The Underground Railroad

Yesterday, we went to our second OLLI session in Springfield, VT - the topic was the Underground Railroad before the Civil War in Vermont. The presenter was Michelle Arnosky Sherburne, who is what I guess you could call an amateur historian - she does not have a PhD in history or an academic appointment, but she does have a passionate interest in the topic and has devoted 20 years or more to researching it and has self-published several books. She is most interested in finding people of that era who were involved in the U.R., and actual, still standing homes, barns, etc. where freedom-seeeking slaves were actually housed in Vermont. There is discussion among historians about how "cloak-and-dagger" the U.R. was in Vermont. Some think that while it is true that escaped slaves did travel through Vermont on their way to Canada, they did not have to be very worried about being caught because slave-catchers didn't usually come this far north. Ms. Sherburne thinks that might have been true to some extent early on, but after l850, the new federal law - the Fugitive Slave Act - upped the ante considerably, and agents did come into Vermont and people assisting escaped slaves were at risk of arrest. She focused her presentation on 4 "hubs" of the U.R. in Vermont: Springfield, Thetford, Burlington and Ferrisburg. She has identified several persons, and located some houses. She had a slide show, but we were in the back of the hall and couldn't see the screen very well. But we could hear just fine, and it was interesting, though it was not crisply organized. But there is a lot of information online, and my interest was certainly aroused. One item I was particularly interested in: a local Vermont minister, the Rev. Joshua Young (First Congregational Church (Unitarian), Burlington, VT), a "Garrisonian abolitionist" very much involved in the U.R., got wind of a funeral service that was to be held for abolitionist John Brown, executed for his role in the Harper's Ferry Raid. The funeral and burial were being held at John Brown's farm in North Elba, New York, just 60 miles or so west of Burlington. Young was the only ordained minister attending the funeral and was asked to preside, which he did. When he returned to his church in Burlington, he was viciously attacked by members of the congregation and forced to resign because of this involvement with John Brown. I wrote fairly extensively about John Brown in this blog back in July, 2010 (see the post titled "Weathersfield Congregational Church Service) when I was seeing some connections between John Brown's struggle against the evil of slavery and the contemporary struggle against fossil fuels and global warming, triggered by the Deepwater Horizon Oil Gusher which released an estimated 134,000,000 gallons of oil into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico over a 3-month period, April-July 2010. All of this still has a lot of resonance today in the current election season (Trump intends to undo all restraints on oil production if he wins).

Michelle A. Sherburne, lecturer.