South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

Abstract

The dominant narratives of slavery in the United States depict a runaway's route to freedom as a constant movement to the northern United States or Canada via the Underground Railroad. Alice Baumgartner details the importance of the less-explored phenomenon of enslaved people in the United States who opted to flee south to Mexico. In South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, Baumgartner goes beyond just offering a narrative of the alternate direction to freedom and argues that enslaved African Americans who took the southern route played a critical role in sectional conflicts over slavery in the United States. The book begins in the early nineteenth century and ends in 1867, after the United States abolished slavery. In this time frame Baumgartner illustrates how as slavery expanded across the southern United States, Mexican leaders began restricting and abolishing slavery in their territories, which had consequences for the United States.Baumgartner states that, based on her research, roughly 3,000 to 5,000 people fled to Mexico for freedom, which is a fraction of those estimated to have fled to the north (p. 4). The thorough analysis of consular records, correspondence, court cases, and newspapers paints a vivid picture of the complexities of this period. In 12 chapters the book seamlessly moves between slavery in Mexico and the United States and displays the overlaps that resulted in political, legal, military, and moral conflicts. The first three chapters provide a brief overview of the history of slavery in the United States and Mexico. These chapters narrate the central role that US settlement in the Mexican region of Téjas would play in the 1830s and detail reactions to Mexico's calls for slavery's abolition, ultimately accomplished by 1837. Baumgartner's work forces us to seriously consider the macro- and microlevel consequences of shifting borders. Chapters 4 and 5 engage the responses of officials in both Mexico and the United States to abolition and the complicated position of Téjas as US settlers moved to this Mexican region with the idea of expanding slavery there. Chapters 6 and 7 emphasize the central role of slavery in the Texas Revolution (1835–36) and in the United States' 1845 annexation of Texas. Chapter 8 explains the US-Mexican War (1846–48) and the increased hostilities regarding slavery after the United States took over more than half of Mexico's territory and newly incorporated western states like California and New Mexico drafted constitutions to prohibit slavery against Southern slaveholding state politicians' wishes.Throughout the book Baumgartner includes the actions that runaways took, yet the later chapters provide more thorough analyses of the broader consequences of these actions. Chapter 9 focuses on the agency and ingenuity of runaways who fled to Mexico for freedom as they joined military colonies, moved to cities, or hired themselves out as labor on haciendas. Enslaved people knew of the abolition of slavery in Mexico and took advantage of that knowledge to flee, whether on foot or hiding on ships as stowaways. Chapter 10 addresses US settlement of former Mexican territories after the US-Mexican War and the on-the-ground consequences of competing national and regional laws regarding slavery. Chapter 11 addresses African Americans in Mexico seeking US citizenship. Chapter 12 focuses on the American Civil War and ends with the role of Maximilian, installed by the French as emperor of Mexico, to demonstrate how slavery wove the national contexts of the United States and Mexico together.A boon for future researchers is how Baumgartner details a wide range of special collections and city, state, and national archives across Mexico and the United States that hold information on runaway African Americans fleeing to Mexico. This work also pushes us to ask further questions. What African-descended communities already existed in Mexico during the nineteenth century? What happened to people years after they arrived in Mexico? What happened to runaways' descendants in Mexico? These questions do not suggest oversights in the work under review. Instead, they highlight the significance of this work in getting us to ask more questions about this crucial topic and time.Through well-sourced accounts, Baumgartner demonstrates the similarities between the southern and northern routes to freedom in terms of the types of actors assisting in escapes, the potential exploitation of runaways, the possibility of capture, and limited employment opportunities once runaways arrived to free spaces. The individual circumstances collectively tied together the broader regional and national contexts of the United States and Mexico and played a crucial role in the sectional conflicts that would lead to the American Civil War. South to Freedom will be insightful for the general reader and informative for students of comparative slavery and freedom; it also adds intriguing angles of query for historians of the United States and Mexico.