Lyddie, Chapter 6: The Underground Railroad and the Quakers of New England

A "Voices from the Field" essay for chapter 6 of Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie*, from Lowell National Historical Park's Books to Parks series, by Dr. Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Professor Emeritus of History at Haverford College.*

It is easy to picture the Underground Railroad in vague, dramatic terms: a secret network of heroes guiding enslaved people to freedom through the night, and brave people risking their lives to escape. Lapsansky-Werner asks readers to look closer.

People doing things

History, she points out, is made of individual people doing things. A farmer might find a woman hiding in the woods with a baby, take them home, feed them, give them a bed, and send them on to another farmhouse a little farther north for the next meal and night's rest. That chain of small acts is what came to be called the Underground Railroad.

There were no trains and no tunnels. The Underground Railroad was a network of people who believed slavery was wrong — that no one, however kind their master, should be forced to work under unfair conditions and be bought and sold as property. White people and free Black people worked together to hide people escaping slavery in barns, attics and cellars, then moved them on to the next house down the road. Some went as far as Canada, where slavery was banned and earlier escapees had settled. Descendants of those who fled still live in the communities their ancestors built in Nova Scotia and Ontario between the 1780s and the 1850s.

Why Quakers

Several religious groups — among them some Methodists, Unitarians and Quakers — preached against slavery and helped people who escaped it build new lives. Quakers believe there is "that of God in everyone," so no one should control another person's freedom to follow what God calls them to do. Quakers were also known for doing what they believed was right even when it broke the law, which made them frequent helpers on the Underground Railroad.

In Lyddie, Quaker Stevens and his family are farmers. In rural Vermont, with few roads and farmers who all knew one another, they could hide a freedom seeker where strangers — like the bounty hunters in the novel — would have no idea where or how to look.

By water, too

Many Quakers were also shipowners and dock workers. For much of the 1800s, food, clothing and household goods travelled by ship, often with enslaved people among the crew, so the Underground Railroad could be the cargo hold of a ship.

Fishing, whaling and shipbuilding also employed enslaved Africans. Such workers sometimes "jumped ship" when they learned they were in a port like New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had a Quaker community openly opposed to slavery and a community of free African Americans a newcomer could disappear into.

How we know

Much of what we know comes from the autobiographies and memoirs of people who escaped and those who helped them. To understand how freedom seekers like Lyddie's Ezekial reached freedom, Lapsansky-Werner suggests looking at the waterways and maps that linked slave states with free areas, and tracing where Quaker meetings — Quaker communities and their places of worship — were settled in the nineteenth century.

Sources

• Emma Lapsansky-Werner, "Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 06 The Underground Railroad and New England Quakers", Lowell National Historical Park, National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/lyddie-voices-underground.htm
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