Necessary Courage: Iowa's Underground Railroad in the Struggle Against Slavery by Lowell J. Soike (review)

The Underground Railroad (UGRR) is a source of endless fascination for Americans. There are local, regional, and national gatherings of amateur historians and UGRR buffs. At historic sites we have actors dressing up like famous fugitives and their allies—Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass impersonators are common—to explain how it all worked. There are endless books on the "mysteries" and tales of the UGRR. Older myths are enhanced by fantastic (and completely made up) modern stories of quilts being hung out of windows to guide fugitives. In this mythological world of false history slaves made elaborate quilts (no one explains where they got the materials or the spare time to do this), full of African symbolism (no one explains how third-or fourth-generation American-born blacks learned all this African symbolism), and then hung these quilts from their windows (in their often-windowless cabins), along the road (never mind that slave cabins were not usually built along roads), so that they could be seen by passing runaways. The quilts directed the runaways to safe houses (how did the slaves know about them?), and only wise slaves, schooled in African lore could read these quilts while clumsy slavecatchers, literate and worldly, never caught on to their meaning. It is nonsense like that makes it so difficult to study or teach about the hugely important issue of fugitive slaves in the United States.

Similarly, in towns and village in the mid-west, Pennsylvania, and even in New York locals have told me about secret rooms and secret tunnels constructed solely for the purpose of hiding runaways. They always look like pretty typical root cellars or storage rooms. Indeed, the desire to be associated with the UGRR is perhaps as interesting as the actual history. Throughout the nation law abiding, patriotic, and even politically conservative Americans want to wrap themselves in the memory of law breakers who were considered, at least by mainstream politicians, to be a threat to the constitutional structure of the nation. They hope and pray that their house, their barn, was really an Underground Railroad stop.

Serious historians are equally troubled by the UGRR because of the layers of myths and legends attached to it. Much of our "evidence" comes from memoirs and reminiscences, often written decades are the events took place. Some of these recollected histories may be true, but many are fabricated, imagined, distorted, and exaggerated. If there had been as many UGRR conductors as the late nineteenth and early twentieth century memoirs and local histories suggest, and as many secret UGRR stations as people think, then most of the slaves in the South would have been in Canada long before Lincoln's election.

The hard evidence is clear. The US Constitution and two federal laws (1793 and 1850) dictated that slaves would not legally gain their freedom by escaping to a free state, and masters or their agents were empowered to recovery runaway slaves. Both laws provided penalties for people who aided runaways or interfered with their return and federal officials were authorized the recovery and rendition of fugitive slaves. Anyone aiding fugitives risked fines, private suits to indemnify owners, and under the 1850 law, jail time. In his enormously proslavery Supreme Court decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), Justice Joseph Story gave masters and their agents enormous power to seize fugitives through a right of self-help. Story limited this right to capture without violence or disturbing the peace. Otherwise, they could call on federal law enforcement officials, and if they were willing to cooperate, local and state law enforcement. But, as Soike's book notes, in Iowa and Kansas, and along the Missouri border, self-help included violence and even murders, with slave catchers and kidnappers facing off against the better angels of the West who abhorred slavery.

The federal courts heard a fair number of fugitive cases, including a half dozen...