Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery

Introduction

1 Over the last few years, there has been reawakened interest in the operations of the Underground Railroad (UGRR), an interest that has risen to levels not seen since the 1890s, when the children of those involved in aiding slaves escape sought to preserve (and some would say glorify) the memory of their parents and the work they did in what was, by any measure, the most clandestine aspect of the antebellum abolitionist movement. The new history is more dispassionate in its praise of the range and effectiveness of the efforts of those who participated in the movement. It has also widened its coverage to include many who, in the earlier histories , had been thought to have played little or only peripheral roles. But most important of all, the new studies assess the work of the slaves themselves in affecting their own freedom.1 This new approach reflects a corresponding popular interest in the abolitionist movement. There are local, state, and federal government agencies devoted to promoting the study of the movement, websites that provide invaluable information on local events, countless conferences devoted to the theme, and national and local museums that explore the meaning of freedom and the workings of the UGRR. In Introduction 2 :: INTRODUCTION fact, it is next to impossible nowadays to give a lecture on any aspect of the abolitionist movement without being asked a question about the UGRR. This study takes its cue from these modern approaches to the movement by emphasizing what the enslaved did. It was the glorification of the work of northern abolitionists, mainly Quakers, in many of the early histories of the movement that led Larry Gara to question this approach and to point to the fact that the initiative to escape came almost exclusively from the enslaved themselves. Since then, other historians, such as Keith Griffler, have explored the many ways in which African American communities in Ohio were central to the activities of the movement in that state. What occurred in Ohio was replicated in many other areas of the North. It was these communities, particularly those in urban areas, that were the backbone of the movement. They provided havens for fleeing fugitives, transported them from one station to another, and, when necessary, dared the authorities to reclaim those seeking freedom. Furthermore, Stanley Harrold and Kate Clifford Larson have highlighted the fact that there were those who crossed into the South to entice and aid slaves to escape. As in many of these studies, my focus is on the slaves as well as those who aided them where it mattered most: in the South. The movement can conveniently be divided into two separate but related areas of activity: what occurred at the point of escape and what happened once the escaping slave reached free territory. What the slaves and their helpers did, I hope to show, affected the politics of the areas and states from which they escaped. Understanding these points of departure leads to an appreciation of the many and complex ways the politics of scale affected conditions in these areas, from Missouri in the west to Maryland and Virginia in the east, the points of greatest friction between slavery and freedom. Put simply, when, for example, slaves escaped from Berlin, Worcester County, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, their action had significant political ramifications locally, which in turn INTRODUCTION :: 3 rippled outward into state politics and on many occasions further into national and international politics. The same is true of the response to efforts to reclaim the enslaved who had reached the relative security of northern communities. Admittedly, it is not always easy to trace a direct political line between Berlin and Annapolis, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., or for that matter West Chester and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., but it can be done. At the heart of these political connections in the decade leading up to the Civil War lies the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. It is not that slave escapes prior to 1850 did not produce political ripples, only that the law, part of the Compromise of 1850, by expressly making recapture and rendition of runaways a national issue—one that came to symbolize in the eyes of many in the South the willingness of the North to recognize the legitimacy of the South’s right to hold slaves and to protect that property—set the stage on which the actions...