Certainly by 1852 when Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) writes that the "gals' been carried on the underground line," the term Underground Railroad was in play culturally (Stowe, p. Another story attributes the term to a tortured fugitive slave who revealed he was heading to where "the railroad ran underground all the way to Boston" (Blight, p. One story suggests that when fugitive slave Tice David escaped from Kentucky to Sandusky, Ohio, a slave catcher commented that he "must have gone off on an underground railroad" (Blight, p. There are a number of possible sources for the coinage, but all situate the origins of the word in the 1830s. The term "Underground Railroad" is not one that can be historically validated. Gary Collison, in Shadrach Minkins, notes that, "In the first month after the law took effect an estimated 2,000 blacks left the North for Canada" (p. The law's passage spurred large communities of northern African American fugitives to leave for Canada for fear of recapture. In fact, the Fugitive Slave Law, which ordered all citizens to assist in the recapture of fugitive slaves, forced participants in the Underground Railroad to shift tactics, particularly as it destroyed the safety of fugitives in northern communities. In the earlier antebellum period, northern cities such as Boston or Cincinnati were havens to escaped blacks in the later period, when the north was bound by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to return runaways, escapees began to move to Canada for greater safety. The final destination was often based on contemporary political situations, the initial location of the slave, and the familiarity of the slave with the area that he or she would have to journey through. Slaves chose a number of destinations for their journey, including maroon colonies (a community of fugitive slaves, often hidden in swamps and forests), Canada, Mexico, Britain, and the free states. As James Horton points out, the actual number of slaves that escaped is very difficult to enumerate, although "some estimates climb to a hundred thousand or more in the decades before the Civil War" (p. Escapees used the most available, convenient, safe, and expedient means of transportation during their journey. Runaways traveled the route to freedom by various means, including by boat, foot, rail, or horse. Runaways were also often housed within the African American communities of cities and transported by black guides whom runaways tended to trust. John Michael Vlach suggests that slaves were not hidden in elaborate tunnels and secret hiding places as popular imagination suggests but were instead given places within the homes and barns of those who helped them progress along the escape route. The Underground Railroad provided numerous stations where runaways could receive shelter, food, money, clothes, advice, and transportation to the next safe haven. Both descriptions defy the loosely constructed networks that allowed escaping slaves to connect with those who desired to assist the fugitives in their quest for freedom. While the Underground Railroad was not a formalized nationwide system, as sometimes represented, it was also not a haphazard set of paths that slaves would passively follow. The Underground Railroad was comprised of a network of people and places that assisted fugitive slaves with their escape from slavery. The disjunction between the facts of the Underground Railroad and the mythology built up around it deserve close study, as they are key to understanding slavery and freedom in America. In part this is due to the necessary obscuration of the workings of the Underground Railroad during the antebellum period in published materials such as slave narratives. However, the idea of the Underground Railroad has become steeped in mythology, which obscures the historically accurate understanding of slavery, mainly in relation to escape as one form of rebellion against slavery. The Underground Railroad remains a central historical topic in both academic and popular knowledge.
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