The Underground Railroad Was a Metaphor

Was the Underground Railroad a secret set of underground tunnels used by slaves to flee to freedom? This is what I was taught in elementary school and high school. But as Matt Pinsker notes at the blog he set up for his Dickinson College Civil War course, the “Underground Railroad” is best understood as a metaphor or a “rhetorical device.” Here is a taste of his post:

Even to begin a lesson by examining the two words “underground” and “railroad” helps provide a tighter chronological framework than usual with this topic. There could be no “underground railroad” until actual railroads became familiar to the American public–in other words, during the 1830s and 1840s. There had certainly been slave escapes before that period, but they were not described by any kind of railroad moniker. The phrase also highlights a specific geographic orientation. Antebellum railroads existed primarily in the North–home to about 70 percent of the nation’s 30,000 miles of track by 1860. Slaves fled in every direction of the compass, but the metaphor packed its greatest wallop in those communities closest to the nation’s whistle-stops.

Looking into the phrase “Underground Railroad” also suggests two essential questions: who coined the metaphor? And why would they want to compare and inextricably link a wide-ranging effort to support runaway slaves with an organized network of secret railroads?

Read the rest here.

The Underground Railroad Was a Metaphor

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