To the slave yearning to escape the hells and horrors of bondage characteristic of the Deep South, it was as good as a highway to heaven. Enshrined in the legends and history of America’s abolitionist movement as “the Underground Railroad,” it was a clandestine network of escape routes and hiding places maintained by slavery-hating whites and used by slaves fleeing the South for the North in the decades leading up to the Civil War.
Most of it had little to do with rails and locomotives, but a considerable portion of it actually did–most particularly that stretch of the antebellum Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad running from Baltimore across the Mason-Dixon line to Pennsylvania and the mecca to fugitive slaves that was Philadelphia.
The President Street Station–the PW&B depot in Baltimore about a mile east of what is now the tourist-thronged Harborplace–survived the Civil War and modern times, though it hasn’t been used as a passenger terminal for decades. This year, it was reopened as the Baltimore Civil War Museum, and a considerable portion of its wonderfully graphic and, in part, interactive exhibits, is devoted to the Underground Railroad and the city’s role as an embarkation point for freedom.
Confined to the depot premises, the museum is relatively small, but content rich. An interactive map of Civil War-era Baltimore shows the various locales, including the President Street Station, that figured in the city’s Civil War history–not only its role in the Underground Railroad but also the threat it posed to Abraham Lincoln on his way to assume the presidency and the active violence against federal troops passing through the city.
Campaign literature and period cartoons show how hated the now revered Lincoln was (he lost Baltimore in the 1860 election by 30-to-1). There is also a model of the horse car he–and, later, Union troops–used to make the dangerous transit from one rail depot to another.
There are photographs and engravings of slaves who managed to escape either through or from Baltimore, wanted posters and other memorabilia.
Perhaps the most compelling object of all in the museum is a set of slave ankle shackles worn by a local unfortunate–graphically expressing as mere printed words cannot why black people of the time sought such desperate means of escaping to the North from this place.
Baltimore would seem to have been an unlikely place for the Underground Railroad to thrive. Though the state was occupied by federal troops too swiftly for it to join the Confederacy, much of Maryland was hotly pro-slavery and pro-secession. Until recently, the state song, “Maryland, My Maryland,” contained a reference to “northern scum.” Fully 25 percent of the state’s white population owned slaves before the Civil War.
Because the city was so hostile and dangerous, Abraham Lincoln had to sneak through it en route to Washington for his inauguration in 1861, arriving at this terminal at 3:30 a.m. disguised in a slouch hat and shawl and accompanied only by detective Allan Pinkerton as bodyguard.
Lincoln’s rail car was quietly uncoupled and drawn by horses along street car tracks to the Camden Station of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad several blocks away.
Two months later, regiments of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts troops on their way to the Virginia front arrived to make the same rail transfer from the President Street to the Camden Street Station. They were set upon by pro-Confederate mobs all along the route and a violent riot ensued in which 10 soldiers and 11 civilians were killed and hundreds were injured.
The subject of a major exhibit in the new museum, this clash was called “The Lexington of 1861” in the North and “The Baltimore Massacre” (as in “Boston Massacre”) in the South. There are artifacts from the clash between Union troops and local citizenry, including remnants of police and military uniforms, a musket dropped by one of the felled soldiers and one of the sharp 7 1/2-foot pikes distributed to pro-South citizenry to “defend” themselves against the federal soldiers, though the troops were simply trying to pass through.
For the rest of the war, the city was under military occupation and ruled by Union generals, including Gen. Lew Wallace, author of “Ben Hur” and the commander who saved Washington from Confederate conquest in the 1864 Battle of the Monocacy.
For all that, Baltimore was also a haven and launching point for escaping slaves, as Civil War Museum director Shawn Cunningham explained.
“Prior to the Civil War, there were 25,000 free blacks living in Baltimore and only about 2,000 slaves,” he said. “It was easy for people heading north to mix with the population.”
Getting away from Baltimore and to the North was not so easy.
As the escapes were largely secret, no one knows for certain how many slaves were able to ride the Underground Railroad to freedom. William Still, a free black abolitionist living in Philadelphia, documented some 800 cases and wrote a book about their experiences that was published after the Civil War.
Certainly many thousands succeeded. The network of escape routes extended west all the way to Topeka, Kan., and included Cairo, Springfield and Chicago as Illinois originations and destinations.
The volume was sufficient for the South to pressure Congress to pass the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made slaves subject to capture and return anywhere in the U.S. Worse, they got the Supreme Court to uphold it in the famous Dred Scott decision.
The escape route through the Baltimore area was heavily traveled. Perhaps the most notable escapees to use it were Harriet Tubman, who became one of the most famous “conductors” on the Underground Railroad, and abolitionist, writer and statesman Frederick Douglass.
Born a slave in brutal conditions on a plantation near Bucktown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Tubman worked as a field hand, picking upward of 200 pounds of cotton a day, until her owner died and she decided to escape to the North.
Her entry point to the “railroad” was the house of a farmer’s wife who opposed slavery. Hiding Tubman, the woman then had her husband spirit Tubman out of the area in his wagon. Tubman then walked the rest of the way north to Philadelphia, where she took a job as a kitchen maid in a hotel, earning $1 a day.
Douglass was also born on a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore but became a skilled ship’s caulker and was eventually allowed to live and work in Baltimore, earning wages for his master and himself. But he, too, broke free of bondage, disguising himself as a seaman and taking a PW&B train to the North.
After he became famous as a brilliant abolitionist lecturer and essayist, Douglass eventually had his freedom bought for him by admirers in Britain, though this caused a controversy with abolitionists who felt the act constituted recognition of slavery.
Both Tubman and Douglass were active agents of the Underground Railroad.
The museum has stories of other “passengers.” In 1856, escaping slaves Charlotte Giles and Harriett Eglin dressed themselves in voluminous black clothes and heavy veils and passed themselves off as women in mourning as they took a PW&B train headed for the North. Their owner caught up with them in the depot, but failed to recognize them even though he looked under their bonnets.
William and Ellen Craft, a married slave couple escaping from Macon, Ga., in 1848, arrived in Baltimore hoping to reach the North by train. They managed it because Mrs. Craft had a very light complexion. Disguising herself as a man with arm in sling and bandaged head, she posed as an injured white gentleman with his slave.
According to Still’s book “The Underground Railroad,” at least two slaves literally had themselves shipped to the North by rail by friendly anti-slavery whites in Baltimore. One, an unidentified black seamstress, reached Philadelphia in a packing box but was left in the depot there overnight and barely survived the freezing temperatures. When finally rescued, she was initially unable to speak.
Henry “Box” Brown was shipped by crate all the way from Richmond to Philadelphia, a 26-hour journey, addressed to a shoe dealer. When he arrived and was unpacked by members of a local anti-slavery society, he rose from his box, stretched out his hand and said, “How do you do, gentlemen!”
The North didn’t exactly prove a haven for escaped slaves. Decent jobs were hard to come by and pay was unequal. Segregation was rampant, extending to public schools. Bounty hunters and private detectives in the pay of slave owners swarmed major disembarkation points, especially New York, looking for fugitives. Many were caught, returned and punished.
Douglass not only survived but also became eminent, a leading figure in the Republican Party and abolitionist circles who gave the South painful reason to regret his escape. Douglass’ relentless pressure was a major factor in Lincoln’s decision to accept blacks into the Union Army. Their force grew to 180,000, and these additional numbers made Southern defeat inevitable when Gen. Ulysses S. Grant ordered an end to the practice of exchanging prisoners of war in reprisal for the Confederate slaughter of black Union Army prisoners of war at Ft. Pillow, Ky.
DETAILS ON RELATED HISTORIC SITES
Baltimore is within an hour’s drive of the Gettysburg, Pa., and Antietam, Md., battlefields and, via Interstate Highway 70, within a half hour of Frederick, Md., home to numerous Civil War sites and adjoining the Monocacy battlefield.
Also in Gettysburg is one of the best examples of a way station on the Underground Railroad, the Dobbin House Tavern, 89 Steinwehr Ave. (717-334-2100). Now an inn, it retains the secret crawl space used by fugitive slaves newly arrived from the South.
Used as a hospital during the famous 1863 battle, it also overlooks the spot where Lincoln gave his Gettysburg address.
Other nearby historic sites include the Harriet Tubman birthplace historical marker at Bucktown, 8 miles south of Cambridge, Md., on Maryland Highway 397, and the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, a 21-room house on 9 acres, at 1411 W St., S.E., Washington, D.C. (202-426-5961; call first for directions).
The National Park Service has published a list of significant Underground Railroad sites in a large number of states. Its “Underground Railroad Official Map and Guide” ($1; stock No. 024-005-01170-6) and “Underground Railroad Special Resource Study” ($8; stock No. 024-005-01175-7) can be obtained through the Superintendent of Documents at 202-512-1806.
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The Baltimore Civil War Museum is at 601 President St., Baltimore; 410-385-5188 (fax 410-385-5189). Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays from November through February (daily from March through October). Admission is $2 for adults and $1 for children.
