Underground Railroad In Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Underground Railroad consisted of many secret routes that the runaway slaves took to escape to freedom. Although some historians claim that the Underground Railroad was never as effective and organized as people make it to be, the system did exist. It’s conductors were always black and they rescored bands of slaves into the North, relying on both black and white homesteads, called “stations.” At these stations, the runaway slaves would hide and be fed. Harriet Beecher Stowe said that she and her husband hid slaves too, and her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was based on a real-life story of how Eliza Harris and her son escaped to the North.
Benjamin Quarles says that for African Americans in the antebellum period, the Underground Railroad

was the most effective way to undermine the slave system and the white masters, who claimed that the slaves were perfectly happy in the South. Even though the North had an image of being friendly to African Americans and advocators of Abolitionism, they still had laws that limited the freedom of the runaway slaves. In the North blacks could not vote, run for political office, sit on juries, attend public schools, marry whites, or work at skilled jobs. As a result, many runaway slaves went further up North to Canada. The Canadian government fully approved blacks and allowed them to work as skilled laborers and enjoy a greater degree of freedom than they could in the United States.
One of the most famous conductors of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman. She was born in 1821 in Dorchester County, one of eleven children of Harriet Greene and Benjamin Ross, who were also slaves. By the time she was five, she was put to work, and continued to do general housework for seven years. Then, Harriet labored in the fields, which gave her muscular strength and physical endurance, things that she would be known for later on in her life as she worked on the Underground Railroad.
Harriet married John Tubman, who lacked his wife’s willpower and instead scoffed at her forebodings. He did not join her as she made the dash for freedom, and soon took on another wife. Harriet kept the name and took a second husband in 1869.
In 1849, the death of her master and the rumor that his estate and property would be split up and dispersed, it impelled her to travel to free-soil Pennsylvania, where she moved to Philadelphia to work in a hotel to save enough money to finance her schemes that would help slaves to freedom. After a year, Tubman had saved enough to rescue her sister, Mary Ann Bowley, and her two children from Baltimore. In the years that followed, Tubman went back to Maryland at least fifteen times, and escorted some two hundred slaves to freedom, including her parents.