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Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 06 The Underground Railroad and New England Quakers

It’s exciting and dramatic to think vaguely about the “Underground Railroad”—that secret network of heroes and heroines who helped enslaved people to escape through the dark of night! And it’s thrilling to imagine those who risked their lives to reach freedom.

But in fact, the “events” of history are constructed of individual people doing things. For example, if a farmer found a woman wandering around the countryside or hiding in the woods with a baby, that farmer might take the mother and child home, give them food and a place to sleep, and then point them to another farmhouse, slightly farther north, where they could get another meal and a place to sleep for a night. This process of “doing things” got the name “Underground Railroad.”

But what was the “Underground Railroad”? Were there special trains running in tunnels underground? No, there were no trains. The “Underground Railroad” was a network of people who thought slavery was wrong. Even if masters were kind, people should not be forced to work under unfair circumstances and bought and sold as property. Groups of white people and Black people who were not slaves worked together to hide runaways in their barns, attics, and cellars, and then to sneak the runaways to another house farther down the road. Sometimes the runaways traveled as far north as Canada, where slavery was prohibited and previous escapees had settled. African American descendants of these runaways still inhabit the communities their ancestors built in Nova Scotia and Ontario between the 1780s and 1850s.

Several religious groups, including some Methodists, Unitarians, and Quakers, preached against slavery and helped escaped slaves make a new life. Quaker religious belief says that “there is that of God in everyone.” Therefore, no person should have control over another person’s freedom to go and do whatever God called them to do! Quakers also had a reputation for doing what they believed was right, even if the things they were doing were against the laws. For this reason, they were frequent helpers on the Underground Railroad and gained a reputation for being “social justice warriors.”

In Lyddie, Quaker Stevens and his family were farmers. They could help a fugitive slave by providing a safe place to hide in rural Vermont, where there were not many roads and the farmers all knew each other. Strangers like the bounty hunters in Lyddie would have no idea where or how to search for a runaway.

But many Quakers were also ship owners and dock workers. And through much of the 1800s, food, clothing, and housewares were moved by ships with crews that included enslaved people. So sometimes the “Underground Railroad” might actually be the cargo space on a ship.

Fishing, whaling, and shipbuilding were important industries during the 1800s too, and those trades often had workers and crews that included enslaved Africans. These enslaved workers sometimes “jumped ship” when they got a message that they were in a location like the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Here, there was a sympathetic community of Quakers who were public about their objections to slavery, and there was a community of free African Americans into which the newcomer could blend.

Much of what we know about the Underground Railroad comes from reading the autobiographies and memoirs of Underground Railroad escapees and the people who helped them. When asking questions about how and why fugitive slaves like Lyddie’s Ezekial were able to reach freedom, it is helpful to think about waterways and maps that connect slave states with “free” areas. It’s also helpful to trace where Quaker Meetings (i.e., Quaker communities and “churches”) were settled in the nineteenth century.