TRANSKRIP 🔗
WEBVTT
1
00:00:00.230 --> 00:00:06.169
Autumn, 1849. In Maryland, a woman named Harriet Tubman slips
2
00:00:06.269 --> 00:00:08.289
out of the cabin where she has lived as an
3
00:00:08.369 --> 00:00:13.339
enslaved person all her life. She is about twenty-seven years old.
4
00:00:14.050 --> 00:00:17.280
She has no map, no money, and no one to
5
00:00:17.320 --> 00:00:21.500
guide her. She walks by night, following the North Star,
6
00:00:22.120 --> 00:00:26.300
hiding by day in woods and swamps. Slave catchers are
7
00:00:26.399 --> 00:00:30.019
already looking for her. If she is caught, She will
8
00:00:30.059 --> 00:00:35.060
be beaten or sold further south or worse. She walks
9
00:00:35.119 --> 00:00:40.369
for nearly 90 miles to Pennsylvania to freedom. And then
10
00:00:41.100 --> 00:00:46.009
she does something nobody expects. She turns around and goes back.
11
00:00:46.530 --> 00:00:50.250
The network she joined is called the Underground Railroad. It
12
00:00:50.289 --> 00:00:54.070
was not underground. It was not a railroad. It was
13
00:00:54.109 --> 00:00:59.850
a secret web of people, free black Americans, white abolitionists, Quakers,
14
00:01:00.469 --> 00:01:04.750
church congregations, who hid people escaping slavery in their homes,
15
00:01:05.370 --> 00:01:08.849
fed them, and guided them north, one safe house at
16
00:01:08.890 --> 00:01:13.739
a time. The houses were called stations, the guides were conductors,
17
00:01:14.379 --> 00:01:17.280
and the whole thing ran on whispers and coded messages,
18
00:01:17.879 --> 00:01:21.859
because a single betrayal could mean prison or death. The
19
00:01:21.900 --> 00:01:26.560
journeys were terrifying. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,
20
00:01:26.560 --> 00:01:29.480
even the Free North was no longer safe. Helping a
21
00:01:29.540 --> 00:01:32.099
runaway meant a fine of a thousand dollars and six
22
00:01:32.159 --> 00:01:36.349
months in jail, so the destination became Canada, where slavery
23
00:01:36.390 --> 00:01:40.390
had been abolished. Stations were usually ten to fifteen miles apart,
24
00:01:40.810 --> 00:01:45.109
a night's walk. Travelers moved after dark, in silence, through
25
00:01:45.189 --> 00:01:48.680
forests and fields, guided by conductors who knew the routes
26
00:01:48.739 --> 00:01:52.099
by heart. They used the language of the railroad as code.
27
00:01:52.659 --> 00:01:56.159
A station was a safehouse, cargo was the people, and
28
00:01:56.200 --> 00:02:00.310
a conductor was a guide. Songs carried coded messages. A
29
00:02:00.370 --> 00:02:02.689
quilt hung on a fence or a lantern in a
30
00:02:02.730 --> 00:02:06.849
window could mean safety or danger. And always behind them
31
00:02:07.209 --> 00:02:10.550
were the slave catchers, paid by the head, hunting with
32
00:02:10.629 --> 00:02:11.569
dogs and guns.
33
00:02:12.229 --> 00:02:16.689
Harriet Tubman became the railroad's most famous conductor. After her
34
00:02:16.789 --> 00:02:21.560
own
Load full transcript
escape in 1849, she returned to the South 13 times,
35
00:02:22.099 --> 00:02:26.259
guiding about 70 people to freedom, family and friends first.
36
00:02:26.830 --> 00:02:31.590
then strangers. She never lost a single passenger. She carried
37
00:02:31.629 --> 00:02:34.219
a pistol and she used it to threaten anyone who
38
00:02:34.259 --> 00:02:37.819
wanted to turn back, because one person turning back could
39
00:02:37.860 --> 00:02:41.400
betray them all. She traveled in winter, when the nights
40
00:02:41.460 --> 00:02:45.360
were long. Later, during the Civil War, she served the
41
00:02:45.460 --> 00:02:48.500
Union Army as a scout and a spy, and led
42
00:02:48.539 --> 00:02:51.879
a raid that freed more than 700 enslaved people in
43
00:02:51.919 --> 00:02:52.759
a single day.
44
00:02:53.360 --> 00:02:57.180
She was not alone. William Still, a free black man
45
00:02:57.219 --> 00:03:00.719
in Philadelphia, kept careful records of the people who passed
46
00:03:00.800 --> 00:03:05.400
through his station, their names, their stories, where they came from,
47
00:03:06.120 --> 00:03:08.969
hiding the records so slave catchers could not use them.
48
00:03:09.909 --> 00:03:13.370
Frederick Douglass hid runaways in his home in Rochester, New York,
49
00:03:13.870 --> 00:03:18.590
and helped 400 people reach Canada. In Ohio, the Quaker
50
00:03:18.669 --> 00:03:23.879
Levi Coffin, called the president of the Underground Railroad, sheltered thousands.
51
00:03:24.930 --> 00:03:29.050
Historians estimate that as many as 100,000 enslaved people sought
52
00:03:29.110 --> 00:03:32.469
freedom on the railroad between the late 18th century and
53
00:03:32.490 --> 00:03:33.229
the Civil War.
54
00:03:33.810 --> 00:03:39.259
The Underground Railroad ended when the Civil War did. After 1863,
55
00:03:39.259 --> 00:03:42.639
its work moved above ground, into the Union war effort.
56
00:03:43.419 --> 00:03:46.740
But what it proved could not be undone. It proved
57
00:03:46.800 --> 00:03:50.439
that enslaved people were not passive victims waiting to be freed.
58
00:03:51.080 --> 00:03:54.849
They freed themselves and helped each other do it. It
59
00:03:54.930 --> 00:03:59.310
proved that ordinary people, at enormous personal risk, would defy
60
00:03:59.379 --> 00:04:02.699
an unjust law, and it proved that freedom was worth
61
00:04:02.740 --> 00:04:06.000
a ninety-mile walk in the dark, guided only by the
62
00:04:06.039 --> 00:04:06.740
North Star.
63
00:04:07.199 --> 00:04:10.039
Harriet Tubman once said that she was the conductor of
64
00:04:10.080 --> 00:04:13.620
the Underground Railroad for eight years, and she could say
65
00:04:13.680 --> 00:04:17.610
what most conductors cannot say. She never ran her train
66
00:04:17.670 --> 00:04:21.350
off the track, and she never lost a passenger. She
67
00:04:21.410 --> 00:04:25.079
turned around and went back thirteen times— into the place
68
00:04:25.139 --> 00:04:29.250
she had escaped, because freedom, she believed, was not freedom
69
00:04:29.410 --> 00:04:33.329
if her family was still in chains. The railroad was secret,
70
00:04:33.810 --> 00:04:38.259
its stations were hidden, but its lesson was not, that courage,
71
00:04:38.579 --> 00:04:41.800
passed from one safe house to the next, can carry
72
00:04:41.839 --> 00:04:44.490
people to freedom, one night at a time.