Curriculum Ideas

 

The following pages suggest project ideas for any in-class unit on the subject of Underground Railroad history in Wisconsin or across the nation.

Activities by type include research-based writing and discussion, creative writing, and hands-on projects.

Some activities are appropriate to accompany stories from Freedom Train North: Stories of the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin by Julia Pferdehirt. Others are Wisconsin-specific. A notation of FTN or WI has been added, with chapter notations where appropriate.

A few activities for students of middle school age and older are included at the end of this section.

Research, Discussion, and Writing
  • Using the African Mosaic website, the National Geographic Society website, or the July 1984 issue of the magazine, trace routes used by fugitive slaves fleeing to Canada on a blackline map of North America.
  • Read and tell in your own words the escape story of one person.  See sources in next activity.
  • Print out a number of first-person accounts and distribute to class.  In discussion, list the common elements:  Did people get help from abolitionists? Were they chased?  How did they reach Canada (or a northern free state)?  What happened when they reached freedom?  Share what you learn with the class.  Sources for first-person accounts include Our Song, Our Toil by Michele Steptoe, Slavery Time When I Was Chillun’, by Belinda Hurmence,  the Library of Congress website (www.loc.gov/ammem), and http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam (Click on Manuscripts, then “WPA ex-slave narratives”); or http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/drew/drew.html (Benjamin Drew’s interviews in Canada)
  • Meet Tony Cohen at www.smithsonianmag.si.edu or www.npca.org/walk.html Tony Cohen has hiked escape routes and filmed his experiences. In the October 1996 (p. 48) issue of Smithsonian Magazine, Tony’s first “hike” is recorded.  Students will enjoy reading this article and mapping his route using the Smithsonian website above.
    On the National Park Service website link above, students can read Tony’s daily calendar as he hiked.  Tony’s first-person experiences would lend themselves well to creative writing starters like “If the walls of this attic could talk, they would speak with the voices of fugitive slaves.”  Or, “We hid in the corn field while Papa went ahead.  Around midnight, while clouds covered the north star, and we waited more.”
  • (WI) Check out the Milton Historical Society website at www.MiltonHouse.org to find out why Milton became a stop on the underground railroad.
  • Using the internet, encyclopedias, or your library, assign students to learn about one of these famous people in the movement against slavery.  Students can share what they learn through oral presentation, or written contributions to a booklet, bulletin board, or poster collection.  Drawings or photos of some individuals may be available online:


    * = mentioned in Freedom Train North  
    **= mentioned in Many Thousand Gone
    Levi and Catherine Coffin *
    Thomas Garrett **
    Harriet Tubman **
    William Still
    Frederick Douglass **
    Sherman Booth (Wisconsin) *
    Lucretia Mott *
    Harriet Beecher Stowe
    William Lloyd Garrison
    Jermaine Loguen    		 Henry “Box” Brown **
    William and Ellen Craft
    Jonathan Walker
    John Brown and Harpers Ferry
    Eliza Harris **
    Sojourner Truth **
    John Rankin
    Dred Scott **
    Elijah Lovejoy

  • Read pages 163 and 164 of Charles Blockson’s book The Underground Railroad, where Isaac Brandt, an Iowa abolitionist tells about using codes and hand signals.  Blockson also lists the following code words:
      • Abolitionist – person working to end slavery
      • Agent – coordinator, plotting course of escape, making contacts
      • Conductors – people who directly transported or guided fugitives ( Harriet Tubman was one conductor )
      • Drinking Gourd – North star
      • Freedom Train – Code for underground railroad network
      • Gospel Train – same
      • Heaven – Canada, freedom
      • Load of potatoes, parcels, bundles of wool, bushels of wheat – people arriving, Preachers – leaders, speakers for the underground railroad
      • Promised Land – Canada, north, freedom
      • Shepherds – escorts for fugitives
      • Station – safe house, temporary refuge
      • Station Master – keeper of safehouse
      • Stockholder – donor of money, clothing, food, etch to ugrr
      • “The wind blows from the South today” – warning of slave catchers nearby
      • "A friend with friends" – password used to signal arrival of fugitives with ugrr conductor
      • "A friend of a friend sent me” – a fugitive traveling alone indicates they were sent by ugrr network.

    Ask students to guess what these codes might mean.  Discuss why and how they think codes were used.  Can students think of other examples of codes?  (i.e., Navajo Indian language used as code during WWII, flag codes in shipping, morse code, WWII resistance movements)

  • Read the text of the Fugitive Slave Law.  What does it say?  What were citizens required to do?  What rights did enslaved people have?  What rights did free black people have?  How was the trial conducted to determine whether a black person was a fugitive slave or a freedman?  How did the trial process influence the outcome?
    The following sources include information and text:
  • The Underground Railroad by Charles Blockson tells the story of the young girl smuggled from the 22nd Wisconsin camp on pages 190-192. (available via interlibrary loan) Read this or other stories about Wisconsin’s Civil War soldiers and their contribution to ending slavery.
    Find more information at:


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Creative Writing

  • Read Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt aloud. Students will write a short fictionalized narrative imagining how one person learned about following the north star to freedom. It is fun to create a bulletin board “freedom quilt” using these stories. Brightly colored paper backgrounds and strips of drawn railroad track, rivers, prairie and forest create the quilt.

  • Write a first-person story patterned after the ex-slave narratives in Benjamin Drew’s on-line interviews. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/drew/drew.html

  • (FTN) After reading William Hall’s story in the first chapter Freedom Train North or in the personal stories section of this website, assign students to write paragraphs imagining how he gets “to the lake.” Read aloud to the class. Students will have a great variety of interesting theories and ideas.

  • (FTN) Read the story of Caroline hiding in the barrel on pages 10 and 11 in Freedom Train North. Ask students to write their own “hiding place” scene, imagining the place, the people, the feelings of someone hiding. Where are the slave catchers? Is help coming? Is the fugitive slave in someone’s house? Attic? Barn? Alone in the woods? With others? How and where is she or he hiding? What happens then?

  • (FTN) Read aloud about Joshua Glover’s rescue from the Milwaukee jail in the Jailbreak! chapter in Freedom Train North. Use the following starter paragraph for a creative writing assignment:

    "By nine o’clock in the morning the crowd had gathered outside the federal jail. ‘Free Joshua Glover,’ people roared. Voices bellowed. Pistol shots cracked in the morning air. Church bells rang across the city. By supper time the crowd had grown.bigger and louder, and angrier. “

    Students will write a descriptive, fictionalized account of the riot that resulted in the rescue of Joshua Glover. Encourage students to imagine they are part of the crowd and write what they see, hear, think, and feel.
    Note: writing short, single-scene or event paragraphs will enable students to focus on details and more completely describe and “paint” the scene with words. Requiring that each creative writing exercise be a beginning-to-end story often results in superficial, slapped-together efforts to get to the end.

  • (WI, FTN) Find out about a time when the underground railroad really went under the ground by reading the story of the Goodrich family’s Milton House Inn in Milton, Wisconsin. Chapter 6, “Overground, Underground” in Freedom Train North or check out the Milton Historical Society website at www.miltonhouse.org

    Students may enter Joseph Goodrich’s mind as he thinks of, imagines, and plans to dig the 50+ foot long, 3 foot high tunnel connecting the basement of their inn with a storage cabin in back. Ask students to write entries in a fictional journal. How does Joseph get the idea? What plans must he make? What is he thinking as he begins to dig?

  • Read Bull Run by Paul Fleishman. Talk about the many people who would see, be involved in, or try to avoid a battle. Imagine two lines of soldiers facing one another along a thickly wooded ridge. What would the Union soldiers see? What would the confederate soldiers see? What would the general standing on a hillside some distance away see? What would a boy peeking out from the hayloft of a barn on the next ridge see? What would the drummer boy back in camp see?

    Each character has a different point of view. Ask students to choose one character and describe the moment the two regiments first spot one another in the woods from that character’s point of view. Compare narratives.


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Hands on!

  • Purchase and listen to the audio and/or video tape Music of the Underground Railroad by folklorist/performers Kim and Reggie Harris. These excellent materials offer a good introduction to any unit study on Underground Railroad history. The video and CD include numerous code songs used to keep underground railroad activity secret.
    (P.O. Box 18871, Philadelphia, PA 19119; 215/548-1679)

  • Read The Drinking Gourd by Manjo, an I Can Read History Book. Using a star map, find the North star. Younger students may want to draw their impressions of the story for classroom display.

    Students may create star maps showing the place of the north star in the summer sky. This information is available on the “quest” website above or in any star guide or encyclopedia. One star map technique is to punch holes for stars, showing their relative sizes, backing the black paper with aluminum foil. Larger maps, showing the cluster of constellations around the big dipper can be made using the hole-punching technique with paper-covered boxes and a flashlight.

    Students may also be assigned to go outside with a parent at night to see if the north star is visible. One school tried this and discovered that only the “farm kids” could see the star. The “city kids” were less fortunate!
    Would a star be a reliable guide? Discuss in class why or why not.

  • (FTN) Read Caroline Quarles’ story in Chapter 2 of Freedom Train North. Her journey to Canada with Lyman Goodnow began in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Trace their trail on a map by finding the cities and towns named by Mr. Goodnow in A History of Waukesha County. In order, they stayed in Spring Prairie, Burlington, (Illinois) McHenry, Dundee, Naperville, Joliet, and Lockport/Beebee’s Grove; (Indiana) LaPorte,; (Michigan) Climax-Scotts, Battle Creek, Ann Arbor, and Detroit,. Caroline stepped foot on Canadian soil at Sandwich, Ontario.

  • (FTN) Read about and create a mural of the jailbreak scene in Joshua Glover’s story. Be sure to check out the drawing of Glover on page 31 of Freedom Train North, Photos of Sherman Booth can be found at http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/WIReader/WER1124.html

    The legend is that Booth rode a white horse down Milwaukee streets shouting, “Freedmen arise!” Visit local cemeteries to find out if Civil War veterans are buried there. Take butcher paper and charcoal or black crayon to do rubbings of old gravestones. Permission from cemetery owners may be necessary.

  • Invite a Civil War re-enactor to visit your class. These spirited creators of living history often know a great deal about the history of and individual soldiers in the regiment they re-create. Information about area re-enactors can be obtained from local historical societies, the Wisconsin Veteran’s Museum in Madison or the Institute for Civil War Studies at 414/524-7198.

  • Perhaps descendants of Civil War veterans live in your community. Ask students to write a letter to the editor in your local paper asking that families with ancestors who fought in the Civil War contact the class with any information – particularly letters, diaries, and family stories – they might have.

  • Using boxes, colored paper, markers, paint, and similar materials, assign students to create a diorama of one event or place in underground railroad history. Good sources might include any story from Many Thousand Gone or Freedom Train North, personal narratives found on this website or online, and other books from the library or classroom collections.

  • Learn “freedom songs” from the CD “Steal Away” by Kim and Reggie Harris (215/548-1679) or the book No More, a collection of songs and stories of slave resistance. School music teachers may have other sources as well. Learn and share some songs with other classes.

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Research and Writing suggestions for older students


  • Older students may benefit from comparing the underground railroad with World War II resistance movements or sanctuary efforts in the U.S. during the 1970s and early 80s to help Central American refugees reach asylum in Canada. This was sometimes called the “Overground Railroad.” Churches and civil rights organizations participated in this effort. A book on the subject, Grab Hands and Run by Frances Temple, Orchard Books is an excellent fictionalized story of such a family’s flight.

  • Assign students to read about Gandhi’s pacifist protests in India or the peaceful protests led by Martin Luther King in the early Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

  • Assign students to research the issue of civil disobedience in contemporary society. Organizations like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Operation Rescue, and ACT-UP are examples of civil disobedient individuals and groups in recent history. Students should learn not only what actions are often taken by groups practicing civil disobedience, but why.

  • Discuss civil disobedience in class.

  • Write Amnesty International to learn about slavery in present-day Sudan.

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Nothing new under the sun:

Pro-slavery people in the 18th and 19th century tried to justify their views. They claimed everything from God to natural selection supported their position that Africans should be held in slavery and whites should be slave owners. Research and summarize those arguments. Some quotes area available on the library of Congress website.

Anti-slavery posters once depicted a kneeling black man in chains with the caption “Am I not a man and a brother?” Pro-slavery people tried to justify their position by claiming that black people were not fully human. They claimed that the property rights of slave owners superceded the right of slaves to life and freedom. They even claimed to be looking out for the slaves’ best interests, saying that poor, illiterate, simple slaves were not capable of managing their own lives. Slavery was actually compassionate, they claimed. Black people were better off enslaved than starving on their own, it was said.

Arguments justifying slavery are hauntingly similar to arguments used in today to justify abortion. (i.e., The unborn are not fully human. Women’s rights to self-determination and privacy supercede the right of the unborn to life and freedom. Poor, unwanted children are better off never born than born into poverty or possible abuse).

Also similar arguments were given in the 19th and early 20th century to deny women the right to vote. (i.e., Women are emotionally fragile and should be sheltered from the “roughness” of politics and government. Women are incapable of managing their own lives, it is “best” that educated men make decisions on their behalf. Some even argued that because “Eve ate the apple,” women could not be trusted to make decisions!)

Challenge older students by an assignment to research and compare those arguments with pro-slavery arguments.

Assign a personal essay about the meaning and value of freedom. Talk first about why students think freedom is so valued by all human beings. Talk about other places and events in world history where people fought for freedom. Search newspapers and periodicals for examples of present-day conflicts where freedom is at issue.


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Please email us at: historyalive@epdmail.engr.wisc.edu

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