Review: On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckoning on the Underground Railroad, by David Goodrich
Most Eastern Shore readers are familiar with Dorchester County’s Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad on the Shore, but they may be less aware of Tubman and the UGRR beyond Maryland and Delaware. In fact, the UGRR ran north to New York City and from there west to Canada.
While taking a break on a bicycle trip in Illinois, environmental writer David Goodrich was handed what may have been a slave collar, and began thinking about Black people escaping from enslavement. He decided to retrace — on a bicycle — Tubman’s escape route from Maryland to Canada. After that first trip, he followed the western UGRR from New Orleans to northern Ohio, with this second freedom trail perhaps not known to many readers on the Shore. Then he wrote a book: On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckoning on the Underground Railroad.
One of his book’s narrative methods might be called “spot history.” Goodrich often found himself engaged with local people or by historical events, learning on the spot from them. For instance, while on the early part of his eastern U.S. trip, Goodrich and companions entered the back of a “red-roofed chapel,” the Star Hill AME Church, south of Dover, Del., on a Sunday. Offered refreshment by the congregation, the travelers spoke with Lucreatia Wilson, curator of the Star Hill Museum. She had local youngsters learn about UGRR travel by having the kids wrap food in rough fabric, tying it all to a stick, and sending them out on a walk.
A few of Goodrich’s stops on his trips are mentioned below, but to get the full flavor of his episodic journeys, you really need to read the book.
In Kennett Square, Pa., Goodrich and companion visited the local Underground Railroad Center and the Longwood Meeting House, led by Quakers. From a local Quaker resident, Goodrich learned that in the 1860s, free Blacks did much to help the enslaved find freedom. In addition, Pennsylvania senator David Wilmot and other Longwood members in 1862 journeyed to Washington and may have influenced President Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation.
After exploring UGRR sites in and around Philadelphia, Goodrich crossed the Hudson River into New York City on a ferry, passing the Statue of Liberty, which writer James Baldwin once described as “simply a very bitter joke.” The gift from France was to celebrate slavery’s abolition. Needless to say, the symbolism of the broken shackle and chain at Liberty’s feet was premature.
Heading north, after a three-day ride up the Hudson Valley to Albany, Goodrich stopped at the Underground Railroad Education Center. In the rain and out of the blue, he and his companions were served lunch by the center’s managers, both of whom also appear in a video at the Harriet Tubman Center in Dorchester County. From Albany, the riders traveled west toward the last UGRR stop in Canada.
At Troy, a plaque describes the Tubman-aided escape of Charles Nalle, originally from Culpepper, Va. Nalle was taken in Troy by slave catchers while Tubman was in town visiting relatives. As Nalle was led out of a building, Tubman, disguised as an old woman, seized the prisoner from the marshalls, and he eventually made it to freedom.
In Buffalo, the riders crossed the Niagara River into Canada. An earlier suspension rail bridge opened in 1855; Tubman rode that iron railroad many times across into freedom. Eighteen miles later, Goodrich and companions arrived in St. Catharine’s, where Tubman and her family lived from 1851 to 1859 in a large community of free Blacks.
Tubman settled in a house she bought in Auburn, N.Y., in 1859 from abolitionist U.S. Sen. William Seward (later in Lincoln’s cabinet). After the Civil War, she founded an early home for the elderly. In 1860, Tubman risked one last adventure back to the Eastern Shore to rescue her sister and two nieces. She found her sister was dead and her daughters gone, but not one to miss an opportunity, Tubman helped a family with three children to freedom.
Both Frederick Douglass and Tubman were born and grew up on the Eastern Shore, and now lie buried a “day’s bike ride” apart in central New York. Tubman’s marker in the Auburn cemetery reads simply “Harriet Tubman Davis.” In 1869, she married Nelson Davis when she lived in Auburn until her death in 1913. Douglass died in Washington in 1895 and was buried in Rochester next to his first wife.
Whatever Eastern Shore residents know of the Underground Railroad on the Shore, few know anything of the UGRR west of Maryland. Goodrich, however, rode from New Orleans, infamous as a slave market, north along the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys to Oberlin, Ohio, on several trips. One of his trips included the Blues Country of the Mississippi Delta.
Much Civil War fighting took place along the border between slave and free states, and Goodrich pays close attention to local sources and local history.
One of these locals introduced Goodrich and his partner to the slave-selling industry in 19th Century New Orleans. Some of his ancestors fought in the 1811 slave rebellion and others with the U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War. In the early 19th Century, tobacco growing declined and the industrial revolution increased demand for cotton, especially because of the cotton gin’s productivity. As great as that invention was for the U.S. economy, it also increased the need for slave labor. Many enslaved people were marched in coffles from the Upper South to the Lower South, including the large slave market in New Orleans.
Encouraged by the success of the 1791 Haitian revolution, in 1811, Charles Deslondes and his allies dreamed of establishing an independent Black government along the Mississippi River. The rebels planned a coordinated two-pronged attack, one part starting upstream and moving down to the city, a second part beginning inside New Orleans. But word got to the authorities, and the rebels were defeated.
Further north, Goodrich cycled through the border state of Kentucky and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, several times crossing the Ohio River. Freedom-seeking Blacks found hostile territory on both sides of the river because slave hunters looked to capture them. Pumping up a hot, steep hill in northern Kentucky, Goodrich met a pastor who took him in his house for some refreshing cold water and air conditioning. After Goodrich told his host that he is on the UGRR route headed for Canada, the clergyman offered a short prayer for his safe travels.
Passengers on the UGRR relied on conductors and others for food, shelter, medical help, and protection. As a long-distance cyclist, Goodrich — though not threatened by slave catchers — discovered that he, too, benefitted from care given by strangers along the way.
As much as Goodrich was interested in history along the route, he often found that “the bike is a story machine.” That is, once Goodrich would share the reason for his travelling, people would often share their knowledge of local history and heroes. Not many of his readers will become long-distance bicycling travelers, but we should all learn from others in the way he learned from them.
Jim Block taught English at Northfield Mount Hermon, a boarding school in Western Mass. He coached cross-country, and advised the newspaper and the debate society there. He taught at Marlborough College in England and Robert College in Istanbul. He and his wife retired to Chestertown, Md. in 2014.
© Common Sense for the Eastern Shore, 2024
Title image: Pond at Pickering Creek Audubon Center, Talbot Co. Photo: Jan Plotczyk
