A Pathway to Freedom The Underground Railroad is considered to be one of the most shameful periods in American history, as it illustrates the hardships of slavery during the nineteenth century. The treatment of African Americans in the South is described as being inhumane, brutal, and shows the lack of basic freedom. Throughout the years, fugitives organized ways to escape the hardships of slavery they encountered. By the use of the Underground Railroad, many runaway slaves abandoned the life that they possessed, in search of something much greater. Their unstoppable desire for freedom that no danger, no hardship, and no power could suppress, and what disturbed them day in and day out, was to escape from the grasps of the cruel race that …show more content…
But, life was not automatically safe once the runaways arrived into the Union States. Little did they know, everyone had their suspicions about them. Federal marshals were on the patrol, tracking down the runaways who were trying to blend into society. If caught, they were captured and forced to surrender themselves to their former plantations and face the consequences of their masters. The Underground Railroad was organized in 1834, by the National Anti Slavery Society. The formation of the Railroad contained the combined efforts of abolitionists, both white and black, to aid in the efforts for fugitives to find a way to freedom. Under the direction of the Railroad’s “agents”, countless slaves made spontaneous escapes from the South. Taking these risks seemed almost effortless compared to what they endured on their plantations day in and day out. No one person could withhold their desire that burned inside of them to be …show more content…
African American women, men, and children in tattered clothing attracted suspicious eyes. Since the runaways had no way to raise this money, it was earned and donated for them to use by the groups, individuals, and vigilance committees contributing to the Underground Railroad. These vigilance committees sprang up in more developed towns and cities in the North. These organizations provided food and shelter, in addition to seeking money. By doing this, it aided the fugitives settle into the community by writing recommendation letters to help them find a successful
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.
As darkness fell over the city of Pittsburgh on July 21, 1877, an enormous failing. The Pennsylvania Railroad's PRR massive railroad yards were engulfed by a sea of fire. "Strong men halted with fear," one witness later recalled, "while others ran to and fro trampling upon the killed and wounded." The conflagration that raged that hot summer night was the result of a long-simmering crisis in the lives of American working men and women.The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the angry response of railroad workers to wage reductions, job cuts, and the profiteering by the huge railroad corporations that had risen to dominance after the Civil War. Millions of Americans had become wage workers when businesses boomed, but a bank panic partly sparked by the instability caused by railroads' rate wars in 1873 sent the nation into an
While there were many states, slaves and abolitionists involved in the Underground Railroad, certain restrictions must be placed on the research. The research in this paper will only cover four stations and their conductors from Washington County, Ohio. The paper will take you on a trip through this county from a slaves point of view. Although the history and origin of slavery will not be covered in this paper, the feelings and thoughts of the slaves on their journeys will be depicted.
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.
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
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).
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
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.
The Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad, nor was it an established route. It was, however, a way of getting slaves from the South to the North, or in this case, from the Deep South, to Mexico. In the 1800s, slavery was a major issue. As the United States began to mature, slavery began to divide. Slavery in the considered “Northern States” was emancipated, and slaves, still under bondage in the South, were looking for ways to get to the North. The Underground Railroad was one way to find freedom. A common myth about the Underground Railroad is that it was only in a pathway full of people, all trying to make it to the North for freedom. The truth is there was hardly any help in the South. The major help came along when the slaves reached the North. A former slave by the name of James Boyd was once interviewed in Itasca, Texas on this very subject. He recalls that many slaves running across the established border between Mexico and Texas to reach freedom in Mexico. ...
Numerous are mindful of the considerable deed that Harriet Tubman executed to free slaves in the south. Then again, individuals are still left considerably unaware about in which the way they were safeguarded and how she triumphed each and every deterrent while placing her life at risk of being captured. She is deserving of the great honor she has garnered by todays general society and you will find out her in the biography. The title of this biography is “Harriet Tubman, the Road to Freedom.” The author of this piece is Catherine Clinton. ”Harriet Tubman, the road to Freedom” is a charming, instructive, and captivating book that history appreciates and is a memoir than readers will cherish. The Target audience of the biography is any readers
The underground railroad was a system organized to safely move slaves into free states (Coddon). Harriet Tubman was an outstanding abolitionist and black leader of her time. After freeing her whole family from slavery, Tubman’s main concern was the freedom of all slaves. She became well acquainted with many white abolitionists and often received food and shelter from them, while trying to free someone from slavery (Coddon). Most of the Underground Railroad was organized in Philadelphia, where Tubman became acquainted with William Still (Coddon). This was were the first anti-slavery society was established. Still was a black man who was the executive director of the General Vigilance Committee and later became known as “The Father of the Underground Railroad” (Coddon). Since written records were life-threatening to keep, many were burned or not kept at all. Although William Still did say this about Harriet Tubman, “She was a woman of no pretensions; indeed , a more ordinary specimen of humanity could hardly be found...Yet courage shrewdness, and disinterested exertions to rescue her fellow man, she was without equal. (Coddon)” Still encouraged African resistance to slavery, and even taught himself how to read (Turner). He worked nonstop to end race discrimination and, in 1867, he published A Brief Narrative of the Struggle for the Rights of Colored
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,
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.
The Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad, it was just an idea of indirect paths from on station to another. The Underground Railroad began when slaves had first entered America in 1619, and it ended along with the American Civil War in 1865 (Lavine - ). Slaves had the choice of escaping to the free-states in the North, or to Mexico. Depending on where you were coming from and what happened on the way, it could take from 24 hours to a year’s worth of running (How Stuff Works “How it Worked”).
The Underground railroad was a system created to help slaves escape to the north, or Canada, to be free.