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NY Times, Jan. 15 2015
Words From the Past Illuminate a Station on the Way to Freedom
Eric Foner Revisits Myths of the Underground Railroad
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Eric Foner has won a place in the front rank of American historians with
books that seem to vacuum up all available sources to produce bold new
interpretations of the country’s reckoning with the big questions of
slavery and freedom.
But his latest grew from a modest beginning: a tip from his dog-walker.
In 2007, Madeline Lewis, an undergraduate history major who helped with
the family cocker spaniel, had been looking at the papers of a
little-known 19th-century abolitionist editor named Sydney Howard Gay,
held at Columbia University, when she came upon a small notebook labeled
Record of Fugitives.
She mentioned it to Mr. Foner, who was busy writing “The Fiery Trial,”
his Pulitzer Prize-winning study of Abraham Lincoln’s shifting views of
slavery. A few months later, he got around to looking at the notebook,
which contained detailed records of Gay’s efforts to help more than 200
runaway slaves passing through New York City.
“I was amazed,” Mr. Foner said recently during an interview in his
office at Columbia, where he has taught since 1982. “I had never heard
of this document, or seen it cited.”
He added: “Normally, I start with a historical question and then go
looking for documents that might help me answer it. This was the first
time it happened the other way around.”
In “Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad,”
to be published next week by W. W. Norton, Mr. Foner uses Gay’s records
as the spine of a story that traces antislavery efforts in New York City
from the early 18th century to the years before the Civil War. The
Underground Railroad, he argues, wasn’t just a noble humanitarian
enterprise, but a movement that significantly fanned the flames of
sectional conflict and helped set off the war itself.
Mr. Foner, 71, has certainly tackled a wildly popular subject. The
Underground Railroad is enshrined in school curriculums and children’s
books as an inspiring story of interracial cooperation, and celebrated
in museums like the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in
Cincinnati, not to mention a growing number of local tourism sites.
“Everybody in Ohio who has a potato cellar thinks it was an Underground
Railroad site,” said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School
who is writing a book on fugitive slave laws.
But the Underground Railroad has had a checkered past among professional
historians, who have long questioned not just the more colorful elements
of popular legend — like the notion that fugitives followed coded
instructions sewn into quilts — but whether it existed at all.
The first scholarly study of the Underground Railroad, published by
Wilbur Siebert in 1898, named some 3,200 “agents,” virtually all of them
white men, who presided over an elaborate network of fixed routes,
illustrated with maps that looked much like those of an ordinary railroad.
That view largely held among scholars until 1961, when the historian
Larry Gara published “The Liberty Line,” a slashing revisionist study
that dismissed the Underground Railroad as a myth and argued that most
fugitive slaves escaped at their own initiative, with little help from
organized abolitionists. Scholarship on the topic all but dried up, as
historians more generally emphasized the agency of African-Americans in
claiming their own freedom.
But over the past 15 years, aided by newly digitized records of obscure
abolitionist newspapers and local archives, scholars have constructed a
new picture of the Underground Railroad as a collection of loosely
interlocking local networks of activists, both black and white, that
waxed and waned over time but nevertheless helped a significant number
reach freedom.
There have been studies of the Underground Railroad in Washington,
southern Pennsylvania and New Bedford, Mass., among other locations, as
well as biographies of black abolitionists like David Ruggles, a member
of New York City’s biracial Committee of Vigilance for the Protection of
People of Color, founded in 1835.
In “Gateway to Freedom,” Mr. Foner ties much of that work together,
while uncovering the history of the eastern corridor’s key gateway, New
York City.
“This book is a capstone,” said Matthew Pinsker, a historian at
Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., who will be teaching it to K-12
educators at a workshop this summer. “The Underground Railroad was real,
and Foner will help ordinary people understand that in a way that
doesn’t rely on fiction or quilt stories, but on actual documents and
records.”
Chief among them is Gay’s Record of Fugitives, which Mr. Pinsker called
“perhaps the most extraordinary” documentary discovery concerning the
Underground Railroad in the past decade. Previously, historians had
known little about the railroad in New York City, where strong
pro-Southern sympathies, stemming from the city’s close ties to the
cotton trade, and enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had driven
its activities further into secrecy.
But in the Record, as well as on scraps of paper that Mr. Foner found
elsewhere in the papers, Gay, the editor of the American Anti-Slavery
Society’s newspaper, kept meticulous, vivid notes on his clandestine aid
to fugitives, right down to the precise amounts of money spent.
Some of the names in the notebook, which he kept in 1855 and 1856, are
well known. “A party of four arrived from Phila.,” he wrote in one
entry. “It was headed by Captain Harriet Tubman.”
To identify more obscure figures, Mr. Foner went hunting in census
records, city directories, newspapers and other sources. Many fugitives
in Gay’s notes were also mentioned in similar records, long known to
scholars, kept by William Still, a black abolitionist in Philadelphia,
suggesting a very real if loose coordination among locations.
“Gara was quite right to take the story down a few pegs,” Mr. Foner
said. “But to say there was no Underground Railroad is not correct.”
“Gateway to Freedom” does some debunking of its own. Instead of the
popular image of a lone fugitive running through the woods, Mr. Foner’s
analysis of Gay’s notes suggests a significant number escaped in groups,
often traveling on trains or boats, helped along by blacks working in
the maritime industry, including some in Southern ports like Norfolk, Va.
Mr. Foner also recovers the stories of forgotten black heroes like Louis
Napoleon, a porter in Gay’s office who began scouring New York’s docks
for runaways as early as the 1830s. Napoleon also played a role in some
important legal cases, including Lemmon v. New York (1852), in which
abolitionists challenged the right of slave owners to transport their
property through a free state.
“He was illiterate, and yet went to court and got writs of habeas
corpus,” Mr. Foner said. “He is an important link between the overt and
clandestine sides of antislavery activism in New York.”
The actual number of people involved in the Underground Railroad was
tiny. Mr. Foner estimated that only a dozen were actively working in New
York City at any given moment, with perhaps no more than 5,000 fugitives
aided nationally each year between 1835 and 1860, out of a total slave
population of about four million.
But the railroad’s political impact, he argues, was enormous, helping to
ignite the Civil War. The longest paragraph in South Carolina’s 1860
declaration of the “immediate causes” of secession, he notes, didn’t
concern the much-debated westward expansion of slavery, but northern
obstruction of the return of fugitives.
And it wasn’t the Underground Railroad that forced the issue, but the
fugitive slaves themselves.
“They may have run away for personal reasons, to better their
situation,” he said. “But by doing so, they changed the political
discourse of the country.”
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