Crossing Freedom’s Fault Line: The Underground Railroad and Recentering African Americans in Civil War Causality

Gettysburg today remains thick with histories. Memories of courage, sacrifice, death, warring ideals, and hopeful reconciliation permeate the town and surrounding fields. It was, thus, no surprise that controversy broke out when, as a part of an Africana studies conference in 2004, the artist John Sims proposed an incisive interrogation of the power of those memories by building a thirteen-foot gallows on the lawn of Gettysburg College and hanging a Confederate flag through a noose. Several southern heritage groups protested; most did so peacefully, though a few threatened violence. The entire episode, which generated significant media attention, ultimately centered on the varied meanings the Civil War still holds for Americans.

Starting in the late-nineteenth century, southern heritage groups that saw the flag as a symbol of honor and sacrifice helped narrow—revise—history to exclude or at least minimize the centrality of African Americans, slavery, and race as a part of the national story.¹ Black people disappeared from what the Civil War was about. In 2010, Virginia’s governor provided fresh evidence of the power of those revisionist histories when he left out any mention of slavery or African Americans in his initial proclamation to reinvigorate his state’s celebration of Confederate History Month. That same year, two southern heritage groups celebrated South Carolina’s secession with a ball that remembered that state’s secessionists as men “compelled by the sublime courage,” like American Revolutionaries, and all but forgot slaves and slavery.² Today, however, many people outside of southern heritage groups—and most historians—recognize slavery as the primary cause of the American Civil War. The Gettysburg National Military Park’s new museum and visitor center epitomizes this shift; when tourists walk through the museum, the first exhibit centers on slavery and its central role in pushing the nation toward secession and war. But the perception is still of an institution—a thing—that caused the war. It is common to say, for instance, “Slavery caused the Civil War.” It is rare, perhaps even unheard of, to say “Slaves—black people—caused the Civil War.”

Telling the full story of the Underground Railroad has the power to help transform national perceptions of the United States’ past and make Americans better know themselves. As Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart noted over a century ago, “the Underground Railroad was the opportunity for the bold and adventurous; it had the excitement of piracy, the secrecy of burglary, the daring of insurrection; to the pleasure of relieving the poor negro’s sufferings it added the triumph of snapping one’s fingers at the slave-catcher; it developed coolness, indifference to danger, and quickness of resource.”³ There is enough violence and subterfuge, treachery and bravery, heartbreak and triumph to capture the imagination of an eight-year-old, a bored college student, or a reader who might otherwise be uninterested in history. But the stories of the Underground Railroad could captivate the national consciousness not just as exciting anecdotes but as a series of nation-changing events that tell a different national story than the one most Americans know.

Underground Railroad research can uncover the multiple interconnected images that developed in Americans’ minds during the antebellum era. American perceptions of the law, of space, and of themselves, intersected and evolved in response to black crossings of the borders between North and South. Understanding this nexus of identity and transgression centers the Underground Railroad’s story in the narrative of the coming of the Civil War and in the mainstream of American history.

This story results from an ideological, legal, geographical, and political fault line. A geological fault line is a place where two of the earth’s plates are in tension with one another as one pushes against the other. When the tension becomes too great, explosive force is released. Freedom’s fault line was the border between northern and southern states, most dramatically represented by the Mason–Dixon line. Differing conceptions of what freedom meant, and for whom it was meant, coalesced on each side...