UNDERGROUND RAILROAD STORY SLAVERY FREE

And last year, Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia, published “Gateway to Freedom,” about the Railroad’s operations in New York City. The following year, Fergus Bordewich published “Bound for Canaan,” the first national history of the Railroad in more than a century. In 2004, the Yale historian David Blight edited “Passages to Freedom,” an anthology of essays on the Underground Railroad. Nonfiction writers, too, have lately returned to the subject. On TV, the WGN America network aired the first season of “Underground,” which follows the fates of a group of slaves, known as the Macon Seven, who flee a Georgia plantation. This year alone has seen the publication of two major Railroad novels, including Oprah’s first book-club selection in more than a year, Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” (Doubleday). But in the past decade or so it has surged into “the popular literature of this nation”-and the popular everything else, too. The Underground Railroad entered our collective imagination in the eighteen-forties, and it has since been a mainstay of both national history and local lore. It did not take long for McKim’s prediction to come true.

Now deemed unworthy of the notice of any, save fanatical abolitionists, these acts of sublime heroism, of lofty self-sacrifice, of patient martyrdom, these beautiful Providences, these hair-breadth escapes and terrible dangers, will yet become the themes of the popular literature of this nation, and will excite the admiration, the reverence and the indignation of the generations yet to come. In an article he wrote some years later, he predicted that future generations of Americans would come to share his emotions: McKim, a white abolitionist with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, had by then been working for the Underground Railroad for more than a decade, and he was awed by the courage and drama of Brown’s escape, and of others like it.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD STORY SLAVERY FREE

When he opened it, out scrambled a man named Henry Brown: five feet eight inches tall, two hundred pounds, and, as far as anyone knows, the first person in United States history to liberate himself from slavery by, as he later wrote, “getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state.” The person to whom the box had been shipped, James Miller McKim, was waiting there to receive it. After arriving in the nation’s capital, it was loaded onto a wagon, dumped out at the train station, loaded onto a luggage car, sent on to Philadelphia, unloaded onto another wagon, and, finally, delivered to 31 North Fifth Street. From there, it was taken to the railroad depot, loaded onto a train, and, on reaching the Potomac, transferred to a steamer, where, despite its label- THIS SIDE UP WITH CARE-it was placed upside down until a tired passenger tipped it over and used it as a seat. Three feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet deep, it had been packed the previous morning in Richmond, Virginia, then carried by horse cart to the local office of the Adams Express Company. The crate arrived, via overland express, one spring evening in 1849. Stories of the Underground Railroad provide the possibility of moral comfort in a profoundly uncomfortable past.

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