Harriet Beecher Stowe, famous for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, gained firsthand knowledge of the plight of fugitive slave through contract with the Underground Railroad in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Underground railroad was the term used to describe a network of persons who helped escaped slaves on their way to freedom in the northern states or Canada. Although George Washington had commented upon such practices by the quakers as early as the 1870s, the term gained currency in the 1830s, as northern abolitionists became more vocal and southern suspicions of threats to their peculiar institution grew. The popular perception of a well-coordinated system of Quaker, Covenanter, and Methodist “conductors” secretly helping fugitives from “station”