The Underground Railroad Chapter 1 Summary

Before I read this book, I would have defined the Underground Railroad basically as a normal railroad that goes underground, which trains or metro use every day, to bring people from one point of the city to another. Like the metro nowadays in the big cities. I would have not thought about a railroad that "went all the way to Boston", taken by people to escape from slavery and go to the Northern States, or Canada. I didn't even think about slavery to be honest. The front cover shows a family riding a horse, in what looks like to be the countryside, which I don't really assimilate to slavery but more to another era of the United States' History, like the Far West, the cowboys etc.

Reading Foner's introductory chapter changed my understanding

It explains the reader that it goes "all the way to Boston", and also that the term first appeared in an article in a Washington newspaper in 1839, when a young slave said he "hoped to escape on a railroad" which goes to Boston. We also learn that people used this appellation in a general way to describe the arrangements made to help the fugitives escaping from slavery. This underground railroad was also very criticized by the South, where slavery was normal and accepted. The definition that a North Carolina newspaper made itself of it describes well the differences of mentalities, mindsets and opinions between the North and the South at that time, regarding slavery. It was thus described by the South as "an association of abolitionists whose first business is to steal, or cause to be stolen, seduced or inveigled… slaves from southern plantations […].", or again as "a fundraising racket that preyed on the misplaced sympathy of well-meaning whites". What I learned about the Underground Railroad and I didn't imagine at all is that "rather than operating in secret, the underground railroad was a quasi-public institution. The adjective 'underground' seems to mean that it was kind of a secret, but apparently not. It enhanced my

How the South treated the slaves, and how the North ended slavery and started to help the fugitives, not everywhere however. The book tells us how helping a fugitive in the slave states was a considerable risk, resulting in going to jail, being heavily fined and sold to slavery when unable to pay, abandoning the city etc. I was also surprised that such a network such as the underground railroad exists, and that it helped a lot of slaves to escape from the 'Southern hell'. And finally, it intrigued me that the underground railroad remained ignored for "a long period of scholarly neglect", which leads me to my last point, why the Underground Railroad is such an especially challenging topic for historians? Well first, we can read that the story of it in New York is like "a jigsaw puzzle many of whose pieces have been irretrievably lost, or a gripping detective story where the evidence is murky and incomplete". It tells us that it was difficult to gather all the evidences of such a network, since a lot of pieces have been lost or are incomplete. Then, although some abolitionists published their reminiscences after the Civil War, these latter including lots of information, they tended to put the white abolitionist as the "central actors" of the story. Moreover, the work of Wilbur H. Siebert about the general history of the underground railroad,