| |
Review: Civil War History
“The first truly comprehensive treatment of the
Underground Railroad in over a century, and by far the best.”
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD is the collective term for antebellum grassroots
networks that aided perhaps 100,000 African-Americans escape from
slavery in the South to (limited) freedom in the North and Canada.
Interest among scholars and readers in this phenomenon does not rival
interest in the Revolutionary generation. But wide-spread engagement
with underground railroad lore is evident in an upsurge in books and
articles published on the subject, in local and national organizations
devoted to investigating it, and in the recent opening in Cincinnati of
the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
Anyone who shares this interest will welcome Fergus M. Bordewich’s Bound
for Canaan. It is the first truly comprehensive treatment of the
Underground Railroad in over a century, and by far the best. As
Bordewich notes, there was never a monolithic, nationally organized
system for aiding escaping slaves. Rather a variety of individuals,
families, and communities cooperated. Bordewich focuses on participants
ranging from former slaves to millionaires, from Quaker pacifists to
militants like Harriet Tubman and John Brown. He describes dramatic
incidents, including what became the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
“Eliza” escape across a frozen Ohio River and violent rescues of
fugitives from state and federal authorities. Distinguishing between
slaves who escaped on their own and organized efforts to help them, he
suggests that the movement began among Quakers in Pennsylvania and North
Carolina during the early 1800s and spread to the Ohio River Valley
during the 1820s.
Bordewich contends that by the late 1830s regional networks, maintained
by black and white northerners, began on a regular basis to pass
fugitive slaves northward along organized routes. Although he does not
mention it, this was also the time that abolitionists believed the
underground railroad began. It reached a peak during the 1850s as,
stimulated by a biracial northern reaction to the intrusive new Fugitive
Slave Law and spreading antislavery politics, it became ubiquitous
across the North. Bordewich does not address Keith P. Griffler’s
plausible thesis in Front Line of Freedom: African Amerians and the
Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley (2004) that black
communities on the north shore of the Ohio River took an early lead in
helping fugitives. Bordewich nevertheless emphasizes throughout Bound
for Canaan that the Underground Railroad was a cooperative undertaking
among escaping slaves and sympathetic black and white activists.
Bound for Canaan is designed for a popular audience, and Bordewich
presents his material as a series of stories centered on an escapees or
those who assisted them. The style is impressionistic rather than
analytical, and readers may grow weary as similar stories unfold. Yet
the book is a virtual encyclopedia of information concerning the
underground railroad and related topics ranging from resistance against
slave catchers to black settlement in Canada. It is also serves as a
history of the antislavery movement from the perspective of the
underground railroad. Bordewich provides ample biographical, social, and
political background information for each incident. Although he relies
heavily on secondary sources—as might be expected in such comprehensive
account—he frequently cites primary documents, revealing an impressive
range of archival research. Because his scholarship is almost always
current, the book will be very useful to historians. They may not like
his imprecise system of notation based on page numbers and selected
phrases. Bordewich, however, makes better use of this system than do
others who employ it.
Some historians, influenced by Larry Gara’s The Liberty Line: The Legend
of the Underground Railroad (1961), regard organized assistance to
escaping slaves as either mythical or an essentially black undertaking.
Gara himself aimed to correct an earlier over emphasis of white
initiative in helping slaves escape. During the past decade numerous
local and regional studies have portrayed biracial underground railroad
networks in which slaves took an active and, indeed, decisive part.
Bordewich’s excellent comprehensive account is a capstone for these
studies. But a major methodological difficulty remains. Helping people
escape slavery was an illegal, often clandestine, activity, carried out
by people who usually did not keep records. Where he can, Bordewich
relies on contemporary documents or on secondary studies based on such
documents. But, like others before him, he frequently relies on
reminiscences, autobiographies, memoirs, local histories, and interviews
produced long after the underground railroad ceased to exist. As Gara
pointed out, such memories can be self-serving and untrustworthy. They
can also be very imprecise concerning chronology. Bordewich acknowledges
this difficulty and treats such material carefully. Yet more may be
understood as sophisticated approaches to memory are applied to these
difficult sources.
This review by Stanley Harrold of South Carolina State University originally appeared in Civil War History journal.
|
|
