Underground Railroad in the context of "Fugitive slaves"

Putnam Historic District, located in Zanesville, Ohio, was an important center of Underground Railroad traffic and home to a number of abolitionists. The district, with private residences and other key buildings important in the fight against slavery, lies between the Pennsylvania Central Railroad, Van Buren Street, and Muskingum River. It became a historic district of the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

Fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were historical terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe individuals who fled the institution of slavery in the United States. Modern historical scholarship often prefers the terms self-emancipated people or freedom seekers to acknowledge the active role these individuals took in claiming their own liberty.

The history of self-emancipation is linked to two federal laws that established the right of retrieval: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The legal status of a person escaping slavery was initially addressed in the United States Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3), which mandated the return of such individuals to the party claiming ownership. This legal framework, in tension with resistance efforts like the Underground Railroad and Northern "personal liberty laws," intensified the sectional conflict between slaveholding states and free states, contributing significantly to the causes of the American Civil War.

Upper Darby Township, often shortened to Upper Darby, is a home rule township in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States. As of the 2020 census, the township had a total population of 85,681, making it the state's sixth-most populated municipality after Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Reading, and Erie. Upper Darby borders Philadelphia, the nation's sixth-most populous city, and constitutes part of the Delaware Valley, also known as the Philadelphia metropolitan area, the nation's seventh-largest metropolitan area.

Upper Darby is home to the Tower Theater, a historic music venue on 69th Street built in the 1920s, and to several Underground Railroad sites. In August 2019, the radio tower on top of the theater was removed due to structural concerns.

Springfield is the most populous city in Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States, and its county seat. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers: the western Westfield River, the eastern Chicopee River, and the eastern Mill River. At the 2020 census, the city's population was 155,929, making it the third most populous city in the U.S. state of Massachusetts and the fourth most populous city in New England after Boston, Worcester, and Providence. Metropolitan Springfield, as one of two metropolitan areas in Massachusetts (the other being Greater Boston), had a population of 699,162 in 2020.

Springfield was founded in 1636, the first Springfield in the New World. In the late 1700s, during the American Revolution, Springfield was designated by George Washington as the site of the Springfield Armory because of its central location. Subsequently it was the site of Shays' Rebellion. The city would also play a pivotal role in the Civil War, as a stop on the Underground Railroad and home of abolitionist John Brown, widely known for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and for the Armory's manufacture of the famed "Springfield rifles" used ubiquitously by Union troops. Closing during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, today the national park site features the largest collection of historic American firearms in the world.

African-American history started with the forced transportation of Sub-Saharan Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, encompassed a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold in the Atlantic slave trade, either to Europe or the Americas, approximately 388,000 were sent to North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to European colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of Sub-Saharan African descent, both free and enslaved.

During the American Revolutionary War, in which the Thirteen Colonies gained independence and began to form the United States, Black soldiers fought on both the British and the American sides. After the conflict ended, the Northern United States gradually abolished slavery. However, the population of the American South, which had an economy dependent on plantations operation by slave labor, increased their usage of slaves to pick cotton, which became the basis of the industrial revolution underway in England and New England. Slavery moved westward from the Southern states during the westward expansion of the United States. During this period, numerous enslaved African Americans escaped into free states and Canada via the Underground Railroad. Disputes over slavery between the Northern and Southern states led to the American Civil War, in which 178,000 African Americans served on the Union side. During the war, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which ended slavery as soon as the Union armies arrived. After the war ended the Thirteenth Amendment, abolished slavery in the U.S., except as punishment for a crime.

Henry Walton Bibb (May 10, 1815– August 1, 1854), was an American author and abolitionist who was born into slavery. Bibb told his life story in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, which included many failed escape attempts followed finally by success when he escaped to Detroit. After leaving Detroit to move to Canada with his family, due to issues with the legality of his assistance in the Underground Railroad, he founded the abolitionist newspaper, Voice of the Fugitive. He lived in Canada until his death.

The history of slavery in Delaware began when it was Delaware Colony and continued until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. The Delaware River was an important waterway used for bringing slaves inland to Pennsylvania. In 1776, Delaware prohibited the importation of slaves, and on December 7, 1787, prohibited both imports and exports of slaves from the state. Delaware never abolished slavery and in the order of admission to the Union, it was the first of the 15 slave states. However, it did not secede from the Union during the American Civil War. There were 1,798 enslaved people living in Delaware at the time of the 1860 U.S. census.

A state with a mix of enslaved people and a large population of free people of color that lay in close proximity to the slave jails of traders in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C., legally free blacks were sometimes kidnapped into slavery, and "freedmen found it wise to deposit apprentice and freedom papers with the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in Philadelphia." For example, the Johnson–Cannon gang, whose tavern and slave pen stood on the border between Maryland and Delaware, were notorious slave stealers and murderers in the early 19th century. The state also hosted stations of the Underground Railroad to assist with escapes from slavery such as the Appoquinimink Friends Meetings House. Thomas Garrett of Wilmington, Delaware, a businessman of the Quaker faith, reportedly assisted in the escapes of between 2,000 and 3,000 slaves.