The Underground Railroad

The goal was freedom. Enslaved people sought to escape bondage and reach places where they could live free and beyond the reach of recapture. Those who helped them — sometimes on the spur of the moment, sometimes as part of organized networks — aimed to get them there safely, in defiance of the law.

Escape began at the place of enslavement. Freedom seekers followed rivers, canals, bays, the Atlantic coast, roads, and trails, and drew on courage and ingenuity — disguises, forgeries, and other strategies — to evade slave catchers who watched the expected routes for rewards. Many made their way alone, but over the decades more help became available: “conductors” guided people between “stations” or safe houses, and the maritime industry spread information and offered jobs and passage. During the Civil War, many freedom seekers escaped to the lines of the Union army.

Slavery was legal, and so was hunting the people who fled it. Enslavers advertised rewards, and professional slave catchers patrolled roads and ports. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, and far more the harsher law of 1850, required that escapees be returned. The 1850 act let special federal commissioners decide cases without a jury, ordered Northern citizens to assist in arrests, and paid commissioners twice as much for sending a person into slavery as for setting them free — which fostered corruption and the enslavement of free Black Northerners. Anyone who helped a person escape faced a fine and imprisonment.

Many people reached freedom. Harriet Tubman, who escaped from Maryland herself, returned again and again to lead family and friends north, later boasting that she “never lost a passenger.” In Philadelphia the Black abolitionist William Still risked his life helping freedom seekers and preserved their letters and stories. After 1850 many fled all the way to Canada, beyond the reach of American law. The Underground Railroad turned private acts of resistance into a widespread movement of civil disobedience and kept slavery at the center of national politics.

Historians and the National Park Service now emphasize that freedom seekers, not their helpers, are at the center of the story, and they debate even the language to use: “fugitive” and “runaway” reflect the slaveholders’ view, so “freedom seeker” is now preferred. New routes are still being discovered.