UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, a term used popularly to designate an organized system existing in the Northern States of the United States prior to the Civil War by which slaves were secretly helped by sympathetic northerners and in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Laws (q.v.), to make their way to Canada, and thus to freedom. The name arose from the exaggerated use of railway terms in reference to the conduct of the system. Levi Coffin and Robert Purvis were the "presidents" of the road. Various routes were known as "lines," stopping places were called "stations," those who aided along the stages of the route were "conductors" and their charges were referred to as "packages" or "freight." The system reached from Kentucky and Virginia across Ohio, and from Maryland across Pennsylvania and New York or New England. The Quakers of Pennsylvania perhaps initiated the system ; the best known of them Thomas Garrett (1789-1871) is said to have helped 2,700 slaves to freedom. One
of the most picturesque conductors was Harriet Tubman, a negro woman called "General" Tubman by John Brown, and "Moses" by her fellow negroes, who made about a score of trips into the South, bringing out with her perhaps 30o negroes altogether. Levi Coffin, a native of North Carolina, in 1826 settled at New Garden (now Fountain City), Ohio, where his home was the meeting point of three "lines" from Kentucky. In 1847 he removed to Cincinnati, where he was even more successful in bringing out slaves. Estimates of the number of slaves who reached freedom through the system vary from 40,000 to ioo,000.
See W. H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad (1898), a scholarly study containing maps of routes and bibliography. W. Still, The Underground Railroad (1872), R. C. Smedley, History of the Under ground Railroad (1883), and Reminiscences of Levi Coffin (1880 are personal records of participants.