A roughly 14-foot-tall bronze statue of the United States’ most famous abolitionist, Harriet Tubman, will become a permanent fixture outside Philadelphia’s City Hall later this year. It will be the first statue of a Black female historical figure in the city’s public art collection.

As scholars of African American studies, Africology and geography at Temple University in Philadelphia, we believe the statue’s completion is an opportune time to think about Philadelphia’s central role in African American history, including as a key destination point for those who escaped slavery along the Underground Railroad.

Philadelphia’s free Black community

After Pennsylvania passed the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery on March 1, 1780, Philadelphia’s Black population grew rapidly. By 1790 there were about 2,000 free Black residents in the city. Among them were doctors, teachers, merchants, clergymen, sailors and skilled artisans.

In 1787, the same year the nation’s founders met in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall, to ratify the U.S. Constitution, Black clergymen Absalom Jones and Richard Allen established the Free African Society in Philadelphia. The FAS was America’s first Black mutual aid association, and it provided financial aid to poor and elderly, unemployed and sick individuals, as well as orphans and widows. Jones later formed the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, and Allen founded the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, both in 1794.

Beginning in earnest around 1830, Philadelphia’s vibrant free Black community, led by successful Black industrialists and merchants such as James Forten and Robert Purvis, collaborated with local white abolitionists, including Quakers such as Thomas Garrett, to fund and arrange people’s escapes from slavery on the Underground Railroad.

A key stop on the Underground Railroad

Importantly, the Underground Railroad was neither a railroad nor underground. It was a clandestine network of places, people and routes used by Black people enslaved in the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War.

Even while this secret network was in operation from about the 1830s to 1860s, the railroad metaphor was widely used. According to the tasks they performed, there were Underground Railroad “agents,” “conductors” and “station masters” who hid “passengers” at safe houses through their journeys to freedom.

Geography was an important aspect of Philadelphia’s service to the Underground Railroad. Located in the southeast corner of Pennsylvania and just north of Delaware Bay, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean, 19th-century Philadelphia served as a major port where many free Black and white people worked in the maritime industry. This network was highly efficient in passing on Underground Railroad communications and coordinating escapes within the coastal and bay regions to the south.

Simple proximity to the Mason-Dixon Line, which formed Pennsylvania’s southern border with Maryland, and which symbolized the division of “free” states from “slave” states, also made Philadelphia an attractive destination for those escaping slavery.

William Still’s careful records

William Still, who was born in New Jersey to a formerly enslaved couple from Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay region, moved to Philadelphia in 1844. He initially worked as a clerk and janitor in Philadelphia’s Abolition Society. Later he served as the secretary of Philadelphia’s abolitionist Vigilance Committee, from 1853 to 1861.

Also known as “the Father of the Underground Railroad,” Still coordinated many Underground Railroad escapes and received over 900 passengers who made their way to Philadelphia and continued on to points farther north, including Canada.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 compelled authorities in northern free states to assist in apprehending and returning those who escaped back to slavery. There were harsh penalties, including imprisonment. Court trials often led to fines as large as $1,000 for those who assisted escapees.

Despite the danger to himself, Still provided financial assistance for travel to many of those who escaped and hid some passengers at his own home at 244 S. 12th St. – mere blocks from where Thomas Jefferson had penned the Declaration of Independence 77 years earlier.

Still carefully recorded the information about the passengers he received, including their names, how they escaped, where they escaped from, and the destination where they planned to unite with family members, when that was the case. Thanks to those records, hundreds of Black families were reunited after the Civil War.

Harriet Tubman plays a prominent role in Still’s records as a brave woman who was called “the Moses of her people.” Tubman memorized the routes and went back at least 19 times to the Eastern shore of Maryland where she originally escaped from. Carrying a rifle, she would walk with her company at night, heading north and passing through New York’s Finger Lakes, across the international bridge at Niagara Falls, to St. Catharines in Canada. Her final stop was the Salem Chapel British Methodist Episcopal Church, where she gave thanks for delivering her passengers to safety.

In his book, Still provided the copy of a letter about Harriet Tubman’s last trip to Maryland. It was sent by Thomas Garrett to Still on Dec. 1, 1860, and described how Tubman and Garrett coordinated a couple’s dangerous escape with their three children from Dorchester County to Chester County outside Philadelphia. This was Tubman’s final rescue mission before the start of the Civil War, when she joined the Union Army as a nurse, spy and scout due to her extensive knowledge of the routes and the geographical terrain.

What Still’s records show us today

Despite the risks, Still preserved his records and later published them in his 1872 book “The Underground Rail Road.”

Recent work by scholars to abstract and digitize Still’s records has made them more accessible to researchers like us. We leveraged this digital data to map and analyze Still’s records, comparing place names of escape origins that Still recorded and linking them to historic towns, cities and counties.

We then created maps that show precisely where people escaped from, when they escaped from those places, and how they traveled to Philadelphia during their flight.

Our analysis reveals several important places of origin and routes used by those escaping slavery to Philadelphia. In 1855, for instance, there was a sharp spike in escapes to Philadelphia from Norfolk, Virginia, which lies at the very southern end of the Chesapeake Bay. We believe this was due to successful efforts to raise funds and bribe steamship captains, though outraged enslavers quickly put a stop to such activities by passing a state law in 1856 requiring ship inspections.

For those escaping to Philadelphia from regions nearer to Pennsylvania, clandestine travel by small boat or by road was more likely than stowing away on a steamship. A distinct rise in escapes from Dorchester County, Maryland, can be observed in Still’s records in 1857. This was no doubt due to the activities of Tubman, who inspired and coordinated numerous escapes in the county where she was born and raised.

The hypocrisy of ‘independence’

In his famous 1852 “Fourth of July” speech, formerly enslaved abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass famously noted the glaring hypocrisy of the institution of slavery while celebrating American independence.

“This Fourth July is yours, not mine,” he said. “You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?”

Today, more than 150 years after the abolition of slavery in the United States, the history and memorialization of both America’s founding and the freedom movement illustrate Philadelphia’s major role in the success of the Underground Railroad. The city shares an honorable legacy through its fight for freedom and its resistance against slavery and injustice.

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Jeremy Mennis receives funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Science Foundation. He is affiliated with the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science.

Nilgun Anadolu-Okur does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.