Skip to main content
Like
Create new Glog
previous
next
Email share
26 views | 0 likes | 0 reposts
The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was an informal 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 who were sympathetic to their cause.The term is also applied to the abolitionists who aided the fugitives. Other various routes led to Mexico or overseas.
Usually, slaves would go all the way to Canada because of the law that enforced people to recapture escaped slaves.
One slave, Henry Brown, persuaded a white man to place him in a box on a ship that was going to the north. The man agreed, but even though he put him in a box that read, "This Side Up With Care", Henry spent seven hours upside down. When he finally arrived in the north, he went all the way to Boston and started working on the Underground Railroad himself.
Created in the early nineteenth century, the Underground Railroad was at its height between 1850 and 1860. One estimate suggests that by 1850, 100,000 slaves had escaped via the "Railroad". Canada was a popular destination with over 30,000 people arriving there to escape enslavement through the network at its peak, though US Census figures only account for 6,000.
Born in 1820, Harriet Tubman was one of the most famous "Conductors" on the Underground railroad. When she was thirteen, she suffered a blow to the head that gave her fainting spells for the rest of her life. Even so, in 1949, when she found out she was about to be sold, Harriet escaped to the north.
Once free in Pennsylvania, she made ninteen dangerous journeys back into the south and helped over three hundred other slaves escape. Among them, she saved her parents and, over time was given the nickname, "Moses".
