What is the relation between the Founders and the Underground Railroad?

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[ProgressingAmerica]

History is an interesting thing. If a journalist doesn't want you to hear about it, they simply don't have to report it. Well what happens if a historian omitted facts in the same manner?

What if, let's say for example, the Underground Railroad consisted of slaves escaping from a state deep in the throws of slavery northward to a different state and that state had abolished slavery? Well of course the historian wants you to focus on the slave continuing their journey up to Canada, but the reality is that not all continued on their course.

What if many slaves stayed in northern states where slavery had been abolished? Well, they did.

Well who did that? Who abolished slavery in those northern states, or who wrote that Northwest Ordinance which secured to places such as Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and many others, would be states born as free states?

Who was it in, say, New York, who wrote those abolitionist laws? Pennsylvania and Vermont and pick any of those states you want. It was the founding generation in general and the Founding Fathers in particular. That's who did that.

Let's explore it from the opposite side, because that's really where the truth will become apparent.

What if the Founders didn't push for abolition in those northern states? Or in Indiana and other states that were formed after the Northwest Ordinance, or in Connecticut or any of the others. What if the Northwest Ordinance would never have been written, would there have ever been an Underground Railroad, or at least would it have been as we know it today?

If these states hadn't become free states, then where would the runaway slaves have run? Well, the simple answer is to Canada but this isn't so simple. The fact is that many fleeing to freedom did stay and make homes in free states and the Founders DID engage in this abolitionist activity and DID pass abolitionist laws once they didn't have the king vetoing these laws.

Isn't it then fair to say that the Underground Railroad came into being _because_ of the Founders, and not despite them?

[ProgressingAmerica]

Ping........

Just the question “How does the Northwest Ordinance influence the Underground Railroad” opens this up in an important way.

[ProgressingAmerica]

From one historian to another, I’d be curious what your thoughts are on this.

[NonValueAdded]

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Recessional of the Sons of the American Revolution:

“Until we meet again, let us remember our obligations to our
forefathers who gave us our Constitution, the Bill of Rights,
an independent Supreme Court and a nation of free men.”

Dr. Benjamin Franklin, when asked if we had a republic or a monarchy, replied "A Republic, if you can keep it."
Were we ever as close to losing it as we are now?

[FirstFlaBn]

Sanctuary cities, 19th Century edition. The northern states really didn’t mean it then when they ratified the Constitution?

How is this any different from modern day Dems (and not a few Repubs) - agree to anything, then immediately start undermining the agreement.

According to modern day Dems, if you anoint yourself as the great moral arbiter, then you don’t have to abide by any agreement you make. Maybe they got the idea from mid-19th Century Repubs.

[ProgressingAmerica]

Please do not poison this thread with modernity.

Thank you.

[LS]

Good take. Current scholarship is revising downward the # of slaves who escaped via the UR.

[kvanbrunt2]

Not sure but 4th Presbyterian in philly has a tradition that they were part of the underground railroad and there is a black church a block away started in 1787

Walk on hallowed ground at Mother Bethel AME Church, the mother church of the nation’s first black denomination.

Founded in 1787,

so you think they would have just blended in.

[ProgressingAmerica]

I thought it was too. Thanks. Progressive historians have so diluted abolitionist efforts between 1780 and 1805 so as to almost say that they basically don’t exist.

Well then if that’s true, it’s a contradiction because then the Underground Railroad doesn’t exist. It can’t be both.

Somebody somewhere here is lying and it goes a long way to explaining how we arrived at the 1619 project with so precious few “historian objectors”.

[Sparky1776]

Back in the day when Rhode Island was split north and south, slavers in the south and Quaker farmers in the north. An interesting read.

“Plantation in Yankeeland; the story of Cocumscussoc, mirror of colonial Rhode Island”

[Sparky1776]

Plantation in Yankeeland:

https://archive.org/details/plantationinyank00wood

[bert]

Harriet Tubman was a felon

Black America of at least much of it still allow felons amongst them

[ExTxMarine]

Sorry, Gen Z is destroying statues of our Founding Fathers because they were all racists and none of them ever did anything good, including writing that old, outdated Constitution-thingy!

So, I can NOT get on board with this re-writing of history! All white people in America (or said territories) from 1700-1899, were racist, rapists, murderers, and blood-thirsty...generally, they were just really bad people. And most whiteys born after 1899, are only just slightly better than the last group!

Anything “good” which occurred or came out of that timeframe was either coincidental to or in spite of the racist, rapey, murdering whites. Besides, we all know that ALL the “good” stuff from that time period was OBVIOUSLY created, invented, thought of, or otherwise the mental results of blacks, which the racist, rapey murdering whites stole from them!

[Wuli]

I was once an acquaintance with and held frequent discussions with a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church (formed in New York City). (Not to be confused with the AME Church formed in Philadelphia.)

Both Churches were formed by black ministers who felt blacks were being discriminated against in the churches they were part of, which were generally churches accepting all races. Both the AME church and the AME Zion church grew out of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) tradition, when, during the growth of the MEC, beginning in the North and then increasing in the south, some MEC churches seemed to move away, in places, from a tradition totally opposed to slavery. Some MEC black ministers felt the MEC was moving away from its founding traditions that occurred during the Great Awakening.

Yes, the issue of slavery was part of schisms of different Protestant churches over the years.

[Little Ray]

Harriet Tubman only survived to become famous because she was sick the day of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid.
While Tubman planned to go with Brown to attack Harpers Ferry, Frederick Douglass, who also corresponded with John Brown, declined to join the attack.
Let that sink in for a while.

[sit-rep]

well before you totally close the curtain on that, i’ll throw in a quick qusetion... I just wonder how many of those sympathetic souls are rolling over in their graves for what is happening in our cities today??

[ProgressingAmerica]

I think they’d probably be rolling more at how few are interested in being historians and actively defend them and it isn’t just the Founders who are being thrown overboard.

Liars are going to lie. You can only get so mad at a lion while it is eating you since that’s what lions do, they eat fleshy animals.

Even in our own time we have people who said basically the same things that the Founders said. The Burkean phrase: The only thing required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing; covers entirely where we’re at.

We had Tea Parties and it was working. It worked! We were actively pushing back against the media and changing their narratives, we were actively ousting worthless politicians from our side, we were being successful in local town hall meetings, and we were having Constitutional discussions among each other that I’ve never had in any other time period in my life. For some odd reason that I cannot explain it was our guys who decided they didn’t want it and I don’t mean republicans, this was conservatives. Sitting down was viewed as a better option than winning. Yeah ok everybody will show up on election day but then for the next 729 days progressives have no opposition.

I don’t get it.

[DiogenesLamp]

What did the founders think of the Underground railroad? Well they would have regarded it as a conspiracy to break Federal law, and a form of insurrection.

The US Constitution requires runaway slaves to be returned to their masters. It is written in flowery euphemisms, but that is exactly what Article IV, Section 2 says must be done.

So people deliberately trying to thwart Federal law would have been regarded by the founders as rebels and insurrectionists, and they would have locked them up in prison.

[DiogenesLamp]

Sanctuary cities, 19th Century edition. The northern states really didn’t mean it then when they ratified the Constitution? How is this any different from modern day Dems (and not a few Repubs) - agree to anything, then immediately start undermining the agreement. According to modern day Dems, if you anoint yourself as the great moral arbiter, then you don’t have to abide by any agreement you make. Maybe they got the idea from mid-19th Century Repubs.

Exactly right. They were the modern equivalent of people smuggling illegals into the country. They were just smuggling illegals out of the country.

[DiogenesLamp]

Please do not poison this thread with modernity.

You may be shocked to learn that there is a continuum between the past and the present. It is one piece, and you cannot strip out the parts you don't like.

I see large numbers of parallels between the past and the present. What the Underground railroad was doing was illegal, and just like them, modern people decide what is "moral" based on what they think, and then proceed to break federal law because it is the "moral" thing to do.

Nah bro, the moral thing to do is to change the law through the normal political process rather than to take it upon yourself to be a vigilante.