The Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early- to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada. The network was assisted by abolitionists and others sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. The enslaved who risked escape and those who aided them are also collectively referred to as the "Underground Railroad". Various other routes led to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, and to islands in the Caribbean that were not part of the slave trade. An earlier escape route running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession, existed from the late 17th century until approximately 1790. However, the network now generally known as the Underground Railroad began in the late 18th century. It ran north and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. One estimate suggests that by 1850, approximately 100,000 enslaved people had escaped to freedom via the network.
Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. The character was seen by many readers as a ground-breaking humanistic portrayal of a slave, one who uses nonresistance and gives his life to protect others who have escaped from slavery. However, the character also came to be seen, especially based on his portrayal in pro-compassion dramatizations, as inexplicably kind to white slaveholders. This led to the use of Uncle Tom – sometimes shortened to just a Tom – as a derogatory epithet for an exceedingly subservient person or house negro, particularly one aware of their own lower-class racial status.
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held that the United States Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for people of black African descent, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, and so the rights and privileges that the Constitution confers upon American citizens could not apply to them. The Supreme Court's decision has been widely denounced, both for its overt racism and for its crucial role in the start of the American Civil War four years later. Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions". Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it the Court's "greatest self-inflicted wound".
Dred Scott was an enslaved African-American man who, along with his wife, Harriet, unsuccessfully sued for freedom for themselves and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, popularly known as the "Dred Scott decision". The case centered on Dred and Harriet Scott and their children, Eliza and Lizzie. The Scotts claimed that they should be granted their freedom because Dred had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years, where slavery was illegal, and laws in those jurisdictions said that slaveholders gave up their rights to slaves if they stayed for an extended period.
The Fugitive Slave Act or Fugitive Slave Law was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern interests in slavery and Northern Free-Soilers.
The Pearl incident was the largest recorded nonviolent escape attempt by enslaved people in United States history. On April 15, 1848, seventy-seven slaves attempted to escape Washington D.C. by sailing away on a schooner called The Pearl. Their plan was to sail south on the Potomac River, then north up the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River to the free state of New Jersey, a distance of nearly 225 miles (362 km). The attempt was organized by both abolitionist whites and free blacks, who expanded the plan to include many more enslaved people. Paul Jennings, a former slave who had served President James Madison, helped plan the escape.
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th century to describe enslaved people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. Such people are also called freedom seekers to avoid implying that the enslaved person had committed a crime and that the slaveholder was the injured party.
Thomas Garrett was an American abolitionist and leader in the Underground Railroad movement before the American Civil War. He helped more than 2,500 African Americans escape slavery.
Anti-Tom literature consists of the 19th century pro-slavery novels and other literary works written in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Also called plantation literature, these writings were generally written by authors from the Southern United States. Books in the genre attempted to show that slavery was beneficial to African Americans and that the evils of slavery as depicted in Stowe's book were overblown and incorrect.
Samuel D. Burris was a member of the Underground Railroad. He had a family, who he moved to Philadelphia for safety and traveled into Maryland and Delaware to guide freedom seekers north along the Underground Railroad to Pennsylvania.
Mary Edmonson (1832–1853) and Emily Edmonson, "two respectable young women of light complexion", were African Americans who became celebrities in the United States abolitionist movement after gaining their freedom from slavery. On April 15, 1848, they were among the 77 slaves who tried to escape from Washington, DC on the schooner The Pearl to sail up the Chesapeake Bay to freedom in New Jersey.
William Cooper Nell was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, publisher, author, and civil servant of Boston, Massachusetts, who worked for the integration of schools and public facilities in the state. Writing for abolitionist newspapers The Liberator and The North Star, he helped publicize the anti-slavery cause. He published the North Star from 1847 to 18xx, moving temporarily to Rochester, New York.
Robert Cooper Grier, was an American jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Roger Brooke Taney was the fifth chief justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864. Although an opponent of slavery, believing it to be an evil practice, Taney believed that it was not the place of the Court or the Federal Government to remedy the issue and that it was the Constitutional right of the states to deal with slavery individually and gradually. Taney infamously delivered the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), ruling that African Americans could not be considered U.S. citizens and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the U.S. territories. Prior to joining the U.S. Supreme Court, Taney served as the U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Andrew Jackson. He was the first Catholic to serve on the Supreme Court.
Levi Woodbury was an American attorney, jurist, and Democratic politician from New Hampshire. During a four-decade career in public office, Woodbury served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, a United States Senator, the ninth governor of New Hampshire, and cabinet member in the Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren administrations. He was promoted as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 1848.
The Ebony Idol is a plantation literature novel by G. M. Flanders, first published in 1860. It is one of several pro-slavery novels written in the Southern United States in response to the 1852 abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Jones v. Van Zandt, 46 U.S. 215 (1847), was a landmark US Supreme Court decision involving the constitutionality of slavery that was a predecessor of Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Supreme Court was then led by Chief Justice Roger Taney, who owned slaves and wrote the Dred Scott decision but not Jones. The Court unanimously reached the decision that the Fugitive Slave Act was constitutional and that the institution of slavery remained a matter for individual states to decide.
"The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?" is a speech that was given on March 26, 1860, in Glasgow, in which Frederick Douglass rejects arguments made by slaveholders as well as fellow abolitionists as to the nature and meaning of the United States Constitution. Due to its popularity, the speech was later published as a pamphlet.
Kentucky raid in Cass County (1847) was conducted by slaveholders and slave catchers who raided Underground Railroad stations in Cass County, Michigan to capture black people and return them to slavery. After unsuccessful attempts, and a lost court case, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was enacted. Michigan's Personal Liberty Act of 1855 was passed in the state legislature to prevent the capture of formerly enslaved people that would return them to slavery
