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Book Review Of Gateway To Freedom The Hidden History Of The Underground Railroad

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Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad focuses on New York, throughout the book Foner indicates that New York city was a crucial way station in the railroad's Northeast corridor, which brought slaves from the upper South through Philadelphia and on to upstate New York, New England and Canada. He begins to tell us about the formation of the New York Anti-slavery Society in 1833, followed two years later by the biracial committee of vigilance for the protection of people of color. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan were the leading figures. Even after abolition, slavery still exists because of an 1817 state law that permitted Southern slaveowners, who in Manhattan on business and as tourists, to bring slaves along for …show more content…

Whites routinely seized free blacks, claimed that they were slaves and, with the permission of local officials, sold them or hauled them off to the South, ““Even after slavery ended in New York, the South’s peculiar institution remained central to the city’s economic prosperity. New York’s dominant Democratic party maintained close ties to the South, and some local officials were more than happy to cooperate in apprehending and returning fugitive slaves. Abraham Lincoln carried New York State in the election of 1860 thanks to a resounding majority in rural areas, but he received only a little over one-third of the vote in New York City. More than once, proslavery mobs ran amok, targeting abolitionist homes and gatherings and the residences and organizations of free blacks,” …show more content…

While this book focuses on the escape of runaway slaves and especially the support and obstacles they encountered in New York City, he places his study within the wider context of American politics at the time. Foner really opened many Americans eyes and made them more informed on the Underground Railroad, he did a great job on informing us about this topic and letting us explore the idea of what he was trying to get through to us. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad made people appreciate the people that really didn’t get any much credit for it, this book truly makes you want to understand and learn more. ““The “underground railroad” should be understood not as a single entity but as an umbrella term for local groups that employed numerous methods to assist fugitives, some public and entirely legal, some flagrant violations of the law,” (

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Another major figure in the Underground Railroad was Thomas Garrett. Born unto a Quaker family who his runaway slaves in Delaware, Garrett was exposed to opposition at an early age. After saving the life of an African American slave who was kidnapped by slave traders, Garrett became dedicated to the abolitionist cause in 1813. He was on record saying, “Friend, I haven't a dollar in the world; but if thee knows a fugitive who needs a breakfast send him to me”. He turned his home in Wilmington, Delaware into the last stop for the Underground Railroad before slaves reached Pennsylvania where they got their freedom.

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Everyone who has taken an American History class should be familiar with the southern slaves of the nineteenth escaping to freedom in the north, but often do not realize they were not the first ones with the idea of running away. Gregory Wigmore is a doctoral candidate for Department of History at the Univerity of California. In his article, “Before the Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom in the Canadian-American Borderland,” he explained how Canadian slaves escaped to North America in the Great Lake region before the times of the Underground Railroad. During this time the gradual emancipation of slaves was in effect in Canada since 1793, meaning that child slaves were still acknowledged as human property until they were twenty-five years of

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David N. Gellman is a professor of Early American History at DePauw University in Indiana and his written work focuses greatly on colonial America and emancipation in the United States. As an expert in Early American History, David N. Gellman gives us a strong background on the institution of slavery in New York in his book Emancipating New York and the road to the emancipation of African Americans in the state of the New York. David N. Gellman’s book Emancipating New York describes the process by which the state of New York abolished slavery with a combination of white opposition, black resistance and political changes. The abolition of slavery in New York was an effort of the above-mentioned sectors of society and government, all with differing views, interests and agendas.

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745 Words | 3 Pages

Throughout the history of the world, freedom has always been a major conflict, which people who weren’t free sought to achieve. People fought to gain freedom, and risked their lives, and everything they love to be free. This freedom isn’t just being free of slavery, but being free of discrimination, and being free of all the negativity that life brings. The text that best demonstrates this fight for freedom, and the risks people took for it, was “Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad.” This text from Unit 4 best captures the idea of fighting for freedom by showing the struggles of real American slaves, who put it all on the line to escape freedom with the help of Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad.

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At the start of the 1790s, a life changing system for slaves was CREATED. It was named the Underground Railroad. It was a hidden network of people and places designed to help escaped slaves get away safely down to the North and Canada, where they could finally seek freedom. Various routes and lines were a majority of the Railroad. It led an uncountable amount of African Americans to freedom.

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The detailed descriptions included in primary sources, along with the descriptive and emotional illustrations included in graphic history are crucial elements in studying and understanding the process and history of the transatlantic slave trade. Rafe Blaufarb and Liz Clarke tie both of these together to help readers truly understand this historic tragedy in the book, Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle Against the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Although different than the standard book that may be used, that simply spews information out in an uncreative and somewhat boring way, this book is a tool that can be chosen in classrooms to teach different aspects of the slave trade. Working together, the primary sources and graphic history

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The Significance of Harriet Tubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s involvement in the Underground Railroad (as part of the Abolitionist Movement, 1850-1860) The Underground Railroad is not what it may appear in its most literal sense; it is in fact a symbolical term for the two hundred year long struggle to break free from slavery in the U.S. It encompasses every slave who tried to escape and every free person who helped them to do so. The origins of the railroad are hidden in obscurity yet eventually it expanded into one of the earliest Civil Rights movements in the US.

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What would it mean to shed light on a part of history that remains largely invisible because it was conducted in secret and under cover of night? This was the challenge faced by Colson Whitehead, for example, in his award-winning novel, “The Underground Railroad.” A clandestine and loosely organized network of activists, safe houses and secret routes, the actual Underground Railroad shepherded as many as 100,000 slaves to freedom in the six decades before the Civil War. Its route would eventually traverse free states from Maine to Iowa, extending as far north as Canada.

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Journal Entry #1: I, Alice Smith, help with the Underground Railroad. I am a free slave who paid her way to freedom. I work to help slaves, who want a better life. The Underground Railroad (UGRR) is a route of houses or places that help slaves runaway to the North. This is our reform movement, besides this, there are Women’s Rights Movements, Prison Reforms, and Education Reforms.

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The Underground Railroad of the United States of America was a complex system of knowledge and experience that made it possible for slaves to escape the harsh realities of laboring for the opportunistic region of the North. With this in mind, all fugitives faced tremendous odds, displaying unimaginable amounts of courage in order to bypass themselves from the conditions they lived under in the South. Similarly, there were many directly opposing ideas making their way through the minds of those in the legislature, in essence creating a social divide that would arguably continue until the end of the civil rights movement. Although today it is known as a singular concept, the Underground Railroad was composed of several independent organizations that in turn collectively had goals of abolishing slavery.

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Another account of a slave says, “After Lincoln took office, a chill settled over many of the plantations of the South. “The white folks begin to treat us different,... they seemed to be strange towards us. Been treat us like we’s one of the family till they got talking about Lincoln and the abolition.” This controversy between the slaves and their owners continued for a majority of Lincoln’s Presidency.

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225 Words | 1 Pages

Annotated bibliography Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Print.

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1198 Words | 5 Pages

The Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the House of Representatives on February 4, 1793 by a vote of 48–7 with 14 abstaining. Eight days later, the Act was approved by Congress. Although the Article four of the U.S. Constitution granted the slave masters the rights to recapture slaves who fled to free states, “the Fugitive Slave Law included new and harsher provisions mandating the participation of northern states and individuals in the recapture process and curtailing the rights of alleged fugitives to prove they were not runaways” (Kazin 492). Many, either white or black, reacted to this Act, especially in the North. Some states even passed personal-liberty laws to allow fugitive slaves to appeal their case in a court.

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Literature is often credited with the ability to enhance one’s understanding of history by providing a view of a former conflict. In doing so, the reader is able to gain both an emotional and logistical understanding of a historically significant event. Additionally, literature provides context that can help the reader develop a deeper understanding of the political climate of a time period. Within the text of The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead’s, the use of literary elements such as imagery, metaphor, and paradox amplifies the reader’s understanding of early 19th century slavery and its role in the South of the United States of America. Throughout the novel, Whitehead utilizes a girl named Cora to navigate the political and personal consequences of escaping slavery, the Underground Railroad, and her transition

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The Underground Railroad. A metaphor as it was, it was neither a railroad nor was it even underground. In the time where slavery became a divided issue with the status of legality in various parts of the country, the underground railroad found its beginnings through collective organized efforts from abolitionists and allies alike to help enslaved African americans to escape to territories and states where they could be free from slavery. It was a loosely-developed system that also included series of routes led by “conductors” such as Harriet Tubman, for escaping slaves, or “passengers”.

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