The Underground Railroad and the Struggle Against Slavery

The heart of the Underground Railroad beats with the energy and determination of the enslaved who chose to flee slavery and the many people, black and white, who aided them. The four stories told here examine the motives of those who fled by looking at their actions and suggest ways to measure the political impact of their actions and how they influenced the debate over the future of slavery in that critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Stories like these can tell us a good deal about how the subjects thought of themselves and what possibly motivated them to act. They provide the historian with an opportunity to examine the lives of those who, outside of what they did, have left us few records. The choice of stories reflects what I think is a new approach to the history of the Underground Railroad. This is concerned with those slaves who, acting on their own, took the initiative to leave; what assistance they may have got from family and friends, free and enslaved, black and white; the possible political impact of their actions locally at the sites of conflict in free states and abroad; and the extent to which those committed to the destruction of slavery went south to entice and encourage the enslaved to flee.

Chose · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Underground Railroad · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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