Neither Underground nor a Railroad
/by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director
This is unfair. Why? I’m going to talk about the subject of an event that is already sold out, with a substantial waitlist, and if I play my cards right, you’ll want to attend even more desperately. Never fear, dear reader. We are concocting a plan to make sure everyone can experience the wonderful Professor Tim Walker and the book that he edited with nine other authors, Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad.
But since this is my blog, I’m going to tell you about how this book changed MY life and encourage you to read it and think about those moments in your own life when some new information transformed your perception of the world.
Illustrations like this 1893 painting, entitled The Underground Railroad by Charles I. Webber, helped to establish the image of the overland flight to freedom in the American consciousness. Courtesy of Cincinnati Art Museum.
When I was a girl living without a television in the wilderness of northern British Columbia, my reading material consisted of four general subjects: Horses and the Pioneer Girls who loved them, Christian missionaries and the Very Bad Time they generally seemed to be having, post WWI high British fantasy, à la Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and lastly, a potpourri of history books so old that they escaped the censorious gaze of my parents.
An aside: My mother popped over a few days ago and laughed when I read her the above paragraph. “I poured over the Mennonite book catalog,” she said. We were not Mennonites, but close enough that she felt confident in the appropriateness of their mail-order selections.
Though Mennonite mail-order catalogues no longer arrive at my door, this slim volume made the trip down from Canada and is still on my bookshelf.
I will credit, not so much the Mennonite texts, but the crusty library rejects with my current profession, as among them I found masterpieces on subjects from early New England to Ancient India, and several biographical volumes written by or about the trials endured by enslaved people fleeing to freedom. Of these last works, I recall a well-thumbed volume of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, and the U.G.R.R embossed on the green cover of William Still’s The Underground Railroad: A Record, both over a century old by the time they made their way to me. Of course, I did not then grasp the full horror of what these books described, but I read these volumes voraciously, imagining the hounds baying in the woods behind me, following the gleam of a hopeful star.
William Still’s The Underground Railroad: A Record was published in 1872 and recorded both overland flight and maritime paths to freedom. This volume is from the Smithsonian.
If you had sat me down just five months ago and asked me to describe the Underground Railroad, I would have told you about enslaved people in the Deep South finding ways to escape overland to freedom in Canada with the help of a network of allies. And if you pressed me to explain why Newbury(port) could have been involved with the Underground Railroad, I may have theorized that people were being brought up via New York state maybe? Connecticut? in wagons through Massachusetts to Maine into Canada? This is not without precedent, as I recall my great-aunt Mary Poore telling me about how Richard Plummer would pick people up in his wagon at the Parker River and hide them amongst sacks of grain, en route to Amesbury and, I assumed, another series of wagon rides to Quebec. I also may have (and this is embarrassing), equated the tunnels that run under Newburyport with some form of escape network. The Underground Railroad is, after all, underground, right?
It's not underground. The tunnels under Newburyport were for drainage, storage, and… I’m sure there were plenty of merchants who were not above avoiding customs agents. But…I am going to plant a deeply unpopular flag here and say that the wealthy merchants who owned the big houses in Newburyport were not designing their houses around an intricate network of tunnels for escapees.
It’s not a railroad either, of course, though some, like Frederick Douglass, hopped a train for part of their journey to freedom.
It's boats. It’s ships and dockworkers and ports and cargo and cash and sailors and the sea. You know - all the things we were and are in Newburyport.
“Light dawns on Marblehead,” as my uncle used to say. “Duh,” as my kids still say. But it took a day with Timothy Walker in New Bedford for this all to sink in.
In late September, the New Bedford Whaling Museum hosted a conference around the topic of the Maritime Underground Railroad. I signed up, still not quite getting it.
My childhood Underground Railroad volume spells it out (though I missed it then). “some (were) guided by the North Star alone, penniless, braving the perils of land and sea…occasionally fugitives came in boxes and chests, and not infrequently some were secreted in steamers and vessels, and in some instances journeyed hundreds of miles in skiffs…”
I was not alone in my limited understanding of how people escaped to freedom. In his presentation at the conference, Dr. Walker noted that the Underground Railroad was primarily conceptualized as a “terrestrial event”, and indeed, the primarily overland routes that enslaved people took to find freedom in the north were the focus of scholarship over the last 120 years. Many of us have seen the famous National Geographic visual indicating the most common routes of the Underground Railroad, and to be fair, it does represent some traffic along the Atlantic coast. But most traffic seems to be coming from Alabama and Mississippi and moving through the Midwest to Canada. But – if a voyage from a Southern port could be made up the Atlantic maritime superhighway in a few days, why are we stuck on this idea of people running through the woods and into wagons, jolting for weeks down country roads and hiding under false floors and under trapdoors?
My friend Kate Clifford Larson said it best in a review of Professor Walker’s book for the journal Civil War Book Review. “Travel by water during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was the equivalent of quick motor vehicle traffic along today’s superhighways and local road systems. People and commodities were transported most efficiently by small watercraft, larger bay and ocean-going sailing vessels, and steamships rather than overland via terribly limited, unstable, and rutted roads.”
Another perspective shift – most freedom seekers came not from the Deep South, but from within a few miles from a border with a free state. Harriett Tubman was from Maryland, as was Frederick Douglass, whose journey to freedom took less than 24 hours. “It was very, very difficult to escape long distances overland through the hostile territory which was the slaveholding South prior to the Civil War.” According to Dr. Walker, these escapes “almost never happened.”
This thing that I, a well-educated, generally thoughtful human, had assumed was the typical flight to freedom for enslaved people in the 19th century ALMOST NEVER HAPPENED.
There are a variety of reasons for why the narrative of escape has become identified with overland networks – too many, and too interesting to do them justice here. I encourage you to read the book. But let me just say that as the day progressed, the picture I had formed since those days reading musty narratives in Canada was filled in with communities of Black mariners, networks of vessels that could be found with the help of a friendly dockhand, abolitionists who arranged voyages north, and clever captains who waited to report “stowaways” long enough to allow successful escapes.
This notice in Newburyport’s Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet, published the day after the Declaration of Independence, offers a reward for an enslaved man named Robin and specifically warns that “all masters of vessels & others are hereby forbid harboring or carrying off said Negro, they would avoid the penalty of the law.”
This, for me, is the beauty of history as a practice. New sources arise and light shines onto the past in new ways. I am proud to do this work, and grateful to those who continuously open my eyes and change my perspective. I am now scouring early newspapers and other sources anew, looking for clues that could lead to a new understanding of how Newburyport helped or hindered freedom seekers. I encourage you all to join me as we explore history as an ever-evolving, multi-faceted experience, subject to the limitations of language, fettered by the perspectives of its interpreters, and awaiting the discoveries of the future, devastating and delicious in their turn.
(Note: after this blog was published, we were generously offered a larger venue for the upcoming Professor Tim Walker talk - seats still available here at as of 2/18/23)