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South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

2020

Synopsis

The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837.

In South to Freedom, historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.

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Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland

Born into slavery, by the 1840s Thomas Smallwood was free, self-educated, and working as a shoemaker a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. He recruited a young white activist, Charles Torrey, and together they began to organize mass escapes from Washington, Baltimore, and surrounding counties to freed...

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The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

Sarah and Angelina Grimke―the Grimke sisters―are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still rea...

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Latest News

February 28th, 2021

A Chapter In U.S. History Often Ignored: The Flight Of Runaway Slaves To Mexico

February 6th, 2021

She was the first Black person freed by Lincoln, long before his presidency. Her grave was paved over and her story hardly known.

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