Despite the horrors of slavery, the decision to flee was not easy. Escaping often involved leaving family behind and heading into the complete unknown, where harsh weather and a lack of food might await them.
Then there was the constant threat of capture. So-called slave catchers and their hounds scoured both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, catching runaways – and sometimes free blacks like Solomon Northup – and bringing them back to the plantation, where they would be whipped, beaten, branded where are you.
Yet those willing to brave the risk had one main ally: the Underground Railroad, a vast, loosely organized network of ever-changing routes that guided black people to freedom.
In total, in the decades preceding the Civil War, up to 100,000 blacks escaped slavery. Some went to Mexico or Florida under Spanish control or hid in the desert. Most, however, went to the Free States of the North or to Canada.
1: Get help
Harriet Tubman, circa 1860s.
Library of Congress
No matter how brave or clever, few slaves got rid of their chains without at least some outside help. Help could be as light as clandestine word-of-mouth advice on how to escape and who to trust. The lucky ones, however, followed so-called “conductors,” like Harriet Tubman, who, after escaping slavery in 1849, devoted herself entirely to the Underground Railroad.
During approximately 13 trips to the east coast of Maryland, where she had been brutally abused as a child slave, Tubman rescued some 70 people, mostly family members and friends. Like his fellow conductors, Tubman cultivated a network of collaborators, including so-called “station masters”, who hid his charges in barns and other safe houses along the way.
Tubman was intimately familiar with the landscape of Maryland, usually following the North Star or the rivers meandering north. She knew which authorities were sensitive to bribes. And she knew how to communicate – and gather intelligence – without getting caught.
She sang, for example, certain songs, or imitated an owl, to signify when it was time to escape or when it was too dangerous to come out of hiding. She also sent coded letters and sent messengers.
2: Calendar
Over the years, Tubman has developed some additional strategies to keep his pursuers at bay. For one thing, she typically operated in the winter, when longer nights allowed her to cover more ground. She also preferred to leave on Saturday, knowing that no runaway notice would appear in the newspaper until Monday (since there was no newspaper on Sunday).
Tubman carried a pistol, both for protection and to intimidate those in her care who were considering turning back. Additionally, she brought drugs with her, using them when a baby’s cries threatened to betray her group’s position. “I never ran my train off the track,” Tubman would later state, “and I never lost a passenger.”
3: Disguises and Concealment
Returning to Maryland again and again, Tubman often relied on disguises, dressing as a man, an elderly woman, or a free middle-class black depending on the situation. His fellow conductors made similar use of costumes. They could, for example, enter a plantation posing as a slave in order to round up a group of escapees.
Conductors also needed disguises, or at least nicer clothes, for the charges they were in charge of: they couldn’t very well flee in the rags of tattered slaves without attracting unwanted attention.
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Some sartorial efforts border on genius. In Georgia, a light-skinned slave girl posed as an injured white man, with bandages over her face and right arm in a sling, while her darker-skinned husband pretended to be under her possession . Traveling openly by train and boat, they survived several close calls and eventually made it to the North.
Frederick Douglass also escaped slavery by hiding in plain sight. Boarding a train disguised as a sailor, he flashed a sailor protection pass, borrowed from an accomplice, to trick the conductor. “If the conductor had looked carefully at the paper”, Douglass would later write, “he could not have failed to discover that he was calling a very different person from mine.”
In contrast, other runaways took extreme measures to hide. Desperate to avoid unwanted sexual advances from her master, a slave girl hid for seven years in an attic. Another lodged in a wooden crate and shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to the abolitionists in Philadelphia.
4: Codes, secret ways
Harriet Tubman, far left, with her family and neighbors at her home in Auburn, NY, around 1887.
MPI/Getty Images
The Underground Railroad barely existed in the Deep South, from which very few slaves escaped. Although pro-slavery sentiment was not as strong in the border states, those who encouraged slaves there nonetheless faced the constant threat of being denounced by their neighbors and punished by the authorities.
They therefore took great care to keep their operations secret, which they did, in part, by communicating by code. A station master, for example, might receive a letter calling incoming fugitives “bundles of wood” or “parcels.” The words “French leave” indicated a sudden departure, while “patter roller” implied a hunter of slaves.
On occasion, escapees might use a secret chamber or a secret path, which would epitomize the Underground Railroad in the popular imagination.
5: Freedom of purchase
For much of its length, however, the Underground Railroad operated openly and brazenly, despite the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which imposed severe penalties on those who aided runaways. Some station masters claimed to have taken in thousands of runaway slaves and widely publicized their actions.
A former slave-turned-stationmaster in Syracuse, New York, even referred to himself in writing as the city’s “Underground Railroad Depot Keeper.”
Meanwhile, so-called “shareholders” raised funds for the Underground Railroad, funding anti-slavery corporations that provided former slaves with food, clothing, money, housing and services. shift.
Sometimes abolitionists simply bought a slave’s freedom, as they did with Sojourner Truth. They also used the courts, filing a lawsuit, for example, to secure the release of Truth’s five-year-old son. Additionally, they fought to change public opinion, funding speeches by Truth and a myriad of other ex-slaves to highlight the atrocities of bondage.
6. Fight
When all else failed, participants in the Underground Railroad sometimes formed large groups to forcibly free runaway slaves from captivity and intimidate slave hunters into returning home empty-handed. Not surprisingly, John Brown was among those who favored brute force.
Prior to his failed revolt at Harpers Ferry, Brown led a group of armed abolitionists into Missouri, where they rescued 11 slaves and killed one slaveholder. Hounded doggedly by pro-slavery forces, Brown then took the fugitives on a 1,500-mile journey through several states, eventually delivering them safely to Canada.
