Songs of the Underground Railroad were spiritual and work songs used during the early-to-mid 19th century in the United States to encourage and convey coded information to escaping slaves as they moved along the various Underground Railroad routes. As it was illegal in most slave states to teach slaves to read or write, songs were used to communicate messages and directions about when, where, and how to escape, and warned of dangers and obstacles along the route.
One reportedly coded Underground Railroad song is "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd". [1] The song's title is said to refer to the star formation (an asterism ) known in America as the Big Dipper and in Europe as The Plough. The pointer stars of the Big Dipper align with the North Star. In this song the repeated line "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd" is thus often interpreted as instructions to escaping slaves to travel north by following the North Star, leading them to the northern states, Canada, and freedom: The song ostensibly encodes escape instructions and a map from Mobile, Alabama, up the Tombigbee River, over the divide to the Tennessee River, then downriver to where the Tennessee and Ohio rivers meet in Paducah, Kentucky. [2]
Another song with a reportedly secret meaning is "Now Let Me Fly" [3] which references the biblical story of Ezekiel's Wheels. [4] The song talks mostly of a promised land. This song might have boosted the morale and spirit of the slaves, giving them hope that there was a place waiting that was better than where they were.
"Go Down Moses", a spiritual that depicts the biblical story of Moses in Exodus leading his people to freedom, is believed by some to be a coded reference to the conductors on the Underground Railroad. The oppressor in the song is the pharaoh, but in real life would have been the slave owner.
Music is important in the religion of African Americans today, as it was in the telling of freedom. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]
Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave and abolitionist author. In his 19th-century autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Douglass gives examples of how the songs sung by slaves had multiple meanings. His examples are sometimes quoted to support the claim of coded slave songs. Douglass similarly offers interesting comments but not clear evidence in My Bondage and Freedom: "A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of 'O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan' something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the north – and the north was our Canaan. I thought I heard them say,/ There were lions in the way,/ I don't expect to stay/ Much longer here/ was a favorite air and had a double meaning. In the lips of some, it meant the expectation of a speedy summons to a world of spirits; but in the lips of our company, it simply meant a speedy pilgrimage toward a free state, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery."
Douglass's observations here likewise do not serve as clear evidence of the successful use of coded song lyrics to aid escaping slaves; he is writing here only of his small group of slaves who are encouraging each other as they finalize their plans to escape, not of widespread use of codes in song lyrics. At the beginning of this same paragraph, he writes that the slave owner may very well have seen through the simple code they were using: "I am the more inclined to think that he suspected us, because... we did many silly things, very well calculated to awaken suspicion." Douglass immediately goes on to discuss how their repeated singing of freedom was one of those "many silly things".
While many believe that the stories told about the songs of the Underground Railroad are true, there are also many skeptics. Some claim that songs of the Underground Railroad is an urban legend dating from the later 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.
Skeptics claim that the legend has been picked up by credulous authors and published as fact without historical documentation. Some authors who believe the song held instructions for escaping slavery admit the ephemeral nature of oral history, often using such phrases as "supposed", "according to folklorists", and "gospelologists cite", to preface their statements.
Many popular sources claim that spirituals and other songs, such as "Steal Away" or "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd", contained coded information and helped individuals navigate the railroad, but these sources offer little traditional archival evidence to support their claims. Some scholars who have examined these claims tend to believe that while the slave songs may certainly have expressed hope for deliverance from the sorrows of this world, these songs did not present literal help for runaway slaves. [12] [13]
There is evidence, however, that the Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman used at least two songs. Sarah Bradford's biography of Tubman, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, published in 1869, quotes Tubman as saying that she used "Go Down Moses" as one of two code songs to communicate with fugitive enslaved people escaping from Maryland. [14]
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The theory perhaps developed from the expansion of a folktale [15] [16] found in John A. Lomax's 1934 book American Ballads & Folk Songs. In his preface to "Foller de Drinkin' Gou'd", page 227 in his section on reels, he quotes a story from H.B Parks: "One of my great-uncles, who was connected with the railroad movement, remembered that in the records of the Anti-Slavery Society there was a story of a peg-leg sailor, known as Peg-Leg Joe, who made a number of trips through the South and induced young Negroes to run away and escape... The main scene of his activities was in the country north of Mobile, and the trail described in the song followed northward to the headwaters of the Tombigbee River, thence over the divide and down the Ohio River to Ohio... the peg-leg sailor would... teach this song to the young slaves and show them the mark of his natural left foot and the round hole made by his peg-leg. He would then go ahead of them northward and leave a print made of charcoal and mud of the outline of a human left foot and a round spot in place of the right foot... Nothing more could be found relative to the man... 'Drinkin' gou'd' is the Great Dipper... 'The grea' big un' the Ohio. [17] [18]
"Go Down Moses" is an African American spiritual that describes the Hebrew exodus, specifically drawing from the Book of Exodus 5:1: "And the LORD spoke unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Let my people go, that they may serve me", where God commands Moses to demand the release of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. As is common in spirituals, the song discusses freedom, referring both to the freedom of the Israelites, and that of runaway enslaved people. As a result of these messages, this song was outlawed by many enslavers.
The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved persons, particularly Africans enslaved in the Americas, though many other examples exist. Over six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist; about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets. In the United States during the Great Depression (1930s), more than 2,300 additional oral histories on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program. Most of the 26 audio-recorded interviews are held by the Library of Congress.
The Underground Railroad was a network of secret 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 from there to Canada. The network, primarily the work of free African Americans, was assisted by abolitionists and others sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. The slaves who risked capture and those who aided them are also collectively referred to as the passengers and conductors of the Railroad, respectively. 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 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 slaves had escaped to freedom via the network.
Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Spirituals is a genre of Christian music that is associated with African Americans, which merged varied African cultural influences with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade. Spirituals encompass the "sing songs", work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs. While they were often rooted in biblical stories, they also described the extreme hardships endured by African Americans who were enslaved from the 17th century until the 1860s, the emancipation altering mainly the nature of slavery for many. Many new derivative music genres such as the blues emerged from the spirituals songcraft.
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is a museum in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, based on the history of the Underground Railroad. Opened in 2004, the center also pays tribute to all efforts to "abolish human enslavement and secure freedom for all people."
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe 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.
Follow the Drinking Gourd is an African-American folk song first published in 1928. The "drinking gourd" is another name for the Big Dipper asterism. Folklore has it that enslaved people in the United States used it as a point of reference so they would not get lost during their journey of escape to the North and to freedom.
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.
The Big Dipper or the plough is a large asterism consisting of seven bright stars of the constellation Ursa Major; six of them are of second magnitude and one, Megrez (δ), of third magnitude. Four define a "bowl" or "body" and three define a "handle" or "head". It is recognized as a distinct grouping in many cultures. The North Star (Polaris), the current northern pole star and the tip of the handle of the Little Dipper, can be located by extending an imaginary line through the front two stars of the asterism, Merak (β) and Dubhe (α). This makes it useful in celestial navigation.
"Wade in the Water" is an African American jubilee song, a spiritual—in reference to a genre of music "created and first sung by African Americans in slavery." The lyrics to "Wade in the Water" were first co-published in 1901 in New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers by Frederick J. Work and his brother, John Wesley Work Jr., an educator at the historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, Fisk University. Work Jr. (1871–1925)—who is also known as John Work II—spent thirty years collecting, promoting, and reviving the songcraft of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, which included being a member and director of the Fisk Jubilee Quartet. The Sunset Four Jubilee Singers made the first commercial recording of "Wade in the Water" in 1925—released by Paramount Records. W. E. B. Du Bois called this genre of songs the Sorrow Songs. "Wade in the Water" is associated with songs of the Underground Railroad.
Quilts of the Underground Railroad describes a controversial belief that quilts were used to communicate information to African slaves about how to escape to freedom via the Underground Railroad. It has been disputed by a number of historians.
"Steal Away" is an American Negro spiritual. The song is well known by variations of the chorus:
Peg Leg Joe is a legendary sailor and underground railroad conductor, popularly associated with the song "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd". According to the folklorist H.B. Parks, who collected the song in the 1910s, Peg Leg Joe was an abolitionist who led enslaved people through the Underground Railroad to freedom during the last years of American slavery. In popular history, he is usually connected with an escape route which led from Alabama to the Ohio River. He may have been a real person or composite of people, but there is no reliable historical evidence of his existence. It is also possible that the story of Peg Leg Joe originates in the African mythical figure, Papa Legba. As his name suggests, Peg Leg Joe is depicted as having a prosthesis for his right leg.
The Quest for Freedom is a 1992 historical film about abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center is a visitors' center and history museum located on the grounds of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park in Church Creek, Maryland, in the United States. The state park is surrounded by the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, whose north side is bordered by the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park. Jointly created and managed by the National Park Service and Maryland Park Service, the visitor center opened on March 10, 2017.
Harriet is a 2019 American biographical film directed by Kasi Lemmons, who also wrote the screenplay with Gregory Allen Howard. It stars Cynthia Erivo as abolitionist Harriet Tubman, with Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn, and Janelle Monáe in supporting roles. A biography about Harriet Tubman had been in the works for years, with several actresses, including Viola Davis, rumored to star. Erivo was cast in February 2017, and much of the cast and crew joined the following year. Filming took place in Virginia from October to December 2018.
Harriet Tubman (1822 – 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Tubman escaped slavery and rescued approximately 70 enslaved people, including members of her family and friends. Harriet Tubman's family includes her birth family; her two husbands, John Tubman and Nelson Davis; and her adopted daughter Gertie Davis.
The Tilly Escape occurred in October 1856 when an enslaved woman, Tilly, was led by Harriet Tubman from slavery in Baltimore to safety in Philadelphia. Historians who have studied Tubman consider it "one of her most complicated and clever escape attempts." It was a risky trip because Tubman and Tilly would not have been able to travel directly from Baltimore to Philadelphia without proof that they were free women. In addition, local slave traders would have recognized strangers. Tubman sought to evade capture by going south, before heading north, and using different modes of transportation over water and land.
"Let us break bread together" is a traditional Christian hymn. Its melody is searching, simple, major key, and has simple lyrics.
