Follow the Drinking Gourd

Follow The Drinking Gourd. Author: Winter, Jeanette

The song and its translation are as follows:

When the sun comes back and the first quail calls,

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

For the old man is waiting for to carry you to freedom,

If you follow the Drinking Gourd.

"When the sun comes back" means winter and spring when the altitude of the sun at noon is higher each day. Quail are migratory bird wintering in the South. The Drinking Gourd is the Big Dipper. The old man is Peg Leg Joe. The verse tells slaves to leave in the winter and walk towards the Drinking Gourd. Eventually they will meet a guide who will escort them for the remainder of the trip.

Most escapees had to cross the Ohio River which is too wide and too swift to swim. The Railroad struggled with the problem of how to get escapees across, and with experience, came to believe the best crossing time was winter. Then the river was frozen, and escapees could walk across on the ice. Since it took most escapees a year to travel from the South to the Ohio, the Railroad urged slaves to start their trip in winter in order to be at the Ohio the next winter.

The river bank makes a very good road,

The dead trees show you the way,

Left foot, peg foot, traveling on

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

This verse taught slaves to follow the bank of the Tombigbee River north looking for dead trees that were marked with drawings of a left foot and a peg foot. The markings distinguished the Tombigbee from other north-south rivers that flow into it.

The river ends between two hills,

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

There's another river on the other side,

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

These words told the slaves that when they reached the headwaters of the Tombigbee, they were to continue north over the hills until they met another river. Then they were to travel north along the new river which is the Tennessee River. A number of the southern escape routes converged on the Tennessee.

Where the great big river meets the little river,

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

For the old man is awaiting to carry you to freedom if you

follow the Drinking Gourd.

This verse told the slaves the Tennessee joined another river. They were to cross that river (which is the Ohio River), and on the north bank, meet a guide from the Underground Railroad.

(source: NASA)

Reading Rainbow: Follow the Drinking Gourd

Historian Ira Berlin: On the Underground Railroad

On the Underground Railroad

The notion of an underground railroad sets up ideas of precision and organization. And, indeed, the Underground Railroad did have conductors, it did have safe houses, it did have a vigilance committee. But for the most part it was a loosely knit network of black, mostly black men and women, some white abolitionists who appeared when somebody was in big trouble, kind of ad hoc. Somebody had escaped a slave trader, a slave trader or a slave catcher was following them, they needed big help. The Underground Railroad provided big help and by that process thousands of black people gained their freedom. And, of course, they then joined the struggle against slavery. The Underground Railroad, besides freeing these individuals had an enormous effect on American society at mid century.

Number one, it demonstrated to northerners, white northerners, who were not committed to the end of slavery, how horrendous an institution slavery was. How much black people desired freedom. What they would do, the extent they would do to gain that freedom. This against the slave holders' propaganda that slavery was a benevolent institution and that black people were happy as slaves.

Professor Ira Berlin

Number two, the underground railroad demonstrated to northerners their own complicity in the institution of slavery. This in particular, after passage of the second Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, an Act which operated against certain treasured rights of the American people, particularly the right of habeas corpus. And which demanded that all Americans participate in the recapture of runaway slaves and if they did not participate they were liable to fine or perhaps even jail.

Thirdly, the Underground Railroad demonstrated to southerners, to slave holders, the extent to which slaves opposed slavery. To the extent to which some radical abolitionists, black and white, were willing to go to help slaves escape. And demonstrated the slow leaching of slavery from the border states which over time would leave them isolated in a slave-holding republic in the deep south. A slave-holding republic which slavery might be liquidated by constitutional means. They, therefore, struck a preemptive strike to create an independent confederacy. That independent confederacy cession led to a war and war, of course, led to emancipation and ironically the end of slavery itself.

On African Americans in the North

On the eve of the Civil War about a quarter of a million black people lived in the North in freedom. Some of them, of course, were descended from people who never were slaves, who slipped through the net of slavery. The vast majority of them gained their freedom as a result of the American Revolution and the emancipations that followed the American Revolution and hence were free for generations, perhaps two, perhaps three generations. Some of them were newly freed, were runaways from the South. These free people of color for the most part resided in cities, by dynamic hub of northern society and although this was the dynamic part of the northern economy, free blacks did not get to participate in this. They were prescribed from the best jobs. Most black people, women worked as domestics, men worked as day laborers. They shouldered a shovel, they pushed a broom, they were not allowed into other kinds of occupations.

They were also limited legally. They were not allowed in most places to run for office, to vote, to sit on juries, to testify against whites, to participate in the militia. Nonetheless, they enjoyed certain critical civil rights, the right to organize, the right to meet, the right to publish. They take these few rights which were allowed them, they form them into a great organizational and political tradition which creates a network of churches and schools and associations which creates a cadre of political leaders, of conventions. Everyone from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass who batter against the institution of slavery, who batter against the institution of inequality, who demand full participation in American society, it is that which is the legacy of free people of color in the northern states.

On African Americans in the South

On the eve of the Civil War slightly more than four million people of African descent lived in the slave states. About a quarter of a million of those were free people of color. That is more free blacks in the South than they are in the North. They lived on the very margins of southern society because slave holders, planters, feared them as harbingers of the Revolution, beginning of slave insurrections, examples to slaves that a black person could be free. So that free people of color were prescribed legally, culturally, socially in a variety of ways. They not only had their legal rights limited, but they were forced to carry passes, denied free travel, a whole variety of prescriptions. Nonetheless, perhaps because they were black and perhaps because blackness was identified with labor, free people of color in the South had certain economic niches which allowed them to participate in the economy, participate perhaps to a far greater degree than free blacks in the North. And free blacks in the South enjoyed a greater economic prosperity than they did in the North which is perhaps one of the reasons why they stay in the South.

The vast majority of African Americans in the South were slaves. And as slaves they suffered from the condition that slaves everywhere did. That is slavery was an institution which rested upon violence, imposition, psychological and physical. A dehumanization as slave holders squeezed the labor and creativity out of black people for their own profit, for their own wealth, for their own political power. Nonetheless, slaves refused to give in to this dehumanization. That is on the narrowest of grounds they created a culture, they created life, they created families, they created churches, they created educational institutions, they created cuisine, language, theology, all of the trappings of culture. So here we have the two facts about slavery: the great tension in slave life between the dehumanization, the violence of slavery and the creativity of black people within slavery.

A second thing should be said about slavery and should be understood, that slavery was not one thing, it was many different things. It was different in cities than in the countryside. It was different on plantations than in farms. And in the 19th century slavery was changing rapidly. At the beginning of the 19th century most slaves grew rice or tobacco. At the end of slavery in 1863 most slaves were growing cotton. In 1800 most slaves lived in the seaboard states by emancipation, most slaves were living in the black belt. That is an enormous migration, forced migration of slaves from the upper to the lower south. We call that the slave trade. And perhaps the most important change that goes on in the 19th century, the embrace of Christianity for the first time by people of African descent and the creation of the Afro Christian Church. All of these things speak to the kinds of changes within slave life. The one thing, of course, that does not change is the desire of black people, of slaves for freedom. That, of course, is a standard throughout the history of slavery.

Interview with Historian Ira Berlin

Watch the full episode. See more American Experience.

Henry In A Box: Mailed To Freedom

Henry "Box" Brown: a slave signed, sealed and delivered

The baggage handlers ignored the "This Side Up With Care" label and rudely shoved the wooden box onto the steamship deck with those words exactly on the bottom. They would certainly have been surprised to learn that inside the crate was a man—Henry Brown, a Richmond slave who was mailing himself to freedom.

Brown was fully prepared to "conquer or die" on his mission, and at that point the latter looked more likely. Positioned upside down, he felt his eyes and the veins in his face begin "swelling as if they would burst." He endured for an hour and a half until two men flipped the box on its side to sit on it. The swelling subsided; his head cleared. Henry Brown, it seemed, just might conquer his bondage, after all.

Born in Louisa County, Va., in 1815, Brown's natural intelligence was quickly noticed by his master, who allowed him to go on errands as he grew older. On those trips off the plantation, Brown devoured any knowledge of the world at large he could gain.

When Brown was 15, his "uncommonly kind" master died, and he was sent to work in Richmond's tobacco industry. While there, he witnessed the retaliations against blacks brought on by Nat Turner's failed 1831 slave revolt, and saw bondsmen whipped, hanged and beaten in the streets. He also endured the vagaries of a series of overseers and experienced firsthand that there was "no law by which the master may be punished for his cruelty."

He married a woman named Nancy and then had to experience one of the most heartbreaking aspects of slave existence when she and their three children were sold away to North Carolina in 1848. Brown watched his wife, children and other slaves pass by on their way out of town. As the miserable gaggle walked on, he resolved to escape their fate, and it was not long before he came upon the idea of "shutting myself up in a box, and getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state."

Brown enlisted the aid of James C.A. Smith, a free black, and Samuel Smith, a white storekeeper who helped for a price. Brown paid him $86 that he had managed to squirrel away in exchange for Smith arranging shipment to Philadelphia abolitionist James Miller McKim.

On March 29, 1849, Brown squeezed his 5-foot-8-inch, 200-pound frame into a wooden crate 3 feet long, 2 feet wide and 2.6 feet deep. With "three gimlet holes" opposite his face for air and fortified only with a bladder of water, he began his "battle of liberty," as he called it, at Richmond's express office.

He bumped and thumped for 27 hours as the box went from wagon, railroad baggage car, the deck of that miserable steamboat, wagon, another railroad car, ferry, railroad car yet again, and the final delivery wagon that took him to McKim's home in Philadelphia.

McKim and a group of abolitionist friends were awaiting their special delivery, and gathered around the box. Brown kept quiet. Finally, he heard someone ask, "Is all right within?" He replied, "All right.'' The box was broken open. Brown tried to stand and promptly passed out, but he had won his battle for liberty.

Henry "Box" Brown and his escape became a cause celebre in the North, but Southerners saw his escape as more Yankee meddling with their property, and pushed even harder for passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which would force the federal government to help return escaped slaves. When that act passed in 1850, Brown had to flee to England.

Brown enjoyed his life in England. He published his autobiography and dramatized his escape onstage. He remarried and in 1875 returned to the United States. The man who mailed himself to freedom died in 1879.

REPRESENTATION OF THE BOX,

In which a fellow mortal travelled a long journey, in quest of those rights which the piety and republicanism of this country denied to him, the right to possess.

3 feet 1 inch long, 2 feet wide, 2 feet 6 inches high.

As long as the temples of humanity contain a single worshipper, whose heart beats in unison with that of the God of the universe; must a religion and a government which could inflict such misery upon a human being, be execrated and fled from, as a bright angel, abhors and flees the touch of hideous sin.

(source: Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery, Enclosed in a Box Three Feet Long, Two Wide, and Two and a Half High. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself. With Remarks Upon the Remedy for Slavery, by Charles Stearns "Henry Box Brown," 1849)

Slave Pen at the Underground Rail

Carl Westmoreland looks over the jail used to hold slaves.
(Photo by Patrick Reddy/The Cincinnati Enquier)

Jake Thamann climbs along the side of a jail used to hold slaves as he takes measurements of the building.
(Photo by Patrick Reddy/The Cincinnati Enquirer)

Timberframes Limited out of Hamilton, Ohio took down and reconstructed this period slave pen.
(Photo by Steven M. Herppich/The Cincinnati Enquier)

Job superintendent Ben Nwankwo talks with timber framers D.J. Gaker and Mike Goldberg during the reconstruction of a period slave pen at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
(Photo by Steven M. Herppich/The Cincinnati Enquier)
An eye ring, secured through a floor joist on a spike, was used to hold a chain to which a slave’s shackles were attached. The rings were in each of the joists along the center of the room; a chain was passed through the eye rings and each slave was chained to a central chain.
(Photo by Patrick Reddy/The Cincinnati Enquirer)


A conceptual drawing shows the restored slave pen in the Freedom Center’s second-level atrium.
(Submitted to The Cincinnati Enquier)