Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery by R. J. M. Blackett (review)

If there is a single figure who stands out from the teeming crowd of fugitive slaves, underground activists, and slave hunters who populate the pages of Blackett’s slender book, it is Richard McAllister, who in 1850 was named the federal commissioner charged with enforcing the new Fugitive Slave Law, in Harrisburg, Penn. Declaring that fugitive slaves and free blacks alike were “a miserable population—a tax and a pest” (34), he terrorized African Americans, arresting dozens of them and dispatching them back into slavery. Though a Yankee, he epitomized the racist zealotry with which the men and women of the Underground Railroad had to contend.

The appeal of this book lies mainly in such “snapshots,” gleaned primarily from a broad assortment of antebellum newspapers and occasionally court records. Blackett delivers many vivid accounts of escapes, some successful and others tragically not, as well as an illuminating discussion of slave catching and the organized kidnapping of free blacks in the Pennsylvania/Maryland border country. A section on fugitives who escaped to the British Caribbean islands is digressive but illuminating.

The book’s title is a misnomer, since it is neither a broad history of the Underground Railroad nor an extended examination of the politics of slavery. It is rather an erudite, if flawed, reflection on several aspects of the Underground Railroad, with an emphasis on the central but long-neglected role that African Americans played in underground activism. Those readers wanting a more thorough and detailed treatment of underground activity in the borderlands will find it in Stanley Harrold’s Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2010), and David G. Smith’s On the Edge of Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Issue in South Central Pennsylvania, 1820–1870 (New York, 2013).

Although Blackett’s book abounds in well-chosen anecdotes, it would have benefited from providing more context—for instance, greater attention to the underground’s evolution, the volume of fugitive traffic that it handled, and its geographical reach. Nor does Blackett challenge the popular but unsupportable belief that the organized underground reached deeply into the South. In reality, the preponderance of underground activity took place on the upper edge of the slave states and in the North, while the majority of successful freedom seekers came from the three border states of Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky.

Blackett also gives surprising, if equivocal, credence to a bizarre, propagandistic 1860 pamphlet called Disclosures and Confessions of Frank A. Wilmot, The Slave Thief and Negro Runner, written by a purported defector from the Underground Railroad. The author, about whom nothing is known, claimed that the “Aiding and Abetting Society,” as he fantastically called it, was a sinister and far-flung conspiracy of “itinerant backsliding ministers, worn out tract colporteurs, elderly females, and a few cunning-looking negroes”—in other words, precisely what Southern nationalists claimed the Underground Railroad to be in their attempt to justify secession on the cusp of the Civil War (91–92).

Southerners tended to attribute every slave’s disappearance to the dark tentacles of the underground. As Blackett shows, however, slaves repeatedly and heroically defied their owners’ belief that they were incapable of planning their own escapes. “Wilmot’s” preposterous cabal never existed; it did not have to, because slaves were capable of voting with their own feet.