Imagine that you, yourself, are a slave. Your body, your time, your life- belongs to a slave owning farmer. You have nothing. You spend at least six days a week tending to the fields of a farm. You have never even had a glimpse of freedom. You never expect to. You can't even imagine being free to do as you wish- very few people of your skin color has ever known anything different than the life of slavery. Despite all that, you wait for the day when there's an opportunity to escape. Freedom for you means a hard, dangerous journey to the North that could easily kill you. Do would you even bother to try it? It's one simple word: Freedom.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slavery was a heavily disputed topic. Slaves were Africans who worked for a small land farmer or large plantation owner their entire lives. They were kidnapped and imported from Africa to be bought and sold as property for the sole purpose of working. The male slaves worked manual labor in the fields and the women slaves worked in the home. Many blacks were born into slavery in America and died as slaves without knowing anything better. Slaves were brutally beaten when they did the most insignificant things wrong and they were made to work the majority of the day without much of any breaks or a real compensation. They were given a small place to stay on the plantation, a small ration, and had to struggle to get by. .
There was only one way out of this life of nearly inescapable horror Run! Slaves started turning to this story called the Underground Railroad. For fifty years the Underground Railroad secretly helped free fugitive slaves on the run to the "promise .
land" of the Northern Free States and Canada. During this time, over one hundred thousand slaves went looking for freedom through the Underground Railroad. .
The Underground Railroad was not really underground or a railroad at all. The Underground Railroad was the symbolic term given to the routes the slaves took to gain their freedom.