When the northern states abolished slavery forever, they became revolutionary for a second time since the original thirteen colonies war for independence with Britain, except this was much more personal. It split a new nation in half along the Mason-Dixon line, between a falsely sharp black-and-white divide, punctuated by the shocking bloodshed of The Civil War.
Of course, the reality of American life is that European colonization and its economy based on imported African slave labor created a corrupt dynamic on top of a native culture that had already bartered, traded, and mated with newly-arrived locals, to create the first mixed ethnicity outside of plantation boundaries. In opposition to the insanely cruel inhumanity that drove the southern slave trade, an underground railroad was designed to free people from their captivity through a secret network of waterways, safe houses, and territories, up to the free states of the north.
New York was essential to the resettlement of freed slaves via its connected waterways of rivers, streams, and brooks. Not far from where I am now is a historic town on the Hudson River called "Nyack", that has a few old underground stops made for a people who yearned to be free. From here, they could escape to the colder north of our upstate wilderness, impenetrable in the wintertime to a slaving people used to the much warmer weather of the American south. Even further north are the prominent river and bay area conduits to Canada, to the always-free provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.
We still have rebellious warrior genes in our blood, represented in the eye-patch logo for the Pearl River Pirates high school football team, or the horned helmet for the team from my high school alma mater, the Clarkstown South Vikings of West Nyack. Here, there is same blended ethnicity as Solomon Northup, the famously kidnapped and freed New Yorker from "12 Years A Slave": Indian, African, European, even Asian blood running hotly through our veins. If you ever need to escape tyranny, I knew a few buccaneers who'll help. Welcome to the underground, my friends. You've reached terminus, the end.
Finally, free at last.
Finally, free at last.
