The Underground Railroad is one of the more elusive subjects in the American history classroom today. Teachers want their students to understand how the antebellum network helped slaves escape from bondage, but few know how to convey the story with facts. There seems to be no records and precious few remaining landmarks. There is always the inspiring tale of Harriet Tubman, but otherwise hardly any specific individuals enter into most modern textbooks. This workshop will help classroom teachers see how they can overcome this frustrating state of affairs. Participants will discover that the record is actually quite thick with evidence. Documents do exist. First-hand accounts are accessible, both in print and online. And perhaps most important, there are important landmarks and sites that can help explain this critical story.

Two of these critical landmarks are each located within 90 minutes of Dickinson College in Carlisle , Pennsylvania and will constitute the framework for our workshop. The first site lies in nearby Lancaster County, at Christiana, Pennsylvania . Here is the field and small town where a group of fugitive slaves and their supporters fought back against a slave-catching posse in 1851. The “Christiana Riot” as it was then called, resulted in the death of a Maryland slaveholder, severely tested the new federal Fugitive Slave Law, and arguably represented the “bloody dawn” of the coming Civil War. The other site marks an even bloodier confrontation and one more widely understood as a harbinger of the war. Harpers Ferry, in nearby West Virginia (then western Virginia), was the location of a federal arsenal that John Brown selected in 1859 at the staging ground for his offensive operations against slavery. People have usually understood John Brown's raid as a failed attempt “to get up a revolt among slaves” (as Abraham Lincoln once put it), but the event should also be taught as the culmination of Brown's frustration with the limited scope of the Underground Railroad and his longstanding desire to create what he called a “Subterranean Pass Way” along the Appalachian Mountains that would carry the fight to aid runaway slaves into the South itself.

By understanding the Underground Railroad in terms of the events at Christiana in 1851 and Harpers Ferry in 1859, teachers will encounter entirely new ways of presenting the subject. They will see how confrontations over fugitive slaves along the Mason-Dixon Line contributed directly to the coming of the Civil War. They will learn how operations aiding fugitives in states such as Pennsylvania were often conducted in open defiance of federal law. And they will consider whether runaways and their allies were even more willing to fight, than to flee, when confronted by slave-catchers outside of the South.

On September 11, 1851 , a prominent slaveholder from Maryland named Edward Gorsuch was shot and killed in southern Lancaster County , Pennsylvania while trying to capture four of his slaves who had previously run away from his nearby plantation. The runaways had sought and received shelter from William Parker, a former slave himself, who lived in southern Lancaster County and stubbornly refused to yield to Gorsuch and a posse of federal marshals. Parker and several others eluded capture after the incident, but prosecutors brought treason charges against various other neighbors who had supported them. A federal jury acquitted the accused ringleader of the “conspiracy” after about fifteen minutes of deliberations and then prosecutors released the rest. The runaways themselves were never returned to slavery. The “riot” at Christiana (as it was then called) was considered a critical test of the new federal Fugitive Slave Law (1850) with results that infuriated southerners and polarized northerners. For many, this was the “bloody dawn” of the conflict that became the Civil War.

Christiana

John Brown's raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal (October 16-19, 1859) is far better known as a precursor to the Civil War than Christiana but its connections to the Underground Railroad are also more obscure. Brown was an abolitionist who had become notorious during the mid-1850s for committing acts of violence against pro-slavery settlers in the Kansas territory. He was vilified by many, but still admired by some, especially by a group of New England intellectuals who abhorred slavery and felt enchanted by his revolutionary charisma. In the late 1850s, Brown obtained their financial backing for a raid on what was then the chief federal arsenal in western Virginia. Brown was certainly a charismatic leader, but his grasp of military tactics was poor and his understanding of southern slaves was equally tenuous. The massive slave uprising that he had predicted to his supporters simply failed to materialize. Brown was wounded and captured and quickly put on trial. He was hanged in early December 1859, but his defiant behavior during the ordeal literally transfixed the nation. To some of his contemporaries, he was a brave martyr and a prophet. To others, he was evil incarnate, a kind of nineteenth-century terrorist.

What most modern students don't understand is that Brown's raid grew out of his experiences with –and vision for-- the Underground Railroad. Throughout his adult life, Brown had not just been an abolitionist, but also an agent who regularly helped escaping slaves in several northern states. For years, he had talked about creating what he called a “Subterranean Pass Way” along the Appalachian Mountains that would help many more slaves escape from bondage. By taking the fight directly to the South, his plan for Harpers Ferry represented a culmination of his longstanding desire to make the escape process both more effective and more aggressive. Admittedly, his dramatic vision is not usually portrayed in these terms, but rather as a mad scheme for slave insurrection. This it may have been, but it was also part of a larger (and more rational) campaign to increase fugitive traffic and to do what the Underground Railroad had always promised —namely, to promote an organized effort to abolish slavery one slave at a time.

Storming the Engine-House at Harpers Ferry

In the short term, however, most Underground Railroad operatives were furious with Brown, because he was captured with a trove of documents that threatened several ongoing operations. Most notably, William Still, a free black resident of Philadelphia, who headed the city's vibrant Underground Railroad network, became increasingly alarmed. Still urgently took the records of his committee (they interviewed each slave they helped) after the Harpers Ferry incident and hid them in a local black cemetery. There they remained until after the Civil War when he returned to retrieve them and publish the collection as a book called The Underground Railroad (1872). Though difficult to use because of its random organization, Still's book was – and remains— the greatest single source of primary information about the Underground Railroad.

William Still

Here is where Harpers Ferry and Christiana are fully joined. Still's network was called the “Vigilance Committee” –a name often applied to the organized core of the Underground Railroad. There were vigilance committees in Boston , New York , Philadelphia , and elsewhere. But the committee in Philadelphia was arguably the most important and the most active because it worked so close to the frontlines of slavery (the entire lower Chesapeake Bay region had legalized slavery in those days, not only Maryland and Virginia , but also Delaware and the District of Columbia ). Harriet Tubman, for instance, worked for the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. And it was vigilance operatives in Philadelphia who had notified the runaways in Christiana that a Maryland slave owner and some federal marshals were on their way to Lancaster County in 1851. The bitter aftermath of Christiana also served to reenergize the Philadelphia vigilance movement, leading to the selection of the young clerk Still to head the committee in 1852. He was the one who pushed most energetically for careful record-keeping, because his own family had been broken apart by slavery. Though Still was born free in New Jersey , both of his parents had been escaped slaves who had been forced to leave behind two of his older brothers. He truly felt the pain of slavery's separations –whether by sale or by escape. Still was convinced that only diligent records could help reunite “some of the bleeding and severed hearts” of the former slaves. His efforts paid off for a number of families, but arguably Still's greatest legacy lies in the historical documentation that his actions made possible and that we can now share with our students to illuminate this supposedly elusive subject. William Still and his vigilance network did not control all, or even most, escapes from slavery, but they had a surprising degree of involvement in much of the fugitive activity along the Mason-Dixon Line. They were literally at the center of operations from Christiana to Harpers Ferry.

Suggested Readings

 Fergus Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America ( New York : Amistad/HarperCollins, 2005).

Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom ( New York : Back Bay/Little Brown, 2004).

Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, orig. pub. 1961; 1996 ed.)

David S. Reynolds, John Brown: Abolitionist ( New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

 
"A Bold Stroke"