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  THE
  UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
  FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM

[Illustration: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD:

LEVI COFFIN RECEIVING A COMPANY OF FUGITIVES IN THE OUTSKIRTS OF
CINCINNATI, OHIO.

(From a painting by C. T. Webber, Cincinnati, Ohio.)]




  THE
  UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
  FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM

  A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY

  Wilbur H. Siebert

  _With an Introduction by_
  Albert Bushnell Hart


  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
  Mineola, New York




_Bibliographical Note_

This Dover edition, first published in 2006, is an unabridged
republication of _The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom_,
originally published by The Macmillan Company, New York and London,
in 1898. The original fold-out map facing page 113 has now been set
into the book on three separate pages in the same location.

_International Standard Book Number: 0-486-45039-2_

Manufactured in the United States of America Dover Publications,
Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N. Y. 11501




To My Wife




INTRODUCTION

BY ALBERT BUSHNELL HART


Of all the questions which have interested and divided the people
of the United States, none since the foundation of the Federal
Union has been so important, so far-reaching, and so long contested
as slavery. During the first half of the nineteenth century the
other great national questions were nearly all economic--taxation,
currency, banks, transportation, lands,--and they had a strong
material basis, a flavor of self-interest; but though slavery had
also an economic side, the reasons for the onslaught upon it were
chiefly moral. The first objection brought by the slave-power
against the anti-slavery propaganda was the cry of the sacredness
of vested and property rights against attack by sentimentalists;
but what dignified the whole contest was the very fact that the
sentiment for human rights was at the bottom of it, and that the
abolitionists felt a moral responsibility even though property
owners suffered. The slavery question, which in origin was
sectional, became national as the moral issues grew clearer; and
finally loomed up as the dominant question through the determination
of both sides to use the power and prestige of the national
government. From the moral agitation came also the personal element
in the struggle, the development of strong characters, like Calhoun,
Toombs, Stephens and Jefferson Davis on one side; like Lundy,
Lovejoy, Garrison, Giddings, Sumner, Chase, John Brown and Lincoln
on the other.

Among the many weak spots in the system of slavery none gave such
opportunities to Northern abolitionists as the locomotive powers
of the slaves; a "thing" which could hear its owner talking about
freedom, a "thing" which could steer itself Northward and avoid
the "patterollers," was a thing of impaired value as a machine,
however intelligent as a human being. From earliest colonial times
fugitive slaves helped to make slavery inconvenient and expensive.
So long as slavery was general, every slaveholder in every colony
was a member of an automatic association for stopping and returning
fugitives; but, from the Revolution on, the fugitives performed the
important function of keeping continually before the people of the
states in which slavery had ceased, the fact that it continued in
other parts