DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
The Underground Railroad
Spiriting escaped slaves to freedom
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
Frederick Douglass was a man of singular abilities. His contemporaries, both white and African American pursued a variety of tactics to combat slavery and win blacks their civil rights. In a nation that was half slave and half free, one obvious tactic was to spirit slaves northward to freedom. Members of several religious denominations took the lead. Beginning around 1800, a number of Quakers (a religious denomination founded in England and influential in Pennsylvania) began to offer runaway slaves refuge and assistance either to start new lives in the North or to reach Canada. “Fugitive Slave” laws enacted in 1793 and 1850 provided for the seizure and return of runaway slaves, but the Quakers were willing nonviolently to disobey what they considered unjust laws. Evangelical Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists subsequently joined the effort, which expanded to help greater numbers of escaped slaves find their way out of the South.
Free blacks came to assume increasingly prominent roles in the movement, which became known as the Underground Railroad, not because it employed tunnels or trains — it used neither — but for the railroad language it employed. A “conductor” familiar with the local area would spirit one or more slaves to a “station,” typically the home of a sympathizing “stationmaster,” then to another station, and so on, until the slaves reached free territory. The slaves would normally travel under cover of darkness, usually about 16 to 32 kilometers per night. This was extremely dangerous work. Conductors and slaves alike faced harsh punishment or death if they were captured.
The most famous conductor was a woman, an escaped African-American slave named Harriet Tubman. After reaching freedom in 1849, Tubman returned to the South on some 20 Underground Railroad missions that rescued about 300 slaves, including Tubman’s own sister, brother, and parents. She was a master of disguise, posing at times as a harmless old woman or a deranged old man. No slave in Tubman’s care was ever captured. African Americans looking northward called her “Moses,” and the Ohio River that divided slave states from free states in parts of the nation the “River Jordan,” biblical references to reaching the Promised Land. Slaveholders offered a $40,000 reward for her capture, and John Brown called her “General Tubman.”
In 1850, a sectional political compromise resulted in the passage of a new and stronger Fugitive Slave Law. While many northern states had quietly declined to enforce the previous statute, this new law established special commissioners authorized to enforce in federal court slave-masters’ claims to escaped slaves. It imposed heavy penalties on federal marshals who failed to enforce its terms, and on anyone who gave assistance to an escaped slave. The Underground Railroad now was forced to adopt more aggressive tactics, including daring rescues of blacks from courtrooms and even from the custody of federal marshals.
While the numbers of agents, stationmasters, and conductors was relatively small, their efforts freed tens of thousands of slaves. Their selfless bravery helped spark an increase in northern antislavery sentiment. That response, and northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, convinced many white southerners that the North would not permanently accept a half-slave nation.
