Underground Railroad

Escapees often made it out on their own – [Fredrick] Douglass borrowed a pass from a free black seaman – but many were aided by the Underground Railroad, which grew into a vast system to conceal runaways and spirit them to freedom, often over the Canadian border. Levi Coffin, a North Carolina Quaker who moved to Cincinnati and did help many fugitives, was the reputed president. Actually, there seems to have been more spontaneity than system about the matter, and blacks contributed more than was credited in the legend. A few intrepid refugees actually ventured back into slave states to organize escapes. Harriet Tubman, the most celebrated, went back nineteen times.

From 1840 on, therefore, abolitionism moved in many channels and spoke with many different voices. The Garrisonians remained influential, with their uncompromising moral stance. Others operated in more moderate ways, arguing that abolition could be accomplished only as the result of a long, patient, peaceful struggle – “immediate abolition gradually accomplished,” as they called it. At first, such moderates depended on “moral suasion.” They would appeal to the conscience of the slaveholders and convince them that their institution was sinful. When that produced no results, they turned to political action, seeking to induce the northern states and the federal government to aid the cause wherever possible. They joined the Garrisonians in helping runaway slaves find refuge in the North or in Canada through the so-called underground railroad (although their efforts were never as highly organized as the terms suggests).

Far from being secret, [the Underground Railroad] was copiously and persistently publicized, and there is little valid evidence for the existence of a widespread underground conspiracy.

Estimates of the number of slaves who made it to freedom in the North vary considerably. It is probable, however, that perhaps one or two thousand per year were successful during the post-1830 period. Not all of them traveled along the routes of the Underground Railroad, however. Whatever the exact number, it is clear that the fugitives who made it to freedom in this manner represented, as one historian said, a “mere trickle from among the millions of slaves.” By contrast, tens of thousands of slaves ran away each year into the woods, swamps, hills, backcountry, towns, and cities of the South. Indeed, running away in the South was commonplace.

Outside the public spotlight, free African Americans in the North and West contributed to the antislavery cause by quietly aiding fugitive slaves. Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1849 and repeatedly risked her freedom and her life to return to the South and escort slaves to freedom. Few matched Tubman's heroic courage, but when the opportunity arose, free blacks in the North provided fugitive slaves with food, a safe place to rest, and a helping hand. This ‘underground railroad' ran mainly through black neighborhoods, black churches, and black homes, an outgrowth of the antislavery sentiment and opposition to white supremacy that unified virtually all African Americans in the North. While a few fortunate southern slaves rode the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North, millions of other Americans uprooted their families and headed west.

The Underground Railroad
Meanwhile, enslaved African Americans continued to suffer. For some, like Fredrick Douglass, life under slavery was so terrible they risked their lives to escape from it. Slaves often had to travel hundreds of miles before reaching freedom in the North. Slaveowners considered their slaves valuable property. As a result slave catchers were immediately sent out to capture slaves who escaped.

A Different Kind of Railroad
Many slaves who did escape got help on the Underground Railroad. This was not a real railroad, but a system of secret routes that escaping captives followed to freedom. On this “railroad,” the slaves were called “passengers.” Those who guided and transported them were “conductors.” The places where slaves hid along the way were called “stations.” People who fed and sheltered them were “stationmasters.”

Enslaved people often used songs to signal their plan to escape. One song, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” gave directions for escaping north in code:

The river ends between two hills,
Follow the drinking gourd.
There’s another river on the other side,
Follow the drinking gourd.
When the great big river meets the little river,
Follow the drinking gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.

Each of the rivers in the song was an actual river. For example, the “great big river” was the Ohio River. The “drinking gourd” was the Little Dipper. One of the stars in the Little Dipper is the North Star, which escaping slaves used to guide them north.

Levi Coffin, a Quaker from Indiana, was one of many people who helped slaves to escape. His wife Catherine Coffin fed, clothed, and hid the slaves in their house. What they did took great courage. If caught, they could have been hanged. Because their work was so secret, we will never know how many people actually worked or escaped on the Underground Railroad.

Slaves constantly protested their bondage, both through group and individual actions. Several small uprisings took place in the early 1800s. Then, in 1831 Nat Turner organized a violent revolt in Virginia. Turner and his followers killed some 60 whites before being captured. These uprisings led southern states to pass stricter slave codes that further limited slaves’ activities.

Other methods of protest included disrupting the plantation routine through such tactics as faking illness or working slowly. Some slaves ran away and tried to gain their freedom in the North. Assistance came from the Underground Railroad, a network of white and African American people who helped escaped slaves reach the North. Escaped slave Harriet Tubman was the most famous and successful “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. She made at least 19 trips and escorted more than 300 slaves to freedom. “There was one of two things I had a right to,” she stated. “Liberty or death: if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man would take me alive.”

The Underground Railroad
Another leader who favored political action was Fredrick Douglass, self-educated and formerly enslaved, who edited an abolitionist newspaper, The North Star. The title was meant to remind people of the Underground Railroad. This secret abolitionist organization, which had hiding places, or stations, throughout the Northern states and even into Canada, brought enslaved people out of the South and thus ensured their freedom. Moving at night, the agents of the Underground Railroad had only Polaris, the fixed star in the Northern skies, to guide them. They not only took care of African Americans after they had come North, but they risked their lives to go into the slave states and lead enslaved others to freedom.
One of the most successful agents was Harriet Tubman, the “Black Moses,” who herself had been born into slavery. After escaping, she returned to the South many times, liberating more than 300 enslaved people. Tubman avoided arrest, despite a reward of $40,000 offered for her capture.

Risking arrest, and sometimes risking their lives, abolitionists created the Underground Railroad, a network of escape routes that provided protection and transportation for slaves fleeing north to freedom. The term railroad referred to the paths that African Americans traveled, either on foot or in wagons, across the North-South border and finally into Canada, where slave-hunters could not go. Underground meant that the operation was carried out in secret, usually on dark nights in deep woods. Men and women known as conductors acted as guides. They opened up their homes to the fugitives and gave them money, supplies, and medical attention. Historians' estimates of the number of slaves rescued vary widely, from about 40,000 to 100,000.

The most famous conductor was a courageous famous slave named Harriet Tubman, who herself had escaped from a plantation in Maryland in 1849 and fled north on the Underground Railroad. Tubman…returned just the next year to rescue family members and lead them to safety. Thereafter, she made frequent trips to the South, rescuing more than 300 slaves and gaining the nickname ‘the Black Moses.'

[Harriet Tubman’s] rebellious temperament, combined with this odd malady, set her apart from others in her youth, and she absorbed a brand of millennial slave Christianity. Marriage to a free black, John Tubman, further aroused her questioning about slavery and freedom, but the difficulty of escape and concern for her parents and husband held her back until 1849, when the death of her owner led her to fear being sold into the deep South. Harriet headed north, traveling by night, and with help from some sympathetic whites made her way to Pennsylvania.

And so she did, earning money as best she could to finance such desperate ventures. Joining with the loose network of free blacks and Quakers – out of whose limited activities post-Civil War legend created the “Underground Railroad,” complete with “switching station,” “conductors,” and “brakemen” – and traveling without benefit of maps or signs, she brought back from Maryland first her relatives, then other slaves, and finally her aged parents. Even in December 1860, with political turmoil over slavery at its height, Harriet made her last trip south before the war, returning with seven slaves, one of them an infant…

The Underground Railroad
Some abolitionists insisted on using only legal methods, such as protest and political action. But with tremendous human suffering going on, other people could not wait for long-term legal strategies to work. They attacked slavery every way they could, legal and illegal.

A Dangerous Operation   Risking arrest, and sometimes risking their lives, abolitionists created the Underground Railroad, a network of escape routes that provided protection and transportation for slaves fleeing north to freedom. The term railroad referred o the paths that African Americans traveled, either on foot or in wagons, across the North-South border and finally into Canada, where slave-hunters could not go.

Underground meant that the operation was carried out in secret, usually on dark nights in deep woods. Men and women known as conductors acted as guides. They opened their homes to the fugitives and gave them money, supplies, and medial attention. Historians’ estimates on the number of slaves rescued vary widely, from about 40,000 to 100,000.

A Courageous Leader: Harriet Tubman   African Americans, some with friends and family still enslaved, made up the majority of the conductors. By far the most famous was a courageous former slave named Harriet Tubman.

Tubman herself escaped from a plantation in Maryland in 1849 and fled north on the Underground Railroad. Remarkably, she returned the next year to rescue family members and lead them to safety. Thereafter, she made frequent trips to the South, rescuing more than 300 slaves and gaining the nickname “Black Moses.” (The name refers to the Bible story of the prophet Moses leading Jewish slaves out of captivity in Egypt.)

The River Route  On a map, the routes of the Underground Railroad look like a tangled clump of lines. (See the map on page 309.) One of those pathways came from the West, where the Mississippi River valley offered a natural escape route. Some slaves managed to get a ticket for riverboat passage northward. If they were lucky, they could reach the Underground Railroad routes that started in western Illinois.

The Mississippi River route was dangerous, however. Slave hunters, who often received generous payments for their work, stalked the riverboat towns and boarded the ships looking for slaves on the run.

Through the Eastern Swamps   The East Coast, by contrast, had a physical feature that offered protection from human pursuers, but posed serious natural dangers. This feature was the string of low-lying swamps stretching along the Atlantic Coast from southern Georgia to southern Virginia. Fugitives who traveled north through the swamps could link up with one of the eastern Underground Railroad routes to Canada, shown on the map. The travelers faced hazards, however, such as poisonous snakes and disease-bearing mosquitoes.

The Mountain Route   The physical feature that most influenced the choice of a route was the Appalachian Mountains. The mountain chain, extending from northern Georgia into Pennsylvania, has narrow, steep-sided valleys separated by forested ridges.

The Appalachians served as an escape route for two reasons. First, the forests and limestone caves sheltered fugitives as they avoided capture on their way north. Second, the Appalachians acted as a barrier for western runaways, leading them northward into a region of intense Underground Railroad activity.

A Refuge for Runaways   The center of Underground Railroad activity included Ohio and parts of two states that border it, Indiana and Pennsylvania. This region shared a long boundary with two slave states, Virginia and Kentucky.

Some abolitionists wanted to do more than campaign for laws ending slavery. Some brave people helped slaves escape to freedom along the Underground Railroad. Neither underground nor a railroad, the Underground Railroad was actually an aboveground series of escape routes from the South to the North. On these routes, runaway slaves traveled on foot. They also took wagons, boats, and trains.

Some enslaved persons found more unusual routes to freedom. For example, Henry Brown persuaded a white carpenter named Samuel A. Smith to pack him in a wooden box and ship him to Philadelphia. The box was only two and one half feet deep, two feet wide, and three feet long. It bore the label “This side up with care.” Despite the label, Brown spent several miserable hours traveling head down. At the end of about 24 hours, Henry “Box” Brown climbed out of his box a free man in Philadelphia. Brown eventually made his way to Boston and worked on the Underground Railroad.

On the Underground Railroad, the runaways usually traveled by night and hid by day in places called stations. Stables, attics, and cellars all served as stations. At his home in Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass hid up to 11 runaways at a time.

As time went on, free African Americans and white abolitionists developed a secret network of people who would, at great risk to themselves, aid fugitive slaves in their escape. This network became known as the Underground Railroad. The “conductors” hid fugitives in secret tunnels and false cupboards, provided them with food and clothing and escorted or directed them to the next “station,” often in disguise.

One of the most famous conductors was Harriet Tubman, born a slave in 1820 or 1821. As a young girl, she suffered a severe head injury when a plantation overseer hit her with a lead weight. The blow damaged her brain, causing her to lose consciousness several times a day. To compensate for her disability, Tubman increased her strength until she became strong enough to perform tasks that most men could not do. In 1849, after Tubman’s owner died, she decided to make a break for freedom and succeeded in reaching Philadelphia.

Shortly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Tubman became a conductor on the Underground Railroad. In all, she made 19 trips back to the South and is said to have helped 300 slaves – including her own parents – flee to freedom. Neither Tubman nor the slaves she helped were ever captured. Later she became an ardent speaker for abolition.

For slaves, escaping from slavery was indeed a dangerous process. It meant traveling on foot at night without any sense of distance or direction except for the North Star and other natural signs. It meant avoiding patrols of armed men on horseback and struggling through forests and across rivers. Often it meant going without food for days at a time.

Once fugitive slaves reached the North, many elected to remain there and take their chances. (see map on p. 313.) Other fugitives continued their journey all the way to Canada to be completely out of reach of slave catchers.

Some abolitionists formed the Underground Railroad. It was not a real railroad, but a network of black and white abolitionists who secretly helped slaves escape to freedom in the North or Canada.

“Conductors” guided runaways to “stations” where they could spend the night. Some stations were homes of abolitionists. Others were churches or even caves. Conductors sometimes hid runaways under loads of hay in wagons with false bottoms.

One daring conductor, Harriet Tubman, had escaped from slavery herself. Risking her freedom and her life, Tubman returned to the South 19 times. She led more than 300 slaves, including her parents, to freedom. Admirers called Tubman the “Black Moses” after the biblical leader who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. Slave owners offered a $40,000 reward for her capture.

When they got to the Ohio side of the river there was no way to get onto the land. The river’s banks were too steep and the horses kept slipping. Soon the three runaways feared they might freeze to death. Then, as morning came, they saw where a road cut through the hilly bank. They had made it to a free state.

But that didn’t mean they were free. According to the Fugitive Slave Law, anyone who found them in Ohio was obliged to return them to their owner. If you broke the law you could go to jail, or be fined, or both.

John, Dinah, and Frank were lucky: the first person they met was a Quaker man who would not obey that law. He was willing to risk a jail sentence. He fed them and gave them a place to rest.

The fugitives were heading for Canada, where slavery had been abolished. Before they went on they let their horses go, sending them back toward Kentucky, where their owner found them. Then Dinah started out; she thought it was safer to go by herself. No one knows what happened to her. John and Frank went next. The Quaker man sent them all traveling on the Underground Railroad.

You may have heard of that railroad. Well, it wasn’t a real railroad, and it wasn’t underground. Still, the name made sense. The Underground Railroad was a secret way of travel, with conductors and stations and passengers. The passengers were blacks escaping from slavery. The conductors – who were blacks and white – helped them along the way. The stations were places where people could be trusted to feed and house and help the runaways. Some of those places were houses with special hidden rooms; some were barns; some were even riverboats.

The fugitives traveled at night, following the North Star. Sometimes the nights were cloudy and there were no stars to follow. Sometimes hunting dogs were sent to track them down. Usually the passengers traveled through places they had never been before. Often they were hungry. Always they were scared. But the idea of freedom gave them the courage they needed. As they went they whispered the locations of the railroad’s stations to one another.

The famous underground railroad must be placed within the context of increasing southern white violence against black families, slave resistance, and aggressive northern abolitionism. Because the underground railroad had to be secret, few details of how it operated are known. We do not even know the origin of the term underground railroad. Slaves had always escaped from their masters and free black people and some white people had always assisted them. But the organized escape of slaves from the Chesapeake, Kentucky, and Missouri along predetermined routes to Canada almost surely began during the early 1840s, and even then most slaves escaped on their own. There never was a united national underground railroad with a president or unified command. Instead there were different organizations separated in both time and space from one another (Map 9-3).

More information exists concerning the underground railroad in the East than elsewhere. Charles T. Torrey, a white Liberty party abolitionist from Massachusetts, and Thomas Smallwood, a free black resident of Washington, D.C., organized it in 1842. Between March and November of that year, they sent at least 150 enslaved men, women, and children north from Washington to Philadelphia. From there a local black vigilance committee provided the fugitives with transportation to Albany, New York, where a local, predominantly white, vigilance group smuggled them to Canada.

The escapees, however, were by no means passive “passengers” in the underground railroad network. They raised money to pay for their transportation northward, recruited and helped other escapees, and sometimes became underground railroad agents themselves. For example, during the mid-1850s, Arrah Weems of Rockville, Maryland, whose freedom black and white abolitionists had recently purchased and whose daughter Ann Maria had been rescued by underground railroad agents, became an agent herself. She brought an enslaved infant from Washington, D.C., through Philadelphia to Rochester, New York, where she met Fredrick Douglass.

This was not an easy journey, and the underground railroad was always a risky business. In 1843 Smallwood had to flee to Canada as Washington police closed in on his home. In 1846 Torrey died of tuberculosis in a Maryland prison while serving a six-year sentence for helping slaves escape. Nevertheless, the underground railroad continued in the Chesapeake until the Civil War.

Abolitionists clamored for the immediate emancipation of all slaves. Black men and women worked with abolitionists in the upper South and the North to help slaves escape through a network of safe stops called the Underground Railroad. The “railroad” consisted of Northerners, white and black, who sheltered fugitives from southern slavery in their flight to the North or, in some instances, to Canada.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 caused fear and alarm among many Northerners. In response to the measure, some African Americans, hiding in northern cities, fled to Canada, often with the aid of conductors on the Underground Railroad. Abolitionists, white and black, made dramatic rescue attempts on behalf of men and women sought by their self-proclaimed southern owners. In Boston in 1851, a waiter named Shadrach Minkins was seized at work and charged with running away from a Virginia slaveholder. During a court hearing to determine the merits of the case, a group of blacks stormed in, disarmed the startled authorities, and in the words of a sympathetic observer, “with a dexterity worthy of the Roman gladiators, snatched the trembling prey of the slavehunters, and conveyed him in triumph to the streets of Boston.” Shadrach Minkins found safety in Montreal, Canada, and a Boston jury refused to convict his lawyers, who had been accused of masterminding his escape. The spectacular public rescue of Minkins, and other such attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, throughout the North, brought the issue of slavery into the realm of public performance in northern town and cities.

Gradually, the war of words over slavery cascaded out of small-circulation abolitionist periodicals and into the consciousness of a nation. In particular, author Harriet Beecher Stowe managed to wed politics and sentiment in a very compelling way. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) sold more than 300,000 copies within ten months and a million copies over the next seven years. The book, originally serialized in a magazine, The National Era, introduced large numbers of Northerners to the sufferings of an enslaved couple, Eliza and George. Slavery’s greatest crime, in Stowe’s eyes, was the forced severance of family ties between husbands and wives, parents and children.

Religious beliefs and practices could both offer comfort and inspire action. By the mid-1880s, hundreds were fleeing plantations each year to freedom in the North and in Mexico. Between 1830 and 1860, a network of abolitionists created the Underground Railroad that helped enslaved African Americans escape by conducting them to safe houses where they could hide on their way to free territories.

One of the most famous “conductors” along the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, a woman who had herself escaped from slavery. Armed with a pistol she was not afraid to use, Tubman guided 19 expeditions of escape out of the South.

Jerry Loguen, another conductor, is said to have helped as many as 1,500 people escape from slavery. When Loguen’s former owner, Sarah Logue, discovered his whereabouts, she wrote demanding that he return or pay her $1,000 to purchase  his freedom and the horse he had stolen to escape.

Despite the threat of punishment, some enslaved laborers made annual forays off the plantations to visit family and friends. Others resisted their masters within the confines of the plantations grounds. They held secret meetings, staged work slowdowns, broke tools, feigned illnesses, and set fires. 

The ranks of free people of color were constantly increased by ex-slaves. Some, like Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, were fugitives. Douglass had paid his owner $3 a month for the privilege of hiring himself out as a ship caulker in Baltimore. Living among free workers gave him an opportunity to escape slavery. By masquerading as a free black with the help of borrowed seaman’s papers, he bluffed his way to Philadelphia and freedom. Tubman, a slave in Maryland, escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 when it was rumored that she would be sold out of the state. Within the next two years she returned twice to free her two children, her sister, her mother, and her brother and his family. Other slaves were voluntarily freed by their owners. Some, like a Virginia planter named Sanders who settled his slaves as freedmen in Michigan, sought to cleanse their souls by freeing their slaves in their wills. Others freed elderly slaves after a lifetime of service rather than support them in old age. Whites who inherited the parents of the slave Isabella (Sojourner Truth), for example, freed them to avoid supporting the father, who was too old to work.

The Underground Railroad wasn’t a real railroad with tracks and trains. It was a network of people and routes – on land and water – that helped slaves escape from the South in the mid-1800s.

Thousands of people in cities, villages, and farm areas of the United States, Canada, and Mexico were part of the network.

Between 30,000 and 100,000 slaves escaped to freedom on the “Railroad” between the 1830s and the end of the Civil War.

“Conductors” were people who helped the runaways. “Stations” were places such as overgrown areas in forests or attics or cellars in houses where slaves could hide.

Conductors gave escaping slaves food, shelter, and clothing. They also helped the slaves get to the next station. At night conductors snuck the slaves out of their hiding places. Most of them went on foot, although some traveled in wagons, sleighs, and boats.

Most conductors on the Underground Railroad were African Americans who lived in the North. But whites and others became part of the network, too. The conductors took great risk to help escaping slaves. If they were found out, the conductors could lose their jobs.

And if escaping slaves were caught, they’d be dragged back to their owners and punished.

Many slaves who did escape got help on the Underground Railroad. This was not a real railroad, but a system of secret routes that escaping captives followed to freedom. On this ‘railroad,' the slaves were called ‘passengers.' Those who guided and transported them were ‘conductors.' The places where slaves hid along the way were called ‘stations.' People who fed and sheltered them were ‘stationmasters.' Enslaved people often used songs to signal their plan to escape. One song, ‘Follow the Drinking Gourd,' gave directions for escaping north in code.…Each of the rivers in the song was an actual river. For example, the ‘great river' was the Ohio River. The ‘drinking gourd' was the Little Dipper. One of the stars in the Little Dipper is the North Star, which escaping slaves used to guide them north.

Levi Coffin, a Quaker from Indiana , was one of many people who helped slaves to escape. His wife, Catherine Coffin fed, clothed, and hid the slaves in their house. What they did took great courage. If caught, they could have been hanged. Because their work was so secret, we will never know how many people actually worked or escaped on the Underground Railroad.

In 1849, Harriet Tubman heard that she and other slaves on her Maryland plantation were to be sold further south. Tubman knew that life was even harder for slaves on the large cotton plantations there. She told her husband, John, ‘There's two things I've a right to: death or liberty. One or the other I mean to have. No one will take me back alive.' Tubman fled from the plantation in the middle of the night and headed for the house of a white woman known to help escaping slaves. The woman gave her two slips of paper with the names of families on the route north who would help her. These were Tubman's first ‘railroad rickets.' Tubman traveled at night, mostly through swamps and woodlands. After traveling 90 miles, she reached the free soil of Pennsylvania. Tubman returned many times to guide her family and many others to freedom. She was given the nickname, ‘Moses,' after the Hebrew prophet who led his people out of slavery in Egypt. Thousands of dollars were offered for Tubman's capture. More than 300 slaves owed their freedom to her.

Although the Fugitive Slave Act included heavy fines and prison terms for helping a runaway, whites and free African Americans continued their work with the Underground Railroad. This informal, but well organized system, begun in the early 1830's, helped thousands of enslaved persons escape. Members called ‘conductors', transported runaways north in secret, gave them shelter and food along the way, and saw them to freedom in the Northern states or Canada, with some money for a fresh start.Dedicated people, many of them African Americans, made dangerous trips into the South to guide enslaved persons along the Underground Railroad to freedom. The most famous of these conductors was Harriet Tubman, herself a runaway. She risked many trips to the South.

In Des Moines , Iowa , Isaac Brandt used secret signals to communicate with conductors on the Underground Railroad - a hand lifted palm outwards, for example, or a certain kind of tug at the ear. ‘I do not know how these signs or signals originated,' he later remembered, ‘but they had become well understood. Without them, the operation of the system of running slaves into free territory would not have been possible.'

Levi Coffin, a Quaker born in North Carolina , allowed escaped African Americans to stay at his home in Indiana , where three Underground Railroad converged….An estimated 2,000 African Americans stopped at Coffin's red brick house on their way to freedom. Coffin later moved to Cincinnati , Ohio , where he assisted another 1,300 African Americans who had crossed the river from Kentucky to freedom. A thorn in the side to slaveholders, the Underground Railroad deepened Southern mistrust of Northern intentions.

Even more disagreeable to the South was the loss of runaway slaves many of whom were assisted north by the Underground Railroad. It consisted of an informal chain of ‘stations' (anti-slavery homes), through which scores of ‘passengers' (runaway slaves) were spirited by ‘conductors' (usually white and black abolitionists) from the slave states to the free-soil sanctuary of Canada.

The most amazing of these ‘conductors' was an illiterate runaway slave from Maryland, fearless Harriet Tubman. During nineteen forays into the South, she rescued more than three hundred slaves, including her aged parents, and deservedly earned the title ‘Moses.' Lively imaginations later exaggerated the role of the Underground Railroad and its ‘station masters,' but its existence was a fact.

“Estimates indicate that the South in 1850 was losing perhaps 1,000 runaways a year, out of its total of some 4 million slaves. In fact, more blacks probably gained their freedom by self-purchase or voluntary emancipation than ever escaped. But the principle weighed heavily with the slavemasters. They rested their argument on the Constitution, which protected slavery, and on the laws of Congress, which provided for slave-catching. ‘Although the loss of property is felt,' said a southern senator, ‘the loss of honor is felt still more.'