South to Freedom
Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A “gripping and poignant” (Wall Street Journal) account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico
The 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, prize-winning 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 an essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.
Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
Winner of the California Book Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Caughey Western History Prize
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Nonfiction
Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
Finalist for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. After Mexico gained its independence in 1821, the country's leaders enacted a series of reforms to bring slavery to a gradual end and in 1837 abolished slavery altogether. (Baumgartner notes that in parts of Mexico, "indentured servitude sometimes amounted to slavery in all but name.") Though far fewer American slaves escaped to freedom across the southern border than on the Underground Railroad to the North, Baumgartner writes, Mexico's laws contributed to the drive to annex Texas in 1845, which in turn gave rise to the free-soil movement and led to the founding of the Republican Party and its antislavery agenda. Baumgartner draws incisive parallels between U.S. and Mexican history on issues of race, nationalism, and imperialism, and recounts surprising stories of escapees, including a group of Black Seminoles welcomed as colonists in the border state of Coahuila, as well as 28 African Americans who fought with an artillery company in Tampico in the Mexican-American War and received their naturalization certificates from the Mexican president himself. This vivid history of "slavery's other border" delivers a valuable new perspective on the Civil War.
Customer Reviews
Excellent study on the realities of Mexico
Carefully written this book describes for me how easily the “truth” is manipulated to serve the greedy interest of the antebellum society and their holding of the slavery that put the United States as nation in the wrong side of history. Lesson that we must learn on the current information manipulation ambient we live today.