The Underground Railroad: The Documented Network, 1820s–1865

The Underground Railroad was not underground and not a railroad. It was a loose, decentralised, illegal network of safe houses, sympathetic boatmen, free Black communities, abolitionist sympathisers, and — most importantly — formerly enslaved conductors, that helped between roughly 30,000 and 100,000 enslaved Americans escape from the slaveholding South between the 1820s and the end of the Civil War. Its single best-documented account, the Philadelphia abolitionist William Still’s 1872 book The Underground Rail Road, contains 649 separate first-person interviews with freedom seekers, conducted by Still over the 1850s and concealed in an attic until after the war. It remains the closest thing the network has to a primary historical record.

The phrase “Underground Railroad” entered common use in the 1830s, taking advantage of the new railway vocabulary then sweeping American culture: “stations” (safe houses), “stationmasters” (the homeowners who ran them), “conductors” (those who moved freedom seekers between stations), “passengers” (the freedom seekers themselves), and “the line” (a particular route). The metaphor was apt. The network was real. This is what is now documented about it.

How the Network Actually Worked

The Underground Railroad’s principal protection against detection was its decentralisation. No single map of routes existed, because no one person knew all the routes. A conductor in Wilmington, Delaware, knew the next station in Philadelphia; the Philadelphia operator knew stations in Trenton, Burlington, and New York City; the New York operator knew stations in Albany or in New England. Knowledge was compartmentalised by necessity. If one stationmaster was arrested, the people he could betray were few.

Most freedom seekers travelled by foot, by night, navigating by the North Star. Many followed rivers and creeks to mask their scent from tracking dogs. The Ohio River, the Mason-Dixon Line of the West, was a major crossing point — Ripley, Ohio, alone served as a crossing for thousands. Eastern Maryland freedom seekers crossed the Susquehanna into Pennsylvania. Some travelled hidden in farm wagons, freight trains, or river steamers; others on the public stagecoach or rail systems, equipped with forged free papers.

The network’s operational core was almost always Black. White abolitionists — Quakers especially, but also Presbyterians, Methodists, and the small radical wing of the Unitarian and Congregationalist churches — provided safe houses and material support. But the freedom seekers themselves did most of the work, and the network’s organisers, fundraisers, and conductors were disproportionately free Black Americans and formerly enslaved people. The historian Larry Gara’s The Liberty Line (1961) was the first major scholarly work to insist on this point, against a century of white-centred mythology; the recent scholarship of Eric Foner (Gateway to Freedom, 2015) and Andrew Diemer (Vigilance, 2022) has confirmed and extended Gara’s argument.

Harriet Tubman

Tubman is the single most famous figure in the network’s history, and her real biography substantially exceeds her popular biography. She was born Araminta Ross on the plantation of Anthony Thompson in Dorchester County, Maryland, probably in 1822. Hired out as a domestic servant from age six, struck in the head with a two-pound iron weight by a white overseer when she was thirteen — a head injury that caused her lifelong narcoleptic-like seizures — she escaped in the fall of 1849 by walking ninety miles north to Philadelphia along routes recommended by Quaker neighbours.

What made Tubman unusual was that she went back. Between roughly 1850 and 1860, she made approximately thirteen documented missions to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, returning to extract family members, friends, and the friends and family of people she had already rescued. The standard estimate, based on Tubman’s own statements at antislavery conventions and on later interviews compiled by her authorised biographer Sarah Bradford in 1869 and 1886, is that she personally guided about seventy people to freedom, with hundreds more whom she gave instructions or financial support to escape on their own.

During the Civil War, Tubman served the Union Army in the Department of the South as a scout, spy, and nurse. On June 1–2, 1863, at her instigation and partly under her tactical guidance, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Infantry (an all-Black regiment under Colonel James Montgomery) raided the Combahee River in South Carolina and liberated approximately 750 enslaved people — the largest single emancipation event led by a Black American in US history. Tubman was the only woman in US history to plan and lead a Civil War combat operation. She received no army pay for any of this work until 1899, after thirty-four years of lobbying Congress, and even then only a partial widow’s pension based on her late husband Nelson Davis’s army service.

William Still and the Philadelphia Records

William Still was born free in Burlington County, New Jersey, in 1821, the youngest of eighteen children of two formerly enslaved parents. He moved to Philadelphia in 1844 and in 1847 began working as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. From 1852 he was the chairman of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, the city’s main organising body for receiving and forwarding freedom seekers.

Still kept meticulous handwritten records of every freedom seeker who passed through Philadelphia. He interviewed them, recorded their birth names, the names of their enslavers, the routes they had taken, the people who had helped them, and where they were forwarded next. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made these notes themselves criminal evidence, so Still hid them in a graveyard vault and later in his own home’s attic. After the Civil War he retrieved them and published them in 1872 as The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Author. The book includes 649 detailed first-person narratives. It is the largest single source on the operation of the network.

Still’s contribution went beyond record-keeping. In August 1850, he interviewed an arriving freedom seeker named Peter Friedman and discovered that the man was his own brother — left behind in Maryland four decades earlier, when their mother Charity had been forced to flee without him. The two brothers had been searching for each other their whole adult lives.

The Other Principal Figures

Beyond Tubman and Still, the network depended on a few hundred publicly identifiable operators and a far larger number who left no trace. Among the documented:

Thomas Garrett (1789–1871), a Wilmington, Delaware, Quaker iron merchant, ran what was probably the network’s busiest single station. He helped roughly 2,750 freedom seekers over forty years. Convicted under the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 in 1848 and fined into bankruptcy, he reportedly told the judge that “if any fugitive needs a friend, send him to Thomas Garrett.” He continued for the next two decades.

Levi Coffin (1798–1877), a North Carolina-born Quaker who relocated to Indiana and then Cincinnati, claimed to have helped over 3,000 freedom seekers from his stations in Fountain City, Indiana, and Cincinnati. Coffin’s Reminiscences (1876) is one of the central white-perspective primary sources, though Larry Gara’s modern scholarship has shown that Coffin’s claim to be the “President of the Underground Railroad” overstated his role relative to his Black collaborators.

John P. Parker (1827–1900), born enslaved in Norfolk, Virginia, bought his own freedom in 1845, settled in Ripley, Ohio, and ran a successful iron foundry. He also crossed the Ohio River at night, sometimes weekly, to retrieve freedom seekers from the Kentucky side. He is credited with personally rescuing at least 440 people. His autobiography, written in the 1880s but unpublished until 1996 (His Promised Land, ed. Stuart Seely Sprague), is one of the most detailed conductor accounts in existence.

John Rankin (1793–1886), the Presbyterian minister of Ripley, Ohio, whose hilltop house was visible across the river from Kentucky and whose lit lantern in the window served as an active signal to crossings — was a key collaborator of Parker’s and was reportedly the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s account of Eliza’s flight across the ice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), who escaped enslavement in Baltimore on September 3, 1838, by boarding a northbound train disguised as a sailor with borrowed seaman’s protection papers, operated an Underground Railroad station out of his home in Rochester, New York, from 1847 until the war.

The Spectacular Escapes

The most famous individual escapes were not typical, but they captured nineteenth-century newspaper attention and helped shape the public’s image of the network.

Henry “Box” Brown arranged in March 1849 to be nailed into a wooden crate measuring three feet by two feet eight inches by two feet, and shipped by Adams Express from Richmond, Virginia, to William Still’s office in Philadelphia. The journey took 27 hours. Brown emerged alive at 624 Lombard Street on March 24, 1849, and remarked, by Still’s later account, “How do you do, gentlemen?”

Ellen and William Craft escaped together from Macon, Georgia, on December 21, 1848. Ellen, who was light-skinned enough to pass as white, dressed as a young white male invalid with bandages over her face (to disguise her inability to write — she had not been allowed to learn) and her right arm in a sling (to avoid being asked to sign hotel registers). William travelled with her as her enslaved manservant. They rode public stagecoaches, trains, and steamships north to Philadelphia, where they arrived on Christmas Day. Their 1860 memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, sold widely in Britain after the couple, threatened by slave catchers in Boston after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, relocated to London. They returned to the United States in 1869 and founded an industrial school for freed people in Georgia.

The Fugitive Slave Act and the Christiana Resistance

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850, federalised the recapture of escaped enslaved people, required citizens of free states to assist slave catchers, and forbade accused freedom seekers from testifying on their own behalf. The act radicalised Northern opinion against slavery and pushed many Underground Railroad routes to extend all the way to Canada, where US law did not reach.

On September 11, 1851, a Maryland slaveholder named Edward Gorsuch arrived with a federal marshal and four armed slave catchers at the farm of William Parker, a free Black resident of Christiana, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Gorsuch was seeking four men who had escaped from his Maryland farm two years earlier. Parker and approximately seventy-five free Black neighbours and escaped freedom seekers, alerted by horn signals, gathered to defend the house. In the ensuing exchange, Gorsuch was shot and killed and his nephew Dickinson Gorsuch was seriously wounded. The slave catchers fled. Thirty-eight people — most of them Black — were indicted for treason against the United States. After the prosecution’s first trial, of Castner Hanway, ended in acquittal after fifteen minutes of jury deliberation, the remaining cases were dropped. William Parker escaped to Canada, where he lived as a friend and correspondent of Frederick Douglass.

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Two distortions are still common. The first is the centrality of white abolitionists in popular retellings of the network. The historical record, particularly as recovered by Larry Gara, Eric Foner, and Andrew Diemer, makes plain that the Underground Railroad was primarily a Black project. Free Black communities in cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Detroit, and Cincinnati provided the network’s backbone; freedom seekers themselves did the most dangerous work; the famous white Quaker stationmasters were essential allies, not the central operators.

The second is the symbol of the quilt code — the popular twentieth-century claim that enslaved people used coded patterns in quilts to communicate Underground Railroad information. There is no contemporary nineteenth-century documentary evidence for this. The claim originates from a 1999 popular book by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard, Hidden in Plain View, which built on a single late-twentieth-century oral tradition. Mainstream scholarly historians, including Marsha MacDowell of Michigan State University and the historians of the Underground Railroad’s federal Network to Freedom programme, treat the quilt-code story as folklore rather than history.

Why It Still Matters

The federal National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom programme, administered by the National Park Service since 1998, has identified and certified more than 800 historic sites, programmes, and facilities across thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia, plus sites in Canada and the US Virgin Islands. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a major museum, opened in Cincinnati in 2004. Harriet Tubman’s home in Auburn, New York, is preserved as the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park (designated 2017); the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland’s Eastern Shore was established in 2014. The William Still Papers are held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

The network’s history is being recovered in real time, in archives, in oral traditions in Black communities, and in primary documents that survived because people hid them. For more on the wider history this story belongs to, see our pieces on American slavery, 1619–1865 and Robert Smalls.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Underground Railroad?

The Underground Railroad was a loose, decentralised, illegal network of safe houses, sympathetic transporters, free Black communities, and abolitionist allies that helped enslaved Americans escape from the slaveholding South to the free states and Canada, primarily between the 1830s and the end of the Civil War in 1865. It was not literally underground and not a railroad; the name borrowed contemporary railway vocabulary as a metaphor.

How many people escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad?

Estimates vary widely. Modern academic historians generally accept a figure in the range of 30,000 to 100,000 freedom seekers helped by the formal network between the 1820s and 1865. Many more enslaved people escaped on their own without formal network assistance. Precise figures are impossible because operators kept few records — the activity was federal crime — and the records that survive, principally William Still’s, cover only a single regional segment.

Who was Harriet Tubman?

Harriet Tubman (c. 1822–1913) was born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland. She escaped enslavement in 1849 and over the following decade made approximately thirteen documented missions back to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, personally guiding about seventy people to freedom. During the Civil War she served the Union Army as a scout, spy, and nurse, and on June 1–2, 1863, she planned and led the Combahee River raid in South Carolina, which liberated approximately 750 enslaved people — the largest single emancipation event led by a Black American in US history.

Who was William Still?

William Still (1821–1902) was a free Black abolitionist and chairman of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee from 1852. He interviewed and recorded 649 freedom seekers who passed through Philadelphia and hid the records, which would have been criminal evidence under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. He published them as The Underground Rail Road in 1872. The book remains the single most important documentary source on the network’s operations.

Was there really a “quilt code”?

No serious contemporary evidence supports the claim that enslaved people used coded quilt patterns to convey Underground Railroad information. The claim originates from a 1999 popular book, Hidden in Plain View by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard, built on a single late-twentieth-century oral tradition. The federal Network to Freedom programme and mainstream academic historians treat it as folklore rather than documented history.

What ended the Underground Railroad?

The network’s primary function ended with the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, made enslaved people in Confederate-held territory legally free, and the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States. Many former Underground Railroad operators continued similar work helping freed people relocate, find lost family members, and access education — Harriet Tubman, William Still, and others remained active in postwar civil rights and relief efforts.

Sources

1. US National Park Service — National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom
2. US National Park Service — Harriet Tubman National Historical Park
3. Historical Society of Pennsylvania — William Still Papers
4. William Still, The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c. (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872)
5. Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton, 2015)
6. Andrew K. Diemer, Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad (Knopf, 2022)
7. Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (Ballantine, 2004)
8. Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (Little, Brown, 2004)
9. Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (University Press of Kentucky, 1961)
10. Stuart Seely Sprague (ed.), His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton, 1996)
11. William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: Tweedie, 1860)