Search

This article examines the roles of black and mixed-race operatives in the criminal human trafficking networks that kidnapped and consigned to slavery thousands of free people of color in the early nineteenth century. The first section explores the distinctive abilities, modus operandi, and motivations of these unexpected and largely overlooked conductors on this Reverse Underground Railroad. The second section triangulates their behavior not only against that of confidence men and counterfeiters working in the shadows of the emerging capitalist economy in the early republic, but also in relationship to that of the many African-descended men and women in the long history of American slavery whose actions thwarted other black people's dreams of liberty. The final section interrogates the distinctive ways in which free black families, neighborhoods, and communities responded to the threat posed by kidnappers of color. It argues that the efforts of black urban dwellers to publicly denounce, promptly apprehend, and violently punish by extralegal means these pernicious predators served to elaborate a new form of direct antislavery action, an early and formative species of the sort of 'practical abolition' activities more typically associated with the aftermath of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

Will the new administration deliver on its immigration promises? It remains to be seen if Trump will revoke DACA, which would affect 750,000 undocumented young people who are now able to attend college, lawfully work, hold driver’s licenses, open bank accounts, and travel. Meanwhile, student and faculty petitions asking universities to declare themselves sanctuaries have garnered thousands of signatures. The campus sanctuary movement builds on a history of solidarity dating back to the Underground Railroad and northern refusal to comply with fugitive slave laws. The American public does not support mass removal of immigrants. Trump does not have a mandate to build a wall, to deport millions of people, to cancel DACA. This is where we draw a line in the sand. We have the power to resist and refuse—and to stop it.

This essay posits that “hover-flying” texts constitute a mini-genre within African American picture books. Juxtaposing Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach (1991) and Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) with Christopher Myers’s Wings (2000) and Fly ! (2001), Jenkins argues that such books adapt the traditional flight motif in order to create new narratives about personal autonomy and social responsibility. These works illuminate Foucauldian theories of power and space, and respond to narratives of migration that are a crucial part of African American literary traditions.

he first chapter of Pauline Hopkins's third and least-known book, Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), seems not to fit its title. Although the magazine novel advertises "Negro" characters and the geography of the "South and Southwest," its prehistory begins among aristocrats in England, and then recaps a particularly fraught historical episode that displaced the Seneca people of Western New York in the first half of the nineteenth century. The novel opens in the vicinity of what would become the Seneca Nation in 1848, extending from a crucial Underground Railroad station—the city of Buffalo, New York—to an island in the Niagara River that became part of the British colonies after the French and Indian War, and then returned briefly to the Seneca. Contested territory and unstable borders become a central theme in the novel, whose characters later traverse proslavery Missouri and John Brown's Bleeding Kansas. The origin of the story, however, is a personal and familial conflict over land on an English estate, even further from the United States South. An aristocrat flees England and a set of trumped-up murder charges to find refuge among the Seneca, who rename him White Eagle. The fugitive, nee Henry Carlingsford, is innocent, but has been framed by his scheming cousin, Titus, who covets the estate he would inherit. Men greedy for land displace White Eagle again when he settles in New York. The fictional White Eagle experiences a very real moment in Seneca history: David Ogden, who had wrangled with the Seneca since at least 1818 because they essentially refused to sell their land, finally gained government support to expel them from that land. By 1838, as Matthew Dennis

David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. By Graham Russell Gao Hodges. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 266. Cloth, $30.00.)Reviewed by Scott HancockHistorians of black America have had at best a loose grasp of David Ruggles's significance. There have been no scholarly biographies explicating exactly how and why Ruggles became a seminal figure in American history. This is perhaps in part because during the necessary but eclipsed era of contributionist and triumphal historiography, Ruggles, who died young, appeared to be overshadowed by longer-lived or more unique luminaries like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Over the last few decades, African American historiography largely left behind contributionist histories and biographies.Graham Hodges, though, makes clear that his biography of Ruggles is right in line with that tradition. Hodges's work is a kind of Sankofa - he manages to hark back to that once necessary tradition while simultaneously moving it forward. For instance, he centers abolitionist history - not simply black abolitionist history, but abolitionist history - on David Ruggles. He also places Ruggles within the antebellum hydrotherapy medical movement by describing how Ruggles first sought hydrotherapy for his serious health maladies, and then started his own well-respected hydrotherapy business in the latter years of his abbreviated life. The overarching thrust of the biography is not, however, to tell the story of developments in antebellum American society. The focus stays fixed on David Ruggles, and the image that emerges is of a militantly determined young man who adhered to a core set of principles throughout a life filled with adversity. His commitment, bravery, and activism exerted a powerful influence on black and white Americans. Ruggles answered David Walker's appeal.Growing up on Bean Hill in Norwich, Connecticut, was an important formative experience during what Hodges labels a Revolutionary childhood. The Revolutionary spirit persisted among white and black residents. The chapter on Ruggles's childhood is a well-constructed, if occasionally a bit speculative, argument. Hodges describes Ruggles's father as a blacksmith who commanded respect because blacksmiths in general earned prestige due to the physical demands of their labor, and characterizes Ruggles's mother as a highly regarded cook in the area. His parents' strong work ethic, and the status this earned them, shaped Ruggles early on. In addition to Hodges's reading of that formative setting, however, it is possible that for black men like Ruggles's father, evolving racial ideologies led to jobs that demanded great strength - simultaneously garnering respect and feeding racist perceptions that enabled many whites to think of the black body as fit only for hard physical labor. Though David Ruggles likely did inherit his impressive work ethic from his parents, he may have also learned that his father's blacksmith labor and his mother's work as a cook could carry contrasting meanings in American society - respect from some, derision from others.Nonetheless, Hodges's interpretation is certainly consistent with the man that Ruggles would become. After a brief period in early adulthood when he seemed more committed to fun than activism, in his early twenties Ruggles began to connect with black and white antislavery activists in New York City. Steadily radicalized through personal confrontations with racists, signing on as a traveling agent for the Emancipator newspaper, and vocally criticizing the American Colonization society, Ruggles fairly quickly came to lead and epitomize the younger, more militant black leadership of the 1830s. …

America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union. By Fergus M. Borde wich. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012. Pp. 496. Cloth, $30.00)Reviewed by Erik J. ChaputJournalist Fergus Bordewich, the author of five previous books, including Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2006), an engaging narrative history of the Underground Railroad, has produced a richly detailed and beautifully written account of a pivotal moment in American history that all too often simply receives a paragraph or two in broader accounts of the antebellum period. It is important to note at the outset that America's Great Debate, though engaging, does not alter the traditional narrative of how the compromise measure worked its way through Congress, in terms of the Omnibus Bill that eventually emerged out of Clay's proposals (against his wishes) to settle the sectional turmoil and Senator Stephen A. Douglas's repackaging of the Omnibus into separate, more passable bills.America's Great Debate is the second book to appear in recent years on the Compromise of 1850.1 Bordewich, however, casts his net wider than Robert Remini's 2010 volume to incorporate a host of characters often glossed over. Indeed, the personalities of the major figures involved matter, and Bordewich sets up to capture this important episode in American history in all its complexity. Using a variety of sources, including the Santa Fe Papers at the Texas State Library; the Zachary Taylor Papers at the University of Kentucky; the published papers of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun; and, of course, the Congressional Globe, Bordewich traces the crisis, detailing the legislative battles in which politicians resembled punch-drunk brawlers. The author paints brilliant vignettes of the proslavery stalwart David Yulee, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Narciso Lopez - a Venezuela-born solider who struck a deal with Mississippi Governor John Quitman to invade Cuba - Pierre Soule of Louisiana, Mississippi's Henry Foote, Texan frontiersman Robert Simpson Neighbors, Maryland Congressman James A. Pearce, Alexander Stevens and Robert Toombs of Georgia, and Millard Fillmore, who was thrust into the office of the presidency after President Taylor succumbed to a severe intestinal illness in July 1850.In addition, Bordewich provides first-rate discussions of California politics, the contentious speakership battle in the House as the ThirtyFirst Congress opened, and the Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute, which was "little more than naked empire building steeped in a mumbo jumbo of legalism" (61). Texas had previously claimed that its territory extended to the Rio Grande River, and President Polk's defense of the Mexican War rested in large part upon this very notion. However, this line of reasoning meant that the former Mexican province of New Mexico would be sliced in half, giving Texas a vast area that included Santa Fe, which it had never occupied. As Bordewich details, the debates show how "much slavery really had to do with the South's aggressive posture." Never "had slavery been defended so explicitly and with such sheer gusto in a national forum" (189). In line with Elizabeth Varon's most recent book, America's Great Debate shows how "disunion" was invoked both "as a process and a threat."2In terms of the final balance sheet, Bordewich sees many more gains for the slaveholding South, which "obtained the harsh new Fugitive Slave Law ... as well as the North's tacit abandonment of the hated Wilmot Proviso. …

This essay analyzes the Hyers Sisters, a Reconstruction-era African American sister act, and their radical efforts to transcend social limits of gender, class, and race in their early concert careers and three major productions, Out of Bondage and Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad , two slavery-to-freedom epics, and Urlina, the African Princess , the first known African American play set in Africa. At a time when serious, realistic roles and romantic plotlines featuring black actors were nearly nonexistent due to the country’s appetite for stereotypical caricatures, the Hyers Sisters used gender passing to perform opposite one another as heterosexual lovers in their early operatic concerts and Urlina . Because they were sisters, audiences did not perceive any threat of an actual intimate exchange. As a result, they were able to create respectful depictions of romantic relationships onstage between black men and women that were otherwise impossible. Collaborating with other black theatre artists, including Sam Lucas and Pauline Hopkins, they created productions that presented inspiring depictions of black male heroes, intact black families, and blacks achieving social progress after securing their freedom. The Hyers Sisters’ positive (re)presentations of (African) American life and love were strategic, political acts of resistance against the rampant racism of Reconstruction-era America. Their pioneering productions enabled the sisters to create early opportunities for themselves and other black artists in a white, male dominated industry, and helped lay the groundwork for the growth and development of black theatre and popular entertainment in the decades to come.

Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. By Carol Faulkner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 291. Cloth, $45.00.)Reviewed by Julie Roy JeffreyLucretia Mott has presented formidable challenges to historians and biographers, Carol Faulkner suggests. The characterization of Mott as a domestic saint has discouraged scholarly examination of her life and career, while Mott's devotion to the family circle can appear to minimize her radicalism. Furthermore, although Mott gave hundreds of sermons and speeches, few were recorded. The paucity of published primary sources, and letters that confine themselves to family news, make it difficult to understand Mott's inner thoughts and motivations. It is hard to bring the domestic saint to life.Undaunted, Faulkner sets out to rescue the woman she considers the most important female abolitionist in the United States. Arguing that recent scholarship has once again excluded abolitionist women by "privileging the radicalism and egali tarianism of political abolitionists and revolutionaries" (4), Faulkner focuses on Mott's public activism. Mott, she argues, played a central role on both the local and national levels as an advocate for immediate emancipation and racial equality. Adopting immediate emancipation and the free produce movement years before William Lloyd Garrison, Faulkner rightly considers Mott as part of "the interracial vanguard" (4) of abolitionism. Although Mott's involvement in the women's rights movement was always subsidiary to her commitment to abolitionism, Faulkner also examines her involvement in feminism as well as other causes like nonresistance.Faulkner shows that underneath the saintly image lay a woman of surprising strength and iron will who held fast to what she believed was right. Both an ideologue and purist, she was unable or unwilling to compromise any of the founding principles of the American Anti-Slavery Society. This stance narrowed her vision and led her to reject actions that she felt did not directly contribute to emancipation or equal rights. Her argument that aiding fugitives and the Underground Railroad did not constitute proper antislavery work resulted in an exodus of members from the Philadelphia Female Anti- Slavery Society. Her dislike of compromise also explained her disinterest in politics and her failure to understand the ways in which politics might contribute to realizing the causes she espoused.Faulkner organizes her book chronologically. In the first chapters on Mott's girlhood and early married life, Faulkner explores some of the origins for her mature views. Her mother's business skills, Mott's own superior education, and the realization of the pay inequities between male and female teachers reinforced the young girl's rejection of female inferiority. From Quakerism, she learned that the leadings of the inner light outweighed the voices of earthly authorities, a view that guided her throughout her life and supported many of her radical stances. Faulkner makes clear how Mott, like other Quaker women, was affected by and contributed to the divisions within the Society even as she rose to prominence as an outspoken female minister. Although she was often critical of her coreligionists and of religious authority in general, she never abandoned her religious community as so many other abolitionists chose to do.The chapters on abolitionism cover some familiar ground with descriptions of the formation of the American Anti-slavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and the organization of the conventions of antislavery women in the 1830s. …

Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War. By Stanley Harrold. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 292. Cloth, $30.00.)Reviewed by Michael W. FitzgeraldFirst, a disclaimer: I have read none of the other numerous and wellregarded books of this author on related topics. This therefore is the analysis of one who approaches this ambitious work as a stand-alone study of the conflict over the escape and rendition of fugitive slaves. The title of Stanley Harrold's Border War says it all, and states the argument as well. In the author's words: "No book before this one . . . has integrated events in the Lower North and Border South into a narrative of cross-border conflict" (14). This emphasis permeates Harrold's thesisdriven work, with the strengths and potential liabilities that implies.Harrold contradicts the image of sectional moderation in the region most forcefully restated in the work of William Freehling. Instead, Harrold "emphasizes a violent and often external threat to the slave system" posed by the border northern states (13). In this telling, the outrage felt by the Border South over abolitionist plots, mass escapes, illegal kidnappings, and outright violence growing out of legal and extralegal attempts to recover slaves thrust them into the arms of the Deep South ideologues during the long run-up to secession. Given historians' skepticism about Underground Railroad tales, Harrold sensibly declines to use unsupported memoirs. The evidence base is from the contemporary press, both proslavery and antislavery, Whig and Democrat, northern and southern. The author has an eye for the vivid anecdote, and the quotations presented certainly seem to support his characterizations. The cumulative effect of this parade of episodes is effective; there are a much greater number of armed confrontations over runaways than one might have thought likely. Given our contemporary sensibilities, it is difficult not to get caught up in these stirring tales. The deeper point is that the often hysterical-sounding southern response, and occasional armed forays into the free states, were motivated by genuine antislavery acts and widespread violations of federal fugitive slave legislation.The author's emphasis does yield productive insights. Northerners and southerners had been shooting each other over slavery long before the Civil War, and the parade of press accounts demonstrates that the public knew. Bleeding Kansas thus appears as the culmination of decades of frustration; Missourians rightly recognized that another Free State on their border meant increased runaways and slave plots. The subsequent violent raids from Kansas by John Brown and James Montgomery demonstrate that the Border Ruffians had a point. Harrold's work takes an instructive turn during the secession crisis. Being on the edge of the proslavery republic would only make slaveholders' problems worse. On the book's final page, the author concludes "it was the long border struggle that predisposed Maryland, western Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri to remain loyal to the U. S. Government" (213). I think this exaggerated, because there were any number of reasons why these states preferred to stay in the Union. But Harrold's evidence does point in this direction, and a more restrained formulation has some merit.Still, it is hard to interpret the representativeness of the author's evidence, the scale of the activity, or if the issue has the sort of salience the author claims. The author demonstrates numerous individual episodes of northern assistance to runaway slaves, and of black and white local resistance to slave catchers. He also shows that the slaveholders of Kentucky and similar states resented them severely. But how much, relative to other issues and grievances that were on white southerners' minds? …

Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas. By Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Pp. 224. Cloth, $32.50.)The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854. Edited by John R. Wunder and Joann M. Ross. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Pp. 236. Paper, $30.00.)Reviewed by Brie Swenson ArnoldThe volumes reviewed here are part of an upsurge in popular and scholarly interest in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the ensuing events in "Bleeding Kansas," and the influence of both on the coming of the Civil War. Both books revisit familiar historical subjects and approach the topic with fresh questions and methodologies. The texts augment the literature by adding those who have been traditionally excluded from the Kansas narrative and by making compelling cases for the influence of culture on the political divisions between antebellum northerners and southerners.In Bleeding Borders, Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel presents a persuasive, innovative take on the contest over slavery in territorial Kansas. Arguing that "Indians, African Americans, and white women played crucial roles in the literal and rhetorical pre-Civil War battle between proslavery and antislavery settlers" (2), Oertel exposes how northern and southern racial and gender ideologies profoundly influenced events in Kansas. Just as northerners and southerners clashed over slavery, they also clashed over competing visions of masculinity, femininity, and white supremacy. Oertel's slim volume clearly demonstrates that cultural conflicts exacerbated the political divisions between free-state and proslavery factions.For Oertel, this story begins two decades before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, when white missionaries, traders, and Indian agents first appeared in what would become Kansas Territory. Then, and in the mid-1850s when pro- and antislavery settlers descended on Kansas, white southerners and northerners agreed that "Indians would be either expelled from the territory or 'civilized' through missionizing tactics and/or intermarriage with whites" (5). The place of other nonwhites in the territory was less clear-cut, with northerners and southerners disagreeing about whether a free or slave labor system would "best maintain white supremacy in relation to African Americans" (5). Though proslavery forces worked hard to introduce slavery, the active resistance of slaves and abolitionists (particularly through the Underground Railroad) thwarted those efforts."Frontier forces" and sectional tensions also triggered reappraisals of gender ideology (58), particularly among white northern men and women. Richly delineating the activities of famous free-staters and abolitionists like Clarina Nichols, Sara Robinson, and Julia Louisa Lovejoy, and lesser-known figures like Margaret Lyon Wood and Susan Wattles, Oertel establishes that northern women advanced new definitions of womanhood and were "an integral part of free labor's triumph over slavery in Kansas" (59). Her exploration of "how competing arguments about masculinity infused political and sectional tensions" is equally persuasive (8). In person and in the popular press, northerners and southerners criticized each other's version of manhood (using, though Oertel uncharacteristically overlooks this, the same terminology used to disparage Indians). While neither side doubted white male hegemony would prevail, they battled (literally and figuratively) over which version of masculinity would triumph. The violence in Kansas prompted northern men to adopt a new model of manhood by the eve of the Civil War - one heavily informed by "the southern version . . . that endorsed violence and aggression" (86). Because gender identity was closely tied to racial identity (94), northerners and southerners also worked, albeit for different reasons and in different ways, to establish "ideologies and policies" that would combat miscegenation and uphold white supremacy (133). …

The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey. By E. Fuller Torrey. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Pp. 248. Cloth, $39.95.)Reviewed by Nikki TaylorHistory has waited far too long for a comprehensive biography of abolitionist Charles Torrey, who played an instrumental role in pushing the movement to become more political. Author E. Fuller Torrey has answered that call in The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey. Most who have written about Torrey primarily portray him as one of William Lloyd Garrison's chief nemeses, who helped orchestrate the split in the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s. E. Fuller Torrey not only offers a sympathetic read of Charles Torrey's motivations in that effort but also demonstrates that he actually contributed so much more to the abolitionist cause in his short thirty-two years of life.By stringently rejecting Garrison's moral suasion, Charles Torrey insisted on "political and then aggressive and radical abolitionism as alternative strategies" (183). As practical applications of his beliefs, he helped establish the Liberty Party and managed the Washington, DC, artery of the Underground Railroad. Eventually, political abolitionism and abolitionist editing ceased to satisfy Charles Torrey, so he decided to take his activism to the next level. Unlike most white Underground Railroad operators who did not believe in going into the South to entice African Americans from bondage, Torrey's religious and moral convictions motivated him to do just that. He actively encouraged slaves to abscond from slavery and then transported them to freedom himself. For him, this type of abolitionism was a more direct and decided attack on slaveholding than either his work in the abolitionist press or political abolitionism had been. Torrey's Underground Railroad activism included a brazen plan that centered on wresting the bondspeople from many prominent politicians, to cause political embarrassment and undermine the system in the nation's capital. He was effective enough in this endeavor that he became an enemy to powerful southern congressmen and other politicians, ultimately leading to his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment in 1844 for slave stealing. His death in prison two years later at the age of thirty-two is why Charles Torrey has been considered an abolitionist martyr.The biggest strength of this project is the masterful job of contextualizing Torrey within the world of antebellum abolitionists. The animus between Charles Torrey and William Lloyd Garrison (13-15) is laid bare. The author presents that relationship in terms of the two men's dissimilar class backgrounds, morals, and levels of self-control, as much as their concerns about politics, religion, and abolitionist tactics. …

In the 1978 made-for-TV film, A Woman Called Moses, Cicely Tyson played the title role of Harriet Tubman. The film chronicled Tubman's life, highlighting her early experiences as a slave as well as her prominent role as a conductor along the Underground Railroad. The movie's narrator, Orson Welles, praised Tubman's work in helping some three thousand slaves escape from slavery, her active role in the suffrage movement, and her position as a Union soldier who received military honors at her funeral. The problem with this description of Tubman, however, is that it relied heavily on hyperbole. While Tubman did help slaves escape along the Underground Railroad, she helped approximately seventy fugitives. She attended one women's rights lecture where she recounted her experiences as a slave and never agitated for equal rights for women. Though she did aid Union soldiers by directing them to a Confederate supply line, she was not buried with military honors. A Woman Called Moses depicted a mythical portrait of this remarkable woman.1 In his well-researched and clearly written book, Milton Sernett carefully disentangles the legends about Harriet Tubman from the reality of her life. The author wants to understand how Harriet Tubman has been remembered and

The four books under review here represent some of the most exciting new work in the emerging field of slavery studies, broadly conceived. Jessica Adams, Stephanie M. H. Camp, Jeannine Marie DeLombard, and Deak Nabers make slavery the analytical framework for their respective inquiries into the meaning of society, power, and resistance. It is perhaps not a coincidence that these books emerge in a historical context characterized by intense energies directed toward public commemorations of slavery s end. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the New York Historical Society's well-attended Slavery in New York exhibition, the UNESCO Slave Route Project, and the costly state-sponsored bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade number among the many recent local, national, and international efforts to address the collective amnesia concerning the past of slavery and its enduring legacies. These public history projects express a profound preoccupation with the myths, meanings, and memories of slavery in the Americas even as their shared injunction, both expressed and implied, to "never forget" begs the question of what it is we are to remember. Such endeavors too have not

South are utterly anonymous today. A few extraordinary women who managed to escape from slavery are well known, such as Harriet Tubman-the heroine of the Underground Railroad.' But the vast majority of slave women who remained in bondage led lives left entirely unrecorded and unremembered. One striking exception is Sally Hemings, who has been subject to centuries of commentary-quite possibly more than any other black woman who lived out her life in the slave South. A woman of many nicknames, "dashing Sally" has long been famous as the female slave whose name was coupled with that of founding father Thomas Jefferson in an 1802 scandal about the widowed president's private life.2 At that time, a disaffected Republican journalist wrote of Jefferson that "the man, whom it delighth the people to honor, keeps, and has for many past years has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY."3

there has been no major biography of this extraordinary woman since 1943. Yet, despite this lack of serious scholarly attention, Tubman has remained an iconic figure largely in the realm of juvenile literature of which there is no shortage. Catherine Clinton, Kate Larson, and Jean Humez gracefully exercise the art of biography by going beyond a synopsis of Tubman's life to present the complexities and motivations of a remarkable black southern woman, who not only escaped the bonds of slavery but also became a leading figure in the Underground Railroad movement and an activist for both abolitionism and women's rights. Three prominent white northerners published accounts of Tubman during her own lifetime. The first was a biographical sketch published by antislavery activist Franklin D. Sanborn. This 1863 account of Tubman's role in a daring raid into Civil War-torn South Carolina catapulted the ex-slave into the international spotlight. The second biography, penned by transcendentalist reformer Ednah Cheney, appeared two years later. Drawing heavily on Sanborn's work, Cheney also drew on her own conversations with Tubman. These first two publications were brief and written for a self-selected audience of anti-slavery readers. The first biography of any depth was Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, largely based

One of the more memorable scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) occurs during Eliza Harris's flight from slavery, after she arrives at the safe domestic haven of Rachel and Simeon Halliday, members of a devout Quaker household who have offered her temporary lodging on behalf of the Underground Railroad. It is in this orderly place of cleanliness, courtesy, thrift, good will, and piety that the fugitive slave Eliza finally is enabled to sleep soundly, and subsequently to dream "of a beautiful country, --a land, it seemed to her, of rest,--green shores, pleasant islands, and beautifully glittering water; and there, in a house which kind voices told her was a home, she saw her boy playing, free and happy child." And, indeed, upon waking the next morning, Eliza finds herself reunited with son and husband in the antebellum social oasis that is the Quaker settlement. If Uncle Tom's Cabin may be understood, in part, as promoting an idealized form of American family life, then surely the Quaker Halliday family is one of the preeminent examples of that domestic sphere. (1) Temperate and serene, the men, women, and children in Stowe's Quaker settlement exude Christian virtue, moral gravity, robust health, (2) and personal strength; for them, social justice begins at home, and the Quaker doctrine of an "inner light" for each believer manifests itself in an environment of mutuality, candor, and dignity. Here, age is respected and venerated, especially among the women, whose beauty seems to ripen with the years rather than fade. No youthful beauty, the carefully coiffed and plainly dressed (3) Rachel Halliday possesses "one of those faces that time seems to touch only to brighten and adorn." Here, too, the authority of patriarchy largely gives way to the guiding genius of cheerful and industrious women. Simeon Halliday, "a tall, straight, muscular man," speaks few words and stands clear of the more-important kitchen labors of the household's women, who bustle about creating "an atmosphere of mutual confidence and good fellowship." A rare moral exemplar among Stowe's male characters in the novel, however, it is Simeon who chastens his young son for hating the slaveholders who would have prevented George and Eliza from living in peace. Instead, the fictional Quaker patriarch serenely insists upon unconditional love and benevolence, and that he "would do even the same for the slaveholder as for the slave, if the Lord brought him to my door in affliction." (4) However, despite all of their admirable morality--which extended to the all-important notion of equality for women--Stowe's novel does not linger long among these Friends of the Quaker settlement. For all the optimism expressed about these believers in the "inner light" of Quakerism, Uncle Tom's Cabin does not directly advocate a turn to Quakerism as a solution for the problem of American social ills. As one critic has noted, while highlighting the otherness of Quaker clothing and dialect, Stowe's novel also clearly indicates her admiration for the humanitarianism of Quakers. There are limits to her representations, however, for in the novel "no Quaker refers to the Inner Light, no Quaker discusses or even alludes to an inner awareness of spirituality, no Quaker refers to Christ." (5) Quakers in the novel are fashioned as exemplary figures of Christian virtue, but do not dominate the narrative as a whole; they are presented as model Americans, but just as clearly their religious world seems to be little more than a fantasy or an impossibility on the larger scale that interests Stowe. In this way, Stowe follows a formula that would become familiar over the course of the nineteenth century. Quakerism's representation in fiction as a set of exemplary American religious and social practices appears alongside its failure to attract large numbers of followers. Consistently in the socially progressive vanguard, and commonly used in fiction as one of the highest expressions of Christianity, Quakers in early American fiction are deployed for our admiration, but also enlist our recognition of their broader failure to capture American religious enthusiasm in any significant way. …

scendents. Many of the relevant records burned in the 1906 blaze that engulfed San Francisco. And although she helped to finance one of the most significant rebellions in U.S. history—John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry— few historians had ever heard of her. Some existing records, cited in footnotes, were privately owned and could not or would not be shared. 1 What could I possibly “know” about her given the sources to which I had access? What would a feminist biography of a woman accused of voodoo, inside trading, and murder look like? These questions haunted me and shaped my study of the nineteenth-century African American entrepreneur and abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814–1904). My journey of discovery took me to expected sites: archives, public libraries, microfilm reading rooms, and the like. But I also learned about her from audience members at book signings, bed and breakfast owners, and the men and women who collected pieces of California’s African American history. I quickly discovered that the public investment in Pleasant’s past far exceeded the interest of academics. From the minute she landed in gold rush San Francisco, Pleasant created a sensation; the story goes that men in the city crowded the dock to bid top dollar for her services as a cook. To unravel her history, I encountered a different but no less determined crowd that gathered around her memory. Their interest in preserving her legacy as a feminist foremother, a voodoo queen, or a freedom fighter forced me to confront the differences between hagiography and critical feminist biography. The history of an African American woman who amassed fortunes in the post–gold rush West is a story ripe for drama of all sorts. During her lifetime, the press had a field day writing fantastic headlines about her use of love potions and her intimate relationships with white men and women. Before the dust had settled over these highly public interracial relationships—for decades she lived with a wealthy banker and his wife posing as their maid—her history became fodder for a Broadway play in the 1920s that Hollywood remade as a “thriller” called The Cat and Canary. Pleasant was depicted as a classic mammy in blackface in the play and film, which further obscured her history as a leader of the Underground Railroad and an early civil rights activist. Capitalism and abolitionism may, to some, make strange bedfellows. A black feminist foremother masquerading as a mammy figure also disrupts our accepted narrative of women’s history. This project required a frame

"Human misery," Amos Webber recorded in 1883, "is only fully appreciated when it can [be] measured" (p. 264). This brief sentence is a succinct summary of Webber's perspective on life. He diligently recorded daily temperatures in his "memory book" (he called it his "Thermometer Book") for half a century (1855-1860, 1870-1903) and, in a separate section, jotted down notes about local and national news and happenings, often framed in moral tones. Webber realized that human misery-like the suffering of the poor in winter--was largely ignored by society until the facts of measurement-like temperatures during a frigid week-were recognized. Where living is a comparative experience, data used as facts determine the conclusion; coerced into subordination, blacks viewed the facts of living in different ways from whites. Amos Webber, born free and fatherless in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1826, moved to Philadelphia sometime in the early 1840s. The transition to an urban environment could only have been a shock to the young man, but there is no direct evidence, since Webber's boyhood and early manhood years are undocumented. What Nick Salvatore has done, and done very well, is to construct the milieu in which Webber lived. In Bucks County, black churches, a black school, and the underground railroad armored blacks against the deprecations, denials, and deportations that whites and white slave catchers forced on them.

His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings 1838-64. By Owen Lovejoy; edited by William F. Moore and Jane Ann Moore; foreword by Paul Simon. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Pp. xxvi, 432. Illustrations. Cloth, $50.00.)I have a soft spot for Owen Lovejoy. Although always second fiddle to his martyred brother Elijah, Owen developed a nationwide reputation for his remarkably consistent devotion to Christian grassroots antislavery politics. A minister and Underground Railroad operator who lived in Princeton, Illinois, Lovejoy overcame several failed runs for political office to become a standard-bearer for abolitionist politicians during the 185Os and 186Os. As a historian of the midwestern antislavery movement, I eagerly delved into this thick collection of Lovejoy's writings and speeches. I was not disappointed. The structure of the book, the meticulous attention to detail, and the choice of documents all make this collection an important addition to primary source material on the antislavery movement.The authors organized the collection much like a good biography, employing a combined thematic and chronological approach. Each of the eight parts of the book represents a stage in Lovejoy's public life. Beginning with his initial membership in the American Anti-Slavery Society and ending at the pinnacle of his political career and close friendship with Lincoln, the book offers a clear sense of the evolution of Lovejoy's political philosophy, his religious convictions, and his abolitionism. Although I would have preferred more documents on the 184Os, most of the book covers the important period from 1854 through the Civil War-when Lovejoy's political career took off. I would also have been interested in more on Lovejoy's private life-which was certainly connected to his political ambitions and policy positions.His Brother's Blood offers readers a concise and insightful introduction to each of the eight parts of the book, with attention to the latest scholarship in the field. This historical context is built upon with short introductions to each of the seventy-seven documents in the collection. The footnoting is brief but informative, avoiding the pitfall of overshadowing the voice of the subject and becoming a biography. The footnote on William Lloyd Garrison, for example, is an edifying four-sentence summary of Garrison's long and complex life. As any historian of the antislavery movement recognizes, this is no easy task. My only critique of the structure of the book is the decision to list the source of each document at its conclusion instead of at its beginning.The choice of documents is as impressive as the structure of the book. The editors included a wide variety of writings, ranging from Lovejoy's own letters and published materials to editorial reviews of his speeches to descriptions of Lovejoy from local histories. …