Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois

In Onward to Chicago, McClellan enters the Underground Railroad discussion by focusing the issue in northeastern Illinois. The author offers explanations of what the Underground Railroad was and what it was not. Instead of an actual physical railroad, it was a network of homes and ever-changing routes from the South to Chicago that allowed from 3,000 to 4,500 freedom seekers a challenging opportunity to a new life either in the Chicago or into Canada. But the passage north came with danger and great risk to the freedom seekers and those free Blacks and white individuals who aided in the process. He summarizes that coalition of people working the Underground Railroad were “an unrivalled affirmation of common humanity.” Southern slave owners still had legal protection to enslave and recapture blacks. This also put free blacks in danger of slave catchers adding them to their captives. As the national controversy over slavery grew, new measures like the Fugitive Slave Law passed in 1850 only strengthened the slave owners’ resolve to recapture their property. Freedom seekers and their supporters on the Underground Railroad were continually in a state of heightened alert around others they did not know. As a result, the network was a closed set of individuals who knew who would support them in the process. Chicago was a key destination on the Underground Railroad, which usually led to Detroit, Canada, and freedom. The young city's size, northern location, increasing rail traffic and growing population of free Blacks made it an obvious choice for freedom seekers. Chicago, and most of northeastern Illinois, also was populated by a large contingent of abolitionist and antislavery citizens. The region was settled and expanded by religious groups, like Congregationalist and Presbyterians, who despised the peculiar institution. They formed committees that vocalized their disgust and as either groups or as individuals they worked clandestinely to aid freedom seekers.McClellan does an admirable job of gathering these abolitionist histories, but his true aim is to give a voice to the many freedom seekers. This is, of course, an almost impossible task as primary sources written by freedom seekers are extraordinarily rare. An example is freedom seekers Jim and Narcissa Daniels, who escaped western Missouri in late 1858. They traveled with the infamous abolitionist John Brown on their trip to Chicago and eventually made it to Canada. Most of the documentation for their case comes from secondary sources. This does not detract from the story of how whites and freedom seekers worked in concert, but it does highlight the dearth of firsthand narratives. McClellan draws significantly from newspapers and local governmental sources to flesh out individual narratives. In telling these stories, he identifies that the real workers on the railroad were the freedom seekers themselves. Had they not garnered the courage to escape and traverse a land full of unknowns to find freedom, the railroad was nothing.Since the closing of the Underground Railroad in April 1861, the Illinois citizenry has highly romanticized the history of white involvement in the workings of the railroad. In present-day folklore, it would be quite a contest as to whether more homes were stations on the railroad or had Lincoln sleeping there. But McClellan is bold enough to attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is another extremely difficult challenge in his work. When primary source documentation allows for the exact establishment of a house as a station, the narrative is direct and concrete. When it does not, the author does qualify some questionable entries with statements like “tradition holds.” McClellan's desire to authenticate these locations obviously ties in with his work of adding listings to the National Park Service Network to Freedom Register of the Underground Railroad—a daunting but necessary and appreciated task. Despite the obstacles, McClellan offers a refreshing exploration that goes beyond the late nineteenth-century county history book entries, focusing on the human narrative. Onward to Chicago is a welcome addition to the Underground Railroad historiography, written in a style that can be appreciated by both general audiences and academics.

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