Day 6
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The Underground Railroad.
The Underground Railroad consisted of an expansive network of people who helped runaway slaves escape to the Northern States and to Canada. The Underground Railroad was not run by any single group or person. Rather, it consisted of many individuals — a good number of whites but predominantly black — who knew only of the local efforts to aid runaways and not of the collective operation. According to one estimate, the South lost 100,000 slaves between 1810 and 1850.
There were many notable conductors of the Underground Railroad, including John Fairfield in Ohio, the son of a slaveholding family, who made many daring rescues, Levi Coffin, a Quaker who assisted more than 3,000 slaves, and the most famous, Miss Harriet Tubman, who made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom. (I feel like I’m back in junior high school doing book reports, I hope you all appreciate my goddamn efforts.)
(Click Image to watch video)
Harriet Tubman
Actual "missing property" ad
The Big Dipper and Polaris played an important part in the story of the Underground Railroad. The old negro spiritual "Follow the Drinking Gourd" (another name for the Big Dipper) was a coded song that gave directions on the escape route from Alabama and Mississippi. While traveling on their long escape journey, runaways could always tell which way was north by the location of Polaris which they could find by the pointer stars. The Big Dipper stays above the horizon all night long as it rotates around Polaris due to the Earth's rotation. It is made up of very bright stars in an easy-to-locate pattern.