The Underground Railroad Monument

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Among the factors that contributed to the coming of the Civil War was the increasing animosity between Southerners and Northerners over the issue of slavery. The operation of the Underground Railroad to help slaves escape to the free North and Canada, which was supported by Northern anti-slavery societies, was a sharp thorn in the sides of slaveholders.

Two major "stations" on the Underground Railroad were located near Preston. Local Quakers, long opposed to slavery, operated one and Harriet Tubman and her parents, Benjamin and Harriet Ross, ran the other. The success of these and other stations in Maryland led to the calling of local and statewide slaveholder conventions, which denounced the North for harboring fugitive slaves. Maryland slave owners were further enraged when these two stations were exposed in 1857-58, but most of their operators, including Tubman, escaped to Northern states and Canada.

On the other hand, Northern abolitionists were angered when a captured "conductor," Sam Green, received a ten-year prison sentence. The respective animosities of slaveholders and abolitionists, increased by the Underground Railroad, finally found expression in armed conflict in 1861.

www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=5411