The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A comprehensive history

by Wilbur Henry Siebert

[CHAPTER XI]

EFFECT OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

The effect of Underground Railroad operations in steadily withdrawing from the South some of its property and thus causing constant irritation to slave-owners and slave-traders has already been commented upon. The persons losing slaves of course regarded their losses as a personal and undeserved misfortune. Yet, considering the question broadly from the standpoint of their own interests, the work of the underground system was a relief to the masters and to the South. The possibility of a servile insurrection was a dreadful thing for Southern minds to contemplate; but they could not easily dismiss the terrible scenes enacted in San Domingo during the years 1791 to 1793 and the three famous uprisings of 1800, 1820 and 1831, in South Carolina and Virginia. The Underground Railroad had among its passengers such persons as Josiah Henson, J. W. Loguen, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, William Wells Brown and Henry Bibb; it therefore furnished the means of escape for persons well qualified for leadership among the slaves, and thereby lessened the danger of an uprising of the blacks against their masters. The negro historian, Williams, has said of the Underground Road that it served as a "safety-valve to the institution of slavery. As soon as leaders arose among the slaves, who refused to endure the yoke, they would go North. Had they remained, there must have been enacted at the South the direful scenes of San Domingo."[965]

It is difficult to arrive at any satisfactory idea of the actual loss sustained by slave-owners through underground channels. The charges of bad faith against the free states made in Congress by Southern members were sometimes accompanied by estimates of the amount of human property lost on account of the indisposition of those living north of Mason and Dixon's line to meet the requirements of the fugitive slave legislation. Thus as early as 1822, Moore, of Virginia, speaking in the House in favor of a new fugitive recovery law, said that the district he represented lost four or five thousand dollars worth of runaway slaves annually.[966] In August, 1850, Atchison, of Kentucky, informed the Senate that "depredations to the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars are committed upon the property of the people of the border slave states of this Union annually."[967] Pratt, of Maryland, said that not less than $80,000 worth of slaves was lost every year by citizens of his state.[968] Mason, of Virginia, declared that the losses of his state were already too heavy to be borne, that they were increasing from year to year, and were then in excess of $100,000 per year.[969] Butler, of South Carolina, reckoned the annual loss of the Southern section at $200,000.[970] Clingman, of North Carolina, said that the thirty thousand fugitives then reported to be living in the North were worth at current prices little less than $15,000,000.[971] Claiborne, the biographer of General John A. Quitman, who was at one time governor of Louisiana, indicated as one of the defects of the second Fugitive Slave Law its failure to make "provision for the restitution to the South of the $30,000,000, of which she had been plundered through the 100,000 slaves abducted from her in the course of the last forty years" (1810-1850);[972] and the same writer stated that slavery was rapidly disappearing from the District of Columbia at the time of the enactment of the new law, the number of slaves "having been reduced since 1840 from 4,694 to 650, by 'underground railroads' and felonious abductions."[973]

The wide divergences among the estimates here given, as well as the obvious difficulty of getting reliable information in regard to the number of runaway slaves, renders these figures of little use in determining the loss of human property by the slaveholding states. Nevertheless, the estimates are valuable in illustrating the character of the complaints that were made in Congress, and in enabling one to realize that the tenure of slave property in the border states was rendered precarious by the operations of the Underground Railroad. Can it be thought strange that the disappearance week by week and month by month of valuable slaves over the unknown routes of the underground system should have produced wrath, suspicion and hostility in the minds of people who could justly claim to have a constitutional guarantee, the laws of Congress, and the decisions of the highest courts on their side?

In the compendiums of the United States Census for 1850 and 1860 are some statistics on fugitive slaves, which fall far short of the most moderate estimates of the Southerners, and flatly disagree with the testimony gathered from all other quarters. The official reports appear to show that the number of slaves escaping from their masters was small and inconsiderable, that it rapidly decreased, and that it was independent of proximity to a free population. But the censuses are not only opposed to the evidence, they are on their face inadequate.

If, as those tables indicate, only 1,011 slaves escaped from their masters in 1850, and only 803 in 1860, and in the latter year only 500 escaped from the border slave states, then it becomes impossible to understand the emphasis laid by Southern men upon the value of their runaway slaves, the steady pressure made by the border states for a more stringent law that resulted in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the allegation of bad faith on the part of the North put forth by the Southern states as a reason for secession.[974] In considering the weight to be ascribed to the figures on fugitive slaves supplied by the census compendiums, it is proper to set over against them the showing afforded by the same compendiums relative to the decline of the slave population in the border slave states during the decade 1850-1860; for it is to be noted that the compendiums show a marked decline in these states, that they show a greater percentage of decline in the northernmost counties of these states than in the states as a whole, and, what is even more remarkable, that the loss appears to have been still greater during this time in the four "pan-handle" counties of Virginia than in any of the other states referred to, or in the border counties of any one of them.[975] It can scarcely be suggested that the relatively rapid decline of the slave population in the border counties was due to larger shipments of slaves to the far South from these marginal regions without at the same time suggesting that the explanation for such shipments lay in the proximity of a free population and the numerous lines of Underground Railroad maintained by it. The concurrence of evidence from sources other than the census reports, and the agreement therewith of part of the evidence gathered from these reports themselves, constrains one to say that those who compiled the statistics on fugitive slaves did not secure the facts in full; and that the complaints of large losses sustained by slave-owners through the befriending of fugitive slaves by Northern people, frequently made by Southern representatives in Congress and by the South generally, were not without sufficient foundation.

It is natural that there should be great variation among the guesses made as to the total number of those indebted for liberty to the Underground Road. Very few of the persons that harbored runaways were so indiscreet as to keep a register of their hunted visitors. Their hospitality was equal to all possible demands, but was kept strictly secret. Under these circumstances one should handle all numerical generalizations with caution.