The Underground Railroad

"I never went off track and I never lost a passenger." So boasted Harriet Tubman when speaking of the nearly 20 times she led Southern slaves to freedom along what came to be known as the Underground Railroad. Hers is just one of the many compelling stories to emerge from what is now regarded as the first sustained act of American civil disobedience.

Kerry Walters' stirring account ranges from the earliest acts of slave resistance arid the rise of the Abolitionist movement, to the establishment of clandestine "liberty lines" through the eastern and then-western regions of the Union and ultimately to Canada. Separating fact from legend, Walters draws extensively on first-person accounts of those who made the Railroad work, those who tried to stop it, and those who made the treacherous journey to freedom-including Eliza Harris and Josiah Henson, the real-life "Eliza" and "Uncle Tom" from Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Tom's Cabin.