On May 14, Amazon Prime will premiere a new mini-series entitled The Underground Railroad. Based on Colson Whitehead’s award-winning book of the same name, the mini-series will bring to life Whitehead’s fictionalized saga of slaves who escaped bondage in pre-Civil War America.
The story is a work of alternative history, or perhaps better described as a sci-fi thriller in which Whitehead creates a mythical world that includes an actual underground train to transport his passengers through time and space to freedom. He intersperses this fantasy world with the real system of safe houses, conductors and danger along the road to freedom that we have come to know as the Underground Railroad.
The realities of the dangers of the Underground Railroad will not be new to most viewers. The 2019 award winning movie Harriet — the story of Harriet Tubman’s journey to freedom and her exploits in rescuing others — brought the story into theaters and later living rooms and classrooms.
But there is another, darker, and often untold story about black people who traveled an underground highway in antebellum America. They made the reverse trip from freedom in the north to slavery in the south. Americans caught a glimpse of this tragic aspect of 19th-century America in the 2013 Hollywood adaptation of the slave narrative Twelve Years A Slave. It tells the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man from New York who was kidnapped in 1841 and held as a slave until his rescue in 1853.
But Northup’s story is atypical. While adult men and women were kidnap victims, especially when any free black person was labeled a fugitive and transported south, the vast majority were children and teenagers. Historians believe that the number of victims is in the tens of thousands, starting from the late 18th century until the end of the Civil War. They have named this trail of tears the Reverse Underground Railroad.
It was America’s middle passage made up of a criminal network of human traffickers and slave traders who operated in a sub rosa world of slave markets, fugitive slave hunters and law enforcement officers who often gave a wink and a nod to the crimes that were committed in plain sight.
The traffickers were frequently poor whites who lived on the fringe of society, trading their human cargo to buyers of slaves, desperate for workers and who asked no questions. Their prime targets were young boys and some girls and women because they were easier to dupe and subdue and less likely to escape or overcome their captors.
When Congress enacted legislation in 1808 that ended the importation of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, there was at the same time an increased demand for slaves in the deep south. This made conditions ripe for unscrupulous individuals to fill the demand for slave labor and make enormous profits at the same time.
Young boys — generally from the age of 10-16 — in cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, where there were large numbers of free blacks and escaped slaves, were especially vulnerable. Usually, victims were enticed through offers of work. Escaped slaves were especially susceptible with offers of food or lodging by kidnappers posing as abolitionist offering aid. An offer of employment to work unloading a ship often resulted in the child being locked in the hold of the ship and sent south.
Other kidnap victims made the months-long overland journey south in coffles, chained together without shoes or proper clothing on starvation diets, being whipped and beaten into submission along the way. Any attempt at escape or make a claim of freedom would bring more severe punishment. Many did not survive the trek.
A kidnapped boy transported to the deep south could be sold for thousands of dollars, with girls being sold for a little less. Except for the cost of transportation, the money was clear profit. And in an age before photography, fingerprints and faces on milk cartons, it was extremely difficult to identify or locate a missing child. The kidnap victim and their parents had little or no recourse with law enforcement, many of whom saw free blacks as a curse on their society.
The University of Maryland’s Richard Bell has brought this tragic practice to light in his 2019 book Stolen – Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, a book that should be read by every student of American history.
Professor Bell tells the story of the capture of five such victims and how they managed, against all odds, to regain their freedom. But it is also the well-documented account of brutality, greed and man’s inhumanity to man and the thousands of other kidnapped blacks who never returned home, living out their lives as slaves.
The story of the Reverse Underground Railroad should be more widely told. These stories will tug at your heart strings and reveal just another aspect of the cruelty inflicted on enslaved Africans and their descents in pre-Civil War America. For those who want the whole story, Stolen is available at your local library, bookstore or on line. It is well worth the read.
C. Ellen Connally is a retired judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court. From 2010 to 2014 she served as the President of the Cuyahoga County Council. An avid reader and student of American history, she serves on the Board of the Ohio History Connection, is currently vice president of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers and Sailors Monument Commission and president of the Cleveland Civil War Round Table. She holds degrees from BGSU, CSU and is all but dissertation for a PhD from the University of Akron.
One Response to “The Reverse Underground Railroad and Other Untold Stories by C. Ellen Connally”
DK Freedheim
Heartbreaking story of a much unknown portion of the American tragedy of slavery. Must be learned to know the full extent of the underground activities at the time.