With arguably more precious cargo, no trains, and led by Harriet Tubman, these elements laid down the foundation to the famous “Underground Railroad”. After analyzing the book Harriet Tubman Conductor on the Underground Railroad by Ann Petry, one can start to pick out bits and pieces of the author bias. The topics that will be analyzed will be why the author may have used bias toward the North and will end with a short summary.
One of the first ways the author shows her bias is when she talks about the North. The author states “All Harriet wanted was for African slaves to have as an equal chance as any other white person” (Petry 88). Petry might have included this text in her book because she too was an African American struggling to get her individual rights because she was living through the Civil Rights Movement. Petry also states “Harriet was now free and safe and could choose what she wanted to do with her life” (Petry 122), This quote makes the North seem like a paradise to runaway slaves but they soon found out it wasn’t as safe as they thought. The North was safer then the South but a new law made it hard for slaves to live in the North and this law was called “The Fugitive Slave Act”. This act allowed slave hunters to travel to the North and return runaway slaves back to the South to their rightful owners. In some cases Northern citizens would turn in runaway slaves because there was a bounty on the slaves’ head and the citizen would claim the reward.
In the book Harriet Tubman Conductor of the Underground Railroad Ann Petry does a really good job by keeping the reader interested. She does this by starting off the book by telling about Harriet Tubman’s early life as a slave, then Petry slowly progresses to when Harriet was about a teenager and she becomes a free African American by using the Underground Railroad. The last part of the book talks about