Summary: Conductor On The Underground Railroad

In the quintessential totalitarian society every aspect of life is run, controlled, and dictated by the government. One must only look to notorious dictators from recent history such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin for attempts at a perfectly regulated population, tailored to the interests of their leaders. People have virtually no control over their lives and decisions in such a civilization. There are many obvious issues dealing with totalitarian rules such as the inability to completely control the population, abuse of power, brutality, loss of freedom, violation of human rights, and many other troubles which can also apply to many other situations where one person has complete jurisdiction over another. With all the downsides of total

Since these people who are resisting their governments know that there are usually very harsh punishments for speaking out, they often form underground resistances, hidden from their leaders attempting to put an end to whatever oppressive regime they are under. There are many examples of this throughout history such as the Sons of Liberty conspiring against Great Britain and declaring the United States an independent nation, the German resistance helping to hide Jewish people from the Nazis, and the Underground Railroad, headed by Harriet Tubman to bring slaves to freedom. These people met, planned, and acted in secrecy and were also extremely hard to control or regulate. In Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, the author, Ann Petry, states that, “There was never anything to indicate his whereabouts. But a few days afterward, a goodly number of slaves would be gone from the plantation. Neither the master nor the overseer had heard or seen anything unusual in the quarter. Sometimes one or the other would vaguely remember having hear a whippoorwill call… Through it was

They raise the stakes of speaking up or defending oneself which often deters people from speaking up. In the biography about Harriet Tubman, one man who she is bringing to freedom eventually reaches his breaking point after all the stress he has endured. He states that it would be better to be a slave than to suffer to be free to which Tubman responds with threatening him with a gun an explaining, “If a runaway returned, he would turn traitor, the master and the overseer would force him to turn traitor. The returned slave would disclose the stopping places, the hiding places, the cornstacks they had used with the full knowledge of the owner of the farm, the name of the German farmer who had fed them and sheltered them. These people who had risked their own security to help runaways would be ruined, fined, imprisoned.” This shows how their fear of being found made it essential for them to continue on. It shows the harsh punishments to not only the escapees but to also those who helped them, such as the German farmer. Despite the severity of the punishments, they do not stop opposition, which is displayed by the Underground Railroad still existing, but they only have negative effects that are arguably more serious than the ethical violations and consequences of