The Roots of the Emancipation Circuit

The common wind was a surprisingly effective pattern of communications among enslaved people that could pass news across plantations, counties, regions. You tell this remarkable story from 1864 when Union officer Lieutenant Hannibal A. Johnson and three other four fellow officers escaped from a Confederate prison camp. They knock on slave quarter doors and then were passed from plantation to plantation for I don't know how this incredible distance by enslaved people until they made it back to Union lines. The slaves in Tennessee got those guys, I'm sorry, South Carolina they started in. They got them 500 miles away. That was the distance. And they got four white guys that far. Of course they were fleeing to the coastline but they had information