essay about 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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Underground Railroad

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 29, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009

The Underground Railroad was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to escaped enslaved people from the South. It developed as a convergence of several different clandestine efforts. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy in a less-secretive fashion.

Quaker Abolitionists

The Quakers are considered the first organized group to actively help escaped enslaved people. George Washington complained in 1786 that Quakers had attempted to “liberate” one of his enslaved workers.

In the early 1800s, Quaker abolitionist Isaac T. Hopper set up a network in Philadelphia that helped enslaved people on the run. At the same time, Quakers in North Carolina established abolitionist groups that laid the groundwork for routes and shelters for escapees.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, established in 1816, was another proactive religious group helping fugitive enslaved people.

What Was the Underground Railroad?

The earliest mention of the Underground Railroad came in 1831 when enslaved man Tice Davids escaped from Kentucky into Ohio and his owner blamed an “underground railroad” for helping Davids to freedom.

In 1839, a Washington newspaper reported an escaped enslaved man named Jim had revealed, under torture, his plan to go north following an “underground railroad to Boston.”

Vigilance Committees—created to protect escaped enslaved people from bounty hunters in New York in 1835 and Philadelphia in 1838—soon expanded their activities to guide enslaved people on the run. By the 1840s, the term Underground Railroad was part of the American vernacular.

How the Underground Railroad Worked

Most of the enslaved people helped by the Underground Railroad escaped border states such as Kentucky, Virginia and Maryland.

In the deep South, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 made capturing escaped enslaved people a lucrative business, and there were fewer hiding places for them. Fugitive enslaved people were typically on their own until they got to certain points farther north.

People known as “conductors” guided the fugitive enslaved people. Hiding places included private homes, churches and schoolhouses. These were called “stations,” “safe houses,” and “depots.” The people operating them were called “stationmasters.”

There were many well-used routes stretching west through Ohio to Indiana and Iowa. Others headed north through Pennsylvania and into New England or through Detroit on their way to Canada.

Fugitive Slave Acts

The reason many escapees headed for Canada was the Fugitive Slave Acts . The first act, passed in 1793, allowed local governments to apprehend and extradite escaped enslaved people from within the borders of free states back to their point of origin, and to punish anyone helping the fugitives. Some Northern states tried to combat this with Personal Liberty Laws, which were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1842.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was designed to strengthen the previous law, which was felt by southern states to be inadequately enforced. This update created harsher penalties and set up a system of commissioners that promoted favoritism towards owners of enslaved people and led to some formerly enslaved people being recaptured. For an escaped person, the northern states were still considered a risk.

Meanwhile, Canada offered Black people the freedom to live where they wanted, sit on juries, run for public office and more, and efforts at extradition had largely failed. Some Underground Railroad operators based themselves in Canada and worked to help the arriving fugitives settle in.

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor for the Underground Railroad.

Born an enslaved woman named Araminta Ross, she took the name Harriet (Tubman was her married name) when, in 1849, she escaped a plantation in Maryland with two of her brothers. They returned a couple of weeks later, but Tubman left again on her own shortly after, making her way to Pennsylvania.

Tubman later returned to the plantation on several occasions to rescue family members and others. On her third trip, she tried to rescue her husband, but he had remarried and refused to leave.

Distraught, Tubman reported a vision of God, after which she joined the Underground Railroad and began guiding other escaped slaves to Maryland. Tubman regularly took groups of escapees to Canada, distrusting the United States to treat them well.

Frederick Douglass

Formerly enslaved person and famed writer Frederick Douglass hid fugitives in his home in Rochester, New York, helping 400 escapees make their way to Canada. Former fugitive Reverend Jermain Loguen, who lived in neighboring Syracuse, helped 1,500 escapees go north.

Robert Purvis, an escaped enslaved person turned Philadelphia merchant, formed the Vigilance Committee there in 1838. Former enslaved person and railroad operator Josiah Henson created the Dawn Institute in 1842 in Ontario to help escapees who made their way to Canada learn needed work skills.

New York City-based escapee Louis Napoleon’s occupation as listed on his death certificate was “Underground R.R. Agent.” He was a key figure guiding fugitives he found at the docks and train stations.

John Parker was a free Black man in Ohio, a foundry owner who took a rowboat across the Ohio River to help fugitives cross. He was also known to make his way into Kentucky and enter plantations to help enslaved people escape.

William Still was a prominent Philadelphia citizen who had been born to fugitive enslaved parents in New Jersey. An associate of Tubman’s, Still also kept a record of his activities in the Underground Railroad and was able to keep it safely hidden until after the Civil War, when he published them, offering one of the clearest accounts of Underground Railroad activity at the time.

Who Ran the Underground Railroad?

Most Underground Railroad operators were ordinary people, farmers and business owners, as well as ministers. Some wealthy people were involved, such as Gerrit Smith, a millionaire who twice ran for president. In 1841, Smith purchased an entire family of enslaved people from Kentucky and set them free.

One of the earliest known people to help fugitive enslaved people was Levi Coffin, a Quaker from North Carolina. He started around 1813 when he was 15 years old.

Coffin said that he learned their hiding places and sought them out to help them move along. Eventually, they began to find their way to him. Coffin later moved to Indiana and then Ohio, and continued to help escaped enslaved people wherever he lived.

Abolitionist John Brown was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, during which time he established the League of Gileadites, devoted to helping fugitive enslaved people get to Canada.

Brown would play many roles in the abolition movement, most famously leading a raid on Harper’s Ferry to create an armed force to make its way into the deep south and free enslaved people by gunpoint. Brown’s men were defeated, and Brown hanged for treason in 1859.

By 1837 Reverend Calvin Fairbank was helping enslaved people escape from Kentucky into Ohio. In 1844 he partnered with Vermont schoolteacher Delia Webster and was arrested for helping an escaped enslaved woman and her child. He was pardoned in 1849, but was arrested again and spent another 12 years in jail.

Charles Torrey was sent to prison for six years in Maryland for helping an enslaved family escape through Virginia. He operated out of Washington, D.C. , and had previously worked as an abolitionist newspaper editor in Albany, New York.

Massachusetts sea captain Jonathan Walker was arrested in 1844 after he was caught with a boatload of escaped enslaved people that he was trying to help get north. Walker was fined and jailed for a year, and branded on his right hand the letters “SS” for Slave Stealer.

John Fairfield of Virginia rejected his slave-holding family to help rescue the left-behind families of enslaved people who made it north. Fairfield’s method was to travel in the south posing as a slave trader. He broke out of jail twice. He died in 1860 in Tennessee during a rebellion .

End of the Line

The Underground Railroad ceased operations about 1863, during the Civil War. In reality, its work moved aboveground as part of the Union effort against the Confederacy.

Harriet Tubman once again played a significant part by leading intelligence operations and fulfilling a command role in Union Army operations to rescue the emancipated enslaved people.

Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad. Fergus Bordewich . Harriet Tubman: The Road To Freedom. Catherine Clinton . Who Really Ran the Underground Railroad? Henry Louis Gates . The Little Known History of the Underground Railroad in New York. Smithsonian Magazine . The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The New Yorker .

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What is the underground railroad.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger .

-harriet tubman, 1896.

The Underground Railroad —the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War—refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage. Wherever slavery existed, there were efforts to escape. At first to maroon communities in remote or rugged terrain on the edge of settled areas and eventually across state and international borders. These acts of self-emancipation labeled slaves as "fugitives," "escapees," or "runaways," but in retrospect " freedom seeker " is a more accurate description. Many freedom seekers began their journey unaided and many completed their self-emancipation without assistance, but each subsequent decade in which slavery was legal in the United States, there was an increase in active efforts to assist escape. The decision to assist a freedom seeker may have been spontaneous. However, in some places, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 , the Underground Railroad was deliberate and organized. Despite the illegality of their actions, people of all races, class and genders participated in this widespread form of civil disobedience. Freedom seekers went in many directions – Canada, Mexico, Spanish Florida, Indian territory, the West, Caribbean islands and Europe.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/ H.L. STEPHENS.

Wherever there were enslaved African Americans, there were people eager to escape. There was slavery in all original thirteen colonies, in Spanish California, Louisiana, and Florida; Central and South America; and on all of the Caribbean islands until the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and British abolition of slavery (1834). The Underground Railroad started at the place of enslavement. The routes followed natural and man-made modes of transportation - rivers, canals, bays, the Atlantic Coast, ferries and river crossings, road and trails. Locations close to ports, free territories and international boundaries prompted many escapes. As research continues, new routes are discovered and will be represented on the map. Using ingenuity, freedom seekers drew on courage and intelligence to concoct disguises, forgeries and other strategies. Slave catchers and enslavers watched for runaways on the expected routes of escape and used the stimulus of advertised rewards to encourage public complicity in apprehension. Help came from diverse groups: enslaved and free blacks, American Indians, and people of different religious and ethnic groups.

Maritime industry was an important source for spreading information, in addition to offering employment and transportation. The Pacific West Coast and possibly Alaska became destinations because of ties to the whaling industry. Military service was an additional option; thousands of African Americans joined from the Colonial Era to the Civil War to gain their freedom. During the Civil War, many freedom seekers sought protection and liberty by escaping to the lines of the Union army.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/ CAROL M. HIGHSMITH

Last updated: July 22, 2022

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.

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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.

William Still: An African American Abolitionist

Reflections on the underground railroad.

By Charles L. Blockson

Though Forty Years have passed, I remember as if it were yesterday the moment when the Underground Railroad in all its abiding mystery and hope and terror took possession of my imagination.  It was a Sunday afternoon during World War II; I was a boy of ten, sitting on a box in the backyard of our home in Norristown, Pennsylvania, listening to my grandfather tell stories about the family.

Charles L. Blockson [1]

(Original map design: oil on canvas, by Charles Hollingsworth, 1981. Image courtesy of the permanent collection of the African American Museum in Philadelphia)  

Introduction

In the year 2012, the history of Black Philadelphians still remains little known to most Americans.  I am hopeful that the creation of the current site on  William Still , made possible through by a federal Save America’s Treasures Grant administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Temple University Libraries, will be an educational tool for teachers, students and the general public to examine the rich history of African Americans.  Among the many original manuscripts in the Blockson Collection are the letters of William Still.  In one letter that William Still wrote to his daughter dated August 13, 1867, he writes that he is, “reading Macaulay’s History of England with great interest,” and that he intends “to write the History of the U.G.R.R. “  He continued, “I must do a good deal of reading and thinking in order to be able to write well.  I may commence my book this fall some time.”  His book,  The Underground Railroad , was published in 1872.  His book was a major inspiration for my research and writing.  In the following essay, I would like to share some history related to The Underground Railroad, William Still and Black Philadelphians that I discovered during my many years of research.

During my research, I found a family connection between my family and the Still family.  Our family relationship extends almost 170 years.  I learned after contacting the National Archives for information on William N. Blockson, the son of Leah Blockson, my great-grandmother.  William married Henrietta G. Still of Philadelphia on July 4, 1869 and that she was the daughter of William Still’s brother .  When the William Still Collection was donated to the Blockson Collection by the Still family, I was surprised to learn that William Still was also one of the antebellum black collectors and bibliophiles along with  Robert Purvis , Dr. Robert Campbell, Isaiah C. Wears,  William Carl Bolivar ,  William Whipper , and John S. Durham.   Clarence Still, the present patriarch of the Still family, bestowed me with the position of honorary chairman of the Annual Still Day Family Reunion, held for over 140 years in Lawnside, New Jersey, once known as Snow Hill.  During one of the reunions, more than three hundred descendants of William Still and his brothers gathered around me and sung a song that I wrote in my 1983 book entitled the “Ballad of the Underground Railroad".

By the year 1984, I had spent more than 40 years conducting research and writing about the mystery, hope and terror associated with the Underground Railroad.  That year, National Geographic published my article in its July issue.  The article, entitled “Escape from Slavery: The Underground Railroad” brought attention to its significant role in African resistance to slavery.  I wrote about my grandfather’s narrative to me:

“ My father—your great-grandfather, James Blockson—was a slave over in Delaware,” Grandfather said, “but as a teenager he ran away underground and escaped to Canada.” Grandfather knew little more than these bare details about his father’s flight to freedom, for James Blockson, like tens of thousands of other black slaves who fled north along its invisible rails and hid in its clandestine stations in the years before the Civil War, kept the secrets of the Underground Railroad locked in his heart until he died.” [2]  

My grandfather also told me about Jacob Blockson, my great-grandfather’s cousin, who also escaped on the Underground Railroad.  Years later, I would read his account in William Still’s classic book,  The Underground Railroad  as well as the name of my great-grandfather James.  My grandfather provided the following account about Jacob Blockson:

“So did his cousin Jacob Blockson, who escaped to St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1858, two years after my great-grandfather’s journey to the promised land, as runaway slaves sometimes called Canada.  But Jacob told William Still, a famous black agent of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, the reasons for his escape: ‘My master was about to be sold out this Fall, and I made up my mind that I did not want to be sold like a horse….I resolved to die sooner than I would be taken back.’” [3]  

When I was 15 years old, I travelled from Norristown to Philadelphia to browse in some bookstores.  At Leary’s Book Store at 9th and Market Streets, I found a thick, worn green cloth-covered book entitled  The Underground Railroad  by William Still published in 1872.  I paid five dollars for the book.  The book was much more than I had bargained for as I found two of my relatives who escaped on the Philadelphia’s Underground Railroad.  The discovery of William Still’s book began my interest in the history of the Underground Railroad which led me to write about it.  Still’s book contained the following information:

Jacob Blockson was a stout and healthy-looking man, about twenty-seven years old, with a countenance indicative of having no sympathy for slavery.  Being invited to tell his own story, describe his master, etc., he unhesitatingly relieved himself somewhat after this manner:

“I escaped from a man by the name of Jesse W. Paten [Layton]; he was a light complected man, tall, large, and full-faced, with a large nose.  He was a widower.  He belonged to no society of any kind.  He lived near Seaford, in Sussex County, Delaware.

I left because I didn’t want to stay with him any longer.  My master was about to be sold out this Fall, and I made up my mind that I did not want to be sold like a horse, the way they generally sold darkies then; so when I started I resolved to die sooner than I would be taken back; this was my intention all the while.

I left my wife, and one child; the wife’s name was Lear [Leah], and the child was called Alexander.  I want to get them on soon too.  I made some arrangements for their coming if I got off safe to Canada.” [4]

Jacob Blockson, after reaching Canada, true to the pledge that he made, wrote back as follows:

Saint Catharines, Canada West, Dec. 26th, 1858.

DEAR WIFE: -- I now inform you I am in Canada and am well and hope you are the same, and would wish you to be here next August.  You come to suspension bridge and from there to St. Catharines, write and let me know.  I am doing well working for a Butcher this winter, and will get good wages in the spring.  I now get $2.50 a week.

I Jacob Blockson, George Lewis, George Alligood and James Alligood are all in St. Catharines, and met George Ross from Lewis Wright’s, Jim Blockson is in Canada West, and Jim Delany, Plunnoth Connon.  I expect you my wife Lea Ann Blockson, my son Alexander & Lewis and Ames will all be here and Isabella also, if you cant bring all bring Alexander surely, write when you will come and I will meet you in Albany.  Love to you all, from your loving Husband,

Jacob Blockson [5]

My article made the cover story on  National Geographic Magazine  and   our nation and the world were re-introduced to the courage and determination of enslaved Africans who escaped on the Underground Railroad.  I wrote in my article of the Underground Railroad that: “It was a network of paths through the woods and fields, river crossings, boats and ships, trains and wagons, all haunted by the specter of recapture.  Its stations were the houses and churches of men and women—agents of the railroad—who refused to believe that human slavery and human decency could exist together in the same land.” [6]  

During January 1990, I was contacted by U.S. Representative Peter H. Kostmayer.  On January 15, 1990, a news conference was held at  Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church  in Philadelphia with me and United States Representative Peter Kostmayer.  At the meeting, we discussed the proposed federal legislation to formally identify and preserve historic sites connect with the Underground Railroad and to designate them as part of an Underground Railroad Historic Trail.  That same year, I was selected to Chair an Advisory Committee when Congress Passed Public Law 101-628, recognizing the significance of the Underground Railroad to American history.  The legislation directed the Secretary of Interior and the National Park Service to conduct a study of the Underground Railroad.  From the beginning Pennsylvania was instrumental in the start of the process for the original proposal.  Our Committee examined the historical significance of various sites existing in 23 states and territories, which included links to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands.  The Advisory Committee’s first meeting was held in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  As a result of our work, President William Jefferson Clinton signed the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Act into law on July 21, 1998.

Black Philadelphians

Most heroic of all were the slaves and free blacks who offered their churches and their homes to help the enslaved—and above all, the passengers themselves. [7]  

The City of Philadelphia was a center where anti-slavery roots were planted and nurtured many years before the 1800’s.   Pennsylvania Abolition Society  was founded in 1775.  Its members included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Dr. Benjamin Rush and Marquis de Lafayette.  These friends of enslaved Africans were the first to popularize and to lobby for total abolition of slavery.  Philadelphia became a vital junction on the Underground Railroad.  It was important because there was an international port in the city.  Men and women, young and old, from all races, religions, and walks of life kept the “Freedom Train” rolling.  William Still was among the brave and courageous Black Philadelphians who participated in the dangerous mission of assisting to liberate enslaved Africans.  Others participants, both White and Black, included The Reverend  Richard Allen  and Sarah Allen,  Passmore Williamson ,  J. Miller McKim , Robert Purvis,  Lucretia Mott ,  Jacob Blockson ,  Henry “Box” Brown , Charles and  Joseph Bustill , William and  Ellen Craft ,  Isaac Hopper ,  Samuel Johnson  and family, and  Lear Green , who at the age of 18 years old, was sent from Philadelphia to Elmira, New York to gain her freedom.

I have spent many years writing about Blacks in Pennsylvania, especially Black Philadelphians.  As early as 1787, the black community in Philadelphia formed the  Free African Society , an organization for mutual aid.  Two important Black churches grew from this society: the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by Richard Allen and the  African Church of St. Thomas , founded by  Absalom Jones .  Their churches became centers of spiritual and political life in the antebellum black community in Philadelphia.  Both pastors were involved in the Underground Railroad.  Bishop Allen and his wife, Sarah, assisted hundreds of enslaved Africans.  They hid them in their church as well as their home, providing them with food, shelter and protection.

Philadelphia became the “antebellum capitol” of the northern free Black population.   Interestingly, the onset of antislavery activities and fugitive aid in 1833 coincided with the emergence of educational and social self-improvement movements within Black communities in Pennsylvania.  By the 1830’s, a majority of Black clergy in Philadelphia permitted abolitionists and fugitive aid meetings and activities in their churches.  They also joined the abolitionist movement.  For example, the Zoar A.M.E. Church in Northern Liberties held a public meeting on April 16, 1838 to solicit contributions and increase membership for the Vigilant [Fugitive Aid] Association and Committee.   The Black clergy was also involved in the Underground Railroad such as The Reverend Walter Proctor, pastor of Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, who was an agent.  He also belonged to the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee.  Other reverends connected with the Underground Railroad were  Reverend Stephen H. Gloucester , pastor of Central Presbyterian Church of Color,  Reverend Charles L. Gardiner , Reverend Daniel Scott, pastor of the Union Baptist Church, and Reverend William Douglass.  Reverend John T. Moore, pastor of the Wesley African Methodist Episcopal Church used his church as a safe house for fugitives.  Campbell African Methodist Church helped enslaved Africans escape.  The religious community also spearheaded the Free Produce Movement, urging concerned citizens in the North to refrain from using products of slave labor.  The Black clergy’s activities were a direct challenge to the prevailing religious dogma of many white churches that a truly religious person was patient, even with slaveholders.

Black abolitionists assumed leadership in reform organizations.   James Forten , one of Philadelphia’s most influential black residents, was active in many political causes and committed to the abolitionist movement. When  William Lloyd Garrison  launched his anti-slavery newspaper,  The Liberator,  Forten not only encouraged him but also contributed money towards the publication.  In 1833, Forten’s daughter Harriet Forten was one of the founders of the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia.  Her husbandRobert Purvis was known as the president of the Philadelphia Underground Railroad.  That same year, Purvis became a charter member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and served as president and vice president of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.  Numerous fugitives were given shelter at his mother’s home, Harriet Judah Purvis, located at Ninth and Lombard Streets.  Robert Purvis’ brother, Joseph Purvis, who married Forten’s daughter, Sarah Louise Forten, was also involved in Underground Railroad activities in Bucks County.  William Whipper’s accounts of Joseph Purvis’ activities in the Underground Railroad are recorded by William Still.  In 1838, Robert Purvis published his famous  Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, To the People of Pennsylvania,  in response to the state’s legislature law prohibited blacks from voting.   Jacob C. White Sr.  and his son  Jacob Jr.  used their home at 100 Old York Road as a Underground Railroad station.

During August 1835, the more militant black and white abolitionists created the Philadelphia Vigilance Association “to fund aid to colored persons in distress.”  The Committee assisted destitute enslaves Africans with room and board, clothing medicine, and money as well as gave them knowledge of their legal rights, legal protection from kidnappers and prosecuted individuals who attempted to kidnap or violate the legal rights of free Blacks.  The association also helped runaways set up permanent homes and/or gave them temporary employment before their departure to Canada.  The association elected three African American officers at its initial meetings, including  James McCrummell , President; Jacob C. White Jr, Secretary, and  James Needham , Treasurer.  John C. Bowers was also a member.  Overtime, a majority of the officers in the association were African Americans.  For example, in 1839, out of the 16 members, the nine African Americans included James McCrummell, Jacob C. White, James Needham, James Gibbons, Daniel Colly,  J.J. G. Bias , and Shepherd Shay.  William Still, Robert Purvis, Charles H. Bustill,  Charles Reason  and Joseph C. Ware also became members.

Underground Railroad lore in Philadelphia provides modern readers with Robert Purvis destroyed many of his records of the Vigilance Association of Philadelphia so that members would not be prosecuted for breaking federal law nor did he want escapees recaptured.  A friend of Purvis, William Still, was secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee.  Still did not destroy his records.  A visionary, he hid the committee’s paper in the loft of a building on the grounds of the Lebanon Cemetery.   Jacob C. White Sr.’s office at the Lebanon Cemetery was also a station stop, communication center and distribution point for anti-slavery newspapers.  Still’s motive in hiding the paper was  to use the records to help reunite relatives and friends.  According to his journal, the committee assisted over 495 runaway slaves between December 1852 and February 1857.  When he published his classic book,  The Underground Railroad,  he covered eight years of assisting fugitives.  His book contains approximately 800 recorded accounts of escaped slaves, including 60 children.  Still and his co-workers thoroughly questioned all enslaved Africans who escaped bondage as well as the strangers who came to them for assistance.  This was done to protect the vast network of agents from spies and imposters who would expose secret operations for either fame or money.

William Still is one among many courageous men and women who were willing to stand up for justice and equality.  This meant that they were committed to end the system of slavery.  I have many reflections on the Underground Railroad.  I hope that this brief essay stimulates your intellectual curiosity to visit the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection to learn more about the Underground Railroad.

[1]  “Escape From Slavery: The Underground Railroad,  National Geographic Magazine,  Page 3 

[2]   Ibid,  Page 3 

[3]   Ibid  

[4]   Ibid.  

[5]  William Still,  The Underground Railroad. 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: Porter & Coates, 1872, Page 490-491. 

[6]  “Escape From Slavery: The Underground Railroad,  National Geographic,  Page 3

[7]   Ibid,  Page 10 

To learn more about William Still, please see:

• The Life and Times of William Still
• William Still's Contemporaries
• Links  to related websites, including links to William Still's books
• View William Still's family photographs, correspondence, and related primary source materials by  Searching the Collections

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The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad

By Kathryn Schulz

The crate arrived, via overland express, one spring evening in 1849. Three feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet deep, it had been packed the previous morning in Richmond, Virginia, then carried by horse cart to the local office of the Adams Express Company. From there, it was taken to the railroad depot, loaded onto a train, and, on reaching the Potomac, transferred to a steamer, where, despite its label— THIS SIDE UP WITH CARE —it was placed upside down until a tired passenger tipped it over and used it as a seat. After arriving in the nation’s capital, it was loaded onto a wagon, dumped out at the train station, loaded onto a luggage car, sent on to Philadelphia, unloaded onto another wagon, and, finally, delivered to 31 North Fifth Street. The person to whom the box had been shipped, James Miller McKim, was waiting there to receive it. When he opened it, out scrambled a man named Henry Brown: five feet eight inches tall, two hundred pounds, and, as far as anyone knows, the first person in United States history to liberate himself from slavery by, as he later wrote, “getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state.”

McKim, a white abolitionist with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, had by then been working for the Underground Railroad for more than a decade, and he was awed by the courage and drama of Brown’s escape, and of others like it. In an article he wrote some years later, he predicted that future generations of Americans would come to share his emotions:

Now deemed unworthy of the notice of any, save fanatical abolitionists, these acts of sublime heroism, of lofty self-sacrifice, of patient martyrdom, these beautiful Providences, these hair-breadth escapes and terrible dangers, will yet become the themes of the popular literature of this nation, and will excite the admiration, the reverence and the indignation of the generations yet to come.

It did not take long for McKim’s prediction to come true. The Underground Railroad entered our collective imagination in the eighteen-forties, and it has since been a mainstay of both national history and local lore. But in the past decade or so it has surged into “the popular literature of this nation”—and the popular everything else, too. This year alone has seen the publication of two major Railroad novels, including Oprah’s first book-club selection in more than a year, Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” (Doubleday). On TV, the WGN America network aired the first season of “Underground,” which follows the fates of a group of slaves, known as the Macon Seven, who flee a Georgia plantation.

Nonfiction writers, too, have lately returned to the subject. In 2004, the Yale historian David Blight edited “Passages to Freedom,” an anthology of essays on the Underground Railroad. The following year, Fergus Bordewich published “Bound for Canaan,” the first national history of the Railroad in more than a century. And last year, Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia, published “Gateway to Freedom,” about the Railroad’s operations in New York City. Between 1869 and 2002, there were two adult biographies of Harriet Tubman, the Railroad’s most famous “conductor”; more than four times as many have been published since then, together with a growing number of books about her for children and young adults—five in the nineteen-seventies, six in the nineteen-eighties, twenty-one in the nineteen-nineties, and more than thirty since the turn of this century. An HBO bio-pic about Tubman is in development, and earlier this year the U.S. Treasury announced that, beginning in the next decade, she will appear on the twenty-dollar bill.

Other public and private entities have likewise taken up the cause. Since 1998, the National Park Service has been working to create a Network to Freedom, a system of federally designated, locally managed Underground Railroad sites around the country. The first national museum dedicated to the subject, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, opened in Cincinnati in 2004, and next March the Park Service will inaugurate its first Railroad-related national monument: the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park, in Cambridge, Maryland, near Tubman’s birthplace.

This outpouring of interest suggests that we have collectively caught on to what McKim long ago understood: that the stories of those who fled slavery and those who helped them to freedom are among the most moving in our nation’s history. It was McKim’s hope that these stories would excite our admiration, reverence, and indignation, and they do. But, as more recent work has made clear, they should also incite our curiosity and skepticism: about how the Underground Railroad really worked, why stories about it so consistently work on us, and what they teach us—or spare us from learning—about ourselves and our nation.

No one knows who coined the term. Some ascribe it to a thwarted slave owner, others to a runaway slave. It first appeared in print in an abolitionist newspaper in 1839, at the end of a decade when railways had come to symbolize prosperity and progress, and three thousand miles of actual track had been laid across the nation. Frederick Douglass used the term in his 1845 autobiography—where he laments that indiscreet abolitionists are turning it into “an upperground railroad”—and Harriet Beecher Stowe used it in 1852, in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” when one slave-catcher cautions another against delaying pursuit of a fugitive “till the gal’s been carried on the underground line.” By the following year, the Times was reporting that the term had “come into very general use to designate the organized arrangements made in various sections of the country, to aid fugitives from slavery.”

Seldom has our national lexicon acquired a phrase so appealing to the imagination, or so open to misinterpretation. In his new novel, Colson Whitehead exploits both those qualities by doing knowingly what nearly every young child first learning our history does naïvely: taking the term “Underground Railroad” literally. His protagonist, a teen-age girl named Cora, flees the Georgia plantation where she was born into slavery and heads north on a series of rickety subterranean trains—one- or two-car numbers, driven by actual conductors and reached via caves or through trapdoors in buildings owned by sympathetic whites.

Whitehead has a taste for fantastical infrastructure, first revealed via the psychically active elevators in his brilliant début novel, “The Intuitionist.” Those elevators were the perfect device—mingling symbolic resonance with Marvel Comics glee, absolved of improbability by the particularity and force of Whitehead’s imagination. In “The Underground Railroad,” he more or less reverses his earlier trick. Rather than imbue a manufactured box with mystery, he turns our most evocative national metaphor into a mechanical contraption. It is a clever choice, reminding us that a metaphor never got anyone to freedom. Among his other concerns in this book, Whitehead wants to know what does: how the Underground Railroad really worked, and at what cost, and for whom.

Those questions were first asked in an extensive and systematic way by an Ohio State University historian named Wilbur Siebert. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, when many parents of the Civil War dead were still alive to grieve for their children and former slaves still outnumbered freeborn African-Americans, Siebert began contacting surviving abolitionists or their kin and asking them to describe their efforts to aid fugitives from slavery. The resulting history, published in 1898 and entitled “The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom,” depicted a network of more than three thousand anti-slavery activists, most of them white, who helped ferry largely anonymous runaways to freedom. That history has been diffusing through the culture ever since, gathering additional details along the way and profoundly shaping our image of the Underground Railroad. In that image, a clandestine organization of abolitionists—many of them Quaker or otherwise motivated by religious ideals—used covert methods (tunnels, trapdoors, concealed passageways) and secret signals (lanterns set in windows, quilts hung on laundry lines) to help convey enslaved African-Americans to freedom.

That story, like so many that we tell about our nation’s past, has a tricky relationship to the truth: not quite wrong, but simplified; not quite a myth, but mythologized. For one thing, far from being centrally organized, the Underground Railroad was what we might today call an emergent system: it arose through the largely unrelated actions of individuals and small groups, many of whom were oblivious of one another’s existence. What’s more, even the most active abolitionists spent only a tiny fraction of their time on surreptitious adventures with packing crates and the like; typically, they carried out crucial but banal tasks like fund-raising, education, and legal assistance. And while fugitives did often need to conceal themselves en route to freedom, most of their hiding places were mundane and catch-as-catch-can—haylofts and spare bedrooms and swamps and caves, not bespoke hidey-holes built by underground engineers. As for the notion that passengers on the Underground Railroad communicated with one another by means of quilts: that idea originated, without any evident basis, in the eighties (the nineteen -eighties).

The putative role of textiles and architecture in antebellum activism doesn’t matter that much, but other distortions in Siebert’s story do. No one disputes that white abolitionists were active in the Underground Railroad, but later scholars argued that Siebert had exaggerated both their numbers and their importance, while downplaying or ignoring the role played by African-Americans. Among religious sects, for example, the Quakers generally receive the most credit for resisting slavery, with secondary acknowledgment going to the wave of evangelical Christianity that spread across the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, in the movement known as the Second Great Awakening. Yet scant mainstream attention goes to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was established in 1816, in direct response to American racism and the institution of slavery, and played at least as crucial a role in raising money, aiding fugitives, and helping former slaves who had found their way to freedom make a new life.

This lopsided awareness holds not only for institutions but for individuals. Many people know of William Lloyd Garrison, one of the country’s leading white anti-slavery activists, while almost no one knows about the black abolitionist William Still—one of the most effective operators and most important historians of the Underground Railroad, whose book about it, published a quarter of a century before Siebert’s, was based on detailed notes he kept while helping six hundred and forty-nine fugitives onward toward freedom. Likewise, more people know the name of Levi Coffin, a white Midwestern Quaker, than that of Louis Napoleon, a freeborn black abolitionist, even though both risked their lives to help thousands of fugitives to safety.

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This allocation of credit is inversely proportional to the risk that white and black anti-slavery activists faced. It took courage almost everywhere in antebellum America to actively oppose slavery, and some white abolitionists paid a price. A few were killed; some died in prison; others, facing arrest or worse, fled to Canada. But these were the exceptions. Most whites faced only fines and the opprobrium of some in their community, while those who lived in anti-slavery strongholds, as many did, went about their business with near-impunity.

Black abolitionists, by contrast, always put life and liberty on the line. If caught, free blacks faced the possibility of being illegally sold into slavery, while fugitives turned agents faced potential reënslavement, torture, and murder. Harriet Tubman is rightly famous for how boldly she faced those risks: first when she fled slavery herself; then during the roughly twenty return trips she made to the South to help bring others to freedom; and, finally, during the war, when she accompanied Union forces into the Carolinas, where they disrupted supply lines and, under her direction, liberated some seven hundred and fifty slaves. By then, slaveholders in her home state of Maryland were clamoring for her capture, dead or alive, and, in the words of her first biographer, publicly debating “the different cruel devices by which she would be tortured and put to death.”

Tubman, of course, is the one black conductor on the Underground Railroad whose fame is commensurate with her work. She is also the only black conductor most people know—though William Still’s reputation may be on the rise, courtesy of his small but compelling role in the uneven but often excellent TV series “Underground.” Still, while white abolitionists remain statistically overrepresented in stories about the Underground Railroad, the recent set suggests that, more than a century after Siebert, the balance may finally be shifting. “Who built it?” one of Whitehead’s fugitives asks, on first reaching a station on the Underground Railroad and peering down a tunnel where iron tracks disappear into darkness. “Who builds anything in this country?” the agent answers.

The fugitive-slave narrative presents a curious paradox. In terms of content, it describes one of the darkest eras of American history; in terms of form, it is, in a way, the perfect American story. Its plot is the central one of Western literature: a hero goes on a journey. Its protagonist obeys the dictates of her conscience instead of the dictates of the state, thereby satisfying our national appetite for righteous outlaws. And its narrative arc bends in our preferred direction: from Tubman to Katniss Everdeen, from “The Shawshank Redemption” to Cheryl Strayed, we adore stories of individuals who fight their way to actual or psychological freedom.

Although such heroes make their journeys under duress, fugitive-slave stories are also a form of travel narrative. And, while in real life fugitives ran in every imaginable direction and were often caught or forced to turn back or died en route, in our stories the direction of travel is more nearly uniform. On the Underground Railroad, geography is plot: the South represents iniquity and bondage, the North enlightenment and freedom.

Whitehead, a canny storyteller, makes use of this narrative tradition in “The Underground Railroad,” while also considerably complicating it. Freedom is illusory in his novel, and iniquity unbound by latitude, but he knows that the story of slavery is fundamentally the story of America, and he uses Cora’s journey to observe our nation, from an upper-crust mixed-race family in Boston to a farming community in Indiana. Some of the finest parts of the novel involve the effort to make sense of a new place—whether through the tiny attic window from which Cora studies the cultural, political, and natural landscape of a North Carolina town or on the long, strange wagon ride she takes through a Tennessee landscape devastated by wildfire. As in “Lolita,” the moral crisis is so consuming that it’s easy to miss the journey—but the journey is the essence of this novel.

Indeed, the most effective liberties that Whitehead takes are not with Cora’s mode of transport but with the terrain through which she travels. Station by station, he builds a physical landscape out of the chronology of African-American history. Cora’s northward journey first lands her in South Carolina, where what initially seems to be a policy of paternalistic benevolence toward blacks turns out to mask a series of disturbing medical interventions: a kind of early, statewide Tuskegee experiment. From there, she moves on to North Carolina, which has implemented, to genocidal ends, the ideals of the American Colonization Society—a real organization and social movement, evoked but unmentioned by Whitehead, that sought to end slavery and return all blacks to Africa, not least to make real the enduring fantasy of a white America. In Whitehead’s fictional version, new race laws forbid blacks to enter the state, and those caught within its borders are tortured, murdered, and left hanging on trees as a warning to others. North Carolina, one character observes, has succeeded in abolishing slavery. “On the contrary,” another corrects him. “We abolished niggers.”

As all this suggests, Cora is trying to escape from much more than a plantation. In the temporally elastic landscape through which she flees, it is slavery, as much as the slave-catcher, that is pursuing her, and anyone alive in today’s America knows that she will never entirely outrun it. Indeed, at times Cora seems to be already traversing a future bereft of full freedom—the landscape blighted by proto-Jim Crow, her journey a private Great Migration. Behind the slave-catcher we can almost glimpse the police officer misusing lethal force; behind the manacles on the walls of a train depot, the bars of mass incarceration.

Still, for all the liberties that “The Underground Railroad” takes with the past, they have nothing on those in “Underground Airlines” (Mulholland Books), by the novelist and playwright Ben Winters, best known for his 2009 parody, “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.” (As it happens, Colson Whitehead’s previous book was about zombies.) Winters posits an alternate history in which the Civil War was averted and slavery, never abolished on the national level, persists into our own era, in what are called the Hard Four: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Carolinas, which together hold three million people in bondage. The protagonist, known mostly as Victor, is a fugitive slave who, after being apprehended, makes a Faustian bargain: in exchange for keeping his freedom, he agrees to work for the U.S. Marshals Service to catch other runaways.

When “Underground Airlines” opens, Victor is working his two-hundred-and-tenth case, trying to track down a mysterious fugitive, nicknamed Jackdaw, who has run away from an Alabama textile plantation. To find him, Victor must infiltrate the national anti-slavery network known as the Underground Airlines—not a literal entity here but “the root of a grand, extended metaphor,” now updated: airport security, gate agents, connecting flights, baggage handlers. “The Airlines flies on the ground, in package trucks and unmarked vans and stolen tractor-trailers,” Winters writes. “It flies in the illicit adjustment of numbers on packing slips, in the suborning of plantation guards and the bribing of border security agents, in the small arts of persuasion: by threat or cashier’s check or blow job.”

Winters, also the author of several mysteries, is working partly in the genre of the hardboiled detective novel; Victor is a classic noir antihero, whose self-interested amorality cloaks a troubled heart. But “Underground Airlines” also belongs to the tradition of counterfactual secession stories, à la Harry Turtledove’s “The Guns of the South” and MacKinlay Kantor’s “If the South Had Won the Civil War.” Such alternate histories run the risk of piling on textbooky details in the interest of proving the credibility of events that never happened, but Winters gets the balance right. He is careful to set up a plausible case for how history shifted off-kilter (Lincoln is assassinated before an armed conflict can break out; Congress, in grief and chaos, jams through a compromise that preserves both the Union and slavery), and he paints a convincing picture of what fugitive life would look like in our own era. (Homeland Security has a division called Internal Border and Regulation, the slave-catchers’ most fearsome tools are technological, and plantation overseers are supplied by private contractors.) But he is ultimately far more interested in the political, intellectual, and moral compromises that people make in order to live in the presence of, and sustain the existence of, legal bondage. Like Whitehead, though in a strikingly different way, he wants to get us to see the past in the present—the innumerable ways that we still live in a world made by slavery.

The first train ride that Cora takes in “The Underground Railroad” begins just below a farmhouse in rural Georgia and ends underneath a tavern in South Carolina. Whitehead, who knows his history, sneaks a little asterisk into the escape. “It was commonly held,” he writes, “that the underground railroad did not operate this far south.”

It did not. Contrary to a claim made by Siebert and subsequently reflected in myriad popular representations, the Underground Railroad didn’t lead “from the Southern states to Canada.” In fact, with very rare exceptions, it didn’t operate below the Mason-Dixon Line at all. Aside from a few outposts in border states, the Railroad was a Northern institution. As a result, for the roughly sixty per cent of America’s slaves who lived in the Deep South in 1860, it was largely unknown and entirely useless.

These are inconvenient facts for those who like to locate America’s antebellum conscience in the North. Had that region really been so principled, it wouldn’t have needed a clandestine system to convey fugitives beyond its borders to a foreign nation. Instead, while slavery itself was against the law in the North, upholding the institution of slavery was the law. As a nation, the United States regarded it as a legitimate practice, respected the right of white Southerners to own other human beings, and expressed that respect in laws that governed not half but all of the land.

This was a moral disaster for our country, and a terror for fugitive slaves. The obligation to return them to their owners was enshrined in the Constitution, then further codified in 1793, and in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—which, as Foner notes, was among the most draconian laws ever enacted in this nation. It rendered impotent any Northern ordinances designed to protect fugitives; compelled citizens to assist in capturing them; set harsh civil and criminal punishments for failing to do so; created a legal document ordering a specific fugitive to be returned to his or her master that could not be challenged in any court of law; and established a fee system whereby officials adjudicating fugitive-slave cases earned ten dollars if they decided in favor of the owner and five if they decided for the slave.

“We could see no spot, this side of the ocean, where we could be free,” Frederick Douglass wrote in his autobiography: fugitives themselves knew that they were only marginally better off in the ostensibly free state of Ohio than across the border in Kentucky, only marginally safer in Maine or Michigan or Wisconsin than in Maryland and North Carolina and Washington, D.C. Outside of scattered pockets in upstate New York, Massachusetts, and the Midwest, moral opposition to slavery was not the norm above the Mason-Dixon Line, and fugitives were not exactly welcomed with open arms. In 1858, an editorial in a Vermont newspaper demanded that “a log must be laid across the track of the underground railroad,” and went on to argue, in terms that echo today’s debates over refugees, for the immediate cessation of “the illegal introduction of colored persons in the free states” to “prevent a large yearly increase of that class of population which is hanging like a millstone around the neck of our industrial progress.” Several ostensibly free states, including Illinois and Indiana, did just that, passing laws that prohibited free blacks from settling inside their borders. On the eve of the Civil War, the mayor of New York proposed that the city secede from the Union to protect its economic relationship with the South.

We should not be surprised, then, that most people who slipped the bonds of slavery did not look north. In fact, despite its popularity today, the Underground Railroad was perhaps the least popular way for slaves to seek their freedom. Instead, those who fled generally headed toward Spanish Florida, Mexico, the Caribbean, Native American communities in the Southeast, free-black neighborhoods in the upper South, or Maroon communities—clandestine societies of former slaves, some fifty of which existed in the South from 1672 until the end of the Civil War. Together, such runaways likely outnumbered those who, aided by Northern abolitionists, made their way to free states or to Canada.

Moreover, most slaves who sought to be free didn’t run at all. Instead, they chose to pursue liberty through other means. Some saved up money and purchased their freedom. Others managed to earn a legal judgment in their favor—for instance, by having or claiming to have a white mother (beginning in Colonial times, slave status, like Judaism, passed down through the maternal line), or by claiming to have been manumitted. In “Slaves Without Masters,” the historian Ira Berlin quotes an irate man addressing a neighbor who had freed his slaves. “I will venture to assert,” he complained, “that a vastly greater number of slave people have passed and are passing now as your free men than you ever owned.”

The more you try to put the Underground Railroad in context, in other words, the tinier it seems. Most runaways did not head north, and most slaves who sought their liberty did not run away. And then there is the largest and most important context, the one we least like to acknowledge: from the vast, vicious, legally permitted, fiercely defended enterprise that was American slavery, almost no one ever escaped at all.

No one knows for sure how many enslaved Americans escaped with the help of the Underground Railroad. Foner estimates that, between 1830 and 1860, some thirty thousand fugitives passed through its networks to freedom. Other calculations suggest that the total number is closer to fifty thousand—or, at the highest end, twice that many.

What we do know for sure is this: in 1860, the number of people in bondage in the United States was nearly four million. By then, slavery in this country was more than two hundred years old, and although estimates are hard to come by, perhaps twice that many million African-Americans had lived their lives in chains. Most accounts of fugitive slaves do not invoke those numbers, and most Americans do not know them. The Underground Railroad is a numerator without a denominator.

The problem, then, is not the stories we tell; it’s the stories we don’t tell. In 1988, after her own story about a runaway slave, “Beloved,” won the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison described the scope of this silence. “There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of or recollect the absences of slaves,” Morrison said. “There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There’s no three-hundred-foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence, or, better still, on the banks of the Mississippi.”

In the decades since Morrison spoke, all of that has only barely begun to change. We have told a few more stories, organized a few more exhibits, planned a few new museums, including one devoted to all of African-American history, opening next month on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., and the privately funded Whitney Plantation, in Louisiana, the first to be wholly dedicated to slavery. Yet, more than a hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, you still will not find, anywhere in our country, a federal monument to the millions of people whom we, as a nation, kept in bondage. To put that omission in perspective, there are more than eighty national parks and monuments and countless other federal memorials commemorating the Civil War. That war lasted four years. Slavery lasted two and a half centuries.

Until the very end of that time, most white Americans, North and South, either actively fought to maintain the institution of slavery or passively sustained and benefitted from it. Only a small fraction had the moral clarity to recognize its evils without caveat or compromise, and, before the war broke out, very few did anything to directly challenge it. Fewer still took the kind of action that later made agents of the Underground Railroad such widely admired figures. Exactly how few is hard to know, but most historians now dismiss Siebert’s original tally of three thousand as considerably exaggerated, compiled as it was from post-hoc accounts. Eric Foner, making the best of difficult data, suggests that, across the country and throughout the duration of slavery, the number of white Americans who regularly aided fugitives was in the hundreds.

Only after the fact—when it no longer required vision or courage or personal sacrifice; when the Civil War was over and the effort to distance ourselves from the moral stain of slavery had begun—did large numbers of white Americans grow interested in being part of the story of African-American liberation. That interest led to the first major renovation and expansion of our favorite piece of mythic infrastructure, a project that began with the work of Wilbur Siebert. A similar expansion is under way in our own times. Much of it is welcome: over all, the recent crop of underground stories feature more black agency, fewer white saviors, greater attentiveness not only to runaways but to what they were running from. The boom in public exhibitions and institutions honoring Railroad sites, however, in part reflects the fact that it has now become not only morally but also economically advantageous to be associated with the Underground Railroad; in contrast to even twenty years ago, significant numbers of people will pay to visit such places. A similar trend is appearing in private real estate. As the historian David Blight wondered, “Is there a realtor in the Northern or border states selling old or historic homes, largely to white people, who has not contemplated the market value of space that might have been used in the nineteenth century to hide black people who were fugitives from slavery?”

That desire to literally own part of the story of the Underground Railroad is extremely widespread and is much of what makes it so popular in the first place. In the entire history of slavery, the Railroad offers one of the few narratives in which white Americans can plausibly appear as heroes. It is also one of the few slavery narratives that feature black Americans as heroes—which is to say, one of the few that emphasize the courage, intelligence, and humanity of enslaved African-Americans rather than their subjugation and misery. By rights, the shame of oppression should fall exclusively on the oppressor, yet one of the most insidious effects of tyranny is to shift some of that emotional burden onto the oppressed. The Underground Railroad relieves black and white Americans alike, although in very different ways, of the burden of feeling ashamed.

White Americans also feature as villains in Underground Railroad stories, of course, but often in ways that minimize over-all white responsibility. Because the stories focus on the fugitive, much of the viciousness of slavery is displaced onto the slave-catcher—an odious figure, to be sure, but ultimately an epiphenomenon of an odious system. Some recent Underground Railroad stories manage to resist that figure’s allure. Victor, the slave-catcher in “Underground Airlines,” is interesting not only because he is a former fugitive but because he is an essentially bureaucratic figure—one of many such people employed by the federal government to navigate and enforce the byzantine system by which slavery endures. But Arnold Ridgeway, the slave-catcher in Colson Whitehead’s novel, and August Pullman, in “Underground,” are Ahab-like characters, privately and demonically obsessed with tracking down specific fugitives. They both come off as irrationally committed to the hunt (and, like all supervillains, irrationally unkillable), and both risk locating the atrocities of slavery in individual pathology.

In reality, and notwithstanding the viciousness of its many enforcers, slavery was institutional. The Underground Railroad, by contrast, was personal: a scattering of private citizens, acting on conscience, and connected for the most part only as the constellations are—from a great distance, by their light. They have earned our admiration and reverence, as McKim knew they would, and we have made much of their few stories, in part for suspect reasons: because they assuage our conscience, distract us from tragedy with thrilling adventures, give us a comparatively comfortable place to rest in a profoundly uncomfortable past.

Yet there are also deep and honorable reasons that we are drawn to these stories: they show us the best parts of ourselves and articulate our finest vision of our nation. When Congress approved funding for the Network to Freedom, it noted, correctly, that “the Underground Railroad bridged the divides of race, religion, sectional differences, and nationality; spanned state lines and international borders; and joined the American ideals of liberty and freedom expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to the extraordinary actions of ordinary men and women working in common purpose to free a people.”

It is to our credit if these are the Americans to whom we want to trace our moral genealogy. But we should not confuse the fact that they took extraordinary actions with the notion that they lived in extraordinary times. One of the biases of retrospection is to believe that the moral crises of the past were clearer than our own—that, had we been alive at the time, we would have recognized them, known what to do about them, and known when the time had come to do so. That is a fantasy. Iniquity is always coercive and insidious and intimidating, and lived reality is always a muddle, and the kind of clarity that leads to action comes not from without but from within. The great virtue of a figurative railroad is that, when someone needs it—and someone always needs it—we don’t have to build it. We are it, if we choose. ♦

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The Underground Railroad Essay

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The Underground Railroad The Underground Railroad was one of the most remarkable protests against slavery in United States history. It was a fight for personal survival, which many slaves lost in trying to attain their freedom. Slaves fought for their own existence in trying to keep with the traditions of their homeland, their homes in which they were so brutally taken away from. In all of this turmoil however they managed to preserve the customs and traditions of their native land. These slaves fought for their existence and for their cultural heritage with the help of many people and places along the path we now call the Underground Railroad . The Underground Railroad was a secret operation that began during the 19th century, and …show more content…

He was a person who went to great lengths to show his help, however he was not secretive about it. He wrote a newspaper call the Tocsin of Liberty, in which he not only published the first names of the people he helped to freedom, but also the names of their slave masters. Because of this many slave owners had arrest warrants written for his imprisonment (Able Brown). Abolitionists helped slaves in their attempts to become free people. They helped to find homes for the slaves to hide in and were also active in many states (The Freedom Sympathizers and Fighters). Quakers also were a large part in the history of the Underground Railroad. They opposed slavery and it was said that almost half of all Quaker communities helped in the freeing of slaves. The Quaker communities had many hiding places for slaves and also many routes to freedom in the New York area. Quakers believed in independence and in supporting the law, but they were quick to take slave owners to court to pay for the injustices that slave owners caused to the slaves (The Role of the Quaker Community). Many slaves fought for their freedom, not just by running away, but also in the court system. For example Dred Scott was taken to a free state by his master and then later returned against his will to a slave state. He fought his master in the court system on the basis that he was a free man since he was in a free state. This court case was taken

Harriet Tubman Research Paper

There were safe houses and the Underground Railroad kept the slaves hidden or prevent them from being captured thats why it was best for them to travel at night. Slaves, activist, and abolitionist would travel through route to escape to free states like Canada with the aid of abolitionist and allies who were sympathetic to the slaves cause.Also the slaves would at least try to move more up North and try and stay away from the South. Because of the underground Railroad Harriet Tubman was able to free over 70 people. Also the Underground Railroad wasn't even a railroad it got its name from the activities it carried out in secret using darkness or disguise and because railway terms were used by those involved with system to describe how it worked.The Network extended through 14 Northern States and ‘the promised land’ of Canada-beyond the reach of fugitive slave

Harriet Tubman Fight for Freedom Essay

A strong and powerful lady said these wise words: “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me”. The brave women who said these words were Harriet Tubman and she was one of the leaders of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves reach freedom. “Although not an actual railroad of steel rails, locomotives and steam engines, the Underground Railroad was real nevertheless” (encyclopedia The Civil War and African Americans 329) The term “Underground Railroad” referred to the

Frederick Douglass: The Life of an Abolitionist Essay

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The abolitionist movement was an important time in American history. Abolitionists were people that opposed slavery which was an enormous problem in the South. African-Americans worked with white abolitionists to gain support and funds for the cause. Former slaves, white men, black women and all different types came together for the movement. Many abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth and Douglass were able to draw on their past experiences as slaves to tell about the horrible treatment of their peers.

How Did The Underground Railroad Affected The American Civil War?

Known to many who lived in the 1800’s as merely a mystery, the Underground Railroad secretly had a major effect on all people during the time the covert operation existed. Although the Underground Railroad may not have been extremely effective in the number of slaves it led to freedom, it did have a major impact on the Civil War, the morale of people fighting for emancipation, and the thinking of all people during the 19th century. The Underground Railroad was a true agent of social change, despite many people’s beliefs that the Underground Railroad was simply a symbolic effort that had no major effect.

The Underground Railroad

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In my opinion, the Underground Railroad was something that is taken way to lightly as if it was not as important as it was. I didn’t know HALF of this information I learned from my research. People mailed themselves to escape the torture of slavery! Some even committed suicide. Death was a better option then slavery. The Underground Railroad helped people take control of their rights, and their lives. This background information was not taught in school. Slavery tore families apart, it took people away from their homes, and it deprived people from their rights and freedom.

Harriet Tubman And The Underground Railroad

The “Underground Railroad” was a secret network organized by people who helped men, women, and children escape from slavery to freedom . The “Underground Railroad” provided hiding place, food, and often transportation. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist. She led hundreds of enslaved people along the route of the “Underground Railroad.” Harriet Tubman was not a criminal because she could have died freeing slaves for the right reasons, she was breaking the law to rescue slaves, and she persuaded the slaves to come with her.

The Underground Railroad was the name of the network that was used by enslaved African Americans. It consisted of very intricate routes that were used so that those moving along its path could lose pursuers traveling under the guise of darkness and staying in safe houses during the day. The goal of the railroad was to get the slaves from the South to the Free states and to Canada where slavery was prohibited. A slave knew that once they crossed the border into any one of the Free states that they were safe from the cruelty of being a slave as long as they were not captured by slave catchers. A reason why the railroad was so successful was because they had allies who were both black and white. One such example is the Quakers, as well as the most astounding former slaves such as Harriet Tubman who was born a slave in Maryland. When she was a teen, an incident caused her to have seizures, severe headaches and narcoleptic episodes for the rest of her life. Sojourner Truth, another pioneer of the Underground Railroad, was born a slave in New York back when it was still a slave state in 1797. She is a famous abolitionist known for her speech, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” Still another famous Underground Railroad freedom fighter was Anna Murray Douglas who was born free; she is the first wife of Fredrick Douglass, and she helped him escape to freedom by giving him money she had saved. What all these women have in common is that they each made a tremendous contribution to the Underground

Underground Railroad Research Paper

The underground railroad was formed as a result of the harsh and legal repercussions faced by recaptured slaves as stated in the Fugitive Slave

Summary Of Bound For Sandwich By W. Bordewich

For most people, when they hear about the Underground Railroad they immediately think of Harriet Tubman and maybe Frederick Douglass. Most textbooks and history classes only speak briefly of the Underground Railroad and everything it accomplished. One reason for this is because there are so few documents that were kept because it was an illegal and secret movement. It consisted of routes with safe stopping places for fugitive slaves fleeing from the South towards either the free Northern states or Canada. None of it was actually underground, but it got that name because it was kept such a secret from authorities and they also used railroad terminology such as lines, stations, and conductors. Fergus Bordewich decided to write Bound for Canaan

One hundred and sixty seven years ago, the Underground Railroad led thousands of slaves to their newfound freedom and helped unite millions of people against the annihilation of slavery within their new nation. Even though the new nation was committed to equality and liberty, it denied the freedom of millions of its residents. The ultimate goal of the Underground Railroad was to accomplish the safe arrival of runaway slaves to the North and Canada where the long arm of the law could no longer reach them. The Underground Railroad was neither a road nor underground; it was any house, cave, hidden room, or empty barn that acted as a place a runaway could hide safely (Buckmaster, 42). This whole operation appears to have started at the end of 18th

Underground Railroads And The Underground Railroad

Underground railroads were a network of secret routes and safe houses used during the 19th century slaves from African descent that were in the United States, and wanted escape to the free states and Canada. The safe houses located on these routes were run by abolitionists and people that were sympathetic towards slaves. The Underground Railroad reached its height during the 1850s and 1860s. It’s difficult to determine how many people actually traveled the routes and made it to freedom, but it is estimated that somewhere around 100,000 slaves journeyed along these paths. It is unfortunate however, that not many people of this 100,000 made it to freedom. There were just around 5,000 recorded cases of runaway slaves, and only about 1,000 a year made it to safety during the peak of this time. The lives of many slaves were horrendous during the early America’s, so many of them sought refuge in the Underground Railroad where they dealt with even dirtier, more dangerous conditions. However, this helped thousands of slaves successfully reach freedom and helped create one of the biggest slave movements of the 1800s.

Underground Railroad Essay

The Underground Railroad was a network of people that helped fugitive slaves get to the freeland (northern U.S. and Canada). It was not ran/maintained by one person or organization, instead it was made up of lots of individuals. Some of these people were white, but most were black. It effectively moved hundreds of slaves northward yearly (according to an estimate, 100,000 slaves were moved up north between the years 1810 and 1850). Though that seems to be a big number, still, lots of slaves were

The Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad at all. It was a network of Americans, both black and white that dedicated their life’s to destroy the institution of slavery. This network was a group that helped individual slaves escape to freedom in the north. The history of the Underground Railroad is rich in history and bursting with danger, full of drama, tragedy, joy, evil slave hunters and anonymous heroes and second chances for slaves. Both men and woman in this network were able to set aside the assumptions about the other race and work together.

Abolitionist Movement Essay

Abolitionist Movement, reform movement during the 18th and 19th centuries. Often called the antislavery movement, it sought to end the enslavement of Africans and people of African descent in Europe, the Americans, and Africa itself. It also aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade carried out in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa, Europe, and the Americans. Black resistance was the most important factor. Since the 1500s Africans and persons of African descent had attempted to free themselves from slavery by force. Which let to revolts that are called Antislavery Organizations. The abolitionist movement includes things like colonization, antislavery newspaper, and there is some famous abolitionist.

The Underground Railroad: Escaping Slavery Essays

The Underground Railroad was what many slaves used to escape slavery. It was not an actual railroad, although it could easily be compared to one. It was a route, with safe houses and many other hiding spots for the slaves to use. The paths had conductors telling you where to go and people who would drive you to the next safe house. You had to be quick, you had to be strong, and you had to be very courageous. The Underground Railroad led all the way to Canada. There were many people helping the slaves, and even more people that were opposing them. It was no easy task. Many slaves died of sickness or natural causes, gave up and returned back to the plantation, or were caught and either killed or brought back. It was a rough journey but a

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The Underground Railroad Essay

The Underground Railroad. A metaphor as it was, it was neither a railroad nor was it even underground. In the time where slavery became a divided issue with the status of legality in various parts of the country, the underground railroad found its beginnings through collective organized efforts from abolitionists and allies alike to help enslaved African americans to escape to territories and states where they could be free from slavery . It was a loosely-developed system that also included series of routes led by “conductors” such as Harriet Tubman, for escaping slaves, or “passengers”. It is imperative to know the conditions of the time prior to the beginnings of the underground railroad and the impact it left on the country in order to understand …show more content…

These conductors guided these fugitive slaves to escape from their enslavement in order to be free as part of the “underground railroad”. Among these conductors is the notable Harriet Tubman, a former slave who led three hundred slaves to safety in the North (McGill, 2005). Besides assisting these fugitives in escapement, other efforts included housing these slaves, recapturing them from authorities, and providing resources for the fugitives to settle in once freed. To further illustrate the metaphor of the underground railroad umbrella, “the homes and businesses where fugitives would rest and eat were called "stations" and "depots" and were run by "stationmasters," those who contributed money or goods were "stockholders," and the "conductor" was responsible for moving fugitives from one station to the next” (“The Underground Railroad”, n.d.). This network of systems continued on and as it became more widespread and more known about, the underground railroad found success in bringing the issue of slavery “to the forefront of public consciousness and convinced a substantial and growing segment of the northern population that the South’s peculiar institution was morally wrong and potentially dangerous to the American way of life” (Devine, 2011). Thus, as the seriousness of the conflict over the issue of slavery heightened, so did the division between the North and the

Book Review Of Gateway To Freedom The Hidden History Of The Underground Railroad

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad focuses on New York, throughout the book Foner indicates that New York city was a crucial way station in the railroad's Northeast corridor, which brought slaves from the upper South through Philadelphia and on to upstate New York, New England and Canada. He begins to tell us about the formation of the New York Anti-slavery Society in 1833, followed two years later by the biracial committee of vigilance for the protection of people of color. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan were the leading figures. Even after abolition, slavery still exists because of an 1817 state law that permitted Southern slaveowners, who in Manhattan on business and as tourists, to bring slaves along for

Ida B Wells The Underground Railroad Analysis

(USHistory.org , 2016 ) “ . There were so many conductors but she was one of the best ones . In the story it said " Perhaps the most outstanding ‘conductor’ of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman.” ( ushistory.org , 2016 ) . The conductors would help the slaves go from the south to the north

The Underground Railrod And The Abolitionist Movement

The Abolitionists were people that were against slavery, and the group was dedicated to the cause of getting rid of it. Most of abolitionists were from the North, and the Abolitionist movement started in the 1830s. The Underground Railroad is the most thought of when we think of the Abolitionist Movement. The Underground Railrod helped fugitive slaves from the south, get to the North. Most of the slaves that went through this process made it to their destination, and became free African Americans like they had wanted to be.

Harriet Tubman And The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century enslaved people of African descent in the United States. It was in efforts to escape to the Free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists that showed sympathy towards them. The Underground Railroad was not “underground” and it wasn’t actually a “railroad.” The reason it was called “underground” was because of how secretive it had to be and it was called a “railroad” because it was an evolving form of transportation.

Comparison Of Harriet Tubman And The Underground Railroad

Both Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad played a huge role in causing the Civil War. They both helped slaves escape the torture that they had to face every day, and were able to give them the lives that they deserved. Many enslaved people’s lives were changed due to the generosity and courage of Harriet Tubman and anyone else who worked on the Underground Railroad. These people risked their freedom everyday helping these slaves whom they did not even know, all because they knew that what they had to face was inhumane. The world was forever changed by the efforts that Harriet Tubman and everyone else put into the Underground Railroad, and we will always recognize the sacrifice that they had to make.

Harriet Tubman Outline

The Underground Railroad Harriet Tubman was considered to be the “conductor of the Underground Railroad.” Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in 1819 or 1822, in Dorchester County, Maryland. “Her Birth date is unknown as paper records of slaves’ births were not kept at the time. Araminta Ross also known as Harriet Tubman changed her name to Harriet, after her mother and adopted her last name from her husband.

The Underground Railroad: A Path To Freedom

The underground railroad was something many slaves used to escape to freedom, and there were a lot of ways that they would travel around. Wickham

Harriet Tubman And Harriet Beecher Stowe's Role In The Underground Railroad

The Significance of Harriet Tubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s involvement in the Underground Railroad (as part of the Abolitionist Movement, 1850-1860) The Underground Railroad is not what it may appear in its most literal sense; it is in fact a symbolical term for the two hundred year long struggle to break free from slavery in the U.S. It encompasses every slave who tried to escape and every free person who helped them to do so. The origins of the railroad are hidden in obscurity yet eventually it expanded into one of the earliest Civil Rights movements in the US.

Harriet Tubman Thesis

Harriet’s last few trips took a stretch of four-hundred eighty miles from Dorchester County, Maryland to St. Catherines in Canada and these trips took approximately more than 1 year each. In these cases, it was very complex for one person to lead five people out of slavery and journey along with them to freedom due to the Fugitive Slave Act that was passed in 1850 and many other factors as well. The Fugitive Slave Act was a main issue that conductors, like Harriet Tubman faced. Basically, this law says that Northerners have to turn in escaped slaves, and if they did not it would be considered against the law. In addition to this requirement, the government decided to give a cash prize for slaves.

Harriet Tubman Dbq Essay

Harriet was the creator of many of the paths on the underground railroad, as well as she acted as an escorter of cargo (Slaves on the underground railroad). On her numerous trips, she saved more than 38 slaves in a span of 10 years” (Document B). She risked 10 years of her life and her freedom to save these people. After Congress Enacted the Bloodhound Act Harriet lead 8 rescue missions, traveling approximately 400 miles past police (Document A). She was the Moses of the underground railroad taking slaves to New Canaan ”Canada”.

Harriet Tubman's Monologue

She was a conductor in the Underground Railroad. She helped slaves escape from slavery. The last time she stepped out to do her job was three days ago and she never came back” the boy sobbed. I looked around and it seemed like he stayed alone at home. “The Underground Railroad’’?

Harriet Tubman Research Paper

At this point Tubman came up with the idea of the Underground Railroad. After she escaped she successfully she was determined to pave the way to freedom to others. Tubman carefully planned and accomplished thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved families and friends using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses now known as the Underground Railroad. She later assisted abolitionist John Brown to recruit men to participate in the raid on Harpers Ferry. In addition to her assisting John Brown, Tubman was an active participant in the post-war era in the struggle for women 's

How Did Harriet Tubman Contribute To Slavery

She has helped the United States in many ways. After that she also purchased land to build a home in 1896 for needy and sick blacks. Harriet tubman was the conductor of the underground railroad The Underground Railroad was a bunch secret routes and safe houses that slaves used to escape to free states or Canada. Harriet was one of the people who helped establish the Underground Railroad. She was also known as “Moses.”

Essay On The Impact Of Railroads In America

The Tremendous Impact of Railroads on America In the late 19th century, railroads propelled America into an era of unprecedented growth, prosperity, and convenient transportation. Prior to the building of the railroads, America lacked the proper and rapid transportation to make traveling across the country economical or practical. Lengthy travel was often cumbersome, costly, and dangerous.

The Underground Railroad Literary Analysis

Literature is often credited with the ability to enhance one’s understanding of history by providing a view of a former conflict. In doing so, the reader is able to gain both an emotional and logistical understanding of a historically significant event. Additionally, literature provides context that can help the reader develop a deeper understanding of the political climate of a time period. Within the text of The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead’s, the use of literary elements such as imagery, metaphor, and paradox amplifies the reader’s understanding of early 19th century slavery and its role in the South of the United States of America. Throughout the novel, Whitehead utilizes a girl named Cora to navigate the political and personal consequences of escaping slavery, the Underground Railroad, and her transition from the title of fugitive to freed. Cora’s ability to convey descriptions of events both tragic and hope-filled such as the dehumanization of slaves or the truth of freedom, while utilizing literary elements, create an emotional understanding of the 1800’s of the United States.

More about The Underground Railroad Essay

Related topics.

• Slavery in the United States
• American Civil War
• Abolitionism
• Abraham Lincoln

The Underground Railroad

Colson whitehead, everything you need for every book you read..

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

The Underground Railroad: Introduction

The underground railroad: plot summary, the underground railroad: detailed summary & analysis, the underground railroad: themes, the underground railroad: quotes, the underground railroad: characters, the underground railroad: symbols, the underground railroad: theme wheel, brief biography of colson whitehead.

Historical Context of The Underground Railroad

Other books related to the underground railroad.

• Full Title: The Underground Railroad
• When Written: 2011-2016
• Where Written: New York, USA
• When Published: 2016
• Literary Period: 21st century African-American historical fiction
• Genre: Neo-slave narrative
• Setting: Several states in America in the year 1850, including Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana
• Climax: When Elijah Lander delivers his speech and it is interrupted by a white gang who destroy Valentine farm
• Antagonist: Arnold Ridgeway
• Point of View: Third-person narrator

Extra Credit for The Underground Railroad

Coming to the small screen. In March 2017 Amazon announced the production of a mini-series based on The Underground Railroad , directed by Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins.

Real pieces of history. The first four runaway slave ads featured in the novel are taken word-for-word from real 19th century newspapers. The only one that Whitehead wrote himself is the last one, Cora’s.

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Guest Essay

‘The Underground Railroad’ Is Not a History Lesson. It’s a Mirror.

By Scott Woods

Mr. Woods is a writer and poet in Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a collection of essays, “Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods.”

Within the first five minutes of Barry Jenkins’s Amazon series, “The Underground Railroad,” there is a scene that struck me so powerfully that I had to pull my copy of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which the series is based upon, from the shelf. The scene didn’t show the kind of brutality I have come to expect from “slave movies.” It is, instead, a moment of startling banality:

The story’s enslaved protagonist Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and a newcomer to the plantation, Caesar (Aaron Pierre), are circling one another around a tree, caught in a golden stream of sunshine, in what appears to be a courting dance. For several beats there are no words, only the dance of unspoken agendas. When Cora asks Caesar the purpose of their meeting, he proposes that she escape with him — not because of his love for her, but for good luck. She thinks it a joke, then turns hot upon realizing that it is not, telling him that she “ain’t nobody’s good luck.” She starts to say something else, but stops, then stomps off. In the novel, the dialogue is close, but not quite. Mr. Whitehead ends the conversation without any adornment — the negotiation is over almost before it has begun. In Ms. Mbedu’s portrayal, however, there are a hundred stories in what she does and does not say, all of them likely horrific. She does not have to speak aloud the dangers of overseers or slave patrollers. She says it all in the stilled tongue, in the pursed lip.

In that moment it became strikingly clear that I was not going to be subjected to the finger-wagging of previous attempts to teach the horrors of slavery to mainstream audiences. Cora is not merely an avatar for enslaved people in that moment. She is a person, complete with emotional range and interiority, and even agency. And “The Underground Railroad” is a rare treatment of the subject that feels made to weigh the experience of Black people, while also being a necessary altar call for white people.

Watching Mr. Jenkins’s 10-part mini-series was not a passive experience for me. The work asks several questions that only Black people can answer: If we simply stayed on the metaphorical, magic-realist train that guides Mr. Whitehead’s book and the Amazon show’s narrative, riding it further and further away from the slavery of the South, would it ever actually take us to freedom? Can someone who isn’t white ever truly be free in America? Can anything ever really change?

Slavery, as a narrative engine in Hollywood, tends to be seen through the white gaze, and comes loaded with obvious moral lessons and simple characterizations of good and evil, cut cleanly along racial lines. This arguably serves an educational purpose, as the history of America’s unforgivable original sin is taught very little and very badly in America’s classrooms. A Houston textbook, for example, referred to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as a pattern of immigration, and described the Africans stolen and sold in America as “workers” … and it was still in classrooms in 2015. The country currently sits in a moment when legislation in several states seeks to restrict school curriculums that include critical race theory and America’s history of slavery (including those built around The New York Times’s 1619 project).

So art — the dutiful soldier of public discourse on difficult subjects — is doing a lot of educational heavy lifting, leaving us with a cinema focused in large part on making sure that audiences learn the essential lessons: that slavery happened, that it was as bad as you’ve heard and that its effects linger in American life.

This is a well-intentioned effort. But it is not enough to say that slavery was bad. We must contend with the intellectual and moral arguments that made it possible to conceive, then implement, the system. “The Underground Railroad” — through its fully realized Black characters and exploration of the range of Black political thought — does something exceedingly rare: It forces every kind of American to reckon with how we have tried to resolve slavery, individually and as a country. All of this inequality we continue to see comes from somewhere.

“The Underground Railroad” is not less traumatic than other fare, showing brutality to rival that of “Antebellum” and “12 Years a Slave.” But in Mr. Jenkins’s adaptation, there is no violence for education’s sake, and no fetishizing of Black trauma . The violence arrives only when necessary for the development of the story, and it isn’t gone in the next scene — the characters bear its scars, seen and unseen.

Mr. Jenkins’s series, like the book it is based upon, is a lot of things at once — journey tale, historical touchstone, matriarchal reckoning — but what both works do better than perhaps any film or show dealing with slavery to date is interrogate the very real relationships Black people have proposed, agreed to and attempted to realize with America itself. Nearly every episode presents us with a new, pointed, difficult question. Here, it proposes at the outset, you tried running from slavery. How’d that work out? Then, when Cora and Caesar make their way to the town of Griffin, where slavery is outlawed but scientific experimentation is the order of the day, it asks, Here’s integration and exceptionalism. How’d that work out? Then, when Cora arrives at the idyllic Valentine farm, which has negotiated away its independence and economic leverage to a nearby white town to keep the peace, the show asks, Here’s separation and capitalism. How’d that work out? Such interrogation is a necessary, if painful, step toward whatever we mean by doing “the work” of antiracism.

The genius of Mr. Whitehead’s novel lies in how he reimagines the various relationships America maintains with Black people in education, labor, religion, policing and protest — all through the literary lens of magical realism. Mr. Jenkins’s direction transforms those allegories into observations that don’t seem very far-fetched at all. In doing so, he manages to shrink the distance between the history we labor to forget and a reality in which Black people still find themselves carried along a vicious school-to-prison pipeline, trapped in systemic inequality and tyrannized by over-policing that smacks of overseer roots.

This series is not a curriculum, but a reappraisal, and as a viewer, it cuts deeper than any history lesson could. Ultimately the series stands as a reminder of the vast catalog of things we can never know about slavery. We can never know all of the stories or real names or where all of the bodies were left behind, buried or not.

A show can’t fix that, but the alchemy of great cinema can create a kind of communion, as Mr. Jenkins has described: Looking at the show’s background actors in costume, he wrote, was like “looking at my ancestors, a group of people whose images have been largely lost to the historical record.” Mr. Jenkins released a powerful 52-minute wordless video of those actors in costume, “The Gaze,” scored by the show’s composer, Nicholas Britell , a few days before the release of “The Underground Railroad.” In it, the viewer is regarded by actor after actor silently representing the “Black gaze,” or as Mr. Jenkins puts it, “the gaze distilled.”

“This is an act of seeing,” Mr. Jenkins wrote in a note accompanying “The Gaze.” “Of seeing them. And maybe, in a softheaded way, of opening a portal where THEY may see US, the benefactors of their efforts, of the lives they LIVED.”

This kind of seeing — those unblinking gazes between the ancestors and descendants of the enslaved, and those with privilege and power — is something we must learn to do as a country if we are to ever fill a hole in our soul the size of slavery.

Scott Woods ( @scottwoodssays ) is a writer and poet in Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a collection of essays, “Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

The Underground Railroad

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Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the below bulleted outlines. Cite details from the play over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. Why doesn’t Colton Whitehead end his novel with a resolution?

• What is the author’s intent in closing with an open-ended conclusion? ( topic sentence )
• What historical commentary does this open-ended conclusion speak to?
• Conclude with a sentence that directly addresses the author’s possible reasons for withholding a neat ending from his reader.

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2. Compare and contrast the novel’s protagonist with the novel’s antagonist. In what ways are Cora and Ridgeway similar? In what ways are they different?

• What differentiates Cora and Ridgeway? Do they share any characteristics? ( topic sentence )
• How do their dichotomous characterizations contribute to Whitehead’s development of theme?
• How do their similarities challenge the dichotomy between good and evil?
• What makes Ridgeway and ideal nemesis for Cora?

3. What theme(s) does the author develop in his decision to make the Underground Railroad an actual railroad?

• What theme(s) are made possible for analysis because of the physical Underground Railroad? ( topic sentence )
• How would this theme change if the Underground Railroad in this novel was instead metaphorical?
• What is Whitehead’s thematic purpose in making his Underground Railroad a physical network of transportation?

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Kathryn Schulz, writer: ‘The world is very large, that’s why it’s so incredible to find the ideal person’

The journalist from ‘the new yorker’ reflects on loss and discovery in ‘lost & found,’ a memoir based on the experience of falling in love while mourning the death of her father.

The Eastern Shore of Maryland, between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, is another character in the memoir Lost & Found , by journalist Kathryn Schulz. The other key characters are the author herself and two people to whom the work — one of the most interesting memoirs in recent history — is dedicated. One is her father, a charismatic, loquacious and polyglot Jew, who peacefully died in 2016 at the age of 74, surrounded by his loving family. The other is Casey Cep, Schulz’s wife. The two met 18 months before Schulz’s father’s death, just when the writer — a reporter for The New Yorker and Pulitzer Prize winner for her report “The Really Big One,” about the risk of an earthquake in the Pacific Northwest — thought that true love would elude her forever.

Both stories — each relatable — are intertwined in a diptych about how “astonishing” it is to find something and grief; not only over the loss of a loved one, but also of a necklace, the house keys, the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the rest of the 200,000 objects we lose on average throughout our lives, according to the book, which says that in our lifetime, we will spend six months looking for lost items. “Just as every grief narrative is a reckoning with loss, every love story is a chronicle of finding,” writes Schulz.

The 50-year-old author moved to this corner of Maryland at the request of her wife, who is also a writer and grew up on a farm in one of the rural communities in the area. The interview began in Easton — a town about 15 minutes away from the house where they both live with their daughter, who is just under three years old — and ended in whispers in the public library. It is one of the richest municipalities in the United States, and during the pandemic, it was one of the one of the areas that saw its population increase thanks to remote working. It is also a place with history: located under the Mason-Dixon line — which marked the border between the North and the South — Frederick Douglass, abolitionist politician and writer, and Harriet Tubman, the heroine of the Underground Railroad , were both born under the yoke of slavery. The two escaped their fate, and both are, according to the writer, “among America’s greatest self-made patriots.”

“It’s kind of a miracle that this nation has held together,” Schulz explains. “Meeting Casey was for me also getting to know the South and realizing that the North still regards itself as innocent and heroic. It is obvious that the sin of chattel slavery certainly persisted in the South a lot longer than it did in the North , and did in fact require a war to bring it to an end. But the idea that the North was somehow enlightened and benevolent, championing the equal rights of all peoples, is laughable. The Underground Railroad [a network of houses and people that helped plantation fugitives escape to freedom] did not take enslaved people out of the Deep South and bring them to the North, but rather took them to Canada, because the North was so unsafe and deeply complicit in this system of slavery.”

Slavery persisted longer in the South of the United States, but the idea that the North was benevolent is laughable

Schulz was born in Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland (Ohio), 434 miles from Easton. Cep is also a writer at The New Yorker , but the couple did not meet in the newsroom, but rather thanks to a friend who thought they could get along. The idea of writing Lost & Found , says Schulz, was actually a decision to turn the 6,000-word article she published after her father’s death into a memoir of just over 200 pages. “I feel profoundly lucky to have gotten to write about that. He was a very avid reader of The New Yorker , although I’m sure he would have been very annoyed that he only got into its pages after his death,” she says.

“A couple of people,” including her book editor, suggested that the article contained the seeds of a book, but she was not convinced until one night when the couple was driving “deep in the middle of nowhere in Alabama.” Cep (C. in the book) was investigating the story of the novel that Harper Lee never finished after publishing To Kill a Mockingbird — research that culminated in the book Furious Hours ). While in the car, the two started discussing the essay. “I said, ‘it’s not that there’s not more to say, I could always talk about my dad. He was an amazing guy. And there’s certainly always more to say about grief and mourning, but I don’t really want to spend two years of my life thinking about nothing but grief.’ And as we were talking about it, it occurred to me that there was this perfect mirror image story, which was the story of falling in love. Suddenly, the abstract category of loss seemed as interesting to me as discovery: the chance encounters and life-changing discoveries, the accidental revelations and the intentional searching.”

From that talk in the car also came the structure of the memoir, which is divided into three parts. The first part “Lost” talks about grief, the second, “Found” about falling in love, while the last one, “And,” is dedicated to marriage and the conjunction, with its “power” to project us “into the future.” It was Cep that night in Alabama who uttered the expression Lost & Found, a nod also to the lost objects awaiting to be found.

And the book is also about that, the strangeness of finding the right person in the great warehouse of lost souls. And of believing, against all logic, that such a discovery is possible. “That is part of what makes the experience of falling in love feel so miraculous, the feeling that predominates is astonishment,” says Schulz. “The world is very large. Even a tiny piece of it, New York, is very large. That’s why meeting the ideal person is so incredible.”

Falling star

Schulz likes the fact that the Spanish translation of her book is called Falling Star. “The person who chose the title is a smart and careful reader, someone who understood the exact reason that falling stars are important in this book. I’m interested in the relationship between our own kind of tiny little lives and the vast universe we live in. And so I thought, the title was perfect,” she explains. The writer is referring to one of the most interesting passages in the book, which mixes memoir with the literary and philosophical. That passage tells the story of an 11-year-old boy who sees a meteorite fall to the earth, a “falling star,” while returning home one Sunday.

Schulz also defines the book as a kind of “covert poetry anthology.” “Writing about grief and love has been done before. When I sat down to write, I said to myself: why not borrow from the poets, from their incredibly long tradition of using the language of pain and love?” And that is how the verses of Robert Frost, Jack Gilbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elizabeth Bishop ended up on the pages of Lost & Found . “Let’s be honest, the vast majority of people do not spend their free time reading poetry, but they do have a certain familiarity with it,” says Schulz. “Do you know when they hear it? When they go to church or synagogue. When they get married, or when they attend a funeral. And I think that’s because poetry can get them closer to the bone of pure emotion, even people who would never look at a book.”

When asked if the abundant number of books on grief helped her get through her experience or, at least, write her memoir, Schulz — who before being a reporter was a literary critic — answers bluntly: “No.” “In my case, poetry helped me much more. The process of overcoming the death of a loved one is very personal, it is part of what makes it complex,” she explains. “Those kinds of stories don’t usually move me, although maybe I shouldn’t say that, because there is actually a book behind my book: A Grief Observed , by C. S. Lewis.” In this novel, Lewis mourns his wife, H, with whom he fell in love late in life, and who died of cancer shortly after their marriage. “[Lewis] wrote that beautiful and very troubling little book in which he opens up about one of the fundamental problems of religion: how is it possible that we suffer so much if there is an all-powerful and benevolent God? He faced that problem when he himself found himself suffering terribly.”

Literature also influences Schulz’s work in The New Yorker . Perhaps her most controversial article was the one in which she asked why, “given its fabrications, inconsistencies and myopia,” the United States continues to venerate Walden by Henry David Thoreau. According to Schulz, it broke her record for “hate mail.” The journalist says that she knew what she was exposing herself to when she sat down to write the article, but points out that it also received praise. “Some people were extremely happy,” she recalls. “Plenty of high school English teachers wrote to say, ‘I’ve had to teach this book for 15 years. I hate it more every year.’ Thoreau had been dead very long time, I was not taking a hatchet to some poor young living novelist, but someone who has approximately 200 million champions. No arrow I shot this figure was going to be fatal. To be honest, I was a ton of fun, but let’s just say I’m not a very welcome figure in Walden,” she says, referring to the Massachusetts town where the 19th-century writer retreated for a year to a lakeside cabin.

Thoreau is also one of the totems of the memoir in the United States, a tradition that is going stronger every and that pervades everything in these times of social media and unbridled navel-gazing. Schulz, who before Lost & Found wrote Being Wrong: Adventures in The Margin of Error , distrusts the “narrative of the self.” “Now almost everything is mediated through personality and the individual, from books to Instagram,” she admits. “I watch it with a kind of distance, curiosity, because I don’t feel that way myself. Although I don’t want to be misunderstood: I find human beings incredibly interesting, I wouldn’t be a journalist if I didn’t. Now, as a reader I also enjoy being able to read a non-fiction work where you never know a thing about the author. I’m not a psychologist, and this is just a guess, but I wonder if it might be that we feel a little disconnected from each other , and that reading about other people’s lives is a way to regain that connection.”

And what was the last thing she lost? “I have a daughter who is just under three years old, and I still lose things very often, but I also forget things all the time. I often joke that I used to have a memory and now I have a baby. Wonderful trade off to be clear. I’m trying to see if I can come up with a specific answer, but I honestly cannot remember,“she responds in a whisper in the public library, before ending the interview and getting lost on the roads of the Eastern Shore, one of the characters in her book.

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The Underground Railroad

By colson whitehead, the underground railroad essay questions.

In your opinion, why does Colson Whitehead make the Underground Railroad a literal railroad? What function does this play in the novel?

The physical reality of a literal railroad amplifies the colossal effort of those who used the real Underground Railroad. Cora dwells on the immensity of the labor it must have took to build the railroad. Thousands of former slaves undertook back-breaking work, carving tunnels out of mountains, digging holes in the ground underneath all of America. The labor of others, she thinks, is redemptive; with it, they have been transformed, and without it, she would never be free. Thus the transformation of the Railroad into a literal engine gives Whitehead the opportunity to directly commemorate the courage of the real men and women in history who operated the network and used it to flee.

How do different characters regard the American Dream in the novel?

For Ridgeway, both the founding principle and the driving engine of America are comprised of a simple principle: if you steal property and keep it, it is yours. This brutal, stable reality is the American Dream. In contrast, Elijah Lander describes the American Dream is a shifting uncertainty, in fact a grand “delusion.” These are perhaps the two opposite poles of belief in the central myths of America. Perhaps Whitehead's point is made by the protagonist, Cora, who oscillates somewhere in the middle. Sometimes she she thinks America is just “a ghost in the darkness,” nothing real at all. At other times, she is unsure, “stirred” by the idea of expansion and progress. In the end, she is aligned with those Americans seeking to cash in on the American Dream, moving out west to reap the rewards of the frontier.

What effect does the structure of the novel's chapters have on the development of the plot?

While being transported in chains through Tennessee, Cora reflects on how the peculiar institution has made her a keeper of lists. In a column in her head, she logs everyone who has impacted her journey, honoring them even as she must move on without them. The novel's structure functions in much the same way. Whitehead alternates between chapters depicting Cora's story, and chapters telling the stories of secondary characters. The first such chapter, giving context for Ajarry's life, functions as an exposition and mood-setting for the entire novel. Later, several characters are featured after their deaths—for example, Ethel, Caesar, and Mabel—and so their chapters function as memorials. Other characters—Ridgeway and Stevens, for instance—provide ideological counterpoints to Cora's story, juxtaposing her struggle with the ideas of white supremacist America. In total, these chapters form a list of characters who have impacted Cora, mimicking the list she keeps in her head.

What role does the character of Mabel have on Cora's story?

In some ways, Mabel is the driving force behind Cora's story. When Mabel escapes the Randall plantation, she leaves behind a vegetable garden that reminds Cora of the promise of freedom. Cora grows to resent her mother for leaving her behind to suffer. Throughout the novel, as she makes her way through a hellish landscape in search of the freedom she believes her mother attained, she pictures Mabel in freedom, perhaps in Canada. Cora's struggle is shaped by Mabel in another way too: Ridgeway, the slave catcher, takes it as a personal insult that he never found and recaptured Mabel. This old grievance drives him to capture Cora at all costs. More than just his job, his pursuit of Cora is a personal and thus much more dangerous vendetta.

In an ironic twist at the end of the novel, however, the narrator reveals that Mabel never made it to freedom. She died on her way back to Cora, in the swamp just outside the Randall plantation. Thus the driving impetus of Cora's story falls apart, and it turns out Cora made her escape all on her own.

How does Ridgeway's character develop over the course of the book?

In the third chapter, Ridgeway's back story describes him as a formidable opponent. Tall, cold-hearted, and extremely violent, he makes the perfect antagonist. As time goes on, however, cracks begin to show in his steely persona. Cora learns the odd story of how he recognized a kindred spirit in a young black slave, Homer, whom he freed and befriended. The relationship between the ten-year-old boy and Ridgeway remains an enigma throughout the novel, but there seems to be clear affection there. Thus the slave catcher is not as hard-hearted as he initially seemed. Ridgeway is then severely diminished by the confrontation with Royal and Red in Tennessee. From that point on, his pursuit of Cora borders on the obsession of a mentally unstable man. When he finally catches up to her for the last time in Indiana, he seems unkempt and disheveled. Thus over the course of the novel, Ridgeway's relentless pursuit of Cora appears to weaken him. He eventually unravels while Cora continues on to freedom.

The Underground Railroad Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Underground Railroad is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Colorism is expressed through the differences in the way that those with lighter skin were treated differently than those with darker skin. Black people with lighter skin were afforded more opportunities, and they were often able to "pass" as...

What are the three cities a former slave escaping from Nashville might pass through to get to Canada?

Though I cannot give you the names of the exact cities, slaves escaping by route of the Underground Railroad from Nashville went through the states of Kentucky and Ohio.

What does fugitive mean?

A fugitive is "a person who has escaped from a place or is in hiding, especially to avoid arrest or persecution."

Study Guide for The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad study guide contains a biography of Colson Whitehead, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Underground Railroad
• The Underground Railroad Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

• Delusion and Reality in The Underground Railroad
• Past and Future Blues: A Comparison of Historical Themes in 'Sonny's Blues' and 'The Underground Railroad'
• Rewriting the Past
• Underground Railroad: The Railroad To The North As A Metaphor For Freedom

Lesson Plan for The Underground Railroad

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Underground Railroad
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Underground Railroad Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Underground Railroad

• Introduction
• Literary influences and parallels
• Television adaptation

Pennsylvania train crash highlights shortcomings of automated railroad braking system

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The collision of three Norfolk Southern trains in Pennsylvania early this month highlights the shortcomings of the automated braking system that was created to prevent such crashes.

None of the circumstances the National Transportation Safety Board described Tuesday in its preliminary report on the March 2 derailment would have triggered the automated positive train control system to stop the trains.

Not only was the system incapable of stopping the second train before it smashed into the back of a stopped train, but it also couldn’t stop the third train. It ran into the derailed cars blockings its track when it arrived less than a minute later.

“PTC today has not generally been designed to protect them in that situation,” railroad safety expert Chris Barkan said.

Congress required railroads to develop the positive train control system after a deadly 2008 collision between a Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train in Chatsworth, California. That crash killed 25 people, including the Metrolink engineer, and injured more than 100. It took more than a decade and roughly $15 billion for the railroads to design and complete the system, but it only works in certain circumstances.

In this Pennsylvania crash, the eastbound train that smashed into a stopped train in Lower Saucon Township along the Lehigh River had slowed to 13 mph (21 kph) after passing a restricted speed signal. But without a stop signal, the braking system would not have been triggered.

The three railcars that derailed after that first collision blocked the adjacent track, and the third train smashed into them at about 22 mph (35 kph). The braking system relies on information from the railroad’s signals to stop a train, and it can’t detect when something is blocking the tracks. But given that the third train arrived less than a minute later, there wouldn’t have been enough time to stop it anyway.

Six railcars, including three carrying ethanol and butane residue, derailed along with two locomotives on the third train, sending the locomotives into the river. No hazardous materials spilled other than the diesel that leaked from the locomotives into the river. The seven crew members aboard the three trains had minor injuries.

Norfolk Southern estimated that the crashes caused $2.5 million damage, but the Atlanta-based railroad declined to comment on the NTSB’s preliminary report. The final report that will detail the cause won’t be completed for more than a year.

NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said preliminary information “suggests that PTC limitations were involved in the accident” and no mechanical problems have been found at this early stage.

The NTSB said its investigation will focus on the railroad’s rules, procedures and training. Norfolk Southern’s safety practices have been in the spotlight since one of its trains derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023. That train released hazardous chemicals and caught fire in a derailment that prompted calls for changes in the industry that have largely stalled .

Federal regulations require crews operating a train in restricted speed areas to slow down enough that they will be able to stop within half the distance they can see. The NTSB said a light rain was falling at the time of the crash, but it didn’t say whether that impeded what the engineer and conductor could see. The report also didn’t say whether there were any curves or hills that made it hard for the crew to see the stopped train.

Barkan, who leads the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said a large number of collisions have occurred because crews failed to properly observe restricted speed.

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