Baumgartner, Alice L.
South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War
Basic Books (New York)
2020
OUR SYNOPSIS: Alice L. Baumgartner presents the stories of the roughly 3,000 to 5,000 self-liberating enslaved people who fled from the United States to Mexico (a.k.a. New Spain, which became independent Mexico in 1821) from the early nineteenth century until 1867. Despite their relatively small numbers, she convincingly demonstrates the historical significance of southern runaways, who took advantage of the relative legal freedom available to them in Mexico. She argues that their flight fostered sectional conflict in the U.S. that called into question the future of American slavery and led to the Civil War. Without any substantial equivalent to the Underground Railroad network on the Mexico route, these people largely forged their own paths to freedom.
BIG QUESTIONS:
How does Baumgartner’s transnational framing impact your historical thinking about slavery?
Did continued U.S. adherence to slavery motivate or impact Mexico’s anti-slavery position?
How did northern and southern runaways differ in their relation to the U.S. government?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“This book tells the story of enslaved people like George and James Frisby, the law by which they claimed their freedom in Mexico, and the crisis that they provoked in the antebellum United States. It begins in the early nineteenth century, with the United States Congress caught up in debates over slavery and the rebels in Mexico fighting for their independence from Spain. It ends in 1867, when civil wars in Mexico and the United States had concluded and both countries began to take up the question of what freedom meant in the wake of emancipation.” (7)
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