A Path To Freedom-

History of the Underground Railroad

    (The Rankin House) (The Parker House)

     This page is about the Underground Railroad the people who made it famous. The Railroad was a system that existed back in times when slavery was legal and blacks given no rights at all. It allowed escaped to find a way up into the free states. Back then there were two kinds of states, free states that did not allow slavery, and slave states that did allow slavery.

    The reason that the underground railroad formed was that there were people called abolitionists. Abolitionists were men and women that did not believe that slavery was right.

    The underground railroads had many "conductors" or people that hid slaves in their house. People like Harriet Tubman and Truth Justice made the Underground Railroad possible. he conductors had special signs that told escaped slaves whether it was safe to come in. A certain blanket when hung out might mean come in and a different blanket might mean go on. They also had special hiding places in their house that they could hide runaways in. A fireplace could lift up to reveal a hidden room, a chimney could have a swinging wall.

     Although the Underground Railroad offered a pretty safe way to get slaves to freedom, it had it's dangers to. A law passed in 1850 allowed slave catchers to pass into free states and capture escaped slaves. Most of the time, the slave catchers wouldn't even catch the right slave but would just take the first black that they saw. This also meant that slaves had to get to Canada to really be free. Another law that was passed said that if you were found harboring slaves in your house then you could be jailed.

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