The best known anti-slavery novel of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (Stowe, 1852), would not have been such a tour de force had its author not relied on the documented real-life stories of the fugitives that had escaped slavery and lived to recount what they had endured; indeed, the vast majority of antebellum slave narratives published in the nineteenth century were by fugitives - enslaved men and women who had risked their lives to break free from bondage in the decades before the Civil War. Most had crossed into the free states from the Upper South, as it was a far shorter distance to travel from Maryland or Virginia than it was from the Deep South plantations and cities of Alabama,  
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[^0]:    1 See Ernest, J., 2007, p. 218 and Still, W., 1872. William Still, a free black man, gathered many such stories through his work with the Underground Railroad, a nineteenth-century network of activists assisting fugitives from slavery in their escape. The largest collection of separately published North American slave narratives, produced by William Andrews, is available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/index.html