Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad refers to efforts of “conductors” and “station masters” assisting slave “passengers” to escape from bondage. The term itself was not used until the late 1830s, although Runaways had plagued the South’s peculiar institution from its beginning. In theory, the escaping slaves were helped from one point to another point until they reached their final destination in the North or Canada. By the 1840s the term was used often. In 1842, an Albany, New York abolitionist newspaper reported that twenty-six fugitives had passed through the city, and that “all went by the underground railroad.” During the 1850s, the term came into general use as newspapers in the North, including the New York Times, described the Underground Railroad as “organized arrangements made in various sections of the county, to aid fugitives from slavery.” Some of the accounts tell of secret passageways, sliding wall panels, hidden rooms in “safe houses,” and dramatic escapes, as men, women, and children made their way to freedom. Although estimates vary, during the thirty years prior to the Civil War probably fewer than one or two thousand slaves escaped from the South to the North each year, through their own efforts or with the assistance of sympathetic whites and/or free blacks. If they were fortunate enough to cross the Mason-Dixon Line they were helped by free blacks and antislavery or abolitionist whites. It is clear that the Underground Railroad was neither a highly organized system with visibly defined routes and stations to assist escaping slaves, nor a system that remained in place over many years. Instead, it was a loose collection of local efforts, mostly in the North, to help fugitive blacks who began the journey from slavery to freedom. Vigilance committees thrived and then disintegrated only to be reconstituted in succeeding years. Tens of thousands of slaves each year ran away for various reasons but only a relative few were successful in securing freedom, and even then, many did so by their own individual efforts. Assistance offered to them was often brief and sporadic and the whites and blacks who did provide support many times feared possible discovery and realized they were indeed lawbreakers and subject to severe punishment.