Underground Railroad

Rare card · No. 46845

The Underground Railroad was an organized network of secret routes and safe houses for fugitive slaves to escape to the abolitionist Northern United States and Eastern Canada during the era of slavery in the United States. Slaves escaped from slavery as early as the 16th century; many of their escapes were unaided. However, a network of safe houses generally known as the Underground Railroad began to organize in the 1780s among abolitionist societies in the North. It ran north and grew steadily until President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The escapees sought primarily to escape into free states or into Canada. The Underground Railroad started at the place of enslavement. The routes followed natural and man-made modes of transportation: rivers, canals, bays, the Atlantic Coast, ferries and river crossings, roads and trails. Locations close to ports, free territories, and international boundaries prompted many escapes. The network, primarily the work of free...

Read on Wikipedia · Image https://lccn.loc.gov/68003375 Siebert, Wilbur Henry, 1866-1961. The underground railroad from slavery to freedom. With an introd. by Albert Bushnell Hart. Gloucester, Mass., P. Smith, 1968 [c1898] xx…, Public domain