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How did slaves find out about the Underground Railroad?That was a major difficultyIf it had been easy, there wouldn’t have been any slaves left by 1860. But it was illegal both to be a white person participating in operating the “railroad” and to be a black person using it.One of the standard punishments for attempted escape (obviously, there was no punishment for successful escape!) was for the master to order an overseer to smash one foot on the runaway with a sledge hammer. Once it heals, the slave will be able to walk slowly, with a limp, but never to walk quickly and certainly never to run. I imagine that it was also incredibly painful. Do this with all the other slaves watching, and you have just discouraged all of them from trying to run… except the ones who take that as a reason to try even harder and get it right!Not only was it bad for black people attempting to run, but it was a capitol crime to be convicted of running a station on the underground railroad. If any free person, white or colored, was caught and convicted of that crime, they would be executed by hanging.So, the word had to be spread secretly.But trying to advertise secretly is a contradiction in terms.So various people worked on creating secret codes that could be used to spread the information with the masters understanding what was being said.of course, the masters knew that the underground railroad existed, if you pass a law banning something, then by definition you know that it exists! But they didn’t know who was part of it, or at least, there were some people who managed to keep their membership secret.On the plantations, the slaves slept in separate “slave quarters” (often abbreviated as just “quarters”), with no white people sleeping there. So they could talk to each other at night without being overheard. But these quarters weren’t large barracks where the whole slave population of the plantation lodged together. They were rows of small huts with 2 to 6 slaves living in each. They were also assigned, and there was punishment if someone went into the wrong hut. So a slave could only talk to the same few fellows night after night. If one of them learned something, it might be difficult to spread it among the rest of the population.One of the ways that they spread information among themselves was through work songs.Let me take a moment to talk about this in general. Work songs are not just a slavery thing. Anyone doing hard but simple manual labor is going to use work songs. They have always existed, in agriculture, on docks where people were loading and unloading ships, on those ships at sea, in mines and quarries, among crews building or repairing roads, and later railroads. Anywhere people were working, there would be work songs, at least before the invention of recorded music. These days there are two reasons why this doesn’t happen anymore. 1) Modern work is more complicated. Even what is considered unskilled low-class work is still more complicated than “pick this thing up, carry it over there, put it down, come pick up another thing” or “haul this rope until the sail is up” mechanics, construction workers, and other supposedly non-intellectual blue-collar work is still complicated, so the people doing it don’t have spare brain-power to sing. But also, we have boom-boxes. When people want music on a job-site, they push a button. People can still do complicated work while listening to music, even if they can’t sing while doing it. But back in the past work songs were a huge thing.The same people who sang work songs while working, sang other songs in the evenings after work. Before any form of electronics or mechanical reproduced music, there was no other way for people to entertain themselves. Evening songs were usually significantly more complicated than actual work songs, but followed the same basic format. You have a caller who sings the lyrics, and then everyone else sings the chorus. With work songs, the verses are shorter and simpler, and the chorus is only a few words long, so that people have plenty of breath for doing the actual work. The evening songs had longer verses, and a chorus that might even be a full sentence, or even more. Most modern collections preserve the evening songs, but not the actual work songs. I can assure you from having actually participated in this activity, that participating in the chorus makes the song FAR more entertaining than just listening to someone else sing it.So, on slave plantations in the U.S., some of the work songs contained coded messages about the underground railroad. Others contained imagery from the Bible about how they would be free in heaven, or about how God was going to come down and free them, or just trying to keep each other’s spirits up so that they didn’t give up hope. With a little research you will find a whole genre of “Spirituals” which are these songs. Well, some of them… the ones that people felt like preserving. It has been over 150 since abolition. Many of the old slave Spirituals were reused to fight Jim Crow, with only minor changes to the lyrics. These songs were also an important contributing factor to the modern R&B genre.But the messages in songs had to be so deeply coded, that they were often quite vague. They simply couldn’t contain detailed information about how to find the first safe-house on the route. Because even if the information was coded, detailed lyrics like that would arouse suspicions among the overseers and masters. The masters might not understand exactly what the lyric meant, but if it was sufficiently complex, they might investigate.Another way of conveying information was through embedding codes in patchwork quilts. Not only were quilts used as blankets on beds, but they were also hung up to add insulation to the walls of a house, and even if they were used on a bed, in a time before powered machines for washing and drying clothing, often you would simply air out a quilt rather than washing it. So it was not suspicious to see a quilt handing from the wall at the back of a porch, or draped over the railing. People who were not members of the Underground Railroad did that all the time. So, when people who were operators on the railroad hung out a quilt with a code signifying their membership, it did not arouse any suspicions. Often, the codes wasn’t so much a code, as simply a distinctive and recognizable quilt. Someone might whisper to one slave “when you run, look for the house with a quilt with three red squares and 4 green squares” or whatever the quilt looked like. But some quilts contained detailed instructions, like “go this many miles towards this recognizable feature, then turn this direction, cross the river at this place” etc.But neither of these methods ever got very many people out. It simply isn’t possible to put enough information into either, or if you do, the masters would be able to decipher it, and then people get hanged, and other people have their foot smashed.So what really got the job done were “conductors” on the railroad. People who went down to act as guides to lead slaves out. Several of them have become famous: Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth among others. These conductors included men and women, black and white. People of conscience and courage who risked everything for freedom. Again, a white person who was caught acting as a conductor on the underground railroad would be hanged. A black person might be hanged, or enslaved (or re-enslaved) many of the black conductors were themselves former slaves who had escaped, and who then chose to go back and rescue others. They would sneak onto their target plantation, and hide in the quarters. A slave owner usually kept a fairly strict inventory of his “property”, and while an unknown extra black person might seem like a benefit (hey! and extra slave, at no cost!) they knew that such people usually meant trouble. So much better for the masters to not even know that the conductor was there. They would gather up those who were ready to run, and a day or so later lead them out under cover of darkness. These conductors could not do this on their own. They relied on the “stations” of the railroad to do their work. It was a whole process.So, the quilts identified the stations, here is where the songs come in. One of the common secret messages of these songs was “a conductor is coming in a few days” and other songs “the conductor is here”. This is a fairly simple message that can be conveyed in code.Most of the conductors made only one trip, or only a few, but a few made dozens, at massive risk to themselves.John Brown was an abolitionist from a family of abolitionists from Connecticut, and throughout much of his life, like his parents before him, he ran multiple “stations” on the underground railroad, helping many slaves get to freedom. Eventually, he needed to do more. After gathering together a sizable force and participating in the “bleeding Kansas” incidents. (Kansas Territory was ready to become a state, and there needed to be a public vote on whether to become a slave state or a free state. Slave state partisans took up weapons to attempt to intimidate free-state voters to stay away from the polls, and even murdered some of them. Some of these terrorists were from within the territory, others entered it from neighboring states and territories to participate in this terrorism. John Brown was one of several counter-terrorists, who came to fight against the pro-slavery partisans). After participating in fighting off around 300 pro-slavery terrorists from Missouri, John Brown went into Missouri and rounded up 11 slaves, and took two white men hostage, and led those 11 slaves north to freedom. He then went on to attempt the same thing in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on a much larger scale. Himself and 19 other men, with extensive financial backing from some wealthy business men in New England who also morally opposed slavery, he went down to Harper’s Ferry, but everything went wrong. He ended up taking many more than just two white men hostage, and did not get out before he was surrounded by state militia, and it turned into a siege and hostage crisis. Eventually, John Brown surrendered, and was then tried, convicted and hanged, in 1859. While John Brown’s work as a direct conductor was only moderately effective, only freeing 11 slaves, his family’s safe houses may have helped as many as 2,500 slaves get to freedom (this number is disputed, but even if it is incorrect, the real number is a lot). He also fought for Kanses to be a free state, risking death in combat to not only himself, but also to his 7 surviving sons (of 8 born) and several of his sons-in-law, along with many other fighters who were not related to him.But probably the most prolific conductor on the underground railroad was Harriet Tubman, who guided more slaves to safety than any other single individual in U.S. history.John Brown (abolitionist) - WikipediaHarriet Tubman - Wikipedia