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The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad

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The truth about the Underground Railroad is difficult to establish, because the operators were violating federal law and consequently kept few records. Most of the early books about it were based on recollections of participants or their children, collected long after Emancipation, and most of these reflected the perspectives of the whites who helped the escaping slaves. It is to Gara's book and his other writings that we owe the major reexamination of the entire phenomenon. He refocuses the discussion on the fugitives themselves, giving a much more balanced picture of how it all happened. It is true, of course, that thousands of whites helped to spirit the fugitives to safety; but it was the slaves themselves who risked everything, who traveled hundreds of miles on foot, in the dark, through swamps and rivers and fields, in search of freedom. The whites--at great personal risk, too--simply helped. Gara has revolutionized our understanding of the UGRR, and his little book is a genuine classic.