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Resisting Ol’ Massa 11 was exercised undramatically in their day-to-day living. Sometimes it was more actively expressed in fl ight to freedom. Least often, resistance took the form of violent revolt or conspiracy to revolt. But however it revealed itself, slave resistance to “ol’ massa” didn’t begin with the rise of Northern abolitionism or the emergence of the Underground Railroad. It was al- ready deeply embedded in slave culture. In its absence, the Underground Railroad would have been pointless because there would have been no northbound fugitives to aid. In this chapter, we’ll explore slave resistance and revolt to situate the Underground Railroad against its broader backdrop. SLAVERY AND DISSONANCE In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an antislav- ery novel that depicted slave owners in luridly negative ways. Two years later, partly in response to Stowe’s novel, two books were published that assured readers that slaves were happy and content in their servitude. One was A South-Side View of Slavery , written by Nehemiah Adams of Boston, who concluded after visiting a few plantations that slaveholders were “the guardians, educators, and saviors of the African race in this country.” 1 The other was George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South , which claimed that the average slave, far from being the mistreated wretch portrayed by Stowe, was “as happy as a human being could be.” 2 Adams’s and Fitzhugh’s books may have been immediately motivated by a rising tide of antislavery sentiment in the North, but the views they defended were long-standing convictions among Southerners—and, as Adams’s book suggests, some Northerners as well. Blacks, so the think- ing went, were incapable of looking out for themselves. As Fitzhugh said, “The negro is improvident [and] will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter.” 3 Left to his own devices, “the negro” inevitably fell into harm’s way. But as a slave, he was fed, clothed, housed, and given meaningful labor. Enslaved blacks were happier and more productive, therefore, than they could ever be living in freedom. The abolition of slavery would only infl ict hardship and misery upon men and women racially unsuited for freedom. Far from being immoral, slaveholders were socially responsible men who shouldered the burden of caring for those unable to fend for themselves.