The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Author.

This is the book Abraham Lincoln asked to see. In 1872, William Still, the son of formerly enslaved parents who escaped from Maryland, published the most authoritative account ever assembled of the Underground Railroad. As a conductor who helped hundreds escape to freedom, Still didn't merely retell these stories; he preserved the actual letters, testimonies, and biographical sketches written in the hands of the fugitives themselves. The result is not a novel or a memoir but an archive: the raw, unfiltered voices of men and women who staked their lives on a dangerous journey north, recorded at the moment when memory was still raw and the stakes were still terrifyingly real. The book includes his own brother's story, Peter Still, enslaved in Alabama, whom William hadn't seen since childhood and who escaped to freedom in Philadelphia. These pages document the greatest campaign of civil disobedience in American history, told by the people who lived it. It is essential reading not because it is uplifting, though it is, but because it refuses to let the escaped speak for themselves.