Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance

7. Family, Church, Community: Pillars of the Black Underground Railroad Movement

Chapter 7 Family, Church, Community Pillars of the Black Underground Railroad Movement African American communities connected through family relations and intermarriage, church organizations, benevolent societies, and the fraternal structure of the Prince Hall Masons. Despite the fact that the average escapee from slavery was a young single male, maintaining family connections motivated escapes, particularly when imminent sale threatened to break up the family. Black family members understood the costs of freedom and stalwartly offered aid to escapees so they too could taste its fruits. Free Blacks, or self-liberated men and women, succeeded in purchasing freedom for themselves and their loved ones. At times, they also had the wherewithal to purchase land to establish towns and settlements or migrate to areas where other free Blacks had settled. The Black Family African American antislavery families supported the Underground Railroad. Children inherited their parents’ activism, brothers and sisters worked together ; whole families cooperated in rescue efforts.Activists such as Harriet Tubman and Priscilla Baltimore, Lewis Woodson and John Mercer Langston, and many of the other prominent Black abolitionists had intimate knowledge of free Black communities because they had either lived there or had relatives who continued to settle in Black enclaves across the country. Daughters as well as sons followed the lead of their families. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, famed editor of The Provincial Freeman, was heavily influenced by her father, Abraham D. Shadd, whom she described as a “chief brakeman” on the Delaware Underground Railroad. He opened his home in Wilmington to escapees, and continued his Underground Railroad work later when he moved the family to a farm in West Chester, Pennsylvania.1 128 part iii. family, faith, and fraternity Harriet Tubman also came under the powerful influence of her father, Ben Ross, and relied on his aid, particularly in engineering the escape of her two brothers from Maryland’s Dorchester County on Christmas Day, 1854. Tubman’s biographer, Kate Larson pieced together the details of the intricately planned escape missions. Complex networks of Black and White supporters helped Tubman achieve her goals.“Tubman relied heavily upon a long established, intricate, and secretive web of communication and support among African Americans to effect her rescues,”observed Larson.“The collective efforts of free and enslaved African Americans operating beyond the scrutiny of whites along the various routes to freedom were crucial to her success . . . it was the African American community from the Eastern Shore of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay to Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New England, and Canada that provided the protection, communication and sustenance she required during the darkest and most dangerous days of fighting for freedom.”2 Flight from slavery, often with close relatives escaping together, underscores the importance of family unity. Several famous family escapes took place in Maryland. Black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet had been a mere nine years old when he was literally carried out of slavery. A group of eleven, including his parents, relatives, and sibling, escaped from New Market. After the young Garnet grew exhausted and could no longer keep pace, he was carried on the backs of the more able. Eventually the family made its way to Thomas Garrett in Delaware, who put them on the Underground Railroad. Garnet forgot neither the 1824 escape nor the subsequent family hardships stemming from attempts by slave catchers to recapture his parents and sister in New York City. While at Troy in upstate New York, a way station of the eastern route of the Underground Railroad, Garnet, by then a Presbyterian minister , claimed to have harbored and assisted hundreds of escapees. Garnet, too, worked actively across black institutions, bringing with him the deep personal understanding of the tragedy and pain slavery inflicted on families. After Anna Murray helped Frederick Bailey (Douglass) accomplish his solitary escape from slavery in Baltimore, Douglass’s first act as a free man was to send for his future wife. Black abolitionist David Ruggles arranged for Rev. Pennington, the former blacksmith who was now well-established in New York after his escape, to marry them before sending the newlyweds onward to New Bedford, Massachusetts. John Weems from Rockville, Maryland, worked tirelessly to free his family in the border state. Weems’s partial success brought liberty to his daughters , Ann Maria and Stella, and to his wife. Charles B. Ray, editor of The Colored American, is best known for his role in the famous escape of Ann chapter 7. family, church...