HarperCollins Publishers overview:
The civil war brought to a climax the country's bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery's denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and white, slave and free, who joined forces to create what would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that occupies as romantic a place in the nation's imagination as the Lewis and Clark expedition. The true story of the Underground Railroad is much more morally complex and politically divisive than even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the country's westward expansion arose a fierce clash of values that was nothing less than a war for the country's soul. Not since the American Revolution had the country engaged in an act of such vast and profound civil disobedience that not only challenged prevailing mores but also subverted federal law.
Bound for Canaan tells the stories of men and women like David Ruggles, who invented the black underground in New York City; bold Quakers like Isaac Hopper and Levi Coffin, who risked their lives to build the Underground Railroad; and the inimitable Harriet Tubman. Interweaving thrilling personal stories with the politics of slavery and abolition, Bound for Canaan shows how the Underground Railroad gave birth to this country's first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for social change.
HarperCollins Publishers editorial interview
Interviewer: You call the Underground Railroad -- not the Civil Rights Movement the first multiracial social movement in the country. Can you elaborate a bit.
Mr. Bordewich: In the Underground Railroad, blacks and whites discovered each other for the first time as allies in a common struggle, learning to rely on each other neither as master upon slave, nor child upon parent, but as soldiers in a common struggle. Apart from concrete help it provided to tens of thousands of fugitives, the underground's greatest achievement was its creation of the nation's first truly free zone of interracial activity where blacks not only directed complex logistical and financial operations, but also, in some places, supervised support networks that included white men and women who were accorded no special status owing to their skin color. Interviewer: What is the most unusual place your research took you? Mr. Bordewich: Ivisited scores of sites related to the underground, from Vermont to Kansas. One which touched me deeply was an overgrown streambed near Guilford College, just outside Greensboro, North Carolina. As a young man, the Quaker abolitionist Levi Coffin and his collaborators secreted fugitive slaves there as early as the 1820s. To realize that they were doing this kind of work in the heart of the slave-holding South, at incredible risk to themselves, was profoundly moving. The streambed is nondescript, no different from many others in the vicinity. But it was a small battlefield in the moral war for the nation's soul. Interviewer: The Quakers played a pivotal role in the Underground Railroad. In terms of American religions, how did they come to have such a central role? Mr. Bordewich: Quakers were the first -- though by no means the only -- religious group to denounce slavery, and to require their members to cease owning slaves. Countless Quakers were influenced by the writings of John Woolman, who in the 1750s argued that emancipation of the slave was essential to personal salvation, writing that "the Color of a Man avails nothing, in Matters of Right and Equity," a very radical idea at the time. Although Quakers numbered only about 2 percent of the population, they were often very influential in their communities, and exerted a moral authority far beyond their mere numbers. They played a dominant role in many early anti-slavery societies.
Chapter Excerpt from the publishers
Chapter One
An Evil Without Remedy | | The Negro Business is a great object with us. It is to the Trade of the Country as the Soul to the Body.
-- Joseph Clay, slave owner | "Josiah Henson's earliest memory was of the day that his father came home with his ear cut off. He, like his parents, had been born into slavery, and knew no other world beyond the small tract of tidewater Maryland where he was raised. He was five or six years old when the horrifying thing happened, probably sometime in 1795. "Father appeared one day covered in blood and in a state of great excitement," Henson would recall many years later. His head was bloody and his back lacerated, and "he was beside himself with mingled rage and suffering." "Henson was born on June 15, 1789, on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, on a farm belonging to Francis Newman, about a mile from Port Tobacco. His mother was the property of a neighbor, Dr. Josiah McPherson, an amiable alcoholic who treated the infant Henson as something of a pet, bestowing upon him his own Christian name. In accordance with common practice, McPherson had hired out Henson's mother to Newman, to whom Henson's father belonged. Newman's overseer, a "rough, coarse man," had brutally assaulted Henson's mother. Whether this was an actual or attempted rape, or the more mundane brutality of daily life, Henson does not make clear. Perhaps he didn't know. Whatever the cause, Henson's father, normally a good-humored man, attacked the overseer with ferocity and would have killed him, had not Henson's mother intervened. For a slave to lift his hand "against the sacred temple of a white man's body," even in self-defense, was an act of rebellion. Slaves were sometimes executed, and occasionally even castrated, for such an act. Knowing that retribution would be swift, Henson's father fled. Like most runaways, however, he didn't go far, but hid in the surrounding woods, venturing at night to beg food at nearby cabins. Eventually, hunger compelled him to surrender. Slaves from surrounding plantations were ordered to witness his punishment for their "moral improvement." One hundred lashes were laid on by a local blacksmith, fifty lashes at a time. Bleeding and faint, the victim was then held up against the whipping post and his right ear fastened to it with a "tack." The blacksmith then sliced the ear off with a knife, to the sound of cheers from the crowd. "What the real sentiments of the slaves watching this punishment might have been no one can say. Perhaps they cheered in a desperate effort to reassure their masters that they, unlike Henson's father, were docile and trustworthy, and harbored no thoughts of rebellion. Or perhaps with relief, seeing a "troublemaker," whose deed had caused their masters to become more vigilant and harsh in an effort to forestall further rebellion, now getting his just deserts. Or perhaps, to people so brutalized by their own degradation, the cruelty may even have seemed a form of gruesome entertainment. Afterward, Henson's father became a different man, brooding and morose -- "intractable," as slave owners typically described human property that no longer responded compliantly to command. Nothing could be done with him. "So off he was sent to Alabama. What was his after fate neither my mother nor I ever learned." "Following his father's disappearance, Henson and his mother returned to the McPherson estate. Even after years of freedom, Henson would remember the doctor as a "liberal, jovial" man of kind impulses, and he might well have lived out his life in passive oblivion as a slave had not it been for another stroke of fate that abruptly changed his life yet again. One morning, when Henson was still a small child, McPherson was found drowned in a stream, having apparently fallen from his horse the night before in a drunken stupor. McPherson's property was to be sold off, and the proceeds divided among his heirs. The slaves were frantic at the prospect of being sold away from Maryland to the Deep South, where it was well known that overwork, the grueling climate, and disease shortened lives. Even sparing that, an estate sale commonly meant that parents would be divided from children, and husbands from wives, lifelong friends separated from one another, a relatively benign master suddenly exchanged for a cruel one. For female slaves, the future might mean rape and permanent sexual exploitation. The only thing that those about to be sold did know was that the future was completely uncertain, and that they had not the slightest power to affect their fate. "In due course, all the remaining Hensons -- Josiah's three sisters, two brothers, his mother, and himself -- were put up at auction. The memory of this event remained engraved in Josiah's memory until the end of his life: the huddled group of anxious slaves, the crowd of bidders, the clinical examining of muscles and teeth, his mother's raw fear. His brothers and sisters were bid off one by one, while his mother, holding his hand, looked on in "an agony of grief," whose meaning only slowly dawned on the little boy as the sale proceeded. When his mother's turn came, she was bought by a farmer named Isaac Riley, of Montgomery County, just outside the site of the new national capital at Washington. Then young Henson himself was finally offered up for sale. In the midst of the bidding, as Josiah remembered it, his mother pushed through the crowd, flung herself at Riley's feet, and begged him to buy the boy as well. Instead, he shoved her away in disgust ... "
The foregoing is excerpted from Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
ISBN: 0060524308; Imprint: Amistad; Went on sale: 03/29/2005; Format: Hardcover; Trimsize: 6 1/8 x 9; Pages: 560; $27.95; $39.95(CAN) or see myAmazon link here for the latest or best pricing.
Other UGRR pages on my site:
- "Quilts and the Underground Railroad Revisted: Interview with HistorianGiles R. Wright"
- "The Use of Quilts as Messengers on theUnderground Railroad"
- Giles R. Wright Critique of HIPV |