(low-key piano music) (soft despondent piano music) - Wisconsin becomes important because African Americans come to Wisconsin to escape through the Underground Railroad.

And the reason why they came here is 'cause our proximity to Canada, and I think because we had some righteous abolitionists here as well.

- We live in a very secular society today, by comparison.

But everyone in those days had religion, or at least the pretense of religion, and they believed that higher principles actually were in play, in terms even of a political legislation.

That politics just wasn't the art of the possible.

Politics should also be the art of the moral.

And that morality did spring from religion.

The idea of nature and nature as God leads to a set of natural principles, natural law.

And in natural law, there is a right to be free, a right to self-determination, a right of the individual.

Those who are active in religion often put the religion into politics.

- The Underground Railroad was not just White people.

In fact, Black Americans took incredible risks to help their fellow people.

These are people who are, oftentimes, working on their own, but they're informal.

They're religious leaders.

They're people who have high moral standing that are working under the cover of darkness.

We all know about Harriet Tubman and our many trips to the South, but Black Americans played a huge role, whether that be Frederick Douglass.

They were oftentimes conductors who put their lives at risk, put their families' lives at risk.

They fought back, and many times what was at stake was higher for them than White Americans.

- It's partly the cultural ethos.

It's partly the ethnic makeup.

It's partly the circumstances of how people had arrived here in our state.

And all of that made Wisconsin a very different place from some other areas.

And all of that is intrinsic to the anti-slavery movement.

(soft piano music)