Episode Details

In 1842 a frustrated Washington, D.C. constable named John Zell complained that escaping enslaved people must be using steam balloons or some hidden underground railroad. Free Black abolitionist Thomas Smallwood printed the remark in an abolitionist newspaper, and the joke gave a dangerous movement its code: stations, conductors, passengers, cargo and stockholders. This episode examines how the network actually ran, driven mainly by free Black communities in Philadelphia, New York and Ohio, Black churches, and the freedom seekers themselves, with no headquarters and strict compartmentalization so that one captured stationmaster could not betray the whole system.

The routes ran in many directions: south into Spanish Florida alongside the Seminole, onto the lands of the Ottawa, Shawnee and Wyandotte, across the Rio Grande into Mexico, and out of ports in cargo holds. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 paid magistrates $10 to send a person into slavery and $5 to free them, yet William Still kept detailed ledgers in Philadelphia while sheltering up to 60 people a month. With the Civil War, Union lines became the destination, and about half a million people crossed into them as contraband of war.

• Freedom seekers broke scent trails with turpentine on their shoes in North Carolina and a paste of charred bullfrogs in Texas.
• Maroon communities settled permanently inside the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina.
• Harriet Tubman used Eastern Shore tides, star navigation and long winter nights on frozen ground to time her escapes.
• Sylvia Hector Weber ran a licensed ferry on the Rio Grande that carried freedom seekers into Mexico.
• William Still's coded messages announced four adults and two children as four large hams and two small hams.