Increasingly, it seems, Americans are fracturing culturally, economically, politically, and spiritually. Anxiety, discontent, and distrust of our fellow Americans have become the common currency of public discourse. Political speech has shrunk to sound bites and tweets. Our grasp of basic grammar – the architecture of clear expression – has disintegrated. Language once fitted for locker rooms, if even there, sprouts on protest placards and from the mouths of national leaders. Popular culture saturated with coarseness masquerades as creativity. What passes for news on television and online too often trivializes complexity, distorts the truth, inflates personality, and delivers ideological combat instead of penetrating reportage.

As we all know, I think, education in civics and government has foundered over the last half-century. Countless young – and even not so young – Americans no longer know the difference between the Senate and the House of Representatives, how a bill becomes law, or understand the way power is shared between Congress and the president. It increasingly seems that, in presidential elections, many Americans of all political stripes feel they are choosing an autocrat who can do what he wants once he takes office, and they react with fury when the balancing machinery of republican government prevents him from doing so. Ignorance guarantees disappointment with the inevitably messy way that compromise politics actually works. And such disappointment with what the Founding Fathers bequeathed us invites the demagoguery – of whatever persuasion — that the Founders rightly feared. This kind of ignorance and corrosive disappointment is not something that America can long afford.

Contempt for fundamental democratic institutions has become commonplace, and support for Congress and the established press has fallen to an all-time and deeply concerning low. Confidence in the ability of seasoned politicians to make the decisions that are necessary for the nation’s welfare has shriveled. We long for examples of constructive, creative, capable government, but don’t find them. Where, we might wonder, as many Americans do, are our Washingtons, our Madisons, our Hamiltons? Where are we to find great conciliators and compromisers like Henry Clay, and moral giants such as Martin Luther King, when we so sorely need them? We might be forgiven for believing that the nation is at one of the most dire points in its history.

While history may not offer much immediate solace in a time of trial, the past can nonetheless illuminate our path through the wilderness of the political moment by reminding us that our ancestors overcame many challenges even more fraught with danger than those we face today. History also encourages us to remember that the seeming giants of the past were not demigods but men as challenged by the crises of their time as we are today. Charles Francis Adams – the great-grandson of John Adams — once said: “We are beginning to forget that the patriots of former days were men like ourselves, acting and acted upon like the present race, and we are almost irresistibly led to ascribe to them in our imaginations certain gigantic proportions and superhuman qualities, without reflecting that this at once robs their character of consistency and their virtues of all merit.” Those words were written in 1871. They are, if anything, even more apt today.

Take James Madison, one of the charter trustees of this college. He was physically unimpressive, decidedly lacking in charisma, and spoke in a whispery, difficult-to-hear voice. Yet he consistently impressed those who worked with him with his “most ingenious” clarity of mind, his powers of persuasion, his willingness to listen to others, and his determination to make the imperfect machine of government work. No other man contributed more to the intellectual bedrock of our government. Brilliant as he was, he suffered several major defeats at the Constitutional Convention: he had proposed that the president be chosen by the legislative branch, that Congress be given the right to override state laws, and that the membership of both houses of Congress be based on population. On each of these he was defeated. Yet he went on, unbowed, to implement the Constitution on the parliamentary battleground of the First Congress.

The First Congress met only months after the ratification of the Constitution, first in New York and then in Philadelphia, from 1789 to 1791. The challenges facing the nation were immense. The United States was a shaky collection of eleven sovereign states – North Carolina and Rhode Island hadn’t yet joined the union yet. (Congress almost dispatched troops to march on Rhode Island, to carry out “regime change” in Providence.) Opponents of the new Constitution – including Hampden-Sydney charter trustee Patrick Henry — were demanding hundreds of amendments. The government had no reliable source of revenue. More than fifty different currencies were in circulation. (Thomas Jefferson had to change money every time he crossed a state line on his journey from Monticello to New York.) There was no permanent capital. Southerners were suspicious of northerners, westerners of easterners, and New Englanders of everyone else. There were well-founded fears that the trans-Appalachian West would break off into another country, or maybe several. The British threatened the fragile new nation from the north, Indian nations from the West, and the Spanish from the South. Quakers were demanding an end to slavery, while southerners threatened secession if government dared to tamper with their “peculiar institution.” Even many members of Congress doubted that the government would survive its birth. It’s worth remembering that when Gorge Washington took the oath of office at his first inauguration, onlookers could see that his hands were shaking. It wasn’t because of age: he feared that he wasn’t up to the task he faced. As Madison, who dominated the first crucial session of the First Congress, put it, “We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us.”

In the teeth of such adversity, the First Congress achieved the most prodigious output of any single Congress in American history. It established the executive departments, the federal court system, the first revenue streams for the national government, approved the first amendments to the Constitution, adopted a program for paying the country’s debts and embraced the principles of capitalism as the underpinning of government financial policy. It also founded the first National Bank, established the national capital on the Potomac River, enacted the first patent and copyright laws, founded the United States Coast Guard, and much more.

How did they achieve all this? It wasn’t with a group hug. They did it largely through contentious debate and pragmatic, occasionally shameless, deal-making. Perhaps the best known compromise – now famous thanks to a certain well-known musical – took place at Thomas Jefferson’s home on Maiden Lane, in the heart of today’s financial district, in New York. There, in June 1790, Madison agreed to supply a certain number of very grudging votes from his friends in Maryland and Virginia in order to enact Alexander Hamilton’s far-reaching financial plan. In return, Hamilton a proto-abolitionist who favored a free-state capital, agreed to trade votes from his supporters in the North for the establishment of the seat of government securely in the slave states of Maryland and Virginia. It was, in essence, the first “backroom deal” in American history.

By today’s unrealistic standards, such swapping of votes at the expense of principle might seem reprehensible. But it required both character and courage on the part of the men involved. And the nation was the better for it.

Most of the members of that First Congress were not so different from the men and women who populate Capitol Hill today. Most were professional politicians, a majority were lawyers, and there was a good deal of chaff along with the human grain. They differed deeply from each other on many issues – slavery, centralized government, financial policy, regional interests, taxation. But every one of them wanted the government to succeed. They also believed in politics as a tool for national survival. After all, the right to be political was what they had fought the Revolutionary War for. The usually astute French ambassador, Louis-Guillaume Otto, rather cynically remarked in 1790: “The intrigues, the cabals, the underhanded and insidious dealings of a factious and turbulent spirit are even much more frequent in this republic than in the most absolute monarchy.” But the turbulence he was describing was just republican government at work.

The urgencies of transactional politics aside, Madison and his colleagues also believed in persuasion over power-driven argument, in accommodating divergent views, and in a willingness to make painful compromises for the greater good. Put another way, they relied on their own character, on their trust in the character of their fellow men, and on the kind of humane values that are deeply rooted here at Hampden-Sydney.

Americans today bemoan political partisanship, not entirely without reason. But partisan battles in the early republic could be savage, too. Take the struggle for the first amendments. We rightly think of the Bill of Rights as one of the most majestic components of our constitutional system. But many members of the First Congress didn’t want them at all. Federalists complained that tampering with the new Constitution would “throw everything into confusion.” Others argued that if the Constitution was treated as something “sacred” and untouchable what was the point of permitting amendments at all? Madison took on the responsibility of compressing the more than two hundred proposed amendments down to twelve, of which ten would ultimately be ratified as the Bill of Rights, although it was never called that then. No one at the time was happy with the result. South Carolina Congressman Aedanus Burke complained that the amendments that were finally enacted were “little better than whip-syllabub, frothy and full of wind, formed only to please the palate.”

We sell the founders short when we imagine that today’s messy political battlefields cannot also produce results that may also be of lasting value. And we sell ourselves short when we imagine that the men and women like us who represent us today are somehow made of lesser human material than our ancestors.

No one opposed the new government, the Constitution, and Madison more vigorously than Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia, and the country’s paramount advocate for the rights of states against strong central government. Frankly, he hated the Constitution. “The principles of this system are extremely pernicious, impolitic, and dangerous,” he declared in 1788, predicting that the new government it created would “oppress and ruin the people.” The following year, he did everything he could to sabotage Madison’s election to Congress. But even Henry resigned himself to results that he had fiercely resisted. “Altho’ the Form of Government into which my Countrymen determined to place themselves had my Enmity, yet as we are one & all embarked, it is natural to care for the crazy Machine, at least so long as we are ought of Sight of a Port to refit,” he wrote to his protégé James Monroe after the close of the First Congress.

Both Madison and Henry were of course gentlemen of their time. But as Henry Adams implied, our ancestors had no monopoly on virtue. One of the most virtuous public men I have ever known lived not far from here, in Lunenberg County. His name was Nathaniel Lee Hawthorne. He was a World War II veteran who served in a racially segregated unit and was badly wounded in the Italian campaign. When I met him in 1967, he was the county chairman of the NAACP. I was a college kid helping him to register disenfranchised African-American voters. He was threatened, harassed, shot at, and accused of crimes he never committed. His rectitude was quiet but unbreachable. He also possessed extraordinary physical courage. One day, he walked into the middle of a Ku Klux Klan rally on the steps of the county court house to prove that African Americans weren’t afraid of them. (I know all this because I was with him that day.) If ever a man had reason to despair of his country it was Hawthorne. But he believed fiercely in it, and – like Madison and Henry – he also believed in the moral fortitude of his fellow men. He was, in every respect, a gentleman. And his battle for fairness in Lunenberg County was not so very different in its essentials from the one that Madison and his colleagues waged in New York two hundred and twenty-seven years ago.

In government, times are always tough, and the future always uncertain. We may wish to return to a kinder and gentler, more inspiring, more honorable, or more enlightened time. But every age has been as fraught with anxiety and dread as our own. In a sense, we are always, in Patrick Henry’s words, “ought of Sight of a Port.” History can’t guarantee us that our future will be bright, or ensure that when the political wheel turns, as it must, it will restore our world as it was before. Rather, history tell us that our political reality was never trouble-free to begin with.

Times of trial are not something for us to fear: crisis also reveals the essential character of a man. We will continue to struggle for the ideals and policies that we believe in. But lasting victory can never be achieved without compromise, and compromise can never be achieved without respect for one’s adversaries. Madison knew it. So did Patrick Henry. So did Nathaniel Lee Hawthorne. When we despair, we would do well to turn to Madison and Washington, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and others like them who brought common values of fairness and tolerance to the political world that we live in. All of them faced crises that tried their souls. Times of crisis also give birth to creative solutions. Just because we cannot see them at the moment does not mean that they don’t exist.

For almost two hundred and fifty years Hampton-Sydney has been committed to shaping character that will endure, and not falter amidst the turbulence of the moment. Its mission to form good men and good citizens is today more urgently needed than ever, as we navigate the personal and public challenges that will inescapably emerge to confront us as our lived history unfolds. Its commitment to teaching and embodying the values of mutual respect, open-mindedness, clear reasoning, and clear language are the blood and sinews of our society. Civility will never become obsolete. Honor need not grow feeble with age. These benchmarks of Hampden-Sydney’s purpose will remain forever vital not just to the molding of its graduates’ character, but to that of the nation.

Wilson is now the latest target in proliferating demands to topple monuments and reputations that honor long dead Americans tainted by racism. Students at Yale are engaged in a similar, much publicized campaign to remove John C. Calhoun’s name from one of the university’s undergraduate colleges. A former vice president, and a senator who was a member of the “Great Triumvirate” that also included Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, Calhoun, who died in 1850, regarded African-Americans as fundamentally “low, degraded, and savage.” He adored slavery and defended it tenaciously, declaring that it ennobled masters and slaves alike, and formed the foundation of true republicanism, by creating the affluence and leisure for white men to engage in self-government.

His advocacy for slavery was accompanied by a broader disdain for mass democracy  and its basic freedoms, even for white men, which he claimed led only to “violence, injustice, and anarchy.” He mocked the assertion of the Declaration of Independence that all men were born free and equal, declaring, “There is not a word of truth in the whole proposition,” adding that “the attempt to carry into practice this, the most dangerous of all political error…has done more to retard the cause of liberty and civilization than all other causes combined.” He advocated that police powers, and censorship of both speech and the press be imposed on the rest of the country to silence slavery’s enemies, and actively fostered, if he did not invent, the South’s antebellum narrative of perpetual resentment and grievance. At a time when Congress was gridlocked and Civil War threatened, in 1850, he stood out among his contemporaries as the leading enemy of compromise.

Calhoun’s legacy remains a vital if too little acknowledged part of American politics today. It survives in appeals to racism cloaked in anodyne present-day appeals to “states rights,” in the continued devaluation of black lives, and in the kind of cultural purism that wishes to build walls against immigrants in the guise of patriotism and “self-defense.”  Calhoun of course cannot be blamed for every retrograde tendency in twenty-first century American politics. But nor should his ghostly influence be underestimated.

Wilson’s record pales beside Calhoun’s contempt not only for blacks but also for basic democratic values. Although Wilson’s policies on race were shameful, they must be balanced against his commitment to political reform, which resulted in the passage of a raft of progressive legislation – the Federal Reserve Act, creation of the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Farm Loan Act, the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote, and much more – as well as his advocacy for the League of Nations and self-determination of the world’s oppressed colonial minorities. His contributions to the liberalization of American government and to the export of America’s higher political values were significant and lasting. Calhoun, by contrast, did more than any other American politician in history to sow suspicion of the federal government, to undermine democracy, and to rationalize authoritarian tendencies in the United States.

It may prove relatively easy to remove Calhoun’s his name from the college that bears it. But it will not scrub his reactionary legacy from the body politic. The more difficult challenge is to confront the pernicious thinking that he championed and that Wilson was heir to. Princeton students, and the rest of us, will benefit more from a fully rounded understanding of Wilson, who illustrates disturbingly but not all that uncommonly how racism can coexist alongside the highest idealism. He deserves to retain his place in the American political pantheon, tainted though it may be: Calhoun does not.

Fergus with Zooey Deschanel shooting an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? for The Learning Channel.

Each episode of this extremely well-researched and entertaining show delves into the ancestry of a celebrity, and the history of the periods in which his or her forbears lived, usually with surprising results. Zooey discovered that she was directly descended from a Quaker who was active in the Underground Railroad, and played a central role in one of the most dramatic events of the pre-Civil-War era, the so-called Christiana Riot of 1851. In this violent episode, which is also known as the Christiana Resistance, defiant African-Americans drove off a posse of slave hunters and federal lawmen who were attempting to recapture two fugitive slaves who had been living peacefully for years in a quiet Pennsylvania hamlet. During the fight, slave owner Edward Gorsuch was killed, and other members of posse fled. Scores of African Americans were later charged with treason for daring to resist the Fugitive Slave Law, the largest treason indictment in American history. Thanks to the courage and quick thinking of Zooey’s ancestor, however, the leaders of the black resistance managed to escape to Canada.

I was asked to participate in the production as an expert on the Underground Railroad, based on my book Bound for Canaan, which includes an account of the events at Christiana.

Fergus tells Zooey Deschanel about the role her ancestor played in the Underground Railroad.

We filmed on an unseasonably frigid day in Lancaster County, just a few miles north of the Maryland state line. Zooey, who was both charming to meet in person and much better dressed for the cold than I was, was learning about her family’s connection to these events for the first time as we talked and walked across the site of the confrontation. Although all traces of the house that once stood at the center of the battle have disappeared, the surrounding landscape remains almost completely unchanged after more than a century and a half. It was easy for us to evoke the sights and sounds of a collision between antislavery and proslavery Americans that was once as famous as John Brown’s raid.

The six articles included in “The Looming Conflict” appeared at different times in Smithsonian Magazine. They all combine, to differing degrees, a narration of historical events with first-hand reporting, and commentary by noted historians, among them Harold Holzer, David Reynolds, Orville Vernon Burton, John Stauffer, and others. Three of the pieces focus on events that led up to the Civil War: the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the long rivalry between pro-southern President James Buchanan and radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, and John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. Two more are war pieces, on the attack on Fort Sumter and the events that led up to it, and on the heroic but ill-fated attack of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment against Fort Wagner, in Charleston harbor, in 1863. (Though a Union defeat, the battle was the heroic debut of African-American troops, and served as the climax of the 1988 film “Glory.”) The final article centers on the creation of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in Cincinnati. Although the Underground Railroad of course preceded the war, I saw the story of the museum’s creation as a way to look not only at the underground’s remarkable history but also at the way in which we may deal with the legacy of slavery and abolitionism today.

I’m as interested in how we relate to the American past as I am with history for its own sake. So nearly all these articles show people of our own time coming to grips with the past in a variety of ways. For instance, you’ll meet George Buss, a masterful Abraham Lincoln reenactor whose nuanced understanding of Lincoln’s speaking style provides a unique window into his performance in the 1858 debates; Jim Delle, a Pennsylvania archaeologist who led me into a newly discovered underground cistern behind the Lancaster Pennsylvania home of Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, where the abolitionist apparently hid fugitive slaves; preservationist Blake Hallman, who took me to splendidly, eerily isolated Morris Island, the site of Fort Wagner, where fragments of shattered cannonballs still turn up in the sand; historian Carl Westmoreland, who discovered a former slave jail in rural Kentucky, and recovered it for the Freedom Center as its paramount symbolic relic of slavery; and many others.

While each story stands on its own as window into history, it will also (I hope) open a door on some aspect of our own time, whether it be the price a nation pays for indecisive political leadership, as in the case of James Buchanan, or the persistence of the passions that are still evoked by slavery and the Civil War, as will be seen in the successful effort to create a coalition of Sons of Confederate Veterans, African Americans, and ecologists to save Morris Island from development. And in our own era of international terrorism, what historical figure is more relevant – and troubling – than our own homegrown idealist and terrorist John Brown?

Many of you may already know that my latest book, America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union, was released on April 17th. With several other new publications in the offing, it seemed like the right moment to inaugurate this long-promised blog as a channel to communicate to you about my work, American history, and (occasionally) myself.

I’ll be delivering news about my current and upcoming writing projects, talking about history—mostly between the nation’s founding and post-Civil War Reconstruction—and ways in which the past continues to interpenetrate and shape the present.

When it seems apt, I’ll tie history to present-day events. I won’t shy away from controversy. But I promise not to rant, nor will I denigrate or insult anyone, present or past.

You’ll be hearing soon about my next work of history, American Dawn, a history of the First Congress, of 1789-1791, which I’ll be working on for the next couple of years, and which will be published by Simon & Schuster. The First Congress has often been overlooked in treatments of the Early Republic, but its importance was immense. It literally invented the United States government from the paper blueprint of the Constitution. What happened there, when it met in New York City still recovering from the ravages of the Revolutionary War, is a dramatic political tale in which we see the Founding Fathers as hard-headed but immensely creative politicians who took the fragile idea of nationhood and made it real. Their success was by no means a forgone conclusion.

You’ll also find, as time goes on, personal reflections, short essays, book reviews, and occasional travel writing about, perhaps, Harriet Tubman country on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, or the abolitionist heartland of upstate New York, or the astonishing Fort Jefferson (“Shark Island”) in the Dry Tortugas, off the Florida Keys.

I MAY ALSO take a literary detour from time to time…

…perhaps with something about China, where I lived and worked in the early 1980s, and still write about from time to time. My review of Paul French’s terrific noirish true-crime thriller Midnight in Peking, set in Beijing in the eve of World War II, will soon be on my website.

…or perhaps about American Indian issues. Much of my childhood was spent around native American communities, and my book Killing the White Man’s Indian was a combination of reportage and history that explored the incredibly complicated relationship of Indians in the present-day U.S.

Before too long, I also hope to give you an early preview of the novel I’ve been writing about the consequences of the Civil War. It’s titled Confederates, and it’s set in the late 20th century…

I hope to be informative, entertaining, and at least sometimes surprising. As a “long” writer by both habit and temperament, the compacted form of blogging doesn’t come to me naturally. But I expect to eventually get the hang of it. I’ll strive to keep the tone informal, in the spirit of a friendly conversation, and to avoid the heavy notes of the lecture hall. New posts will appear regularly at least several times a month.

In my next post, I’ll be talking about my soon-to-be-released e-book, The Looming Conflict: Radicals, Rebels, and the Road to Civil War.

The Underground Railroad has bred mythology like no other phenomenon in American history. People in almost any town in the Northern states have heard about some old house, or tunnel, or hidey-hole in which fugitive slaves were supposedly sheltered.

The vast majority of these have no documentable connection with the Underground Railroad; it’s clear from abundant references in period literature that fugitives—when they needed to be hidden at all—were usually sent simply to upstairs bedrooms, basements, barns, cornfields, or nearby woods. Nor is there substance to the most recent addition to the underground legend: the alleged use of coded quilts which fugitives supposedly followed to freedom. (Those interested in this particular myth may read Leigh Fellner’s debunking article “Quilt Code,” in the March 2003 issue of Traditional Quiltworks.)

The Underground Railroad was about much more than exotic hiding places, and mysterious codes. Its real history is rooted in the people who made the underground work, what moved them, and how they changed America. The activists of the underground seem at the same time both startlingly modern and peculiarly archaic, combining very radical ideas about race and political action with very traditional notions of personal honor and sacred duty. In an era when emancipation seemed subversive and outlandish to most Americans, they defied society’s standards on a daily basis, driven by a sense of spiritual imperative, moral conviction, and, especially on the part of African-American activists, a fierce visceral passion for freedom.

The Underground Railroad was a movement with far-reaching political and moral consequences: It was the nation’s first first interracial political movement, its first movement of mass civil disobedience since the American Revolution, and the first American political movement to assert the principle of personal, active responsibility for others’ human rights. The Underground Railroad and the broader abolition movement were also the seedbed of American feminism. In the underground, women were for the first time participants in a political movement on an equal plane with men, sheltering and clothing fugitive slaves, serving as guides, risking reprisals against their families, and publicly insisting that their voices be heard.

Understanding the Underground Railroad has also been hampered by the seeming dearth of meaningful statistics. However, enough local underground groups published figures on the number of fugitives they aided during a given span of time to make it possible to estimate larger patterns for the system as a whole. Over the sixty-odd years of its existence, from its beginnings in Philadelphia in the 1790s to the Civil War, the underground facilitated the escape of probably something in the order of 100,000 fugitive slaves to save havens in the northern states and Canada. This is an impressive figure in terms of lives saved. But it must be understood in a larger context. There were 4 million slaves in the United States by 1860. Moreover, most slaves who fled were recaptured and returned to slavery. Although those helped to freedom by the Underground Railroad were a small percentage of the total, their impact on the hearts and minds of Americans was enormous. The underground delivered tens of thousands of fugitives into northern communities where for the first time large numbers of whites encountered former slaves, heard their heartrending stories of enslavement, and began to recognize African Americans as people like themselves.

Slave owners imagined the Underground Railroad as a vast conspiracy with tentacles that reached deep into the South. In fact, there is little evidence of organized underground activity in the Deep South, except in seaports. The great majority of successful fugitives came from just three states: Kentucky, Virginia (West Virginia did not become a state until 1863), and Maryland, all of which had long borders with free states. And most came from the upper portions of those states, where slaves were more likely to have reliable information about geography, routes north, and the Underground Railroad.

It has often been said that the true story of the Underground Railroad is unknowable precisely because the system was clandestine. In truth, plentiful evidence of the underground exists in local archives, small-town libraries, and historical societies all across the northern states. In the border country, the underground was as secret as its members could keep it. A man who grew up in southern Indiana later recalled how as a child he was frequently roused at night by his mother sobbing and his father stealthily slipping out of the house: “My curiosity, then awakened, was not wholly satisfied for a year or more, during which time the, to me, mysterious events recurred. My parents were devout Baptists, members of the church nearby, and I attended regularly the meetings and Sunday school. I heard much of wicked men, thieves, robbers, and murderers, and began to fear that my father must be engaged in some such wicked work, and I used to cry to myself when I heard poor mother crying and because, I thought, she was grieving over my father’s wickedness.” Finally, one morning, after a year of this, the boy discovered that his father was hiding fugitives in the hayloft, where he found three men, a woman, and a baby hidden concealed in the hay. “Father then explained the whole history, cautioning secrecy. Thus warning that some of the pro-slavery men might kill him, or burn his barn and other outbuildings.”

But further north, the underground was amazingly open. Abolitionist newspapers like Henry Bibb’s Voice of the Fugitive, published in Ontario, often reported underground news in detail, including the passage of fugitives through specific northern towns, and even the names of people who helped them. In some places—Albany, New York and Detroit, Michigan for example—the Underground published posters announcing what it was doing, and how many fugitives it helped. In Syracuse, New York, Jermain Loguen, a former slave who became a key figure in the local underground in the mid-1850s even advertised his home in newspapers as the main “station” in the city.

We also typically think of the Underground Railroad as a fixed system which, once established, was rarely altered. And we usually visualize fugitives on foot, or in the backs of farm wagons. In reality, the underground was never static. As new routes were opened, old ones were often abandoned. When new technology was available, the underground adapted to it. For instance, as steamboats proliferated on American rivers, overland routes sometimes fell into disuse as fugitives were sent by water. The same thing happened as iron railroads spread across the North. Harriet Tubman, having led her “passengers” north from Maryland to Philadelphia, accompanied them by trian to New York City, where she took them to Grand Central Station and bought them tickets to Albany.

Perhaps the most tenacious Underground Railroad myth of all was the monochromatic narrative of high-minded white people condescending to assist confused and terrified blacks. Only recently have African Americans begun to be restored to their rightful place at the center of the story, both as fugitives who liberated themselves by fleeing bondage, and as organizers and leaders of the Underground Railroad itself. During the long night of Jim Crow politics, this truth was actively suppressed, or at least aggressively forgotten. In a nation committed to segregation and blind to racism, the story of a politically radical, biracial movement led in part by African Americans was just too subversive to accept. Indeed, the underground’s greatest achievement may have been its creation of a truly free zone of interracial activity where blacks not only directed complex logistical and financial operations, but also supervised networks that included white men and women who were accorded no special status because of their color.

What was John Brown’s Subterranean Pass-Way? As Brown envisioned it, it would be an underground highway that would reach 2,000 miles all the way down through the Appalachian Mountains through Virginia and Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and into the Deep South, as far as Georgia. It was the vision that Brown had in mind when he marched into Harper’s Ferry in 1859. This was the UGRR on an epic scale. Had it succeeded, today we’d all be talking about how the entire underground as we know it was just the lead-up to John Brown’s monumental plan.

What did Brown really have in mind? How would the Subterranean Pass-Way have worked? Was it was just a pipe dream, or something that could really have happened?

FIRST, LET’S PUT the Underground Railroad in perspective. Apart from sporadic slave rebellions, and individual acts of defiance, only the Underground Railroad physically resisted slavery. It was the nation’s first interracial political movement. From its beginnings, it was a collaborative movement involving free blacks, anti-slavery whites, and even slaves.

It was also the nation’s first great movement of mass civil disobedience since the American Revolution. It engaged thousands of citizens in the active subversion of federal law. And it was the first American mass movement that asserted the principle of personal, active responsibility for others’ human rights.

The Underground Railroad and the broader abolition movement were also the seedbed of American feminism—all the women who helped organize the first women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 came out of the Underground Railroad. In the underground, women were for the first time participants in a political movement on an equal plane with men, sheltering and clothing fugitive slaves, serving as guides, risking reprisals against their families, and publicly insisting that their voices be heard.

The UGRR began in Philadelphia in the 1790s into a national network spanning the northern states. Why then? Why there? Philadelphia was the first place in America that offered the human synergy that made the UGRR work: large populations of emancipated blacks and anti-slavery whites (Quakers in this case). There could be no UGRR until there were havens to which fugitives could be safely delivered. There were none until the 1790s—the region around Philadelphia was the first safe haven in the US.

THERE WAS of course never any president of the underground, no board of directors. It was a diverse, flexible, efficient system with no central control. It was a model of democracy in action, operating with the maximum of grassroots involvement. As a station master in Ohio, put it, “There was no regular organization, no constitution, no officers, no laws or agreement or rule except the ‘Golden Rule,’ and every man did what seemed right in his own eyes.”

By the 1850s, in much of the North the Underground Railroad was operating with remarkable openness. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, for example, regularly published detailed reports on underground activity in articles that were signed by agents themselves. In Syracuse, Jermain Loguen advertised his underground work, and his address in local papers, and identified himself on his business cards as “Underground Railroad Agent.”

To give you some context for the extent of John Brown’s ambitions—he expected to free hundreds of thousands of slaves—I’ll give you some figures for the kind of numbers that the UGRR actually handled at this time. Thomas Garrett, the station master at Wilmington, Delaware, one of the few to keep a tally of his passengers over a long span of time claimed to have helped a total of 2,750 over about forty years, an average of two hundred twenty-five per year. From mid-1854 to early 1855, the all-black (and predominantly female) Committee of Nine, which oversaw underground work in Cleveland, Ohio, forwarded two hundred and seventy five fugitives to Canada, an average of one per day. The Detroit Vigilance Committee, possibly the busiest in the United States, reported 1,043 fugitives crossing to Canada from May 1855 to January 1856, an average of one hundred thirty per month.

In 1858, Brown wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Boston abolitionist: “Rail Road business on a somewhat extended scale is the identical object for which I am trying to get means. I have been connected with that business as commonly conducted from my boyhood…”

Brown’s family had engaged in underground work out of their home in Hudson, Ohio—a rabid abolitionist town—since the early years of the 19th century. Fugitives were hidden in the Browns’ barn. And as a young man, Brown himself traveled around northeastern Ohio guiding fugitives. At the age of thirty-seven, he had taken a personal vow before God to consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery. Not long before the Harper’s Ferry raid, he told Harriet Tubman that the Day of Judgement was at hand, that it was time for “God’s wrath to descend,” and that he was the divine instrument ordained to deliver it.

Brown may have begun thinking about a Subterranean Pass-Way as early as the 1840s, when he worked for a time as a surveyor in the mountains of western Virginia. He probably began to think of that rugged, underpopulated region as an area through which large numbers of fugitives might be moved safely.

In 1847, when Frederick Douglass met Brown for the first time, in Springfield, MA, Brown spread out a map of the United States. Pointing at the Appalachians, he told Douglass that the mountains “were placed here to aid in the emancipation of your race; they are full of natural forts, where one man for defense would be equal to a hundred for attack; they are also full of good hiding places, where a large number of men could be concealed and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time. I know these mountains well and could take a body of men into them and keep them there in spite of all the efforts of Virginia to dislodge me, and drive me out.”

THE PLAN was to start out with twenty-five picked men—almost exactly the number he had at Harper’s Ferry twelve years later—who would be stationed in small cells. They would come down from the mountains to raid plantations, bring away slaves, arm them, and retreat to the mountains. Some would be guided north through the mountains to the free states—this was the literal meaning of the Subterranean Pass-Way. Others would remain with Brown. They would eventually become a bastion of armed freemen who would govern themselves in the mountains like a sovereign state.

As Brown envisioned it, the plan would ultimately bring slavery to its knees. Brown was nothing if not an apocalyptic thinker—and this was an apocalyptic scheme. The South would hemorrhage slaves. Slaveholders would be impoverished, and crippled by terror. Arming blacks would generate self-respect, independence, and courage. Slavery was already a state of war, he told Douglass. Slaves had every right to fight by any means at hand to achieve their own freedom.

Douglass was taken with Brown, if not quite swayed by his plan. He thought it was impractical. Brown, he wrote, however “though a white gentleman, is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”

With the privilege of hindsight, Brown’s plan looks foolhardy and impossible. Was it?

He had done a lot of homework. Brown had studied slave insurrections like Nat Turner’s. Turner had terrified the entire state of Virginia in 1831. He’d studied European guerrilla, particularly how Portuguese mountain fighters had held off the French army at the beginning of the 19th century. He’d studied the Seminole resistance to the U.S. in the swamps of Florida, in the 1830s and 1840s. He knew about the multitude of virtually independent maroon communities that runaway slaves had established in the mountains of Jamaica. And he was of course familiar with the Haitians’ successful—bloody—war to overthrow French rule. He also probably knew that since 1820 North Carolina Quakers had successfully been sending fugitives almost 1,000 miles along an underground route that ran from the Quaker enclave around Greensboro all the way to Indiana.

Brown’s plan was not unique, by the way. An almost identical plan was advanced by a man who is almost totally forgotten today—Lysander Spooner. Spooner was a lawyer and anarchist who was well known in the 1840s for arguing that slaves had a right to wage war against their oppressors. In 1858, Spooner independently published a pamphlet urging whites to invade the South, arm slaves, and help them fight a war of liberation. He also spoke of building forts in the forest, amassing arms, and waging “a just war for liberty.” (He was also the first, I think, to assert that blacks deserved reparations for their years of enslavement.)

Many abolitionists—Arthur Tappan, even Wendell Phillips—shunned Spooner’s proposals as far too dangerous, and violent. Other abolitionists’ criticism reflected the widespread racist assumption that blacks had been so beaten down by slavery that they simply would not fight. Brown was of course right. Hundreds of thousands of black troops would fight valiantly in the Civil War.

When Spooner met Brown and learned about his plan, he opposed it, asserting that neither blacks nor whites in the South were ready for the kind of action that Brown intended. He thought Brown was foolhardy…that without both groups having been trained in advance and aware of the general strategy the plan was doomed to failure. (Spooner of course was right.)

BROWN WAS LIVING at this time in North Elba, New York, not far from Lake Placid. Brown had bought two hundred and forty four acres of land there, on credit from the wealthy abolitionist (and underground activist) Gerrit Smith, who hoped to establish a colony of free backs there. Brown was undeterred by the rugged boulder-strewn landscape, thickly forested with maple, oak, and spruce. They settled into a four-room farmhouse that looked out over valleys shimmering with golden rod and 4,000-foot high Whiteface Mountain. The Adirondacks, like the hands of omnipotent God, Brown believed would lift up the suffering black poor, and himself. Brown lived his beliefs. His goal was to transform the rag-tag settlement of African Americans into a self-sufficient community. He hired black workers, sowed crops, helped rationalize confused boundaries, and prepared to take the community’s affairs in hand. The writer Richard Henry Dana, who encountered him there, was fascinated by this “tall, sinewy, hard-favored, clear-headed, honest-minded man,”and his teeming mob of children. Most of all, Dana was astonished to find the Browns, including even their daughters, dining with their black neighbors, addressing them as “ Mr. Jefferson” and “ Mrs. Wait,” and so on.

The Harper’s Ferry raid was also the culmination of an increasingly violent decade. More and more abolitionists were beginning to think that only direct, violent action could bring the evil of slavery to an end.

After the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the pacifist, Quaker style of the underground was increasingly overshadowed by men more willing to confront slavery aggressively, and to answer the violence of slavery—and federal repression—with violence. Militant abolitionist crowds physically wrenched recaptured fugitive slaves from the hands of federal officers in Boston and Syracuse. And in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania underground men—all African Americans, by the way—lured a slave master and a posse of police officers into a trap, confronted them, and shot several of them, leaving the slave master dead. West of the Appalachians, underground men in some places actually sent mounted posses of armed men across the Ohio River into Kentucky to bring out fugitive slaves who were waiting there.

In January 1854, another act of Congress pushed still more Northerners beyond their limits of tolerance. Under pressure from the South and its allies, Congress had opened the western Territories to slavery, leaving the legality of slavery up to voters in each territory. Even many deeply racist Yankees were converted into an army of voters committed to the principle of keeping the soil of Kansas and Nebraska free for white immigrants. “[T]his Nebraska business is the great smasher in Syracuse, as elsewhere,” the Syracuse underground leader Jermain Loguen (a fugitive slave), wrote to Frederick Douglass. “It is smashing up platforms and scattering partizans at a fine rate…The people are becoming ashamed to have any connection with the ungodly course that many of their Congressmen…The time is coming when blood is to flow in this cause; and let it come I say.”

When Free State settlers in Kansas begged eastern abolitionists for guns to defend themselves, Brown’s wealthy supporter Gerrit Smith promised immediate help: “Will we do for them what we can? We will!” Smith’s friend, U.S. Senator William H. Seward, declared, “We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers as it is in right.”

It was in Kansas that John Brown learned to fight. He arrived in Kansas in October 1855, driving a wagon loaded with rifles and swords, determined “to help defeat Satan and his legions.” Kansas transformed him from a failed businessman into a prophet whose private apocalypse would become a battle plan for guerrilla warfare.

In Kansas, John Brown finally found reality violent enough to fit the cosmic battle between Good and Evil he had always carried in his head. His first taste of warfare came in December 1855, when a proslavery force of two thousand men menaced the Free State bastion of Lawrence, fifty miles north of the Browns’ cabins at Osawatomie. The Browns and their neighbors raced to Lawrence’s defense, arriving there in a wagon that bristled like a lethal porcupine with rifles, pikes, and bayonets. Brown was commissioned a captain on the spot, and appointed to command a company of twenty men, his first military commission. From the first moment, he savored the power that weapons and leadership conferred. Although the anticipated attack never materialized, Brown had discovered that men would follow him, and fight for him.

STILL, UNTIL the spring of 1856, John Brown was not much different from many other scripture-quoting abolitionists in Kansas. Despite the incendiary rhetoric in the air, only six Free Staters had so far been killed. Then, in May, proslavery raiders sacked Lawrence in an orgy of burning and looting. Almost simultaneously, Kansans learned that Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the most outspoken abolitionist in the United States Senate, had been beaten senseless on the floor of the chamber by a cane-wielding Congressman from South Carolina, in a shocking tableau that left men like Brown feeling ashamed of the North’s seeming helplessness in the face of Southern power. “Something must be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights,” Brown declared. Advised to act with caution, he retorted, “Caution, caution, sir. I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.”

On the night of May 23rd, a party of men led by Brown, and including four of his sons, swept through an isolated settlement on Pottawatomie Creek, thirty miles from Osawatomie. They dragged five men out of their cabins, and hacked them to death with cutlasses embossed with the American eagle. The victims were all notorious proslavery men, and had advocated attacks against the Free Staters, but none was guilty of killing anyone. Two of Brown’s sons who had not participated in the raid were so distraught that they suffered nervous breakdowns. But Brown was unrepentant.

The murders ignited a reign of terror. Proslavery “border ruffians” raided Free Staters’ homesteads. Abolitionists fought back. Federal troops scoured the prairie in search of Brown and his band. Hamlets were left desolate, farms abandoned. Osawatomie was burned to the ground. Brown’s son Frederick, who had participated in the massacre, was shot dead by a proslavery man. Brown himself was almost caught in September, when a troop of dragoons rode up to the cabin where he was hiding, and stayed for refreshment. He lay hidden in the loft, with a revolver in each hand, watching through cracks in the floorboards as his host fed melons to the soldiers. Although he survived many brushes with the enemy, Brown seemed to sense his own fate. He told his son Jason, the quietest of all the Browns, a farmer who dreamed more of raising fruit trees than of vengeance, “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause.”

Brown’s experience in Kansas gave new life to his plan for the Subterranean Pass-Way. Having eluded his enemies for months on the open prairies of Kansas, he believed that it would be to even easier to defy them in the fastnesses of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only “a few resolute men” would be needed at first. Once they had established a chain of defensible positions, recruits could be sent down as they were needed.

In January 1858, Brown left Kansas to find backers for his plan. His itinerary was a Cook’s Tour of the leading underground figures in the East. He spent three weeks with Frederick Douglass, in Rochester, where he wrote a forty-eight article constitution for a “Provisional Government,” including a unicameral legislature, president and vice-president, supreme court, a commander-in-chief, all to serve without pay. He told Douglass that his first objective was the capture of the Virginia town of Harper’s Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, with its federal armory and rifle works, which would provide weapons for the thousands of slaves he expected to flock to his cause.

Not long afterward, he met Harriet Tubman for the first time. Tubman was a celebrity by now within the underground. She had made eight trips to the South, and brought out some fifty fugitives. Brown recognized in her a kindred spirit, whose physical courage, boldness, and skill at traveling unnoticed through the South would be invaluable. He took to referring to her as “General Tubman,” and Tubman, for her part, embraced Brown as one of the few whites she had ever met who understood, as blacks always had, that anti-slavery work was not just moral uplift but part of a war in which combatants had to be prepared to die.

FROM ROCHESTER, Brown moved on to Gerrit Smith’s mansion at Peterboro, where he was introduced to the well-connected abolitionist and educator Franklin Sanborn, for whom Brown enthusiastically sketched plans for his mountain redoubts on a scrap of paper. (Sanborn cautiously labeled the designs “woolen machinery.”) Sanborn and Brown then traveled to Boston, where Brown won the support of four more prominent radical abolitionists who had already lent their support to the Free State cause in Kansas, and now agreed to organize financing for Brown’s southern strategy.

On May 8th, at a secret convention in Chatham, Brown proclaimed the establishment of his Provisional Government. Of the forty-six men present, the only whites were thirteen of Brown’s followers from Kansas. Brown left Chatham with the hope that hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadian blacks would eventually join his expedition. Only one did, Osborne P. Anderson, a printer who was elected a member of Brown’s provisional Congress.

To draw attention away from his real intentions, he returned to Kansas, where he lay low for the next six months. When he left Kansas in December 1858, his departure was spectacular. A Missouri slave named Jim Daniels had contacted him, and asked for help in liberating the members of his family, who were about to be sold. It was an opportunity to carry out precisely the kind of raid into slave territory that Brown had in mind, on a vaster scale, for Virginia. Brown led a detachment of men ten miles into Missouri to the plantation where Daniels lived. They collected the five members of Daniels’s family, and five more slaves from another plantation nearby. A second detachment freed a slave at a third farm, and killed her owner. For the next month, the fugitives were hidden in a cabin across the state line in Kansas. In late January 1859, Brown and the twelve fugitives (a baby having been born in the interim, and christened “John Brown”), set off northward toward Nebraska with the fugitives in an ox-drawn wagon and an armed guard of fifteen abolitionists, dodging proslavery guerrillas, marshals’ posses, and at one point fighting and defeating a sixty-man force of United States troops. Near Nebraska City, when thawing ice halted their flight at the Missouri River, Brown’s men cut down trees and flung logs from the shore to firmer ice, and dragged their wagons across by hand, just hours ahead of their pursuers. They traveled east along an established underground route through Iowa, via Tabor and Grinnell, where they were welcomed by Josiah Grinnell, the founder of the college that bears his name. Grinnell personally reserved a boxcar for Brown’s party at the nearest railhead, to carry them directly to Chicago, which they reached on March 10th. Two days later they arrived in Detroit where, presumably with the assistance of the local underground, they were taken to the wharf and ferried across the Detroit River to Windsor. As he watched them embark, Brown recalled a passage of Scripture: “Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen thy salvation.” They had covered almost fifteen hundred miles in eighty-two days, proof to scoffers, Brown felt sure, that he was capable of making the Subterranean Pass-Way a reality.

AROUND TEN THIRTY on the dank night of Sunday, September 17th 1859, seventeen shadowy figures led by the man some now called Old Osawatomie slipped down from the brooding bluffs of Maryland overlooking the Potomac River, and with the brisk steps of men who knew that whatever the outcome they were about to make history, they entered the black tunnel of the covered railroad bridge that spanned the river to Harper’s Ferry. Each carried a Sharpes rifle, a brace of pistols, and a knife sheathed at his waist. Twelve of the men were white, five black. Almost all were in the twenties. Some were naive idealists, others veterans of the guerrilla war in Kansas. Among them were Brown’s youngest sons Watson and Oliver, two neighbors from North Elba, New York, a Canadian spiritualist, a black graduate of Oberlin College, a pair of Quakers who had abandoned their pacifist beliefs to follow Brown from Iowa, a freed slave hoping to liberate his wife and children, and boys from Maine, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.

We all know the rest of the story. Measured against Brown’s hopes, the raid was a spectacular failure.

Brown failed to take account of the real nature of the South in the 1850s. There was little organized underground activity south of the border states. (The main exception had been the Quaker counties of North Carolina, but underground work there apparently ceased to function after about 1853, when the last known underground men were forced to flee.)

Brown did no investigation whatever of the realities that his plan would have to deal with in the South. So strongly did he feel that he was guided by God, and so intensely did he identify with enslaved African-Americans that he failed to take WHITE Southerners into account. Of course, in the mid-19th century no one did focus groups, or market research, so to speak. Brown lived in an age that believed that faith and destiny could trump reality.

The South was, in effect, what we call today a totalitarian society. I’m using that word deliberately. Yes, it’s an anachronism, a 20th century term. But it accurately describes what the South was like for African-Americans both enslaved and free—and for whites who dared to publicly challenge the institution of slavery. For them, the Bill of Rights simply did not apply: there was no right of free speech, free press, or free assembly. Whites who dared were smeared, attacked, ostracized, driven from their homes, and sometimes killed. This had been going on for decades. By the 1850s the kind of whites whom Brown counted on to help him in the Deep South had fled the region. Nearly all the antislavery Quakers in North Carolina had migrated north, or fallen silent. Those who remained were silent and cowed.

But as a spark that lit a feverish passion for freedom in the hearts of both white and black abolitionists, the raid was a spectacular success. Less than two years after Brown’s execution in Charlestown, Virginia, war came. As Union armies marched southward, John Brown’s failed dream of a Subterranean Pass-Way became a great highway. Wherever the armies marched, slaves poured off the plantations, to the Union lines, and to freedom.

We know that large numbers of fugitives were sent from Philadelphia to New York City, and up through the valley to Albany and Troy. Between 1842 and 1843—fugitives—virtually all, probably, from New York City. Most of them were sent onward to Central New York, Vermont, or Massachusetts.

But there is almost no record of how they traveled. Compared to other areas—for example, Central New York State, southern Pennsylvania, the Ohio River Valley, Detroit—the absence of records is deeply puzzling.

How did they travel? What routes did they follow? And who helped them?

Profile of the valley and slavery

Before we get to the answer, I want to go back in time somewhat. New York was once home to the largest number of slaves of any state in the North—more than Georgia, until the late 18th century. The heaviest concentration of them was on plantations in the Hudson Valley, many owned by the prominent Livingston family. At times, slaves had made up as much as 10% of the population. Slavery was cruel here as it was anywhere in the South. Slaves were branded with irons, and notched in the ears, like cattle. Sometimes they were punished with castration.

In the early 19th century, there were about 2,000 slaves in Dutchess County—in some areas of the county, one-third of the population was enslaved.

Support for slavery—or at least tolerance for it—persisted in the valley’s staunch antebellum Democratic Party politics. Especially in the plantation country along the east shore of the river, the atmosphere was, frankly, intensely hostile to abolitionism.

In 1833 and 1834, agents for the newly-formed American Anti-Slavery Society swarmed through the state, setting up hundreds of local branches, and recruiting many thousands of members. They were less successful in the Hudson Valley than in any other part of the state. Apart from the Quaker strongholds of Poughkeepsie and Hudson, they recruited almost no one. In 1839, an agent assigned to the mid-Hudson was mobbed and driven out of Newburgh. The same year, a Liberty Party ticket received only 29 votes in Dutchess County—compared to 438 votes in Madison County, near Syracuse, which was a hotbed of abolitionist activity.

And in 1840, Samuel Ringgold Ward of Poughkeepsie—the state abolition society’s first black lecturer—was prevented from speaking anywhere. No churches or public buildings were opened to him. And the wheels were even stolen from his wagon.

In 1846, in a referendum on black suffrage, the vote in the valley against allowing blacks to vote was overwhelming: 92% in Columbia County, 96% in Westchester and Ulster, and almost 98% in Putnam.

The land route

So let’s come back to the question I began with. We know fugitives traveled through the valley in big numbers. But how did they do it?

In the early decades of the century, fugitives were assisted by the tacit alliance that formed the nucleus of the underground in many parts of the county: Quakers and free blacks.

But: Bear in mind that in this early period many of the fugitives handled by the underground were not coming from the South, but fleeing from slavery right here in New York State, or from New Jersey, or Connecticut.

The main route—as best as I have been able to determine it—ran more or less due north through a chain of Quaker communities that extended from New York City to Vermont. Families and meetings were intertwined. Quakers could travel from New York to Burlington without ever sleeping beneath a non-Quaker’s roof. So could fugitives.

In the 1830s, fugitives were dispatched northward by underground men like David Ruggles and Isaac T. Hopper. Ruggles—who had connections in Poughkeepsie—was the founder of the New York City Vigilance Committee, the first black-operated underground unit in the country. Hopper was, in a sense, the “father of the Underground Railroad.” He began doing underground work in Philadelphia as early as the 1790s.

Fugitives dispatched from the city found protection at three Quaker-owned mills, and possibly at the Colored Peoples Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, in New Rochelle, and among Quakers in Mamaroneck and Scarsdale.

The route continued north to the homes of Joseph Pierce at Pleasantville, and John Jay Jr. at Bedford, in northern Westchester. The Jay family included some of the most important, if underappreciated heroes of the abolitionist movement. His grandfather, also named John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was a founder of the New York Manumission Society (though a slave owner himself). His father, Judge William Jay, was one of the most prolific pamphleteers of the abolitionist movement. His son, William Jay Jr., reportedly forwarded fugitives out of New York City while he was a student at Columbia University. (I’ll come back to the Jays later.)

Fugitives probably also found refuge, or at least assistance, in an African-American settlement known as “The Hills,” near the town of Harrison.

From northern Westchester, fugitives continued on through Brewster, in Putnam County, and into Dutchess County to the Quaker stronghold known as Quaker Hill, near Pawling. Many, if not most, found shelter at the home of a Quaker farmer named David Irish.

Dutchess County had the largest concentration of Quakers outside Philadelphia. The eastern portion of the county was densely settled with Quakers. The Oblong Meeting of Quaker Hill was was the first in the country—in 1769—to free slaves as an official action of the body.

North of Quaker Hill, fugitives could count on protection from Quakers belonging to the Oswego Meeting, to the northwest. Some were sheltered at Susan Moore’s Floral Hill boarding house, a few miles from the Meeting, at Moore’s Mills.

About twenty miles north of Quaker Hill stood the most important single abolitionist institution in the valley—and one of the most important in the country: the Nine Partners School, just east of present-day Millbrook.

This Quaker school may, in fact, have served as a sort of command center for the underground in the entire region. As early as the 1810’s, students were required to memorize a lengthy anti-slavery catechism that described slavery as a “dreadful evil.” Ending slavery, it went on, was “a great revolution,” a “noble purpose” for which men and women had been created by their Heavenly Father.

The school had a profound influence on students who went on to shape the entire abolitionist movement—and other great reform movements. They included abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucretia Coffin and her future husband James Mott, also a prominent abolitionist. And Daniel Anthony, later a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, and the father of Susan B. Anthony.

The school’s headmaster Jacob Willetts—he was author of the most popular textbooks of the day—personally sheltered fugitives at his home just down the road from the school. So did several of his Quaker neighbors.

Some fugitives may have been sent west to Poughkeepsie, where there was a strong abolitionist community. Underground activity in the city has not yet been documented. But fugitives may very well have been assisted by members of the Congregational church, which sponsored a first-rate school for African-Americans as early as the mid-1830s. (David Ruggles probably taught there, along with Samuel Ringgold Ward.)

But the main land route continued due north. The best evidence I’ve seen for what route they may have followed is in a letter written by Roland Robinson, the owner of Rokeby, the wonderful museum and underground site just south of Burlington, Vermont. Robinson was a close friend of Isaac T. Hopper and other hard-core Quaker abolitionists. His home was, in effect, a northern terminus of the Underground Railroad. Robinson was describing the route he followed in Columbia and Dutchess counties in the course of a trip to New York City. His stops included meetings at Nine Partners, Pleasant Valley, Poughkeepsie, and Crum Elbow, near Hyde Park, all in Dutchess County; and Claverack, Hudson, Ghent, and Chatham, in Columbia County; and then Troy. I think this is certainly the route by which fugitives were sent.

Incidentally, there is a remarkable archaeological project underway near the old Crum Elbow meeting, in Hyde Park, at the site of a black hamlet known in the nineteenth century as the Guinea Settlement. (It was abandoned in the 1870s, and the site lost until recently.) The settlement was populated mainly by former slaves who had worked on the great river plantations. But archaeologists and researchers—Chris Lindner of Bard College, and Susan Hinkle—have identified by name three fugitive slaves who lived there. The community was more or less under the protection of the Quaker Crum Elbow meeting, some of whose members lived there. It’s the best example I know of the intimate interaction between Quakers and blacks in the valley, and the best proof so far that communities like this were integral parts of the Underground Railroad.

The most important underground center in Columbia County was Hudson. In the early nineteenth century, two-thirds of the families in the city were Quakers—and the rest were said to be “half-Quakers.” A contemporary described it as “a city of bustling warehouses, wharves, and docks, ropewalks, and industry,” with a population of about 5,000. The meeting house is still there…

Until his death in 1843, the pivotal underground figure in Hudson was a man named Charles Marriott. He was an English-born Quaker and gentleman farmer. Marriott is another one of the great forgotten figures of the underground. His home is still standing, after a fashion…

Marriott was a key link in the whole web of underground activity in eastern New York. He was in constant touch with fellow antislavery Quakers in Vermont, Rhode Island, Rochester, and New York City. He was an intimate collaborator with Isaac Hopper, in New York City, and with Roland Robinson, the proprietor of Rokeby, near Burlington, Vermont. (He also kept a home in New York City, on Mott St., in present-day Chinatown: the site now houses a Chinese hair salon, and herbal medicine store.)

In his letters, Marriott eloquently expressed the moral radicalism of the underground. He wrote, for example, in 1835, “Friends [i.e. fellow Quakers] generally seem to deplore the present excitement. For my share, I hope it will never subside until slavery be abolished.” He was also one of the few underground men who left documentary proof of what they were doing. In a letter at Rokeby, he wrote matter-of-factly, in 1838, “Many fugitives from the South effect their escape. 3 passed through my hands last week.”

So far, I’ve been talking about the Quaker route up the eastern edge of the valley. There is also evidence that a west-to-east land route also crossed the valley from Port Jervis, on the Delaware River, to Newburgh, on the Hudson. This was, apparently, one of several alternate routes available to the Philadelphia underground. The best source for this route is Roger King’s small book “The Silent Rebellion: The UGRR in Orange County”. King ferretted out old news stories and memoirs chronicling the passage of fugitives through the towns of Chester and Goshen to Newburgh. In Newburgh, they were often received by an African-American family named the Alsdorfs. King also suggests the existence some kind of route up the western shore of the river from New Jersey.

There is also some evidence that fugitives were sometimes rowed across the Hudson from Newburgh to the vicinity of Beacon, and led from there across Dutchess County to the Quaker enclave at Quaker Hill. Some fugitives may also have found refuge in the African-American hamlet of Baxtertown, near Beacon. Baxtertown’s site has been lost. But, like the Guinea Settlement, it is only waiting to be rediscovered.

River travel

After the 1830s, something odd happens. There is almost no mention of fugitives at all in the valley. What’s going on?

The answer, I think, has to do with something that happened in the valley in the year 1807, that had nothing whatever to do with slavery…the first successful steamboat, Robert Fulton’s “Clermont.”

After that, the Hudson rapidly became the great Interstate Highway of its day. Between 1826 and the Civil War, travel time between New York City and Albany dropped from 15 hours to just 7 hours. Sending fugitives by river was both cheap and fast. Traveling from New York to Albany by land might take ten days or two weeks, and require a massive commitment of escorts, wagons, shelter—and money.

Rev. Charles B. Ray, a central figure in the New York City underground explained how they did it: “New York was a kind of receiving depot, whence we forwarded to Albany, Troy, sometimes to New Bedford and Boston, and occasionally we dropped a few on Long Island. When we had parties to forward from here, we would alternate in sending between Albany and Troy, and when we had a large party, we would divide between the two cities.”

On one occasion, Ray had a party of twenty-eight people on his hands, ranging from a grandmother to a child of five years. Ray recalled, “I secured passage for them in a barge, and Mr. Wright and myself spent the day in providing food, and personally saw them on the barge. I then took the regular passenger boat [at the] foot of Cortlandt St., and started. Arriving in the morning, I reported to the committee at Albany and then returned to Troy, and gave Brother Garnet notice, and he and I spent the day in visiting friends of the cause there, to raise money to help the party through to Toronto.”

With luck, a fugitive could expect to be in Canada less than a week after stepping on board a steamboat in Manhattan.

Charles Ray makes it clear that it was commonplace to put fugitives on barges. Travelers also had a choice of about 20 regularly scheduled steamboats, not to mention hundreds of cargo sloops and steamers, scows, and canal boats that were towed in long chains from the city up to the Erie Canal. In mid-century, on any given day, as many as 500 ships were traveling on the river, many of them crewed or captained by African Americans.

Some fugitives may have traveled on so-called “Abolition boats” such as the People’s Line owned by committed abolitionists, who carried fugitives on regular trips. Among these may well have been the family of Samuel Schuyler, a former Albany slave who had bought his freedom, and founded a prosperous tow-boat business that was carried on throughout the antebellum period by his sons.

Black stewards also served on the steamships that plied the Hudson between NYC and Albany. One of them was Steven Myers, a leader of the Albany underground. Myers worked as a steward on the Armenia, which sailed between Albany and New York. Considering that he was the head of the underground in Albany, it’s almost inconceivable that he didn’t escort fugitives as a regular thing. (Steamboats were incredibly dangerous: they blew up, burned, and hit snags and sank all the time. In July 1852, the Armenia was beaten by the Henry Clay in the most famous race ever on the river—famous because, near Yonkers, the Henry Clay caught fire and became a floating inferno, killing eighty on board, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister.) Fortunately Myers lived on to serve the underground until the Civil War.

The image of fugitive slaves sneaking northward in the dead of night has a terrific iconic power. But in much of the North this was a myth. By the 1850s—and in spite of the Fugitive Slave Law—more and more of the underground’s work took place completely in the open. In June 1852, the warden of Sing Sing penitentiary, in Westchester, released one day early a prisoner, a fugitive who had served two years for the theft of a boat—to keep him from falling into the hands of the U.S. Commissioner, who intended to hand him over to his former master. And when local Democrats complained to one Northern sheriff about the number of fugitive slaves who were passing openly through the county, he replied: “Let ‘ em!”

The underground always embraced new technology. Just as steamboats replaced the old land route, the underground literally took to the rails wherever it could. The opening of the railroad up the eastern shore of the river in 1851 cut travel time in half. In the 1850s, the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery office gave fugitives train fare for travel from New York City north. In January 1855, Harriet Tubman simply took three of her brothers, and several other companions she had led all the way from Maryland, to Grand Central Station and bought them tickets for Albany.

Conclusion

Although the land route was largely superseded, it apparently was never abandoned. Earlier I mentioned the Jay family.

William Jay Jr., the great-grandson of John Jay was deeply active in the underground. He was also a close friend of Stephen Myers, the head of the underground here in Albany. He was apparently also one of the underground’s main financial supports.

The curator of the Jay home recently shared with me a remarkable letter.

In August 1860, Stephen Myers’s Harriet wrote to William Jay Jr. from Albany (Stephen was working at the time as a butler at Lake George): “The two fugitives arrived here that you sent, and I sent them immediately on their route for Canada… I have to attend to the fugitives myself. I was very thankful that you gave some aid, for it was on Saturday they came, and it would have been difficult to get money to send them on that day.” She went on to thank him profusely “for all the favors you have done for the downtrodden that come to this office.”

The relationship was so close that the Myerses named one of their grandchildren after him: William John Jay Myers. It is a signpost to the kind of remarkable relationships that the Underground Railroad inspired across racial and class lines. It was of course, just one of many—and an indication of the social and moral radicalism that the underground embodied.

It’s a fitting place for me to end.