The Fugitive's Gibraltar

The Fugitive's Gibraltar
Title The Fugitive's Gibraltar PDF eBook
Author Kathryn Grover
Publisher Univ of Massachusetts Press
Pages 376
Release 2001
Genre History
ISBN

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"In this study, Kathryn Grover addresses these questions. She documents fugitive traffic in and around New Bedford and analyzes it within several spheres - the origins, persistence, and growth of the city's African American community; the place of Quaker ideology in shaping the extent and character of local opposition to slavery; and the role of the city's coastal trading and whaling industries in the presence of fugitives in the port. Through an intensive examination of demographic data, fugitive narratives, Underground Railroad accounts, and correspondence, Grover concludes that the issues of helping fugitives in fact divided white abolitionists at the same time that it strengthened the resolve of abolitionists of color."--BOOK JACKET.

The Dream Dancers: Volume One

The Dream Dancers: Volume One
Title The Dream Dancers: Volume One PDF eBook
Author Spencer Jourdain
Publisher Lulu.com
Pages 282
Release 2016
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 0976523264

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In writing (vol. 2), Journey to the Promised Land, Jourdain discovered that, like oral histories and stories, the black Negro spirituals, country blues, and worksongs sung by Tommy McLennon, Blind Willie McTell, Misssippi John Hurt, Huddie Ledbetter and others, lent much deeper understanding of the history-changing post/Civil War era.

The Captive's Quest for 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 532
Release 2018-01-25
Genre History
ISBN 1108314104

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This magisterial study, ten years in the making by one of the field's most distinguished historians, will be the first to explore the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, Richard J. M. Blackett traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves.

Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of 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

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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.

The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad
Title The Underground Railroad PDF eBook
Author Kerry Walters
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Pages 241
Release 2012-03-09
Genre History
ISBN 1598846485

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Full of true stories more dramatic than any fiction, The Underground Railroad: A Reference Guide offers a fresh, revealing look at the efforts of hundreds of dedicated persons-white and black, men and women, from all walks of life-to help slave fugitives find freedom in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The Underground Railroad provides the richest portrayal yet of the first large scale act of interracial collaboration in the United States, mapping out the complex network of routes and safe stations that made escape from slavery in the American South possible. Kerry Walters' stirring account ranges from the earliest acts of slave resistance and the rise of the Abolitionist movement, to the establishment of clandestine "liberty lines" through the eastern and then-western regions of the Union and ultimately to Canada. Separating fact from legend, Walters draws extensively on first-person accounts of those who made the Railroad work, those who tried to stop it, and those who made the treacherous journey to freedom-including Eliza Harris and Josiah Henson, the real-life "Eliza" and "Uncle Tom" from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In the Shadow of Freedom

In the Shadow of Freedom
Title In the Shadow of Freedom PDF eBook
Author Paul Finkelman
Publisher Ohio University Press
Pages 257
Release 2011-05-03
Genre History
ISBN 082141934X

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Few images of early America were more striking, and jarring, than that of slaves in the capital city of the world’s most important free republic. Black slaves served and sustained the legislators, bureaucrats, jurists, cabinet officials, military leaders, and even the presidents who lived and worked there. While slaves quietly kept the nation’s capital running smoothly, lawmakers debated the place of slavery in the nation, the status of slavery in the territories newly acquired from Mexico, and even the legality of the slave trade in itself. In the Shadow of Freedom, with essays by some of the most distinguished historians in the nation, explores the twin issues of how slavery made life possible in the District and how lawmakers in the District regulated slavery in the nation.

The First Reconstruction

The First Reconstruction
Title The First Reconstruction PDF eBook
Author Van Gosse
Publisher UNC Press Books
Pages 759
Release 2021-01-05
Genre Social Science
ISBN 1469660113

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It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution's ratification through Abraham Lincoln's election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.