Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was a loose network of secret routes, hiding places and helpers that enabled enslaved people in the American South to escape, chiefly to the free Northern states and to British North America, now Canada. It took shape among Northern abolitionists from the 1780s and grew until the Civil War. It was neither underground nor a railway: the name was a metaphor, and most of the work was done by free and enslaved African Americans themselves.

People had fled slavery in North America since the sixteenth century, often without help. Before about 1790 many went south to Spanish Florida, where the Spanish crown offered refuge and founded Fort Mose near St Augustine for free Black people in 1738. As Northern states abolished slavery after the American Revolution, the direction of escape turned north. The federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 let slaveholders pursue escapees into free states, which in turn spurred abolitionists to organise. The earliest known use of the phrase "underground rail-road" in print dates from 10 August 1842, when the Black abolitionist Thomas Smallwood used it, mockingly, in an Albany newspaper.

There was no headquarters, map or membership list. Small independent groups passed fugitives from one safe house to the next by word of mouth, and borrowed the language of the new railways: guides were "conductors", hiding places "stations", escapees "passengers". Quakers, Congregationalists, Wesleyan Methodists and other churches took part, but historians stress that free Black communities, in places such as Philadelphia, New York and Ohio, and their vigilance committees were essential. Escapees travelled mostly at night, carried forged passes, hid in swamps such as the Great Dismal Swamp, and used tricks to throw off tracking dogs. Many followed rivers and coasts, or stowed away on ships.

The main northward routes ran up through the Appalachians and across free Ohio, whose border with slave Kentucky was only the width of the Ohio River, to the shore of Lake Erie and by boat to Canada. Others led west, to Native American lands, to the Caribbean, or south to Mexico, which abolished slavery in 1829. Canada was attractive because Britain had abolished slavery throughout its empire from 1834 and because American fugitive laws did not apply there. Fort Malden at Amherstburg, Ontario, became a main landing place, and Black settlements grew between Niagara, Toronto and Windsor.

Harriet Tubman, who escaped from Maryland's Eastern Shore, became the most famous conductor, returning repeatedly to lead others out. In Philadelphia William Still helped hundreds of fugitives and later published their stories, in 1872. The Quaker Levi Coffin was credited with aiding over 2,000. Frederick Douglass, himself an escapee, warned that too much publicity about the network helped slaveholders more than the enslaved. Some historians argue that later legend exaggerated the role of white helpers and underplayed the self-liberation of enslaved people.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 denied suspected fugitives a jury trial and fined anyone who helped them $1,000. Between 1850 and 1860, 332 of 343 people brought before federal commissioners were sent back south. Many Black Northerners fled to Canada; by one estimate 3,000 had arrived there by December 1850. Once the American Civil War began in 1861, escapees increasingly fled to Union lines instead, where they were treated as "contraband of war". Estimates of the total who escaped vary widely: at least 30,000 and perhaps over 100,000 reached Canada, and one historian has put the number who freed themselves by the end of the war at 500,000 or more.

Our 1815 and 1878 maps show the United States and British North America, the two sides of the border that so many freedom seekers crossed.