There were many well-used routes stretching west through Ohio to Indiana and Iowa. Others headed north through Pennsylvania and into New England or through Detroit on their way to Canada. The reason many escapees headed for Canada was the Fugitive Slave Acts.
The first act, passed in , allowed local governments to apprehend and extradite escaped enslaved people from within the borders of free states back to their point of origin, and to punish anyone helping the fugitives. Some Northern states tried to combat this with Personal Liberty Laws, which were struck down by the Supreme Court in The Fugitive Slave Act of was designed to strengthen the previous law, which was felt by southern states to be inadequately enforced. This update created harsher penalties and set up a system of commissioners that promoted favoritism towards owners of enslaved people and led to some formerly enslaved people being recaptured.
For an escaped person, the northern states were still considered a risk. Meanwhile, Canada offered Black people the freedom to live where they wanted, sit on juries, run for public office and more, and efforts at extradition had largely failed. Some Underground Railroad operators based themselves in Canada and worked to help the arriving fugitives settle in.
Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor for the Underground Railroad. Born an enslaved woman named Araminta Ross, she took the name Harriet Tubman was her married name when, in , she escaped a plantation in Maryland with two of her brothers.
They returned a couple of weeks later, but Tubman left again on her own shortly after, making her way to Pennsylvania. Tubman later returned to the plantation on several occasions to rescue family members and others. On her third trip, she tried to rescue her husband, but he had remarried and refused to leave.
Distraught, Tubman reported a vision of God, after which she joined the Underground Railroad and began guiding other escaped slaves to Maryland. Tubman regularly took groups of escapees to Canada, distrusting the United States to treat them well. Formerly enslaved person and famed writer Frederick Douglass hid fugitives in his home in Rochester, New York, helping escapees make their way to Canada.
Former fugitive Reverend Jermain Loguen, who lived in neighboring Syracuse, helped 1, escapees go north. Robert Purvis, an escaped enslaved person turned Philadelphia merchant, formed the Vigilance Committee there in Former enslaved person and railroad operator Josiah Henson created the Dawn Institute in in Ontario to help escapees who made their way to Canada learn needed work skills.
John Parker was a free Black man in Ohio, a foundry owner who took a rowboat across the Ohio River to help fugitives cross. He was also known to make his way into Kentucky and enter plantations to help enslaved people escape.
William Still was a prominent Philadelphia citizen who had been born to fugitive enslaved parents in New Jersey. It existed rather openly in the North and just beneath the surface of daily life in the upper South and certain Southern cities. The underground railroad, where it existed, offered local service to runaway slaves, assisting them from one point to another. Farther along, others would take the passenger into their transportation system until the final destination had been reached.
The rapidity with which the term became commonly used did not mean that incidents of resistance to slavery increased significantly around or that more attempts were made to escape from bondage. It did mean that more white northerners were prepared to aid runaways and to give some assistance to the northern blacks who had always made it their business to help escapees from slavery. A trip on the Underground Railroad was fraught with danger. The slave or slaves had to make a getaway from their owners, usually by night.
Operators of the Underground Railroad faced their own dangers. Myers became the most important leader of the Underground Railroad in the Albany area. Being caught in a slave state while aiding runaways was much more dangerous than in the North; punishments included prison, whipping, or even hanging—assuming that the accused made it to court alive instead of perishing at the hands of an outraged mob.
White men caught helping slaves to escape received harsher punishments than white women, but both could expect jail time at the very least.
The harshest punishments—dozens of lashes with a whip, burning or hanging—were reserved for any blacks caught in the act of aiding fugitives. The place was big in its smallness. Crew says he hopes the new Amazon adaptation emphasizes the psychological toll of slavery instead of simply depicting the physical abuse endured by enslaved individuals.
There are other ways of portraying the horrors and the painfulness of enslavement. How are they making themselves whole? Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history. Website: meilansolly. Meilan Solly Associate Editor, History.
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