9UNP1250SD_Jesse_Gant_WordPress

- Today we are pleased to introduce Jesse Gant as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's "History Sandwiched In" lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. Jesse Gant is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Public Humanities Fellow with the Wisconsin Humanities Council. Today's talk draws upon research he originally produced for his master's thesis produced at New York University. His soon-to-be-completed dissertation will examine black activist efforts, including protests of the Fugitive Slave Act, and their impact on the rise of the Republican Party during the 1850s and 1860s. Here today to discuss Wisconsin's Underground Railroad in History and Memory, please join me in welcoming Jesse Gant. 
(applause)

- Thank you so much. It's great to see such a packed house on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of summer. It's delightful to see you all here, and I look forward to sharing stories from Wisconsin's Underground Railroad, a subject that I've been looking at and thinking about for quite some time, haven't talked about publicly in quite a while, but looking forward to really diving in. 

I want to start off with a clip that was put together by the Wisconsin Media Lab on the life of Joshua Glover, one of the two, I think, most famous Underground Railroad escapes in state history. The Joshua Glover escape happened in March 1854, and it's often paired with the rescue of Caroline Quarlls, a much earlier rescue that occurred in the state of Wisconsin in 1842. I think this clip just really magically and nicely encapsulates a lot of the themes and points that I would like to talk with you today. So, for the first five minutes or so, let's take a look at this, and we'll discuss it afterwards.

§ Oh brother man 
§ Fold to thy heart thy brother 
§ Where pity dwells 
§ The peace of God is there 
§ To worship rightly 
§ Is to love each other 
§ Each smile a hymn 
§ Each kindly deed a prayer § 
(somber instrumental music)
(fire crackling)
 
(groan)
(whipping)
 
(somber instrumental music)
(loud drumming)

(dogs barking and growling)
(fast-paced drumming)
 
(dogs barking and growling)
(crowd talking)
 
(gentle guitar music)
(birds chirping)

(gentle guitar music)
(dogs barking)
 
(ominous music)
(dogs barking and growling)

(somber instrumental music)
(horse galloping)

(horse neighs)
(crowd booing)
 
(dogs barking and growling) 
(door rammed)
 
(dogs barking and growling)
(ominous drumming)

(crowd cheering)
(gentle guitar music)

So I think the clip you just saw really nicely introduces not only one of the key historical narratives, the rescue of Josh Glover in 1854, but a lot of the sort of motifs and architecture, the atmospherics that surround a lot of the ways that Underground Railroad stories are told in the state of Wisconsin and elsewhere. Today I want to talk about some of the pitfalls and some of the problems associated with ways we talk about the Underground Railroad in the state of Wisconsin. Obviously, it's a very popular and accessible and much beloved subject in lots of ways. The room being so filled today with enthusiastic folks gives one piece of evidence of that. And we are, I think, in 2015 standing at the cusp or at the apex, maybe, of a sort of resurgent Underground Railroad story that since the early 1990s has really captivated new public audiences. But what are these stories? How are they really functioning? And what sort of meanings are they really embedding? And I want to kind of take the next 45 minutes or so and sort of establish some critical space around the Underground Railroad stories as they function in our state's sense of itself.

I think one of the key projects of kind of restoring a more usable and interesting idea of the Underground Railroad is maybe beginning with a definition. When we're talking about the Underground Railroad, when I say we, I mean professional historians, but anybody in the world of doing education and programming around Underground Railroad stories, including places like the Wisconsin Historical Society, we actually mean a very specific thing. It's a term that developed in the late 1830s and became popular increasingly in the 1840s and 1850s. So it's really just two decades before the Civil War when this term sort of gains currency in a lot of the publications and newspapers of the era.

It's a process or a system. Most often it's thought of as this kind of vast clandestine network by which activists, black and white, throughout the North increasingly brought their energies and wisdom to bear on bringing down slavery. That's a convenient idea maybe, but it's, in the case of Wisconsin's Underground Railroad stories, not entirely accurate. I mean, I think we have to recover a sense that a lot of these rescues were very spontaneous and sort of happenstance episodes that did not involve necessarily institutional or systemic alliances of black and white activists operating throughout the North at the time. Certainly, we can access and, I think, talk about a systemic resistance to slavery through the Underground Railroad, especially when we look at black communities and free black Northerners especially, particularly communities in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, some of the more entrenched and bigger populations on the East Coast. But here in the West and particularly in a place like Wisconsin, which had the smallest population of free black Northerners both regionally and throughout the north of the Western states at the time, it's kind of a difficult discussion to have when there are not a lot of the institutions and free newspapers, churches, and other sort of institutions that were so important to free black politics at the time. 

I think we've also gained in the last few decades, in the last 50 years especially, a much broader sense of the geography of the Underground Railroad. We tend to think, and the video really, I think, really nicely encapsulated this, but we tend to think of a certain trajectory that leads directly out of the South to the Northern states and then to Canada. But historians have become much more sensitive and aware, I think, of the varieties of paths that led out of the South and increasingly, and I think most importantly, a lot of flight happened within the South itself to maroon colonies, to the swamps of Louisiana, to the Western frontier, to Florida. There were a variety of different options, I think. Options is a problematic term, maybe, in a context like slavery, but I think some sense of the ways that people could escape to sea, using the shipping routes like Frederick Douglass with his famous, probably his most famous escape in US history in the 1840s, and the varieties of geographies that are sort of implicated in Underground Railroad stories. The last point I would like to make is that really Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, a variety of people use the term the Underground Railroad in different ways, so it's not always and immediately this sort of uplifting story of fugitive slave resistance. A lot of Southerners looked at it as a vast conspiracy of, you know, trouble-making abolitionists up North. Westerners would kind of look at it as a way to maybe remove troubling or problematic black populations and their ideas. So there isn't a lot of rhetoric that, you know, African-Americans actually belong in the West among a lot of the activists who are involved in these rescues, so it does have this kind of problematic idea depending on the perspective and depending on the geography you're located in. I really love this graphic from 1861, interestingly. 

The Civil War is already underway and the Census Office produces a map showing you where enslaved populations are most dominant. And I like to point this out in the discussion of Wisconsin's Underground Railroad because, as you can see, the enslaved populations in the US South really are concentrated on a large belt that extends from northern Virginia on down through the deep South to eastern Texas. And then you have this massive population of Mississippi Delta enslaved populations. This is kind of the biggest population, the biggest concentration of enslaved people by the time of the Civil War. And these laborers are really working in a plantation system that has developed a very strong police apparatus around it, so people who are located in the Delta working in northern Virginia don't have a lot of options actually for escape. It's a very difficult proposition. I think there's a lot of rhetoric in Underground Railroad stories and in the video we just saw that there's somehow a choice or some sort of ability that you could just kind of flee whenever you liked. But in Wisconsin's examples, if you look at the populations of northern Kentucky along the Ohio River, these are groups of people who are frequently crossing the Ohio into the state of Ohio, where they're actually working as coerced laborers under contracts, even as slaves. And then another important population here north of the Missouri River, in and around St. Louis, and that's called Missouri Slave Belt, which is another really important population for the discussion in the state of Wisconsin. 

and I think it's really important to point out that these are groups of people located on kind of the most important interior waterways in North America, right? You have the Ohio River here, the Mississippi River flowing northward towards Minnesota, and these provide ready-made routes of escape for both Quarlls and Glover. Glover and Quarlls are located in St. Louis and make their way northward via the Mississippi River. I like to point that out just to kind of give you a sense of the geography and the limitations, actually, that faced a lot of enslaved Southerners at the time. By the early 1840s there's already sort of a system of representations of the Underground Railroad that have emerged that are quite literally taking the system as a literal underground railroad, disappearing under the hills like the "Chicago Western Citizen" here in 1844, which gives you one of the first actual representations in a newspaper of the Liberty Line, as it was called, making its way underneath the mountain system and speeding people off to the North. But if you look at the description underneath this image, it's actually loaded with a lot of racist assumptions about these sort of hapless people who have no agency or control or sense, even, where they're heading or what they're doing on the Liberty Line. So it's a very, you know, complicated racial politics playing out in a lot of the representations of the Underground Railroad, at the earliest stages anyway. As I mentioned, there are two stories that kind of dominate discussions in the state of Wisconsin: the Joshua Glover rescue in 1854, the rescue of Caroline Quarlls in 1842. We actually do have an image of Benammi Garland, the master, the owner of Joshua Glover, from the Missouri History Museum, and the clipping showing the $200 reward for Joshua Glover's return. 

I also wanted to include the poster for the mass convention that was organized in the state of Wisconsin following the Glover rescue in 1854. 1854 is kind of this really important moment in the anti-slavery movement's history because of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which is being debated in Congress in January and March, January, February, and March predominantly, in the early part of that year. It's really in that context that the Glover rescue happens and sort of animates a lot of the attention in the state of Wisconsin. Quarlls is the sort of lesser known and lesser understood rescue that happens. She actually escaped slavery by purchasing a ticket on a steamship for $100, sorta contrary to all the typical or traditional notions of how Underground Railroad escapes happened, and sailed via steamship to the state of Wisconsin and spent some time in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where the rumor was that bounty hunters were in the region and were in active pursuit of her. And Waukesha activists led by a fellow named Lyman Goodnow organized to have her escape through southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, Indiana, and then over to Detroit, Michigan, following a fairly typical trajectory for Underground Railroad escapes through the state of Wisconsin. We think that there were probably about 100 rescues that happened in the state, but the two, Glover and Quarrlls's, are the most famous and the most talked about. And I mentioned at the beginning that I think we're in kind of a moment that's really important for rethinking and gaining some critical appreciation for the Underground Railroad. And I can historicize it a little bit and sort of explain how this all came about. In 1998, the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Act passed, and this provided, really importantly, support to a variety of public history initiatives throughout the United States to sort of raise awareness and raise the visibility of Underground Railroad destinations. 

It had a really profound impact. I think we can all speak and think about maybe examples we've been to or places we've been. Racine, Wisconsin, has monuments in its downtown Monument Square commemorating the beginning part of the Joshua Glover rescue that received some funding from the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Bill. But this really created a sort of proliferation of Underground Railroad destinations and publications and attentions around this topic that has been really quite influential and, I think, a welcome development, but one that we need to think about here in the state of Wisconsin. Since 1998, then, we've seen, maybe, I think it's certainly related that we've seen a proliferation of scholarship, both public and, if we want to draw a line between popular scholarship and academic scholarship, we can, popular works on Caroline Quarlls for kids. A lot of this, sort of, is marketed initially to a younger audience, certainly the video we watched at the top of the discussion for fourth graders, I think. A new biography of Joshua Glover published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. So there has been a kind of resurgence in interest in these subjects, including, I think, a really interesting scholarly study by H. Robert Baker on the Joshua Glover rescue, and actually the first one ever published. So this has all been part of the rising interest in the state throughout these discussions. 

I came to the Underground Railroad, and I was actually first initiated to the subject as a student in the Janesville public schools, and we toured the Milton House, which many of you may know has a tunnel underneath the home where apparently folks were shepherded or hid in the times when marshals would come and do inspections or be on the search for runaway slaves. It has been accredited through the National Underground Railroad Freedom Network funding, and along with Racine, I think Loom is kind of the biggest places where actually the landscape, the physical landscape of the state of Wisconsin has markers and memorials commemorating the rescues. I would add to that the recent murals in the city of Milwaukee. These are at I-43 and Fond du Lac Avenue, just underneath the underpass, that commemorate the Quarlls and Glover rescue again. On the top left there is an image showing Goodnow and Quarlls. Goodnow is actually supporting her hand and pointing for her, in some sense, in the direction of freedom. It's incorporated these sort of folklore motifs of the quilts that you may be familiar with, this sort of legend of fugitive slaves using embedded symbols inside quilts and other symbols to navigate their way northward. And the Glover rescue kind of borrows a lot of civil rights icons, the placards, the "Free Joshua Glover Now," and again kind of plays on this idea of a benevolent white Milwaukee community really, literally uplifting Joshua Glover here and again raising his arm in these murals.

A lot of these images and ideas first originated with the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in the early 1850s. The famous escape of Eliza in the beginning part of that novel really, I think, captured and framed a lot of the ways people think about fugitive slaves' escape. 

Throughout time, since the 1850s, you begin to see a kind of recycling a lot of these images. And so whether or not Harriet Beecher Stowe actually included some of the motifs in her novel, you begin to start to see, especially in the 1880s and 90s, the incorporation of bloodhounds and sort of trappings of the familiar tale that we saw at the top of the hour in the Glover video. I think one really important turning point was the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where Charles T. Webber unveiled a really iconic painting at the Chicago World's Fair showing fugitives making their way northward, and this was actually viewed by a young Ohio State historian for the first time at the Chicago Fair, named Wilbur Siebert. Wilbur Siebert was active during the 1890s collecting testimonials from Underground Railroad conductors, as he called them, throughout the North who were then sending in letters and soliciting, and he was providing space for them to share their stories about their involvement in rescues. Tellingly, I think, Siebert collects about 5,000 letters or so from Underground Railroad conductors in the North, and most of them are white men who have kind of written in and shared their stories about involvement in the Underground Railroad. And I think Siebert is very uncritical about what to do with those narratives and nonetheless crafts, I think, a really important history in 1898 that, among other things, maps the actual routes of the escapes. So, again, you see a real hardening or a real sense that the routes were real, that there was this kind of vast Underground Railroad network that activists, black and white, maintained throughout this period.

And I think we have to keep in mind as we're considering these stories and the way that the Underground Railroad was popularized, that there has been always parallel to that sort of more traditional view, a view of the Underground Railroad that emerges sort of organically out of the black community. William Still's really interesting account from 1872

is based largely on his experiences as leader of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, which in contrast to a lot of the rescues, and especially the rescues in the state of Wisconsin, does emerge out of that much stronger institutional background for black politics in Philadelphia. And so the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee actually did institutionally provide weapons, food, clothing, and other sorts of support for fugitive slaves that made their way through the city, and that's typically not the story historians or popularizers of the Underground Railroad really emphasize. This really interesting painting from 1862, I think, also captures a dynamic of the Underground Railroad that we tend to overlook. This is a war-time representation of a fugitive family fleeing from the South during the Civil War. So we think of the underground railroad as this sort of thing that existed prior to the Civil War but didn't have a life once the war started. Some really interesting scholarship by a woman named Thavolia Glymph has illustrated that, actually, some of the greatest numbers of escapes actually happened during the war and involved some of the most dangerous and highest stakes. And this painting, I think, really brilliantly captures, you can't see it very well, but you can see a line of Union troops advancing right behind this family at the Battle of Manassas. And so the conflict of the Civil War really finally opened up space from which people could actually escape the system beyond the slave patrols and the other police apparatus that were so powerful under slavery. This is the language that is published in the Wisconsin Historical Society Press biography of Joshua Glover's "Finding Freedom" in 2007. I won't read the entire passage but I think it really nicely, again, sort of gives you a window into how the Underground Railroad has become this kind of place where we want to speak to a variety of ways of bringing together all these various facets of our sort of conflicted racial moment. 

So in this depiction, which happens right at the beginning of the Joshua Glover biography, there's certainly sensitivity to the broad geography of the Underground Railroad, but then there's this kind of reach or this idea that everybody, Indian nations, Canadians, Caribbeans, were all sort of united in this struggle, which raises the question, well how did slavery endure if so many people were active in trying to undermine it? Also this move at the end here to unite refugees from the American Revolution all the way to the Vietnam War, again, kind of speaks to this idea that it's the ready-made, it's the perfect story for the time and place we're in right now, but whether it's a critical or usable story for history's sake remains to be seen.

The Milton House for a long time used to have promotional materials that said nobody needed a ticket to travel the Underground Railroad, just a deep desire for freedom, which raises again some troubling assumptions because if you just needed, you know, a deep desire for freedom, why didn't everybody escape? The best estimate is that 250, maybe 300, maybe 400,000 people escaped slavery in the years before 1860. There were four million enslaved people in the United States by the time of the Civil War, so we are always talking about a very, very small population, and it's important to keep that in mind, I think. I think the most famous example of a fugitive slave escape, just to kind of give you a sense of the kind of standard account and a biography that really looms large over this history, is Frederick Douglass, and if you think about the example of Frederick Douglass. I mean this is a very exceptional character. He learned how to read and write while being enslaved.

He lived in a geography that enabled him to kind of access shipping routes and access white families and white allies in ways that were not unique, and he was actually one of the leading critics of the way that white Westerners talked about the Underground Railroad. In the 1845 narrative that really launched his career as an anti-slavery activist, he said that he had never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends conducted what they call the Underground Railroad, and he really speaks to this kind of tension about what sort of work is the Underground Railroad really doing in the sense of the sort of traditional way.

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was the sort of dominant mobilizing catalyst for a lot of fugitive slave activity during the 1850s, and it really touches off, I think, the most dramatic rescues and efforts of the decade before the Civil War.

And, again, I think we have to really insist on a regional and state-wide history that really focuses on the efforts of free black Northerners if we're really going to get at what made the Underground Railroad significant. And regionally, I would point to places like Cincinnati, Ohio, or Oberlin, Ohio, as places where a lot of these histories can really be focused. Wisconsin's examples are so marginal and sort of far-flung that they don't get us very close to what the Underground really meant regionally or nationally. Nonetheless, and I think predictably, we tend to associate Underground Railroad stories in Wisconsin more with the white activists than we do with the black people who actually were implicated in the rescues. So Sherman Booth, for example, the kind of leading activist involved in the Joshua Glover rescue from 1854 had a street named after him in Milwaukee during the 1850s, but it wasn't until 1994 that Joshua Glover got a street named after him in Milwaukee by Milwaukee high school students. The Rescue of Joshua Glover plaque in Cathedral Square, right behind there is actually where the rescue originally happened, again, sort of plays up the role of the mediating white abolitionists playing the heroic role at the expense of kind of we don't get a very good sense of what happened to Glover and what his life in Canada was like, for example. And there's a tendency, I think, with a lot of the work around the Underground Railroad in the state of Wisconsin to kind of misplace the place of anti-slavery in the state. So you have language like this which accompanies the mural text that says, "The state of Wisconsin "was attractive to those who escaped slavery. "Abolitionists and others in Wisconsin were leaders "in the fight against slavery." 

I think one of the problems and one of the key themes that you really encounter when you look at black politics from the period 1840s and 1850s, there's profound ambivalence about the Western states in black newspapers and in all sorts of black publications on account of the Black Laws, which are these sort of systemic restrictions that, first of all, were aimed at limiting immigration into the state. The State of Ohio imposed a $500 bond just to even move there in its state constitution in 1802 and 1803. You know, the state of Wisconsin never allowed black suffrage until after the Civil War. So black activists and black leaders are always sort of questioning just where is this identity as a good anti-slavery state really coming from? It's often coming from white anti-slavery activists who do not necessarily have a benevolent idea of racial politics in mind. They might be anti-slavery, but that doesn't make them pro-black. Lyman Goodnow, for example, and this is a really telling document, I think, in 1808. After the Civil War, a lot of these anti-slavery leaders and abolitionist participants, and I use abolitionists in quotes, wrote publications or wrote testimonies to fill county histories and sort of local histories and filled their accounts, actually, with accounts that I think should trouble us. Caroline Quarlls, this is him describing his role in the rescue in 1880. "The first slave transported over the Underground Railroad "from this region was probably an octoroon. 

"She had thin lips, straight nose, and was not very dark, "which probably accounted for her being able to escape from "St. Louis, where she was owned by an aunt, a Mrs. Hall. "Caroline obtained some money, got permission "from her mistress to visit a friend, "and taking a bundle of clothes with her, "which she had dropped from her window, "she took to a steamboat at Alton, Illinois." And in fact, if you look at the letters that Wisconsin activists sent to Wilbut Siebert in the 1880s, they're filled with very disparaging racial comments and frequently used racial epithets. So these are the people who presumably toppled slavery and worked actively in the anti-slavery movement, but they're also, you know, announcing the most vicious white supremacy in their accounts. Here's the mural in River West, Wisconsin, that shows you the new mural for Joshua Glover, which went up in 1994, but for, again, a long time that street was named for, was intersected actually, with the street for Sherman Booth.

There are also these sites around the state of Wisconsin that sort of have these connections to the Underground Railroad. I was a tour guide for a long time at the Lincoln-Tallman Restorations in Janesville, this is a house where Abraham Lincoln slept one weekend, and it's been making money off of it ever since. You know, you think about the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, probably the greatest president we've ever had, the epicenter of a war that cost 750,000 lives, saw the emancipation of the slaves, any number of things that Lincoln was entangled in: creation of the national parks, it goes on and on and on. 

It's just a remarkable presidency. That story has really been shoved aside actually over time as people came to the Tallman House, beginning in the 1880s and 90s, as Tallman's sons started writing some of these reminiscences that said, you know, our father was involved in the Underground Railroad. And as these stories made their way into newspapers and into accounts, I, as a tour guide, as a young teenager, heard a lot of people come to me and say, "You know that's great, that's interesting about Lincoln, "but tell me about the Underground Railroad," which was always very interesting to me because there is absolutely no evidence that this house was a station on the Underground Railroad. As a kind of nosy young student, I spent a lot of time in the archives. And it's actually been a tension among administrators at the Rock County Historical Society and their relationship to the Milton House up a few miles north. They've never been able to find evidence that that actually occurred, and there's been periodic digs on site by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I think most recently in 2011, where they've sent geologists out to find that tunnel that apparently existed between the river and the house, and it's never turned up. This isn't to say that I think we need to dismiss all Underground Railroad stories or that there has to be some sort of factual basis necessarily. I think the sort of folklore and the legend around Underground Railroad stories is interesting on its own, but it raises a lot of problems if there's just no evidence for it.

- So how was it that that story came to be? What's your sense of that?

- Yeah, that's been widely discussed, and that's an interesting phenomenon. David Blight, a historian at Yale, has argued that in the 1880s and 90s anti-slavery activists, feeling like the centrality of slavery to the Civil War was being pushed aside in the culture of the Union, invented a notion of alternative veteran-hood. So they saw all these veterans, Union veterans, being celebrated culturally and saw slavery being pushed out of the story as a result, felt that the Underground Railroad was the place where they could make a claim about slavery's significance to the war. And so they started writing all these stories to say well this war was all about slavery, and we sacrificed our lives and our situations to really bring the war about, so you see a proliferation in the 1880s and 90s of these sorts of accounts. In Tallman's example it's his son, who, for whatever reason, I think that's a really interesting question why he would do that, but I think there must've been some reason as to, you know, restoring his father's legacy or his identity, or even, more cynically, you know, preserving the house, keeping it from destruction and falling into disrepair. Just sort of raises this idea. It's very clear in the archive at the Rock County Historical Society in Janesville. If you go to it, you can see the sort of invention of this myth in the post-war years, and you see references to it, actually, all the way up through the 1950s and 60s. I mean, it's repeatedly referred to as an Underground Railroad destination. It's part of the marketing for the house at the expense of Abraham Lincoln's story, which is phenomenal even though it's one weekend. 

That's the only house in the state of Wisconsin where Lincoln stayed, so in that sense it does have a viable and interesting story attached to it that has sort of been pushed aside over the years. The real impetus for a lot of the revision that's happened around the Underground Railroad. I've been talking about this kind of revisionist history of the Underground Railroad and the increased critical stance toward it really originated with this interesting account called "The Liberty Line", written by a PhD graduate here at Madison named Larry Gara. And this was 50 years ago. So while academic historians have really been critical, and I think, in developing some space around the Underground Railroad and rethinking its imperatives, popular historians and more secondary education historians especially have, I think, been slow to kind of pick up on some of the interventions that have been made in the academic scholarship. Just doesn't have a lot of evidence for it. It kind of relies on some questionable research. And then the book on the right, Betty DeRamus's "Forbidden Fruit", actually tries to make the experience of slavery in the United States a love story. So, I think, tellingly, the blurb for the book says "haunting, riveting, always triumphant." So, you know, how you turn an experience like slavery in the United States into a triumphant tale is quite exceptional, I think.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, has emerged since 2004 when it opened, is a kind of new front, and it'll be interesting to see where, I included this slide because I think it's going to be interesting to see where a lot of these discussions about the Underground Railroad go because it was driven in part by the funding and the new attention based on that 1998 legislation that really made the Underground Railroad highly visible culturally and politically. It opened the year of the Kerry and Bush presidential contest. Both presidents came, they shook hands, they participated in the ceremony. This is again, speaks to the way that the Underground Railroad seems to unite all sorts of political coalitions. Everybody loves the Underground Railroad,

no matter what political background you're from. But I think in the years since 2004, and 2005 especially, we've entered a period where as the Underground Railroad has become much more popular, and there are actually yearly conferences and a proliferation of sites and new books, I think there is a kind of rising sensibility that, while the Underground Railroad has become so popular as a children's and youth discussion, it's time for adults to get real and start talking about some of the racial and broader political motivations behind a lot of these stories. So, with that, I'm happy to answer your questions and lead this discussion forward. Thank you. 
(applause)