Famous Quotes:Underground Railroad,The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists, both black and white, free and enslaved, who aided the fugitives. Other various routes led to Mexico or overseas. While an "underground railroad" running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession, existed from the late 17th century until shortly after the American Revolution, the network now generally known as the Underground Railroad was formed in the early 19th century, and reached its height between 1850 and 1860. One estimate suggests that by 1850, 100,000 slaves had escaped via the "Railroad". British North America, where slavery was prohibited, was a popular destination, as its long border gave many points of access. More than 30,000 people were said to have escaped there via the network at its peak, although U.S. Census figures account for only 6,000.
The Underground Railroad fugitives' stories are documented in the Underground Railroad Records.
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, a term that was coined during the 1840s to designate a system of secret networks of escape routes and hiding places used by runaway blacks seeking safety as they made their way from the southern slave states to freedom in the North. To aid these runaways, sympathetic Americans served as "conductors" along these land and sea routes stretching out of the South through the North and into Canada.

The concept of a system of escape routes out of slavery predates the antebellum era, when the development of train travel inspired the clever appellation "underground Railroad." During the colonial period, a viable system of escape routes existed as both a protest and political movement. The "railroad" of these years engaged enslaved and free blacks, whites, and significantly, Native Americans. Its changing character over time allows for a generalized thesis about the railroad's three phases of development.

During the initial phase, Native American nations like the Tuscaroras aided fugitive slaves as part of their war against the colony of North Carolina at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Tuscaroras and blacks formed a community, first in eastern North Carolina, and then as maroons in the great Dismal Swamp. When the Tuscaroras were invited to join the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the center for the Native American freedom networks shifted to Iroquois country in colonial New York. After American independence, fugitives could fabricate free identities through the Iroquois binational system of encampments. Native Americans in the Deep South often accommodated slavery, but on the frontier of planter society they endangered the slaveholders' enterprise. The outlying Seminole nation, an Afro-Indian people in Florida, took abetting fugitive slaves to its logical limit. Blacks among the Seminoles became not only free but also constituent citizens and soldiers.

The early freedom networks organized by European settlers in British North America originally stemmed from religious conscience. German Quakers in Pennsylvania were the first to renounce slavery on religious authority in 1688. Quakers and other pietists slowly moved from benevolence toward blacks to a faith-driven collaboration to aid fugitives. Like the "righteous gentiles" of a later period, these conscientious believers took personal responsibility for the earthly fate of the oppressed. Quakers,

Dunkers, Mennonites, and Shakers, later joined by those from the theologically radical wings of Baptism and Methodism, almost certainly constituted the first institutional skeleton of the later, secular, and more elaborate underground Railroad.

In its third phase, the sophistication of the underground Railroad of the antebellum period was propelled by a number of important developments. The rise of a republican "conscience"—a secular antislavery sensibility parallel to the Christian one—swelled the numbers of Americans willing to risk aiding fugitives. The ideology of the Revolution and consequent state emancipations in New England raised serious doubts about the compatibility of republicanism and slavery. Moreover, the rapidly growing class of free blacks became the new engine for the railroad. Harriet Tubman's amazing career is emblematic of this important shift. Free blacks identified with the slaves, provided places of refuge in their settlements, and were most often the engineers to freedom in both the South and the North.

The Underground Railroad as a social movement matured during the first half of the nineteenth century, when its various constituencies began to merge ideologically as abolitionists and intellectually as a spiritually influenced grassroots republican faction. The spokesmen for slavery were right to fear this movement. The railroad was, in an important sense, simply a functional arm of radical abolitionism. It engaged abolitionists committed to immediate and concrete action against slavery. In addition, in helping individual women and men escape to freedom, the railroad facilitated creation of the most potent weapon of abolitionism: first-hand testimony on the evils of slavery. Frederick Douglass was the most famous of these witnesses. Douglass, in turn, assisted hundreds of runaways to freedom from his home base in Rochester, New York.

The political, moral, and financial effectiveness of the railroad was underscored in the congressional debates of 1850, out of which grew the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This extreme extension of federal power in the interest of slavery incited fierce protest in the North and set the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution against and over the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth amendments. The railroad almost certainly provoked this political blunder.

In its final fifteen years, the influence of the underground Railroad increased due to continued resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in the North, while simultaneously providing clandestine aid to fugitives and free blacks there, especially those subject to the racial violence that swept the region. The railroad disbanded when emancipation was assured by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bland, Sterling Lecatur, Jr. Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Buckmaster, Henrietta. Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolitionist Movement. New York: Harper, 1941.

Franklin, John Hope, and Schweninger, Loren. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hunter, Carol M. To Set the Captives Free: Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen and the Struggle for Freedom in Central New York, 1835–1872. New York: Garland, 1993.

Mitchell, William M. The underground Railroad. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970.

sources: wikipedia,encyclopedia