Abandoned Tracks: The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania by W. Thomas Mainwaring (review)

With the recent resurgence in interest in the Underground Railroad (UGRR), W. Thomas Mainwaring offers a case study of Washington County that looks at the myths and the realities of the “Liberty Line.” He traces the origins and development of four myths that have surrounded the UGRR in the popular imagination: the image of “dramatic escapes from the clutches of foulmouthed, whiskey-swilling slave catchers” (4); the belief in white abolitionist heroes, most often Quakers, taking the lead in the operation; the idea that an underground operation reached deep into the South to lure enslaved people from their masters and guide them to freedom; and an emphasis on a literal underground operation that included tunnels, trap doors, hidden rooms, and secret codes. Mainwaring examines each of these myths in both the national and local context and then provides a detailed assessment of the realities of the UGRR in southwestern Pennsylvania. He provides an important case study that offers both scholars and local history buffs an account that is interesting but also realistic. He ultimately shows that “there is a real history to the Underground Railroad in Washington County, but as in so many other places, it has been covered up by a heavy layer of romantic lore and greatly exaggerated” (15).

The first two chapters recount the history of antislavery in western Pennsylvania to set a context for the rise of the Underground Railroad. Both Virginia and Pennsylvania originally claimed the area, and Washington County came about only after the 1781 settlement of the dispute. This meant that the original settlers included a significant number of slaveholders, as the county was founded after the new state’s 1780 gradual abolition law. The institution, however, was “of marginal importance” in the area and follow-up abolition laws brought abolition there in 1782. Some county residents founded an auxiliary of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) in 1789, but it was even more conservative than the parent organization, including slaveholders as members and concerning itself primarily with protecting free blacks from kidnapping rather than fighting to end slavery. Though this first foray of whites into the antislavery world was tepid at best, the black community began to unify after 1790 and it was this group that served as the real basis for antislavery to later take root in the 1830s.

As happened throughout the North, radical abolition in Washington County grew out of black abolition. It opened a door for the emergence of the Underground Railroad in southwestern Pennsylvania. By 1830 the haphazard and spontaneous assistance offered to slaves was becoming more organized due to the growth of the free black community, the organization of black churches, and a growing rank of prosperous blacks. In this context the American Antislavery Society began to focus on the area by sending lecturers, including Theodore Dwight Weld, who encouraged local abolitionists to create the Western Abolition Society (later replaced by the Washington Anti-Slavery Society). Weld’s lectures, the leadership of local white abolitionist Julius F. Le Moyne, and the presence of the active free black population put Washington County at the forefront of abolition in western Pennsylvania despite an angry backlash that included mob action. Indeed, the mobbings only served to convince people who were previously unconcerned about slavery to join the struggle in order to preserve their own rights to free speech. This legacy of abolition set the stage for an active UGRR to emerge in Washington County, but that railroad was much less structured than local historians have portrayed. Mainwaring describes it as “a very loosely organized network of sympathetic individuals that responded to situations as best it could” (124).

After establishing the existence of the Underground Railroad in southwestern Pennsylvania, Mainwaring addresses each of the myths in depth. First, his assessment of abolition in the region proved that blacks played a larger role than whites in the railroad. Regarding the idea...