The Underground Railroad was never one organisation with a timetable. The US National Park Service describes it as the efforts of enslaved African Americans to free themselves, and most of them set out with no help at all. Many finished the whole journey that way. Organised help existed only in some places.
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The first stretch was the loneliest
Escapes usually happened at night, the BBC notes, with the North Star as the only guide. Those who fled depended on their own wits and a good deal of luck, even where a support network existed further on.
The land did much of the work a map could not. The Park Service lists rivers, forests and caves among the features freedom seekers commonly used. Some even rode real trains, though that was a dangerous choice.
Help was often improvised. In many cases, the Park Service says, a person who assisted an escape may have been reacting on the spot to a chance that presented itself. Only in some places, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, did the network become deliberate and organised, with operatives linked by family or faith.
Who helped, once help arrived
The African American community, free and enslaved, sat at the centre of the effort. Churches mattered too. The Park Service singles out the African Methodist Episcopal, Presbyterian and Methodist Episcopal denominations.
In northern cities the work came out into the open. Vigilance committees in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, groups of African Americans organised against slave catchers and kidnappers, gave money, food and a bed to people arriving from the South.
Quakers appear in most popular accounts, and some did take part. The Park Service stresses that many did not, because Quakers agreed slavery was wrong but split over how to end it. Even so, George Washington once complained that “a society of Quakers” had helped one of his runaways, long before the network had a name.
The river as a road
Water was a route as well as a barrier. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History records that many people stowed away on steamboats, often with help from African Americans working on board. Others followed the banks of rivers that ran north.
The Ohio River was one such line. John P. Parker, a formerly enslaved man living in Ripley, Ohio, helped others cross it. He described one night when seven armed men rowed three boats across to Kentucky to collect five people hiding by the bank, then carried them on to Red Oak Station without stopping.
Conductors and the risks they ran
Conductors, men and women alike, guided freedom seekers from one station or safe house to the next. Those safe houses might be barns, churches, homes, caves or hollows dug into a riverbank.
Helping carried a price. In the North, the BBC notes, a person convicted of aiding an escape could be fined hundreds or thousands of dollars, while in the South a caught conductor faced jail or a lynch mob.
Harriet Tubman is perhaps the best-known conductor. The BBC credits her with at least 19 trips back into the South and more than 300 people led to freedom. It also names Levi Coffin, who it says led over 3,000 people out of slavery.
Where the road ended
The destination shifted with the law. Before 1850 many freedom seekers settled in northern states that had outlawed slavery. After the Fugitive Slave Act, a second wave pushed on into Canada, which had outlawed slavery in 1834.
Not every route pointed north. Some people went to Spanish Florida, the Caribbean or Mexico, and a few joined whaling ships and stayed on in San Francisco or Hawaii.
How many made it is uncertain. The BBC and The New York Times both cite an estimate of about 100,000 people, and the Times places that figure across the six decades before the Civil War.
Why the tunnel image lasts
The routes were a web of secret paths, not tracks. Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad imagines a real train running beneath southern soil, a metaphor the BBC contrasts with the plain facts. The Park Service says the railroad language itself dates from the 1840s, as real railways spread.
The quilt code is a similar story. The Park Service finds no first-hand account of anyone using quilts as signals, and notes that many of the patterns involved date from after the Civil War.
The civil rights leader Andrew J. Young wrote that the Underground Railroad has been described as the country’s first civil rights movement, because it crossed lines of race, gender and religion.
