Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Underground Railroad is at once one of the best known and least understood aspects in the history of American slavery, but Pulitzer Prize winner Foner (The Fiery Trial) makes expert use of an unusual primary source to illuminate the workings of this secret system. He focuses on the antebellum accounts of Sydney Howard Gay, a Manhattan newspaper editor, abolitionist sympathizer, and Underground Railroad participant, whose "record of fugitives" sheds light on the experiences of more than 200 enslaved men and women who passed through New York City. The accounts also offer fascinating glimpses of the lives of individual fugitive slaves, including Simon Hill, who walked from southern Virginia to Philadelphia, and Winnie Patsy, who with her young daughter spent five months hiding in a dark, unventilated crawl space outside Norfolk, Va. Foner shows how Gay's network functioned on a practical level, helping fugitives to move from one safe space to another along the East Coast often to Canada and he emphasizes the crucial role played by African-Americans themselves, from dockworkers to clergymen, in helping fugitives to freedom. The Underground Railroad is much mythologized but not widely understood; Foner's gripping account of slaves' struggles to free themselves reveals the immense risks they, and their sympathizers, took to escape bondage.
