(The student, he takes pains to mention in his acknowledgments, decided to become a lawyer, so no scholarly careers were harmed in the production of this volume.) Several years ago, an undergraduate in Foner’s department at Columbia, at work on her senior thesis, discovered the previously overlooked journal of a white New Yorker who aided hundreds of escaping slaves in the 1850s-a find that inspired his latest book. Now Eric Foner, one of the nation’s most admired practitioners of history-his previous book, on Abraham Lincoln and slavery, won a Pulitzer Prize-joins an increasing number of scholars shining lanterns into the darkness. The Underground Railroad often was not hidden at all. “I escaped without the aid … of any human being,” the activist minister James W. African Americans told a different story.
A generation after the Civil War, one historian (white) interviewed surviving abolitionists (most of them white) and described a “great and intricate network” of agents, 3,211 of whom he identified by name (nearly all of them white).
Was the Underground Railroad truly a nationwide conspiracy with “conductors,” “agents,” and “depots,” or did popular imagination simply construct this figment out of a series of ad hoc, unconnected escapes? Were its principal heroes brave Southern blacks, or sympathetic Northern whites? The answers depend on which historians you believe.Įven the participants’ testimonies often contradict one another. What’s more, the existing literature sometimes seems to obscure the real story still further. For a saga that looms so large in the national memory, it has received surprisingly little attention from scholars, at least until recently. The century and a half since its heyday has only deepened the mystery. And increasingly, this movement operated not under cover of darkness but in broad daylight.į or most people today-as for most Americans in the 1840s and 1850s-the phrase Underground Railroad conjures images of trapdoors, flickering lanterns, and moonlit pathways through the woods. Rather, an organized network, vast and sinister, actively encouraged and abetted it.
Worst of all, the exodus could no longer be blamed on scattered outbreaks of Drapetomania. How long before the entire fabric began to unravel? The Mason-Dixon Line had become slavery’s fraying hem.
Although only a few thousand people, at most, escaped slavery each year-nearly all from states bordering the free North-their flight appeared to many Southern whites the harbinger of a larger catastrophe. The essays’ author, the distinguished New Orleans physician Samuel Adolphus Cartwright, described in precise anatomical terms the reasons for African Americans’ supposed laziness (“deficiency of red blood in the pulmonary and arterial systems”), love of dancing (“profuse distribution of nervous matter to the stomach, liver and genital organs”), and exceptional dislike of being whipped (“skin … as sensitive, when they are in perfect health, as that of children”).īut what drew readers’ particular attention was Cartwright’s discovery of a previously unknown medical condition that he called “Drapetomania, or the disease causing Negroes to run away.” (He derived the name from an ancient Greek term for a fugitive slave.) This affliction, he continued, had two effective cures: treating one’s slaves kindly but firmly, or, failing that, “whipping the devil out of them.”ĭrapetomania seemed on the verge of becoming a fatal contagion in the summer of 1851, when Cartwright’s articles appeared.
A decade before the Civil War, the leading Southern periodical De Bow’s Review published a series titled Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race-a much-needed study, the editors opined, given its “direct and practical bearing” upon 3 million people whose value as property totaled some $2 billion.