Journey to Freedom
Uncovering the Grayson Sisters' Escape from Nebraska Territory
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2025 Nebraska Book Award
Finalist for the 2025 Midwest Book Award
In late November of 1858 two enslaved Black women—Celia Grayson, age twenty-two, and Eliza Grayson, age twenty—escaped the Stephen F. Nuckolls household in southeastern Nebraska. John Williamson, a man of African American and Cherokee descent from Iowa, guided them through the dark to the Missouri River, where they boarded a skiff and crossed the icy waters, heading for their first stop on the Underground Railroad at Civil Bend, Iowa.
In Journey to Freedom Gail Shaffer Blankenau provides the first detailed history of Black enslavement in Nebraska Territory and the escape of these two enslaved Black women from Nebraska City. Poised on the “frontier,” the Graysons’ escape demonstrated that unique opportunities beckoned at the confluence of Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas, and their actions challenged slavery’s tentative expansion into the West and its eventual demise in an era of territorial fluidity. Their escape and the violence that followed prompted considerable debate across the country and led to the Nebraska legislature’s move to prohibit slavery. Drawing on multiple collections, records, and slave narratives, Journey to Freedom sheds light on the Graysons’ courage and agency as they became high-profile figures in the national debate between proslavery and antislavery factions in the antebellum period.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The bold wintertime escape of two enslaved sisters and the major role their story played in national tensions leading to the Civil War is painstakingly pieced together in this revelatory debut account from historian Blankenau. In 1858, with the help of local abolitionists, Celia and Eliza Grayson fled their enslaver Stephen Nuckholls's home in Nebraska City and crossed the Missouri River into neighboring Iowa, a free state, where for over a week they hid in the abolitionist towns of Civil Bend and Tabor as proslavery mobs crossed the border in pursuit, ransacking homes and lighting prairie fires to prevent the sisters from traveling clandestinely by night. The conflict made national headlines, provoking debate about the unclear status of slavery in the Nebraska Territory (officially neither permitted nor banned, but in practice widespread). Celia and Eliza eventually made it across Iowa and into Illinois, but in 1860 Nuckholls and his henchmen tracked down Eliza on the streets of Chicago and attempted to drag her into a carriage. A crowd formed to heckle the kidnappers, and an abolitionist lawyer began throwing punches. Eliza was arrested for "disturbing the peace," and officials made plans to return her to Nebraska, but during a prisoner transfer, she was forcibly liberated by "Underground Railroad agents." Blankenau paints a remarkable portrait of antebellum turmoil. It's a vital resurfacing of a largely forgotten story.
