Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner (review)

After languishing for years following Larry Gara’s critical denunciation, the Underground Railroad has received a bit more scholarly attention in recent years. Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad has made it official: the Underground Railroad is safe to study again. Foner successfully elides the mythology surrounding the Underground Railroad through careful contextualization. Although Foner claims that the book is “a study of fugitive slaves and the underground railroad in New York City,” it is much more (7).

Rather than an elaborate system filled with codes, hidden tunnels, and secret messages, Foner’s Underground Railroad is an “interlocking series of local networks, each of whose fortunes rose and fell over time, but which together helped a substantial number of fugitives reach safety in the free states and Canada” (15). Foner’s deep contextualization and the breadth of his narrative offer two primary contributions. First, he relies on the accounts of operatives to explain how the Underground Railroad actually functioned. Using these sources, Foner explains in detail how enslaved African Americans escaped, and how northerners aided them. Thus he reveals how the Underground Railroad developed over time and increased in complexity in response to the tumult of the 1850s. Second, Foner situates the Underground Railroad within a broad historical context. The development of the abolition movement, for example, and the divisions within it, affected the development of the Underground Railroad. And, in helping fugitives to escape, Underground Railroad operatives contributed to the escalation of sectional tension that led to the Civil War.

The book begins with Foner’s description of the process of emancipation that created a free black population in New York City. This new free black population quickly created an urban infrastructure that increased the chances for enslaved African Americans to escape successfully. Whereas Foner reminds readers that “as long as slavery has existed, slaves have escaped to freedom,” he shows that the Underground Railroad began with the interracial abolition movement in the 1830s (30). In response to the related issues of fugitive slaves and the kidnapping of free African Americans, in 1835 New Yorkers created the New York Committee of Vigilance, which was dedicated to protecting free African Americans through the court system and to aiding fugitives arriving in the city. Within the committee, there were divisions between those who called for direct action and those who preferred to focus on racial uplift. The first leader of the Committee of Vigilance, David Ruggles, favored direct action, but some leaders of the African American community believed that direct action, often in the form of mob violence, violated calls for racial uplift. In the 1840s the Underground Railroad became a “patchwork system” that “depended for its effectiveness on political and personal networks” (101). And whereas infighting continued, and the New York abolitionists sometimes worked at cross-purposes with William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, as Foner puts it, “Aiding fugitives was an activity in which warring abolitionists could and did cooperate” (98).

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law created a “crisis” in the free black community, but it was this period, the 1850s, that marked the Underground Railroad’s “heyday” (151). The measures of the new law made black freedom in the northern states perilous, and so abolitionists began sending more fugitives to Canada, intensifying their operations to meet the emergency rather than succumbing to the law’s threat to prosecute those who helped fugitives escape. In the 1850s, local networks of operatives extended along the East Coast connecting major metropolises to upstate New York and to Canada.

In his most intriguing chapter, Foner introduces readers to Sydney Howard Gay, an operative who kept detailed records on more than two hundred fugitives who passed through his office between 1855 and 1856. Gay recorded the motivations of fugitive slaves, their origins, and their methods of escape. Thus we learn that most fugitives were young, and...