The Underground Railroad got its name from a joke about steam balloons
In 1842 abolitionist Thomas Smallwood mocked a baffled Baltimore constable who reckoned escaping slaves must be travelling by steam balloon or underground rail-road. The quip stuck. It named a secret network, run mostly by Black Americans free and enslaved, that helped perhaps 500,000 people reach freedom by the end of the Civil War.
Enslaved people had fled on their own since the sixteenth century, but an organised web of safe houses began forming among Northern abolitionist societies in the 1780s and kept growing until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It was neither underground nor a railway. It had no headquarters, no maps and no printed guides; small independent groups passed people along by word of mouth. The vocabulary borrowed from the newest transport of the day, so helpers were conductors, escapees were passengers, and the Big Dipper, a star pattern that guides the eye towards Polaris, became the drinking gourd.
Researcher Scott Shane traced the first printed use to 10 August 1842, in Smallwood's column for the Tocsin of Liberty, an Albany abolitionist paper edited by Charles Turner Torrey. An older claim rested on an 1839 article recalled from memory in an 1879 book and never otherwise found.
Canada was the goal for many, and an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 settled there, half of them during the 1850s. That surge followed the Compromise of 1850, whose harsher Fugitive Slave Law forced officials in free states to help slave catchers and stripped suspects of the right to defend themselves in court; kidnappers exploited it to seize free Black people, including children. Some Northern states answered with personal liberty laws, and Southern anger at such defiance was later cited as a reason for secession. Other routes ran to Mexico, the Caribbean and western territories, and some went by sea, as Ona Judge did in escaping George Washington's household.
Survival depended on ingenuity. Escapees rubbed pepper, lard and vinegar on their shoes, or turpentine in North Carolina, to baffle bloodhounds, travelled mostly at night, and carried forged free passes. Quakers, Congregationalists, Wesleyan Methodists and other congregations sheltered them, alongside free-born Black helpers, white abolitionists, formerly enslaved people and Native Americans.
Source: Underground Railroad
