Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale
The director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, he has been influential in perpetuating the view that the Underground Railroad was more legend than reality, and more the braggadocio of old men puffing up their achievements.
His book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory brilliantly articulated the thesis that true story of the Civil War was distorted by apologists for the South and northerners seeking reconciliation with the South. He showed that because the South was ashamed of its role in the brutal, inhuman, and racist institution of slavery, they wanted to lay the war’s cause on other factors like economics rather than its real cause, the abolition of slavery.
Underground Railroad
Blight has applied this theory to the history of the Underground Railroad, and Wilbur Siebert is his proverbial bogeyman. “Siebert's work is less about the creation of reunion literature per se than about the scope and character of the audience for romantic memory of the Civil War era,” he wrote in Race and Reunion. “He tapped into a vast reservoir of Northerners eager to claim their places, or that of their parents, in a heroic legacy, this time not so much as soldiers in the war, but as veterans of the ‘old liberty life guard,’ as one Connecticut man called his father.”
According to Blight, the “reality” is that the alleged network of ‘depots’ and ‘conductors’ by which fugitive slaves escaped to freedom . . . had never been as elaborate as legend portrayed it,” and he dismissed the traditional story of the Underground Railroad as “sentimental retrospection.”
It takes Blight only eight pages in his 512 page book, Race and Reunion, to write off the Underground Railroad. On reading it, one gets a feeling of déjà vu. It is as if one is rereading the final chapter of Liberty Line, “Reminiscence and Romance.” He even picks one of Larry Gara’s selected letters from the Siebert Collection as an example of this romanticized view, that of H.D. Platt, which is considered in my post, Wilbur Siebert Historian or Fabulist.
Story of Udney Hyde
Far more damaging to his case, however, is his attack of another Underground Railroad story that included the attempted rendition of Addison White from Mechanicsburg, Ohio, in 1857, who was being harbored at the time by a seasoned Underground Railroad conductor, Udney Hyde.
Blight used a story from the Marysville, Ohio Tribune, dated September 29, 1897 in support of his idea that “Many of those who answered [Siebert] were seeking what we might call an alternative veteranhood. For [civilians], it was a way of saying that they too had served in the great cause. For some, homespun tales of helping slaves escape may have been a kind of white alternative slave narrative, a mode of participating in a literary tradition. As in soldiers' battle narratives, alleged Underground Railroad operatives recited their battles with slave catchers, and they remembered virtually no defeats.”
Blight mocked the article which stated that “Hyde's leadership of hair-raising rescues of fugitives provided ‘one of the causes’ of the Civil War,” and made light of the article's statement that he “deserved ‘a recompense as so many of our brave boys in blue are so deservedly receiving today.’ Blight concluded that such articles sometimes found it difficult “to separate truly heroic abolitionism from romantic adventure stories.”
What a pathetic commentary that an esteemed historian could write such damning words concerning something he knew so little about. Hyde’s participation in the Underground Railroad and his aid to the fugitive slave, Addison White,was well-documented, and the story in the Marysville Tribune was told by Hyde’s granddaughter. The story of the attempt by federal marshals to seize White at Hyde’s home in Mechanicsburg, Ohio was reported in the Springfield Republic on May 20, 1857, June 5, 1857, June 19, June 26, 1857, and July 3, 1857; the Cincinnati Enquirer, June 18, 1857; and the Ohio State Democrat on June 18, 1857, and the Citizen and Gazette on June 5, 1857 and June 12, 1857, both newspapers in Urbana, Ohio.
In 1934. Ralph M. Watts, wrote a lengthy article entitled, “History Of The Underground Railroad In Mechanicsburg,” for the July issue of Ohio History. He was able to interview many residents who were still alive prior to the Civil War. Among them were Tod Owens, who worked for Hyde; Charles Cushman, a Civil War veteran; Albert Green, an ex-slave; and Mandy White, ex-slave and wife of Addison White, and 13 others with recollections from that time.
Homespun Tales in the Siebert Collection
Perhaps, as Blight alleged, they were telling “homespun tales of helping slaves escape,” or maybe they were just telling it like it was. Certainly, all those newspaper accounts which were used by Watts were eyewitnesses to a history that Blight was only speculating about.
The problem with such an esteemed historian leading the charges that reports of the Underground Railroad were greatly exaggerated is that it causes so many others to believe him because he is such a trusted authority. As a result, many mainstream historians are ignoring the treasure trove of accounts in the Siebert Collection. But therein lays the mother lode of information that will provide us with many of the answers to the truth of the Underground Railroad and how it operated.
References
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
Larry Gara, Liberty Line (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996 edition).
Wilbur H. Siebert Underground Railroad Collection, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio.
Tom Calarco - Tom Calarco is the author and editor of five books on the Underground Railroad, the latest, Places of the Underground Railroad, to be ...
