traveling chiefly by night and guided by the North Star. Having
reached a free State, they found friends among those of their own
race, or were taken in hand by officers of the Underground
Railroad and were thus helped across the Canadian border.

>From the seacoast the valley of the Connecticut River furnished
a
convenient route for completing the journey northward, though the
way of the fugitives was often deflected to the Lake Champlain
region. In later years, when New England became generally
sympathetic, numerous lines of escape traversed that entire
section. Other courses extended northward from the vicinity of
Philadelphia, Delaware, and Maryland. Here, through the center of
American Quakerdom, all conditions favored the escape of
fugitives, for slavery and freedom were at close quarters. The
activities of the Quakers, who were at first engaged merely in
preventing the reenslavement of those who had a legal right to
freedom, naturally expanded until aid was given without
reservation to any fugitive. From Philadelphia as a distributing
point the route went by way of New York and the Hudson River or
up the river valleys of eastern Pennsylvania through western New
York.

In addition to the routes to freedom which the seacoast and river
valleys afforded, the Appalachian chain of mountains formed an
attractive highway of escape from slavery, though these mountain
paths lead us to another branch of our subject not immediately
connected with the Underground Railroad--the escape from bondage
by the initiative of the slaves themselves or by the aid of their
own people. Mountains have always been a refuge and a defense for