The murder of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, in November 1837 sent shockwaves through the growing anti-slavery movement. Lovejoy had already seen his printing press destroyed by mobs multiple times after he moved from St. Louis to the southern Illinois town. When town leaders ordered him to stop publishing the anti-slavery Alton Observer, he publicly refused.
Five days later, he was killed. At a memorial service held in Hudson, Ohio, a man rose from the back of the church and raised his right hand. Years later, his half-brother remembered the words: “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery. ” That man was John Brown, and it was his first public statement on the issue of slavery.
These confrontations occurred not in the slaveholding South but in Illinois and New York. Such events reveal the complexity of the Underground Railroad, a movement more diverse and more dangerous than popular memory often suggests. Far from a simple network of white Quakers guiding passive fugitives to Canada, the reality involved blacks, whites, and Native Americans; it included Wesleyan Methodists, Jews, Dunkers, Unitarians, Covenanters, and Roman Catholics. Routes were not always northward, and many escapes were made by water rather than overland.
The exact origin of the term “Underground Railroad” remains uncertain. One account traces it to 1831, when a frustrated master searching for an escaped slave in Ohio remarked that the man must have gone off on an underground railroad. Another version credits Pennsylvania slave catchers with a similar comment. A third places the origin in the District of Columbia in 1839, when a captured fugitive said he was to be sent north where the railroad ran underground all the way to Boston.
The movement borrowed heavily from the nation’s fascination with railroads. Escape routes were called rails, safe houses were stations, fugitives were passengers or packages, and those who helped were conductors or station masters. Yet enslaved people had been escaping long before these terms existed, and not always to the North. Some fled south to Spanish Florida, to Mexico, or to live among the Seminoles.
Some escaped alone or with a single companion, without any coordinated network. The rise of organized abolitionism in the 1830s gave the movement new energy. William Lloyd Garrison, a Baptist, pushed for immediate emancipation based on Christian morality. Because the Constitution protected slavery, he publicly burned a copy of it, calling it a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.
Unlike John Brown, Garrison opposed violence and saw himself as a harmonizer rather than an insurgent. His message spread through his weekly newspaper, The Liberator, and attracted supporters such as Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Theodore Dwight Weld, Lucretia Mott, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Anti-slavery advocates faced overwhelming obstacles. The Constitution included the three-fifths compromise and affirmed a master’s right to recover runaways.
The Supreme Court upheld federal protection of slavery in cases such as Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842, Dred Scott in 1857, and Ableman v. Booth in 1859. Economics also played a major role.
From 1830 to 1860, land was the nation’s largest form of capital investment, but slavery was second, with nearly four million slaves valued at roughly four billion dollars by 1860. By the end of the 1830s, many abolitionists who had preached moral persuasion shifted toward resistance. One influential voice was Wendell Phillips, a Boston attorney who had been convinced of slavery’s moral wrong by his wife. In 1837, he captured national attention with a widely circulated speech responding to Elijah Lovejoy’s murder.
Phillips denied the legitimacy of the Constitution, welcomed slave revolt in the South, and defied federal enforcement of the fugitive slave laws. Congress responded to rising debate by imposing a gag rule from 1836 to 1844, effectively banning consideration of anti-slavery petitions in the House of Representatives. But the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 proved to be a turning point. The law imposed harsh fines and imprisonment for aiding runaway slaves, established commissioners who were not constrained by judicial tradition, and denied arrested fugitives trial by jury and habeas corpus.
Commissioners who ruled in favor of returning fugitives received ten dollars per decision, while those who ruled otherwise received only five. Free blacks in the North were terrified by a law that did not distinguish between those born into freedom and those who had escaped slavery. The reaction was swift. Vigilance and safety committees formed across the North, organizing protests and pledging open defiance.
In July 1855, the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee acted when United States Minister to Nicaragua John H. Wheeler stopped in the city with Jane Johnson, an enslaved woman, and her two young sons. Black and white abolitionists confronted Wheeler before he boarded a ship and informed Johnson that under Pennsylvania personal liberty laws she was free. They successfully removed Johnson and her sons from Wheeler’s custody.
Most runaways, however, were younger males who escaped alone or with one or two companions. By the 1850s, it is estimated that 95 percent of escaped slaves ran without a coordinated network. Some ran short distances and returned within days, a practice owners tolerated as “absconding” or “lying out. ” Others used such temporary absences as trial runs for final escapes.
Former slaves sometimes found refuge in maroon communities, isolated settlements often located in thick forests or formidable swamps. Between 1672 and 1864, an estimated 59 such communities were formed. Examples included Snow Hill on the outskirts of Haddonfield, New Jersey; Poke Patch in Lawrence County, Ohio; and a settlement in the Great Dismal Swamp of northeastern North Carolina, where as many as 2,000 former slaves camped across a thousand square miles. In the deep South, some enslaved people fled south to join the Seminoles in Florida, who had absorbed black runaways since the late 1700s.
For those heading north, one notable refuge was the home of Reverend John Rankin in Ripley, Ohio, a town of about 400 people on the Ohio River. A southerner by birth, Rankin offered refuge from 1822 onward. In 1828, he moved to the highest point in the area, plainly visible from slaveholding Kentucky. At night, he raised a lantern to the top of a flagpole.
He is believed to have helped liberate some 3,000 slaves, and bounties of as much as $2,500 were offered for his capture. Contrary to popular imagination, safe houses rarely featured hidden rooms or tunnels. Frederick Douglass and other station masters recalled that fugitives usually slept on bed rolls on kitchen floors or in barns between stacks of hay or firewood. Modest homes were preferred precisely because they drew less attention.
Station masters themselves endured social censure, threats from slave catchers, personal assaults, fines, and occasional imprisonment. Waterways offered effective escape routes. Frederick Douglass escaped from Maryland’s Eastern Shore by water at age 18. In 1859, William Peele of Baltimore wrapped himself in straw, placed himself inside a wooden crate, and shipped himself aboard a coastal steamer to an abolitionist.
In 1854, Savannah slave Edward Davis hid in the bow of the steamship Keystone State and survived three days of ocean waves washing over him before being found near death. Some escapes became legendary for their daring. William and Ellen Craft escaped from Macon, Georgia, in disguise. Light-skinned Ellen dressed as a young white man, bandaging her face as if suffering a toothache and putting her arm in a sling to avoid having to sign documents.
William traveled as her servant. They reached Boston on October 26, 1850. Even more famous was the escape of Henry Brown, known as Henry “Box” Brown. In March 1849, Brown paid $86 of his $166 life savings to two men who agreed to help him escape Richmond.
He was nailed inside a hickory box three feet by two feet and shipped to Philadelphia. The box was marked “this side up with care” but was repeatedly turned upside down and bounced during the 26-hour journey. Brown carried crackers, a beef bladder filled with water, a hat to fan himself, and a small hand drill to bore air holes. He survived and was delivered to the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee’s office.
One of his helpers, Samuel Smith, was arrested and spent eight years in prison. The fear of recapture haunted all who escaped. Solomon Northrup was a free black musician from Saratoga Springs, New York, who in 1841 was lured to Washington, D. C.
, where he was drugged, robbed, and sold to a slave dealer. Despite protesting that he was a free man, he was beaten and enslaved for twelve years before justice was served. His memoir, published in 1853, later inspired the 2013 Academy Award-winning film “12 Years a Slave. ”
Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston on May 24, 1854, a year after fleeing Richmond by ship.
When brought before a commissioner, an integrated crowd stormed the courthouse, killing a United States marshal in the attempt. The rescue failed, and it required a large force of militia, an artillery company, and a company of marines to return Burns to Virginia. Resistance continued in other forms. In September 1851, William Parker, an escaped slave from Maryland, led an armed group of blacks in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to confront slave catchers led by master Edward Gorsuch.
The confrontation, known as the Christiana riot, left Gorsuch dead. In October 1851, a crowd of between 2,000 and 5,000 people in Syracuse, New York, stormed a courthouse where William McHenry was being held, and despite his temporary recapture, eventually escorted him to Canada. Historian Stanley W. Campbell found documents recording 330 fugitive arrests from 1850 to 1860, with 296 returned to slavery.
Fugitives in Ohio and Pennsylvania faced the greatest danger due to their proximity to the border. Campbell found 96 arrests in Ohio and 86 in Pennsylvania during that decade, compared to only 17 in New York and seven in Massachusetts. No discussion of the Underground Railroad is complete without Harriet Tubman, known as Moses. Born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland, the exact year of her birth is uncertain, with sources ranging from 1815 to 1825.
She was one of 11 children of Benjamin Ross and Harriet Green. As an adolescent, she was struck in the head by an iron weight thrown by an angry overseer, an injury that caused headaches and seizures for the rest of her life. Despite this, she became skilled at plowing and heavy labor. In 1844, Harriet married John Tubman, a free black man.
In 1849, she fled Maryland, taking her mother’s name Harriet to confuse possible captors. When she learned that a niece and two children were about to be sold south, she returned to Maryland and helped smuggle them out. More trips followed, and from 1850 to December 1860, she made approximately 20 trips and was credited with rescuing 200 to 300 people. She worked closely with station masters Thomas Garrett of Wilmington, Delaware, and William Still of Philadelphia, who recorded details on 649 fugitives who passed through Philadelphia.
Tubman was a master of disguise, once wearing a sun bonnet and carrying flapping chickens around her neck to avoid recognition by her former master, who passed within inches of her. She also tested strangers in the North by showing them photographs of known abolitionists; only if they could identify them would she speak more openly. In 1857, she traveled south to rescue her elderly parents, both in their 80s, and guided them to Ontario, where five of her siblings had resettled. They eventually moved to a home in Auburn, New York, which Tubman purchased from William Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s future Secretary of State.
During the Civil War, Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts sponsored her passage to Sea Island, South Carolina, in late May 1862. There, she worked behind Confederate lines, made contact with slaves, and built a network of agents and scouts. On June 2, 1863, she led a raid up the Combahee River, engineering the escape of more than 750 slaves. She carried a musket on that raid, though on rescue missions into the South she carried only a pistol, which she reportedly intended to use on anyone who lost heart.
She never lost a passenger. In later life, Tubman became a philanthropist, opening homes for elderly, orphaned, and disabled veterans, as well as for the needy of all races. She named one home after John Brown, who had called her “General. ” With the help of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, she opened another home in 1908 that, despite her protests, bore her name.
It closed in the 1920s. Tubman died on March 10, 1913. History has remembered her unevenly. Until the 1940s, only a handful of books and articles existed about her.
Interest grew through subsequent decades, particularly in children’s literature. Yet scholarly works remain scarce, with only two major studies: one by friend Sarah Bradford in 1869 and another by journalist Earl Conrad in 1943. The story of the Underground Railroad is the story of those who acted against a gross injustice, risking punishment to rescue human beings from slavery in a country whose declaration proclaimed that all men are created equal.
It is why that story, as the source concludes, should never be allowed to stay buried underground.