Dear Bennie,

I am not seeking an argument about how many fugitive slaves crossed on the West Virginia Underground Railroad from the eastern part of Virginia into (Western) Virginia to the Ohio River. I also am not attempting to conduct a class on the Underground Railroad in West Virginia History for my ex-wife Sandra Burke or The Friends of Freedom Society. I simply wish to express my analogy and make a brief point about how I developed my analogy about the Underground Railroad in West Virginia. Of course I don’t know the number of slaves in Virginia who attempted to escape and failed or where they might have originated. I do have a few written accounts of what happened to a few slaves in Virginia who attempted to escape and were caught.

This part of my view is based on a law of physics: “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line”. When fugitive slaves escaped, reaching and crossing to the north side of the Mason-Dixon Line was a critical factor, and this involved traveling in as straight a line as possible. While there were some slaves and perhaps a few free blacks along with some whites who operated the Underground Railroad in (West) Virginia), I remind everyone that West Virginia was still part of the slave state of Virginia! In general, the level of assistance from the Underground Railroad for fugitives slaves in slaves states was substantially less than assistance from the Underground Railroad in non-slave states. The longer a fugitive slave stayed in Virginia, the longer he or she was exposed to a higher level of risk! Therefore, common sense dictates that a fugitive slave would seek the shortest possible route (Straight Line) to the Mason-Dixon Line.

I pose this question: Would it make sense for fugitive slaves from eastern counties in Virginia take the extra risk of traveling hundreds of miles through a slave state with rugged and hostile terrain to reach the Ohio River, when there were closer Underground Railroad routes through Pennsylvania and other non-slave states that rant toward Canada ? Still I recognize that there were enough exceptions to this analogy to make note, that there indeed were fugitive slaves who did travel all the way from eastern counties in Virginia to the Ohio River! But this was an exception!

Henry Robert Burke