Define Underground Railroad - a system of cooperation among active antislavery people in the United States before 1863 by which fugitive slaves were secretly helped to reach the North or Canada —called also Underground Railway [Merriam-Webster] It was secret by necessity, so we do not have good records about it that were written at the time it took place. [An enslaver may have first used the term “Underground Railroad,” as there was one instance where one of them said that the freedom seekers “disappeared, as if on an ‘underground railroad.’”] People spoke and wrote about it many years later.*
Define slavery and note its effects - The historical term for human beings held in bondage and forced to perform labor or services against their will under threat of physical mistreatment or death.
There were tens of millions of kidnapped Africans transported to the Americas, and held in bondage from the sixteenth century through the American Civil War. [Network to Freedom website; the NTF is a program of the National Park Service focused on the Underground Railroad.] The preferred term to use now when we talk about people suffering under slavery is “enslaved,” to indicate that it was a condition imposed on them, rather than an inward condition of being inferior.
It is important to note that enslavers were looking for particular skills, such as agricultural expertise, in the people they kidnapped in Africa.
Those enslaved were forced to work without pay, severely mistreated and separated from their families at the whims of their enslavers. Living conditions were so bad that many were willing to risk everything for freedom.
Define location of slavery in U.S. - most who were enslaved were living below the Mason-Dixon Line in the U.S. This was originally the boundary between
, as the dividing line between slave states south of it and free-soil states north of it. The term Mason and Dixon Line was first used in congressional debates leading to the
(1820). Today the Mason and Dixon Line still serves figuratively as the political and social dividing line between the North and the South, although it does not extend west of the Ohio River. [Brittanica.com, 10/1/2015, accessed 3/20/17]]
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Historical Background