Underground Railroad: The William Still Story

-It was my good fortune to lend a helping hand to the weary travelers flying from the land of bondage.

[ Dogs barking ] -[ Breathing heavily ] -William Still was just a boy when he helped the first one escape.

He never knew the man's name, only that he was being hunted by slave catchers.

But in the years ahead, there would be many hundreds more, and Still vowed their stories would never be forgotten.

-The heroism and desperate struggle that many of our people had to endure should be kept green in the memory of this and coming generations.

-And he kept his promise.

His diaries tell the secret stories of that great slave exodus known as the Underground Railroad.

Impossible escapes, heartbreaking separations, and families reunited.

William Still recorded it all, risking his own freedom to tell the stories of those who had the courage to run.

-They were determined to have liberty, even at the cost of life.

[ Birds chirping ] -William Still never forgot where he came from, the first generation of his family born free.

Raised in New Jersey, Still moves to Philadelphia at age 26 to work as a laborer, but he's ambitious, a man who taught himself to read and write and wants to do something with it.

-He was organized.

He was hard-working.

He was a great communicator.

I can use a lot of adjectives to describe him.

Most of the good traits that we want in a great leader, he had them.

-In the fall of 1847, Still applies for a job with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.

He starts as a clerk, but he has eyes on something much bigger.

-Perhaps that may be the means of more than rewarding me in some future days, I go for liberty and improvement.

-His duties involve the publicly stated business of the society, correspondence, record-keeping, and the publication of an abolitionist newspaper called the Pennsylvania Freeman.

But Still knows its secret purpose is the running of a covert resistance network dedicated to helping slaves escape from the South.

It's a revolutionary cause.

-The Underground Railroad was a mass movement of civil disobedience, and it was the first mass movement in American history when huge numbers of American people made sacrifices for other people's human rights.

That never happened before.

-[ Humming ] -But what they're up against is an institution with more than two centuries of history in America.

In the Southern states, slavery grows deeper roots every year.

-By 1860, the dollar value of America's slaves -- there were about 4 million slaves by 1860 -- but the dollar value of those slaves were greater than the dollar value of all of America's banks, all of America's railroads, all of America's manufacturing combined.

When you look at how the economics of slavery translated into the general economy of the nation, then you can see that slavery was not just some sideshow in American society.

It was the main event in American history.

-In the plantation economy of the South, where cotton is king, slave labor is the engine of growth, and to slave owners, a God-given right.

-See, some people figure slavery would just run its course.

I don't believe it would have run its course unless there was an economic reason for us no longer to be of value.

But as long as people were allowed to enslave someone else and do whatever they wanted to, they were going to do it and fight to the death for the right to do.

[ Bell ringing ] -But the United States is a country divided.

While slavery is deeply entrenched in the South, in the North, it had been gradually abolished with the coming of industry.

The cities are full of cheap labor, and factories and machines do the work of slaves.

The boundary separating free and slave states falls along the old Mason-Dixon line, extending west to the frontier.

And that puts Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the front line of the great struggle over slavery.

-Philadelphia was the first place in the United States to produce the human synergy that made the Underground Railroad and abolitionism work, that's to say, first, a large Quaker population and the Quakers were the first organized group in the United States to collectively oppose slavery.

And more than that, you had a large free Black population.

And those two groups are the two working together that make the Underground Railroad work so well.

-A year after joining the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, William Still has learned how the railroad works -- its methods, its escape routes, and its code of secrecy.

-The slave and his particular friends could only meet in private to transact the business of the Underground Railroad.

All others were outsiders.

The right hand was not to know what the left hand was doing.

[ Hooves clopping, dogs barking ] -Legend has it, it was a slave catcher who gave the Underground Railroad its name, when the runaway he was chasing seemed to just disappear as though the Earth had swallowed him up.

But the name stuck.

And every year, hundreds of slaves ride that railroad, mostly from the upper slave states, but the economic threat to the South is potentially crippling.

-They see the Underground Railroad as the scourge of the nation, that, in fact, what they are doing is making their property unsecure because it is providing an outlet for those who want to run.

It's encouraging those who may not think about running to think about running.

And it also illustrates, in fact, that what they are saying to the rest of the nation, that enslaved people are content in their situation, is not true.

-Slave owners are puzzled by the exodus, and they regard the Underground Railroad as nothing more than organized theft.

-There were some slave holders who actually argued that they were holding these people in slavery as a way of protecting those people, as a way of providing security for people who could not provide security for themselves.

That's the way that slave holders reconciled that great contradiction, you know, the contradiction that said, "I believe in freedom, but I have those people as my slaves."

-Most runaways don't make it far.

They're picked up by the marshals, run down by hunting dogs, or professional slave catchers.

The newspapers are full of advertisements offering rewards for the recapture of fugitives.

And William Still keeps records of them, like snapshots from the life of a slave.

-"Ran away, a Negro woman and two children.

A few days before she went, I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face.

I tried to make the letter M." "Ran away, a Negro man named Henry.

His left eye out, some scars from a dirk on his left arm, and much scarred with a whip.

$50 paid to whomever returns him."

"Matilda, a young mulatto branded on the right breast with the letters N.B.

Had with her a small child when she ran."

[ Whip cracking ] -Of all the reasons to run -- the beatings, the hard labor, the starvation diet -- none compare to the breaking apart of family.

Slave auctions are big business in the South.

Some cities have permanent holding pens, and the auction houses advertise their wares on Main Street next to the tack shops and hardware stores.

-Now, you can recover from the whippings -- you'll have the scars.

But when your children are taken from you, when your family is taken from you, that's a longing that can never be resolved.

That's a longing that becomes embedded in who you are, part of your personality, so they feared that.

That was the most powerless place to be was on that auction block.

-The horrors of the block was looked upon through the light of the daily heartbreaking separations it was causing to the oppressed.

No pen could describe or mind imagine, and so many of the passengers ascribe their first undying resolution to strike for freedom to the auction block or to the fear of soon having to take their chances there on.

-[ Singing in native language ] -They essentially had no choice.

They could remain where they were and know what they would be facing until the day they drop dead or were whipped to death or were sold further South, only to have it happen then, or they could take that chance.

-William Still's own mother took that chance.

She'd escaped from a plantation in Maryland long before William was born.

But she paid a terrible price.

-Like millions of my race, my mother and father were born slaves, but were not contented to live and die so.

My father purchased himself an early manhood by hard toil.

Mother saw no way for herself and her children to escape the horrors of bondage but by flight.

The first time Sidney Still ran, she and her four children were recaptured and taken back to the plantation.

But she was determined to try again.

William remembers her telling him about a memory that had haunted her since childhood.

-She had been witness to the fact that her own father's brains had been blown out by the discharge of a heavily loaded gun deliberately aimed at his head by his drunken master.

She needed only half a chance to make a bold strike for freedom.

-The second time she ran, she knew she'd never make it with all four children.

She must choose.

The two boys, aged 6 and 8, had the best chance of survival on their own.

-I shall never forget hearing my mother speak of the night when she fled.

She went to the bed where her two boys were sleeping, kissed them, consigned them into the hands of God, and took her departure for the land of liberty.

-I think about what that means to a person.

She's got to make a decision which of her children is she going to leave in slavery in order for her to experience freedom and two of her children to experience freedom.

I mean, that's a -- that's a terrible choice to have to make.

How do you make such a decision?

-I mean... the slave master had his way with women, and so you take the girls.

You figure the boys would grow into strong men and can kind of defend themselves in some way, but the girls were just there for the taking, for the picking, for the liking for the evening.

So you grab the meekest and you run.

-They travel at night without map or compass.

Only the North Star to guide them.

The days they spent hiding in swamps or caves, knowing that to be spotted was to be caught.

-I have somewhere a piece that I've written thinking about her, and I can remember on the inside of me in the writing, the rhythm in my head was "hiding by day, running by night, running, running, running, praying."

Oh, my goodness, can you imagine?

But they did it.

They did it.

-It took them weeks to reach the Delaware River and cross into the free state of New Jersey.

The Still family settled on a 40-acre homestead in a remote farming community, and it's here that William was born and raised, the last of 18 children.

-My mother and father were again reunited in freedom, while two of the little boys were in slavery.

What to do for them rather than weep and pray were questions unanswerable.

For over 40 years, the mother's heart never knew what it was to be free from anxiety about her lost boys.

-Sidney changed her name to Charity and fabricated a story to throw the slave catchers off the scent.

Only the Still family knows the truth about her past and those two little boys she left behind.

-And William Still said that that dark cloud with which he grew up shaped his character.

It taught him compassion.

It taught him to love freedom, to hate tyranny and slavery.

-By the late 1840s, William Still has become the chief conductor on one of the busiest branches of the Underground Railroad, and his own house was a frequent stopover for runaways.

-He was the secretary for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.

He was on the Vigilance Committee out of Philadelphia, and he had a system and a whole network of people that he was working with to create an opportunity for people to get away.

It was almost like a way station or a halfway house on the way through.

-I mean, you realize that for a period of time, he was helping something in the neighborhood of 60 slaves a month to escape, to go farther north, sometimes all the way to Canada, from their runaway point in the South.

-The Underground Railroad has now laid tracks all over the country.

It's grown into a complex network of safe houses and hiding places, stretching from the South to the free states north of the Mason-Dixon line.

And any slave willing to chance it can rely on William Still to be waiting on the other side.

[ Hammering ] -In 1849, Still is in on the most famous escape in the history of the Underground Railroad.

Henry Brown is a slave in Richmond, Virginia, who'd made friends with a local merchant, and together they cook up a wild and risky plan.

The crate is just big enough for Brown to huddle inside.

The merchant, a man named Samuel Smith, writes the address of the Anti-Slavery office on the lid, bores a single, small breathing hole in the side, and nails it shut for shipment.

For the next 28 hours, Henry Brown suffers in silence.

Fighting for air, heaved from train to steamer to wagon.

By the time he arrives at the Anti-Slavery office, William Still doubts he's still alive.

-All was quiet.

The door had been safely locked.

The proceedings commenced.

[ Chuckles ] Witnesses will never forget that moment.

Saw and hatchet quickly had the lid off, and the marvelous resurrection of Brown ensued.

Rising up in his box, he held out his hand saying, "How do you do, gentlemen?"

[ Chuckles ] The little assemblage hardly knew what to do or think at that moment.

He was about as wet as if he'd come up out of the Delaware.

[ Chuckles ] -The story of Henry "Box" Brown becomes an international sensation.

Newspapers across America and Europe print every detail.

-And he became something of a media star in the North.

He traveled around on the lecture circuit with a box telling how he had escaped, and his story was reported in the South.

And not surprisingly, there was much greater scrutiny of boxes being directed to northern destinations.

-Sure enough, the man who'd helped "Box" Brown escape is undone by a new invention called the telegraph.

When he tries the same trick again a few months later, the slave owner sends a message ahead to Philadelphia and the shipment is seized.

Samuel Smith is arrested, convicted of aiding fugitive slaves, and serves every minute of an eight-year prison sentence.

It's a reminder that secrecy is the cardinal rule of the Underground.

-Prudence often dictated that even the recipients of our favor should not know the names of the helpers, and vice versa, they did not desire to know theirs.

The risk of aiding fugitives was never lost sight of and the safety of all concerned called for still tongues.

-But Still has taken to breaking his own rule.

He starts compiling secret notes detailing the fugitive stories -- where they'd come from, how they'd escaped, family left behind.

It's a dangerous practice.

-It was an incredible risk to maintain these records about people he was helping to escape because it condemned both of them.

It condemned him to being actively involved and it condemned them as -- and confirmed that they were escaping, stealing their labor from their owners.

-But if Still knows it's dangerous, in August of 1850, an astonishing encounter convinces him it's worth the risk.

-Can I help you?

-The older man who comes to his door that morning introduces himself as Peter Freedman and then tells a story that leaves Still reeling.

-You believe your family in Philadelphia.

-Peter said that he was from Alabama.

He stated that he and an older brother had been stolen away from somewhere in this direction about 41 or 42 years ago when he was a boy, only about six years old.

-My mama, she took my two sisters... -The stranger tells Still he'd been born into slavery, he thinks, in Maryland, but then at the age of six, he and his brother had been kidnapped and sold to a slave trader in Alabama.

When his older brother passed away, Peter vowed not to die a slave like him.

He took on extra work as a laborer and grave digger.

It was years before he saved the $500 to buy his freedom.

-Now nearly 50 years old, he'd come 1,600 miles searching for any scrap of information about his family.

-Do you remember both of your parents' names?

I then inquired of him if he knew the names of his parents.

To which he replied that his father's name was Levin and his mother's name Sidney.

-William Still started to recognize the fact that he was related to Peter.

-It all begins to fall into place.

-Originally, her name was... An own, dear brother, who I had never before seen, was before me.

My feelings were unutterable.

-And then he says, "I looked at the face of my new-found brother."

-I could see in the face of my new-found brother the likeness of my mother.

[ Exhales sharply ] -Still also figures out the real story behind the kidnapping Peter remembers.

It was the punishment for his mother's escape.

-As soon as the master realized she was successful and he could not find her, he retaliated by selling the two sons further south to a place that he was sure she would never find them.

-It's pure chance that the brothers have found each other, and Still wonders how many others might never be reunited with their families.

-It's been a long journey.

-And once he had his experience with Peter Still, he realized that families that were all torn asunder, they didn't have a place to go to find one another, to find their relatives.

-While I knew the danger of keeping strict records, the idea forced itself upon my mind that all over this wide and extended country, thousands of mothers and children separated by slavery were in a similar way, living without the slightest knowledge of each other's whereabouts.

Thousands of escapes, harrowing separations, dark gropings after lost parents, brothers, sisters, and identities seemed ever to be pressing on my mind.

-Not long after, an abolitionist newspaper carries a story on Peter Still, under the headline "The Kidnapped and the Ransomed."

It describes Peter's desperate attempts to raise $5,000 to buy his wife and three children from the slave owner in Alabama.

The story catches the eye of a tough old underground veteran named Seth Concklin.

-He learned of the story of Peter Still.

It touched his heart.

He came up with a plan for recovering Peter Still's family in Alabama, and there are extremely few cases on record of any underground railroad conductor going that deep into the South and successfully bringing away a fugitive.

It was almost unheard of.

So Seth Concklin's ambition to do this is remarkable in itself.

-He, in the spirit of the Good Samaritan, volunteered his services without pay or reward to go and rescue the wife and three children of Peter Still.

The magnitude of this offer can hardly be appreciated.

It was literally laying his life on the altar of freedom for the despised and oppressed whom he had never seen, whose kinfolk even he was not acquainted with.

Frankly was he told of the great dangers and difficulties to be encountered through hundreds of miles of slave territory.

In short, he was plainly told that without a very great chance, the undertaking would cost him his life.

-But Concklin is an adventurer and determined to try.

He travels to Alabama posing as a miller looking for work.

He finds Peter's wife and children, and they escape at night.

His plan is to follow the waterways 300 miles north to Indiana and a safe station.

-He did it.

He succeeded.

It took a week.

He rode and rode and rode, and he reached Indiana, and he made it onto a line of the Underground Railroad in Indiana and traveled fairly far north and then tragically was caught.

-A few days later, Still learns from his contacts that mother and children have been sent back to Alabama.

But he never hears from Seth Concklin again.

-A report found its way into the papers to the effect that the white man arrested in connection with the capture of the family was found drowned with his hands and feet in chains and his skull fractured.

It proved, as his friends feared, to be Seth Concklin.

And in irons upon the river bank, there was no doubt he was buried.

-The business of the Underground Railroad had always been dangerous work, but in the fall of 1850, the stakes get much higher.

In an effort to appease the South and shut down the Underground Railroad, Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act.

-Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 said that every state and territory in the United States was required to return fugitive slaves or escaping African-Americans to their owners or their owners' agents, and that those agents had the right to seek them out anywhere in the continental United States.

-It means there's no safe haven left for fugitive slaves, no matter how far they'd run or how long ago.

-The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act had such a dramatic effect on Blacks across North America.

Many of those people who had fled to the northern states, who had established themselves, built homes, became part of communities, and building lives there, suddenly, that was threatened.

No one was safe.

-The new law also obliges every citizen to aid in the recapture of fugitives under pain of imprisonment and fines.

-The day the Fugitive Bill passed, even the bravest abolitionists began to fear that a fugitive slave was no longer safe anywhere under the Stars and Stripes, North or South.

-It's kind of like this is the last resort, and the one hope you thought you had of being free, we're going to take that because if you could get to the North and live as a free person, fine.

But once you realized that the boundary is no longer the United States, you have to go further north because if they catch you anywhere, they can bring you back.

So you're never free.

You're always looking over your shoulder.

You're always dodging.

You never know when someone could come and say, "Yeah, that's mine, I'm taking them back."

[ Horse whinnies ] -It's now infinitely more dangerous for agents in the Underground.

And Still takes to hiding his records every night in the crypt of a cemetery.

-If you read other stories of people who are involved in the Underground Railroad, what you hear is that when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law is passed, many of them decide they're going to destroy the records that they had saved in order to make sure that they weren't caught.

And I think Still is remarkable in that he is willing to continue to preserve those records despite the jeopardy that it put him in.

-But if the intent of the law is to shut down the Underground Railroad, the effect is quite the opposite.

The Railroad doesn't go out of business, it just gets longer.

Instead of making its last stop in one of the northern states, it will now extend all the way into Canada.

Under British law, slavery had been illegal here since 1833.

-And once this act went into effect, whole congregations of Black churches, for example, made the trek across the border, for example, from Buffalo into St. Catharines and Niagara Falls.

It was powerful.

It was phenomenal.

-Hundreds, possibly thousands, pick up stakes and flee to Canada.

Many return later on.

But by the hundreds, entire church groups, entire neighborhoods pick up from Pittsburgh, from the Boston area, from parts of New York state, and moved to Canada, where they feel safe.

-In the first few months after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, 3,000 Black Americans flood across the border.

They call it Freedom's Land.

-As far back as my memory goes, around the age of 10, my grandfather one day was sitting in the backyard of my hometown of Norristown, Pennsylvania, 18 Martin Boulevard, singing a song, "There's a Highway to Heaven."

And I said, "Grandpa, what are you singing about?"

He said, "I'm singing about the Underground Railroad.

It was a spiritual -- was called spirituals."

You know, the Underground is the Highway to Heaven.

Heaven was referring to Canada.

He said, "My father, James Blockson, and his cousins escaped on the Underground Railroad."

-The words we're saying have a double meaning.

So any time you hear anything about traveling shoes or chariots or wheels, somebody is getting ready to run.

And so you take a Negro spiritual, Swing low, sweet chariot Comin' for to carry me home Swing low Sweet chariot Comin' for to carry me home That chariot's movement.

That chariot is swinging low, picking you up, putting you on that Underground Railroad, taking you somewhere to freedom, so when we sing those songs, it's like, "Mm-hmm, something's getting ready to happen."

Say, "I looked over Jordan and what did I see?"

Jordan, that was metaphoric for the Ohio River.

"A band of angels coming after me."

Those coming -- Those conductors coming to help you.

"Comin' for to carry me home."

So they had all kind of little messages.

And the slave master would hear us singing and say, "Oh, don't they sound pretty happy tonight."

Next day, two or three people gone because we put that message out.

-In the years before the Civil War, as many as 40,000 Black Americans take refuge in Canada.

None of them really know what to expect once they cross that border, but they know it's Queen Victoria's land, where slaves are free.

One 12-year-old runaway says he's certain she must be just like him.

-He pictures Queen Victoria as a Black woman surrounded by Black servants.

He thinks she has to be Black because he is so used to seeing cruelty at the hands of white people where he lives in the South, that he just can't imagine this queen being anything but Black.

[ Chuckles ] -Slave owners in the South, hoping to dissuade them from flight, paint a grim picture of Canada -- a land of fierce cold and famine.

-They would tell slaves that if they made their way to Canada, they wouldn't find any food there.

They would tell them that the winters were 10 months long.

They would tell them that people in Canada would make collars for their coats out of their hair.

They would tell them all kinds of horrendous tales to make them so fearful of going that they would feel that remaining in slavery would be a better option.

-They even spread rumors that Canadians are running their own illegal slave trade and that the natives here are cannibals.

But what William Still hears from the fugitives is that the lies only backfire.

-Daily, the disposition increased among the more intelligent slaves to distrust the statements of their masters, especially when they spoke against the North.

For instance, if the master told the slave that the Blacks in Canada were freezing and starving to death by the hundreds, his hope of trying to reach Canada was made tenfold stronger.

He was willing to risk all the freezing and starving that the country could afford.

His eagerness to find a conductor then would become almost painful.

-Any communication between branches of the Underground is conducted through messengers or the mail service.

And William Still corresponds regularly with many other station masters and agents.

Even Harriet Tubman, the most famous operative in the Underground Railroad, comes to him for help.

From a base in Canada, she makes a dozen trips back to the slave states, smuggling out as many as 70 people.

-She seemed wholly devoid of personal fear.

The idea of being captured by slave hunters seems never to enter her mind.

She would not suffer one of her party to whimper once about giving out and going back, however weary they might be from hard travel.

She had a very short and pointed rule of her own -- once enlisted, they had to go through or die.

So when she said to them that a live runaway could do great harm by going back, but that a dead one could tell no secrets, she was sure to have obedience.

-In the spring of 1856, William Still records a high watermark in the annals of the Underground.

In a single day, 17 fugitives passed through his hands on their way north.

[ Indistinct whispering ] There are two sisters in mourning veils who escaped right under the nose of their owner by joining a funeral cortge.

A group of young men arrives after stealing a carriage and horses and fighting off an attack by slave catchers.

Then, two families with children are taken in after Still was tipped off by a policeman who was supposed to arrest them at the train station.

Philadelphia has now emerged as one of the central stations of the Underground Railroad, and Still's involvement is the worst kept secret in the city.

He seems an easy caller for the federal marshals.

-It would have been extremely easy to stake out his house.

Frankly, it probably was staked out often, but the fact is the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, at least, was protected by public opinion.

There was really no political will to speak of in Philadelphia to prosecute activists in the Underground Railroad.

-What's more, Pennsylvania law stipulates that any slave entering the state in the company of his or her master is automatically entitled to freedom.

And William Still himself puts that law to the test.

Still is working in the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery office when a porter from The Dockside Hotel delivers a hastily written note.

-"Mr.

Still, sir, will you come down to Bloodgood's Hotel as soon as possible as there are fugitive slaves here and they want liberty?"

-The note had come from Jane Johnson, a slave traveling to New York with her owner, a prominent politician named John Wheeler.

-When he set up the trip, he made a big mistake.

The Fugitive Slave Law was clear -- runaways would be returned to their master, and everyone had to participate in the capture of a runaway, but there was no law that said that a slave who was taken to a free state by a master had to be returned to him.

-Still and a colleague race down to the docks, arriving just as the 5:00 ferry is about to sail.

They find Jane on deck, and Still tells her she has the right to walk away.

-You are entitled to your freedom, according to the laws of Pennsylvania, having been brought into the state by your owner.

If you prefer freedom to slavery, you have the chance to accept it now.

Act calmly.

Don't be frightened by your master.

We cannot force you to leave.

We only want to make you sensible of your rights.

Remember, if you lose this chance, you may never get such another.

-When Jane replies, "I want my freedom," Still hustles her off the ferry and into a waiting carriage.

But it's not over.

Her owner is a senior official in the federal government with friends high up in the justice system.

And a few days later, William Still is arrested on charges of riot, assault, and battery.

-Because it was such a high-profile event, it was news at the time.

It was very widely reported.

The federal government and its agents in Philadelphia, its allies in the local Democratic Party -- the pro-slavery party at the time -- saw this as an opportunity perhaps to crack the Anti-Slavery office.

-The federal case against William Still rests on Wheeler's claim that his slave had actually been abducted.

But it all falls apart when a surprise witness appears -- Jane Johnson.

As a free woman now, she can legally testify in Still's defense.

-Deliberately, Jane answered in a ladylike manner to her name, and then was the observed of all observers.

"Nobody forced me away.

Nobody pulled me and nobody led me.

I went away of my own free will.

I had rather die than go back."

-Judge John Kane, a slave owner himself, reluctantly concedes the prosecution has no case against Still.

[ Bell ringing ] The victory encourages the champions of the Underground Railroad and enhances Still's reputation as one of its best agents.

-And he was the guy -- I don't even know if I'm using this correctly -- I'm thinking he was the go-to guy.

He got things done.

-And he'd come up with some new tricks.

On his advice, 15-year-old Ann Maria Weems escapes from Washington, D.C., by disguising herself as Joe the coachmen.

Still arranges for his own doctor to meet her with horse and carriage right outside the White House.

-This done, the order was given to Joe, "Drive on."

Joe bravely obeyed.

The horse trotted off willingly, and the doctor sat in the carriage as composed as though he had succeeded in procuring an honorable and lucrative office from the White House and was returning home to tell his wife the good news.

-They arrive at William Still's house in Philadelphia on Thanksgiving Day.

But there's a $500 bounty on Maria's head, so the next morning, he passes her on to another agent for the trip north to Canada.

Several branches of the Underground lead to the border, but two main trunks carry most of the traffic.

One line crosses over at Niagara Falls, the other runs through the gateway at Detroit.

But even that final journey is risky.

Slave hunters hover around the border towns, and fugitives sometimes get caught right on freedom's doorstep.

But still they come.

By now, there are Black settlements growing rapidly all over southern Ontario, often fairly close to the Canada-U.S. border.

One of the most successful is at Buxton, near the town of Chatham, 50 miles across the river from Detroit.

-You see those attachments as communities are being built, people from Mississippi living beside people from Arkansas, aside, people from Alabama, Pennsylvania, Delaware, all these different states that they came from, and... makes you realize in so many ways, sometimes even just small ways, they did indeed find that promised land that they used to dream about when they were children.

-At its height, the Buxton settlement as a thriving community of about 1,200 former slaves.

But thousands of others are settling in the cities of Chatham, Amherstburg, or Toronto, and dozens of small communities in between.

And for most, it's the first taste of citizenship.

-People could vote.

They -- which was huge, huge.

They could serve on juries.

They could testify on their own behalf in court.

What a tremendous civil right, a real civil right to have access to.

Could educate their children and themselves.

This was, if not perfect -- and I don't think it was perfect -- it was better than the idea of being carried back to slavery, which could happen to them in any of the northern states.

-But if the fugitives had found freedom from slavery here, they are not safe from racism.

Many of the white settlers fear the influx of Black Americans will depreciate property values, discourage investment, and drive out established white families.

-Many people think that freedom meant that Black people got everything that everyone else got immediately.

That really isn't the case.

What they got was free.

They had to get the rest.

Does it mean that there were issues?

Absolutely, because we have incidences of race riots.

In some places, petitions were drawn up seeking the removal of Black residents.

-William Still, the man who had sent so many fugitives to Canada, decides to see for himself what kind of place it is.

He tours the Black settlements all over southwest Ontario and returns more determined than ever to keep the Railroad going full throttle.

-We can do for ourselves what nobody else can do.

The hundreds of heroic fugitives who yearly throw off their yokes, passing through indescribable perils and hardships on their way to Canada, seem to cry aloud in our ears.

"Hereditary bondsmen!

Know ye not.

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?"

[ Cannons firing ] [ Drum beats ] -But by April 1861, the Underground Railroad had run its course.

When the first shots of the Civil War are fired at Fort Sumter, it's all out in the open.

Two months after the outbreak of war, William Still resigns his position with the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.

In his 14 years in the service of the Underground Railroad, he'd helped more than 800 fugitive slaves to escape.

-He didn't invent the Underground Railroad, but he ran arguably the most important or the busiest single Underground Railroad operation in the country, and that took a lot of skill.

Very, very few people were lost in Philadelphia thanks to William Still, and in the 1840s and '50s, that's the measure of success.

Did you lose people?

Were they recaptured?

And in Philadelphia, almost nobody.

-On July 3, 1863, it was said that the smoke from the battlefield at Gettysburg could be seen drifting in over the Canadian border.

On that day, there were former slaves who'd once found refuge here fighting in the ranks of the Union Army.

William Still also went to war for the Union, procuring supplies for the Army base at Camp William Penn, just outside Philadelphia.

Coming home from the camp one day, he boarded a city streetcar.

The conductor refused him a seat.

Somebody else might have walked away.

Not William Still.

He launched an eight-year campaign that went all the way to the state governor and led to the desegregation of Philadelphia's streetcars.

After the war, Still went into the coal business and proved to be as shrewd in commerce as he had been in the smuggling game.

He became a wealthy man.

At the final meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in 1872, Still was granted permission to publish the secret notes he'd kept.

-And so, while we have the stories that are true and that are heart-gripping about the slavery movement itself, we have the wonderful, wonderful story of man's humanity to man, of people helping one another.

And if it had not been for William and his writing, we would not know about that.

-And in telling the story of the Underground Railroad, William Still hoped he was also writing a kind of personal guidebook to history.

-His sense of the historical importance of capturing their stories so that it might lead to future reunification of families was incredibly important.

-And it has been a gold mine over time for helping families to reconnect with each other, both in Still's day and in later generations.

It is still used today to help reunite the separated descendants of fugitive slaves.

-The New York Times called William Still the father of the Underground Railroad, but he saw himself as just another soldier for the cause.

It was those who'd had the courage to run he admired.

-He believed that the future generations needed heroes, and here were the most heroic people that he could imagine without any better counterpart in history, and so he wanted these stories for the future.

-William Still died in 1902 at the age of 81.

By then, his book was recognized as the most authentic account of the brightest moments in one of America's darkest chapters.

-Now we know who these people were.

It's not just a mass of faceless, nameless people who were bent over picking cotton.

They were individuals, and their stories are deserving to be remembered.

-Now, thank God we have no more slavery to oppress us.

We have no more tyrants to flee from.

The prison house and the Underground Railroad are things of the past.

Let us not forget the days of our bondage, however, but let us keep constantly in memory the pit from whence we were digged and the rock from whence we were hewed, that our children may see what their parents have suffered and stand up fully for God and freedom... while life lasts.

- Mm-mm Mm-mm, mm-mm-mm Mm-mm-mm-mm mm-mm-mm Mm-mm-mm Mm-mm mm-mm-mm Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm - Swing low Sweet chariot Comin' for to carry me home Swing low Sweet chariot Coming for to carry me home