The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana

The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana PDF Author: Pamela R. Peters
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786450622
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Floyd County, Indiana, and its county seat, New Albany, are located directly across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville was a major slave-trade center, and Indiana was a free state. Many slaves fled to Floyd County via the Underground Railroad, but their fight for freedom did not end once they reached Indiana. Sufficient information on slaves coming to and through this important area may be found in court records, newspaper stories, oral history accounts, and other materials that a full and fascinating history is possible, one detailing the struggles that runaway slaves faced in Floyd County, such as local, state, and federal laws working together to keep them from advancing socially, politically, and economically. This work also discusses the attitudes, people, and places that help in explaining the successes and heartaches of escaping slaves in Floyd County. Included are a number of freedom and manumission papers, which provided court certification of the freedom of former slaves.

The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana

The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana PDF Author: Pamela R. Peters
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786450622
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
Floyd County, Indiana, and its county seat, New Albany, are located directly across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville was a major slave-trade center, and Indiana was a free state. Many slaves fled to Floyd County via the Underground Railroad, but their fight for freedom did not end once they reached Indiana. Sufficient information on slaves coming to and through this important area may be found in court records, newspaper stories, oral history accounts, and other materials that a full and fascinating history is possible, one detailing the struggles that runaway slaves faced in Floyd County, such as local, state, and federal laws working together to keep them from advancing socially, politically, and economically. This work also discusses the attitudes, people, and places that help in explaining the successes and heartaches of escaping slaves in Floyd County. Included are a number of freedom and manumission papers, which provided court certification of the freedom of former slaves.

The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad PDF Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317454162
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 847

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Book Description
Provides a look at the network known as the Underground Railroad - that mysterious "system" of individuals and organizations that helped slaves escape the American South to freedom during the years before the Civil War. This work also explores the people, places, writings, laws, and organizations that made this network possible.

Encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad

Encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad PDF Author: J. Blaine Hudson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476602301
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Fugitive slaves were reported in the American colonies as early as the 1640s, and escapes escalated with the growth of slavery over the next 200 years. As the number of fugitives rose, the Southern states pressed for harsher legislation to prevent escapes. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 criminalized any assistance, active or passive, to a runaway slave--yet it only encouraged the behavior it sought to prevent. Friends of the fugitive, whose previous assistance to runaways had been somewhat haphazard, increased their efforts at organization. By the onset of the Civil War in 1861, the Underground Railroad included members, defined stops, set escape routes and a code language. From the abolitionist movement to the Zionville Baptist Missionary Church, this encyclopedia focuses on the people, ideas, events and places associated with the interrelated histories of fugitive slaves, the African American struggle for equality and the American antislavery movement. Information is drawn from primary sources such as public records, document collections, slave autobiographies and antebellum newspapers.

A Tour on the Underground Railroad along the Ohio River

A Tour on the Underground Railroad along the Ohio River PDF Author: Nancy Stearns Theiss
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439668949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Running for 664 miles along Kentucky's border, the Ohio River provided a remarkable opportunity for the enslaved to escape to free soil in Indiana and Ohio. The river beckoned fugitive slave Henry Bibb onto a steamboat at Madison, Indiana, headed to Cincinnati, where he discovered the Underground Railroad. Upriver from Cincinnati, a lantern signal high on a hill from the Rankin House in Ripley, Ohio, stirred others to flee for freedom. These stories and more along the borderland of the Ohio River also served as the setting for Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which became an inspiration of human resistance. Author Nancy Theiss, PhD, takes readers on a tour through American history to places of courage and sacrifice.

The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America

The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America PDF Author: Robert H. Churchill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108489125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.

Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in the Kentucky Borderland

Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in the Kentucky Borderland PDF Author: J. Blaine Hudson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476604223
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Between 1783 and 1860, more than 100,000 enslaved African Americans escaped across the border between slave and free territory in search of freedom. Most of these escapes were unaided, but as the American anti-slavery movement became more militant after 1830, assisted escapes became more common. Help came from the Underground Railroad, which still stands as one of the most powerful and sustained multiracial human rights movements in world history. This work examines and interprets the available historical evidence about fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad in Kentucky, the southernmost sections of the free states bordering Kentucky along the Ohio River, and, to a lesser extent, the slave states to the immediate south. Kentucky was central to the Underground Railroad because its northern boundary, the Ohio River, represented a three hundred mile boundary between slavery and nominal freedom. The book examines the landscape of Kentucky and the surrounding states; fugitive slaves before 1850, in the 1850s and during the Civil War; and their motivations and escape strategies and the risks involved with escape. The reasons why people broke law and social convention to befriend fugitive slaves, common escape routes, crossing points through Kentucky from Tennessee and points south, and specific individuals who provided assistance--all are topics covered.

Places of the Underground Railroad

Places of the Underground Railroad PDF Author: Tom Calarco
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031338147X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
This up-to-date compilation details the most significant stops along the Underground Railroad. Places of the Underground Railroad: A Geographical Guide presents an overview of the various sites that comprised this unique road to freedom, with entries chosen to represent all regions of the United States and Canada. Where most works on the Underground Railroad focus on the people involved, this unique guide explores the intricacies of travel that allowed the "conductors" to carry out the tasks entrusted to them. It presents an accurate picture of just where the Underground Railroad was and how it operated, including routes and itineraries and connections between the various Railroad locations. Through information about these locations, the book takes readers from the beginnings of organized aid to fugitive slaves during the period following the American Revolution up to the Civil War. It delineates the possible routes fugitive slaves may have taken by identifying the rivers, canals, and railroads that were sometimes used. And it shows that a network, though decentralized and variable over time and place, truly was established among Underground Railroad participants.

The Captive's Quest for Freedom

The Captive's Quest for Freedom PDF Author: R. J. M. Blackett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108311105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 531

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Book Description
This magisterial study, ten years in the making by one of the field's most distinguished historians, will be the first to explore the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, Richard J. M. Blackett traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves.

William Still

William Still PDF Author: William C. Kashatus
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268200386
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The first full-length biography of William Still, one of the most important leaders of the Underground Railroad. William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia is the first major biography of the free Black abolitionist William Still, who coordinated the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad and was a pillar of the Railroad as a whole. Based in Philadelphia, Still built a reputation as a courageous leader, writer, philanthropist, and guide for fugitive enslaved people. This monumental work details Still’s life story beginning with his parents’ escape from bondage in the early nineteenth century and continuing through his youth and adulthood as one of the nation’s most important Underground Railroad agents and, later, as an early civil rights pioneer. Still worked personally with Harriet Tubman, assisted the family of John Brown, helped Brown’s associates escape from Harper’s Ferry after their famous raid, and was a rival to Frederick Douglass among nationally prominent African American abolitionists. Still’s life story is told in the broader context of the anti-slavery movement, Philadelphia Quaker and free black history, and the generational conflict that occurred between Still and a younger group of free black activists led by Octavius Catto. Unique to this book is an accessible and detailed database of the 995 fugitives Still helped escape from the South to the North and Canada between 1853 and 1861. The database contains twenty different fields—including name, age, gender, skin color, date of escape, place of origin, mode of transportation, and literacy—and serves as a valuable aid for scholars by offering the opportunity to find new information, and therefore a new perspective, on runaway enslaved people who escaped on the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad. Based on Still’s own writings and a multivariate statistical analysis of the database of the runaways he assisted on their escape to freedom, the book challenges previously accepted interpretations of the Underground Railroad. The audience for William Still is a diverse one, including scholars and general readers interested in the history of the anti-slavery movement and the operation of the Underground Railroad, as well as genealogists tracing African American ancestors.

Making Freedom

Making Freedom PDF Author: R. J. M. Blackett
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469608782
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated action to aid in the recovery of runaway slaves and denied fugitives legal rights if they were apprehended, quickly became a focal point in the debate over the future of slavery and the nature of the union. In Making Freedom, R. J. M. Blackett uses the experiences of escaped slaves and those who aided them to explore the inner workings of the Underground Railroad and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, while shedding light on the political effects of slave escape in southern states, border states, and the North. Blackett highlights the lives of those who escaped, the impact of the fugitive slave cases, and the extent to which slaves planning to escape were aided by free blacks, fellow slaves, and outsiders who went south to entice them to escape. Using these stories of particular individuals, moments, and communities, Blackett shows how slave flight shaped national politics as the South witnessed slavery beginning to collapse and the North experienced a threat to its freedom.