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

Introduction

introduction The Underground Railroad movement secretly operated in conjunction with free Black communities and their historic Black churches. Peering at these sites through a cultural landscape lens allows a new perspective for understanding the relationship between free Black communities, the Black church, and the Underground Railroad. Blacks, enslaved and free, operated as the main actors in the central drama that was the Underground Railroad. Extended families populated Black communities and filled the Black churches at the heart of the movement. Ministers, such as William Paul Quinn, and their wives, in addition to congregations of interrelated families, acted as major forces for social change. The Underground Railroad dwells in national imagination as a wellknown yet poorly understood icon of American lore. Once etched in the national memory as the solitary work of Harriet Tubman and kindly Quakers from Ohio or misunderstood as an actual train complete with tracks, the Underground Railroad movement nags at the nation’s psyche. Elastic, interconnected escape routes and networks merged with creative ruses, legal maneuverings, and bold confrontations by African Americans to sustain the contradictions of a movement that was at once clandestine and well-known. Drawing from sources such as church histories, newspaper articles, and biographies, for example, informed by oral narratives, convention records, and church and organization minutes, this work provides an alternative account of the mechanisms of escape from slavery. Few histories connect the Underground Railroad with Black churches, Black communities, or fraternal societies such as Freemasonry. Gone are the century-old definitions of the Underground Railroad dominated by images of shivering, frightened fugitive slaves. Fading away are the biased images of solitary men, criminalized for escaping slavery, usually on foot, and aided by sympathetic White abolitionists working within a 2 introduction loosely organized network dominated by kindly Quakers. Historian Larry Gara calls the Underground Railroad “America’s favorite legend.”1 Using these landscapes of freedom introduces methodological and theoretical approaches to preservation of the history and memory of free Black communities and their associations with the Underground Railroad. Until recently, African Americans were not part of the American collective identity and therefore required few or no preservation efforts.2 The language of the landscape reveals evidence of daily activities of those who left few written records even though large parts of the evidence are missing from the landscape as well.3 Tracking escape routes through Black communities and mountain passes and adding iron furnaces as an important new link in the Underground Railroad chain, this history charts poorly understood African American pathways to freedom. Blacks participated in a movement thoroughly identified with routes and landscape, terrain, landforms and natural shelters, as well as settlements and houses, all of which define the landscape of the Underground Railroad and the geography of resistance. Historically however, the Underground Railroad narrative has slanted away from the harrowing stories of free Blacks contending with the tyranny of slavery toward interactions with better-known and documented groups of Quaker families, White abolitionists, and other antislavery activists. Invariably these are the main focus of Underground Railroad literature. Reexamining the romantic tales of heroism and moral drama exposes the risks African Americans endured in the cause of their own liberation. Free Blacks with their churches, literary societies, fraternal orders, and other institutions simultaneously ensured their own freedom and the liberty of family and friends as well as that of strangers Small communities of Black families in rural and border regions acted as conduits for escape before the Civil War. As first points of entry into treacherous southern regions of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, Black communities in the southernmost counties bordering the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were positioned to offer sanctuary to anyone able enough to escape slavery. Fleeing, however, was not the sole or most preferable alternative to slavery, nor was it the most common expression of the desire to be free. Purchasing oneself was the enslaved’s legal path to freedom and deathbed manumissions the slaveholder’s path to exoneration. Federal law ensured that most of the millions of enslaved Africans would never be freed by their own hand. As Frederick Douglass observed, passage of“that legislative monster,”the Fugitive Slave Law, in 1850 brought“some introduction 3 of the most repugnant features of slavery into the heart of Northern cities and towns” with ramifications for Black communities.4 In addition to small local settlements, large cities, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, for example, in addition to...