I, too, see organization where none seemed to have existed - or earlier researchers did not notice an organized network where there was in fact one. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland into Delaware and New Jersey, and from the Eastern Shore to Baltimore, there are numerous networks that operated at various times and were run by different groups of people, or succeeding generations of families. I have noticed that quite a few runaway advertisements from the Eastern Shore during the late 18th century into the early 19th suggest a consistent path to New Jersey - and that white slaveholders were aware of it, though not, perhaps, the particular details of who and where.

By the time Tubman ran away (1849), she was able to tap into a very well organized network of mostly black, and some white, activists in Maryland and Delaware. She also tapped into a significant network of family and friends in Baltimore who were then living and working on the waterfront there. She was also the benficiary of the network that Chris Densmore just wrote about around Philadelphia and neighboring counties and towns. By the time she reached Central New York, she participated in a network that had also been operating for decades. Some of the people she connected to were formerly from the Eastern Shore of Maryland - runaways and free blacks who settled in that region (including Frederick Douglass).

The URR was organized in some areas, and it probably was, as we have seen repeatedly, centered on familial and social/religious relationships that did and could span generations and geography.

Kate Larson