Bound for Canaan (103 page)

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The decades after the Civil War saw the publication of several books that remain essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the Underground Railroad. The 1877
Reminiscences
of Levi Coffin is the most detailed, if naturally subjective, rendering of one man's life in the underground. Less exhaustive, but still quite interesting, are Eber Pettit's brief memoir of underground work in western New York State,
Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad,
published in 1867, and William Cockrum's
History of the Underground Railroad as It Was Conducted by the Anti-Slavery League,
published in 1902, a lively recounting of the activities of the underground cell to which Cockrum's father belonged in southwestern Indiana. Robert Smedley's 1886
The Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania,
though confusingly organized, profiled virtually every known
white
activist in that region, and offers a valuable human roadmap to the interlinked nature of a network in mature form. In many respects, the most important postwar work on the underground is William Still's
The Underground Railroad,
published in 1872, a massive work that culled hundreds of fugitives' stories from the records of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office. The published narratives of fugitive slaves sometimes offer insights into the operation of the underground, though usually only as an episode in the larger trajectory of the author's life. Interesting mentions of underground activity are found, for instance, in the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Jermain Loguen, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and others. Students of the Underground Railroad owe perhaps the greatest debt to Wilbur H. Siebert of Ohio State University, who in the 1890s began collecting information on the underground at a time
when many of its members were still alive. Siebert's primary work,
The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom,
published in 1898, was the first attempt to write an overarching history of the underground as a whole. The vast collection of Siebert's papers at the Ohio Historical Society remains the richest archive of Underground Railroad material in the country, containing hundreds of letters and first-hand interviews with underground veterans, as well as much other well-organized research material on the underground gathered in the course of Siebert's long life.

Serious writing on the underground became very sparse after the turn of the century. Two worthy books appeared around mid-century,
Let My People Go,
by Henrietta Buckmaster, and
Make Free: The Story of the Underground Railroad,
by William A. Breyfogle, published in 1941 and 1958 respectively. Buckmaster's book broke no new ground, however, while Breyfogle's was marred by the inclusion of fictionalized composite stories. Larry Gara's slender but very influential 1961 revisionist work
The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad,
took issue with the then-traditional myth of the Underground Railroad that overemphasized the role of white Northerners. Gara cogently argued that the central figures in the history of the underground were the fugitive slaves themselves. Horatio Strother's masterful 1962 study
The Underground Railroad in Connecticut
is a glowing exception to the blandly conventional quality of most writing on the subject during this period. Beginning in the 1970s, the works of Charles Blockson, including
The Underground Railroad,
an anthology of escape stories, generated a renewed interest in the underground, especially among African Americans, helping to foster a new emphasis on the traces of underground history embedded in family oral history, and local records. More recently, a new generation of historians has begun to bring the tools of modern scholarship to bear on aspects of the Underground Railroad and abolitionism. Among these are Stanley Harrold's superb study of underground activity in Washington,
Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D. C., 1828–1865;
Kate Clifford Larson's trenchant new biography of Harriet Tubman,
Bound for the Promised Land;
Gary Collison's study of the background to one of the most dramatic fugitive rescues of the antebellum period,
Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen;
Steven Weissberger's
Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South,
a meticulous reconstruction of the tragic Margaret Garner case; Randolph P. Runyon's fascinating examination of the intricate, interwoven stories of Calvin Fairbank and Delia Webster, in
Delia Webster and The Underground Railroad;
Milton C. Sernett's
North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom,
a model regional study of abolitionism and its underground component; and Ann Hagedorn's portrait of the Rankin family of Ripley, Ohio, and their collaborators, in
Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad
.

Much of the most exciting work today is being done by independent local scholars, whose numbers are far too great to cite individually. Among them, however, Judith Wellman's research in Oswego and other parts of central New York, Diane Perrine Coon's work in and around Madison, Indiana, and Christopher Densmore's writings on eastern Quakers and other subjects related to the underground deserve much wider attention.

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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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