The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America by Robert H. Churchill

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America by Robert H. Churchill Crystal Webster (bio) The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America. By Robert H. Churchill. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 256. Cloth, $99.99; paper, $24.99.) Scholars have increasingly centered violence as a category of analysis in order to provide nuance to historical events and periods. This trend in the historiography is reflected in the groundbreaking scholarship of Joanne Freeman, Stanley Harrold, and Kellie Carter Jackson, each of whom have focused on physical violence in historical periods and political movements that earlier had been represented as refined, passive, and respectable. Robert Churchill contributes to this historiography with The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America. In Churchill’s telling of the story of fugitive slavery, violence was ubiquitous on the route to freedom. Those involved in violence ranged from enslavers and slave catchers to antislavery activists. This violence and conflict along the Underground Railroad, argues Churchill, led to the radicalization of antislavery activism, violent expressions of mastery, and the development of regional identity, which in turn aggravated the sectional divisions and conflict leading up to the Civil War. Robert Churchill’s history challenges the ways in which popular representations of the Underground Railroad perpetuate it as a mythic, elusive element of American history. Scholarship on the Underground Railroad began with William Still’s Underground Railroad Records (1872) and other primary-source collections of first-person accounts of those who aided fugitive slaves. More recently, scholars have breathed new life into the significance of fugitive slavery, including Richard Blackett, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, and Fergus Bordewich. In particular, Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015) makes clear that the scope and scale of the fugitive slave experience was crucial to the events that led to the Civil War. By centering the role of violence, Robert Churchill upends romanticized and static histories of the Underground Railroad, thus complicating its history and providing fresh insight into this increasingly popular topic. A clear strength of the book is its conceptualization and explanation of the sociospatial geography of the Underground Railroad. The book is organized around both chronological and regional distinctions, which consist of [End Page 272] the Borderland, the Contested Region, and the Free Soil Region. Churchill excels in his in-depth geographic descriptions of the physical and social landscape for each region and analyzes the ways in which these contexts shaped the function of violence in the movement. Through descriptive and visual explanation, Churchill reveals how political and spatial geography are key to understanding how violence was wielded. In the Borderland, slave catchers were aggressively violent in ways that extended the reach of slave mastery. Here, slave catchers and enslavers dominated the fugitive experience and prevailed even against whites who may have been sympathetic to the antislavery cause. While some locals of the Contested Region provided shelter and aid to African American fugitives, white residents were less likely to defend escaped enslaved people against violent slave catchers, particularly when legal mores were appropriately followed. Locals nonetheless rejected the violence exhibited by slaveholders and slave catchers as violating ideas of dignity and restraint. In the Free Soil region, local whites reacted aggressively to slave catching and kidnapping and defended fugitives to the death. These distinctions give a greater sense of depth to the Underground Railroad at a community and regional level, appropriately portraying the movement as a “living organism responding to local stimuli” (17). Churchill’s Underground Railroad is therefore not only one of fugitive slaves, slave catchers, and white abolitionists, but also one of space and culture. The movement, in turn, shaped the regions through which fugitives fled. Many of Churchill’s sources that reveal these differing regional cultures will not be unfamiliar to scholars of the period, and those sources rely on reflections on the movement by predominantly white activists, which can lean heroic. However, Churchill complicates the sources with in-depth analysis and explanation of the local and regional history. A strong intervention of the book is that violence in the Underground Railroad led to the type of sectional conflict...