Why do you think people were willing to risk their lives to work on the Underground Railroad? Do they deserve to be called heroes? Why or Why Not?

Any cause needs speakers and organizers. Any mass movement requires men and women of great ideas.

But information and mobilization are not enough. To be successful, revolutionary change requires people of action — those who little by little chip away at the forces who stand in the way. Such were the “conductors” of the Underground Railroad. Not content to wait for laws to change or for slavery to implode itself, railroad activists helped individual fugitive slaves find the light of freedom. The Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad, but was instead a network of safe houses and routes slaves could take to escape from the South to freedom in the North.

The Underground Railroad operated at night. Slaves were moved from “station” to “station” by abolitionists. These “stations” were usually homes and churches — any safe place to rest and eat before continuing on the journey to freedom in the North, sometimes as far away as Canada. Often whites would pretend to be the masters of fugitives to prevent their capture. Sometimes lighter-skinned African Americans took this role. In one spectacular case, Henry “Box” Brown arranged for a friend to put him in a wooden box, where he had only a few biscuits and some water. His friend mailed him to the North, where bemused abolitionists received him in Philadelphia.

Most of the time, however, slaves crept northward on their own, looking for the signal that designated the next safe haven. This was indeed risky business, because slave catchers and sheriffs were constantly on the lookout. Over 3,200 people are known to have worked on the railroad between 1830 and the end of the Civil War. Many will remain forever anonymous.

[5]Perhaps the most outstanding “conductor” of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman. Born a slave herself, after she escaped to Philadelphia, she began working on the railroad to free her family members. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman made 19 separate trips into slave territory. She was terribly serious about her mission. She threatened to shoot any slave who had second thoughts with the pistol she carried on her hip. By the end of the decade, she was responsible for freeing about 300 slaves. When the Civil War broke out, she used her knowledge from working the railroad to serve as a spy for the Union.

Needless to say, slave owners did not appreciate the Underground Railroad. Although they disliked Abolitionist talk and literature, the railroad was far worse. To them, these were simple cases of stolen property. Slave catchers often traveled to the North to try to recapture freed slaves. When Northerners rallied around freed slaves and refused to compensate former slave owners, Southerners felt they were being robbed of property.

This disagreement over freed slaves lay yet another brick of the foundation for the South to eventually secede from the Union and help spark the American Civil War.