Freedom Park: A Journey to Freedom

Freedom Park: A Journey to Freedom. The Underground Railroad. Enslaved African Americans could not free themselves under American law. An African American might be set free by his or her owner, or might be emancipated by governmental action, neither of which was likely, or, an enslaved African American might seize freedom through revolt or flight. Slave revolt was ultimately suicidal since whites outnumbered enslaved African Americans by two to-one in the slave states. Consequently, fleeing slavery, despite its obvious dangers and the possibility of recapture, was the best alternative available to those African Americans determined to be free., After the American Revolution, state laws permitted and the U.S. Constitution protected slavery in the "southern" states while the institution was dying elsewhere in the country, creating a border within the United States, with slavery legal on one side and illegal on the other. The goal of slaveholders and slave-catchers was to defend that border. The goal of fugitive slaves was to reach and cross it and, if need be, the border with Canada or Mexico or the Caribbean as well., Driven by the hunger for freedom, thousands of enslaved African Americans chose this path, from a trickle in the 1600s to a steady stream of over three thousand per year by the 1850s. Most escaped without any help and depended entirely on their own ingenuity and courage. Those who received assistance did so from free people of color, Native Americans and white Americans who comprised a loosely organized conspiracy of conscience known as the Underground Railroad-with its shadowy hosts of agents, conductors and station-keepers., Because the 1793 and later 1850 Fugitive Slave Acts criminalized any assistance to fugitive slaves, true "friends of the fugitive" stood not only for freedom but for the possibility of multiracial democracy in the United States. For these reasons, the Underground Railroad stands, even today, as one of the most powerful and sustained multiracial human rights movements in American and world history. , continued..., continued... , Given the political and physical geography of American slavery, Kentucky, as the key border state in the trans-Appalachian west, became central to the Underground Railroad-and the Ohio River became a veritable "River Jordan" for black freedom seekers. As both slave population and cotton cultivation shifted steadily to the southwest after 1815, escape from Kentucky became more common and escape through Kentucky became the best route available to fugitive slaves from Tennessee and points south., For the same reasons, Louisville became one of the busiest fugitive slave "stations" and crossing points in the country. With the largest free black community in Kentucky and with smaller free black settlements in southern Indiana, fugitive slaves could find both refuge from the slave-catchers and help in crossing the river. Although clandestine river crossings were possible at or near the numerous ferries and small settlements along the river, by the 1850s, the most important crossing point in the greater Louisville area was located west of Portland, leading from Louisville across the Ohio River to New Albany, Indiana. After negotiating a river crossing, fugitive slaves could follow several routes leading from New Albany and/or Jeffersonville to Salem, or an alternative Underground Railroad "station," and then northward with the assistance of white friends of the fugitive, many of whom were Quakers. By the 1850s, local newspapers reported an average of one slave escape per day., Of necessity, the Underground Railroad in a slave state was truly underground and few of its white key leaders have been identified clearly. Far better documented are the roles played by many leaders of the free black community of Louisville. Among them, James C. Cunningham, a local black orchestra leader, worked on riverboats and smuggled abolitionist literature into the city by hiding it in his sheet music. Washington Spradling was remembered as "a shrewd Negro" and the key local leader by former fugitive slaves in the 1890s. Shelton Morris, after moving to Cincinnati, worked with Levi Coffin in the 1850s and was considered "the most careful operator in that community. There, he was involved in efforts to help Margaret Garner, the fugitive slave woman who, in 1856, killed her own child rather than see it returned to slavery as was later immortalized in Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved.