Washington Spradling was remembered as “a shrewd Negro” and the key local leader by former fugitive slaves in the 1890s. Cunningham, a local black orchestra leader, worked on riverboats and smuggled abolitionist literature into the city by hiding it in his sheet music. Far better documented are the roles played by many leaders of the free black community of Louisville. Of necessity, the Underground Railroad in a slave state was truly underground and few of its white leaders have ever been identified. By the 1850s, local newspapers reported an average of one slave escape per day from Louisville alone. After negotiating a river crossing, fugitive slaves could then follow several routes leading northward with the assistance of free blacks and white friends of the fugitive, many of whom were Quakers. Although clandestine river crossings were possible at or near the numerous ferries and small settlements along the river, by the 1850s, the most important crossing point in the greater Louisville area was located west of the Portland neighborhood-leading from Louisville across the Ohio River to New Albany, Indiana. With the largest free black community in Kentucky and with smaller free black settlements in southern Indiana, fugitive slaves could find both refuge from slave-catchers and help in crossing the river. As slave population and cotton cultivation shifted steadily to the southwest after 1815, escape from Kentucky became more common and escape through Kentucky became the best route available to fugitive slaves from Tennessee and points south.įor the same reasons, Louisville became one of the busiest fugitive slave “stations” and crossing points in the country. Given the geography of American slavery, Kentucky became central to the Underground Railroad as the key border state in the trans-Appalachian west,-and the Ohio River became a veritable “River Jordan” for black freedom seekers. Resistance and the Underground Railroad: Side 2 For these reasons, the Underground Railroad stands, even today, as one of the most powerful and sustained multiracial human rights movements in American and world history-and the courage of fugitive slaves stands as a testament to power of the human spirit and the meaning of freedom. Those who received assistance did so from free people of color, sometimes Native Americans and white Americans opposed to slavery who comprised a loosely organized conspiracy of conscience known as the Underground Railroad-with its shadowy hosts of agents, conductors and station-keepers.īecause the 1793 and later 1850 Fugitive Slave Acts criminalized any assistance to fugitive slaves, true “friends of the fugitive” stood not only for freedom but risked their lives and livelihoods for the possibility of multiracial democracy in the United States. Most escaped without any help and depended entirely on their ingenuity and courage. The goal of fugitive slaves was to reach and cross it and, if need be, the border with Canada or Mexico or the Caribbean as well.ĭriven by the hunger for freedom, thousands of enslaved African Americans chose this path-from a trickle in the 1600s to a steady stream of over three thousand per year by the 1850s to a floodtide of hundreds of thousands during the Civil War. The goal of slaveholders and slave-catchers was to defend that border. Consequently, fleeing slavery, despite its obvious dangers and the probability of recapture, was the best alternative available to those African Americans determined to be free.Īfter the American Revolution, slavery ended in the northern states but became even more deeply entrenched in the south, thus creating a border within the United States, with slavery legal on one side and illegal on the other. Being outnumbered by two-to-one even in the slave states, revolt was ultimately suicidal. Alternatively, enslaved African Americans might seize freedom through revolt or flight. They might be set free by their owners, or might be emancipated by governmental action, neither of which was likely. Enslaved African Americans could not free themselves under American law.
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