The Underground Railroad - Real and Imagined

Few subjects in America’s past are more steeped in myth than the Underground Railroad, according to Fergus Bordewich, author of Bound for Canaan. Lacking facts about the real history, tales of hidden tunnels, cryptic codes, songs, quilts and secret maps flourished. In reality, the Underground Railroad was a partnership between African Americans, both free and enslaved, and whites, first Quakers and later Christian reformers. Its existence was dependent on cooperation, trust, flexibility, and the Golden Rule.

Why is so little known? Bordewich writes that much of it was suppressed during Jim Crow years because it demonstrated the great cooperation between Blacks and whites, men and women who worked on equal footing.  Together they “created the first interracial mass movement for others’ human rights.”

                      Painting of Runaway Slaves on the Underground Railroad

Peter Pointz escape from slavery and who lived much of his life in Clyde, Ohio, bears testimony to these facts. Born into slavery in Bracken County, Kentucky in 1817 and “owned” by one Hugh Atwell.  He spent most of his young life at farm work and then as a hotel porter in Maysville. Peter was one of perhaps as many as 70,000 enslaved (Ohio’s Freedom Center puts the number at 100,000) who escaped via the Underground Railroad in the 60 years before the Civil War. Most were from Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky, states that shared long borders with free states and where information about northern routes was readily available. According to Bordewich, few could escape from the Deep South where the way north was one long, dangerous route.

Cincinnati National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

Courtesy of Ohio History Connection

In 1848, so many slaves were escaping across the Ohio River that all were being watched closely by whites. After several attempts, Peter paid a Black man to take him across the Ohio River with co-worker Mary Gross and another. They arrived in Ripley and were taken on horseback to the home of a mulatto couple named Delaney who refused any payment. The Delaneys transported them at night on horseback to the Voorhees home where there were other runaway slaves. Peter wrote, “We all helped him strip his tobacco. That night he took 17 of us to the next place and so on traveling in the night on horses we went from place to place til we reached Delaware.”

Ohio Underground Railroad Routes

Courtesy of Federal Writers Project

On January 7, 1849, they departed for Mt. Gilead, where Peter and Mary remained for some months. That May the couple travelled by buggy to Mansfield and were put aboard the REAL railroad bound for Sandusky, Ohio.  At the docks, Peter found work on the “Sultana.” He later married Mary and settled in a home he had rented in Oberlin.

Peter Pointz

Courtesy of Harris-Elmore Library

Peter became fearful when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850. He and Mary fled to Windsor, Canada where they leased a farm until 1858.  All the while, Peter corresponded with his brother Samuel who assisted him in buying his freedom from the Atwells. He then returned to Kentucky to help a nephew escape to the north, but Peter found him to be a “worthless, shiftless fellow who did not know the value of freedom.” It was then that Peter traveled north and made his home in Clyde until his death in 1898.

In Bound for CanaanBordewich reminds us that slavery shows Americans at their worst, but the history of the Underground Railroad shows them at their bravest and best.”

A version of this article appeared in Lifestyles 2000.