smithsonianlibraries:
An especially captivating illustration in the book The Underground Rail Road by William Still is that of [Ann] Maria Weems, whose story of escaping slavery included her dressing as a male coach driver. She had made her escape from slave trader Charles Price in Montgomery County, MD some time after he refused to let an abolitionist pay for her freedom like had been done for her mother. After weeks spent in nearby Washington, D.C., her path on the Underground Railroad was plotted: she would pose as the teenage male driver of a “Dr. H,” meeting him in front of the White House (that was then occupied by the ardently anti-abolitionist Franklin Pierce) and accompany him in his travels North through Maryland to Philadelphia, posing as his slave, Joe Wright. From there, Weems would make her way to Canada and freedom..
Read more accounts of the Underground Railroad in The underground rail road: a record of facts, authentic narratives, letters, &c., narrating the hardships, hair-breadth escapes, and death struggles of the slaves in their efforts for freedom, as related by themselves and others or witnessed by the author by William Still (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872)
For further reading on Weems, there are a couple more recent books in our collection that you might find interesting. Clicking the titles will take you to Worldcat, where hopefully a copy exists for you in a nearby library:
Stealing Freedom by Elisa Lynn Carbone (New York: Knopf, 1998)
A Shadow on the Household: One Enslaved Family’s Incredible Struggle for Freedom by Bryan Price (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009)