- 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)