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.

As all the major media outlets have not reported this story, I thought I would mention it here. On Tuesday (July 29, 2008) the House of Representatives approved a resolution that apologized for slavery. This resolution (H. Res. 194) notes that “the system of slavery and the visceral racism against persons of African descent upon which it depended became entrenched in the Nation’s social fabric.” The Government Printing Office has the full text available as a pdf. You can also find it by searching the Library of Congress website. For more, see this Associated Press report.

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.

Though the use of spirituals as coded ‘road maps’ for the Underground Railroad is contentious, it can be fruitful to use these ‘documents’ in the classroom as a key to understanding how songs were important in the lives of slaves.

One site that examines the different purposes and meanings of these historical records is Sweet Chariot: The Story of the Spirituals.

The site explores the history of spirituals, reincarnations of these songs in the 20th century Civil Rights movement and includes sound files of the many spirituals.

The ‘Freedom & Equality’ section highlights the use of spirituals as: expressions of protest, sources of inspiration and motivation… both of which are useful in thinking about the psychological aspects of slaves deciding to take the risk of pursuing their own freedom.

Ella Forbes, former professor of African American studies at Temple University and author of “But We Have No Country: The 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania Resistance,” has written an article on the use of violence at the Christiana Resistance. Forbes argues that the use of violence at Christiana is “…an indication of the alienation blacks felt in a nation which showed its hostility so openly towards them, a nation unwilling to protect them from white violence, a nation whose very laws promoted their disenfranchisement.” Forbes’ article in the Journal of Negro History makes its point clearly, and illustrates in great detail social and political alienation experienced by both enslaved and freed African Americans living in the antebellum United States. The article is worth reading for its insight alone, though the article presents an important teaching moment: Use and analysis source documents and materials. Forbes cites heavily William Parker’s narrative in support of her argument. But there is question as to the authorship of the narrative, as this website from Millersville University explains. Parker, the only individual involved in the Christiana Resistance to have published an account, received help in compiling his memoir from an editor identified by only the initials “E. K.” Since it is not known who this individual was, it is difficult to gauge the editor’s mark on the work. Is Parker’s narrative a reliable, factual work or did it suffer alteration by “E.K.” for his own propagandistic purposes? Provides a great springboard for discussion about primary source materials, bias, and analysis of Forbes’ article. The full bibliographic citation for Forbes’ article is below.

Bibliographic Citation: Forbes, Ella. “‘By My Own Right Arm’: Redemptive Violence and the 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania Resistance.” Journal of Negro History 83, no. 3 (1998): 159-167.

History Now, an online journal of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, provides essays studying a variety of issues and events throughout history. Abolition of slavery is one among them. In the September 2005 issue of History Now, abolition is the topic. Robert Abzug, a professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin writes about the religious inspirations for abolition both in America and Britain. Abzug discusses how the republican goals and ideals of the American Revolution melded with the values of American Protestantism. He writes of the effort to address slavery as a spiritual issue, and cites abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and the very interesting case of Presbyterian minister George Bourne. This issue of History Now contains a number of other interesting articles on the topic of abolition. Worth reading.