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.
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