Working on the (Underground) Railroad

How do you run an illicit system of transporting those stripped of their human rights and dignity through hostile terrain? The Underground Railroad, which helped the self-emancipated escape from slavery in the years before the Civil War, was run like a business. “Railroad” was metaphorical, but abolitionists also consciously copied the model of the actual interstate transportation system. As historian Andrew Diemer writes, from the 1830s, as the actual railroad burgeoned across the United States, anti-slavery forces “were already adapting the terminology of railroads to describe their efforts to aid fugitives from slavery.”

Of course, instead of profits on, say, so many hogsheads of this or that commodity, this “railroad” produced freedom, the antithesis of property in human bodies.

Diemer explores the life of one of the few people who actually worked, as opposed to volunteered, for the Underground Railroad. William Still (1821–1902), born a free Black man, was hired by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society as clerk in the fall of 1847.

“Clerk” doesn’t mean today what it did then. Diemer reminds us that these positions were central to the new, “urbanizing, capitalist economy” of the antebellum period.

“To a significant extent [clerks] helped make [the American economy] the dynamic force that it became,” he writes. And for Still, his clerkship helped secure his “status as a middle-class man.” He worked for the “UGRR” until 1860, meaning what he did contravened federal law, thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made the “federal government into an effective ally of southern capitalists.”

“As clerk at the Anti-Slavery Society of Pennsylvania and as chair of the Acting Committee of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee,” Diemer writes, Still “devoted a significant amount of his working hours, perhaps the lion’s share, to the aid of fugitive slaves.” It was his job “to move people as quickly and efficiently as possible, and to keep records of what it took to make that happen. Secrecy was a plus, and sometimes it was essential, but in all cases speed was the key.”

Slave-catching, the “brutal tip of a vast economy of slavery,” needed to be outrun and/or countered as quickly as possible. The “increasingly sophisticated business of slave-catching” also had networks across the northern states—including Black informers—and used the telegraph and transportation system (railroads, ships) as skillfully as the abolitionists did. Northern policemen such as Philadelphia constable George Alberti, who actually lived not far from Still, profited by moonlighting as a kidnapper for the plantation economy.

Avoiding the slave-catcher threat, practical abolitionists like Still kept the books, managed the money, and worked to make the escape to Canada more efficient. Inflation has made the monetary amounts seem absurdly small—less than $10 to get a dozen fugitives from Philadelphia to Elmira, New York, for instance, in July 1856—but these cash outlays were literally a matter of life and death, or the death-in-life of slavery. Still marked it all in his ledgers. Frugality and transparency were the order of the day—Still’s bosses were almost all no-nonsense Philadelphia businessmen. Diemer notes that money was always scarce and that “a significant portion of the funds came from overseas donors”: the Friends of England and Scotland, for instance, made the largest contribution of 1854: $77.

Information was another vital part of the “business of the road.” The Vigilance Committee subscribed to papers including the Baltimore Sun and Richmond Dispatch, which carried advertisements from slavers looking for runaways. These could be previews of whom to expect to arrive in Philadelphia. Information could also come from unexpected sources: when slavers sought a Philadelphia warrant to make arrests in Lancaster County, the son of the judge who issued the warrant alerted Still, who then warned the targets. And not all lawmen were like Alberti: a constable Southerners mistakenly wired about six fugitives alerted Still instead.

“The UGRR—No road in the world is more ably managed than this,” declared Douglass’s Monthly in 1859, “and though the dividend declared consists in nothing more than the internal satisfaction of one having done his duty and trampled on a wicked law, yet the stock is ever at a premium.”

In 1872, William Still’s The Underground Railroad became one of the first major histories of the enterprise. He used his extensive records to help tell the tale of those who escaped bondage, downplaying his own vital role in favor of the bravery of those who took that most difficult road, “narrating the hardships, hair-breadth escapes and death struggles of the slaves in their efforts for freedom.”

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