The Underground Railroad to Canada

Picture a Baltimore constable, red-faced with frustration, insisting that enslaved people must be escaping by “steam balloon” or some “underground rail-road” — because nothing else could explain how so many were simply vanishing. That exasperated joke, cracked in 1842, gave a name to one of the most remarkable grassroots movements in American history: a scattered, secretive network of safe houses and guides that carried tens of thousands of people out of bondage and, for many, all the way to freedom in Canada.

A joke that became a legend

The phrase “Underground Railroad” entered print on August 10, 1842, through the pen of Thomas Smallwood, a Black abolitionist writing in the Tocsin of Liberty, an abolitionist newspaper based in Albany, New York. Smallwood was mocking enslavers’ bewilderment at the scale of escapes, and he said he was quoting a Baltimore constable named John Zell, who groused that fugitives must be traveling by some fantastical new technology. The joke spread fast among abolitionists and stuck as a name for the whole effort.

There’s an earlier, shakier claim to the term’s origin — a passage in Eber Pettit’s 1879 book that recalled a Washington newspaper article from 1839, though that source has never been found. Whatever its exact birth date, the railroad metaphor took hold completely. Routes were “lines,” safe houses were “stations” or “depots,” guides were “conductors,” and escapees were “passengers.” The Big Dipper, pointing toward the North Star, became the “drinking gourd” in coded song and speech. The whole enterprise was sometimes called the “freedom train” or “Gospel train,” rolling toward “Heaven” — meaning Canada.

None of this was literal, of course. The first actual underground railway didn’t exist until 1863. As the abolitionist John Rankin explained it, the name stuck because escapees who entered the network “disappeared from public view as really as if they had gone into the ground,” passed secretly from one hiding place to the next until they reached safety.

How the network actually worked

There was no headquarters, no membership roster, no map you could buy. The Underground Railroad consisted of meeting points, secret routes, transportation, and safe houses, held together by word of mouth among sympathetic people — though at least one report describes a numeric code used to encrypt messages between participants. Groups organized small and stayed independent of one another, which kept the whole system harder to betray or infiltrate.

The people who ran it came from every background: free-born Black Americans, white abolitionists, formerly enslaved people who had escaped or been freed, and Native Americans. Christian congregations played a significant role too, particularly the Quakers, Congregationalists, Wesleyan Methodists, and Reformed Presbyterians, along with anti-slavery factions that split off from larger denominations like the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Baptists over the issue of slavery.

But historians are clear that free Black communities were the indispensable core of the operation, not a supporting cast. Historian Cheryl Janifer Laroche put it directly: enslaved and free Black people “operated as the main actors in the central drama that was the Underground Railroad.” She and others have pushed back against an older version of the story that credited white religious reformers, especially Quakers, with rescuing “helpless” slaves — a framing that historian Diane Miller says erased the agency of African Americans fighting for their own freedom. Free Black communities in places like Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Philadelphia, and New York sheltered freedom seekers, and Black churches regularly served as stations, with congregants hiding fugitives in sanctuaries and homes. Organized local groups known as vigilance committees coordinated much of this work on the ground.

Historian Larry Gara has argued that popular memory has drifted into folklore, inflating the roles of a handful of famous figures — Harriet Tubman, Thomas Garrett, Levi Coffin — while casting Northern white abolitionists as the primary heroes of a story that was, in truth, driven overwhelmingly by Black self-emancipation.

The routes, the risks, and the tricks of escape

Escape routes followed whatever geography offered cover: rivers, canals, bays, the Atlantic coastline, ferries, river crossings, roads, and trails. Places near ports, free territory, or international borders saw disproportionately high numbers of escapes, for obvious reasons — they offered the shortest distance to safety. Researchers have identified some 200,000 runaway-slave advertisements printed in North American newspapers between the mid-1700s and the end of the Civil War, a staggering record of how constant and widespread these escapes were.

Water played an outsized role. Harriet Tubman herself learned to navigate the marshes and swamps of Maryland’s Eastern Shore while enslaved there, knowledge she later used to lead others to freedom. The Great Dismal Swamp, straddling North Carolina and Virginia, hid both freedom seekers passing through and people who lived there permanently, outside the reach of enslavers. In Alabama, people hid aboard steamboats heading to Mobile, hoping to blend into the city’s free Black population, or used boats continuing north into free territory; some built their own canoes. Alabama’s legislature responded in 1852 with a law punishing enslavers and boat captains who let enslaved people travel without a pass. One of the more extraordinary sea escapes belonged to Ona Judge, who had been enslaved by President George Washington.

Not every route pointed north. Some freedom seekers in Panama escaped enslavers who were passing through en route to California, slipping away into the city of Panama, where slavery was illegal and local Black Panamanians actively encouraged their escape. Others made for Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, or for Caribbean islands outside the slave trade. There was even an earlier, largely forgotten southern escape route toward Spanish Florida that functioned from the late 1600s until roughly 1790.

Capture meant catastrophe, so people improvised constantly. To throw off bloodhounds, some coated their shoes in a mix of hot pepper, lard, and vinegar; in North Carolina, turpentine served the same purpose, while in Texas escapees used a paste made from charred bullfrog. Others simply waded into swamps to wash their scent away entirely. Most moves happened at night, under cover of darkness. Forged free passes — the documents free Black people carried to prove their status — were another crucial tool, manufactured by free and enslaved allies alike to help travelers bluff their way through slave territory.

Law, politics, and the push toward Canada

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 required officials in free states to help slaveholders recapture escapees, though some state legislatures resisted enforcing it. The law made capture easier and, in some cases, let slave catchers claim free Black people as runaways. It also galvanized the opposition, feeding the growth of anti-slavery societies and the Underground Railroad itself.

Southern lobbying produced an even harsher Fugitive Slave Law as part of the Compromise of 1850, passed after the Mexican-American War. It compelled Northern officials to assist slave catchers and gave those catchers legal immunity while operating in free states. Because it required so little documentation to identify someone as a fugitive, it opened the door to kidnapping free Black people, including children, and selling them into slavery. It also stripped suspected fugitives of the right to defend themselves in court. Some Northern states answered with personal liberty laws, making it illegal for local officials to help capture or jail former slaves — defiance that Southern politicians later cited as a justification for secession.

Against this backdrop, Canada became the goal for many. An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 freedom seekers settled there, about half of them arriving between 1850 and 1860 alone, drawn by a border the Fugitive Slave Law couldn’t reach.

What we still don’t know

Even the network’s name is debated — the 1842 newspaper citation is the earliest documented use, but an undated, unverified 1839 reference lingers in the historical record without confirmation. The overall scale of the Underground Railroad is similarly contested: one estimate puts escapees via the network at roughly 100,000 by 1850, while another scholar has argued that 500,000 or more African Americans had self-emancipated by the war’s end. Because the system left almost no paper trail by design — no headquarters, no membership lists, no maps — historians are still working to separate documented history from the folklore that grew up around famous conductors, and to restore full credit to the free and enslaved Black communities whose work made the whole system possible.

Sources

– This article is a synthesis of the Wikipedia article on Underground Railroad (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad), which itself cites the underlying scholarship. Readers wanting primary sources should follow that article’s reference list.