An interesting story in The NY Times  Here’s a free gift link to the article

”Thomas Smallwood was a busy man in the summer of 1842. Born into slavery outside Washington, D.C., in 1801, he had largely educated himself and bought his own freedom 11 years before. By day, he ran a shoemaking business from the little house he shared with his wife and four children a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. By night, he was organizing daring, dangerous escapes from slavery — not by ones and twos but by the wagonload — from Washington, Baltimore and the surrounding counties.

Yet somehow he found time every week or two to write a new dispatch for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany, N.Y., a stop for many of those he was sending north. Written at considerable risk, his letters mercilessly mocked enslavers and celebrated those fleeing from them, using everyone’s real names — except for his own, which he hid behind a pseudonym. And one day early that August he took up his pen and made literary history, becoming the first to use a phrase that would resound through the subsequent decades of slavery and to the present day: underground railroad.…”  Here’s a free gift link to read the rest of the article