The House Divided Project contains many depictions of Underground Railroad related violence, many taken from William Still’s The Underground Railroad. Depictions of events such as this one of the Christiana Riot are surprisingly graphic despite being hand drawn engravings.

Other pictures with titles like “Desperate Conflict in a Barn” and “Fight in the Bay” are equally as graphic yet very interesting to study. The story of the Underground Railroad had many important cases of violent conflict, and pictures such as these are useful for understanding those events. All pictures related to the Underground Railroad can be found on the image tab of the Underground Railroad page.

Like we are doing today, 150 years ago Americans across the country were analyzing the fallout of the most recent elections. The 1858 midterm elections were of considerable importance for the Civil War Era, and the results of the election made great strides to divide the nation politically. As this New York Times article from 1858 indicates, the victory of Stephen A. Douglas over Abraham Lincoln in Illinois made him “more powerful at Washington than the President with all his patronage.” Today we have the leading figures in the two major parties advocating Americans to come together, but 150 years ago the parties themselves were decisively split. The original article, as well as its transcript, is available on the House Divided website.

I recently read an article in Military History by Martin Dugard entitled “The Warm-up War”. In the article, the author shows how the Mexican War was the first significant military experience for many West Point educated officers that would later serve in the Civil War. Notable names such as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and Jefferson Davis are all mentioned.  These connections were an intricate part of the story of the Civil War, and as it nears completion, the House Divided project will provide users with an unprecedented ability to navigate between these connections. The web that ties many of these men goes through many years and multiple wars and is important to the greater history of the period. The article can be located in the September/October 2008 edition of Military History.

The New York Times reports that some noted scholars such such as Milton Sernett and Kate Larson have questions about the authenticity of a moving quotation from Harriet Tubman used by Hillary Clinton in her recent speech to the Democratic National Convention.

“If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”

It turns out that although many authors and even the Harriet Tubman House in Auburn, NY have used this passage from Tubman, both Sernett and Larson, leading Tubman scholars, doubt its veracity and trace its origins to a twentieth-century children’s book.  A spokesman for Senator Clinton says that from now on she will only use the passage in paraphrase.

While I already mentioned Teaching the Journal of American History in another post, I want to highlight their recent update. Lacy Ford’s article from the June 2008 issue (Reconfiguring the Old South: ‘Solving’ the Problems of Slavery, 1787-1838) is now available for free.  The author provides six interesting exercises that you could use in class. Each exercise has several questions, related primary sources, and suggestions for further reading. Even if you do not use the article, be sure to check out the primary sources that are available. This site also provides free access to several other articles from the Journal of American History, including one on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the Scopes Trial.

No activist of the Underground Railroad served longer or with more distinction than Levi Coffin. Coffin was raised in the Quaker enclave in Guilford County North Carolina, where in 1819-1820 he helped to organized the only documentable UGRR operation beyond the upper South. From then until about 1850, Quakers with the assistance of local African Americans, including at least one slave “Hamilton’s Saul” — who chose to remain enslaved in order to help others to freedom — dispatched fugitives overland with Quaker emigrants to Indiana. Coffin himself moved to Indiana in the 1820s, where he organized another efficient underground organization, which funneled “passengers” north toward Detroit. In the 1840s, Coffin moved again, to Ohio, where he built an effective UGRR in Cincinnati. In all, Coffin, who at the end of his life chronicled his is experiences in a book, his “Reminiscences”, estimated that he had assisted as many as 1,000 escaped slaves to freedom.

Another major Underground figure is David Ruggles, who was born free in Connecticut, and in the 1830s created the UGRR in New York City. Ruggles was a remarkably bold and confrontational man, who repeatedly challenged the authorities in a city where collaboration among slave hunters, police and the courts was tragically rife. Indeed, New York then was far from progressive in its politics, which generally were aligned with the slave-holding South, since the city’s economy depended significantly on Southern trade. The city was a slave hunter’s paradise, where recaptures were tragically common. Ruggles was himself targeted by slave hunters on at least one occasion, and barely escaped. He also received in his home the fugitive Frederick Bailey, whom he sheltered and dispatched to safety in New Bedford, MA: There Bailey changed his name and became the man we know as Frederick Douglass.

George de Baptiste, like Ruggles, embodied the bold personality and deft political skills that characterized many AFRICAN-American leaders of the UGRR. Born free in Virginia, trained as a valet and barber, he was also a successful member of the black middle class of his time. He eventually settled in Madison, IN, where in the 1840s he helped organize an all black UGRR operation which reached into Kentucky, and assisted fugitives northward until it was penetrated and destroyed by pro-slavery agents in the late 1840s. de Baptiste escaped to Detroit, where he helped create the mosty efficient UGRR operation west of the Appalachians.

The three characters I would teach – given very limited time – would be, of course, Harriet Tubman, William Still, and Thomas Garrett. These three people were incredible forces on the UGRR as individuals and as accomplices and colleagues. Harriet Tubman tapped into Thomas Garrett’s and William Still’s extensive and sophisticated UGRR network that encompassed not only Garrett’s home state of Delaware, but Tubman’s Maryland stomping ground, as well as Virginia and North Carolina. Garrett is credited with aiding in the escape of approximately 2700 fugitives over a forty year period to the Civil War. Tubman, 70 or so friends and family from the Eastern Shore of Maryland between 1850 and 1860; and William Still, as Secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee during the 1850s, assisted at least 2000 runaways. Their powerful networks of agents, conductors, and station masters extended all the way from slave territory to Pennsylvania, New York, New England and Canada. There are so many personal stories you can share with your students that involve these three historical figures and the people they helped and interacted with. They also represent a core of an important theme of the UGRR movement – biracial cooperation and mutual support. So discover Thomas Garrett, a Wilmington, DE Quaker, William Still, a free born African American business man and notoriously underrated UGRR in Philadelphia, and of course, Harriet Tubman, formerly enslaved woman whose love of her family and friends moved her to conduct dangerous missions back into slave territory to bring away her loved ones, and who used her great intelligence and skills to perfect and utilize this UGRR network to her great advantage.

Explorepahistory.com is a great resource for teachers of Pennsylvania, BUT it is also useful to ALL scholars, historians, teachers and students of the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.

The website provides images and explanations of every historical marker in Pennsylvania including The Christiana Riot, William Still, Frederick Douglass and John Brown. There are also lesson plans focused on the use of primary documents. For teachers who wish to address the myths associated with the Underground Railroad and topics that are often overlooked, this site is very useful.

There is a high school lesson entitled: “There Were Many Paths to Freedom.” In this lesson plan, students are challenged to rethink misconceptions and stereotypes of the Underground Railroad. Then students read original documents related to the varied experiences of runaways, including William and Ellen Craft, Anthony Burns, and Henry “Box” Brown. The third part of the lesson allows students to role-play a meeting of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, which conducted interviews of fugitive slaves who reached Philadelphia and decided how they would assist them.

There is also another lesson entitled “How Far to Freedom?” where students create a “Big Book on the Life of William Parker” after reading excerpts of his narrative. Overall, this website provides teachers and students a tremendous amount of primary documents and interactive activities that reveal significant runaways and vigilant activists of the Underground Railroad.

Was the Civil War the result of conflict between small militant anti-slavery and pro-slavery groups? The questions is still debated today. To allow your class to join in on the debate, History Now provides a lesson plan for high school level students exploring Militancy in the Abolition Movement. The lesson provides primary source documents to which students respond. A well chosen bank of questions is included. Certainly worth a look!

As a NEH participant in the URR workshop, I want to recognize John Brown’s link to Iowa by pointing out that Brown, on his way east to prepare for Harper’s Ferry, stopped among the Quaker community in Iowa near Springdale. A couple of Quakers from that community, “abandoning their pacifist principals to fight with Brown,” to paraphrase one source, accompanied him and helped to execute the violence at Harper’s Ferry.

Springdale is within eyesight today of Interstate 80, about 55 miles west of the I-80 bridge over the Mississippi River. That Quaker community was the same later to influence the upbringing of Herbert Hoover, born in West Branch, about 6 miles to the west of Springdale. Herbert Hoover Historic Site explains some of Hoover’s Quaker influences, and the site features a meetinghouse from the area used by the Friends. The national park is easily accessible, a little more than a quarter mile from the exit ramp of the interstate, and features Hoover’s birth home, a presidential library, and gravesites.