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Review: The New Yorker
IN THE FIRST years of the nineteenth century, most runaway slaves
didn't get very far: “Slave holders sought to impress their slaves with
a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory,” Frederick Douglass
wrote, and, given the reach of fugitive slave laws, “the real distance
was great enough.” Those who did make it almost always had the help of
Quakers, free blacks, and other opponents of slavery, who composed what
Bordewich calls a “national geography of freedom.” This engrossing
account of the Underground Railroad describes how scattered
“experimental, impulsive” acts (for instance, defending a fugitive from
a patrol) became an organized operation involving thousands of
stationmasters, conductors, and spies. Some of the less known, and more
remarkable, stories here involve the blacks workers on the Railroad,
such as Arnold Gragston, who, while remaining a slave, ferried hundreds
of runaways across the Ohio River until 1863, when he became his own
last passenger.
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