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South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War
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About This Book
A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to MexicoThe 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.
Reviews
"Baumgartner describes, with skill and great sensitivity, the experiences of those enslaved men and women who, in resisting their oppression, bravely quit the United States altogether."
"to the Republic of Mexico before the Civil War ..."
"It is a must-read for anyone seeking a fuller awareness of our history."
"Baumgartner, a history professor at the University of Southern California, debuts with an eye-opening and immersive account of how Mexico's antislavery laws helped push America to civil war ..."
"Baumgartner brings to life the stories of slaves who escaped to Mexico and how they made it to freedom ..."
"presents little-known, but astounding narratives of Black Americans such as Dupuis who claimed freedom in Mexico in the antebellum period ..."
"Significantly, [the] author take[s] the long tradition of Black resistance as a given; the book [is] not [a] study of racial exceptionalism, but of Black political agency as a persistent current ..."
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