What Was The Underground Railroad

No one knows where the term Underground Railroad came from--there were no trains or tracks, only "conductors" who helped escaping slaves to freedom. Including real stories about "passengers" on the "Railroad," this book chronicles slaves' close calls with bounty hunters, exhausting struggles on the road, and what they sacrificed for freedom. With 80 black-and-white illustrations throughout and a sixteen-page black-and-white photo insert, the Underground Railroad comes alive!

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!

Slavery existed throughout the western Hemisphere, but after its abolition in the British empire it persisted for decades in much of the U.S. Even in states where slavery was illegal, slaves were subject to capture and return to their owners. The only sure escape was to cross the border into Canada. The Underground Railway was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses, an organized escape route run by blacks and whites who opposed slavery and who helped black Americans find freedom in Canada. They arrived at points as far east as Nova Scotia and as far west as British Columbia, but the vast majority landed in southwestern Ontario. In this book L.D. Cross recounts the harrowing experiences of many including Harriet Tubman, a slave who escaped and later helped many others to do so and Alexander Ross a white doctor and ornithologist from London, Ontario who travelled many times to southern plantations to 'study birds' and to surreptitiously hand out information re the secret routes leading to freedom in the north.

Describes the system by which black slaves escaped captivity in the southern United States.

Enjoy learning the vast history of the Underground Railroad through many different eyes in this book by William Still, the black abolitionist who is often called the "Father of the Underground Railroad" for his remarkable role in organizing its operation, as well as the multitude of people he helped to find freedom. Discover the many individual stories of the journey to freedom in this remarkable book.

William Still (1821–1902) was an African-American abolitionist, businessman, writer, historian, civil rights activist. He was also a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses created in the United States during the early to the mid-19th century for use by African American slaves in order to escape into free states or Canada. In 1872, he published “The Underground Railroad”, an account of the underground system and the experiences of 649 slaves who escaped to freedom. An incredible collection of real-life stories that provide a unique insight into the adversity faced by pre-emancipation African-Americans. Contents include: “Seth Concklin”, “Underground Rail Road Letters”, “William Peel, alias William Box Peel Jones”, “Wesley Harris, alias Robert Jackson, and the Matterson Brothers”, “Death of Romulus Hall—New Name George Weems”, “James Mercer, Wm. H. Gilliam, and John Clayton”, “Clarissa Davis”, “Anthony Blow, alias Henry Levison”, “Perry Johnson, of Elkton, Maryland”, “Isaac Forman, William Davis, and Willis Redick”, etc. Read & Co. History is proudly republishing this classic book in a brand new edition complete with an introductory biography by William Wells Brown.

Examines the events and key figures behind the formation and operation of the Underground Railroad, the secretive and illegal organization that helped American slaves escape to freedom in the northern United States and Canada.