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The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was neither underground nor a railroad, but a network of people who hid and passed on enslaved people escaping north. The network is hard to document precisely because secrecy was the condition of its working, and later accounts have both exaggerated its scale and understated how much of the work was done by free Black communities. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made citizens of northern states legally obliged to assist in captures, and is a principal reason the slavery question could no longer be held as a regional matter. Canada received an estimated thirty thousand.
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