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In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states ...
In this song the repeated line "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd" is thus often interpreted as instructions to escaping slaves to travel north by following the North Star, leading them to the northern states, Canada, and freedom: The song ostensibly encodes escape instructions and a map from Mobile, Alabama, up the Tombigbee River, over the divide to ...
For example, the Kansas territory became a state in 1861, and slavery was prohibited in the state of Kansas. During the Civil War, abolitionists, free staters, and Jayhawkers helped to emancipate freedom seekers who escaped slavery from Missouri (a slave state that bordered Kansas) and brought them back to Kansas as contraband of war. [154]
Song of the Free" is a song of the Underground Railroad written circa 1860 about a man fleeing slavery in Tennessee by escaping to Canada via the Underground Railroad. [1] It has eight verses [ 1 ] and is composed to the tune of " Oh!
Follow the Drinking Gourd is an African-American folk song first published in 1928. The "drinking gourd" is another name for the Big Dipper asterism.Folklore has it that enslaved people in the United States used it as a point of reference so they would not get lost during their journey of escape to the North and to freedom.
Historical military map of the border and southern states by Phelps & Watson, 1866. In the American Civil War (1861–65), the border states or the Border South were four, later five, slave states in the Upper South that primarily supported the Union. They were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and after 1863, the new state of West ...
The River Jordan of the song became a coded message for escape, calling to mind the Mississippi or Ohio Rivers, both of which led to the slave-free northern United States and thus freedom. [2] The song was collected and arranged by Lucy McKim in 1862. [3] [4] In the same year, she sent a letter with some recordings from her trip to St. Helena ...
The Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution gave slave states disproportionate political power, [3] while the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3) provided that, if a slave escaped to another state, the other state could not prevent the return of the slave to the person claiming to be his or her owner. All Northern states had ...