Alice L. Baumgartner. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.

Abstract

In some ways, Alice L. Baumgartner’s South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War could be mischaracterized as a political history of a well-studied subject: how the spread of slavery and the acquisition of Texas and other lands from Mexico led to intensifying divisions that culminated in the Civil War. After all, the male-centric narrative is dominated by presidents, senators, congressmen, and dignitaries. But doing so would miss entirely what makes this study unique. Baumgartner examines this past from a borderland perspective, interweaving conversations between Mexican officials and American politicians as they wrangled with the issues of slavery and abolition. Through this approach, she makes the case that “‘American’ histories of slavery and sectional controversy are, in fact, Mexican histories, too” (8). Furthermore, the author molds this transnational saga around the lives of former slaves seeking freedom in Mexico, stories pieced together from ads in Louisiana and Texas newspapers, and from archives on both sides of the border. Between three and five thousand slaves sought new lives south of the Rio Grande, the author estimates, and these stories highlight a potent conflict that scholars have missed to date: how abolitionist Mexico stuck like a thorn in the side of the antebellum South.