From Fugitive to Freedom
Title | From Fugitive to Freedom PDF eBook |
Author | Steven Otfinoski |
Publisher | Capstone |
Pages | 97 |
Release | 2017-01-01 |
Genre | Antislavery movements |
ISBN | 1515736369 |
In an immersive, exciting narrative nonfiction format, this powerful book follows a selection of people who experienced the Underground Railroad.
Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
Title | Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad PDF eBook |
Author | Eric Foner |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Pages | 320 |
Release | 2015-01-19 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0393244385 |
The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York—Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring—full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage—and significant—the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.
Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America
Title | Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America PDF eBook |
Author | Damian Alan Pargas |
Publisher | University Press of Florida |
Pages | 276 |
Release | 2020-09-08 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0813065798 |
This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different “spaces of freedom” they inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. North and South, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Using newspapers, advertisements, and new demographic data, contributors show how events like the Revolutionary War and westward expansion shaped the slave experience. Contributors investigate sites of formal freedom, where slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free, to determine the extent to which fugitive slaves experienced freedom in places like Canada while still being subject to racism. In sites of semiformal freedom, as in the northern United States, fugitives’ claims to freedom were precarious because state abolition laws conflicted with federal fugitive slave laws. Contributors show how local committees strategized to interfere with the work of slave catchers to protect refugees. Sites of informal freedom were created within the slaveholding South, where runaways who felt relocating to distant destinations was too risky formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations. These individuals procured false documents or changed their names to avoid detection and pass as free. The essays discuss slaves’ motivations for choosing these destinations, the social networks that supported their plans, what it was like to settle in their new societies, and how slave flight impacted broader debates about slavery. This volume redraws the map of escape and emancipation during this period, emphasizing the importance of place in defining the meaning and extent of freedom. Contributors: Kyle Ainsworth | Mekala Audain | Gordon S. Barker | Sylviane A. Diouf | Roy E. Finkenbine | Graham Russell Gao Hodges | Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie | Viola Franziska Müller | James David Nichols | Damian Alan Pargas | Matthew Pinsker A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller
From Fugitive to Freedom
Title | From Fugitive to Freedom PDF eBook |
Author | Steven Otfinoski |
Publisher | Capstone |
Pages | 113 |
Release | 2017-01-01 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 1515736040 |
In an immersive, exciting narrative nonfiction format, this powerful book follows a selection of people who experienced the Underground Railroad.
From Fugitive to Freedom
Title | From Fugitive to Freedom PDF eBook |
Author | Steven Otfinoski |
Publisher | Capstone |
Pages | 113 |
Release | 2017-01-01 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 1515736083 |
In an immersive, exciting narrative nonfiction format, this powerful book follows a selection of people who experienced the Underground Railroad.
Making Freedom
Title | Making Freedom PDF eBook |
Author | R. J. M. Blackett |
Publisher | UNC Press Books |
Pages | 137 |
Release | 2013-09-30 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1469608782 |
The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated action to aid in the recovery of runaway slaves and denied fugitives legal rights if they were apprehended, quickly became a focal point in the debate over the future of slavery and the nature of the union. In Making Freedom, R. J. M. Blackett uses the experiences of escaped slaves and those who aided them to explore the inner workings of the Underground Railroad and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, while shedding light on the political effects of slave escape in southern states, border states, and the North. Blackett highlights the lives of those who escaped, the impact of the fugitive slave cases, and the extent to which slaves planning to escape were aided by free blacks, fellow slaves, and outsiders who went south to entice them to escape. Using these stories of particular individuals, moments, and communities, Blackett shows how slave flight shaped national politics as the South witnessed slavery beginning to collapse and the North experienced a threat to its freedom.
The Captive's Quest for Freedom
Title | The Captive's Quest for Freedom PDF eBook |
Author | R. J. M. Blackett |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 531 |
Release | 2018-01-25 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1108418716 |
Examines the impact fugitive slaves had on the Fugitive Slave Law and the coming of the American Civil War.