Tens of thousands of enslaved African Americans surreptitiously traveled the Underground Railroad north toward freedom, bravely risking re-enslavement, torture, and even death if caught. Several routes passed through Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from slave-holding Kentucky. At some point in the mid-1860s—likely after the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act in June 1864—this group of formerly enslaved people gathered with Quaker abolitionist Levi Coffin in the Cincinnati studio of James Presley Ball, one of the period’s most prominent African American photographers. Frederick Douglass declared Ball’s photography “one of the best answers to the charge of natural inferiority we have lately met with.”