Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was an organised network of secret routes and safe houses by which enslaved people in the United States escaped, chiefly to the free Northern states and Canada. It took shape in the 1780s among abolitionist societies in the North and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Primarily the work of free and enslaved African Americans, aided by abolitionists, it used railway terms: escapees were "passengers" and those who aided them "conductors". One estimate holds that about 100,000 people had escaped through it by 1850.