Colgate’s location makes it an ideal spot to study abolitionism and the Underground Railroad. Upstate New York was a nationally important center of abolitionist activity from the early 1830s until the Civil War and home to key figures including abolitionists Gerrit Smith, Jermain Loguen, Beriah Green, Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman.
Three major tracks of the Underground Railroad ran through upstate New York. On the eastern side of the state, freedom seekers found sanctuary and assistance in New York City, up the Hudson River to Albany and through the Adirondack Region. In the middle of the state, Underground Railroad routes ran across the Mohawk River to Syracuse, Oswego and Canada, or up to Ithaca and Rochester, and from Binghamton to Syracuse. The third route encompassed the western corridor through Fredonia, Buffalo, and Niagara Falls. Americans find the histories of the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement appealing largely because they represent the moral activism of a concerned, enlightened interracial citizenry intent on ending slavery and making the United States live up to its revolutionary principles.
Public Domain
While upstate New York will be the “laboratory” for the institute, readings, discussions and individual research will extend to the development of abolitionism and the Underground Railroad nationally. Using Karen Wulf’s influential article in Humanities, “Vast Early America,” this institute strives to uncover how enslaved people resisted servitude across North America. Geography mixes with chronology in the institute. Participants will study the beginnings of the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad from their origins in the religious questioning and enslaved resistance of the colonial era, through the egalitarian and freedom-loving ethos of revolutionary and early national periods through the advent of the Civil War. The emergence of gradual emancipation, post-revolutionary northern legislation that slowly freed African Americans after years of service to masters, reignited past questions about the nature of slavery and resistance to it. Many African Americans gained freedom by gradual emancipation, through courtroom battles, by personal agreements with masters and most commonly, by flight from bondage. In 1799, New York State enacted gradual emancipation and in 1827 ended legal servitude. At the same time, a rising educated African American elite sought to protect endangered freedoms and to fight kidnappers who were intent on profits from illicit sales of blacks to the south, actions that connected New York State blacks with enslaved peoples in southern states. Among whites, evangelical religion, the legacy of the American Revolution, and concerns about Slave Power (the northern states’ view that southern slaveholding states had excessive national power) sustained growing anti-slavery and free labor convictions in the northern states. Using newer materials, the institute examines the development of a southern Underground Railroad into Spanish-held Florida, Texas and Mexico. Examining these historical trends helps uncover the combined efforts of African and white Americans, significant involvement by women in antislavery activities, and the development of local abolitionism and the Underground Railroad. Internal debates focused on electoral politics, regarded by many as corrupted by slavery, and which undeniably excluded blacks and all women.
The Underground Railroad and abolitionist movements have a distinguished and lively historiography among scholars and sustain popular appeal to local and state historians, who publish guidebooks, family and community histories, and regional surveys about the movements. The institute will feature recent work by Manisha Sinha, Richard Blackett, Leigh Fought, Kate Larson, Eric Foner, Kellie Carter Jackson, Alice Baumgartner, Amy Murrell Taylor, Karen Cook-Bell and Graham Hodges, among many other scholars. Jacqueline Simmons from Teachers College, Columbia University will work with institute colleagues to interpret scholarship into curricular knowledge. Simmons and Hodges will work directly with participant to create podcasts, videocasts, and digital portfolios.
Graham Russell Gao Hodges, the George Dorland Langdon, Jr. Professor of History and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University, will organize, direct, be the principal lecturer at the institute, and will attend all sessions and events. Douglas Egerton, Professor of History at LeMoyne College, a major scholar of the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras, and a speaker at past institutes, is prepared to replace Hodges should the need arise.
Seven scholarly guest speakers include:
- Daniel J. Broyold, Associate Professor of African American History, University of Massachusetts-Lowell
- Alice L. Baumgartner, Assistant Professor, University of Southern California and author of a pioneering book on the UGRR in Mexico
- Leigh Fought, Associate Professor of History at Le Moyne College and author of Frederick Douglass’s Women
- Kerri Greenidge, Associate Professor of History, Tufts University
- Kellie Carter Jackson, Assistant Professor of History at Wellesley College and author of the acclaimed book, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionism and the Politics of Violence
- Kate Clifford Larson, author of the definitive biography of Harriet Tubman
- Kate Masur, Distinguished Professor of History, Northwestern University
- Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History, University of Pittsburgh
- Manisha Sinha, Draper Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolitionism
- Kamau Ware, Founder, Black Gotham Experience
- William Williams, Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Fine Arts and Curator of Photography at Haverford College
Jacqueline Simmons, Senior Lecturer and Vice Chair of the Department of Curriculum & Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, will create and conduct seven pedagogy sessions for the institute. Simmons and Hodges will attend all events.
Other respected authorities will help on the group’s trips. Paul and Mary Liz Stewart, independent researchers and co-founders of the Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region, Inc., will enable the field trip to the Myers Home in Albany. Dr. Lindsay Varner, the director of the Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, will oversee the group’s visit there. Steve Strimer, director of the David Ruggles Center in Florence, Massachusetts, will conduct the group tour at the site. John Brown Lives, a volunteer group of scholars, will organize events and cooperate with the New York State Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation agency for a tour of the John Brown home. Kezia Lawler, the Administrative Assistant for the Colgate Department of History, and a selected undergraduate, will assist in the program.
Participants should come out of this intensive three-week experience well-armed with primary documents and databases, exposure to the best secondary treatments, awareness of the importance of local historical sites, museums, and archives, and a genuine enthusiasm for teaching the history of abolitionism and the UGRR to their students.
Based on attendance and participation, the director of the summer institute will provide a letter recommending that each teacher participating in the institute should receive credit for fifty development hours.
NEH Policy
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
