Consider This from NPR - How The Underground Railroad Got Its Name

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Popular culture is filled with stories of the underground railroad - the legendary secret network that helped enslaved people escape from southern slave states to free states in the north. Harriet Tubman is the underground railroad's best known conductor. Tubman, who was a Union spy during the Civil War, escaped slavery in Maryland, but returned again and again, risking her own freedom to help free others, including members of her family. Inevitably there's much we don't know ...including how the term, the Underground Railroad, came to be.Journalist Scott Shane, stumbled on the answer while he was writing his book "Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland." His book tells the story of Thomas Smallwood, an activist and writer who's story and the key role he played in the abolition movement has mostly been lost to history.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

There's word of an underground railroad here. Impossible. Indeed. Yeah, where do they go? In the 2021 television series The Underground Railroad, based on Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the secret network of abolitionists who helped enslaved people escape to freedom is an actual train running underground. The Underground Railroad is bigger than its conductors. It's all y'all too.

The history of the Underground Railroad is filled with stories of bravery, defiance, and sacrifice. So it is no surprise that the idea of the Underground Railroad has inspired countless artists, writers, and filmmakers. A recent Hollywood biopic portrays Harriet Tubman, a real-life heroine. Harriet, welcome to the Underground Railroad. Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland but returned again and again, risking her own freedom to help free others, including members of her own family. You tried to destroy my family, but you can't. You tried to destroy my people, but you won't.

God has shown me the future, and my people are free. But consider this. For every story like Harriet Tubman's, there are hundreds more that we don't know, like why it's called the Underground Railroad and who named it. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's Monday, February 26th. It's Consider This from NPR. Popular culture is filled with stories of the Underground Railroad, the legendary secret network that helped enslaved people escape from southern slave states to free states in the North. And inevitably, there's still a lot we don't know,

including how the term the Underground Railroad came to be. Journalist Scott Shane stumbled on the answer while he was writing his book, Flee North, a forgotten hero in the fight for freedom in slavery's borderland. His book tells the story of Thomas Smallwood, a little-known activist who played a key role in the abolition movement. And he decided to start writing about these escapes in satirical dispatches for a newspaper, a little abolitionist newspaper in Albany, New York. He always portrays the slaveholders as a sort of dim-witted bunch of very incapable people. Shane filled me in on

Smallwood's backstory and how he didn't stop at those dispatches written under a pseudonym. Thomas Smallwood is an amazing guy who very few people know about. He was born into slavery in 1801 just outside D.C. He purchased his freedom by the age of 30. He became a shoemaker in southeast Washington. And basically, he began with the help of a white sidekick named Charles Torrey to organize escapes from slavery. And they decided they would not try in ones and twos and threes, but they would try to help people escape by the wagon load. So they would load 10, 15, 20 people into a wagon and drive them north or send them north. I'm curious, in all of your research, as you were learning about the story of Thomas Smallwood, how are you able to know for certain, or as certain as one could be, that this is the place

and the person with whom this idea of the name, the Underground Railroad, that this is the place and the person with whom this idea of the name, the Underground Railroad, that this is where it comes from. When I found Smallwood talking about the Underground Railroad as this kind of mythical transport system by which people were supposedly escaping slavery, I immediately went like anybody else would to Wikipedia. I found that there were some kind of folklore theories about where that phrase came from, but none of them held up to much scrutiny, and scholars really had not accepted any of them. And so, therefore, it was a bit of a historical mystery as to where this came from.

So then I looked into the big digitized databases that now exist of 19th century newspapers and just put in that phrase Underground Railroad and was amazed to find that all of the early uses of Underground Railroad come from Smallwood's dispatches and from pieces by his buddy Charles Torrey, who had become editor of that paper in Albany. So he picks up this phrase, the Underground Railroad, and he starts using it in his newspaper dispatches, essentially to beat up on the slaveholders and the slave catchers. It's one more way that he can mock them. So he starts riffing on it and he appoints himself the general agent of all the branches of the National Underground Railroad. And so he has a lot of fun with this basically as one more way of sticking it to the slaveholders who are his enemies. But within a year or two, it gets picked up by other newspapers and it gradually becomes a kind of way of referring to the escapes from slavery, especially those aided by folks in a network kind of up the line to the north. You know, it really strikes me listening to you describe the way that Thomas Smallwood is

writing about the enslaved and their owners, this mockery. Even though he's writing under a pseudonym, it seems like there's a great deal of risk inherent here with what he's doing. Is that how you see it? Absolutely. I mean, on top of sending these things off to the Albany paper, he asked the editors in Albany to send a copy of any newspaper that named a slaveholder to that slaveholder. These are people in D.C., Maryland, to some degree Virginia. And so these folks are sort of unsuspecting. They get this copy of a paper from Albany, New York.

They open it up, and here they are being mocked publicly. And sometimes their brutality is exposed and he insists that these newspapers be sent to the slaveholders. So it definitely got people riled up. I think one thing you can say is that in some ways his best disguise is the literary quality of these newspaper dispatches. I don't think anyone initially who was stung by these newspaper pieces was thinking that this black shoemaker was their author. Were there any preconceived notions about the Underground Railroad that you were hoping to either interrogate or correct in your work?

I think in our time, the Underground Railroad has become a polite way, a kind of kinder, gentler way of talking about the horrors of slavery, the crime of slavery. And in part, that's because it's a story of liberation. It's basically a good news story. And also, I think, because it provides a role for warm-hearted white people. of Smallwood and in sort of some of the early years, you realize that this, first of all, was not at all institutionalized, not at all organized. This was a small number of activists taking grave risks to help people to freedom and a very, very dangerous thing and something that was seen by most abolitionists at the time as too dangerous. And so people like Thomas Smallwood were actually in the small minority, even of abolitionists, who would take the risks to make these kinds of escapes happen. So many of us who grow up in this country, we're educated about slavery, about the Underground Railroad, but Thomas Smallwood's name is not one that comes up

in that education. Why do you think that his name and the story that you've brought us is one that seems to be largely forgotten by history? You know, I think it's a combination of things. Thomas Smallwood, like the people he was sending north, eventually has to make his own very daring escape. And he ends up in Canada as well. Basically, his career as a writer ends with the exception of a short memoir that he writes in 1851. But there's also one other element, which is somewhat darker, which is Charles Torrey, his partner in getting the escapes going, never credited Smallwood, even in private correspondence, with really what was the far more important role in beginning to organize these escapes? Other writers at the time who would have been aware of Smallwood's role also did not credit him. And I think there was probably an element of racism in that.

And so Smallwood just never gets credit. So his writings get kind of cast to the winds. And he's busy earning a living. And, you know, he just sort of his story falls by the wayside. Scott Shane is the author of the book, Flee North, A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland. Scott, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers. It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Jeanette Woods.

Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.