Underground city

“ Men, women and children were alike sharers in the common struggle for freedom—were alike an hungered, in prison, naked, and sick, but it was a fearful thing in those days for even women and children to whisper their sad lamentations in the city of Philadelphia, except to those friendly to the Underground Rail Road. ”

“ The dark city’s people are all workers. There are no crimes committed there and vice does not enter. There is no police patrol—none is necessary. The laws that govern this underground city are recognized and obeyed without the necessity of brass buttons and nickel stars. ”

“ The Underground Road was active in New York City at a much earlier date certainly than Lossing gives. He says, "After the Fugitive Slave Law, the Underground Railroad was established, and the city of New York became one of the most important stations on the road." ”

“ There must be some opening in the underground city by which the air is sucked in. They'd never have only one opening to it. But we don't need to look for the other. Come on, we'll get out the torches. ”

“ Taken as a whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a population of five or six thousand. In this present day some of those populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as we strike a fire alarm. Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a thousand feet deep. In such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest. ”

“ But Drew Lane and Tom Howe were due for a surprise. Forces of which they were not aware were at work in this great, grim city.
86 CHAPTER VIII
FIRE UNDERGROUND
No two cities are exactly alike. New York, Boston, London, Paris; all these have their subways, giant tunnels through which thousands upon thousands of workers are hurled to their day of toil. The metropolis of our story has no subway; yet far down beneath its busy streets forty, fifty, sixty feet underground, one still finds life. Forty miles of tunnel, a great spider-web network, pass beneath this city. ”

“ These galleries lead from the city under ground, and are as large as the bore of a large cannon; they are thirteen inches across, and more than a hundred yards long. I have already told you that the labourers never come out into the light, when they can help it; and these underground ways are the great roads to the city, to fetch in clay, or wood, or water, or provisions: and now I will tell you another thing which shows a great deal of sense. ”

“ Like sap at the first frost at five o'clock men and women begin to drain gradually out of the tall buildings downtown, grayfaced throngs flood subways and tubes, vanish underground.
All night the great buildings stand quiet and empty, their million windows dark. ”

“ During her stay in York she had frequent opportunities of seeing passengers on the Underground Rail Road. In one of her letters she thus alluded to a traveler: "I saw a passenger per the Underground Rail Road yesterday; did he arrive safely? Notwithstanding that abomination of the nineteenth century—the Fugitive Slave Law—men still determine to be free. Notwithstanding all the darkness in which they keep the slaves, it seems that somehow light is dawning upon their minds.... These poor fugitives are a property that can walk. ”

“ Yes, I will hurt her infinitely worse than a fire, that might burn every house from Castle Garden, from river to river, to Central Park. I will make it entirely safe for women and children to cross Broadway at City Park, Astor House, Wall Street, or elsewhere, without the protection of policemen. ”

“ Our lives and the lives of the men on top depended on our success in outwitting them. Silence below ground was absolutely essential, and every possible precaution to secure this was rigorously insisted on. When we approached, as we often did, in these clay galleries, to within three or four feet, before firing our mines, the men underground would work without boots, often without lights; blankets would be hung at different places along the galleries to drown noise; the floors of the tunnels covered with sand-bags ”

“ As its pages reveal the methods by which aid was given to the escaping slave, one is compelled to wonder almost as if he were facing a revelation. The secrets of Masonry are not more mysterious than were the ways of these officials who clothed, fed and comforted the fugitive, while they apparently never knew his name or whereabouts. Even those who never believed in the existence of an UNDERGROUND RAILWAY, or who, believing, cursed its existence, will read its history, at this time, with the relish of astonishment and the zest of discoverers. ”

“ The grim old building which, when it was new, gave its name to the town, is one for which no search needs to be made; its blackened and time worn walls are seen from the train windows by every traveller who enters the city from the south. ”

“ But it so happened that several hundred families belonging to the metal-working guilds, who knew the underground passages to the mines as foresters know the pathless wood, had taken refuge in the vast underground caverns with all the goods they could carry. Poor deluded creatures! they thought that this sudden coming of the winter blast, of the blinding snow and vast floating fields of ice, was but a freak of nature, and that in a few months the old warmth and the old sunshine would come back again. ”

“ Some, not content with personal freedom and happiness, went secretly back to their old homes, and brought away their wives and children at much peril and cost. The rumor widened; the fugitives so increased, that a secret pathway, since called the Underground Railroad, was soon formed, which ran by the huts of the blacks in the slave states, and the houses of good Samaritans in the free states.... ”

“ In general the participants in underground operations were quiet persons, little known outside of the localities where they lived, and were therefore members of a class that historians find it exceedingly difficult to bring within their field of view. ”

“ The shaft rose from a sort of plaza, a wide space, rectangular, with avenues dug through the living stone and lined with metal, top and bottom as well as both sides, and with the various compartments that would correspond to our buildings honeycombed out from each avenue, so that there really was no feeling of a city as we know it—only of immense tunnels, intersecting, none of the relief of roofs and chimney pots and varying architectural façades—a triumph of cubism, a nightmare of magnesium that reflected a pale green light from opalescent tubing recessed everywhere into the city's roof. ”

“ If in any way we have erred in the task of furnishing facts and important information touching the Underground Rail Road, it has not been in overstating the sufferings, trials, perils, and marvellous escapes of those described, but on the contrary. In many instances after hearing the most painful narratives we had neither time nor inclination to write them out, except in the briefest manner, simply sufficient to identify parties, which we did, not dreaming that the dark cloud of Slavery was so soon to give way to the bright sunlight of Freedom. ”

“ Then the railing is reached, and the alley instead of ending has merely given itself an angular twist to the right, and extends three squares further, to a great, pale green dome, and stately entrance.
The calmly-thinking, quietly-laboring, cool and conservative world is for the nonce left behind. With the first stepping across Customhouse street, the place widens architecturally, and the atmosphere, too, seems impregnated with a sort of mental freedom, conducive to dangerous theorizing and broody reflections on the inequality of the classes. ”

“ Wherever it is placed on the borders of a capital, a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth of a city. It seems as though, around these great centres of the movements of a people, the earth, full of germs, trembled and yawned, to engulf the ancient dwellings of men and to allow new ones to spring forth, at the rattle of these powerful machines, at the breath of these monstrous horses of civilization which devour coal and vomit fire. The old houses crumble and new ones rise. ”

“ The little old forts, put into such repair! and the armoured train, with a Maxim and a Hotchkiss, standing in the Railway siding, ready for business. And the earthworks! And the trek-waggon barricades, and the shelters panelled and roofed with corrugated iron. And your bomb-proof Headquarter Bureau, the iron skull that's to hold the working brain of the place ... with underground telegraphic and telephonic communications with all the forts and outposts. It's colossal! A masterpiece of cool, deadly, lethal forethought.... ”

“ If, therefore, we can offer them an asylum and profitable employment on the estate, we shall open up a new Underground Rail Road, or rather enable the slaves to escape from Cuba by getting into a boat, and in one night finding their way to freedom. ”

“ There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply. Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry had gradually lost its birthright in the sky. ”

“ The trader, the slave-pen, the auction-block, the coffle gang, the rice swamp, the cotton plantation, bloodhounds, and cruel overseers loomed up before him, as they had never done before. Without stopping to consider the danger, he immediately made up his mind that he would make a struggle, cost what it might. He knew of no other way of escape than the Underground Rail Road. He was shrewd enough to find an agent, who gave him private instructions, and to whom he indicated a desire to travel North on said road. ”

“ Splendid, however, as the terrace and its houses are, both in conception and execution, the underground work which upholds them is perhaps more remarkable still. The vast series of arched vaults has been described by a modern writer as a very town, which, during the years that they were open, formed subterranean streets leading to the river and its wharves. ”

“ It was as though a living wave, of brilliant heat and light from the bursting shells, were dancing like lightning across the two cities; and in that instant it must have burned from them all the life in their towers, even as they were striving to do with our own. The towers of each city became in that moment almost a single great surface of fusing, white-hot metal; its awfulness added to by the exploding of the stores of heat-shells and magazines beneath the terrific flares. Out beyond them and around them there swept other cities of the European armada to protect them. ”

“ An American accent and a woman's touch. Suelette weaved her magic. The Black Mountain raid had taken place. The county police had supported it. We had our confirmation.
While this anecdote is a strong account, it's also representative one. Every chapter in underground has many tales just like it. They're unseen, because a book must not just be true in details, but true in feeling. ”

“ The city bore marks of havoc everywhere. Gaping bridges, half-demolished houses, many without doors, which had been taken off their hinges and cast into the courtyard or the roadside, fallen roofs, smouldering ruins, told their dismal tale. ”

“ It was these who had made possible, who had created, the terra-cotta sky-scrapers; it was these who had made possible that marvelous procession of automobiles which taxed the width of Woodward Avenue; it was these who had made possible the building up of that miracle of industrial life that stretched around the town like fortifications around some European city—but fortifications holding the city safe, not from a foreign invader, but from an economic invader. Factory-fortresses preserving the prosperity of the town. ”

“ In the common trench of the Poor Burying Ground they lie packed three stories deep, shoulder to shoulder, crowded in death as they were in life, to “save space;” for even on that desert island the ground is not for the exclusive possession of those who cannot afford to pay for it. There is an odd coincidence in this, that year by year the lives that are begun in the gutter, the little nameless waifs whom the police pick up and the city adopts as its wards, are balanced by the even more forlorn lives that are ended in the river. ”

“ The Underground Railroad, it will be seen, has done much the greatest work in behalf of human liberty.
The conductors on this route were some of the noblest, self sacrificing men the world ever saw. No civil penalties dismayed them. They boldly proclaimed by deeds of moral heroism and self-sacrifice their faith in the higher law, before which human statutes were impotent when human liberty was at stake. ”

“ And all these things are coming so fast and so close to one another, that it seems a miracle anyone can get through. Not long ago an underground passage with steps leading down to it was built, so that people can go under instead of over the street, which is, I think, a very good thing. ”

“ There are a few volumes that supply us with numerous illustrations of the Underground Railroad in operation. These books are not general treatises on the underground system, but give us an insight into the clandestine work of several limited localities; they are important because they exhibit the methods and devices of operators, show the sacrifices made by them in behalf of the midnight seekers after liberty, and supplement with valuable matter the unpublished reminiscences. ”