"Underground Railroad" refers to coordinated efforts made by free citizens during the nineteenth century to help slaves escape bondage and avoid recapture. Those white Americans who worked on behalf of the Underground Railroad did so for humanitarian and political reasons, but for black Americans the Underground Railroad often demonstrated the importance of family over the politics of slavery.

Soon after white Marylanders began to hold African Americans as slaves, those slaves began attempting to run away. By the late eighteenth century, a runaway's social network could play a crucial role in his escape. Although most fled alone, preparation for and successful execution of escapes often hinged on others being available and willing to help. Family and friends of runaways participated in all phases of flight attempts, and this system proved singularly important once the struggle for freedom became a national movement.

Though precedents existed during the colonial era, especially among Quakers, following the Revolution white Americans began to encourage their neighbors, countrymen, and elected officials to end slavery. The Abolitionist Movement organized activists to fight slavery in different ways. Many ordinary and anonymous white citizens aided fugitive slaves, supplementing the efforts in black communities. Thus began the "Underground Railroad."

The Underground Railroad generally involved the loosely coordinated and sporadic efforts of a regional association (called "lines") that brought together northern benefactors, willing white and free black accomplices in the slave states, and fugitives on the run searching for assistance. Money was necessary for transportation, lodging, and often legal defense. A code soon developed. Fugitives became "passengers," and places that welcomed them were "safe houses." Depending on their role, accomplices were "agents," "conductors," or "station masters."

Maryland was a major link on the "Eastern Line" connecting the Atlantic seaboard states, and Maryland probably lost more fugitives to flight than any other slaveholding state. By the 1840s, Marylanders were not only passengers on the Underground Railroad but agents and conductors as well. Although even approximate numbers may never be recovered, information suggests that safe houses were scattered across the Eastern Shore, central Maryland, and Baltimore City. Thousands of north-bound fugitives from the deep South passed through Maryland on their way north, often as the secret guests of Marylanders.

At least three general routes operated in Maryland. The first two?northward through Maryland's Eastern Shore counties, and northward from southern and central Maryland?were probably the most dynamic, for they drew from the heart of the state's enslaved population. When Harriet Tubman fled the lower Eastern Shore, she followed the Choptank River into Delaware, ultimately arriving in Philadelphia. On several of her thirteen subsequent missions into Maryland she followed a similar course, using safe houses and agents between Cambridge, Maryland; Wilmington, Delaware; and Philadelphia. /font>

From Southern Maryland, fugitives often moved toward Washington, DC, where several agents operated. More important was the large free black community in the nation's capital, many of whom were connected by bonds of family to slaves in Maryland. Adam Smith, for example, fled Prince George's County in 1857 to his mother in Washington before continuing on to an Underground Railroad station in Philadelphia.

The presence and role of local African Americans made Baltimore perhaps the busiest hub of fugitive activity in the state. Frederick Douglass, for one, relied on his social network to escape that city in 1838. Not until he reached New York, in fact, was he connected with Underground Railroad agents. This demonstrates that Underground Railroad advocates in the northern states, rather that initiating escapes, can be most accurately described as having tapped into the on-going, earlier tradition of slave flight.

A third route, connecting western Maryland to Pennsylvania and Ohio, has also been noted. Western Maryland's fugitives apparently moved into Pennsylvania through a number of points west of Frederick. Local lore in Allegany County, for example, holds that a fugitive of Vicksburg, Mississippi, having fled his owner, settled in Cumberland and assisted other would-be fugitives passing through the town.

Because few records are available, it is difficult to know the number of fugitives who escaped slavery, with or with the aid of the Underground Railroad. Nonetheless, existing evidence suggests that the number of Maryland fugitives was considerable. William Still, born in exile as the son of runaways from Maryland, spent more than a decade heading the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee's underground station in Philadelphia. Entries in Still's journal record only those who fled during the 1850s to Philadelphia and to Still, but the number exceeded 800, more than half of them Marylanders.

The Underground Railroad required enslaved and free, African Americans and white Americans, vulnerable and powerful, to work together. In 2004, to honor their work, the National Underground Railroad and Freedom Center opened in Cincinnati, Ohio.