Fergus M. Bordewich: The fake history now associated with the Underground Railroad
[Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of “Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America.”]
FEW aspects of the American past have inspired more colorful mythology than the Underground Railroad. It’s probably fair to say that most Americans view it as a thrilling tapestry of midnight flights, hairbreadth escapes, mysterious codes and strange hiding places.
So it’s not surprising that the intriguing (if only recently invented) tale of escape maps encoded in antebellum quilts — enshrined in a metastasizing library of children’s books and teachers’ lesson plans and perhaps even in a Central Park memorial to Frederick Douglass — should also seize the popular imagination.
But faked history serves no one, especially when it buries important truths that have been hidden far too long. The “freedom quilt” myth is just the newest acquisition in a congeries of bogus, often bizarre, legends attached to the Underground Railroad. Despite a lack of documentation, tales of actual tunnels through which fugitives supposedly fled persist in communities from the Canadian border to the Mason-Dixon Line.
Popular songs associated with the underground rarely withstand scrutiny, either. Recent research has revealed that the inspirational ballad “Follow the Drinking Gourd” — perhaps the single best-known “artifact” of the Underground Railroad — was first published in 1928, and that much of the text and music as we know it today was actually composed by Lee Hays of the Weavers in 1947. Nor do its “directions” conform to any known underground route.
Legend has also elevated to nearly superhuman status the underground conductor Harriet Tubman, typically claiming that she led north more than 300 slaves. The actual number was closer to 70, according to a Tubman biographer, Kate Clifford Larson. The truth takes nothing away from Tubman, a remarkable woman by any measure, but her deification as the embodiment of the Underground Railroad has obscured the work of many lesser-known African-American activists — among them New York’s David Ruggles, who organized the city’s underground in the 1830s and helped more than 600 former slaves to freedom.
The notion of maps hidden in quilts surfaced in the 1980s — in a children’s book, according to a quilting historian, Leigh Fellner, who has shown that many of the patterns supposed to contain “coded” directions for fugitives date from the 20th century....
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FEW aspects of the American past have inspired more colorful mythology than the Underground Railroad. It’s probably fair to say that most Americans view it as a thrilling tapestry of midnight flights, hairbreadth escapes, mysterious codes and strange hiding places.
So it’s not surprising that the intriguing (if only recently invented) tale of escape maps encoded in antebellum quilts — enshrined in a metastasizing library of children’s books and teachers’ lesson plans and perhaps even in a Central Park memorial to Frederick Douglass — should also seize the popular imagination.
But faked history serves no one, especially when it buries important truths that have been hidden far too long. The “freedom quilt” myth is just the newest acquisition in a congeries of bogus, often bizarre, legends attached to the Underground Railroad. Despite a lack of documentation, tales of actual tunnels through which fugitives supposedly fled persist in communities from the Canadian border to the Mason-Dixon Line.
Popular songs associated with the underground rarely withstand scrutiny, either. Recent research has revealed that the inspirational ballad “Follow the Drinking Gourd” — perhaps the single best-known “artifact” of the Underground Railroad — was first published in 1928, and that much of the text and music as we know it today was actually composed by Lee Hays of the Weavers in 1947. Nor do its “directions” conform to any known underground route.
Legend has also elevated to nearly superhuman status the underground conductor Harriet Tubman, typically claiming that she led north more than 300 slaves. The actual number was closer to 70, according to a Tubman biographer, Kate Clifford Larson. The truth takes nothing away from Tubman, a remarkable woman by any measure, but her deification as the embodiment of the Underground Railroad has obscured the work of many lesser-known African-American activists — among them New York’s David Ruggles, who organized the city’s underground in the 1830s and helped more than 600 former slaves to freedom.
The notion of maps hidden in quilts surfaced in the 1980s — in a children’s book, according to a quilting historian, Leigh Fellner, who has shown that many of the patterns supposed to contain “coded” directions for fugitives date from the 20th century....