{"id":225,"date":"2018-09-25T22:27:41","date_gmt":"2018-09-25T22:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/?p=225"},"modified":"2023-08-05T18:11:49","modified_gmt":"2023-08-05T18:11:49","slug":"gateway-to-freedom-the-hidden-history-of-the-underground-railroad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/gateway-to-freedom-the-hidden-history-of-the-underground-railroad\/","title":{"rendered":"Eric Foner- Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sydney

Sydney Howard Gay, courtesy of Columbia University Libraries<\/p><\/div>\n

The Record of Fugitives, a journal kept by abolitionist newspaperman\u00a0Sydney Howard Gay<\/a>, was a secret record detailing the escapes of over 200 enslaved people who passed through New York City during their\u00a0flight\u00a0to freedom. [1]\u00a0This remarkable primary source<\/a> and the fascinating stories it contains remained largely unknown and unexamined by historians until Eric Foner finally analyzed the document in detail for\u00a0Gateway to Freedom\u00a0<\/i>(2015), his recent capstone study of the Underground Railroad.\u00a0 Gay’s journal reveals a number of insights, including important ones about the frequency of group escapes.\u00a0\u00a0Foner writes that \u201cwhile the popular image of the Underground Railroad tends to focus more on lone fugitives making their way North on foot, in fact more slaves who passed through New York in the mid-1850s escaped in groups than on their own.\u201d [2]<\/p>\n

Eric Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author of Pulitzer Prize-winning\u00a0The<\/i>\u00a0Fiery Trial<\/i>, focuses on the Underground Railroad in New York City in the 1840s and 1850s but his work has national implications. In particular, the Record of Fugitives includes valuable information about slave stampedes that traveled through New York.\u00a0 In Gateway to Freedom <\/i>(2015),<\/i>\u00a0Foner uses the word \u201cstampede\u201d twice in reference to group escapes. In 1857, he writes, \u201ca newspaper reported a \u2018general stampede,\u2019 (as the press called group escapes) from Dover, the state capital, \u2018by the underground railroad.\u2019\u201d [3] Here, Foner is explicitly describing the term \u201cstampede\u201d as used by the antebellum press. He also employs the term later on his own when describing a number of stampedes out of Chestertown, Maryland, which was \u201cparticularly vulnerable to mass escapes.\u201d [4]<\/a> Within only two months in 1855, at least three groups of seven or more individuals are reported by the local newspaper to have successfully escaped from Chestertown. Foner writes that \u201cNot surprisingly, these \u2018stampedes\u2019 alarmed Chestertown slaveowners,\u201d asserting a direct connection between mass escapes and slaveholders\u2019 anxiety over the fugitive slave crisis, an anxiety heavily reinforced by the press. [5]<\/p>\n

Throughout the book, there are at least twelve cases of group escape depicted for the 1840s and 1850s. For example, Foner writes of the well-known 1848 attempted escape of 76 individuals on the schooner Pearl<\/i>. This escape from Washington, DC was \u201cparticularly alarming to slaveholders\u201d in the enormous number of escapees and the level of planning required to execute the escape. [7] Other examples of stampedes, such as the 35 enslaved people who fled from a single county in Maryland on a single day in 1850, are used to emphasize the anxiety that slaveholders felt about stampedes. [8]<\/p>\n

However, Foner does spend some time analyzing certain group escapes themselves, and makes some valuable claims for this project. For example, he writes that\u00a0\u201dwhen slaves escaped in groups, these frequently included relatives\u2014husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, even, as in the case of eleven women or married couples and one man in Gay\u2019s records, small children.\u201d [9]\u00a0Additionally, Foner\u2019s analysis of how group escapes\u00a0occurred\u00a0reveals the instrumental role that the Underground Railroad and its agents played in stampedes. Every group escape documented by Foner involved at least one antislavery agent who housed, fed, or directed the group to safety.<\/p>\n

\"Tubman\"

Harriet Tubman, courtesy of the National Women’s History Museum<\/p><\/div>\n

Harriet Tubman<\/a> directed one of the most dramatic examples of such group escapes pulled from the Record of Fugitives.\u00a0 In 1856, Tubman and four escapees fled from the Eastern Shore of Maryland by foot. After being forced to hide from the slaveholders in a \u201cpotato hole\u201d for a week, Tubman tapped into the Underground Railroad network to help get the four enslaved men to safety in Wilmington, Delaware. Then, with the help of vigilance committee operative William Still, the group took a train from Philadelphia to New York, where they were placed under the protection of Gay. From there the slaves were sent to Syracuse and then Canada. [10] Without the Underground Railroad and its many known and unknown agents willing to take the enormous risk of traveling with large groups of fugitives, slave stampedes would never have been possible.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom, The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad<\/em> (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), 10.<\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0Foner, 122.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0Foner, 229-230.<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0Foner, 156.<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0Foner, 206.<\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0Foner, 206.<\/p>\n

[7]\u00a0Foner, 205.<\/p>\n

[8]\u00a0Foner, 116.<\/p>\n

[9]\u00a0Foner, 200.<\/p>\n

[10]\u00a0Foner, 191-192.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Record of Fugitives, a journal kept by abolitionist newspaperman\u00a0Sydney Howard Gay, was a secret record detailing the escapes of over 200 enslaved people who passed through New York City during their\u00a0flight\u00a0to freedom. [1]\u00a0This remarkable primary source and the fascinating stories it contains remained largely unknown and unexamined by historians until Eric Foner finally analyzed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21280,6109],"tags":[6109],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scholarship","category-secondary-sources","tag-secondary-sources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2668,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions\/2668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/stampedes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}