![]() ![]() Almost immediately, however, these groups extended their protective services to runaway slaves. During the mid-1830s, free black residents first in New York and then across other northern cities began organizing vigilant associations to help them guard against kidnappers. Nineteenth-century American communities employed extra-legal “vigilance” groups whenever they felt threatened. One way to grasp the Underground Railroad in its full political complexity is to look closely at the rise of abolitionism and the spread of free black vigilance committees during the 1830s. Instead, the Underground Railroad deserves to be explained in terms of sectional differences and the coming of the Civil War. They make few distinctions between North and South, often imagining that slave patrollers and their barking dogs chased terrified runaways from Mississippi to Maine. Students often seem to imagine runaway slaves cowering in the shadows while ingenious “conductors” and “stationmasters” devised elaborate secret hiding places and coded messages to help spirit fugitives to freedom. White southerners complained bitterly while abolitionists grew more emboldened. Between 18, there were only about 350 fugitive slave cases prosecuted under the notoriously tough law, and none in the abolitionist-friendly New England states after 1854. This level of defiance was not uncommon in the anti-slavery North and soon imperiled both federal statute and national union. The next year in a fiery speech at Pittsburgh, the famous orator stepped up the rhetorical attack, vowing, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers”. In September 1851, he helped a former slave named William Parker escape to Canada after Parker had spearheaded a resistance in Christiana, Pennsylvania, that left a Maryland slaveholder dead and federal authorities in disarray. Anxious fugitives and their allies now fought back with greater ferocity. Publicity about escapes and open defiance of federal law only spread in the years that followed, especially after the controversial Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. ![]() “I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad,” he wrote in his Narrative in 1845, warning that “by their open declarations” these mostly Ohio-based (“western”) abolitionists were creating an “ upperground railroad.” Frederick Douglass, for instance, claimed to be appalled. ![]() To some participants this seemed a dangerous game. According to the pioneering work of historian Larry Gara, abolitionist newspapers and orators were the ones who first used the term “Underground Railroad” during the early 1840s, and they did so to taunt slaveholders. Abolitionists, or those who agitated for the immediate destruction of slavery, wanted to publicize, and perhaps even exaggerate, the number of slave escapes and the extent of the network that existed to support those fugitives. The answers can be found in the abolitionist movement. Looking into the phrase “Underground Railroad” also suggests two essential questions: who coined the metaphor? And why would they want to compare and inextricably link a wide-ranging effort to support runaway slaves with an organized network of secret railroads? Slaves fled in every direction of the compass, but the metaphor packed its greatest wallop in those communities closest to the nation’s whistle-stops. Antebellum railroads existed primarily in the North–home to about 70 percent of the nation’s 30,000 miles of track by 1860. The phrase also highlights a specific geographic orientation. There had certainly been slave escapes before that period, but they were not described by any kind of railroad moniker. There could be no “underground railroad” until actual railroads became familiar to the American public–in other words, during the 1830s and 1840s. Understanding the history of the phrase changes its meaning in profound ways.Įven to begin a lesson by examining the two words “underground” and “railroad” helps provide a tighter chronological framework than usual with this topic. In this case, the metaphor described an array of people connected mainly by their intense desire to help other people escape from slavery. But the phrase “Underground Railroad” is better understood as a rhetorical device that compared unlike things for the purpose of illustration. The more literal-minded students end up questioning whether these fixed escape routes were actually under the ground. ![]() Yet many textbooks treat it as an official name for a secret network that once helped escaping slaves. ![]()
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