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The Underground Railroad 3 our slaves to leave their homes.”9 And shortly after his inauguration as president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis had the Underground Rail- road in mind when he said that “fanatical organizations [are] assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt means [are] furnished for their escape from their owners and agents se- cretly employed to entice them to abscond.”10 So far as the South was concerned, Underground Railroad workers weren’t following a higher law at all. They were merely outlaws, thieves of other men’s property. SEPARATING FACT FROM FOLKLORE Sometimes, especially north of the Free States that bordered the Mason- Dixon Line and particularly in the decade leading up to the Civil War, Underground Railroad workers were publicly defi ant of slave laws and openly boastful of their deeds in newspapers. As angry opposition to slav- ery escalated in the 1850s, several dramatic and highly publicized rescues of fugitives at risk of being returned to the South by federal offi cials also took place. But for the most part, both because they were breaking the law and in order to protect the runaway slaves they were helping, Railroad workers operated as clandestinely as they could. After the Civil War, the secrecy that surrounded the Underground Railroad tended to encourage fanciful folklore and romantic legend. As historian Larry Gara persuasively argues,11 one reason for this is the pau- city of contemporaneous written documentation about the Railroad and subsequent historians’ too-uncritical reliance on anecdote and oral tradi- tion. Railroad workers and fugitives who told their stories to reporters and chroniclers 20, 30, or 40 years after the event can hardly be faulted for imaginative embellishment, but their accounts ought to be taken with a grain of salt. Another reason is the fact that both abolitionist and proslav- ery journalists tended to exaggerate, for their own purposes, the scope and activities of the Railroad. A third explanation for the distortion is that most accounts of the Railroad, contemporaneous or later, were written by whites and often emphasized, even if unintentionally, white involvement at the expense of black involvement. Consequently, the understanding of the Underground Railroad that has evolved in the nation’s consciousness often distorts the facts. According to popular understanding, the Railroad was a vast, highly structured, and tightly coordinated network its hidden