• Introduction
• The Underground Railroad
• Secret Signals
• The Underground Railroad Quilt Code Patterns
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The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was a network of free blacks and sympathetic whites that operated to assist fugitive slaves. According to some accounts (including that of Wilbur Siebert, an Underground Railroad historian who published a major study of it in 1893), the name Underground Railroad derives from a statement made by a man closely pursuing a slave escaping from Kentucky. When the escapee suddenly vanished from a riverbank, the pursuer said it seemed the man had “gone off on an underground railroad.” It was most active between about 1830 and 1865, when the Abolitionist movement was gaining strength in the U.S., especially after 1850 when Southern political leaders won a re-enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Laws.

Escaping the plantation was dangerous and scary business. While slaves certainly knew more about the surrounding countryside than their masters did, they did not know much about where they were going. They depended on help from other slaves, free blacks and helpful white families. Runaways covered maybe 10 miles a day on a journey that could last four or five months passing through wilderness and hostile territory. The Underground Railroad involved a series of “safe houses” and “stations” where fugitives could hide, as well as a map of routes to some northern states and especially to Canada where individual freedom was assured. Because any escape had to be planned and executed in secrecy, there was minimal communication within the network. The Underground Railroad relied on secret communication methods that had been developed for generations. Escape required an understanding of the code not only among slaves throughout the South, but also among the loosely connected free blacks who were instrumental in assisting fugitives. In fact, learning about the Underground Railroad is difficult because so much of the planning and running was done in secrecy and in coded language.

Research and the passing down of family stories have revealed many aspects of the secret signaling used to help slaves flee to freedom. These range from the use of open or shut windows to lighted gateposts, from signs placed along the routes to secret phrases exchanged between free blacks and runaway slaves.

One of the secret communication systems that has come to light only recently is the Underground Railroad Quilt Code. Historian Jacqueline L. Tobin, along with African American art historian and quilter Raymond G. Dobard, in 1999 published their study of the Quilt Code in their book, “Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad.” The study began in 1994, when Jacqueline Tobin met Ozella McDaniel Williams, an African American quilter in Charleston, S.C., who gradually revealed the story as she had learned it from her mother and grandmother.

Much of the language itself has faded away entirely. Even though Ozella McDaniel Williams was the keeper of the code in her part of South Carolina and disclosed it to Jacqueline Tobin (only after Ozella recognized her as “ready” for the story), Tobin and Dobard had to delve into ancient African decorative arts symbolism and the conditions of African American slavery to crack the code’s meaning throughout the Underground Railroad.