On this episode of Our American Stories, here to tell the story is Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Scott Shane. Shane is the author of "Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland."
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Our next story
comes to us from Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist
Scott Sheen. Shane is the author of Flee North, Forgotten Hero,
and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland. Let's take
a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
The central character of my book is a guy named
Thomas Smallwood, and I just want to take you to
what he was up to in eighteen forty two. He's
a man who had been born in slavery, had basically
educated himself, built a business as a shoemaker, and he
was living about a fifteen minute walk from the United
(00:53):
States Capital in southeast Washington. By day, he's running this
shoemaking business to support his family. He has a wife
and four kids, and a fifth kid on the way.
At night, he's organizing these mass escapes by the wagon load.
(01:13):
And even as he's doing all this during the day
and at night, he somehow is finding time to write
up a new dispatch for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany,
New York, which used the real names of the slaveholders
and the real names of the people escaping from them,
(01:34):
and basically were based on the satirical style of Charles Dickens,
and he wrote them using a pseudonym from Charles Dickens,
because everything he was doing was illegal and he was
in danger of arrest at any moment. And what he
wrote was the only real time, first hand accounts of
escapes from slavery ever published. They were so much in
(01:59):
real time that sometimes he writes he had held a
particular dispatch for a week or two to make sure
the people he's writing about had made it to safety
in upstate New York or Canada. So this is Thomas Smallwood.
His own experience of slavery had been relatively benign. It
(02:20):
happened that he was inherited, along with his sister by
a woman who then made a second marriage to a
man by the name of John Ferguson, who was a
minister and somewhat anti slavery, certainly somewhat embarrassed to find
himself as a slaveholder, But he was encumbered by the
(02:43):
terms of a will, so he could only buy Smallwood
and his sister essentially from his new wife and her children.
And he did that, and he said Smallwood, when small
was fifteen, that he would give him his freedom at
the age of thirty but he would have to pay
(03:03):
him back over time. So John Ferguson and his wife,
the slaveholder, taught Smallwood to read, which was quite unusual
at the time. And Smallwood talks about how he impressed
the neighbors by being able to spell as a young
boy words of two syllables like baker and cider, he says.
(03:25):
And later he worked for another guy as a household
servant for an educator by the name of John MacLeod
in Washington. And this guy was apparently quite a fervent educator,
and he had adult children of a similar mindset, and
all of them helped kind of guide Thomas in his
reading and encourage him. And so by the time he
(03:47):
had completed the purchase of his freedom and he was
a free man at the age of thirty, he was
extremely well educated. He'd read widely in contemporary literature, in
ancient literacyre ancient philosophy. He knew an awful lot. So
at that time, he's married, he's building his shoemaking business,
(04:08):
and he gets involved in something called the colonization movement.
Colonization was the idea that African Americans should start a
new life in some other country that basically, their prospects
here were dim and they would do better to go elsewhere.
Usually it was Liberia in West Africa, which was a
(04:29):
new country founded by the American Colonization Society, and for
a while Smallwood was quite intrigued by this possibility, but
then he had a change of heart because he realized
that in fact, a lot of slaveholders were behind the
Colonization Society, and one of their key goals was to
get black people, particularly free black people, out of the
(04:52):
United States, so it was really more of an ethnic
cleansing operation. Boldemot was the largest free black community in
the country, and free blacks significantly outnumbered and slave blacks
in the cities in Washington and Baltimore, so he turned
against that movement, but he was still extremely pained and
(05:18):
angry about slavery, not so much about his own experience,
but about much of what he had witnessed and wanted
to do something about it. And just about that time,
this guy Tory comes from New England and moves to Washington,
theoretically to become a newspaper correspondent for little ablitionh Neist
papers across the North, and the two of them get
(05:42):
together because Smallwood has heard that Tory was arrested in Annapolis, Maryland,
the capitol, after going there to try to write about
a convention of slaveholders, and they spot him and figure
out that he's not on their side, and a mob gathers,
and anyway, he's taken to jail, more or less for
(06:04):
his own safety. But this all gets written up in
the paper and Smallwood reads about it and he thinks,
who is this crazy white man who was confronting the slaveholders,
you know, essentially on their own turf. I want to
meet this guy. And it happened that Smallwood's wife, Elizabeth,
did the laundry for the boarding house in d C.
(06:27):
Where Tory was living. So he asks his wife, can
you introduce me to this guy Tory? And she sets
up a meeting. And it's so interesting to me to
think about this. This is in January of eighteen forty two.
These two guys, so Smallwood's about forty, Tory is about
twenty eight, and they're kind of opposites in many ways.
(06:50):
They meet across their generation of part They meet across
the course the chasm of race. Tory's grandfather, who raised
him after his parents died of tuberculosis, had been had
served in Congress as quite a prominent family. He'd gone
to Exeter and Yale. Smallwood born in slavery, totally self educated,
(07:12):
never went to school a day in his life. So
they're so different, and yet by the time the two
of them meet, they both seem equally dedicated to the
cause of doing something to combat slavery, but also a
little bit tired of talking about it. They want to
do something practical, and so as they talk, they come
(07:36):
up with this scheme to start helping them escape. And
there are several things that they're doing that are a
little bit unusual. They want to do it not by
ones and twos, but by the wagon load. So they
start packing wagons with ten to fifteen even twenty men,
(07:57):
women and children, covering it over as to SKUs in
some way, and they'll take off in the middle of
the night and head north. They also, at the beginning,
were recruiting people to escape. They weren't waiting for people
to say, Hey, i'd kind of like to escape, do
you know anyone who can help me? They would actually
Smallwood would actually approach people and say, you know, we
(08:21):
got a wagon load going and you want to be aboard.
And the third thing would be that they had a
larger strategy in mind, and that was to demoralize the slaveholders.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
And you're listening to pull in surprise. Winning author and
journalist Scott Shane tell the story of an unlikely collaboration
between a former slave, Thomas Smallwood, and a white man
interested in freeing slaves too is named Charles Tory, and
how the two together went to try and free not
(08:56):
just one or two slaves at a time, but slaves
by the way load, revolutionary idea at the time, and
doing it overground, not underground, even going so far as
to recruit those slaves or escape. The story of Thomas
Smallwood and his partner in crime is it was a
crime then to do these things, Charles Tory. Their story
(09:19):
continues here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(09:40):
our American stories. Born into slavery by the eighteen forties,
Thomas Smallwood was free and self educated. He recruited a
young white abolitionist named Charles Tory, and together these two
set out to do something practical to combat slavery. That
was to one recruit slaves and two arranged for their
escape by the wagon load and three demralized the slaveholders themselves.
(10:06):
Here again is Scott Shane.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
The idea was, if we essentially make off with these
people's wealth, because their human property was extremely valuable at
the time, they'll just realize that the idea of enslaving
people is not going to work, and they'll change their
(10:29):
ways and they'll start hiring workers instead of enslaving them.
And they had some success at that. Smallwood talks about
overhearing some people who's, as he puts it, human property,
walked off and he overhears them saying I'm never going
to buy another slave, and that was sort of a
sensible decision in those circumstances. I calculated roughly. I was
(10:54):
looking at a particular wagon load that Smallwood describes in
some detail, and I made a rough estimate that the
value of the fifteen people on this wagon on the
slave market at the time would have been something like
two hundred thousand dollars in today's dollars. So you're talking
about a fairly good sized bank robbery every time a
(11:15):
wagon load goes north, and you're talking about people losing
a large share of their wealth. So their dream was
that you would undermine slavery, sort of slaveholder by slaveholder,
and you would also be doing it in this splashy way.
(11:35):
You know, if you have fifteen people leaving in a wagon,
they come from several households, so a number of slaveholders
are going to wake up in the morning and say
where is everybody? And this would get a lot of attention.
And they're in Washington, d C. They're in the Capitol,
and some of the people whose slaves they are helping
to escape are members of Congress, members of the Cabinet,
(12:00):
other public employees who have brought their enslaved workers from
somewhere else and brought them to Washington. So they thought
that would have a particular resonance, and so that too
sort of set their operation apart. So part of my
story I looked at a third character. In addition to
(12:22):
Thomas Smallwood and Charles Torrey, the third guy that I
looked at was Hope Slatter. And there pass these three
men's passed cross in various ways, and Hope Slatter was
the leading slave trader in the region from the late
eighteen thirties to the late eighteen forties. So these guys
are in a strange sense, they're almost competitors, so they're
(12:47):
really enemies. One of the things that was quite interesting
about Hope Slatter, though, was, in addition to the drive
to make money, which he made a whole lot of
in his ten years or so in Baltimore buying and
selling human beings, he also wanted respect that would match
(13:08):
with his wealth. But he didn't get it. It seems
that the slaveholders, even though they're quite dependent on and
did business with the slave traders, needed somebody to look
down on, and a lot of them chose to look
down on the slave traders. So he was constantly trying
(13:30):
to curry favor with the sort of powers about town
and about the state of Maryland. At one point he
actually loans his big fancy carriage for the day to
the visiting President of the United States, James Polk, and
Polk uses Slatter's carriage, and it's written up in the paper.
(13:53):
So Slater's always on the lookout for ways to become respectable,
so to speak. At one point, they're building a big
new Methodist church, and one of the ways they're raising
money for it is they're selling the pews. In other words,
you pay a big chunk of money, and that's going
to be your family pew forever. So Slatter buys a
(14:16):
pew in this church, but once again he's frustrated because
the family who's bought the pew behind his the man
announces they're not going to ever attend that church as
long as Slatter and his family are attending, because he
doesn't want to look at this guy while worshiping. So
(14:37):
Slatter does not find the respectability that he is seeking,
and eventually he retires essentially from the slave trade in Baltimore,
and moves far to the south finds people who can
give him the respec that he's been seeking all these years.
Once I'd learned that Thomas Smallwood had written these dispatches
(14:59):
to the Albany Paper, which was originally called Tocsin of Liberty,
which is an old word for Bell, so essentially liberty Bell,
I checked in the Library of Congress and found that
the largest run of that newspaper stole in existence appeared
to be in the Boston Public Library. Unfortunately, they were
(15:19):
shut down this twenty twenty during the pandemic. But eventually
I got through to some people and they took up
my cause, and eventually they dug these out of warehouse
and put them on microfilm, and I went to the
library and downloaded them all onto a thumb drive and
spent several months reading Smallwood's dispatches. So I'm reading along
(15:41):
at one point and I find him addressing a slaveholder
by real name and talking about how perhaps his enslaved
workers got away by that underground railroad or steam balloon
that one of your city constables was worrying about the
other day. And I think that's kind of funny. He's
(16:03):
talking about underground railroad, but in a way that it
sounds like it's not in common parlance. Anyway, he elaborates
later in another dispatch on that story, and he names
the constable, and essentially this is a fairly notorious police
constable in Baltimore and Washington who made a lot of
money as a slave catcher. Anyway, this guy was understandably
(16:28):
frustrated that large numbers of people were escaping and he
could not figure out where they were going, and so apparently,
in some kind of outburst of frustration, he said they
must be leaving by underground railroad or steam balloon. Those
were sort of non existent technologies. There were railroads, but
there were no underground railroads. So it was essentially like
(16:51):
somebody might say, they must have been teleported to another state,
they must have been abducted by aliens. In other words,
I have no idea where they're going. And Smallwood heard
about this and ends up loving it because it's a
compliment to him to his escape operation. The people are
(17:11):
making the escapes. So he starts using this phrase underground
railroad and just sort of builds a world around it
in his imagination. He starts advising the slaveholders in his
dispatches to report to the office of the Underground Railroad
in Washington to inquire about their lost property. He appoints
(17:34):
himself general agent of all the branches of the National
Underground Railroad. He at one point talks about how he
can't reveal the secret of the underground Railroad, which is
known only to the President and his cabinet, And so
he's just having a good old time using the underground Railroad,
this mythical transport system as a way to beat up
(17:57):
on the slaveholders and make fun of them and their
slave catching police allies. So, you know, I'm reading this
stuff and wondering, you know, it sounds like this is
the origin of the use of that phrase and that
concept could that be? And I start poking around. It
(18:18):
turns out there are some old stories about where that
term comes from, but they don't hold up to much scrutiny,
and most scholars had rejected them as folklore. And then
I went into the big nineteenth century newspaper databases that
have been built up over the last twenty years. The
ones I mainly use were Newspapers dot com and Genealogybank
(18:40):
dot com, and I just plugged in that phrase, and
sure enough, all of the early uses of underground railroad
were from Smallwood's dispatches and other articles. His white sidekick,
Charles Tory, becomes editor of that paper, so Smallwood is
sending the dispatches to Tory, and Tory begins to use
(19:02):
the term underground railroad in his articles for the paper.
But that's where it all seems to start. And within
a couple of years it sort of lost its origin
as a joke and as a way of mocking the slaveholders,
and it's just become a way of describing escapes, a
(19:22):
sort of generic term for escapes from slavery, especially those
using help along the way. So now I can say
with confidence that that is actually the solution to that
historical mystery. And Thomas Smallwood is the guy who gave
the underground Railroad its name.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
pull a surprize winning author and journalist Scott Shane. He's
the author of Flee North, a Forgotten Hero and the
Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland, and we learn where
that term underground railroad comes from. There was nothing underground
(20:01):
about it, but boy was Smallwood and his paddle Charles
Torrey trying to stick it to the slave owners working
together to end slavery in their own way. Their story
here on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. Our next story
comes to us from Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist
Scott Sheen. Shane is the author of Flee North, Forgotten Hero,
and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland. Let's take
a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
The central character of my book is a guy named
Thomas Smallwood, and I just want to take you to
what he was up to in eighteen forty two. He's
a man who had been born in slavery, had basically
educated himself, built a business as a shoemaker, and he
was living about a fifteen minute walk from the United
(00:53):
States Capital in southeast Washington. By day, he's running this
shoemaking business to support his family. He has a wife
and four kids, and a fifth kid on the way.
At night, he's organizing these mass escapes by the wagon load.
(01:13):
And even as he's doing all this during the day
and at night, he somehow is finding time to write
up a new dispatch for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany,
New York, which used the real names of the slaveholders
and the real names of the people escaping from them,
(01:34):
and basically were based on the satirical style of Charles Dickens,
and he wrote them using a pseudonym from Charles Dickens,
because everything he was doing was illegal and he was
in danger of arrest at any moment. And what he
wrote was the only real time, first hand accounts of
escapes from slavery ever published. They were so much in
(01:59):
real time that sometimes he writes he had held a
particular dispatch for a week or two to make sure
the people he's writing about had made it to safety
in upstate New York or Canada. So this is Thomas Smallwood.
His own experience of slavery had been relatively benign. It
(02:20):
happened that he was inherited, along with his sister by
a woman who then made a second marriage to a
man by the name of John Ferguson, who was a
minister and somewhat anti slavery, certainly somewhat embarrassed to find
himself as a slaveholder, But he was encumbered by the
(02:43):
terms of a will, so he could only buy Smallwood
and his sister essentially from his new wife and her children.
And he did that, and he said Smallwood, when small
was fifteen, that he would give him his freedom at
the age of thirty but he would have to pay
(03:03):
him back over time. So John Ferguson and his wife,
the slaveholder, taught Smallwood to read, which was quite unusual
at the time. And Smallwood talks about how he impressed
the neighbors by being able to spell as a young
boy words of two syllables like baker and cider, he says.
(03:25):
And later he worked for another guy as a household
servant for an educator by the name of John MacLeod
in Washington. And this guy was apparently quite a fervent educator,
and he had adult children of a similar mindset, and
all of them helped kind of guide Thomas in his
reading and encourage him. And so by the time he
(03:47):
had completed the purchase of his freedom and he was
a free man at the age of thirty, he was
extremely well educated. He'd read widely in contemporary literature, in
ancient literacyre ancient philosophy. He knew an awful lot. So
at that time, he's married, he's building his shoemaking business,
(04:08):
and he gets involved in something called the colonization movement.
Colonization was the idea that African Americans should start a
new life in some other country that basically, their prospects
here were dim and they would do better to go elsewhere.
Usually it was Liberia in West Africa, which was a
(04:29):
new country founded by the American Colonization Society, and for
a while Smallwood was quite intrigued by this possibility, but
then he had a change of heart because he realized
that in fact, a lot of slaveholders were behind the
Colonization Society, and one of their key goals was to
get black people, particularly free black people, out of the
(04:52):
United States, so it was really more of an ethnic
cleansing operation. Boldemot was the largest free black community in
the country, and free blacks significantly outnumbered and slave blacks
in the cities in Washington and Baltimore, so he turned
against that movement, but he was still extremely pained and
(05:18):
angry about slavery, not so much about his own experience,
but about much of what he had witnessed and wanted
to do something about it. And just about that time,
this guy Tory comes from New England and moves to Washington,
theoretically to become a newspaper correspondent for little ablitionh Neist
papers across the North, and the two of them get
(05:42):
together because Smallwood has heard that Tory was arrested in Annapolis, Maryland,
the capitol, after going there to try to write about
a convention of slaveholders, and they spot him and figure
out that he's not on their side, and a mob gathers,
and anyway, he's taken to jail, more or less for
(06:04):
his own safety. But this all gets written up in
the paper and Smallwood reads about it and he thinks,
who is this crazy white man who was confronting the slaveholders,
you know, essentially on their own turf. I want to
meet this guy. And it happened that Smallwood's wife, Elizabeth,
did the laundry for the boarding house in d C.
(06:27):
Where Tory was living. So he asks his wife, can
you introduce me to this guy Tory? And she sets
up a meeting. And it's so interesting to me to
think about this. This is in January of eighteen forty two.
These two guys, so Smallwood's about forty, Tory is about
twenty eight, and they're kind of opposites in many ways.
(06:50):
They meet across their generation of part They meet across
the course the chasm of race. Tory's grandfather, who raised
him after his parents died of tuberculosis, had been had
served in Congress as quite a prominent family. He'd gone
to Exeter and Yale. Smallwood born in slavery, totally self educated,
(07:12):
never went to school a day in his life. So
they're so different, and yet by the time the two
of them meet, they both seem equally dedicated to the
cause of doing something to combat slavery, but also a
little bit tired of talking about it. They want to
do something practical, and so as they talk, they come
(07:36):
up with this scheme to start helping them escape. And
there are several things that they're doing that are a
little bit unusual. They want to do it not by
ones and twos, but by the wagon load. So they
start packing wagons with ten to fifteen even twenty men,
(07:57):
women and children, covering it over as to SKUs in
some way, and they'll take off in the middle of
the night and head north. They also, at the beginning,
were recruiting people to escape. They weren't waiting for people
to say, Hey, i'd kind of like to escape, do
you know anyone who can help me? They would actually
Smallwood would actually approach people and say, you know, we
(08:21):
got a wagon load going and you want to be aboard.
And the third thing would be that they had a
larger strategy in mind, and that was to demoralize the slaveholders.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
And you're listening to pull in surprise. Winning author and
journalist Scott Shane tell the story of an unlikely collaboration
between a former slave, Thomas Smallwood, and a white man
interested in freeing slaves too is named Charles Tory, and
how the two together went to try and free not
(08:56):
just one or two slaves at a time, but slaves
by the way load, revolutionary idea at the time, and
doing it overground, not underground, even going so far as
to recruit those slaves or escape. The story of Thomas
Smallwood and his partner in crime is it was a
crime then to do these things, Charles Tory. Their story
(09:19):
continues here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(09:40):
our American stories. Born into slavery by the eighteen forties,
Thomas Smallwood was free and self educated. He recruited a
young white abolitionist named Charles Tory, and together these two
set out to do something practical to combat slavery. That
was to one recruit slaves and two arranged for their
escape by the wagon load and three demralized the slaveholders themselves.
(10:06):
Here again is Scott Shane.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
The idea was, if we essentially make off with these
people's wealth, because their human property was extremely valuable at
the time, they'll just realize that the idea of enslaving
people is not going to work, and they'll change their
(10:29):
ways and they'll start hiring workers instead of enslaving them.
And they had some success at that. Smallwood talks about
overhearing some people who's, as he puts it, human property,
walked off and he overhears them saying I'm never going
to buy another slave, and that was sort of a
sensible decision in those circumstances. I calculated roughly. I was
(10:54):
looking at a particular wagon load that Smallwood describes in
some detail, and I made a rough estimate that the
value of the fifteen people on this wagon on the
slave market at the time would have been something like
two hundred thousand dollars in today's dollars. So you're talking
about a fairly good sized bank robbery every time a
(11:15):
wagon load goes north, and you're talking about people losing
a large share of their wealth. So their dream was
that you would undermine slavery, sort of slaveholder by slaveholder,
and you would also be doing it in this splashy way.
(11:35):
You know, if you have fifteen people leaving in a wagon,
they come from several households, so a number of slaveholders
are going to wake up in the morning and say
where is everybody? And this would get a lot of attention.
And they're in Washington, d C. They're in the Capitol,
and some of the people whose slaves they are helping
to escape are members of Congress, members of the Cabinet,
(12:00):
other public employees who have brought their enslaved workers from
somewhere else and brought them to Washington. So they thought
that would have a particular resonance, and so that too
sort of set their operation apart. So part of my
story I looked at a third character. In addition to
(12:22):
Thomas Smallwood and Charles Torrey, the third guy that I
looked at was Hope Slatter. And there pass these three
men's passed cross in various ways, and Hope Slatter was
the leading slave trader in the region from the late
eighteen thirties to the late eighteen forties. So these guys
are in a strange sense, they're almost competitors, so they're
(12:47):
really enemies. One of the things that was quite interesting
about Hope Slatter, though, was, in addition to the drive
to make money, which he made a whole lot of
in his ten years or so in Baltimore buying and
selling human beings, he also wanted respect that would match
(13:08):
with his wealth. But he didn't get it. It seems
that the slaveholders, even though they're quite dependent on and
did business with the slave traders, needed somebody to look
down on, and a lot of them chose to look
down on the slave traders. So he was constantly trying
(13:30):
to curry favor with the sort of powers about town
and about the state of Maryland. At one point he
actually loans his big fancy carriage for the day to
the visiting President of the United States, James Polk, and
Polk uses Slatter's carriage, and it's written up in the paper.
(13:53):
So Slater's always on the lookout for ways to become respectable,
so to speak. At one point, they're building a big
new Methodist church, and one of the ways they're raising
money for it is they're selling the pews. In other words,
you pay a big chunk of money, and that's going
to be your family pew forever. So Slatter buys a
(14:16):
pew in this church, but once again he's frustrated because
the family who's bought the pew behind his the man
announces they're not going to ever attend that church as
long as Slatter and his family are attending, because he
doesn't want to look at this guy while worshiping. So
(14:37):
Slatter does not find the respectability that he is seeking,
and eventually he retires essentially from the slave trade in Baltimore,
and moves far to the south finds people who can
give him the respec that he's been seeking all these years.
Once I'd learned that Thomas Smallwood had written these dispatches
(14:59):
to the Albany Paper, which was originally called Tocsin of Liberty,
which is an old word for Bell, so essentially liberty Bell,
I checked in the Library of Congress and found that
the largest run of that newspaper stole in existence appeared
to be in the Boston Public Library. Unfortunately, they were
(15:19):
shut down this twenty twenty during the pandemic. But eventually
I got through to some people and they took up
my cause, and eventually they dug these out of warehouse
and put them on microfilm, and I went to the
library and downloaded them all onto a thumb drive and
spent several months reading Smallwood's dispatches. So I'm reading along
(15:41):
at one point and I find him addressing a slaveholder
by real name and talking about how perhaps his enslaved
workers got away by that underground railroad or steam balloon
that one of your city constables was worrying about the
other day. And I think that's kind of funny. He's
(16:03):
talking about underground railroad, but in a way that it
sounds like it's not in common parlance. Anyway, he elaborates
later in another dispatch on that story, and he names
the constable, and essentially this is a fairly notorious police
constable in Baltimore and Washington who made a lot of
money as a slave catcher. Anyway, this guy was understandably
(16:28):
frustrated that large numbers of people were escaping and he
could not figure out where they were going, and so apparently,
in some kind of outburst of frustration, he said they
must be leaving by underground railroad or steam balloon. Those
were sort of non existent technologies. There were railroads, but
there were no underground railroads. So it was essentially like
(16:51):
somebody might say, they must have been teleported to another state,
they must have been abducted by aliens. In other words,
I have no idea where they're going. And Smallwood heard
about this and ends up loving it because it's a
compliment to him to his escape operation. The people are
(17:11):
making the escapes. So he starts using this phrase underground
railroad and just sort of builds a world around it
in his imagination. He starts advising the slaveholders in his
dispatches to report to the office of the Underground Railroad
in Washington to inquire about their lost property. He appoints
(17:34):
himself general agent of all the branches of the National
Underground Railroad. He at one point talks about how he
can't reveal the secret of the underground Railroad, which is
known only to the President and his cabinet, And so
he's just having a good old time using the underground Railroad,
this mythical transport system as a way to beat up
(17:57):
on the slaveholders and make fun of them and their
slave catching police allies. So, you know, I'm reading this
stuff and wondering, you know, it sounds like this is
the origin of the use of that phrase and that
concept could that be? And I start poking around. It
(18:18):
turns out there are some old stories about where that
term comes from, but they don't hold up to much scrutiny,
and most scholars had rejected them as folklore. And then
I went into the big nineteenth century newspaper databases that
have been built up over the last twenty years. The
ones I mainly use were Newspapers dot com and Genealogybank
(18:40):
dot com, and I just plugged in that phrase, and
sure enough, all of the early uses of underground railroad
were from Smallwood's dispatches and other articles. His white sidekick,
Charles Tory, becomes editor of that paper, so Smallwood is
sending the dispatches to Tory, and Tory begins to use
(19:02):
the term underground railroad in his articles for the paper.
But that's where it all seems to start. And within
a couple of years it sort of lost its origin
as a joke and as a way of mocking the slaveholders,
and it's just become a way of describing escapes, a
(19:22):
sort of generic term for escapes from slavery, especially those
using help along the way. So now I can say
with confidence that that is actually the solution to that
historical mystery. And Thomas Smallwood is the guy who gave
the underground Railroad its name.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
pull a surprize winning author and journalist Scott Shane. He's
the author of Flee North, a Forgotten Hero and the
Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland, and we learn where
that term underground railroad comes from. There was nothing underground
(20:01):
about it, but boy was Smallwood and his paddle Charles
Torrey trying to stick it to the slave owners working
together to end slavery in their own way. Their story
here on our American Stories
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.