Abandoned Tracks: The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania
W. Thomas Mainwaring, "Abandoned Tracks: The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania"
English | ISBN: 0268103577 | 2018 | 306 pages | EPUB | 10 MB
English | ISBN: 0268103577 | 2018 | 306 pages | EPUB | 10 MB
In Abandoned Tracks, W. Thomas Mainwaring bridges the gap between scholarly and popular perceptions of the Underground Railroad. Historians have long recognized that many aspects of the Underground Railroad have been mythologized by emotion, memory, time, and wishful thinking. Mainwaring’s book is a rich, in-depth attempt to separate fact from fiction in one local area, while also contributing to a scholarly discussion of the Underground Railroad by placing Washington County, Pennsylvania, in the national context. Just as the North was not consistent in its perspective on the Civil War and the slavery issue, the Underground Railroad had distinct regional variations. Washington County had a well-organized abolition movement, even though its members helped a comparatively small number of fugitive slaves escape, largely because of the small nearby slave population in what was then western Virginia. Its origins as a slave county make it an interesting case study of the transition from slavery to freedom and of the origins of black and white abolitionism.