The Underground Railroad

In the decades before the Civil War, millions of Black Americans were held in slavery in the Southern states. Some of them made the dangerous choice to escape, and a secret network of people and hiding places grew up to help them. It became known as the Underground Railroad, although it was neither underground nor a railroad. The name took hold in the 1840s, when steam railroads were still new and exciting, and "underground" simply meant secret.

People in the network borrowed words from the railroads as a kind of code. Guides who led freedom seekers from one place to the next were called conductors, and the homes and barns where they rested were called stations or safe houses. There was never one main line. Most routes ran north toward the free states and Canada, but some freedom seekers headed south to Mexico instead. Travelers usually moved at night, sometimes following the North Star, and hid by day in attics, cellars or wagons with false bottoms.

Some escapes were remarkably creative. In 1849, a man named Henry Brown had himself sealed inside a wooden crate in Richmond, Virginia, and shipped north to Philadelphia. The crate traveled by wagon, train and steamboat, and the trip took about twenty-seven hours. When helpers in Philadelphia pried off the lid, Brown climbed out and greeted them. For the rest of his life, he was known as Henry "Box" Brown.

Many different people kept the network running. Free Black communities in Northern cities did much of the work, sharing food, shelter and information. In Philadelphia, William Still, a free Black man, helped hundreds of freedom seekers and wrote down their stories, then hid his notes for years. Quakers and other white allies opened their homes as well. The most famous conductor was Harriet Tubman. She escaped from Maryland in 1849 and then returned about thirteen times to guide roughly seventy people, many of them her own family and friends. Even so, the greatest courage often belonged to the freedom seekers themselves, many of whom planned and finished their journeys with little or no outside help.

Everyone involved took serious risks. Freedom seekers who were caught could be returned to slavery and harshly punished, and helpers could face heavy fines or jail. In 1850, a federal law required people in free states to help capture those who had escaped. After that, even the North felt less safe, so many travelers kept going all the way to Canada, where slavery had been abolished. Because the network depended on secrecy, few records survive. Historians can only estimate that tens of thousands of people reached freedom this way.