We explored the 'uncomfortable' and inspirational truths about the Underground Railroad

CHURCH CREEK, MD ‒ Arnold Montgomery looks to the future by looking back through Harriett Tubman's eyes.

On a recent visit to the rural area where the Underground Railroad's most famous conductor was born enslaved in 1822, Montgomery, 71, can't help but be moved by her tenacity. Her resilience. Her refusal to quit.

And he worries that the current political climate means historians and everyday Americans are being encouraged to downplay the reason she's famous: She helped dozens of enslaved people escape to freedom at a time when owning another human was not just legal but socially acceptable.

"How can you move forward if you don’t know where you came from?" the retired substance abuse counselor from Canton, Ohio, asks out loud.

Although many enslaved people tried to escape what was formally known as "chattel slavery," Tubman is the most-remembered name from the Underground Railroad, a loosely organized system that aided people running away from enslavers by crossing the Mason-Dixon Line. Tubman escaped in 1849.

Out of a population of about 3 million enslaved people when Tubman first freed herself, perhaps as many as 100,000 escaped to liberty in northern states like New York, Massachusetts and Vermont, fled further north to Canada, or sought refuge in Mexico, the Caribbean or among Native Americans, according to the National Park Service.

With its tales of daring escapes and midnight rendezvous, life-or-death hiding places, secret signs and code words, the Underground Railroad has long captured Americans' imagination. Historians say the illegal journeys to freedom hold a special place in our collective self-image as a nation of people seeking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, while giving us heroic figures like Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, USA TODAY dispatched reporters to revisit some of the iconic American journeys ‒ some happy, some tragic ‒ that helped shape this country. Reporters retraced parts of the Oregon Trail, panned for gold in California and replicated Paul Revere's 1775 ride from Boston to seek out these journeys and others that still resonate today.

Our reporting sheds light on the stories we as a country tell and teach as we consider what the next 250 years may bring.

And it comes as the Trump administration has launched an effort across national parks, museums, libraries and classrooms to reconsider exactly whose voices are highlighted and whose voices are quieted in the telling of our uniquely American story.

In September, the administration was criticized by historians over a proposal to remove a heartbreaking photo of an escaped enslaved man from a National Park Service site.

The 1863 photo of a man named Peter, known as the "Scourged Back" image, has been used to show the horrific conditions in which enslaved people lived. Abolitionists used the photo from Harper’s Weekly to stir public sentiment against slavery. After escaping enslavement, Peter, whose last name is unknown, served as a sergeant in the Black regiment in the Union Army during the Civil War, according to the National Portrait Gallery.

Some historians worry the Trump administration will downplay the horrors of slavery in favor of highlighting more flattering parts of American history. The president has repeatedly complained that the American education system, libraries, museums and other sites spend too much time focusing on the nation's failings instead of its successes.

But learning about the Underground Railroad necessitates understanding a basic fact: It existed only because roughly 4 million people were held as slaves at the start of the Civil War ‒ a war fought in large part to end enslavement in the United States.

"We don't tell truth because the truth a lot of time makes us uncomfortable," said Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, a North Carolina-based leadership expert who this summer led a group of young women retracing portions of the Underground Railroad.

"We want and need to tell the whole truth of this country, how we came to be, how we came to be great, what was done to other humans to help us gain all this wealth. The truth liberates us," said Robinson, a former Marine, who runs Leadership LINKS Inc., a mentoring program for Black girls. "And in telling the truth we can come to understand that's where we were, that's what we did, and now this is where we are, and then we ask, 'Where would we like to go?'"

The abolitionist movement is 'an inspiration for us all'

Merchants brought the first enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619, using their free labor to help boost the economy of the then-British colony. For more than 100 years, enslaved people lived and labored in the colonies, but after the Revolutionary War, northern states eventually abolished most forms of enslavement by the early 1800s, led by Vermont in 1777.

Because slavery persisted in the South, the North became a beacon of freedom for enslaved people who broke the law to escape.

And in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated stiff penalties for those helping enslaved people escape, even if they were living in northern "free" states.

The Underground Railroad, never a formal system, had existed virtually as long as people held slaves, but it began operating in earnest in the 1830s and through the Civil War’s end in 1865.

Professor Kyle T. Mays, the vice chair of the UCLA Department of African American Studies, said escaping enslaved people knew the risk of death was high – as was punishment if they were caught and returned. But many Whites, especially northern Whites, saw slavery as a southern problem, he said.

That means relatively few White people actually aided escapees.

“The reason some people latch on so strongly (today to the story of the Underground Railroad) is because in general, White people across the board were apathetic about the institution of slavery,” said Mays. “White America was complicit.”

Historians say that although Whites, especially northern Whites, played an important role in aiding escapees along the Underground Railroad, the effort was largely run by Black people, for Black people.

Still, the idea that Americans came together to help freedom seekers in the face of immoral laws offers hope for America’s truest ideals.

"That abolitionist movement represents the best of who we can be," Robinson said. “It's an inspiration for us all."

'I was free and they should be free'

Tubman was one of nine children who was born to enslaved parents in Maryland in 1822. Tubman suffered a head injury as a child when an enslaver trying to catch a runaway hit her in the head with a metal bar. She had visions and sleep disorders the rest of her life.

When she was about 27, Tubman left behind her husband and ran away from her enslaver on the Brodas Plantation, finding freedom in neighboring Pennsylvania.

At the time, maps were restricted and knowledge of geography limited. Historians say Tubman learned how to navigate Maryland's Eastern Shore from Black sailors with whom she worked harvesting lumber.

And she had Polaris, the North Star, which served as a celestial guide to fleeing enslaved people. Unlike other stars that circle across the sky each night, Polaris remains static in the north sky, making it an invaluable navigation tool for people who couldn't read or write or easily access maps. In rural Dorchester County, Maryland, where rivers and swamps complicate the tree-covered flat landscape, being able to look up meant Tubman knew which way to go.

"God's time is always near. He set the North Star in the heavens; He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free," Tubman told a biographer. Like most enslaved people, Tubman could not read or write.

What helps Tubman stand out, historians say, is her willingness to reject the status quo of slavery at a time when millions of people were enslaved, with society's weight keeping them in place. Tubman herself left behind parents, siblings and a husband when she fled, though she later rescued many of them on her 13 trips back to the slave state.

Allowing enslaved people to get married and have families helped "anchor" them to geographic areas, said professor Dann Broyld of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Further, he said, slaveholders perpetuated the myth that enslaved people needed help to escape, so they would be less willing to strike out on their own.

"I think (slaveholders) sometimes believed their own mythology: Black people aren't smart enough to get themselves all the way to freedom in Canada," said Broyld.

Tubman noted that she knew no one, and no one was waiting for her, when she crossed into Pennsylvania. There was no system in place to aid her: "I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home after all, was down in Maryland; because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there. But I was free, and they should be free."

Seek freedom or die trying

Eisley Brown, 13, was among those who traveled with Robinson this summer along portions of the Underground Railroad. Now an eighth-grader in Dallas, Brown said traveling a portion of the railroad helped bring home the risks Tubman and other freedom seekers took.

"She would tell them, 'You either go to freedom or you die. And that's your only option,'" Eisley said. "Them working their way to freedom is them saving themselves. You either do that or you spent the rest of your life working for no pay, facing torture."

Eisley said visiting President Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello, along with the town in Canada where Tubman led some of her freedom seekers, drove home another point for her: "Her life was on the line and she helped other people ‒ I'm not sure people today would do that."

Among the White northerners who did help freedom seekers were members of a well-to-do Quaker family living in northern Vermont near the shores of Lake Champlain.

Sitting about 250 miles east of Tubman's later-life home in New York, the Rokeby Museum in North Ferrisburgh tells the story of the Robinson family's effort to help people escaping slavery. Vermont had banned slavery for adults in 1777 and was home to a small but thriving free Black population.

Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 pushed many escapees to travel to Canada.

People who turned in escaped slaves could reap significant financial benefits; Tubman's owner offered a $300 reward during her first escape attempt in 1849, which would be worth more than $12,000 today.

At Rokeby, museum interpreters explain how the Robinson family's ancestors had become wealthy in part due to the slave trade but were abolitionists in later generations.

The family helped at least 11 people escape to freedom. While the Robinsons kept meticulous records ‒ the museum has the bill of sale for merino sheep imported from Spain in 1810 ‒ historians believe they may have deliberately obfuscated exactly how many escaping slaves passed through the farm.

The second generation of Robinsons to live there, Rowland Thomas and Rachel Gilpin Robinson avoided purchasing goods made by enslaved people and routinely preached at area churches on the evils of slavery. They also often hired escapees to work on the farm, paying them for their labor.

"They were doing something that was illegal and would've carried strict punishments," said museum education programs manager Jonathon Ahl. "... And I think a thing to remember as well is that there is a big difference between believing something to be morally wrong and having the courage to stop it."

That's still true, Ahl noted. "There are many people, especially in the world today, who would identify certain laws and certain situations as immoral and wrong, but they likely also would not do anything to stop it because they would feel that it might not be their business."

Nothing's more American than fighting injustice

Broyld, the professor, helped design the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park center in Maryland. He said Tubman and the Underground Railroad represent a combination of "modernity, fairytale and actual movement" that tells an important story about Americans as a people. The railroad and Tubman, he said, are inextricably linked.

After her years of helping freedom seekers, Tubman during the Civil War led 150 Black soldiers in the Combahee Ferry Raid, an operation behind Confederate lines that rescued more than 700 enslaved people. In 2024, she was posthumously awarded the rank of brigadier general in the Maryland Army National Guard in recognition of the raid.

Said Mays, the UCLA professor: "It's the American dream of being able to secure freedoms, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s this narrative that you can truly go from the bottom to the top."

Back in rural Maryland at the Tubman historical park, Montgomery said he was struck by how a network of Americans came together to fight the injustice of slavery. Montgomery's wife, Annette, 69, has long displayed a Tubman statue in their house.

Understanding the Underground Railroad offers insights into how America can continue to be a great country, Montgomery said.

"This adds to the search for where we're from," he said. "Folks can realize what a great nation we have when we fight for a common cause. We need each other, and the hope of tomorrow is built on the promise of today."