Fergus M. Bordewich

Archive for the ‘Archives’ Category

The Underground Railroad: Myth & Reality
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD occupies a romantic place in the American imagination that is shared by few other episodes in the country’s history. The term is so instantly recognizable that today it is automatically applied to clandestine routes of travel almost everywhere, whether we’re talking about downed Allied airmen escaping from Nazi-held France, or North Korean refugees trying to make their way to China or Japan.

The Underground Railroad has bred mythology like no other phenomenon in American history. From the archives 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.) (more…)

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Evangelical Religion, Liberalism, and Antislavery
Friday, February 10th, 2006

WHEN STUDENTS AND FACULTY at Calvin College in Grand Rapids protested the invitation of President George W. Bush to speak at commencement in 2005, it made national news. This wasn’t Harvard or Columbia, but an evangelical institition supported by the Christian Reformed Church—the president’s supposed home turf, at least spiritually speaking. After all, weren’t evangelicals the shock troops of the Radical Right?

The evangelical movement has never been a political monolith. In the early nineteenth century, evangelicals were most likely to be found on the radical left. From the archives Indeed, evangelical religion helped lay the groundwork for modern liberalism. Its contribution can most clearly be seen in the spiritualized politics of the abolitionist movement in the years before the Civil War.

Although Quakers always played an important role in abolitionism, they were soon joined by large numbers of both white and black Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. The evangelical message of individual redemption through political action resonated deeply with Americans in a deeply pious era when Judgment Day was an event as real as the annual spring planting and autumn harvest, and the secularist passions of the Revolutionary generation had grown stale. (more…)

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John Brown’s Subterranean Pass-Way
Saturday, January 14th, 2006

JOHN BROWN believed that God himself had ordained him to bring an end to slavery. Achieving his goal hinged on a radical and deeply secret scheme: the establishment of an “Underground Pass-Way” that would extend the Underground Railroad more than a thousand miles southward through the Appalachian Mountains into the heart of the Deep South. This highway to freedom would drain the South of slaves, Brown believed; they would travel north to the free states protected by strongholds manned by armed abolitionists and freed slaves. Few abolitionists knew what Brown really had in mind. Brown’s dreams ended in the debacle at Harper’s Ferry.

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. From the archives 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? (more…)

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The Underground Railroad
in the New York Hudson Valley
Thursday, July 28th, 2005

WE KNOW the Hudson Valley was one of the main arteries of the Underground Railroad.

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, From the archives 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. (more…)

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