Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania

Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania PDF Author: William J. Switala
Publisher: Stackpole Books
ISBN: 9780811716291
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Includes detailed maps of the known routes and railroad sites. Organized in antebellum America to help slaves escape to freedom, the Underground Railroad was cloaked in secrecy and operated at great peril to everyone involved. The system was extremely active in Pennsylvania, with routes in all parts of the state.This book retraces those routes, discusses the large city networks, identifies the houses and sites where escapees found refuge, and records the names of the people who risked their lives to support the operation.

Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania

Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania PDF Author: William J. Switala
Publisher: Stackpole Books
ISBN: 9780811716291
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
Includes detailed maps of the known routes and railroad sites. Organized in antebellum America to help slaves escape to freedom, the Underground Railroad was cloaked in secrecy and operated at great peril to everyone involved. The system was extremely active in Pennsylvania, with routes in all parts of the state.This book retraces those routes, discusses the large city networks, identifies the houses and sites where escapees found refuge, and records the names of the people who risked their lives to support the operation.

Slavery & the Underground Railroad in South Central Pennsylvania

Slavery & the Underground Railroad in South Central Pennsylvania PDF Author: Cooper H Wingert
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1625857322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
This in-depth history examines how a stronghold of slavery in Pennsylvania became a central hub for the abolitionist cause. Much like the rest of the nation, South Central Pennsylvania has a fraught history of struggle over slavery. The institution lingered locally for more than fifty years, even as it went virtually extinct everywhere else within Pennsylvania. Gradually, abolitionist views prevailed as the region became an important destination for enslaved people escaping the south. The Appalachian Mountains and the Susquehanna River provided natural cover for fugitive, causing an influx of travel along the Underground Railroad. Locals like William Wright and James McAllister assisted these runaways while publicly advocating to abolish slavery. In this expert study, historian Cooper Wingert reveals the struggles between slavery and abolition in South Central Pennsylvania.

History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania

History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania PDF Author: Robert Clemens Smedley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Abolitionists
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description


The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania

The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania PDF Author: Charles L. Blockson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description


Abandoned Tracks

Abandoned Tracks PDF Author: W. Thomas Mainwaring
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268103607
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In Abandoned Tracks, W. Thomas Mainwaring bridges the gap between scholarly and popular perceptions of the Underground Railroad. Historians have long recognized that many aspects of the Underground Railroad have been mythologized by emotion, memory, time, and wishful thinking. Mainwaring’s book is a rich, in-depth attempt to separate fact from fiction in one local area, while also contributing to a scholarly discussion of the Underground Railroad by placing Washington County, Pennsylvania, in the national context. Just as the North was not consistent in its perspective on the Civil War and the slavery issue, the Underground Railroad had distinct regional variations. Washington County had a well-organized abolition movement, even though its members helped a comparatively small number of fugitive slaves escape, largely because of the small nearby slave population in what was then western Virginia. Its origins as a slave county make it an interesting case study of the transition from slavery to freedom and of the origins of black and white abolitionism. Abandoned Tracks lends much to the ongoing scholarly debate about the extent, scope, and nature of the Underground Railroad. This book is written both for scholars of abolitionism and the Underground Railroad and for an audience interested in local history.

Just Over the Line

Just Over the Line PDF Author: William C. Kashatus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780929706177
Category : Antislavery movements
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description


The Indigo Scarf

The Indigo Scarf PDF Author: P J Piccirillo
Publisher: Brown Posey Press
ISBN: 9781620061695
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The Indigo Scarf chronicles the crossing lives of escaped slaves Jedediah James and George Sharpe as they flee with their white wives into the wilderness of Pennsylvania's Sinnemahone country, on the upper reaches of the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, during the frontier decades after Pennsylvania's last Indian purchase. The novel opens, however, in 1882 in Washington's Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station. Narrator Anna Maria Sharpe is departing for the backwoods of north-central Pennsylvania, which she fled in her teens doubtful of her identity. She encounters Benjamin James, now a drifting, alcoholic longshoreman, who'd been implicated in the murder of his brother during Anna Maria's childhood. Benjamin decides to join her on the journey. Along the way, we follow the tale of the founders of their sordid hideaway settlement: his father, the infamous ex-slave Jedediah James; George Sharpe, a former indentured grist-miller whom Anna Maria believes was her grandfather; and the white women they had escaped with to the wild Sinnemahone country, Sarah James and Rosanna Sharpe. Through the story, Anna Maria learns that the man Benjamin had been accused of murdering had been her father, and the murderer, her half-brother. Benjamin's account of the life of Jedediah James reveals a fatal obsession with ownership driving this freed slave toward his reckoning. Hostilities build to a head between James and his wife's father-the august revolutionary war veteran Samson Starret-as well as Sarah's ex-suitor, Williamsport's Thomas Tillman, a man fixated on this woman whom an ex-slave stole from him on the eve of their arranged marriage. The scenes of The Indigo Scarf take the reader from a plantation in Virginia's tidewater region to the tragic end of a whiskey and timber-pirating operation on the Susquehanna's un-peopled and feral West Branch during the frontier decades after Pennsylvania's last Indian purchase.

Abolition & the Underground Railroad in Chester County, Pennsylvania

Abolition & the Underground Railroad in Chester County, Pennsylvania PDF Author: Mark Lanyon
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 143967440X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Chester County was home to a diverse patchwork of religious communities, antislavery activists and free Black populations, all working to end the blight of slavery during the Civil War era. Kennett Square was known as the "hotbed of abolitionism," with more Underground Railroad stations than anywhere else in the nation. Reverend John Miller Dickey and the Hinsonville community under the leadership of James Ralston Amos and Thomas Henry Amos founded the Ashmun Institute, later renamed Lincoln University, the nation's oldest degree-granting Historically Black College and University. The county's myriad Quaker communities fostered strong abolitionist sentiment and a robust pool of activists aiding runaway slaves on their road to emancipation. Author Mark Lanyon captures the rich history of antislavery activity that transformed Chester County into a vital region in the nation's fight for freedom.

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.

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad PDF Author: Eric Foner
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393244385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York—Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring—full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage—and significant—the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.