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Why did Harriet Tubman escort her escaped slaves to St. Catherines instead of stopping in Albany during the 1850s?
Quick answer:
Harriet Tubman felt compelled to escort the escaped slaves all the way to St. Catherines in Canada due to the United States' Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which required northern states to return fugitive slaves back to their owners. Canada has previously outlawed slavery, which made them a safer destination than any northern state, and St. Catherines had a welcoming community that opposed slavery.
As the other answers here describe, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 meant that there was nowhere safe for an escaped slave anywhere in the United States. That is why Harriet Tubman had to take her runaway slaves all the way to St. Catherines in Canada.
Slavery was legally abolished in Canada in 1834. At the time, Canada was still part of the British colonies. Although they were major players in the slave trade in the previous century, abolitionist sentiments became the norm in Britain by the early 1800s. They abolished the slave trade in 1807 and outlawed slavery throughout its entire dominion in 1833 (the law went into effect the following year).
When this happened, Canada became a safe refuge for escaped slaves. However, before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, most escaped slaves were content to find a new home in the northern states of the United...
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States. After 1850, many were compelled to head further north to Canada. Situated just over the Niagra River in Ontario, St. Catherines soon became Harriet Tubman's destination. There was a relatively welcoming community of people opposed to slavery there.
In fact, St. Catherines had been a destination for escaped slaves long before Harriet Tubman. The Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada of 1793 outlawed the importation of slaves to the territory. It did not free existing Canadian slaves, but it meant new arrivals could not be enslaved. As early as the 1820s, St. Catherines' location near the US border made it an attractive destination for fugitive slaves. When slavery was finally abolished in all of Canada in 1834, a thriving black community developed in this town. This made it even more attractive to Harriet Tubman and other conductors on the Underground Railroad.
References
In the 1850s, the Fugitive Slave law was in effect. This made it legal for enslaved people who had fled to the northern, non-slave states such as New York to be recaptured and returned to their "owners" in the southern (slave) states. The Dred Scott decision confirmed the notion that an escaped slave could not be free simply by virtue of being on free-state ground.
The Fugitive Slave Law represented an enormous extension of federal power in favor of the slavery oligarchy of the South. It is the ultimate irony that the South would later claim that the Civil War was fought to defend "state's rights" in the abstract against the encroachment of federal power, when the slaveholders had been all to eager in the case of the Fugitive Slave Law to use federal law to protect the institution of slavery. So, Tubman and others who facilitated the escape of enslaved people realized that those people would only secure their freedom if they were escorted across the northern border into Canada or somewhere else outside the U.S.