NORM DANN CLOSES THE GERRIT SMITH ESTATE SUMMER SUNDAY SERIES ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2024 AT 1 PM WITH THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD: AND THE EXAMINATION OF ITS MORAL SIGNIFICANCE
Dann will explain the Underground Railroad and discuss it as a symptom of a corrupt nation whose founding values were not implemented. He describes the origins of slavery, details the lives of the enslaved, and describes the Underground Railroad as a process of achieving freedom via the use of a network of support persons linking the United States slave states to Canada. He will also discuss the risks incurred by the formerly enslaved as they moved north, and the efficacy of the process of escape.
Frederick Douglass printed on the front page of his December 8, 1848 edition of his newspaper The North Star a quote from his friend and fellow black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet, “There are yet two places where slaveholders cannot come, Heaven and Peterboro.” Peterboro was a special place for fugitives from slavery and their guides, as well as for abolitionists working on the Underground Railroad at other locations. Peterboro residents were accustomed to seeing freedom seekers around the hamlet as they worked their way north. Indeed, Smith purchased the freedom of enslaved persons, and, in some cases, families stayed in Peterboro after arriving from the South.
The program is presented in The Barn from which carriages going north were kept. At the end of the session Dann will show the stables for the horses. The Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark is on the National Park Service Network to Freedom (the national Underground Railroad system), and the New York State Underground Railroad Heritage Trail.
The presenter, Norman K. Dann PhD, is the author of When We Get to Heaven: Runaway Slaves on the Road to Peterboro as well as author of biographies on each of the members of the Ann and Gerrit Smith family.