The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America

Abstract

Robert Churchill has written an important book, though it might be better subtitled “The Geography of Violence in the Antebellum White North.” His book certainly includes the Black experience along the Underground Railroad, in the 1840s and 1850s, but it has little to say directly about the antebellum South, and the Black experience is not at the center of his analysis. His book is primarily about the geography of while cultures of violence that impacted Black Americans as they made their way through the North from slavery to freedom. It is a book that speaks both to our understanding of the coming of the American Civil War and to our contemporary national debates about race, politics, and the lessons of history.Churchill's book is part of a wider project of historiographical recovery. On a patch of lawn below my office window there is an Ohio historical marker commemorating the research of Wilbur H. Siebert. During the 1890s Siebert worked to record the operations of the northern Underground Railroad (UGRR), interviewing dozens of mostly white onetime antislavery activists, especially in the Midwest and in Ohio. By the time of the civil rights movement and the Civil War bicentennial, Siebert's efforts were seen as what Robert Penn Warren in 1961 (The Legacy of the Civil War) called the “Treasury of Virtue,” allowing white northerners to triumphantly bask in the glories of emancipation while ignoring their complicity in the rise of post-Reconstruction Jim Crow Regimes. That same year Larry Gara, in The Liberty Line (1961), specifically assaulted Siebert's work as a whitewash of the UGRR, in which elderly white people told stories glorifying their purported roles in the great struggle, reducing African Americans to traffic on the line. Gara's UGRR was an all-Black project, achieved with little or no white involvement. Gara's book was reinforced by Stanley's Campbell's The Slave-Catchers (1972), which focused on the successful renditions of fugitives under the Fugitive Slave Act that occurred as the white North passively stood by.The recovery of Siebert began several years ago, most explicitly with Eric Foner's Gateway to Freedom (2015), which describes the close coordination between Black and white abolitionists in the movement of fugitives through New York City, and their rescue from slave-catchers during the 1840s and 1850s. Churchill's recovery of Siebert is broader and more specific, taking the entire North as his canvas and mining Siebert's archive. Churchill presents a convincing cultural geography that explains both the communities that self-liberating Black Americans moved through in the 1850s and historians’ competing interpretations of that experience.Most importantly, this geography is not a northern monolith. Churchill explores three regions running across the North, primarily defined by white migration patterns. Two are reasonably familiar. A Borderland Region in counties adjacent to the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River was shaped by a common culture and economy shared with the Border South, and a Free Soil Region ran across the Upper North. In between lay a pivotal space, Churchill's “Contested Region.” In sum, white people in the Borderlands were sufficiently hardened to slavery and shared enough of white southerners’ culture of violence that they either eagerly aided slave-catchers or stood quietly by; white people in the Free Soil Region were sufficiently antislavery that Black fugitives could walk the roads by day, confident that they were safe from rendition. In the sprawling “Contested Region,” whites expected that legal norms would be upheld: they supported slave-catchers who respected these norms, but they were radicalized in the face of unlawful slaveholder violence.Churchill's book opens with a discussion of the problem of violence along the UGRR and a description of aid to fugitives before 1838. He then examines his three regions from 1838 to 1850, first the raw confrontation of antislavery activists like John Rankin with proslavery Borderland vigilantes, then the boundaries of law-abiding accommodation in the Contested Region, and finally the rise of resistance in the Free Soil Upper North. Finally, he tackles the 1850s, following the Fugitive Slave Act, examining his three regions in a slightly different order: moving from the raw edges of lethal violence along the border, to the militance of the Upper North, and then to the critical collapse of accommodation in the Contested Region. His epilogue argues, in concert with a new body of historical work, that growing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, most decisively in his Contested Region, contributed both to northern radicalization and to southern anxieties, building the ground for secession and war. He closes with an invaluable nine-page appendix listing hundreds of fugitive slave rescues, a subtle counterpoint to Campbell's short appendix of renditions.Churchill's model makes a lot of sense, and he explains it well, in spectacular detail. His North is a complex place. There is room for both Campbell's white northerners allowing violent renditions in the Borderlands and Gara's white northerners not really participating in the UGRR in “Free Soil” rural New England. But there is also plenty of room for Siebert's white operatives, working in close coordination with Black operatives, to play a central role in both the Borderlands and the Contested Region, moving the self-liberated through a network of safehouses toward freedom in Canada.This is an important book that all historians interested in Civil War origins will need to consider carefully. Churchill does leave a few things on the table, however, which provide grist for further work. He demonstrates that cultural geography matters, but I might tweak his regions a bit. “Border” culture reached farther north than the border counties, and there were “Contested” counties in his Upper North, including Boston. (And we never get a simple table of rescues by region, which would have been helpful.) He also misses an opportunity in avoiding electoral politics. His three regions are quite familiar to anyone who has studied the geography of the 1856 and 1860 elections: his Free Soil region—a “greater New England”—famously voted for John C. Frémont in 1856; his “Contested Region” famously realigned to Lincoln in 1860. We might wonder about the synergies here. Churchill's book urges that we look across the great divide, merging the history of the greater antebellum North with that of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In our current struggle between the Second Jim Crow and a Third Reconstruction, recovering the alliance of Siebert's white antislavery activists with Black Americans is a worthwhile—even essential—enterprise.