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Author: Laura Hamilton Waxman
Publisher: Lerner Publications
Published: 2011-01-01
Total Pages: 52
ISBN-13: 0761352295
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Looks at the network of safe havens and routes that were set up to help American slaves escape to the north and achieve their freedom.
Author: Laura Hamilton Waxman
Publisher: Lerner Publications
Published: 2011-01-01
Total Pages: 52
ISBN-13: 0761372369
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the early 1800s, many black slaves in the southern states began to risk their lives to gain freedom in the North. They escaped from plantations with no money to buy food and no maps to help them find their way. They could travel only at night. If runaway slaves were caught, they could be beaten to death. Still, many slaves tried to flee. Slave catchers chased them, but the runaways seemed to disappear into thin air—or through a secret underground escape route. So how did slaves escape from their masters? Where did they hide? How did the slaves communicate with each other and the people who were helping them? Discover the facts about the brave men and women who formed the Underground Railroad. Learn how their secret work changed the lives of thousands of slaves.
Author: Alice L Baumgartner
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-11-10
Total Pages: 362
ISBN-13: 1541617770
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico. 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, historianAlice 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.
Author: Walter T. McDonald
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society
Published: 2012-05-01
Total Pages: 172
ISBN-13: 0870205692
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Shall a man be dragged back to Slavery from our Free Soil, without an open trial of his right to Liberty?" —Handbill circulated in Milwaukee on March 11, 1854 In Finding Freedom, Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald provide readers with the first narrative account of the life of Joshua Glover, the runaway slave who was famously broken out of jail by thousands of Wisconsin abolitionists in 1854. Employing original research, the authors chronicle Glover's days as a slave in St. Louis, his violent capture and thrilling escape in Milwaukee, his journey on the Underground Railroad, and his 33 years of freedom in rural Canada. While Jackson and McDonald demonstrate how the catalytic "Glover incident" captured national attention—pitting the proud state of Wisconsin against the Supreme Court and adding fuel to the pre-Civil War fire—their primary focus is on the ordinary citizens, both black and white, with whom Joshua Glover interacted. A bittersweet story of bravery and compassion, Finding Freedom provides the first full picture of the man for whom so many fought, and around whom so much history was made.
Author: Jean M. Humez
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2006-02-06
Total Pages: 489
ISBN-13: 0299191230
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Harriet Tubman’s name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children’s literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. Jean M. Humez’s comprehensive Harriet Tubman is both an important biographical overview based on extensive new research and a complete collection of the stories Tubman told about her life—a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources. This book will become a landmark resource for scholars, historians, and general readers interested in slavery, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and African American women. Born in slavery in Maryland in or around 1820, Tubman drew upon deep spiritual resources and covert antislavery networks when she escaped to the north in 1849. Vowing to liberate her entire family, she made repeated trips south during the 1850s and successfully guided dozens of fugitives to freedom. During the Civil War she was recruited to act as spy and scout with the Union Army. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she worked to support an extended family and in her later years founded a home for the indigent aged. Celebrated by her primarily white antislavery associates in a variety of private and public documents from the 1850s through the 1870s, she was rediscovered as a race heroine by woman suffragists and the African American women’s club movement in the early twentieth century. Her story was used as a key symbolic resource in education, institutional fundraising, and debates about the meaning of "race" throughout the twentieth century. Humez includes an extended discussion of Tubman’s work as a public performer of her own life history during the nearly sixty years she lived in the north. Drawing upon historiographical and literary discussion of the complex hybrid authorship of slave narrative literature, Humez analyzes the interactive dynamic between Tubman and her interviewers. Humez illustrates how Tubman, though unable to write, made major unrecognized contributions to the shaping of her own heroic myth by early biographers like Sarah Bradford. Selections of key documents illustrate how Tubman appeared to her contemporaries, and a comprehensive list of primary sources represents an important resource for scholars.
Author: Frederick Douglass
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2017-10-24
Total Pages: 32
ISBN-13: 9781978444942
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland around February 1818. He escaped in 1838, but in each of the three accounts he wrote of his life he did not give any details of how he gained his freedom lest slaveholders use the information to prevent other slaves from escaping, and to prevent those who had helped him from being punished.
Author: Laura Hamilton Waxman
Publisher: LernerClassroom
Published: 2011-01-01
Total Pages: 52
ISBN-13: 076137129X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Looks at the network of safe havens and routes that were set up to help American slaves escape to the north and achieve their freedom.
Author: Kathy Tilghman
Publisher:
Published: 2015-09-23
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781504337397
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An immigrant escapes the Irish potato famine only to find fresh horrors in America in this debut novel. During the winter of 1848, Lord Hargrove Bromwell of Clonaugh, Ireland, is losing his fortune to the potato blight. He decides to oust his tenant farmers, paying their ways to America rather than keeping them on land they can't afford. Twelve-year-old Sarah Laughlin and her mother, Anna, sail for Baltimoretowne in the United States, where Sarah's grandfather Andrew Browne awaits them. Sadly, Anna doesn't survive the ship's unsanitary conditions, and Sarah meets Andrew with her new friends, Joseph and Mrs. Connor, who helped her through the rough trans-Atlantic journey. Soon after arriving, she's offered kitchen work at the Kensington Plantation, where Andrew also works. There, she meets Matilde, a slave her own age. Sarah can't understand why slaves don't earn wages or how they can be considered someone's property. She secretly teaches Matilde to read, flouting the law. Later, she overhears her grandfather speaking with abolitionists about helping escaped slaves from Richmond, Virginia, travel north. Sarah's desire to help Matilde and other slaves escape quickly builds into an irresistible force.
Author: Eric Foner
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-01-19
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 0393244385
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: Damian Alan Pargas
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2020-09-08
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 0813065798
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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
