Essay about The Underground Railroad

The most popular and best underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman was one of the bravest people of her century. Risking her life constantly for others really showed what type of person she was. Harriet Tubman in an escaped slave that went on to save thousands of other slaves. She snuck them from the south to the north using the underground railroad, her being one of the best conductors known. Tubman had an impact on the civil war because she saved thousands of slaves and was a very active abolitionist.

The “stations” were usually ten to twenty miles apart. It was especially dangerous for woman and children. They had to travel with little to no belongings, cross treacherous terrain, fend off wild animals, and survive severe temperatures. Safe houses were important so the runaways could get some nutrition because the risk of starvation was great. They put themselves in grave danger for a chance at a better life. Some slaves could not handle the journey and would return home to their slave owners. How many feet traversed the path to freedom will never truly be known. However one estimate suggests roughly one hundred thousand slaves made the perilous journey northward. The following is an example of one of the many songs that the fugitive slaves used for directions on their way to

The clanging of chains, the quiet trekking of fugitives through swamps and forest, the kind hands of strange friends, the disguises, the whizzing of bullets through trees and brush, the long winding “train tracks” that pierced the border of states and morality, and the dark complexion of the most courageous men and women that defied law. It was these that carved the crack in the concrete wall of slavery and formed the Underground Railroad. Obtaining an understanding of the Underground Railroad can be key to a sense of pride in our country and its stride at overcoming the prevailing issue of ethnic discrimination.

History.com explains that Africans first came to America in the year 1619 as indentured servants in Jamestown, Virginia. These indentured servants voluntarily contracted to work for a set amount of time in exchange for their freedom. To provide a cheaper form of labor, in beginning of the 17th century, the European settlers opted to capture slaves from the western shores of Africa to work for a small fraction of the cost they were paying indentured slaves. The numbers of slaves that were brought here was estimated to be between 6 and 7 million in the 18th century.

Slavery began in the early 1600’s and lasted until 1865 when it was finally abolished. For 265 years blacks in the United States were considered property and were treated like animals. Most slaves suffered immensely and did not have the same rights as other people in the United States. Since the slaves had no rights they had to come up with their own way of protesting. They came up with the brilliant idea of the Underground Railroad. escaped slaves make their way from southern states, into northern states where they would be considered free. The Underground Railroad, which was not a railroad and most certainly not underground, was a way to help escaped slaves make their way from southern states, into northern states where they would be considered

The Underground Railroad is a popular topic in United States history, but many of the stories told about it are more myth than fact. Quilts have been often used as a symbol in children 's picture books to further the understanding of one of the darkest periods of United States history: slavery. Parents and teachers have eagerly embraced these illustrated books as a way to understand and teach past turmoil. Many of these books suggest that people who participated in the Underground Railroad used quilts as a means of communication to help slaves safely escape to freedom. The idea of quilts as communication tools has been well-received, and many educators have created wonderful programs, guides, and lesson plans to extend the experience with these books and to further explore United States history; however, what is depicted in these books have been consistently contested by quilt historians and folklorists This essay discusses the myth that secret codes were stitched into quilts to help slaves escape to freedom and why this myth continues today.

The Underground Railroad was a major development that united a diverse group of people for a common goal. Slaves were able to escape and went to a free land where they were considered free. The slaves would have to live in seclusion to avoid being found by slave catchers and returned to the terrible conditions from which they fled. Helpers, also known as conductors, assisted many slaves on their journey to freedom by concealing them in secure places and provided the slaves with food and information needed to continue the expedition. The developments of the places used to hide fugitives were basic wagons, rooms, and closets. There were peculiar spaces like specially built shelters, tunnels, and improvised rooms in strange places. The risks to

Underground railroads have been prevalent in history since the early nineteenth century. Throughout time, many different underground railroads have been created for many different purposes, all liberating those subject to slavery or poverty. Modern slavery, known as human trafficking, usually affects immigrants who don’t completely know their rights or who are tricked into a “job” that does not fit its original description.

For 300 years captured slaves in the United States had no hope for freedom. In the 1800s everything changed when the Underground Railroad had gone into effect as the system kept on growing and there were more than 100,000 slaves escaped from the South and gained their freedom. The journey for a slave to gain freedom was difficult and dangerous under the circumstances in the nineteenth century. Not even slave owners were looking for fugitive slaves, governments also imposed laws to restricted the rights of fugitive slave, causing their escape as an illegal movement. Runaway slaves faced lots of struggles through their escape, they not only encountered the risk of capture from slave owners, they also faced dangers from wild animals. However, there were safe houses called stations, in which would provide safe shelters and food for the needed runaway slaves. With the help from conductors, stations, and the system of Underground Railroad, fugitive slaves had the opportunities to seek freedom of rights someday.

Comparisons come in all shapes and sizes, but in the case of the Underground Railroad, it is rare that such a metaphor would come to life as a physical embodiment of freedom. The Underground Railroad is often misinterpreted by grade-school students as a literal underground railroad with subterranean tracks and shiny train cars chugging along in the darkness, but Colson Whitehead, the author of The Underground Railroad, takes artistic liberties and reimagines the famous trail to freedom just as a child would: With actual rails running through caves and train cars bumping through the earth under America. With respect to a The New Yorker review, Whitehead chooses to have this literal railroad as both a device to further the plot of his novel

There were two fugitive slave acts, the first slave act was in 1793. It required all states including those that forbid slavery, to forcibly return all escaped slaves to their original owner. The law stated “no person held to service labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein,be discharged from such labor or service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” “it was not until June 28, 1864, that both of the fugitive slave acts were officially repealed by an act of congress”(www.history.com).” When political and social elites in the city worked with their southern counterparts to seize escaped slaves.”(Vesey, Denmark). The government didn’t help the slaves at all. They tried to seize the escaped and bring them back to the

For Harriet working on the plantation was very hard, she was hired as a laborer when she was five years old. Harriet’s least favorite place to work was indoors, in her early teen years Harriet was no longer allowed to work indoors so she was hired to be a field hand. Her masters routinely beat and whipped her. In 1844 Tubman married a free black man named John Tubman. Five years later in 1849 her main fear at the time was when the owner of the Broads Plantation died, many of the slaves were scheduled to be sold soon. “After Tubman heard about the future in the new plantation she was supposed to go to. That night Harriet had planned to escape but only told her sister because her husband could not have kept her escape a secret. Harriet took a ninety-mile trip to the mason- Dixon line with the help from the Underground Railroad and the conductors.” (Sahlman.) Tubman had a very successful and safe trip she settled in Philadelphia. A year later Tubman went back to rescues her sister’s family and her husband but it turned out that her husband had moved on and gotten married. In 1857, Tubman settled with her parents in Auburn, New York. When she helped out with the Underground Railroad she was nicknamed “ the Moses of her time.” Tubman made nineteen trips on the underground saving about three hundred slaves all by her self. When she was a “conductor” she had very good tactics of

The Underground Railroad is a story about a slave’s journey to freedom from the harsh life she is currently facing on her plantation. Cora, the slave the story is centered on, makes the decision to leave the severe conditions she faces and travel north via the underground railroad. She crosses the threshold from the ordinary world she lives in to the special world of uncertainty as soon as she runs away with Caesar, a friend from the plantation. Her journey isn’t easy and as the story progresses, the more obstacles come her way. However, the biggest obstacle Cora faces is Ridgeway, the slave catcher who wants to bring Cora back to the

Most runaway slaves were young, male, unattached and highly skilled. When the slaves travelled they travelled at night to avoid being seen by slave masters, people getting paid to find slaves, and most southerners who would report them for being spotted. When a slave travelled at night he/she would follow the North star as a guide in the right direction.

Southerners would have you believe that their society is a genteel one, full of caring masters and happy slaves. Nothing could be further from the truth. The very existence of the Underground Railroad refutes this argument, as 100,000 formerly enslaved people have sought freedom through the Underground Railroad. If the life of the Southern Negro is one of happiness in a bucolic and genteel paradise, then why would so many of them choose to leave their families and risk their lives in order to be free of it? The answer is of course that they wouldn’t; we know that in truth the institution of slavery is one of cold brutality where a man is simply a piece of property to be inventoried along with the hogs and mules. To the Southerner a slave is property that has no value beyond the money he can make for his master, and no limits are placed on the cruelty that master can exercise in order to extract his profit.