The Role of Female Union Spies in the Civil War by Hallie Murray

Author:Hallie Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Underground Railroad was a network of safe houses used by escaping slaves to travel to the Northern United States and Canada, where slavery was illegal. This map, originally published in 1920, shows many of the different routes that were available to passengers on the Underground Railroad.

In 1844 or 1845, Tubman married John Tubman, a free black man. His status as a freeman encouraged Tubman to hire a lawyer to look into her own legal history. The lawyer unearthed evidence that her mother had been free since the death of a former owner. The evidence proved that Tubman should not have been born a slave. She began to contemplate her freedom.

The Underground Railroad

In the early nineteenth century, the network of routes and safe houses known today as the Underground Railroad began to come into use. The network ran throughout the South, with some routes leading to Florida, which was a safe haven for escaped slaves until it was annexed by the United States in 1821, and many more leading north, through the free states and up to Canada. Slave catching was a big business at the time, so operatives of the Underground Railroad had to work in secret. They also had specific names based on railway terminology—guides like Harriet Tubman were known as “conductors,” while safe houses were called “stations,” and the escaped slaves themselves were called “passengers.” Thus Harriet Tubman’s famous quote: “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

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