Bound for Canaan Read Free Page A

Allied airmen from Nazi-held France, or refugee Afghans making their way to Western Europe from their war-torn homeland. (During the Civil War, Southerners even used it to describe the passage of escaped Confederate prisoners southward from Yankee jails, with the help of proslavery sympathizers.) Yet its true historyand its lasting significance are surprisingly little known. Because the Underground Railroad was secretive, and because much of its story has been forgotten, or deliberately suppressed, its memory has sheered away into myth and legend like no other piece of our history. To most Americans, perhaps, mention of the Underground Railroad evokes a thrilling but vague impression of tunnels, disguises, mysterious codes, midnight rides, and hairsbreadth escapes. And although residents of almost any town in the Northern states have heard about some old house or hidey-hole in which fugitive slaves were supposedly sheltered, few can name a single man or woman who was part of the Underground Railroad, apart from the inimitable Harriet Tubman.
    The story of the Underground Railroad is an epic of high drama, moral courage, religious inspiration, and unexpected personal transformations played out by a cast of extraordinary personalities who often seem at the same time both startlingly modern and peculiarly archaic, combining then-radical ideas about race and political action with traditional notions of personal honor and sacred duty. For generations, Americans thought of the Underground Railroad as a mostly monochromatic narrative of high-minded white people condescending to assist terrified and helpless blacks. Only recently have African Americans begun to be restored to their rightful place at the center of the story. But the Underground Railroad is no more “black history” than it is “white history”: it is American history, and it swept into its orbit courageous Americans of every hue. It was the country’s first racially integrated civil rights movement, in which whites and blacks worked together for six decades before the Civil War, taking great risks together, saving tens of thousands of lives together, and ultimately succeeding together in one of the most ambitious political undertakings in American history. Their collective experience is, if anything, an even greater record of personal bravery and self-sacrifice than is generally known. In border areas, underground agents faced the constant danger of punitive litigation, personal violence, and possible death. In an era when emancipation seemed subversive and outlandish to most Americans, the men and women of the underground defied society’s standards on a daily basis, inspired by a sense of spiritual imperative, moral conviction, and, especially on the part of African American activists, a fierce visceral passion for freedom.
    Beginning with a handful of members around Philadelphia at the turnof the nineteenth century, by the 1850s the underground had developed into a diverse, flexible, and interlocking system with thousands of activists reaching from the upper South to Canada. In practice, the underground was a model of democracy in action, operating in most areas with a minimum of central direction and a maximum of grassroots involvement, and with only one strategic goal: to provide aid to any fugitive slave who asked for it. While the forwarding of fugitives was the central purpose of the underground, it also incorporated a broader infrastructure of itinerant preachers, teamsters, and peddlers who carried messages for the underground into the South, slaves who themselves never fled but provided information regarding escape routes to those who did, sailors and ships’ stewards who concealed runaways on their vessels, lawyers who were willing to defend fugitives and those who were accused of harboring them, businessmen who provided needed funds, as well as an even wider pool of family members, friends, and fellow parishioners who although