In the North, white activism often centered in evangelical churches whose members rejected slavery on moral grounds. Although this organization, founded by the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison and New York businessman Arthur Tappan, officially confined itself to public activity, its agents fanned out across the northern states setting up local branches of the society, which in turn frequently became nurseries for the more radical activists of the Underground Railroad. It speeded up dramatically after the establishment of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Underground activity spread from Philadelphia to other Quaker communities in the surrounding states. A probably apocryphal tale attributes it to the spontaneous remark of an anonymous citizen in Ripley, Ohio who, when asked by slave catchers where a fugitive had gone, replied that he must have disappeared on “an underground road.” More likely, the terminology developed naturally during the 1830s and 1840s when the development of the underground coincided with that of iron railroads, whose language of “stations,” “lines,” “trains,” “passengers,” and “conductors” lent itself neatly to what the underground had been doing for decades. The origin of the term “Underground Railroad” remains unknown. Although no single figure created the Underground Railroad, its most prominent early activist was the Quaker Isaac Tatum Hopper, who was delegated by the local Society of Friends to assist newly freed slaves, and was soon collaborating with them to help still-enslaved men and women to freedom. There, at the turn of the 19 th century, perhaps slightly earlier, Quaker antislavery activists joined with free African Americans in moving fugitive slaves, sometimes in disguise, from safehouse to safehouse, and from town to town in the Pennsylvania countryside, establishing techniques that would be used by the underground for decades to come. The Underground Railroad’s origins can be traced to Philadelphia. The underground and the broader abolition movement of which it was a part also fostered American feminism: women were for the first time participants in a political movement on an equal plane with men, publicly insisting that their voices be heard, sheltering and clothing fugitive slaves, serving as guides, and risking reprisals against their families. And in an era when proslavery ideologues stridently asserted that blacks were better off in slavery because they lacked the basic intelligence, and even the biological ability, to take care of themselves, the Underground Railroad offered repeated proof of their courage and initiative. It also gave many African Americans their first experience in politics and organizational management. By provoking fear and anger in the South, and prompting the enactment of harsh legislation that eroded the rights of white Americans, the Underground Railroad was a direct contributing cause of the Civil War. The nation’s first great movement of civil disobedience since the American Revolution, it engaged thousands of citizens in the active subversion of federal law and the prevailing mores of their communities, and for the first time asserted the principle of personal, active responsibility for others’ human rights. But its political and moral importance both in antebellum America and as a forerunner of modern Civil Rights activism far outweighs its legendary romance.Īpart from sporadic slave rebellions, only the Underground Railroad physically resisted the repressive laws that held slaves in bondage. The real history of the Underground Railroad is indeed an epic of high drama. Mention of the underground typically evokes a thrilling but vague impression of tunnels, disguises, mysterious codes, and hairsbreadth escapes. Because so much of the Underground Railroad’s history was forgotten, or deliberately suppressed, its memory melted into myth like few other pieces of the American past.
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