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

Abstract

Reviewed by: South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner Mark Smith (bio) South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. Alice L. Baumgartner. New York: Basic Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1541617780. 384 pp., cloth, $32.00. Fugitive slaves from the United States who ran to Mexico during the antebellum period “reorient our understanding of the Civil War, showing that one of the most distinctively ‘American’ events in US history was in part ignited” by these freedom seekers (4). Such is the central thesis of Alice L. Baumgartner’s brilliantly written but sometimes interpretively frustrating book. The stories of the fugitives are utterly compelling, but the extent to which runaways to Mexico “contributed to the outbreak of a major sectional controversy over the future of human bondage in the United States” remains murky (7). Those who made it to Mexico did so without the help of anything resembling an underground railroad. Their escapes were assisted by the occasional ally, not facilitated by a system or formal network. These fugitives escaped and made it to Mexico by their own wits, and it is these stories, the tales of courageous men and women, that Baumgartner captures brilliantly. Runaways were greeted with one of two options. Some joined the military outposts that the Mexican government had established to defend their nation’s northeastern frontier. Others traded their enslaved status for indentured servitude and worked as servants or on haciendas. In this respect, fugitives in Mexico were not unlike those who made it to the US North. After all, courtesy of the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, runaways who managed to get above the Mason-Dixon line found themselves in a condition of what Frederick Douglass called “doubtful liberty.” Still, differences abounded, and Baumgartner sagely reminds us of the powerful antislavery inflections at work in the Mexican national government. After the Texas Revolution, for example, the Mexican Congress abolished slavery; in 1849, it passed legislation making free any enslaved person from another country who stepped foot in Mexico. Nor did Mexico agree to any extradition treaties. Plainly, these antislavery currents perturbed Southern slaveholders not least because these policies threatened their expansion and held the real potential to disrupt slavery in the US borderlands. The backbone—interpretively and stylistically—of Baumgartner’s study is in the poignant, endearing, and inspiring stories of enslaved men and women who escaped to Mexico. Baumgartner has a superb eye for the revealing detail and evinces a deep tenacity when it comes to ferreting out stories long buried in far-flung archives. She is also extremely adept at unpacking the complicated legal [End Page 428] histories of slavery in the US and Mexico and does a superb job toggling between the two without losing sight of why slavery was and was not permitted in different places at different times. But historians interested in evidence beyond beautifully crafted stories will be disappointed. For example, Baumgartner cannot tell us how many enslaved people from the United States made it to Mexico. “My estimate,” she ventures, “based on scattered and incomplete Mexican sources, puts the number somewhere between three and five thousand” (4). While she is right to suggest this is far less than the tens of thousands who escaped to the US North, it is nonetheless frustrating that she offers nothing to document this guess. Yet for Baumgartner, the numbers do not matter, because while the “number of slaves who reached Mexico was undeniably small,” she believes that “each escape was important in its own right” (4). Critically, “their collective story had strategic and political significance out of all proportion to the numbers involved” (4). This may well be true. But while it is surely the case that fugitive slaves to Mexico “contributed” to the sectional tensions that led to the US Civil War, many things “contributed” to the coming of that war and to varying extents. Historians of the sectional conflict are under some obligation to stake their case about causality with more precision than Baumgartner’s interpretive framework can muster. Mark Smith University of South Carolina, Columbia Mark Smith MARK SMITH is...