Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (review)

The Underground Railroad is "hot" these days, a facet of American racial history that suddenly widely disparate groups have embraced. Staunchly conservative right-to-life advocates invoke abolitionists aiding fugitive slaves to justify civil disobedience aimed at abortion providers, while liberals see in the Underground Railroad an example of interracial collaboration that speaks to the needs of a nation that race still divides. Unquestionably the most visible manifestation of this new interest has been the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, which opened a year ago with remarks from Laura Bush and Oprah Winfrey, and which has become one of the city's major tourist attractions.

Fergus Bordewich's Bound for Canaan is doubtless intended to take advantage of this public interest, and it will serve that public interest well. Bordewich is an engaging writer with a knack for crisp prose, an eye for the appropriate quotation, and a gift for telling stories. Combined with wide-ranging research and an understanding of the work of academic historians on abolition and the Underground Railroad, Bordewich has produced an excellent book.

Aimed at a popular audience, Bordewich does not posit new or groundbreaking ideas about his subject. He begins with an overview of slavery in America down to the early nineteenth century, then takes up the story of a few central figures who felt it right to aid fugitive slaves—the Quakers Isaac T. Hopper in Philadelphia and New York and Levi Coffin in North Carolina and Indiana, as well as the trusted overseer turned fugitive slave, Josiah Henson, in Maryland and Kentucky. Along the way, other figures are introduced, nearly all of whom will be familiar to historians of abolition, including William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, John Rankin, Jermain Wesley Loguen, Frederick Douglass, Henry "Box" Brown, William Still, Jonathan Walker, Harriet Tubman, and, at the climax of his narrative, John Brown. In this sense, Bordewich hearkens back to what Larry Gara in his 1961 book The Liberty Line called "the legend of the Underground Railroad—the image of the intrepid conductor braving legal sanction and public hostility to aid terrified fugitives." But Bordewich gives equal attention to the fugitives themselves—their stories and narratives are equally central to his account, and they seldom emerge as helpless or terrified.

A few flubs mar the work. For instance, we get three different dates of birth for Thomas Jefferson: he is both fifty-five and fifty-eight at his inauguration in 1801, then in 1814 is aged seventy-eight (cf. 30, 32, 82). But these are minor matters. Unlike so many other popular histories, this is a work that tells a good story and does it without ignoring the ways that professional historians have deepened our understanding of its subject over the past generation. We could use more such.