Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad

Harriet soon misses her family and decides to return to help them escape as soon as she can. It is 1849, and Harriet gets a job working as a hotel cook. She hates indoor work but stays for one year, saving as much money as possible. Harriet feels out of place in Philadelphia, a busy city with many other fugitive slaves, and she often feels homesick for her family’s cabin. Harriet seeks information from the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, a group that helps fugitive slaves by offering them money, clothes, food, and train tickets. Harriet frequently visits the Committee’s offices to listen to William Still speak, a free Black man and the secretary of the Committee. Still’s stories reinvigorate her desire to help more slaves reach freedom in the North.

Meanwhile, in Maryland, Harriet’s brother-in-law, a free Black man, has learned that his wife Mary and their children will be sold and asks for help from a Quaker friend, who informs the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. The Underground Railroad “conductors” do not use the postal system; instead, they pass messages from person to person, always using their code words to avoid detection. The Committee agrees that a boat will be ready to transport the family from Cambridge, Maryland, to Baltimore, where they will continue their way north. Harriet learns about her sister’s problem and, with the help of the Committee, arranges to rescue her sister and brother-in-law and their two children via the Underground Railroad by herself.

In Maryland, Harriet’s sister Mary and their children have already been taken to the “slave pen,” where they will be auctioned off to buyers. Her husband John pretends to be working for the auctioneer, so the guard allows him to take his family away. With the town streets quiet at lunchtime, John, Mary, and their children walk to their friend’s house, who hides the family in his attic until nighttime. Then they hide under blankets in their friend’s wagon, and their friend drives them to the river, where he rows them out to a small fishing boat packed with supplies. John rows the boat toward Baltimore and stops when he sees a blue and yellow light together. He meets a white woman who helps him when he says the password, “A friend with friends” (112).

Mary, John, and their children hide in the woman’s wagon and then in her barn, where they eat a meal and wait for night. The woman takes them by wagon to the next house, where they are surprised to find Harriet waiting for them. Harriet then guides the family through the same network of homes she is already familiar with until they reach Philadelphia. Once they reach the city, Harriet learns of a new law, the “Fugitive Slave Law,” which puts anyone who aids a runaway slave in danger of prosecution and imprisonment. It also allows southern slave owners the legal right to capture their slaves, even if they lived in a free northern state. Runaway slaves were already in great danger of recapture and punishment, and this law only added to the “undercurrent of fear” (113) along the Underground Railroad.

Petry concludes the chapter with a historical note explaining that while Congress sought to pacify the rising tensions between the North and South by passing the Fugitive Slave Act, the law only made it worse. Northern men resented that Southerners wanted them to be “slave catchers” and doubted that the system of slavery was as beneficial for Black Americans as slave owners wanted it to seem (114).