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

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...