2.20 Race to the Promised Land: Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad wasn't underground and wasn't a railroad. It was a covert network of Black and white abolitionists who gave freedom seekers transportation, shelter, food and other help as they fled the South. Their destinations were the free states of the North, Canada and Mexico. Railroad words were used as code: guides were 'conductors' and safe houses were 'stations'.

An estimated 30,000 African Americans reached freedom this way in the 1800s. The network was large; older accounts that downplayed it, or that cast white helpers as the main heroes, were wrong. Free Black communities and vigilance committees, like William Still's in Philadelphia, did much of the work. Above all, it succeeded because enslaved people chose to take the first, most dangerous step themselves.

Because escapes had to be secret, sources about them are limited. Read them critically, asking who wrote them, when and why.

So many people escaped that Congress passed Fugitive Slave Acts in 1793 and 1850. They allowed freedom seekers to be seized and returned to their enslavers. The 1850 act was harsher: it required ordinary citizens to help catch freedom seekers, denied accused people a jury trial and put free Black people at risk of being kidnapped. After 1850, many freedom seekers kept going to Canada, beyond the reach of US law.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland and escaped to Philadelphia in 1849. Then she went back, again and again, to lead family members and others to freedom. The course framework says she returned at least 19 times and led about 80 people; some recent biographers count about 13 trips and about 70 people, and say she gave instructions to dozens more. Either way, she later said she never lost a passenger. She used spirituals to signal plans to leave.

During the Civil War, Tubman used her knowledge of the land and her network of contacts to work as a scout, spy and nurse for the Union Army. In 1863 she helped lead the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, which freed more than 700 enslaved people. She became the first American woman to lead a major military operation.

The Refugee (1856), by Benjamin Drew, collected interviews with formerly enslaved people living in Canada. It includes a short reflection by Tubman and is the only known text to record her own words directly.

Sarah H. Bradford's Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886) is based on interviews with Tubman, but Bradford took creative license, including writing Tubman's speech in dialect. Comparing the two is a lesson in sourcing: a firsthand record and a retelling shaped by another writer.