Do You like book Bound For Canaan: The Epic Story Of The Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (2006)?
I wanted a book about the Underground Railroad; here's the book my research led me to, and I'm glad it did. I had a pretty murky understanding of what the whole thing was about - like, Harriet Tubman and a bunch of underground tunnels? Now I know better.Here are all the stories you know: Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup (the Twelve Years a Slave guy), John Brown. The slave escape that inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin and the story that inspired Beloved.Here also are important figures I didn't know about:- Isaac Hopper, who with other Quakers in the early 1800s "became what can fairly be described as the first operating cell of the abolitionist underground."- Levi Coffin, another Quaker (there were lots of Quakers! Go Quakers!) known as "The President of the Underground Railroad';- Josiah Henson, an escaped slave who founded a Canadian settlement for other escapees;- Anthony Benezet, who started a black school in 1750 and 'helped convert Benjamin Franklin and others to aboltionism, by demonstrating that his students were capable of the same level of achievement as whites."- Jermain Loguen,an escaped slave who became a popular preacher - William Lloyd Garrison, whose fierce Boston-based paper the Liberator was an important abolitionist resourceThere are a ton of exciting stories about the Railroad - of course there are - and an awful lot of them are in this book. I totally dug reading it - even with its fairly frequent lapses into breathless, purpleish prose - and I learned everything I wanted to.Random other quotes"The British colonies of North America and the United States imported only about 6 percent of the between 10 and 11 million slaves that were brought from Africa.""From the earliest days of settlement, at least some colonists had equivocal feelings about slavery. In 1641 Massachusetts forbade slavery."Philadelphia was the early center of the underground railroad, and Quakers were early pioneers: around 1800, "in the cobbled lanes of Philadelphia, fugitive slaves, free blacks, and white Quakers were discovering one another, and recognizing one another as allies in the struggle that was to come." Other books this one led me toI've read slave narratives by Northup, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. It's a genre I'm interested in. This book also directed me to Olaudah Equiano, Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb Moses Roper. William Wells Brown was the country's first African-American novelist.
—Alex
Great book. Meticulously researched from original sources. Quoting from newspapers, letters and other documents you really get the feel for what people were thinking and experiencing during the time. Besides the sweep of the story of the system to conduct runaway slaves from the south to the northern states or Canada you learn detailed snippets of history: -In NC I believe a white man bought a slave and set him free and then bought the slaves son and gave the son to the father so that the father would have the required $250 (the son being valued at $400) to keep his freedom. A law required free blacks to have $250 in property or they could be re-enslaved.-A prominent Methodist minister, a member of the underground, was brought before a grand jury in Ohio by a southern slave holder for helping escaped slaves. When asked if he helped slaves he responded to the jury (many of whom were quiet abolitionist) "I have helped some people who said they were slaves but since a black person's testimony in inadmissible in a trial of a white man I couldn't really say." The jury found in his favor.- In a letter to a former slave who had escaped to the north 20 years previously his previous owners widow tells the slaves that his escaping and the stealing of one of her horses cost tremendous financial hardship for her resulting in her having to sell the fugitive's brother and sister and sell some land. She requests that he pay her $1000 so that she can buyback the land. Otherwise she said she would sell him and assured him that times would change and he would be enslaved again. I did not realize the central roll that the abolitionist movement and the UG Railroad had in turning the live and let live attitude of many in the north to fervent, vehement anti-slavery.Uncle Tom's cabin, based on real-life stories, was widely read in the north, banned in the south, and was responsible for wakening many northerners about the horrors of slavery. Lincoln thanked HBS for turning the North against slavery.The fugitive slave act around 1850 required that federal troops help in the capture and returning of slaves to their southern masters masters and required citizens to help in those recaptures with penalties fines and even jail if they did not assist. This brought home to many the horribleness of returning fugitive slaves to slaveryJefferson Davis was the United States Secretary of War!I know it may seem silly to many but the depictions of the vast, almost empty wilderness that the slaves in the early 1800's on the UG railroad had to travel through in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, NC etc made me realize that the slaves not only worked on plantations, they cleared virgin forests and swamps etc to make all that cropland. I know Duh! They then built the the lovely plantations that we can now go visit on home tours in the south. 60% of US exports in the 1850's was cotton. Slaves built much of this country. When you pass a field in the south today growing something you like to eat realize the debt we all have to African men and women.
—Bob Schmitz
Bound for Canaan is something of an historical epic in its scope, cutting through a swathe of history and individuals. This is something it should be commended for: instead of focusing on a few well known historical figures or the (white)legalistic frameworks that ultimately overturned slavery this book focuses on the complex web of individuals and communities who exercised civil disobedience to create an environment for law makers to implement serious reform. It was, at times, quite a moving account of heroism. The scope of the book means that at times it can be overwhelming in its attention to multiple individuals, events, places and time frames but it is well worth a read.
—Emma
