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Gateway to freedom : the hidden history of the underground railroad / by Foner, Eric,1943-(CARDINAL)150964;
Includes bibliographical references and index.Introduction: rethinking the underground railroad -- Slavery and freedom in New York -- Origins of the underground railroad: The New York Vigilance Committee -- A patchwork system: the underground railroad in the 1840s -- The Fugitive Slave Law and the crisis of the Black community -- The metropolitan corridor: the underground railroad in the 1850s -- The record of fugitives: an account of runaway slaves in the 1850s -- The end of the underground railroad.Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner relates the dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom.This book tells 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. - Publisher.
Subjects: Abolitionists; Antislavery movements; Antislavery movements; Fugitive slaves; Fugitive slaves; Fugitive slaves; Underground Railroad.;
Available copies: 51 / Total copies: 56
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Slave escapes & the Underground Railroad in North Carolina / by Miller, Steve M.(CARDINAL)337417; Allen, J. Timothy(James Timothy),1959-(CARDINAL)309333;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 145-149) and index.The Underground Railroad : a confusing idea -- The Underground Railroad : background and definitions -- Runaways and the North Carolina law -- Who were the slaves? -- Quakers and the Underground Railroad -- William Still -- Austin Bearse, William Beard and William Mitchell -- The heroine of Edenton, Harriet Jacobs -- Runaways during the Civil War -- Appendix: Where to go.Quaker safe houses and freed slave communities were a fixture in North Carolina. The Coffin family in Greensboro helped develop safe zones and houses on the Underground Railroad in the 1800s. In the east, networks of freedmen and sympathizers aided slaves, hiding in remote locations such as the Dismal Swamp. In coastal towns like New Bern and Wilmington, slaves were secreted aboard ships in search of freedom along maritime routes. Authors Tim Allen and Steve Miller use harrowing firsthand accounts to investigate how African Americans escaped oppression in a dark chapter of Tarheel State history.
Subjects: Fugitive slaves; Underground Railroad;
Available copies: 29 / Total copies: 38
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Rush Home Road : a novel / by Lansens, Lori.(CARDINAL)664519;
Adelaide Shadd is a 70-year-old black woman who takes in five-year-old Sharla Cody when Sharla's "white trash" mother abandons her. As Addy turns Sharla from a malnourished, heedless child into a healthy, thoughtful girl, she recollects her own past. Addy grew up in Rusholme, a fictional cousin to the many Ontario communities founded by fugitive slaves brought north by the Underground Railroad. By 1908, when Addy is born, Rusholme is settled almost entirely by black farmers and is close to idyllic. But a rape and subsequent pregnancy force Addy to run away from Rusholme (she thinks of it as a command: "Rush home"), not to return for many years.
Subjects: Psychological fiction.; Domestic fiction.; Women, Black; Multiracial children; Abandoned children; Black people; Girls; Girls.;
Available copies: 11 / Total copies: 12
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River runs deep / by Bradbury, Jennifer(Jennifer A.),author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-320).Twelve-year-old Elias is sent to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky to fight a case of consumption--and ends up fighting for the lives of a secret community of escaped slaves traveling along the Underground Railroad.730LAccelerated Reader AR
Subjects: Fiction.; Tuberculosis; Slavery; Fugitive slaves; Underground Railroad; African Americans;
Available copies: 4 / Total copies: 5
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Shadrach Minkins : from fugitive slave to citizen / by Collison, Gary Lee,1947-(CARDINAL)192735;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-277) and index.On February 15, 1851, Shadrach Minkins was serving breakfast at a coffeehouse in Boston when history caught up with him. The first runaway to be arrested in New England under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, this illiterate black man from Virginia found himself the catalyst of one of the most dramatic episodes of rebellion and legal wrangling before the Civil War. In a remarkable effort of historical sleuthing, Gary Collison has recovered the true story of Shadrach Minkins' life and times and perilous flight. His book restores an extraordinary chapter to our collective history and at the same time offers a rare and engrossing picture of the life of an ordinary black man in nineteenth-century North America. As Minkins' journey from slavery to freedom unfolds, we see what day-to-day life was like for a slave in Norfolk, Virginia, for a fugitive in Boston, and for a free black man in Montreal. Collison recreates the drama of Minkins' arrest and his subsequent rescue by a band of black Bostonians, who spirited the fugitive to freedom in Canada. He shows us Boston's black community, moved to panic and action by the Fugitive Slave Law, and the previously unknown community established in Montreal by Minkins and other refugee blacks from the United States. And behind the scenes, orchestrating events from the disastrous Compromise of 1850 through the arrest of Minkins and the trial of his rescuers, is Daniel Webster, who, through the exigencies of his dimming political career, took the role of villain.
Subjects: Biographies.; Minkins, Shadrach.; Enslaved persons; Fugitive slaves; African Americans;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
On-line resources: Suggest title for digitization;
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The Parker sisters : a border kidnapping / by Maddox, Lucy,author.(CARDINAL)525495;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In 1851, Elizabeth Parker, a free black child in Chester County, Pennsylvania, was bound and gagged, snatched from a local farm, and hurried off to a Baltimore slave pen. Two weeks later, her teenage sister, Rachel, was abducted from another Chester County farm. Because slave catchers could take fugitive slaves and free blacks across state lines to be sold, the border country of Pennsylvania/Maryland had become a dangerous place for most black people. In The Parker Sisters, Lucy Maddox gives an eloquent, urgent account of the tragic kidnapping of these young women. Using archival news and courtroom reports, Maddox tells the larger story of the disastrous effect of the Fugitive Slave Act on the small farming communities of Chester County and the significant, widening consequences for the state and the nation. The Parker Sisters is also a story about families whose lives and fates were deeply embedded in both the daily rounds of their community and the madness and violence consuming all of antebellum America. Maddox's account of this horrific and startling crime reveals the strength and vulnerability of the Parker sisters and the African American population,"--Amazon.com.
Subjects: Biographies.; Parker, Elizabeth, approximately 1841-; Parker, Rachel, 1834-1918.; United States.; Free African Americans; African American girls; Kidnapping; Borderlands; Slave trade; Slave trade;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
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Under the freedom tree / by VanHecke, Susan.(CARDINAL)705359; Ladd, London,illustrator.(CARDINAL)488594;
Includes bibliographical references.Tells of the Civil War's first contraband camp that began when three escaped slaves were granted protection at a Union-held fort, prompting runaway slaves to seek freedom there and build the country's first African American community.NPAccelerated Reader AR
Subjects: Poetry.; American poetry; Children's poetry, American.; Fugitive slaves;
Available copies: 9 / Total copies: 9
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New studies in the history of American slavery / by Baptist, Edward E.(CARDINAL)214388; Camp, Stephanie M. H.(CARDINAL)271525;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-298) and index."Some could suckle over their shoulder" : male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology / Jennifer L. Morgan -- Consciousness and calling : African American midwives at work in the antebellum South / Sharla M. Fett -- The pleasures of resistance : enslaved women and body politics in the plantation South, 1830-1861 / Stephanie M. H. Camp -- Genealogies to a past : Africa, ethnicity, and marriage in seventeenth-century Mexico / Herman L. Bennett -- Kinship and freedom : fugitive slave women's incorporation into Creek society / Barbara Krauthamer -- My people, my people : the dynamics of community in southern slavery / Dylan C. Penningroth -- Spiritual terror and sacred authority : the power of the supernatural in Jamaican slave society / Vincent Brown -- Correspondences in Black and white : sentiment and the slave market revolution / Phillip Troutman -- "Stol' and fetched here" : enslaved migration, ex-slave narratives, and vernacular history / Edward E. Baptist -- British slavery and British politics : a perspective and a prospectus / Christopher L. Brown.
Subjects: Slavery; Slavery; Slavery; Slavery;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
On-line resources: Suggest title for digitization;
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Flight to freedom : African runaways and maroons in the Americas / by Thompson, Alvin O.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 349-370) and index.pt. 1. Ideological bases of marronage -- ch. 1. Totalitarianism and slavery -- ch. 2. Forms of marronage -- pt. 2. Origins and development of marronage -- ch. 3. The imperative of freedom -- ch. 4. Establishment of Maroon communities -- ch. 5. Military expeditions and judicial terror -- pt. 3. Maroon organization -- ch. 6. Physical organization of Maroon communities -- ch. 7. Maroon government -- ch. 8. Maroon economy -- pt. 4. Accommodation or revolution? -- ch. 9. Negotiations and treaties -- ch. 10. Maroons and revolutionary struggle.This book is about the struggles of enslaved Africans in the Americas who achieved freedom through flight and the establishment of Maroon communities in the face of overwhelming military odds on the part of the slaveholders.
Subjects: Fugitive slaves; Maroons;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Vigilance [large print] : the life of William Still, father of the Underground Railroad / by Diemer, Andrew K.,author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 530-566)."Born free in 1821 to two parents who had been enslaved, William Still was drawn to antislavery work from a young age. Hired as a clerk at the Anti-Slavery office in Philadelphia after teaching himself to read and write, he began directly assisting enslaved people who were crossing over from the South into freedom. Andrew Diemer captures the full range and accomplishments of Still's life, from his resistance to Fugitive Slave Laws and his relationship with John Brown before the war, to his long career fighting for citizenship rights and desegregation until the early twentieth century. Despite Still's disappearance from history books, during his lifetime he was known as the Father of the Underground Railroad. Working alongside Harriet Tubman and others at the center of the struggle for Black freedom, Still helped to lay the groundwork for long-lasting activism in the Black community, insisting that the success of their efforts lay not in the work of a few charismatic leaders, but in the cultivation of extensive grassroots networks. Through meticulous research and engaging writing, Vigilance establishes William Still in his rightful place in American history as a major figure of the abolitionist movement."--
Subjects: Large print books.; Biographies.; Still, William, 1821-1902.; African American abolitionists; Fugitive slaves; Antislavery movements; Underground Railroad; Abolitionists;
Available copies: 6 / Total copies: 8
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