Runaways and the Abolition Movement
Slave resistance occurred wherever bondage existed. The
brutality of involuntary servitude and the yearning for freedom inspired
most bondsmen to rebel against their conditions. Bondsmen consistently
used flight as a form of resistance. Escapes occurred as early as the 1500s
when African captives arrived in the Spanish colonies. In Spanish North
America, some bondsmen escaped and took refuge with Native American groups
who welcomed the runaways as members of their communities. Others absconded
into unclaimed territories and secluded areas and formed maroon or free
societies there. Later, maroon settlements were primarily found in the
Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and Virginia, the bayous of Louisiana,
and the mountainous regions of Kentucky and Tennessee. These communities
usually offered shelter to thousands of fellow refugees. In the early 1700s,
hundreds of enslaved Africans and Native Americans sought refuge in Spanish
Florida which accorded them liberty. This act indeed posed a threat to
White settlers in nearby British, French, Danish, and Dutch territories.
African runaways often lived and intermarried with Native American groups
such as the Creeks and Muscogee who provided them protection. Eventually
this group of peoples became known as the "Seminoles" (a Native
American word meaning runaway). Hundreds of African refugees from the Carolinas
and Georgia customarily sought asylum with the Seminoles and freed African
communities such as the Garcia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Fort Mose)
and the Negro Fort (Fort Gadsden). According to historian John Blassingame,
"by 1836 there were more than 1,200 maroons living in Seminole towns"
(Buckmaster 1992: 18; Thompson 1987: 284-85; Gara 1961: 28-29; Preston
1933: 150; Deagan 1991: 5; Blassingame 1979: 211).
In the British North America and later the United States,
antislavery sentiment flourished during the revolutionary period, but faded
slightly by the beginning of the early 19th century. The call to end human
bondage compelled freed African Americans and Quakers to form abolition
societies such as the American Anti-Slavery Society and the New England
Anti-Slavery Society in the North. Moreover, churches such as African Methodist
Episcopal, Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Presbyterian, and
Methodist as well as Black fraternal organizations and social clubs played
key roles in calling for emancipation and human rights.
The most controversial aspect of the antislavery movement
was the effort at colonization of both enslaved and liberated African Americans.
Such groups like the American Colonization Society (ACS), mostly "viewed
colonization as a means of uplifting the free [African] and of extending
Christian missions to far-off lands." By the 1820s, abolitionists
in England and the United States established two African colonies, Sierra
Leone and Liberia, as a means to rid African Americans from White society.
In fact, the ACS moved nearly 12,000 African Americans to Africa and other
areas outside the United States. Not surprisingly, most African Americans,
especially in the North, vehemently opposed the motives of the ACS. Yet
some African Americans like Paul Cuffee supported its ideals and helped
relocate about 3,000 African American emigrants to areas in Africa, the
western territories, and Canada. Since few African Americans actually emigrated
to these areas, schemes of this type generally failed (Quarles 1969; Franklin
1988: 155-56).
The antislavery movement played a primary role in assisting
runaways to freedom. Abolitionists were crucial to the operations of the
underground, but not all of them participated in or sanctioned its activities.
Occasionally, African American and White abolitionists worked jointly to
aid the runaway. Yet for the most part, the African American abolitionist
played a key role in underground activities. Since most African American
abolitionists were former bondsmen, they usually took a personal interest
in helping loved ones or anyone who wanted to gain freedom. Their work
contributed to the success of the Underground Railroad.
The strength of abolitionism was in its diversity. At
one extreme, African American writers and lecturers such as Olaudah Equiano,
Francis Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, David Walker, and Charles L. Remond
condemned slavery and the slave trade through their literary publications
and speeches. Moreover, antislavery supporters reported the conditions
of bondsmen, ideology, and work of abolitionism in the Freedom's Journal,
Liberator, and North Star newspapers. In the other extreme, abolitionism
took form in slave insurrections that were usually planned and/or led by
radicals and bondsmen such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner,
and John Brown. Inspired in part by the success of the Haitian Revolution,
the number of revolts that occurred in the United States from 1790 to 1865
was small compared to other slave societies in the Western Hemisphere.
Though these revolts were generally unsuccessful, the threat of their actions
was a potent force to abolitionism (Strickland and Reich 1974: 125).
Origins of the Underground Railroad
Evidence is unclear when the "underground" began;
however, Henrietta Buckmaster, author of Let My People Go, asserts that
"the first fugitive slave who asked for help from a member of his
own race or the enemy race drove the first stake in that `railroad'"
(Buckmaster 1992: 11). One of the earliest recorded "organized"
escapes may have occurred in 1786 when Quakers in Philadelphia assisted
a group of refugees from Virginia to freedom (Blockson 1984: 9; Siebert
1896: 460). One year later, Isaac T. Hopper, a Quaker teenager, "began
to organize a system for hiding and aiding fugitive slaves." Soon,
several towns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey offered assistance to runaways
(Haskins 1993: 9). Organized flight became evident in 1804 when General
Thomas Boudes, a revolutionary officer of Columbia, Pennsylvania, aided
and then refused to surrender a runaway bondsman to the owner (Buckmaster
1992: 23). By the 1830s, participation in furtive activity increased, and
abolitionists recognized the underground as an effective weapon of attack
against human bondage.
In 1831, the popularity of the railroad train coupled
with legendary flights of certain runaways introduced the name for the
underground movement. Supposedly, the term Underground Railroad originated
when an enslaved runaway, Tice Davids, fled from Kentucky and may have
taken refuge with John Rankin, a White abolitionist, in Ripley, Ohio. Determined
to retrieve his property, the owner chased Davids to the Ohio River, but
Davids suddenly disappeared without a trace, leaving his owner bewildered
and wondering if the slave had "gone off on some underground road."
The success of Davids' escape soon spread among the enslaved on southern
plantations (Stein 1981: 5þ10; Hamilton 1993: 53-56).
Organization and Operations of
the Underground Railroad
Determined bondsmen escaped whenever there was an opportunity to do so. Historian Larry Gara maintains in The Liberty Line that "fugitives who rode the underground line often did so after having already completed the most difficult and dangerous phase of their journey alone and unaided." Typically, enslaved African Americans who fled from plantations and cities in Delaware, District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Virginia were more likely to take refuge in northern states, Canada, and western territories. In contrast, those who lived in the Deep South often ensured their freedom by escaping into Mexico and the Caribbean. Among other locations to which they fled were maroon societies, Native American groups, and large southern cities such as Baltimore, New Orleans, and Charleston, South Carolina (Gara 1961: 18, 29; Breyfogle 1958: 33; Fields 1985: 16).
