The Underground Railroad is one of the most taught topics to young schoolchildren, and every American is familiar with the idea of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada and the North with the help of determined abolitionists and even former escaped slaves like Harriet Tubman. The secrecy involved in the Underground Railroad made it one of the most mysterious aspects of the mid-19th century in America, to the extent that claims spread that 100,000 slaves had escaped via the Underground Railroad. Of course, from a practical standpoint, the Underground Railroad had to remain covert not only for the sake of thousands of slaves, but for a small army of men and women of every race, religion, and economic class who put themselves in peril on an ongoing basis throughout the first half of the 19th century, and in the years leading up to the war.

Over 150 years later, that same secrecy has helped the Underground Railroad become so romanticized and mythologized that people often visualize it in ways that were far different from reality. Before the American Civil War eliminated slavery, it was a fixture in North America for over 200 years, and by 1850, a trained slave was worth approximately $2,500, around 10 times the sum of a typical annual salary in that day. As a result, the economic dependence on slavery in the South was an extreme one, and in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act, Black people in the North were under constant pressure to defend their “credentials” to bounty hunters and owners. Between the value of slaves in America, rising abolitionist sentiment at home and overseas, and political debates promoting or hindering the movement toward equality, the era in which the Underground Railroad operated cannot be easily fit into a concise body of principles, actions, or geography.

Although the slave systems required the continual use of force and coercion, as well as the harsh punishment of any rebellion, slaves were not a helpless labor force terrorized into obedience and docility. Slaves resisted and sometimes rebelled, and over the centuries there were thousands of slave rebellions of varying sizes. Slaves commonly resisted in many ways, such as sabotaging their tools and the crops they were tending, but much more rarely slaves violently rebelled, which were for the most part put down with extreme violence.

Of course, a fairly common form of resistance was running away and seeking hiding places in environments where slave catchers experienced difficulty. Slaves who ran and hid out, or who made their own settlements, were called maroons, from the Spanish word cimarron, which means “wild” or “untamed”. The term that historians commonly use to describe this is marronage, adapted from the French word maron, meaning the same as maroon. Marronage took two forms, grand and petty. Grand marronage was permanent, with escapees joining together to establish lasting settlements in inaccessible areas in mountains and swamps, sometimes preferring death rather than being caught and enslaved again (Howard 33).

Petit marronage, on the other hand, was temporary. In these cases, slaves ran away for a time, living in isolation in the woods, temporary camps, or perhaps aided by maroons. Petit marronage was usually for a short time, perhaps a few days or a few weeks, with the slaves intending to return. They typically left because an overseer was being too cruel, or to visit relatives on another plantation. Typically, they hid in the woods not too far away, and they were often helped by slaves from the same plantation who chose not to try to escape. Slaves usually had some idea of where runaways might be encamped and were sometimes aware of maroon settlements.