The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad

Preface to 1996 Edition

PREFACE TO THE 1996 EDITION My LONG journey on the underground railroad began nearly fifty years ago when I was a student in Paul Miller's United States history class at William Penn College in Iowa. For that class I wrote a paper on the underground railroad, based on secondary source material and full ofthe usual stereotypes and oversimplified stories. Fouryears later, in a graduate seminar with William B. Hessletine at the University of Wisconsin , my reexamination of the underground railroad began. For the seminar I wrote a paper on the propaganda function of the underground railroad. My use of original source materials convinced me that the traditional version rested on shaky ground. I put the topic aside while completing work for my degree, then returned to it as the subject of my first postgraduate research. The result was The Liberty Line: The Legend ofthe Underground &ilroad , originally published more than thirty years ago. Mter examining the traditional sources, I concluded that the underground railroad legend was a mixture of fact and fiction. Research for mostearlier histories had relied on memoirs ofwhite abolitionists. Wilbur H. Siebert based his pioneer monograph, The Underground &ilroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898), for example , on the reminiscences ofdescendants and friends ofabolitionists . Several things became clear to me as my research continued . While assistance was available to fugitive slaves in the North, it was quite different from the legendary accounts. As I studied the narratives or autobiographies offormer slaves, I was struck with their active roles in their own escapes. These records contrasted with their passive roles in the legendary accounts, when, indeed, those accounts mentioned them at all. Discovering William Still's classic The Underground &ilRoadstrengthened my view. Here was a work written by an Mrican American who had devoted years to working with the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee to help fugitive slaves. Still preserved and published xii Preface to the 1996Edition contemporary records, yet he had been overlooked as a source for underground railroad history. Placing the fugitive slaves at the center of their struggle for freedom was the major contribution of The Liberty Line. Of course, white abolitionists played a significant role, and I had no intention of overlooking them. Were I to write the book again, I would give more recognition to the abolitionists, many of whom risked a great deal to help escaping slaves. Yet it remains undeniable that the slaves themselves actually planned and carried out their runs for freedom. Any aid they received came after they had left the slave states and were in territory where they still faced return under terms of the Fugitive Slave Law. More often than not, their destination was Canada, where they became refugees from an oppressive society. In this light the underground railroad became an instrument ofcolonization, even though most abolitionists had rejected the colonization idea. Mrican Americans in Canada became refugees from oppression just as had other groups who emigrated to new lands in order to escape tyranny. Recognizing this contradiction, some abolitionists tried to convince fugitives that they could safely remain in the United States. Yet ever-present race discrimination in the North, coupled with the threat of kidnapping or legal return to slavery, made Canada an attractive haven. Consequently, despite their opposition to the colonization idea, many abolitionists actually assisted in such a program. Another theme that I would develop were I to rewrite The Liberty Line is the important example of successful nonviolent action the underground railroad provided. Much has been written about the relatively few open slave rebellions, and about Nat Turner in particular. Those were heroic uprisings, but all ofthem failed and resulted in terrible retribution. On the other hand, with few exceptions the slave escapes were a nearly perfect model of nonviolent action, action that often succeeded without loss of life. Moreover, abolitionists who helped the former slaves were also nonviolent activists, openlyviolating federal and state laws as they practiced nonviolent civil disobedience. While only a few were Preface to the 1996Edition xiii arrested under the Fugitive Slave Law, their ordeal resulted directly from adherence to what they considered a higher law than the United States Constitution. Carleton Mabee's important Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionistsfrom 1830 through the Civil War (1970) discusses many other examples ofnonviolent action practiced by slaves and abolitionists. Much of this history becomes lost in the many legendary accounts that continue to appear today in newspapers and popular magazines. Recent scholars...