Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (3 page)

The scholarly study of the underground railroad began in the 1890s, when Wilbur H. Siebert, a history professor at Ohio State University, developed what became a lifelong fascination with the subject. Siebert sent questionnaires to dozens of surviving abolitionists asking for their recollections about the operations of the underground railroad. He conducted interviews, scoured local newspapers, and retraced routes taken by fugitive slaves. Siebert lived to the age of ninety-five, and between 1896 and 1951 he published several volumes on the underground railroad, in addition to works on loyalists during the American Revolution and the history of Ohio. He laid the groundwork for all future study of the subject.

Siebert noted that the underground railroad should not be thought of as a formal institution with a membership, officers, and a treasury, and that efforts to assist fugitives ebbed and flowed throughout the decades preceding the Civil War. But overall, he presented a portrait of a highly organized system involving thousands of northern agents and a “great and intricate network” of stations leading to Canada. He reinforced this image with detailed maps (largely a product of his vivid imagination) that looked very much like contemporary railroad maps and purported to show the regular routes taken by escaping slaves. Siebert’s general history of the underground railroad, published in 1898, identified no fewer than 3,211 “agents” by name, nearly all of them white men. The book said very little about activities in New York. Of these “there is scarcely any information,” he wrote, and his exhaustive list of agents included only nine in the city. His account of other locales, however, was prone to exaggeration. In southeastern Pennsylvania, he wrote, “there seems to have been scarcely any limitation upon the number of persons . . . willing to assume agencies for the forwarding of slaves.” Siebert tended to ignore replies to his questionnaires that did not fit his image, such as one from a Massachusetts abolitionist who emphasized the ad hoc nature of responses to the arrival of fugitives and noted, “We had no regular route and no regular station.”
19

Siebert’s work powerfully influenced both scholarly and popular conceptions of the underground railroad. It remained largely unchallenged until 1961, when Larry Gara published
The
Liberty
Line
, a searing critique of Siebert’s methods and conclusions as well as the work of other writers, such as Smedley. Gara acknowledged his own debt to the materials his predecessors had gathered, but he chided Siebert for accepting at face value the romanticized reminiscences of “old time abolitionists,” lumping together individuals who occasionally aided a fugitive with those who devoted a great deal of time and energy to such assistance, and exaggerating the degree of organization of their efforts. Historians, Gara insisted, had offered legitimacy to a “popular legend” that emphasized the role of benevolent whites at the expense of escaping slaves and free black communities in the North. Gara did not deny that a small number of energetic individuals, such as William Still, systematically assisted fugitives, but he emphasized that slaves almost always escaped on their own initiative and received little help from abolitionists until they reached the North. The idea of a highly organized transportation system ferrying multitudes to freedom, Gara insisted, was a myth.
20

The
Liberty
Line
appeared just as the study of African American history began to enter the scholarly mainstream and with it an emphasis on the “agency” of ordinary black Americans. Gara’s critique conformed to this perspective, and most historians quickly accepted his conclusions, a response that, unfortunately, led to a long period of scholarly neglect of the underground railroad. The term appears only twice in the index of the most comprehensive study of runaway slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, published in 1999. Instead, they emphasize that a far larger number of slave “absentees” ran off for a few days or weeks, hiding out in the vicinity and then returning to their homes, than ever reached the North.
21

Recently, however, historians both within and outside the academy have begun to question the sweeping nature of Gara’s revisionism. While acknowledging Siebert’s exaggerations, they insist that the reminiscences he and others gathered cannot be entirely discounted. They have supplemented a rereading of these documents with in-depth local research and a close examination of pre–Civil War abolitionist correspondence and antislavery newspapers, white and black, and produced inventories of sites and people connected to fugitive slaves.
22
Biographies have appeared of such key underground railroad figures as David Ruggles, Robert Purvis, and Jermain W. Loguen, the “underground railroad king” of Syracuse. Scholars have also begun the difficult task of exploring covert systems of aid to fugitives within the slave states as well as lines of communication between slave communities. The most recent general account of the underground railroad, by the independent historian Fergus Bordewich, follows Gara in noting that the number of fugitives has been exaggerated, but it traces the emergence of local groups in the North that assisted runaway slaves. Far more, however, remains to be done in analyzing how vigilance networks functioned on the local level, and how they built connections with groups across the antebellum North.
23

Meanwhile, independent of the scholarly debate, the underground railroad has enjoyed a resurgence as a focus of public history. A major museum, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, opened in Cincinnati in 2004. The National Park Service has developed a variety of valuable educational activities related to the subject (as well as a bicycle “adventure” along underground railroad routes), and numerous local groups have been engaged in identifying sites where fugitive slaves were hidden. While prone to exaggeration for reasons ranging from community pride to the desire to increase tourism, such work has deepened our understanding of how local activists assisted fugitive slaves. The popular appeal of the underground railroad is not difficult to understand, even apart from the inherent drama of escaping from bondage. At a time of renewed national attention to the history of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, subjects that remain in many ways contentious, the underground railroad represents a moment in our history when black and white Americans worked together in a just cause.
24

The picture that emerges from recent studies is not of the highly organized system with tunnels, codes, and clearly defined routes and stations of popular lore, but of an interlocking series of local networks, each of whose fortunes rose and fell over time, but which together helped a substantial number of fugitives reach safety in the free states and Canada. Vigilance committees thrived and then fell into abeyance, only to be reconstituted after a few years. The “underground railroad” should be understood not as a single entity but as an umbrella term for local groups that employed numerous methods to assist fugitives, some public and entirely legal, some flagrant violations of the law. The underground railroad in New York City conforms to this pattern.

It was more than a coincidence that both Frederick Douglass and James W. C. Pennington originated in Maryland. For obvious reasons, escape from the states that bordered on free soil proved far easier than from the cotton kingdom of the Lower South. Runaways farther south tended to head to cities such as New Orleans and Mobile, where they hoped to lose themselves in the free black population, or to Indian nations, Mexico, or nearby British possessions like the Bahama islands. Some managed to establish settlements in remote areas, such as Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp.
25
The Canadian census of 1861 found that 80 percent of southern-born blacks in Canada, many of them fugitive slaves and their children, had been born in only three states—Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky. These, along with Missouri, a prominent Kentuckian wrote on the eve of the Civil War, “have borne all the losses and annoyance.” Delaware, where the institution was in rapid decline (on the eve of the Civil War, the state contained only 1,800 slaves), also experienced numerous escapes, including, in 1850, a slave who belonged to the son of Douglass’s former owner.
26

The largest number of fugitives discussed in the pages that follow originated in Maryland, a state particularly vulnerable to escapes because of its long land border with Pennsylvania. Interspersed among advertisements for the sale of horses, pianos, cough medicine, and false teeth, nearly every issue of the
Baltimore
Sun
, the state’s major newspaper, carried notices, headed “Ran Away,” offering rewards for fugitive slaves from throughout the state. With the nation’s largest free black community—25,442 men, women, and children in 1850, compared with fewer than 3,000 slaves—Baltimore was the “black capital” of the Upper South, a haven for fugitives from the countryside and a place where skilled slaves like Douglass could not only work on their own and live apart from their owners but also find free blacks willing to assist their quest for freedom. In most parts of Maryland, free blacks outnumbered slaves, and blacks traveling on their own were a common sight, making escape easier.
27

Maryland also had numerous transportation routes, by sea, rail, and road, heading to the North. Indeed, while the words “fugitive slave” conjure up an image of escapes like Pennington’s—on foot, through woods and fields—new modes of transportation that proliferated in the Jacksonian era not only catalyzed the expansion of market capitalism (and with it the rapid spread of cotton cultivation into the Deep South) but also offered new possibilities for flight. Many slaves escaped from Baltimore and other Upper South ports by stowing away on coastal vessels, finding employment on ships that needed crewmen, or locating captains who would take their money to transport them to freedom. Two years after Douglass reached New York, the
Colored
American
took note of how the railroad had become “a means of emancipation”:

A few years since, when elopements from slavery were fewer than they now are, the poor slave . . . [who] would flee from his chains . . . had to wind his way by a circuitous route, on foot, sleeping by day, and walking by night, and after a week’s time, he might, if not overtaken, as was frequently the case, reach New York. . . . Now so extensive are our railroads . . . that a poor fugitive may leave Baltimore in the morning, and the third night following, may find himself safely in Canada.

The editor hoped the “railroad mania” would continue until lines penetrated the “extreme South,” offering greater opportunities for slaves there to escape to freedom. Of course, railroads, and from 1844, the telegraph, also made possible rapid travel and communication among slaveowners and slave catchers, facilitating the capture of fugitives.
28

“I escaped,” Pennington later wrote, “without the aid . . . of any human being. . . . Like a man, I have emancipated myself.”
29
And by far the greatest credit for successful escapes goes to the fugitives themselves. Few, however, succeeded entirely on their own. Douglass’s escape was facilitated by his fiancée in Baltimore and the black sailor who loaned his papers. Pennington received assistance while on the road in Maryland and shelter from the Wrights and other Quaker families in Pennsylvania. When he reached New York, however, no organization existed to assist fugitives; he really was on his own. Douglass was fortunate enough to arrive after the formation of the Vigilance Committee, one of whose purposes was to assist fugitives like himself.

Before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made the return of runaways a federal responsibility, their rendition depended on owners or their agents locating and seizing their human property, or local officials in the North doing so. In some parts of the North, public opinion made this extremely difficult. But when they reached the free states, fugitives usually found themselves in the Lower North, where pro-southern sentiment was strong, abolitionism weak, and numerous judges, sheriffs, and policemen were more than willing to assist in their apprehension. This was why Ruggles dispatched Douglass and his wife to the safer environs of Massachusetts and other runaways to upstate New York and Canada.
30

Most escapes could not have been successful without the support of black communities, free and slave, North and South. Long before there were organized networks to assist fugitives, individual slaves and free blacks offered hiding places and in other ways provided them with assistance in the South. In the North, black men and women whose names are lost to history offered aid to slaves seeking freedom: hotel employees informed slaves brought to New York City by their owners that they were legally free; stevedores assisted fugitives hidden on ships from southern ports; anonymous individuals who encountered fugitives on the streets offered them aid. Free blacks were the main activists in the vigilance committees modeled on New York’s that sprang up in Philadelphia, Boston, Syracuse, and other cities. The leadership of these groups, organized at the local level but in frequent communication with counterparts elsewhere, was generally interracial, but the committees were “to a considerable extent, and in some places entirely sustained by the colored people,” the white abolitionist Samuel May Jr. noted.
31

At the time of the American Revolution, there had been few free blacks anywhere in the country. The growth of the free black population, North and South, in the first half of the nineteenth century proved crucial for the prospects of fugitive slaves. So did the rise of the abolitionist movement. Especially after the emergence of militant, interracial abolitionism in the early 1830s, sympathetic whites offered aid—material, legal, and monetary—to individual fugitives and to the black-dominated vigilance committees. The networks assisting fugitives offered a rare instance in antebellum America of interracial cooperation and a link between the lower-class urban blacks who provided most of the daily activism of vigilance committees and their more affluent white allies.