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Destination, Freedom
Review by John J. Miller, Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2005
ON A COLD winter night in 1838, a woman carrying an infant fled across the frozen Ohio River. The ice had started to thaw, but she could hear the dogs of her pursuers barking in the distance and decided to push forward. Cracks opened beneath her twice, drenching her in the frigid water. When she finally reached the far shore, she somehow mustered enough strength to stumble to a farmhouse. She and her baby warmed themselves before a fire, received a change of clothes and were led to another home before sunrise.
It was their first stop on the Underground Railroad. Harriet Beecher Stowe eventually heard the story and turned it into one of the most memorable episodes in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” In the novel, the woman was called Eliza. In real life, none of the people who helped “Eliza” that night knew her name.
That was typical—and it presents a mighty challenge to historians. The network of abolitionists devoted to helping slaves find their freedom wasn’t described as “underground” for nothing. Records of its operations are scarce. Frederick Douglass urged his allies to keep mum. “Let us not hold the light by which [our enemies] can trace the footprints of our flying brother,” he said.
Yet in “Bound for Canaan” (Amistad, 540 pages, $27.95), Fergus M. Bordewich illuminates the lives and times of the Underground Railroad’s stationmasters, conductors and passengers. He has written an excellent book that is probably as close to a definitive history as we’re likely to see.
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