Travelers to Freedom: Conclusions
Published:
This post details the “Travelers to Freedom” project data visualizations and explains what they can tell us about the Underground Railroad.
Themes and conclusions
The data gleaned from existing Underground Railroad records, especially when presented geographically, can reveal significant details about freedom seekers’ experiences.
Freedom seeker journeys were self-directed
Overwhelmingly, the freedom seekers in Gay’s records left slavery of their own volition, without connections to northern abolitionists. The map below indicates locations to which freedom seekers received directions from an agent or other individual. By “directions” here, I mean instructions given with likely or certain knowledge of a freedom seekers’ fugitive status. Freedom seekers likely asked for simple geographic directions (for example, the distance or direction to a certain town) fairly frequently, but these type of directions differ from directions purposefully putting them in connection with the Underground Railroad.
As we can see from the map, freedom seekers were far more likely to receive directions to locations further to the north and to reach southern locations by their own planning. This is true whether we compare specific cities that were frequent stops for northern travel—Wilmington, Philadelphia, and New York—or whether we look at travel locations by state.
Emphasizing that freedom seekers planned and carried out the early stages of their escapes and travel without help from northern abolitionists helps explain national patterns of fugitivity. This brings us to the second conclusion:
Proximity and opportunity shaped freedom seekers’ choices
By visualizing data from Sydney Howard Gay and William Still with other geographic factors, we can draw conclusions about the things that made escape seem more or less possible to potential freedom seekers. The maps below show Underground Railroad data with historical US county boundaries and railroad, river, and canal routes. Counties in which freedom seekers were enslaved appear in green.[2]
The first and most clear observation we can make is that the majority of escapes are in the upper South, and tend to be concentrated along the coast.
The data from Gay’s records only includes five freedom seekers from states other than Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Of these, three people—Laura Lewis, Emeline Brown, and Rebecca Gill, all from Louisville, Kentucky—were brought to free states by their enslavers and claimed their freedom there. The remaining two individuals—an unnamed man from Savannah, Georgia and Sarah Moore from New Bern, North Carolina—both traveled to New York by ship. The man stowed away on a schooner; Louis Napoleon, a black abolitionist leader in New York and an ally of Gay’s, discovered him and brought him to Gay’s office. Moore traveled secretly with the help of the ship’s steward, who hid her in a storage area for the duration of the voyage. She met her fiance, a free sailor acquainted with Gay’s abolitionist network, in New York.[5]
Still’s data includes more escapes from the far south than Gay’s records, but looking at the outliers—escapes from states other than Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas—reveals a similar pattern. The data includes five such outliers, with one overlap (Laura Lewis of Louisville, Kentucky) with Gay’s records. Like Lewis, James Conner of Orleans County, Louisiana, traveled to Philadelphia with his enslaver, and there claimed his freedom. Edward Davis stowed away on a steamship departing from Savannah, Georgia; John Thompson of Madison County, Alabama, escaped by climbing on top of a train car. Only one freedom seeker, Bill Paul of Oglethorpe County, Georgia, appears to have made the first part of his journey on foot.[6]
As the map below shows, walking—in many ways the most accessible option, especially in areas without rail lines or navigable rivers or canals—was most viable as an escape option in states closest to the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.
What's next?
I plan to continue building the database until it includes all of the freedom seekers in Gay’s Record of Fugitives. Subsequent posts about this project will profile the journeys of individual freedom seekers in the record, especially individuals whose stories highlight interesting or underappreciated elements of travel to freedom.
[2] This isn’t an exact recreation of escape origin, especially for the map depicting Sydney Howard Gay’s data, which is filtered for “LOCATION_TYPE = Enslavement.” In some cases, a freedom seeker may have been enslaved in more than one location, or may have escaped from a location other than the county of residence of their primary enslaver (for example, a travel location or a location where they were hired out).
[3] Major map data from Jeremy Atack, “Historical Transportation of Navigable Rivers, Canals, and Railroads in the United States,” Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, March 15, 2017, 10.3886/ICPSR36353.v1; John H. Long et al., “Atlas of Historical County Boundaries,” Newberry Library, 2012, https://publications.newberry.org/ahcb/; Jeremy Mennis, “Geospatial Dataset of Cities and Counties of Escape Origin as Recorded in William Still’s Records of the Underground Railroad, 1853-1861,” Harvard Dataverse, 2025, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/1BLSRL; view this map, including additional data and layer citation information, here.
[4] Major map data from Atack, “Historical Transportation of Navigable Rivers, Canals, and Railroads in the United States,” 10.3886/ICPSR36353.v1; Long et al., “Atlas of Historical County Boundaries,” https://publications.newberry.org/ahcb/; view this map, including additional data and layer citation information, here.
[5] Sidney Howard Gay, Record of Fugitives, 1855-1856, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 4-7, 9-10, 13, https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/fugitives/record_fugitives/book1.
[6] William Still, The Underground Rail Road (Porter & Coates, 1872), 106-107, 240-245, 291, 403-405.
