Tracing Sections of the Underground Railroad in Maryland
@publiks.org
follow us
The New York Times has published the most recent installment in its remarkable travel series on the Underground Railroad, tracing Harriet Tubman’s path to freedom through Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
CAMBRDIGE, MARYLAND — For the latest entry in its longstanding travel series on the Underground Railroad, The New York Times has chosen Maryland’s Eastern Shore and there traced Harriet Tubman’s guided path to freedom. This most recent stop comes after equivalent explorations in Detroit, Florida, New York, Ohio, Ontario, and Pittsburgh, making for one of the more substantive recent uses of time, space, editorial attention, and photographic and narrative craft by a premier international newspaper, toward the elucidation of a significant facet of African-American history.
That the Underground Railroad is worthy of such repeat attention is by now widely recognized, given its established status as a progenitor of organized, internationally refracted resistance in the United States, at least for the two closing centuries of the second millennium. What becomes more notable here however, as one peruses the series, is the increasingly met need for technical innovation in attending to, and at times recreating, the Railroad’s piecemeal archive.
Best understood as a sustained constellation of efforts to conduct fugitive slaves to the then more humane and accommodating regions of North America, the Underground Railroad was even at its peak little more than unrecorded and selectively decodable knowledge. Intentionally and resolutely so, as insurance against its disruption by overseers of neighboring and legally defended estates. The nature of the Railroad’s operation is thus reflected in the nature of its archive — as dependent on oral accounts passed on as it is on Tubman’s preserved home, hymnal, and tombstone to eventually make descendent audiences see, read, and inhabit anew landscape crossed over by centuries of traffic, growth, and the accoutrements of development.
The shape of the Railroad itself has roots in its organic development in the 1800s as a response to ongoing pressure, further accentuated by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to have Americans alter their conception of the capture and return of escapees. What was often seen as a matter of pure, individual or interpersonal principle was persuasively argued to be a wider public concern, involving a central form of interstate commerce. And it should therefore not be surprising for careful readers of the period to see that some of the earliest, informal “conductors” of the Railroad were Quakers. Animating their participation were a set of rigorous, openly practiced stances, not only against government infringements on individual freedom, but also against the specific set of economic principles and interests needed to reconceive the capture of freedom-seekers as a vital means of retaining, or even generating, federal and national value.
Another, associated logical extension of its development was the geography of the nascent Railroad...
