Aboveground railroads and the Underground Railroad

Over the past decade, the literature on the Underground Railroad as grown significantly. Works from Robert Churchill, R.J.M. Blackett, Charles Bolton, and others have added significantly to our understanding of the Underground Railroad, how it operated, and how it changed over time.

In my own work, I have had the opportunity to explore the impact of steam transit had on those attempting to flee slavery. Black abolitionists and their white allies were acutely aware of the power steam transit had to liberate the enslaved. In 1840, the Colored American made a very explicit argument about the link of railroads to freedom. The paper noted that just a few years prior, someone escaping slavery might need a week to walk from Baltimore to New York and would constantly be in danger of capture. By contrast, “Now so extensive are our railroads, and such the arrangements, one leaving upon the arrival of another, that a poor fugitive, may leave Baltimore in the morning, and the third night following, may find himself safely in Canada, a British subject.” The writer concluded that railroads could have no “better purpose” than helping people escape slavery. “May the railroad mania in our country increase,” declared the author, underlining the value that steam transit had for abolitionism. (Colored American, September 26, 1840) The same newspaper voiced similar sentiments in the following year, declaring that “Abolitionists ought to be the friends of internal improvements, even though it should bankrupt the nation, while it would assist in freeing the slave.” (Colored American, December 25, 1841)

Enslaved people were crucial in the construction of southern transportation networks, and surely no white southerners intended that these networks would make it easier for enslaved people to escape the South. But one of the most significant unintended consequences of transit construction in the South was the ingenious way in which enslaved Americans made use of them to escape from slavery.