Underground Railroad Free Press
News and views on the Underground Railroad • Vol. XVIIII, no. 106, March 2024
Published bimonthly since 2006, we bring together organizations and people interested in the historical and the contemporary Underground Railroad. Free Press is the home of Lynx, the central registry of contemporary Underground Railroad organizations, and the Free Press prizes awarded annually for leadership, preservation and advancement of knowledge, the community's highest honors. Underground Railroad Free Press is emailed free of charge around the 15th of odd-numbered months. Readership is about 26,000. Reach us at http://urrfreepress.com/contact.html.
In This Issue
Current Happenings
Hagerstown Finds Trove of Underground Railroad Connections
Postal Service Issues Ten Underground Railroad Stamps
Featured Article: When the Underground Railroad Got Its Name
An Ambassador, New Sites, Busy Writer
Dutch Ambassador Visits
Chicago's Ton Farm Underground Railroad site announces that on March 21 the Honorable Birgitta Tazelaar, Ambassador to the United States from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, will visit the Ton Farm. She will be joined by community and regional leaders to dedicate a new interpretive sign telling the stories of Dutch settlers and their work on the Underground Railroad.
Starting in the late 1840s, Dutch immigrants settled in what are now the Chicago neighborhood of Roseland and the Village of South Holland. They gave assistance to freedom seekers escaping from enslavement. After reaching the relative safety of Chicago, some of these travelers then came, often on foot, south on the Chicago to Detroit Road heading toward freedom in Canada.
The Ambassador and some of her staff from Washington and Chicago will be with her for the dedication ceremony. Community leaders and local elected officials have been invited.
The address of the farm is 557 East 134th Place in Chicago.
Network to Freedom Names Four New Maryland Sites
The National Park Service Network to Freedom program has designated four new Maryland sites as important connections in the Underground Railroad freedom trail.
They are:
Elkridge Furnace at Patapsco Valley State Park in Howard County. Elkridge Furnace, now a high-end restaurant, was one of the largest operating iron furnaces in colonial Maryland. It used labor from enslaved and indentured people as well as convicts. At least five people escaped from the site.
Eliza Parker Escape Site at Belle Vue Farm in Harford County. At the circa-1661 Belle Vue Farm in Havre de Grace, Eliza Howard Parker, her mother and siblings escaped to freedom.
Henry Massey Escape Site at Stoopley Gibson Manor on Kent Island in Kent County. The 14-year-old Henry Massey escaped enslavement from the Stoopley-Gibson Plantation in 1849, making it to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before being recaptured five years later.
Mount Clare Railroad Station in Baltimore City. Mount Clare is the nation’s oldest rail station. Freedom-seekers traveled through it concealed or in disguise to a new life.
Tom Calarco Stays Busy
Author Tom Calarco, author if eight books on the Underground Railroad, announces his new website at
https://undergroundrailroadconductor.com
with a few new professional offerings. In 2008, Calarco was the first winner of the annual Underground Railroad Free Press Hortense Simmons Memorial Prize for the Advancement of Knowledge.
A Mountain Town Awakens to Its History
Hagerstown Finds Trove of Underground Railroad Connections
They had to be there. With dozens of Underground Railroad routes and safe-houses identified in surrounding counties, there were bound to be some in Washington County, Maryland, but barely any mention of them could be found until recently. Now, the county's Convention and Visitors Bureau has completed a research project that has made a good start in identifying the county's Underground Railroad sites and historical figures.
For the time being, the project concentrates on the Underground Railroad history of Hagerstown, the county seat, but research expansion county-wide is expected. Washington County, located in far western Maryland in the Appalachian Range, experienced lower freedom seeker traffic because of its mountainous terrain and easier travel up Maryland's Monocacy Valley three mountains to the east. Nevertheless, Washington County had its share of the Underground Railroad.
Free Press articles and research have touched on Washington County.
James Curry escaped enslavement from North Carolina in 1833, stating in his autobiography that he crossed the Potomac River at Georgetown in Washington, DC,, walked the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath to Williamsport in Washington County, then turned north to Pennsylvania.
In 1843, Joseph Blanhum was arrested for ferrying freedom seekers across the Potomac River to Washington County's Susquehanna Path.
In his post-Civil War autobiography, Reverend Thomas W. Henry writes of his conducting freedom seekers northward through Washington County. As district superintendent and country circuit rider of the African Methodist Episcopal church, he tended many flocks in Maryland and Pennsylvania, had his home as pastor of the Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church built in Hagerstown in 1841, oversaw the operations of A.M.E. churches in his charge, and worked as an Underground Railroad conductor and safe-house keeper.
Not all traversing Washington County found success. For example, several capture accounts are recounted by the National Park Service regarding its Ferry Hill Plantation property in Washington County. Referring to nineteenth-century Ferry Hill owners, a Park Service publication states, “Blackford family journals document the capture of people fleeing along the Potomac River. John Blackford captured a woman on July 29, 1829, who belonged to a slave trader named Malone; she was committed to the Hagerstown jail with the intention of returning her to her master. Franklin Blackford found five runaways hiding near the canal on June 1, 1839."
Today, central to Washington County's rediscovery of its African American and Underground Railroad heritage are the Doleman brothers, creators of Hagerstown's Doleman Black Heritage Museum. It was the Dolemans' mother who acquired the extensive collections of the museum over many decades in the twentieth century. As Free Press wrote in a letter of support for the museum's founding, " The Doleman Black Heritage Museum’s collections of documents, photographs, family histories, memorabilia, objects, and historical artifacts comprise one of the very best compilations of African-Americana in Maryland and certainly the best in Washington County where Hagerstown is located. Collections of African-Americana of the quality and extent of the Doleman collections are rare and provide an unparalleled look into the past of African-American life in America, a sorely under-documented area of the American experience and history. The Doleman collection spans the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and is a gem which needs to be brought to light. The collection’s earliest holdings, which date to the 1830s, are very rare even on a national level."
What will lend a national boost to the county's Underground Railroad efforts is the recent release of the television documentary "The House on Jonathon Street" by 3 Roads Communications.
https://www.thehouseonjonathanstreet.com
From the producer's website, “The House on Jonathan Street is a one-hour documentary intended for national distribution to Public Television, and national and international distribution through Amazon Prime. The documentary uses the accidental discovery of the significant history of a modest dwelling on a traditionally African American street in Hagerstown, Maryland to trace the roots of middle America’s racial, economic, and social interactions. Through the lens of this house, the rise and fall of the African American community in small rust belt towns and cities across America is told. And how its discovery, renovation and renewal may portend a change in the fortunes of the street and the larger community.”
For more on Washington County's re-entry into the national Underground Railroad community, visit https://www.visithagerstown.com/search/Underground-Railroad.
More Underground Railroad Stamps
Ten new stamps from the United States Postal Service now commemorate the Underground Railroad. The pane of twenty stamps depicts ten of the most prominent men and women who were Underground Railroad freedom seekers, conductors or safe-house operators.
The Underground Railroad would have begun in 1585 or shortly after when an enslaved person first escaped the Spanish colony at St. Augustine, Florida, and anyone else aided him. Though the Underground Railroad ended after the Civil War, routes and safe-houses continued to be used as many of the newly freed headed north.
The first issue of the stamps was held on March 9, 2024, the day before Harrier Tubman's birthday, at the headquarters of the National Park Service's Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program's Church Creek, Maryland, visitor. The center is named for Harriet Tubman, who grew up nearby and is featured on one of the stamps.
First Row
An 1868–69 photograph of Harriet Tubman (1822–1913) who escaped slavery, then returned to Maryland numerous times to lead others to freedom. During the Civil War she worked for the Union Army as a scout and spy.
An 1850s photograph of Thomas Garrett (1789–1871), a Delaware-based Quaker operative.
A photograph of William Still (1821–1902), born to a mother who had escaped slavery and a father who had purchased his own freedom. Still became leader of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee and authored the landmark The Underground Railroad in 1871.
An 1894 photograph of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897), who escaped slavery and wrote a memoir describing her escape and the horrors of her life in bondage.
An undated photograph of Rev. Jermain Loguen (1813–1872), who escaped slavery and became an operative based in Syracuse, New York.
Second Row
An engraving of Catharine Coffin (1803–1881), a Quaker operative in Indiana and Ohio.
An 1873 photograph of Lewis Hayden (1811–1889), who escaped slavery and became an operative in Boston.
A photograph of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped slavery, then rose to fame as an abolitionist and orator. He sheltered freedom seekers in his Rochester, New York, home.
A photograph of William Lambert (1817–1890), who was born free and became an operative based in Detroit.
An 1864 photograph of Laura Haviland (1808–1898), a Michigan-based Quaker operative.
These are "forever stamps” good for postage at any future rate. They are available for purchase at https://store.usps.com/store/product/buy-stamps/the-underground-railroad-stamps-S_484604.
When Did the Name “Underground Railroad” First Appear?
For our issue of March 2010, Underground Railroad Free Press sought the answer as to when was the first use of the term Underground Railroad. We went about answering this by means of a reader poll which resulted in a number of responses, the oldest date of which was November 19, 1842. We recorded this date in the Free Press Underground Railroad timeline as "First known appearance in print of the term Underground Railroad when Thomas Smallwood uses the phrase 'our new underground railroad' in his November 19, 1842, letter to the editor of The Tocsin of Liberty."
http://urrfreepress.com/index_files/Timeline.pdf
Now, Free Press subscriber Scott Shane has pushed back the earliest date to August 10, 1842. Kudos! Shane, a reporter for The New York Times from 2004 to 2019, is author of the recently released Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland, a biography of Thomas Smallwood available at Amazon.com.
At The Times, Shane wrote about national security and other topics. He was part of teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2017 for coverage of Russia's hacking and in 2018 for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to Donald Trump.
https://www.amazon.com/Flee-North-Forgotten-Slaverys-Borderland
On September 11, 2023, Shane’s opinion piece here, "How the Underground Railroad Got Its Name," was published by The New York Times. Reprinted with the author's permission.
How the Underground Railroad Got Its Name
By Scott Shane
Thomas Smallwood was a busy man in the summer of 1842. Born into slavery outside Washington, D.C., in 1801, he had largely educated himself and bought his own freedom 11 years before. By day, he ran a shoemaking business from the little house he shared with his wife and four children a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. By night, he was organizing daring, dangerous escapes from slavery — not by ones and twos but by the wagonload — from Washington, Baltimore and the surrounding counties.
Yet somehow he found time every week or two to write a new dispatch for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany, N.Y., a stop for many of those he was sending north. Written at considerable risk, his letters mercilessly mocked enslavers and celebrated those fleeing from them, using everyone’s real names — except for his own, which he hid behind a pseudonym. And one day early that August he took up his pen and made literary history, becoming the first to use a phrase that would resound through the subsequent decades of slavery and to the present day: underground railroad.
In researching a book about Mr. Smallwood, likely the most fascinating and important African American activist and writer you’ve never heard of, I stumbled upon the solution to an old historical mystery: Where did the Underground Railroad get its name? The answer: from Mr. Smallwood’s newspaper dispatches, overlooked until recently in aging newsprint stacked in a Boston Public Library warehouse. As I read through these extraordinary letters, a rare real-time account of escapes and a lost masterpiece of satire, I came across the first use of “underground railroad” from the Aug. 10, 1842, edition of Tocsin of Liberty, an abolitionist newspaper published in Albany.
Addressing in his usual antic style a Washington slaveholder whose “walking property walked off,” as he once put it, Mr. Smallwood told the man, “It was your cruelty to him, that made him disappear by that same ‘under ground rail-road’ or ‘steam balloon,’ about which one of your city constables was swearing so bitterly a few weeks ago, when complaining that the ‘d----d rascals’ got off so, and that no trace of them could be found!”
In a later dispatch, Mr. Smallwood elaborated: The outburst had come from a notorious Baltimore police constable named John Zell, who often collected the rewards paid by slaveholders for returning runaways. There were, of course, no actual underground railroads at the time; Mr. Zell was referring sarcastically to a nonexistent, futuristic means of travel, just as we might quip that a person who suddenly vanished must have been teleported to another city or kidnapped by aliens.
The policeman’s bitter jest would soon have been forgotten — except that Mr. Smallwood seized on it as a backhanded compliment to him and those he was helping to flee north. He began riffing in his columns on this mythical transport system supposedly speeding people out of the clutches of the slaveholders, wielding the phrase with savage mockery. He advised slaveholders bewildered by the disappearance of their enslaved workers to apply at the “office of the underground railroad” in Washington for information on their lost property. He appointed himself “general agent of all the branches of the National Underground Railroad.”
When I first discovered these passages, I hurried to learn what historians had written about the origin of the name. There were multiple accounts, but scholars had generally rejected them as dubious folklore, for good reason. One version had a slaveholder exclaiming in 1831 that his enslaved man must have fled from Kentucky to Ohio “on an underground road,” but the story was first recorded in print decades later. Another came from an 1879 book, “Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad,” which traced the phrase to a Washington newspaper in 1839 — but the author admitted that some 40 years later, he was recounting the article “as closely as I can from memory.” None of the theories mentioned Mr. Smallwood.
The advent in recent years of massive collections of digitized American newspapers made it possible to resolve this old puzzle. All the earliest references in print to “underground railroad” come from Mr. Smallwood and his younger, white sidekick, Charles Torrey, who moved to Albany to become editor of Tocsin of Liberty in late 1842 and sometimes echoed Mr. Smallwood’s joke. Within a year or two, however, “underground railroad” had been picked up by other writers around the country, who at first mimicked Mr. Smallwood’s mocking tone but soon began to use the phrase as a handy generic term for escapes from slavery.
In the 181 years since Mr. Smallwood’s introduction of the term, the Underground Railroad has become a thrilling chapter of American history, taught even in elementary school, the subject of countless novels, plays and movies. If Mr. Smallwood had used the term in his ironic metaphor, as a verbal “lash” against slaveholders and slave catchers, it would soon lose its sting. The story of the Underground Railroad would give Americans, white and Black, a kinder, gentler way to talk about the violent criminal enterprise of human slavery, because some white people had worked with Black people helping refugees from slavery flee north.
As the decades passed, Mr. Smallwood’s scathing joke grew into an American cultural phenomenon, a legend that sometimes slipped the limits of historical fact. The drama of the Underground Railroad, with its elaborate argot of stations and conductors, came to obscure the likelihood that most people who escaped bondage liberated themselves without much help. And the role of African Americans in organizing escapes was at times overshadowed by attention paid to white allies. My research indicates that Mr. Torrey has long been given credit for escapes Mr. Smallwood organized without him.
The popular attention paid to the Underground Railroad stands in contrast to decades of virtual silence about a related, opposite phenomenon: the domestic slave trade, which acted as an engine driving the Underground Railroad. Mr. Smallwood and Mr. Torrey were often approached by people desperate to avoid the dire fate of being sold south, away from home and family. In the decades after the African slave trade was banned in 1808, some one million enslaved people were forcibly transported from the Upper South to the cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South. To this day, despite several excellent books on the subject, most Americans remain unaware of the nature and dimensions of the domestic slave trade, which offers no heartwarming stories of white heroes.
None of this subsequent cultural history would have surprised Mr. Smallwood, who himself escaped to Toronto in 1843, as the police closed in, and started a business manufacturing saws. Life had taught him to keep his expectations of the U.S. government and its white citizens low; he wrote in his 1851 memoir, with some prescience, that he believed “the United States will never voluntarily grant the African race among them freedom.”
But his most memorable writing had been the madcap letters of the 1840s, in which the Underground Railroad was only one of Mr. Smallwood’s many jokes at the expense of those who believed they should own other human beings. “A shrewd slave,” he wrote, “has wit enough at any time to get round a lazy, mole-eyed slaveholder.” In his topsy-turvy framing, the enslavers were a dim race of pampered, morally bankrupt fools; the enslaved were noble and clever, to be celebrated especially for their wit.
The poor manstealers and their watchdogs are greatly at a loss to know how their victims escape,” Mr. Smallwood wrote at the peak of his own clandestine operation sending people north. “At times they watch the Rail Road, with eagle eyes. … At other times they reckon their victims escape in coaches or wagons. Then they imagine they go by water, which is often the case. All this shows that they would give a plum to know where the under-ground Rail Road begins!”
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