The Underground Railroad and the Struggle Against Slavery

Abstract

��� We know people, Haitian mothers used to say, by their stories. There is no doubt these stories tend to fade over time. The trick for the teller is to find ways to remember. How to remember is one of the major problems confronting historians keen not just to understand the workings of the Underground Railroad (UGRR), but to reconnect with the enslaved who risked life and limb, who decided to leave the places and the people they knew for an unknown future in unknown places. The act of leaving can tells us a great deal about the many ways they endured and resisted being crushed by the hammer of oppression. But it also tells us something about their passion for freedom and their notion of rights. By zeroing in on those acts, that is by looking at the actions of the enslaved who decided to abandon the plantation, we can glimpse if only for brief periods the reasons behind and the consequences of their actions, or to put it another way: the politics of their action. It is clear, as I hope the evidence will show, that – to borrow an apt phrase from E. P. Thompson – those who took flight had a ‘general notion’ of rights and a passionate desire for freedom. The activities of the UGRR in communities on both sides of the slavery divide are replete with such stories and provide a canvas on which to sketch the broad outlines of the fugitive slaves’ impact on the struggle against slavery. It is in these communities, whether on the Eastern Shore of Maryland or in the capital city of Pennsylvania, where these conflicts played out, that we can come to appreciate nature of this struggle. Ever since Gaul was divided into three by Caesar, historians have felt an obligation to do the same in anything they write. I want to take a different tack and tell four stories which I hope will provide novel insights into the workings of the UGRR, the people who drove it and its impact on the debate over the future of slavery in the United States. One caveat: much of what I have to say is limited to the decade of the 1850s, not because what happened in the years before is unimportant, but rather because the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 changed the terms of the debate over slavery by providing for the first time in the nation’s history a national system of enforcement, one which had the full backing of the federal government. As a result, slave escapes came to assume greater political significance. Recapturing those who ran away became for many a measure of the