The National Park Service presents a website explaining the history of the Underground Railroad and listing sites throughout the United States, in twenty-one states. The site gives brief overviews of topics in the history of American slavery. For each site listed, a brief overview is given. Visiting information is given for sites open to the public.

Aboard the Underground Railroad

This article published by the New York Times gives a glimpse of the tension of the raid from the perspective of those seeking to end it. The document is part of a wider collection of Harper’s Ferry material on A House Divided.

The Pennsylvania Historical Society, much more than just compiling the history of the state and collecting artifacts, provides freely lesson plans on the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, abolition in a more general context, and the experience of the free black community in Philadelphia. The seven lessons are for Middle to High School age students. Glossary, primary source material, and even relevant legal cases are included with the lesson plans. Discussion questions are also included. A worthwhile resource.

Abolition and the Underground Railroad from the Pennsylvania Historical Society

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a classic story about the adventures of a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River, who helps the slave Jim escape. Published in 1884, the book portrays how life was in antebellum South. The novel is known as one of the first novels to take dialect into account. A free audio version of the book can be found online. As a supplement to a lesson about fugitive slaves, excerpts from the book can be played to give the students a fantastic story with accurate dialect.

A House Divided has a great clip on the Video Channel of Kate Clifford Larson and her book Bound for the Promised Land.  In this clip, Larson explains one of the many myths that surrounds the story of Harriet Tubman.

I want to highlight an advertisement for William Still’s Underground Railroad that is available on the Ohio Historical Society website. Published in Cleveland Gazette on November 11, 1883, the ad claims that Still’s book “[was] one which must prove interesting and profitable to every reader.” If students read excerpts from Still’s book, some might want to see how the publisher tried to sell it in the 1880s. You can also get the full text of the Underground Railroad from Their Own Words.

PBS did a four part series on slavery in America with supplemental narratives and teacher’s guides online.  One of the parts is Judgement Day focusing on 1831-1865.  The segment of the narrative about the Underground Railroad mentions several people that can be found on House Divided.

Abolition in the United States, like in Great Britain, had religious inspirations. Some of the first and most outspoken abolitionists were members of the religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. Benjamin Lay addressed the Yearly meeting of Quakers on the subject of abolishing slavery as early as 1738. Quakers continued their support for abolition throughout the nineteenth century, an example found prominently in Thomas Garrett, a Quaker merchant who helped countless escaped slaves to freedom as a “stationmaster” on the Underground Railroad. In Great Britain, evangelical Anglicans John Newton, Thomas Clarkson among others pressured Parliament for the abandonment of the slave trade. Abolitionism on both sides of the Atlantic carried a religious dimension that should not be ignored in any study of the movement.

In his blog, “Underground Railroad: Myth & Reality,” Fergus Bordewich explores the religious roots of the antislavery movement. Bordewich points to the Great Awakening as a main catalyst for growth of antislavery sentiment.

The National Humanities Center presents an essay on the topic of religion and antislavery movements as well. The essay by Bertram Wyatt-Brown goes into greater detail than Bordewich’s blog post, includes a classroom discussion guide, and a brief bibliography. Wyatt-Brown writes with a teacher audience in mind. The essay serves as much to introduce and explore the connection between abolition and religion as to provoke discussion and provide teacher resources. Certainly a worthwhile resource.

Wyatt-Brown’s essay is part of a larger TeacherServe webpage provided by the National Humanities Center. Additional essays on religion in America are provided, along with essays and materials exploring the environment in American history, and teaching African American history.

Author Fergus Bordewich’s “Bound for Canaan” traces the abolition movement from 1790 to the eve of the Civil War, primarily through the Underground Railroad. Bordewich writes that the Underground Railroad “…occupies a romantic place in the American imagination that is shared by only a few episodes in the nation’s history: the Lewis and Clark expedition, for instance, the California Gold Rush, the Indian wars, and a handful of others.” (Bound for Canaan, 3) And perhaps because of its position in the American consciousness, the memory of the Underground Railroad, like so many other prominent historical events, is checkered with truths and untruths. Was the Underground Railroad a consistently clandestine operation? Are clever codes and hiding places all there is to amaze the modern student of the Underground Railroad? Indeed, secrecy, codes, and hiding places all had their part in the Underground Railroad, but a concentration on these has served to give birth to myths clouding the truth of the movement.

Bordewich addresses the issues of myth and reality in the Underground Railroad in “Bound for Canaan,” but for a more succinct discussion of the issue, one can turn to the author’s blog. A post from July of 2005 examines the truth of the Underground Railroad in accessible, informative prose, and serves as a fine introduction and springboard for further investigation of the issue. Certainly worth reading.

The Underground Railroad: Myth & Reality

If your class is going to study the Underground Railroad, one website you should check out is Documenting the American South (DocSouth). The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has put together a great collection of primary sources, including slave narratives published before 1920. To see a list of what they have available, go here. Besides the full text of books, DocSouth has great supplementary material for almost every title. On Frederick Douglass, for example, the site provides a short biography and related primary sources. While students may be familiar with Douglass or Harriet Tubman, they can find on DocSouth many new interesting stories from fugitive slaves like Solomon Northup and William Wells Brown.