The Impact Of Special Role Quilts On The Underground Railroad

To understand the special role quilts may have played in the Underground Railroad, we first have to understand the life and times of the people who lived during the years the railroad was running, approximately 1830-1862. These times were politically turbulent and impossible to summarize in a few brief paragraphs. This article should be considered an overview only. In the first year of the US Census, 1790, the United States of America consisted of 3.8 million people including 694,000 slaves scattered along the 16 states of the east coast. The issue of slavery was a thorny one for the new government. The 40,000 slaves in the northern states of CT, NJ, NY, PA and RI worked alongside free white men in cutting, burning, and clearing bush for cultivation. Southern slaves were vitally important to the economy of the southern states, which depended on the production of labor-intensive crops such as sugar, coffee, cacao, tobacco and rice. Southern states agreed to join the United States of America only on the provision that they were allowed to keep their slaves. Congress was well aware of the both the importance of southern crops to the economy of the United States and the importance of slave labor to the production of these crops. As the country expanded westward, provisions were made for slavery to continue. Yet as each new area was opened to slavery, the voices of abolitionists (anti-slavery proponents) got louder. As a compromise, An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves