2.20 - Race to the Promised Land: Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad
The Scale of the Underground Railroad
The term "Underground Railroad" refers to a covert, coordinated network of Black and white abolitionists who provided transportation, shelter, and other essential resources to help enslaved people escape the South and resettle in free territory, whether in the northern United States, Canada, or Mexico, throughout the nineteenth century.
It's worth being clear about scale here: early portrayals suggesting the Underground Railroad's reach or influence was limited simply weren't accurate. In reality, an estimated 30,000 African Americans reached freedom through this network. And since it functioned as a covert operation, any surviving visual or written records about it need to be read critically, with an understanding of the factors that shaped how those records were created and preserved. It's also important to remember that enslaved people's own determination to escape was the real driving force behind the Underground Railroad's success, they took the first, most dangerous step themselves, and the network existed to support that choice, not to create it.
Because so many enslaved people successfully escaped, Congress responded by passing the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, laws that legally authorized local governments to capture and return escaped people to their enslavers, even in free states.
The 1850 law, part of the Compromise of 1850, was much harsher than the 1793 law. It created federal commissioners to decide cases, denied accused people a jury trial or the right to testify for themselves, paid commissioners more when they ruled for the person claiming ownership, and punished anyone who helped a freedom seeker. Because even free Black people in the North could be seized and taken south, thousands fled to Canada after 1850.
The broader abolitionist movement that supported this effort ran roughly from 1830 to 1870, and it was led jointly by Black activists and white supporters. Existing churches, along with organizations created specifically for the cause, helped champion and spread the movement. Abolitionists made effective use of speeches and published writing to build public sentiment against slavery and to directly confront those who defended it.
Harriet Tubman's Legacy
Harriet Tubman stands as one of the most well-known conductors of the Underground Railroad. After escaping slavery herself, she returned to the South at least 19 separate times, leading roughly 80 enslaved African Americans to freedom, an extraordinary risk to take repeatedly given the danger of recapture. She used spirituals as a coded signal, singing them to alert enslaved people that plans to escape were underway.
Tubman was born enslaved on Maryland's Eastern Shore and escaped to Philadelphia in 1849. She returned again and again to lead family members and others north, at first to free states and, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, often all the way to Canada. Abolitionists called her "Moses" because she led her people out of bondage. Counts of her trips vary: the AP course uses at least 19 trips and about 80 people, while the National Park Service, using Tubman's own accounts and records of her rescues, puts it at about 13 trips and about 70 people.
Tubman's contributions didn't end with the Underground Railroad either. She put her deep geographic knowledge and extensive social network to use during the Civil War, serving as both a spy and a nurse for the Union Army. During the Combahee River raid, she went even further, becoming the first American woman to lead a major military operation, a remarkable distinction on top of everything else she'd already accomplished.
The raid took place in June 1863 along the Combahee River in South Carolina. Using information gathered by Tubman and her network of scouts, Union gunboats carrying Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, under Colonel James Montgomery, moved up the river, destroyed Confederate property, and freed more than 700 enslaved people.
Required Sources
Harriet Tubman's Reflection in The Refugee by Benjamin Drew, 1856 (p. 30)
Benjamin Drew, a white Boston abolitionist, traveled to Canada West (present-day Ontario) and interviewed Black refugees who had escaped slavery, publishing their accounts in 1856 as The Refugee. Tubman's short statement, recorded in St. Catharines, is the only known text that captures her speech directly. In it she describes growing up "like a neglected weed," with no experience of liberty, and calls slavery "the next thing to hell." It's an unusually direct window into her own voice, and it explains why people risked everything to escape, the determination that drove the Underground Railroad.
I grew up like a neglected weed, ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented: every time I saw a white man I was afraid of being carried away. I had two sisters carried away in a chain-gang, one of them left two children. We were always uneasy. Now I've been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave. I have no opportunity to see my friends in my native land. We would rather stay in our native land, if we could be as free there as we are here. I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell, if he could.
Harriet Tubman, statement recorded in St. Catharines, Canada West, in Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (1856), p. 30. Source: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Excerpt from Harriet, the Moses of Her People by Sarah H. Bradford, 1886 (pp. 27 to 29)
Sarah H. Bradford, a white writer from upstate New York, interviewed Tubman and published a short biography in 1869, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, which she expanded and reissued in 1886 as Harriet, the Moses of Her People. Sales of the books helped support Tubman. The account is based on real interviews, but Bradford took creative license, writing Tubman's speech in dialect and shaping the stories for white readers, so the phrasing reflects Bradford's choices as much as Tubman's own words. Comparing it with The Refugee shows why historians read sources about the covert Underground Railroad critically, thinking about who recorded them and why.
[...] the constantly recurring idea of escape at sometime, took sudden form that day, and with her usual promptitude of action she was ready to start at once.
She held a hurried consultation with her brothers, in which she so wrought upon their fears, that they expressed themselves as willing to start with her that very night, for that far North, where, could they reach it in safety, freedom awaited them. But she must first give some intimation of her purpose to the friends she was to leave behind, so that even if not understood at the time, it might be remembered afterward as her intended farewell. Slaves must not be seen talking together, and so it came about that their communication was often made by singing, and the words of their familiar hymns, telling of the heavenly journey, and the land of Canaan, while they did not attract the attention of the masters, conveyed to their brethren and sisters in bondage something more than met the ear. And so she sang, accompanying the words, when for a moment unwatched, with a meaning look to one and another: [...]
Again, as she passed the doors of the different cabins, she lifted up her well-known voice; and many a dusky face appeared at door or window, with a wondering or scared expression; and thus she continued: [...]
The brothers started with her, but the way was strange, the north was far away, and all unknown, the masters would pursue and recapture them, and their fate would be worse than ever before; and so they broke away from her, and bidding her goodbye, they hastened back to the known horrors of slavery, and the dread of that which was worse.
Harriet was now left alone, but after watching the retreating forms of her brothers, she turned her face toward the north, and fixing her eyes on the guiding star, and committing her way unto the Lord, she started again upon her long, lonely journey. Her farewell song was long remembered in the cabins, and the old mother sat and wept for her lost child. No intimation had been given her of Harriet's intention, for the old woman was of a most impulsive disposition, and her cries and lamentations would have made known to all within hearing Harriet's intended escape. And so, with only the North Star for her guide, our heroine started on the way to liberty. "For," said she, "I had reasoned dis out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have de oder; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when de time came for me to go, de Lord would let dem take me."
Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886), pp. 27 to 29. Source: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The two [...] gaps mark the farewell hymn Tubman sang outside the cabins, telling her friends she was leaving for the promised land. The song's verses are left out here.
Harriet Tubman's farewell song, as recorded in Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (New York: Geo. R. Lockwood & Son, 1886), p. 28
On the day she decided to escape, Tubman could not tell her family her plan without putting herself and them at risk. Instead, Bradford writes, she walked past the cabins singing a farewell song, so the people she was leaving would understand that she was going north and hoped to see them again. It's a clear example of how enslaved people used songs to pass messages that enslavers would miss.
Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886), p. 28. Source: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (the song's words are on p. 28)