The Causes And Consequences Of The Underground Railroad

1345 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Slave trade across the Atlantic

The Underground Railroad wasn’t a railroad, it wasn’t a locomotive fueled by coal and steam, the UGRR was a loose co-operative network of free Blacks, escaped slaves and White abolitionist. The network of people worked together to construct an elaborate scheme that spanned from south to north on both sides of the Mississippi River and assisted runaway slaves in their escape to freedom. The road to freedom was long, scary and painful without the help received on the UGRR many wouldn’t have made it. Slaves attempted to find freedom despite the consequences set forth by the law and slave owners; in turn they became fugitive slaves.
Africans opposed being captured in their villages and on the shores of Africa and Africans and African-Americans opposed enslavement in the New World. Slaves have always contested their capture and enslavement, on various levels. Some fought back in small ways and others payed with their lives to oppose being made into property. Although slavery has been incorporated in every culture and some form of slavery existed among all ethnicities and nations, Europeans were exceptionally cruel and barbaric in their form of slavery being race based when involving Africans and people of colour. They [Europeans and
Due to high tensions, severe possibilities (of being caught) and challenges fugitive slaves depended on themselves and were deeply gracious and appreciative of help received from others. Through time and the consistent effort of free Blacks, escaped slaves and abolitionists the loose co-operative network of assistance to fugitive slaves would be coined the Underground Railroad. The UGRR in its lifetime would help some 100,000 fugitive slaves set foot on free soil and some 40,000 of them would find themselves in what we know as Canada

Show More
Related

  • Essay On The Underground Railroad

    2342 Words  | 5 Pages

    The Underground Railroad was a vast, loosely organized network of people who helped aid fugitive slaves in their escape to the North and Canada. It operated mostly at night and consisted of many whites, but predominately blacks. While the Underground Railroad had unofficially existed before it, a cause for its expansion was the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act allowed for runaway slaves to be captured and returned within the territory of the United States and added further provisions regarding the runaways and imposed even harsher chastisements for interfering in their capture (A&E). The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was a major cause of the development of the Underground Railroad because it caused people to realize just how cruel slavery was, which invoked an increase in the support and aid of the strong, free, black population, who were a crucial component to the Underground Railroad, as well as abolitionist and anti-slavery white, resulting in the expansion of the Underground Railroad.

    Read More

  • Analysis of White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro by Winthrop D. Jordan

    1182 Words  | 3 Pages

    Winthrop D. Jordan author of White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812, expresses two main arguments in explaining why Slavery became an institution. He also focuses attention on the initial discovery of Africans by English. How theories on why Africans had darker complexions and on the peculiarly savage behavior they exhibited. Through out the first two chapters Jordan supports his opinions, with both facts and assumptions. Jordan goes to great length in explaining how the English and early colonialist over centuries stripped the humanity from a people in order to enslave them and justify their actions in doing so. His focus is heavily on attitudes and how those positions worked to create the slave society established in this country.

    Read More

  • The Role of Washington County, Ohio in the Success of the Underground Railroad

    3735 Words  | 8 Pages

    Fugitive slaves, or runaway slaves, were fleeing a life of hardship and confinement for a life of h...

    Read More

  • Signs, Symbols and Signals of the Underground Railroad

    3218 Words  | 7 Pages

    The Underground Railroad was an escape network of small, independent groups of individuals bound together by the common belief that enslaving a human being was immoral. A loosely structured, informal system of people who, without regard for their own personal safety. Conducting fugitives from slavery to free states, and eventually to Canada where they could not be returned to slavery was a dangerous undertaking.

    Read More

  • The Legend Of The Underground Railroad Analysis

    1099 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Underground Railroad was an extremely complex organization whose mission was to free slaves from southern states in the mid-19th century. It was a collaborative organization comprised of white homeowners, freed blacks, captive slaves, or anyone else who would help. This vast network was fragile because it was entirely dependent on the absolute discretion of everyone involved. A slave was the legal property of his owner, so attempting escape or aiding a fugitive slave was illegal and dangerous, for both the slave and the abolitionist. In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass understands that he can only reveal so many details about his escape from servitude, saying, “I deeply regret the necessity that impels

    Read More

  • Taking a Look at the Underground Railroad

    1076 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Underground Railroad was large group of people who secretly worked together to help slaves escape slavery in the south. Despite the name, the Underground Railroad had nothing to do with actual railroads and was not located underground (www.freedomcenter.org). The Underground Railroad helped move hundreds of slaves to the north each year. It’s estimated that the south lost 100,000 slaves during 1810-1850 (www.pbs.org).

    Read More

  • Harriet Tubman's Arguments About The Underground Railroad

    299 Words  | 1 Pages

    Another point that someone might argue about the Underground Railroad is Harriet Tubman. She was one of the conductors of the Underground Railroad. She would an African American born slave, spent most of her life on the plantation, who risked her life multiple to times to get her fellow slaves to safety. She escaped from Maryland but see continued to put her freedom on the line for fellow slaves who wanted to use the Underground Railroad. Her original intent was to go back to Maryland to get her husband, but to her surprise, he had taken a new wife. She was angered by this but this anger was only used for the good of getting her whole family out of slavery and to their freedom. She continued to travel back south help people about ten years

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay On The Underground Railroad

    508 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Underground Railroad was not a real railroad with a train, but a network of meeting places in which African slaves could follow to Canada where they could free. Those who helped were at risk of the law but got the satisfaction of knowing that they were helping those who did not deserve to be treated like less than everyone else. People who escaped had to take care, they were creative with giving instructions and the way they escaped their owners, but if they were caught the punishment was not very humane. John Fairfield was a white man, born into a family in Virginia who owned slaves; he never liked the idea of owning slaves, so he became friends with them. When he turned twenty, he helped his friend escape by taking him to Canada.

    Read More

  • Underground Railroad Benefits

    112 Words  | 1 Pages

    Many people would argue the Underground Railroad was a great strategy because of the benefits it brought. Even though the Underground Railroad was a strong, high risk for the slaves, it also helped many slaves too. The slaves would sing songs along the trails as they escaped to their freedom and they would be sent to different conductors along the travel. Different conductors would led them in the way they needed to go to successfully get freedom. They would use the stations to help them hide or eat. They would have to travel long distances barefoot and deal with severe temperatures. They were constantly on the run from slavecatchers and their dogs.

    Read More

  • White Man's Burden Summary

    1766 Words  | 4 Pages

    Slavery is the idea and practice that one person is inferior to another. What made the institution of slavery in America significantly different from previous institutions was that “slavery developed as an institution based upon race.” Slavery based upon race is what made slavery an issue within the United States, in fact, it was a race issue. In addition, “to know whether certain men possessed natural rights one had only to inquire whether they were human beings.” Slaves were not even viewed as human beings; instead, they were dehumanized and were viewed as property or animals. During this era of slavery in the New World, many African slaves would prefer to die than live a life of forced servitude to the white man. Moreover, the problem of slavery was that an African born in the United States never knew what freedom was. According to Winthrop D. Jordan, “the concept of Negro slavery there was neither borrowed from foreigners, nor extracted from books, nor invented out of whole cloth, nor extrapolated from servitude, nor generated by English reaction to Negroes as such, nor necessitated by the exigencies of the New World. Not any one of these made the Negro a slave, but all.” American colonists fought a long and bloody war for independence that both white men and black men fought together, but it only seemed to serve the white man’s independence to continue their complete dominance over the African slave. The white man must carry a heavy

    Read More

  • Abina And The Important Men Analysis

    1051 Words  | 3 Pages

    Ever since there has been humanity, slavery has been a mechanism used by people in order to subjugate and dehumanize other individuals. Abina and the Important Men is a book that illustrates how slavery was still able to manifest, even after it had been abolished within British society. By enslaving young women under the false pretense that the individuals were wards, powerful African leaders and British rulers were able to maintain a social hierarchy where African women occupied the lowest rung. The trafficking of Africans through the Transatlantic Slave Trade, brought wealth to European and other western nations as well as African leaders who were willing to cooperate. Europeans, such as the Portuguese, British, and French, first began arriving to Africa in the 16th century since they were drawn by the valuable resources that could be found in coastal, African societies.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Underground Railroad

    942 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Underground Railroad despite occurring centuries ago continues to be an “enduring and popular thread in the fabric of America’s national historical memory” as Bright puts it. Throughout history, thousands of slaves managed to escape the clutches of slavery by using a system meant to liberate. In Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, he manages to blend slave narrative and history creating a book that goes beyond literary or historical fiction. Whitehead based his book off a question, “what if the Underground Railroad was a real railroad?” The story follows two runaway slaves, Cora and Caesar, who are pursued by the relentless slave catcher Ridgeway. Their journey on the railroad takes them to new and unfamiliar locations,

    Read More

  • The Impact of the Fugitive Slave Law on Abolitionism

    1112 Words  | 3 Pages

    By the early 19th century, slavery had grown and become interwoven with all social and political institutions, and was considered by many to be a vital part of our nation. As many of the northern states began to change their policies on the enslavement of Africans, the South became aware that those areas might become a haven of refuge for runaway slaves. In an effort to appease southern slave owners, the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1793, which allowed slave owners to apprehend fugitives in any state or territory and only required them to apply for custody from a circuit or district judge. Due to the act’s ambiguity and lack of uniform enforcement, slaveholders became increasingly agitated. The growing movement of abolitionists to smuggle and rescue fugitive slaves compounded this frustration; the best known organization being the Underground Railroad.

    Read More

  • Slavery as the Cause of the American Civil War

    1746 Words  | 4 Pages

    Slavery was the core of the North and South’s conflict. Slavery has existed in the New World since the seventeenth century prior to it being exclusive to race. During those times there were few social and political concerns about slavery. Initially, slaves were considered indentured servants who will eventually be set free after paying their debt(s) to the owner. In some cases, the owners were African with white servants. However, over time the slavery became exclusive to Africans and was no limited to a specific timeframe, but life. In addition, the treatment of slaves worsens from the Atlantic Slave trade to th...

    Read More

  • Modern Day Slavery Essay

    1371 Words  | 3 Pages

    Slavery has been a part of human practices for centuries and dates back to the world’s ancient civilizations. In order for us to recognize modern day slavery we must take a look and understand slavery in the American south before the 1860’s, also known as antebellum slavery. Bouvier’s Law Dictionary defines a slave as, “a man who is by law deprived of his liberty for life, and becomes the property of another” (B.J.R, pg. 479). In the period of antebellum slavery, African Americans were enslaved on small farms, large plantations, in cities and towns, homes, out on fields, industries and transportation. By law, slaves were the perso...

    Read More

More about The Causes And Consequences Of The Underground Railroad

Open Document