The noblest endeavor in the nation's history both in colonial times and after nationhood, the nation's Underground Railroad existed for 280 years - more than a quarter of a millennium - from 1585 when the first enslaved people from Africa arrived in the New World at the Spanish settlement of Saint Augustine, Florida, to the end of the Civil War in 1865. The inception of the Underground Railroad would have been when an enslaved person first escaped from the Saint Augustine colony and was aided by some other person, most likely a Native American.

Some historians count as the first written reference to what became known as the Underground Railroad George Washington's letter of April 12, 1786, to William Morris of Philadelphia recounting Quaker assistance to a freedom seeker escaped from Washington's friend, Mr. Dalby of Alexandria, Virginia. "In another letter, written to William Drayton on November 20, 1786, Washington complains that he had apprehended one of Drayton's runaway slaves, but when he sent the slave under guard to Baltimore to be reunited with Drayton, the slave escaped and was aided in this by some sort of escape network." So, the man later called the father of his country was not only an enslaver himself but a slave catcher.

The long-lived, ubiquitous clandestine operation which came to be known as the Underground Railroad did not even have a name for 250 years until the 1830s when participants in what then came to be known as the Underground Railroad took on the terminology of the young nation's new transforming technology, the railroad. Freedom seekers began to be referred to as passengers, their guides along the back ways and trails to freedom as conductors, and those who gave them shelter along the way as agents, station operators or station masters. And the entire operation, taking on the name of the whole technology, became known as the Underground Railroad. Though actual railroads were one means of transporting people to freedom, and the nature of the flight to freedom was "underground" by being clandestine, the Underground Railroad was not literally either a railroad or underground, nomenclature actually lost on some of today's American adults. Another signal event of the Underground Railroad occurring during the 1830s was the abolition of slavery by the British Empire including Canada in 1834, resulting in Canada and the British Caribbean islands becoming magnets for freedom seekers from the United States. Indeed, after the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act which required that United States citizens anywhere assist in the apprehension of runaways, Canada became the true safe haven for freedom seekers until the end of the Civil War.

The Underground Railroad's reason for existence vanished at the end of the Civil War with the abolition of slavery, though many of the old Underground Railroad routes and safe-houses must have continued to be used by people migrating north. It is likely, too, that these migrants continued to be assisted after 1865 by people who had served as conductors and safe-house operators on the Underground Railroad. No one has yet devised an accurate means of estimating the numbers of Freedom Seekers, conductors or safe-house operators. The estimates of the number of freedom seekers run from the tens of thousands to the low millions with the truth being perhaps somewhere in the mid six figures.

One author has aptly called the Underground Railroad the war for the soul of the nation. During its entire 280-year existence, every American - black, white, Native American and others - knew of slavery, that all enslaved people wanted freedom, that some enslaved people would risk all to break for freedom if the chance arose, and that others in defiance of law and custom would aid them in their journeys north. All of this was part of the fabric of daily life for more than a quarter of a millennium and thus was ingrained as a deep part of the very consciousness of Americans. In the nation's clearest historical example of the struggle of good versus evil, the Underground Railroad and the brave souls who participated in it stood in defiant opposition to slavery and won the war for the soul of America.