance committees or papers of high-profile participants. But understanding the full scope of the Underground Railroad requires investigating its history at the local or regional level. The operations of the Underground Railroad often were not recorded in sources that historians have traditionally privileged, such as government documents, correspondence, and newspapers that reside in national collections. Many of the documents that do exist are located in local libraries or historical societies or with the families of descendants. The National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program, working with communities around the country, has recognized seven hundred historic sites, research facilities, and educational programs with documented ties to the Underground Railroad. An interactive map of these listings is available online, and the applications supporting the listings are available upon request. Completed by local researchers and genealogists, these applications include citations to resources that would be difficult to discover from more centralized research. Among these listings are dozens of historical societies, local libraries, and state archives that have records for researching the Underground Railroad with finding aids.

The story of the Underground Railroad lived on in the memory of families and communities across the country, and thus oral traditions are often an important tool for uncovering Underground Railroad history. Skeptics dismiss oral testimony as unreliable and self-serving; that can be true. Carefully analyzed and weighed along with other evidence, however, oral traditions are a useful tool. They can be analyzed in a similar fashion to written sources. Many Underground Railroad oral traditions are merely community memories widely circulated with few specific details and unknown origin. Some, however, have a genealogy that can be traced to the originator as a participant in, or investigator or witness of, the events. They have been passed primarily through vertical transmission from one generation to the next, often in a very deliberate and almost ritualistic fashion. These surviving oral accounts have preserved their integrity, as evidenced by accuracy, completeness, and retention of the originator’s values. While there may be inaccuracies, typically they have an element of truth and specific details that can be sorted out and corroborated through other evidence. This is the starting point for further investigation.

Building a case for Underground Railroad involvement starts with creating a profile of the individuals or groups involved. For example, some families today may claim an Underground Railroad heritage, though further investigation reveals their ancestors to have been slave owners. While this inconsistency may not preclude Underground Railroad involvement, it makes it less likely. More often, though, specific oral traditions are supported by evidence of abolitionism, specific connections to other known Underground Railroad operatives, or membership in churches of abolitionist Christian denominations. These associations can be documented through genealogical research, census records, letters to family members or associates, journal entries, newspaper accounts of events, court records of fugitive slave cases, membership in antislavery societies, signing antislavery petitions, and similar sources. A preponderance of consistent evidence can support information from oral traditions or help interpret veiled references in written documents.

Some significant primary source collections do exist for documenting the Underground Railroad. The explosion of databases and digitized records is facilitating new research possibilities for the Underground Railroad. Slave narratives are available online, and many recount journeys to freedom. Wilbur Siebert’s research materials are available from Ohio Memory . William Still’s surviving records and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society records are available from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania . Boston Vigilance Committee records are available in Account Book of Francis Jackson, Treasurer, the Vigilance Committee of Boston . Several state and university archives projects have digitized pertinent records and made them available online. Databases for runaway slave ads are available for different parts of the country and states such as North Carolina, Texas, and Maryland. The Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal has links to many of these resources. Freedom on the Move is an online crowd-sourced project dedicated to creating a database of runaway ads of fugitives from slavery in North America. Because churches and family relationships were significant factors in the Underground Railroad, church and genealogical resources should not be overlooked.

Links to Digital Materials

• National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom .
• Boston: An Underground Railroad Hub .
• Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal .
• Wilbur Siebert Collection, Ohio Memory .
• Digital Library on American Slavery .
• Legacy of Slavery in Maryland .
• Kansas Memory, Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861 .
• Texas Runaway Slave Project .
• Freedom on the Move .
• Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers .
• American State Papers .
• Quaker History Resources, Swarthmore .
• Quaker Archives at Hege Library at Guilford College .
• Boston Public Library Anti-Slavery Collection .
• Account Book of Francis Jackson, Treasurer, the Vigilance Committee of Boston .
• Slave Narratives
• North American Slave Narratives .
• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938 .

Vigilance Committees

• Historical Society of Pennsylvania .
• Pennsylvania Abolition Society records .
• Journal C of Station No., 2, William Still, 1852–1857 .

Further Reading

• Berlin, Ira . Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998.
• Blight, David , ed. Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory . Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004.
• Bordewich, Fergus . Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America . New York: Amistad, 2005.
• Diouf, Sylviane A. Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of American Maroons . New York: New York University Press, 2016.
• Foner, Eric . Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad . New York: W. W. Norton, 2015.
• Franklin, John Hope , and Loren Schweninger . Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation . New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Gara, Larry . The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad . 1961. Reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
• Griffler, Keith P. Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
• Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo . Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
• Hudson III, James Blaine . Encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
• Landers, Jane . Black Society in Spanish Florida . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
• LaRoche, Cheryl Janifer . Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
• Pargas, Damian Alan , ed. Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Smardz Frost, Karolyn , and Veta Smith Tucker , eds. A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland . Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016.

1. William Waller Henning, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 , vol. 2 (New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), 170.

2. Jane Landers, “Slavery in the Lower South,” OAH Magazine of History 17 (2003): 23.

3. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 239.

4. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 28–29 .

5. William B. Marye, “‘Patowmeck above Ye Inhabitants’: A Commentary on the Subject of an Old Map, Part Two,” Maryland Historical Magazine 30, no. 1906 (n.d.), 126–133.

6. Clayton Colman Hall, Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly of Maryland, October 1720–October 1723 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1914), 431.

7. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992) .

8. Gene Allen Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 27.

9. Marion Gleason McDougall, Fugitive Slaves (1619–1865) (Boston: Ginn, 1891), 105.

10. Rhode Island General Assembly, “Act Creating the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, Also Known as the ‘Black Regiment,’ 1778,” 1778, Rhode Island State Archives.

11. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself , ed. Anchor Books (Boston: Anti-Slavery Society, 1845), 66.

12. Douglass, Narrative , xxii.

13. Calvin Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank during Slavery Times: How He “Fought the Good Fight” to Prepare “The Way” (Chicago: R.R. McCabe, 1890), 46.

14. Lucy A. Delaney, From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom (St. Louis, MO: J. T. Smith, ), 22.

15. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown; A Fugitive Slave, Now in England , ed. Louis Alexis Chamerovzow (London: British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1855), 73.

16. Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849), 52–54.

17. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 228 .

18. Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 1–4 .

19. William Still, The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes, and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Author; Together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders, and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisers, of the Road (Philadelphia, PA: Porter & Coates, 1872), 611–612.

20. William Cooper Nell, “Meeting of the Colored Citizens of Boston,” in William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings 1832–1874 , ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 2002), 270.

21. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch , vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1902), 373.

22. Paul Finkelman, Slavery in the Courtroom: An Annotated Bibliography of American Cases (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1985), 61.

23. Paul Finkelman, “ ‘Let It Be Placed among the Abominations!’: The Bill of Rights and the Fugitive Slave Laws .”

24. Finkelman, Slavery in the Courtroom , 60.

25. Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2.

26. Finkelman, Slavery in the Courtroom , 95–99.

27. Finkelman, Slavery in the Courtroom , 103–107.

28. Finkelman, Slavery in the Courtroom , 107–112.

29. Aviam Soifer, “Abelman v. Booth; United States v. Booth,” in The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States , ed. James W. Ely Jr. and Joel B. Grossman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.

30. “ An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the River Ohio ,” 1787, National Archives.

31. Wilbur H. Siebert, “The Underground Railroad in Ohio,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 4 (1895): 61.

32. Keith P. Griffler, Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 10–11 .

33. Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 90 .

34. John Henry Tibbets, “ Reminiscences of Slavery Times ,”, 1888.

35. Gunja SenGupta, For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854–1860 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 1.

36. Perl W. Morgan, The History of Wyandotte County, Kansas, and Its People (Chicago: Lewis, 1911), 140.

37. SenGupta, For God and Mammon , 120–121.

38. SenGupta, For God and Mammon , 127.

39. Zu Adams, “Slaves in Kansas,” September 2, 1895, 1–2, Slavery Collection, 2, Kansas State Historical Society.

40. Kristen A. Tegtmeier, “The Ladies of Lawrence Are Arming!: The Gendered Nature of Sectional Violence in Early Kansas,” in Anti-Slavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America , ed. John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 216.

41. Richard Cordley, “‘Lizzie and the Underground Railroad’ in Pioneer Days in Kansas ,” in Freedom’s Crucible: The Underground Railroad in Lawrence and Douglas County, Kansas, 1854–1865; A Reader , ed. Richard B. Sheridan (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1998), 69–70.

42. Samuel A. Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The New England Emigrant Aid Company in the Kansas Crusade (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1954), 191–193.

43. William Elsey Connelly, “The Lane Trail,” Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society 13, no. 1913–1914 (1914): 269–270.

44. Connelly, “Lane Trail,” 270.

45. “John Doy, Lawrence, K. T., to Samuel May, Massachusetts,” January 1859, Ms.B.1.6, vol. 7, no. 91, Boston Public Library.

46. James B. Abbott, “The Rescue of Dr. John W. Doy,” Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1886–1888 4 (1890): 312.

47. John Doy, The Narrative of John Doy, of Lawrence Kansas: Printed for the Author (New York: T. Holman, 1860), 23.

48. Richard J. Hinton, “John Brown and His Men, with Some Account of the Roads They Traveled to Reach Harper’s Ferry,” in Sheridan, ed., Freedom’s Crucible , 80–81.

49. Doy, Narrative of John Doy , 123.

50. Sheridan, Freedom’s Crucible , 27–34.

51. Abbott, “Rescue of Dr. John W. Doy,” 312.

52. Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), 29.

53. Mulroy, Freedom on the Border , 31.

54. Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People , rev. ed. Amos Alcione and Thomas Senter (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 119.

55. Porter, Black Seminoles , 124.

56. Rolanda Teal, “ Underground Railroad Route along El Camino Real de Las Tejas ” (Santa Fe, NM: National Park Service, National Trails Intermountain Region, 2010), 2.

57. Teal, “Underground Railroad Route,” 3–4.

58. Teal, “Underground Railroad Route,” 10–11.

59. Kyle Ainsworth, “ Texas Slave Runaway Project ,” database, n.d.

60. Foner, Gateway to Freedom , 11; and David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

61. Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad: Being a Brief History of the Labors of a Lifetime in Behalf of the Slave, with the Stories of Numerous Fugitives Who Gained Their Freedom through His Instrumentality, and Many Other Incidents (Cincinnati, OH: Western Tract Society, 1876), title page; and Still, Underground Rail Road .

62. Wilbur Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: MacMillan Company, 1898); and Wilbur Siebert, Mysteries of Ohio’s Underground Railroads (Columbus, OH: Long’s College Book Company, 1951).

63. Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1961), 73 .

64. Louie Psihoyos and Charles L. Blockson, “The Underground Railroad,” National Geographic Magazine , July 1984, 3.

65. Charles Blockson, The Underground Railroad: First Person Narratives of Escapes to Freedom in the North (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987), 4.

66. David Blight, ed., Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004) .

67. Griffler, Front Lines of Freedom ; and LaRoche, Free Black Communities.

68. James Blaine Hudson, Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in the Kentucky Borderland (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002).

69. Kate Larson, Bound for the Promised Land (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003); Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (Boston: Little, Brown, 2004); Jean Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and Stories (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); and Lois Horton, Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013).

70. Nikki Taylor, Driven toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016).

71. David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018..

72. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) .

73. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana .

74. Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroon (New York: New York University Press, 2016) .

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Tracks to Freedom: The Inspiring Story of the Underground Railroad

A newly found journal of interviews with fugitive slaves gives insight into the secret network.

The 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave brought the darkest era of America's history into the forefront of the national consciousness. Most slaves died in servitude. But a lucky—and courageous—few managed to escape via a network of safe houses and dedicated helpers that came to be known as the Underground Railroad. Long the stuff of mythology and local lore, the Underground Railroad has often been either overrated or undervalued.

In his new book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad , Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University , sets the record straight.

From his office on New York's Upper West Side, Foner explains how a chance find in the Columbia University archives led him on a journey of discovery, how one of George Washington's concerns after the War of Independence was to get his slaves back, and why—at a time when the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri , has inflamed race relations in the U.S.—the Underground Railroad is something to celebrate.

Tell us about your discovery of Gay's "Register of Fugitives" and how that inspired you to tell this story.

I actually owe the discovery to a student of mine, who is doing a senior thesis here at Columbia on the abolitionist editor Sydney Howard Gay . His papers are here, and she mentioned to me one day that there was this little document relating to fugitive slaves. It wasn't relevant to what she was doing, but she thought I might find it interesting. It was these two little notebooks called "Record of Fugitives."

Sydney Howard Gay was very connected to the Underground Railroad, and between 1855 and 1856 he kept a record of over 200 men, women, and children who passed through New York City. Being a journalist, he interviewed them, so the notebook is filled with fascinating information about who owned these slaves, where they came from, how they escaped, who helped them, how they got to New York, and where Gay sent them on their way to freedom in Canada.

Sydney Howard Gay is one of the main characters in the book. Give us a quick profile.

Sydney Howard Gay is little known today, but he was a fairly prominent abolitionist before the Civil War. He was born in Massachusetts and became an abolitionist around 1840-41, first as a speaker. Then he was appointed to edit a weekly newspaper, the National Anti-Slavery Standard , published in New York City, which represented William Lloyd Garrison and his group of abolitionists. New York was a hostile environment for abolitionists. It was a city very closely tied into the slave South economically. But Gay was a pretty courageous guy.

Later, during the Civil War, he became the managing editor of the New York Tribune , which was a very important journalistic position at that time. His newspaper office also became what you might call a station on the Underground Railroad, where slaves would come through from farther south. Gay would hide them in local homes and then send them on their way out of New York City.

Chitwetelu Ejiofor (at center) played Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South, in the 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave.

In the past the Underground Railroad was regarded as little more than local lore. Has your research uncovered a wider national significance to it?

The Underground Railroad has been portrayed incorrectly in both directions. In some literature, it's this vast, organized system with regular routes, like a real railroad with stations and times and secret passwords. On the other hand, some scholars denigrate it altogether. They say, "There was no such network—it was just the fugitives themselves getting out on their own initiative with no help."

When I started I had a somewhat skeptical view myself, because there is so much mythology about the Underground Railroad. In some towns in New England or upstate New York, it seems every other house has a little marker on it saying "This was a station on the Underground Railroad." [Laughs]

But as I studied these documents, I came to conclude that, yes, there had been such a network. It was incomplete. It was not highly organized. It was basically local groups that communicated with each other. There weren't a vast number of people involved. In New York City at any one time there were never more than a dozen people actively working to help slaves. Many others were sympathetic but weren't that involved. So one shouldn't exaggerate it. But it did exist, and it helped a considerable number of fugitives to get out of slavery.

Many people, including myself, assumed the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad. How did it get its name?

Nobody quite knows how it got its name, or when the name was used for the first time. There were people helping fugitives long before the term came into existence. But certainly by the 1840s, it was a widely accepted metaphor for a secret set of networks assisting fugitives. But it was not an actual physical railroad. Slaves escaped by all sorts of modes. Some escaped on foot; some escaped in horse-drawn carriages, on boats, or on actual trains. There were trains running between the upper South [Virginia or Maryland] and the North, and if you could get "free papers" from someone, you could get on a train and get up to the North. But the term "Underground Railroad" stuck as a metaphor.

The movie 12 Years a Slave brought to life one aspect of this story. Tell us about the slave catchers and a term that has gained an ominous new relevance today: rendition.

One thing about that movie is that it's the story of a free man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. That happened quite frequently. In New York City there were gangs that preyed upon black people, particularly children. They would just nab them, put them on a boat, and send them to the South to be sold into slavery.

The original organization that founded the Underground Railroad was the New York Vigilance Committee. It was basically a black organization founded in the 1830s to try and stop this kidnapping epidemic. Then they expanded to help fugitives coming from the South through the city.

Rendition just means "capturing and returning a fugitive slave," sometimes without any legal process at all. They just grabbed them and took them back. And the rendition of fugitive slaves became a very common thing, especially in the 1850s after the federal government passed the Fugitive Slave Acts , which greatly strengthened the legal mechanisms for doing this.

Harriet Tubman, a slave in Maryland who escaped and subsequently led some 70 fugitives out of the state to freedom, has been called the "Moses of her people."

There are many heroes and heroines in your book. Perhaps the most famous is "Captain" Harriet Tubman . Tell us about her and her operations.

Harriet Tubman was a slave in Maryland who escaped around 1849. Unlike most people who escaped, she went back several times during the 1850s. It's estimated that she led about 70 or so slaves to freedom from Maryland. If you were caught helping a fugitive slave in the South, the punishments were draconian. People were sentenced to 30 or 40 years in jail. So anybody doing this in the South was taking a tremendous risk. But she managed to do it. She passes through New York City twice, in 1855 and 1856, and she appears in this document, the "Record of Fugitives."

Sydney Howard Gay calls her Captain Harriet Tubman. I found that an interesting title. It suggests that he knew her before this or knew who she was. "Captain" wasn't a term normally applied to women at that time—it's a military rank—but her reputation as someone of great courage had already preceded her. So he writes in his book "Captain Harriet Tubman appeared with 4 fugitive slaves."

My wife's ancestors were Wilmington Quakers who actually hid fugitive slaves. How important was Delaware on the Underground Railroad?

Delaware was very important. It's a very small place, as you well know. But it was on the way between the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where slavery was concentrated, and the free soil of Pennsylvania. Delaware itself had almost no slaves. By 1860 there were only 1,800 slaves in Delaware, so it's mostly people passing through from Maryland, Virginia, or the District of Columbia.

Wilmington was an odd place. It was in a slave state, yet it's only five or six miles from the Pennsylvania border, and it was one of the very few states where there was an active anti-slavery movement involving Quakers. One Quaker, a Wilmington businessman named Thomas Garrett, claimed to have assisted 3,000 fugitives slaves over the course of the 30 or so years before the Civil War. The Quakers were well known for their anti-slavery sentiment, and slaves knew this. One of the fugitives, who is mentioned in Gay's records, tells him, "When I got to Pennsylvania, I knocked on a door and said, 'Send me to a Quaker. I don't care who, just send me to a Quaker.'"

In this sketch from the mid-1700s, slaves flee from Maryland to Delaware. Thanks to the Underground Railroad, thousands of fugitives were able to escape bondage in slave-holding states.

It's rather disconcerting to discover that one of George Washington's main concerns after the War of Independence was to get his slaves back. Tell us about the British dimension to this story.

In 1783, when the war was over, the British were evacuating Charleston, [South Carolina, and] Savannah [Georgia] and took a lot of slaves with them. Washington was up here in New York, negotiating with General Clinton, the British commander. Thousands of slaves had fled to New York City. The British were not abolitionist at that time. Slavery was thriving in the British Empire. But nonetheless Clinton said, "We must keep our word. We have promised these people freedom."

Washington said, "We want our slaves back. Indeed, I wish you would keep a lookout for a couple of my slaves who I think are here." It's a sign of the contradiction built into American history at the outset—that you have a war for liberty, yet it's being conducted by slave owners. That contradiction is there right from the start of our republic.

The question of fugitive slaves was one of the underlying irritants that led to the Civil War. Tell us about the Fugitive Slave Acts .

First of all, the right of the South to get their fugitives back is in the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, on this and many other points, the Constitution is rather vague. It doesn't say who's supposed to capture them or whose responsibility it is. In 1850, because previous laws had not succeeded in stopping the escapes of slaves, this fugitive slave law, which was very draconian, was passed. This made it a federal responsibility for the first time. The federal government would send marshalls into northern places looking for fugitives. It set up a new category of officials called federal commissioners, who would hear these cases. Even the Army could be used to take people back to slavery. It was also retroactive. You could have lived in the North for 30 years and still be grabbed under this new law.

This became a big irritant between the North and South. We tend to think of the South before the Civil War as a bastion of state's rights. But in fact the South wanted this law, which overrode all the rights of the northern states and was a very vigorous exercise of national power in defense of slavery. In the North, there were instances of armed resistance. In Pennsylvania, a slave owner was killed by a mob trying to protect fugitive slaves. In Boston, a mob, mostly of free blacks, entered a courthouse where a fugitive slave was being held, grabbed him, took him out, and sent him off to Canada. The same thing happened in Syracuse [New York].

And these kinds of things exacerbated the sectional conflicts. Southerners began to say, "How can we trust the North, if they willingly violate federal law and constitutional provisions when it comes to fugitive slaves?" Northerners said, "This just shows how slavery is undermining the liberty of all people, not just blacks."

How has writing this book changed your view of early American history?

I've taught this period for a long time. [Laughs] So I don't know if my view has changed completely. But it certainly changed my view of the Underground Railroad, which, as I said, I'd been pretty skeptical about. Nobody knows the exact numbers because this was in secret. But my estimate is that about a thousand slaves per year managed to escape, or 30,000 in the period from 1830 to the Civil War. There were four million slaves in 1860, so this is just a drop in the bucket. It didn't destroy the institution of slavery.

But I think it is a significant accomplishment. I find the story inspiring. We've had in this country lately a lot of racial tension because of incidences that have occurred with the police, like in Ferguson, Missouri. Here's an example of black and white people working together in an interracial movement in a just cause. And I think we should be proud of it.

Simon Worrall curates   Book Talk . Follow him on   Twitter or at   simonworrallauthor.com .

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• AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

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Underground Railroad

Article by Natasha Henry-Dixon

Updated by Andrew McIntosh

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited March 3, 2023

The Underground Railroad was a secret network of abolitionists (people who wanted to abolish slavery). They helped African Americans escape from enslavement in the American South to free Northern states or to Canada. The Underground Railroad was the largest anti-slavery freedom movement in North America. It brought between 30,000 and 40,000 fugitives to  British North America  (now Canada ).

This is the full-length entry about the Underground Railroad. For a plain language summary, please see The Underground Railroad (Plain-Language Summary).

A provision in the 1793  Act to Limit Slavery stated that any  enslaved  person who reached  Upper Canada  became free upon arrival. This encouraged a small number of enslaved African Americans in search of freedom to enter Canada, primarily without help. Word that freedom could be had in Canada spread further following the  War of 1812 . The enslaved servants of US military officers from the South brought back word that there were free “Black men in red coats” in  British North America . ( See The Coloured Corps: Black Canadians and the War of 1812 .) Arrivals of freedom-seekers in Upper Canada increased dramatically after 1850 with the passage of the American  Fugitive Slave Act . It empowered slave catchers to pursue fugitives in Northern states.

Organization

The Underground Railroad was created in the early 19th century by a group of abolitionists based mainly in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Within a few decades, it had grown into a well-organized and dynamic network. The term “Underground Railroad” began to be used in the 1830s. By then, an informal covert network to help fugitive slaves had already taken shape.

The Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad and it did not run on railway tracks. It was a complex, clandestine network of people and safe houses that helped persons enslaved in Southern plantations reach freedom in the North. The network was maintained by abolitionists who were committed to human rights and equality. They offered help to fleeing slaves. Their ranks included free Black people, fellow enslaved persons, White and Indigenous sympathizers, Quakers , Methodists , Baptists , inhabitants of urban centre and farmers, men and women, Americans and Canadians.

Symbols and Codes

Railroad terminology and symbols were used to mask the covert activities of the network. This also helped to keep the public and slaveholders in the dark. Those who helped escaping slaves in their journey were called “conductors.” They guided fugitives along points of the Underground Railroad, using various modes of transportation over land or by water. One of the most famous conductors was  Harriet Tubman .

The terms “passengers,” “cargo,” “package” and “freight” referred to escaped slaves. Passengers were delivered to “stations” or “depots,” which were safe houses. Stations were located in various cities and towns, known as “terminals.” These places of temporary refuge could sometimes be identified by lit candles in windows or by strategically placed lanterns in the front yard.

Station Masters

Safe houses were operated by “station masters.” They took fugitives into their home and provided meals, a change of clothing, and a place to rest and hide. They often gave them money before sending them to the next transfer point. Black abolitionist William Still was in charge of a station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He assisted many freedom-seekers in their journey to Canada. He recorded the names of the men, women and children who stopped at his station, including Tubman and her passengers.

Jermain Loguen was another Black station master and leader in the abolitionist movement. He ran a station in Syracuse, New York. He permanently settled there after living freely in  Hamilton  and  St. Catharines ,  Upper Canada , from 1837 to 1841. Loguen was well known for his public speeches and articles in anti-slavery newspapers . Numerous women were also station masters. Quaker women Lucretia Mott and Laura Haviland, and Henrietta Bowers Duterte, the first Black female undertaker in Philadelphia, are just a few. Many other women also worked with their husbands to operate stations.

Ticket Agents

“Ticket agents” coordinated safe trips and made travel arrangements for freedom-seekers by helping them to contact station masters or conductors. Ticket agents were sometimes people who travelled for a living, perhaps as circuit preachers or doctors. This enabled them to conceal their abolitionist activities. The Belleville -born doctor Alexander Milton Ross, for instance, was an Underground Railroad agent. He used his bird watching hobby as a cover while he travelled through the South telling enslaved people about the network. He even provided them with a few simple supplies to begin their escape. People who donated money or supplies to aid in the escape of slaves were called “stockholders.”

Ways to the Promised Land

The routes that were travelled to get to freedom were called “lines.” The network of routes went through 14 Northern states and two British North American colonies — Upper Canada and Lower Canada . At the end of the line was “heaven,” or “the Promised Land,” which was free land in Canada or the Northern states. “The drinking gourd” referenced the Big Dipper constellation, which points to the North Star — a lodestar for freedom-seekers finding their way north.

The journey was very dangerous. Many made the treacherous voyage by foot. Freedom-seekers were also transported in wagons , carriages, on horses , and in some cases by train. But the Underground Railroad did not only operate over land. Passengers also travelled by boat across lakes , seas and rivers . They often travelled by night and rested during the day.

The Canadian Terminus

An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 freedom seekers entered Canada during the last decades of enslavement in the US. Between 1850 and 1860 alone, 15,000 to 20,000 fugitives reached the  Province of Canada . It became the main terminus of the Underground Railroad. The newcomers migrated to various parts of what is now Ontario . This included  Niagara Falls , Buxton,  Chatham ,  Owen Sound ,  Windsor , Sandwich (now part of Windsor), Hamilton , Brantford , London ,  Oakville  and  Toronto . They also fled to other regions of British North America such as  New Brunswick ,  Quebec  and  Nova Scotia . After this mass migration ,  Black Canadians  helped build strong communities and contributed to the development of the provinces in which they lived and worked.

Although out of their jurisdiction, a few bounty hunters crossed the border into Canada to pursue escaped fugitives and return them to Southern owners. The Provincial Freeman newspaper offered a detailed account of one particular case. A slave holder and his agent travelled to  Chatham , Upper Canada, which was largely populated by Black persons once enslaved in the US. They were in search of a young man named Joseph Alexander. After their presence was announced, a large crowd of Black members of the community assembled outside the Royal Exchange Hotel. Alexander was among the throng of people and exchanged words with his former owner. He rejected the men’s offer of $100 to accompany them to Windsor. The crowd refused to let the men seize Alexander, and they were forced to leave town. Alexander was left to live in freedom.

The Underground Railroad operated until the 13th amendment to the US constitution banned enslavement in 1865. Freedom-seekers, free Black people and the descendants of Black Loyalists settled throughout British North America . Some lived in all-Black settlements such as the Elgin Settlement and Buxton Mission, the Queen’s Bush Settlement, and the Dawn Settlement near  Dresden , Ontario , as well as Birchtown and Africville in Nova Scotia . Others chose to live in racially integrated communities in towns and cities.

Early African Canadian settlers were productive and innovative citizens. They cleared and cultivated the land, built homes and raised families. Black persons established a range of religious , educational , social and cultural institutions, political groups and community-building organizations. They founded churches, schools, benevolent societies, fraternal organizations and two newspapers . ( See  Mary Ann Shadd .)

During the era of the Underground Railroad, Black men and women possessed and contributed a wide range of skills and abilities. They operated various businesses such as grocery stores, boutiques and hat shops, blacksmith shops, a saw company, an ice company, livery stables, pharmacies , herbal treatment services and carpentry businesses, as well as Toronto ’s first taxi company.

Black people were active in fighting for racial equality. Their communities were centres for abolitionist activities. Closer to home, they waged attacks against the prejudice and discrimination they encountered in their daily lives in Canada by finding gainful employment, securing housing, and obtaining an education for their children. Black persons were often relegated to certain jobs because of their skin colour. Many were denied the right to live in certain places due to their race. ( See Residential Segregation .) Parents had to send their children to segregated schools that existed in some parts in Ontario and Nova Scotia. Through publications,  conventions  and other public events, such as Emancipation Day celebrations, Black communities spoke out against the racial discrimination they faced and aimed to improve society for all.

Wherever African Canadians settled in British North America , they contributed to the socio-economic growth of the communities in which they lived. In their quest for freedom, security, prosperity and  human rights , early Black colonists strived to make a better life for themselves, their descendants and their fellow citizens. They left behind an enduring and rich legacy that is evident to this day.

For Black History Month 2022, the Royal Canadian Mint issued a silver coin designed by artist Kwame Delfish to commemorate the Underground Railroad.

See also:  Underground Railroad (Plain Language Summary) ; Black Enslavement in Canada (Plain Language Summary) ; Chloe Cooley and the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada ; Slavery Abolition Act, 1833 ; Anti-Slavery Society of Canada ; Josiah Henson ; Albert Jackson ; Richard Pierpoint ; Editorial: Black Female Freedom Fighters .

Black History in Canada Education Guide

• Black Canadians
• Black History
• Enslavement
• underground railroad

Further Reading

Adrienne Shadd, Afua Cooper, Karolyn Smardz Frost, The Underground Railroad, Next Stop Toronto! (2009)

Karolyn Smardz Frost, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land (2007)

Barbara Greenwood, The Last Safe House: A Story of the Underground Railroad (1998)

Rona Arato, Working for Freedom: the Story of Josiah Henson (2009)

Barbara Smucker, Underground to Canada (1978, rev. 2003).

Karleen Bradford, Dear Canada: A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson (2012)

External Links

Up From Slavery Author Bryan Walls provides a vivid account of his ancestors’ harrowing escape from enslavement along the Underground Railroad. A University of Toronto website.

From Slavery to Settlement Historical accounts and key documents relating to the abolition of enslavement and the establishment of Black settlements in Ontario. From Archives Ontario.

Ontario Black History Society Informative online resource about Black Canadian history and heritage.

Tracks to Freedom Travel down the interactive Tracks to Freedom website to learn about the people and events associated with the legendary Underground Railroad. From the Ottawa Citizen.

Underground Railroad Watch the Heritage Minute about the "underground railroad" from Historica Canada. See also related online learning resources.

The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! This nicely illustrated book offers new insights into the life and times of 19th century Toronto and the intriguing history and heritage of Toronto’s Black community. From indigo.ca.

North to Freedom Noted historian and human rights advocate Daniel Hill talks about the importance of the Underground Railway in this 1979 CBC Radio clip.

Recommended

Chloe cooley, black enslavement in canada.

The Underground Railroad

The historic movement carried thousands of enslaved people to freedom. This is their journey.

In 1619, the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, one of the newly formed 13 American Colonies. They had been kidnapped from their homes and were forced to work on tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations from Maryland and Virginia all the way to Georgia . According to the law, they had no rights and were not free.

Escaping to freedom was anything but easy for an enslaved person. It required courage, wit, and determination. Many fled by themselves or in small numbers, often without food, clothes, or money. Leaving behind family members, they traveled hundreds of miles across unknown lands and rivers by foot, boat, or wagon. To be captured would mean being sent back to the plantation, where they would be whipped, beaten, or killed.

Not everyone believed that slavery should be allowed and wanted to aid these fugitives, or runaways, in their escape to freedom. As more and more people secretly offered to help, a freedom movement emerged. It became known as the Underground Railroad.

How the Underground Railroad started

Americans had been helping enslaved people escape since the late 1700s, and by the early 1800s, the secret group of individuals and places that many fugitives relied on became known as the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad was not underground, and it wasn’t an actual train. It was a network of people, both whites and free Blacks, who worked together to help runaways from slaveholding states travel to states in the North and to the country of Canada, where slavery was illegal.

No one knows exactly where the term Underground Railroad came from. “Underground” implies secrecy; “railroad” refers to the way people followed certain routes—with stops along the way—to get to their destination. The phrase wasn’t something that one person decided to name the system but a term that people started using as more and more fugitives escaped through this network.

The operators of the Underground Railroad were abolitionists, or people who opposed slavery. Many were members of organized groups that helped runaways, such as the Quaker religion and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Often called “agents,” these operators used their homes, churches, barns, and schoolhouses as “stations.” There, fugitives could stop and receive shelter, food, clothing, protection, and money until they were ready to move to the next station.

A dangerous journey

The Underground Railroad was secret. Nothing was written down about where to go or who would help. So once enslaved people decided to make the journey to freedom, they had to listen for tips from other enslaved people, who might have heard tips from other enslaved people. If they were lucky, they traveled with a conductor, or a person who safely guided enslaved people from station to station.

Whether alone or with a conductor, the journey was dangerous. Slave catchers with guns and dogs roamed the area looking for runaways to capture. People who spotted the fugitives might alert police—or capture the runaways themselves for a reward. The fugitives were often hungry, cold, and scared for their lives.

To give themselves a better chance of escape, enslaved people had to be clever. For instance, fugitives sometimes fled on Sundays because reward posters could not be printed until Monday to alert the public; others would run away during the Christmas holiday when the white plantation owners wouldn’t notice they were gone. The fugitives also often traveled by night—under the cover of darkness—following the North Star.

Once they were on their journey, they looked for safe resting places that they had heard might be along the Underground Railroad. A hiding place might be inside a person’s attic or basement, a secret part of a barn, the crawl space under the floors in a church, or a hidden compartment in the back of a wagon. At these stations, they’d receive food and shelter; then the agent would tell them where to go next.

To avoid capture, fugitives sometimes used disguises and came up with clever ways to stay hidden. One bold escape happened in 1849 when Henry “Box” Brown was packed and shipped in a three-foot-long box with three air holes drilled in. After traveling along the Underground Railroad for 27 hours by wagon, train, and boat, Brown was delivered safely to agents in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Agents of change

Runaway slaves couldn’t trust just anyone along the Underground Railroad. Fortunately, people were willing to risk their lives to help them. Many were ordinary people, farmers, business owners, ministers, and even former enslaved people.

In 1826, Levi Coffin, a religious Quaker who opposed slavery, moved to Indiana. By chance he learned that he lived on a route along the Underground Railroad. Coffin and his wife, Catherine, decided to make their home a station. More than 3,000 slaves passed through their home heading north to Canada.

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery from Maryland in 1838 and became a well-known abolitionist, writer, speaker, and supporter of the Underground Railroad. He hid runaways in his home in Rochester, New York, and helped 400 fugitives travel to Canada.

Another Underground Railroad operator was William Still, a free Black business owner and abolitionist movement leader. By day he worked as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, but at night he secretly aided fugitives. He raised money and helped hundreds of enslaved people escape to the North, but he also knew it was important to tell their stories.

That’s why Still interviewed the runaways who came through his station, keeping detailed records of the individuals and families, and hiding his journals until after the Civil War. Then in 1872, he self-published his notes in his book, The Underground Railroad . It’s one of the clearest accounts of people involved with the Underground Railroad.

The most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman , who escaped from slavery in 1849. Determined to help others, Tubman returned to her former plantation to rescue family members. Later she started guiding other fugitives from Maryland. Tubman made 13 trips and helped 70 enslaved people travel to freedom. William Still even provided funding for several of Tubman’s rescue trips.

Fugitive slave laws

Americans helped enslaved people escape even though the U.S. government had passed laws making this illegal. In 1793, Congress passed the first federal Fugitive Slave Law. This law gave local governments the right to capture and return escapees, even in states that had outlawed slavery. Plus, anyone caught helping runaway slaves faced arrest and jail.

But the law often wasn’t enforced in many Northern states where slavery was not allowed, and people continued to assist fugitives. Politicians from Southern slaveholding states did not like that and pressured Congress to pass a new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 that was much harsher.

This law increased the power of Southerners to reclaim their fugitives, and a slave catcher only had to swear an oath that the accused was a runaway—even if the Black person was legally free. So slave catchers began kidnapping any Black person for a reward. No place in America was safe for Black people. Many enslaved and free Blacks fled to Canada to escape the U.S. government’s laws.

But the 1850 law only inspired abolitionists to help fugitives more. Widespread opposition sparked riots and revolts. In 1851, a group of angry abolitionists stormed a Boston, Massachusetts, courthouse to break out a runaway from jail. Other rescues happened in New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

It wasn’t until June 28, 1864—less than a year before the Civil War ended—that both Fugitive Slave Acts were finally repealed by Congress.

Future generations

The Underground Railroad successfully moved enslaved people to freedom despite the laws and people who tried to prevent it. Exact numbers don’t exist, but it’s estimated that between 25,000 and 50,000 enslaved people escaped to freedom through this network.

The Underground Railroad was a social movement that started when ordinary people joined together to   make a change in society. It’s an example of how people, regardless of their race or economic status, united for a common cause.

As the late Congressman John Lewis said, “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.” That’s why people today continue to work together and speak out against injustices to ensure freedom and equality for all people.

Read this next!

• African American Heroes

African American Pioneers of Science

Black history month, 1963 march on washington.

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Harriet Tubman: Timeline of Her Life, Underground Rail Service and Activism

In addition to freeing slaves, Tubman was also a Civil War spy, nurse and supporter of women's suffrage.

Wanting to bring an end to slavery, Tubman also coordinated with abolitionists. During the Civil War , she became a nurse and a spy for the Union. And despite her ongoing financial struggles, she continued to fight for equality and justice by speaking out against prejudice and advocating women's suffrage. It's clear Tubman led a momentous life that made the world a better place.

c. 1822: Tubman is born as Araminta "Minty" Ross in Maryland's Dorchester County

Her parents, Ben Ross and Harriet "Rit" Green, are both enslaved, meaning Ross had the same status at birth.

Though her birthdate has often been listed as around 1820, a record from March 1822 lists that a midwife had been paid for tending to Green, which suggests the birth may have taken place in February or March of that year.

c. 1828: Tubman is about five or six years old when her enslavers hire her out to tend to an infant. She is whipped for any perceived mistakes.

c. 1829: Around the age of seven, Tubman is again hired out. Her duties include walking into wet marshes to check muskrat traps. She becomes ill with measles and returns to her mother to recover.

c. 1834-36: An overseer throws a two-pound weight at another slave but hits Tubman's head. She barely survives the devastating injury and experiences headaches for the remainder of her life. It's possible this injury led to her suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy , which could explain her visions and sleeping spells.

c. 1835: Tubman works as a field hand, which she prefers to inside tasks.

c. 1830s: Two of Tubman's older sisters are sold and transported out of Maryland.

1840: Tubman's father is freed from slavery.

1844: She weds John Tubman, a free Black man, though her status as a slave means the union is not legally recognized. Upon marriage, Tubman adopts her mother's name of Harriet.

March 7, 1849: Tubman's owner dies, which makes her fear being sold.

September 17, 1849: Tubman heads north with two of her brothers to escape slavery. However, the men become nervous and convince their sister to return.

October 1849: Tubman runs away

She follows the North Star and makes it to Philadelphia. As Pennsylvania is a free state, she has escaped enslavement.

September 18, 1850: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passes. It requires all parts of the United States, even states that had outlawed slavery, to participate in the return of runaway slaves.

December 1850: Tubman helps rescue a niece and her niece's children after learning they are supposed to be sold at auction.

1851: Tubman tries to bring her husband north, but he decides to remain with his second wife, a free Black woman. Tubman instead guides another group to Canada, where they will be outside the reach of the Fugitive Slave Act.

December 1854: Tubman helps a group that includes three of her brothers travel to Canada.

READ MORE: How Harriet Tubman and William Still Helped the Underground Railroad

June 1857: Tubman brings her parents from Maryland to Canada

Her father is in danger because he has been helping the Underground Railroad.

April 1858: In Canada, Tubman meets abolitionist John Brown . She learns of his plans to spark a slave rebellion in the United States and agrees to gather recruits for the cause.

October 16, 1859: Brown's raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry in Virginia (now West Virginia) takes place. Tubman does not participate, perhaps due to illness.

1859: Tubman purchases a property in Auburn, New York, from antislavery politician William H. Seward . Having been unhappy in Canada, her parents join Tubman there.

April 27, 1860: In Troy, New York, Tubman helps former slave Charles Nalle elude the U.S. marshals who intend to return him to his enslaver.

December 1860: Tubman makes her last trip on the Underground Railroad

1862: Following the start of the Civil War, Tubman joins Union troops in South Carolina. She becomes a nurse, while also running a wash house and working as a cook to earn money.

c. 1863: Tubman serves as a spy for the Union

She coordinates with former slaves from the area to gather information about the opposing Confederate forces.

READ MORE: Harriet Tubman's Service as a Union Spy

June 1-2, 1863: Tubman leads an armed raid up the Combahee River raid in South Carolina. The mission destroys Confederate supplies and frees more than 700 enslaved people. Tubman is the first woman to head a military expedition in the United States.

July 1863: After the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, whose soldiers were African American volunteers, suffers devastating losses during a bloody battle at Fort Wagner, Tubman helps bury the dead and aids survivors.

June 1864: Tubman is granted a furlough and goes to Auburn to visit her parents.

1865: Tubman nurses Black soldiers at Fort Monroe in Virginia. After the Civil War ends, she visits Washington, D.C., and informs the surgeon general that Black soldiers are experiencing harsh conditions in military hospitals.

READ MORE: Inside Harriet Tubman's Life of Service After the Underground Railroad

July 1865: Tubman asks Seward, who is secretary of state, to help her receive payment for her work during the war. She is not successful, due in part to the turmoil of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination and Seward's ongoing recovery from stab wounds suffering during an assassination attempt.

October 1865: Tubman is traveling home by train when a conductor orders her, using a racial slur , to go to a different car. She defends her rights but is forcibly removed.

December 1868: Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman , a biography by Sarah Bradford is published (though the official publication date is listed as 1869). The book has multiple inaccuracies but sales raise approximately $1,200 for a financially struggling Tubman.

March 18, 1869: Tubman weds Nelson Davis, a 25-year-old former slave and Civil War veteran.

1873: Tubman is robbed by men who trick her into believing they could provide her with Confederate gold.

1874: Tubman and her husband adopt a daughter, whom they name Gertie Davis.

June 1886: Tubman buys 25 acres of land next to her home in Auburn to create a nursing home for Black Americans.

October 1886: A revised Tubman biography, Harriet, the Moses of Her People , is published.

October 18, 1888: Tubman's husband dies after suffering from tuberculosis.

1890s: Tubman becomes more involved in the movement for women's suffrage.

June 1890: Tubman applies for a pension as a Civil War widow.

October 16, 1895 : Tubman is approved for a war widow pension of $8 a month .

July 1896: Tubman speaks at the founding conference of the National Association of Colored Women.

November 1896: Tubman is introduced by Susan B. Anthony at a suffrage convention in Rochester, New York.

1897: Queen Victoria sends Tubman a shawl and a medal in celebration of her Diamond Jubilee. The queen also invites Tubman to visit England to celebrate her birthday, but Tubman's straitened finances make this an impossibility.

Late 1890s: Tubman undergoes brain surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in an attempt to alleviate her painful headaches.

1899: Congress raises Tubman's pension to $20 per month, but the increase is for her services as a nurse instead of her military work.

June 23, 1908: Tubman attends the opening ceremony for the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. It will be operated by AME Zion Church, which has taken over the deed to the property.

May 19, 1911: An ailing Tubman becomes a resident of the Harriet Tubman Home. Supporters raise funds to finance her care.

March 10, 1913: Tubman dies following a battle with pneumonia

March 13, 1913: Tubman is buried with military honors.

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Underground Railroad’s forgotten route: Thousands fled slavery by sea

History textbooks and popular media generally depict the Underground Railroad as an arduous overland journey, one that would stretch for days until the right covered wagon allowed the enslaved to cross over into a free state. But while this was the case for many enslaved people living in border states, for those farther from the Mason-Dixon Line, escaping by land was almost unattainable.

Instead, as scholars in recent years increasingly are documenting, the method for abducting the enslaved from Africa became the same method that would help many regain their freedom: travel by boat.

“Most maps would lead you to believe that people were escaping over land by foot or by horse or by wagon from the Deep South, but the historical record doesn’t back that up at all,” said Timothy Walker, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and editor of the book “ Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad .”

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s ancestors were enslaved. Her husband’s were enslavers.

Escaping to a border state more than a couple of days’ walk away was impractical, Walker said, and the most that anyone could travel was 20 miles in one night. “Without a proper pass or permission to go a very long distance through the Deep South, you risk being stopped and challenged and recaptured,” he said.

It’s hard to know how many enslaved people escaped by sea, Walker said, since the people fleeing rarely left a paper trail. But some estimates say that as many as 100,000 people escaped U.S. enslavement by various methods. Abolitionist William Still kept a record of the people he helped, and his book “ The Underground Railroad ” details many arriving to freedom by boat.

In the early 1800s, shipyards in Alexandria, Norfolk, Charleston and as far south as coastal Florida became hotbeds of escape — and rumors.

Ships departing such ports, including those headed north to cities such as New Bedford, Mass., were often manned by enslaved people who knew the waterways well. Enslaved Black people had worked in the maritime industry as early as the Revolutionary War, and for parts of the 19th century, they worked on most fishing boats and merchant vessels and in shipyards.

Their enslavers sometimes loaned them to work for pay under Quakers, who generally opposed slavery, and free Black men, said Lee Blake, president of the New Bedford Historical Society.

On sea voyages, some sympathetic captains and crews stowed away enslaved people and helped them reach a free state.

“They can escape very quickly by water, because a ship that is sailing 24 hours a day up the Gulf Stream can travel 200 miles in a day,” Walker said. “So a ship passage is relatively quick, relatively safe, and you're not in danger of being recaptured when you're at sea.”

Accordingly, he said, some formerly enslaved men sought safety back at sea on whaling voyages lasting two to three years at a time.

One notable maritime escape occurred in 1796 in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, where a news bulletin called for information about “a mulatto woman named Ona Judge ” enslaved by President George Washington. Though Pennsylvania had passed a “gradual abolition” act in 1780, Washington brought Judge back-and-forth between Philadelphia and his estate at Mount Vernon in Virginia. Before one return trip to Virginia, Judge boarded a ship and fled — “without provocation,” the bulletin said.

But the risks for maritime escapes were manifest. A 1793 law — a precursor to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — prohibited aiding anyone who escaped by boat. Bounty hunters waited for ships at port cities, and anyone caught abetting a fugitive could have their boats confiscated or be imprisoned.

She cherished the home where her family fled slavery. Then a stranger bought it.

The latter was the fate for the crew of the Pearl Schooner . The ship was trying to escape from Washington, D.C., to New Jersey in 1848 with 77 enslaved men, women and children. But when the Pearl Schooner was stopped amid difficult water conditions at the mouth of the Potomac River by the Chesapeake Bay near Maryland’s Point Lookout, enslavers and other armed volunteers overtook the ship by threat of force. The enslaved were sold to plantations in the Deep South.

So crews and enslaved people alike went to great lengths to hide their plots. (Judge, for instance, said she didn’t reveal the name of the captain who helped her escape until after he died, “lest they should punish him for bringing me away.”)

In Norfolk, which saw heavy port traffic, fugitive-smuggling journeys typically began at the docks’ dirty loading areas in the middle of the night, Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a contributor to Walker’s “Sailing to Freedom” volume, explained in a panel discussion for the Library of Congress . Women “were rare at the docks, so they’d wear men’s clothing to gain access,” said Newby-Alexander, who directs the Joseph Jenkins Roberts Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at Norfolk State University.

“On some schooners, captains built secret compartments so that more than one or two people could escape,” she said. One captain in Norfolk, James Watson Fountain , “had a secret compartment so large that over 20 people could cram in.” On passenger ships, a crewman would smuggle people into a compartment near the boiler room; such journeys could last up to three days.

Early on, Massachusetts was a welcoming place to land, having been the first state to abolish slavery altogether in 1784. New Bedford was called the “Fugitive’s Gibraltar,” Blake said, a place where the formerly enslaved could find not only refuge but employment and wealth. So many Black people fled to New Bedford that by 1853 almost 30 percent of its residents said they had been born in the South.

Abolitionists in New Bedford such as Nathan and Mary Johnson often housed transient people and, through their work and social affairs, enticed wealthy White friends to help pay for escapees’ freedom.

Residents had a system, too, for when suspected bounty hunters pulled into port, Blake said: Someone would ring a bell, and a group would form a blockade or help the escaped people get a head start in hiding. If the suspected bounty hunters persisted, “the locals beat them up,” Blake said, and kicked them out.

The same local solidarity played out in nearby Nantucket in the early 19th century. Arthur Cooper and his wife and children had fled from Alexandria, Va., to New Bedford on the sloop Regulator and settled in Nantucket . In 1822, a slave catcher named Camillus Griffith attempted to invoke the Fugitive Act to take the Coopers back south. When threats and intimidation didn’t work, Griffith reached out to local law enforcement for help, arguing that they had to follow the law.

But Nantucket residents physically blocked Griffith long enough for a magistrate to refuse to enforce the act and force him to leave the city. According to Griffith’s account, that magistrate, Alfred Folger, “observed to me that the laws of their state did not recognize any persons as slaves, and if I attempt to molest these people or remove them, he should consider it his duty as a magistrate to arrest me and my party.”

He became the nation’s ninth vice president. She was his enslaved wife.

The maritime Underground Railroad’s legacy today is honored in cities such as Norfolk and New Bedford, whose whaling museum hosts a “Sailing to Freedom” exhibit expanding on Walker’s book.

That exhibit features Ona Judge, whom George Washington had once enslaved. Despite Washington’s efforts to reclaim her, she lived out her days in New Hampshire — thanks in part, as with thousands of others, to brave Black deckhands.

“I am free,” Judge told an interviewer late in life, “and have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means.”

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The Underground Railroad in Illinois

After the Civil War, freedom seekers headed north toward freedom into Illinois. Even though Illinois was a free state, it was far from being a safe or welcoming place for them. The state’s Black Laws denied African Americans most fundamental freedoms (gathering in groups, voting, bearing arms, etc.), and the Fugitive Slave Act required residents to return freedom seekers to their owners. Many areas were patrolled, hoping to capture freedom seekers and return them to their owners for a reward.

This meant they had to travel through Illinois discreetly, usually under the cover of darkness. Freedom seekers would go from safe house to safe house—a path to freedom that came to be known as the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad’s history in Illinois originates in the Southern part of the state, with freedom seekers using the natural routes of the two rivers that border the state as the main route. Some of the first known locations for Underground Railroad activity were found in these parts, and many towns in Southern Illinois still have traces of this rich history.

Illinois, with its proximity to slave states, played a significant role in facilitating escapes. The Ohio River touching Kentucky and the Mississippi bordering Missouri created a geographic advantage. Escaped slaves often sought refuge in the Illinois free black communities, strategically located in rural areas along the Illinois River. These remote locations, most of which would disappear during the Great Migration, provided a safe haven for those seeking freedom.

Lovejoy, Illinois (present day Brooklyn, IL)

According to oral history tradition, in 1829 "Mother" Priscilla Baltimore led a group of eleven families, composed of both fugitive and free African Americans, to flee slavery in St. Louis, Missouri. They crossed the Mississippi River to the free state of Illinois, where they established a freedom village in the “American Bottom”. Baltimore was said to have purchased her freedom as an adult from her master. She also bought the freedom of members of her family. Born in Kentucky, she tracked her white father to Missouri and bought her mother's freedom from him.

The Illinois River and its surrounding areas became strategic routes for escaped slaves heading towards the safety of Canada. Another river town just up the way from Lovejoy that would prove to be a pivotal stop on the Underground Railroad would be the town of Alton.

Alton, Illinois

Alton became an important town for abolitionists, as Illinois was a free state, separated from the slave state of Missouri only by the Mississippi River. Pro-slavery activists also lived there and slave catchers often raided the city. Escaped slaves would cross the river to seek shelter in Alton, and proceed to safer places through stations of the Underground Railroad. During the years before the American Civil War, several homes were equipped with tunnels and hiding places for stations on the Underground Railroad to aid slaves escaping to the North. On November 7, 1837, the abolitionist printer Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered by a pro-slavery mob while he tried to protect his Alton-based press from being destroyed for the third time. He had moved from St. Louis because of opposition there. He had printed many abolitionist tracts and distributed them throughout the area. When one of the mob made a move to set the old warehouse on fire, Lovejoy, armed with only a pistol, went outside to try to stop him. The pro-slavery man shot him dead (with a shotgun, five rounds through the midsection). The mob stormed the warehouse and threw Lovejoy's printing press into the Mississippi. Lovejoy thus became the first martyr of the abolition movement.

Old Rock House - Alton

2705-2707 College Avenue

Located along the Mississippi River, it was a refuge for freedom seekers from Missouri and Southern slave states. Abolitionists and free blacks helped former enslaved people make it from one station to the next location on the Underground Railroad.

The Old Rock House was the home of Reverend Thaddeus Beman Hurlbut, who was the pastor of the Upper Alton Presbyterian Church (also known as the College Avenue Presbyterian Church) and a friend of Elijah Parish Lovejoy. It was built in 1834–1835 by Henry Caswell and John Higham. It was a double-dwelling building, with John Higham on the east side. In 1927, the house was owned by Dr. Isaac Moore.

The first meeting to organize the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society was held on October 26, 1837. From meeting notes, the meeting started at the church, but due to "disorderly elements", the meeting ended. It was rescheduled for the following day at the Rock House, where the society was organized. This happened just before the pro-slavery riots in Alton on October 28.

College Avenue Presbyterian Church and the Rock House are across College Avenue from each other. A historical marker for both buildings is located at College Avenue and Clawson Street

Enos Apartments - Alton

325 East Third Street

The basement of the four-story building, once a sanatorium and now the Enos Apartments, would have been among your escape routes. Historians say it was part of the Underground Railroad; a tunnel in the basement was a coal shed where escaped slaves hid.

The underground tunnels exist 15 feet below 3rd Street and resemble Roman catacombs. The basement of the apartment complex contains a sealed tunnel that reportedly held a passageway to hidden rooms where enslaved people rested during the day before traveling at night to the next stop on the Railroad.

Union Baptist Church - Alton

7th & George St.

From the Enos Apartment building, freedom seekers would make their way up George street to the Union Baptist Church. The  stop had its origins in the summer of 1836, when 10 former slaves made their way to Alton. They first met at the home of Charles Edwards, and the group included such established city leaders as the Rev. Eben Rodgers of the First Baptist Church.

As more meetings followed, the group organized into the African Mission Freedman, which led to the founding of the African Baptist Church in 1837, with the Rev. John Livingston serving as its founding pastor.

The original church was a two-story frame building constructed in 1854 on the corner of Seventh and George streets. Now named Union Baptist Church, the church was located on the second floor, and Alton's first African-American school met on the lower level.

Falling on hard times, the church was forced to sell the property in 1876 and reverted to meeting in homes.

Wood Station, Foster Township - Near Alton

In 1819, the First Illinois General Assembly enacted a system that would limit the rights of free African Americans.

Despite these efforts, James Henry Johnson and Samuel Bates became some of the most prosperous landowners in the Foster Township of Madison County. Johnson and his wife, Eleanor, started the 80-acre Oak Leaf Farm in 1850 after moving to the Wood Station area of Foster Township. Not only did Johnson found and pastor Baptist churches in Alton, but he also represented Madison County at the State Convention of Colored Citizens of the State of Illinois in 1856.

Bates and his wife, Martha Arbuckle, married and moved to Foster Township in Madison County in 1847. The brick house that Bates built for his family in 1865 still stands on Wood Station Rood at Seiler Road in Alton. Bates made the bricks himself.

Cheney Mansion - Jerseyville, IL

Dating back to 1827, the Cheney Mansion has plenty of history. The center part of the Mansion was the first structure built in Jerseyville and was called the ‘Little Red House,’ it was a stop for the Stage Line which ran through this part of the country. In the basement, there is a false cistern that slaves were hidden in, which served as a “station” for the Underground Railroad.

The station was a small underground room located beneath the mansion. A tunnel, discovered in the 1950s when State Street was being repaired, connected the room to a stable across the road. A trapdoor in the dining room allowed food and water to be lowered to those hiding below. The wall that once separated the basement from the underground room was removed by the Historical Society, so visitors can easily see the room.

Jacksonville, IL

In the mid-1800s, Jacksonville, Illinois acted as a local hub for the Underground Railroad, sheltering hundreds who wished to escape the horrors of slavery. Several local historic homes served as havens on this journey to freedom, making Jacksonville one of the first such stations in the area.

Proud, educated abolitionists like Jonathan B. Turner and Edward Beecher, brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, proved to be invaluable advocates for freedom. Edward Beecher was the first president of Illinois College, the first private college in Illinois. Because of the strong views of many of the students and faculty, Illinois College was considered an engine of abolitionism. Benjamin Henderson, a former slave, came to Jacksonville in 1841 and immediately began working with the Underground Railroad. These men and countless others kept the spirited torch of freedom burning bright.

In Jacksonville there are at least 9 documented sites which were important to this endeavor during the years before the Civil War. Most are private residences still available to be seen and their stories told.

1. THE FORMER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH - 520 W. College Avenue

On December 15, 1833 thirty-two men and women founded the Jacksonville Congregational Church. They were all anti-slavery in belief and the church was soon called “the Abolition Church,” not always a compliment in the divided community of Jacksonville. When the UGRR became active in town, Deacon Elihu Wolcott was known as the “chief conductor.” Many members of this church bravely risked prison and fines by actively providing shelter, clothing, food and transportation. The Congregational Church is recognized by the National Park Service, National UGRR Network to Freedom program.

2. BEECHER HALL - Illinois College Campus

Illinois College was founded in 1829 by the “Yale Band,” a group of Yale theology graduates who left Connecticut to found churches and a college on the Western frontier. These young men were all opposed to slavery. The Rev. Edward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was named the first president. He was a good friend of the Rev. Elijah Lovejoy and together they founded the first Illinois Anti-Slavery Society in Alton. After Lovejoy’s tragic death the students held a massive protest near Beecher Hall. Students, professors and trustees of the College all were active in the UGRR. Beecher Hall and Illinois College are recognized by the National Park Service, National UGRR Network to Freedom program.

3. WOODLAWN FARM - 1463 Gierke Road

This farm was settled in 1824 by Michael Huffaker and his wife from Kentucky. Michael employed four free AfricanAmerican families for whom he provided cabins. In 1840 he built the home which still stands on the property. People were used to seeing blacks working on the farm and didn’t suspect that this was a safe house for “freedom seekers.”

4. DR. BAZALEEL GILLETT HOUSE - 1005 Grove Street

This home was purchased by Dr. Gillett in 1838.Construction began in 1833 and was finished by Dr. Gillett shortly after buying it. He was a physician who helped during the cholera epidemic of 1833. He also helped to found Trinity Episcopal Church and was one of the trustees of the Female Academy which merged with Illinois College in 1903. As an abolitionist he allowed “freedom seekers” to hide in an abandoned cabin on his 10 acres of land. One story tells of three women who were hiding in the shed and were rescued by Professor Jonathan Baldwin Turner of Illinois College.

5. ASA TALCOTT HOUSE - 859 Grove Street

This was the home of Asa and Marie Talcott, founding members of the Congregational Church. The home was built in 1833, with additions in 1844 and 1861. Asa Talcott was also a bricklayer and plasterer. Benjamin Henderson, a free black man and important conductor of the UGRR, stated that Asa Talcott was among those he could count on for help whenever he needed supplies for the fugitives. One story of a fleeing slave in February 1844 states that a slave was put in a haystack of Talcott’s barn, while authorities searched for the fugitive.

6. HENRY IRVING HOUSE - 711 West Beecher Avenue

Henry Irving moved to Jacksonville in 1842 and was an active member of the Congregational Church. His obituary from the Jacksonville Daily Journal states: “For a number of years after he came to this city he had the honor to belong to the brave band of Abolitionists who did so much to help fugitive slaves to freedom...His house was more than once a refuge to the freedom seekers.”

7. AFRICA IN JACKSONVILLE

In the 1800s most of Jacksonville’s African-American population lived in the area of town known as Africa. The area was bordered by W. Beecher Avenue (then known as College St.), S. West St., Anna St. and S. Church St. Here lived Ben Henderson, famous for his work in the UGRR and Rev. Andrew W. Jackson, pastor of Mt. Emory Baptist Church. In 1860 Africa had 156 residents. Many were former slaves who helped shelter “freedom seekers” on their way north.

8. GENERAL GRIERSON MANSION - 852 E. State Street

Garrison Berry owned a small brick home which originally stood on this property. One night he provided shelter for Emily Logan, who had escaped from her owner, Mrs. Porter Clay. The property was later purchased by the Grierson family and the original brick house was incorporated into the mansion. Benjamin H. Grierson, a general during the Civil War, later commanded the all black 10th U.S. Cavalry known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

9. PORTER CLAY HOUSE - 1019 W. State Street

The home was built in 1834 on six acres of land owned by Elizabeth Hardin Clay who had married Porter Clay, a brother of Henry Clay. She came from Kentucky with two of her slaves, Emily and Robert Logan. After living a while in Jacksonville, the young people learned that Illinois was a free state. Fearing that Mrs. Clay would send them back into slavery, they fled the home and hid with friends in Africa (site #7). Robert was recaptured and sent back south while Emily was hidden by friends in the Congregational Church until her freedom was granted by the Supreme Court (sites #1 & #8). 

San Antonio Report

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Historians discover Mission San José was a stop on the Underground Railroad

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The National Park Service on Monday announced that new research has uncovered that enslaved African Americans sought freedom at Mission San José in the 1800s — the first of several sites connected to the U.S. slave trade to be identified in San Antonio.

The ongoing research is part of the National Park Service’s National Underground Network to Freedom program , which lists locations of the Underground Railroad — a network of sites that were significant in the journeys of enslaved people, or freedom seekers — in an effort to preserve the history. 

New listings are added twice per calendar year to the NPS map. The latest update included 19 new sites, which are not yet added to the interactive map online which includes more than 740 sites identified across 39 states. 

Of the 19 locations added, two were identified to have been in Texas. One is at Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, founded in 1720 on what is now the city’s South Side, and the second is at Jackson Ranch Church in Hidalgo County.

Listings don’t only include safe houses, but kidnapping sites, churches, Maroon communities (the name for groups that escaped slavery together), and any location related to a freedom seeker’s journey.

Allison Young, integrated resources program manager at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, said that in 1830, five freedom seekers fled from Louisiana and 400 miles southwest to Mission San José. When slave catchers arrived to take them three years later, an “armed conflict” arose when the Mexican Army upheld its anti-slavery laws.

Mission San José was also identified in a “run-away advertisement” as a potential stopping site of freedom seekers escaping a plantation that was nearby, Young said.

“These documented stories may indicate a deeper history of Underground Railroad activity at the Mission among the mission community and associated religious orders during the antebellum era,” she said.

The announcement came at a naturalization ceremony at Mission San José in honor of the new designation, Earth Day and National Park Week, where 15 people from the Philippines, China and Mexico received their citizenship.

With small U.S. flags in hand and proud families documenting them, each person proudly swore their allegiance.

“The United States is still seen as the beacon of freedom around the world,” U.S. National Park Service Director Chuck Sams said at the ceremony. ”Inviting in and bringing in new citizens, … it rings true for the folks who came here seeking freedom and it still does today.”

The National Park Service’s documentation of significant sites related to escaping slavery started after the agency took a deeper dive into listening to the Black history being brought forward, Sams said. It’s known that former slaves traveled north, but freedom seekers also began to travel West and into Texas territory, he said, where Mexico had outlawed slavery. Texas later joined the U.S. as a slave state.

“The Mission itself and the people that lived here, both the indigenous and Mexican people, helped slaves become free,” Sams said.

Now, the NPS is focused on identifying the locations along the Underground Railroad that had been lost to history or forgotten.

“Slaves came from Louisiana, out to Mexico, and received sanctuary from the Mexican government,” Sams said. “We’re always learning new stories that we’re either not told, or maybe under-told stories.”

The San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, or SAAACAM, partnered with the National Parks Service to do local research and found evidence that places slaves at Mission San José. It is still working on compiling that research that will be presented publicly in a few years, according to Cristal Mendez, historian at SAAACAM. 

And tourists visiting the Missions are starting to learn San Antonio’s connection to the Underground Railroad, she said.

“Not a lot of people know this history in San Antonio,” Mendez said. “I don’t think people realize slavery existed in San Antonio, and to think about this other layer that exists at the Missions is something new to folks.” 

More sites are being nominated to be listed in the Network to Freedom, including two sites in San Antonio, where freedom seekers were imprisoned for escaping slavery and sold as property, Mendez said. Researchers have also obtained Spanish archived records in Bexar County of enslaved people showing up in sales, she added, information the museum is working to confirm.

Young also noted that some American and Anglo-American immigrants still attempted to re-enslave freedom seekers who sought refuge in San Antonio between 1829 and 1835.

Mendez said there’s still “so much research that needs to be done,” and that all the new information about the Underground Railroad in San Antonio will be included in new exhibits when SAAACAM relocates to the Kress Building downtown.

“We’re working on that research to share in our museum and to have on the National Park Service listing . It’s stories like that we’re still trying to understand,” Mendez said. “There’s just a lot of history in the larger story of slavery in San Antonio.”

This weekend’s ‘Go Do That!’ promises Fiesta fun, rock ‘n’ roll and baseball legends

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News release, national park service announces 19 additions to the underground railroad network to freedom in 10 states.

Contact: [email protected]

WASHINGTON  – Sites of daring escapes and places of refuge are among the 19 new listings added to the National Park Service's  National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom . The announcement was made today by National Park Service Director Chuck Sams during a  National Park Week  event at Mission San José in  San Antonio Missions National Historical Park . The mission, one of the new listings, was the scene of an 1833 armed conflict over slavery.  

“The National Park Service is committed to sharing a fuller and more inclusive account of our nation's history, a history that is not complete until all voices are represented,”  National Park Service Director Chuck Sams  said. “These listings are the result of years of research and documentation that recount the struggles and successes of freedom seekers during the Underground Railroad era. As we approach the 250 th  anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and its advocacy of equal rights and self-determination, we must ensure that our national narrative includes their stories of bravery, persistence and resilience.”

Created by Congress in 1998, the Network to Freedom recognizes places and programs with verifiable connections to the Underground Railroad and the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight. It includes almost 800 sites and programs in 40 states, Washington, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands and Canada.  

The network documents the diverse experiences of people who escaped slavery and the allies who supported them. The listing for Mission San José commemorates an 1833 defense of Mexico’s anti-slavery laws. Five freedom seekers from Louisiana completed a treacherous 400-mile journey to safety in San Antonio, which was part of Mexico at the time. The Mexican Army protected the five men by opening fire on the slave catchers pursing them. 

Following are the additions to the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. Some sites are privately owned. If a site is not open to the public, please respect the privacy of the owner.  

• Timucuan Preserve's Freedom Seeking Stories 
• Saltwater Underground Railroad Experience

Indiana     

• Lawrenceburg Public Library District Genealogy & Local History Department

Illinois        

• Allison Family Homesite
• Contraband Camp at Cairo, Illinois                                                                                                                   

Maryland    

• Button Farm Almanac Tour
• Union Bethel A.M.E. Church of Cecilton

Missouri                                                                                  

• Seeking Freedom: Bold Escapes from the Bissell House, Missouri
• Lila, the Life of a Missouri Slave
• Oglesby Park
• Smith Chapel Cemetery in Foristell, Missouri
• Ohio Freedom Path
• Restore Cleveland Hope   
• Post Street in Utica, NY
• Crossing to Freedom: The Cataract House and the Underground Railroad

Pennsylvania  

• Daniel & Hannah Gibbons Burial Site at Lampeter Friends Meetinghouse
• Byberry Hall
• Southward to Mexico: Mission San Jose, 1833
• Jackson Ranch Church and Martin Jackson Cemetery  

Nominations for the Network to Freedom are accepted twice a year. Grants and technical assistance are available to help communities investigate their connections to the Underground Railroad. Information and applications are  available online .  

Throughout National Park Week (April 20-28), Sams is traveling to several national parks and related sites. Highlights include meeting with staff, volunteers, visitors, and partners; and touring infrastructure projects that are improving accessibility, climate resilience, and the visitor experience. 

While at San Antionio Missions on Earth Day, he also participated in a naturalization ceremony for new citizens, distributed military passes to service members from Joint Base San Antonio, and worked with a youth crew on an  activity funded by the Great American Outdoors Act  to repair and restore the historic Espada Aqueduct, the oldest Spanish aqueduct in the United States.  

www.nps.gov 

About the National Park Service.   More than 20,000 National Park Service employees care for America’s 429 national parks and work with communities across the nation to help preserve local history and create close-to-home recreational opportunities. Learn more at  www.nps.gov  and on  Facebook ,  Instagram ,  X  (formerly Twitter)  and  YouTube .

Last updated: April 22, 2024

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19 sites added to the underground railroad network to freedom.

Mission San Jose, in San Antonio Missions National Historical Park/NPS

Sites of daring escapes and places of refuge are among the 19 new listings added to the National Park Service's  National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom . The announcement was made Monday by National Park Service Director Chuck Sams during a  National Park Week  event at Mission San José in  San Antonio Missions National Historical Park . The mission, one of the new listings, was the scene of an 1833 armed conflict over slavery.  

“The National Park Service is committed to sharing a fuller and more inclusive account of our nation's history, a history that is not complete until all voices are represented,”  Sams  said. “These listings are the result of years of research and documentation that recount the struggles and successes of freedom seekers during the Underground Railroad era. As we approach the 250 th  anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and its advocacy of equal rights and self-determination, we must ensure that our national narrative includes their stories of bravery, persistence and resilience.”

Created by Congress in 1998, the Network to Freedom recognizes places and programs with verifiable connections to the Underground Railroad and the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight. It includes almost 800 sites and programs in 40 states, Washington, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands and Canada.  

The network documents the diverse experiences of people who escaped slavery and the allies who supported them, a Park Service release said. The listing for Mission San José commemorates an 1833 defense of Mexico’s anti-slavery laws. Five freedom seekers from Louisiana completed a treacherous 400-mile journey to safety in San Antonio, which was part of Mexico at the time. The Mexican Army protected the five men by opening fire on the slave catchers pursing them. 

Following are the additions to the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. Some sites are privately owned. If a site is not open to the public, please respect the privacy of the owner.

• Timucuan Preserve's Freedom Seeking Stories 
• Saltwater Underground Railroad Experience

Indiana     

• Lawrenceburg Public Library District Genealogy & Local History Department

Illinois        

• Allison Family Homesite
• Contraband Camp at Cairo, Illinois                                                                                                                   

Maryland    

• Button Farm Almanac Tour
• Union Bethel A.M.E. Church of Cecilton

Missouri                                                                                   

• Seeking Freedom: Bold Escapes from the Bissell House, Missouri
• Lila, the Life of a Missouri Slave
• Oglesby Park
• Smith Chapel Cemetery in Foristell, Missouri
• Ohio Freedom Path
• Restore Cleveland Hope   
• Post Street in Utica, NY
• Crossing to Freedom: The Cataract House and the Underground Railroad

Pennsylvania  

• Daniel & Hannah Gibbons Burial Site at Lampeter Friends Meetinghouse
• Byberry Hall
• Southward to Mexico: Mission San Jose, 1833
• Jackson Ranch Church and Martin Jackson Cemetery  

Nominations for the Network to Freedom are accepted twice a year. Grants and technical assistance are available to help communities investigate their connections to the Underground Railroad. Information and applications are  available online .  

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The Little-Known Underground Railroad That Ran South to Mexico

By: Becky Little

Updated: August 30, 2023 | Original: October 24, 2018

The Underground Railroad ran south as well as north. For enslaved people in Texas, refuge in Canada must have seemed impossibly far away. Fortunately, slavery was also illegal in Mexico .

Researchers estimate 5,000 to 10,000 people escaped from bondage into Mexico, says Maria Hammack , who is writing her dissertation about this topic at the University of Texas at Austin. But she thinks the actual number could be even higher.

“These were clandestine routes and if you got caught you would be killed and lynched , so most people didn’t leave a lot of records,” says Hammack.

There’s some evidence that tejanos , or Mexicans in Texas, acted as “conductors” on the southern route by helping people get to Mexico. In addition, Hammack has also identified a Black woman and two white men who helped enslaved workers escape and tried to find a home for them in Mexico.

Mexico abolished slavery in 1829 when Texas was still part of the country, in part prompting white, slave-holding immigrants to fight for independence in the Texas Revolution . Once they formed the Republic of Texas in 1836, they made slavery legal again, and it continued to be legal when Texas joined the U.S. as a state in 1845.

Enslaved people in Texas were aware that there was a country to the south where they could find different levels of freedom (though indentured debt servitude existed in Mexico, it was not the same as chattel slavery). Hammack has discovered one runaway named Tom who had been enslaved by Sam Houston . Houston was a president of the Republic of Texas who’d fought in the Texas Revolution. Once Tom got across the border, he joined the Mexican military that Houston had fought against.

Fugitive enslaved people got to Mexico in many different ways. Some went on foot, while others rode horses or snuck aboard ferries bound for Mexican ports. Stories spread about enslaved people who crossed the Rio Grande river dividing Texas from Mexico by floating on bales of cotton, and several Texas newspapers reported in July 1863 that three enslaved people had escaped this way. Even if this wasn’t logistically possible, the imagery of floating to freedom on a symbol of slavery was strong.

But it wasn’t only enslaved people in Texas who found freedom in Mexico. “I have found individuals who made it all the way from North Carolina , Mississippi , Louisiana , Alabama ,” Hammack says.

Slaveholders knew that enslaved people were escaping to Mexico, and the U.S. tried to get Mexico to sign a fugitive slave treaty. Just as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had compelled free states to return escapees to the south, the U.S. wanted Mexico to return escaped enslaved people to the U.S. But Mexico refused to sign such a treaty, insisting that all enslaved people were free when they set foot on Mexican soil. Despite this, some U.S. owners of enslaved people still hired slave catchers to illegally kidnap escapees in Mexico.

It’s unclear how organized the southern “underground railroad” was. Hammack says some enslaved people may have found their way to Mexico without assistance. Other evidence suggests tejanos, especially poor tejanos, played a part in helping escapees get to Mexico.

Hammack and researcher Roseann Bacha-Garza have also identified a mixed-race family from Alabama who moved to southern Texas near the Rio Grande and helped enslaved people escape to Mexico. The wife, Matilda Hicks, was a formerly enslaved woman. Her husband, Nathaniel Jackson, was the son of the man whose plantation she used to work on.

In addition, some northern abolitionists traveled south to help enslaved people reach Mexico.

“I have come across abolitionists from the north who were going to Mexico to petition Mexico to allow them to buy land to establish colonies for runaway slaves and free blacks,” Hammack says. In the early 1830s, Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy “was actively petitioning the Mexican government to allow for colonies to be established for, I guess what we would consider now, refugees.”

Lundy’s plan to start a free colony in Mexico’s Texas region was thwarted when it separated from Mexico and legalized slavery. Later, in 1852, Seminole groups that included runaway enslaved people successfully petitioned the Mexican government for land. “It still belongs to their descendants and they still live there to this day in Mexico,” Hammack says.

These and other refugees fleeing slavery through the southern “underground railroad” all benefited from Mexico’s willingness to give them a safe haven.

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Black resilience on display in upcoming Green Book exhibition

April 25, 2024, black resilience on display in upcoming  green book  exhibition.

Smithsonian-produced exhibition comes to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center July 13

CINCINNATI – The resilience and ingenuity of African Americans take center stage in a new exhibition coming to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center . The Negro Motorist Green Book offers an immersive look at the iconic travel guide that safely guided Black travelers through segregated America in the middle of the 20 th century. The featured exhibition developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) opens July 13.

The Negro Motorist Green Book uses Smithsonian artifacts, from business signs and postcards to historic footage, images and firsthand accounts, to convey the apprehension felt by African American travelers and to celebrate the resilience, innovation and elegance of people choosing to live a full American existence. The exhibition brings into focus a vibrant parallel world of African American businesses, the rise of the Black leisure class and the important role The Green Book played in facilitating the second wave of the Great Migration, empowering African Americans to escape the hostility of racism across the country – particularly in the South – and pursue their American Dream.

"We’re excited to share the story of The Green Book with our community. It’s a story that transcends history because its legacy, and those who lived it, are still with us,” said Woodrow Keown, Jr., president and COO of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. “ The Green Book is a light in a dark period in American history. It showed, as the Underground Railroad did a century earlier, that African Americans would not be denied their freedom and were prepared to prevail over the systems designed to oppress them.”

The Negro Motorist Green Book is included with museum admission and will be open from July 13 to October 13 at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was developed by SITES in collaboration with award-winning author, photographer and cultural documentarian Candacy Taylor. The exhibition was made possible through the support of Exxon Mobil Corporation whose predecessor, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, played a significant role in the distribution of The Green Book through its U.S. network of Esso stations, helping to provide motorists and their families opportunities for safer and more comfortable travel. Esso stations were the only major retailer of The Green Book . Esso also employed many African American engineers, scientists and marketing executives and welcome African American motorists at its stations.

About the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center  The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in August 2004 on the banks of the Ohio River in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Since then, more than 1.3 million people have visited its permanent and changing exhibits and public programs, inspiring everyone to take courageous steps for freedom. Two million people have utilized educational resources online at  freedomcenter.org , working to connect the lessons of the Underground Railroad to inform and inspire today’s global and local fight for freedom. Partnerships include Historians Against Slavery, Polaris Project, Free the Slaves, US Department of State and International Justice Mission. In 2014, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center launched a new online resource in the fight against modern slavery,  endslaverynow.org .

About Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) has been sharing the wealth of Smithsonian collections and research programs with millions of people outside Washington, D.C., for more than 65 years. SITES connects Americans to their shared cultural heritage through a wide range of exhibitions about art, science and history, which are shown wherever people live, work and play. For exhibition description and tour schedules, visit sites.si.edu .

About ExxonMobil ExxonMobil, one of the largest publicly traded international oil and gas companies, uses technology and innovation to help meet the world’s growing energy needs. ExxonMobil holds an industry-leading inventory of resources, is one of the largest refiners and marketers of petroleum products and its chemical company is one of the largest in the world. For more information, visit exxonmobil.com .

Here's where Harriet Tubman byway might go in Rochester

Self-described history lover Chandra Pointer came out to a public meeting about the proposed Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad New York Corridor to make sure she was heard.

She doesn't want Black people — their experiences, their presence and their present — left out, she said.

"It's like we're second-class citizens to the story of our history," said Pointer, a 19th Ward resident. Too often, she said, the accounts of enslaved Black people are told from the perspectives of white abolitionists. The stories of Black Rochesterians are sometimes noticeably absent from tours and museums and places marked on maps, she said.

What about the Black folks in Rochester and New York at large — beyond Frederick Douglass — who lived here, helped enslaved people escape and escaped themselves, Pointer wondered. Will there be a place for their points of view in this project? What about their connections to the Black people of Rochester now?

Roughly 50 people gathered Monday evening at Legacy Drama House in Rochester's Beechwood neighborhood to hear from the planners of the corridor and tell those planners their hopes and expectations for the 500-mile route that, if it becomes a reality, would connect historic sites to increase tourism and improve the public's understanding of how some enslaved people reached freedom before the Civil War.

Attendees told the corridor organizers, who are still in the early stages of a multiyear process to get Scenic Byway status for a route along existing roads, which historical locations they thought should be included on the path and asked that it illustrate the many permutations, triumphs and tragedies of the Underground Railroad. The planners said they were grateful for the feedback and wanted more.

Where would New York's Underground Railroad corridor run?

The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad New York Corridor would run between New York City and Niagara Falls, passing through 21 counties, including Wayne, Monroe and Orleans, according to the Underground Railroad Consortium of New York State's draft route.

From Lockport to Lyons, the corridor would follow State Route 31, according to representatives from Hargrove International Inc. , a cultural heritage tourism consultant assisting with the development of the corridor proposal. In metro Rochester, State Route 31 runs on thoroughfares including Spencerport Road, Lyell Avenue, Broad Street and Monroe Avenue.

Ultimately, the consortium aims to earn  Scenic Byway status  from the state and federal governments for the route and provide travelers with a cohesive path of Underground Railroad sites from southern Maryland to St. Catharines, Ontario, which is about 15 miles from Niagara Falls in New York.

The existing  Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway  spans more than 200 miles from southern Maryland to Philadelphia, connecting 46 sites. Its success in telling the story of the Underground Railroad and as an economic development agent inspired New York to pursue a similar route, New York corridor organizers said.

If a byway designation were obtained in New York, no new billboards could be constructed along the route, according to Hargrove International representatives. Because the corridor uses existing roadways, they said, a byway designation does not facilitate the state Department of Transportation's ability to take property via eminent domain or increase the likelihood that would happen.

Details about the route and its stops are to be determined

The corridor planners designed the draft route so that it would intersect the New York sites that are on the National Park Service's "Travel with Tubman" road trip planning tool: the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center in Niagara Falls, the Smith Opera House in Geneva, the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, the Thompson Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn, the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark in Peterboro and the Stephen and Harriet Myers Residence in Albany.

The draft route does not approach Lake Ontario's shore, disappointing Martha Lightfoot, who attended the meeting to advocate for the inclusion of the Sodus Bay region. The area has a history of slavery , was the site of an early Black settlement and served as a departure point for people who sailed across the lake for freedom in Canada. The Sodus Bay Lighthouse Museum has several features related to the Underground Railroad in the region, Lightfoot said.

The Sodus Bay region was not included on the draft route, said Cheryl Hargrove of Hargrove International, because it is already included on the Great Lakes Seaway Trail , a National Scenic Byway .

Other attendee recommendations included marking the Talman Building in Rochester , where Douglass printed The North Star antislavery newspaper, on the route and, since much of the draft route runs east-west, providing information about the many north-south pathways people escaping slavery took across the state.

Hargrove said it has not yet been determined how many miles off the route a landmark could be for it to be part of the byway's sites. That will be decided as the process continues, she said.

One idea that came out of the Underground Railroad byway planning process in Maryland that proved successful is an orientation center that serves as an interpretive gateway to the route, Hargrove said.

How to get more information on the Tubman corridor and offer input

Conversations about a New York byway to tell the story of the Underground Railroad began in 2022, according to Karen Kuhl, executive director of the Cayuga County Office of Tourism, an initiative leader and consortium member.

But the process is still in its infancy, and the organizers seek more feedback from the public.

"We are really in the initial discovery aspect of it," said Hargrove. "It's our job to figure out what's the best way to make it work for everybody."

More information, including notice of future public meetings, about the proposed Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad New York Corridor is available online at https://harriettubmancorridorny.com/ .

The Underground Railroad Consortium of New York State also provides information about the corridor online at https://www.urcnys.org/corridor .

Questions or comments about the corridor may be emailed to Sage Hamilton-Hazarika, a coordinator for the consortium, at [email protected] .

Things To Do | Berkeley Rep’s new season: From Mexican…

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Things to do | cal poly humboldt closes campus for rest of semester over gaza protests, things to do | berkeley rep’s new season: from mexican underground railroad to a holocaust mystery.

A hip-hop musical about the underground railroad to Mexico, a mystery over Holocaust-era photographs, new takes on “The Magic Flute” and “Uncle Vanya,” and a hit Broadway comedy about the doings at a Harlem salon frequented by West African immigrants are among the shows headed to Berkeley Repertory Theatre as part of the company’s 2024-25 season.

The new season announced recently by the award-winning company also includes two world premieres: Korean American playwright Jiehae Park’s meditative look at life and aging, “the aves”; and “The Thing About Jellyfish,” a stage adaptation of Ali Benjamin’s best-selling novel about a 12-year-old girl dealing with loss.

Despite serving up a season of new and recently developed productions, the company is also bringing back several favorite artists that Berkeley Rep patrons have seen in the past, including playmaker Mary Zimmerman (“Metamorphoses,” “The White Snake”), playwright Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project (“The Laramie Project”) and Jocelyn Bioh (“Goddess”).

All told, the season will be about “telling stories both timely and timeless, allowing us to use theater to interrogate some of the most pressing issues of this moment, and also to escape into worlds both imaginative and fantastical,” said company artistic director Johanna Pfaelzer. “It feels fitting and necessary that the season will give us the shared opportunity to travel from the enchanted forest of Mozart’s Magic Flute to Nazi-occupied Poland; from Harlem’s 125th Street to the Mexico/Texas border, and countless places along the way. I look forward to the journey in the company of this incredibly engaged community.”

Subscription packages for the seven-play season, starting at $224, are now on sale. Single tickets will go on sale at a later date.

Here’s a peak at the new season, in chronological order.

“Mexodus” (Sept. 13-Oct. 20): Described as “hip-hop meets history,” the musical by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson focuses on the estimated 4,000-10,000 U.S. slaves who escaped to freedom in Mexico. The score is created live during each show using instruments and live-looping technology.

“The Matchbox Magic Flute” (Oct. 18-Dec. 8): Playmaker Mary Zimmerman, who has enchanted Berkeley Rep audiences with her evocative and minimalist staging of classic stories, employs a cast of 10 singers and five musicians to re-invent Mozart’s popular opera about Prince Tamino’s quest to free an imprisoned princess.

“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” (Nov. 8-Dec. 15): Jocelyn Bioh, who wrote the book for the exuberant hit musical “Goddess,” which played at Berkeley Rep to years ago, returns with stage comedy about the denizens of a popular Harlem hair salon where talk turns to love, family, neighborhood gossip and the forces of gentrification.

“The Thing About Jellyfish” (Jan. 31-March 9): Ali Benjamin’s 2015 novel about a middle-school girl immersing herself in the life and science of jellyfish after the death of a more-popular friend was a runaway best-seller and a National Book Award finalist. Keith Bunin’s adaptation of the book gets its premiere at Berkeley Rep.

“Uncle Vanya” (Feb. 14-March 23): The plays of Anton Chekhov seem to be a magnet for adaptations and satires — especially this one. Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s widely praised 2020 adaptation comes to Berkeley starring “Downton Abbey’s” Hugh Bonneville in the title role.

“Here There Are Blueberries” (April 5-May 11, 2025): Moises Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project’s docu-drama style of theatrical production created an unforgettable work in “Laramie Project,” which focused on the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard. The company returns to Berkeley Rep to present this play, written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, about the stunning mystery that arose when an album of Nazi-era photographs arrived at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“the aves” (May 2-June 8, 2025): This world premiere by Jiehae Park centers on an elderly man and woman in a park, and their humorous, insightful and slightly surreal discussion of just abut everything.

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