Gateway to freedom: the hidden history of the underground railroad

The Resource Gateway to freedom: the hidden history of the underground railroad
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Gateway to freedom: the hidden history of the underground railroad
Statement of responsibility
Eric Foner
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Author
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North's largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s, vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city's underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Foner presents fresh information -- including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family
Member of
Cataloging source
DLC
Illustrations
illustrations
Index
no index present
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography
Series statement
Thorndike Press large print nonfiction

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Context of Gateway to freedom: the hidden history of the underground railroad

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