Illustration by Leeay. Whenever I see a magic trick, Iâm never content to just simply enjoy it; I have to know how it works so I can re-create it on my own. Iâm also really, really bad at sitting still: I can never just watch a movie; I always have to be doing something with my hands.
Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was a secret network of abolitionists who helped African Americans escape from enslavement in the American South to free Northern states or to Canada. It was the largest anti-slavery freedom movement in North America, having brought between 30,000 and 40,000 fugitives to British North America (Canada).
They make few distinctions between North and South, often imagining that slave patrollers and their barking dogs chased terrified runaways from Mississippi to Maine. Instead, the Underground Railroad deserves to be explained in terms of sectional differences and the coming of the Civil War. One way to grasp the Underground Railroad in its full political complexity is to look closely at the rise of abolitionism and the spread of free black vigilance committees during the 1830s.