50 Fun Facts About Underground Railroad

Which enslaved Virginian escaped by having himself shipped to Philadelphia abolitionists inside a wooden crate?

Henry Brown spent 27 hours in a box labelled as dry goods, carried by wagon, railroad and steamboat. He later toured England as a magician under the nickname Box.

Harriet Tubman's rescue missions into slave territory earned her the name of which biblical prophet?

Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, and Tubman made some 13 trips back south to bring about 70 relatives and friends out of slavery.

Frederick Douglass escaped Baltimore by train in 1838 wearing the uniform of which profession?

A sailor's uniform and a free seaman's papers carried Douglass to New York in under 24 hours. His future wife, Anna Murray, supplied the clothes and part of her savings.

Which pattern in the night sky did freedom seekers call the drinking gourd and use to find north?

The Big Dipper gave its nickname to the folk song Follow the Drinking Gourd, though scholars doubt that such songs carried real directions for people on the run.

Harriet Tubman often began escapes on which evening, since runaway notices could not be printed until Monday?

Saturday starts bought her groups a head start, and she usually worked in winter, when long nights and cold weather kept people indoors.

What did the name Underground Railroad describe in the decades before the Civil War?

Secret routes and safe houses were described in the slang of the newest transport of the day. The first railway that really ran underground did not open until 1863.

In Underground Railroad slang, what name was given to guides who led freedom seekers between hiding places?

Conductors included free-born Black Americans, white abolitionists, formerly enslaved people and Native Americans. Some posed as enslaved workers to get onto a plantation.

Since the 1980s, a disputed theory has held that patterns on which household items guided freedom seekers north?

Quilts hung one at a time on a fence were said to carry ten coded patterns, but historians have found no evidence from the period that such a code existed.

A southern branch of the Underground Railroad led to which country, which abolished slavery in 1829?

Mexico ended slavery under President Vicente Guerrero, who was himself of African descent, and people who crossed its border from the United States became free.

Ona Judge fled the President's House in Philadelphia by ship, escaping enslavement by which president's family?

George Washington's household was packing for a trip to Virginia when Judge slipped away. She reached New Hampshire and was never recaptured, though in law she stayed a fugitive for life.

Freedom seekers gave the Ohio River, the border between slave and free states, the name of which biblical river?

Jordan was the river the Israelites crossed to enter the Promised Land, which is the name fugitives gave to Canada.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, on the Eastern Shore of which state?

Maryland bordered free Pennsylvania, and Tubman escaped to Philadelphia in 1849, only to go back soon afterwards to rescue her family.

Which novelist turned a true tale of a mother carrying her child across Ohio River ice into fiction?

Harriet Beecher Stowe heard the tale from the minister John Rankin, who had housed the woman in 1838, and modelled Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin on her.

Which actress earned an Academy Award nomination for playing Harriet Tubman in the 2019 film Harriet?

Cynthia Erivo was nominated twice over for the film: she also co-wrote its song Stand Up, which was up for the Oscar, Grammy and Golden Globe.

Which constitutional amendment of December 1865 made the Underground Railroad unnecessary by outlawing slavery?

The Thirteenth Amendment kept one exception in its text: slavery and involuntary servitude were banned except as punishment for a crime.

Which Christian group, the faith of Pennsylvania founder William Penn, was especially active in hiding freedom seekers?

Quakers had not always opposed slavery: in colonial Pennsylvania it was fairly common for Friends to own slaves, until protests from their own members turned the group against it.

As an adolescent, Harriet Tubman suffered a lifelong head injury when an overseer threw which object at another person?

A metal weight of about two pounds, aimed at a man who had left work without permission, hit her instead. The wound brought seizures and vivid visions that she took as messages from God.

Harriet Tubman helped a militant abolitionist plan and recruit for his 1859 raid on which Virginia town?

Harpers Ferry was attacked on October 16, 1859, but Tubman, whom the raid's leader called General Tubman, was in New York City when it happened.

Most freedom seekers who reached Canada settled in which present-day province, then known as Canada West?

Ontario drew the largest group, and whole villages of formerly enslaved people grew up in its Kent and Essex counties.

The 1856 escape of Margaret Garner across the frozen Ohio River inspired which Toni Morrison novel?

Beloved grew out of what Garner did when slave catchers cornered her family: she killed her two-year-old daughter rather than see the child returned to slavery.

Many freedom seekers finished the journey to Canada by boat from Ohio ports across which body of water?

Lake Erie lay at the end of the main route north, which ran up the Appalachians and through the strongly anti-slavery Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio.

In 1978 Harriet Tubman became the first African-American woman to be honoured on which everyday item?

A postage stamp carried her portrait again in 1995, when the United States issued a second Tubman design.

Which novelist won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for a book that imagines the Underground Railroad as real trains in tunnels?

Colson Whitehead won the fiction Pulitzer a second time in 2020 for The Nickel Boys, a double that very few writers have managed.

Which surveyed boundary on Pennsylvania's southern edge became shorthand for the divide between free and slave states?

The Mason–Dixon Line was surveyed in the 1760s to end a quarrel between colonies, and took on its later meaning once Pennsylvania had abolished slavery.

Harriet Tubman carried which weapon on her missions as protection against slave catchers and their dogs?

A revolver also kept her groups moving: when one man lost his nerve and wanted to go back, she aimed it at his head and gave him the choice of walking on or dying.

Which Philadelphia abolitionist kept hidden notes on hundreds of escapes and published them as a book in 1872?

William Still interviewed every arrival, and one man he questioned turned out to be his own brother Peter, whom he had never met.

Which Indiana merchant, said to have sheltered 3,000 fugitives, was nicknamed President of the Underground Railroad?

Levi Coffin was first given the title by an exasperated slave catcher, and his house in Fountain City became known as the network's Grand Central Station.

Which woman escaped slavery in 1848 disguised as a white male planter, with her husband posing as her servant?

Ellen Craft and her husband William rode first-class trains and steamboats from Macon to Philadelphia, arriving on Christmas Day.

After the 1851 Christiana Resistance in Pennsylvania, 41 people were indicted for which crime against the United States?

Treason proved impossible to make stick: a jury took only 15 minutes to acquit the first defendant, and the charges against everyone else were dropped.

Frederick Douglass named his Rochester abolitionist newspaper after which nighttime guide followed by freedom seekers?

The North Star first appeared in December 1847, paid for with money English supporters had given Douglass, and it figuratively stood for Canada as well.

Which president signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which obliged free states to help return people who had escaped?

Millard Fillmore held the bill for two days until his attorney general assured him it was constitutional, and he later threatened to send the army to enforce it in Vermont.

Which city on the Ohio River is home to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, opened in 2004?

Cincinnati faced slaveholding Kentucky across the river, and thousands of people escaped by crossing to the free shore there.

Which city, one of the last stops before a river crossing into Canada, was code-named Midnight?

Detroit's Second Baptist Church alone is said to have hidden some 5,000 people before they crossed to Canada.

In which upstate New York city did Harriet Tubman settle her parents and spend her final decades?

Auburn was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and in 1859 the wife of Senator William Seward sold Tubman a seven-acre farm on its edge.

Harriet Tubman changed her first name around the time of her marriage; what name was she given at birth?

Araminta was shortened to Minty by her family, and the name she chose instead, Harriet, was her mother's.

From 1738, people fleeing Carolina plantations could live free at Fort Mose in which Spanish colony?

Florida's Fort Mose was the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what became the United States, and Spain used it as a first line of defence for the colony.

In which city did the 1854 arrest of Anthony Burns bring federal troops to escort him to a ship back to Virginia?

Boston sympathisers later bought his freedom, and the outrage over his case swelled support for abolition across the North.

Harriet Tubman once wore a bonnet and carried two of which live birds to look as if she were running errands?

Chickens were one disguise among several: on a train, recognising a former enslaver among the passengers, she grabbed a newspaper and pretended to read.

Before the Civil War, freedom seekers crossed into Canada over a railway suspension bridge spanning which river?

The Niagara bridge, completed by the engineer John Roebling, was the first working railway suspension bridge in history.

Which Wilmington, Delaware, iron merchant helped more than 2,500 people escape and was heavily fined for it in 1848?

Thomas Garrett is said to have told the court that fined him to send him anyone who needed shelter, and he later gave Harriet Tubman the money to bring out her parents.

Which preacher escaped to Upper Canada in 1830 and founded the Dawn Settlement for fellow freedom seekers?

Josiah Henson's 1849 autobiography is believed to have inspired the title character of Uncle Tom's Cabin, though some historians question the link.

Which North Carolina woman hid for seven years in a crawl space under her grandmother's roof before escaping north?

Harriet Jacobs told the story in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, long taken for a white author's fiction until research in the 1980s proved it was her own memoir.

Which filmmaker created and directed the Amazon series The Underground Railroad, with Thuso Mbedu as Cora?

Barry Jenkins began filming in Savannah in 2019, and the finished series won the Golden Globe for best limited series and a Peabody Award.

Which wetland on the Virginia–North Carolina border hid thousands of escaped people, known as maroons, for generations?

Great Dismal Swamp communities lasted from about 1700 until the 1860s, and an 1856 novel, Dred, carried their story to readers across the country.

Harriet Tubman guided Union steamboats up which South Carolina waterway in an 1863 raid that freed over 700 people?

The Combahee raid left Tubman widely credited as the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States, and more than 100 of the men it freed joined the Union army.

In Underground Railroad code, what financial name was given to supporters who donated money or supplies?

Stockholders completed the railway vocabulary, alongside the stations where people rested and the station masters who kept them.

By tradition, the Rankin family of Ripley, Ohio, raised what on a hilltop pole to signal a safe river crossing?

A lantern on the Rankins' hill could be seen from the Kentucky shore, and the family also built a staircase up the slope for people climbing to the house.

Which founder of the anti-slavery Provincial Freeman became the first Black woman publisher in North America?

Mary Ann Shadd launched the weekly in 1853, which also made her the first woman of any background to publish a newspaper in Canada.

Which Ohio college town saw residents chase a U.S. marshal to nearby Wellington in 1858 to free the fugitive John Price?

Oberlin's rescuers hid Price in the home of a future college president before sending him on to Canada.

In her later years, Harriet Tubman spoke at meetings in several Northern cities in support of which cause?

Women's suffrage drew a blunt answer from her: asked whether women ought to have the vote, she said she had suffered enough to believe it.