Underground Railroad Connection
Slaves traveled from the South to the North from station to station mostly under the cover of darkness. Often, once runaways got into the states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, they were not in much danger of being captured by bounty hunters or the police. Runaways in New York often worked and did chores with the station owners during the day.
In 1850 the United States government, in trying to prevent a war between the slave and non-slave states, passed the new and more aggressive Fugitive Slave Act. This law gave bounty hunters from the South more rights to chase slaves into the North and forced Northern police officers into arresting and returning runaway slaves that they captured. Abolitionists hated the Fugitive Slave Act, and started working with more intensity and urgency to find ways to end slavery. Southern slave plantation owners hated Northern abolitionists because the abolitionists wanted to end slavery which in turn would mean that the plantation owners would lose their laborers, considered as their chattel.
The average slave was worth a lot of money to a slave owner-about $1,000 in the 1860s, so owners would pay bounty hunters to bring runaway slaves back to them or pay upon delivery of the runaway slave.
Read more about this topic: Cyrus Gates Farmstead
Famous quotes containing the words underground railroad, underground, railroad and/or connection:
“The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)