Over the course of just one year in the early 1840s, Thomas Smallwood, a recently emancipated Black man, with the assistance of the New England educated white abolitionist Charles Torrey, arranged for around 400 enslaved people to escape the Baltimore and DC area for freedom in Canada. While the abolition movement was still debating the best path forward, Smallwood and Torrey put their beliefs into action, establishing the Underground Railroad, and using the press to taunt the slaveowners whose enslaved people they freed.
Joining me in this episode to discuss Thomas Smallwood, Charles Torrey, and the Underground Railroad, is journalist Scott Shane, author of Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode audio is “Go Down Moses,” performed by the Tuskegee Institute Singers in 1914 and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” performed by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers in 1909; both songs are in the public domain and available via the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox. The episode image is "Crossing the river on horseback in the night," from 1872, available via the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library; the image is in the public domain.
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