E. Statement of Historic Contexts
F. Associated Property Types
G. Geographical Data
H. Summary of Identification and Evaluation Methods
I. Major Bibliographical References
Theme Study Home
ENDNOTES
1 Randolph Paul Runyon, Delia Webster and the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Stuart Seely Sprague, ed., His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
2 Many sources have described this activity. See the Bibliographic Essay for suggestions on the assessment and use of such sources.
3 The best overview remains George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
4 Phillip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 18.
5 For a summary of these diverse experiences, see Brenda Stevenson, "From Bondage to Freedom: Slavery in America," in Underground Railroad, (Handbook 156, Division of Publications, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1998.)
6 John Thornton. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xv. See also Donald R. Wright, African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harland Davidson, Inc., 1990).
7 James Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 17-18. See also Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson and Jan Vansina, African History (New York: Longman, 1991); Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 62-85.
8 Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W.Norton, 1975), 299-311; Winthrop Jordan, The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 26-54.
9 James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 5-12.
10 Thornton, 116-125.
11 Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 247.
12 For the origins of northern free blacks, see James O. Horton and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty, Ch. 1-2. For a Chesapeake example, see T.H. Breen and Steven Innis, "Mynne Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
13 Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 83; Daniel C. Littlefield, "The Slave Trade to Colonial South Carolina: A Profile," South Carolina Historical Magazine 91 (1990): 68-99; Susan Westbury, "Slaves of Colonial Virginia: Where They Came From," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series 42 (1985): 228-237.
14 Jordan, Burden, 113-116; Jean Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)
15 Richard Price, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) contained only one reference to maroons in North America. That article was a reprint of a well-known 1939 essay by Herbert Aptheker, "Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States," which listed fifty such societies over time. Yet Peter Hinks, in To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, Pa.: Penn State Press, 1997), 40-46, uses court records and current scholarship to describe maroon camps in eastern North Carolina and Virginia that flourished between the 1760s and the 1820s. But Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and Kenneth Porter, "Negroes on the Southern Frontier, 1670-1763," Journal of Negro History 33 (January 1948): 53-78 both contend that, although maroon attempts were plentiful, they were not permitted to exist for very long.
16 Lathan Algerna Windley, A Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from 1730 through 1787, in Graham Hodges, ed., Studies in African American History and Culture (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1995), 27; Kenneth Porter, "Negroes on the Southern Frontier, 1670-1763," Journal of Negro History 53 (January 1948):53-78.
17 Adele Stanton Edwards (ed.). The State Records of S.C. Privy Council: Journals of the Privy Council 1783-1789, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 203 in Windley, 12.
18 Charleston, South Carolina Gazette, May 21-28, 1754 in Windley, 123.
19 Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 20.
20 Smith and Wojtowicz, 47. Other sources for runaway advertisements include Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); the four-volume work by Lathan Algerna Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History for the 1730s to 1790 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983); Daniel Meaders, Advertisements for Runaway Slaves in Virginia 1801-1820 (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1997); Freddie L. Parker, Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in North Carolina 1775-1840 (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1993); `Pretends to be Free': Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1994.)
21 See, for example, Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts 5th ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1983); Thomas J. Davis, "The New York Slave Conspiracy of 1741 as Black Protest," Journal of Negro History 56 (January 1971): Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
22 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 16; Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 47-49.
23 Sydney James, A People Among Peoples: Quaker Benevolence in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963)
24 John B. Boles, ed. Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740-1870 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988).
25 Robert L. Harris, Jr., "Early Black Benevolent Societies, 1780-1830," The Massachusetts Review 20/3 (Autumn 1979): 603-625; Thomas Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," American Historical Review 90/2&3 (April/June 1985).
26 See William Cooper Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855) and Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770-1800 (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 10-13.
27 Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1975), 316; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); John Hope Franklin and Albert Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 7th ed.(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 70, 92; Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976) 42, 70-80. For an overview, see Sylvia Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
28 See David Brion Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
29 Gary Nash, Race and Revolution. (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990) 6
30 IRA Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1976).
31 Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 117: James Horton and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 71-72
32 Zilversmit, 201-202, 213, 221-222; Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 72-75.
33 Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 62-65.
34 Paul Finkelman, "Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity." Journal of the Early Republic 6 (Winter 1986): 343-370.
35 Testimony of Ben Woolfolk and of Prosser's Ben at trial of Prosser's Gabriel, Calendar of Virginia State Papers, Negro Insurrection, Executive Papers, James Monroe, Sept., 1800, Box 114, Virginia State Library, Richmond. This account of events is drawn from Douglas R.Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800-1802. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.)
36 Peter Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol.3 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 37.
37 Daniel Meaders, Advertisements for Runaway Slaves in Virginia, 1801-1820 (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1997), 37.
38 Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (reprint ed. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 32.
39 Clement Eaton, Growth of Southern Civilization (New York: Harper, 1961), 73.
40 Mechal Sobel, Trabelin' On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 3-17, 19-20,48-49, 86-88; Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xiv, xv, 14,16, 68-70; John Boles, The Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972); Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism:Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisana State Universtiy Press, 1988).
41 Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982), 143-147, 163-167, 307-308; Mathews, 68-80; Sobel, 3-17, 19-20,48-49, 79-90,86-88; Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The `Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.)
42 James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 137-140.
43 Gregg Kimball and Marie Tyler-McGraw, In Bondage and Freedom (Richmond, VA: Valentine Museum, 1988), 35-44. See also Charles V. Hamilton, The Black Preacher in America (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1972) and David E. Swift, Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.)
44 Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Random House, 1981), 120.
45 Michael Wayne, "The Black Population of Canada West on the Eve of the American Civil War: A Reassessment Based on the MS Census of 1861." Historie Sociale/Social History 28/56 (November 1995): 465-481.
46 Svend E. Holsoe and Bernard L. Herman, A Land and Life Remembered: Americo-Liberian Folk Architecture (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988). 3-5.
47 Herbert Aptheker, ed., "One Continual Cry": David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), 121.
48 Aptheker, 123.
49 John Saillant, ed., "Circular Addressed to the Colored Brethren and Friends in America: An Unpublished Essay by Lott Cary, Sent from Liberia to Virginia, 1827," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 104/4 (Autumn 1996), 495-496.
50 Randolph Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
51 Benjamin Lundy, The War in Texas: A Review of Facts and Circumstances Showing that this Contest is a Crusade . . . to Re-establish, Extend, and Perpetuate the System of Slavery and the Slave Trade (Philadelphia, 1837), in Randolph Campbell, An Empire for Slavery.
52 Clarksville (TX) Northern Standard, Dec. 25, 1852, in Campbell, Empire, 180.
53 Campbell, Empire, 180-181.
54 For the travel journal of an abolitionist who went to Mexico, Canada, and Haiti seeking the best accommodations for free blacks, see Benjamin Earle, ed., Life, Travels and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (New York: reprint ed. Arno Press, 1969).
55 Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life
and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself
(New York, 1849) in Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin on Ole Massa (New
York: Harper Books, 1969), 141. See also Kenneth Mulroy, Freedom
on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila,
and Texas (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1993) and
Ronnie C. Tyler, "Fugitive Slaves in Mexico," Journal of Negro History
57 (1972): 1-12.
56 Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas; or, a Saddletrip on the Southwestern Frontier (New York, 1857) in Campbell, Empire, 64.
57 Earle, Life of Lundy, 240.
58 Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
59 Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); Peter C. Ripley, et al, eds. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Vol. 2, Canada (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
60 Harding, There is a River, 34-35; Thomas J. Davis, "The New York Slave Conspiracy of 1741 as Black Protest," Journal of Negro History 56 (January 1971).
61 Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). Henry Irving Tragle, ed. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831. (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1971) is the best collection of documents concerning the Nat Turner insurrection.
62 Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of Slave Revolt and its Impact on American Abolition, Law and Diplomacy, pp. 22-26, 29-31, 80-95, 132-33, 188-194.
63 See Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad reprint ed. 1996 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961), for a discussion of the logical inconsistencies in those parts of the legend which speak of hundreds of fugitives using the same trails and hiding places again and again.
64 Under the title Studies in African American History and Culture , Garland Publishing Company is issuing a series of books which are compilations of slave runaway advertisements. See previous citations on these useful works. See also David Blight,ed., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Bedford Books for St. Martin's Press, 1993).
65 For overviews of black and white women's abolitionist activity, see "The Woman Question," in Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 39-77 and "Freedom's Yoke: Gender Conventions Among Free Blacks," in James O. Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 98-120. See also Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1989) and Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists, A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).
66 James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 88-98; Kraditor, Means and Ends, 7, 52, 142-43, 180-81, 145.
67 Ripley, Witness for Freedom, 11-17. Frederick Douglass was the most famous of the antebellum black newspaper editors, but he was far from the only one. Black newspapers included the Colored American, Freedom's Journal, the North Star, Frederick Douglass's Paper and the Weekly Advocate.
68 History of Black Americans, 481.
69 Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins; From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Stewart, 155-159; Jonathan Katz, Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana, Pennsylvania, Sept. 11, 1851 (New York: Thomas Cromwell, 1974).
70 History of Black Americans, 482.
71 White abolitionist families in Rochester reportedly included the Posts, Blosses, and Porters. History of Black Americans, 485. See Carol M. Hunter, To Set the Captives Free: Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen and the Struggle for Freedom in Central New York, 1835-1872. (New York: Garland, 1993).
72 Charles Emery Stevens, Anthony Burns: A History (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856), 163-164.
73 James Sidbury, "Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and Resistance to Slavery, 1790-1800," Journal of Southern History 63/3 (August 1997): 531-552; Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 18000 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 104-107.
74 Priscilla Thompson, "Harriet Tubman, Thomas Garrett, and the Underground Railroad," Delaware History 22 (Sept.1986): 1-21.
75 History of Black Americans, 487. Accounts of court cases, such as Helen Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning Slavery (1927) often give details of escape attempts.
76 Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 343.
77 Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South 1831-1861 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 68, 74.
78 Sojourner Truth is often paired with Tubman, but her life was both more complex and was less tied to the Underground Railroad. See Nell Irvin Painter. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996). Truth was an active abolitionist, but her work was only marginally connected to the Underground Railroad. The value of this excellent biography for the Underground Railroad study lies in the thoughtful manner in which Painter explores Truth as a product of the needs and projections of different audiences over generations. This includes her own self-fashioning for her own persuasive purposes in the mid-nineteenth century.
79 See Lowell H. Harrison, The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978) for a list of slave memoirs with Kentucky origins and for biographies of antislavery Kentuckians; also see Steven Weisenburger, (forthcoming). Harrison, 86, for estimate of escapes.
80 Foner, History of Black America, 480.
81 Stuart Seely Sprague, His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker (New York: W.W.Norton, 1996); Randolph Paul Runyon, Delia Webster and the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996).
82 Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990).
83 Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
84 Berlin, Blight, McPherson, Quarles.
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