Essay --

Slaves wanted freedom. They wanted to get away from their malicious and abusive owners, reunite with their families, and have a chance at a new life. The Underground Railroad gave them that chance. Before the Underground Railroad, slaveholders became accustomed to the use of this cruel system in which they called slavery, where slaves were often treated worse than farm animals. Slaves were forced to live in terrible conditions, where they were crowded into poorly built huts, exposed to both the freezing cold and extreme heat, worked from sun up until sun down, and were malnourished. Slaves could also be subjected to torturous punishments at the will of his or her master or overseer. As a southern judge once decreed, â€Å"The power of the master must be absolute.† Slaveholders would even aim to break up slave families just so that their absolute control would never waver. (Landau) It is believed that the system of the Underground Railroad began in 1787 when a Quaker named Isaac T. Hopper started to organize a system for hiding and aiding fugitive slaves. The Underground Railroad was a vast, loosely organized network of people who helped aid fugitive slaves in their escape to the North and Canada. It operated mostly at night and consisted of many whites, but predominately blacks. While the Underground Railroad had unofficially existed before it, a cause for its expansion was the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act allowed for runaway slaves to be captured and returned within the territory of the United States and added further provisions regarding the runaways and imposed even harsher chastisements for interfering in their capture (A&E). The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was a major cause of the development o... ...d and inspired blacks to do something about the situation that they were being given, and so they did. Blacks and whites came together to fight on the same side, to fight for the abolishment of slavery. This coming together is what caused the Underground Railroad to expand and evolve, but none of it would have ever happened, or at least not as fast as it did, without the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which brought blacks and whites together. In this way the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was a major cause of the development of the Underground Railroad because it caused people to realize just how cruel slavery was, which invoked an increase in the support and aid of the strong, free, black population, who were a crucial component to the Underground Railroad, as well as abolitionist and anti-slavery white, resulting in the expansion of the Underground Railroad.