South to Freedom

It is well known that the quest for freedom in the nineteeth-century United States sent enslaved people fleeing across the northern border and into Canada. But as Alice Baumgartner argues in her remarkable new book, their flight also pointed directly south, into Mexico and into a country that protected their freedom and threatened the futures of their former owners. Between three thousand and five thousand enslaved people made their way into Mexico in the first half of the nineteenth century. There they found a place where, despite frequent political upheavals, a steady commitment to anti-slavery produced a series of gradual emancipation laws beginning in 1824. An egalitarian new constitution in 1857 eventually codified abolition and enshrined the “freedom principle”—that anyone who stepped foot on Mexican soil would be recognized as free. And yet, the radical and persistent nature of Mexican anti-slavery has for too long been unappreciated, by both the...

Constitution · Economic history · Economics · Emancipation · Futures contract · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies